Today’s scheduled launch of space shuttle Endeavour has been pushed back at least 72 hours due to a problem with one the orbiter’s auxiliary power units, or APUs in NASA-speak (which, for the record, doesn’t annoy me nearly as much as the bizspeak). The fuel lines that feed the APUs have to be heated to prevent them from freezing up in space and leaving the shuttle without full hydraulic power for flight control surfaces and the landing gear upon re-entry. Apparently a thermostat on one of those heaters has gone bad, making the unit unreliable. Technicians are now draining the 535,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen from the external fuel tank, so they can work safely in and around the orbiter’s rear section. The astronauts never even made it aboard their ship before the cancellation; they were in their Astrovan, en route to the pad, when the news came down. I imagine they must be tremendously disappointed. Launch delays are an occupational hazard for astronauts, of course, but I know if I were in their position, I’d have been up all night, totally wired and rarin’ to go, and then to have the adventure snatched away when you’re so close, within moments of boarding and only hours of actually going… well, I personally would be crushed. Guess I don’t have the right stuff.
Anyhow, I wonder if the problem has anything to do with the lightning storm last night. Perhaps there was some damage done after all? (Incidentally, that gorgeous photo above was taken after the storm; the shuttle is reflecting in a really big puddle of rainwater…)
This was the spectacular scene at Launch Pad 39A earlier this evening:
According to various Twitter feeds and such, Endeavour was unharmed by the lightning storm; I guess Mother Nature was just giving her a big sendoff for her final voyage. Now the Rotating Service Structure, the big clamshell gantry that encloses the shuttles while they sit on the pad, has been retracted and, as of this writing, everything is on track for a scheduled liftoff tomorrow afternoon at 3:47 EST.
A couple streets over from my office, near the southeast corner of a city block that’s come to be known in recent years as Library Square, there stands a small, makeshift memorial. You know the sort of thing I’m talking about, a pair of wood scraps fastened together to form a cross, then draped in flowers and colorful plastic beads. Crosses like this are all over the place if you pay attention, alongside streets and roads and highways, marking places where somebody’s loved one met their destiny while behind the wheel of a car, and often at the hands of another driver. The one at Library Square is at the spot where my coworker Julie Ann Jorgenson’s car came to rest after it was slammed from behind by a speeding truck a few months ago.
I didn’t know this marker was there until just a couple days ago. My father drove past it at some point and asked me if it could be related to my “friend from work.” He didn’t finish the rest of that thought, “the one who got killed.” He didn’t have to. I knew immediately who he meant, and figured that yes, the marker was probably for her.
Yesterday afternoon, I took a little stroll during my free time. I didn’t plan on going to Library Square, but somehow that’s where I ended up, kneeling before this tiny structure underneath a gorgeous blue sky. I gently rubbed the petal of a bloom as I read Julie’s name, painted in light blue letters along the cross-bar. I don’t know what I expected to feel… a resurgence of the surprisingly intense grief I experienced when I first heard the news, or a sense of relief, or maybe some sense of Julie herself, a lingering whiff of her spirit… something. But the truth is, I didn’t really feel anything. I wondered who had placed the marker here, and how long the city will allow it to remain. I took a guess at who is changing out the wilted flowers for fresh ones. And I shook my head for the hundredth time at the vast, stupid, cosmic waste. But I didn’t feel anything. It bothers me.
In a related note, I had a Google alert waiting when I got home last night, notifying me that Julie’s killer, Shane Roy Gillette, is scheduled for a hearing to determine his mental competency. So this is going to be his defense? Incompetency? He was pretty damn incompetent the morning he killed a vibrant young woman, wasn’t he?
With space shuttle Endeavour, the youngest of the fleet, scheduled to blast off on its final mission Friday afternoon, this seems an appropriate time to post the following, a NASA-produced video overview of the shuttle program narrated by none other than Captain James T. Kirk himself. Blow this one up to full-screen size… there’re some great clips here, including a time lapse of the crawler carrying Endeavour out to the launch pad, archival footage of the lifting bodies that were tested early in the shuttle’s design phase (think of the opening from The Six Million Dollar Man), and film of the mid-70s glide and landing tests using the prototype shuttle Enterprise.
It looks to me like this might be part of a longer documentary, considering it only touches the surface of the shuttle program, completely ignoring the Challenger and Columbia disasters and equally failing to mention the many, many achievements such as the Hubble Space Telescope, the ISS, and the Buck Rogers-style untethered spacewalks using the Manned Maneuvering Unit. If this does turn out to be a preview of a full-length doc, put me down for a DVD copy…
Incidentally, I found it interesting that Enterprise was originally supposed to be called the Constitution, considering that Star Trek‘s fictional Enterprise is — are you ready for this? — a Constitution-class starship. And yes, I know exactly what a tremendous nerd I am, thank you for mentioning it…
I’ve done a lot of griping over the years about the “bizspeak” I encounter in the materials I proofread, weird stuff like “leverage” and “dialogue” used as verbs instead of nouns; weasel words designed to obfuscate unpleasantness, like “downsize” and “rightsize” instead of “layoffs”; and stuff that in any other context would just sound creepy, such as “thought leader.” (I can’t help it: whenever I read that one, I immediately picture some kind of mind-controlling alien monster from Doctor Who manipulating a bunch of zombie-slave humans.) I’ve always assumed the awfulness of this stuff was self-evident, but weirdly enough, I’ve found myself more than once trying to explain to others why it offends me so much. Many people don’t seem to mind it, and some even champion it, and nothing I’ve said on the subject ever seems to sway those poor misguided souls who’ve let The Man so thoroughly indoctrinate them with his mediocrity. Me being me, I naturally blame myself. My meager talents obviously haven’t been up to the task of articulating the deep cosmic wrongness of corporate jargon.
Perhaps all I need, though, is a little help from a fellow traveler, another true believer in just saying what you mean instead of trying to sound smart or cool or whatever it is these people are doing. Here’s one of Andrew Sullivan‘s readers from earlier today:
Whenever a colleague uses “deliverable” in my presence, I am seized
with a strong desire to bring the meeting to a shrieking halt and demand
an actual, specific description of the thing he expects to be
delivered.
Imagine if we used these sorts of meaningless, reflexive nouns to
describe all the objects in our lives. This apple in my lunch? It’s
actually just an eatable, just like everything else I consume today.
I’m writing this sendable to you on a typeable. When I’m done, I’ll
lean back in my sitable and use my thinkable to imagine a world that
doesn’t turn me into a suicideable.
Consultants use words like deliverable because it saves them the
trouble of actually explaining what they do, because the meat of our
work is so often complicated, imprecise, and poorly conceived. This
problem, though, is precisely why consultants (and lawyers and other
people who traffic in ideas instead of concrete physical products)
should avoid vague, meaningless words. If your goal on a project is
complicated and imprecise, your first step should be to think hard about
those goals, identify and name them. When you rely on “action items”
and “deliverables” to get you to the end, you will most likely produce
something nearly as meaningless and useless as the words you’ve used to
describe its creation.
Amen, brother, whoever you are! (I regret that this writer was not identified in the blog entry I ganked his words from…)
I just heard your latest radio spot advertising upcoming performances. It sounds like a great line-up over the next couple months. I enjoy your smaller, more intimate venue and I’m grateful for the opportunity you give to older artists who can no longer fill the big arenas, but still love to perform for their fans.
However, I would like to mention that Rick Springfield does have male fans. No, really. Trust me on this point. Prefacing his segment of the ad with a voiceover saying, “Hey, ladies….” and suggesting that a Rick concert is a perfect girls’ night out — which it is, I won’t deny — is somewhat alienating to those of us who love his music but also sport that Y chromosome. Just something to consider…
One memorable evening about a century ago (or so it seems), back when I was a callow 20-year-old kid struggling to come to terms with my first real broken heart, a young lady of my acquaintance asked me how old I felt, deep down inside. My answer — “about a hundred and two” — was intended to be flippant, the sort of thing Bruce Willis might growl at the end of a brutal action flick that left him covered in filth and blood. But the statement was honest, too. I really did feel ancient that night, hollowed out and spent by experiences I was turning out to be ill-equipped to deal with. My friend nodded in agreement, took a drag on her cigarette — no doubt her conscious attempt to add some drama to the scene, as much as the simple action of smoking — and said my half-assed joke made sense because she’d always perceived me as having an old soul.
Now, I don’t know if I believe in the concept of “old souls” — that implies reincarnation or pre-existence or some other philosophical notion that would make my head hurt if I gave it much thought — but there’s no question I always identified more with the adults in the room than with the other kids at the folding card table in the corner. Also, I recall that from an early age, I had an unusual knack for empathizing with the feelings of my elders. Consider, for example, my youthful affection for the song featured in tonight’s edition of Friday Evening Videos:
“Your Wildest Dreams” was The Moody Blues’ highest-charting single in two decades, widely viewed as a big comeback for a band that hadn’t ever really gone away but had struggled for years to match its greatest success. Despite the song’s status as a hit, however, it didn’t please everyone. Older Moody fans were put off by the band’s newly accessible, synth-based pop sound, and many folks my own age sneered that it was just another steaming nugget of the Baby Boomers’ nostalgia for their precious Sixties. That lady friend I mentioned a moment ago was firmly in the latter camp; she told me once that her mom loved “Your Wildest Dreams,” which was reason enough for her to despise it.
Personally, I sided with her mom. I also loved this song, and a big part of the reason why was that its story of a middle-aged man wondering what had ever become of his lost love resonated with me. It shouldn’t have, when I think about it. I was still a year away from graduating high school when “Your Wildest Dreams” was released, and I hadn’t yet experienced anything that could legitimately be called “love.” Regardless, though, I got what the song was about, in that weird way I’d often gotten so many things that rightfully should’ve been beyond my years. I’m not saying I was precociously mature; I wasn’t, and in fact I feel like I’m still pretty damn immature for my age in many important respects. But I was able to imagine myself as this song’s narrator, to project myself forward in time and share in the wistful, melancholy fondness he still feels for this woman.
The great irony of this little ramble is that it’s now been nearly 20 years since I last saw my friend and I often find myself wondering if she ever thinks of me, and if so, how. I’ve gone from being able to imagine myself as the protagonist of “Your Wildest Dreams” — a song this girl hated, remember — to really being the protagonist. And my soul, old or otherwise, has very little to do with that. That’s just plain old time that’s done that…
ADDENDUM: A reader pointed out this morning that in this modern, electronic age of miracles in which we live, it’s not all that difficult to track down people we’ve lost touch with. For the record, I have looked for the girl I think of when I hear this song. Not surprisingly, she’s on Facebook, but she’s apparently not interested in connecting to anyone except a very small circle, as she’s not accepting friend requests or even messages, and she’s made very little information about herself public.
(Still, she’s better than the other girl I referenced above, the one who broke my heart — she’s on Facebook, too, but she has
everything locked down, no public info at all, not even a photo. What’s the point of even being involved with Facebook if you’re going to be that way about it? At least with the Wildest Dreams girl, I’ve been able to see what she looks like these days and find out what state she’s living in. Enough information to satisfy my basic curiosity.)
To be honest, though, I’m not sure I wantto get reacquainted with her. We’ve all had the experience of being disappointed after bumping into an old love or friend (this girl was both for me at various times), and I just don’t think I want to take the risk with her. I don’t want to hear that life may have ground the edges off the crazy, fierce, fragile, tough-talking-but-creme-filled cookie who sat with me beside Little Cottonwood Creek one night, smoking and listening while I poured out my heart. And I really don’t want to know what she might think of the way I’ve turned out. She was very outspoken when she disapproved of something or someone, and, well, I never did shake the dust of this old town off my heels like she thought I ought to. Sometimes maybe it really is better to leave sleeping dogs alone.
One of the great disappointments of my life is that Redford and Newman only made two films together. Really, guys? You honestly couldn’t come up with any other good scripts?
Jaquandor, who I believe is actually a bit younger than myself, said the following in passing earlier today:
Scary thought: E.T. is older now than Casablanca was when I was born.
Thinking to myself, “nah, that can’t be right,” I did a little googling followed by a little calculating, and indeed, it is so. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was released in 1982, 29 years ago this summer, whereas in the year I was born, 1969, the Bogart-Bergman classic — released in 1942 — was a mere 27 years old.
I’ve had a lot of similar thoughts lately, comparing the now-current ages of my own life’s pop-cultural landmarks to things that I thought of as “old” when I was a kid. Star Wars is now as old — 34 years — as Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman was in the year Star Wars came out. Miami Vice is now as old — more or less — as Dragnet (the TV version; the radio serial was even older) was when Vice premiered. Christopher Reeve’s Superman: The Movie is currently seven years older than George Reeves’ Adventures of Superman TV series was when “modern” special effects first made me believe a man could fly. Most sobering of all is that movies that screened during my career as a multiplex usher and later projectionist — which really does feel like yesterday to me — are now as ancient (and probably as dated in appearance and subject matter) as Easy Rider was when I started at Movies 7.
Of course, the peculiar thing about me is that I always liked old movies and TV. It’s never made much difference to me if something was in black-and-white or if its cast had strange haircuts and clothes. I wonder if there are any kids of the current generation who feel the same? Probably not… they’re all too spoiled by photorealistic CGI and the spastic-rabbit style of editing to tolerate older films.
I don’t really have a point here, I guess, except to note how strange it feels when I realize that things I still like, that still matter to me, that still feel relatively recent to me, are, well, old. Not just out of fashion or no longer current but downright old. Strange… and depressing. And it’s happening more and more often, too…
