Monthly Archives: April 2011

Apr202011

What’s It Like to Jump Off a Building?

I didn’t get around to blogging about it at the time, but we had quite a bit of excitement around here last November when a couple of BASE jumpers dove off the observation deck of the LDS Church Office Building in the middle of a sleepy workday and parachuted into a nearby parking lot. (Ed. note for out-of-town Loyal Readers: in addition to its famous temple, the Church owns a number of other buildings in and around Salt Lake’s downtown core, including a 28-story edifice that houses extensive administrative offices. It’s not the tallest building in SLC — that honor belongs to the Wells Fargo Center, which curiously has fewer floors than the Church Office Building but measures two feet higher — but nevertheless, the COB is a very prominent part of the local skyline.) As with just about anything in this city that involves the Church even tangentially, there was a whiff of controversy about the jump. Scanning through online comments about the incident, you’ll see that some speculated it was intended as a political demonstration, a thumb in the eye of a religious organization that was still doing damage control for its involvement in California’s Proposition 8. Some Mormons took it as a personal insult to their Church, not tied to any particular issue but obviously some kind of desecration because the building the jumpers chose was Church-owned. Still others thought it had nothing to do with the Church per se, but was disrespectful to authority and civility in general. And then there were those with the attitude that it was nothing more than an audacious stunt, utilizing the best property in the city for doing such a thing (the area around the Wells Fargo is much more congested, making it far more likely someone would’ve gotten hurt), which just happened to be a building belonging to the Mormons, and that the whole thing was a refreshing lark for a sedate city that needs an occasional jolt in the arm. (For the record, that was my take on it.)

In any event, the jumpers had a getaway car waiting and sped off within moments of reaching the ground, but they were soon identified and arrested. They’ve both recently pleaded guilty to trespassing and disturbing the peace, and received relatively light handling (as I understand it, the judge will drop the case if the men pay their court fees and keep their noses clean for six months, which is entirely appropriate in my view, considering no actual harm was done).

And now, just as a coda to a minor but memorable incident in Salt Lake history, one of the jumpers has posted a video documenting their stunt:

Church Office Building from Marshall Miller on Vimeo.

Personally, I still think these guys did something pretty cool…

Apr152011

The Fig Tree

I’ve never read Sylvia Plath, but I recently came across a passage from her novel The Bell Jar in, of all places, an article on New York’s famed Barbizon Hotel for Women in a year-old copy of Vanity Fair magazine. This passage struck a chord with me, strongly enough that I want to record it someplace, if not share it with others. I admire the craftsmanship of this paragraph, the strong imagery that so clearly illustrates a fairly nebulous idea. It”s a level of writing to which I aspire.

The thing that really gets me, though, is how strongly the passage resonates with some thoughts I’ve been having lately. I have no idea what the context is here, or even what The Bell Jar is about. But this single image, shorn of plot and standing all on its own, is powerful stuff that I find myself relating to, regretfully more than is entirely comfortable…

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the
story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful
future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and
children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a
brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and
another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig
was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with
queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady
crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I
couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig
tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which
of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but
choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to
decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they
plopped to the ground at my feet.

Apr152011

Won’t Somebody Think of the Children?!

Not much to say here, this just made me smile:

I don’t know the provenance of this video, although it sounds like one of the teachers is speaking in an Australian accent at one point, but the puppeteer and his get-up are reminiscent of the Walking with Dinosaurs show I saw a few years ago, in which astoundingly lifelike dinosaurs roamed around Energy Solutions Arena for 90 minutes and made me briefly forget that I was a grown-up man living in 21st-century Salt Lake City. Instead, I became a wide-eyed seven-year-old magically transported to the Cretaceous Era. Incredibly cool… I can only imagine the impact this classroom visit must’ve made on these kids. Sometimes the future is all right after all. We certainly didn’t have velociraptors dropping by Riverton Elementary when I was a kid!

Via Boing Boing, of course.

Apr122011

The End… and the Beginning

This afternoon, NASA chief Charles Bolden announced where the four surviving space shuttles will be going once the program ends later this year. It’s a question space buffs like myself have been speculating about for months as museums across the country vied to be one of the lucky recipients. The results are somewhat predictable, but also arguably the best possible choices.

If you haven’t already heard, the Smithsonian will trade Discovery for Enterprise, the original orbiter that never flew in space (it was used only for glide tests in the 1970s) and which has been on display at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center in Virginia for several years; Enterprise will in turn go to the Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York City. The Endeavour is headed for the California Science Center in Los Angeles, and finally, Atlantis, currently scheduled as the last shuttle to fly, will remain at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Like I said, I think this arrangement is probably the best that could be expected. I seem to recall some talk of the Smithsonian wanting two shuttles, so it could display the Enterprise alongside one that had flown in space in a “beginning and ending” sort of display. While I think that would be neat, it’s also not very fair considering how few shuttles there are to go around. And given that the Smithsonian is the keeper of our nation’s most historically significant items, it makes more sense for it to have Discovery, the workhorse of the shuttle fleet, over Enterprise, a prototype that never left Earth’s atmosphere. It also makes sense that one of the shuttles remain at Kennedy, the home port of the fleet. (My hope is that NASA builds something similar to the astounding and dramatic Apollo/Saturn V Center to house Atlantis.)

I’m somewhat more ambivalent about the Enterprise going to the Intrepid Museum. I’ve been to the Intrepid and it’s an outstanding facility, but this means that three of the orbiters will be on the east coast. There are many fine air museums around, and it seems to me like there ought to have been one somewhere in the middle of the country that could’ve
housed a shuttle, so everyone in the nation could have relatively easy access to one. In other words, they should’ve been distributed so there’s one one each coast and one in the middle, with the fourth remaining at Kennedy. But looking at the situation selfishly, at least there’s going to be one near me in LA. I’m already thinking about a pilgrimage to see Endeavour
once it’s installed at the California Science Center.

One final note: I’m sure it was planned this way, but the announcement happens to come on the 30th anniversary of the very first shuttle launch, the mission designated STS-01. On April 12, 1981, Columbia took off with only two men aboard: Commander John W. Young, a veteran of the Apollo missions who was the ninth man to walk on the moon, and pilot Robert Crippen, on his very first spaceflight. I can still recall my dad waking me up at the crack of dawn to watch the countdown and launch live, my frustration at all the delays and building anxiety because it was getting near time for me to leave for school, and how much I loved my dad for saying I could be late for school because some things are more important. Here’s an edited clip of that history-making moment:

I loved seeing the white external fuel tank again — they used to paint them, you know, before someone realized they could save a few million pounds of take-off weight if they left the tank its natural orange color; yes, I said a few million pounds — and it amuses me to hear the cheering when the solid-rocket boosters successfully separate. All of this routine stuff was still very uncertain back then…

Apr042011

What, Another TV Meme?

I know I just recently did a TV-themed meme, but this one (already done by Jaquandor and SamuraiFrog) looked sufficiently different to be worth the time, and besides, last week was one of those weeks when I couldn’t seem to produce an original and coherent blog entry to save my life — even the weekend was a washout, thanks to a overnight snowstorm that brought down tree branches all over the Compound and left me with a chainsaw in my hand for most of yesterday — but I could answer a couple of questions here and there in between doing other things. Maybe I ought to try one of those “Ask Me Anything” deals like Jaquandor and John Scalzi both do…

Anyhow, the meme begins below the fold: