Space Shuttle Pic of the Day: Hitchin’ a Ride

Here’s a sight we haven’t seen much since the shuttles began landing regularly at Kennedy Space Center, the same place they’re processed and launched from, instead of on the other side of the continent at Edwards Air Force Base:

This was the way the shuttle orbiters first entered the public consciousness during the Enterprise‘s ATL flights, before we civilians ever got a look at the now-familiar “stack” of solid-rocket boosters and external fuel tank, and it’s how the orbiters get home if they have to land somewhere other than at Kennedy. Basically, we’re looking at a tow-truck operation. It’s a tow of staggering statistics, a roughly 90-ton spacecraft physically anchored to the top of a 159-ton airliner, but a tow, nevertheless. If you don’t know your airplanes, the “tow truck” is a Boeing 747, still one of the largest airliners in the world even after 40 years of operation. NASA has two of them (technically referred to as the Shuttle Carrier Aircraft, or SCA) that have been specially fitted out for shuttle-hauling duty. Interestingly, the first was purchased from American Airlines and was still sporting the AA livery — red, white and blue stripes running horizontally down the length of the fuselage — during the early days with Enterprise. And here’s another fun bit of trivia: on both planes, the mechanism the orbiter mounts to sports hand-painted instructions to “Attach Orbiter Here… Black Side Down.”

One of the SCAs came through the Salt Lake area with an orbiter on its back about a decade ago, circling the valley several times before landing at SLC International, where it was on display to the public overnight. As I recall, I caught a glimpse of it flying along the eastern mountain range, but like a damn fool I didn’t make the time to go to the airport and actually see it. Now in the waning days, I’m kicking myself hard for that. It’d be nice if the orbiter destined for the California museum stopped by here on its way west, but I’m not holding my breath…

Photo credit: Ken Kuhl

Jul052011

Say What?

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency has posted an incisive and terribly important piece of psychological insight: a list entitled “What Your Favorite ’80s Band Says About You.” But while many of the items on this list are right on target — if your fave is Big Country, for example, you probably have a Highlander poster in a tube in the back of your closet; get it? Big Country was a Scottish band, Highlander is about an immortal Scotsman — I have to confess that I’m utterly baffled by the one that best applies to me. Here it is:

Rick Springfield: Your wallet weighs over a pound.

Huh? WTF is that supposed to mean? Anyone? My wallet… weighs… over a pound. Why would it weigh so much? And what does liking Rick Springfield have to do with that? Sometimes, I feel very dense…

Jul052011

Space Shuttle Pic of the Day: Enterprise Makes Her Debut

As we count down to the final ever space shuttle mission, I thought I’d post a few photos from the early days of the program, just to remind myself and my Loyal Readers of a time when the world was young and these vehicles were revolutionary, and we couldn’t wait to get them up there because we knew it was going to be a glorious adventure. First up, the official rollout of the prototype shuttle Enterprise on September 17, 1976 (two days after my seventh birthday), with some very special guests in attendance:

If you don’t recognize them, that’s the cast of the original Star Trek television series, minus William Shatner who was apparently too important to show up. (Actually, I don’t know why Shatner wasn’t there, but it’s no secret that he frequently behaved like a colossal jerk during the ’70s and ’80s.) From left to right, we’re looking at Dr. James D. Fletcher, NASA Administrator; DeForest Kelley (Bones); George Takei (Sulu); James Doohan (Scotty, hard to recognize with the beard); Nichelle Nichols (Uhura); Leonard Nimoy (Spock, of course); Gene Roddenberry (Star Trek’s creator and chief promoter); some unidentified dude, probably a NASA official; and Walter Koenig (Chekov).

Jul042011

One Week to Go

One week until the launch of STS-135, the final mission for space shuttle Atlantis, and the final mission of the space shuttle program.

I’m trying very hard not to get depressed over this, but I’m sure I’m going to be in tears come Friday, and certainly by the end of the mission 12 days after that. Not to be too hyperbolic, but it honestly feels to me like our country is on the verge of just giving up. Not only in space, but in everything you can think of, all fields, all categories of activity, all levels of society. Everything in America is diminishing, wearing out, running down, crumbling to dust. We used to dream big dreams and do big things. Now we ask how much it will cost and fret about whether it’s 100-percent safe. We bicker endlessly and worry constantly about whether any particular decision will help or hurt our particular ~~tribe~~ party in the next election. Now we just lower our gaze from the horizon to our smartphones and play another round of Angry Birds. And it doesn’t help my gloomy feelings any when I read articles like this one, which flat-out declares the space age to be over and we hope you enjoyed it, because low-earth orbit is the best we could do. We dreamed of Moonbase Alpha, but we could only manage satellite TV. And that seems to be enough for many, perhaps even most, people. And that’s the hardest thing for me to swallow, this realization that so many of the things I care about, the ones I’ve always cared about and held at the very center of my identity, are turning out to be nothing more than fads, and they’re all going out of style…

Photo: sunrise over Atlantis a few days ago, courtesy of the NASA Kennedy Space Center Facebook page.

Jul042011

Comments Closed Again… Possibly for Good This Time

When the Movable Type software that underlies this blog got upgraded a few months ago, I was hopeful that one of my most persistent and maddening problems — an unrelenting flood of comment spam — would finally be a thing of the past. Sadly, no. The sick bastards who create that shit must’ve had a uproarious laugh at my naivete. Their effluent started trickling back in within a few days of the upgrade. While my friends struggled to figure out how to navigate the new sign-in protocol, the bots were somehow slipping right past the hurdles and creating fully authenticated user identities for themselves, from which they could spew their annoying garbage with impunity. Yes, that’s right: several of my Loyal Readers still can’t leave a comment to save their own lives, but the spammers are able to set up pre-appoved accounts and publish their crap instantly, without even being held for moderation. And, just like it did before, the amount of spam I’ve been receiving has been inching up day by day. I’ve just spent several hours this evening manually clearing out a couple thousand phony comments accumulated over a mere two-day period.

It isn’t just the volume of spam that’s increased, either. The actual spam messages themselves have gotten larger, too; many of them are very, very long, essay-length strings of badly translated Engrish that appear to be masquerading as a some kind of epic folk tale but ultimately come down to a shill for knock-off designer shoes, or some damn thing. Sometimes the bots don’t even bother with the translation, and leave behind a big block of Chinese characters. At least I know where this shit is coming from, I suppose. But due to the way my back-end blog interface is constructed, I end up having to do a lot of scrolling to get past these huge tumorous things just so I can mark them for deletion. Sometimes I’m able to delete them in batches, which speeds things along, but just as often, the spammers publish a single message from each of a hundred identities, so I have to take them out one at a time.

Well, tonight I’ve reached the end of my rope. Again. The whole time I was wading through this stuff, removing it from my sight click by tedious click, I kept hearing a line from the classic Cold War movie WarGames: “After very careful consideration, sir, I’ve come to the conclusion that your new defense system sucks.” Indeed, sir, indeed.

I’m still hoping to find a solution to all this. A couple of helpful people have asked why I don’t install a Captcha module, one of those things that ask you to re-type the characters you see in a little box in order to prove your humanity; others have suggested I abandon Movable Type and migrate Simple Tricks to another blogging platform altogether. Unfortunately, neither of those options work for me, for various reasons. (The Captcha thing is especially frustrating. I know that system works well for those who have it, but for some ridiculous reason, Movable Type — at least the instance of it that I’m dealing with — isn’t set up to work with it.) So in the meantime, I’ve come to the unhappy decision to once again just shut down commenting altogether. As I’m sure I said the last time, I really hate to do this. The conversation with my friends and readers has been one of the great pleasures of having a blog. But I just can’t put up with this anymore. Lately, I’ve been spending more time dealing with spam than actually blogging.

I don’t know… maybe it doesn’t matter. There hasn’t been much conversation in a very long time anyhow. The last legitimate comment I received was over a month ago. And as much as I hate to say it, blogging itself seems to be on decline. Out of the little circle of non-professional bloggers I’ve enjoyed reading, only the indomitable Jaquandor still seems to be producing with gusto. Even my own habits have slacked off in recent months. I really hope I’m wrong, because blogs and blogging have been a pretty big deal to me over the past decade, but maybe it was just another passing fad whose time has come and is now rapidly going. Like I said, I just don’t know. And right now, it’s late and I’m tired and frustrated and more than a little depressed about all this, so I’m probably not thinking too clearly anyhow.

If anyone out there would like to talk to me about something I write here, I invite you to send a message to jason (at) jasonbennion.com. You can also find me on Facebook, where I post links to every entry that appears on this blog. I know these options are sub-optimal, but they’re the best I can offer at this time…

Jun252011

The Long Trajectory

Woke up this morning to the news that gay marriage is now legal in New York state. Good for New York. Social progress comes slowly. Sometimes it seems it’s never going to arrive. But if you wait long enough, work hard enough, hold on to your principles no matter what, it eventually does come around. The long trajectory of this country has forever been toward greater equality under the law for all its citizens, no matter who they are or what they stand for. New York just affirmed that fundamental idea in a major way.

Now, anyone care to wager over whether my home state of Utah will be the last in the union to the affirm that idea? No, I suppose not… the odds are too bad…

Jun242011

Friday Evening Videos: “Space Girl”

This isn’t the usual sort of thing I post as a Friday Evening Video, being neither a true rock-and-roll song nor a relic from the 1980s, but I ran across it earlier today and found it utterly charming, for reasons that will quickly become obvious:

Ah, pretty girls and rayguns… like sweet, sweet catnip!

My Loyal Readers are probably thinking that your host, being such a big-time nerd and all, can name the source of all these clips. Well, not quite. I recognize most of them but believe it or not, there are several that completely mystify even me. I’m guessing they were British productions that never made it to the states, or which I’ve simply never managed to catch. I could’ve done without the clip from Starship Troopers at roughly 2:30 — I loathe that piece of shit movie — but the poignancy of the very final scene more than makes up for it. Oh, my sweet Sarah Jane… the first celebrity death in a long time that genuinely hurt.

Jun242011

Still… Alive… Old… Friend…

Sorry, kids, I must’ve been channeling Shatner there for a second when I wrote that headline. It happens sometimes. More often than you might think, actually.

So, how is everyone? In case you didn’t catch the subtle hint in the previous entry — you know, all that stuff about the romance of the open road and such… okay, don’t feel bad, it was very subtle — The Girlfriend and I were on vacation last week, and what with The Man getting even with me for taking time off and various other things going on since we’ve been home, I just haven’t been able to find time for this little ol’ blog. Yeah, yeah, Bennion, but where did you go, you’re asking. Why, Las Vegas, I’m replying. More specifically, we drove down to Vegas on Monday, came home Thursday, then headed out again on Friday to catch my man Rick Springfield in Wendover, then finally home for good Saturday afternoon.

I hate to say it, but I’ve had better vacations.

Don’t misunderstand, we had plenty of fun, and I don’t at all regret going. We were able to see some old friends and meet some new ones, and we partied hardy with our current social circle. (To explain, Anne and I weren’t traveling alone; we met up with a bunch of people in Vegas to celebrate a wedding, and our friends Jack and Natalie accompanied us to see Rick.) But we also had a lot of irritating random mishaps; it was one of those “one damn thing after another” situations from the moment we left. First, the couple we had planned to convoy with on the way to Vegas got held up for a couple of hours because of an emergency doctor’s visit to check out a spider bite. Then I had a savage allergy attack on the drive down — my eyes looked like they were about to shoot laser beams out of them, X-Men-style, and the skin around them was puffy and tender for two days. Then Anne did something to her knee and had to spend an evening in the hotel room with an ice pack. I went out with our friends while she did that and got pulled over by the cops on Las Vegas Boulevard because — get this — the officer couldn’t see my license plate clearly enough. (I have a plastic cover over the plate that has yellowed with age, and the little light bulb that illuminates the plate had burned out.) I got off with a verbal warning, but it’s pretty damn embarrassing to get busted on the Strip with friends in the car.

The jinx continued on the way home, too: my car developed some kind of problem as we were going over the canyon between Mesquite, Nevada, and St. George, Utah. I decided it was just crappy gasoline from a Vegas 7-Eleven, and sure enough, topping off the tank and adding some STP in St, George seemed to cure it, but I was on edge waiting for something to go wrong again all the way home.

Oh, and then, just to cap it all off, Jack and Natalie and Anne and I experienced quite possibly the worst service in the history of the restaurant business out in Wendover. Our waiter was a nice enough kid — and I do mean kid; he didn’t look old enough to drive, let alone work in a casino environment — but he didn’t quite grasp the basic concepts of his work. I guess hiring standards are lower when you’re in an isolated desert outpost and its 100 miles in any direction to find more qualified candidates.

Jun132011

An Island of Light in the Darkness

My father spent 36 years, most of his adult life, working for the same company, Kennecott Utah Copper. From my vantage point up here in the 21st century, where my current job is about to become the longest one I’ve ever held at a mere six years in, that’s an almost unimaginable level of job security and stability. Nowadays, it seems like the corporate overlords are determined that everybody ought to be freelancers who can be popped in and out of jobs like disposable electronic components, owing nothing and with nothing owed to them. It didn’t used to be that way. There used to be more of a reciprocal relationship between employee and employer, and a lot more loyalty from both sides of the equation. There was an understanding that if you were good at your job, and you liked it well enough, you were going to be there for the long haul.

Still, even in those days before the world moved on, no working person was ever 100% secure. When the price of copper tumbled in the early 1980s, Kennecott responded by shutting down its Bingham Canyon copper mine — one of the largest open-pit mining operations in the world — for two years. A couple thousand workers, including my father, were laid off. Fortunately, he was far more resourceful than I imagine I would be under the circumstances. He could and would do just about anything to earn a buck, and because of this, our little family made it through those two years without too much pain. They were lean years, to be sure, but they were never truly bad. Not for us, anyhow.

Of all the myriad odd jobs he did to hold things together, the most memorable was his gig as a long-haul truck driver, ferrying massive wooden roof trusses across the western states. The trusses were built in our little rural home town and were destined for new LDS church houses that were springing up in California, Idaho, and Wyoming at the time. And the reason I so clearly remember Dad doing this particular job is because I got to ride along with him on the truck a few times. I don’t remember for sure if these trips coincided with summer break, or if Dad just took me out of school when I wanted to go, but those were magical experiences for me. I was around 12 or 13, and even though Smokey and the Bandit and the CB radio craze were long over by then, I still found the whole idea amazingly cool: traveling with my dad in a truck (not a full-blown 18-wheeler, but still bigger than all the traffic around us), a couple of manly men with the wide-open landscape unrolling in front of us and who knew what around the next bend.

Jun102011

Spielberg Sees the Light!!!

In a new interview for Ain’t It Cool News, Steven Spielberg goes on the record as being opposed to any further digital revision of his work:

(In the future) there’s going to be no more digital enhancements or digital additions to anything based on any film I direct. I’m not going to do any corrections digitally to even wires that show. If 1941 comes on Blu-Ray, I’m not going to go back and take the wires out because the Blu-Ray will bring the wires out that are guiding the airplane down Hollywood Boulevard. At this point right now I think letting movies exist in the era, with all the flaws and all of the flourishes, is a wonderful way to mark time and mark history.

Italics mine. He goes on to note that when he did give in to the Lucas-ian temptation to tinker with his early masterpiece, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, both versions were released on DVD so consumers could choose which version they wanted to watch (the way it should be done, in my opinion, whenever there are multiple variants of important movies… especially movies whose titles begin with the word “star” and end with the word “wars”), and then he adds, “When people ask me which E.T. they should look at, I always tell them to look at the original 1982 E.T.”

Steve, I can’t tell you how good it feels to have someone in your position vindicating my purist theories. Thank you. Sincerely. If by some miracle some assistant of your stumbles across my little blog and relays what I say here back to you, thank you.

Unfortunately, though, Steve later says he’s attempted to convince the Great Flanneled One of the wisdom of this position and he just can’t. And if Steven Spielberg can’t, probably no one can. Sigh…

Incidentally, Steve also makes an interesting comment about the 1953 War of the Worlds (another favorite of mine) that’s worth a click-through, and a longer version of the interview is supposed to be posted next week, so if you’re interested, keep an eye out over there.

Hat tip to Michael May for alerting me to this.

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