I noticed this semi-meme list thingie over at Michael May’s Adventure Blog the other day and thought it looked like something I ought to do. There are no rules, really; it’s just an exercise in free association that asks you to name 100 things you love about movies. I interpreted that as things that made me fall in love with movies, or that rekindle my love for them when I see them again. Anyhow, it’s a list of movie-related stuff I like… how could I resist that?
So what did happen to her clothes, anyhow? Did she have a spare outfit on the Falcon, or did she have to go back to the Rebel fleet in the metal bikini?
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NASA says it will be at least May 10 before they make another attempt to launch Endeavour. The engineers have decided to replace something called a Load Control Assembly (LCA), which I understand is similar to a circuit-breaker box. The faulty LCA is believed to have been causing the problem with the heaters on the Auxiliary Power Unit, which led to the scrubbing of last week’s launch attempt, and it will take some time to swap it out and retest everything it connects to.
It’s funny… even knowing that this will be Endeavour‘s last flight, I’m still as impatient with these delays as I was when I was a kid. Once those birds get out to the launch pad, I want to see them fly… irrational, isn’t it? Considering that a successful launch only means we’re that much closer to the end of the shuttles forever. But I’ve never claimed to be rational when it comes to things like this.
It would’ve been nice, I think, if the previous administration had given more weight to the “intelligence, patience, and commandos” approach that was used yesterday to such great success, rather than going directly to “Hulk SMASH!!!!” mode and bankrupting us with full-scale wars in two separate countries. I’m just sayin’.
So the son of a bitch is dead. Good. Now can we get the hell out of Afghanistan and stop having to take our shoes off at the airport? I know the answer to both questions is “probably not,” which for me beggars a third one: what practical good did bin Laden’s death accomplish?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m as thrilled as anyone that this particular “i” has finally been dotted. It’s been a long time coming. But after all the cheering dies down, what, if anything, has actually changed? Al Qaeda is still out there, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see them stage a bunch of retaliatory attacks, possibly even here on American soil; we’re still hemorrhaging resources into a country that’s known as a historical breaker of empires (and our empire is so very close to being broken, isn’t it?); we’re still running the anti-American gulag at Guantanamo (yes, I’ve heard some of the intelligence that got bin Laden came from Gitmo; doesn’t change the fact that the place’s very existence runs counter to all the American values I learned as a kid from Star Trek and Schoolhouse Rock); the PATRIOT Act is still in effect, making a mockery of our Fourth Amendment protection against unwarranted search and seizure; the TSA is still getting its jollies without even buying us dinner first; people still need jobs; the ice caps are still melting; we’re still running out of oil; Hollywood is still creatively bankrupt (although there’s sure to be a movie or three about today’s big story); and the Republicans are still trying to dismantle 75 years of social progress. In short, the 21st Century continues to suck. Hard.
On the other hand, bringing down the monster who is directly responsible for steering our nation into the Bizarro-world dimension we’ve inhabited for the past 10 years has had an undeniably positive effect on the country’s psyche. I noticed on my way into work this morning that a lot of people are walking with a renewed spring in their step, and the prevailing mood seems to be, if not actually happy, than incrementally less miserable than it’s been in a very long time. I find myself thinking of Doolittle’s Tokyo raid that accomplished very little tactically speaking, but was a huge morale booster in the dark months after Pearl Harbor. Bin Laden’s execution is perhaps the same sort of event… it didn’t really change a damn thing, as I’ve noted, but everybody’s feeling better because of it. And I must confess, that includes myself.
Of course, it could just be that the days are finally starting to warm up, and the tulips in the downtown sidewalk planter boxes are looking lovely… that always makes me feel a little happier…
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?
And so it goes, as Vonnegut wisely observed…
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…)