Cheap Therapy

I’ve just finished reading Andrew Smith’s book “Moondust”, in which he attempts to interview the 9 remaining Apollo landing astronauts. (In one way it was strange because it kept referencing various popular artists I’d just been reading about in the previous book I’d started reading (“Culture Club” by Craig Shuftan )).
I guess the interesting bits I found were:

• Astronaut Edgar Mitchell shared a house with Arthur C. Clarke for a week
• Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Norman Mailer watched the Apollo 14 launch together
• The entire Apollo programme cost $24 billion dollars. At the time Vietnam was costing $30 billion per year.
• Armstrong took Dvorak’s “New World” symphony on the trip, along with a theremin piece. (The author was constantly haunted by Also Sprach Zarathrustra throughout researching the book!)
• Real programmers patch the Apollo LEM computer inside a 30 minute hard deadline
• How the Apollo toilets actually worked!
• Landing on the moon effectively ended the astronaut careers of Armstrong and Aldrin, after that they were too valuable to risk on any future space missions
• The alternative for most Apollo astronauts (many ex-Korea pilots) would have been flying missions in Vietnam
• Most of the astronauts were younger than I am now. The average age of staff in Mission Command was 26.

With only 9 remaining people alive who have walked on another world, it is amazing to read about how their lives were changed forever, being able to look at Luna and say to themselves “Hey, I was up there”. Mingling in the crowd at SF cons are people who have actually been into deep space, or walked on the Moon. Pretty much all of them agree they were the best moments of their lives, and everything since then has been learning to cope with the fact that the rest of their existence will be hard to compare to those moments.
Moondust is definitely worth a read if you’re a space fan or, perhaps more importantly, if you wonder what the effect of standing on another world and looking back at ours would be like and how that would affect rest of your life.

• A relaxing weekend in Mandurah
• Planning an interstate trip
• Wrangling FileMaker, MySQL, PHP, qpopper and postfix.
• Bilby getting much more talkative. Many more words and signs (miming juicing an orange to indicate she wanted OJ!) Long involved soliloquies, if only I could understand what she was actually saying…
• Colds all round Mounds of tissues
• Car serviced.
• Got a call from my ISP claiming I was DoSing someone. Oops (No, it was not a virus)
• Most excellent engagement party with many good friends.
• Baked a Jaffa Marble Cake and a vegan Apple and Almond cake (I was out of walnuts).
• Got a ladder for my birthday. Used it to clean the gutters.
• Got many birthday wishes from people, thankyou, it meant a lot.
• Had a close friend ring up on my birthday to ask me how to send a break from telnet. This was good for the amusement value of him forgetting my birthday at least.
• Watered trace elements into the plants.
• Saw Da Vinci’s machines. Had forgotten how much of it was weapons research.
• Indian buffet.
• Saw Dr. Jones.
• Read Moondust.

Visit nocleanfeed.com to get informed as to what you can do to stop Stephen Conroy from crippling Australia’s internet access.

Tony Stark makes it in at number 8 on Forbes fictional 15,behind Ritchie Rich and Scrooge McDuck.

I was thinking today that if there was one thing that I’d like my kids (and really, pretty much everyone) to be able to do it would be to be able to wonder at the beauty in and of things. Pretty much anything really. Trees, rocks, whatever. Illuminated by light from a nearby star(!) (itself powered by nuclear fusion) that makes its way out from the core of the sun, streams through space, the atmosphere, hits the object and is reflected into the (improbably evolved) eye where it’s interpreted by an equally fantastic thing called a brain that exists, and is here and able to wonder about everything. And that’s ignoring the subatomic level, time, and lots of other cool stuff. Pretty much the more you know the more levels you can appreciate things on, and whatever way you cut it, existence is cool.

Set your TV recording devices for “How Art Made The World”, Tuesdays at 2030hrs. on Channel 2 (Sorry, ABC1 Dr. Nigel Spivey hosts a very cool show about how art came about, and what it’s done since then. Next week’s episode, The Art of Persuasion. This week’s episode included some pretty cool cave paintings.
[Edit: Next week is The hunt for HMAS Sydney in that timeslot, so the next episode of How Art Made the World is 8th April 2008]

Check out isitferret’s Swancon 2008 photobucket here. Leece and Rob’s photos from the Heroes and Villain’s Ball are here. Suggested flickr tag swancon2008.

Fans of the awesome graphic novel Watchmen might like to know that the promo images from the film are available.

If you’re free on 18th March you might want to check out this lecture (at UWA’s Social Sciences Lecture Theatre).

Mark Bould is a Reader in Film and Literature at the University of the West of England. He is the founding co-editor of “Science Fiction Film and Television”, and an advisory editor for “Historical Materialism: Research in Critical Marxist Theory”, “The Journal of Horror Studies” and “Science Fiction Studies”. He is the author of “Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City” (2005) and “The Cinema of John Sayles: Lone Star” (2008) and co-editor of “Parietal Games: Critical Writing By and On M. John Harrison” (2005). He is currently writing “The Routledge Film Guidebook: Science Fiction”, co-writing “The Routledge Concise History of Science Fiction”, and co-editing “Neo-noir, Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction”, “The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction” and “Fifty Key Figures in Science Fiction”.

Know Thyself

by Alexander Pope

Know then thyself, presume not God to scan;
The proper study of mankind is Man.
Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,
A being darkly wise and rudely great:
With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,
With too much weakness for the Stoic’s pride,
He hangs between; in doubt to act or rest,
In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast,
In doubt his mind or body to prefer;
Born but to die, and reasoning but to err;
Alike in ignorance, his reason such
Whether he thinks too little or too much:
Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;
Still by himself abused, or disabused;
Created half to rise and half to fall;
Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;
Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurled:
The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!