Cheap Therapy

Fans of Philip Pullman might like to take a look at the documentary “Inside his Dark Materials” on ABC2, 8:30pm tonight (Sunday), put together by a friend of his.

• Home Based Learning Network trade fair. I won the first door prize
• Touring the frozen eastern states. Qantas cancels two of my flights due to maintenance issues, and books me on the earlier flight. Fortunately I am able to make it to the airport on time in both cases, although one of them involves eating my dinner in the car… One flight is on a plane flown up from Melbourne to replace the original aircraft. The new plane has a loose interior panel next to my seat, which the hostie kicks into place And the reading lights don’t work. Hopefully nothing else is wrong with it!
• I’m going to try a cut for those who like such things. Apologies if this doesn’t work on the syndicated feed.

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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.

It would seem that there’s Mary MacKillop, the musical.

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

The CofE are looking at Christian symbolism in Doctor Who as a way to seem more relevant to youngsters.

“Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master.” — Commissioner Pravin Lal

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own — a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. -Albert Einstein, physicist, Nobel laureate (1879-1955)

You don’t seem to realize that a poor person who is unhappy is in a better position than a rich person who is unhappy. Because the poor person has hope. He thinks money would help. – Jean Kerr

When the rich wage war it is the poor who die. - Jean-Paul Sartre

Being Poor means sitting on your rooftop while your house is submerged, seeing helicopters rescuing those around you and knowing that you “cannot afford” to be rescued by one. A lady said that in NO two weeks ago, and that made me cry. - blog commenter on John Scalzi’s Being Poor

It is not life and wealth and power that enslave men, but the cleaving to life and wealth and power. -Buddha (c. 563-483 BCE)

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.

This morning Triple J were playing “The King is Dead” by The Herd, a song celebrating the downfall of John Howard. Highly recommended. IIRC “We partied like it was new years’ eve”

Fabulous last paragraph in this article about the new Iranian “Be alert, not alarmed” national security hotline. Or watch the video (requires Windows Media or Flip4Mac WMV plugins)