Here I am to save your day.

October 6, 2004

I was accused yesterday of writing depressing blog entries. What can I say? I write what I feel.

This past weekend I was happy to see that TNT was airing the “From the Earth to the Moon” miniseries, all 12 parts of it. This series was first aired in about 1997 or 1998, somewhere around there, and Tom Hanks was one of the executive producers. This was following the release of Apollo 13, and so I was interested in seeing it, but alas, it aired on HBO or Showtime, neither of which I had, and so I had to hope that I could catch it again in the future. So I set my Tivo to record the miniseries only to find on Sunday that the first three parts were missing. There was plenty of room on my Tivo, but for some reason it had erased parts 1, 2, and 3 without clearing off older stuff first. Damn! I’ll just have to set up a new season pass for it and hope that TNT is showing it nonstop like they do for movies and specials they run. When you wait to see something for that long, it’s a bit disappointing to miss out on it in the end.

Speaking of space-related stuff, I hope you all noticed that SpaceShipOne took the X-Prize and made two successful jaunts into space in less than a week, beating the requirements hands-down. Congratulations, now we’re back at the technological level we had in the early 1960’s. The Air Force X-15 made flights past what’s commonly referred to as the edge of space, but the whole program was discontinued when the Gemini and Apollo space programs got more publicity. Frankly, I find the idea of a plane that can lift off from a runway, fly essentially straight up into space, and then land again a whole lot cooler than the exercise in physics that the rocket programs were. An extremely COMPLICATED exercise in physics, but essentially comparable to shooting a cannonball from one place to another, as the original analogy went. SpaceShipOne launches from a plane like the original X-1 did, but it’s just a variation on the basic idea.

I’ve been seeing crackpot notions as long as I can remember that we didn’t actually land on the moon, and I’ve never given credence to the claims. I’ve never understood, however, why we just stopped sending people to the moon, stopped pushing the envelope. We made it to the moon, and that was it. I have no doubts in my mind that we DID send people to the moon, but it seems like it’s taken a loooong time for us to get back to the point where it’s a reality again. Bush announced awhile ago that he wanted to send astronauts to Mars, and given the state of disarray that NASA is, despite the explorer inside me that wants to do it, I don’t think it’s a good idea with the high-profile mistakes that have happened with NASA in the last five or six years. Why not send people back to the moon? Why not continue the experiments that Apollo started? Why not do what everyone expected us to do back in the 1960’s and set up a moonbase? Seems like a safer, albeit still fantastic idea. Now that commericial spaceflight is beginning to see the light of day, maybe a private industry will pave the way instead.

That’s why I liked the whole idea of the X-Prize. Get everyone besides governments going. In science fiction media, we always see people lifting off in their own private spaceships or hitching a ride on a transport, but ten to one neither one is owned or run by the government. At what point would the governments of the world open up orbital flight and beyond to private citizens? In at least the film 2001, the transport at the beginning taking people to the moonbase was a Pan Am ship, if I remember correctly. Of course, Pan Am doesn’t exist anymore, but eventually the few remaining airliners would get involved.

I’d suggested that the floudering United, Delta, and US Air all get involved in space flight, but there’s nowhere to GO yet. Practical space flight needs a destination. People are putting downpayments on flights with Richard Branson’s (the multimillionaire head of Virgin Enterprises) planned fleet of five SpaceShipOne variants he plans to operate by 2007, but that’s just a ride. Give them somewhere to go.

Also in space-related news, astronaut Gordon “Gordo” Cooper died on the same day that the X-Prize was won. For those not as up on astronaut lore as I am, Gordo was one of the original Mercury 7 astronauts, the first group to go up and come back down in the early 1960’s, and also the last American to orbit the Earth by himself, among other achievements. I’m sure that record will hold for at least another few years, but I estimate that before the 50th anniversary of his flight, a private citizen will do it again. For those more with a passing familiarity with astronaut lore, in the fantastic movie (based on the fantastic book) The Right Stuff about the Mercury astronaut program, Gordo was played by Dennis Quaid. Remember him now?

“Who’s the best pilot I ever saw? You’re looking at him!”

You had The Right Stuff, Gordo, and your picture is finally on the wall with the other heroes.

I spent the Borders gift card I got from my Mom for my birthday on the extended edition of The Two Towers (like there isn’t anyone who knows me that this would surprise) as well as season three of The Simpsons. I was debating between Simpsons and “Futurama,” but I finally went with the former because I’ve been watching the latter daily on Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network, and I just don’t find the later epsides as consistently funny as I do the early ones. Kinda like “The Simpsons” in that regards, though not nearly to the same scale. Not enough to make me want to stop watching altogether, at least. Plus, since I AM watching Futurama almost daily, I didn’t see a need to buy the next DVD set.

I also decided what I would spend my gift certificate to Barnes & Noble on that I got from my stepmother. Next Tuesday, the first and second season of “Ren and Stimpy” is coming out on DVD. It will be mine. Oh yes, it will be mine. I have very fond memories of that show, and since I’ve seen episodes within the last few years and still laughed until my sides hurt, I know that I won’t be disappointed with my childhood memories. Other cartoons I used to watch have crossed my path, and I remember thinking “Huh? I used to like this?” because they didn’t scale well to adulthood, but “Ren and Stimpy” works well on so many levels. This isn’t the shambles of a cartoon that Spike TV aired last year, but rather, the best of the best original series.

Now I just need to find the first couple of seasons of MTV’s “Liquid Television” on DVD somewhere, and my television habits from the early 1990’s will be complete.

By order of Andrew, my sister is hereby prohibited from bringing food and/or drink into my room forthwith. Her habits of spilling food are legendary among our family, extended back as far as I can remember with plenty of evidence to back up our teasing. Last night she decided to spill a whole cup of water all over my floor, herself, and mostly missed my clean clothes. Mostly. I have things hanging out to dry now, had to dry off the basket, but most of it came out OK. If it had been wine or something, I wouldn’t have been quite as forgiving.

I got a haircut for myself on Monday, something I desperately needed. For the first time in I-don’t-know-how-long, I have a new hairstyle, too. I’ve been parting my hair down the middle for many years, before that I parted on the side. Basically, I’ve been parting my hair since I was in middle school. I started wearing my hair like I did until Monday sometime in high school, and so here I am, eight years later. Time to change my hair. I even got an “Are you sure?” from the sylist. It was an experiment, if nothing else. So no, I don’t have a shaved head, and no, I didn’t get a buzz cut, but my hair is significantly shorter than it was three days ago. My boss said that I’d jumped forward about two decades in my hairstyle, but I’m not exactly sure what that meant. Maybe ONE decade, but two? Meh, I dunno. I’ve been wondering how it would look without my goatee, though, but the idea of regrowing it if I don’t like the look (again) doesn’t appeal to me. Last time I did that was in April, and I don’t relish the idea of going through a month and a half of looking like a shemp before it gets back to the length I prefer. Same would have gone for my hair, I suppose, but the experiment worked, and I’m largely happy with my hair.

Work’s going OK. I know I was kind of gloom-and-doom a bit ago, but things have always been OK. I wasn’t in a hostile work environment or anything, just made a mistake and got the wrath of the boss. Happens to the rest of us. The only big thing going on is the speculation of where we might move to in the spring, though as I believe I stated earlier, it’s going to be downtown, no matter what. There are about three buildings my boss is looking at, all of which would offer us offices off the street level. One place would actually force us to up our image a bit given the clientele in the rest of the building, and my boss joked that some of us would have to get new clothes. I wouldn’t mind that as long as it was in a nice location. Preferably close to a McMenamins as we are now (then again, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting a McMenamins in this town) and close to all the restaurants downtown. The idea of being able to go to Good Dog, Bad Dog on a regular basis sounds good to me. Plus I could meet up with my Dad now and then for lunch, and best of all, take the MAX and/or bus to work on a daily basis. My commute’s only about ten or fifteen minutes now, but I wouldn’t mind increasing my commute time if I didn’t have to drive.

You’ll notice that I retitled my blog. I felt that the time had expired on the title “I want you to trip like I do,” and that despite the enjoyment I have of the song that lyric is taken from, I needed something new and more representative. “Kinda I want to” is a lyric from a Nine Inch Nails song off the 1989 album “Pretty Hate Machine,” which I currently have in my car CD player. I’ve listened throuhg the whole album about six or seven times in the last couple of months since I last changed CDs, and I’ve really gained a whole new appreciation for Trent Reznor (the lead man) and NIN. NIN is usually seen by most people as heavy metal (for lack of a more specific term, since that’s what those who don’t really know would call it) or techno, though his lyrics are surprisingly poignant. Reznor writes lyrics like Sylvia Plath might have written if she had composed music and, you know, hadn’t gassed herself in an oven. The specific song I took the lyric from doesn’t have any overt meaning, but I just felt that the lyric “kinda I want to” sounds like something representative of me. Maybe.

On one final note, I’ve kept an eye on Mount St. Helens in the last week to see if it’ll blow its top again, and even though it’s not expected to erupt with the same amount of force as it did in 1980, since it’s located only 50 miles from my hometown I’m still, as I said, keeping an eye on it. Not that there would be anything I could do if it DID erupt like it did in 1980. As a humorous aside, yesterday I had Windows Media Player open with a streaming cam trained on St. Helens playing, and it was neat to see the steam and ash drifting out of the cone and the wind blowing it East. But I went back and checked after an hour of working and all I saw was a test pattern…and that alarmed me for a moment until the image came back. False alarm! But nonetheless, it’s expected to erupt sometime in the next few days. That the lava dome has risen 150 feet in the last three days is one of the best indicators, I suppose.

Frankly, I’m more worried about potential future eruptions of Mt. Rainier, or even worse (for me, at least), Mt. Hood.

So that’s about where I stand for the time being. I’ve tossed around the idea in the last week or discontinuing my blog altogether, but I’m not sure that would be the best of ideas. I just need to focus more on writing in greater frequency, but as I’ve said several times before, I just have other things on my mind.

I’ll work on being better.

Posted in Beer, General, Movies