Obsidian Wings

Fifty Years Ago Today

by Doctor Science

I was twelve. It was the day we arrived back to our house in Illinois after a year in Dijon, France, where my father had an exchange professorship. We rode down the familiar streets, but it was almost like a dream or a Twilight Zone episode, because there was almost zero traffic. We'd been driving for almost 3 days from New York City, so we weren't really conscious of the news, and it took us a while of driving down deserted streets to remember, right, it's the day they're landing on the moon.

When we got to our house, the first thing we did was find and set up fans, but we then dug out our lousy, small black-and-white TV and of course turned on CBS. I don't remember all that many details about the broadcast or about the landing itself, just the TV on top of cardboard boxes in our living room as we unpacked the house, which another professor's family had been living in for the past year as part of the exchange. But I do remember "One small step", though I was VERY tired and I think maybe my 10-year-old brother was already asleep.

I loved the Apollo program growing up, but I'm OK with a focus away from humans toward robot-based exploration. Especially if it keeps idiots like Jeff Bezos from thinking we don't have to solve the climate change problem.

I'm following along Apollo in Real Time and it is *gripping*-- not to mention so much clearer than that little TV 50 years ago.

We had a dinner party tonight, and the people who are old enough to remember talked to the younger people about how it felt back then. We grew up seeing the Vietnam War toll growing on our TVs every night, seeing violence in the streets, assassinations and riots. What really stands out in retrospect is how great it was to see and feel part of a really large project to do something ... wonderful.

I don't know if such a project is imaginable today, and what it would look like. Maybe only space is impractical enough to be the focus of a truly wonderful, large project: anything done on Earth of similar scope (halting anthropogenic climate change, for instance) is too practical or useful to feel like something done for beauty, for love, for joy.

View from command module Columbia as the lunar module "Eagle" returned from the surface of the Moon

A Revised Version

by Ugh

Four score and seven years ago our [white] fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all [white] men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of [white] freedom -- and that government of the [white] people, by the [white] people, for the [white] people, shall not perish from the earth.

[Donald J. Trump]

 

Feh

Women's World Cup Final! U! S! A! (open thread too!)

by Ugh

Let's do this.  For some reason the game is at 11am Eastern instead of 3pm like the semifinals, but whatever.  Need to by me a Rapinoe jersey and walk around by the White House with it on if they win.

Separately - go Coco!  And really, All England Club, this "no middle Sunday play" nonsense has got to stop.  Srsly.  Also, love that the French starts on Sunday, the other tourneys should do that too (though I guess the Australian technically starts on Sunday in the US).

What other less than horrible sh1t is going on out there?

Open thread 

Women's World Cup (yetanotheropenthread)

by Ugh

So I've said before the nation rooting order for anyone watching the (male) World Cup should be:

1. Your home country
2. Any nation from Africa
3. Any nation outside of South America & Europe
4. Brazil
   ....
   121,212,312. Germany (no offense Hartmut!)

This gets more complicated for the Women's World Cup as the primary reason for rule 3 is that no nation outside those two areas has ever won the Men's World Cup, or indeed even made the World Cup Final.  That's obviously not the case for the current tournament.

Anyway, based on my own rules, U! S! A! (for the sportsball tournament, not our nightmarish presidential administration that, apparently, thinks it's cool to emulate Soviet Russia and roll tanks down The Mall on July 4th.........).

Maybe someone could trick Trump into reading "What to the slave is the Fourth of July?"

Feh

UPDATE:  You fncking go Sue Bird.