Everything About Mission Control Houston

It’s done in a style of Vogue’s 73 Question series (a great watch btw) but NASA didn’t really do a great job with the delivery. But I’ll give them a pass, they aren’t entertainers, they are engineers. But I I did enjoy learning a lot of new stuff.

Houston, we have a problem – there are too many questions about Mission Control. Luckily, Flight Director Mary Lawrence is here to answer as many as she can before her shift starts. Listen as she and her fellow flight controllers answer everything about Mission Control Houston: what time does it close, how many acronyms do you have to learn, is there a phone number for the space station, and many many more.

All of the flight controllers on screen are real Houston flight controllers and controllers in training.

Posted in Goofy, Interesting | 1 Comment

Bag of Randomness for Wednesday, January 18, 2017

  • I bet most folks think President-Elect Trump will wear a red tie for his inauguration, but I’d put money on a silver tie. However, if any part of his wardrobe has red, it will only be the sash which has “PRESIDENT” embroidered in gold.
  • Per last night’s ‘CBS Evening News’, three times in our nation’s history the out-going president boycotted his successor’s inauguration: John Adams didn’t attend Thomas Jefferson’s, John Quincy Adams didn’t attend Andrew Jackson’s, and Andrew Johnson’s skipped Ulysses S. Grant after Grant refused to ride with Johnson to the capitol.
  • The role of White House Press Secretary has always fascinated me. In many ways, it’s a thankless job, having to be in the direct line of fire for all the press while maintaining composure. There’s even a silly tradition of the out going one passing down a flak jacket to the incoming one. I say all that because I never put together that the current White House Press Secretary has the last name of “Earnest”, which as Obama put it yesterday when publically thanking him, is a good name to have for that particular role. Sure, you may think he’s rotten as all get out, but the name itself for that role is unique. It’s akin to Usain Bolt being a sprinter, Quentin Jammer playing cornerback, or if someone with the last name Cook was a chef.
  • The ‘Magnum P.I.’ Ferrari has been restored and is for sale. This might be my Hollywood dream car, I’d take this over the Adam West Batmobile.
  • Drew Barrymore has a new series on Netflix, it’s a zombie comedy, and judging from this trailer (language warning), I’m totally in.
  • Philly newspaper enjoying a Cowboys loss
  • Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee is leaving Crackle for Netflix
  • We watched the first episode of HBO’s ‘The New Pope’, here are some spoiler-free thoughts:
    • It’s slow, in the same style as ‘Rectify’ and maybe a tad slower than ‘Breaking Bad’ when it first started out, but I’m totally cool with that.
    • James Cromwell is typecast as a man of the cloth. I took a quick glance at his IMDB page, and since 1999, he’s played that role at least eight times.
    • One quote that really stood out, “Rumors fly so quickly here that sometimes they arrive before the event has taken place.”
    • I done learnt me a new word:
      • calumny – 1 : a misrepresentation intended to harm another’s reputation <denounced his opponent for his defamatory insinuations and calumny> 2 : the act of uttering false charges or misrepresentations maliciously calculated to harm another’s reputation
    • I forgot Pope Benedict XVI is still alive, he’s 89 right now with a birthday this April. I didn’t think he’d live this long.
Posted in Personal | 4 Comments

Bag of Randomness for Tuesday, January 17, 2017

  • From the comments yesterday, I’m going to have to get an HDTV antenna for backup sports purposes and should see if my television has the ability to automatically display closed captioning when put on mute. Thanks.
  • The last human to walk on the moon, Eugene Cernan, died yesterday. Two things I’ll like to note.
    • His daughter was nine-years-old when he was on the moon and he wrote her initials on the surface. There’s an interview of her I saw many moons ago (see what I did there?) that I can’t track down, but she stated she didn’t think much of it at the time, but as she got older, she understood just how cool that fatherly gesture was.
    •  He had a few regrets about how he left the moon.
      • But 44 years ago, when his space boots pressed down into moon dust for the final time, and he lifted them on to the rungs of his lunar module’s ladder, he looked back at the prints he had left – but didn’t think to take a photo. Nor did it cross his mind when he scratched his daughter Tracy’s initials into the greyish dust. “I wish I’d had a camera,” says Gene. “And for the most nostalgic moment; the moment when I was going up the ladder and turned round and saw the Earth still there, still beautiful.
        • OK. One additional item I want to note which comes from that old article. I love his description of sight and sound.
          • “The moon, unfortunately, is magnificently beautiful but a bland colour,” he says. “When we landed, we had mountains surrounding us higher than the Grand Canyon is deep. But they weren’t snow covered and there were no trees, no water running down the hills. They were grey and bland… but still overwhelming in terms of beauty.” He adds: “And though we were in spacesuits, you could feel the silence. It was stark silence, nothing, zero.”
  • If you are a fan of NPR’s “Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me!” you have to check out the latest episode in which Tom Hanks is the guest host.
  • A lot of U2 fans in Dublin were camping outside waiting to buy tickets for their upcoming concert so Bono decided to order pizza for them.
    • Speaking of pizza, here’s a random bit of pizza trivia I recently ran across:
      • Despite its name, Hawaiian pizza is not a Hawaiian invention but Canadian.
        • And I bet it’s crap like that is why you keep coming back to this here blog.
  • Rolling Stone – The Edge Breaks Down U2’s Upcoming ‘Joshua Tree’ Tour
    – Guitarist also reveals status of band’s upcoming ‘Songs of Experience’ LP and discusses rare songs fans might get to hear live

    • I was wondering about this, but it sounds contradictory:
      • Are you going to play the album in sequence at the shows?
        I believe we will, and I say “believe we will” because that is certainly the working assumption right now. The show might not necessarily start with Track One, Side One, “Where the Streets Have No Name,” because we feel like maybe we need to build up to that moment, so we’re still in the middle of figuring out exactly how the running order will go, so yes. We will be playing the album in sequence.
  • Not a lot of tweets make me literally laugh out loud, but this one did – @MsTexas1967: The Bruce Springsteen cover band have pulled out of Trump’s inauguration but their slot will be filled by Huey Lewis and the Fake News
  • I keep thinking about how President-Elect Trump is the P.T. Barnum of our time, and how in many ways, he’s so much better at self-promoting than Barnum ever was, and he’s considered the epitome. But it’s a bit strange I’ve been thinking of that for a while and now Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus will be no more before summer hits.
  • This New York Times article is about President Obama and his love of books. But the author’s claim that Obama, like Lincoln, taught himself how to write is ludicrous or a metaphor just zoomed right passed me going mach five.
  • New York Times – The Lost Footage of Marilyn Monroe – That film image of Ms. Monroe’s skirt rising high in a gust of air? It’s a reshoot of a discarded and more risqué scene seldom seen until now.
    • I never knew that Joe DiMaggio was a wife beater. The lyrics to “Mrs. Robinson” will never be the same:
      • Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio
        Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you
      • A bit of trivia on the song from Wikipedia:
        • Paul Simon met Joe DiMaggio accidentally in a New York restaurant, and the two immediately discussed the song. DiMaggio said “What I don’t understand, is why you ask where I’ve gone. I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial, I’m a spokesman for the Bowery Savings Bank and I haven’t gone anywhere!” Simon replied “that I didn’t mean the lines literally, that I thought of him as an American hero and that genuine heroes were in short supply. He accepted the explanation and thanked me. We shook hands and said good night.” In a New York Times op-ed in March 1999, shortly after DiMaggio’s death, Simon discussed this meeting and explained that the line was meant as a sincere tribute to DiMaggio’s unpretentious heroic stature, in a time when popular culture magnifies and distorts how we perceive our heroes. He further reflected: “In these days of Presidential transgressions and apologies and prime-time interviews about private sexual matters, we grieve for Joe DiMaggio and mourn the loss of his grace and dignity, his fierce sense of privacy, his fidelity to the memory of his wife and the power of his silence.”
  • Mark Zuckerberg kicks off year of travel with charity work in Dallas
  • I used to give Steve Harvey the benefit of the doubt on most things, but his comments about Asian men is hurtful and in bad taste. It was hard, even as a half-Asian, being turned down by girls because of my ethnicity. But, maybe I’m the victor in the end since I ended up with a white girl.
    • During a Jan. 6 episode of his talk show, Harvey ran through some dating books, including 2002’s How to Date a White Woman: A Practical Guide for Asian Men. “That’s one page,” he said. “‘Excuse me, do you like Asian men?’ ‘No.’ ‘Thank you.’” He then asked an imaginary black woman if she liked Asian men, and acted out her response: “I don’t even like Chinese food, boy. It don’t stay with you no time. I don’t eat what I can’t pronounce.”
    • I do appreciate Eddie Huang’s thoughts on the matter, he expresses a lot of things that have gone through my head:
      • … every Asian-American man knows what the dominant culture has to say about us. We count good, we bow well, we are technologically proficient, we’re naturally subordinate, our male anatomy is the size of a thumb drive and we could never in a thousand millenniums be a threat to steal your girl.
      • Attractiveness is a very haphazard dish that can’t be boiled down to height or skin color, but Asian men are told that regardless of what the idyllic mirepoix is or isn’t, we just don’t have the ingredients.
      • But no matter how successful I was, how much self-improvement was made, or how aware I was that stereotypes are not facts, there were times I thoroughly believed that no one wanted anything to do with me. I told myself that it was all a lie, but the structural emasculation of Asian men in all forms of media became a self-fulfilling prophecy that produced an actual abhorrence to Asian men in the real world. That’s why this Steve Harvey episode is so upsetting. He speaks openly about issues facing the black community, he is a man of God, and he has a huge platform to speak from.
Posted in Personal | 2 Comments