My middle little sister just sent this to me. I was actually surprised that she even knew who Father Guido Sarducci is because she's not that old (notice that the audience is straight out of the late seventies-early eighties) but her explanation that she had watched it during a staff development meeting (she's a teacher) made more sense:
This reminded me of one of my favorite exchanges from the movie Reality Bites:
Lelaina: Quick, Vicky, what’s your social security?
Vicky: Ahh... eight five one two five nine three five seven.
Troy: Very impressive.
Vicky: It’s the only thing I really learned in college...
The next impotent volley from my conservative counterpart Donald Douglas of American Power has been duly served and it barely cleared the net this time with "Brain Rage Chunky Vomit":
I guess I hurt JBW's feelings with my last post repudiating the Brain Rage embrace of death-wish drug abuse:
...my favorite part of this post is Don's continued insistence, albeit indirectly this time, that I should somehow embrace him as some type of mentor based on his 13-14 years seniority of me. I hate to disappoint the guy but I've tried this particular song and dance in the patriarchal sense twice in my life and the results were less than stellar both times: my father ignored me until he was on his death bed and my step-father was a serial dick throughout my childhood, so I'm sure I can be excused for not embracing the intellectual arguments of someone who consistently calls me a loser or worse.
Been there. Done that.
It sucks JBW when no father-figures have been there for you. That's called father-hunger. My heart bleeds for you buddy. And of course your pain helps explain why you'd take cocaine over camaraderie. So I'll be blunt: Drugs suck. They're for losers. If you don't want to be a loser. Don't do drugs.
P.S. Sorry to hurt your feelings, but your post truly reminds me of "chunky vomit." And like the flummoxed muscle-bound macho teacher at the clip, you're hightailing it outta there when it comes to sophisticated engagements. Get some help dude.
First, I'd wager that there are few things you or most anyone else could say or do in this world that would legitimately hurt my feelings, Don. I know your old man was a less than stellar role model as well and I sympathize (I also assume it's why you're so quick to be so confrontational; me too on that count, perhaps...) but contrary to your characterization I don't feel any need to fill any void caused by this: I've only gained strength from it. I wasn't lamenting my upbringing so much as it was merely full disclosure for my readers. I think honesty's a good thing and I try to exemplify that as much as I can when I write.
Again, the conflation of cocaine use within a discussion about the merits of cannabis is a desperate straw man deflection but I'm going to let you in on a little secret that the rest of us adults already know: not everyone who uses drugs does so to alleviate pain. Drugs can be quite fun and stimulating when used responsibly (hell, they even cure some diseases) but you and your nanny state ilk would deny that freedom and responsibility to everyone else because you either can't handle it yourselves or simply can't grasp the grown-up concepts I'm delineating here. You don't need your government to prohibit you from using drugs if you don't like them, Don: just don't use them. That's what adults do.
I understand now why you're so afraid that your sons might try drugs someday: merely telling them that "Drugs are bad. You shouldn't do drugs." might work for a while when they're young and naive but at some point (if you've raised them correctly) they'll start to question such a simplistic world view and they'll soon find that your black or white tropes have ill-prepared them for a complex and dynamic world. They're going to realize after looking around outside your little cocoon that not all drugs are the same and that drug use does not necessarily equal drug abuse and then they'll wonder what else you've been lying to them about. You can and should do better than your old man on this count.
On a lighter note, your homosexual vomit fetish video was quite silly and not at all to my liking. In the future I would prefer any posts about myself to include video of strict school marms disciplining naughty young girls to your depictions of teenage boys eating fake vomit for the benefit of their gay gym coach. I'm not judging you for your proclivities and I similarly don't expect you to judge me for mine (although yours are somewhat gross and pretty damn gay). NTTAWWT!
I'm not sure how I'm "hightailing it outta there when it comes to sophisticated engagements" by constantly challenging you to sack up and honestly debate your side of this argument but I'm sure your cognitive dissonance allows you to somehow believe this and think yourself superior as a result. When you're ready to use your big boy voice I've got a swollen cranium full of clever bon mots to lob at whatever emaciated arguments you'd care to put forth in defense of your side of this discussion. The chance to make your brain my brain's bitch is all the help I need, dude.
The idolization/fetishization of Ronald Reagan by the Republican party has been running rampant for years and now one of his sons (the conservative one, natch) has decided to try sucking even more cash out of his old man's memory by attempting to prey upon the gullibility of the political right:
Conservative talk radio host Michael Reagan, eldest son of former president Ronald Reagan, is selling @Reagan.com e-mail addresses on his website with an appeal to conservatives to stop giving their money to companies he casts as tied to liberalism.
Writes Reagan: "People who believe in true Reagan Conservative Values are unwittingly supporting the Obama, Pelosi and Reid liberal agenda! What do I mean? Well, every time you use your email from companies like Google, AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail, Apple and others, you are helping the liberals. These companies are, and will continue, to be huge supporters financially and with technology of those that are hurting our country."
"Is that where you want your money to go? I didn't so I changed things," he continues. "I came up with the very first conservative email service provider. You now can put your name next to the name of the Greatest Conservative of all, my father Ronald Reagan." ...
@Reagan.com e-mail addresses cost $34.95 per year (through tomorrow, after which prices go up). Reagan says those who purchase the e-mail addresses will also get a DVD of his father's famous 1987 "Tear Down This Wall" speech at Brandenburg Gate in Berlin.
So let me see if I have this straight: for only 35 bucks a year you can buy something that dozens of other companies give away for free and as a bonus you get a DVD that... you can watch online for free. I suppose it makes as much sense as voodoo economics, although I have to admit that it'd be pretty funny to have lancethundercock@Reagan.com on all my business cards. Too bad I support the Obama, Pelosi and Reid liberal agenda, huh? Well, the Obama liberal agenda anyway. I relegate Pelosi and Reid to the same category I do condoms: necessary evils, at best.
It seems that there are some things we still really butt heads on. From Gallup:
PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans generally agree about the morality of 12 out of 16 behaviors or social policies that sometimes spark public controversy, with sizable majorities saying each is either "morally acceptable" or "morally wrong." By contrast, views on doctor-assisted suicide, gay and lesbian relations, abortion, and having a baby outside of marriage are closely divided -- the percentage supporting and the percentage opposing are within 15 points of each other.
That the cultural taboo of having a baby outside of marriage is one of these four most controversial issues surprises me a bit. I suppose it shouldn't, as I assume much of the disapproval comes from biblical and other religious circles and we're a nation of mostly religious Christians but it still just seems a largely outmoded concern to me. I'm guessing that attitudes on race also have something to do with it since blacks and Hispanics have significantly higher numbers of unwed mothers per capita than whites. I had assumed that we'd gotten past this particular social stigma but I guess there are always going to be reasons to disapprove of others' behaviours.
I've never passed my genes on to a miniature version of myself but if I ever do I'm going to try to make the announcement as cool and nerdy as this one:
[Update: Of course you don't want to make your wedding announcement too epic or else the pregnancy will just seem like a weak-ass sequel. I think it would be quite interesting to know these two individuals:
Radley Balko at Reason.com revisits a previous post:
In February, I wrote the following about a drug raid in Missouri:
SWAT team breaks into home, fires seven rounds at family's pit bull and corgi (?!) as a seven-year-old looks on.
They found a "small amount" of marijuana, enough for a misdemeanor charge. The parents were then charged with child endangerment.
So smoking pot = "child endangerment." Storming a home with guns, then firing bullets into the family pets as a child looks on = necessary police procedures to ensure everyone's safety.
Just so we're clear.
Now there's video, which you can watch below. It's horrifying, but I'd urge you to watch it, and to send it to the drug warriors in your life. This is the blunt-end result of all the war imagery and militaristic rhetoric politicians have been spewing for the last 30 years—cops dressed like soldiers, barreling through the front door middle of the night, slaughtering the family pets, filling the house with bullets in the presence of children, then having the audacity to charge the parents with endangering their own kid. There are 100-150 of these raids every day in America, the vast, vast majority like this one, to serve a warrant for a consensual crime.
But they did prevent Jonathan Whitworth from smoking the pot they found in his possession. So I guess this mission was a success.
Here's the video:
Look at the house. It isn't a drug den or a crack house, these are your next door neighbors and their kid. This happened in America. Per a discussion in the comment section of a previous post, this is one of the costs beyond the billions we spend every year on the failed War on Drugs. Of course, this video doesn't definitively prove that it's a failure (as Balko says, they did successfully stop this guy from smoking his cannabis) but is this what you imagine when you think of the drug war succeeding?
Yeah I know, but this one is just more funny than hateful. Enjoy my conservative counterpart Donald Douglas of American Power's pithy post "Lego Blogging!", in which he purports to be spending some quality time with his son although it seems to be more about how horrible he thinks I am than playing with Legos:
My son and I build stuff during off-blogging hours. That's one of the cool things about having a wife and kids (not to mention God). Maybe JBW should quit troll-stalking babes on the web and try some traditional values. Seriously, that's got to beat posting anti-child atheist trash or Rachel Maddow bullshit talking points. Freakin' Christ, James B. "Weightist" Webb, get a goddamned life...
"Not to mention God"? I don't get it: is God playing Legos with them? Now Don doesn't know this but I actually do have a wife. She's invisible and she's called "Drink as much wine as you want and sleep with other women". She's the perfect mother to my invisible teenage son "Spend my college money on a trip to Europe" and my newborn invisible baby "Eight hours of sleep a night". I even have an invisible god who never reveals any evidence of his own existence and appears wholly indifferent towards my life and the lives of everyone else on the planet. No wait, that's Don's god. My invisible god is actually called "Think for yourself because magic isn't real" and he's never watching over me but that's OK because I don't need to believe in a supernatural parental figure looking over my shoulder and shaking his finger at me.
Now I love my invisible family and my non-meddling god because they're perfect for me but I would never insist that anyone else should live the same way I do because I believe in individual liberty and personal freedom. Everyone should be free to live their life as they and they alone see fit as long as it doesn't impinge on anyone else's freedom to do the same. As you've probably noticed though, there are many religious folks like Don out there who are convinced of their own moral superiority and have absolutely no problem telling the rest of us how we should live. Don don't like drugs so nobody should be allowed to use drugs. Don don't like prostitutes so nobody should be allowed to sell or pay for sex. Don believes in God so everyone else should too (just make sure it's the right god, of course) and if you don't or you fail to pay his god the proper respect your character and moral integrity will be called into question. Nanny statism and casting moral aspersions: I'm sure it's What Jesus Would Do.
[Update: Whilst making a run for the border Don reports that he's subsequently edited all of the dirty blasphemy and Jesus bashing from his post:
...cleaned up my post from this morning with the profanity. My apologies. That's not so much like me, and I haven't felt right most of the day. Frankly, I do it mostly to push the boundaries and confound the lefty freaks. But that needs to be way less frequent. I'm practically morphing into that which I reject (i.e., unwashed netroots atheist commies), and THAT bothers me.
That Don: he's such a confounding boundary pusher. And by "unwashed netroots atheist commies" I assume that he's referring to any of the dirty nihilist America haters who frequent my comment section because if he was referring to myself he'd also be shouting WEEEIGHTIST!]
This is getting old. I understand now why most of my liberal/nihilist/whatever friends have stopped trying to engage my conservative counterpart Donald Douglas of American Power on pretty much every level of civilized discourse. It's not just his delusions that he constantly gets the better of me in our little back and forths (I see no need to beat my chest about it, you can judge that for yourselves) or his rank hypocrisy and faux outrage about anything he dislikes or disagrees with (you name it, and everything he includes in this category is always egregious and atrocious and his assessment of such is of course beyond dispute) or even the fact that he selectively refuses to allow comments on any thread in which he mentions me (what kind of blogger who's worth a damn even does that and expects to be taken seriously?) that annoy me.
It's the level of tone-deafness he displays in the face of any and all logic and reason. Case in point, "Living by Faith in God". I'm busy with other things at the moment so I'm going to make this quick:
I thought I'd postpone some of the JBW blog wars for a few days, but I have to say, for an Easter holiday, this guy packs some wicked demonic heat. Thankfully, Serr8d's on the case and has been peppering JBW with covering fire. And as you can see, the Brain Rage posts have become more whiny and impotent with each iteration, so the higher power's getting to this human defect, fallen temporarily though he may be.
Shorter Don: I'm bad, Don's winning, his god's helping him win.
JBW's responded as well to Stogie's photoshop, but my comments on that will go live tomorrow or Tuesday or whenever. Here I just want to elaborate the differences between myself and JBW, and perhaps he'll think through the scathing fires of the perturbations tormenting him.
The differences are of faith, and that which sustains me, and the absence of The Good, which inflicts JBW for want of meaning and fulfillment. Here's a passage from The Strategy of Satan: How to Detect and Defeat Him, which is a pocket handbook for the Christian (blog) warrior, "Living by Faith in God":[A bunch of religious cut and pasting I'm not going to waste time addressing.]
Shorter Don: Don's good because he believes in a god, I'm bad because I don't, bible verses.
At seeing JBW's Easter sacrilege today my heart skipped at Satan's breath, and I fear the JBW knows not of his wayward travels to the underworld of death. He thinks he's cool -- that I'm an old man, a tubby has been -- and that he's got nothing to learn of the ways of grief and hardship and perseverance to the life of goodness in The One. Serr8d, in his rough manner, repudiates JBW's demonology, and that's when JBW recoils and pleads his divine tormentors off. We might say in regular terminology: "If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen." So, in fact it's JBW who should call it a day when beaten silly.
Shorter Don: I'm bad and in league with Satan(?), I'm young and naive, I'm still losing and I think there was something about Neo from The Matrix in there.
But however it's assessed, the boy has lost his faith, and thus he's lost his way in this world. (I know this from JBW's confessions of his parents love and values, and his rejection of them.) Perhaps a further comeuppance is due before change can be effected, but mysterious are the ways of the Lord.
More tomorrow, dear readers ...
OK, I'll spend a few moments on this last part: I've never had faith in any type of god so I had nothing to lose, and I reject the arrogant notion that a person is somehow "lost" without it. The values my parents taught me (which Don apparently completely missed the gist of in my comment) were to question everything in this world with a critical eye and to err on the side of logic and knowledge rather than that of superstition and wishful thinking. Rather than reject these values, I've embraced them as an intellectual philosophy. Oh, shorter Don: Don's not through beating me, his god is helping him do it, this ain't over yet. Jesus...
I was recently perusing my archives looking for a particular post to link to when I came across this one wherein I wrote about Sarah Palin's callous exploitation of her mentally handicapped son Trig as a political prop and I noticed that another site had linked to it in a post about Palin's faux outrage concerning the recent Family Guy episode featuring a Down Syndrome actress. Imagine my surprise when I followed the link and found out that it was from Alan Colmes' website Liberaland (which I've admittedly never heard of before this).
Cool. Does the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game apply online? Because if it does this puts me enticingly close to FOX News' Megyn Kelly. Ouch! And yes I know, Colmes and Hannity don't have a show together anymore but frankly most of the individual pictures of the man were just too gruesome to use for the top of this post so I picked this old publicity still instead. Just kidding, Alan; I need a high-paying job as a liberal commentator and/or political pundit in the worst way. Come on compadre, hook a left leaning brother up! Gracias.
I have no idea what this movie is about but I have to admit that this short trailer intrigued me:
Based upon this extraordinarily obvious Batman rip-off accompanying movie poster: I assume that he's training his daughter to become some type of superhero/urban vigilante, which I can totally respect. My own childhood superhero training was rather abysmal (my old man never even taught me how to fight, much less how to take a bullet) so I can understand Cage's character's motivations. If I'm not raising superheroes, then what the fuck am I doing here? Right?
I returned to California last night after spending a great Thanksgiving holiday with the family in Texas. The food was incredible (thanks, Momma!) and the football was exciting (the Cowboys won while the Aggies put up a valiant yet ultimately losing fight against UT, one of the best teams in the country). I drank too much wine and ate so much crawfish etouffee before I boarded the plane that I thought I was gonna burst. Nonetheless, it's good to be back. Hope everyone else had a good one as well. So, what's been going on?
A Tibetan funeral ritual that despite my extensive education in anthropology I've only just now learned about:
After death ceremonies vary from each faith from Judaism, Islam, Christianity, etc. In Tibetan Buddhism, there's a method of burial known as sky burial. Being Buddhist myself, I didn't know what a sky burial was. My humanities professor in college explained the sky burial before we watched a movie called "Kundun." The story behind Kundun is a biographical drama detailing the life of the current Dalai Lama who is the religious leader of the Buddhist faith.
The sky burial is pretty gruesome sight especially watching it for the first time. First time I saw the sky burial that was portrayed in Kundun, I wanted to cringe. It gave me the creeps. But you can't overlook the symbolism behind a sky burial. Each burial ceremony is sacred and carries a lot of symbolism. Sky burial is no different from such burial ceremony.
During the ceremony, the deceased is carried out to the open mountainous areas where vultures are present. What the monks due is sever each body part of the dead body and toss them out to the vultures. It seems disrespectful and sacrilegious to most faiths because it looks as if the body is desecrated. But that's not the intention of the sky burial.
Sky burial's intention is that when the vultures tear apart the flesh from the bones, your essence is part of the birds' essence. To them, you're still living but part of your body lives on in the birds. Also, the sky burial represents that you're giving back to life and to nature. Vultures are considered birds of prey and the sky burial is to honor those birds of prey...
...A lot of people would consider a sky burial to be disrespectful. But a sky burial possesses strong symbolism and a few benefits. A sky burial represents generosity which is one of the virtues taught in Buddhism. You're giving your body up to the birds in a generous acts in hopes to reincarnate in better circumstances. However the reason it's called a sky barrier because it was dubbed that name by the Westerners. While in Tibet it's called a jhator which is defined as giving to the birds. A sky burial is also friendly on the environment because no nutrients and resources are wasted. Meaning no trees are chopped up, no rocks containing minerals are crushed, and no fuel is burned meaning no pollution.
In a nutshell, a sky burial was the cycle of life and death at its simplest as nature intended.
For a much more comprehensive photologue of a Tibetan Sky Burial click here (rare warning: explicit content). Of course, I don't consider a sky burial disrespectful because I have no problem with the fact that our bodies simply decay upon our deaths; Is there any real difference between being eaten by worms or being eaten by vultures? Still the same naturalistic circle of life, as far as I'm concerned.
Now I'm sure that I've mentioned this on this blog before but just in case I haven't: I expect a massive party to be held upon my death, replete with the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol (amongst other chemicals) to be performed by everyone I care about upon my passing with absolutely no funeral proceedings of any kind. Now, I'd prefer that my body be donated to science after my death (yes, I realize that my Hunter S. Thompson-esque dream of being bodily fired from a cannon is a long shot, no pun intended) but regardless of the final destination for my obviously good-looking corpse I fully expect a grand soiree to be in full swing at the time. And I can honestly say that after many years of preparation I have full confidence that many of my true friends will make this happen according to my premortem wishes. Many thanks in advance, amigos.
I slept through the attacks on 9/11. My cell phone rang around 6:00 a.m. here on the West coast when an ex-girlfriend in Texas called me to see if I'd seen what was happening but I didn't answer, although I did have the thought "Why the hell is she calling me so early?" just before I rolled over and went back to sleep. Being a bartender and hard-drinking partier (yes, even harder than I am now) at the time I leisurely arose around noon and came downstairs where one of my roommates told me that "We've been attacked".
I flipped on the television and numbly watched news coverage for the rest of the day until I had to be at work that night. I didn't know anyone living in New York City at the time but I did call my family and my ex back in Texas; I guess I just wanted to hear their voices. When I got to work I watched news coverage there until closing. Not one person sat at my bar that night. After work I went home and drank even harder than I had the night before, but for very different reasons. That's how I spent 9/11. I'm kind of glad I slept through it.
As sad as this may be to admit, these next three days I'll be spending camping in Sequoia National Park will be the longest I've gone yet without Internet access since Brain Rage went live back in February of 2008. True, I've taken various vacations during which I've had several days off from actively blogging but this will be the longest I've gone without at least periodically checking in and monitoring the comment sections to some extent.
So as always I've loaded up a multitude of post-dated posts to be liberally dispensed during my absence and I've even included a jaw-dropping confession to be put up if I fail to return within 24 hours of my original plan (I assume that this will happen as the result of my untimely death either from evisceration by a rabid chipmunk or complete liver failure because yes, we're taking up a significant amount of distilled spirits). I would also like to encourage as many comments between regular readers absent my ever-witty rejoinders as possible. In addition, please feel free to talk as much shit about me while I'm gone as you wish but also know that upon my return I'll be going full-Big Brother on all your Winston Smith-asses.
So adios, Brain Ragers! Keep an eye on the place while I'm gone and if you can, try to pick up a bit around here. The bon mots are seriously starting to pile up. Adieu.
Our twins are preemies - born at 34 weeks. While there were no complications, it was cold-and-flu season when we brought them home. Their health was a very precarious affair. We were under strict orders to keep them in the house, to limit visitors, to always wash hands after coming back into the house, etc. When we went to the pediatrician, she scheduled us on on a Saturday afternoon when the office was empty in order to minimize potential contact with other sick children.
At our first visit, she recommended a vaccination for a common virus. This is a virus that everybody gets, and is generally mild. With preemies, however, it can be quite severe and commonly results in hospitalization and even death. It should have been done in the NICU, but it had been missed. She scheduled us for the following week. She had to order the vax since it was quite expensive (a total of about $16K.) Two days beforehand, she notified us that our insurance company had denied the coverage as too expensive.
We then proceeded to try to get the insurance company to cover the vax. Our doctor called. The NICU doctor called. We had conference calls with them and the insurance company. We worked up the chain of command at the insurance company. We had it done and paid out of pocket. What choice did we have? Finally, we pulled in a specialist and managed to get high enough up the chain to get it approved. By this point, it had become something of a crusade for the various doctors involved. Two weeks later, my company's health insurance premiums went up 30%.
Coincidence? Who knows. But when people talk about rationing under socialized medicine, I always think, "You know, we have rationing now, it just hasn't effected you. Yet." And mine was one of those highly-vaunted "gold-plated" private health insurance policies.
I personally am very fortunate in that I barely ever get sick and take no prescription medications so I rarely have cause to visit any kind of doctor. Subsequently, I've never had to go toe-to-toe with an insurance company in a situation wherein the very nature of the battle stacks the odds squarely against the patient but I nevertheless empathize with people in situations like this one. Their story is neither remarkable nor uncommon yet this is the manner in which the current health insurance system has been structured to operate since the introduction of the HMO (Health Maintenance Organization) Act 0f 1973 by then President Richard Nixon.
I don't know about you but having to come up with $16,000 without warning to ensure the safety of my (nonexistent) children's lives would be a fairly large yet obviously unavoidable speed bump in my life. Before the housing collapse and current economic downturn of the last couple years illness and/or medical bills contributed to nearly two thirds of all bankruptcies in this country. If something like this can so easily happen to someone with a "gold-plated" private health insurance policy then what can we expect for those 45 million of us without health care of any type whatsoever? As I always say, I don't know enough about this issue to claim to have all the answers but I do know that something definitely has to change. The lives of millions of Americans are depending on it.
Regular readers might have noticed a new commenter around here by the name of "Parsley's Pics" (and more recently just "Leslie"). Leslie Parsley of the site Parsley's Pics is a newcomer to the blogosphere from a less than digital generation (I've never been rude enough to ask her exact age but from her comments about the sixties and the addition of "aka Mom" to her signature in her emails I assume that she's roughly the same age as my own beloved momma) whom I've been mentoring a bit on the ins and outs of HTML, amongst other things blogorific.
Well, Leslie was kind enough to write a post in praise of yours truly (in addition to Ron Chusid of Liberal Values) and this humble site entitled "Hot Blogs: Take a Good Look":
Brain Rage is authored by James B. Webb who offers up solid commentary, provoking thoughts and the most amazing graphics I've seen yet. He's a talented writer, he's witty and he loves to throw darts at the status-quo. This is not always a site for the faint of heart but it is definitely worth visiting and taking a tour. Just click here and here and here for a taste of his graphics and videos. For a personal perspective read his Health Care Reform in America. Make sure to read the comments.
Regular readers also know that I'm a sucker for compliments so please forgive my lack of humility by reproducing them here. Leslie, I'm truly flattered, Ma'am. Blog on.
Regular readers know that I'm a big fan of all things space-related so naturally the upcoming anniversary of our first sojourn to the moon has been on my radar for some time but this site has definitely piqued my interest:
In honor of the 40th anniversary of the moon landing the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum has launched a new website. The goal of the website is to allow visitors to experience the Apollo 11 mission in real time. In fact, the website will go live at 9:32am on July 16th which is exactly 40 years to the minute after the historic launch.
The website is sponsored by the JFK Presidential Library and Museum because it was under President Kennedy’s direction that a mission to the moon be planned and executed. To allow visitors to experience the Apollo 11 mission as it happened the website utilizes archival audio, video, photos and “real time” transmissions. Besides the AOL powered website, visitors can also receive mission updates through three different Twitter accounts.
The simulation goes live tomorrow morning exactly twelve hours from now (you can keep track of the time with the coolest watch ever) and you can watch it all happen here. While I have many happy memories from following NASA's space program and its accumulated milestones over my lifetime I've always envied my parent's generation for getting to watch this historic mission play out during that amazing week back in 1969. My own three most vivid memories of space history all involve the space shuttle program and sadly, two of those have been tragic accidents that I'm not going to expound upon here.
The third is actually one of the few happy memories that I can attribute to my pretty much asshole of a step-father. I don't know if he realized at the time how much I would cherish this experience but props to him for making the effort. He dragged my oldest little sister Holly and I out of bed when I was seven-years-old before 8 a.m. on a Sunday morning (no, we never went to church so this was quite unexpected) to watch live what he obviously considered history being made:
STS-1 was the first flight of the Space Shuttle program, launched on April 12, 1981, and returning to Earth April 14. Space Shuttle Columbia orbited the earth 37 times in this 54.5-hour mission. It was the first US manned space flight since the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project on July 15, 1975, and the first (and so far only) manned maiden test flight of a new spacecraft system.
I won't even go into how many times I visited Space Center Houston over and over again while I was still living there in the nineties. I suspect that fascinations like this one have played a significant part in my never having actually felt like a real adult thus far in my lifetime, and I'm still not sure if I ever want that to change.
Brain Rage is the home of James B. Webb, intellectual elitist, political junkie and Southern food addict. He grew up in Texas but he got to California as soon as he could.
