Category: [Important images]

Scum and villainy

As a not exactly mega fan of Star Wars, I have always found Star Wars Day kind of irritating…

I made this a few years ago in “protest”

…but tonight I have discovered something interesting:

Oh?

OH.

Apparently this is something that’s always been known about, in that there was a making of book about Empire Strikes Back and this was recorded in that (albeit with slightly incorrect details), but, because I am me, I am only finding out about it now forty-seven years later. I wonder how much this influenced the later popularity of the phrase. Either way, though, I now have an actually good reason to be irritated by May the Fourth…

Meet George Doe

While going through that old Livejournal the other night, I rediscovered this picture of me with George W. Bush’s stunt double at 2SER… this was the glory days of APEC 2007; Australia was hosting the APEC gatherings for that year and Sydney was declared the location for Leaders’ Week, when the leaders of the 21 member nations did their particular get-together, and accordingly the old town became something of a police state where the people who actually live here weren’t allowed into our own city. Fortunately 2SER was outside the zone, so we kept going… and that Wednesday afternoon I met the “president”. Flat and lifeless like the real thing, though nonetheless still smarter than the present incumbent. So yeah, there’s me nearly 20 years ago… my beard was controlled and had no grey in it. Hard to believe it is me somehow…

Optimism is beautiful

I don’t know who wrote this blurb for the Velvets from Hullabaloo magazine, but they were unnecessarily upbeat about White Light/White Heat‘s commercial prospects, as that album notably appeared on the Billboard chart for just one week at position 199. With hindsight, of course, even that looks miraculous. There was no way in hell this album was ever going to make Lou and the gang pop stars, and if our author expected that to happen they were being deeply naive. Either that or they were being deeply sarcastic, of course, which the “happy sunshine” line suggests, cos if there are two words no one with any sense would associate with this album, those words are “happy sunshine”…

To the Moon and back

To be honest, when I first heard about the Artemis II mission, I was like: the US is going back to the Moon? Under TRUMP? Astonishingly, the whole thing actually did begin under his aegis in 2017, when the first proposals were made, but it didn’t actually really get going until 2022 when the first unmanned Artemis mission took off under Biden. Then the manned second mission also began under Biden, who was probably expecting to still be the president when it actually happened. That’s kind of why I’m surprised Trump didn’t cancel it; apart from all the other things he’s demanded an end to, this was something that Biden could claim credit for, and I couldn’t imagine him tolerating that.

But—despite all that, Artemis II went up and returned safely to Earth. I was holding off writing about it until it did that, which it did earlier today… it set a number of milestones along the way, most notably the four people on board travelled further away from the Earth than anyone has before (as well as being the first people to do so in over half a century), but I think the fact that it happened at all is the amazing thing. Artemis II went to the Moon and came back. It proved NASA could pull it off. It almost feels like a fuck you to Edolf, doesn’t it? “Look at that, we managed the job without blowing up on the launch pad”…

I saw that online, and it’s an… inelegant way of putting it, but there’s so much truth in it. Because the important thing about Artemis II is that it worked. A US government body—part of THIS particular US government, lest we forget—carried out a major operation for the benefit of science, sending four people into space as far as the Moon for the first time in over half a century, then bringing them back to Earth (good thing there was still an Earth for them to return to, eh); not only was it a useful thing, it was a successful one. A US government body got something RIGHT. And I don’t think people expect that now, especially not from the current mob. We are starved for this sort of competency in recent years, at least when it comes to things that aren’t evil.

And I don’t know what it all cost, but I have seen complaints about the no doubt vast amounts of money being spent on it rather than on things like healthcare. And I mean… Trump was never going to spend that money on healthcare or anything good for the American people in the first place, but also none of that money got spent on anything bad either. It didn’t blow up schools and so forth in Iran, for example. And yeah, obviously America should be putting itself in order and there are other, higher priorities… but that money was going to be spent on something. Better going on something that adds to science and knowledge rather than takes away from life, something actually good and useful at a time where we can no longer count on the US to do that sort of thing.

As a final thing, here’s Hank Green:

But which faith?

J. Divans has a new book:

This is the story of the First Bitch’s journey from atheism to Catholicism. Apparently there’s one slight problem, though, which is that the lovely cover art actually depicts a Methodist church. Apparently it is from somewhere in JD’s native Appalachia, but it is… not of his religion. I wouldn’t have known had someone else not mentioned it online, admittedly; I did do a quick Google search which suggests Catholics are less than one percent  of the Appalachian populachian, so it may just have been awfully difficult to find an actually Catholic structure… but surely there’s at least one? Something else for Pope Leo to snipe at him about, I suppose…

Yes

I suspect we’re all feeling at least a bit like this at the moment. How the fuck is it only the end of March? What the Christ else can still go wrong in the remaining three-quarters of this year? Or should I not ask in case I jinx things? Probably the latter. Sigh.