I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.
A little more than 8 years later, it was done. On July 20, 1969, 49 years ago today, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon, took a walk, and returned safely to Earth a few days later. And the whole thing was broadcast live on television screens around the world.
4:10:30 pm: Moon landing broadcast starts
4:17:40 pm: Lunar module lands on the Moon
4:20:15 pm: Break in coverage
10:51:27 pm: Moon walk broadcast starts
10:56:15 pm: First step on Moon
11:51:30 pm: Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew
12:00:30 am: Broadcast end (on July 21)
You can add these yearly recurring events to your calendar: Moon landing & Moon walk.
Here’s what I wrote when I launched the project, which is one of my favorite things I’ve ever done online:
If you’ve never seen this coverage, I urge you to watch at least the landing segment (~10 min.) and the first 10-20 minutes of the Moon walk. I hope that with the old time TV display and poor YouTube quality, you get a small sense of how someone 40 years ago might have experienced it. I’ve watched the whole thing a couple of times while putting this together and I’m struck by two things: 1) how it’s almost more amazing that hundreds of millions of people watched the first Moon walk *live* on TV than it is that they got to the Moon in the first place, and 2) that pretty much the sole purpose of the Apollo 11 Moon walk was to photograph it and broadcast it live back to Earth.
I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Andrew Chaikin’s account of the Apollo program, A Man on the Moon, and the chapter about Apollo 11’s Moon landing was riveting.1 I’ve watched the TV footage & listened to the recordings dozens of times and I was still on the edge of my seat, sweating the landing alongside Armstrong and Aldrin. And sweating they were…at least Armstrong was. Take a look at his heart rate during the landing; it peaked at 150 beats per minute at landing (note: the “1000 ft altitude” is mislabeled, it should be “100 ft”):
For reference, Armstrong’s resting heart rate was around 60 bpm. There are a couple of other interesting things about this chart. The first is the two minutes of missing data starting around 102:36. They were supposed to be 10 minutes from landing on the Moon and instead their link to Mission Control in Houston kept cutting out. Then there were the intermittent 1201 and 1202 program alarms, which neither the LM crew nor Houston had encountered in any of the training simulations. At the sign of the first alarm at 102:38:26, Armstrong’s heart rate actually appears to drop. And then, as the alarms continue throughout the sequence along with Houston’s assurances that the alarm is nothing to worry about, Armstrong’s heart rate stays steady.
Right around the 2000 feet mark, Armstrong realizes that he needs to maneuver around a crater and some rocks on the surface to reach a flat landing spot and his heart rate steadily rises until it plateaus at the landing. At the time, he thought he’d landed with less than 30 seconds of fuel remaining. That Neil Armstrong was able to keep his cool with unknown alarms going off while avoiding craters and boulders with very little fuel remaining and his heart rate spiking while skimming over the surface OF THE FREAKING MOON doing something no one had ever done before is one of the most totally cold-blooded & badass things anyone has ever done. Damn, I get goosebumps just reading about it!
The book is read by Bronson Pinchot, who played Balki Bartokomous on the 80s sitcom Perfect Strangers. He is a fantastic audiobook narrator.↩
Oh, I DO NOT think her family is in on it. Megs would much, much, MUCH rather people be seeing her articles about her fashion and how she’s adjusting to royal life. This Daily Mail story is purely an attempt to put out the fires that her father is causing.
At the very end of the story, the DM repeats what Papa Markle said much earlier: “I was silent for a full year.” That’s a man saying he knows how to be quiet. I suspect that given Megs has hit back in the UK tabs with the heart stuff is fake that Papa Markle is going to hit back with he was never invited to the wedding to begin with. It’s what many people suspected early on.
And then we’ll be treated for another tit-for-tat between the Markles and Megs. It’s just going to go on and on and on. Meanwhile, Harry will eventually not get any press and start getting even more pissy about it. Such a lovely way to start a marriage…
It’s true though! It’s a full blown soap opera now, and it’s not going to stop tomorrow. I have no doubt this is going to go on until the beginning of September, at least.
Some people enter your life in a whirlwind and no matter how hard you try you can’t stop thinking about them, even after they leave…especially after they leave.
I honestly think that they have to do something but whatever they do will probably get a backlash. They could issue a statement but that could stoke the fires more. They could try to sit down with the Markle family and ask them what it would take for them to sign an NDA but if they don’t then the family would definitely sell it as a story that they tried to get them to sign an NDA. If they go a legal route then it again could create more attention or could backfire if they don’t win in some way. So yeah. I don’t know what I’d advise at this point but I don’t think they can let it continue as it is right now.
We are the same as plants, as trees, as other people, as the rain that falls. We consist of that which is around us, we are the same as everything. If we destroy something around us, we destroy ourselves. If we cheat another, we cheat ourselves.
I always had a larger view. I’m interested in real life – my family, my friends. I have tried never to define myself by my success, whatever that is. My happiness is way beyond roles and awards.
What’s next? A simple majority of House
members signed on to a discharge petition to force a floor vote on the
CRA before August recess begins on July 30. We currently have 177 out of 218
needed supporters. At the same time, the court case against the FCC’s
2017 action will be ramping up towards the end of the summer.
Sometimes it is easier to see clearly into the liar than into the man who tells the truth. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
I had confidence because of James. And I was glad to see a lot of your humor in it. Jason: I was too. It’s tough because you’re going from one filmmaker, Zack Synder, who gave birth to it, to another. The new director has to be able to build a whole new world and set the tone. And James let me do silly stuff. He’d encourage me to be a bit more goofy and then I’d watch [scenes during post-production] and I was like, “Holy s—, he kept that in!” I did a lot of stuff that I didn’t think he was going to keep.
James told me about how when you were growing up in Iowa, that your experiences there helped you relate to what he wanted to do with half-human and half-Atlantian Aquaman.
Jason:
One hundred percent. I grew up in the Bridges of Madison County area, like one county over. I graduated with maybe 100 kids, all very much the same. I stood out. I didn’t kind of do the same stuff. I was a bit of a skateboarder, and I started rock climbing. I love Iowa, but I just didn’t fit in. If you’re a Hawaiian kid in Iowa, you’re kind of a fish out of water. Then I went back to Hawaii and I got ostracized there too. I loved both, but just made my own path. So I think it’s easy to relate with Arthur Curry, not really being accepted here and not really being accepted there. I definitely got bullied, but it was—
What other superhero parts have you tried out for over the years?
Jason:
I met the Russo brothers [who directed Marvel’s Captain America: Civil War and Infinity War], who are amazing. It was one of the best meetings I’ve ever had. I was going to do something with them, which unfortunately didn’t work out.
Can you say what character it was?
Jason:
I don’t know. It was going to be a villain, I think. People always want to hire me to play a villain, you know? I did an audition for Guardians of the Galaxy, which was super cool. I got to audition with [Chris Pratt], who’s just a legend and a gentleman. That didn’t work out. And then really the other one after that was my audition for Batman with Zack. And I almost didn’t go because I was like, “This is bulls–t. I’m not a white guy. I ain’t playing Batman. Even if I do, I don’t even want to. It’s like an American playing James Bond, you know? I almost didn’t do it. I thought for sure I was going to be playing [DC Comics villain] Lobo or something. The only people I knew they were casting for were Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman — who the hell am I going to play? So in the meeting, I just played it as if Batman had died in an alley and some thug picked up his suit and put it on. I just played him as a smart ass, jaded and sarcastic. And that’s when Zack was like, “I have an idea…”
What was it like working with your costars?
Jason:
[Amber Heard, who plays Mera] and I are mostly alike. We’re kind of the deviants. She likes to have her wine, I like to have my beer, and we’re both kickbacks. Patrick is definitely the thespian but he’s also a joker. And Yahya is just the mission man. We would always work out together. I didn’t pull too many pranks like I normally do.
What’s the secret to acting like you’re underwater when you’re not actually filming underwater? Jason: Pretend like you’re underwater. That’s the secret. Pretend like you’re underwater. Act, motherf—er, act.
Might as well. He’s got to know by now that she’s never going to get protocol right. Things like that are exactly why she had her pr peeps leak details about the “dumb” protocol things she has to do now.
Personally–the way this is going–I wouldn’t be surprised if next week or the week after if Thomas Markle hopped a plane to the London and did an in-the-studio LIVE interview with Piers Morgan.
And more interviews with Fleet Street. In person.
I mean, we can all see which way this thing is going…
The remains of dozens of people found at a construction site in Texas this year are mostly likely those of African-Americans who were forced to work on a plantation there around the turn of the 20th century, officials said this week.
That finding, announced Monday, opens a window onto a little-remembered period in which blacks in certain Southern states were essentially treated like slaves post-emancipation.
The remains of about 95 people were discovered early this year on a construction site outside Houston, where the Fort Bend Independent School District is building a new school, according to school district officials and court records.
This week, archaeologists announced that the bones were most likely those of African-American laborers who worked as part of the so-called convict lease system, in which the state of Texas outsourced prisoners to work and live on plantations. Read more.
In 1988, at the behest of Volkswagen, author Kurt Vonnegut wrote a letter of advice to people living on Earth 100 years in the future. In it, he urged people to live more in harmony with the natural world through these seven steps:
The sort of leaders we need now are not those who promise ultimate victory over Nature through perseverance in living as we do right now, but those with the courage and intelligence to present to the world what appears to be Nature’s stern but reasonable surrender terms:
1. Reduce and stabilize your population.
2. Stop poisoning the air, the water, and the topsoil.
3. Stop preparing for war and start dealing with your real problems.
4. Teach your kids, and yourselves, too, while you’re at it, how to inhabit a small planet without helping to kill it.
5. Stop thinking science can fix anything if you give it a trillion dollars.
6. Stop thinking your grandchildren will be OK no matter how wasteful or destructive you may be, since they can go to a nice new planet on a spaceship. That is really mean, and stupid.
7. And so on. Or else.
Opinion: U.S. And U.K. Remain United, Not Divided, By Their Common Language
“Great Britain and the United States are two nations separated by a common language.”
That’s the stock witticism, but if you ask me, it gets things backwards. Great Britain and the U.S. are more like two nations united by a divided language — or more precisely, by their mutual obsession with their linguistic differences. For 200 years now, writers from each nation have been tirelessly picking over the language of the other, with a mix of amusement, condescension, derision and horror.
A case has been lodged in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg last week by five women to remove the state-sanctioned gender bias among the nobility and to give girls and boys equal rights to inherit.
In 2013, the royal laws of succession were amended to give equal rights to a baby girl, but attempts to extend this to the peerage came to nothing. Princess Charlotte of Cambridge was…
If it was a different color, it would look so much better. Pale beige does nothing for her and just washes her out. Ironically, this one fits, but the material is so bulky on her petite body that it again looks like it doesn’t fit or that something is off.
The matching handbag and shoes don’t do any favors either since the color matches. She didn’t use anything to accent such a blah dress.
Harry looks better because he doesn’t wash out with different colors of his ensemble.
House of Brat 