Come Fly With Me

I got to thinking about Fly Me To The Moon, the 2007 computer-animated film about how heroic American flies kept Soviet flies from sabotaging Apollo 11. This isn’t the first time I’ve thought about it, although I still haven’t seen it. It’s just that back in September 2020 I noticed some of the Internet Movie Database goofs recorded for the film. checked again and it seems like there are more goofs recorded now. Yet how could that be? Who is going in to a movie from 2007 and sneaking new errors into it? For that matter, who went and snuck into my old article and claimed it was a film from 2008 when the Internet Movie Database says it was 2007?

Anyway just so we can track the progress of whoever it is adding errors to the movie for some reason all these years later, the Internet Movie Database currently lists eleven goofs. This is less than half the number of goofs in The Third Man, so I guess we know who the craftsmen among filmmakers are here.

Statistics Saturday: Some Credible Facts About Apollo 11

• Although none of the Apollo 11 astronauts ever flew a spaceship again, they did fly in airplanes and took boat rides and probably even train rides like the rest of us.
• Neil Armstrong left his wristwatch behind in the Lunar Module when it (the watch) stopped working.
• Buzz Aldrin was prescribed Ritalin to cope with his post-Apollo depression.
• The mission patch originally depicted the eagle landing on the moon holding an olive branch in its talons, which for some reason moved to being held in its beak, or maybe it started out held in its beak. Whatever it was on the actual mission patch it started the other way, though.
• The Apollo Guidance Computer was less powerful than the Space Shuttle Guidance Computer, but more powerful than the Gemini Guidance Computer.
• Some of the Apollo 11 prime or backup crew have probably ridden horses some time or other. What the heck, maybe even the support crew.
• Apollo 11 set a record for human lunar population that since then has been tied, but never beaten.
• Though there was a fair chance Apollo 11 would not land on the Moon, there was no reasonable chance it would land on Mars instead.
• There were no woodchucks on the prime, backup, or support crews of Apollo 11.
• At the time of Apollo 11, not a single person person had yet attended the Woodstock music festival.

Reference: Car Wars: The Untold Story, Robert Sobel.

What’s Going On In Alley Oop? Did the Apollo astronauts meet an alien on the Moon? June – September 2021

No. Alley Oop and crew observed Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin going through a mysterious door in the Sea of Tranquility. It turned out to be the bathroom. The Apollo 11 crew did not find the Moon Alien, Frodd. Alley Oop, Ooola, and Doc Wonmug met him later.

So this should catch you up on Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the start of September 2021. If any news about the strip breaks out, or if you’re reading this after about December 2021, there may be a more useful essay at this link. If there isn’t, well, we live in complicated times.

Alley Oop.

20 June – 4 September 2021.

This story almost exactly fit my publishing cycle. It started a week before my last Alley Oop update, with the gang going back to 1969 to watch the Apollo 11 moon landing. They start with understandable celebrity-creeping behavior. Pretending to be NASA workers. Messing around in training facilities. Then it escalates to following Apollo 11 all the way through the landing.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 6th of July, 2021. Sure, you may sneer at using a display prop as a rocket. But almost exactly this idea appears in renowned science fiction author Stephen Baxter’s 1997 novel Titan. In it, the Saturn V Structural Test Article — used in the 60s to develop processes for handling the actual rockets — is refitted and launched into space as part of sending a space shuttle to Saturn’s moon Titan. And do we call Baxter’s Titan bad? Yes. It was appalling in its badness. It was a novel I finished because if I threw it across the bus someone else might have picked it up and read it, and I could not inflict that on an innocent stranger. The comic strip, though? That’s cool.

So Our Heroes watch Apollo 11’s moonwalk. This in a strip that ran the 21st of July, a timing miss I’m sure keeps Lemon and Sayers from getting a decent night’s sleep. After solving the mystery of the door, Our Heroes walk over to the far side of the Moon, where it happens also to be dark. There they discover a bored-looking alien playing at a computer.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 5th of August, 2021. So, folks who played SimEarth on the Mac back in the 90s. Remember there was an easter egg, a little thing where you typed in ‘JOKE’ and got this weird little Dadaist message? Right. So, anyone remember what it was exactly? I can’t find the joke for the Mac port listed in web sites listing video game easter eggs. There’s emulators to play SimEarth, but it’s the PC version, where the joke is it shows an image of the Earth in a giant frying pan, next to some space bacon and eggs, and labels it ‘Pan-Gaia’. I could swear that on the Mac SimEarth, the easter egg joke was something like “How many Glenn Campbells does it take to screw in a light bulb?” (Hit OK, and get the answer) “Two.” But I can’t find any evidence anyone else has this memory at all. Do I have a weirdly detailed false memory?

Frodd’s playing Earth as a “kind of a video game”, for a school project. Frodd starts to defend his Earth-playing skills, but has to come home for dinner, and takes Our Heroes with them. Frodd’s mother sees the humans and grounds Frodd, for “a Froddulon Millennium”, which is something like a billion earth-years.

So Our Heroes escape, Alley Oop along the way swiping some kind of necklace from somewhere. Turns out the thing makes Our Heroes invisible, which is good for getting them away from alarmed Froddians. They get to Frodd’s spacefaring bubble, which turns out to be able to get them anywhere instantly. They return to the Moon, planning to resume the Earth that Frodd left paused. Turns out Frodd’s there. He passed his school project, with a C-.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 19th of August, 2021. While it is jumping for a silly punch line, the Froddian’s declaration that “the inquisitive ghosts are back” works for me. I don’t know why it works and others don’t. Maybe because it suggests other stories, relying on the idea the world has more stuff in it than we could get to see.

They talk Frodd out of shutting down this Earth simulation, and even snag a nice moustache toggle for Alley Oop. With a pretty successful week, then, they head home. It’s too early to say what the next story will be, although Doc Wonmug has gone back to prehistoric Moo with them.

I admit some dissatisfaction with the story. A little bit from not caring for the reality-is-a-video-game premise. It’s something a certain streak of nerd loves without learning enough philosophy to know what issues it’s not addressing. But most of us enjoy pop culture items that raise issues it doesn’t address. Besides, if it address an issue well then it stops being a pop culture thing and becomes culture. I’m also a bit dissatisfied that Alley Oop, Ooola, and Doc Wonmug don’t have much to do. For most of the story, they’re just present. Note how little I had to break down what Alley Oop did, versus what Oola did, versus what Wonmug did.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 30th of August, 2021. The notion of thousands of Earths is the sort of thing I mean, raising issues the comic strip isn’t dealing with. But those are essentially the issues raised by the multiverse idea — and the changeable-timeline idea — that’s been part of the Lemon and Sayers run on Alley Oop anyway, so it’s not a new issue.

My bigger dissatisfaction is that, in the strip’s focus on having a punch line and a plot development every day, we get some conflicts. I don’t want to call them continuity errors. For one, there’s very little that can’t be harmonized. But we get things like Frodd starting the 40,000-light-year journey to Froddulon A (the 9th of August) by altering Our Heroes’ source code so they won’t age. Later on, when we get back to the Moon (the 2nd of September) Our Heroes just miss some aliens hoping to find someone to bestow immortality on. There’s no contradiction here. But it feels sloppy to do this joke twice in one story. Frodd first explains he’s simulating Earth to get on the high score table (4th of August). The next day he explains it’s an unwanted school project (5th of August). Frodd gets grounded for a millennium (the 12th of August); he’s on the Moon later that day (the 27th of August).

More like a continuity error is Frodd needing to alter Our Heroes’ source code to not age. But we see (the 21st and 23rd of August) that Frodd’s space bubble can travel instantly. We can rationalize that, yes. (And it would wreck the story’s pace if Our Heroes’ escape took 40,000 years.) Puttering around at NASA Alley Oop discovers an Alien Alley Oop (28th of June). But their little launch causes NASA to think they’ve discovered aliens (14th of July). Again, anyone trying could reconcile this. And if an artist has a better idea for an ongoing project they should use the better one. But this feels to me more like they use every idea, which can’t always work.

Jonathan Lemon and Joey Alison Sayers’s Alley Oop for the 24th of July, 2021. As with the Inquisitive Ghosts, this throwaway joke works for me. Part of it may be that it’s about expanding the world, albeit in a way that makes human-mouse interactions in the strip somehow worse than they are in reality. But also that it’s a basically nice joke, Alley Oop having a nice time with new friends, which is easier to take than the cynical or mean jokes.

And the drive for a punch line every day has good sides too. For example, on the 24th of July, Alley chats with the mouse astronauts who beat Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon. It’s a scene I liked.

Next Week!

It’s been one week longer in arriving than usual, but I look at Roy Thomas and Larry Leiber’s The Amazing Spider-Man for the final time. Did Spider-Man save Albuquerque from destruction at the hands of an alien war machine using nothing more than Rocket Raccoon and the secret alien war machine’s commander? The only person I knew in Albuquerque moved away years ago, so I have no way of knowing. Sorry!

Statistics Saturday: Apollo 15 By The Numbers (corrected)

Editorial note. Due to an editing error last week’s chart included the number “1”, representing the number of deep-space spacewalks (as opposed to moonwalks) during Apollo 15. Although that statistic had been considered, the intention was to instead present the number of parachutes which failed to open during the (safe) splashdown. I regret the mistake and include the corrected chart here. Thank you for your understanding.

Still not depicted: 26.975, 560.389, or 4.687.

Reference: European History 1648 to 1789, R M Rayner.

Statistics Saturday: Apollo 15 By The Numbers

Not depicted: 360, 33:07, or 7744.

Reference: Close To Shore: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916, Michael Capuzzo.

Statistics Saturday: The Duration of 15 Things as Measured by the Runtime Of Turbo (2013)

Thing	Durations in Runtimes of Turbo (2013)
Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address	0.05938
Apollo 14	135
Bambi	0.7292
Construction of the Empire State Building	244.375
First non-exhibition/spring-training baseball game of the Houston Colt.45s, 10 April 1962	1.583
“The Gates of Delirium”, by Yes	0.2274
The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island (including commercials)	1.250
The Hundred Years’ War	637,711.71
One second	0.000 173 6
Robert Altman’s Popeye	1.1875
The 1960 Summer Olympics	262.5
Thunderhawk roller coaster (one ride cycle only), Dorney Park, Allentown, Pennsylvania	0.01354
Turbo (2013)	1
Turbo Teen (complete series, including commercials)	4.0625
We’re Back! A Dinosaur’s Story	0.7396

Reference: Roughing It, Mark Twain.

Statistics Saturday: Some Astounding Apollo 14 Trivia

Apollo 14 Thing	Apollo 14 Thing Count or Measure
Launch vehicle Saturns	5
Launch vehicle Saturn V’s	1
Change in angle of flight azimuth required by 40 minutes, 2 second prelaunch weather delay	3 degrees, 30 minutes, 39.24 seconds
Astronaut noses (total)	3
Astronaut noses (per capita)	1
Tree seeds	400, maybe 500, who knows, they’re seeds
Golf balls hit on moon	2
How much longer the astronauts needed to walk to catch sight of the abandoned alien spacecraft in Cone Crater	52 seconds
Softballs hit on moon	0
Service Modules returned to earth	1 (not observed; if you find an Apollo 14 Service Module please bring it to your nearest NASA office)
Baseballs hit on moon	1
Baseballs foul-tipped on moon	2
Moons visited	1
Wastewater dumps deliberately photographed	1
Wheels left on the lunar surface	2
Mortar shells left on the lunar surface	4
Moons secretly visited	3
Astronauts named ‘Stuart’ returned from lunar orbit	1
Time between lunar impact of S-IVB stage and its first detection on the Apollo 12 seismometer 94 nautical miles away	37 seconds
Frisbees thrown on moon	5
Successfully	0
RCS engine deactivation completed	457 hours 57 minutes Mission Elapsed Time
Moon features given the name “Weird Rock”	1
Astronaut toes	10 per nose
Relative humidity at launch	86%

Reference: It’s Back To School, Charlie Brown, Charles M Schulz.

In which I think about Fly Me To The Moon for some reason

I got to thinking about Fly Me To The Moon, which is not a forgotten computer-animated movie from 2008 because even the people making it did not know they were making it. In the movie, a fly sneaks aboard Apollo 11 and saves it from Soviet flies.

The film has a page of goofs. It leads with the characters giving each other high-fives years before high-fives were a thing. Also, the movie apparently ends with Buzz Aldrin explaining to viewers that there weren’t any flies on Apollo 11.

Also the Wikipedia plot summary and the IMDB Goofs Page disagree about whether the Apollo capsule lands in the Pacific Ocean or in Florida. I grant that people of good will could disagree about the contents of an ambiguous scene. And that a movie does not need to have a single reading to be good. But I think if it is unclear whether an Apollo capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean or in Florida then the movie is doing something to stoke confusion, is all.

The trivia page mentions that this is Christopher Lloyd’s fourth film in which he interacts with members of the McFly family. So that’s also kind of sitting on my head today.

Seized by the thought of this momentous anniversary

I’m sorry I’m late. I got caught up in thinking how it was just 31 years ago tonight that I was sitting up watching, on TV, the coverage of the 20th Anniversary of Apollo 11. Gosh. You never see time moving, especially not this year, and yet there it goes nevertheless. You realize next year is going to be the 10th anniversary of the 20th anniversary of the first space shuttle launch? Just amazing.

More Thoughts While Doing My Daily Walk Around Town

Is that … snow? Yes, that’s snow. I’ve seen snow before, although not so much this winter. Who ordered snow? My parents better not hear about this.

Oh, hey, the place that used to be the 24-hour diner. Then the new owners figured instead of being the diner everybody went to because it was 3 am, they could just open for breakfast and lunch. Then they fired the staff and closed entirely. And forgot to get the social media passwords from the staffers. Then they tore down the diner because they figured the vacant lot was worth more than a diner-filled lot. Well, that turned out great. Hey, this has to be the spot where J— discovered his eyeglasses had gouged ridges into the side of his head. Good times.

This … was a lot warmer, like, a week ago. We are going into spring, right? We couldn’t be going right back out of spring again, not with how much everybody agreed on having a spring.

That’s a nice clearly-marked bike lane that comes into existence and runs nearly the length of a full block before fading out again. Probably a story there. Probably also an angry Facebook group.

Oh, criminy, it’s the 50th anniversary of Apollo 13. That would be nice and timely. I did that thing for Apollo 11 and forgot to do anything for Apollo 12. Let me see if there’s anything there, let me think a while and see if I can come up with like three jokes, that’s enough to build a piece around. Oh, who am I kidding, that’s a dumb idea.

So that’s a lone coffee mug six feet from the sidewalk on the torn-up field that used to have a convenience store and now just has the telephone pole with an ‘ATM Inside’ sign on it. This seems to be the setting for some short story with too poignant an imagery to actually read.

Oh, but remember how angry the Usenet group sci.space.history got over the From The Earth To The Moon series, when its Apollo 13 episode wasn’t just doing the movie all over again but on way less budget? Everybody was so angry about it being how reporter Jay Mohr won over reporter Cranky Old Guy. I mean, not so mad as they’d be when the Apollo 16 episode. They got so mad the episode was about the astronaut wives instead of how the Apollo crew drank too much orange drink and passed gas the whole flight. Boy, but the Internet used to be fun to be angry on. What happened?

If I just took that coffee mug how much would I have to clean it to use it again? I’m kidding, I would never stop cleaning it.

Well now I’m just thinking about that report where the Mars Curiosity team had shifted over to working remotely. It’s just, like, they already kind of were. They probably get that a lot. If I ever meet anybody on the team I’m going to have to not tell them that one.

Ooh, hey, the hipster bar left their Wi-Fi on even though they’ve been closed a month now. Good grief it has been a month now. All right. Well, that’s going to be great if my iPod does that thing again where I pause my podcast and it decides to throw away the file and I have to re-download the whole thing. … And I do that when I happen to be right next to the bar. Well, they left the curtain up front open just enough that if I press my face against the window and stare I can kind of make out what have to be the pinball machines. I can stop around to do that a while.

Still thinking about how the Lansing airport listed they had four flights arriving today and only two departing. That’s got to be atypical, right? They can’t be stocking up on two extra planes a day, indefinitely. They’d fill up the parking lot.

All right that’s … nine … ten … twelve pairs of sneakers lined up on the curb, and with a locker mirror and a $4 yard sale price stick on it. There’s probably a good explanation for all of this and the only way I’ll ever know is to knock on the door and ask. They probably get a lot of people knocking on the door asking about the shoe lineup and mirror, though. Maybe I’ll check if they have a web site instead.

Oh, the guys who practice drums four hours a day are still doing that. Still … sounds like drumming. It’s nice to have that to rely on.

Statistics Saturday: Pink Panther Cartoons Debuting During Apollo Missions

1. In The Pink Of The Night (18 May 1969, during Apollo 10)
2. Yeah, that’s it. Weird, right? I mean, there weren’t that many Apollo missions really, but they sprawled like twelve days each, and they were all concentrated in this four-year span. There’s some near misses, like, Pink Sphinx came out the day after Apollo 7 landed, and Pinkcome Tax came out the day before Apollo 8 launched, but there’s no other cartoons that overlapped Apollo missions. Not even the unmanned missions. It just doesn’t add up.

Reference: The History Today Companion to British History, Editors Juliet Gardiner, Neil Wenborn.

Statistics Saturday: Apollo Missions By Length

1. Apollo Six (no crew)
2. Apollo Ten
3. Apollo Four (no crew)
4. Apollo Five (no crew)
5. Apollo Nine
6. Apollo Seven
7. Apollo Eight
8. Apollo Eleven
9. Apollo Twelve
10. Apollo Fifteen
11. Apollo Sixteen (yes crew)
12. Apollo Thirteen
13. Apollo Fourteen
14. Apollo Seventeen
15. Apollo-Soyuz Test Project

Not listed: Skylab 1, Skylab 2/1, 3/2, or 4/3, as those were generally regarded as Skylab rather than Apollo missions.

Reference: Tudor Historical Thought, F J Levy.

Some Astounding Little-Known Facts About Apollo 11

Most of us know three or even four astounding facts about Apollo 11. And yet these do not exhaust the subject. There are over twelve different things about this legendary space mission. Let’s review some of them.

Did you know, for example, that Apollo 11 had the first automatic dishwashing machine brought into lunar orbit? The Westinghouse corporation was proud to make the cramped Command Module at least as livable as an efficiency apartment is. Unfortunately the system failed shortly before the first midcourse correction burn. This was after breakfast but before full testing. Still, we owe the development of dishwashing gel packs to NASA’s need not to have powder floating all over the cabin. Thanks, Moon landing!

Many of us think of the poignancy of Michael Collins, remaining alone in lunar orbit while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the surface. But do you ever consider poor Ronald Evans, who had to remain in earth orbit on the S-II stage while the rest of the crew went on to lunar orbit? Do you remember Ken Mattingly, who had to stay behind on the launch pad while everyone else from the mission went on to earth orbit? And that just because he wasn’t willing to split the tolls. And then there’s poor William Pogue, who had to stay behind in the room where they put all their spacesuits on, because he misunderstood the question. He felt awful about that for years. He can’t even remember what he thought they were asking at the time. “What could it have been, besides `do you want to come to the moon with us’?” he said, in the 1974 debriefing. “Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid.” Well, live and learn.

The date for the landing was not settled until late in mission planning. The later the landing, after all, the more chance to train, although the less time to launch another mission in case something went wrong. All they knew was it had to launch before the 31st of December, 1969. And for that there was a heated debate about whether that meant Washington, DC, time or Houston time. “What if we need that extra hour,” was the point of contention. Anyway the date was set in May of 1969 when someone pointed out they had already inscribed on the plaque that men first set foot on the moon in July 1969. Sometimes it’s the littlest things that settle the hardest questions.

Do you know what held the crew and some people exposed to lunar dust for three weeks after the end of the flight? It was the Mobile Quarantine Facility. And it’s still out there. It’s still roving, too, and no one can stop it. If you encounter it, know that you are not in specific peril. But you aren’t going to have any in-person encounters for 21 days except for whoever else it’s caught. The facility got Wi-Fi in 2004, but it’s not good enough to stream HD video.

Not a single one of the crew returned from space transmogrified in any way. Granted, nobody seriously expected major changes. Like, someone coming back as a cool gelatinous blob. Something. There could be some cool field of strange energy. They could pass through and grow these cool retractable antennas. Maybe eyes some weird, brand-new color like neopurple or techneteal. I know what you’re thinking and no. We know they weren’t a weird color only while they were in space and we were watching in black-and-white. They were checking.

Also a disappointment: while, again, nobody was seriously expecting it? A lot of people hoped the astronauts would make contact with some incredible species of, they don’t know, magic otter aliens. Beings with technology and concepts of space nudity as much as five centuries ahead of anything known to Earth science and pants. No good, though. Despite the breakthroughs of the early 70s we still just have taking off clothes.

It’s true that the Lunar Module touched down with less than a minute of fuel remaining. They avoided this problem on following missions by launching them a minute later. “I don’t know why we didn’t think of that sooner,” said Buzz Aldrin in the 1989 debriefing. “But, hindsight, you know?”

While Apollo 11 was seen as quite the big deal at the time, the opinion of space historians has changed. While it’s still seen as important, that’s less for what it was by itself. Most in-the-know now see Apollo 11’s real legacy being its service as full dress rehearsal for the legendary Apollo 12 mission. So we’ll come back in November and do this again.

How To Swim In Some Other Way

With all the talk these days about spring starting soon — please disregard this message if spring isn’t due to start soon — it’s a good time to learn some new swimming moves. You’ll want to do this before the swimming pools get to opening. In the fast-paced world of competitive recreational swimming if you wait for the pools to open you’ll be swarmed and overwhelmed by people who think they know what they’re doing. Nothing’s a greater threat to getting anything done than swarms of people who think they know what they’re doing. If anyone ever did know what they were doing they’d reconsider doing it in the first place.

And there’s no sense waiting for the pools to close. Getting your swimming-learning in then just leads to awkward questions and sometimes a court appearance. And not the good kinds of court either (basketball, tennis, or stuffed-doll kangaroo). If you find yourself somewhere after the pools close you could pretend to swim. Get into your shower, say, and make the appropriate motions. This will knock the shampoo over and send half of it down the drain. This will give some much-needed bounce to the hair clot that’s about two months away from causing a critical plumbing malfunction.

Now there aren’t any of these swimming strokes designed for efficiency. We already know the most efficient way to get across a swimming pool. First approach the pool at its narrowest end, making soft cooing noises without any startling motions. Then, having strapped a jet engine to your back, jump in at no less than 80% full thrust. Bring it up to 105% nominal full thrust before you hit the water and with luck you’ll be across without even getting wet, and you just might beat the falling boulder to that pesky roadrunner. No; what we want here is a full swimming experience, which is what these are about.

First: The Ladder Climb. Start from the top of a ladder which leads into the pool or other body of water. You might need to bring a ladder with you, in which case be sure to mark your name on it somewhere, yes, even if your name is “Mark”. Stand securely with both hands on the railing and both feet on a step, and make your way one step at a time down. When your body is mostly in the water you can then shift to hopping down, both legs taking one step. For the final step hop away from the ladder while describing this as one small step for a man or woman as appropriate but nevertheless one giant leap etc. Advanced swimmers might try a more obscure line such as “Whoopie! Man, that may have been one small step for Neil.” Or try working up your own lunar-landing quote, possibly delivering it imitation of some 1930s comedian you know only from Bugs Bunny cartoons. Try Ben Turpin. Nobody will know if you’re doing it wrong.

Second: The Vertical Drop. Place your arms and legs together to descend rapidly to the bottom of the water. With your eyes closed (if you’re anything like me, you have to do this before you even get started) reflect on how nice it is to be there. It’s warm enough. The light leaking through your eyes is diffuse and nonspecific. Children squealing sound like they’re thousands of miles away. Lifeguards blowing whistles sound like alien life forms. The cries of people evacuating the pool are barely audible. The siren warning about sharks in the area is as nothing compared to the weird, not-exactly-grippy surface nosing you around. Remember to not breathe until you’re done with your business down below.

Third: The Twist. Start from a horizontal pose within the water. Select one arm (the wrong one) to move forward as it’s above the water line, the way you would for a crawl or for that other crawl. Meanwhile using the other arm (the right one) move backward, similarly. With your legs kick left and right simultaneously, producing a lurching motion that immediately propels you into the person in the next lane. With your full measure of grace apologize and pledge never to do it again. Then using the second arm (the right one) forward and the wrong arm backward (the other one) try again. This will propel you into the person in the other lane. In case you are swimming where there’s not any lanes bring along some ropes and string them up yourself. It may seem like a lot of work, but it’s worth it.

While these may seem obvious to do, it is worth practicing so that you look up to four percent less silly when you can go swimming again. Put the shampoo bottle on the sink. Sorry, no idea how the shark got into this.

Interestingly, I Need Help

I was in the university library because I don’t really make sense anywhere else. Not to brag but in my life I’ve been in over twenty places, and really, “university library” is the one I look the least awkward and weird in. I don’t mind. At least it’s somewhere.

But I was there because I’d wanted to read this history of word processors. Not a recent book, mind you. The book was written sometime in the mid-80s. That’s a lot of word-processor history ago, I admit. Back then word processors were primitive affairs, often programs we got by typing them in from magazines that cost $2.95 at the grocery store and there’s nothing about that I’m making up. Many of them were coal-powered and they were able to store up to one macro, which would be “add a line break after each paragraph, except that makes your document more than 4 kilobytes big, so the computer runs out of memory”. Still, I’d want to know more about how we got to that point.

And that’s when I discovered the horror: the library was reorganizing its shelves. Like, all of them, best I can figure. Everything. And I thought: no! That shelf where I ran across that book about pasta technologies holds nothing now! How will I ever find that book again? I haven’t wanted to find it again since I first read it but still, I knew where it was. I was lost.

This made me realize something. I own multiple books about the history of containerized cargo. I own a book that’s entirely about nutmeg, a spice I could not positively affirm under oath that I had ever had. Seriously, if I tried it would go something like this, taken from my court appearance for failure-to-yield in this minor traffic accident I had at the awful traffic circle where Route 206 crosses White Horse Avenue in Trenton, New Jersey:

ATTORNEY: And have you, knowingly, ever consumed a thing with nutmeg on or in it?

ME: I … think? Maybe? Don’t they use it for pumpkin pies? I’ve eaten that.

ATTORNEY: Maybe? Didn’t you knowingly and deliberately sprinkle some onto the free coffee you got at the farmer’s market so you could see what it was like?

ME: Oh, yes, I guess. It tasted … like every spice ever?

I don’t know what the attorney hoped to prove. In any case they forgave the failure-to-yield and only gave me a citation for listening to an audiobook about the history of the concept of corporations. And that feeds back to my point. I want to say I’m curious about all aspects of the human experience, and that I’m open to how much thought and history goes in to even the small, insignificant things. And then the attorney asks, “Don’t you own multiple books about the history of calendars each written by someone with the name “Duncan”?” Yes. Yes I do. And I already knew all the good stuff in the various Duncans’ books from having read many books about the calendar when I was a kid.

Clearly, I need help. I need some kind of guide to what things are in fact interesting and what things are not. This might take the form of some kind of specially-trained support dog. Someone who will notice how I’m looking over a history of subway tokens (by Brian J Cudahy, author of one of those containerized-cargo books) and leap onto me, shoving me to the ground and maybe rolling me over to something of more general interest. Like a history of an Apollo mission. No, not that Apollo mission. A famous one, like Apollo 11 or 13. Good grief. Fine, maybe 8. No not 12 why are you looking at 12? Who notices Apollo missions that didn’t have James Lovell involved?

They didn’t have the word-processing book. So, hey, someone else found it interesting or they lost it in 1992 and nobody’s asked about it yet. Left to my own devices, I got to Harvey C Mansfield’s 1947 A Short History of the Office of Price Administration, because apparently I need to know something about the theory and practice of World War II price-control administration that I couldn’t just pick up from listening to Lum and Abner episodes that had a public-service mission. Ah, but consider this: it includes this July 1947 quote from Bernard Baruch, architect of what price controls the United States government attempted in World War I and a leading advocate for strategic planning of economic needs given the national emergency:

Also, as a result of piecemeal price control, we are now faced with inflation which, next to human slaughter, maiming and destruction, is the worst consequence of war.

This serves as a valuable reminder that one does not get to be an extraordinarily wealthy individual and public intellectual advising presidents across many decades without completely losing one’s ability to realize one has just composed the daftest sentence in all of 1947, a year when the administration of Germany was divided into The Soviet Sector, the Brassiere, and Bizonia. Yes, yes, plus the Protectorate of the Saar. Don’t nitpick me. I do my reading.

The Apollo 12 astronauts considered giving their Command Module the name Abner, so that their call signs would be Lem and Abner, but this was stopped when, I trust, a NASA Public Affairs Officer came down and slugged Lunar Module pilot Alan Bean. I can show you the book that’s from.

Statistics Saturday: Apollo Lunar Landings, By Day

I certainly hope this clears up some things!

Source: Oh, come on, like anyone couldn’t rattle off the dates that (say) the Apollo 16 Lunar Module was on the surface of the Moon with its complement of astronauts, Commander Astronaut Commander Guy, Lunar Module Pilot Pilot Person, and Command Module Pilot Ed Harris aboard? This hardly needs sourcing. We’re not savages.

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index rose four points, no thanks to Lisa who’s still walking around and mentioning stuff about “deal memos” just loudly enough that everybody knows what she thinks she’s doing. We’re not taking her bait on the intimations of some kind of Dutch TV producers being involved either.

365

Statistics Saturday: Some Answers

• North Dakota in the year 1822.
• Myoglobin.
• It has none.
• The square root of two raised to the square root of two power.
• Cuckoo clocks.
• Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffmann.
• The Hartford Whalers.
• SS Ideal-X.
• Hexagons.
• Polymerization.
• The pathetic fallacy.
• Saw the board into two halves; combine the two halves to make a whole, and then climb out through the [w]hole.
• Pointillism.
• 95 percent.
• Dormer windows.
• Walk The Moon.
• James Irwin.
• Violincello.
• Doyenne, D-o-y-e-n-n-e. Doyenne.
• Had you considered the village barber might be a woman?

Another Blog, Meanwhile Index

The index dropped three points today, owing to traders getting all sulky when I told them that while I appreciated their idea about an imaginary HGTV show talled Tiny McMansions, there was no way I could build that up to one of my big-size weekly essays and I wasn’t going to try. Lisa went off fuming and saying she was going to put together a pilot episode.

328

Dogs Make News By Acting Like Dogs

You might have seen this on Reuters in which case I’m sorry but you probably already thought of my jokes about it. I hope we can still be friends. Anyway at England’s Manchester Airport they’re reviewing their team of drug-sniffer dogs just because in seven months of work they never found any smuggled drugs. To be fair this compares well with my track record of finding illicit drugs.

And it isn’t like they found nothing. According to a review the dogs did manage “multiple accurate detections, but most were of small amounts of cheese or sausages, wrongly brought back by returning British holidaymakers and posing minimal risk to UK public health”. And they’re reviewing how it is the project spent £1.25 million on dogs who recovered somewhere around 181 kilograms of meats. I’m a bit unsure about it myself. I would think you could train dogs to sniff out smoked meats and cheese without much more advanced training than saying, “Who’s a good doggy?” while waving a slice of pepperoni. You could do this in an empty room and a good doggy would appear, and then follow you around, pleading for more. I suppose they did get six dogs, and that’s got to be more pricey than one. Still, it seems like there’s something missing here.

I guess the surprising thing is that in seven months British holidaymakers only bring something like 181 kilograms of illegal meat back home through Manchester. I mean, that’s not nothing. The Apollo 17 mission only brought 110 kilograms of moon rocks back. But there were just the two astronauts on the moon, and the whole trip took less than two weeks, and there was just the one of it. Also they probably declared their rocks and didn’t land in northern England. And for another comparison, the early “Schreibkugel” model typewriter which Friedrich Nietzche owned weighed only 75 kilograms. But if the British holidaymakers are sneaking a lot of other meats in, then how are the dogs missing them? Definitely a scandal here.

A Follow-Up Note To My Seven-Year-Old Self, Who Still Doesn’t Believe It’s Me

But before I get to the update, my mathematics blog had another Reading the Comics post, and I get to talk a lot about reciprocals. Trust me, this is thrilling if you go in willing to be thrilled.

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So, seven-year-old me: We finished the pie. I ate the last piece of pecan right out of the tin plate. Also there’s a new Star Wars movie coming out sometime this month although I’m not really sure what weekend it is. That’s all right, you’re going to love the first when you see it at Eddie Glazier’s house. It’s going to be a lot better than Far-Out Space Nuts, because in Star Wars movies they make up all their spaceships. They don’t use an Apollo Lunar Module. So you don’t have to be bothered by all the ways Far-Out Space Nuts depicts the Lunar Module doing things it couldn’t do, like reentering through an Earth-like atmosphere and taking off again with the descent stage attached. I really should work out what weekend the new Star Wars movie comes out but I’ve been busy is all.

Statistics Saturday: Battle of the Network Starship Captains

Actor	Starship Captain In	Number Of Times Was A Battle of the Network Stars Team Captain
William Shatner	Star Trek	4
Richard Benjamin	Quark	1
Greg Evigan	Babylon 5, if you’ve mistaken Greg Evigan for Michael O’Hare	1
Mark Harmon	From The Earth To The Moon (1998), if you count Apollo 7 as a “starship” since he played Wally Schirra	1
Patrick Stewart	Star Trek: The Next Generation	0
Avery Brooks	Star Trek: Deep Space Nine	0
Kate Mulgrew	Star Trek: Voyager	0
Scott Bakula	Star Trek: Enterprise	0

I know what you’re all thinking: What about Telly Savalas, two-time captain for CBS and cohost of the November 1977 Battle? And I’m sorry, as while he did once portray Magmar, the leader of the evil faction of Rock Lords on the planet Quartex, Magmar was never properly speaking in control of a spaceship of any kind, much less a starship, so far as I can tell from reading the Wikipedia description of the plot of GoBots: Battle of the Rock Lords, and thus does not qualify for this count.

The Right People Will Get Paperwork

I didn’t know it until it was pointed out to me (but isn’t that always the way?) but, according to according to Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan site mst3kinfo.com on the 14th of July, 1989, “Paperwork is filed with the state of Minnesota pertaining to the creation of a new corporation, Best Brains Inc”. That’s the corporation which would make Mystery Science Theater 3000. In its earliest days episodes were found by venture-traders sailing to the East Indies and making deals for nutmeg and Roger Corman movies, but an increased demand for ironically-viewable entertainment forced more reliable production methods.

It’s hard to say how exciting it was to have incorporation papers filed for Best Brains Inc, though it was between the ranges of a pretty good sale on battery-operated tea lights at Meijer’s and of the Apollo 14 moon landing. After the promising but disappointing start with Middlingly Decent Brains Inc, and then the apparent setback of Mediocre Brains Inc, followed by the steps up of Somewhat Improved Brains Inc and then Rather Good Brains Considering Inc, it was clear they had something good here. Wonder whatever happened to them.