Pertaining...what it's meaning...regarding?

Bronson Pinchot will never not crack my shit up.

I Actually Like the Quiet

Silent is the House:

Come, the wind may never again

Blow as now it blows for us;

And the stars may never again shine as now they shine;

Long before October returns,

Seas of blood will have parted us;

And you must crush the love in your heart, and I the love in mine!

Emily Brontë.

“Sounds like we’re in business, old friend.”

I'd bet most folks likely won't want to listen to the entire stand-up EVA conducted by CDR Scott at the start of lunar surface activities.  I mean, what Dave describes is wicked amazing, but the audio is admittedly a bit dry.  Anyway, here's how he sets the scene in the book he wrote with Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov (you've met before), Two Sides of the Moon:

Though Deke Slayton and others in NASA management had initially opposed it on the grounds that it would consume extra oxygen, the plan we had finally agreed on was for me to perform a half-hour stand-up EVA, or SEVA, shortly after touchdown. By climbing up on to the cover of the engine inside the craft, and opening the upper hatch—rather as if I was in the conning tower of a submarine or the turret of a tank—I would stand up and take a good look around. 

On geology trips I had learned the value of such an initial reconnaissance. But this would be a reconnaissance like no other. So, two hours after touchdown, after slowly depressurizing the cabin, I placed a protective outer helmet—a lunar excursion excursion visor assembly, or LEVA—over my inner helmet, and clambered up to my vantage point in my bulky, but by now pressurized, spacesuit. 

Pulling my oxygen hoses and communication cables behind me, I slowly hoisted my elbows on to the rim of the hatch. I found I could support my own weight quite comfortably in the reduced gravity, and started to take in the view. What an awesome view it was.

Even with the protective filter across my visor, the sunlight reflecting off the crystal-clear features on the surface was intense, contrasting sharply with the deep, rich blackness of the sky beyond. The low sun angle of the early lunar morning laid long shadows over the spectacular scenery spread before me. 

It was like an exhibition of exquisite images by the great photographer Ansel Adams. There was no color, but great contrast between the brightly illuminated surface and the black shadow of the mountain slopes and craters where no sunlight fell. 

“Oh, boy, what a view!” I exclaimed. “Beautiful.” 

Jim handed a bearing indicator and large orientation map up to me, and I began to give a number of precise location indicators and started to take a series of high-resolution connecting photographs of the full panorama that encircled us. Shortly after we had landed I had advised Houston, “Tell those geologists in the back room to get ready because we’ve really got something for them.” 

They sure did.  And with that, happy First and Only (so far) SEVA on the Lunar Surface Day to all who celebrate!

PS - Image from here.  You know, I have a birthday coming up...

#throwbackthursday

Because the kids' supervised visits with Ericka happened on Sundays, we necessarily took a roundabout path to the facility, and always had some extra time to goof around.  This was during the final trek.  (2020)

You have a lot of verve

Look, it's Richard Grant, star of Confessions II!  Also really loved him in Hamlet Part VIII: The Revenge.

Ay, There’s the Rub

I Dreamed That I Was Old:

I dreamed that I was old: in stale declension   

Fallen from my prime, when company

Was mine, cat-nimbleness, and green invention,   

Before time took my leafy hours away.

My wisdom, ripe with body’s ruin, found   

Itself tart recompense for what was lost

In false exchange: since wisdom in the ground   

Has no apocalypse or pentecost.

I wept for my youth, sweet passionate young thought,

And cozy women dead that by my side   

Once lay: I wept with bitter longing, not   

Remembering how in my youth I cried.

Stanley Kunitz.

Up, up the Long, Delirious, Burning Blue

STS-51-F launched on this date in '85.  Most folks probably don't remember the mission, so let's turn to Dark Star: A New History of the Space Shuttle:

The launch hiccup—the failure of a heat sensor that resulted in the premature automatic shutdown of one of the three Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs)—was a peculiar form of emergency: serious enough to warrant special contingency measures but relatively tame in impact. In the event that one SSME failed, the shuttle would still reach Earth orbit, but lower than planned. “ 

‘Abort to orbit,’ it was called at the time,” the Post noted of the incident. In a space program that had, until that point, been relatively free of well-publicized in-flight mishaps, the failure was both a troubling warning and a metaphor for the Space Transportation System (STS). Although giving the appearance of an operational infrastructure (deploying satellites and conducting scientific work), the space shuttles’ flights from 1981 to 1986 were marred by a series of worrisome problems. 

The problem that struck STS-51F came as little surprise to those who designed and operated the shuttle: the three main engines mounted at the rear of the orbiters operated under unprecedented pressure, using one of the most energetic propellant combinations available: liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, each chilled to hundreds of degrees below zero. Unlike previous engines using this combination of propellants, the SSMEs were intended to be reusable for up to 100 flights, a level of performance never expected from a propulsion system devised to work for only a few minutes. 

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) had hoped that the engines would require little maintenance between flights, but as problems mounted, the engines required almost complete disassembly and recertification before each flight, an expensive process representative of the tremendous risks that NASA sought to control. On July 29, 1985, though, Challenger dodged a bullet: it had not failed, but neither had it quite succeeded. Procedures intended to compensate for problems had worked, but the abort had left the orbiter where nobody wished it to be. 

Abort to Orbit (ATO) was one of several contingencies scripted by NASA in the event that the shuttle suffered a serious malfunction on launch. Astronauts, to the extent possible, trained for these aborts and carried printed procedure books in the cockpit to perform the often-complex steps required for each. Each abort mode was keyed to a failure of the shuttle’s propulsion system at various points in the flight, from a relatively late, partial failure (ATO) to more crippling early failures of the main engines or solid rocket boosters (SRBs). 

A more profound propulsion system problem (or inflight emergency) required an Abort Once Around (AOA), in which the shuttle, having limped into too low an altitude to sustain multiple revolutions around the Earth, would reenter the atmosphere and land after a single ninety-minute circumnavigation. A more disabled shuttle unable to enter orbit could, alternatively, coast on a suborbital trajectory to Transoceanic Abort Landing (TAL) on a predesignated airstrip several thousand miles east of the launch site in Florida. 

More extreme and most difficult to execute would have been a Return to Launch Site (RTLS) abort, which would have been the earliest option available to the crew. The crew would jettison the shuttle’s boosters after they burned out and fire the SSMEs to try to loop the shuttle in a return trajectory that would place it on a path to land on the runway at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC). Astronauts regarded this abort mode as impossible to execute: NASA had considered attempting it during an early shuttle test flight, but astronauts refused, finding the abort more dangerous to fly than an orbital mission. 

Just presaging what would come:

The space shuttle was, simply, only half-complete: safety systems intended for the craft were shed during its tortuous development...

The peculiar dangers that the Challenger and Columbia astronauts experienced were not a feature of spaceflight generally. Rather, they were caused by specific flaws manufactured into a vehicle by engineers who knew about better alternatives and hoped the vehicles would never fly long enough to be undermined by the compromises they had made. 

The Thrust-Assisted Orbiter Shuttle (TAOS) configuration that NASA selected in 1972 lacked robust propulsion technologies, redundancies, and safety systems that would protect a crew in the event of trouble; that is what had made it cheap and why it was chosen over safer vehicles that would have cost twice as much and employed liquid-fueled boosters, escape pods, and configurations that generally offered lower risk. While NASA publicly insisted that the shuttle was safe, even the engineers and analysts who developed the TAOS configuration believed that the shuttle would be redesigned to improve its safety. 

Challenger’s loss appeared to stem principally from the fact that these upgrades came too late; indeed, most never came at all. A second fatal accident involving the orbiter Columbia in 2003 similarly failed to derail the space shuttle program, despite new evidence that the shuttle was even more fragile than the public believed. 

It's well-known that I still love the beautiful, compromised machine, but it was a fucking deathtrap all the same.  One hopes we learned those lessons written in blood as we continue to reach for the stars.

Selah.

Has he been...

Yes, after breakfast.

Allées et venues

Coming and Going:

As long as you believe in miracles

You watch the sun fall into the sea

Every evening

Then you turn your back and sink

Among the ferns sparkling from a moon or from the other

Night up to your knees under the vault of cries.   

 

The pubescent monkeys, the adolescent pumas

Contemplate the slender crescent

Of the earth

In the eyes of a dead viper

That knots on the asphalt

The alpha of a future alphabet.   

 

It’s the end of night the mosquitoes

Place themselves on your forehead and die with you

In the ruins of your dreams erected

By the distant suggestions of cities

Where you wish to find an empty

Bed to die in.   

 

The cathedrals the cinemas the soliloquies

The beggar’s ear glued to the violin

Music

To be lovesick when the songs

All temple prostitutes all rotgut for two cents

Are going to end up in the pink slit of a jukebox.   

 

Hope is under the hand that weak flesh

Groped massaged turgescent with eyes shut

Comes and goes

Let’s keep knotted kisses to ourselves for a long time

Until another day erases

The trace of each passing.

Pierre Martory (translated By John Ashbery).

It was one of those nights

One of those nights when you feel the world stop turning.

Cuilteanna

The Design:

Sometimes the quilts were white for weddings, the design
Made up of stitches and the shadows cast by stitches.
And the quilts for funerals? How do you sew the night?

Michael Longley.

Shenanigans

Hang it in the Louvre lmao https://t.co/vX81hevvSX

— Chris Williamson (@CWilliamson44) July 26, 2026

The All Star Game was as silly as usual, which means it was a lot of fun to watch.  Lots of antics with my favoritest players, and I especially enjoyed this moment in W history.

In local news, Sam and friends saw the Storm host the Lynx (my top two teams!) last week whilst I was sweating and working in the Carriage House.  Annoying that he caught a game at Climate Pledge Arena before I did, but I guess that's just payback for the time Ericka and I went to see the Celtics at Moda.

Anyway, bring on the second half of the season!

Since I was very young I've realised

I never wanted to be human size.

PS - I never wanted to be tall, tall, tall, big as a wall, wall, wall, though.  I always wanted to be small, small, small, small as a ball, ball, ball.  Like, gnome-sized.

It’s So Hard to Move On

Where Somebody Died:

The self  refuses to appear

         in this bare place.

It fears that mute chair

         and the still window.

The sunlight scares it.

There might rise up a sound.

The door doesn’t like to move,

         and the crow out there

         hesitates; he knows

         a hole flown into by mistake

         would make a bite of   him.

What was sits standstill in the chair,

         hangs, stunned, against the dry-eyed light.

Nobody in sight.

Inanimate things, still  lifeless.

This room’s so empty

         I doubt I’m standing here;

         there can’t be room for me

         and total emptiness.

Only some far-off sounds persist.

The brute truck

         over the interstate.

The flames in the incinerator

         chewing his old vests.

Eleanor Ross Taylor.