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.

Ἀμαθίην κρύπτειν ἄμεινον

Figured that instead of focusing on the launch of Apollo 15 on this date in '71, I'd take a look at one of the pivotal events in exploration and science from the mission.  Chaikin described it thus:

Scott and Irwin’s attention was riveted to the strange, white rock Irwin had seen earlier. As they approached, they strategized about the best way to collect it. Irwin suggested lifting it off its dusty pedestal with the tongs. Scott did so, and he raised it to his faceplate to inspect the find, which was about the size of his fist. It looked fairly beaten up, and it was covered with dust, but as he grasped it with his gloved fingers some of the ancient coating wiped off, and he could see crystals: large, white crystals. Suddenly— 

“Ahhh!” 

“Oh, man!” 

—both men realized what they had discovered. The rock was almost entirely plagioclase. Exposed to light for the first time in untold eons, its white crystals glinted in the sun, like the ones they had seen in the San Gabriels. This was surely a chunk of anorthosite, a piece of the primordial crust. Scott radioed the news. 

“Guess what we just found. Guess what we just found. I think we found what we came for.” 

“Crystalline rock, huh?” prompted Irwin. 

“Yes, sir,” said Scott. 

“Yes, sir,” repeated Joe Allen, like a brother at a revival meeting. After describing the rock in detail, Scott placed it in a special sample bag by itself. Of all the rocks brought back from the moon this one would be the most famous. To the geologists, it would be sample number 15415, but to the world it would be known by the name bestowed upon it by a reporter covering the mission at the space center: the Genesis Rock. 

In time, probing the treasure with electron beams in their laboratories, the geologists would peg the rock’s age at 4.5 billion years. If the moon was any older than that, it wasn’t much older; the solar system itself was thought to have formed only 100 million years earlier. 

Scott couldn’t hear the geologists’ ecstatic reactions in the back room, but he didn’t need to. And Spur had even more to offer.

Kids in a candy shop:

As they made their way along the crater rim they happened on one remarkable find after another, poking out of the dust. Scott sounded like a rare-coin collector who had stumbled across a treasure chest in the attic. “Oh, look at this one!” Scott told Allen what was already clear: “Joe, this crater is a gold mine!” 

“And there might be diamonds in the next one,” said Allen, a gentle reminder that Scott and Irwin could not linger here. They were getting close enough to their immutable walkback limit that Allen was telling them to press on. Now Allen radioed that Irwin’s sample bag was about to come loose—everyone in mission control could see that on the big screen, and they worried that all those priceless samples might tumble into Spur crater. 

Precious minutes were lost as Scott cinched it up. With less than 15 minutes remaining, Scott and Irwin looked hopefully at a boulder that lay perhaps a dozen yards farther along Spur’s rim, the only large rock in sight, and therefore the only rock for which the geologists could be sure of its place of origin. Undoubtedly it had been torn from the floor of Spur. 

Just now, Allen passed up word from the back room: forget the boulder; they wanted them back at the Rover, using the rake to collect a bunch of walnut-sized fragments. Scott eyed the boulder. He told Irwin to go ahead and start raking; in the meantime he went into high gear. A short run along Spur’s rim brought him to his quarry. Working on stolen time, he clicked off Hasselblad pictures of it from every angle. 

There wasn’t time to hammer off a piece, but he spotted a small fragment in the dust—obviously knocked loose from the big rock—and got his sample after all. He hoped the geologists would be able to figure out where it came from by studying the pictures. Scott turned and ran back to join Irwin in his work. He hated to leave. It was a frustration he would feel again and again on the moon, just as he had that first day in the Orocopias with Silver: there was never enough time.

This is one of my favorite missions ever.  Looking forward to seeing astronauts getting dirty again on the lunar surface, lighting new fires in our imagination and expanding our understanding of the cosmos.

Day of Remembrance

Not long before we left Vermont.  (June '17)

Silver Falls, Oregon.  (Sept '17)