Tag Archives: NASA

Remembering When Crime Didn’t Pay

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Richard Linklater's new film 'Apollo 10 1/2' premieres at SXSW
Director Richard Linklater

So I’m trying to remember when I stopped believing, “Crime doesn’t pay”? As a teenager, I suppose. But the question connects to why I believed it in the first place? Where did that reassuring, fanciful notion come from in the first place?

Mom and Dad? As I recall they were quite clear in their belief that the bastards were always getting away with things. The nuns at St. Joe’s Catholic School? Well, if impure thoughts about cute little Marcia with the pigtails was a crime, I knew for sure I was going to burn in eternal hell. Something in the water in rural Minnesota? Mmm, maybe. It was an awful long ways from the crimes I saw on the evening news.

This all rattled through my alleged mind while watching director Richard Linklater’s latest film, “Apollo 10 1/2” on Netflix the other night. For those unfamiliar with Linklater, I regard him as one of the most acute and compassionate observers of modern American mores working today. He’s most famous for films like, “Dazed and Confused”, the “Before Sunrise/Sunset/Midnight” trilogy with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy and “Boyhood”, which somehow lost out for Best Picture in 2015. (In 2022 Hollywood it would of course have to be re-titled “Identifies as Non-BinaryHood.”)

Technically, “Apollo” is a re-visit of the rotoscope animation Linklater used in his 2001 film “Waking Life”, which explored American culture via dream states. (Highly recommended.) Thematically though, “Apollo” is one of the most charming and evocative strolls any Boomer can take down through the mediums of an era that formed us far more, says I, than Mom, Dad or any nun or minister.

Apollo 10 1⁄2' review: Richard Linklater's dreams of childhood - Los Angeles Times

Set among a big, loving, idiosyncratic family in suburban Houston during the rise of NASA and the race to the moon, it is chock full of references — reminders — of where our arguably naive notions of truth, justice and the American way came from. Which is to say … from television and pop culture, far more than strict, sterile religious authority figures.

Apollo 10½: A Space Age Childhood (2022) - IMDb

The story — built around one of the son’s/narrator’s fantasy of being sent to the moon before Apollo 11 — is basically a hang-out with the family enjoying the innocence of the era. Its like a long, carefree summer full of TV shows — “I Dream of Jeannie”, “Bewitched”, “Bonanza”, “Gunsmoke”. Pop music like “Sugar, Sugar” by The Archies, Herb Alpert’s “Whipped Cream and Other Delights”, Janis Joplin on Dick Cavett. And movies like “The Shakiest Gun in the West” (at the drive-in where half the kids are snuck in under blankets in the back of Dad’s station wagon) and “2001” (with the narrator trying to explain the ending to his glazey-eyed buddy.) And days at space-themed amusement parks like AstroWorld.

It’s a lovely little film, full of bittersweet nostalgia.

Bittersweet, because I wonder what 10 year-old now, much less any 16 year-old still believes “crime doesn’t pay” or that “the bad guys always lose in the end.”?

What sort of sensory deprivation would such a kid have to be living in to not see:

The President of the United States, defeated in a fair election, set off a riot at the Capitol and (to date) face no consequences for it?

Or the same guy on TV, lying to everyone’s face thousands of times a year, killing tens of thousands of his own voters with venality and gross incompetence, not to mention defrauding banks and insurance companies for years and avoiding any kind of day of reckoning?

Or watch greed-crazed bankers and manipulators crash a world economy without a single top executive ever going to jail?

Or a dumb kid practically their age kill a couple people with a rifle in full view of police and be acquitted by a jury of his peers?

Or, hell, a Russian sociopath unleashing genocide on a neighboring country and continuing to enjoy the fruits of two decades of outrageous kleptocracy?

The sweet summery innocence Richard Linklater shows in “Apollo 10 1/2” was of course an illusion even then.

But I can’t help but think that the illusions of Boomer youth were stronger and therefore more real than whatever lessons the kids of 2022 are taking away from what they’re watching today.

100 Days. How Much Stupidity Can We Survive?

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3So let me get this straight. The “yuge”, “beautiful” wall keeping out all those Mexican drugs, bad hombres and strawberry pickers is not only not going to be paid for by the Mexicans, but probably isn’t going to be built at all. Likewise, China the worst currency manipulator in the world, the bastards destroying our economy … will not be branded a currency manipulator, partly because the Chinese guy spent 10 minutes explaining how complicated this North Korea thing is.

And ObamaCare repeal, that thing Republcans voted for 50, 60, 200 times, meaning actually tearing the whole damn thing up and returning us to the golden days of yore when health insurance was dirt cheap and “accessible” to everyone … eh, not so much, and sure as hell not in time for the big 100 Days check-off this Saturday.

Ditto tax “reform” (i.e. the usual Republican ritual performance of oral sex on its donor class without so much as a handshake for you and me). And … and … well the list of what His Orangeness promised, in the loudest and angriest terms to his hootin’ and hollerin’ rally-goers last fall is very, very long and all but entirely incomplete, except for Neil Gorsuch.

In other words it is exactly the farce of buffoonish incompetence most of us expected when we voted Nov. 8. The only thing that is “fer sure” is that the timer on the hand grenade both the “deplorables” and the tribal conservative clod-bro culture wanted rolled into D.C. is seconds away from detonation.

At last Saturday’s “March Against Stupidity” “March for Science”, I kept thinking, “How much stupidity can an enormous, intricately complicated society withstand before something blows … fatally?”

A lot of people are watching Trump poke at North Korea, like an impaired six year-old jabbing a stick at a rabid dog trapped against a fence. None of the outcomes to this drama are good, and some are border-line apocalyptic. More to the point, confidence that either of the main guys involved are rational and competent is, well, kinda like non-existent. (I still wonder what serious humans like “Mad Dog” Mattis would actually do if Trump decides he wants to lob some missiles into Pyongyang? There are — rarely used — military codes of ethics that prohibit an officer from following an order he deems illegal or wholly unjustified.)

Most likely, like everything else on his list of batshit campaign bluster, Trump will do nothing, other than play another round of golf at Mar-a-Lago and enjoy another five or six slices of “the most beautiful chocolate cake you’ve ever seen.” But the issue is what the North Korean nutjob does in response to what he thinks Trump might do.

While enjoying the sunshine, the crowds and a lot of very funny signs at the Science march I was reminded of another detail related to a book I read last month, “Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs.” Harvard astrophysicist Lisa Randall and her team have a theory about the “periodicity” of asteroid impacts on planet earth. Something big and nasty rolls in roughly every 35-40 million years. Their idea is that this coincides with our Solar System’s two million-year passage through the center plane of the Milky Way, a plane dense, she thinks, with dark matter and its mysterious gravitational effects.

She theorizes that these effects kick up a storm among the rocks and comets otherwise tumbling innocently through the Oort Belt far out beyond Pluto, sending a barrage of the stuff inward toward the Sun and colliding with earth.

And what’s this got to do with Donald Trump and the ascendance of crass stupidity to power in all facets of the government of the planet’s most technically advanced society?

Well, there this. In his fourth grade coloring book of a budget “presented” last month, the one red-lining Planned Parenthood, the National Endowment for the Arts, Big Bird, and on and on, there was the part cancelling NASA’s Asteroid Redirect Mission.

The main part of that mission was an elaborate project to grab material off a passing asteroid and get it back to orbiting astronauts for examination. But a facet of it was money to pay smart people here on earth, (FoxNews/talk radio/clod-bro culture’s much derided “experts”), to think seriously and propose ideas about how me might deal with an apocalyptic meteor heading our way.

The cost of the entire Mission was pegged at $1.25 billion. The part where the gubmint pays smart people down here on terra firma to work out the details of how to protect civilization from toasted dinosaur-like destruction was probably a lot … a lot … less.

But if you’re too incompetent, lazy or sociopathic to care about stuff like that, well, screw it. We gotta pare this insane spending down to compensate for whacking the Alternative Minimum Tax, which would have saved Trump roughly $25 million off the only tax return we’ve ever seen.

Stupidity is darkly funny up to the point it makes survival an open question.