Word: earth's
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...Earth scientists have discovered a way to solve the planet's energy crisis: harvest an element called helium-3 from the Moon. Apparently this vast effort requires only one human: Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who's nearing the end of a three-year contract working alone in a station on the lunar surface. All that time alone, with only a talking computer and some old TV shows as company, has made Sam edgy; he can't wait to be picked up and taken back to Earth, to his loving wife and child. His anxiety escalates to horror when he discovers...
...before. Released nine days before the Apollo 11 moon landing, and played by the BBC in its coverage of the event, it describes the communication of a lonely astronaut: "This is Major Tom to Ground Control... / Here am I sitting in a tin can / Far above the world./ Planet Earth is blue,/ And there's nothing I can do. / Though I'm past one hundred thousand miles, / I'm feeling very still... / Tell my wife I love her very much. / She knows." Maybe Bowie ought to get a story credit...
...Destitute and unwell, the painter lived on Hiva Oa in his two-story thatched Maison du Jouir, or "House of Bliss." A former stockbroker, Gauguin had left his wife and five children years earlier to pursue his artistic dream at the end of the earth. (One of his letters home explains: "Life has no meaning unless one lives it with a will, at least to the limit of one's will.") He took up with various Polynesian women, and his freewheeling ways made the local missionaries livid. Less than two years after his arrival, he was dead...
...power at 31 in 1967, just seven years after Gabon's independence, one of the first. As such, he set and maintained the catastrophically low standard for African leadership that would ensure that a continent bursting with natural resources would remain the poorest and most war-ravaged place on earth for the ensuing four decades...
...Rovers and Hummers (to negotiate all the giant potholes) thrive, while hypermarkets sell $400 bottles of wine and the city's restaurants and bars serve more champagne per capita than Paris. But the riches enjoyed by a few have made Libreville and Port-Gentil among the most expensive on earth. Despite its large size and seas teeming with fish, almost all food is imported from Europe, entrepreneurialism has all but evaporated, and the majority of Gabonese survive on the margins in ramshackle slums. On a visit to the capital in 2007, I found a community of thousands living...