Word: things
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...folks at the Johnson Space Center in Houston have never much cared for their $225 million lawn ornament. Certainly, it's an impressive-looking thing; measuring nearly 400 ft. from its needly nose to its four stubby fins, it was designed on a scale more commonly associated with buildings than machines. The problem is, it's been decades since this particular machine actually stood to its full height. Instead, it has spent most of its life lying on its side in the withering Houston sun--beached, spent, a triumph less of engineering than of taxidermy...
...over science, it was the Apollo astronauts themselves. (All told, there were a dozen moonwalkers; with the death of Apollo 12 astronaut Pete Conrad last week, nine of them survive.) Before his death in 1982, Jack Swigert, command-module pilot of Apollo 13 (a mission that taught NASA a thing or two about adventure), noted that the very thing that qualified lunar astronauts to fly the missions they were flying disqualified them from experiencing them fully. Can you fathom the utter, hostile emptiness of translunar space and still retain the calm to fly your spacecraft blithely through...
...everything crazy that a lot of people do can be called a trend; it may simply be a crazy thing that a lot of people do. But it's worth noticing when an increasing number of youngish folks, more than 400 worldwide, seek to get their kicks from jumping off bridges and roofs. If this is how they behave in flush times, imagine what they would do in a depression...
...part of the explanation of the appeal of this madness may be that it returns our soft, comfy civilization to an ancient roughness--man vs. nature, life or death, that sort of thing. The recent successes of stories like The Perfect Storm, Into Thin Air and The Endurance would suggest that the E-ZPass, "we deliver" world is yearning--if only in its dreams--for situations of hardship and danger. Death doesn't even seem to attend war anymore; Kosovo showed that a push-button war could be casualty-free, at least for those who pushed the buttons. Routine phrases...
...summer lab gets the least attention, but it's the most important thing we do," says Redford over lunch in the Sundance mess tent, the music of rushing streams riding in on drifts of alpine air. Important because this level of creative nurturing doesn't exist anywhere else and because these future directors do not seem inclined--not yet, anyway--toward the variety of film that is promoted with either a Happy Meal or the billboard image of a star urinating on a wall...