Okay, CoSo.
I wrote a piece to offer some deeper and important history surrounding the latest mess in Canadian Parliament.
Yes, the Speaker has resigned.
But that's where the danger begins: when we have an easy target, which allows us to avoid thinking about the historical illiteracy that underpins these errors and allows old wounds to be opened and leveraged in current wars.
History is always a casualty of war. But if we can lessen the size of the wound, we should.
https://onlysky.media/mclark/war-makes-us-terrible-historians/
@MLClark Reading it now ... An aside about the Yalta photo ...
FDR had only two months left to live. I've always been astounded by how he summoned the strength and courage to fly halfway around the world in a small airplane during the middle of a war.
I saw that plane on display years ago at the USAF museum in Dayton. It had an elevator lift to accommodate his disability.
He was so vulnerable, in more ways than one.
Onto the article ...
@MLClark Re someone having to take the blame for the faux pas ...
Wernher von Braun had a practice that, if someone at Huntsville screwed up, the person wasn't fired. It was viewed as a teachable moment, an opportunity to keep someone in whom time and money had been invested.
I wish our politics worked that way.
Very clever choice of example, Stephen!
History contains such multitudes.
I am so terribly curious how you'll find the presentation in For All Mankind. It's quite possible the verisimilitude of the series will make any deviations from your experience all the more maddening.
How do you bear up to filmic reenactments of space flight history in general? (Not to be confused with straight documentaries.) Do you find any of them tolerable?
@MLClark "How do you bear up to filmic reenactments of space flight history in general?"
Hmmm ... Funny you ask that. I was thinking that today.
"The Right Stuff" and "Apollo 13" are at the top of my list. "The Right Stuff" takes many liberties with history, but gets the look and feel right. Ron Howard and Tom Hanks used NASA's "vomit comet" to film weightless scenes in 30-second bits.
"First Man" was relentlessly depressing. It had some nitpicky things wrong ... (1/2)
@MLClark The one that stood out in my mind was the scene of the Gemini 8 launch. It shows Armstrong and Scott walking across the access arm to their capsule while an Atlas launches in the background. That would never happen!
Even worse, they were using the LC-39A gantry with the VAB in the background, while in reality they were at LC-19 which was way smaller and nowhere near the VAB. Harrumph. (2/2)
:) And I'm sure they heard all about it the moment it came out!
It takes a lot of chutzpah to make a film about such a detail-focused field, knowing the experts will be tearing into you the moment it "launches"!
(That said, almost *everything* about Gravity drove me bonkers--science & story. I only credit it for trying to humanize each station interior to highlight our shared humanity. But that's it! 😂 Gee! Female lead! Gotta give her daddy issues to explain why she's in space!)