"No, Not the Mind Probe!!?!"

Very sad news. I don't know, maybe I'm a naive idealist when it comes to that sort of thing, but I think in spite of all of the politics and international rivalries involved, the "space race" remains on the whole something we should be proud of, as a planet, regardless of nationalities and ideologies. And even if no human being ever sets foot on the moon again, twelve people did, once, and Neil Armstrong was the first of them. Every time I look up at the moon in the night sky, I'm reminded of that fact and quietly humbled by it.


Originally posted by james_nicollat The first human to walk on the Moon has died

Well, I have returned and, to be honest, despite my dire expectations the weather last week in the vicinity of Penrith and Keswick was much better than we could have hoped for; grey but dry last Saturday, Sunday, Monday, admittedly peeing down on Tuesday, but really rather bright and sunny for the rest of the week (although on Thursday I was trudging along an extremely exposed ridge on the Cumbria-Northumbria border following a mostly-surviving section of Hadrian's Wall, which while sunny proved to be blimmin' cold too).

Anyway, sights were seen, ale was quaffed and photos were taken, so I reckon I'm counting that one as a result. To get back on-topic, anyway:




( Read All About the Violent and Interesting History of Pencils! )

I will just leave you with a book rec. I am currently reading State of Emergency by Dominic Sandbrook, a social and political history of Britain between 1970 and 1974. The author is perhaps a bit softer than I would like on the Conservative Party in general and on then-Education Secretary Margaret Thatcher in particular (but then again, looking at the newspapers he writes for as a day job, this might not be wholly surprising), but not to the point where I'd say it was a one-sided view of the period. The stuff about contemporary popular culture is pure gold, and very interesting for the Doctor Who fan. The chapter about the rise in popularity of environmentalism during the period is even entitled "The Green Death", and features a detailed analysis of said Who story and a couple of others in the context of the period. I haven't got to the chapter about what many people at the time called "women's lib" yet, but a quick flick forward reveals repeated mentions of Sarah Jane Smith in the first couple of pages. ;D Good stuff.

For lost_spook, we open with a picture of Rhuddlan Castle, in northeastern Wales, taken iirc sometime during the summer of 2010:




( READ ON...! )

You know, you can be as cynical as you like about the politics surrounding the space race (and you'd be right!) and there are certainly serious arguments as to why we just don't need manned spaceflight, but my inner space cadet can't help thinking "Fifty years, and we're still tooling around in low orbit?" Apart from the moon landings, of course, but they were a long time ago too...

Plus great big rockets are really cool! ;D

Hopefully, though, to strike a sickeningly utopian retro-sf note, when people look back in centuries to come the Cold War will seem like a curiosity and Gagarin and the other space pioneers will be remembered as great figures in human history. Hopefully.

I'm thinking about Who (not unusual where I'm concerned), and I'm thinking about historicals. Or rather, the lack of them in modern Who (and by modern, I mean Who after about 1966!). Black Orchid, of course, is the last entry in the genre, and I'd even argue that that is not a true historical. Okay, it's a story in a period setting that doesn't feature any outright science fiction elements, so it has that. When I talk about historicals, though, I'm talking about stories about famous events and people and settings that you may have heard about back in long-ago school daze.
( Read On... )