#like does Edwin know we landed on the moon?

[iswearimahuman]

y’know you could do a lot with Edwin’s age. And I’m not just talking about gay repression. I mean like dude died before women were even aloud to vote. You could come up with some fun stuff with that. I’m sure he’s partially up to date with modern times but like there’s probably a lot he doesn’t know about. Like he missed out on 70 years of pop culture.

[rabbitcruiser]

National Reach As High As You Can Day

National Reach As High As You Can Day is observed on April 14 every year. The day can be interpreted in numerous ways, however, the message remains the same — to reach as high as you can. Whether it is aiming for a higher professional or personal goal, or even to reach for something physically, it is a day to believe in yourself and take a chance that you may have shied away from before.

History of National Reach As High As You Can Day

Reaching can be defined as physically extending to grab or touch something. It can also mean conceptually extending to increase something’s impact or application. Humans have been reaching new literal and metaphorical heights since the beginning of time. If it were not for people reaching as high as they can and aiming for bigger and better, the world as we know it would have been different. It is impossible to pinpoint the origination date for a concept like this, but history is full of examples and evidence that shooting higher paves the way for new opportunities.

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first person to reach outer space, explorer Leif Day is said to be the first person to reach America, inventor Thomas Edison reached to create the first light bulb, and the world was never the same again. To stay within our comfort zone comes with a sense of safety and certainty, but to reach for something newer and bigger has consequences that can be revolutionary and life-changing.

National Reach As High As You Can Day, observed every year on April 14, encourages all of mankind to push our limits and venture out of our comfort zones. This ‘reaching’ can be as big or as small as we are comfortable with. It is a chance for us to bring about a much-needed change in our lives, and many even change someone else’s.

National Reach As High As You Can Day timeline

1909 North Pole

Robert Peary reaches the North Pole.

1911 South Pole

Roald Amundsen reaches the South Pole.

1953 Mount Everest

Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reach the summit of Mount Everest.

1969 Moon

Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin reach the moon.

National Reach As High As You Can Day FAQs

How many times have we reached the moon?

Approximately six missions have landed people on the moon so far, and many more are underway.

When did humans reach France?

1.57 million years ago humans reached and discovered France and paved the way for others to do so too.

How long does it take to reach Mars?

On average, it is believed to take 162 days to reach Mars. However, a closer route has estimated about 41 days.

National Reach As High As You Can Day Activities

Reach for something physically

Reach for something professionally

Reach for something personal

You could reach for that one book at the top of the shelf that you have not read yet, or a jar that you avoid using because of its high placement. You could even try to reach that restaurant you have been meaning to try out for a while.

No matter what your field of work is, there are always certain short or long-term goals in the back of your mind. Take this day to think about ways in which you can broaden your horizon and reach for something higher than before.

As with other things, most of us have certain personal goals that we aim for. Whether it is a personal record at the gym or the duration of your daily meditation, try to reach for a slightly higher milestone and believe in yourself.

5 Facts About Reaching That You Probably Didn’t Know

It takes time

It inspires others

It takes commitment

It is not always linear

It takes dedication

It took astronauts four days to reach the moon.

Since the first climb, over 5,000 people have reached Mt. Everest’s peak.

Sometimes a task needs to be repeated for it to become a habit.

Some ups and downs come with advancements, but it is part of the process.

A giraffe’s neck cannot reach the ground, but they do not stop trying.

Why We Love National Reach As High As You Can Day

It inspires us

It encourages advancement

It stimulates exploration

It is less scary to do what we know, but taking risks and reaching higher can be liberating and rewarding in more ways than one. Nothing is guaranteed, but a day like this pushes us to re-evaluate our goals and activities and determine the areas where we can do more.

If people from the beginning of time did not reach in one way or another, life would be different from what it is now. Most of what we have, if not everything, is the result of someone pushing forward and discovering the undiscovered.

Whether it is intellectual, geographical, or physical, reaching higher opens doors that we didn’t know existed. Would you know about your favorite hiking spot if someone did not reach there and tell you about it?

Source

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 23, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

On July 20, 1969, American astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin became the first humans ever to land, and then to walk, on the moon.

They were part of the Apollo program, designed to put an American man on the moon. Their spacecraft launched on July 16 and landed back on Earth in the Pacific Ocean July 24, giving them eight days in space, three of them orbiting the moon 30 times. Armstrong and Aldrin spent almost 22 hours on the moon’s surface, where they collected soil and rock samples and set up scientific equipment, while the pilot of the command module, Michael Collins, kept the module on course above them.

The American space program that created the Apollo 11 spaceflight grew out of the Cold War. The year after the Soviet Union launched an artificial satellite in 1957, Congress created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to demonstrate American superiority by sending a man into space. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy moved the goalposts, challenging the country to put a man on the moon and bring him safely back to earth again. He told Congress: “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

A year later, in a famous speech at Rice University in Texas, Kennedy tied space exploration to America’s traditional willingness to attempt great things. “Those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it—we mean to lead it,” he said.

[T]here is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people…. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills….”

But the benefits to the country would not only be psychological, he said. “The growth of our science and education will be enriched by new knowledge of our universe and environment, by new techniques of learning and mapping and observation, by new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school.” The effort would create “a great number of new companies, and tens of thousands of new jobs…new demands in investment and skilled personnel,” as the government invested billions in it.

“To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money…. I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us.”

Seven years later, people across the country gathered around television sets to watch Armstrong step onto the moon and to hear his famous words: “That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind.”

President Richard Nixon called the astronauts from the White House: “I just can't tell you how proud we all are of what you have done,” he said. “For every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives…. Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man's world…. For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one…in their pride in what you have done, and…in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.”

And yet, by the time Armstrong and Aldrin were stepping onto the moon in a grand symbol of the success of the nation’s moon shot, Americans back on earth were turning against each other. Movement conservatives who hated post–World War II business regulation, taxation, and civil rights demanded smaller government and championed the idea of individualism, while those opposed to the war in Vietnam increasingly distrusted the government.

After May 4, 1970, when the shooting of college students at Kent State University in Ohio badly weakened Nixon’s support, he began to rally supporters to his side with what his vice president, Spiro Agnew, called “positive polarization.” They characterized those who opposed the administration as anti-American layabouts who simply wanted a handout from the government. The idea that Americans could come together to construct a daring new future ran aground on the idea that anti-war protesters, people of color, and women were draining hardworking taxpayers of their hard-earned money.

Ten years later, former actor and governor of California Ronald Reagan won the White House by promising to defend white taxpayers from people like the “welfare queen,” who, he said, “has 80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards and is collecting veteran’s benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands.” Reagan promised to champion individual Americans, getting government, and the taxes it swallowed, off people’s backs.

“In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,” Reagan said in his Inaugural Address. Americans increasingly turned away from the post–World War II teamwork and solidarity that had made the Apollo program a success, and instead focused on liberating individual men to climb upward on their own terms, unhampered by regulation or taxes.

This week, on July 20, 2021, 52 years to the day after Armstrong and Aldrin stepped onto the moon, former Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and four passengers spent 11 minutes in the air, three of them more than 62 miles above the earth, where many scientists say space starts. For those three minutes, they were weightless. And then the pilotless spaceship returned to Earth.

Traveling with Bezos were his brother, Mark; 82-year-old Wally Funk, a woman who trained to be an astronaut in the 1960s but was never permitted to go to space; and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen from the Netherlands, whose father paid something under $28 million for the seat.

Bezos’s goal, he says, is not simply to launch space tourism, but also to spread humans to other planets in order to grow beyond the resource limits on earth. The solar system can easily support a trillion humans,” Bezos has said. “We would have a thousand Einsteins and a thousand Mozarts and unlimited—for all practical purposes—resources and solar power and so on. That's the world that I want my great-grandchildren's great-grandchildren to live in.”

Ariane Cornell, astronaut-sales director of Bezos’s space company Blue Origin, live-streamed the event, telling the audience that the launch “represents a number of firsts.” It was “[t]he first time a privately funded spaceflight vehicle has launched private citizens to space from a private launch site and private range down here in Texas. It’s also a giant first step towards our vision to have millions of people living and working in space.”

In 2021, Bezos paid $973 million in taxes on $4.22 billion in income while his wealth increased by $99 billion, making his true tax rate 0.98%. After his trip into the sky, he told reporters: “I want to thank every Amazon employee and every Amazon customer because you guys paid for all of this…. Seriously, for every Amazon customer out there and every Amazon employee, thank you from the bottom of my heart very much. It’s very appreciated.”

—-

Notes:

https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-space-flight-passenger-revealed-wally-funk-2021-7

https://www.businessinsider.com/blue-origin-auction-spacecraft-jeff-bezos-winner-seat-astronaut-2021-6

https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-launches-to-space-blue-origin-first-human-spaceflight-2021-7

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2021/06/08/wealthy-irs-taxes/

https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-thanks-amazon-customers-for-paying-trip-to-space-2021-7

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LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[From comments: “When you’ve been able to amass your money by not paying your fair share of taxes, your “privately funded” venture is a diversion of rightfully public funds. This new space race is publicly funded, but absent public controls and alignment. Socialize the expenses, privatize the profits.”

“After May 4, 1970, when the shooting of college students at Kent State University in Ohio badly weakened Nixon’s support, he began to rally supporters to his side with what his vice president, Spiro Agnew, called “positive polarization."Combined with the unsubtle racism of Nixon's Southern Strategy, thus began the decades long Republican policy of dividing Americans against each other that has led us to what we have today; two Americas that reside in different universes, and our national wealth controlled by a handful of unelected, supremely, in some cases psychotically, self-centered white men.Jeff Bezos could not have existed in Kennedy's America. We must make that so again.”

[riacannafon-writer]

F.E.A.R.

Chapter Three

I stood in a lounge or study of sorts. High walls, two of which stacked with full bookshelves, a large, roaring fire in the middle of a third. Luxurious sofas made on fine red velvet, comfy armchairs of leather all arranged in a semi-circle shape around the fireplace. I took a step towards the ceiling-high window, but stopped when I noticed myself wearing my assassination gear, the hood of my cloak casting an eerie shadow over my face.

    I recognised this room. I knew it, but couldn't think of how I did.

    I kept going towards the window. The sky outside was dark in night. Something was off. I stared up, squinting this way and that, just trying to get an indication of what made me uneasy about the sky. Dark clouds sat ominously above, never moving, blending so perfectly it was as if they weren't there at all.

    Because they're not there...

    It's wasn't clouds at which I gazed. Instead, I found myself lost in the deep abyss that was the sky, devoid of any starlight or even one of the moons.

    I blinked, and it all came at once. The stars and two moons flickered into existence like bulbs. They all stared down into my eyes, and their light whispered harsh words in my mind.

    Murderer...

    You did it.

    You...killed them!

    In blood of ice... It was you...

    I slammed my hands over my ears to shut the voices out, but they only screamed louder and louder and louder. Voices. Wouldn't stop. I couldn't make them stop. Louder. In my head.

    "Shut up!" I shrieked. "Shut up! I'm not a murderer!"

    You are marked.

    The mark tells all. The birthmarks going down my back burned, but I couldn't feel it.

    I shrank back, desperately needing to hide from the light. I sensed someone behind me. I didn't think. I couldn't think. I spun around, whipped out my dagger and drove it deep into their neck. Hot blood splattered over my hands and face. They let out a piercing, strangled cry and slumped to the floor. They gripped helplessly at the dagger. All I could do was stand there, listening, watching. Their body convulsed, and a gurgling sound emanated from their throat as blood pooled around them.

    Murderer.

    You only hurt.

    You made them all...suffer.

    You killed him.

    You. Killed. Athen.

    "No...No! I didn't...!" The shock had passed, and now the tears came flooding. I twisted back to stare out the window, where the night sky glared at me through its pale light. "I never -"

    Something grabbed my ankle and yanked it back, hard. I toppled onto the carpet floor, shock and fear once again filling my blood. Athen's sea-green eyes focused on me. Then at my dagger in his hand.

    "Athen!" I begged. "Athen, please! I swear, I didn't mean - !"

    He plunged the dagger deep into my stomach. Everything went numb, and the wound ached worse and worse until it was all I could feel. I screamed, but Athen lunged forward and wrapped his hands around my throat. He squeezed. His face hovered over mine. Clotted blood dripped from his mouth.

    "Ple...ase..." I couldn't breathe. I clawed at his hands, trying to get loose. "S...top."

    He gripped tighter. My neck was going to break; I could feel it.

    My vision blurred and my hearing muted. Blood vessels in my neck popped. My lungs were on fire. Something snapped in my neck. Blood dripped out of my nose. I lost all feeling, everywhere. Everything slowly turned black.

I lurched bolt upright, drenched in sweat. My breathing came in shallow rasps. A sharp pain in my gut bent me double, clutching at my sides.

    "Cramps," I whispered to nobody. "Just cramps."

    A faint tap, tap, tap brought my attention to my window. A grey dove perched on the windowsill pecked at the glass.

    I shakily got up and went over to open the window. The dove flew in and landed on my bed, staring at me with large, orange eyes. I noticed a small piece of paper tied to its leg. Slowly, I crept towards the dove. Conscious of the creaking floorboards, I make sure to my steps light and quiet.

    Carefully, I untied the paper from its leg. The moment it was off, the dove flew away, back out the window and into the starry night sky.

    Stars, I thought. I think I've had enough of stars for a while.

    I turned my attention back to the paper in hand. Hands still shaking, I unfolded the (surprisingly large) page. The paper held a note; the handwriting and stamp in the corner meant it was signed clearly by a noble. I scanned the note. My blood ran cold. I sucked in a huge breath and read it again and again, trying to convince myself it was part of some dream.

Dear "Crow",

        I'm sure it comes of little surprise to you to receive a request for assassination. I, along with many others of many classes, have heard the tales of your daring missions. How it is said that you could sever a man's limb with such speed he'd never know you were there. How you can dissappear without a trace.

        Perhaps I should offer a brief description of myself. I am the Grand Duke of the Georte Republic, in Risilia. I have come to you to ask one thing: does your king truly care for your nation? He rarely attends Peace Meetings, always with some excuse or another; surely this must show how little responsibility he feels regarding Novula's peaceful relationships. So, I offer you a mission with a hefty reward, and asylum withing Risilia should you choose to complete it.

        Assassinate King Edwin Castillo. Do this, and your nation will be better off.

    My heart hammered in my chest. Assassinate the king?! He can't be serious!

    The Duke was smart, no doubt. There was no way I'd be able to expose him without exposing myself. Mind running circles, I re-folded the note and stuffed it under my pillow, for now. I needed to clear my head.

    I left my room and made my way slowly down the hallway. I could hear Darren and Oliver's muffled discussion in the lounge downstairs. I stopped when I reached Athen's door, but I couldn't quite make myself grab the handle. The image of Athen's pale and bloodied face flashed across my vision.

    I have to, I told myself. I need to see that it was only a dream.

    I shakily grasped the handle and hesitantly eased open the door. I peered inside. A sigh of relief escaped me as I saw Athen sprawled clumsily on his bed, snoring slightly. Silently, I closed the door with a soft click.

    I took a deep breath, then another. I crept over to the stairs and started down them. Oliver laughed at some story Darren was telling him. I paused halfway down, wondering if I really wanted to go downstairs. The last thing I wanted right now was unwarranted social interactions.

    "Oh, hello, Arietta," Darren greeted.

    "Hello," I simply replied.

    "Everything alright? You look pale." Oliver stood up and stepped round the sofa towards me.

    "I'm alright, thank you. I just haven't slept much," I muttered, politely waving off Oliver's attempted fussing.

    "Why?" Oliver pressed. "Is the cut on your cheek hurting? Or your arm? I mean, you did hit the tree with quite a lot of force." He tried to lightly guide me to sit down, but I moved away, massaging my temples.

    "No, not that. It's just... I've got a lot on my mind right now."

    "Such as..?" Darren inquired.

    "I... I'm just stressed. These last few years have been pretty rough. For both me and Athen."

    "Hey." Darren sat up straighter and his expression got softer. "Why don't you sit down? You look like you want to talk."

    "It's not really anything I want to talk about." I gave Darren an apologetic, but still somewhat awkward, smile.

    "Just because you don't want to talk about something -" Darren gestured with one hand to nothing in particular. "That doesn't mean you don't need to." He gestured again with his other hand.

    "Don't tell me you want me to spill my entire life story," I retorted.

    "I'm just sayin', it's not healthy to keep things bottled up all the time."

    "Alright," I sighed. I shuffled over to the bookshelf in the corner, scanning for my favourite.

    I picked it out, flicking through the pages to where I left off as I wandered back. I plopped myself down on one of the armchairs, revisiting the candlelit world within the words. I let myself become submerged in the battle scene: watching, hearing, feeling it play out around me.

    "What're you reading?" I jumped out of my skin as Oliver peeked over my shoulder. I twisted round to face him, almost falling off the chair as I went.

    "I - sorry?" I panted.

    "What book are you reading?" He repeated. He kindly took hold of my arm, helping me set myself upright again.

    "Oh, right," I muttered sheepishly. "It... it's called Ashes of a Sun. It's basically about this universe where almost any structure is made out of metals or even plastics! Everything is run by electricity, there's carriages with no horse or ocard or anything like that to pull it. There's this group of people working against the government's immoral plans, and there's so many plot twists!" I stopped as I caught myself rambling.

    "Sounds interesting," Darren piped up. "I think my cousin read that book. I remember her mentioning it when we were kids."

    "Could you read us some?" Oliver asked.

    "What," I joked. "You want me to read you a bedtime story?"

    Darren yawned. "Sounds like a plan. That is, if you're willing." He added.

    "Okay," I murmured. "Get comfy, you two."

    "Yes, ma'am." Oliver sat himself down on the floor, legs crossed and leaning back against he sofa. His face bright with excitement, he picked a cushion from behind, holding it like a stuffed toy. Darren sat with one leg crossed over the other, tucked into the sofa corner, huddled in amongst more cushions.

    I took note of my page and skipped back to the beginning. I cleared my throat, and started in my 'trademark' melodramatic reading voice:

    "He longed to clear away the city, to no longer see the towering buildings, to no longer hear the rumbling of engines passing below..."

    I'd made it to chapter seven uninterrupted  (aside from the occasional question from Darren and Oliver) until the pale glow of sunlight glided in through the window. The first birds began their morning harmonies, and the misty trail of a caligo faded from view.

    I looked up to see Darren asleep, Oliver - also out cold - leaning against his knee, still cuddling that cushion. I stopped reading and gently closed the book, leaving it the arm of the chair.

    I wonder how long they've been sleeping.

    I stood up and stretched my stiff limbs, earning a few pops and clicks and cracks from my joints. Yawning, rubbing my tired eyes, I quietly dragged myself up the stairs to my room. I immediately flopped on my bed, contemplating whether or not I could be bothered to get changed. I decided I will be bothered, whether I liked it or not.

    Today was a gardening day, so I switched into my grubby working clothes. I ran a brush through my hair, and tied it back with a strip of fabric as I went to the water bowl in the corner to wash my face.

    My routine's a little out of order today, I thought. Who cares? It's just today.

    I shuffled down the hallway, back to Athen's room. I rapped my knuckles against the wood; no reply. I rolled my eyes and swung open the door. Athen lay as he was last night: sprawled. I strode over to his bed, snatched the pillow from under his head and dropped it back on him.

    "Oi, dipshit." I nudged him to try and get him to move. "Get up."

    "I'm not a dipshit," he mumbled from under his pillow.

    "Yes, you are. Now get up, I'm making breakfast."

    "Fine," Athen complained. "I'm getting up."

    I hummed a short tune, walking out of his room and back down the stairs. I entered the lounge, where Oliver must have just woken up.

    "Sleep well?" I smiled.

    "Yes, thank you," he replied as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes. He chuckled lightly.

    "What?"

    "Oh, nothing," he said shyly. "Thanks for the bedtime story. Haven't had a night's sleep that good since the last time someone read me a story before bed, when I was - what - nine?"

    "You're welcome." I giggled.

    An awkward silence descended upon the room. I tried to avoid direct eye contact with Oliver, so I picked up Ashes of a Sun, checked again what page I originally left off on, and placed it back into its spot on the bookshelf.

    "Arietta?" Oliver sounded...nervous.

    "Yes?" I turned to face him.

    "Do you think that...mabye..." He trailed off, averting his eyes.

    My heart pounded a little harder; I stood stil. "That mabye what?"

    "Mabye... we could do something like this again?" A faint tinge of pink spread over his face.

    "Of course!"

    "Really?" His face lit up and he sat more forward, more upright.

    "Yeah, I'll glady have you and Darren over again!"

    Oliver's shoulders slumped slightly, and his smile didn't quite reach his eyes.

    "Oh, okay."

    I felt like something wasn't right with him. Like I said something wrong.

    "What's up?" I asked.

    "What d'you mean?"

    "You suddenly went all glum."

    "Oh." He looked away from me, focusing instead on the softwood floor. "I guess I kind of hoped it would be, you know, just you and me."

    "Sure." I flashed him a sweet smile, then turned and walked to the kitchen. "I'm making breakfast; you want some?"

    "Yes, please. Want me to wake Darren, see of he wants anything?" Oliver got to his feet, patting the cushion back into its place.

    "If you want," I replied.

    Oliver nodded and nudged Darren in the arm. "Hey. Wake up."

    Darren shot up, eyes wide. "Shit! I'm late for training, aren't I?!"

    "Darren," Oliver said softly, placing a hand on his shoulder. "You're thrity-two."

    Darren pondered this for a moment, before his face reverted back to panic.

    "Oh gods, I'm an instructor!" He rushed to get up, but Oliver gently held him down.

    "Mate, it's Spring. You're not teaching the new trainees until Autumn."

    "Oh." He relaxed. "Thank goodness."

    "We wanted to check if you wanted anything for breakfast," I stated.

    "Thank you for the offer, but I'm afraid I'll have to pass. My daughter, Ffion - she'll be wondering where I am." Darren beamed at the mention of his daughter, and continued on. "I left her with a babysitter last night and I promised to take her on a picnic today, so I best get going. Thank you again for having us over for the night, Arietta."

    "It's been a pleasure," I replied. Darren stiffly got up from the sofa, and let himself out the front door. He paused suddenly in the doorway.

    "One more thing: if you find or hear of anything else regarding the Crow, please let us know."

    "Will do. Be careful going back up that trail, okay?" I raised an eyebrow to let him know I meant it. Darren waved and shut the door behind him. I headed back for the kitchen. "I'll start breakfast, then. Omlettes alright?"

    "Sure," Oliver responded, following behind me. "Can I felt at all?"

    "Why, do you want to?"

    "Seems appropriate," he shrugged. "I mean, you've shown me wonderful hospitality. Shouldn't I return the favour?"

    "You're a guest." I picked out a small basket from the pantry floor. "It's not mandatory for you to help out."

    "But I want to. I'll feel bad about it, otherwise."

    "Alright, then; follow me."

    A single, loud thud came from the lounge, followed by a less-than-subtle sting of curses. Oliver and I rushed in to see Athen laying on the floor on his back, one boot on, the other loosely held in his hand.

    "You okay?" I grasped his upper arm, pulling him back up to his feet. "What happened?"

    "I lost my balance trying to get my boot on, that's all."

    "As long as you're not hurt." I kept hold of his shoulder as he pulled on his other boot.

    "I'm fine," he grunted.

    "Alright, alright," I sighed. "I'm just gonna get some eggs from the chicken coop. We're having omlettes."

    Athen nodded, watching as I left for the back door with Oliver in tow.

    "So -" Athen trotted after us with a smug grin on his face. "- are you two dating?"

    "*What?!*" Oliver and I both jumped back, faces beet red.

    "Well? Are you?"

    "No -"

    "Why would you even -"

    "We're not dating!"

    "Yeah, of course," Athen smirked.

    "Why don't you go skip out Hydrane's pen, huh?" I retorted, annoyed.

    "Okay, fine." Athen winked and jogged away. "I'll leave you two alone together."

    "How old did you say he is?" Oliver whispered in my ear.

    "First of all: I didn't say." I turned and headed for the coop. "Secondly: he's fourteen."

    "Fourteen," Oliver scoffed. "Forgive me for being rude, but I was annoying at fourteen, but not that bad."

    "That's probably down to me," I admitted.

    "Please, do explain."

    "For the last five or so years of his life, he was basically raised by an angsty teenager - me."

    "What about your parents?"

    "Let's see." I stooped down do open the coop hatch, setting it in place with a metal rod as I picked out some eggs. "Dad left to work abroad when I was twelve, haven't heard much from him lately. Mum ran off with some well-earning bloke she met in a tavern a little while later; that was when I was about fourteen or fifteen."

    "Woah, your mother sounds like quite the deadbeat."

    "She wasn't too bad. She had a part-time that brought in enough to get us by, and I started selling herbal remedies she taught me."

    "Then why'd she run off?" Oliver asked.

    "Didn't really care enough to ask," I answered, shaking my head. "I think she mentioned something about 'being able to finally live comfortably'. She offered to bring me and Athen with her, but we didn't want to know - still don't."

    "Still?" Oliver raised an eyebrow.

    "Yeah. She sends letters now and again, asking if we've changed our minds."

    Oliver nodded and went to pick up an egg just as I did. Our fingers brushed and we both flinched away slightly; my cheeks started to get warm and Oliver coughed awkwardly.

    Come off it, Arietta, I scolded myself. There's no way you like him in that way. You met him yesterday!

    I decided that eight eggs should be enough for three omlettes, and so I made a beeline for the tomatoes. I added two perfectly ripe ones to the basket, as well as a little bit if rosemary.

    I glanced up at the sky. It was painted grey, almost as one shade on a canvas. I shuddered, thinking again of the starless sky of my dream. I half expected the sun, or even the moons, to burst through he haze and blind me once more with wild, blaming whispers.

Today's gonna be a long day.

[bryancroidragon]

Finding Maggie and Sams

My fifth Artventure Noir story features neither Maggie or Sams in person. Actually, it is probably because of that this might be the worst story I have written for Artventure Noir yet. Besides Kitkat, most of the characters who appear in this are OCs so I’m not sure how people will feel about this. here is hoping the people at @internetremix like it.

It was a fine Tuesday morning at O’Sullivan Manor, formerly known as “Carthach Manor”, and also known as the O’Sullivan Museum of Egyptology, formerly known as the “Carthach Museum of Egyptology.” Edwin O’Sullivan and his wife Audrey were enjoying breakfast on the veranda of the manor.

Audrey was a young woman the same age as her husband. She was a thin woman with light skin, reddish-brown eyes and straight long hair. She was wearing a blue dress just as Edwin was wearing a red blazer.

Edwin was looking at a letter he had received from the Internet City Zoo. It said they had managed to acquire a young male caracal from the Cairo Zoo and wanted Internet City’s very own Egyptologist to name him.

“I have a few names considered, Audrey” Said Edwin.

“May I hear them, dear?” asked Audrey.

“Akhenaten, Tutankhamen, Ramses, Alexander, Augustus, Caligula and Nero.”

“I’d remove ‘Caligula’ and ‘Nero.’” Said Audrey, stirring her tea with a spoon. “Caligula was, well, Caligula and Nero was the Antichrist. I’m not sure those are the most inviting names.”

“Noted.” Edwin said, nodding. “I should probably remove ‘Ramses’ from the list too since that DeMille picture came out and portrayed Ramses the Great as the Pharaoh of the Exodus.”

“You aren’t removing ‘Augustus’ for how he is often portrayed?” asked Audrey.

“No, I think Robert Graves’ novels will really turn things around and people will view him as a great hero! I am keeping him on the list!”

“So, we have three names that start with the letter ‘A’…” Audrey tapped her teaspoon on her teacup.

“Yeah, looks like we are going with Tutankhamen.” Stated Edwin. “No, wait! Merneptah!”

“For goodness sake, Edwin! Not everyone in Internet City is an Egyptologist! They won’t know that Merneptah was Ramses the Great’s successor and thirteenth son!”

“Of course they will! He was in that Austrian film ‘The Moon of Israel!’”

The subject of the caracal’s name came abruptly to an end as two gremlins came running onto the veranda. One was obviously Kitkat, the gremlin that Sam McSams had abducted but the other was a smaller one that only came up to the bottom of Kitkat’s neck, had a stubby left leg, a right shoulder that was higher than the left and was wearing a top hat.

“Hello, Kitkat. What brings you here?” asked Audrey. “And who is your adorable little friend?”

“He’s Algae Cake!” replied Kitkat. “Maggie was grabbed at the cemetery when she was visiting Leon’s grave!”

“Oh! By who?”

“By cops!” answered Algae Cake. “She was handcuffed by them and then gagged after she bit the nose of this old guy!”

“And they got Sams too!” exclaimed Kitkat. “We went to his place and found the place ransacked! There was a broken bottle and a puddle of blood!”

“What did they say?” asked Edwin. He never was able to understand gremlins they were as intelligible as people who spoke French to him.

“It would seem corrupt policemen have taken Maggie hostage and someone has gotten Sams too.” Answered Audrey. “Oh, Edwin, it is dreadful! You’ve got to do something!” Both Edwin and Audrey were fully capable of managing the museum but only Edwin had ever been a person of action since he had fought in the war of the previous decade.

 “I’ll be home once I’ve found Maggie and Sams, Audrey.” Edwin stood up. “If I don’t come back…” He looked at his wife and Audrey could not bear to look her husband in the eye. “I’ll be back home soon. I promise.”

“I pray that you will, Edwin.” Said Audrey, her voice sounding like she was about to cry. “I pray that you will.”

With his revolver from the war and the two gremlins on his shoulders, Edwin made his way to the Internet City Police Station. Police had taken their own police chief captive? Well then, it was best to start at the viper’s nest itself.

Edwin’s paternal grandfather Charles had been buried beneath the police station. That was an odd wish but even odder was that he dictated that he be buried upside down in a baseball bat shaped coffin. Ever since reverting the name to “O’Sullivan” Edwin had made arrangements to have Charles’ body dug up and buried on the grounds of the O’Sullivan estate. That had been a month ago, they were still digging Charles out.

Entering the police station he walked right to where his gut told him to go: Maggie’s office. The fifty-five year-old Robert McFarlane looked up from his desk as Edwin passed and raised an eyebrow when he saw the gremlins sitting on Edwin’s shoulder. When Edwin entered the office, he saw a policeman who had the appearance of a derelict and a bleeding nose standing before Maggie’s desk. He was ripping a photograph of Sams, Maggie and her late partner Leon to pieces.

“Officer Mark Dean…” said Edwin, causing the middle-aged officer to turn around in surprise.

“Mr. O’Sullivan! It is Chief Mark Dean now.”

“Where is Maggie?”

“Don’t know, must have left town.” Dean looked at Kitkat and then Algae Cake. “Since when do you let goblins ride on your shoulders?” Both gremlins glared at the usurper and began pointing fingers at him while quickly speaking in Edwin’s ear. He did not understand a word they were saying but they were getting across plainly what they were trying to tell him. Dean had been the leader of the cops that had gotten Maggie! Dean paid the gremlins no mind and just picked up Algae Cake by the back of his jacket, saying: “Look at this scrawny little runt! How much do you wanna guess he doesn’t survive being thrown out the window?”

“Where is Maggie?” asked Edwin again. “And you can tell me where Sams is too.”

“I told you I don’t know where she is, as for McSams he is probably drunk is a gutter somewhere.” Dean held Algae Cake up to the light and looked at the little gremlin’s left leg. “Take a look at his stubby leg! With his uneven legs he should have been euthanized!”

 “Put the gremlin down and tell me where Maggie and Sams are. I know that a group of policemen took Maggie captive and that Sams’ home was ransacked, now tell me where they are!”

 Dean tossed Algae Cake onto the desk, the gremlin landing on a pair of handcuffs. “They are with Lorenzo Deutsch, I’m sure you must have met him at the Club Lavender.”

“The sympathizer of that bloc of authoritarians led by the Charlie Chaplin lookalike that sounds like Margaret Hamilton? I’ve met him. Where has he taken them?” Edwin kept his eyes on Dean, he had a feeling the corrupt cop would come at him any moment.

“To that warehouse on the eastside!” Dean laughed. “At eleven Deutsch is going drown them in concrete!”

“Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“They will drown! I am not going to be taking orders from a woman ever again and I won’t let some Egyptologist save that damn woman and her goblin-loving boyfriend!” Dean began to charge with a raise fist only to be suddenly stopped. “What the?” He looked down and found his right ankle handcuffed to the leg of Maggie’s desk. Algae Cake was standing there with a smile on his face, waving at Dean. The corrupt cop furled his brow, narrowed his eyes and then kicked the gremlin across the room until he hit the office’s wall. The next thing Dean knew he heard the screams of Kitkat. He turned and saw her flying at him with her saxophone in hand. She ended up bashing her saxophone against Dean’s nose, which had already been in pain enough from Maggie biting it. After screaming, Dean hurled Kitkat across the office only for Edwin to punch him in the face, hitting him right on the nose.

So fell Mark Dean.

With the unconscious cop on the desk, Edwin walked over to Kitkat and picked her up. “You okay?”

Although Edwin could not understand her, Kitkat answered with “I’m okay!” while nodding.

“Great and what about… Uh… Top hat gremlin?”

No sooner did Edwin finish the question did Algae Cake come running over… while holding the top of a mop. “I have the top of a mop!” he said, stating the obvious. “I can flop it on a cop! I can swap it for a top! I can—“

“I think you should stop.” Commented Kitkat with a completely deadpan expression.

Edwin just stared in confusion at this sight. He had seen no mop top so he felt the need to ask Kitkat:” Does Maggie keep a drawer full of mop tops?” Kitkat could only shake her head leading to Edwin sighing: “Okay then…”

The Egyptologist and the two gremlins left the office, leaving the unconscious corrupt cop on the desk with his right ankle handcuffed to the desk’s leg. McFarlane approached the three and said: “I heard everything. Want me to get some men rallied and we’ll go save the chief and McSams?”

“No, stay here and root out the other corrupt cops!” ordered Edwin. “Leave the rescuing of them to us.” Edwin, Kitkat and Algae Cake then left the police station completely.

If only Dean had stayed unconscious longer. No sooner than Edwin and the gremlins left the office, Dean had regained consciousness and took of the phone on Maggie’s desk, turned the dial until he got the number he wanted and said: “Deutsch, it is Dean! You might want to drown those two ahead of time!” 

[wheredidhiseyebrowsgo]

I read a really good FBI Derek fic a few months ago. Now I am on the hunt for any FBI Sterek fics!! A friend recommended this blog. So I am hope you can help me. Thanks 😊

AND

Anonymous said:Good morning lovely people!!! After last nights finale I am in desperate need of all FBI Stiles or FBI Derek fics!! Please any all as long as it ends with HEA STEREK! Pretty please 😘

In case you missed it. It’s now canon that Stiles is going to school to be an FBI agent. So...let your little fic writing hearts explode. - Anastasia

And In That Moment (I Saw You) by Boom

(1/1 I 1,397 I Not Rated)

Derek Hale has been hunting the assassin known as the Nogitsune for six years. Granted there hasn't been a murder attributed to him in five years, but Derek it sure he's close. His husband, Stiles, thinks he should let it go.

This is a scene from a longer work I may or may not actually post. Can be read as a stand alone.

I can't count to I love you by constellationmoles (Fawxy)

(1/? I 1,433 I Mature)

As much as Stiles loves being in the most corrupted part of the FBI, running with werewolves, and the secrets he has to tell his dad, no other emotion can rival with his hatred for Agent fucking Hale. With his horrible whatever color his eyes are and shitty Adonis face. And why does he look like he was crafted out of marble? Shit uh wait no come back I got this.

Alright fine. As pretty as Agent Hale is, he does not wish to be married to the guy. But his boss says 'hahahah no pretend to be in love with him because hunters and witches and stuff' yeah yeah whatever Deaton you just want us to stop fighting in the break room over the last donut hole.

Stiles Stilinski does not want to be fake married Derek Hale but nobody listens.

Not even his new husband.

Lunatic by Horribibble

(2/2 I 2,469 I Mature)

FBI Agent Derek Hale is one of the good guys. He takes his suppressants and plays the part of a decent human being with remarkable accuracy. But when he's sent in to interrogate Stiles Stilinski, alleged serial killer, it looks like the pack's come back to haunt him.

“You shouldn’t pout like that, baby. Not when we planned you such a big surprise.”

Better Safe than Sorry by Inell

(1/1 I 3,435 I Teen)

Stiles, Derek, and Isaac check out the area where Paige Krasikeva was likely kidnapped by their perp.

The Secret's Out by DarkAlpha67

(1/1 I 3,769 I Teen)

Edwin Rocks has been Stilinski's partner for years and he doesn't know anything about the kid, until there's a bombing and he sees another side of Stilinski and finds out some interesting things too...

Underlying Architecture by Blue_Five 

(2/? I 4,042 I Mature)

Remains are discovered in Arlington Cemetary. FBI Special Agent and Alpha Derek Hale has to figure out who the body used to be and what happened. Dr. Stiles Stilinski is an Omega and a brilliant anthropologist capable of doing just that with his equally brilliant team at the Jeffersonian.

Unfortunately, they can't stand each other.

Anguis in Herba by WednesdaysDaughter

(3/3 I 8,606 I Mature)

“Not to gross anyone out more than they already are, but has anyone found the victims' skin?” Lydia asks and Stiles gags.

“I don't even want to consider the answer to that question Lyds,” Stiles complains and Allison grimaces in agreement.

When a serial killer from his home town runs rampant, Stiles Stilinski (Technical Analyst for the B.A.U.) along with his team must find him in time to save one of their own from ending up like the first three victims: Poisoned and skinned alive.

Jones by Lostxcow

(5/? I 15,901 I Mature)

It was only supposed to be a regular case with the BAU team flying out to Beacon Hills to assist Detective Stiles Stilinski solve a copy-cat murderer case who was supposed to be dead 2 years ago. How did Derek end up flying back every weekend on his days off just to see him again?

or

AU where Derek is an FBI and meets Stiles (detective) to help for a case. they hit it off from there. Derek visits every days off he has, Stiles texts him random shit while he's bored. Derek always forgets about time difference making Stiles mad, but he loves him too much to care.

or

Criminal Minds AU but with Derek and Stiles instead of JJ and Will bc i love them both so why not. and there's not a lot of FBI sterek which there should be

Keep On the Sunny Side by GiggleSnortBangDead

(1/1 I 53,746 I Explicit)

It's like a Tarantino revenge flick, but worse. It's all a little cliche but, hey, they gotta kill Kate Argent.

By Blood or Bite (Pack) by bigbootsmanofwar

(15/? I 98,970 I Explicit)

Derek didn't do field work. He refused. God knew the last time he left the office, it didn't go so well. He's perfectly content to just sit in his lab, help out from afar, and keep to himself.

If the kid who kept breaking all the rules would stop confusing him, things might have been OK. You know, with the kid he's turned who he can't stop worrying about, the damaged splinters of family he has left, and the Uncle he doesn't trust looming over Stiles' shoulder.

If he wasn't so lonely, he'd pack it all in now.

Blue Moon by AsexualDerek (Cammerel)

(24/24 I 113,050 I Explicit)

After Agent Hale's partner is killed, he gets landed with a young, nubile agent that doesn't know how to keep his mouth shut and stop asking questions about things that aren't his business to know.

[one-of-us-blog]

Victory of the Daleks (Doctor Who S05E03)

Today Jon is forced to watch and recap “Victory of the Daleks”, the third episode of Doctor Who’s fifth series. The Doctor has to head back to World War II to help out his old buddy Winston, but he soon learns that Churchill’s gotten in over his head. Can the Doctor keep England from losing the War and stop the return of an old foe?

Keep reading to find out…

Eli, you’re an unstoppable machine when it comes to churning out fantastic reviews! I knew that dastardly Buddy was up to no good because of my past experience with Milo O'Shea in Barbarella, but I wanted him to be okay in the end, too. And I love that Winston Churchill is a bridge between our two recaps! I don’t know why I’m so emotionally invested in the epic saga that is The Story of Rose and Charlie, but I really liked that this episode helped establish that more for you. 

For now, though, buttocks tight!

Episode directed by Andrew Gunn and written by Mark Gatiss

In the Cabinet War Rooms, Prime Minister Winston Churchill is reminiscing on his brief tryst with a beautiful young Sicilian waitress and checking on the status of an approaching group of German planes. They’re out of normal range, but Churchill says it’s time to roll out the Brits’ new secret weapon. It’s… a Dalek!

Holy shit!

After the opening credits, the TARDIS arrives on the scene and the Doctor is greeted by a bunch of armed soldiers. Churchill arrives and the Doc gives some introductions for Winston and Amy. Churchill wants a TARDIS key, because he could achieve a hell of a lot with that kind of technology at his disposal, but the Doc turns him down. This is standard repartee for the two of them, and soon they’re headed off for the War Rooms. Turns out Churchill called the Doc, like, a month ago, but the War’s still raging and another formation of Jerry planes is on the way. Churchill says he’s got something to show the Doc and takes him and Amy up to the roof. En route the Prime Minister explains that he’s going to take advantage of any tool at his disposal to fight the Nazis.

On the roof, Amy and the Doctor are introduced to Professor Edwin Bracewell, head of the Ironsides project. Amy is horrified by the devastated London laid out before them, but the Doc says it’s history. The enemy squadron is close, and Bracewell’s Ironsides quickly take them out. The Doctor’s heard the sound of those weapons before. He comes face to face with an Ironsides, but it’s not a bit of WWII claptrap… it’s a Dalek!

Holy shit!

Only, it says it doesn’t know who the Doctor is. It says it’s a servant to the British people, and its only goal is to win the War. Back in Churchill’s office, the Doc tries to explain the threat the Daleks pose, but Churchill doesn’t buy it. Bracewell has apparently invented the Ironsides, and they’re just too powerful to pass up. Churchill called the Doc a month ago because he thought they were too good to be true, but they’ve proven themselves invaluable to the war effort. The Doc asks Amy to tell Churchill how dangerous the Daleks are, only she can’t, because she’s never heard of them. For some reason she has no memory of the Battle of Canary Wharf or the whole Stolen Earth incident. That’s weird, because she definitely should remember the Earth being dragged halfway across the universe and invaded by hostile Daleks. The Doc says it’s not possible for her to have forgotten, but here we are.

The Doc wants to know what the Dalek are up to, and Amy, not knowing the danger she’s in, just walks up to one of the Ironsides and asks if it’s an alien. It says it’s a soldier and it has a job to do. The Doc tries again to convince Churchill to destroy the Ironsides, but he refuses. The Doc lays his cards on his table: the Daleks are his oldest and most dangerous foes. They have no empathy or pity or value of non-Dalek life. Churchill says if Hitler invaded Hell the Prime Minister would side with the Devil if he had to. The all clear alarm sounds and Churchill shuffles off as the Doctor tells Amy that the Daleks are made of pure hatred and he’s going to prove it.

He goes to Bracewell’s lab. Bracewell and Amy bond over being Scottish and the Doc asks Bracewell where he got the idea for the Ironsides, and he says inspiration just comes to him. The Doctor says that whatever the Daleks have promised him, they’re not gonna give it to him. An Ironsides offers him some tea, and the Doc’s had enough. He begins whacking it with a wrench and orders it to fight back. He finally tells it that he’s the Doctor and it’s a Dalek, and it says he’s right. It’s gotten the testimony it wanted the whole time, and it transmits it to a Dalek craft hidden behind the moon. The Doctor’s admission of his identity activates a progenitor, and the Daleks are done playing nice. They vaporize a few marines and then blow Bracewell’s hand off. Turns out, Bracewell didn’t create the Ironsides; the Daleks created him. He’s an android, and now a one-handed android at that.

The Daleks declare victory and then beam back to their ship. The Doctor rushes back to the TARDIS and tells Amy to stay put with Churchill. The Brits know where the Dalek ship is up in the sky, but they’re stuck on Earth. The TARDIS lands inside the Dalek craft and he emerges to greet his enemies. They’re ready to exterminate him, but he produces some sort of pastry and says it’s a TARDIS self-destruct mechanism. He threatens to blow the TARDIS and take the Daleks with it if they even scan the not-really-a-device. The Daleks, the most fearsome creatures in the universe, buy this. They explain that after Davros’ reality bomb plan fell apart a single Dalek ship survived and fell through time only to end up here. They found a progenitor device, which contains pure Dalek DNA. They’re going to use it to create a whole new fleet of Dalek warriors. They needed Bracewell as a smokescreen to lure the Doctor here and give testimony that they are, in fact, Daleks, because for some reason the progenitor won’t recognize them.

The Daleks play their ace in the hole. They can’t destroy Earth, but they send a signal to the city which causes all the lights to turn on. Every building will be clear as day to the Germans, and they’re practically an open invitation for German bombs. Jerries are already on their way, and Amy says they can’t just sit here. She realizes Bracewell is their own ace in the hole and she and Churchill go to his lab. The Doc threatens to blow up the TARDIS again if the Daleks don’t turn off the lights, but they tell him to leave and let them go. Their only goal is to avoid extinction, but the Doc says he won’t let them get away again. Too late, though, as the progenitor has finished creating a new Dalek paradigm. The new Daleks are bigger (and more colorful!) and more imposing than their creators.

Back on Earth, Bracewell is ready to kill himself, but Amy and Churchill arrive in time to stop him. Bracewell is confused; the Daleks gave him false memories, and he doesn’t understand who or what he is. Amy tells him she understands where he’s coming from, but right now the humans need him to fight the Daleks. Bracewell’s been working on a gravity bubble thingamajig, and Churchill says it’s time to party. The new Daleks quickly label their creators as impure and inferior. The old Daleks agree and allow themselves to be exterminated. The new Daleks, who are now the only Daleks, recognize the Doctor and are ready to exterminate him, as well, but he tries his pastry bluff again.

The white Dalek breaks down the color-coded power structure of the new Dalek paradigm; the white Dalek is the supreme, blue is the strategist, red is the drone, orange is the scientist, and yellow is the eternal. Got it? Good, because that’ll definitely come up later. At some point. Bracewell’s space planes launch while the Daleks figure out the pastry is just a pastry. The Daleks still don’t exterminate the Doctors as they’re interrupted by the approach of the space planes. The Doc’s able to let the planes know where to shoot and make it back to the TARDIS. Two of the three planes are quickly destroyed, and they can’t damage the Dalek craft. The Doc sets about lowering the Dalek defenses and the dish sending out the signal to the lights of London is destroyed.

The plane comes back around to destroy the Dalek ship, but the Daleks tell the Doctor to call off the attack or they’ll activate Bracewell. Oh, but the way, Bracewell is powered by an oblivion continuum, which is, like, a really big bomb. The Doctor has to decide between stopping the Daleks and getting to Bracewell before he can detonate. The Doc calls off the attack and gets the TARDIS back to Earth, but, no surprise, the Daleks activate the oblivion continuum anyway. The Daleks time jump away and the Doc gets Bracewell talking about his implanted memories. That’s somehow going to stop him from detonating. He begins spilling his beans, but it doesn’t do the trick. Time for Amy to save the day again! She gets Bracewell thinking about an old bae of his, Dorabella, and that does the trick.

The Doctor’s saved Earth (actually Amy did it), but he feels the Daleks have beaten him. Amy cheers him up and he admits saving Earth is pretty great. A bit well the Doc’s gotten rid of all of the alien technology lying around, despite Churchill’s protest. The Prime Minister asks the Doc to stick around and help him win the War, but the Doctor says England’s in good hands as it is. The two hug, and Churchill pickpockets the TARDIS key from the Doc. Amy, who refuses to stop saving the day, catches this in time and gets the key back. Bracewell thinks he has to be deactivated, and the Doc knows he should, but he lets Bracewell escape to go track down Dorabella and live some kind of life.

Amy reflects on the Doctor having serious enemies out there, but she’s not scared into going home. The Doc still doesn’t understand why she didn’t know about the Daleks, and that’s worrying him. They reenter the TARDIS and it departs, revealing a crack like the one that was in Amy’s old bedroom wall.

The End

~~~~~

I just can’t get enough of those lovable tin cans! It was really nice to see the Daleks again, and I really liked the look of their new design. Churchill was a lot of fun, too, and it was really nice to see Amy saving the day left and right. I didn’t quite get how Bracewell believing in his humanity stopped the bomb from going off, though. I mean, he didn’t have any control over the bomb beginning to detonate, so I’m not sure why he had any control over it not going off. And, I mean, I hate to be that guy, but Bracewell isn’t human. I don’t think that diminishes his right to exist as a sapient being, but at the end of the day he’s an intelligent machine. And from what I gathered, his false memories are real memories from a real dude, so there’s a real Dorabella out there who was really in love with the person whose memories Bracewell ended up with. Bracewell isn’t that person and Dorabella’s never met him before, so I don’t know if I can accept that the two of them are going to live happily ever after together. The more I think about this the more it falls apart, so I’m going to stop dwelling on it. Something else that fell apart for me was the Doctor’s moral choice in the end. He had to know the Daleks weren’t going to keep their word and not detonate Bracewell, right? I mean, they’re Daleks! Not keeping their word is their whole thing! He knew the threat Bracewell posed and he had to at least think he had a chance of stopping the detonation, so why not blow up the Dalek ship and then take care of the bomb issue?

Those logical issues aside, I didn’t hate the episode. I’m not sure I can say I’m any more warmed up to this new Doctor, but nothing I saw in this episode made me like him less, at least. 

I give “Victory of the Daleks” QQQ½ on the Five Q Scale.

Tune in again on Tuesday when Eli will fight for his man with his recap of the next episode of The Golden Girls, “The Artist”, and then on Wednesday we’ll keep this train a-runnin’ with the next episode of Doctor Who, “The Time of Angels”.

Until then, thanks for reading, thanks for KBO and thanks for being One of Us!

[theattainer]

21 quotes from the Apollo 11 astronauts on everything from walking on the moon to the future of spaceflight

https://theattainer.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/neil-armstrong-post-moon-walk-attainer.jpeg

https://theattainer.com/21-quotes-from-the-apollo-11-astronauts-on-everything-from-walking-on-the-moon-to-the-future-of-spaceflight/

21 quotes from the Apollo 11 astronauts on everything from walking on the moon to the future of spaceflight

Half a century ago, on July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts took off for the moon.

Neil Armstrong, Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, and Michael Collins arrived four days later to a place no human being had ever been before.

Collins orbited the moon while Armstrong and Aldrin landed on its surface. It took them hours to put on their space suits and prep for touchdown. After descending the ladder onto the lunar surface, Armstrong uttered his historic words: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” (Armstrong would later claim, “‘That’s one small step for ‘a’ man.’ It’s just that people just didn’t hear it.”)

The 600 million people watching the moon landing on television would remember that line. But the three astronauts had much more to say about their experience flying to the moon and back.

Here are the astronauts’ most memorable words.

Neil Armstrong on vision

Astronaut Neil Armstrong smiles inside the Lunar Module July 20, 1969.

NASA via Getty Images

“There are great ideas undiscovered, breakthroughs available to those who can remove one of truth’s protective layers. There are places to go beyond belief.”

Source: United Press International

Buzz Aldrin on dreams

NASA/AP

“One truth I have discovered for sure: When you believe that all things are possible and you are willing to work hard to accomplish your goals, you can achieve the next ‘impossible’ dream. No dream is too high!”

Source: “No Dream is Too High: Life Lessons From a Man Who Walked on the Moon”

Buzz Aldrin on keeping an open mind

NASA/AP

“Your mind is like a parachute: If it isn’t open, it doesn’t work.”

Source: “No Dream is Too High: Life Lessons From a Man Who Walked on the Moon”

Neil Armstrong on challenges (answered during Apollo 11’s pre-flight news conference)

Getty

“I think we’re going to the moon because it’s in the nature of the human being to face challenges. It’s by the nature of his deep inner soul … we’re required to do these things just as salmon swim upstream.”

Source: Internet Archive

Michael Collins on liftoff

Apollo 11 command module pilot astronaut Michael Collins during a break in training for the July 1969 moon landing journey in Cape Kennedy, Florida, June 19, 1969. Astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin (Buzz) Aldrin Jr., took a walk on the lunar surface, while Collins circled alone in moon orbit.

AP Photo

“We are off! And do we know it, not just because the world is yelling ‘Liftoff’ in our ears, but because the seats of our pants tell us so! Trust your instruments, not your body, the modern pilot is always told, but this beast is best felt. Shake, rattle and roll!”

Source: “Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys”

Buzz Aldrin on weightlessness

Buzz Aldrin poses in an Apollo 11 spacesuit in July 1969, just days before launching toward the first human landing on the moon.

NASA

“There’s a tremendously satisfying freedom associated with weightlessness. It’s challenging in the absence of traction or leverage, and it requires thoughtful readjustment. I found the experience of weightlessness to be one of the most fun and enjoyable, challenging and rewarding, experiences of spaceflight. Returning to Earth brings with it a great sense of heaviness, and a need for careful movement. In some ways it’s not too different from returning from a rocking ocean ship.”

Source: Scholastic

Neil Armstrong after landing on the moon

Public Domain

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

Source: NASA

Neil Armstrong’s first words on the moon

NASA/AP

“That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Source: NASA

Neil Armstrong on his famous quote

Astronaut Edwin E. “Buzz” Aldrin Jr. poses for a photograph beside the US flag deployed on the moon during the Apollo 11 mission on July 20, 1969

AP Photo/NASA/Neil A. Armstrong

“I thought, well, when I step off it’s just going to be a little step — a step from there down to there — but then I thought about all those 400,000 people who had given me the opportunity to make that step and thought it’s going to be a big something for all those folks and, indeed for a lot of others that weren’t even involved in the project, so it was kind of a simple correlation.”

Source: CBS News

Neil Armstrong on his moonwalk

NASA

“Pilots take no special joy in walking: pilots like flying. Pilots generally take pride in a good landing, not in getting out of the vehicle.”

Source: “In the Shadow of the Moon”

Buzz Aldrin on the lunar surface

NASA

“Magnificent desolation.”

Source: “Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon”

Neil Armstrong on the lunar surface

Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin Jr. walks on the surface of the moon, July 30, 1969, with seismogaphic equipment which he just set up. The flag like object on a pole is a solar wind experiment and in the background is the Lunar Landing Module.

AP Photo/NASA/Neil Armstrong

“It’s an interesting place to be. I recommend it.”

Source: CBS News

Michael Collins on looking down at Earth

NASA

“I really believe that if the political leaders of the world could see their planet from a distance of, let’s say 100,000 miles, their outlook would be fundamentally changed. The all-important border would be invisible, that noisy argument suddenly silenced.”

Source: Michael Collins on Twitter

Michael Collins on orbiting the moon alone

Project Apollo Archive

“I am alone now, truly alone, and absolutely isolated from any known life. I am it. If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God knows what on this side.”

Source: “Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journeys”

Buzz Aldrin on looking back at Earth

NASA

“From the distance of the moon, Earth was four times the size of a full moon seen from Earth. It was a brilliant jewel in the black velvet sky. Yet it was still at a great distance, considering the challenges of the voyage home.”

Source: Scholastic

Buzz Aldrin on being the second man on the moon

“As the senior crew member, it was appropriate for [Armstrong] to be the first. But after years and years of being asked to speak to a group of people and then be introduced as the second man on the moon, it does get a little frustrating. Is it really necessary to point out to the crowd that somebody else was first when we all went through the same training, we all landed at the same time and all contributed? But for the rest of my life I’ll always be identified as the second man to walk on the moon. [Laughs.]”

Source: National Geographic

Buzz Aldrin on returning to space

“Everyone who’s been in space would, I’m sure, welcome the opportunity for a return to the exhilarating experiences there. For me, a flight in a shuttle, though most satisfying, would be anticlimactic after my flight to the moon.”

Source: Scholastic

Neil Armstrong on being an engineer

NASA/Reuters

“I am, and ever will be, a white-socks, pocket-protector, nerdy engineer — born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow.”

Source: National Academy of Engineering

Michael Collins on Mars

“I see more moon missions as delaying Mars, which is a much more interesting place to go.”

Source: United Press International

Neil Armstrong on lunar bases

Alex Brandon/AP

“Oh, I am quite certain that we will have such bases in our lifetime, somewhat like the Antarctic stations and similar scientific outposts — continually manned. Although, certainly there is the problem of the environment, the vacuum, the high and low temperatures of day and night. Still, in all, in many ways, it’s more hospitable than Antarctica might be.”

Source: BBC interview via Business Insider

Buzz Aldrin on exploration

NASA/AP

“The urge to explore has propelled evolution since the first water creatures reconnoitered the land. Like all living systems, cultures cannot remain static; they evolve or decline. They explore or expire.”

What do you think?

[sciencespies]

To the Moon and back: 50 years on, a giant leap into the unknown

https://sciencespies.com/space/to-the-moon-and-back-50-years-on-a-giant-leap-into-the-unknown/

To the Moon and back: 50 years on, a giant leap into the unknown

The first four days of Apollo 11’s journey to the Moon had gone according to plan, but just twenty minutes before landing, the atmosphere grew tense as the crew encountered a series of problems.

It was July 20, 1969, and as the world followed the spacecraft’s progress, it briefly lost radio contact with mission control in Houston.

Then, as the lunar module Eagle was in the middle of its descent, piloted by Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and mission commander Neil Armstrong, an alarm bell began ringing.

Eagle had detached two hours earlier from the main part of the vessel, the command module, Columbia, where the third crew member Michael Collins remained in orbit.

It was an anxious moment for Armstrong, a brilliant test pilot and aeronautical engineer, but a man of famously few words.

“Give us a reading on the 1202 Program Alarm,” he radios to mission control. They are told to keep going. Houston realizes the onboard computer is experiencing an overflow, but all systems are functional.

Below them, the Moon’s craters are zipping by fast. Too fast, realizes Armstrong: at this rate, they will overshoot the landing site by several miles.

He switches to manual control and starts to scope out a new landing site from his porthole. But there’s trouble finding the perfect spot, and it’s going to be tight.

“Pretty rocky area,” he tells Aldrin.

Aldrin continues to tell him speed and altitude readings from the computer. “Coming down nicely,” he says.

“Gonna be right over that crater,” Armstrong replies.

Meanwhile, the fuel is rapidly depleting.

Houston continues to announce the number of seconds left to the “Bingo fuel call”—the point at which Eagle will have 20 seconds left to land, or abort the mission.

It is now 30 seconds left to Bingo.

Armstrong, summoning all his experience, is silent as he concentrates.

The module comes to a rest on the ground. “Contact Light,” says Aldrin, meaning one of the leg’s foot sensors has touched down. The engines are switched off.

“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed,” announces Armstrong.

“We copy you on the ground. You got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again. Thanks a lot,” replies Charlie Duke, the CapCom or capsule communicator on the ground.

Nazi rocket man

History records that the number of people who worked on the Apollo program was 400,000. But two figures tower above the rest for their contributions.

In 1961, President John F Kennedy called upon his vice president Lyndon Johnson to beat the Soviets in space.

“We are in a strategic space race with the Russians, and we are losing,” Kennedy had written in a magazine the year before. “If a man orbits Earth this year, his name will be Ivan.”

Johnson reaches out to the godfather of NASA’s space program: Wernher von Braun.

The former card-carrying Nazi was the inventor of the V-2 rockets that rained destruction on London in World War II.

Toward the end of the war, he surrendered himself to the Americans, who brought him and a hundred of his best engineers to Alabama, as part of the secret “Operation Paperclip.”

Von Braun told Johnson that while the US was well behind, they could conceivably beat the Russians when it came to putting men on the Moon, if they immediately started work on a giant booster rocket.

Kennedy would address Congress later that year, famously committing “to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” by the decade’s end.

Eight years later, Richard Nixon was president when the goal was realized.

In case of a tragedy, he had prepared the following remarks: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the Moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.”

But the extraordinary national efforts paid off.

It all happened fast, thanks to a blank check for the mission from Congress. Between October 1968 and May 1969, four preparatory Apollo missions were launched. Armstrong was chosen in December 1968 to command the eleventh.

Months from launch, Armstrong told Aldrin he was pulling rank and would be the first to set foot on the lunar surface.

“I kept my silence several more days, all the time struggling not to be angry with Neil,” Aldrin later recalled in his memoirs.

“After all, he was the commander and, as such, the boss.”

The giant leap

When the monstrous rocket designed by von Braun launched with the Apollo 11 capsule at its summit on Wednesday, July 16 1969, one million people flocked to the beach across from Cape Canaveral to watch.

But many had doubts that they’d succeed in landing on the Moon on the first attempt. Armstrong confided in 1999: “My gut feeling was that we had a 90 percent chance—or better—of getting back safely, and a 50 percent chance of making a successful landing.”

For those in America, the final descent would take place on Sunday evening.

In Europe, it was already nighttime, but everyone was glued to their televisions, though they could only hear crackling radio communications until Armstrong set up his black and white camera ahead of his first step.

His grandmother had advised him not to do it if he felt danger; he had agreed, according to the book “Rocket Men” by Craig Nelson.

As he climbed down to the foot of the ladder, he observed that Eagle’s footpads had sunk into the ground by only an inch or two, and the surface appeared very fine grained. “It’s almost like a powder,” he recalled.

Then, over the radio: “Okay. I’m going to step off the LM now.” A pause, and then the immortal words: “That’s one small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.”

According to Armstrong, the line wasn’t scripted. “I thought about it after landing,” he would say in an oral history recorded by NASA in 2001.

One problem: without the indefinite article (“a man”), it wasn’t grammatically correct. Armstrong said he meant to say it, but agreed it was inaudible.

What does the Moon look like, up close?

Its color varies with the angle of the Sun: from brown to grey to black as coal. And the lower level of gravity takes getting used to.

“I started jogging around a bit, and it felt like I was moving in slow motion in a lazy lope, often with both of my feet floating in the air,” Aldrin wrote in a book in 2009.

Over the course of two-and-a-half hours, Armstrong picks up piles and piles of Moon rocks and takes photographs. Aldrin installs a seismometer and two other scientific instruments.

They plant the US flag, and leave behind a host of items including a medal honoring the first man in space, Russia’s Yuri Gagarin.

Of the 857 black and white photos, and 550 in color, only four show Armstrong. The majority are of Aldrin. “He’s a lot more photogenic than I am,” he joked in 2001.

Homeward bound

By the time they were set to go, the astronauts were covered in dust. In the cockpit, “It smelled, to me, like wet ashes in a fireplace,” said Armstrong.

Collins had been waiting up in orbit for the past 22 hours.

“My secret terror for the last six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to Earth alone,” he later wrote.

“If they fail to rise from the surface, or crash back into it, I am not going to commit suicide; I am coming home, forthwith, but I will be a marked man for life and I know it.”

Happily, the lunar module’s engine worked, it rendezvoused back with Columbia, and the trio began the long journey home.

By the end, shorn of its extra modules and fuel, the capsule weighs only 12,250 pounds, or 0.2 percent of the launch weight of the fully loaded Saturn V rocket.

On July 24, it enters the atmosphere, becoming for a while a fireball in the sky before deploying three parachutes and splashing down safely into the Pacific.

The US had dispatched an aircraft carrier to recover them. Nixon was on board.

Elite divers extract the men, who are unharmed but malodorous after their journey, to transfer them by helicopter to the ship.

There, they are placed in quarantine over the fear at the time that they may be contaminated with extraterrestrial microorganisms.

At their first press conference, three weeks later, reporters asked the three men, now global heroes, whether they would ever consider returning to the Moon.

“In the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, we had very little time for meditation,” replied Armstrong, ever to the point.

None of them would go back to space ever again.

After six more missions, the Apollo program was terminated in 1972.

It was not until Donald Trump came to office that the US would decide to return to the Moon, under the Artemis program, named for Apollo’s twin sister.

Explore further

To the Moon and back: 50 years on, a giant leap into the unknown

© 2019 AFP

Citation: To the Moon and back: 50 years on, a giant leap into the unknown (2019, July 14) retrieved 14 July 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-07-moon-years-giant-unknown.html

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#Space

[bharatiyamedia-blog]

50 years On Of Apollo 11's Journey, A Big Leap Into The Unknown

http://tinyurl.com/yxp4qjrk Apollo 11’s journey to the Moon had gone in response to plan (Representational Picture) Washington:  The primary 4 days of Apollo 11’s journey to the Moon had gone in response to plan, however simply twenty minutes earlier than touchdown, the ambiance grew tense because the crew encountered a sequence of issues. It was July 20, 1969, and because the world adopted the spacecraft’s progress, it briefly misplaced radio contact with mission management in Houston.  Then, because the lunar module Eagle was in the course of its descent, piloted by Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin and mission commander Neil Armstrong, an alarm bell started ringing. Eagle had indifferent two hours earlier from the primary a part of the vessel, the command module, Columbia, the place the third crew member Michael Collins remained in orbit. It was an anxious second for Armstrong, a superb take a look at pilot and aeronautical engineer, however a person of famously few phrases.  “Give us a studying on the 1202 Program Alarm,” he radios to mission management. They’re instructed to maintain going. Houston realizes the onboard pc is experiencing an overflow, however all techniques are purposeful. Beneath them, the Moon’s craters are zipping by quick. Too quick, realizes Armstrong: at this price, they are going to overshoot the touchdown web site by a number of miles.  He switches to guide management and begins to scope out a brand new touchdown web site from his porthole. However there’s bother discovering the right spot, and it should be tight.  “Fairly rocky space,” he tells Aldrin. Aldrin continues to inform him pace and altitude readings from the pc. “Coming down properly,” he says. “Gonna be proper over that crater,” Armstrong replies. In the meantime, the gasoline is quickly depleting.  Houston continues to announce the variety of seconds left to the “Bingo gasoline name” — the purpose at which Eagle can have 20 seconds left to land, or abort the mission. It’s now 30 seconds left to Bingo. Armstrong, summoning all his expertise, is silent as he concentrates. The module involves a relaxation on the bottom. “Contact Mild,” says Aldrin, that means one of many leg’s foot sensors has touched down. The engines are switched off. “Houston, Tranquility Base right here. The Eagle has landed,” broadcasts Armstrong. “We copy you on the bottom. You bought a bunch of men about to show blue. We’re respiration once more. Thanks loads,” replies Charlie Duke, the CapCom or capsule communicator on the bottom.  Nazi rocket manHistorical past information that the quantity of people that labored on the Apollo program was 400,000. However two figures tower above the remainder for his or her contributions. In 1961, President John F Kennedy known as upon his vp Lyndon Johnson to beat the Soviets in house. “We’re in a strategic house race with the Russians, and we’re shedding,” Kennedy had written in {a magazine} the 12 months earlier than. “If a person orbits Earth this 12 months, his identify will probably be Ivan.” Johnson reaches out to the godfather of NASA’s house program: Wernher von Braun.  The previous card-carrying Nazi was the inventor of the V-2 rockets that rained destruction on London in World Warfare II.  Towards the top of the battle, he surrendered himself to the Individuals, who introduced him and 100 of his greatest engineers to Alabama, as a part of the key “Operation Paperclip.” Von Braun instructed Johnson that whereas the US was properly behind, they might conceivably beat the Russians when it got here to placing males on the Moon, in the event that they instantly began work on a large booster rocket. Kennedy would handle Congress later that 12 months, famously committing “to touchdown a person on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth” by the last decade’s finish. Eight years later, Richard Nixon was president when the aim was realized. In case of a tragedy, he had ready the next remarks: “Destiny has ordained that the boys who went to the Moon to discover in peace will keep on the moon to relaxation in peace.” However the extraordinary nationwide efforts paid off. All of it occurred quick, due to a clean test for the mission from Congress. Between October 1968 and Could 1969, 4 preparatory Apollo missions had been launched. Armstrong was chosen in December 1968 to command the eleventh.  Months from launch, Armstrong instructed Aldrin he was pulling rank and can be the primary to set foot on the lunar floor.  “I stored my silence a number of extra days, on a regular basis struggling to not be offended with Neil,” Aldrin later recalled in his memoirs.  “In spite of everything, he was the commander and, as such, the boss.” The large leapWhen the monstrous rocket designed by von Braun launched with the Apollo 11 capsule at its summit on Wednesday, July 16 1969, a million folks flocked to the seaside throughout from Cape Canaveral to observe. However many had doubts that they’d achieve touchdown on the Moon on the primary try. Armstrong confided in 1999: “My intestine feeling was that we had a 90 p.c probability — or higher — of getting again safely, and a 50 p.c probability of creating a profitable touchdown.”  For these in America, the ultimate descent would happen on Sunday night.  In Europe, it was already nighttime, however everybody was glued to their televisions, although they might solely hear crackling radio communications till Armstrong arrange his black and white digital camera forward of his first step. His grandmother had suggested him to not do it if he felt hazard; he had agreed, in response to the e book “Rocket Males” by Craig Nelson. As he climbed right down to the foot of the ladder, he noticed that Eagle’s footpads had sunk into the bottom by solely an inch or two, and the floor appeared very wonderful grained. “It is virtually like a powder,” he recalled. Then, over the radio: “Okay. I will step off the LM now.”  A pause, after which the immortal phrases: “That is one small step for man; one large leap for mankind.” Based on Armstrong, the road wasn’t scripted. “I considered it after touchdown,” he would say in an oral historical past recorded by NASA in 2001. One downside: with out the indefinite article (“a person”), it wasn’t grammatically appropriate. Armstrong mentioned he meant to say it, however agreed it was inaudible. What does the Moon appear like, up shut? Its shade varies with the angle of the Solar: from brown to gray to black as coal. And the decrease stage of gravity takes getting used to. “I began jogging round a bit, and it felt like I used to be shifting in sluggish movement in a lazy lope, typically with each of my toes floating within the air,” Aldrin wrote in a e book in 2009. Over the course of two-and-a-half hours, Armstrong picks up piles and piles of Moon rocks and takes images. Aldrin installs a seismometer and two different scientific devices. They plant the US flag, and depart behind a bunch of things together with a medal honoring the primary man in house, Russia’s Yuri Gagarin. Of the 857 black and white pictures, and 550 in shade, solely 4 present Armstrong. The bulk are of Aldrin. “He is much more photogenic than I’m,” he joked in 2001. Homeward sureBy the point they had been set to go, the astronauts had been lined in mud. Within the cockpit, “It smelled, to me, like moist ashes in a fire,” mentioned Armstrong. Collins had been ready up in orbit for the previous 22 hours. “My secret terror for the final six months has been leaving them on the moon and returning to Earth alone,” he later wrote.  “In the event that they fail to rise from the floor, or crash again into it, I’m not going to commit suicide; I’m coming residence, forthwith, however I will probably be a marked man for all times and I do know it.” Fortunately, the lunar module’s engine labored, it rendezvoused again with Columbia, and the trio started the lengthy journey residence. By the top, shorn of its further modules and gasoline, the capsule weighs solely 12,250 kilos, or 0.2 p.c of the launch weight of the totally loaded Saturn V rocket.  On July 24, it enters the ambiance, turning into for some time a fireball within the sky earlier than deploying three parachutes and splashing down safely into the Pacific. The US had dispatched an plane service to get well them. Nixon was on board. Elite divers extract the boys, who’re unhurt however malodorous after their journey, to switch them by helicopter to the ship.  There, they’re positioned in quarantine over the concern on the time that they could be contaminated with extraterrestrial microorganisms. At their first press convention, three weeks later, reporters requested the three males, now international heroes, whether or not they would ever contemplate returning to the Moon. “Within the Lunar Receiving Laboratory, we had little or no time for meditation,” replied Armstrong, ever to the purpose. None of them would return to house ever once more. After six extra missions, the Apollo program was terminated in 1972.  It was not till Donald Trump got here to workplace that the US would resolve to return to the Moon, underneath the Artemis program, named for Apollo’s twin sister.  (Aside from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV workers and is revealed from a syndicated feed.) Get Breaking news, reside protection, and Newest News from India and world wide on NDTV.com. Catch all of the Stay TV motion on NDTV 24×7 and NDTV India. Like us on Facebook or comply with us on Twitter and Instagram for latest news and live news updates. (function(d, s, id) {var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];if (d.getElementById(id)) return;js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;js.src = "http://connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.5&appId=213741912058651";fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); Source link

[jeroldlockettus]

How to Fail Like a Pro (Ep. 370)

Inventor James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes before he succeeded in revolutionizing the vacuum cleaner. (Photo: Bruno Vincent/Getty)

The road to success is paved with failure, so you might as well learn to do it right. (Ep. 5 of the “How to Be Creative” series.)

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

In our “How to Be Creative” series, we’ve talked to artists, scientists, inventors, and others about their creative process; about having good ideas and, even more important, how to execute those ideas. Today, we’ll hear about a part of the creative process that everyone can relate to — even if you don’t think of yourself as a “creative person.” This is something we all do, probably more than we’d like to admit; it’s something that almost no one enjoys; but it’s an inevitable, and absolutely essential, component of any success. I’m going to let you figure out what it is. Don’t worry, it won’t take long. Let’s start back in the late 1980’s. A young physicist named Saul Perlmutter, at the University of California-Berkeley, was looking around for a good research project.

Saul PERLMUTTER: And at that time I was lucky enough to come across the possibility that we could go back and make a measurement that people had wanted to do ever since the times of Einstein and Hubble, which was the measurement of how much the universe has been slowing down in its expansion over its lifetime.

Ever since Einstein theorized it, and Edwin Hubble observed it, everyone knew the universe was expanding. But another thing everyone knew was that all the matter in the universe — all the galaxies and nebulae and stars and planets and moons and comets and asteroids — all the stuff in the universe has gravitational attraction. So physicists assumed that, eventually, that gravitational attraction would slow down the expansion of the universe. For a physicist, understanding this dynamic was itself an attraction.

PERLMUTTER: If you could measure how much it was slowing, it would tell you a couple really amazing things. Like, first of all, you could find out: is it slowing enough so someday it could come to a halt and then collapse? And this was just before the millennium, so we thought we could walk around with those signs saying “The universe is coming to an end.” But if we found out that it wasn’t, then we would have shown that the universe will last forever. And also we would have shown that we live in an infinite universe. It just seemed like, whatever we found would be a great story, and we’d love to know the answer.

Stephen DUBNER: I have to say, I think the latter headline is much more exciting, personally — not just because of infinity and because long-lasting but it’s optimistic, yes?

PERLMUTTER: Yeah, I think that’s right. You start getting a little personally invested in our universe even though we’re talking about billions of years from now. We sort of would like it to go on, you know.

So you can see why it’d be valuable to measure the rate of the universe’s expansion. But conducting this sort of measurement — even for an astrophysicist — is, well, it’s hard. Saul Perlmutter had an idea. It involved measuring the light coming off of supernovas. But they had to be a particular kind of supernova. And they had to be very far away.

PERLMUTTER: We needed to find these very distant ones because we want to look way back in history. And the further away you look in astronomy, the further back in time you’re getting to see, because it’s taking light that time to travel to you from those very, very distant locations. We needed to look some, three, four, five billion years back in time for us to be able to see the slowing effects that we thought we were trying to track.

Given the specificity of what they needed, and the overall degree of difficulty, Perlmutter know the project would take some time.

PERLMUTTER: We wrote the original proposals saying that we did not expect to be able to find the 30-some-odd supernovae that we would need to make those measurements in anything less than three years. And we thought this was going to be like a long three-year project.

Perlmutter and his team built a tool for this project: a new kind of high-resolution, wide-field digital camera that could be attached to the big telescopes you find in observatories. Now all they had to do was get some time on one of those big observatory telescopes.

PERLMUTTER: Telescope time on these biggest telescopes in the world is really precious.

One observatory, in Australia, was open to a deal.

PERLMUTTER: And we traded the use of that camera for 12-and-a-half nights of telescope time. And so you’re doing everything you can to try to find the time that you’ll need to make the measurements you want. In those 12-and-a-half nights, we got two-and-half nights of good weather.

Two-and-a-half nights of useful telescope time, over three years. Remember, they needed to find “30-some-odd” supernovas to make their measurements. So how many did they find?

PERLMUTTER: At the end of three years, we had not yet found a single supernova.

So, picture that. You started with a quest, a creative scientific idea. Drawing on all the knowledge you’ve amassed over time, and all the knowledge amassed by earlier generations, you formulate a plan of attack. You write the grant proposals; you get the grant. You invent a special tool to facilitate your plan, and use that tool as leverage to gain access to an even more important tool. You’ve done everything possible, and you’ve done everything right. But you know what? You still failed.

PERLMUTTER: At the end of three years, we had not yet found a single supernova.

The failure of Perlmutter’s team was compounded by the fact that there was another team of physicists out there, working on the same problem, using the same technique.

PERLMUTTER: Which meant that we were going to the same telescopes and using the same instruments, and so we passed each other in the airports, you know, going back and forth.

The rivalry was not all that friendly.

PERLMUTTER: It was highly secretive between each other in general. I’d say the competition with each other was a big deal but it’s nothing like the competition with the ways in which the universe is trying to give you a hard time.

“A hard time” meaning instruments breaking; the night sky being cloudy.

PERLMUTTER: It was so hard to get these whole sequence of observations to work in a given semester that had to all run like clockwork. And if anything went wrong, the whole thing would fall apart.

The overall challenge was so difficult, the chance of failure so strong, that Perlmutter’s team and the rival team, led by the astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, would in fact help each other out.

PERLMUTTER: So there were several occasions where our sequence was about to fall apart and the other team would help. So one time we took some observations for that team and similarly there was one time where the other team traded night with us at a telescope so that we could keep our time sequence working.

Years of effort; years of difficulty and uncertainty; years of failure. But in the end, a breakthrough: Perlmutter’s team found the supernovas they were looking for; they were able to get enough observations to take their measurements; and those measurements led them to a surprising result: the expansion of the universe was not slowing down; in fact, it was speeding up. Saul Perlmutter’s team wrote up its findings and, in 2011, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics — which they shared, by the way, with the other team. The lesson for Perlmutter in all this?

PERLMUTTER: One thing that’s really interesting that it’s important for people to hear sometimes is that a really tough, challenging problem is worth spending a lot of time on, and that you can be learning a lot while you’re trying to get there.

In other words: failure is an inevitable component of success. So in order to bring your creative project to a happy place, you’d better learn to handle failure well — or even better, as Perlmutter suggests, handle it productively. After all, failure provides data: this doesn’t work, that didn’t work, that didn’t work. Great! Now you can cross all those off the list. So what does work?

*      *      *

This is not the first time we’ve discussed failure on this program. Episode No. 169, from 2014, was called “Failure Is Your Friend.” Episode No. 42, back in 2011, was called “The Upside of Quitting,” and it looked at failure as a signal that it might be time to just move on. But that calculus is very, very tricky: what if you quit too soon? What if all your failures are an unavoidable desert you need to trek through in order to make it to the promised land? In today’s show, we look at the relationship between failure and creativity.

Dean SIMONTON: The number one thing in my view is that people who don’t understand creativity, who are looking at it from the outside, don’t really appreciate how much you have to fail.

Dean Simonton is a University of California psychologist who’s spent decades studying creative genius.

SIMONTON: How many revisions this has to go through. How many masterpieces you put out there, and nobody even buys a copy. Maybe your mom does, whatever. But the failure rate is just horrendous, even for the creative geniuses.

Which genius does Simonton pick as the most successful hitmaker of all time?

SIMONTON: That’s Mozart. And he’s about 60 to 70 percent success rate. Well, you turn it upside down, and that’s a 30 to 40 percent failure rate.

On the other hand, consider Toni Basil. Or Nena. Or the Baha Men. Who? Yes, exactly. Toni Basil brought the world “Mickey.” Nena gave us “99 Luftballons” The Baha Men? How could you forget “Who Let the Dogs Out”?

The Baha Men, Nena, and Toni Basil were some of the biggest one-hit wonders in modern history. Which puts their failure rates a lot higher than Mozart’s. But what happens when you do succeed? Success can raise expectations to a level that’s crippling. The novelist Jennifer Egan had been writing for a couple decades when she had a breakout hit with A Visit From the Goon Squad — which produced, among other things, a Pulitzer Prize. And the book after that?

Jennifer EGAN: I sort of finally got into my new book and at first I was actually having a great time with it. It was really going well, I felt. And I was excited. And then things started to feel rockier and I really started to have serious doubts about whether I could actually pull it off at all. And then, I have to say, I kind of flipped out. I plunged into a state of despair over my work. And I really thought maybe my career was over, that maybe I was kind of ruined by all of this.

DUBNER: Was the problem expectation, then? Was that the barrier?

EGAN: I think the problem was that I actually was struggling with my book because every book is a struggle, especially if you’re pushing yourself. And at a certain point I started thinking about how I would be perceived if the book sucked. And it’s never good to be looking at yourself from the outside in. It’s very difficult to engage creatively when when you know, mean and horrible commentary is flowing through one’s mind. In retrospect, I thought, I was really an abusive boss. I was a boss who was telling her employee, namely me, that I was worthless. And it’s really hard to work in those conditions.

Nico MUHLY: I’m enormously self-critical. I begin and end each day with a litany of things that I consider failures and shortcomings.

Nico Muhly is a composer, the youngest ever to get a commission from the Metropolitan Opera.

MUHLY: Back in the day, it was a combination of self-flagellation and complete emotional neutrality. So, it was like I hated it, but I didn’t care. I didn’t feel anything, like I made this huge opera and I thought it was really good. But literally the sense of achievement was akin to like a successful morning of errands or like I went to the dry cleaner and bought dog food.

That began to change when Muhly started on a new medication.

MUHLY: I had a really dark like mental-health journey involving the wrong medication which I assumed wasn’t having a bearing on my artistic output, which of course it was. But the big change in the last three years is that I’m finally able to see some pieces as the end of the sentence of that conversation. So, it’s not, “I could do better next time.” It’s not, “I can’t believe I didn’t do better this last time.” And the difference is insane, to have written pieces now where I’m not in a state of constant self-flagellation. I think the first piece I wrote in my new and improved version was this mass called Spiral Mass. I can hear it and enjoy it and think that that was, you know, better than three minutes of silence.

It’s a fairly obvious fact that outsiders often overlook when they think about a creative lifestyle, and how cool it must be. In most cases, you are both creator and critic, boss and employee. Since many people who have a boss do not like their boss, it might seem incredibly attractive to be your own. But do you really want to be your own boss? Do you have the discipline to keep your projects on track? Do you have the temperament to drive yourself? Do you have the requisite paranoia?

John HODGMAN: I am a person for whom being creative is terrifying.

John Hodgman has done a lot of creative work over the years, most of it somewhere on the humor spectrum.

HODGMAN: It is the most rewarding thing that I can do. But it is a constant struggle with a very clear feeling that I am out of gas every day, every day. And that I will not be able to support myself or my family, because I have now finally run out of ideas, for sure, this time, I mean it. I started writing jokes for the Internet morphed into writing humor for books, morphed into doing T.V. on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, morphed into doing some ads for Apple Computer that gave me some acting opportunities, and all of these, I just sort of jumped from job to job very happily and very luckily, in no small part because it allowed everything to feel a little bit like a hobby. And at no point was I ever putting all of my eggs, say, into writing books, because my fear was, if I run out of gas on that, then I’m done.

If I lose the ability to write a book — which sounds irrational, but it is a true fear that I have — in fact, today I have it — then I can always fall back on the podcast, or I can always fall back on going out and touring my imitation stand-up comedy, or I can always try to get more work as an actor. It’s not even a fear. It is a certainty that I’m done, that I have no further ideas, and trick my brain into providing ideas again, because they’re in there. I’m 47 years old and I’ve been doing this — this and only this, whatever this is — now for 21 years.

DUBNER: And that’s not enough of a track record to persuade yourself that there will be 21 more?

HODGMAN: I figured out, sort of rationally, that I have enough data to support the suggestion that I will be able to continue. But even though I understand it rationally, in a deep part of me, I am certain it is done.

Don HAHN: I was lucky early in my life to have some successes in my 30s with Roger Rabbit and Lion King and Beauty and the Beast.

Don Hahn is a Hollywood producer.

HAHN: And 15 or 20 years after that, you start second-guessing yourself. And start saying, “Have I lost what I had back then?” Then you lose the process because then you don’t start. You just don’t start because you’re afraid that somebody is going to say, “Well, Don was really great back when he was 30 years old, but boy has he lost it,” you know? Those are really hard times to get over because they’re a crisis of confidence.

So how do you quiet those voices of disapproval — voices that are often imagined, either your own or someone else’s?

EGAN: It took a while. It was like a year and a half of that.

Jennifer Egan, remember, was stuck on her post-Pulitzer novel. Her solution was just to keep plowing through.

EGAN: I kept working through it because one thing I really know is that, you know, you can work through anything. I think we we think we are more fragile as artists than we really are. One thing that kind of helped me get through it psychologically was that I finally thought, winning a Pulitzer Prize shouldn’t ruin anyone. I mean, if I really can’t write another good book because of winning that, I was done.

HODGMAN: The only reason I’m terrified now is because I’m not actively working on it today, but when I get down into it line-by-line, something clicks, something comes together.

John Hodgman also finds the only solution for fearing the work is doing the work.

HODGMAN: It also helps to be in the shower. I remember back in early 2009 I was invited to do some comedy at the Radio and Television Correspondents Awards Dinner, which is sort of the junior-league White House Correspondents Dinner. The tradition was, the comedian would do comedy and the president would be there and say some words as well. This was a stunning invitation for me to receive. I had only been on The Daily Show for a couple of years. And of course, I had to say yes, even though I had no idea what sort of comedy I could do, on that stage, for then-newly-inaugurated President Barack Obama, whom I liked, but also who had no track record as a president to even make jokes about. And I really was frozen for a long time as I tried to think up “jokes,” to tell.

And then I was in the shower and I remembered, just sort of talking out loud to myself, I remembered that on a different radio show — Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me — Peter Sagal had asked Barack Obama, who was a guest on the show at the time when he was a Senator, “Is it true that you saw Leonard Nimoy in the streets of Chicago, and did you flash him the Vulcan salute?” And Barack Obama confirmed that this was true. And I remembered that Barack Obama had been making jokes regarding dilithium crystals and Jor-El, the parent of Kal-El, who of course is better known as Clark Kent/Superman. And I’m like, “Oh, right. There’s a reason I like this guy. He’s a nerd. Yeah. Or is he a nerd? Or is it all an act?”

And I realized in that moment in the shower what my preoccupation was — what I wanted to know was, are you really a nerd, or are you faking it? Which, I realized in that moment, was sort of the question that everyone on all political sides were asking about Barack Obama. Are you for real? Of course, we remember a lot of people who did not like Barack Obama asking him if he was a real U.S. citizen, asking him if he wasn’t secretly a Muslim, or an alien, or whatever it was. We forget, there were a lot of people on the left-leaning wing of the spectrum who didn’t trust that he was a real liberal, and there was so much about him that was unknown. And for me, I had a genuine question to ask, “Are you really a nerd?,” that could serve as a metaphor for asking, “Who are you, and what kind of leap of faith are we taking with you?”

Hearing Hodgman describe this you may be thinking: wait a minute; you were asked to do comedy; is this nerd thing funny?

HODGMAN What’s more important than funny, when you’re creating comedy, is: what are you genuinely curious about? What are you genuinely feeling? Even the most absurd fake facts that I wrote for The Daily Show had to resonate around an ounce of truth. So tuning into that — what am I thinking about — knowing what you know, or knowing what’s going on in the back of your head, is kind of the hardest part. And once you get that out of there, suddenly for me, it all floods out from there.

*      *      *

Failure is such an obvious component of any success that it probably keeps a lot of people from trying things they should. That’s a shame. Teresa Amabile is a social psychologist at the Harvard Business School who studies creativity, especially in work settings.

AMABILE: If people have a growth mindset, they believe, “I can always get smarter, I can always get better at something, and I’m not going to get better unless I try things that are hard, and sometimes that means I’m going to fail at something, but who cares?”

But a lot of people do care. For a lot of people, failure hurts; and it hurts to have other people witness your failures. So who are these people who don’t care? Where does that come from?

AMABILE: Partly that’s a trait. But it’s something that can be changed. Parents can talk to their kids about it and we can certainly do that as as managers of ourselves. “Look, I know that this is a stretch for me. I’ve been asked to take on this project but I’m going to go for it. And if it doesn’t work out that well, I will have learned how I can do better next time.”

James DYSON: I had to build 5,127 prototypes. So 5,126 failures.

James Dyson is the British engineer best known for having revolutionized the vacuum cleaner.

DYSON: And just when you’ve had enough, and you think you’re never going to get the answer, that’s the point where you must try even harder. Because that’s the point where everybody else gave up. So you must go through that pain barrier in order to succeed. I would say that for an engineer or someone developing technology, it’s really a life of failure. And you have to get used to that. Because your successes are pretty rare. But it’s not an unhappy life, I mean failure isn’t something that makes you unhappy. It makes you even more curious as to how to overcome the problem. And in order to fail, you have to experiment and experimenting is exciting. Even if it doesn’t work. In fact it’s almost slightly disappointing when it does work. Because you’ve then done it and that’s the end of that one, and then you’ve got to get on to something else.

RESNICK: So as you’re building things, you have one idea in mind.

Mitch Resnick runs a project called Lifelong Kindergarten at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

RESNICK: But then it works a little differently than you expect and that gives you a new idea and you start making adjustments. And I do think the most creative and the most enjoyable experiences come when you’re involved in that process at the intersection of making and playing, where you’re constantly experimenting, iterating, trying new things, refining. And I think it’s true that in today’s society oftentimes kids aren’t given enough opportunities for tinkering. They’re given fully made things that they just use, or they’re given instructions exactly how to do things. So I really do think we need to give them the tools, materials, and support where they can tinker, experiment, and iterate constantly trying new things. That’s the way they’re going to best develop as creative thinkers and be ready to thrive in a society that’s going to demand and require creative thinking more than ever before.

There’s one word that Resnick does not use to describe this iterative process: failure. He feels the negative connotation is just too strong.

RESNICK: Clearly things go wrong, things go unexpectedly all of the time, but you should become accustomed that. Don’t see it as a problem but see it as something of an opportunity. It’s really important to create environments where kids feel safe to take the risks, because when things do go wrong, if someone says, “Hey, you know, that’s no good, why’d you ever try that?,” they won’t take risks again. So we have to make sure to create environments where kids are encouraged and feel safe to take risks, to have things go wrong but then be able to recover and to take it in new directions.

The ability to recognize when something’s failing, or at least foundering, is important in the creative arts as well. Maybe you’ve had success doing one thing for a long time. But tastes change; technologies change. And the thing you’ve been doing — even if you keep improving — it’s just not connecting the same way.

Conan O’BRIEN: Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Conan O’Brien is a history nerd; maybe he’ll become a U.S. ambassador someday.

O’BRIEN: I’d like to know what it pays. I’d like to know what kind of ambassadorial residence I would have. Am I really free to commit crimes in those countries?

In the meantime, he’s still a late-night TV talk-show host, which he’s been doing for more than a quarter of a century. But recently he made a change.

O’BRIEN: The story there is I realized a couple of years ago that I’m killing time at half an hour. When I first got the gig it was, you fill an hour because it’s this precious hour that needs to be filled and it’s all how you do it creatively. But over time you’re starting to say “and my next guest, and my next guest” And that felt artificial to me. And it felt like it didn’t fit this new world we’re in.

And so he reformatted his show, which is called Conan. It’s now 30 minutes instead of 60. He also did away with the stream of celebrity guests that march through most talk shows. Instead, he’s focusing on the comic pieces that have driven his massive online numbers.

O’BRIEN: We have YouTube videos that have had 70 million views. But no one’s watching the whole show. Other than my parents, no one is watching the show from 11 to 12. But there’s a whole generation of people that don’t watch anything like that.

There is another creative medium where taste changes so aggressively, so ethereally, that trying to outthink your audience, or the market, may drive you mad.

Jorinde VOIGT: I’m Jorinde Voigt. I’m an artist.

Jorinde Voigt, who lives in Berlin, has become quite successful: her paintings sell for a lot of money and they’re in the permanent collections of the Pompidou in Paris, the British Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But she doesn’t like this kind of success as a measuring stick.

VOIGT: It’s not about failing or winning, it’s just about being and doing. Failure is always part of it. To accept it and take it as part of a reason to do something new.

There’s one form of failure that Voigt celebrates …

VOIGT: Of course you could say a picture fails if it’s not sold. For a gallery it might be like that, for me not. I’m always happy when I get a picture back. Really! I mean really, because I’m — it’s also weird to sell the works all the time.

DUBNER: Yeah, is that right?

VOIGT: Yeah. It’s not made for selling. You made it because you want to know something. Yeah? And it’s ready, and you know something, then you don’t need it anymore and you are able to sell it.

I like Jorinde Voigt’s attitude: the failure of a painting to sell is actually a success because she gets to have the painting back. How you think about a failure, or what other people might consider a failure, says a lot about who you are as a creative, and as a person. Also as a brother.

Mark DUPLASS: This is Mark Duplass. I am a filmmaker.

Duplass and his brother Jay Duplass have been working together, extraordinarily closely, since they were kids. They wrote a book about it, called Like Brothers.

DUPLASS: Yeah, I mean the biggest failure we had in our career was making this feature film Vince Del Rio for about $70,000, that turned out terribly and we never even finished it. And then a couple of weeks later we turned around and we spent $3 making a short film in our kitchen and that was our first movie that went to Sundance. So we very quickly realized that being professional and making a movie for a lot of money does not mean it’s going to be a good movie. But staying near and dear to your anxieties, your fallibilities, your vulnerabilities, staying close to that conversation you had at 2:00 a.m. with your sibling or loved one or friend, where you were giggling with shame or crying about something that was so personal to you you think no one could understand it. As soon as you go into that stuff, I think that’s where you win.

The Duplass brothers over the years built an unusual and unusually robust career, making films and TV shows together. They wrote and directed together — sometimes inseparably. In the beginning, Mark did a lot more acting but eventually Jay was doing a lot too — most notably in Transparent. They made the films Cyrus; Jeff, Who Lives at Home, and they made the H.B.O. series Togetherness. That show was all-consuming:

DUPLASS: Yeah, we wrote, produced, and directed every episode of that series like idiots. And the main issue is that we had completely lost our desire to hang out with each other because we were essentially hanging out together 13 hours a day working. And we weren’t spending any time together as brothers and friends. And we always promised ourselves we would keep an eye on that, on that work and personal balance.

They’d had two successful seasons with H.B.O.

DUPLASS: And we were in the middle of writing season 3.

But there was a shakeup at H.B.O.

DUPLASS: And we got the news that we were going to be canceled, and neither of us wanted to be the first one to speak and we were both scared about how relieved we were as opposed to actually emotionally crushed and didn’t want to admit it to each other. And once we did it felt amazing. We realized that there was no way we were going to cancel Togetherness ourselves. There was no way, the situation was too good. The money was too good. The creative opportunity was too good. People were loving the show. We were going to go and drive that thing until it killed us. We had to actually have it taken away from us and that began the new phase of of Jay’s and my relationship.

So for the first time in forever, Mark and Jay Duplass weren’t really a team anymore. It was a sort of failure.

DUPLASS: And we both felt a little bad about it and both felt a little excited about it. And it’s been really healthy for us in the long run. I mean, I’ll be honest with you, there was a lot of tears and a lot of heartbreak on both of our parts. And there are times when I wake up and I miss so desperately the way it felt when Jay and I were 23 and 27 just moving through the world as one being. But we’re also aware that that was of a time and a place, when our life was a unilateral thing, and we can’t really get that back and we have to redefine what that thing is now for us.

DUBNER: Does the collaboration feel a little bit like a phantom limb that, like, “Whoa I’m used to this working this way.” And I guess another way of asking the same question is does it feel like something that you want or need to get back to or that you’re kind of happily or resignedly or just organically getting to a new phase and you’re willing to take it as it comes?

DUPLASS: It doesn’t feel dissimilar to a really amicable breakup, and I would liken it to a couple that breaks up because one wants to have kids and the other one doesn’t. They still very clearly love each other but they have different views of the future and they would miss each other desperately but also know that it doesn’t work right now if they were to do that. Right. And so that’s very similar to the way Jay and I are. There’s actually kind of a working rhythm that we have developed into where my brain is this very firework-y, loud, explosive place where ideas tend to come whether I want them or not.

DUBNER: You’re the barfer, correct?

DUPLASS: Yes I’m the barfer, and they’re noisy and they are at times quite annoying to Jay because he can’t get the space to incubate his really well-crafted, quiet, thoughtful, soulful ideas. At the same time, Jay can be really annoying to me because I’m ready to go. My fireworks are going off and he’s holding me back because he’s like trying to do his thing and so we had to get honest with each other and be like, “Uh-oh, we might be creatively bad for each other right now. And this is just one rhythm and one phase we’re in.”

And God knows what’s going to happen a year or two from now. We might listen to this podcast and be like, “Whoa, you were totally wrong you just needed six months away and then you’ll be fine.” But you know, he’d be the first one to admit he feels like an albatross to my rhythms at certain times. It’s really good for us. But the phantom limb thing is I would say very, very accurate. I can go make a project on my own. I can literally hear what Jay is saying to me without him saying it because I know what he would say. And I can get a lot of his feedback.

DUBNER: So who needs him?

DUPLASS: And — yeah who needs him, yeah? And then the other element is that we have been able to take some of the lessons we’ve learned as collaborators and collaborate with other people and make those collaborations pretty successful too. Because I will say this to anyone out there, if there is anyone in the world who is interested in collaborating with Jay Duplass, there is no greater, more self-aware, sweeter, more generous collaborator in the f—ing universe.

DUBNER: Would he say the same about you roughly? Slightly different adjectives maybe.

DUPLASS: I think he would use different adjectives. I think what he would say — I know what he would say. He would say that there is no more generous collaborator than Mark. There’s no one who is willing to drown himself while holding you above water so you can achieve your glory than Mark, which is you know something else I’m working on in therapy too but, you know. That’s a whole other podcast.

Thanks to Mark Duplass and everyone else who’s shared their ideas, their fears, their advice in this “How to Be Creative” series. If you want to hear some of the full interviews from the series, check out Stitcher Premium — you’ll find my full conversations with Jennifer Egan, Conan O’Brien, and Wynton Marsalis.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica, with help from Stephanie Tam and Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Zack Lapinski, and Corinne Wallace. We had help this week from Andi Kristins. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Teresa Amabile, psychologist and professor emerita at the Harvard Business School.

Mark Duplass, film director, film producer, and actor.

James Dyson, inventor, industrial design engineer and founder of the Dyson company.

Jennifer Egan, novelist and journalist.

Don Hahn, filmmaker.

John Hodgman, humorist.

Nico Muhly, composer.

Conan O’Brien, television host, comedian, and writer.

Saul Perlmutter, astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Mitch Resnick, leader of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Dean Simonton, professor emeritus of psychology at University of California, Davis.

Jorinde Voigt, artist.

RESOURCES

Creativity In Context by Teresa Amabile (Routledge 1996).

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf 2010).

EXTRA

“How to Be Creative,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)?,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Where Do Good Ideas Come From?,” Freakonomics Radio (2019).

“A Good Idea Is Not Good Enough,” Freakonomics Radio (2019).

The post How to Fail Like a Pro (Ep. 370) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/creativity-5/

[knowpedia]

In July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped on the moon. It was a historic moment. The purpose of the Apollo 11 mission was to land men on the lunar surface and to return them safely to Earth. Some say that Neil Armstrong saw aliens on the far side of a crater on the moon. Is it true?

Well, during the conversation between NASA and Armstrong, there was a two minutes broadcast interruption reportedly caused by an overheated camera (Likely a lie - Likely scenario: NASA's Private Radio Loop); during that two minutes window, hundreds of radio operators intercepted NASA’s broadcast exchange with Armstrong.

The recorded transcript goes as follows:

“Armstrong: What was it? What the hell was it? That’s all I want to know!

Mission Control: What’s there? Malfunction. Mission Control calling Apollo 11

Apollo 11: These babies were huge, sir! Enormous! Oh God! You wouldn’t believe it! I’m telling you there are other space-craft out there, lined up on the far side of the crater edge! They’re on the Moon watching us!”

The HAM operator’s radio intercept was widely dismissed by the media, but in 1975 it received unexpected support. Maurice Chatelain, is a retired NASA communications engineer who helped develop the communications system used in the Apollo moon missions. In his 1975 book, Our Cosmic Ancestors, he wrote:

Only moments before Armstrong stepped down the ladder to set foot on the Moon, two UFOs hovered overhead. Edwin Aldrin took several pictures of them. Some of these photographs have been published in the June 1975 issue of Modern People magazine.”

Later, in 1979, Chatelain said that Armstrong’s sighting of two UFOs over a lunar crater was being deliberately kept from the media and public by NASA:  “The encounter was common knowledge in NASA, but nobody has talked about it until now.” Even more remarkably, Chatelain claimed that: all Apollo and Gemini flights were followed, both at a distance and sometimes also quite closely, by space vehicles of extraterrestrial origin – flying saucers, or UFOs, if you want to call them by that name. Every time it occurred, the astronauts informed Mission Control, who then ordered absolute silence.

Was the missing two minutes of radio silence during the Apollo 11 moon landing an attempt by NASA to cover up what Armstrong really saw on the moon? Were UFO sightings a common occurrence during Apollo missions?

According to Buzz Aldrin in a number of press interviews, Apollo 11 was indeed watched by a UFO during its journey to the moon. Aldrin describes how the Apollo 11 astronauts avoiding mentioning the word UFO in reporting what they were witnessing, and instead asked Houston about the location of the Saturn V launch rocket. Aldrin’s admission that Apollo 11 was being shadowed by a UFO does give credence to belief that UFOs did witness the moon landing, and Armstrong had reported this to NASA in a radio communication that resulted in the missing two minutes of radio silence. Aldrin’s admission also supports Chatelain’s claim that one or more extraterrestrial vehicles watched the Apollo 11 moon landing as Chatelain claimed in his book.

Is there any other source supporting the controversial claims that Neil Armstrong had witnessed two huge extraterrestrial vehicles over a lunar crater watching the Apollo 11 moon landing? According to Timothy Good, Dr Vladimir Azhazha, a physicist and Professor of Mathemetics at Moscow University at the time:

“Neil Armstrong relayed the message to Mission Control that two large, mysterious objects were watching them after having landed near the moon module. But his message was never heard by the public – because NASA censored it.

So why did NASA eventually terminate the Apollo missions if extraterrestrial visitors were there and watching the Earth? The answer according to Armstrong, as relayed by an unnamed Professor at a NASA symposium is as follows:

Professor: What really happened out there with Apollo 11?

Armstrong: It was incredible of course, we had always known there was a possibility the fact is, we were warned off. There was never any questions then of a space station or a moon city.

Professor: How do you mean “warned off”?

Armstrong: I can’t go into details, except to say that their ships were far superior to ours both in size and technology – Boy, they were big! and menacing. No, there is no question of a space station.

Professor: But NASA had other missions after Apollo 11?

Armstrong: Naturally – NASA was committed at that time, and couldn’t risk a panic on earth…. But it really was a quick scoop and back again.

So what’s the truth? Did Neil Armstrong really see extraterrestrial vehicles on the moon, who eventually warned NASA not to return? With Armstrong’s death we will perhaps never have his personal version of what really happened on that day in 1969. Perhaps NASA will one day release an official version of what really happened, or have they already done so through a fictional movie admission by Buzz Aldrin? In the movie Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Buzz Aldrin comes forward to reveal a version of the truth about what he and Armstrong saw on the moon. In the movie he says on a secret black operations radio line to NASA, during public radio silence, while on the moon:

Buzz Aldrin: You cannot believe what we're seeing.

Black Ops NASA Technician: We are not alone after all, are we?

Buzz Aldrin: No, sir. We're not alone.

So, what do you think? Is there really aliens on the moon? Let me know in the comment section.

[rabbitcruiser]

National Reach As High As You Can Day

National Reach As High As You Can Day is observed on April 14 every year. The day can be interpreted in numerous ways, however, the message remains the same — to reach as high as you can. Whether it is aiming for a higher professional or personal goal, or even to reach for something physically, it is a day to believe in yourself and take a chance that you may have shied away from before.

History of National Reach As High As You Can Day

Reaching can be defined as physically extending to grab or touch something. It can also mean conceptually extending to increase something’s impact or application. Humans have been reaching new literal and metaphorical heights since the beginning of time. If it were not for people reaching as high as they can and aiming for bigger and better, the world as we know it would have been different. It is impossible to pinpoint the origination date for a concept like this, but history is full of examples and evidence that shooting higher paves the way for new opportunities.

Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was the first person to reach outer space, explorer Leif Day is said to be the first person to reach America, inventor Thomas Edison reached to create the first light bulb, and the world was never the same again. To stay within our comfort zone comes with a sense of safety and certainty, but to reach for something newer and bigger has consequences that can be revolutionary and life-changing.

National Reach As High As You Can Day, observed every year on April 14, encourages all of mankind to push our limits and venture out of our comfort zones. This ‘reaching’ can be as big or as small as we are comfortable with. It is a chance for us to bring about a much-needed change in our lives, and many even change someone else’s.

National Reach As High As You Can Day timeline

1909 North Pole

Robert Peary reaches the North Pole.

1911 South Pole

Roald Amundsen reaches the South Pole.

1953 Mount Everest

Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reach the summit of Mount Everest.

1969 Moon

Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin reach the moon.

National Reach As High As You Can Day FAQs

How many times have we reached the moon?

Approximately six missions have landed people on the moon so far, and many more are underway.

When did humans reach France?

1.57 million years ago humans reached and discovered France and paved the way for others to do so too.

How long does it take to reach Mars?

On average, it is believed to take 162 days to reach Mars. However, a closer route has estimated about 41 days.

National Reach As High As You Can Day Activities

Reach for something physically

Reach for something professionally

Reach for something personal

You could reach for that one book at the top of the shelf that you have not read yet, or a jar that you avoid using because of its high placement. You could even try to reach that restaurant you have been meaning to try out for a while.

No matter what your field of work is, there are always certain short or long-term goals in the back of your mind. Take this day to think about ways in which you can broaden your horizon and reach for something higher than before.

As with other things, most of us have certain personal goals that we aim for. Whether it is a personal record at the gym or the duration of your daily meditation, try to reach for a slightly higher milestone and believe in yourself.

5 Facts About Reaching That You Probably Didn’t Know

It takes time

It inspires others

It takes commitment

It is not always linear

It takes dedication

It took astronauts four days to reach the moon.

Since the first climb, over 5,000 people have reached Mt. Everest’s peak.

Sometimes a task needs to be repeated for it to become a habit.

Some ups and downs come with advancements, but it is part of the process.

A giraffe’s neck cannot reach the ground, but they do not stop trying.

Why We Love National Reach As High As You Can Day

It inspires us

It encourages advancement

It stimulates exploration

It is less scary to do what we know, but taking risks and reaching higher can be liberating and rewarding in more ways than one. Nothing is guaranteed, but a day like this pushes us to re-evaluate our goals and activities and determine the areas where we can do more.

If people from the beginning of time did not reach in one way or another, life would be different from what it is now. Most of what we have, if not everything, is the result of someone pushing forward and discovering the undiscovered.

Whether it is intellectual, geographical, or physical, reaching higher opens doors that we didn’t know existed. Would you know about your favorite hiking spot if someone did not reach there and tell you about it?

Source

[metawitches]

Midnight, Texas was a good show last year, but it’s improved to become a great show, within it’s genre, this year. It’s a fun, sexy, funny, slightly scary, thought-provoking romp through Charlaine Harris’ world. It’s True Blood Lite, and that’s not a bad thing. True Blood was amazing, but it also took itself too seriously at times and went off on some ridiculous tangents. Not to mention the gore.

Midnight Texas can be watched by a general audience, but it’s not just fluff and vampires. The characters have chemistry and have developed a bond that makes the drama they go through compelling. The supernatural elements are often used as metaphor, which gives the show relevance. But Midnight never forgets to have fun, and if all you want from it is a relaxing Friday night, you can ignore the larger implications easily.

Midnight, Texas is my choice for this season’s best show that nobody’s watching.

This week, the Midnighters help a newborn baby weretiger find her way to her rightful family and discover a forced supernatural fight ring run by gypsies. We learn more about Olivia’s past along the way.

Fiji and Bobo continue to struggle with the ancient curse that’s forced them apart. Bobo won’t give up on Fiji, so she’s looking for a way to deter him and a way to break the curse. This leads her to take some extreme measures.

Manfred and Patience finally have a little time to relax and get to know each other better, which leads to her taking part in this week’s caper. She’s a great addition to the group, able to jump into any situation and land on her feet, with no judgement of the supernaturals. And she has excellent chemistry with Manfred. Jaime Ray Newman is listed as a guest star every week, which makes me nervous that they plan to kill her off. Can we keep her? Please?

I Put a Spell on You begins with a young pregnant woman, Sheila, driving into town and breaking into Rev’s church, just as she begins to give birth. The baby is more active than a normal child, and claws its way out through her abdomen, Alien-style.

Lem, who is working at the pawn shop, smells the blood and rushes to check the church. He finds the baby and a note left by the now deceased mother: Rev- Her name is Mary. Please help her.

Manfred and Patience are at the bar having drinks, sharing secrets, and staring into each other’s eyes. Patience confesses that Kai spends a lot of time on the road with Lyric and Sequoia (said in the most disdainful voice possible) and doesn’t have much time left over from his demanding career to spend with her. Like every cheating husband ever, she thinks he’s a good man who has a busy schedule.

Lem calls Manfred and the rest of the gang to the church. Patience tags along. Fiji is holding Baby Mary, but puts her down when everyone else comes in. Manfred tries to get a reading from Sheila’s ghost, but she’s already moved on. Olivia notices ligatures marks on Sheila’s wrists and Bobo notices a scar from a stun gun on her arm, suggesting that she was held captive.

Suddenly the baby hisses, growls, cries and has a grow spurt, stopping when she looks as if she’s about 3 years old. Joe uses his angel light to look inside her mind. He can see that she’s hungry for meat. Combined with the other clues, they figure out that Mary is a weretiger.

Lem and Olivia bring Mary home with them for the night. Olivia is worried that a baby weretiger might be unpredictable and dangerous, but Lem explains that she’ll only turn on the full moon, which is weeks away.

The rest of the gang is searching for where Sheila and Mary came from. Joe is looking for the Rev. Manfred and Patience search the truck Sheila was driving.

Olivia is freaked out by seeing Lem sit watching a baby sleep. He tells her that when he was human, he always wanted kids. He asks Olivia if she’s ever thought about it. She becomes upset, reminding him that her father abandoned her and her stepmother pimped her out to support her drug habit. Lem says that having kids has a way of healing the past. Olivia tells him, “That is a hard no.”

Fiji packs the rest of Bobo’s belongings to give back to him in hopes that she can get him to move on. But Bobo isn’t ready to give up. In an homage to the movie Say Anything, Bobo stands in the driveway with his bluetooth speaker and plays Edwin McCain’s I’ll Be at full volume for Fiji. Fiji tells Bobo that they’re not right for each other, and it’s over. Bobo tells her that they’re soulmates, and he’s never giving up on her. Then he plays more I’ll Be, promising to be the greatest fan of her life.

WHERE IS MY BOX OF TISSUES? 😭😭😭😿😿😱😱

Manfred and Patience discover that Sheila stole the truck she was driving, probably to escape whoever was holding her captive. They also find a photo of Sheila with a man they hope is Dad. The truck has a locked metal storage locker in the back.

Lem has gone to bed for the day and left Olivia to play mom. Mary is as much of a handful as you’d think a young weretiger would be. She’s picking up language and culture at lightning speed from TV. At midday, she has another growth spurt and becomes a cranky preteen.

Awkward questions and shared clothing come with the growth spurt. Mary asks where her mom and dad are. Olivia tells her that her mom died, and the only one she can depend on is herself.

Fiji brings Bobo a cup of coffee at the bar. The coffee has been laced with a tincture and a spell to make him forget all about her. The tincture works. It’s as if they’ve never met. But as they reintroduce themselves, it’s clear that Bobo is still very attracted to Fiji.

Manfred uses a crowbar to pry open the locked box in the truck’s bed. He discovers that it holds shock collars sized for humans. Before he and Patience can investigate further, two thugs, who’ve come to town looking for Sheila, come around the corner and see the truck, which is theirs. Manfred and Patience hide under the truck. The thugs complain about the broken lock, then drive away in their car to look for Mary.

Olivia discovers that Mary has wandered outside, just as Manfred calls to warn her about the thugs. Olivia looks fondly at the drawing that Mary made of the two of them, then grabs a gun. Manfred, Patience and Olivia find Mary right after the thugs do. Mary has already taken care of the situation herself by transforming into a tiger, and the goons are dead.

Olivia is able to talk Mary down the rest of the way, then she takes her back inside. Manfred, Patience and Joe are all sympathetic. They stay to run interference with the police, who were called by the hotel guests. Manfred explains that it looks like an animal attack to him. The police officer says that it always does, in Midnight.

Best police officer they’ve had yet. They should definitely keep her and her sarcastic wit.

As the bodies are loaded for transport to the morgue, a ghost appears to Manfred for a moment. Manfred gets his first good look at the thug and realizes he’s a gypsy, too.

Olivia and Lem reassure Mary that she’s safe and they’ll take care of her. She’s worried about being different, so they also convince her that being different is cool. Even Olivia gets in on the hugs. Then they go to Home Cookin’, and Mary eats about a dozen burgers.

Fiji and Bobo meet again for the first time at Home Cookin’ and he’s all over her. He’s in danger of becoming a stalker. Olivia asks Fiji the obvious question, what if he falls in love with her again? But Fiji refuses to think about that eventuality.

We know how Aunt Mildred handled it.

An older woman shows a photo of Sheila around the restaurant, claiming that she’s looking for her daughter. Olivia and Fiji tell her that Sheila died. The woman, Grace, cries and acts sad. Then Mary introduces herself.

Olivia, Fiji, Grace and Mary sit down together to talk the situation over. Grace knows who Mary’s dad is, but she doesn’t seem to know that he’s a weretiger. She seems gentle and loving, like the perfect person to raise Mary. Olivia doesn’t trust it, and asks Fiji to do a spell to make sure they’re really relatives.

Patience dresses up in a skimpy outfit and pretends that her car broke down near the morgue, so she needs her battery jumped. She plays the lost southern girl to perfection. The security guard buys her Daisy Mae act and follows her outside so he can jump her.

Once they’re gone, Manfred slips in through a side door and finds the ghost thug’s body. For some reason it’s a moldy green color. Manfred thinks his gypsy tattoo will gain him cooperation, but the thug doesn’t like Manfred’s clan, the Bernardos. Manfred threatens to leave the ghost frozen in the morgue drawer for 6 months or so, unless he cooperates.

He says that his client runs an underground, supernatural, traveling fight ring. Mary’s dad is a huge weretiger and one of their best fighters. They didn’t want to lose Mary, since she comes from such good stock. The owner is the baddest b–ch around.

And maybe a grandmother. Fiji returns to tell Olivia that Grace and Mary are definitely related, just as Manfred calls to warn them that an evil old woman is looking for Mary. Olivia has already told Fiji that relatives don’t always have one’s best interests at heart. Olivia gets off the phone and discovers that Grace has disappeared with Mary.

Grace has forced Mary back to her fight camp at gunpoint. As she drags Mary in, she villain monologues about how things work. The supernaturals are kept in circus train car cages, which always smell because the living conditions are so horrible. Everyone has a shock collar- silver for weres, gold for banshees, iron for demons.

Grace expects Mary to make a lot of money for her in the ring, once she’s full grown, which should be soon. Sheila was a traitor, who slept with a filthy animal and defiled their gypsy bloodline. When Grace found out Sheila was pregnant, she locked her up, but Sheila escaped. She’ll make sure that Mary doesn’t escape.

One of the large men in a nearby cage calls Mary over. He tells her that he’s Mike, her father. Grace activates his shock collar before he can say more, and pulls Mary away.

Bobo finds Fiji at home in her store, working on a protection spell for Mary. He invites himself in to talk. Fiji tries to discourage him, but he touches her arm. The memory spell burns away, so that he remembers everything. He knows that they’re in love, and his feelings haven’t changed.

The gang have found where the fight ring is camped and are ready to infiltrate. Manfred’s tattoo elicits hostility here, too, so Patience jumps in and uses her skimpy outfit and improvisational skills again to get them in. Once they’re inside, Manfred takes over, introducing Lem as a new vampire fighter, and himself as willing to bet a lot of money on Lem.

Grace: “He’s a vampire? We never get vamps around here. How’d you manage to capture a vampire with no shock collar or silver chains??

Manfred: “You don’t need collars and chains, when you know how to break down their spirit.”

Manfred tries to make dorky threatening movements toward Lem, but lacks any conviction. Lem barely bothers to respond.

The fight begins with Lem vs one were-something adversary, but Grace decides that it’s uneven, and sends several more of her fighters into the ring. Good thing Lem has a little something extra, too.

Joe and Olivia sneak into the back, where Joe uses his power to get Mary’s location from a guard’s mind, leaving the guard dazed. Joe moves on, figuring the guard is disabled. Olivia stops to beat him up a little, in honor of the women everywhere who’ve been taken advantage of by men.

Mary’s in her own circus train cage. Olivia easily breaks the lock, but Mary won’t leave without Mike.

Lem plays it like he’s losing the fight, until Manfred sees a goon informing Grace about the escapes. Then Lem easily throws off and disables an entire pile of monsters. Definitely a good person to have on your side.

Everyone meets up by the cages and is ready to go, but Mike asks them to let the rest of the fighters out, since they’re all victims. Before they have time to make a plan, Grace catches up to them and activates Mike’s collar. She threatens to fry everyone if the Midnighters don’t leave empty-handed.

Olivia raises her hands in surrender, trying to calm Grace down, and says, “Okay!” Then she throws a knife at the hand Grace has the remote in. Once Grace drops the shock collar remote, everyone runs, and Joe uses his light to unlock the collars and the cages.

Once they get away, Mary asks her dad to come to Midnight with them. He explains that there’s a were safe haven in Nevada where they can go and be protected. Mary asks Olivia to come with them, but she tells Mary that Midnight is her home. She and Lem hope Mary and Lem will come back and visit them someday.

Olivia tells Mary that if she had a second chance with her dad, she wouldn’t think twice about taking it. She reminds Mary that they’re both strong and special, then they hug goodbye.

Manfred and Patience walk home down the middle of the Midnight main street, with Patience marveling over the way everyone in Midnight looks out for one another. She thinks that they’re a family, and that Manfred is amazing. He thinks she’s not bad herself. They almost kiss in the middle of the street, then she remembers she’s married, then he remembers she’s married, and they take off for their own places on opposite sides of the road.

Fiji has found a, hopefully temporary, solution to her Bobo problem. It’s the same solution Aunt Mildred used with the love of her life. She hoped it would be temporary, too. It wasn’t.

Fiji turned Bobo into a golden retriever.

Mr Snuggles is not okay with this. Not sure if he’s not okay because the same thing happened to him and he feels bad for Bobo, or simply because he’s a cat and he doesn’t want to share the house with a dog.

Bobo isn’t talking. Yet.

Olivia looks at Mary’s drawing. Lem asks if she’d really give her father another chance. Of course she wouldn’t, he willingly left her to a terrible fate.

Lem tells Olivia that it’s okay to cry. Olivia says that it was only two days, but it felt like they were a family, and it’s been such a long time since she’s had that. She breaks down in tears.

Manfred sits alone in his front room drinking whiskey. Patience appears behind him on the front porch. He senses she’s there and turns around, then stands up. They stare at each other, and move together to the door. When he opens it, they look at each other a moment more, one more chance to change their minds. Then Patience moves forward and they grab for each other. As they kiss, she jumps up into his arms. He slams the front door shut.

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  I wouldn’t have minded an extended version of the last scene. It was very grown up, and I’m very into the maturity of this pairing. 😘 When Manfred gets that wild look in his eyes and she answers right back, all bets are off. 🔥🔥🔥 😘😘❤️❤️😍😍🔥🔥🔥

Despite what Lem says, studies and statistics show that abuse gets handed down through the generations. Having a baby won’t fix your childhood trauma anymore than it will fix your marriage. Bad idea, Lem. If you had a rough childhood, please seek help with processing it and learning better coping and parenting skills before you have kids, so you can stop the cycle of abuse.

I’ll Be is the perfect choice of love song for two 90s kids from Texas. They both probably danced to it at their proms, and they’ll dance to it at their wedding.

The Annie Lennox version of I Put a Spell on You is perfect for Manfred and Patience, who are a little out of control and needy, but also actually fit together. They’ve got some tough times ahead, since she’s married and her husband is whatever not-good thing Kai is. But they’ve been drawn together since the minute they met, and have always taken care of each other. The writers had better get them through this together, too.

I just hope that they aren’t going to take Manfred and Patience down the Bobo-Aubrey route, and reveal at some point that Kai forced her to get close to Manfred for his own reasons. I suspect that she does have some ulterior motive for getting close to Manfred, but I want it to be her own, not Kai’s. Maybe she thinks Manfred can free her from Kai, with the help of the town, so she wants to be accepted by them as soon as possible.

I don’t think we’ve seen Lem working at the pawn shop before. His attachment to the shop plays a significant role in the books, so I’m glad to see the show including this thread. Lem will need to keep the shop going while Bobo’s a dog.

The show seems to be sticking a little closer to the books this season, while still putting their own spin on each element. They’ve found a good balance, including enough book lore to give the series a sense of structure, but veering away from the books’ specifics enough to keep it unpredictable.

I wouldn’t have minded having Quinn show up, though. I hated him in the Sookie Stackhouse books, but came to enjoy him in the Midnight, Texas books. It’s odd that such a huge part of both book series has been ignored.

With the Rev gone, and Mike and Mary moving on, the supernatural population of Midnight appears to be shrinking. Kai and Chuy are hardly ever around, leaving Joe, Lem, Manfred, and Fiji. Seems like they’re due to recruit some new blood.

The show left an opening for Grace and her thugs to show up again in the future, either for revenge, to “recruit”, or to deal with whatever their issue is with the Bernardo clan. They also expanded the supernatural world further than they ever have before, mentioning that there are many kinds of weres, and bringing up banshees. They told us that the weres have a colony of their own and that there’s a way to control demons without killing them (iron shock collar). We found out that silver controls weres the way it controls vamps, and that gold controls banshees. We also found out that there is an unusual lack of vampires in the area around Midnight.

Three guesses as to why the vampires steer clear.

Though Olivia has a problem with the name Patience, it’s been used as a name since the Puritans of the 1600s. It had some renewed popularity in the 1800s, when virtue names were popular, and has come back into use again in the last 25 years.

Given the history of her name, could Patience’s family go back to the Puritans and the New England Witch Trials? Could she have witch blood in her? Could her family be responsible for Fiji’s curse? Could Patience herself have been alive since the 17th or the 19th century?

Patience says, “A trapped woman will do desperate things.” That sounds like she’s talking about more than just Sheila. When Patience says it, Mary is about to be desperate enough to kill 2 men, but I think it has something to do with Patience as well. Something that will be revealed in an episode or two, I hope?

I desperately want there to be more to Patience and Kai’s marriage than faded love and a business arrangement. Maybe he’s blackmailing her, or able to hold her hostage as long as he has the painting or some other relic. Maybe Carolyn Baker, and her attempt to flee her abusive marriage and the hotel, were foreshadowing for what Kai’s really up to.

As I keep pointing out, Kai never releases the negative energy he removes from his clients. Maybe that means he owns your soul after he heals you. He sucks something out through everyone’s mouths. That would be a traditional way to remove the soul. Maybe Kai is some form of devil or higher demon. It would be typical of a devil to forget to mention the downside of a deal.

Next Week’s Promo- Season 2 Episode 5: Drown the Sadness in Chardonnay

“What kind of secret would be worth killing somebody for?” Joe and Chuy are alarmingly naive this season. But is Manfred jumping to conclusions because he wants Kai to be guilty, or is he basing his accusation on good evidence?

  Images courtesy of NBC.

Midnight, Texas Season 2 Episode 4: I Put a Spell on You Midnight, Texas was a good show last year, but it's improved to become a great show, within it's genre, this year.

[consciousowl]

Is Interdimensional Travel Possible?

If you don't believe when I talk to you about things on earth, how can you possibly believe if I talk to you about things in heaven?​

-Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John

When we think of the movies Star Trek and Star Wars, we think of objects popping in and out of space, both appearing and disappearing in rapid succession. Accounts of UFO’s attest to their ability to instantaneously accelerate to supersonic speeds, vanishing beyond the horizon. Most space movies assume our ability to go well beyond the speed of light (Warp speed), just as we exceed the speed of sound with the sonic boom. There is one slight difference. Sound travels at just 761 MPH, while light travels at 186,000 miles per second. At the speed of sound, it would take several hours to cross the continental United States. At the speed of light, you could reach the moon and back in just two seconds. Best estimates, such as those of Dr. Michio Kaku of the City College of New York, propose that the best we can theoretically do with our present understanding and our current technology is reach one-third the speed of light with an atomic-powered spacecraft. At the speed of light, we could then enter the fourth dimension of time. All stories of time travel are interdimensional in nature.

What Are Multiple Dimensions?

If we think about dimensions, we start off with the basic three: Height, Width and Depth. If we remember Einstein’s formulation of Spacetime, we can then point to Time as the fourth dimension. However, our own experience reveals these dimensions by themselves are insufficient to account for all of reality. If we have seen spirits or taken psychotropic substances, we have directly experienced how malleable the Universe may seem. Objects melt into each other. This is also true of our dreams, as well as our ​Near Death Experiences It is noteworthy that Dr. Eben Alexander, a neurosurgeon, underwent a week-long coma where his brain wasn’t operational and he was placed on life support. Miraculously, he recovered and resumed a normal life. Dr. Alexander’s first book, Proof of Heaven, went to great lengths describing an exquisitely beautify landscape, much like the Swiss Alps, with rapturous music and an overwhelming experience of love. Given that Dr. Alexander was rigorously trained as a research scientist and MD, we should give his story careful consideration.

Flat Land: From Three Dimensions Down to Two Dimensions

When we look at going beyond the familiar four dimensions, we find ourselves stymied. How can we put words to it? This dilemma was masterfully portrayed in Flatland by Edwin Abbot Abbot back in 1887. This novel portrays the challenge of a 3D creature to awaken 2D creatures on a sheet of paper as to the reality of the third dimension. The 3D creature doesn’t appear in a proper light in a 2D world, but rather appears as a circle, rather than a full sphere. The 2D creatures are terrified of the 3D creature, as he doesn’t fit into their world and threatens their slippery grip on sanity. His attempts to convince them of the new reality are futile until he lifts one of them off the paper into the 3D world. This mirrors the tension between Jesus Christ and His disciples when He tries to relate divine truth to human truth. They just don’t get it.

When we consider multiple dimensions, we have a very tough time visualizing them. The Dutch artist, M.C. Escher, managed to suggest this very effectively by drawing an illustration of a man’s hand drawing itself. When you look at it, you ask, which is the drawing, and which is the real hand?

Higher Dimensions: String Theory Requires Eleven Dimensions

In the wake of the astrophysics of Albert Einstein and the quantum mechanics of Werner Heisenberg, we are confronted with two conflicting views of the Universe where the laws are utterly opposed. It is all about scale, the scale of the infinitesimally small strings, vastly smaller than subatomic particles, such as quarks, versus the scale of infinitely large galaxies that can take thousands of light years to cross. String theory emerged a generation ago to reconcile them. It has worked out a highly sophisticated interpretation that reconciles the apparent differences at Planck Scale, 10-35 . It visualizes infinitely tiny strings or membranes of energy. Only one problem. The mathematics require 11 dimensions, or the familiar four dimensions, plus 7. It is explained that they are all wrapped up somewhere, which is why we don’t see them. Visualize an ant crawling along a wire over a roadway. At a distance, the cable seems to be a straight line. Up close, however, you see the strands of the cable spiraling. The ant does not actually cross a straight line, but circuitously walks along the spiraling strand. So also with the higher dimensions.

Starting the Interdimensional Journey Outward

If we are going to experience interdimensional travel, as in the recent film, Interstellar, we need to find an extremely fast spaceship and a worm hole, a tiny portal, to another star system, galaxy or even universe. This is extremely dangerous, as it we are uncertain humans can survive the passage between one side of the wormhole and the other. Our heart’s fondest dream might be, like Marty McFly in Back to the Future, to grab a sexy DeLorean. Adjust the flux capacitor and rev up the engine to do 88 miles per hour. In that movie, you would land 30 years in the past, or 30 years into the future. You need not worry about the stringencies of attaining the speed of light. However, is it really necessary to travel outward to enter a new dimension? If the Universe really is constructed in 11 dimensions, then we inhabit each one of the dimensions. Could there be a link between the seven chakras and the 11 dimensions, between higher and lower chakras and higher and lower dimensions?

Starting the Interdimensional Journey Inward

When we realize that the Universe is a gigantic hologram, and that as Einstein suspected toward the end of his life, spacetime is a construct of the human mind, it becomes much easier to accept multiple dimensions. Here, traveling between dimensions is as simple waking up to their existence through an experience of satori, or even an encounter with LSD, Mescaline or DMT. The first three dimensions could correspond to the first through third chakras: Security, Sensuality and Power. The fourth chakra, Love, has all the fluidity of time. The higher chakras of Cosmic Consciousness, Divine Consciousness and Unity Consciousness could contain the extra seven dimensions. An easy place to start is with our right brain holistic, intuitive awareness that instantaneously grasps the Big Picture, while the left brain, linear and precise, ponders all the details. As we cultivate our intuition through creative expression, meditation and wandering in the forest or resting by the sea, we wake up to the Higher Dimensions and can effortlessly travel between them.

Love Always the Way Back Home

Love is the ultimate homing device. We can navigate the entire universe with it. As Dante put it, “Love is the force that moves the Sun and the other stars.” We can strive to know God’s Mind, as did Einstein, or God’s Heart, as did Christ. When we strive to know the heart of God, we will never miss. Love is the context of our lives. It is the unseen motive to everything we do. We needn’t worry about figuring it all out in advance. We can simply BE with other people. As we open our hearts to them, we will learn. We will let their wisdom infuse us. Love never loses. You win only when the person you love wins. When you love your enemy, your “enemy” can’t long remain your enemy. When you are weak, you are strong, and when strong, you are weak. You give up forever trying to prove yourself. Interdimensional travel is, indeed, possible. As Timothy Leary once put it, “Turn on, tune in, drop out.”

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