Bignjuicy

Wishing you well in twenty twelve dear reader.

I’ve been enjoying, for quite some time, the exquisite Retronaut.  All manner of obscure and wonderful visual ephemera grace its pages and it’s updated with satisfying frequency (unlike my organ of late). Today was a bit special – the ‘immigration’ form completed by the Apollo 11 team when they entered the US in 1969 after their little trip away. Self explanatory, wondrous and surreal all at the same time.

I’m growing tired of hearing so many people who can’t speak normally any more. They pepper their speech with stock, media-derived phrases which are glued clumsily together into cliché-ridden sentences. The glue is usually the word ‘like’. The filling is comprised of a mix of standard English, spoken in a pseudo-Jamaican accent with the following seasonings:

‘For free’, ’Awesome’, ’Massive thankyou’, ’You / guys’, ’Fantastic’, ‘Legend’, ’Oh my days’, ‘My bad’, ‘It’s a big ask”.

I wish they’d all just bugger orf and get some elocution lessons innit?

I can’t help feeling that things will never be the same again with the ending of the shuttle program. The era of big US publicly funded space projects is over and the modernist imagery which can trace its lineage back to the Third Reich will be supplanted by corporate logos, lean pared down ground support operations and a wholly more functionalist approach to space. It’s the privatisation culture finally going cosmic. Testament I suppose to the success of the pioneers that space technology is now sufficiently reliable to be commoditised in this way.

Finally, a shot of Atlantis, post-landing and its virtual equivalent from Google Earth. I tracked this last mission for most of its journey these last days via the amazing real time telemetry stream that NASA supplied for Google Earth. FAB.