Coffee and cigarettes…

…but it sure looks a lot like the old one.

Da boss is out sick, still. I’m on my own here at the Fun Factory.

Which means that the fun, relaxed, happy vibe I brought in with me from ZOMG Best Weekend Evar lasted about 45 seconds. (That’s not entirely true… I do still feel really damn good. It’s just on the back burner while I fight all the fires that I found waiting for me when I came in. Maintain….just maintain.)

In no particular order, the highlight reel begins….now.

• Guitar Hero is still fun. Aggravating and scary, but fun.
• Rockets are cool. The trip to Kennedy was all kinds of awesome. I got to see a number of my grandfather’s toys, still out in the Rocket Garden. (Gramps was a missile/rocketry engineer during the 50s and 60s.)
• Driving long distances is more entertaining when your co-pilot has musical ADD and can’t listen to the same thing for more than 60 seconds.
• Drunken Guitar Hero is more fun.
• ClearChannel must die. Why must ALL their stations go to commercial at the same time?
• Good engineering says “yes, we can” in such a way that you never, ever doubt it was possible in the first place.
• Mostly-naked drunken Guitar Hero is foreplay. And fun.
• So, those early astronauts… how did they fit their enormous testicles into those tiny capsules? Plummeting back to earth at terminal velocity from the very edge of the atmosphere, and the only thing between you and fiery death is a bit of sheet metal and a layer of ablative wax composite for heat shielding. Giant. Fucking. Testicles.
• Bad engineering just reinforces the belief that just because we can doesn’t mean we should.
• There are two problems with the Astronaut’s Memorial at KSC.
  • One, there are entirely too many names on it. Both shuttle incidents were, in my opinion, process failures that shouldn’t have happened in the first place – and wouldn’t have, if the processes had been correct and the people doing them had been less concerned with their own political futures.
  • Two, there’s too much space for future expansion. I doubt that was their intent with it – they wanted a lot of space around the names for metaphorical reasons – but when looking at it, the first thought that occurred to both AB and myself was “are they planning on adding more names?”
• That said… when someone speaks of heroes, those brave men and women (and their Soviet counterparts) are the first ones I think of. Military heroes do exist, and I honor them… but I always first think of those who have given their lives in pursuit of something noble and uplifting, rather than men who “did something amazingly stupid when there were witnesses around”, as many military heroes describe themselves.

And one last thought before I dive back into the fray:

• Hey, humanity. Step it up a bit, will ya? As a collective conscience, we’ve gone from the Apollo program and the drive to put a man on the moon within a decade, to American Idol and Survivor. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but… no, I can’t do it. There’s a LOT wrong with that. Fix this shit, NOW.