February 1st, 2003

[angus]

I'd forgotten the date, so I cheated and looked it up.

I do remember that period now.  I was living and working in the SF bay area.  We had a visitor in our lab the following week from Amsterdam.  He cut out from his local newspaper and brought to me a favorite cartoon series, one I enjoyed when I worked in Amsterdam.  "Fokke en Sukke" is the cartoon, and they're two little smart-alek ducks that make fun of everything.  Especially politics.  Their dialogue was funny, but also simple enough for me to practice as I learned the Nederlands language.  The episode of Fokke en Sukke he brought to me was particularly irreverent.  It showed people searching in a field for the nosecone of the space shuttle.  Then someone finds a pointy object and says here it is!  Then in the next frame it says, "nevermind, it's just Michael Jackson's nose."  Of course, it was much funnier at the time because the sudden detachment of Michael Jackson's prosthetic nose was big news about a year ealier.  Nose news is good news.

Although, as I recall, Jackson's nose detachment turned out to be an urban legend.  Still, both the irreverence and timeliness of the cartoon was stunningly clever.  To this day I can't think about the space shuttle without thinking about Jackson's nose.

[angus]

So wait - they did that after the shuttle disintegrated?

As for myself - I didn't write this earlier:

I had had a friend spend the night, and for some reason we turned the TV on around 8 that morning when it was just being rumored that something had happend - it wasn't confirmed - then I saw the pictures and we all knew.  That and September 11th are hte only 2 things that I can still picture the video just playing through my head - and it's very eerie.

September 11, 2001 was really eerie for me.  Depressing, frustrating, surreal.  I think I posted in great detail of my situation at that time so I won't go into it again. 

I was a freshman in college when the challenger's o-rings failed.  The physics prof had procured a TV and taped the re-entry that morning and planned to show it to our physics class.  I showed up in class expecting to see the majestic challenger coming home, but when I entered the room I could tell something was weird.  Anyway, he elected not to show it, although you could argue that there was some physics to be learned by watching the devastation.  I think he was trying to be sensitive.  that episode was depressing too, and shocking.  but within days the tacky jokes started.  What color are Christa MacAuliffe's eyes?  Blue.  One blew this way and one blew that way.  I think by the time the challenger blew apart, many years later, and the jokes had become more sophisticated (What does NASA stand for?  Need another seven astronauts) we had become somewhat desensitized.  After all the discussion of the previous failures, even starting way back when I was in middle school and the asbestos tiles wouldn't stay on, society had been questioning the decision.  Launch after launch was delayed.  Time and again enthusiastic Americans gathered on the humid, flat Florida coastline only to be told to go home for there would be no show.  What we know now is that Nixon was presented with three plans for vehicles to explore space and asked to choose one.  He gave it about three seconds' thought.  Eenie, meenie, miney, mo, dammit henry just pick one and leave me alone.  It seems that the shuttle idea wasn't the best choice after all.  But I'm not trying to play monday morning quarterback here.  Just sharing impressions from the moment in question, as we all are.