{ texts for nothing }

Imagine being Buzz Aldrin. You’re the second human being to set foot on the Moon, a central figure in one of the most amazing experiences in human history. Everything afterward savors of anti-climax. But on a clear night you can still step outside, look up at the Moon, and say to yourself, “Yeah, I’ve been there.”

(Then, because you’re a Real American Hero, you go and punch a moon-landing denier in the face.)

Today is the 40th anniversary of the first Moon landing. If that sort of thing interests you, I recommend taking a look at a most excellent documentary called For All Mankind. (By a strange coincidence, I happened to watch the film last night, not realizing how appropriate my timing was.) Rather than taking the usual chronological approach, the movie stitches together archival footage from a bunch of different Apollo missions to tell the story of the six Moon landings as if they were all a single flight. The various astronauts who provide voice-over narration aren’t even individually identified. There’s relatively little technical or historical detail; instead, the focus is on what it was like for human beings to take a trip to the Moon.

As a result, you get quotes like this one from Michael Collins, the third guy on the Apollo 11 mission, talking about what went through his mind as he watched the other two astronauts head down to the lunar surface without him:

Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were right in front of me in the lunar module, and then simultaneously the Earth popped up right behind them, so that I could say to myself, “Well, look, that’s all there are. There they are. Three billion people there, and two people there, and that’s all there are.”

Not bad for a bunch of apes.

Note to the cafes in which I occasionally work: You can stop with the Christmas music now. I assure you, that reggae version of “White Christmas” will not be missed.

Only on Wikipedia can you find nearly three years of debate about whether sudo is short for “substitute user do” or “superuser do.”

From the Wikipedia entry on André the Giant:

When André was young, he could not fit on a normal school bus and had to be driven to school. As his parents were unable to afford a car of their own so his neighbor, Samuel Beckett, drove him every day.