The Importance of Being Idle

Weeeeeeeeell I Woke Up This Afternoon....

Bloody hell, I need to start waking up when it's y'know, actually the morning. I don't know what's goin' on here, but I suspect I'm falling into the ultimate trap of the unemployed: having nothing to do. Having no externally imposed purpose is a real pain in the arse for me, I'm terrible at keeping myself motivated towards a goal that is largely abstract. I'll let this week play itself out though, and see how we go from there. See, that's the other terrible thing right there: its Tuesday and I've already written the week off as a failure! Not that there is any way to distinguish one day from the next, they're just a blur of amazing pointlessness.
Speaking of which, I finally saw Withnail & I yesterday, and whilst I enjoyed the movie immensely what thrilled me the most was that (according to Danny at least) the events of the movie encompass the day of my birth way back in '69. Which for some reason I found staggeringly cool. Then I got all nostalgic for the 70s, then I went to bed. For like a bazillion hours! And I had a weird dream about a guy who claimed to have invented something, but who got sliced up for constantly going on about it, and then I was running away from things I could hear but couldn't see, and met this cute girl working at reception in a hotel and then the invisible things attacked and she had to go on the run with me too (shame!) and... I remember hiding in the ruins of an old disused gym...
Today NASA are gonna make another attempt to put Discovery into orbit after the last launch was scrubbed by a fault they apparently can't quite pin down, but are willing to ignore if it happens again. I'd really thought that with the aborting of the last launch I'd actually lived to see the end of manned space-flight, and I suppose if something hideous happens today then I will have. NASA however have done some tests, can't work out what's wrong and are gonna go ahead with it anyway (that having worked out so brilliantly in the past - if the fuel sensor fails then the engines will auto-shutdown, and if that happens during the first few seconds of lift-off then there's gonna be a hell of a bang when the shuttle falls unceremoniously back to Earth) and I was actually surprised to see Bush has plans to return man to the Moon and then to eventually push on to Mars (which to be fair was the original vision for the post-Apollo programme space-flight environment), although as a lame duck president he really has no way of making this happen. From a realistic point of view, manned space-flight achieves next door to nothing, its almost prohibitively expensive, its dangerous - and yet I find it to be the pinnacle of the romance of exploration and I'm immensely moved by it. Robotic missions are far better for useful space science, no matter what astronauts might tell you, but the actual experience of having a human being there, able to make first hand observations... that's mind-blowing to me. It's astonishing to think that in the entire history of mankind exactly twelve men have set foot upon an alien planet. I do tend to get lost in the romance of it all, as I've said, if you let me I'll go on and on about it all day... but I won't, I want some lunch.

posted by BadMonkey @ 12:32 PM