Yikes, there’s a Jandek documentary on the way.
Month: February 2003
An even better Columbia FAQ
The folks of sci.space.shuttle have put together a pretty good FAQ about the loss of Columbia.
Kill your television
Garth points out the STS-107 Mission Report as the best place for non-absurdist information on Columbia. I’d add in NASA Watch myself. Either way, forget the newspapers or TV.
Cantonese idioms and expressions
A friend over at the UCI Library emails me with some great excerpts from a book of Chinese idioms:
UCI got another book about Chinese idioms today, and it’s a lot of fun. Since I already told you about “eating dates whole” and “one day of sun and ten days of rain”, I figured you might find some of these interesting/amusing, too. (I’m particularly fond of the first one, since it explains Hong Kong cinema and vice versa …)
— “to start a movie” —
(to cause a fight among rival gangs)
“Hey! Let’s go start a movie with the Tseng triad!”
— “to drop an orange then pick up a tangarine” —
(to recover some of your losses)
“After the stock market crashed, I lost a lot of oranges, but I found some tangerines, too”
— “to throw down the cooking pot” —
(to divorce)
“Things haven’t been the same since mom and dad threw down the cooking pot.”
— “the roof only leaks on a rainy night” —
(troubles have a way of compounding and overlapping)
“I should have known that this store would be closed when I am in desperate need of some asprin — after all, the roof only leaks on a rainy night”
— “to be slapped by a ghost” —
(when a person bluntly reveals the truth about a situation)
“He finally told me about the affair he’d been having. He must have been slapped by a ghost.”
— “big food” —
(to take more than your share of the entree, and less than your share of the rice that’s meant to accompany it — to be greedy)
“Watch out for him. He’s big food — he’ll take all your money and leave
you with none”
Columbia
Brian Webb’s Thursday email alert for viewing Columbia’s re-entry is still in my inbox. I set the alarm early and poked my head outside to see what the weather was like, but it was pretty well socked over at the coast and didn’t feel like driving far north to see it. So I went back to sleep.
Other blogs have been much more eloquent about today’s events, so I’ll go with this picture instead – the very first shuttle landing (STS-1) out at Edwards in 1981. I was fifteen years old and didn’t know the ways of telephoto lenses so it’s a tiny photo, but I was there. This is how I’ll remember Columbia.