smacky and bucky

The live version of "Flash Gordon" by Queen is playing on my iPod on shuffle now, and it's so awesome I completely scrapped what I was going to post about.

Happy Labor Day weekend, folks. We're having a happy hour at our house tonight (backyard), so come if you're able! It will be laid back and fun!

I love my wife.
I love my kid.
I love my kid on the way.

But man, do I love getting a good night's sleep.

RIPT Apparel is another one of those places that offers a T-shirt design for 24 hours, and then it's gone forever. Yesterday they had this one:


Now, if you don't know, Rogers is Steve Rogers (AKA Captain America) and Stark is Tony Stark (AKA Iron Man). I'm not wild about the "Avenge America" tagline, but it's really no more repugnant than Romney's "Restore America" (Hello? America's standing in the world dropped when we avenged the September 11 terrorist attacks by starting two decade-long (+) wars. Sigh.) The logo (Cap's shield inside Iron Man's chest light) makes this shirt, so at $10 I had to bite.

This post is going to be a bit all over the place, since I have a lot of small things I've been meaning to post.

Just checked the stats on the Hindenburg: Of the 97 people on board (36 passengers, 61 crew), there were 35 fatalities; there was also one death among the ground crew. (We saw this at the Air & Space Museum the other weekend.)

Since the iconic picture of the Hindenburg is of it burning with the tail section fully engulfed in flames, people (me included) tend to forget this was 1937, Hitler was preparing to start a big war, and yes, those are Nazi swastikas on the Hindenburg.


 Stopping here. Doesn't seem right to add anything else. Busy week a the casa. Tomorrow is air conditioner repair and bathroom tile and bedroom drywall replacement. Whoooo!

Marriage is tough sometimes, y'all. (Preaching to the choir, I know.)

I just saw Madness perform live at the closing ceremony of the Olympics online, but the streaming quality of NBC blows (like most of their coverage. Ryan Seacrest? REALLY? You paid extra to borrow him from Fox? Blech!).

So I'll be watching to rebroadcast on network TV tonight, and pray Bob Costas can shut his damn cakehole for five minutes while all the bands perform.

Things I like this weekend: Everything But the Girl, beer, grilled food, naps, beer.

I must have been 5 1/2 years old when my mother took me to see Star Wars. The title was so generic, and I honestly don't think I saw a single commercial for it before seeing the movie in the theater. (Boy, you'd have to be the unabomber to do that now. Now we have costume pics and an outline of the plot on the web before a single frame is shot!)*

Today we have what was most likely my very first Star Wars figure, Luke Skywalker, and definitely the character in the movie with whom I most closely related:

(1) Like Luke, I spent most of the movie wide-eyed with mouth agape at what I was seeing.
(2) I had blonde hair. Just like LUKE!  
(3) A cool smuggler who makes wisecracks at chicks? Ha! Han was so not me then (or me decades later, but we won't discuss that).

Luke has that awesome '70s wings hairstyle.

As a figure, Luke was very well made. Sturdy as heck, with his legs surviving years of little uncoordinated hands cramming him into the driver's seat of a landspeeder!

 The white plastic in the torso portion of his shirt is the only real sign that he's 35 (!!!!) years old. Some definite yellowing going on there.



*There have been three times in my life I recall going to movies and having had NO "pre-viewing" hype: Star Wars, ET, and (years and years later) Sling Blade. I was visiting a (then) girlfriend at her college in Florida and I suggested seeing Sling Blade based on a two sentence blurb in the movie listings in the paper. It was a great choice, and I'm so glad I knew nothing about it going in!

"The Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center near Washington Dulles International Airport is the companion facility to the Museum on the National Mall. The building opened in December, 2003, and provides enough space for the Smithsonian to display the thousands of aviation and space artifacts that cannot be exhibited on the National Mall. The two sites together showcase the largest collection of aviation and space artifacts in the world."

Fifteen miles from our house and we had never been. Can you believe it?

Sunday morning we returned to our house after an overnight trip to attend Laura's high school reunion (Grandma watched the kiddo). It was shaping up to be another hot day, with our A/C not being able to keep up. I said, "Let's go to the Air and Space Museum at Dulles!" Indoors, cavernous, and definitely properly air conditioned. A few minutes later we were in the car!

 The Space Shuttle Discovery is housed there (and an Air France Concorde, along with hundreds of other planes, all indoors, to give you a sense of the size of this place!). I had never seen any of the space shuttles in person, so seeing one up close was awesome. I told Henry (22 months old) that it was a space ship like Buzz Lightyear flies in, and then he totally got it! 

Close-up of the nose section. Did you know that the black tiles are individually numbered and coded? Smart thinking!

It was actually pretty emotional seeing the flag on that giant ship. I didn't expect to feel that.

A communications satellite hangs above the shuttle.

I have (at least) one more post coming about this trip. Stay tuned! 

Related news: HUGE congratulations to NASA for safely landing Curiosity on the surface of Mars! The little guy already sent back his first picture (the shadow of one of his wheels on the surface!) Here's what it looks like:

Being a child of the '80s, I can't look at this guy and not think of the movie "Short Circuit!"

Related link: Here's a letter written in 1970 by Dr. Ernst Stuhlinger, then associate director of science at NASA to Sister Mary Jucunda, a nun stationed in Africa who had written him and asked how we could afford to go to space when children were starving on Earth. His response to her is freaking amazing: http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/08/why-explore-space.html.