Nov. 29th, 2019

twoeleven: Hans Zarkov from Flash Gordon (mad science)
we got stuffed the french-named hotel, which has an excellent thanksgiving buffet. the buffet ran at odd times this year, as part of interleaving it with the hotel's five-course thanksgiving meals.
so: the buffet ran at 11am and 2pm, while the five-coursers were at 1 and 4. the last two made perfect sense: lunch, possibly on the late side, and an early dinner. but the first two left us puzzled.¹

since we wanted the buffet, we had thanksgiving brunch at 11. that started with a risotto chef cooking to order, followed by taking full advantage of the buffet. each of us had a little chicken, salmon, and roast beast, with the huge array of veggies, both typical and unusual. i went back for seconds, as is my habit. all excellent; the roast beast was especially tender and tasty.

the buffet also comes with a dessert buffet: slivers of pie, tiny tarts, miniature chocolate confections. it's my favorite part, and i saw no reason not to indulge. i think i had eight different things. we waddled back to our car, happily sated.

1: and apparently left everybody else puzzled, too. there were only nine tables occupied for brunch, all but one for small groups, but they had about forty tables set for the 2pm buffet, including some set for parties of ten or more.
twoeleven: Hans Zarkov from Flash Gordon (mad science)
i rather liked reading the story about the brokenness of new york's penn station and the attempts to fix it, since it hits two of my favorite topics:

1) why is american transportation such a mess?
2) how should we govern ourselves?

it's well-worth the read.
twoeleven: Hans Zarkov from Flash Gordon (mad science)
as part of plowing through the AFI 100 list of films,¹ watched charlie chaplin's gold rush, a 1925 comedy about the klondike gold rush. it's known for a number of specific scenes, which remain laugh-out-loud funny, the first use of a wild animal on set (a trained bear), and a few other things.

i happened to see a 1942 re-release, which replaced the title cards with chaplin's narration (it was originally silent). so it's also one of the very first "director's cuts" remastered with better special effects. :)

while it's all smiling funny, scenes which were apparently originally side-splitting now seem to go on a bit long. but since it's only an hour long, that's easy to overlook. it's also a good example of the past being a foreign country. some of the female characters smoke to show that they're flappers -- too radical for today's tastes -- but every time a man and woman are alone on screen, it's either outside or in a room with an obviously open door in frame. god forbid we suggest that they're doing anything other than talk!

it's worth seeing overall, and since it's long out of copyright, there may be videos of the good parts online for more convenient viewing.

1: one can argue about whether the AFI 100 list is a good list of "important" films or not. i'm just using it as a list of famous movies to watch that i probably otherwise wouldn't have seen, or in some cases, even heard of.

---

chasing new horizons, about the new horizons mission to pluto, reminds me of another movie: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

the good: it's hard to find well-written books about large, complex projects from conception to completion. it's especially hard to find them about space probes.

and alan stern does seem to have been very clever about this project. not only does he seem to be a good scientist, he's also a good administrator, and is otherwise a towel-aware hoopy frood.


the bad: there's a bit much gee whiz for my tastes, especially nonsense comparisons to give a sense of scale ("it's like spotting an ant in another galaxy!") nah; many of them just don't work that way: it's like comparing apples to ostriches. but i'm not the book's target audience.

there's also a bit much special pleading about the things that go wrong. things go wrong even in small, simple projects. in big, complex projects -- space missions, feature-length movies, big pieces of civil engineering -- it's not only inevitable that things will go wrong, it's inevitable that there will be show-stoppers. succeeding against the odds seems to go with the territory.

so while i did want to read about all the specific things that went wrong with new horizons, and how they were overcome, i kept hearing a whiny teenager's voice in my head going on about how uniquely awful their typical experience was.


the ugly: as the foreward admits, david grinspoon wrote all the first drafts, and then he and alan stern jointly edited them. grinspoon appears to be a reputable scientist, but he was also a PR flak for the mission ("press liaison") and alan stern's old friend. so, i'm constantly left wondering how much of stern's awesomeness is real and how much exists in their heads.

case in point: there was a period in the project where the team was mired in problems so numerous and varied that NASA HQ sent somebody around to give an independent assessment of the mission's chances. he said they were doomed. all the problems are blamed on third parties, and stern is quoted to the effect of "we'd normalized error".

uh-huh. how 'bout "despite being a gifted scientist, a solid administrator, and something of a showman, alan stern was completely overwhelmed by the challenges of building a spaceship, and NASA had to send adult supervision."? if he's gonna get all the credit, he can take all the blame.

oh, and did i say "something of a showman"? forget that: alan's a great self-promoter. he had the great ideas for turning on a marketing machine for pluto of the sort that's otherwise reserved for disney's blockbusters. so all of the emotional highs and lows in the book are deliberately written to read that way. sometimes they're overwritten to the point where i was left feeling like i was being sold a used car. ugh.

on balance, the book is worth reading. the book's flaws hit a bunch of my pet peeves, so YMMV. i'd read it the way i'd watch a melodrama: i'd enjoy the ride, but not take it too seriously. the bits on the how-to of space missions outweigh the nonsense.

Profile

twoeleven: Hans Zarkov from Flash Gordon (Default)
twoeleven
July 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 2025
Page generated Aug. 12th, 2025 10:55 am