10 Comments on “Not Dead”

1. Shouldn’t that be, “I aten’t dead”? Just asking.

2. So, that means your are undead?

3. Good to see you this weekend, John. You spin a mean platter :-)

   Ol’ Doc Unger

4. @Romeo…that’s only Granny Weatherwax

5. *sigh* This is the last time I use bargain-bin ninjas…

6. It is very important to train for Chicago area cons. They can be grueling (or you can get eaten by a grue). Looking forward to your dance at Worldcon.

   *hug*

7. James A. Lovell with John L. “Jack” Swigert as Command Module pilot and Fred W. Haise as Lunar Module pilot, had a long day traveling back. Swigert was a late replacement for the original CM pilot Ken Mattingly, who was grounded by the flight surgeon after exposure to German measles.

   I had a 33-hour flight back from Gladstone, after my 2 hour ferry ride back from Heron Island Nature Preserve. You say that you’re slightly tired from DJing and flying from Chicago?

   Welcome to the weary world of Apollo 13 (which kids see now and don’t realize is quasi-documentary, like the women in the ladies oom when my wife and I sawe “Inglorious Bastards” who were saying: “was this based on what happened in History?).

   Apollo program, the prime crew for Apollo 13 would have been the backup crew for Apollo 10 with Mercury and Gemini veteran L. Gordon Cooper in command. That crew was composed of

   * L. Gordon Cooper, Jr (Commander)
   * Donn F. Eisele (Command Module Pilot)
   * Edgar D. Mitchell (Lunar Module Pilot)

   However, Deke Slayton, NASA’s Director of Flight Crew Operations, never intended to rotate Cooper and Eisele to another mission, as both were out of favor with NASA management for various reasons (Cooper for his lax attitude towards training, and Eisele for incidents aboard Apollo 7 and an extra-marital affair). He assigned them to the backup crew simply because of a lack of flight-qualified manpower in the Astronaut Office at the time the assignment needed to be made.[2] Slayton felt Cooper had a very small chance of receiving the Apollo 13 command if he did an outstanding job with the assignment, which he did not. Despite Eisele’s issues with management, Slayton always intended to assign him to a future Apollo Applications Program mission rather than a lunar mission, but this program was eventually cut down to only the Skylab component.

   And Edgar MItchell was (according to wikipedia, and if I’m rambling I blame jet lag): getting deeper into consciousness and paranormal phenomena. On his way back to earth during the Apollo 14 flight he had a powerful Savikalpa samadhi experience, and also claimed to have conducted private ESP experiments with his friends on Earth. In early 1973, he founded the nonprofit Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) to conduct and sponsor research into areas that mainstream science has found unproductive, including consciousness research and psychic events.

   Mitchell says that a teenage remote healer who lives in Vancouver and uses the pseudonym Adam Dreamhealer helped him heal kidney cancer at a distance. Mitchell said that while he never had a biopsy (the definitive test for cancer), “I had a sonogram and MRI that was consistent with renal carcinoma.” Adam worked (distantly) on Mitchell from December 2003 until June 2004, when the “irregularity was gone and we haven’t seen it since”.

   Mitchell has publicly expressed his opinions that he is “90 percent sure that many of the thousands of unidentified flying objects, or UFOs, recorded since the 1940s, belong to visitors from other planets” and that UFOs have been the “subject of disinformation in order to deflect attention and to create confusion so the truth doesn’t come out”

   Is there a science fiction novel in here struggling to get out?

8. “Not dead”

   So, you want me to stop poking you with this stick then?

   *poke**poke**poke*

9. In New Hampshire one fine day, whilst travelling to Boston by bus, I met a woman who was on her way to New Mexico. By bus. With 3 small children. Now THAT’s a long trip!

10. It’s that time zone thing. I don’t know how losing an hour makes the trip take twice as long, but it does.