Dear Tucker,
Oops. Sorry to have put you on the spot with that nice Mr. Murdoch you work for. I’m so used to thinking of you Standard fellows as a hardy band of rugged individualists that I tend to forget who owns you. I may not really have the chops for life in the new media jungle.
Can’t argue with you about that Partnership ad though I didn’t see it myself. Another thing that’s creepy about it is that the apparently the brilliant folks who write these ads (a sort of volunteer A-team from Madison Avenue as I understand it) seem to think it’s not enough to provoke you to imagine your child’s death; they have to lay on the imagery with a trowel, just in case you’ve sniffed too much paint solvent to connect these emotional dots. Anyway, I like your ire over it.
My last big enthusiasm for the day is space. Both the Post and the Times have op-ed pieces scratching their heads over the huge yawn that greeted yesterday’s launch of the American-Russian crew who will become the first inhabitants of the new International Space Station. The better of them, by born-enthusiast Bryan Burrough in the Times, notes that we may have seen the last day of our lives on which there are no humans colonizing space. And because it’s an international effort, “It’s a real-life step toward a Star Trek universe, the first foray into The Federation.” But no one cares. When Burrough was researching a book on space travel, he notes, “at the Johnson Space Center in Houston I saw dozens of situations where ordinary people were allowed to question astronauts.” All they wanted to know was: How do you go to the bathroom? And is it possible to have sex in space?
Now I read science news about as willingly as you read the business sections. I felt only a sort of bored sheepishness at Burrough’s rebuke, but it was enough to propel me into Kathy Sawyer’s news article about the project in the Post. It turns out that this is great stuff! (I should have known it would be good because Sawyer wrote a wonderful dispatch, a couple of months back, about the very question of whether there is sex in space. No, was the answer, but this has not stemmed the proliferation of wild rumors among space junkies. Weightlessness and Velcro straps, it turns out, have a most inflaming effect on the human imagination.) Anyway, Sawyer’s piece today is full of great material about keeping house in space (watch out for flying gobs of hot coffee) and how the human brain actually finds it so hard to process the presence of objects floating in space that it’s all too easy to get beaned by an unsecured wrench. One astronaut found that the people in his dreams began to float, just like his colleagues.
Check it out. Talk to you in the morning.
Weightfully,
Marjorie
