The Stars My Destination Presents the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 11
Man alive, Mike Collins cracks me up: Command Module Pilotlink. Mars, ho!

And now a pair of hyperlinks about the technology that got us there and will get us there again: Saturn resurrectionlink and Lunar Module/Altairlink.

Last but not least, let us hope that President Obama does not have the courage to fulfill his campaign promise to put an end to American manned spaceflight: Armstrong, Collins, and Aldrinlink.

"This was a Golden Age, a time of high adventure, rich living, and hard dying… but nobody thought so. This was a future of fortune and theft, pillage and rapine, culture and vice… but nobody admitted it. This was an age of extremes, a fascinating century of freaks… but nobody loved it."
—Alfred Bester, The Stars My Destination




Will the Ares I rocket be allowed to carry us boldly into the future?

The Summer of Crime
Crime-themed motion pictures I've watched this summer:

The Taking of Pelham One Two Three
Bullitt
The Thomas Crown Affair
The French Connection
Dirty Harry

All hail from the late 1960s/early '70s; coincidence? Two set in New York, two in San Francisco, and one in Boston.

Plus, I've watched all three seasons of Veronica Mars and have been reading Hercule Poirot mysteries since April. Though Dame Agatha's Belgian detective would disapprove, raise your glass and toast: To crime!

The Queue
I suppose the most disappointing thing I learned from reading Neptune Noir is that though Veronica Mars was a very smart show, it didn't necessarily attract smart viewers and admirers. To wit, one of the essayists proffered the dumbfounding contention that "Dirty Harry" Callahan from the eponymous series of films and Jack Bauer from the television series 24 are examples of vigilantism in television and the cinema. Wait, what?

vigilante, n., one who takes the law into one's own hands

Inspector Harry Callahan is a police officer, a bona fide member of the San Francisco Police Department (S.F.P.D.). Accusations of vigilantism may arise from the end of Dirty Harry, wherein Inspector Callahan defies the Mayor of San Francisco's orders and singlehandedly stops the Scorpio Killer, but only if one willfully ignores several important details both in those scenes and in the wider series. After Callahan kills the Scorpio, he throws his S.F.P.D. badge out over a pond and walks away; but in the sequel, Magnum Force, Dirty Harry is still an S.F.P.D. Inspector. And the plot of Magnum Force pits Callahan against a gang of actual vigilantes, who summarily execute criminals. Throwing away his badge clearly did not mean Harry was no longer a law enforcement officer.

Within the standoff with the Scorpio Killer (played by young Andy Robinson, later to be immortalized in the recurring role of "plain, simple" Elim Garak on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), Dirty Harry acts as a police officer, not a vigilante. If Callahan had taken the law into his own hands, he would simply have blown the Scorpio away with the famous .44 Magnum. Instead, through the iconic speech—"You've got to ask yourself one question: 'Do I feel lucky?' Well, do ya, punk?"—Harry baits the Scorpio into snatching up a pistol and aiming it at Callahan. Directly threatened, Harry uses justifiable deadly force against the Scorpio: within the rules as a police officer, not outside the law as a vigilante.

And I asked my father, exactly the sort of pudding-minded viewer 24 attracts, and he confirmed that Jack Bauer is, most of the time, an agent of the fictional U.S. intelligence agency the Counter Terrorist Unit*. And thus, as an armed agent of the United States Government, Jack Bauer is not taking the law into his own hands, not a vigilante. Neither S.F.P.D. Inspector "Dirty Harry" Callahan nor C.T.U. agent Jack Bauer is guilty of vigilantism. The definitions of words matter, people. One cannot simply decide that a word has whatever meaning one deigns, not if one wishes to write coherently or find one's writing greeted by anything other than derisive laughter.

Recently
Agatha Christie, Three Act Tragedy
Rob Thomas, editor, Neptune Noir: Unauthorized Investigations into Veronica Mars

Currently
Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table

Presently
Henry Chang, Chinatown Beat
Agatha Christie, Murder at the Vicarage
Agatha Christie, After the Funeral
Agatha Christie, Cat Among the Pigeons
Francie Lin, The Foreigner
Karen E. Olson, The Missing Ink
Steve Martin, Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life
G. K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
Saki, When William Came: A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns
Sloane Crosley, I Was Told There'd be Cake
John Hodgman, The Areas of My Expertise

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
MxPx, "Chick Magnet" from Life in General (T.L.A.M.)

Commentary:

"Knows how to make a girl smile,
How to drive a girl crazy."

*"Counter Terrorist Unit"? That doesn't even make any sense. "Counter," in the way it is clearly intended in the name Counter Terrorist Unit, is a prefix, "counter-," not a freestanding noun. Examples include the C.I.A.'s Counterterrorism Center, the F.B.I.'s counterintelligence function, the Catholic Counterreformation (also Counter-reformation), counterclockwise, counterpart, counterweight, Counter-Earth. Counterterrorist Unit or Counter-terrorist Unit would be acceptable, but Counter Terrorist Unit? Do they only investigate instances of terrorism against counters, or terrorism committed by counters? I have to tell you, it would break my heart to learn that our kitchen counter was involved in terrorism. Odd's blood, 24's popularity is baffling.