generational markers (was "Disney's Man In Space")

On Thu, 27 May 2004 04:37:48 -0700, Dale wrote:

I only know Strombecker from their paper locomotive models. Not very
convincing, but you see so many of them in antique malls and flea markets
that they must have been pretty popular (plus they were dirt cheap).

....Yep, and you could easliy add them to the chassis of an H-O scale
train if you knew what you were doing. I've even seen some scaled-up
versions that were retrofitted on a Lionel scale engine. Never did get
into trains after about age 5, tho. Getting the living **** zapped out
of me by a transformer gone bad sort of set off my fresh fried lobster
on that hobby.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

On Thu, 27 May 2004 05:34:45 -0500, Pat Flannery
wrote:

We still have a beautifully made one sitting around down where I work,
with a sheet full of nearly microscopic print that tells you how to use
it.

....I saw the other day where apparently the local school district had
a surplus equipment auction. They had several of those 4-foot-wide
"above the chalkboard" demonstration slide rules. Had I known in
advance *and* had the extra cash, I'd have bought one.

I still get a kick out of that crank-driven cylindrical navigational
calculator that got discussed here a while back.

....Ah, the Kurta.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

On Thu, 27 May 2004 05:26:39 -0500, Pat Flannery
wrote:

By the way, did Spielberg get the dinosaur's colors right in "Jurrasic
Park"?

....Why are you asking Beady? He came after Chicxlub. Henry's the one
you need to be hitting up on this one.

OM

--

"No ******* ever won a war by dying for | http://www.io.com/~o_m
his country. He won it by making the other | Sergeant-At-Arms
poor dumb ******* die for his country." | Human O-Ring Society

- General George S. Patton, Jr

"Mike Flugennock" wrote in message
...

So, you skipped a calculus class to do orbital mechanics calculations?

Yeah, although that makes me sound more fanatic than I think I was.
Might have helped if we had covered elliptic integrals of the worst
kind, when I got around to looking up how to set the problem up
analytically - which happened only much later around the launch of
STS-1. I did make it the 400 miles or so to Edwards to watch Columbia's
first approach from orbit, only because the launch delay let me finish
an observing session at Lick Observatory the previous night and
the San Jose L-5 chapter caravanned down with some base passes.
There was such a crowd that no one at Edwards was checking those,
as it happened.

Bill Keel

Born 1967...
"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...
snip
In my case (born same year you were) the markers would be:
1.) Did you demand to your parents that the barber give you a crewcut,
because that's what the astronauts had?
No, I never really thought about my hair that much.

2.) Did you habitually use the term "AOK" when talking?
Not so much, but I do remeber using "roger that" periodically.

3.) Was your school pencil sharpener a plastic Mercury capsule?
No, but I seem to recall having one built into a CSM. The pencil went in
where the SPS bell should have been.

4.) Did you develop a real fascination with tubes of toothpaste, because
there were tubes just like that that contained _food_ rather than
toothpaste?
I drank gallons of Tang.

5.) Did you ever own a plastic Col. McCauley helmet with a "microphone"
that had a sheet of plastic in it that gave your voice a buzzing sound?
No, but I had the full astronaut kit for my "Big Jim" action figure (the
early 70's demilatarized G.I. Joe) including a PLSS pack that contained a
crystal radio.

6.) Were rubber buckle-up snowshoes a really cool thing, because they
looked like part of a pressure suit?
I lived in Wisconsin as a kid, so I had a full body snowsuit. In spring, it
became my spacesuit.

7.) Did you ever think that Sister Linda, your fifth-grade
teacher....might be a lot of fun in the sack?
With me it was my sixth grade science teacher... Brains and looks, Wow!

8.) Did you ever suspect that the Mother Superior of your school might
be thinking the same thing? :-)

Went to public school and I'm pretty sure (in retrospect) that the history
teacher was doin' her.

One of my earliest clear memories is of my mother waking me up one night and
taking me into her room where the good TV was so I could see men walking on
the moon. I was too young to really get it at the time, but it may just have
been Apollo 11.
Another memory: My mom was an Avon rep for a while and one of their products
was a kids shampoo that came in a bottle shaped like a CSM. Included with
the shampoo was a board game that used the empty bottle for part of the
game. What you did was place the included LM on top of the shampoo bottle
(think CSM/LM docked configuration) and then you launched the LM by pressing
down the accordian shaped base of the bottle. The side of the LM that landed
up would tell you how many squares to move. The game board was an
illustration of the earth and the moon with the play path being a genreric
Apollo flight. (Start at launch, move to orbit, then TLI, then LOI, then
descent and landing, then ascent and rendezvous, then TEI, reentry, and
splashdown. First one back from the moon wins.
I wish I had kept that game. Does anyone else remember anything like that?

--Dave--

"OM" om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org wrote
in message ...
On Thu, 27 May 2004 12:44:09 +0100, "Steve at fivetrees"
wrote:

"Jonathan Silverlight"
wrote
in message ...

But wasn't AOK some horrible journalistic invention?

Yeah... Shorty Powers, IIRC, embellishing things a little for the
press...

...I'll be honest on Powers. For the want of coherency lost by an
abrupt wakening, the NASA PAO was deprived of a presence that has been
vastly needed since.

Was that the "We're asleep down here" quote?

Steve
http://www.sfdesign.co.uk
http://www.fivetrees.com

In article ,
OM om@our_blessed_lady_mary_of_the_holy_NASA_researc h_facility.org
wrote:

I also had a similar cheap plastic
Saturn 5, which was wild because the entire CSM stack was still
attached to the adapter shroud, and at the base was a bas-relief
chrome representation of the back end of the LM. This was also stuck
on top of an S-II stage with a spring-loaded pop launcher that a)
popped the CSM stack off into orbit, and b) would put your eye out if
you weren't careful.

Oooh, oooh, oooh! I had one of those, too! I got mine circa 1974 or
so. When I lost the S-I due to a terrible staging accident in the back
of my grandfather's car involving my sister and an open window, I was
heartbroken. But wasn't the spring-loaded CSM-stack ejector at the top
of the S-IV?

I also had a pair of yellow (!!!) injection-molded Polaris subs (George
Washington class, I think, in retrospect) that you could put these
little fizzing Alka-Seltzer-like tablets into to make them surface and
dive. You'd remove the sail and a expose an internal space (about where
the CIC would be, I suppose) and place the fizzing tablets inside. Then
replace the sail and set it into the water. Water would fill up the
compartment through a couple little holes and the sub would submerge.
When water hit the fizzers, they'd dissolve and release the gas,
expelling the water and making the sub surface. When the fizzing was
over, the compartment would flood again and the boat would sink once
more. Great fun for a six year old. Of course, if I'd realized that
the basic design flaw would result in the deaths of a hundred and twenty
innocent imaginary sailors for each mission, trapped in their watery
graves at the bottom of the tub, well, perhaps then I wouldn't have been
so excited . . . ;-)

--
Herb Schaltegger, B.S., J.D.
Reformed Aerospace Engineer
Columbia Loss FAQ:
http://www.io.com/~o_m/columbia_loss_faq_x.html

In article ,
Rick DeNatale writes:
On Wed, 26 May 2004 15:41:55 -0600, Sam Seiber wrote:

Pat, Somewhere in there you missed a reference to a slide rule. I
recall
using the beasties in high school.

I've still got my trusty K+E Log-Log Decitrig from my college days within
arms reach. Still in it's nifty orange leather scabbard.

Me too. It was my father's. first, and will be passed on to my
daughter.
It's had a heck of a life, too. It's helped run niclear reactors at
Argonne, computed intercept trajectories for knocking down Sputnik,
(Dad took it rather personally, & decided to see it he could do
something about it with stuff that they had lying around the
Institute. (They could)) Cooler heads prevailed after a test run of
teh first stage motor blew up. (On Campus, In the middle of Boston.
No, it wasn't MIT). It saw me through High School & College (Although
calculators were generally available by then, battery life was still
pretty hapless, & you weren't getting through Finals on internal
power. I still keep it handy - If I've got something quick & dirty to
figure out, I'll use it. It's still danged fast, & the answers are
Good Enough. I've also got a 7-foot Pickett, of teh type usually used
in classrooms. Interestingly enough, I've taken it on the road a few
times to give soem Guest Lectures on Problem Solving to Math adn
Computer classes (Jr. High School level) in the local School System.
It's amazing to watch the expressions on teh kid's faces when they can
see the relationship of the numbers they've been dealing with spread
out before them - It's like the epiphany that occurs when you realize
the almost instinctive understanding of teh passage of time with an
analog watch vs. the false precision of a Digital Watch.

As for the cultural references:
Born May 5, 1958. Shepard's flight was the best Birthday Present I
can remember. (His father was a neighbor, and our Insurance Guy.
Much whooping and hollering ensued.) I had most of the books listed on
J. Sisson's page. (I can still recall the taste of teh glue on the
stamps of "Space Travel (A golden Stamp Book).
Didn't miss a launch, or a landing, until STS-5. (On TV, at least)
Growing up in Southern NH/Northern Massachusetts in the 1960s was a
Space Junkie's Dream. We had Avco, Raytheon, Sanders, Lincoln Labs,
Mitre, SDC, EG&G, Draper, and all the other folks around doing Space &
Rocket stuff. School science fairs included demonstartions of H2O2
thrusters, kids playing Propane torches on sections of rejected Heat
Shield, Home-Built van De Graf Generators. (I always wanted one of
those GE Desktop Cyclotrons, but we couldn't afford one).
It was an exciting time.

--
Pete Stickney
A strong conviction that something must be done is the parent of many
bad measures. -- Daniel Webster

Andrew Gray wrote

Gee, you is all old... ;-)

That, actually, is something that has been noticed before,
even Viewed With Alarm. If you look at the demographics of
space-related groups both professional and amateur, the age
distributions tend to be skewed to the gray side.

(Allen Thomson) writes:
Rick DeNatale wrote

Doug wrote:


Hmmmmm... I was born in October of 1955, about two years "even" before
Sputnik. I don't recall Sputnik's launch, but I was alive then.

I *do* recall Mercury.

I was born 10 years and 1 day after the Pearl Harbor attack.

OK, I'll play too.

I was born five and a half months before Apollo-Soyuz. I remember my
dad waking me up (we lived in Liberia at the time) to tell me about
Challenger.

--
Gordon Tisher

If something is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.
- G. K. Chesterton