beyond captain america

Some guy writing for the University of Nebraska's student newspaper (The Daily Nebraskan), has decided that your favorite superhero is indicative of your political preferences (not only is it indicative, actually, it's "all you need to know" to figure out how to vote).  Not only is this total bullshit - me and my ultra-conservative Greek Orthodox friend have pretty much the exact taste in action movies, except she likes Rocky more than I do - but he says if you prefer Batman over Superman, you're a Republican.

Yes. 

I have no idea how good ol' Clint Waltman (o rly? ya rly) votes, but seeing as how he's from Nebraska and his name is CLINT WALTMAN, it seems like he's just trying to claim the only cool superhero for the GOP.  Which is just wrong.  

( clint waltman is dumb )

Yes, I know that Superman's creators were more liberal than conservative, that they made him in the context of FDR's New Deal, and so Superman reflected '30s Democrats, at least at first.  But the '30s Democrats, God love 'em, got fucked up by World War II.  Then Truman, a Democrat, decided to use nuclear weapons on a country that was all but surrendered.  And let me tell you, as a modern Democrat who nevertheless respects the New Deal and FDR, I hate Truman and I hate Kennedy.  I don't think Kennedy deserves the mantle of the Democratic Party - not for Marilyn Monroe, but for the Missile Crisis.  What a royal dumbass.  And anyway, it doesn't really matter how Superman's creators intended him to be read in the '40s.  What matters is how he's read now, how he's interpreted now, and what Democrats and Republicans are like today.  Besides, maybe Siegel and Shuster suck trying to push their politics on people, because I would never read Superman as a liberal icon, immigrant or no.  But then again, I'm a by-product of the '90s. 

Similarly, Waltman's main problem is that he compares Bruce Wayne to Barry Goldwater and Clark Kent to Harry Truman.  Aside from the fact that Barry Goldwater is NOTHING like Bruce Wayne and championed the 1950s Stepford Lifestyle (I can see Clark Kent's similarity to Harry Truman, with the H-bomb and all), these are politicians of yesteryear, not the Republicans and Democrats of today.  And the Republicans and Democrats of yesteryear are dead.  They are not voting.  If he wanted any hope of being vaguely relevant, his column is 50 years too late.

the air crash as life

"Disasters don't just happen.  They're a chain of critical events." 
- Seconds From Disaster motto

"When you do an analysis of an accident, you've got to look at the human errors in judgment that were made and try to rectify those.  That is my hope and dream for human spaceflight."
- Jon Clark, husband of Laurel Clark

I've decided that catastrophes and terrorist attacks and wars and nuclear meltdowns and disease outbreaks are all just big long plane crashes.

I just realized that I don't remember anything - anything - about the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster.  I was watching its Seconds From Disaster episode and assuming it happened in the 90s when suddenly there was a clip of President Bush addressing the nation.  I looked it up, thinking it happened when I was in middle school and out of it, but it was 2003.  2003!  I was a sophomore in high school and I remember nothing!  How can that be?  I remember researching this just last semester and reading Laurel Clark's letter and somehow I didn't understand that this had happened very recently and I should have had memory of this. 

I asked my roommate if she remembered it.  She said, "Didn't that happen in nineteen ninety something?"  I said it was 2003 and she couldn't believe it either.  I don't know if this is a matter of inadequate media attention or us just being too obsessed with our own lives and unable to register important global events. 

From wikipedia:

In a hoax inspired by the destruction of Columbia, some images that were purported to be satellite photographs of the shuttle's explosion turned out to be screen captures from the opening scene of the 1998 science fiction film Armageddon, where the shuttle Atlantis is destroyed by asteroid fragments. In reality, Columbia disintegrated rather than exploded. In response to the disaster, FX pulled Armageddon from that night's schedule. It was replaced with Aliens instead.

Aliens?  Really?  Something is wrong with us.  

Since I just recently saw Encounters at the End of the World, I find it interesting that there's a memorial for Columbia at "the bottom of the world", in McMurdo Station in Antarctica.  God.  We have a very strange sentience, a very strange homemade divinity.