Technical Mayhem!

[rain_gryphon]

Every so often, 'Something Awful' rocks:

"With a Soyuz you have a button that says "dock" on it and then you wait until you can see the docking arm and then you hit the dock button. This activates a huge booster that will burn for thirty seconds and you use the reinforced docking hatch on the Soyuz to bend the docking arm until it is locked into place."

*****

Somewhere I prolly still have my old book about Mister Bill landing on the moon. Sluggo was in charge of Mission Control, and in order to beat the Russians to the moon, they turned the lander upside down and fired the descent then ascent engines to get Mister Bill to the surface faster. I love the picture of Mister Bill upside down, screaming, with the ascent engine blazing away, *and* all of the 'up' attitude jets burning for that little bit of extra delta vee. It's the little touches that impress. >:)

*****

There's a movie about Dale Earnhardt now. I suppose that was inevitable. He was a great race driver, but the whole sort of semi-religious cult that's sprung up around him makes me uneasy. It's a lot like Elvis, in a way, and seems to appeal to the same people.

I'm old enough that the concept of really good drivers being killed isn't that alien to me. I recall Clark and Donohue and Senna.

My favourite stock car driver was always big fat sneaky old Junior Johnson. He's from a fundamentally different era of racing, back before the marketing machine took over. He indirectly saved my life one afternoon many years ago when I got a rear-drive car sideways on ice, with a cliff on one side and a rapidly approaching semi on the other side. I knew in theory how to do a 'Junior turn' and get a sliding car under control, and it seemed a very good time to try to translate that theory into practice. No-one was more surprised than I when it actually worked. I was so pumped full of adrenalin that when I realized I'd actually pulled it off I began laughing maniacally. My poor passenger (a guy named 'Crump') was white as a sheet. I don't think he ever got in a car with me again.

Comments

[loganberrybunny.livejournal.com]

the whole sort of semi-religious cult that's sprung up around [Earnhardt] makes me uneasy

I don't know what it's like in the US, but that's just how it is with Senna over here. I don't like it much either.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

That surprises me, actually. I'd thought this was some particular American weirdness.

Most Americans wouldn't have heard of Senna, I think. Automobile racing's not a mass-market sport here, apart from NASCAR, and that frankly becomes less about the actual racing with every season that passes. They realized some time back that while racing fans might understand an event in terms of tire wear and fuel consumption and setting up the car, for the vast majority of generic 'sports fans' it's simply an exercise of driving skill, and there're a whole lot more generic fans than there are racing fans. That consideration has driven their marketing from the late 70s onward.

In theory it's a good way to broaden the base of support, and I was heartily in favour of it at first. The immediate results were that a lot more money started coming into stock car racing, and suddenly you could watch all of the races on television, instead of a selected few. The downside was less obvious, and took a bit longer to become apparent. What was supposed to happen was that over time, the new fans would come to understand the depths and complexities of the sport and would grow into actual racing fans. That didn't happen, of course. The sport conformed to the fans, rather than the other way 'round.

What seems to have gone wrong was the need for a marketing 'hook' to get newbies to feel an immediate involvement so that they'd keep coming back. Getting the new fans to focus on the drivers instead of technical abstractions is what worked. It sold a lot of driver-oriented merchandise too, to the point where the major names are making more from marketing than they could ever hope to from racing. They have, fur instance, 'Jeff Gordon' chocolates (shaped like little race cars - and yeah, I bought some... ) at the grocery store where I shop. NASCAR stuff is just ubiquitous now.

Over time, though, almost while no-one was paying attention, what had begun as a contest between teams of drivers and mechanics has transformed itself in the mind of the merchandise-buying public into a contest between drivers alone. In addition (and this is the part that I'd thought was peculiarly American) winning is seen not just as the mark of skill, but also as some weird sort of moral barometre. Racing has morphed into a contest of virtue rather than skill. In the popular mind, Jeff Gordon's victories aren't merely an indicator of his remarkable skills, but also somehow show his moral superiority.

When you live in that kind of haunted existence where worldly success stems from moral virtue (and many Americans do, especially in the south) it's hard to accept that a man as successful as Dale Earnhardt might simply be killed in a meaningless accident that could happen to anyone. It doesn't help that for most of the new fans, racing has been a safe sport as long as they've been watching. *Any* driver dying is an earthshaking event for them, let alone someone like Dale Earnhardt. There absolutely has to be some meaning found for his death. People seem to have settled on the idea that his life and death hold some profound moral lesson for us all, and thus he really died as a sort of martyr, giving his life to make this lesson manifest. It's frankly scary to be around those people.