I have a few theories about exactly when and where I actually bought my ticket to Hell. Any reasonable and sound person who believes in the supernatural could point to a wide array of things I’ve done in my life to explain my eventual, assured, eternal damnation.
I wasn’t the kind of kid that pulled the legs off spiders or burned ants with magnifying glasses. And I’m not the kind of adult who practices patently criminal pastimes outside the occasional traffic infraction, as evidenced by the summons recently found in my mailbox which featured a few snapshots of my Toyota Prius driving through what was seemingly a red traffic signal. The evidence, including close-ups of my license plate and an actual DNA sample left at the scene, made it difficult for me to argue it wasn’t me driving. Damn revolutionary imaging technology. But the $70 I spent to make that indiscretion go away is nothing compared to what I have to look forward to.
It’s not that I really went out of my way to assure myself a blistering infinity. My life has simply been filled with decisions that needed to be made and hunger that needed to be addressed. Who could blame someone for being decisive and sticking to their guns?
The first such instance was when I became newly-minted intern for iconic local rock station WBAB on Long Island – the youngest on the roster, in fact. I was proud of my unpaid position and saw it as the perfect excuse to leave my family behind on Rosh Hashana, the biggest of the varied Jewish holidays where families gather to feast on bland food and celebrate collective self-loathing and misery.
As it happened, legendary Bon Jovi guitarist Richie Sambora was scheduled to visit WBAB that very day. It’s not so much that I wanted to meet Sambora, but he was my meal ticket to teenage popularity and possible sex with a really hot girl.
Weeks prior to the Sambora Incident, after years of what can only be classified as passive stalking, I finally summoned the courage to convince my friend Brian Clermont to ask out the hot girl from the music booth at the Commack Flea Market for me. When she said yes, I knew I needed to impress. This was, after all, the most sought after girl in all of Commack. Her mane of tall, stiff 80s hair represented the Holy Grail for all male flea market shoppers within a 10-mile radius. Long story short, I told her I was a bigwig with a local music outfit known as the biggest rock radio station on Long Island and promised I’d bring her to meet then next rock star that came through the doors. How can I help it if Sambora was a Goy with no respect for my predicament or my religion? What choice did I have?
More recently, I’ve become acutely aware of my religious heritage. I’m relatively certain that in my beloved town of Loganville, there are more people who have ridden in an actual space shuttle than have drawn a shamus across a line of Hebrew text in a Torah. Now, I define this next issue more as self-preservation than denial of heritage, but eight months into my Bible Belt residency none of my neighbors knows that I’m Jewish yet. Not that I’ve given them any real clues.
For instance, I would bet the house (the one I risked my life to wrap in Christmas lights) that I was the only Jew in town climbing across the roof to ensure that Santa could easily locate us when it came time to pony up with the presents. But that was only after I went with the family to a tree farm, saw in hand, to physically cut down the perfect pine tree so we could put it in our living room and decorate it with all sorts of non-Jewish bric-a-brac.
But the worst of all offenses may be when I attended a pig roast one Yom Kippur, the holiest of all High days in the Jewish faith. Yom Kippur is the Jewish equivalent of confession, only you don’t actually confess your sins to anyone; instead you atone through the majesty of starvation while sitting in a crowded temple all day with a bunch of other starving Semites. When the hunger hallucinations begin, the Rabbi might begin to take the shape of a raw porterhouse steak with legs, like on Tom and Jerry. In the hours before sundown, when you are legally allowed to eat again, delirium has set in, making matzo seem like a viable food option. But I digress….
One fateful year, when I was about 20 years old, my friend Tony was attending college and invited me to the aforementioned pig roast at a frat house. Being a passive zealot, I failed to realize that the day of that particular non-kosher pig’s reckoning happened to be the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. Considering I had already paid my $20 (non-refundable for those of you keeping score), there was no way I wasn’t going to attend. So as my family wallowed in self-loathing after paying ten times as much for temple tickets, I ate pork directly off a swine carcass on a spit.
At this point it’s all academic for me. If sex, drugs and rock and roll aren’t enough to make me Mr. Applegate’s new Lola, turning a blind eye toward my religion is sure to do the trick.
But religion has a funny way of getting even. Case in point: the flea market girl never answered my calls again after Richie Sambora outed me as an unpaid member of the hangers-on club of Long Island; it wasn’t until after the Christmas lights were hung that I realized only about half the strands worked; and I got food poisoning from the undercooked fraternity pig.
So maybe Hell is really delivered in small doses immediately following religious infractions. Not that it matters. In my eight months here the only religious practice I’ve followed is yelling “Jesus Christ” and flipping the bird to what have to collectively be the worst drivers in the world.
Showing posts with label space. Show all posts
Showing posts with label space. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 5, 2008
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Help Wanted: Space Shuttle Astronaut / Tile Mason
Is it just me or do they launch the Space Shuttle these days for the sole purpose of repairing what went wrong on takeoff so there are no catastrophes upon reentry? I’m all for safety, but nowadays the phrase “Let’s light this candle” – famously said week after week by Rabbi Mordechai Goldfarb of Congregation Beth Shalom in the quaint Connecticut suburb of Old Saybrook - takes on a whole new meaning.
The Space Shuttle program launched, with much fanfare, in the early 1980s - presumably by a group of engineers who thought that 80s electronica music was so bad that they couldn’t even stay on the same planet with it. The world simultaneously welcomed Soft Cell and bid goodbye to a handful of lucky astronauts who were protesting the death of rock music.
The Space Program was all but dead, and out of the public eye, after a successful series of missions in the 60s and 70s which brought human beings to the surface of the moon. Of course, this WAS the heyday of LSD, so whether or not man actually flew to and walked on the moon remains a true mystery. The only thing that we know for sure is that Tom Hanks was THIS close to walking on the moon but missed his opportunity (as illustrated in the Hollywood blockbuster film, appropriately titled, Tom Hanks Never Walked on the Moon).
In any case, the Space Shuttle program was the next revolution in space travel. The orbiter was able to launch, reenter and launch, again and again. Unless, of course, someone forgot to tighten a screw somewhere along the way.
Such was the unfortunate case with the Space Shuttle Challenger, which completed just nine missions before disintegrating on January 28, 1986 - just 73 seconds into the launch of its tenth mission. This disaster could have been avoided had the O-rings, which in this case were shaped like rhombuses, been shaped like actual O’s. Seven lives, and a vehicle almost as cool as a De Lorean, were lost as a result of a shape problem that could have been solved by any random nursery school teacher.
This disaster brought the space program to a grinding halt – until someone indiscriminately suggested that they build another Space Shuttle and give it a much cooler name. Thus were born the Discovery, the Atlantis and the Endeavour (the last one, by the way, while an American spacecraft, was inexplicably named by a Brit called Reginald Huggins, III – thereby explaining the randomly placed “U”).
Over the years, space shuttle launches became passé, and coverage of launches and landings moved from national broadcast networks to the pages of the Weekly World News, which covers the latest breaking space news you won’t read anywhere else. Included is news like in this actual passage from an article about the planets:
“Last year, the fifty-four-year-old astronomer claimed that not only was Pluto still a planet but that it was inhabited by Irish sheepdogs.”
You can’t make this stuff up. This is clearly news you will see nowhere else.
All remained boring with the shuttle program until February 1, 2003, which was when Cuban percussionist Ramón "Mongo" Santamaría passed away unexpectedly as a result of a stroke. Ironically, it was his music that was playing at mission control that day when the Space Shuttle Columbia burned up upon reentry. NASA scientists determined that a hole had formed on the shuttle’s wings when a piece of insulating foam from the external fuel tank peeled off during the launch 16 days earlier.
It is unfortunate that the only way NASA can get headlines anymore is to have a major catastrophe that involves a Space Shuttle. They could probably take a lesson or two from English entrepreneur Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, the world’s recognized King of Self-Promotion.
The end result, however, is that NASA has turned into a bunch of overprotective kindergarten mothers when it comes to its space program. Every single time a shuttle is launched, the cargo bay is filled with heat-resistant black replacement tiles, concrete, grout, a Costco-sized container of Tang and several cases of those diapers the crazy astronaut lady wore when she drove clear across the country at a rate of speed faster than a Space Shuttle, in order to “talk to” (read: kill) a flight attendant who was making whoopee with her imagined astronaut boyfriend. (For the record, I believe her insanity was founded. I mean, who WOULDN’T go crazy with a car full of dirty diapers? Anyone who has kids can vouch for this. But I digress….)
The tiles in a shuttle’s cargo bay are there to replace damage sustained by the tiles on the orbiter when it takes off. Which means, by my calculations, that the space program has essentially turned itself into the world’s most costly unnecessary repair shop. In fact, I’ve been informed by insiders that the bulk of the training that new astronauts undergo involves replacing various parts of the Space Shuttle while in space.
It does seem to be a waste of a space program to simply fix what goes wrong instead of really ‘living on the edge’ like the old astronauts used to do. That’s why they were so revered. They stared death in the face and, in most cases, died doing so - but not without the everlasting acclaim of the American people.
I think our resources are being spent foolishly in space. Case in point: The Jetsons first appeared on TV in 1962 – 45 years ago! – and we STILL do not have flying saucer cars that convert into suitcases. What a waste of technology.
I think noted sci-fi author Larry Niven put it best when he said, “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!" He said that in 2001, which makes me really wonder whether or not he had been conscious for the past 40 years.
Needless to say, the NASA space program will forge ahead. There’s a space station that isn’t going to build itself, there are astronauts in diapers training for their next tile-replacement mission, and there are science fiction writers who need to obviously ignore reality and say ridiculous things about why dinosaurs went extinct.
The Space Shuttle program launched, with much fanfare, in the early 1980s - presumably by a group of engineers who thought that 80s electronica music was so bad that they couldn’t even stay on the same planet with it. The world simultaneously welcomed Soft Cell and bid goodbye to a handful of lucky astronauts who were protesting the death of rock music.
The Space Program was all but dead, and out of the public eye, after a successful series of missions in the 60s and 70s which brought human beings to the surface of the moon. Of course, this WAS the heyday of LSD, so whether or not man actually flew to and walked on the moon remains a true mystery. The only thing that we know for sure is that Tom Hanks was THIS close to walking on the moon but missed his opportunity (as illustrated in the Hollywood blockbuster film, appropriately titled, Tom Hanks Never Walked on the Moon).
In any case, the Space Shuttle program was the next revolution in space travel. The orbiter was able to launch, reenter and launch, again and again. Unless, of course, someone forgot to tighten a screw somewhere along the way.
Such was the unfortunate case with the Space Shuttle Challenger, which completed just nine missions before disintegrating on January 28, 1986 - just 73 seconds into the launch of its tenth mission. This disaster could have been avoided had the O-rings, which in this case were shaped like rhombuses, been shaped like actual O’s. Seven lives, and a vehicle almost as cool as a De Lorean, were lost as a result of a shape problem that could have been solved by any random nursery school teacher.
This disaster brought the space program to a grinding halt – until someone indiscriminately suggested that they build another Space Shuttle and give it a much cooler name. Thus were born the Discovery, the Atlantis and the Endeavour (the last one, by the way, while an American spacecraft, was inexplicably named by a Brit called Reginald Huggins, III – thereby explaining the randomly placed “U”).
Over the years, space shuttle launches became passé, and coverage of launches and landings moved from national broadcast networks to the pages of the Weekly World News, which covers the latest breaking space news you won’t read anywhere else. Included is news like in this actual passage from an article about the planets:
“Last year, the fifty-four-year-old astronomer claimed that not only was Pluto still a planet but that it was inhabited by Irish sheepdogs.”
You can’t make this stuff up. This is clearly news you will see nowhere else.
All remained boring with the shuttle program until February 1, 2003, which was when Cuban percussionist Ramón "Mongo" Santamaría passed away unexpectedly as a result of a stroke. Ironically, it was his music that was playing at mission control that day when the Space Shuttle Columbia burned up upon reentry. NASA scientists determined that a hole had formed on the shuttle’s wings when a piece of insulating foam from the external fuel tank peeled off during the launch 16 days earlier.
It is unfortunate that the only way NASA can get headlines anymore is to have a major catastrophe that involves a Space Shuttle. They could probably take a lesson or two from English entrepreneur Sir Richard Charles Nicholas Branson, the world’s recognized King of Self-Promotion.
The end result, however, is that NASA has turned into a bunch of overprotective kindergarten mothers when it comes to its space program. Every single time a shuttle is launched, the cargo bay is filled with heat-resistant black replacement tiles, concrete, grout, a Costco-sized container of Tang and several cases of those diapers the crazy astronaut lady wore when she drove clear across the country at a rate of speed faster than a Space Shuttle, in order to “talk to” (read: kill) a flight attendant who was making whoopee with her imagined astronaut boyfriend. (For the record, I believe her insanity was founded. I mean, who WOULDN’T go crazy with a car full of dirty diapers? Anyone who has kids can vouch for this. But I digress….)
The tiles in a shuttle’s cargo bay are there to replace damage sustained by the tiles on the orbiter when it takes off. Which means, by my calculations, that the space program has essentially turned itself into the world’s most costly unnecessary repair shop. In fact, I’ve been informed by insiders that the bulk of the training that new astronauts undergo involves replacing various parts of the Space Shuttle while in space.
It does seem to be a waste of a space program to simply fix what goes wrong instead of really ‘living on the edge’ like the old astronauts used to do. That’s why they were so revered. They stared death in the face and, in most cases, died doing so - but not without the everlasting acclaim of the American people.
I think our resources are being spent foolishly in space. Case in point: The Jetsons first appeared on TV in 1962 – 45 years ago! – and we STILL do not have flying saucer cars that convert into suitcases. What a waste of technology.
I think noted sci-fi author Larry Niven put it best when he said, “The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right!" He said that in 2001, which makes me really wonder whether or not he had been conscious for the past 40 years.
Needless to say, the NASA space program will forge ahead. There’s a space station that isn’t going to build itself, there are astronauts in diapers training for their next tile-replacement mission, and there are science fiction writers who need to obviously ignore reality and say ridiculous things about why dinosaurs went extinct.
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