fflo | Bow Tie Tuesday

I owe you this one from yesterday. It's not Tuesday any more, see. I didn't go to rained-out trivia after picking up my repaired Jeep, but was in the cinema with a friend when the flash flood warnings buzzed peoples' phones. Then I just didn't get to the bow tie post. So here it is, the next day.

CBS had a man-to-the-moon special last night, which shoulda been better, what with their having all that Walter C. footage. But it was majorly eh. Much better was the 3-part "Chasing the Moon" on public TV's American Experience. I also recently saw that series' show on the Stonewall uprising, and learned a lot from that one as well. These two really big things happened when I was 6-going-on-7 and just-barely-7, and I didn't know about the former one for many years. If I had known I wouldn't have recognized it as a good thing. But the astronaut stuff was, to me, very good. It was a representation of hope, and the glory of curiosity pursued, and the promise of collective knowledge building on itself, even while it was all kinds of other more contemptible things. (One especially nice thing about the Chasing the Moon series was its contemporary viewpoint, and how it explored, to some extent, the excluded, and other politically uncomfortable aspects of how power worked at the time. Things you're just not gonna get in the archival presentations.) (Did you know there was to be a black astronaut? I had not known that. Ed Dwight, which sounded a lot like Ed White, making for a real cool bit in there.) (The last episode opens, before the credits, with Tom Lehrer performing his song about Werner von Braun, in its entirety.)

That's just one little paragraph, but the 50th anniversariness of those two big things has stirred up a lot in me, as I take some time to look back on them. Contemplate, and absorb. That kind of thing.

Some of my coworkers and I are almost done putting together a jigsaw puzzle my family had when I was a kid (but this copy of which I bought offa eBay, sealed in the box, by Milton Bradley):

It has a slightly textured matte finish, which is a little weird, and its pieces include lotsa non-notching connections, and clearly aren't just cut from a repeating pattern. My "ur" sense of jigsaws may be due to this puzzle's design, as may my subsequent desire to "anchor" pieces to the puzzle, instead of letting matched edges float away from each other and get lost. That's kind of a space program thing, too, in its way, now that I think about it. :)