Inhuman Swill

One of my earliest memories is of standing with my father after dark on the front lawn of our home in Highland Park, Los Angeles. He pointed at the moon and told me, "There are men up there right now."

The Apollo 11 mission reached the lunar surface on my mother's 24th birthday. I was still weeks shy of my second birthday, so I find it doubtful that this memory (if, indeed, it isn't wholly apocryphal) comes from that first landing. Maybe it was Apollo 12 later that year, or Apollo 14 in 1971 (though that date seems too late). Doesn't matter. I remember feeling a childish awe that people had flown to that distant bright sphere.

No humans landed on Mars last night, just a robotic rover, but the wonder and awe I felt were perhaps even greater than on that Vietnam-era night. Because, in a sense, we all traveled along with Curiosity on its thrilling, harrowing, lonely plunge to the Martian surface. NASA brilliantly sucked us into the narrative by walking us through its "7 Minutes of Terror" in advance, then let us hang out with the gang in mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to live those seven minutes with them. Yes, this is something like the seventh time that humans have landed devices successfully on Mars, but never before have we observers all been able to experience the event with such immediacy, unmediated by professional reporters. I'm not ashamed to say that I burst into tears when Curiosity was reported to have landed safely, and I know from the conversation taking place on Twitter that I was far from the only one who did.

Kind of a silly reaction to the fact that we humans (or some of our smartest representatives) had fired a hunk of metal and glass through space to a soft landing on a neighboring ball of rock, right? Not really. Those first couple of pictures, featuring the wheel or shadow of a human-made object on Mars made clear that, even if most of us had long since come to terms with the fact that we would never set foot on the Red Planet ourselves, an emissary could still go there for us and make its first task upon arrival to send us back photos. And that was almost as wondrous as being there.


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill

This past Sunday my father-in-law turned 71. He used to be (and quite possibly I will get this wrong) a Formula Four racer and has always had a thing for cars. In planning for this birthday, he found a Groupon for an exotic-car driving experience at the Autobahn Country Club in Joliet. The country club is exactly what it sounds like—a place where, instead of golfing, members get to race their high-performance cars on one of the private tracks. And for a few weeks every year, an outfit called Imagine Lifestyles puts on events there where reg'lar folks like you or me can drive Lamborghinis or Ferraris or Maseratis or what have you.

It was supposed to be my father-in-law, my brother-in-law Tom, and me, but it so happened that my father-in-law was ill on Sunday so he offered his slot to Laura. (Our friend Barbara Lynn was in town from New York, so she tagged along with us to the track, too.) I was very nervous about driving, especially after the quick safety-training session we had to go through, which explained all the flags you might see around the track and how to use the orange and green cones to guide you through the execution of each curve.

Tom drove a Lamborghini Gallardo (I believe that was the make). Laura drove a Mercedes SLS with gull-wing doors. I drove a Ferrari F430. Four cars would go out at a time, led by a souped-up Mustang as the pace car. My Ferrari happened to be the first car after the pace car, and I was pretty worried about not keeping up and ruining the experience for the three drivers behind me. Fortunately, there was a coach in the passenger seat beside me, and though I lagged a little through the first lap, I managed to keep up pretty well through the next two. My knuckles were white, though.

There was a video camera mounted in every car, so we each got an SD card with our cockpit video on it after the "race" to take home. Here's mine, if you want to hop into the Ferrari with me for a little spin:



After Laura's drive in the Mercedes, her coach accidentally dropped her SD card between the console and seat. They searched the car but couldn't find the card, so they let Laura take another ride, either as a driver or passenger. She elected to ride shotgun in a Corvette convertible as one of the professionals drove, so she could get a feel for what it was like on the track with someone who knew what he was doing at the wheel. Here's the video from that ride:



I've never really been a car guy, but now I can understand why someone would want to become rich just to be able to do something like this every weekend from April to October.


Crossposted from Inhuman Swill

Speaking of giant squid ... giant squid!