HOOP-DI-DO: We spent around four fun hours inside Key Arena today, taking in the quarterfinals of the Pac-12 women's NCAA basketball tournament. We were super fortunate to score free tickets via a friend I used to work with who is family friends with an Arizona State player. We had to send her an in-the-bowl thank you shot. :)
We watched the No. 2 seed Arizona State University take on #10 seed Cal.
Unfortunately for ASU, they were flat out of the gate and stayed that way through four quarters. Cal took them out of the tournament in a major upset. We walked the concourse before, between and after games. The kids took advantage of a New York Life photo opp to go for a jump ball.
There were mascots aplenty today. The kids crossed paths with a friendly Bruin.
The kids sustained themselves between games with WAY overcooked chicken 'tenders' and WAY under-cooked 'fries.' Hooray for awful, overpriced concessions! Ha ha.
In the second game we watched, Arizona took on UCLA. The Bruins looked so polished. Well prepared and well coached, and they totally overwhelmed Arizona.
Christian noticed a player on the Arizona team was named Griffey. I knew that Ken Griffey Jr.'s son Trey plays football for the Wildcats and surmised the woman was his sister. Sure enough, Taryn Griffey is a redshirt freshman for the basketball team.
During the halftime of the ASU/Cal game, kids in the stands were invited down onto the court. Here's a super terrible video of that via my super terrible cell phone. CJ is about 2 o'clock in it, top right of screen in a red shirt at the fringe of the crowd. His height made it easy for me to spot him.
STILL STANDING: Look at Scott Kelly, conquering gravity like a boss! Just a few hours after returning to Earth after a 340-day absence (while on board the ISS), Kelly was walking around, no trouble. Here's an awesome shot of Kelly falling back to Earth yesterday, in a remote part of Kazakhstan.
Photo Credit: (NASA/Bill Ingalls) Kelly is expected to return to Houston at about 9:55 a.m. Thursday. NASA Television will broadcast Kelly’s
arrival back stateside beginning at 9:40 a.m.
Speaking of space, as we've been known to do, this afternoon, we watched the wonderful, Oscar-nominated animated short “We Can’t Live Without Cosmos.” The 15-minute (word-free) film by Konstantin Bronzit follows a pair of cosmonauts as they prepare for a space mission.
The New Yorker has posted the video on YouTube. I'm not going to post any spoilers here, other than saying, have some Kleenex ready. Sniffle.
https://youtu.be/2ClMGtB7yhc SORRY, SEUSS: Today is the birthday of Theodore Giesel, better known as Dr. Seuss. We've always tried to mark the day in some special way, and yesterday the kids asked for green eggs and ham as today's observance.
Specifically, Annabelle wanted the egg to look just like the one in the book - like a 'normal' fried egg, but the yolk is green instead of white. We talked about various ways to potentially make this happen and I hit upon the idea of sprayed on food coloring we had in the cupboard. Sounded like an easy, sure bet! ... First, we carefully fried up a couple of eggs.
We plated them atop some ham. ...
Then, we used a shield to supposedly carefully shoot the green only onto the yolk.
And here is the horrific final product!
Bleech. Wouldn't want to leave you with that, so we'll leave you with this. ...
THEY'RE BA-ACK!: After 340 consecutive days off planet, astronaut Mark Kelly and cosmonaut Mikhail Kornienkohave returned to Earth!
This morning, Kelly took this photograph of the last sunrise on his final day of a nearly-year-long mission.
Photo: NASA/Scott Kelly We watched this afternoon as the pair bid adieu to their crewmates and climbed into the Soyuz capsule that would ferry them back to the Earth's surface. Imagine, feeling the Earth's gravity after 340 days on the International Space Station.
Graphic: NASA The New York Times recently published a story summing up Kelly's (almost) year in space by the numbers, Kelly was on station for 10,944 sunrises and sunsets, he made over 5,440 orbits of Earth, and traveled 143,846,525 miles (about the distance to Mars, by the way!). It's estimated Kelly drank 193 gallons of recycled urine and sweat, and he ran 648 miles (exercise is important to combat bone density loss in microgravity). By the way, the NASA astronaut who previous held the record for longest consecutive space mission was Michael López-Alegría, who spent 215 consecutive days in space in
2006 and 2007. The man who holds the record for the all-time longest space misison is Valeri Polyakov, who was on Russian space station Mir for 438 days from 1994 to 1995. Kelly worked on more than 400 experiments, and took thousands of photos. (You can see some of his top shots here: http://www.asc-csa.gc.ca/eng/blog/2016/03/01/20-amazing-pictures-from-astronaut-scott-kelly-s-year-in-space.asp.) RACE: We had a Groupon for a movie and popcorn we had to use up by yesterday, so we headed to Columbia City, the southeast part of Seattle, to Ark Lodge Cinemas, a nice vintage movie house that puts REAL BUTTER on their popcorn! Since we're sports fans and it was the last day of black history month, we chose to see movie "Race." It was a good choice. I'll let CJ tell you a bit about the movie.
"Race" is a docu-drama about Jesse Owens, an iconic Olympian who broke boundaries when he raced at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany. According to his website at jesseowens.com, Jesse began his promising athletic career began in 1928 in Cleveland, Ohio, where he set Junior High School records by clearing 6 feet in the high jump, and leaping 22 feet 11 3/4 inches in the broad jump.
Jesse Owens went to Ohio State College, and continued to practice his athleticism there. In 1935, Jesse Owens went to the Big Ten championships in Ann Arbor, where he succeeded. Jesse Owens went to the Olympics in 1936, which was troublesome, as the Nazi regime believed that black people, one of which was Jesse, were supposedly inferior to the "aryan" race.
Jesse Owens performed very well at the Olympics, winning 4 gold medals for his efforts. According to his website, he was the first American track-and-field athlete to do so. In the long jump competition, Jesse Owens was given 3 tries to do a successful jump. He was disqualified from the first 2 attempts, but a German athlete named Max Luz scrunched up his towel and placed it next to the jumping line, to show Jesse where to jump. Jesse finished and won the long jump.
Jesse Owens joined the American relay team for the Olympics for an unusual reason. The Nazi regime demanded there be no Jews on the Americans' relay team, so two of the Jewish athletes on the American team had to be taken off the team. Jesse Owens replaced one of them, but didn't want to because he felt sorry for them. He asked the Jewish athletes in question if it was okay that he replaced him, and the Jewish athletes eventually said yes.
In one of the last scenes of the film, Jesse Owens was back in New York, being the guest of honor for a banquet at an expensive hotel. Jesse, expecting more respect because he was a winning Olympic athlete and the guest of honor, attempted to enter through the normal entrance, but was turned away because he was black. He had to enter through the "colored door," a door that was not as nice as the main door. Even though he won four gold medals, Jesse Owens was never invited to the White House.
The end of the movie was heart wrenching. Owens was such a triumph at the Olympics, and then to come home and be treated so poorly. Fortunately, we have made progress since the mid-1930s.
MORNING STROLL: We had a wet weekend, but fortunately Monday morning brought some blue sky. We made it a point to get out in it, Christian, the dogs and I on foot, the kids on bikes.
HAPPY SATURDAY: We head down to the Living Computer Museum at least once a month for their movie nights, but we also made a trip down there on Saturday, to a special members-only open house event. We perused the regular exhibits for a few minutes before heading to the 'basement' for the special stuff. ;)
This PDD-12 is one of my absolute faves. LOVE its pop art styling!
I'll let CJ tell you a bit more about the members only event ...
Recently, the Living Computer Museum decided to hold a "Member Happy Hour," a members-only event where they would showcase the computers they got, which were not in the main museum yet. I just went to the Member Happy Hour, and I would like to tell you about some of the computers I saw. One computer I saw was from 1963, and was green with several dials on the front. The computer and its dials were large, and did not look very user-friendly. Another computer I saw was the Altair 8800, which looked like a box with multiple switches on the front. It was from 1975, and helped revolutionize personal computers. I also saw a sign for the Commodore VIC-20, which was advertised as "The Friendly Computer", and was the predecessor to the iconic Commodore 64. They also had multiple circuit boards and the parts they would go with on display. One of the circuit boards apparently had parts that dated back all the way to 1950, and most of the rest of them had "vintage" parts.
The circuit boards and parts CJ is talking about are part of the David Freeman collection, featuring artifacts from the 1950s through the 2010s. The collection includes a wide variety of vintage transistors, vacuum tubes, logic-related parts, and more.
We were all taken aback by this item ...
Introduced in 1977, the IBM 370/14B was part of LCM's Paul Pierce acquisition.
Back in the day, you could buy one of these machines for as 'little' as $689,000, or you could lease the machine from IBM for 'just' $17,280 to $22,650 a month. Yowza.
MAN ON THE MOON: On Saturday evening, we were going to try to stream one of the movies nominated for an Academy Award for Best Picture this year, but in reviewing our options, we passed on that idea. Instead, we wound up watching the just-released "The Last Man on the Moon."
I'll let Annabelle tell you a little more about it.
“The Last Man on the Moon” is a movie about Eugene Cernan,
who was the titular last man on the moon, and his life as an astronaut. His
first mission was Gemini 9, where he was the pilot due to his background in
naval aviation. The mission of Gemini 9 was to test the effects of long periods
of spaceflight on humans, practice docking procedures, and have Gene test out a
jet pack for a 2-hour spacewalk. Back then, the jet packs did not have arm or leg
straps, so it was hard for gene to grab onto it. He had to detach from the
umbilical (on purpose) so that he could grab it. Something went wrong, however,
and Gene had to reattach to the umbilical. The next flight he went on was Apollo
10, which was supposed to orbit the moon. It worked, and this set the stage for
the moon landings. The last flight of his, and also the last moon landing, was
Apollo 17. There were originally planned to be more, but due to budget cuts
this was the last. Two crews were fighting to be on the mission, and Gene’s eventually
won, while also gaining an amazing geologist from the losing crew. He describes
the moment after landing as being completely silent. He stepped out onto the
moon and instantly saw his footprint on the surface. At one point he took a
rover to a crater and carved his daughter’s initials in the dust. She was the
last person back into the lander, earning him the title of last man on the
moon.
We all enjoyed the movie. Stunning images and a spellbinding story. Highly recommended by MPA!
Here's the movie's trailer if you want a sneak preview ...
PAST BLAST: We also took an hour out of our weekend to watch one of the most memorable episodes from Star Trek (the original series), "A Taste of Armageddon."
Written by Robert Hamner and Gene L. Coon and originally aired on Feb. 23, 1967, the story is about some crew members of the USS Enterprise visiting a planet where they have devised a more 'civilized' way to handle their 500-year-and-counting war. Instead of real bombs and weapons, they use computer simulated models, and the virtual bombs denote areas hit and casualties. Victims then have just a matter of hours to report to a disintegration chamber. While the approach to war is clean and efficient, Captain Kirk comes to show them that a 'sterile' war is a ridiculous notion, really. War is messy business, no matter how efficiently it's conducted.
