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A little bit early for totality ..
A little bit early of course but the skies in western Ohio are just about perfect, high cirrus and contrails. I feel like that’s as good as it’s going to get. And unlike my former stomping grounds of Aroostook County, Maine, it’s 70 degrees and no snow anywhere.
That being said, kudos to northern Maine. You won the eclipse jackpot, and I am so happy for you.
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Weathering the eclipse
I haven’t looked at weather maps this hard since two trips ago to the UK OR the last total eclipse of the sun, when I changed my plans at the last minute and went to Kentucky instead of South Carolina.
This time around, I’m hoping to go two hours’ north or northwest to either northwest Pa., or maybe Ohio south of Cleveland. That way the traffic won’t be as much trouble. But … a big factor will be cloud cover. I’m also open to western New York although I really don’t want to drive that far.
Certainly a first-world problem.
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Torment into beauty
For my money, one of the most touching scenes in all of “Doctor Who,” with Bill Nighy walking on with brilliance to honor Vincent Van Gogh: “He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray, but to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world … No one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again.”
Happy birthday, Vincent Van Gogh.
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Do you remember the good old days?
The Specials, as always, coming in hot and perfectly timed for the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Turns out this is the late Terry Hall’s birthday.
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Remembering Jimmy Breslin
Listening to WCBS on the way into work this morning and Wayne Cabot mentioned today was the anniversary of Jimmy Breslin’s passing. Growing up in the New York metro area and reading the papers, you could read a lot of Jimmy Breslin. I did.
Breslin was one of the journalists I grew up reading, wanting to emulate as a street reporter, and who I have kept coming back to, over and over again. When I have taught journalism, in class and also as an editor, I’ve used Breslin’s work. Yeah, I’m a huge fan. And I’ve made at least one other Breslin fan who thought just as highly of his work.
(And there’s now a Library of America collection of Breslin’s newspaper and magazine articles and two of his books, which I highly recommend.)
Read Breslin’s columns in the paper as a kid (til he went to Newsday, which was hard as heck to find in Connecticut) and his book about the Mets. I happened upon his JFK columns as a teenager and it was like lightning struck, not just the writing and who he chose to talk to, but how you went about choosing sources and stories. “It’s an Honor” is still one of the best things I’ve ever written in newsprint.
I saw him speak about it back 26 years ago next month at the late, lamented National Writers Workshop in Hartford, Connecticut, back when we used to talk a lot about improving and celebrating newspaper writing as a craft. I know the exact date because I took notes and I couldn’t wait to unload them into my journal. There, in Hartford, Breslin spoke about the gravedigger theory he’s so famous for. This is directly from my journal, what he said:
“I don’t know many other ways to do my business. I think the best way today would be to take half the phones out of every city room, because you’re dead with stories done on the phone. You’re not going to hold my interest. There has got to be some chemistry and that has to come from the reporter talking to the person involved, face to face, getting those really odd facts that really make the story.”
Even now, 34+ years into my journalism career, I’d rather see someone face to face than get it on telephone or Teams or email. That’s what the job is, or should be.
According to Jimmy Breslin, who did it better than just about anyone else.
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31 years
It’s been 31 years since the bombing of the World Trade Center on a late February afternoon in 1993. Like 9/11 eight years later, from this vantage point I find it so difficult to believe so much time has passed.
I was working about 40 miles away at a newspaper outside New York City, and heard about it on WCBS Newsradio 88 as I drove from assignment to assignment. These were the days before the cell phone, so I knew my first duty was to rush back to the newsroom to see what we needed to do. For reasons I don’t really understand, our newspaper decided to cover it mostly from wire reports and one reporter.
That didn’t make sense, given the surety there were people from our coverage area who were either working at the World Trade Center or the Financial District every day. Dozens of commuter trains piled into Grand Central station from our area every weekday, not to mention the people who drove. I was only a reporter, I didn’t drive the coverage. I just went where they told me to go.
And they didn’t want us to go.
It would be a few months later, on a big story in our city, that I would decide to follow my own instincts. But that’s another story.
The ’93 WTC attacks get lost in history, I’m afraid, because of the sheer scope of 9/11 and how many people it killed and how the aftereffects still reverberate today. I know it does for me, as I lived closer and worked closer and actually covered 9/11 and its aftermath in 2001 and in the years afterward for several papers. Sept. 11 wasn’t just the biggest story I would ever cover, it was also personal. Like most everyone in the New York area, we had a personal connection.
It’s still personal. It’s not performative saying #neverforget. Because we never will.
Remember what happened 31 years ago today, that’s important too. It was one of the first times I remember thinking that terrorism was more than just something that happened overseas. I knew that for years, for a girl my age from my hometown was killed in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 on Dec. 21, 1988. But I guess I was too naive to think it couldn’t happen here. Then the ’93 bombings, which killed six people. Two years later, the domestic terrorism in Oklahoma City.
And then Sept. 11.
I moved to another state about a decade after 9/11, but it’s remained in my heart and my head. I listen to the reading of the names every year until one in particular, and I never miss it, no matter what. It’s crucial we remember them. And it’s crucial we remember those we lost, 31 years ago today.
We must never forget.
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Digital media’s decline
Photo by Format on Pexels.com For years, those of us who were in traditional media (TV, radio, newspapers) have either lost jobs or seen them change drastically — or, sometimes both — with the rise of social media and online sites like Gawker, BuzzFeed, Vice Media, Huffington Post and others that are either still here or not.
I’m not here to glorify the Good Old Days of Traditional Media, nor am I here to trample on the graves of the publications, in print and online, that have shuttered. There are way too many to mention. But I keep wondering, as the business models of journalism continue to sputter and fail, just what’s next. Because I don’t see the need for news outlets going away.
For a while, digital news was thought to be journalism’s savior. It could survive, creatively, by mass audiences and by the new economics. But that seems so 2013. Now, unfortunately, that isn’t working out, either. Both BuzzFeed and Vice Media have undergone a number of layoffs and, according to this CNN.com article, are in survival mode.
That’s a shame. I wanted digital media to survive, just as I wanted newspapers and TV and radio to survive. We need it all.
“At one point, the outlets inspired fear in their legacy media competitors, with each valued at billions of dollars while making splashy hires and threatening further disruption. Now, they’re struggling to keep their head above water.”
Nobody wins in this environment.
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It’s a success in my book
Depending on who you listen to, Intuitive Machines’ Odysseus lunar landing is either a success or a partial failure.
They got to the Moon, but the lander ended up tipped over. It may or may not be able to do all the things that it expected. But it’s doing a lot.
“We have quite a bit of operational capability even though we’re tipped over,” Intuitive Machines CEO Steve Altemus said Friday at the mission update.
Guess what? That’s a lot more than there was before landing. And the fact that it’s running, well, that’s a huge accomplishment, for Odysseus, for Intuitive Machines, and for NASA.
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From the Earth to the Moon
The United States is back on the Moon for the first time since 1972. And, for the first time, it’s a private company that’s leading the way.
Inituitive Machines’ Odysseus lander touched down on Thursday evening after a journey from Cape Canaveral, a launch aboard a SpaceX rocket and then the trip to lunar orbit and then, history.
Amazing what we can do.
I followed the last hour or so of the landing, as Odysseus initiated a deb orbit burn and then headed to the surface. There was already a change in the mission, when something didn’t work so they had to improve with the sensors that help it navigate. The webcast was tense and, after the jury-rig for navigation, there were several uncertain moments when it wasn’t clear whether Odysseus had survived.
But then a first signal was heard. Intuitive Machines had successfully landed Odysseus on the Moon.
Amazing what we can do.
I’ve been following the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program, a public-private partnership with NASA to make the Moon more accessible, for a while. I’ve been writing about the race to put a private mission on the Moon since about 2013, starting with the heat of the Google Lunar XPrize competition back then. I’ve written a fair amount about Astrobotic, a Pittsburgh-based company that had formerly been a Lunar XPrize competitor and had always had the long vision of commercializing space. Intuitive Machines was founded around that time out of Houston, and it’s become a public company since then.
Astrobotic, unfortunately, wasn’t able to complete its mission to the Moon earlier this year, after a propellant leak doomed the lander. It was bittersweet to write this story in January about what happened and Astrobotic’s next steps, because it was so close and they had gone through so much. But Intuitive Machines’ success, as well as Astrobotic’s next try, is what is going to start to change space exploration.
We’re one step closer to the day when the Moon and space will be much more accessible places to live and work. I won’t live to see its full potential. I’ve been waiting since the Apollo missions of the early 1970s to see this. But I am confident it will happen.
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‘Masters of the Air’
I watched with interest the promo for “Masters of the Air,” the new miniseries from Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg on Apple TV+. What it depicts is part of my family history.
My grandfather was a B-24 and B-29 aircraft commander and instructor pilot. He didn’t fly in Europe, but still “Masters of the Air” tells a familiar story. I also read the book on the subway and nearly missed my stop a couple times, it was that engrossing. I also gave him a copy before he died.
I have to say that I doubt this miniseries will come close to the power of two of the best WWII movies, “Twelve O’Clock High,” and “The Best Years of Our Lives.” The former is all about the air war over Europe, and comes closer than anything about the psychological as well as full bodily cost of the bomber war. It’s a hard watch even 65 years later, because it’s unsentimental and unsparing and it wasn’t too long after the war. It isn’t telling a feel-good story. Many of those men died in the early days.
“The Best Years” also takes on PTSD and you cannot help but be crushed by Fred’s memories of bombing runs and what it meant to him. Again, this was just after the war and it wasn’t just a movie but real life. I
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Journalist and writer. Loves writing, storytelling, books, typewriters. Always trying to find my line. Oh, and here’s where I am now.
Nows and Forevers 
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