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I was bored, so I watched the movie that astronauts must view before launch:
Sometime Wednesday, perhaps around the time this article is published, NASA astronaut Chris Cassidy and his two Russian crew mates—Anatoly Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner—will repair to their quarantine crew quarters for movie night in the Cosmonaut Hotel.
[...] The Russians have the oldest space program in the world and by far the most traditions and superstitions related to launch, including peeing on the wheel of the bus that takes the crew to the launch pad—a tradition that dates back to Yuri Gagarin's first human spaceflight in 1961.
Among those traditions is watching a movie[*] the day before launch in the Cosmonaut Hotel. It's always the same movie, White Sun of the Desert. No one is quite sure why this Soviet-era film, which came out in 1970, is always watched (yes, it's mandatory). But it likely dates to Soyuz 12, in 1973, when cosmonauts Vasily Lazarev and Oleg Makarov watched the movie before their mission. This return-to-flight mission followed the disastrous Soyuz 11 flight two years earlier, when the spacecraft depressurized as the crew prepared to reenter Earth's atmosphere, killing all three men. Soyuz 12 proved a success, and the movie came to be seen as a good luck charm. Since then, over the course of five decades, the Soyuz has never lost a crew.
[...] The film has nothing to do with space. However, I do think the symbolism of [the main character] Sukhov being far from home and his wife might hold parallels for astronauts about to fly into space, far from their loved ones back on Earth. They will be in the vast expanses of space rather than the empty dunes of the desert, but they will be lonely all the same.
[*] Available on YouTube.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2020, @04:56PM (7 children)
Lost my job, Lost my home, Lost my wife, Lost my dog, Lost my new shopping cart of personal items, Lost my bank account, Lost my shoes, Lost my clothes (except on my back), Lost my phone, Lost my friends, Lost my family, Lost my self worth, Lost my mask (j/k, couldn't afford one)...
But I'm sure the one time payment of $1k will stimulate me in ways I could only imagine! USA! USA! USA! Four more years!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Pslytely Psycho on Thursday April 09 2020, @04:59PM (3 children)
There is a hit traditional country song in there somewhere just waiting to be teased out!
Alex Jones lawyer inspires new TV series: CSI Moron Division.
(Score: 0, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2020, @05:04PM
"There is a hit traditional country song in there somewhere just waiting to be teased out!'
FUCKING. GOLDEN.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday April 09 2020, @07:12PM
He only referred to his mama in passing, as part of "family", and failed to say anything about trains, or prison, or rain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCvi714T8vo [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Thursday April 09 2020, @08:34PM
Some comedian asked what would happen if you play a country song backwards: you get your house back, your wife back, your dog back, your truck back...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 09 2020, @05:07PM
My wife left me but I got to keep the real doll modeled after Roseanne Barr. Oh, Rosie, you're so nutty!
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Ethanol-fueled on Thursday April 09 2020, @07:03PM (1 child)
There are plenty of services the homeless can use to get back on their feet if you're willing to lay off the crack and the meth and use some of that spare change you panhandled to get a cheap Bic razor and do what you can to avoid looking like a total shitbag. But if you can even somehow access your Trump-bucks, I have faith that you will spend it all on dope and junk food, perhaps a few ten-dollar prostitutes.
Goddamn, I used to have such empathy for the homeless, even donating to a homeless cause once. Now I see them as nothing more than clownish verminous pests, and believe that it should be legal to shoot the violent ones on sight -- maybe we should start having bounties on the violent ones like farmers pay bounties for coyotes and lock the nonviolent ones up involuntarily in comfortable Sweden-style prisons.
People fall on hard times and crash on couches or live out of their cars from time to time, I get that. But the ones who fall into total bumville in cities with shitloads of homeless resources and minimum-wage jobs get no fucking sympathy from me. Those fucking shitheads have zero respect for others' property and person.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 11 2020, @04:10AM
Of the roughly 554,000 homeless people in the US on any given night, about 40,000 of them are veterans. Many of those veterans have difficulty reintegrating into society because they suffer from mental illnesses due to their experiences in combat. Some of the homeless people who are aggressive may be exhibiting symptoms of PTSD from their time in combat. Whether you agree with the wars, we sent these people into combat, to fight our wars for us. When they struggle with the effects from the combat we sent them into, shall we just shoot them?