The truth is out there
16Here in the comment section of meh, we are no strangers to having a strong opinion about things. Or using appropriate language appropriately.
Today, I want to talk about one of the more divisive controversy running around out there.
Not Protestant vs Catholic or other religious labels, or SEC vs PAC 10. Not even miracle whip vs. mayonnaise.
No, this is the biggie.
Moon landing - hoax vs real. Did we really go to the moon? Really put people out there, up there, on it, and bring them home?
An air and space engineering company in town advertised having an actual space suit on display, open to the public, come on down and take a selfie.
I loaded up the kids and we stood in line and I took their picture. The Boy asked me, “Was it real?” A real suit? There it is, I said. No, he was asking if it was true that our country spent a boatload of money and time to put a man on the moon.
Fortunately, he used his polite, inside the library voice… not!
His earnest question, which I was surprised he had, immediately drew response from people in line.
Of course it was real! It was a hoax! No one knows! Cannot trust the government to tell the truth, ya know. We stood in line and listened. The Girl asked me, why are they arguing? Of course we put Louis Armstrong on the moon. (She was close) The Boy snorted, do you really believe that?
The discussion was lively as we waited for our turn for a selfie. We heard about film on film, actors, why it is impossible to leave orbit, why it is impossible to return. Why it couldn’t have been done then, cannot be done now.
We heard that we DID do it, greatest accomplishment by mankind, of course it was real. Some people got worked up, others merely shook their head.
Honestly, the kids were kind of bored by it all. I bribed them to be there, I thought it an opportunity.
My dad retired from that company, by a different name. He was proud of the involvement with the Apollo program. When the company evolved, and offices were being torn out, he salvaged dozens of glossy 8 by 10 color photographs with labels on the back explaining what they contained. He brought them home and had an arrangement on his office wall. I grew up seeing that arrangement and he talked about the accomplishment, the challenges, and how a group of motivated engineers could accomplish anything they set their mind to. (Teleportals would be nice, Dad. If we can fax a 3D object, why not people)
I think if Dad had been in that line, he would have shook his head and classified the doubters as morons, or flat earth followers (oh! Other great controversy) and, hopefully, ignored them.
Well, I took my kids to see the suit. I thought it was pretty neat.
Then I took the kids for ice cream and ruined their appetite for supper
- 14 comments, 32 replies
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Nice dad/mom shorts.
@mike808 I think that’s what the kids are thinking.
Umm, it’s real…duuuhhh! We have cheese.
@ybmuG
Bonus points for this!
@blaineg I wondered if anyone would pick up on that. I listen to that classic every thanksgiving to keep it alive.
@blaineg @JnKL I caught it even before I finished reading the sentence. Made me laugh. Haven’t heard it in like forever though. Will try to make an effort this Thanksgiving.
NASA hired Kubrick to fake it, but he’s such a perfectionist, he filmed it on location.
@blaineg There’s actually some basis for Kubrick being involved. NASA lended Kubrick a low-light lens to be used in the movie “Barry Lyndon” for the rights to use the “Space Odyssey 2001” moon set. People such as Donald Rumsfeld said it was true that they did in fact fake a moon landing video on that set just in case Apollo 11 did not make it.
Since they did make it to the moon (we have the rocks they brought back to prove it), the fake video mysteriously disappeared.
@blaineg @cengland0 interesting write-up on the french mockumentary Opération Lune (English title: Dark Side of the Moon) on the whole Kubrick fakery and involvement of Rumsfeld and others:
https://www.quora.com/When-did-the-rumours-of-Stanley-Kubrick-filming-the-Moon-Landings-begin
My favorite response:
@blaineg while violence is never the answer, I don’t blame him for going there.
@blaineg @JnKL I blame the libelous turd for the equal to yelling “fire” in a theatre. It was reckless endangerment of the public commons of knowledge and intentionally provoked by declaring as fact that another person’s life experience was non-factual. He got an instant Darwin award for publicly mis-stating and confusing his opinion with facts. Right up there with anti-vaxxers (thank Allah they self-select themselves out of the population eventually), flat-earthers, and climate change deniers (who unfortunately may self-select all life as we know it out of the planet).
Both-siderism is bullshit and not productive public discourse or responsible journalism.
He is entitled to his opinion, but he is not entitled to his own set of facts.
@blaineg I’m so that lady walking away—I’d miss the big moment by only a fraction of a second.
So … During the height of the Cold War, according to some, we faked several moon landings.
And our mortal enemies at the time, the Red Russkies, who had the tech to track all that lunar activity, for some reason, decided to let us get away with the deception?;
even tho they could have taken us on big-time over the fake, and scored a huge propaganda win, if they outed the supposed lie.
The fact that the Russies didn’t out us means…
Either we actually went …
Or we must have offered them the best bribe ever.
Maybe Nixon and Kissenger spent all night at the WH baking Toll House cookies for the Kremlin payoff.
And of course the Russkies weren’t the only nation who could track the entire thing.
That’s a whole lotta cookies there, for everyone to keep quiet about it all.
/giphy moon cookie
@f00l That is a great argument that I’d never heard before.
I usually just go with the Occam’s razor argument that it’d be much more difficult to successfully hide such a complex hoax for all these years than to actually put humans on the moon.
Your’s is essentially the same argument but with much more convincing specifics.
@DennisG2014 @f00l That is a great anti-conspiracy theory, I hadn’t heard it before either.
When my kid was a bit over 10 there was a full moon close to the horizon so really large. I told her that people had been to the moon (I adopted her from SE Asia). She told me that wasn’t true. I asked her why not. She said there wasn’t a ladder tall enough.
I then bought the DVD of the moon landing “For all mankind”. After viewing that she told me it was all Hollywood. She believes now, but back then it seems incredibly far fetched to her.
A neighbor of my grandmother didn’t believe people had been to the moon. As kids we had no luck convincing him they really had. As we would launch rockets using the car battery (they had parachutes so we could try to find them when they landed to use again), when one landed somewhere we couldn’t find on his property (farmland) we were hoping that if he found it he’d believe aliens had landed.
@Kidsandliz that’s such a good movie. I got chills!
@UncleVinny I was so glad I knew about it and bought the DVD. It was amazing (for folks that haven’t seen it - home videos of the astronauts and some “mission control” stuff too).
My kid had lived a stone age existence in Cambodia and in 36 hours was transported from that to the space age. So much was so new to her. She once said, “America like the moon or something”.
confusion and mis-direction, so often used to hide the fact that aliens took over the US government in 2008 after we brought back their trojan-horse artifacts from our so-called “moon landings”!
Here we see more examples, as this is not an Apollo spacesuit, but a Space Shuttle suit, not the model A7L (which was described as “almost cuddly”.)
And why are some of the labels and indicators on this suit mirrored backward?
Are they added from some other photograph? and why does the edge between the boy’s head and the arm of the spacesuit look so photoshoppy?
And you can see, through careful pixel-level image analysis, the same type of light-exclusion areas reflected in the face shields of both suits …
@stolicat you are on to something…
@stolicat Not sure how serious you are, but your questions about the suit piqued my curiosity, so…
“An actual space suit” - no mention of Apollo missions or lunar landings, so nothing fishy about it being from the shuttle era.
I would bet you a large sum of money that the suit would have a mirror on the forearm so that the astronaut could see those controls, and the labels are mirrored so they wouldn’t get confused trying to read them in the mirror.
@DennisG2014 that was my theory on the backwards lettering also, as they seem to be controls for the suit pressure and maybe the air mixture, and a mirror was their solution for making them readable in that position.
And of course I was deadly serious about the trojan-horse artifacts and light-exclusion …
@stolicat Poe’s law strikes again.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@DennisG2014 i try to make them as absurd as possible, but I guess that’s almost impossible nowadays …
@stolicat
/image can’t tell if serious
@DennisG2014 @stolicat
“If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, thought, you have to be pretty technical before you can even aspire to crudeness.”
William Gibson
Well, I think we can all agree that we put Louis Armstrong into space, and from there it’s not much of a leap…
@aetris where else would he have the perspective to write “What a Wonderful World”? And then going on to cheat his way to winning the Tour-de-France. Trully an amazing human being…or something…
@aetris @sicc574 they named a midwestern hockey team after him
@JnKL Was it Astronaut ice cream? My grandparents had a dear family friend who worked on the early space missions. In fact, he helped design the space capsule flotation collars used during splash down.
On trips to see our grandparents, every once in awhile he’d stop by and we’d be treated to something space related, whether it be a small sheet of something resembling mylar, to nutrition/meal bars shaped like Slim Jims & tasting like very old cookie dough, or even freeze-dried “astronaut ice cream.”
I have very faint memories of visiting Miss Baker in her little compound, but as a kid I couldn’t grasp her importance. I was at that age where going to the moon didn’t seem to be a big deal. We had cars, and trains, TV and electricity, microscopes, airplanes and telephones. Of COURSE man could go to the moon. Humans could do anything!
Yeah, no doubt in my mind we went to the moon. Now, whether the astronauts actually drank Tang on their missions…I’m not so sure.
Miss Baker
@LaVikinga page not found. bummed.
@jrwofuga Well, hell. Try this link: https://thepulsepensacola.com/2016/03/the-monkey-astronauts-who-helped-pave-the-way-for-manned-spaceflight/
@LaVikinga interesting!
@LaVikinga It was freeze dried stuff that theoretically, when you add cold water, will taste just like it did before you removed all the water. Except in my opinion either the original was crappy to begin with or something happens dehydrating and then rehydrating it.
You can still try some if you want to. It is sold in many museum stores and in many places that sell freeze dried food for camping.
@Kidsandliz I think I ran across the ice cream not too long ago when visiting the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola. My memory of the being unimpressed with the stuff as a kid was enough to prevent me from forking over a pretty penny to try it again.
Pillsbury sold space food sticks back in 2 or 3 flavors in the 70’s. The manufacturing was taken over by a different company in the early 2000’s, and they can be purchased in a few musuem gift shops–probably on line, too.
Frankly, squishing up a Little Debbie Brownie and rolling it into logs will give you a better bang for your buck (and probably taste better).
@Kidsandliz @LaVikinga as much as I love astronaut ice cream, it didn’t ever go to space. The crumbliness would be terrible for all the electronics. Don’t know why they just don’t call it freeze dried ice cream. Guess it wouldn’t be as popular.
My favorites are the ice cream sandwich and the mint chocolate chip.
Freeze dried stuff is fun. I love the crunchiness.
Take them to the Space Museum in Bonne Terre, MO.
http://www.space-mo.org/
The Science Center in St. Louis also has a lot of artifacts. http://slsc.org
If someone is convinced that the moon landings are fake, what is the possible appeal to show up and see a space suit? (speaking of the adults in line, not your son. You already said he was bribed)
I guess I shouldn’t be looking for logical decisions for that subset of the population.
IMO Space was the bigger accomplishment, and Russia had the lead. Though we did bring back some nice rocks. Hey, they still haven’t landed on me! I’m just as important… right? No? I need some chocolate.
@PlutoIsAPlanet there there Pluto, you will always be a planet in my book.
@thismyusername
I always liked xkcd’s explanation:
@billyrogers I think that is pretty funny!