Someone alert the overwrought metaphor police.

Worst. Glanville column. Ever.

I bet Glanville is vegan.

So many words.

#### this column, I declare a thread hijack on the theme of ... SPACE!

Neil Armstrong has died.

This makes me sad.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be an astronaut. Still do.

RIP Neil.

That said, The Right Stuff makes Armstrong out to be something of a tool.

In honor of Neil, I give you all this:

In 1969, Neil Armstrong beat every Lunar Lander player and everyone else who has ever held the controls to anything ever. Apollo 11 was on its way to becoming history when that almost became an action movie line instead of a dramatic one. First the lunar module computer started flashing up "executive overflow" errors, saying that it had too much to do and would get back to some of these calculations later. Since these were the "NOT crashing into the moon" calculations, it was a bit of a concern. Ground controllers saved the mission by heroically working out that this was literally a non-fatal error, while Aldrin and Armstrong saved the mission by stoically soaring toward the moon's surface anyway until they did that.

That's when Armstrong noticed that the jittery computer was about to pull a younger-sister Mario by relentlessly steering them to death. The programmed landing site had looked fine under telescope observation, but was full of lander-destroying boulders under "inside that lander" observation. With a few hundred thousand miles on the clock and less than a minute of fuel remaining, Neil was damned if he was turning the car around and going home. So as well as being the first person on the moon, he got to be the first person to save space by pulling manual override and steering the ship himself. With a life expectancy measured in seconds, he and Buzz calmly surveyed the surface of the moon and found the most important parking space in history.

Cracked.

When I was growing up, I wanted to be an astronaut. Still do.

I'm a middle aged, fat, paper pusher in real life, but me too.

Armstrong, Aldrin, Collins ... Glenn, Lovell, Shepard on through folks like Ride and Husband teach us that there is nothing a person can't do when we reach for the stars.

That said, The Right Stuff makes Armstrong out to be something of a tool.

We want the best pilots... that we can get.

Well ####.

There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die. Their controls would freeze up, their planes would buffet wildly, and they would disintegrate. The demon lived at Mach 1 on the meter, seven hundred and fifty miles an hour, where the air could no longer move out of the way. He lived behind a barrier through which they said no man could ever pass. They called it the sound barrier.

That said, The Right Stuff makes Armstrong out to be something of a tool.

You must be thinking of John Glenn, Armstrong is barely in The Right Stuff, and then only as a X-15 pilot that gets selected in the next group of astronauts.

If Clemens came back and was suspended 50 games, it would be an early Christmas present.

There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die.

I watched that movie so many times when I was 8-9 years old that I wore the vcr tape through, then taped it together and watched it some more. It's probably about 80% of the reason I became an aero engineer.

(The rest being the fact that my eyes weren't good enough to fly, and I missed the lasik window by a year or two).

I bet Glanville is vegan.

I seriously doubt it. Last pic I saw of him, a guy who was a bitty little sparkplug kind of player when active must have weighed 250 pounds.

And rock on Mr. Armstrong.

But on that glorious day in May 1963, Gordo Cooper went higher, farther, and faster than any other American - 22 complete orbits around the world; he was the last American ever to go into space alone. And for a brief moment, Gordo Cooper became the greatest pilot anyone had ever seen.

Chief Scientist: I agree with those who say we could launch a pod.
Lyndon Johnson: A pot?
Chief Scientist: A POD - a, uh, capsule. Now, we would be in full control of zis pod. It vill go up like a cannonball, and come down like, uh, a cannonball, splashing down into ze water, the ocean, vith a parachute to spare the life of the specimen inside.
Lyndon Johnson: Spaceman?
Chief Scientist: SPE-CI-MEN.
Lyndon Johnson: Well, what kind of spe-ci-men?
Chief Scientist: A tough one. Responsive to orders. I had in mind a jimp.
Lyndon Johnson: JIMP? Well what the HELL is a jimp?
Chief Scientist: A jimp. A-a-a jimpanzee, Senator. An ape.

Harry Shearer? Jeff Goldblum??

#### ... and ...YES!!!

[edit] Well, and Chuck Yeager himself ...

Neil (who spent a good chunk of years as an honest-to-god professor...teaching, researching, etc.) would really work to avoid answering questions about the moon landing. BUT...if you had the opportunity to just sit and chat with him, it seems he couldn't resist going into stories about it (as you'd rightly expect). One of the favorites seems to have been about how he and Buzz accidentally broke off a switch on the landing and ended up using the shaft of a ball point pen as a stand-in such that they were able to launch the lander from the surface. The faculty whose office is next to mine will probably spend much of the next week retelling stories he got from Neil...and we'll all be darn happy to hear them again.

Folks from UC have talked about all the gyrations the poor man had to go through to avoid autograph seeking (I believe he did some chunk of autographs each day on behalf of NASA), yet still interact in office hours with students. Someone mentioned how students used to semi-scale the wall outside his office area to look through the windows to catch a glimpse of him.

I'm sure we'll do something on Monday on our campus...probably right by the his statue in front of the building we managed to get named for him in (plenty of) time. I just hope we can do something for Gene in time, too....