w00t w00t booyah

One of the drawbacks of having a memory that works like mine does (just about photographic, but not quite) is that when I remember a thing, it often does not come with the association of present day.

No, if I remember a thing I dealt with at age fourteen or so, remembering it *instantly* removes me back to a house with rotten linoleum flooring badly laid, no air conditioning in the summer and I'm sitting at the kitchen table on a stack of phone books so I can reach the keys of the typewriter, typing away (looking for my little brother sneaking a peek over my shoulder so he can torment me with the information later) for hours and hours. I would literally do this until either my butt quit or my shoulders hurt too much to continue. At fourteen - that's a lot of typing.

The typewriter, I still have - Dad used to type prescription labels on it in the pharmacy, and that business was gone before 1966, so no. It wasn't an electric.

And I read anything I could get that was Star Trek. At that point, you had 79 hours, that's it, of television - there were no VCRs, let alone DVDs or laserdiscs. The Star Trek novels we have lining the shelves of used book stores? Nope. If you were fortunate to know about it, you knew about Star Trek Lives!, and maybe you had written to Shirley Maiewski and gotten a copy of the Star Trek Welcommittee, so you could actually look up some of the fan fics mentioned.

Which I had.

I can't hear the name Gagarin without stepping back into my much younger self, reading Alternate Universe Four, and I'm reading about a planet named Gagarin, which is described as kind and unpretentious, peaceful and restful. Turning the word over in my head, trying to figure out how to say it and thinking it was a pretty nifty name for someone to come up with out of the ether.

Because I'd never heard of Yuri Gagarin.

I could tell you who flew all the Apollo missions, recite the names of the Gemini astronauts and had a silent 8mm movie with Ed White doing a spacewalk in it. But what I knew of the Soviet space program was that they made their astronauts land on the ground because they didn't dare allow them to land in the oceans - they might get away! (Hand to ghad.) And well, that was just mean - didn't you think so? That's it.

(The fact that we are now relying entirely on the Russian space program today for transport to and from the international space station just makes me smile. Because I can't really make it clear why this is so ironic anymore.)

It shouldn't be a surprise I became a student of popular culture after I discovered just how much of an impact what we had seen - and what had been omitted - became clearer and clearer as time went on.

Snapping a pencil was an act of violence in the late seventies, and counted the same as a gunshot. Maude did a two parter that involved her getting pregnant (yes, really) and her decision to terminate the pregnancy. It aired once, and the second part had such a disclaimer aired in front of it, I swore it was going to have a nuclear bomb or something in the middle of it. We got Starsky & Hutch and then Hill Street Blues. Reagan took office amid hits like Dallas and Dynasty took over.

Satellite and cable television owners won their case in court, and all of a sudden - nobody was responsible for content any longer. At the same time, cable companies discovered they could draw audiences with channels targeted to much smaller audiences (like all news/all the time CNN). Advertising dollars fell through the floor and the networks went to the much cheaper (in every way, including taste) 'reality' TV. Star Trek? Put out the very first direct-to-syndication sale with Next Gen, and the last time I checked? Star Trek had turned into 'how fast can we get everyone out of their shirts?' But I digress.

It wasn't overnight, but after 1989? And even moreso after 1991? I knew who Boris Yeltsin was. And soon after that? I found out about Yuri's Night And people talk now about Yuri Gagarin being the first human being in space. (Up to then? John Glenn, doncha know?)

(I also found out Ed White had died in the Apollo 1 fire, and cried. A lot. He'd been dead all the years I had loved that little bit of film of him losing that glove during his spacewalk. No, nobody ever talked about the Apollo 1 fire. Nobody talked about a lot of things in those years.)

I remember the not knowing and that's the wackiest part of all. I remember what that was like.

Today, I can send a message on Twitter to Buzz Aldrin with reasonable certainty he'll get it. I can find people I haven't seen in forty years on Facebook - and we talk again (and fight, hooray).

A Russian company hosts this little bit of free speech. The news, back in the day? Was a public service that lasted an hour. And I can't help but wonder if that wasn't the proper focus for such things.

I remember doing research in the library, running through card catalogs and stacks of books. Today, I query Google and it goes much faster.

But I know who Gagarin is. And it is a who, not a what - and I am grateful to a fan fic author for having the willingness to name a planet after him.

And I now know how to pronounce it.

One of the drawbacks of having a memory that works like mine does (just about photographic, but not quite) is that when I remember a thing, it often does not come with the association of present day.

No, if I remember a thing I dealt with at age fourteen or so, remembering it *instantly* removes me back to a house with rotten linoleum flooring badly laid, no air conditioning in the summer and I'm sitting at the kitchen table on a stack of phone books so I can reach the keys of the typewriter, typing away (looking for my little brother sneaking a peek over my shoulder so he can torment me with the information later) for hours and hours. I would literally do this until either my butt quit or my shoulders hurt too much to continue. At fourteen - that's a lot of typing.

The typewriter, I still have - Dad used to type prescription labels on it in the pharmacy, and that business was gone before 1966, so no. It wasn't an electric.

And I read anything I could get that was Star Trek. At that point, you had 79 hours, that's it, of television - there were no VCRs, let alone DVDs or laserdiscs. The Star Trek novels we have lining the shelves of used book stores? Nope. If you were fortunate to know about it, you knew about Star Trek Lives!, and maybe you had written to Shirley Maiewski and gotten a copy of the Star Trek Welcommittee, so you could actually look up some of the fan fics mentioned.

Which I had.

I can't hear the name Gagarin without stepping back into my much younger self, reading Alternate Universe Four, and I'm reading about a planet named Gagarin, which is described as kind and unpretentious, peaceful and restful. Turning the word over in my head, trying to figure out how to say it and thinking it was a pretty nifty name for someone to come up with out of the ether.

Because I'd never heard of Yuri Gagarin.

I could tell you who flew all the Apollo missions, recite the names of the Gemini astronauts and had a silent 8mm movie with Ed White doing a spacewalk in it. But what I knew of the Soviet space program was that they made their astronauts land on the ground because they didn't dare allow them to land in the oceans - they might get away! (Hand to ghad.) And well, that was just mean - didn't you think so? That's it.

(The fact that we are now relying entirely on the Russian space program today for transport to and from the international space station just makes me smile. Because I can't really make it clear why this is so ironic anymore.)

It shouldn't be a surprise I became a student of popular culture after I discovered just how much of an impact what we had seen - and what had been omitted - became clearer and clearer as time went on.

Snapping a pencil was an act of violence in the late seventies, and counted the same as a gunshot. Maude did a two parter that involved her getting pregnant (yes, really) and her decision to terminate the pregnancy. It aired once, and the second part had such a disclaimer aired in front of it, I swore it was going to have a nuclear bomb or something in the middle of it. We got Starsky & Hutch and then Hill Street Blues. Reagan took office amid hits like Dallas and Dynasty took over.

Satellite and cable television owners won their case in court, and all of a sudden - nobody was responsible for content any longer. At the same time, cable companies discovered they could draw audiences with channels targeted to much smaller audiences (like all news/all the time CNN). Advertising dollars fell through the floor and the networks went to the much cheaper (in every way, including taste) 'reality' TV. Star Trek? Put out the very first direct-to-syndication sale with Next Gen, and the last time I checked? Star Trek had turned into 'how fast can we get everyone out of their shirts?' But I digress.

It wasn't overnight, but after 1989? And even moreso after 1991? I knew who Boris Yeltsin was. And soon after that? I found out about Yuri's Night And people talk now about Yuri Gagarin being the first human being in space. (Up to then? John Glenn, doncha know?)

(I also found out Ed White had died in the Apollo 1 fire, and cried. A lot. He'd been dead all the years I had loved that little bit of film of him losing that glove during his spacewalk. No, nobody ever talked about the Apollo 1 fire. Nobody talked about a lot of things in those years.)

I remember the not knowing and that's the wackiest part of all. I remember what that was like.

Today, I can send a message on Twitter to Buzz Aldrin with reasonable certainty he'll get it. I can find people I haven't seen in forty years on Facebook - and we talk again (and fight, hooray).

A Russian company hosts this little bit of free speech. The news, back in the day? Was a public service that lasted an hour. And I can't help but wonder if that wasn't the proper focus for such things.

I remember doing research in the library, running through card catalogs and stacks of books. Today, I query Google and it goes much faster.

But I know who Gagarin is. And it is a who, not a what - and I am grateful to a fan fic author for having the willingness to name a planet after him.

And I now know how to pronounce it.