How the Lunar Module REALLY worked. Apparently.

[gillianren]

Never seen Blazing Saddles? I envy the first time experience if you do.

Dated, but still funny!

If you enjoy certain types of humour.  If you don't, it's awful and tedious.

[Bryanpoprobson]

Never seen Blazing Saddles? I envy the first time experience if you do.

Dated, but still funny!

If you enjoy certain types of humour.  If you don't, it's awful and tedious.

Comes into the top twenty, of nearly every all time comedy list, and is number 1 in many. Not my personal no 1 but certainly in a top 10 with Life of Brian at the head.

[Zakalwe]

If you enjoy certain types of humour.  If you don't, it's awful and tedious.

To be fair, you can say that about anything, can't you? Especially humour.

De gustibus non est disputandum and all that.

[dwight]

Kiwi, you got it on the nosie! I also like the Moon Machine series!

[Al Johnston]

Never seen Blazing Saddles? I envy the first time experience if you do.

Dated, but still funny!

If you enjoy certain types of humour.  If you don't, it's awful and tedious.

I can forgive a lot for this scene:

[raven]

It's twoo, it's twoo!
(OK, Young Frankenstein, but still. Actually, I think I like that one better myself, for all the effort it goes into making it an authentic feeling parody/homage.)

[BazBear]

...Some of my favourite DVDs are the ones detailing how the AGC was developed, or the food prep, for example.

Would that be the Spacecraft Films DVD Set, "Mission to the Moon"?  If so, I was so intrigued by the extremely good part about the AGC that I did a full typescript or everything that was said. Sample below.

If anyone would like a copy PM me with your email address.  It's five pages of Arial 9-point in Open Document Format (.odt). It is very informative about how the AGC was made and about the rigorous testing of the parts.

<snipped>

Kiwi was kind enough to send me a copy of his excellent transcript. But as I started reading it, I realized I had seen this documentary somewhere, and figured it had to be on YouTube. I searched for it, and sure enough, there it was Computer For Apollo.

[Luke Pemberton]

Kiwi, you got it on the nosie! I also like the Moon Machine series!

Thanks for that post Dwight, I have revisited this series over the last couple of days. I really like the focus on the development of the Apollo hardware and how the story of development is interlaced with the missions. The CM episode is particularly sad as the engineers involved talk about the Apollo 1 accident.

[raven]

I love the human stories that are told, like the lady working on the spacesuits jabbing the lady who left a colour coded pin in one of the suits in the sit-upon. Or the engineer who, for security reasons, had to sleep with the spacesuits in his motel room when he was on route delivering them to NASA.
My biggest gripe is the freaking narrator. I don't watch many documentaries, but he sounded so bored and lethargic, I thought he was going to fall asleep.

[JayUtah]

I'll leave the debunking of the pseudoscience/engineering in this gem of an article to our resident experts...

There really isn't much to debunk.  First, the design and operation of the lunar module according to ordinary principles of rocketry is well established and well documented, and has contributed extensively to ongoing space engineering.  Proposing it to be an elaborate ruse belies that it would have to be a very elaborate ruse -- so elaborate, in fact, that it would have worked as advertised, and is believed and consulted by every practicing space engineer out there.  The 3,500-lbf Aerojet ascent motor that this author says wasn't used managed to work as an upper-stage motor in launch vehicles well into the 1980s.  The guidance system he said wasn't installed (covering for a 200-year-old electrostatic generator design) managed to operate a U.S. military jet well into the 1970s.

Second, the scenario proposed is pure technobabble.  It alludes to a few principles in high-voltage physics, but provides no "meat" that would necessarily come from an expert on the subject.  It's clearly meant to fool laymen.

Veterans Today has a particular brand of stupid.  Their modus is to handwave a bunch of nonsense above the name of someone with nebulous or ill-fitting credentials and assert that you have to believe the "experts."  This is the outfit, for example, that publishes James Fetzer's anti-Semitic rants and Dimitri Khalezov's nonsense about nukes on 9/11.

[ka9q]

Never seen Blazing Saddles? I envy the first time experience if you do.

Dated, but still funny!

I think it has actually withstood the test of time pretty well. Ever since Richard Pryor (one of the primary writers) died there's been a long drought in well-done racial satire. Sometimes I think Key & Peele are channeling his ghost. They certainly demonstrate, as Pryor did, that sometimes the best way to get a very serious message across to people is to make them laugh themselves silly.

[ka9q]

A lot of good science fiction takes the premise 'Yes, this is impossible, but what if it wasn't . . .?"

I'd change that a little: A lot of good science fiction takes the premise "This is possible, though we haven't figured out how to do it yet. But what if we did...?"

Most of what passes for 'science fiction' these days is really fantasy. IMHO, real science fiction, sometimes called 'hard' science fiction, doesn't run roughshod over the known laws of physics. It makes one or two imaginative extrapolations (eg., an encounter with extraterrestrial intelligence) but otherwise stays within the bounds of known physics.

It's much harder to write. Not only do you have to know your physics, you can't just change it willy-nilly to get your characters out of whatever jam they've gotten into. For a while it seemed that Star Trek: The Next Generation discovered a new subatomic particle every week, usually some form of tachyon.

[ka9q]

Sometimes I think Key & Peele are channeling his ghost.

Example: Obama Teaches Malia to Drive. It's on Youtube. If you don't think this is one of the funniest things you've ever seen, well...

[twik]

The hardest I ever laughed at Blazing Saddles was one time it was shown on TV. When the beans scene came on, it appeared that the network had decided that bodily function humour was not appropriate. Instead of cutting the scene entirely, they decided to remove the noises. So, the viewers got about two minutes of cowboys sitting around a campfire, in complete silence. Absolutely nothing funny occurred. For some reason, this was hysterical to me.

[Bryanpoprobson]

The hardest I ever laughed at Blazing Saddles was one time it was shown on TV. When the beans scene came on, it appeared that the network had decided that bodily function humour was not appropriate. Instead of cutting the scene entirely, they decided to remove the noises. So, the viewers got about two minutes of cowboys sitting around a campfire, in complete silence. Absolutely nothing funny occurred. For some reason, this was hysterical to me.

That would have tickled my funny bone too. The other one that networks do, not for Blazing Saddles, but when some real villain swears. Normally there is a close up of this real angry person holding a gun and the words, "Forget you!" come out, kills me every time, who actually thought up that replacement profanity?