Return to Earth

I'm not quite sure if I'm starting to repeat titles for these "spaceflight posts," but I think it shouldn't matter that much. In any case, I managed to learn after getting back from work that space shuttle Discovery had made a safe landing after a complicated flight. After the previous mission, when a dent in the heat shield was just left (not that I see it as an entirely bad thing to show that not all damage is to panic about), it was interesting to hear about and see work on wiring a snagged solar panel back together; I just may have remembered the salvage work done on Skylab more than thirty years ago. With that, too, the tower that's been sticking up from the space station for years has been taken down, and it looks a bit more like it's "supposed" to look like (if unbalanced once more...)

Also, the "flying lightsabre" was brought back to Earth, which is good too. A little part of me did wonder "Was Luke's 'blue' lightsabre too valuable to send into space?" Still, in some ways being aware of that also makes me aware of how I just may see green lightsabres as more a fundamental part of Star Wars than I used to. That, of course, is a trivial comment to make on a day when some people got back to Earth after genuine space travel.

Will Fandoms Collide?

After noticing in one (previous) day both a thread of unimpressed reactions to the first of the Mystery Science Theater 3000 "animations" and a critical review of one of the "Film Crew" DVDs, it was mildly refreshing to hear about a new post from Joel Hodgson on the "Cinematic Titanic" site. In the post itself, Joel mentioned how an interview with him is going to appear on the official Star Wars site. Unfortunately, I couldn't help but start wondering if this is going to be one of those reviews I only hear about, where the official site-runners let someone get away with bad-mouthing half or more of the saga... Still, that's hardly worthy of the essential optimism Joel Robinson and the bots faced those five and a half seasons of cheesy movies with.