I had hardly anything to do at work all week, and all of a sudden, work arrived this afternoon! Sorry, no movie posts today.

We had an interesting week, but I'll keep most of the details to myself. Shopping, errands, walks to uptown, visits with landlords, watching movies, and working out filled most of my evenings. This weekend we're going to a party with lots of food tomorrow, but we're not scheduled for anything else, so give us a call if anyone out there gets bored. :)

Recently it seems that the media has been really down on NASA. The whole Lisa Nowak story and drunk astronaut story didn't help. Then talk radio and editorial boards jumped on the bandwagon. Why do we spend so much on space exploration when that money can be spent here on the ground in the US? A brief but good article can be found here (via NASA Watch).

I tend to think that the railing about NASA says something about the lack of journalistic standards/ethics and even more about the state of science education in the US. Consider the op/ed piece written in the Houston Chronicle here (Johnson Space Center director Mike Coats' response is here). In particular read through the comment section. You see, the Chronicle piece attributed an explosion the killed two people to NASA, when in reality the responsible party was Scaled Composites, a private NASA competitor. The irony pointed out by a commenter is that perfection is demanded of the world's most complicated machine and those who work on it, yet fact checking a simple opinion article is beyond the scope of the author's duty. It should be noted that the offending bullet point has since been removed from the article, though no retraction was issued that I know of. The op/ed also criticized the alcohol story, which now appears to be without merit. You might not know that, because even though the drunk astronaut headlines were splashed across websites, papers, and television for several days, when a report found no evidence of boozing astronauts was released this week, you hardly heard about it.

It's also not just people with a forum espousing their ill informed opinions. Check out this article posted on Yahoo! news, which contains this line:

The only moon landing in history is NASA's Apollo expedition in 1968.

I don't even know what to say about this.

How does such terrible science reporting get printed? I sense that it is directly linked to the science education of our country. At the university level, our schools are educating more and more foreign students and less and less Americans. I've done no research on the theories, but why do you think this is? What are America's potential scientists and engineers studying?

I'll end by saying that we could use some more journalists with science/engineering backgrounds. Is there a track for that at journalism schools? How can it be encouraged? I do believe that it would be easier for a scientist to become a writer, than vice versa.

My Boring Ass Life: The Uncomfortably Candid Diary of Kevin Smith by Kevin Smith

The Books of Magic by Neil Gaiman

From a Buick 8 by Stephen King

Harlan Ellison's Watching by Harlan Ellison

Last night I saw the Bronx at Double Door, FOR FREE. If you haven't heard them yet, they are absolutely the best rock n' roll band around right now. The show was completely energetic. Vocalist Scott Caughthran has the coolest voice. He ran around the pit during "They Will Kill Us All (Without Mercy)" and didn't miss a note. I was blown away. Did I mention it was free?

The shame of it all is that the club was maybe three-quarters packed, but that probably had more to do with the fact that it was a mid-week show and the band went onstage close to midnight. But it was worth losing sleep for. They performed practically their entire catalog, which isn't difficult since they have only released two albums so far, both of which are self-titled.

A bonus was hanging with a couple guys I worked with before we were laid off. We used to talk about the Bronx every day at work, so it was a blast to see the band with them.

Think Progress, a liberal blog that reports on daily political developments, has found that its site is now banned by the US military network, so that soldiers serving in Iraq cannot access it.

Furthermore, they claim that the ban went into effect "sometime shortly after Aug. 22," when they published an op-ed from retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste that criticizes US involvement in the war.

No comments from me this time. Just...interesting.

Well, that was fast. Kevin made it official today that he won't be directing an episode of Battlestar Galactica. There was a scheduling snafu and the episode will be directed by John Dahl instead. That's a bummer, but at least Kevin will have more time for his other projects. He just finished the script for Red State, which is a horror film. Should be interesting.