wolfpangs | Jai guru deva om.

I meant to post this a month ago when I read it but I forgot. So, here it is now! When the Germans, and Rockets, Came to Town, a piece in the Times about the effect of the space program on Huntsville.

"In 1950, this cotton market town in northern Alabama lost a bid for a military aviation project that would have revived its mothballed arsenal. The consolation prize was dubious: 118 German rocket scientists who had surrendered to the Americans during World War II, led by a man — a crackpot, evidently — who claimed humans could visit the moon."

I love this kind of stuff. Not just the fact that it's about Alabama but the extraordinary vision and hope that von Braun (the "crackpot") possessed. Then again, it was what probably fueled him through life in Nazi Germany. And now I want to see The Good German. See, if I were teaching American history, this is the kind of thing we'd be talking about. Or I could just do like some people and try to see how many classes straight I could use the word "weltanschung." And vade mecum, come to that. But that's just me!

Speaking of American history, I just watched The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. I loved it. It is very long, yes, but I like being in the world of the movie. One of the things I like the most about it is that it shows that we don't change much. We like to think that we invent the world as we're born into it but really, we live with the same old archetypes...and try to create new ones. There has probably always been those who would try to shortcut their way to fame and there's probably always been a prurient crowd eager to exploit the famous. (That picture link might be spoilery, I guess, but really the spoiler is in the title so you kind of have to see it coming.)

It's also interesting to me how James was a murderer and a robber but how the fact of that seems to be outweighed by the fact that he was killed in a cowardly fashion. James's epitaph, which his mother wrote, reads, "In Loving Memory of my Beloved Son, Murdered by a Traitor and Coward Whose Name is not Worthy to Appear Here."

Another fun fact: James and I (and

gannet_guts!) share a birthday.

I also saw The Brave One this weekend and it was pretty much what I expected it to be. One unexpected thing--unless I missed it, no one mentioned Bernie Goetz the entire time, which I thought was sort of unusual, given the subject matter.

Speaking of movies, I'm back on Netflix so if you want to be friendly, here's my link.

Now I'm going to watch Across the Universe and let's bring this post full circle by mentioning that my watching this movie is just in time for tomorrow, when NASA will beam the song itself toward the North Star, Polaris. If you want to play along, it will begin broadcasting at 7pm EST.