Houston, We Have A Problem

The night I wrote the blog entry about my Roll Call cartoon, I happened to have a copy of the movie Apollo 13 with me, borrowed from the library. Since I indirectly used the phrase "Houston, we have a problem" in the cartoon, I made a note to see the movie itself to see where in the movie the phrase was made. On Sunday, I found the time to watch it, at last. Two and a half hours long, I am glad I don't watch movies everyday. How would one have the time to surf the web looking for BitTorrent files or write blog if one is tied to the couch and the TV/DVD/VCR remote control?

Being a techie sort of a guy, I really enjoyed the movie. American ingenuity, teamwork, some funny jokes, I like it all. All the space lingo was lost on me, for all I know, they could have been gobbledygook just to sound technical to us earthlings, but I still know what was going on. I like the part about the engineers having to come up with a way to improvise on a carbon monoxide filter. Or with Ken Mattingly taking part in the rescue. Mattingly was bumped from the flight because he was misdiagnosed as having the measles, but when things went wrong, he was brought in to work the ship with a minimum amount of electricity. I didn't catch the name of the guy who first notified the ground command (Ed Harris) of the problem with power, that they could only use 20 watts or less. (Or was it 20 amps?) Many people took part in the effort, not just one guy who did all the work while the rest acted like wimps.

While watching the movie, I kept recalling a few lines from the "song" "Every OS Sucks" by the comedy group Three Dead Trolls in A Baggie. I put quotes on song because it's mostly a talking routine, not rap, mind you. The song mentions that before Mac OS, Windows, and Linux, computers were used only to either play Pong or to get astronauts to the moon. You should check them out at http://www.deadtroll.com/