Back when we owned the moon.

 

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Today is the 56th anniversary of the day that men landed on the moon. On this date in 1969, astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin piloted NASA's lunar lander away from their spaceship, Apollo 11, and touched down on the surface of the moon. (The third guy on the mission, Michael Collins, stayed behind in the command module to keep the motor running, as it were.) Neil was the first one out the door of the lander; his first words as his foot touched the surface got kinda garbled in the transmission back to earth, but what he said was, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

Yeah, he did say "mankind", not "humankind". This was 1969 -- women were good enough to do the math to get us into space, but we weren't good enough to be remembered in everyday speech. Yet.

Certain events are imprinted on the national consciousness in terms of where we, personally, were when they happened: President John F. Kennedy's assassination on November 22, 1963; the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger on January 28, 1986; the day the Twin Towers collapsed (and the Pentagon was also attacked) on September 11, 2001; the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021; and this one. It's become fashionable to bring up these events on their anniversaries and remember what we were doing when we either saw it happen or heard about it. 

NASA says Armstrong's left foot hit the lunar dust at 9:56 p.m. Central Daylight Time, the same time zone I lived in (albeit 1,100 miles away). I watched the historic event at home with my parents. I was eleven years old that summer, plenty old enough to stay up late to watch history in the making. Then I went to bed. (I mean, I was a kid -- celebratory toasts were way off in my future.)

What strikes me today is why people are making kind of a big deal about it this year. It's not like it's a major anniversary. Who celebrates the 56th anniversary of anything? Nobody.

No, I think it's nostalgia at work. It was JFK who set the goal for us, to beat the Russians to the moon, in May 1961. It only took us eight years to get there. Think of that: Americans had set a major goal, focused on it, pulled together, and reached it in only eight years. Our nation was truly ascendent, and not just in space exploration; since at least World War II, we had been a shining beacon to the rest of the world, and now here we were, excelling again. In 1969, it seemed, everybody wanted to be American.

Today, Americans might rather be Finns. All of the top five happiest countries in the world are Nordic countries. Even Mexico is happier than the United States: they're number 10, and we're number 24.

A lot could be said about what's happened to our nation since 1969 that has caused that to happen, and folks of differing political proclivities of course have different opinions. But I think it's clear that almost no Americans want what's happening right now to continue. 

Can we ever be the best country on earth again? I think we can. But we'll never do it while Trump and his Project 2025 minions are in power, so our first task is to get them out.

No, I don't have a plan. But we didn't have a plan for getting to the moon until JFK made it our national goal, either. To get our country out of this mess, I think we're going to have to develop the plan together.

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I guess I've never shared this on the blog before. In 1989, as part of the 20th anniversary of Apollo 11, NASA sent Buzz Aldrin around on a PR tour. I covered his news conference at the NASA Langley Visitor Center in Hampton, VA, for WTAR Radio. During the Q&A part of the event, all of us were serious news people, asking relevant questions and such. But once the mics and cameras were turned off, we turned into fanboys and fangirls. I still have the poster that Aldrin signed for me, and of course I framed it. Sorry for the angle -- the hallway here is too narrow for a full-on photo. 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

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These moments of spacey blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe, and look to the stars!

In praise of smaller airports.

 

ClassyCatStudio | Deposit Photos

You get a quick post tonight because I've been out of town at a convention this weekend (Mystic South). Travel is exhausting, as I'm sure you know, and I need to get to bed soon. But traveling into and out of a smaller airport is a lot less exhausting, as I was reminded this weekend.

A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post ranked the 50 best US airports (it's a gift link), and my current local airport -- the Albuquerque International Sunport -- was ranked seventh. Oh heck, to save time, here's their list of the top ten:

1. Portland International Airport
2. Long Beach Airport
3. National Airport*
4. Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport
5. Seattle Paine Field International Airport
6. Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport
7. Albuquerque International Sunport
8. Indianapolis International Airport
9. Salt Lake City International Airport
10. Detroit Metro Airport

By and large, you will notice, these are not behemoth facilities. Small airports are just less complicated and easier to get around -- and in some cases, parking is cheaper. For instance, I parked in the garage adjacent to the terminal in Albuquerque this weekend; the maximum charge per day is $14, less than half what you'd pay for the same parking proximity at National.

The convention I went to this weekend was in a suburb of Atlanta, so of course I had to fly into Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the busiest airport in the world. A reported 108 million people traveled through that airport in 2024, and I swear to gods, pretty close to that many were there Friday night. It didn't help that I rode the train out to the rental car area only to find out that I didn't have a reservation, after all (thanks, Travelocity!), and then rode the train back to the main terminal to find the rideshare pickup point, which was an absolute mob scene. Landed in Atlanta at about 10 p.m.; didn't get in the Lyft until 11:40 p.m.; and it was nearly 12:30 a.m. when I got to the convention hotel.  The drive took longer than usual because my Lyft driver went out of her way to avoid traffic downtown due to the Beyonce concert. (Thank the gods that my body was on Mountain Time.) 

Today, we landed in Albuquerque at about 3:45 p.m. I stopped to use the ladies' room (no line!), got to my car, and drove the 45 minutes home. Even with stopping at the grocery store for a couple of things, I was home by about 5:30 p.m. Piece of cake.

Airports are such weird spaces anyway. Smaller ones are just nicer.

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*The official name is Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. It was plain old National Airport until 1998, when Bob Barr, then a congressman from -- wait for it -- Georgia, went on a campaign to rename a whole bunch of stuff in DC after President Reagan. I believe Reagan has a lot to answer for, so I stick with the airport's old name. 

I liked flying out of National, too. The best part was that when we lived in Potomac Yard, it was only a five-minute drive from our apartment.

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Oh, the convention? It was interesting and fun. The workshops gave me a lot to think about. Might write about it all in a future post.

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These moments of traveling blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Safe travels, everyone!

Whose flag? Our flag.

As you probably know, Friday was Independence Day here in the US. I haven't been feeling much in the mood to celebrate our country lately, so I wasn't interested in finding a local fireworks display -- and anyway Santa Fe has been in a drought for pretty much forever, it seems like, and so setting off fireworks just seemed like a bad idea. (It didn't stop some of the neighbors, but then some people just want to blow stuff up and damn the consequences.)

But when the Santa Fe Opera sent an email saying they were offering tickets to this weekend's performances at 40 percent off, I snapped up a ticket to The Marriage of Figaro without thinking twice.

I like going to the opera, and we have a terrific -- dare I say world-renowned -- company here in town. World-class performances ten minutes from my house? Yes, please! Plus unlike most other live performance venues, the Santa Fe Opera has built into the auditorium seat backs a screen that shows what amounts to closed captioning. It's for translating the lyrics into English and Spanish, but it's pretty fabulous for hard-of-hearing folks, too.

Anyway, just before the performance started, the orchestra struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner". At the first strains of the song, the audience got to its feet, as did I -- years of public schooling trained me well -- and we began singing along.

Then I heard some guy in the aisle behind me say "something something Republicans". I don't remember his exact words, but what he meant was it was the sort of song you'd expect a bunch of well-to-do Republicans to trot out on the Fourth of July. Maybe he was trying to impress his date with world-weary snark, I dunno. But if I hadn't been concentrating on staying on key, I would have turned around and let him have it.

Our national anthem is for all Americans. I'm not about to cede it to the Republican party -- or our flag, either, which is what the anthem is all about. 

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think the song is perfect for our times.

suti | Deposit Photos

"The Star-Spangled Banner" was written by Francis Scott Key, a lawyer who lived in Georgetown, which at that time was still a sort of suburb of Washington, DC. If you want the whole story, you can read about it on Wikipedia -- but suffice it to say that during the War of 1812, Key and a couple of American companions ended up stuck on a ship in British custody as the Brits were about to bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore's harbor. The attack began at dawn on September 13, 1814, and continued for 25 hours.

Key and his companions realized they wouldn't know the outcome until dawn on the 14th: if the American flag still flew above the fort, it would be clear that it was still in US hands. And it did, and it was. Key was moved by the British defeat to write a poem that was published as "The Defence of Fort M'Henry".

It wasn't much later that the poem was set to the tune of "The Anacreontic Song", also known as "Anacreon in Heaven", that was written for a gentleman's club in London by John Stafford Smith. It didn't become our national anthem until 1931 (beating out "America the Beautiful", which is a heck of a lot easier to sing).

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"The Star-Spangled Banner" has lately been criticized for racist language in a verse that's hardly ever sung (fun fact: the song has four verses), and there have been calls for a different song to be chosen as our national anthem. Earlier this year, after Trump enacted his on-again, off-again tariffs, Canadians booed the song when it was played at sporting events involving the U.S. and Canada. And of course, there are the everlasting complaints about how hard it is to sing.

But think about its genesis. Key wrote it during wartime, in the thick of battle. He didn't know whether the battle would be won. Moreover, he didn't know whether the country would survive.

It's somewhat analogous to where we are today, except we're not fighting the British -- we're fighting the oligarchy and Project 2025. The ending to the final verse is so hopeful that it could be a rallying cry for today:

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave 

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

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"The Star-Spangled Banner" isn't perfect by any means -- but neither is the United States. And I'm not interested in relinquishing our anthem and our flag to those who don't believe in America's ideals -- freedom, equality, fairness, and the rest -- to desecrate.

That would be obeying in advance.

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These moments of patriotic blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.

All hail the semicolon; and a few words about Mamdami.

I tell you what: Nothing brings out the pedants like a post about punctuation. (And I'm counting on you lot to follow through!)

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Washington Post columnist Mark Lasswell knows this, apparently. His column published in the paper today is titled, "This punctuation mark is semi-dead. People have opinions." (You can read it for free here; you're welcome.)

Lasswell's bio on WaPo's website says only that he has a BA from the University of Missouri. His LinkedIn indicates that he was an op-ed editor for the Wall Street Journal before being forced out in 2017 due to intra-department conflicts during Trump 1.0. That seems like an odd thing to leave out of one's biography on your current employer's website, but maybe he's flying under the radar due to Jeff Bezos's ownership of the Post.

Anyway, back to the poor, benighted semicolon, which Lasswell says was introduced by a Venetian printer in 1494. But according to a study released by Babbel, its usage has dropped by half over the past 50 years in British English books; things are not much better on this side of the pond, according to a Swedish study of semicolon usage in US publications from 1920 through 2019. 

One wonders why it was left to a Swedish academic to study semicolon usage in the United States, but answering that question is beyond the scope of this post (translation: I ain't spending my Sunday afternoon reading a 27-page linguistics paper. If that's your jam, have at it).

Lasswell doesn't proffer any reasons for the declining usage; instead, he wisely (perhaps) leaves it to the peanut gallery to speculate. The usual suspects are suggested, including the dumbing down of edumacation (rest assured that the Oxford comma also gets dragged into the discussion). 

I didn't comment (well, I did, but not about what I'm about to say here), but the discussion did put me in mind of something I learned in a Great Courses course from linguist John McWhorter: As languages become the lingua franca of more people, particularly as people with different native languages come together more often, certain things about them become simplified. For example, irregular verb forms become more regular. And I would suggest that punctuation becomes simpler, too. The semicolon has only a few uses in prose: to connect two closely related independent clauses (i.e., if the text on each side of the semicolon could stand as a sentence on its own); and separating items in a list, if one or more of the items is complex so as to require a comma. (Mama Google's A.I. adds a third usage -- before a conjunctive adverb like "moreover" -- but to my mind, that's the first rule with an extra word thrown in to underscore the relationship between the first and second clauses.) 

So the semicolon is fairly specialized, and people who don't write regularly (I'm not counting social media posts as "writing regularly") probably forget what it's used for. I've seen a whole lot of comma splices that should have been a semicolon. 

I like semicolons; I appreciate their usefulness; and I do get annoyed with comma splices. But at work, we tend toward extreme avoidance. I've seen complex lists in legislation that use nothing but commas. But then we tend to use commas more sparingly than I'd like, too, which is a whole 'nother rant.

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Okay, briefly, Mamdami (since I can't bring myself to comment on Trump's Big Bullshit Bill without swearing): People all over the country are losing their minds over Zohran Mamdami's win in last week's New York Democratic mayoral primary. Mamdami, who says he's a democratic socialist, is predictably making conservatives' heads explode -- but he's also discomfiting Democratic Party stalwarts like Bill Clinton who backed former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo (never mind that Cuomo quit as governor after an investigation found credible evidence that he sexually harassed eleven women). Cuomo outspent Mamdami, $87 per vote to $19 per vote; still, Mamdami won.

There are so many angles to cover with a story like this, Islamophobia (Mamdami is Muslim) being only one. But the thing that most interests me is the Democrats' reactions. They're correct when they say that you can't extrapolate election results in liberal New York City to the rest of the country. But the sotto voce backlash to Zamdami's win is reminding me a whole lot of what the party did to Bernie Sanders in 2016: they decided it was Hillary's turn to be president, and they just were not going to acknowledge Bernie's popularity, period, end of story. Why? Because the Democratic National Committee's business model is to collect as much money as possible to elect as many candidates as possible so they can hold onto as much power as possible. That's their whole reason for being. 

But Bernie proposed helping people, not corporate donors. He talked about income inequality and the oligarchy, and the DNC's big donors are part of the oligarchy. Bernie funded his campaign with small-dollar donations that the DNC couldn't control (and Bernie, bless him, refused to hand over his donor list to the DNC when he dropped out of the race).

Mamdami won by doing the same thing. No wonder the DNC is scared; he's attacking their business model.

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Seven semicolons and the use of "discomfiting" in a single blog post. I ought to get a prize or something.

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But seriously, who thought it was a good idea to back an accused sexual harasser for political office? I mean, Andrew Cuomo is no Trump...

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These moments of bloggy punctuality have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!