Alan Coleman

I remember watching the Space Shuttle launch shortly before my tenth birthday, at a small school in the Essex countryside. The sun was shining outside as  we gazed in amazement at the school television, it had buttons on the front and 3 channels. It was soon after we had a visit from an American basketball team from Weathersfield Airbase, the biggest people we’d ever seen.

The launch we watched on that wooden Televsion on the 12th April 1981 was Columbia’s first mission, STS 1. It was a memory I relived yesterday as I watched Endeavour launch its last mission, STS 134, from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida 30 years later.

What struck me about yesterdays launch was how similar it was to the first one I saw, why would it be any different? The thing is, it’s not as if I’ve been that interested in the program during the last 30 years, it’s pretty much passed me by. It’s a bit like getting into a band shortly before they split up.

Yesterdays launch was as exiting as the first time I watched it, awesome. Great watching online too, complete with Specky banter and realtime launch info. Wicked.

A day before the space shuttle launch in 1982 Mr Atkins, our primary school teacher at the time, asked us to find out something about the men who pioneered space travel. Easy I thought to myself, just look up Neil Armstrong, that’s all we knew about space, Neil Armstrong.

At home, we had half a set of encyclopedias that had been inherited from my Grandma. It was a gamble as to whether or not you’d find what you where looking for depending on what books from the collection still existed.

Book A was missing which meant Armstrong was out of the question. After asking mum (Always quite taken with anything Russian) about  spacemen, I looked up Gagarin’s name and was rewarded (by chance) with three paragraphs about his first trip into space, an orbit of the earth in Vostok 1, taking 1hour 48 minutes.

The accompanying photo was what got me most, grey, shiny and unmistakably Russian. Amazingly it’s the one currently used in Gagarin’s entry on wikipedia. Quite how I recognised it instantly after 30 odd years when I can’t seem to remember where I currently live, is beyond me. Relaxed, happy, almost laughing. His confidence and huge beaming smile seemed to belay everything that everyone was saying about the Soviet Union at the time. Look at the picture and judge for yourself, he was a great guy then and if he was here today he’d still be a top bloke.

During the Vostok Program, colleagues were asked to vote for the member of the program to fly first, 17 out of 20 voted for Gagarin, incredible.

The following is how a Soviet Air Force Doctor evaluated Gagarin’s personality in 1960, 8 months before his mission into space:

Modest; embarrasses when his humor gets a little too racy; high degree of intellectual development evident in Yuriy; fantastic memory; distinguishes himself from his colleagues by his sharp and far-ranging sense of attention to his surroundings; a well-developed imagination; quick reactions; persevering, prepares himself painstakingly for his activities and training exercises, handles celestial mechanics and mathematical formulae with ease as well as excels in higher mathematics; does not feel constrained when he has to defend his point of view if he considers himself right; appears that he understands life better than a lot of his friends.

In that sense Yuri Gagarin was a childhood hero of mine. All everybody else at school wanted to talk about was Neil Armstrong and how he walked on the moon, a magnificent achievement in its own right, but for me I was always more intrigued by Gagarin’s ground breaking solo voyage into space and around the earth. When I was younger the Soviet space program portrayed in the media in the west always looked a little bit  home made, like the whole thing was being put together by a bunch of enthusiasts, which I suppose it was. I was drawn to the spirit of the people who built and developed technology under the Soviet regime.

It’s a shame that Yuri’s life would be cut short at the age of 34, apparently amid suspicious circumstances. Ironically, the very same society he championed through his achievements would eventually bring about his downfall.

Yuri Gagarin, Hero of the Soviet Union and space legend.

At first I thought the new advertising campaign for Apple Mac, featuring Mitchell and Webb from Peep Show, was just slightly amusing. Then I realised that I was laughing not at the characters, but at the utter stupidity of the content on display. I honestly thought we’d got that Mac and PC thing out of our systems a few years ago, but it looks as though sneering consumerism is alive and kicking.

It’s based partly around the fact that Apple Mac computers tend to be used in the creative industries of music production and graphic design, examples of two occupations that suffer acutely from superiority complexes. The idea that the Apple is a superior experience is also a statement of identity, highlighting ones cool job that somehow transcends the trivial office environment of the sandwich man and the water cooler. The nature of the adverts in question being everything required to back up both of these statements.

Maybe that’s a bit mean. I know plenty of Mac users, Amoungst others Becki, Roger, Dickie and Peter, you know who you are. These people are amongst the most forward thinking people I have ever met, creatives operating at the top of their chosen field. I love you all and the Mac is most suitable for your work. But really, it gets on my nerves.

In the adverts Mitchell plays the geeky PC bloke in straight clothes, his dry humour adding the dour and realistic personality of a fairly average bloke. Webb on the other hand is the smug student type with the stupid GAP jeans, every inch the epitome of cool with the sarcastic suburban wit. Ironically, and this is where the advert falls down, it is Webb who is the dislikeable character, the selfish fashion victim who
looks down upon his PC friend. Spreadsheets? Surely not! I mean why do a
mundane job when you could buy a Mac and create music? Nice idea, but in
reality you’ll end up down the pub or watching Telly.

Personally I identify with Mitchell, a bloke at least trying to get by
in life without entertaining the faddish and gimmicky tedium that
surrounds us. I look at Webb, and think about the arrogance of fashion,
and the middle class obsession with product, design and cool. Grown up
people, adults, defining themselves through brightly coloured and shiny
gadgets, the latest technology from the must have and satisfyingly
overpriced brand. Essentially, the inanity of bling for farmers market
types. Every time I see one of those smug thirty something’s marching
through Shoreditch, with a Mac tucked under arm and a stripy scarf round neck, I feel the need to run up and stamp on this weeks trainers, then comb his fake scruffy hair as he lies on the pavement in pain.

‘There there Rufus, sorry about the retro Greenflash, but you’ll thank
me for this later’.

This campaign may have misfired. 25 Million people in this country now
look at those people with the other sort of computers and think, ‘Who
the hell do they think they are?’. In fact they probably don’t think
that at all, because unlike me and Mac users these are the people that
have the sense to turn their machines off at 5:30 and do something
interesting, like dogging for instance.

Lastly and most sadly of all, just like surfing and snowboarding, the Mac may just have become a parody of itself.

How great is MySpace? I’m properly into it and have my own page and everything.

This surely, is what the Internet is all about, meeting people, listening to music and linking through to other stuff you might be interested in. I’ve tried to set up forums and message boards here on my own site in the past, with the vague idea of forming some sort of online community, but spam made it practically impossible so I just jacked it in.

I’ve only had my page on MySpace for 24 hours, and already I’ve got people who I havn’t seen for ages as my friends. I can admit to feeling a little chuffed when I went back on and saw that other MySpacers have answered my plea for some mates. And Jenna Jameson too, now there’s blast from the past, and no hard feelings either.

So now I have to think of a way of blinging it up a bit, I’m thinking maybe dark grey and green, but I’m not sure.

Anyway, who cares? It’s great to see old friends!

I don’t think we spend enough time appreciating the mundane things in life. So concerned are we with our highly strung and vain accessories, that we forget to value the things that make our everyday life an easier place to be.

The plastic lunch box is a prime example of this.
It lasts for years, cost practically nothing to buy and can be used to store anything from sandwiches to maggots. They’ll quite happily sit for months at the back of a cupboard before being called to perform some thankless task, after which they’ll be slung aside again like they never existed. You can put them in the freezer for years, or leave them out in the garden with worms in, they simply don’t mind. Even better, next time you find a single fresh prawn lying around at a friends house, seal it into a plastic lunch box and throw it to the back of a cupboard. Give it a couple of weeks, and the unlucky individual who cracks that little baby open will be met by a smell so foul, it’ll make FC’s shit smell like Mr Matey.