Cosmonauts, Voyager, and Humans

Thursday, May 28, 2020

     Two documentaries show how small humanity and Earth are in the universe, but how big Earthlings' insights can be:  "Cosmonauts:  How Russia Won the Space Race," by the the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) (2017), and "The Farthest/Voyager in Space" (2019) by the Public Broadcasting System, of the United States.  The British and USians inject the obligatory national chauvinism and anti-communist hysteria in each film, but especially the second film makes humans small and big at the same time.

     Russia, still the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the internal fifth column working for foreign interventionists not having sabotaged it and pillaged its public assets yet, was the first nation to send a rocket into orbit around the earth, an animal next, and a human, between 1957 and 1961.  Space suits the Soviets invented are the model for those used to this day by every nation that sends people outside Earth's atmosphere.  Rockets the Soviets invented remain the basis for rockets used to deliver cargo to space stations, another Soviet invention.  When the internal and external sabotage of socialism reduced the Soviet Union to several rump states in the 1990s, cosmonauts on the Russian space station were stranded and almost forgotten in a disintegrating vessel that almost didn't return to Earth.  The documentary lets various cosmonauts and engineers speak about the historic Soviet achievements.

     The second film, about Voyager 1 and 2, launched by the United States, that absurdly-named nation, shows humanity's smallness in the cosmos, but also great human insight.  By 1986, the two unmanned space vehicles had flown near Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and their moons and rings, some of them unknown by us until then.  In 2012, the crafts left the gravitational pull of the sun and thus the Solar System.  Aboard Voyager 1 is a record made of metal and gold, with recordings of Earth nature photos, human biology, language, and music, Earth's place in the Solar System, and other items about Earth and nature, which includes us.  Playback instructions and a stylus are there, too. 

     Long after humans are extinct, and the Sun is a red giant that consumed the Earth and much of the Solar System, this tiny proof of our once-existence will coast through interstellar space. The odds are vast against an intelligent being finding this object.  Pivotal space scientist Carl Sagan worked on the Voyager and other US space projects.  In the film, his son says that Voyager is about us more than about the cosmos.  Carl convinced his bosses to turn the Voyager cameras to photograph the Solar System as the craft left it.  The Earth is a speck in a faint sunbeam.  That's all we were and are, but this spaceship shows the heights we can conceive.

     The other day the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) Radio One in British Columbia, Canada interviewed a Canadian astronaut during a call-in show.  One caller said that the $10/year/Canadian spent on the space program is a profoundly wise investment.  We struggle with poverty, injustice, racism, and other flaws born of our system based on private property and the profit system; but this $10 hints at what we can aspire to, if we choose.

    Look through a drinking straw at the sky, a woman scientist of the Voyager program said.  That tiny round view includes hundreds of galaxies, in a universe of billions of galaxies.  A century ago people thought there was only one galaxy, our Milky Way.  By caring to look and ponder, we humble and exalt ourselves at the same time. 

Stanley Cup Winning Games from 1976, 1984, and 1989

Victoria Monday, May 18, 2020

I just watched a condensed version of the fourth and last game, May 16, of the 1976 Montreal Canadiens- Philadelphia Flyers National Hockey League Stanley Cup Final series.  Montreal won the cup against the two-time defending champions in four straight games.  Fans in Philadelphia's Spectrum gave Montreal a standing ovation.  When the 1994 Vancouver Canucks lost the cup at home to the New York Rangers, the Rangers' first cup in decades, Vancouver fans not only gave no standing ovation, they rampaged destructively through downtown Vancouver after the loss.  I remember listening to the end of that game on the radio on the Alkali Lake school bus entering Vancouver on a field trip I helped lead during my not-brief-enough teaching career. 

In the 1976 game, Guy Lapointe, Number 5, played defense;  I, Number 5, played defense in the Edson house league, my last year of minor hockey.  It was the first year that Yvan Cournoyer was captain; Henri Richard retired after the previous year.  Richard died a few weeks ago.  He won 11 Stanley Cups, the most of any NHL player.  Ken Dryden was goalie.  Guy Lafleur, Pete Mahovlich, Jacques Lemaire, and young Doug Risebrough, Steve Shutt, Doug Jarvis, and Bob Gainey were forwards.  Serge Savard, Larry Robinson, and Pierre Bouchard played defense.  Lafleur scored the cup-winning fourth goal with five minutes left in the 5-3 game.  I wore Number 10, like Lafleur, when I started playing minor hockey in 1970, on right wing.  Mahovlich scored the last goal.  The Canadiens' finesse overwhelmed the  "Broadstreet Bullies" of Dave Schulz, more elegant than I remember him, Bobby Clarke, Bill Barber, and Reggie Leach, the second person from a losing team, and the first Indigenous person, to win the Conn Smythe Trophy as most valuable player in the playoffs.

I was 14, growing like a weed, fit, fast, lean, and full of ice hockey, grass hockey, floor hockey, and any other hockey I could get my hands on.    Tennis balls were for grass hockey, not tennis.

The Habs won the next three Stanley Cups.  They lost only one of 13 games in the 1976 playoffs, and only 8 or 12 of 80 80 or so games in the 1977-78 season. 
The December 31, 1975 game in Montreal against the Soviet Red Army team was the best hockey game I saw until the mid-1980s Edmonton Oilers became the best team of all time, according to Gordie Howe, among others.  Pele called Maradona the best soccer player of all time.  Opinions are not always like assholes, although everyone has one.     

Cut to the last game of the 1984 cup final, in which the Oilers beat the New York Islanders, who had won the previous four cups, after the Canadiens' four cups.  I was glad the Oilers stopped the Islanders from winning their fifth cup and tying the all-time record of the 1956-60 Habs.  I watched that game between the two academic years of my University of Alberta Bachelor of Commerce After Degree.  I watched a condensed form of that game last week.  The Oilers became the first Western Canadian team to win the cup.  Watching them play was watching poetry on ice:  speed, passing, shooting, Andy Moog magical in net, Gretzky and Kurri in front, Anderson and Coffey faster than anyone, any year, any team.  To be fair, Cournoyer was still pretty fast in 1976.  Watching that game again was what made me write this blog post.

Go five years in the future to 1989, the last all-Canadian final, between the victorious Calgary Flames and the Montreal Canadiens.  Last week I watched a condensed version of the game in which the Flames won their only cup.  I was happy for moustachioed Lanny Macdonald, who had reached the 1977-78 semi-finals or quarter-finals with the Toronto Maple Leafs, only 11 years after the Leafs' last cup.  The Leafs last won in 1967, now 53 years ago.  I doubt any Canadian team will ever again win the cup.  The last team to do it was the 1993 Canadiens, who are now years into the longest cup drought of their history. 

I watched a game of the 1989 Flames-Habs series in a taxi office in Antigonish, Nova Scotia.  I was traveling across Canada by train, and Newfoundland by bus.  Nova Scotia bars were closed on Sundays.  The Saint Francis Xavier student residence where I stayed for $12 that night had a crowd of other young people watching something else on the common-area television.  Harrumph, as I say to those who giggle at folks such as I watching decades-old hockey games again. 

I watched another game of that series on the ferry from North Sydney, Nova Scotia to Port-aux-Basques, Newfoundland.  Played in Calgary, that game had a very late broadcast time in Newfoundland.  The ferry lounge, closed partway through the game but for its television, had three people in it:  me and two other young men bent on Christian evangelizing me.  I already had the religion of hockey.  I gave them enough attention for politeness but not enough to miss important parts of the game.

When a tv sports channel started broadcasting old games because the worldwide coronavirus crisis caused the closure of hockey and other sports leagues, from professional to toddler, this spring, I noticed few high-profile advertisers during the early broadcasts.  Who'd want to watch a mid-2010s  game between two of the many boring teams that populate the NHL now?  The three games above had advertisers such as usually advertise on tv pro hockey broadcasts, automakers, for example.  Perhaps these games are more popular than the drivel disguised as hockey that has been National Hockey League play since 1989, or not long after.

Now I sound like one of those old timers such as my dad, who venerate Charlie Connacher, Howie Morenz and Maurice Richard, who played before I was born.

As I age, many notable events recede into the past, but they're worth remembering.  People still watch Hamlet, although I don't remember any Danes playing in the NHL.          

A and N Boutique No More

May 11, 2020

Army and Navy, "Western Canada's Department Store," one slogan says, went out of business this week.  This family-owned business started in 1919 in Vancouver.  The first location I knew was the Edmonton one at 82 Avenue and 104 Street, when I started attending the nearby University of Alberta in 1979.  My brother called it "A and N Boutique."  I bought many bargain clothes there, notably fleece pants for running in winter.  I also knew the 105 Avenue and 97 Street location, which closed more than 20 years ago, years after I left Edmonton.  In 2019 the original, downtown Vancouver location decreased from two buildings to one, and had various centenary decorations after the reopening of the diminished space.  I was in the New Westminster location many times, and in the Langley one once or twice.  The remaining five locations closed this week.  Army and Navy joins Kresge, Metropolitan, Eaton's, Sears, Woodwards, Zellers, SAAN, W.W. Arcade, Stedman's, Marshall Wells, Macleods, and various other retailers on the ash heap of capitalist consolidation.  What would Rosa Luxemburg say?