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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. Site created 30 May 1999. Home page URL http://www.angelfire.com/grrl/flipsock/
| sneedle flipsock |
essay: the eagle has landed19 July 2002 (happy birthday, Michael!) |
flipsockgrrl @ gmail .com |
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As some of you already know, I was born in Parkes, New South Wales--yeah, just down the road from The Dish (it's actually at Alectown). Dad was a partner in Parkes Industries, an engineering company that built agricultural machinery and other stuff out of steel. He contributed to the construction of the radio telescope by working out an effective way to shield the curved concrete walls against the diurnal extremes of temperature you get in central-west NSW. Too much expansion or contraction in the walls, and you'd throw the dish out of focus. On the other side of the family, Mum's brother Keith misspent some of his youth going out to the telescope construction site of an evening to watch the welding. Parkes was a happening place, all right. Ten years later, the Parkes radio telescope was already a bit of a family legend. And then, on 21 July 1969, the Eagle finally landed and Parkes--little old Parkes--was briefly the sole link between our planet and a whole nother world. (Don't believe everything in the movie: Honeysuckle Creek was the real star of the show. Thanks to Jono for this link.) That year I started kinder and had my tonsils out. But my only memory of 1969 is the fuzzy afterglow of a huge crush on Neil Armstrong (who took a fabulous photo of Buzz Aldrin planting a flag). It was the start of a lifetime of nerdity. Recently I visited a piece of a Saturn 5 rocket, the kind that was used to power the Apollo moon missions. The rocket dangles from the ceiling at Sydney's Powerhouse Museum, and it's a damned spooky thing to stand under its huge, dark cone. On that Saturday morning, the aerospace section of the museum was deserted. In the silence, the scratchy recordings of radio transmissions from space really did sound like voices from Somewhere Else, somewhere so foreign that we really can't begin to imagine being there. (Oh, all right. If you insist, it was 20 July in the USA. For once, Parkes was ahead of the rest of the world.)
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2004 flipsocks:17 Dec: the
sock has flipped
Also on this site:articles: listmania: neology: recipe: reviews: Without whom (web):frankenstein
journal (Chris)
Without whom (also):Ramona P Lovechild
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subscribe, contribute or comment by e-mailing flipsockgrrl @ gmail .com |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Licence. Site created 30 May 1999. Home page URL http://www.angelfire.com/grrl/flipsock/ |