Me and the shuttle

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I'm sick. Spent most of yesterday cycling between feeling completely fine and having severe stomach pains, on about a five- to twenty-minute cycle. Went in to work for a couple hours, but eventually realized I ought to be home. Feeling somewhat better this morning, but still not completely better. I think it was something I ate on Monday afternoon.

Last night, Kam and I were going to watch the Branagh Love's Labour's Lost, but the DVD turned out to be broken along one radius, snapped through. Returned that to Netflix. (I'm interested in seeing it partly because I don't think I've ever seen or read the play, though I realize this may not be the most faithful adaptation ever.) Went out and rented Phantom of the Opera instead. Fun, melodramatic, over-the-top, and even had one moment (near the end) of real emotion. I linked to these way back last December, but it can't hurt to link again: a review of the movie version by Suzy McKee Charnas, and her Phantom Phragments, which are essentially fanfic.

In entirely unrelated news, today's shuttle launch was scrubbed fifteen minutes ago, according to the Live Launch Countdown Coverage page. Sadness! I gather tomorrow is the next opportunity for launch.

The launch seems to be plagued with problems; I can't tell whether that's just normal or not. The scrub was because "one of four low-level fuel cutoff sensors is not functioning properly." Earlier, fueling was delayed "due to an improperly functioning primary heater." And a cockpit window cover fell off and damaged two heat-shielding tiles. Is it just that there are so many small and potentially fragile parts that some of them are bound to run into problems? I haven't followed a luanch closely in a long time, so I'm not sure whether this is par for the course.

There are also concerns about weather. We'll see. I hope that they manage to launch tomorrow—but I hope even more that they'll do so safely.

Edited to add: I've been trying to articulate exactly what the connection is between me and the shuttle that made it make sense to put us both in this entry. And finally the answer occurred to me: we're both under the weather!

6 Responses to “Me and the shuttle”

  1. SarahP

    Sorry to hear your tummy’s wonky. Don’t be too sure it was something you ate, because there’s definitely a tummy bug going around (even Brad Pitt had it!).

    And I thought Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost was lousy. Didn’t they make it into a musical version, or something? Or was that just the setting, reminding me of a cheesy musical?

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  2. Chris Cobb

    Let me put in a good word for Branagh’s Love’s Labours Lost: I found it an enjoyable film, with many delightful moments, many of them courtesy of Nathan Lane. It is a musical. Not an original score: they use a number of classic showtunes, as I recall. But it _is_ deliberately cheesy (though also gorgeous). So if you’re allergic to cheesiness, the film will probably not please.

    Shakespeare’s play is not, of course, a deliberately cheesy musical with classical show tunes (though parts of it are deliberately cheesy in some Renaissancy ways), so if you want to find out what Shakespeare’s play is like, you won’t learn a whole lot from the Branagh film. Some of the great speeches are there, though, and Branagh holds to the general outline of the plot (insofar as the play has one). But there’s a great deal missing, including most of the stuff that would get talked about in my Shakespeare class.

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  3. Michael

    Does the great deal missing include an ending? Because that’s what annoys me about the original play — the sense of coyness interruptus.

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  4. Chris Cobb

    *Spoiler Alert: I’m about to talk, in fairly general terms, about the ending of the Branagh film and the text of the play*

    The Branagh film handles the ending quite differently from the playscript. If you find the ending of the play annoyingly coy, then you may well prefer Branagh’s choice, which sensitively works out exactly the sort of ending someone trying to make LLL a more accessible and successful film would logically choose.

    I like both endings, for quite different reasons.

    The ending as Shakespeare wrote it is integral to his design. If the play didn’t end as it does, the title would make no sense 🙂 . The ending of LLL marks an important point in S’s development as a writer, because it shows an early instance of his resolving his plots by following the development of his characters to a psychologically logical conclusion, rather than arranging his characters’ psychologies to suit the form of the plot implied by the play’s genre. (For an example of his brilliant handling of the opposite approach to resolution, see _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_.) LLL as a whole, like its ending, is brilliant but unsatisfying, and that’s the point.

    Interestingly, there’s a reference in a 1598 list of Shakespeare’s plays to a play called “Love’s Labours Won.” No play under that title is extant. Some scholars infer that this play is a sequel to LLL, but the current consensus is that this title probably refers to the play we now know as _Much Ado About Nothing_.

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  5. Michael

    I was actually referring to the rest of the play up until the ending as being coy, but thank you for the explanation of why he did what he did. That will make it more satisfying to see the play next time. (I’ll probably wait a couple of years, since I just saw a bizarre and hilarious production a month ago.)

    It’s fun to imagine a sequel, simply because I prefer happy endings. So which play would be Love’s Labours Called On Account Of Rain?

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  6. Chris Cobb

    So which play would be Love’s Labours Called On Account Of Rain?

    The Tempest?

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