Blushing brides and cosmonauts don't meet their bitter end
Now, if you're me "Ealing Civic Society" sounds depressingly worthy and best avoided. However, on the way to a BBQ the other day we passed a poster. And when we got to the BBQ ChrisC relayed to the assembled company the information from the poster:
Professor Heinz Wolff is (courtesy of the ECS) giving a lecture entitled "How Soviet Cosmonauts Landed In Ealing".
Now, that's the kind of thing that makes you either go "yayayyy!" or "eh?". I was briefly in the "eh?" camp until someone said you know, Heinz Wolff, the Great Egg Race man, at which point I crossed the floor to "yayayyy!".
For those not quite keeping up with the plot, The Great Egg Race was a BBC programme of the early 80s which was the bastard offspring of Blue Peter and Scrapheap Challenge. Except, of course, it massively pre-dated Scrapheap Challenge, so that's a bit of a Nell-is-her-mother's-own-mother sort of situation. Like Scrapheap Challenge, people made contraptions to solve problems, only with less arc-welding and more toilet-roll middles. It was inspiring in the way Scrapheap isn't - as a kid, I frequently thought "hey, I could do that! now! let's start!" in a way that you don't when the people on the telly are wrestling with internal combustion engines.
Of course, this memory of watching TGER with my dad is filtered through 30 years of haze; anything I've just said may be rubbish.
Anyway, Prof. Heinz Wolff is a cartoonish German mad scientist - he's got the hair and everything. He invented bioengineering, and has spent a lot of time sitting on European Space Agency committees and inventing experiments to be done in space.
To be honest, having attended this free lecture which the ECS provided on my doorstep, I'm still not actually entirely sure what the Soviet cosmonauts were doing in Ealing. Prof. Wolff was working on Juno, the Anglo-Soviet joint space mission, and he and some Russians ended up at a very alcoholic party in Ealing. That was pretty much it. Apparently the Russians refused to touch vodka, but sank a significant amount of whisky.
However, Prof. Wolff did talk for an hour and was highly entertaining on the subjects of preparing for space travel, the effects of space travel, space toilets, government funding, cosmonaut selection processes, dragons' Bar Mitzvahs, and what he calls "constructive waste". The last one is his theory that any sufficiently stable government will enter into projects of constructive waste to use up spare resources: to qualify a project must be, among other things, massively expensive and considered by a high proportion of citizens to be completely useless - examples being the Pyramids, cathedrals, Stonehenge and the Cold War. If you are near somewhere he's speaking, go along; it probably won't be high-powered science, but it will be very amusing.
On a first impression Ealing Civic Society appear to be a bunch of reactionaries who will protest against anything. However, they are nice enough to lay on childhood heroes for my entertainment, so they may get a second chance.
Professor Heinz Wolff is (courtesy of the ECS) giving a lecture entitled "How Soviet Cosmonauts Landed In Ealing".
Now, that's the kind of thing that makes you either go "yayayyy!" or "eh?". I was briefly in the "eh?" camp until someone said you know, Heinz Wolff, the Great Egg Race man, at which point I crossed the floor to "yayayyy!".
For those not quite keeping up with the plot, The Great Egg Race was a BBC programme of the early 80s which was the bastard offspring of Blue Peter and Scrapheap Challenge. Except, of course, it massively pre-dated Scrapheap Challenge, so that's a bit of a Nell-is-her-mother's-own-mother sort of situation. Like Scrapheap Challenge, people made contraptions to solve problems, only with less arc-welding and more toilet-roll middles. It was inspiring in the way Scrapheap isn't - as a kid, I frequently thought "hey, I could do that! now! let's start!" in a way that you don't when the people on the telly are wrestling with internal combustion engines.
Of course, this memory of watching TGER with my dad is filtered through 30 years of haze; anything I've just said may be rubbish.
Anyway, Prof. Heinz Wolff is a cartoonish German mad scientist - he's got the hair and everything. He invented bioengineering, and has spent a lot of time sitting on European Space Agency committees and inventing experiments to be done in space.
To be honest, having attended this free lecture which the ECS provided on my doorstep, I'm still not actually entirely sure what the Soviet cosmonauts were doing in Ealing. Prof. Wolff was working on Juno, the Anglo-Soviet joint space mission, and he and some Russians ended up at a very alcoholic party in Ealing. That was pretty much it. Apparently the Russians refused to touch vodka, but sank a significant amount of whisky.
However, Prof. Wolff did talk for an hour and was highly entertaining on the subjects of preparing for space travel, the effects of space travel, space toilets, government funding, cosmonaut selection processes, dragons' Bar Mitzvahs, and what he calls "constructive waste". The last one is his theory that any sufficiently stable government will enter into projects of constructive waste to use up spare resources: to qualify a project must be, among other things, massively expensive and considered by a high proportion of citizens to be completely useless - examples being the Pyramids, cathedrals, Stonehenge and the Cold War. If you are near somewhere he's speaking, go along; it probably won't be high-powered science, but it will be very amusing.
On a first impression Ealing Civic Society appear to be a bunch of reactionaries who will protest against anything. However, they are nice enough to lay on childhood heroes for my entertainment, so they may get a second chance.