I just saw the movie. (Thanks to 826Michigan.) You should too.
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T-Minus signing at the National Air and Space Museum: Saturday Sept. 26, 2-4pm
Please come see Friendship 7, Gemini IV, Apollo 11, and me on Saturday the 26th at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. I’ll be signing T-Minus there from 2-4pm. I suppose I could be more excited and honored by this but I’m not sure how.
The National Book Festival is also happening that day, outside on the National Mall itself, so if you’re heading over plan to leave yourself some extra time to get around and look around.
Jim Ottaviani at SPX, September 26-27 in Bethesda, MD
This will be my 12th time exhibiting at the Small Press Expo, and I’m as excited about it as ever. With a guest list that includes Gahan Wilson, Carol Tyler, Joshua Cotter, Paul Karasik, and Josh Neufeld, you won’t want to miss it.
I’ll have the last few hardcovers of T-Minus, a few of the limited edition Charles R. Knight hardcovers as well, the new editions of Two-Fisted Science and Dignifying Science, and more science graphic novels than I can now comfortably fit on a table.
What I won’t have is all the time in the world on Saturday — I’m likely only available at the show for the first and last hour that day. This is not bad news. More when the details are pinned down, but for now I’ll leave it at this. As much as I’m always in the shadow of greatness at SPX, this raises that metaphor to new heights.
See you there.
Old body, new shoes
This has been a rough year for running, for me. Decades of pounding my flat feet flatter caught up with me in February — it’s interesting how things can change almost overnight. Interesting in the “why can’t I walk without wincing?” way, at least. So I now wear motion control running shoes and hard plastic inserts that force about a 1.5cm arch into my soles. I also had to get rid of almost all my other shoes and switch to ones you can’t torque. After 30-odd years of running I’ve found adjusting to these things hard, and it’s gotten me thinking about age and running shoes I’ve loved over the years.
There haven’t been many, but looking back at them now is fun. I can’t decide whether shoes have gotten incrementally or exponentially uglier over the years, for one thing. De gustibus non est disputandum and your mileage may vary and all that, but for me, I want art deco, but the only choices out there are art nouveau. So here’s what I wear now, not entirely by choice: 
I’ve finally begun to like the way the Asics Gel Foundation
feels in the last few weeks, as my second pair is getting fully broken in. These miracles of engineering couldn’t protect me from a sprained ankle, though. Where’s that technology when you need it on the Crooked Lake Trail? I won’t stock up on them, in other words.
Moving backwards in time, here’s the first shoe I bought multiple pairs of when I found it was going out of production:
I figured you couldn’t get enough of the Nike Vengeance, but as I cracked open my third and last box in 1990 or so, I realized that the world had probably passed it by and that I could do better. And it had.
But if I could still be wearing these…?
…well, I’d have never found out and I’d be running sub-4 minute miles and I’d still be wearing them and never mind what the podiatrist said. That’s the Brooks John Walker RT-1 there, ladies and gentlemen, and it was magic. It’s the first shoe I fell in love with, the shoe I lettered in, the shoe that John Walker himself designed and wore, the shoe featuring Brooks Special Open Mesh Nylon and the Varus Wedge™, and a shoe only available for about a year, maybe two. I laced on my first pair towards the tail end of that second year and when I wore them out and wanted to purchase another and they were not available I was crushed like a gardenia.
(That metaphor is dedicated to the people who read this blog to hear about comics.)
I doubt the RT-1 was much lighter than what I wear now, and what I wear now is heavy compared to shoes designed for 17 year-olds with, you know, arches. But I like to think that somewhere out there, maybe within shouting distance of Plato’s Cave, Pheidippides is lacing on a pair of these ideal shoes and limbering up for a training run.
See you all at Dances With Dirt!
Land on the Moon in Google Earth
The guided tours by Buzz Aldrin and Jack Schmitt are only the beginning of the great features of this enhancement to Google Earth.
T-Minus signing Monday, July 20 and Apollo 11 spotted by the LRO
A reminder (see the previous post) about the book signing event at the Vault of Midnight Monday, July 20, at 6pm.
And…the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) has found Apollo 11. Not that it was lost, but it’s great to see it still there, still casting a long shadow.
