"Untitled"

I saw this on Facebook and had to look it up. It really happened, albeit the details are different. From Homesteading Space: The Skylab Story:

"On the evening of MD-46, I finally played the trick that had been in work for over two month," said Garriott. "It even had the flight controllers puzzled for twenty-five years! My objective was to pretend that my wife, Helen, had come up to Skylab to bring us a hot meal, even though this was an obvious impossibility. Here is how the scheme worked. I recorded her voice on my small hand-held tape recorder before flight, pretending to have a brief conversation with a Capcom, with time gaps for his replies. The Capcom would be my only accomplice, but his role would be carefully disguised.

It was also necessary to have some recent event mentioned to validate the currency of the dialogue, so it would seem it could not have been recorded before fight. The short dialogue is printed below in its entirety. I knew that both Bob Crippen and Karl Henize were going to be Capcoms for Skylab, so they were brought into the planning, given the script and rehearsed on their timing. They kept the short script on a piece of paper in their billfolds, awaiting the right moment.

"For our flight in August-September, there would be many occasions of natural disasters involving forest fires or hurricanes, which would be widely known throughout the United States. So a few comments about one or the other were made on the tape. This led to four different scripts being recorded, one for each of the two Capcoms and one each for the two natural events. I would play the tape on the normal air-to-ground voice link with my wife's recorded voice and the Capcom would respond as if totally surprised by the female interloper."

Near the end of one period of voice contact Garriott said to the ground, "I'll have something for you on the next pass, Bob." Crippen replied, "Roger that, Owen." Then quietly and surreptitiously, he reviewed the brief script that had been in his pocket for all these weeks. Soon after coming into voice range, the ground heard this voice on the standard air-to-ground link:

Skylab (a female voice): "Gad, I don't see how the boys manage to get rid of the feedback berween these speakers.... Hello Houston, how are you reading me down there? (s sec. pause) Hello Houston, are you reading Skylab?"

Capcom: "Skylab, this is Houston. We heard you alright, but had difficulty recognizing your voice. Who do we have on the line up there?"

Skylab: "Hello Houston. Roger. Well I haven't talked with you for a while. Isn't that you down there, Bob? This is Helen, here in Skylab. The boys hadn't had a good home cooked meal in so long, I thought I'd bring one up. Over"

Capcom: "Roger, Skylab. Someone's gotta be pulling my leg, Helen. Where are you?"

Skylab: "Right here in Skylab, Bob. Just a few orbits ago we were looking down on those forest fires in California. The smoke sure covers a lot of territory, and, oh boy, the sunrises are just beautiful! Oh oh..... See you later, Bob. I hear the boys coming up here and I'm not supposed to be on the radio."

"Then quiet returned to the voice link, but we were told later, Bob Crippen had lots of questions coming his way in the Control Center," Garriott said. "What was going on? Where was this voice coming from? Bob must have been a very good actor, because he claimed complete ignorance and innocence of how it happened. Everyone heard it coming down on the air-to-ground loop. The whole two-way conversation sounded like a perfectly normal dialogue. No breaks or gaps, and they all heard Bob respond in real time. Could I have recorded Helen's voice on a 'family conversation' from our home? Yes, but there was no recent one. How would she have known about the fires, or who was to be on Capcom duty and how could she respond to Bob's comments in real time, as everyone could hear?

"No one ever worked out how this was accomplished. Finally, at our twenty-fifth reunion celebration in Houston in 1998, and with many of the flight directors and controllers present and still with no clue as to how it was done, I described it all as above. My prejudiced opinion is that this was the best 'gotcha' ever perpetrated on our friendly flight controllers!"

Crippen recalled: "That was kind of a fun trick. There was head rubbing.

So, you’re writing a thing, and you need to name a character. And, as we all know, naming a character is a giant pain in the ass. I offer this list of shit I use pretty regularly, for this purpose.

Behind the Name (The etymologies are weird as fuck, in a few places, but it’s great if you’ve got a name and need to find other names that are from or derived from the same culture/language)

Behind the Surname (BTN for family names)

Academy of Saint Gabriel Medieval Names Archive (This is the go-to for medieval names in Europe and the Near East. Hardcore scholarship and a distinct lack of fucking around.)

Kate Monk’s Onomastikon (The original internet name resource.)

The Soldier in Later Medieval England (Actual names from English military rolls around the Battle of Agincourt)

England’s Immigrants (Non-native residents of England, 1330-1550)

Celtic Personal Names of Roman Britain

Mapping the Medieval Countryside - People (People appearing in English inquisitions post mortem, 1418-1447)

Wiktionary’s Index of Biblical Names

Ancient Names Galleria (The weird shit is here. If you need Akkadian or Phoenecian names, those are totally covered.)

Trismegistos People (Names extracted from the Trismegistos Texts – mostly names from Graeco-Roman Egypt.)

First music, then voice modifiers… Now this. Perfect.

but like…Becky, of course LGBTQ+ people existed before Stonewall. We’ve all existed since the beginning of time. But the movement got a shock to its senses, a jump-start, a rocket-into-space when that glass shattered via Marsha P. Johnson, and when Sylvia Rivera was up on-stage protesting guess who was on the sidelines heckling her?

Without a trans black woman, LGBT+ rights would not exist. Never forget. Never “pay it no mind”.

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It wasn't exactly what Glenda had expected, but somehow it was one hundred percent Nutt. "Please tell me the interesting thing about ships," she said.

"The interesting thing about ships is that the captains of ships have to be very careful when two ships are close together at sea, particularly in calm conditions. They tend to collide.

"To put it simply, each ship shields the other ship from lateral waves on one side, so by small increments outside forces bring them closer without their realising it."

"Oh! It's a metaphor?" said Glenda, relieved. "You think we're being pushed together . . . if we don't do anything we'll just get closer and closer?"

"Yes," said Nutt.”

79/450 daily goal to get to 100k by the last day of the petition, so it can be considered for debate at parliament

sign here -