Who Doesn’t Love Space Trash?

What does a ska kid do when coming across a discarded Chinese rocket? Pick it up, pick it up, pick it up!

Hello! Welcome to a very special Mother’s Day edition of Moronitude! 

OK, I need to come clean with you, it’s not really a special Mother’s Day edition. It’s just the normal old newsletter. We don’t have any specially branded Mother’s Day sponsored content from ProFlowers or a quiz about famous moms or a saccharine reminiscence about Mother’s Days past. Sorry. It just sounds cool to have a special edition, ya know? 

Moms are great though. Go call yours. Right now. The newsletter can wait for you…

Welcome back!

Earlier this week I got a DM from an old friend of mine, a guy who used to be in a ska band that my ska band used to play shows with all the time. He sent me a link to a podcast that he thought I should listen to, simply telling me that he thought I would like it. 

It was an episode of Best Midwestern dedicated to Midwestern ska, which as many know, is my wheelhouse. If you ever want to sit down and have a conversation about Animal Chin, MU330, Deals Gone Bad or Telegraph, I’m your guy. At the moment I got the DM I was on the Asbury Park boardwalk—pretty far from the Midwest and ska, although does the presence of the Big Man in the E Street Band make them ska? I say yes—so I figured I’d give it a listen a little later. And I’m glad that I did. 

The pod opens up with the hosts discussing their first ska shows, and at this point I was listening to it very passively, as one tends to do while listening to podcasts. Then around the 5-minute mark my ears perked up as the host mentioned going to a battle of the bands in Ottawa, Illinois. My brain started whirring right here, there’s no way they’re actually going to mention what I think they’re going to mention, is there? 

I’ll quote Aubrey directly here: “The band that won that battle of the bands at Ottawa High School was a band called The ShuttleCocks.” Here’s a live look at what happened as I listened:

Prior to the very second I heard this pod it was completely unfathomable that anybody outside my inner circle could possibly remember our dumb little band 20 years later. We were just a bunch of kids playing on a riser in the middle of a football field. My memory is notoriously a block of Swiss cheese, but I remember thinking that people weren’t very into us at all. I vaguely recall staring out at a crowd filled with blank and confused faces. I do remember winning the thing because, well, I have a memorized list of every single W I’ve posted in my 40+ years on this planet, but that’s a topic for another day. 

I’m likely in the middle of a mid-life crisis of sorts, but I’ve been thinking about those days a ton lately. Being in a band, even a small one who never caught a whiff of a “record deal,” is the sort of thing you hang on to for years. The thing I’m most struck by as time goes by is the way that it isn’t the big shows we played that stick in my head, but the weird ones. Like the time we played on the loading dock of a glass factory. Or the time we outnumbered the crowd. Or the time I slept standing up at some kid’s farm in Michigan. Or the infamous “drunk show” in our friend’s basement.

This seems so stupid to say as I type this out, but I never expected the people who attended the shows to remember them at all. Which sort of negates the entire premise of what we were doing in the first place, but it’s truly how I’ve thought about it. I remember playing these shows, but there’s no way that random folks will hang on to those memories. I mean, maybe they’d remember for a couple weeks, but not 20 years. That concept is simply too absurd for me to even consider. 

I’m not blowing this out of proportion and treating it as validation that what we did in that band “meant something.” I’m not an asshole like Bono. I just think it’s so crazy that somebody enjoyed watching us play enough to let it occupy a tiny portion of their memory for decades. Like, is there some poor soul out there who still remembers the lyrics to “Rap Star” or “So Stinkin’ Lazy?” It’s insane. 

When asked if the ShuttleCocks were any good, Aubrey responds with a perfect answer, “14-year-old me thought they were amazing…” Honestly, that’s all we were aiming for, so mission accomplished. Wait, no, MISSION SKACOMPLISHED. 

You can give the whole thing a listen here, it’s a damn enjoyable podcast, even if you aren’t one of the prestigious few (actually, the number is probably around 28 people, I think) who can call themselves an alumni of the ShuttleCocks.  

Weekly Song to Rock Out To

Paper Fish by Doctor Manette 

I know we’ve already had a lot of ska on here, but please bear with me for one second longer. Of the hundreds of barely known bands I saw as a teenager, Doctor Manette is the one I was convinced would make it huge. But, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, they never did. It makes no sense! They were the answer to the ultimate question: What would Weezer sound like if they were a ska band? 

Anywho, Doctor Manette ruled. I wore their shirt until it completely fell apart. I spent way too much money on some Japanese import ska compilation entirely because they were on it. And I still listen to them quite often. Enjoy.

Charlie’s History Corner

Who’s ready to talk about space junk?! 

As you likely saw in the headlines this week, a Chinese rocket was set to crash down somewhere on Earth, but nobody knew exactly where it would land. Being as there is a fairly high percentage of the planet with people walking around on it, this was slightly concerning. 

Normally one of two things happens when a rocket is sent into space: it’s descent back to Earth is controlled and aimed at hitting the ocean or it just stays up in a sort of “graveyard orbit,” circling the planet for decades or longer. 

As a citizen of Earth who does not wish to have my life snuffed out by an errant rocket falling upon my head, I don’t really find much comfort in either of those two scenarios. It just sort of seems like the kind of thing where I’d want a much more definitive idea of where exactly the rocket is going to end up crashing down, but I may be a bit of a control freak here. I guess I’d be comfortable with a fairly narrow guess, like, a 300 mile radius or something. 

In the case of the LongMarch 5B the possible landing area was a bit, shall we say, broader. “The European Space Agency had predicted a ‘risk zone’ that encompassed ‘any portion of Earth's surface between about 41.5N and 41.5S latitude,’” according to CNN. “Which included virtually all of the Americas south of New York, all of Africa and Australia, parts of Asia south of Japan and Europe's Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece.”

Essentially Canada was in the clear and the rest of the world was left waiting for oblivion to arrive in the form of a discarded Chinese rocket. Luckily, it crashed down in the ocean near the Maldives (apparently the rocket had a good nose for vacation locales) and nobody was hurt. Woohoo. 

But the whole thing got me to thinking about SkyLab and the mania surrounding its demise. SkyLab was the first (and so far, only) space station. The space station was in operation from 1973-1979 as it hosted three separate missions. It had a nice little run. Some science got done on it, astronauts played darts (seriously) and when the last crew left they kept the hatch unlocked so astronauts (or maybe aliens) could come back some day and enjoy SkyLab. That last detail really gets me, like space is just some small town where you don’t need to worry about crime, which is probably true, but I think I’d lock up my $2.2 billion space station. Hell, I always locked the doors on my shitbox Chrysler LeBaron, it literally seems like the least those astronauts could do. 

I digress. SkyLab kept circling the Earth in orbit for years, but eventually its orbit started to decay, meaning it was getting closer and closer to Earth. The original plan was to send a space shuttle up to give the ol’ girl a little nudge deeper into space, but there was a small hiccup—the first space shuttle wouldn’t be good to go until 1981. Its orbit had decayed at a greater pace than expected, so in 1979 it became obvious that SkyLab was going to go out in a blaze of glory. 

All around the world people were panicking about the idea of a space station landing on them. A town in Nebraska painted a target, egging SkyLab to give them their best shop. Two competing San Francisco newspapers offered rewards for bringing in bits of the space station, better if you can prove you were injured by it. The president of the Philippines had to give a national address to calm people down about the situation. It was a big deal. 

NASA still had a little control over SkyLab, so they aimed it at a spot in the Pacific Ocean about 800 miles southeast of South Africa. SkyLab had other ideas when it began its reentry, refusing to burn up at the rate scientists had predicted and going way off its predicted course. 

Unbeknownst to researchers at NASA, SkyLab had become self-aware years ago. The sentient space station was fueled by a deep hatred of koalas, so it grabbed the wheel and aimed itself at Australia with hopes of taking as many of the furry marsupials out as possible in one immense conflagration. Or scientists made a 4% error in their calculations. Regardless of the cause, SkyLab ended up raining debris all across western Australia. 

Luckily, there’s less chance of hitting people in western Australia than pretty much any other stretch of land on Earth, so everything worked out fine. People got treated to a light show as the space station burned up in the atmosphere and some folks also found bits of debris. The town of Esperance even hit NASA with a $400 fine for littering, which the well-funded government organization scoffed at, refusing to pay. Many years later a radio host did some crowd-funding to clear up the fine, thus allowing NASA to once again check books out from the Esperance Library, a quaint little building located in the heart of the scenic shire. 

Looks pretty nice, doesn’t it? 

So when the Long March 5B fell from the sky it turns out we were all OK, just like we were when SkyLab made a similar plummet. And soon some other enormous piece of space trash will fall from the sky. Maybe this time we won’t be so lucky. [cue foreboding music from a horror movie]

That’s it for this week’s Mother’s Day Super Spectacular Edition of Moronitude! See ya next week… unless I get brained by some space debris.