Premature Explosion ala the 4th

The disaster of the Space Shuttle Challenger was witnessed by millions of Americans in horror. Ronald Reagan seemed at first perplexed by the booster rockets’ explosion, then realized the Shuttle and all its crew were lost in the fiery conflagration. I have long blamed that President and his administration for forcing NASA to launch in freezing temperature outside the parameters of safety in order to get a photo op.

The tragedy had lived in our memories for years, but Jamie Parker and I were sitting in the Horseshoe Bar on Avenue B the next evening and he asked, “You know who Christa McAuliffe is?”

“Everyone knows who she is.” The burly bartender put down his wipe rag. He didn’t like Jamie. My friend was not only a junkie, but a wiseass and there were enough of those in the East Village in the 80s. “She was the school teacher in the Space Shuttle.”

“Well, you know what her last words were?” Jamie slotted his eyes left and right. The rest of the bar was listening to his every word.

“No, what were they?” The bartender asked with exasperation, knowing the answer would be to his liking.

“What’s this button for?”

We were booed out of the bar two seconds later.

President Reagan would have loved to blame the Challenger disaster on a schoolteacher from New Hampshire, however his commission assigned the fault to the booster rockets’ frozen 0-rings without any mention of presidential pressure on NASA to green-light the mission in unsatisfactory weather conditions.

Yesterday in San Diego the twenty-minute firework extravaganza lasted fifteen seconds for the thousands of spectators gathered around the inner bay. Most ooh and aahed with pleasure, but a few fled the fireballs, because they recognized that something was not right.

There was no do-over and according to August Santore of Garden State Fireworks, “This is very uncommon …. there was nothing in the pyrotechnics that went wrong. It was the electronics. It’s just something that obviously was beyond our control. Anyone who has ever had any kind of computer situation, or otherwise — it’s not perfect — so we’ve never had this situation before and God willing, we’ll never have anything like this again.”

A similar electronic malfunction occurred in Thailand back in 2009.

I accept the computer error story.

It’s always best to blame someone or something that can’t protest its fault, but in the end all mistakes with a computer happen somewhere between the finger in the keyboard.

To err is human. To blame something else is even more human – Pascha Ray

To view the 20-second extravaganza please go to the following URL