Laika, The Cosmonaut

On November 3, 1957 the world tuned in to the distant beep-beep-beep of the Sputnik II orbiting satellite. It was the second object launched into outer space by the Soviet Union, but it was the first to carry a living passenger. On board was the dog, Laika.

She would also be the first living being to die in space.

Laika is remembered as the first to reach outer space, but she began her brief life in far humbler circumstances:
She was a mutt and a stray, living on the streets of Moscow and begging for food. When she was about three years old, she was found by a scientist in the Russian space program and brought to Star City, where she would begin her new life as first-cosmonaut-in-training.

They gave her the name ‘Laika’ there at Star City, (it means simply ‘Bark’ in Russian), but they usually called her ‘Little Bug’ or ‘Little Lemon’.

She was well fed for the first time in her life and had a warm bed to sleep in every night. These, one can only imagine, were the happiest days of her life.

She lived with two other dogs, Albina and Mushka, and they spent their days undergoing tests on their reflexes, their heart rates, their hearing, their breathing.
Albina and Mushka both survived brief sub-orbital trips up in Soviet rockets prior to Laika's fateful voyage, but the real mission was saved for Laika.

In the end, it was her most unheroic trait that earmarked her for destiny - she was the calmest, the best behaved, the quietest.

Sputnik II weighed more than 1,000 pounds and was filled with instruments and antennae and insulation and electrical wiring. In the very center of the craft, however, a small cavity, just large enough for a smallish dog to stand or lie down in (but not turn around), was reserved for Laika.

To prepare her for the cramped quarters, she was kept in progressively smaller cages - in the dark - for two weeks at a time.
To accustom her to the stress and shaking of the flight, her cage was routinely agitated hydraulically or placed in the massive centrifuge used to train the human cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin, who would go up a year later.
To simulate the noise of liftoff, speakers were positioned outside her closed box that periodically played - at full, deafening volume - a recording of a rocket during launch.
She was fed a nutrient enriched jelly and given water, but the close quarters stopped her from urinating or defecating.
Her pulse was monitored at all times and ran high, but within the bounds of safety.
She was adjudged to have performed admirably, under the circumstances.

Three days before launch, Laika was gently bathed and groomed, fitted with a harness and electrodes to monitor her vital signs, and placed into the padded cavity of the Sputnik II capsule at the launch site. The capsule was sealed. Laika would never see the sky or the sun or another living thing ever again.
It was so cold that they had to attach a hose to the capsule to pipe in heated air. Laika was restless.

Launch! Half a ton of steel and fire hurtled into space at twenty thousand miles an hour. Laika, the stray-dog cosmonaut, the fastest thing alive.

The capsule slung around the Earth for five and a half months (2,570 orbits) before it burned up in a flash of chrome and vermillion upon re-entry. Re-entry was on April 14th, 1958 - the 46th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic and the 93rd of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln - an infamous day, April the 14th.

Of course, Laika was dead long before that day.

She was never meant to survive the trip. There was never any consideration of recovering Laika or the capsule itself. Hers was always going to be a one-way flight.

It has never been entirely clear how long Laika was able to stay alive inside her Sputnik (Russian for ‘Companion’), but it was not longer than ten days. After ten days there would be no more food or water and a poisoned dose of her nutritional jelly would have euthanized her.

She may have survived as many as four days before dying of stress and heat. Recently, a Russian scientist who worked at Star City alleged that Laika lived little more than a few hours following her fiery ascent up Jacob’s Ladder.
He said that he has always regretted what they did to Laika.

However long she stayed alive in her dark-little-fastest-flying-coffin, she has become one of the most famous dogs in history. Her face has graced the postage stamps of several countries; her image adorns a Russian monument to all those who died in the pursuit of space; she has been featured in novels and songs.

That song by Domenico Modugno, ‘Nel Blu Dipinto Di Blu’, was likely written in 1958 (only months after Laika's voyage) as a kind of homage to Laika.

I originally had a whole thing about the lyrics here, but I think you’ll feel it more if I leave it at this: in the song, the narrator is exclaiming how happy he is to be flying away from everything and into infinite space. It’s a metaphor for a love affair, sure, but it’s filled with a kind of pathos as the singer moves further and further away from the Earth and everything he has ever known there, singing all the while.
Here's a link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-DVi0ugelc&feature=player_embedded

Vancouver: I Cause an International Breakfast Incident

At breakfast one morning in Vancouver, I scanned the menu anxiously. When the waitress arrived to take our orders, I went last.

“I’ll have a cappuccino and the waffles,” I said.

“All right,” she said.

“And, do you have American bacon?”

“What?”

Now look: It’s Canada. They have Canadian bacon in Canada, no? It stands to reason that in Canada they are not going to call Canadian bacon ‘Canadian bacon’. Hell, I’ve ordered bacon in Britain before and received Canadian bacon. So I’m asking, you know? I mean, the menu just says “bacon”.

I mean, now I know they call that 'ham' or something. But at the time.

“American bacon?” I answered.

“What’s American bacon?” she asked.

“It’s just like Canadian bacon, only more arrogant and Iraq-invadey,” I said.

A good, healthy, tension-clearing laugh from all involved.

“You mean strip bacon?” she asked.

“Yeah, sure. Strip bacon.”

“Oh, okay. American bacon. huh.”

And everyone is looking at me with furrowed brows.

Well fuck them.

It is American-style bacon. It’s our thing. Our birthright, Goddamnit.

Inside the brain of every Canadian is a klaxon alarm that sounds whenever they hear the word "American." We’re Americans too! We’re Americans too! America is a continent, not a nation! it cries. But what are we supposed to call ourselves, United Statesians? I think she simply refused to grant us the adjective for our bacon out of spite. Strip bacon, indeed.

My father then tells me that he thinks I have insulted all Canadians because I said that American bacon was more arrogant, thus implying that Canadian bacon is some arrogant.

This is the kind of thing my father says at breakfasts.

I told him that I didn’t think so, that you could be more obnoxious than someone who was zero obnoxious just like I could have more coffee than Tim, who had none. My father grew hot under the collar and red in the face.

“Ridiculous!” he nearly yelled.

“No it isn’t, it’s perfectly reasonable to say you have more money than someone who has none money.”

“That’s idiotic. No one talks that way. If they did, no one would understand them.”

“Well, everyone here at this table understood.”

“I guess you think you’re a better lawyer than me, huh? A better drafter, is that it?”

“Apparently.”

“You’re an idiot, Jeff. A real idiot, you know that?”

“Right.”

Families are the best, amirite?

When the waitress arrived with my meal, she placed the plate in front of me and said “Your waffles with American bacon.”

“Mmm, awesome.” I said, “I can almost smell the county music.”

Canadians, by the way, really say “Eh” at the end of declaratory sentences.

I mean the accent is one thing. It’s normal to have an accent. have more accents. Accents complete me.

But peppering your speech with some sort of verbal hiccup like “eh" is preposterous.

So, you know, relax, Canada.

Vancouver: Tim Has Some Sort of Seizure

While standing outside a restaurant waiting for a cab, I admired Tim’s Pea Coat.

“I’m intensely jealous of your Pea Coat,” I said.

Tim glanced down at himself, then at me and my single-breasted overcoat. “I’m jealous of your coat,” he said.

“No, damnit, you’re not,” I replied. “I gotta get me a Pea Coat like that.”

Tim shrugged. I shrugged. I pulled the corner of my mouth up and shoved my hands in the pockets of my non-Pea-Coat coat.

Tim looked over at me. “I don’t know about Scott Bakula,” he said. “He just doesn’t seem like a starship captain to me.”

I picked up my eyes from where they had fallen out of my head and used them to stare at Tim incredulously.

“I mean,” he continued, “That Captain Janeway was too real for me, like a real naval captain or something. But Scott Bakula is too, I dunno, Scott Bakula for that show.”

“You’re not seriously discussing this with me,” said I.

“I am. I mean, look, as a time traveling do-gooder he was fine, even great, but as the first captain of an interstellar spaceship?”

“Dear God.” I said and picked up my eyeballs again.

Tim was feeding on my dismay like those Harry Potter bad guys with the robes and the flying, and I considered mentioning that to him, but that would have only kicked him into overdrive. Instead I put my hand on his shoulder and looked into his eyes.

“It’s a helluva coat, though. A helluva coat.”

Vancouver: A Dream Deferred

The hotel was a highrise. I had a corner room on the 21st floor. Close-up views of the entire downtown skyline of Vancouver. This provided an excellent opportunity to fulfill one of my great, unrealized dreams:

To witness two people having sex in the office after hours through the window of an adjacent building.

I don’t particularly care if they are having an illicit affair or are simply using the office to spice up their sex-life. I just want to look across a city block from a darkened hotel room and see it happen.

Cleaning crew doesn’t count, they have to actually work there during daylight hours.

Fatcat boss and secretary would be ideal.

My dream remains unrealized. The closest I got that night was while looking across the way into the Fairmont hotel. I saw a guy in his bathrobe on the 18th floor looking up at me from behind his curtain.

Maybe he has the same dream as I do.

I waved and he scampered back into the welcoming darkness of his room. I stood by my window for a moment, scanning the illuminated boxes in the skyscrapers near me, thinking of Rear Window. Then I turned and went to bed.

I left all the curtains open, just in case.

Every So Often, Not at Great Speed

So up there in Seward, Alaska, at the Alaska Sea Life Center, they had this Octopus called Aurora.

Aurora was about five years old when she died. A Giant Pacific octopus, she was found outside the Sea Life Center when she was only about the size of a softball.

She was living inside an old tire that had filled with water from the rain. They took her to live in the aquarium and she did pretty well.

Octopuses are really smart - maybe as smart as dogs. They are excellent problem solvers and can learn to recognize symbols and play games. But they don’t live very long.

Aurora lived at the aquarium for three years before somebody had the idea to try to hook her up with the other resident Giant Pacific octopus, a male by the name of J-1.

J-1 was the largest known octopus in the world. He weighed 57 pounds. He, too, was a foundling - found on a beach when he was only the size of a quarter.

He was about five years old at the time he was introduced into Aurora’s tank. He was pretty near the end of his life. His skin was beginning to wear away and his suckers were cracking and becoming pitted. He had never met another octopus.

When they dropped J-1 into Aurora’s tank, Aurora freaked out a little bit. She retreated to the bottom and bunched herself into a ball. Eventually though, it was Aurora who approached J-1. She reached out a tentative tentacle and touched the old guy. Then she ran away, scrunched herself into a corner of the tank.

Little by little, J-1 pursued Aurora and won her over with, I dunno, charisma. Maybe he did the thing where he squeezes into a really little jar.

Anyway, at some point, the two of them suckered themselves onto the back wall of their glass enclosure with J-1 on the outside, completely covering Aurora. They stayed like that for more than eight hours, mating. At times during this somewhat alien lovemaking, J-1 flashed several different colors in rapid succession, from deep red to ghostly white, which is a thing octopuses can do. Nobody really knows what it means, though.

When they finally separated, J-1 had done what he could, but nobody was sure if the two were too old to conceive.

A month later, Aurora retreated to a rocky outcropping in a corner of the tank and laid tens of thousands of tiny, pearlescent eggs. She began the long process of caring for her unborn young by drawing water into her mantle and blowing it over them, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This was June. If all went well, in six to eight months she would hatch her eggs and then die of starvation and exhaustion.

Octopuses stop eating entirely while they tend their eggs. They really only die because they give up everything for their eggs.

But early on, there were problems. Her eggs weren’t developing. They failed to grow or change color as they should have. Probably Aurora was simply too old to be an octopus mother. Still, she sat next to her eggs and kept the water moving over them. Occasionally she would have to get rid of a curious starfish or two that snuck in at night, looking for a meal.

In September of 2004, J-1 died of old age and Aurora was still tending her (most likely sterile) eggs. She hadn’t eaten anything in months.

When December rolled around and still the eggs showed no sign of developing, Aurora’s keepers decided to drain the tank and remove the eggs that were slowly killing their well-intentioned mother.

Aurora had other ideas.

As the water level fell, the eggs were slowly exposed to the air and, in order to stay under water where she could breathe, Aurora was forced further and further away from them. She repositioned herself, half in and half out of the water, and began spraying long streams of water onto the now exposed rock face where her eggs were slowly drying and dying in order to keep them moist.

An intern charged with clearing the undeveloped eggs from the tank noticed that some of them had little red dots inside them - eyes.

They were woefully undeveloped after seven months, but Aurora’s eggs weren’t sterile after all. They hastily refilled her tank and she moved back next to them and resumed her vigil. She would have a long while left to go.

It should have taken - at most - eight months, but it took Aurora and her eggs more than twelve.

Finally, one day in April 2005, a tiny, almost spherical, baby octopus hatched from one of the eggs and began floating around in the tank. The keepers were sure that would be it, but in the coming days, in ones or twos or tens or twenties, "every so often, and not at great speed", thousands and thousands of babies were born.

They had to set up additional tanks just to hold them all.

As the eggs hatched, Aurora became noticeably more active for the first time in months, stretching herself across the glass and moving around her tank.

Aurora, who had weighed 37 pounds at the beginning of her long ordeal, was now a cephalopod waif. She hadn’t eaten on her own in more than a year. Her keepers had been hand feeding her fish and crabmeat in an effort to extend her life. They were successful, after a fashion. She lived until August of 2005, four months after the first of her babies were born, when she was euthanized out of concern for her comfort.

For octopuses, birthing is a numbers game. Out of thousands of babies, some two dozen of Aurora’s babies (a huge number for an octopus brood) have survived and grown up and are being cared for at the Sea Life Center today.

Here's a picture of Aurora, who was a hell of a mother octopus:

While the Cat is Away

. . . the mouse will sort of sit around, feeling bored and kinda lonely.

So Chiara took a jetplane to Italy on Sunday, and she left me and the cat (the actual cat) to hold down the fort. The cat might disagree, but I think it’s going all right so far; I almost always remember to feed her.

I mean, sure, the place is getting a little frayed around the edges, but nothing catastrophic. It is like the end of the Roman empire: it just gets more decadent and unkempt, and the dustbunnies make some inroads into the interior (in this metaphor, they’re the Visigoths), and eventually Chiara comes home and clucks and tsks a bit and we clean house and presto, Renaissance!

Thing is, when your wife goes out of town for a month or so, you spin these gossamer webs in your mind’s eye about what it’ll be like. You imagine that now, at last, you’ll have that poker game, or smoke those cigars, or watch those pornographic movies, or go to those bars with your bachelor friends. You think that you’ll play music as loud as you want because no one will be in the other room trying to watch the Biggest Loser. You think you’ll go out every night and the cat thinks she’ll be allowed to sleep in the bed.

Of course, the reality is somewhat more tame. Mostly you just wish you had something to do. You feel sort of depressed and suddenly feel sure that, were your wife around, you’d be having sex. And you feel sure it would be way crazier than any sex you actually have with her. The bed is noticeably colder and the house noticeably quieter.

I guess you play the music (mostly so you don't feel so alone) and you get to dance like an idiot, but that’s more fun when someone is there to roll her eyes at you.

And you don’t really like cigars or strip clubs or whatever anyway.

And the cat? Hell, she’s batshit crazy. Who knows what she thinks about cigars or stripclubs? And if I let her in the bed, Chiara will probably knife me.

So, unless someone gets me out of the house, This’ll be more or less just a great opportunity to catch up on some reading. I’m looking at you, Grapes of Wrath.

Well, and the porn. That part is just like you imagine it will be, more or less.