Gwyneth Paltrow rouses Discovery crew

The crew of space shuttle Discovery was roused this morning by Gwyneth Paltrow's Coming Home, a choice wake-up ditty selected by the space station flight controllers in Mission Control. The venerable vehicle is on track to land at Kennedy Space Center at 16:57 GMT at the end of its final mission - STS-133 to the International …

[sandman]

Please let us land!

With that quality of music to wake up to I'd be trying to land anywhere as fast as possible.

[Annihilator]

Nope

"We're not landing, we're never going back to a planet that could generate that"

[Liam Thom]

End of an era, etc

And then they can put the Space Shuttle in a museum next to the Harrier and Concorde and any other cutting edge technologies that have been discontinued and not replaced.

[Adus]

To be fair...

The JSF with a vertical take off configuration is comparable to the Harrier and the UK was very involved in the JSF project. Your supersonic flight for passenger airliners point stands though.

[Alastair Dodd 1]

NIice

Okay which member of the crew pissed off Huston?

[phil mcracken]

In space...

... noone can hear you scream "arrrgh! turn this shite off!"

[blah 5]

As someone who loves all kinds of music...

...including yes, country, bluegrass, folk, Handel, Beethoven, Nazareth, Rainbow, the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Cash Calloway, Chuck Berry, and many, many others: Paltrow's song is by no means the worst that I've ever heard. It's really not all that bad. She also has a much better voice than I would have expected from someone who started a professional singing career in her 40s.

Nope, bad is Leonard Nimoy's abortion of an album. Or for that matter, Shatner's. :-)

[Goat Jam]

Shatners Album "Has Been"

Produced by Ben Folds (who also plays) is actually quite excellent.

Sure he talks rather than sing, but Shatner pulls it off imparting an impressive amount of emotion to the spoken lyrics.

Standouts are "Common People", "Real" and the excellent title track of course.

I'm willing to bet that you have never actually heard this album.

[sgtrock]

Wrong album. :-)

I meant his first one from 1968, "The Transformed Man."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transformed_Man

"In 2006 Q Magazine ranked The Transformed Man 45th in their list of the 50 worst albums ever.[1] In the decades since its release, most of the album's tracks have been used satirically, either on compilation albums meant to showcase bad celebrity singing (the Rhino Records "Golden Throats" series) or by radio disc jockeys looking for laughs."

[Goat Jam]

OK then

I haven't heard that album myself so I can't comment on it. I took a look at Amazon though and the album gets an average of 4 stars from 70 reviews.

Reading the reviews are . . . interesting. I find myself wondering whether radio station DJ's are in such a good position to determine what is good or bad in music. Most of them have no compunctions with playing Lady Gaga pr Kenye West and carrying about how their "music" is totally cool and awesome.

From an Amazon review;

"Each two-part track is meant to reflect upon a different aspect of the duality of man. Of course, you don't get this effect when some radio station cues up Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds or Mr. Tambourine Man for comedic purposes; those guys never play the first half of each track, so it's impossible for the listener to know what Shatner was actually trying to do with this album"

Me? I think I will reserve judgment until I get a chance to hear it for myself.

[Goat Jam]

OK fair enough then

I haven't heard that album myself so I can't comment on it. I took a look at Amazon though and the album gets an average of 4 stars from 70 reviews.

Reading the reviews are . . . interesting. I find myself wondering whether radio station DJ's are in such a good position to determine what is good or bad in music. Most of them have no compunctions with playing Lady Gaga pr Kenye West and carrying about how their "music" is totally cool and awesome.

From an Amazon review;

"Each two-part track is meant to reflect upon a different aspect of the duality of man. Of course, you don't get this effect when some radio station cues up Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds or Mr. Tambourine Man for comedic purposes; those guys never play the first half of each track, so it's impossible for the listener to know what Shatner was actually trying to do with this album"

Me? I think I will reserve judgment until I get a chance to hear it for myself.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ban on orbital weapons

This is why orbital weapons are banned. Can you imagine what would happen if they had access to space-based weaponry?!!

[Cochituate]

Roused by Gwyneth?

Okay, the crew was roused by the blond goddess, but who woke them up that morning?