Space tape

400 bajillion dollars, highly trained, courageous men and women, and yet the whole program can't get by without duct tape.

On the road we called it (and it's still called) gaffer's tape. None of us should be surprised that gaffer's was used to hold together an assemblage of parts that probably cost NASA ten million bucks. Hell, Gaffer's has been at work for years, holding fenders together for NASCAR, and gosh only knows what else, and, all kidding aside, there would not, COULD NOT be a single concert anywhere in the world if there were suddenly no gaffer's to be found.

Bands large and small, known by one or known by all, couldn't take the stage without it. In typical fashion, the magic of any performance is a culmination of many smaller, homely, unseen cogs in the wheel known as the show, and much of that is held down/secured/hidden/marked by the strong, reliable yet underappreciated treasure known as gaffer's. I'm not even sure that the possessive apostrophe is right, but, damn, I'm going with it. Cables, cords, stage marks, boxes of T-shirts, so much of live entertainment rides upon the sticky shoulders of gaffer's. Back in the day (isn't this where the kids can't keep their eyes open as granpa spins anouther road yarn?), roadies working for smaller bands with miniscule record label support would guard their primo gaffer's with their lives. Primo gaffer's was THE stuff: flat black, textile-based (not that glossy black plastic shit), with good tear and stickiness.

And gaffer's has its uses in many situations that might not occur to the uninitiated. For example, we once used gaffer's and cardboard to seal the tour bus bunk space of a rather portly roadie who had a neglectful attitude towards personal hygene, with the portly, smelly roadie inside. There are many other road stories, mostly true, of gaffer's used in the most original fashion. But, the true worth of gaffer's is its reliability to adhere to just about anything and hold just about anything together, as NASA and its astronauts have finally discovered.
Gaffer's in space. It's an amazing world.

And speaking of amazing, the other bright news story of the day is that researchers have discoverd that psilocybin mushrooms actually do exapnd your mind and make you contemplate, well, whatever you happen to be looking at after you've eaten psilocybin mushrooms.

I'm not sure where to go with this, other than to ask, what did they think was happening to people when they ingested thsoe mushrooms? My other questions are, where can one sign up for the studies, will they be doing more, and was there an overwhelming response when they asked for volunteers?

They did mention that a handful of people in the study had 'bad trips', which is a phrase I haven't heard in, well, a while, and that does indicate that the mushroom state of mind may not be for everyone.

It's nice to have a day where we can have two stories from two different places, where one is about one of the simplest inventions on Earth used in space, and the other is about one of the spaciest things on Earth used to get into space...or something like that...

Enough. Gotta get ready for liftoff; please use your roll of gaffer's to secure yourself to the seat.