Maybe if I pee on the VLA radio telescope, Jodie Foster will love me!

I just watched the movie Contact for the first time since I saw it in the theater, and, wow, what a turd-burger. I'm sorry, but I'm giving a lecture tomorrow (well, tomorrow by the time you read this) about the novel, but there is nobody in that movie who is not bad. I understand the changes that a fan must suffer through in order to see their favorite books translated to the screen. I went through 12 stages of grief when they put Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide on the big screen and they put Arthur and Trillian in a relationship. But this Palmer Joss and Ellie Arroway made me barf a little. Oh, and all of the acting was nightmarish. Nobody looked good.

But, I did have a moment of nostalgia during the movie. They seem to have filmed at the Very Large Array radio telescope in Socorro, NM. I once peed on that telescope. True story. Well, not on the telescope itself, but one of the things about having a line of radio telescope dishes is that you increase the wavelength that the telescope can detect. (I don't know if they ever went through with the plan to coordinate radio telescopes globally so that we had an earth-sized dish, but you get the idea.) So, if you want to imagine that the dish of the telescope is really whatever is along the diameter of the array of scopes, my peeing on the ground put me well inside that dish.

But I really had to go.

Oh, apparently the Very Long Baseline Array is a real thing. I've peed on that one many times too.

Hey, don't you judge me. I drove a long way to see the VLA, and they put it in the middle of this huge basin with mountains all the way around and not a place to piss for miles. Also, I have a bladder the size of a peanut, as anyone who was at the Atlanta Skeptics Meetup last week can testify to.

At any rate, I must cut this short. I have class in the morning and need to get my 5 hours of sleep. Also, I have to pee.

HJ