supersonic percussion

Sometimes I play a word game in my head, choosing a word and then seeing how many other words I can make out its letters. For example...
"example"... lamp, ex, ax, axe, leap, maple, (etc.)

This morning while doing that game with the word "percussion", I realized that it is an anagram of "supersonic"!

That reminded me of the 1987 "Supersonic" song by J.J. Fad:

"Supersonic (Flim Flam Remix)" (Watch on YouTube)

Video title: Supersonic (Flim Flam Remix)
Posted by: J.J. Fad - Topic
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH4fNNoVbaQ

Kazakh

This Kazakh music video is both visually and audibly (the sound of the Kazakh language) intriguing to me, even though I don't like the scenes of war and fighting. From what I've been able to find, it was made in honor of Kazakhstan's 550th anniversary. The music group is named Gauhartas.

"Гаухартас- "Казагым-ай" (клип 2015)" (Watch on YouTube)

Video title: Гаухартас- "Казагым-ай" (клип 2015) (Gauhartas "Kazagim-ay")
Posted by: Айганым Баймуратова
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FlBCJbb2oo
Date posted: Oct 23, 2015


Here are the lyrics along with an English translation. Some of the translation does not make much sense, and Google Translate seems to do a better job for those parts.

Some things I learned after watching the video:
Kazakhstan has a small ethnic group of Germans.
The Volga Germans were ethnic Germans who settled in a region of Russia in the 18th century.
About 100,000 ethnic Germans from Russia immigrated to the U.S. by 1900.
During WW2, the Soviet Union deported all of the Volga Germans (over 900,000) to camps in Siberia and Kazakhstan as a "preventive measure". A third of them died during the deportation.

lunar missions

While scrolling through these old newspaper images from the time of the first manned moon landing...
These 50-year-old front pages show how Apollo 11 captivated the country

(There are some headlines about Ted Kennedy leaving the scene of a car crash on Chappaquiddick Island.)

One also sees headlines mentioning Luna 15. It was an unmanned Soviet craft designed to land on the moon and bring back lunar samples to Earth. It orbited the moon at the same time as Apollo 11 - I don't remember hearing about that before! (Space race, indeed.) After the American moonwalk had finished, it attempted a landing but crashed into the moon.

Interesting to read:
Luna 15 Accompanied Apollo 11 to the Moon
Luna-15: Russia’s secret moonshot designed to beat Apollo 11

The first article mentions 2 medals the Soviets gave to the Americans "to leave on the Moon honoring two lost cosmonauts, Yuri Gagarin and Vladimir Komarov," but doesn't say whether the Americans actually took the medals to the moon. According to this article, they did:
What Have We Left on the Moon? (answer: half a million pounds of equipment, trash, and other items).

Jodrell Bank Lovell Telescope records Luna 15 crash:
(there's not really much one can hear in the video, but it is still interesting.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJthrJ5xpxk

gfish staged a Lego re-enactment of the Apollo 11 mission on Twitter:
https://gfish.dreamwidth.org/386990.html

This is an interesting video about the computer on the lunar landing module, and the 1202 alarm that happened:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z4cn93H6sM0