I watched it in person, sort of.
I was living on the Florida Gulf Coast at the time. From the Gulf Coast, a shuttle launch was just a bright bead drawing a thin line up from the horizon, so it wasn’t any sort of spectacle, but it was something interesting to watch if you happened to be outside, which I was.
And it was obvious even from there what had likely happened, since the bright bead suddenly flashed, then went out, and the line went off sideways.
Meaning is subjective and not intrinsic, so there can be no such thing as “the” meaning of anything.
The artist can have an intended meaning, but the audience not only can but will find their own meaning in it. It might be the case that the audience gets the same meaning from it that the creator intended, but it might just as easily be the case that they get some entirely different meaning from it.
None of them are right or wrong - that’s not even a coherent concept in that context. They just are whatever they are.
No.
(A quick search later)… Ah… yeah A likely two-bit Babylonian copper hustler who through a quirk of fate is a sort of legendary historical figure almost four millennia later.
Yep - that has the same sort of appeal. Thanks for that.
It’s something about irony - the legendary nobody, famous for something mundane.
My username is actually from a side character in Terry Gilliam’s first non-Python movie - Jabberwocky.
The protagonist, Dennis, is a cooper - a barrelmaker (actually he’s a tedious putz who can’t even manage to make a barrel, but that’s another story). Early on, he goes to make his fortune in the big city, where he meets a legendary cooper - “The Wat Dabney?! The inventor of the inverted firkin?!” - who has been reduced to begging because all of the business in the city is controlled by the guilds and they’ve shut him out.
Curiously, many years later I ran across a somewhat similar character in an entirely different medium who appealed to me the same way. This one is in a manga - The Voynich Hotel, by Dowman Sayman. They have a serious problem with the boiler in the eponymous hotel, so the protagonist sets out on a quest to track down a hermit who’s reputed to be able to fix anything - Tepes, the legendary second-rate boiler engineer.
I’m not sure what appeals to me about second-rate legendary craftsmen, but…
I think they’re analogous to people who would stand and watch a stoning, then congratulate themselves on not having thrown any rocks themselves.
Right - that’s the new Christian Single Commandment - “Thou only need bother to be somewhat less evil than those other people over there.”