The Soviet Union launched the Mir space station on February 23, 1986, and it orbited the Earth for a little longer than 15 years until March 23, 2001, 15 years ago today, when it was guided through a de-orbit maneuver and burned up in the Earth’s atmosphere.

During its years in orbit, its home country closed for business and re-opened as Russia, it became the first station to house Russian-American missions, and it almost saw a crew die in space when a cargo ship crashed into it. Its crew quarters were cramped, tools that no one could figure out a use for cluttered its work spaces, and it had difficulty staying in any one position for long, which would sometimes smack crew members about.

Russian mission control successfully guided the crippled space station to a re-entry over the South Pacific, so no debris struck land.

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George Frideric Handel’s oratorio “Messiah” had its London premiere on this date in 1743. A debate in the newspapers about whether such a serious story—Christ’s Nativity, Passion, Resurrection and Ascension—was suitable for performance in a theater may have hurt the success of the premiere. Handel cut the scheduled number of performances in half, from six to three. A revival of the piece in 1749, with some cuts and changes made to it, sparked a new public embrace of the oratorio, an embrace that has not diminished in the years since. “O Death Where is Thy Sting” (after the fold):
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William Shatner is 85 today. As of the moment I am typing this, 4:05 p.m. on March 21, Mr. Shatner has sent out approximately 40 Tweets today alone, all of them joshing replies to questions from his many admirers, like this one:

I'm the pied piper of Twitter… https://t.co/W88qnAIGv5

— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) March 21, 2016

 
I am sure there will be 40 more between when I type this and when you will be reading this.

His show business career is legendary, one of the few in which an actor has traveled the road from up-and-coming new star of the future to leading man to has-been to leading man to parody to self-parody and then back to leading man. Perhaps he has always been an up-and-coming performer, just starting out, and we are the ones who have insisted on boxing him in. Shatner has remained a perpetual 45-55 years of age for the last 45 years. I have friends who have interviewed him, and the reports are always that meeting him was one of life’s highlights for them.

He is living long and, it appears, prospering. And he seems incapable of slowing down, much less stopping. A tv appearance from February (below the fold):
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Vivian Stanshall was born on this date in 1943. I published a tribute two years ago, “Vivian Stanshall: Not an Eccentric.”

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“A House Divided,” the final episode of the third season of the television drama, “Dallas,” aired 36 years years ago tonight on CBS. It ended with the shocking cliffhanger: J.R. Ewing is shot in the final seconds and left for dead. His assailant is not seen. In the long-unfolding plot of the series, the season, and the episode, the number of characters who might have wanted to see the grinningly evil J.R. Ewing shot numbered in double (perhaps triple) digits. For the next eight months, until the first episode of the next season, American media was obsessed with this question: “Who shot J.R.?” When that episode aired, on November 21, 1980, some 75% of all American televisions that were turned on that night were tuned to “Dallas” on CBS. The “shooting” (below the fold):
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