March | 2015 | Tash Friday

Good morning Tash Appreciators,

As we head to work today, most of us will be looking forward to the end of the week and a couple of days off. It might even be a non-uniform day at work because it’s the last Friday of the month. However, for one chap in particular, this definitely isn’t a “dress-down” day and he definitely isn’t looking forward to a nice weekend at home.

This morning, Scott Kelly woke up in the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan and won’t go to bed on Earth again for a whole year. That’s because Captain Kelly is going to spend a year on this:

The point of spending a year in space is to find out how the body changes in zero-gravity conditions over a long period of time. That’s going to be useful information to have before folk start heading off to Mars in the not too distant future. The guys at NASA are apparently concerned that long periods of time without gravity could lead to eyeballs changing shape; muscles (including the heart) weakening to the extent that they don’t function properly when back on Earth (or Mars); and bones losing minerals like calcium and weakening.

Of course, in any experiment about the effects of a particular type of situation on the human body it’s useful to have a control subject. Luckily for NASA, Captain Kelly has a twin brother – Mark. Mark Kelly was also an astronaut and you may recall that he’s married to Gabrielle Giffords, the former Congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt.

Mark Kelly isn’t just a control subject though – he’ll be key to his brother dealing with a whole year away from not just his home and family but his planet. As Elton John predicted: “it’s lonely out in space”. to Scott, the feeling of helplessness while he’s away with absolutely no way of getting home is likely to be the hardest part – he’s been in space for long periods before and he doesn’t seem all that concerned about the physical side of things.

Mark will be the person at the other end of the phone who’ll keep Scott’s spirits up and makes sure everything is OK at home. I guess it’s really true that no man is an island; even when he’s 229 miles above the Earth, going at 17,500 mph.

I almost forgot the Tash. You’ll never guess what Mark Kelly likes to rock…

He’s grown his Tash out a bit since his days in space ended – no doubt that will be some comfort to his brother.

Have a great weekend folks!

What’s next?

Good morning Tash Appreciators,

This week marks the beginning of what will hopefully be the return to normal service of TF. I say “hope” as editions may not appear every week but it wouldn’t be TF if we didn’t at least give it a go. You know, daring greatly and all that.

I wonder if any of you know who this chap is:

His name is Derrick Coleman – he won the Superbowl with the Seattle Seahawks last year.

What’s interesting about Mr Coleman isn’t that he won the Superbowl (loads of folk have done that) but that he’s been deaf since he was three years old. That’s a problem in a sport where a key part of the game is hearing and implementing a particular play. If you’ve ever seen an NFL game, you’ll have seen the coaches giving instructions from the sidelines and plays being called on the field.

You’d think that a deaf person would find it difficult to play football at any level; let alone in the NFL. You’d be right. Derrick Coleman was told from the beginning that he couldn’t play. Even after he’d played in college, NFL teams didn’t think he had what it took and none of them picked him in the 2012 NFL Draft.

Looking back on those who said he’d never play in the NFL, Coleman said: “I’ve been deaf since I was three, so I didn’t listen.”

He was in an excellent series of Duracell adverts called “Trust Your Power”. It’s worth a watch:

I like that phrase: “trust your power”. I like it even more when you add “it’ll take you anywhere you want to go”. I take it to mean that if you back yourself and your own ability to get where you want to be; you’ll get there. The other point is that if you don’t trust your own power, and your own ability, no-one else will.

The other interesting point about Derrick Coleman, at least from my perspective, is that he’s almost exactly the same age as my younger (but bigger) brother.

Unlike Derrick Coleman, my brother isn’t deaf. He doesn’t have a Superbowl winner’s ring either. However, he has recently beaten very daunting odds by trusting his own ability and persevering when others would have either given up or compromised. His achievement is testament to the fact that hard work will take you literally anywhere you want to go.

There is one further similarity between my brother and Derrick Coleman in that most of us would love to work in their offices. Coleman’s office is a stadium but my brother’s office will look like this:

Congrats, pal – you deserve it.

All that remains is to roll out this week’s Tash.

He did a different type of flying but, who knows, maybe the Wee Man will do a bit of flight instruction when, sometime in the distant future, he packs in the jet-set lifestyle. This week’s Tash is Tom Skerritt, aka Mike “Viper” Metcalf from Top Gun.

Have a great weekend folks!

What’s next?

Tash Friday

Monthly Archives: March 2015

Rocket Man

Trust Your Power