Joe Acaba aboard the Soyuz TMA-04M spacecraft in May.

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration has overcome a number of harrowing obstacles along the road toward accomplishing out-of-this-world feats—the Apollo missions, followed by the space shuttle, and now the development of Commercial Crew vehicles—but there remains one roadblock of sorts that it is still trying to navigate its way around: How do we get these darned kids to think we’re hip?

NASA administrator Charles F. Bolden Jr. is well aware that his current audience remains much the same as it was during the space race; a lot of older people follow NASA closely because of intense nostalgia for space-related memories like gathering around a black-and-white TV set with their entire extended family and watching something special like, say, the moon landing. Today's youth, on the other hand, hasn't grown up with these scientific breakthroughs occupying an abundance of airtime or attention, and these major events are pretty much known to them from what they've read in school textbooks or heard at family gatherings—when grandpa has had one too many bourbons.

But now, NASA is launching initiatives to bring the agency better remembered from monochrome boob tubes into the present, aligning itself with pop culture trends. It recently released Angry Birds Space, which is designed to encourage users to consider anti-gravity trajectories while they eliminate egg-stealing pigs. (Following the game release, a YouTube demonstration on the International Space Station of real-life angry birds using a slingshot and balloons had 16 million views.) And Bob Jacobs, deputy associate administrator for communications, tells us the agency's fervent social media efforts are “award-winning.”

“There was a time when space exploration was new, that every launch was a pioneering effort,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Kids today don’t know a time without space exploration.”

This Friday at 4 p.m., however, NASA hopes that the elusive younger demographic will be brought into a space story of their own—about the time they listened to the first DJ spin from the stars out yonder.

Astronaut Joe Acaba will host the program, entitled “The Joe Show: New Rock From Space,” from the International Space Station, 240 miles above Earth.The show will be broadcast on NASA’s radio station, Third Rock Radio, available on the NASA home page and via a mobile app called TuneIn.

Cruze, one of the founders of Third Rock Radio, tells us that the station is like any other, except for two small details: It only plays new music, discovered online and at music shows by its team of “music explorers,” and, during breaks from the program, it shares facts about NASA and other technology developments.

“In between songs, instead of saying things that other DJs might say like, ‘Join us next Thursday for drinks at so-and-so’s club,’ the Third Rock DJs talk about ‘Hey we’re landing this info finder on Mars next week.'"

Cruze—who goes by only one name—told us that he and his partner Pat Fant have more than 30 years of broadcast experience between them, which they are trying to apply to NASA’s new initiative. “This is NASA’s challenge, frankly,” he told us. “Becoming more relevant to a new generation.” But this isn’t NASA’s first foray into experiments with the music world, he said. Cruze related an experiment by Don Tepit, an American astronaut who put water droplets on a speaker and then blasted ZZ Top so the water droplets could be photographed in suspension.

At Third Rock Radio, the DJs make an effort to match music with whatever they are reporting. And Cruze says that though it might sound “cheesy,” the Apollo landing would definitely pair well with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. He added that he wasn’t the only one who thought Pink Floyd goes well with spaceflight miles from Earth. During an interview with Third Rock, astronaut Joe Kriegel told them about a mission during which they played the album while they looked at Earth through the cabin windows.

“They missed the moment for re-entry and had to wait until they got the go-ahead to try again, so they shut off all of the lights in the cabin,” he told us, “and listened to the entirety of Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd.”

Cruze thinks all of the expeditions can be paired with music tracks. Other expeditions are a little “more psychedelic,” he laughed over the phone. “Any Mars landing might be something sort of electro.” He points to songs by a French duo called Air, which released an all-instrumental record intended to be a soundtrack to the silent film “Voyage to the Moon.” In light of the Curiosity rover landing on Mars scheduled for Monday, the album might very well hit Third Rock's airwaves.

Despite these pairings, Cruze tells us they don’t like when their songs are too literal. “We don’t want to have it be about Rocket Man by Elton John,” he told us. “A lot of time that’s what people think Third Rock is about. But it’s about what’s new and not been heard everywhere else.”

He hastens to add that during Friday’s show, he’s not enforcing any limits. “If Joe Acaba wants to play Rocket Man, I’m not going to tell him not to.”

There we were—a young journalist—standing on the viewing deck of the recently erected bubble pavilion on the top level of the museum . From our elevated post we were eye-to-eye with the cockpit of the Enterprise, the shuttle that will be housed in this temporary structure until it finds a more permanent home on the premises. Just inches away from the craft's enormous nose, Ms. Marenoff continued, “If the Intrepid can play a role in stimulating minds and getting them excited about science again by having the Enterprise here, that’s important to us."

When The Observer arrived at the Intrepid for the pavilion’s ribbon cutting ceremony earlier today, the clouds were nearly as gray as the body of the massive boat. We couldn’t help but wonder who would forfeit their entire Thursday morning, present company excluded, to sit outside on the flight deck of a boat in on and off drizzles of rain?

The answer seemed to be, with the exception of  those being honored, a handful of astronauts, the original crew of the intrepid and some space buffs, the very kids Ms. Marenoff was talking about, who were excited at the prospect of seeing a real live shuttle in their very own city.

The Enterprise didn’t have an easy trip here. Even after it had traveled to space and back, it still had to be lifted from Washington D.C. to John F. Kennedy international airport in April, and then up the Hudson river by barge. Then, it was craned onto the flight deck of the museum to its home in the pavilion. The ceremony celebrating its reveal to the public featured speeches by a number of affiliates with the museum including Ms. Marenoff, as well as Charles F. Bolden Jr., administrator of NASA.

The Observer caught up with Mr. Bolden inside the pavilion after the ceremony ended, and he told us its not easy to get children excited about science. “I think our biggest obstacle is getting them exposed to what’s available,” he told us. “This exhibit is great. Having a kid from New York City be able to stand under a shuttle, I mean, that’s incredible. It’s different than Googling or looking at stuff online.”

Mr. Bolden told us that his generation was enamored with space travel because so many were inspired by the moon landing.  “I was in flight school at the time,” he told us. “And I remember being in front of a black and white TV and watching Neil Armstrong. Even though I had no inkling of going into space training at the time, it captured my imagination.”

For those without an iconic moment like the moon landing in their recent memory, Ms. Marenoff told us the Enterprise’s arrival to New York City can offer some comfort. She told us that when the Enterprise arrived in New York City and did a fly over before landing at JFK International Airport, people young and old gathered in nooks of the city to watch in what she calls “a  very New York moment.”

“The over-forty generation remembers all of these missions and are very sentimentally attached to it,” Ms. Marenoff said of the space programs. “For the youth who don’t remember, having the enterprise here is just cool, for lack of a better word.”

Cool it was. As The Observer set off across the exhibit to track down the main attendees and targets of the Enterprise exhibit, children ages 9-12 weighed in with their opinion about the massive shuttle overhead. And guess which adjective they all chose?

“It’s pretty cool,” nine-year-old Jordan Quiles told us, in a short break from walking around the exhibit with his mom and dad.

Meanwhile, another young attendee told The Observer the exhibit inspired him with grand aspirations for the future. “I think that I would like to discover a new planet or drive a space shuttle that moves at a very fast speed,” twelve-year-old Gabriel Soluri said.

So, as they say at NASA, mission accomplished.

Meanwhile, the target on children elicited a different response by some of the older visitors, namely the original crewmembers of the Intrepid.

“I have to bring my grandchildren,” Mark Horvath, told The Observer.

A few moments later across the room, without missing a beat, Richard Mills told The Observer the ceremony gave him the same idea. “We’re planning a trip with our grandchildren,” he told us. “It’s going to knock their socks off.”

mnarov@observer.com

Mr. Platzker at Seattle's Space Needle.

"The old paradigm that I'm trying to get rid of is that space is for governments and the super-rich, and it takes years, and it costs millions of dollars, and I say this is just wrong" said Peter Platzer, an Austrian-born former CERN physicist and hedge fund quant who was in town to promote his start-up NanoSatisfi. "It's the democratization of innovation. We're going to let people write their own space experiments."

Mr. Platzer's idea is this: Equip a small satellite with an open-source processor (Arduino, if you're into that sort of thing) and 25 sensors, including a camera, Geiger counter, spectrometer, etc.; Launch the thing into orbit; Rent space on the satellite to anyone with a few hundred dollars, the ability to write some simple code and the desire to play in the heavens. From there the possibilities are endless: Amateur astronomers, budding physicists, video game designers or hopeless romantics could find a use for the service, Mr. Platzer said:

"You could program the satellite to send your girlfriend a text message from space. 'Happy birthday, I love you.' Once you put the power of space into the hands of the people, who knows what they'll come up with."

For Mr. Platzer, the project represents the convergence of lifelong interests. Born in Vienna and trained as a physicist at the Max Plank Institute and CERN—European Organization for Nuclear Research—he feared that the slow-pace of the space bureaucracy would prevent him from getting meaningful work done, and decamped for the private sector. He traveled the world for Boston Consulting Group before earning an MBA at Harvard Business School and building quantitative trading programs for a series of investment funds, including Deutsche Bank and The Rohatyn Group. Technology advanced, and private money began to find its way into space exploration, and Mr. Platzer saw a chance to rekindle his early passion. He enrolled at the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, and began developing the project that would become NanoSatisfi.

With the Kickstarter launching today—he's hoping to raise $35,000, but says he'll launch the first satellite regardless of whether he meets that goal—Mr. Platzer sat down with The Observer to talk about his path from Wall Street to the edge of the final frontier.

You were trained as a physicist, but spent the bulk of your post-graduate years in finance. What happened?

Did I always want to do space? Yes. When I was finishing my physics degree, and I vividly remember someone telling me the story of a scientist who worked on an instrument for 15 years so that he could get data and write a paper and get tenure, and then when the instrument got launched, the rocket blew up, and with that his career went out the window. I didn't want to go into a field if I didn't see a potential other than to be massively frustrated.

So management consulting...

I got hooked on the idea that you can take large, amorphous problems and break them down into pieces that you can than solve and put back together again, because that's exactly what you do as a physicist. Why is a bird flying? It's not concrete, so you break it down—what forces are working on the bird—and then you build a model from that and you can start making predictions and see if they come true. And that's what management consultants do.

And from there to quantitative trading...

I was working on the Singapore Stock Exchange, and I was doing a lot of capital markets analysis, doing a lot of research into understanding that whole universe. I remember, I was walking down the street in Singapore, and I said, wouldn't it be fun to write a computer program to trade the stock market? I said, 'That's way too much fun, it can't be possible. Stop dreaming Peter.' Two years later I'm sitting in Harvard Business School, and we go around and introduce ourselves. So I tell my story, and the next person over introduced himself and said, for the last six months I've been writing a program to trade the markets.

Needless to say, we started talking, and four months later we started a company to do exactly that.

What's different about Space now?

You feel it stronger in the Valley than here, but there is a huge push to the private sector. Money starts to be available. If you were to ask NASA today, 'How long will it take to put a man on the moon?' They'd tell you, 'Give us 25 years and half-trillion dollars.' And in the '60s, when they had nothing, it took them eight or nine years to do the same thing. They could not do today what Elon Musk just did. It's like the Bannister mile has been broken. No one thought you could break a 4-minute mile, and then Bannister did it and within six months, six other people did it.

OK, so we can rent some space on your nanosatellite. What then?

You can do really cool things with earth observation with nanosatellites, such as mapping the ocean temperature, mapping rainforests, atmospheric density, space weather. One of the experiments that I would want to run is measure the magnetosphere, which shields us from solar radiation, to get a sense of the shape of the earth's magnetic field. I think people will want to take pictures of planet—hobby astronomy is a $100 million business every year.

But I purposefully don't try to think about it. If I had asked you in 2008, how many applications will be on the App Store, what are people going to do with it, I doubt we would have come up with even a fraction of the 600,000 applications that people invented. Maybe Brad Pitt wants to buy Angelina Jolie her own personal satellite. He buys her all sorts of other crazy things.

Thank you, NASA. (screengrab)

Tonight the moon will come 15,000 miles closer to the Earth and will be full. This combination of proximity and brightness results in a phenomenon known as the supermoon--by far the brightest and largest full moon we'll see all year. As we are still primitive beasts loping madly across the plains and will surely be at each others' throats as soon as the moon is closest to us (11:35 p.m. E.T.), the Associated Press has taken it upon themselves to soothe the cresting tides of madness to come--with science!

But no matter how far away a full moon is, it's not going to make people kill themselves or others, commit other crimes, get admitted to a psychiatric hospital or do anything else that popular belief suggests, a psychologist says.

Studies that have tried to document such connections have found "pretty much a big mound of nothing, as far as I can tell," said Scott Lilienfeld of Emory University.

Professor Lilienfeld, who addressed the myth of the maddening moon in 50 Great Myths of Popular Psychology, told the A.P. that moon-related strangeness is a singularly intractable legend because those who believe it can so easily confirm their bias by attaching any coincidence that occurs under a full moon to the phenomenon.

NASA has also published a helpful video explaining away myths surrounding the moon here.

So with all your moon-related fears dismissed, feel free to head out for a moon dance.

Which, if spotted, will surely confirm the still-uninformed viewer's idea that the supermoon is making someone super-crazy.

According to Foursquare's official blog:

Commander Douglas H. Wheelock became the first human to ever use a location-based service from space. Doug checked in from the International Space Station and unlocked the new NASA Explorer Badge.

The wonders of space travel have now been reduced to the awarding of virtual badges. Not sure that's a good thing.

Still, the event does inject a level of competition into America's extraterrestrial ventures not seen since the Sputnik days.

"When Expedition 26 docks later this year," wrote the Foursquare blog, "We'll be excited to welcome Commander Scott Kelly to the ISS, where he'll be competing for perhaps the most elusive mayorship on Foursquare."

- We Choose the Moon, a project from the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum and AOL, re-creates the original Apollo 11 mission in "real time" with countdowns, photo slideshows, video and interactive displays. Twitter accounts, Houston Mission Control, Eagle Lunar Module, and Apollo 11 Spacecraft will relay real-time messages. 

- On the NASA site, users can view restored videos of the moon landing, listen to a "radiocast" of the mission and recently released audio files, explore the landing site and the Eagle in the Sea of Tranquility, and lots more.

- Google has an interactive map of the moon in which users can explore craters and important sites during all of the Apollo missions.

- Mashable created a YouTube timeline of the landing, including Kennedy's speeches.

- TreeHugger has a slideshow that explains what the Apollo landing can teach us about the environment.

- The New York Times has a slideshow of reader-submitted photos capturing what they were doing when the Apollo landed. There's also an interactive feature in which John Noble Wilford, the reporter who covered the mission for The Times, narrates a review of the experience.

Houston is home to the Johnson Space Center, where NASA's manned spaceflight programs are based. And Clinton urged a large, fervent crowd at Delmar Fieldhouse to "be sure we have a president who wants to keep sending Americans into space so that we can continue to map the heavens."

"One of the differences" between her and Obama, Clinton said, is that she "want[s] Houston to remain the capital of the space race.”

“I don't want to be sending Americans into space on a Chinese- or a Russian-made vehicle,” she said. “I want that work done right here in Houston."

She seemed to be alluding to Obama's plan to fund new education initiatives in part by delaying for five years a NASA program called Constellation. The program aims to send astronauts to establish a settlement on the moon—a "lunar outpost," in the space agency's words. From there, it is hoped they could eventually journey onward to Mars.

When Obama laid out his plan in November, a Clinton spokesperson told The Washington Post, "Senator Clinton does not support delaying the Constellation program and intends to maintain American leadership in space exploration."

The remarks on space came in the midst of a relatively brief but energetic appearance by Clinton, who may have been buoyed by the announcement, earlier in the day, that her campaign had raised $35 million this month. The crowd here numbered around 3,000, was overwhelmingly female and included a sizable Hispanic contingent. Women and Hispanic voters have proven among Clinton's most loyal supporters during the election campaign.

A promise from the candidate to "fix our broken immigration system" elicited loud applause, as did a reference to her having been endorsed by the family of Cesar Chavez and by Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the National Farm Workers Association with Chavez (and is believed to have come up with the original version of “Yes We Can).

But the most striking moment of Clinton's 20-minute speech came when she related a story she said she had been told in southern Ohio. The arena hushed as she outlined how a young woman who had been having complications with her pregnancy had been unable to afford a visit with a doctor and had then been turned away from a hospital as her health problems persisted. The woman did not have the $100 upfront payment the hospital demanded, Clinton said.

"When she finally went into labor, the baby was dead," Clinton added. She then revealed—to gasps from the audience—that the woman herself died 15 days later. "This cannot continue to go on in America!" Clinton proclaimed.

She also used the dramatic story to pivot into her favorite line of attack against Obama's health care plan.

A "big difference" between her and him, she asserted, was that she was "not going to leave anybody out."

Clinton also delivered standard stump lines about strengthening national security, expanding access to college education and protecting the environment.

It seemed that she meant for the speech to be populist in style as well as substance, dropping her g's in an imitation, apparently, of the people she was talking to.

And seeking to bolster the sense of a candidacy on the rebound, she told the crowd, "I have a feelin' it's beginnin' to grow. We're movin'. We're gonna make it happen on Tuesday." (She said much the same in Ohio earlier in the day.)

Clinton's speech here did not begin until almost 10 p.m. even though the doors had opened almost three hours earlier. One section of the crowd, though, enjoyed its own entertainment—courtesy of a female Elvis impersonator in its midst.

The look-alike, 45-year-old Lucy Salazar, told me she felt an empathy for the New York senator because "as a female Elvis impersonator—and I'm a girl mechanic, too—I know what it's like to have to prove yourself all the time."

She also insisted that the King would "most definitely" have supported Clinton: "Elvis loved and cared for the people. He was a very caring person and so is she."

Salazar, turning back to the crowd, demonstrated some Vegas-period Elvis moves and yelled (in character), "Don't y'all forget to vote for Hillary, y'hear?"

She followed that up with a denunciation of Obama as "nuthin' but a hound dog."

This guy faces the same on-screen dilemmas as Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sly Stallone. It must be rough for him to break out of his cookie-cutter mold to find a balance between the assigned fate of celebrated movie-star icon whose fans expect and demand the same goofball double takes over and over again, and the fulfilling redemption that inevitably comes with the knowledge that there is more to acting than slapstick, pratfalls, rude noises in the toilet, and custard pies in the face. I knew he could act back in 1992, when he played the alcoholic son of a dysfunctional all-American family in the made-for-TV drama Doing Time on Maple Drive, but he gave up serious acting shortly after that, and from his big-screen breakthrough in The Mask it was downhill all the way. Still, I applauded his courage, mixing sub-mental characters like the hero of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective with tortured, self-destructive life forces like comic Andy Kaufman in Man on the Moon. Now there is fresh evidence that he wants to pursue an even broader agenda, ignore the easy shortcuts, work hard to prove his value, and maybe get some good reviews for a change. It will take a much better movie than The Number 23 to do it.

Without playing the fool, Mr. Carrey plays Walter Sparrow, a mild-mannered dogcatcher with a brilliant wife and teenage son whose sudden obsession with the coincidences surrounding the number 23 crosses over to the dark side of insanity, decadence and death. Numerology students may be fascinated by the catalog of references to the number 23 contained in the murky gumbo of a script (by somebody named Fernley Phillips): It runs the gamut from the number of letters in both the Latin alphabet and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s name, to the most popular psalm in the Bible. The rest of us will giggle and yawn. Anyway, on Walter’s birthday, his wife Agatha (a totally wasted Virginia Madsen) gives him a book called The Number 23 that seems to reveal secrets that apply only to his life. While Walter reads aloud from this mysterious, unpublished parapsychological nightmare, the narration turns into dramatically staged episodes in the cinema of his mind, in which he becomes a saxophone-playing Mike Hammer–style detective who is also a serial killer. In his job, a stray dog bites him, inflicting a deep wound that requires stitches. But in the book’s chapters, the same dog turns out to be guarding the grave of a girl he is suspected of murdering. The number 23 dominates everything, linking him with the date of maniac Ted Bundy’s death in the electric chair. Are the horrors in the book figments of his imagination, or are the 23 chapters real clues to unsolved crimes? How will it all end? Who knows? Chapter 23 is blank. And so he drags his wife and son into a search for the identity of the killer by outlining every 23rd word on every 23rd page. Their lives become endangered, and so does the possibility of taking seriously the laugh-out-loud direction by Joel Schumacher, who has been influenced by David Lynch to the point of lunacy. Like Mr. Lynch’s curios, the fragments of the puzzle never add up to a completed design. Did I fail to mention that not one word of this movie makes one lick of sense? It would take 23 asylum inmates to explain the ending that finally drives Jim Carrey into a straitjacket and the audience racing for the door marked “Exit.”

The Number 23 appears to have been made by people on psychedelic mushrooms. It takes the dogcatcher the entire length of the film, which covers several months in time, to finish the book, proving only one thing: He’s a slow reader. Jim Carrey might secretly suffer from a similar problem. There might be a reason his movies are so bad. Maybe he can’t read the scripts. No matter. He knocks himself here, growing his hair long and filthy, his fingernails rotten with dirt, festering visually to a rancid green, much like Christian Bale in The Machinist. He takes it all seriously. The audience does all the laughing. Never mind. The Number 23 may be a catastrophe that disappears overnight, but like Banquo’s ghost, I predict that Jim Carrey will survive the funeral.

A Space Odyssey

In the whimsical fable The Astronaut Farmer, Billy Bob Thornton is so good, so charming and so inspired by the role of Charlie Farmer, a stubborn Texas cowboy who builds his own spaceship in his barn and launches it into outer space, that he almost makes you believe in Tinker Bell, Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Charlie didn’t make it to NASA, but his lifelong dream of becoming an astronaut never died. Nobody in town thinks he’s tightly wrapped except his loyal, supportive and long-suffering wife Audie (Virginia Madsen again, who also skyrocketed into space after Sideways), his two little daughters and the 15-year-old son he drags out of school to be his flight commander, operating out of mission control in the hayloft. Charlie’s credit rating is shot, the bank is foreclosing the mortgage on his 352-acre ranch, and the judge orders a psychiatric exam. But it’s his order for 10,000 pounds of illegal rocket fuel that, thanks to the Patriot Act, brings the F.B.I., C.I.A., F.A.A., U.S. military, Department of Homeland Security and the international press to the farm, as well as the commander of the NASA space shuttle (played by Bruce Willis, trim and toned, with a handsome new hairpiece), who drops in for one of Audie’s fried-chicken dinners. Does it launch? Well, the first try is a near-fatal disaster that bankrupts Charlie and lands him in the hospital. Then Charlie’s father-in-law (Bruce Dern) saves the day (and the movie), and they start all over again, doing overnight what it takes NASA decades of aeronautics engineering to achieve. “If we don’t have our dreams, we have nothing,” says Charlie in the closest thing this heartfelt little family film gets to philosophy. While there’s actually no law—yet!—to forbid an American citizen from constructing his own gravity-defying rocket missile, this is another of those “Follow your dream and you will find inner peace” fantasies you should not try at home.

Does Charlie at last orbit the moon on his second try? What good is a fable if you know how it ends before you even see it? And it is worth seeing for the honesty, thrill and dedication of Billy Bob Thornton at his best. There’s one kitchen-table scene in which he entices his finicky children to find magic in their cereal that is so moment-to-moment heartbreaking you could swear he studied at the Actors Studio. Directed with sincerity by Michael Polish, who co-authored the sweet screenplay with his brother Mark, The Astronaut Farmer is a feel-good movie about the indomitable spirit of a can-do dreamer who does when everybody says don’t. It is not for cynics. I know it’s a fable, and the premise is so ridiculous you may roll your eyes, but I found myself rooting for Charlie and his Seven-Up can of a rocket ship in spite of myself. In boots, spurs and bow-legged jeans under his homemade Stanley Kubrick space suit, Billy Bob makes dreamers of us all.

Family Act

The music scene is divinely enhanced this week at the Algonquin, where the cultured and wise are flocking to hear the elegiac singing of Sandy Stewart and the sophisticated chords of her ace-pianist son, Bill Charlap. Without frills, artifice or attitude, they’re the real deal. From the opening number, an artfully composed “Why Did I Choose You,” to a trio of gorgeous Rodgers and Hammerstein ballads from The King and I, Sandy is quiet as a whisper, scarcely using the mike at all. On “My Heart Stood Still,” her emphasis on Lorenz Hart’s word “thrill” trembles like a blush of first love. The great Dietz-Schwartz gem “I See Your Face Before Me” is a masterpiece of understatement. She picks up the tempo on “That Face,” soft as velvet and shiny as freshly ironed taffeta, with only a smoke ring’s trace of vibrato. In Bill’s solo outing, he swings artfully through a medley of Cole Porter and the Gershwins, with a bit of Art Tatum stride. Nothing corny here—no stupid jabber, and none of those trendy, terrible and utterly forgettable tunes that most singers throw in to prove they’re “today.” Sandy Stewart is true to what makes her feel like she’s home: classics from the Great American Songbook that bring out the lyrical symmetry in a singing style that is thrilling. Even “My Funny Valentine” is less boring than usual, because she only uses it as a set-up for a superior and much more hauntingly beautiful excursion into ballad bondage called “Lovers After All,” by Johnny Mandel and Richard Rodney Bennett. She is not a seeker of the improvisational road less traveled that jazz critics call “creative,” but which more often takes precedence over the lyrical content of the composer’s intentions. She doesn’t deconstruct; she sings simply, from the heart, finding nuance in every phrase. In a noisy, banal cabaret scene overcrowded with mediocrity, Sandy Stewart and Bill Charlap are the square root of marvelous. I could listen to this tasteful duo for nights on end. So get yourself over to the Algonquin, experience genuine ecstasy, and learn something.

I had an awkward phone conversation with the missus above. She deftly stated that if the problem were indeed caused by their renovation, then their contractor would repair it. I was feeling edgy. The ceiling had a heavy light fixture that at any moment could have come crashing down like the chandelier in Phantom of the Opera and knocked our daughter unconscious while she was brushing her teeth.

We removed the fixture and waited. One got the impression that the neighbors’ contractor was trying to avoid ripping up his clients’ new tiled floor to find the leak, and my husband and I were increasingly convinced that we would have to endure a messy legal battle.

Luckily, that didn’t happen. Workers invaded our living space, and the ceiling was fixed. I don’t have to dread running into our neighbors in the lobby (although there will always be a little undercurrent of unease that doesn’t quite go away).

I’ve renovated two prewar apartments myself, and it’s hard for me to say which is worse: being the alleged perpetrator of damage or the victim of someone else’s renovation fallout. There’s nothing like standing next to a potential plaintiff in the wood-paneled confines of your building’s elevator. And if the trouble should be with a co-op board member, you can pretty much forget about getting a fair trial.

When my first project was underway, the downstairs neighbors complained about—you guessed it—a crack in their dining-room ceiling. When my contractor went down to take a look, he observed that said ceiling hadn’t been painted since the 1920’s. There were profuse paint chips flaking off, which seemed to have no relationship to the alleged fissure. Nevertheless, he generously directed his painter to skim-coat the entire surface.

It seems that renovations often pave the way for aggrieved shareholders to get free touch-ups of their own crumbling apartments. Because spurious claims have become so rampant in prewar buildings, many contractors now insist upon inspecting and photographing downstairs apartments prior to the renovation process, to provide handy recourse when the neighbors claim your jack-hammering caused their “showplace” to look like a $5 million tenement.

Before my friend Hilary commissioned construction in her apartment, which is in an exclusive Upper East Side building, she tried diligently to get such pictures of all the adjoining abodes. “All neighbors consented to the photo session,” she said, “except the lady below us.” As co-op fate would have it, when the renovations were complete, this downstairs neighbor complained that there was damage to her dwelling. Not that she would permit an inspection of the premises. “She presented us with a bill for over $3,000 in cleaning services,” Hilary said. “I think she wanted her apartment cleaned and used this as a way to make us pay. Our contractor paid it because he wanted to make ‘peace in the valley.’”

Some claims are so outlandish that they would send even the most diplomatic renovators screaming to the suburbs. While doing work on their Park Avenue apartment, my friend Linda and her husband were sued for dust damage by their neighbor two floors above. There was no problem with the apartment directly upstairs, but somehow these pixie particles magically wafted through two floors. The neighbor collected $23,000 from the insurance company. Linda later discovered that he had sued other people in the building as well.

Then there was the Upper East Side “eccentric” my contractor encountered after his electrician accidentally broke a fist-sized hole into the apartment adjacent to his client. My contractor sent an apologetic note and flowers. The neighbor said she didn’t want the hole fixed. Nor did she want the mess on the carpet removed. Instead, she billed her renovating neighbors for the following items: 1) the services of three structural engineers to make sure the wall didn’t fall down, 2) a visit to her cardiologist’s office to make sure she wasn’t breathing in any dust and 3) a box of Godiva chocolates, “to calm her nerves.” Although this woman collected insurance money, she is suing her neighbors for $25,000. Nine months later, the schmutz is still on her carpet.

Many rich New Yorkers apparently just take it for granted that litigation is going to ensue. An architect friend of mine told me that in one building he renovated, the work had caused a hairline crack in the neighbor’s wall. One day the architect and contractor ran into the neighbor, who said, “Cracks are one thing, but I’ve just gotta sue you.” He was perfectly polite and didn’t seem at all upset—just resigned. “That kind of thinking is pretty typical of New Yorkers,” said my architect friend. “In this rarefied atmosphere, people are so accustomed to dealing with lawyers.” Then there’s that co-op in the East 70’s where an upstairs neighbor complained that a downstairs neighbors’ retiling of a bathroom two levels below had somehow caused a crack. Upstairs sued for $10,000. Downstairs countersued for the same amount, claiming that the neighbor’s leak had damaged their master-bedroom closet. In the end, both claims were settled.

Even if your relationship with your neighbors remains non-adversarial, don’t forget contending with the building staff, which often wields significant power. The super controls the flow of workers in and out of the building and can choose whether or not to bend the rules to allow workers to stay over the 4:30 p.m. service-elevator closing time (which some staff cling to with NASA-like accuracy). A little greasing of the palms is expected, but my beloved contractor was once the victim of a shakedown at a Central Park West building. “The super said, ‘We’re not going to let you work in the building unless you talk to us,’ ” he remembered. “He told me there was a fee of $5,000 that had to be paid to the super and building staff.” My contractor, sensing foul play, asked if he could write a check. When the super agreed, my contractor sent a copy of the check to the managing agent. Busted!

Of course, sometimes the neighbors’ banging has nothing to do with construction. My contractor also told me about one memorable walk-through of a downstairs neighbors’ Park Avenue apartment, during which he entered the bedroom and found the neighbors’ college-age son naked in bed with two women. Now that was one crack he never expected to see.

The other day, when Hillary's claim that she wrote to NASA and was told in a responding letter that the space agency "didn't take girls" struck us as implausible and poorly calculated because obviously checkable, our interest waned at the prospect of FOILing the correspondence.

First Lady in Space Sally Ride is only a few years younger, as James Taranto has pointed out, than Hillary Clinton.

But the really interesting thing is that someone just a few years younger is more likely to have gotten that letter than Hillary was.

In fact NASA was training women until 1962. Hillary was about 15 when they cancelled the Mercury 13 program, which trained a group of women to go into space only to be cancelled when the real prospect of sending them up was before NASA.

Here's the report from All Things Considered:

It was several years before they returned to the idea of training women.

That means Hillary has to have written that letter when she was in high school or college, when other reports tell us she pretty well knew what she was going to do with herself. And she wasn't planning a career as an astronaut.

It's Sally that would have been a little girl when she got that discouraging note. Hillary would already have been having those heady political discussions around the Rodham family dinner table.

To be fair, nobody, including us, has asked for any more details about that letter. Hillary? You reading this? The comments section is open. You might also address the Sir Edmund Hillary dispute.

- Tom McGeveran