There’s a neat factoid that pops up now and again on the Internet: That in a 1969 photo by astronaut Michael Collins of the Earth and his Apollo 11 spacecraft, he is the only person at the time, living or dead, not pictured.
The totality of that claim has always irked me slightly, as it presumes there’s absolutely no one who figured out a way to blast a beloved great-uncle’s cremains into space.
Lest you doubt just how possible that is, a group connected with the app TV Tag attached a bobblehead depicting Breaking Bad‘s Walter White to some sort of amazing balloon, then filmed the micro-Heisenberg’s ascent as it soars near a claimed 85,000 feet, into the stratosphere.
Oddly, tragically, and appropriately, Bobble-Heisenberg stays intact for the entire journey, but loses his head at the very end, as he crashes into a southwestern plant. Like the character, he died doing the destructive thing he loved.
Questions still persist after his death, though. TV Tag is a social networking app to make it easier to chat with your friends while watching television. So why would TV Tag send bobbleheads into space? Why do you need a social networking site to help you chat with friends while watching TV? Why do emotional-Americana coffee-shop pop groups Megafaun and the National Parks provide the soundtrack? Why Walter White, and not Michael Collins, or someone’s beloved great-uncle? What happened with the whole Marie shoplifting plotline?
Screengrab via tvtag/YouTube