In light of Obama’s idiotic comments at the Prayer Breakfast, this oldie is worth a re-read (or read, if you haven’t).
Category Archives: History
Obama’s Drones
…have killed more people than the Spanish Inquisition. So he shouldn’t get up on his high horse, I guess.
Sid Caesar
RIP.
Most people are probably too young to know who he was, but he was a comedy genius, of my parents’ time.
[Update Saturday morning]
OK, so I was a year late with the announcement. I was on an airplane just following Twitter links, and didn’t check the date. Worth remembering anyway.
Barack Obama
A moral and historical ignoramus.
It’s not like it’s anything new.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Crusades and other “root causes.”
[Friday-morning update]
A Jew examines why Obama will not name Islam.
The Ukelele
My dad had one, with a Burl Ives book.
When I was growing up, we pronounced it Youkuhlaylee, but as the article points out, Hawai’ian is the most phonetic language in the world (because the written language was invented to be so by the missionaries). So the proper pronunciation is (as the article notes) Ookaylaylay. Also, Honolulu is Hohnohlooloo, not Hahnahlooloo, which is the popular mainland haole pronunciation.
Heading Home
In an hour or so, I’m heading up the coast for the day to see Caesarea, then this evening, back south to Ben Gurion to go through the supposed lengthy flight check in, then a 13-hour flight to Philly, then a layover, then a five-hour flight back to California. Not looking forward to any of it, other than the initial sightseeing.
Anyway, probably off line until at least early Saturday morning, eastern time. I may use wifi on the flight to LA, if I’m sufficiently conscious.
[Saturday-morning update]
Well, I seem to be sufficiently conscious (despite not really having gotten anything resembling sleep for over 36 hours). From the plane over eastern Tennessee, heading west.
[Bumped]
Why Go To Mars And Other Places
I missed linking this article at The Space Review by John Strickland.
The real problem with space policy is not that we can’t decide where to go, but that we can’t decide why.
Remembering Auschwitz
It’s a little surreal to be in Israel (for my first time) during the seventieth anniversary. But considering the past (and the subsequent almost complete loss of all the Jews in that country), it was touching and poignant that Poland allowed Israel to do an overflight of that now-sacred ground. I’m sure they wish they’d had that kind of military capability seventy years ago. It would have been a bombing run on the chambers and ovens.
Space Anniversaries
Yesterday was the 48th anniversary of the loss of three astronauts on the launch pad, in preparation for the Apollo missions. A child of the space age, I remember it particularly well, because it occurred the day before my twelth birthday. A little over nineteen years later, on my actual birthday, Challenger was lost. I recollected it on the sixteenth anniversary of the event.
Today is the twenty-ninth anniversary of that tragedy, and while I commemorate it, I also celebrate the completion of my sixtieth trip around the sun, over eight thousand miles from home. I’m in Israel to attend a conference named after Ilan Ramon, an Israeli hero who died a dozen years ago on February 1st, when Columbia disintegrated in the skies over east Texas. That anniversary coming up with Sunday, by which time I’ll be home, if all goes according to plan, to celebrate with friends and family, but also grieve for the losses. Yet as I point out in my book, such losses are inevitable, and necessary, perhaps even at a faster rate than once per generation, if we wish to accomplish much greater things than we have in space over the past six decades since my birth.