This will be growing by about two or three links per day as I get my bookmark data gradually transcribed here.
Most Recent Edit: Moon's Day, the 18th of May, 2009 C.E., 11:14 a.m., C.D.T.
Amygdala; Animation World Magazine; Apostropher
Bad Astronomy; Bear's Battlestar Galactica Blog; Bob Mitchell in the 21st Century; Brendan Calling; By Ken Levine
Chaos Manor Musings; Chaos Manor Reviews; Classically Liberal; Consumerist; Crooks And Liars; Cult News from Rick Ross
The Daily Dish; The Daily Superman; The Daily WTF; Dandelion Salad; Darth Mojo; Disloyal Opposition
Eschaton; Exposing LJ Abuse
Fafblog; Felicia Day; File 770; For What It's Worth
Generation Y; Grits for Breakfast
The Hill; Hullabaloo
Ideas; iFeminists.net; Instapinch; Is That Legal?
Jane In Progress; Johnny Dollar's Place; JustOneMinute
L. Neil Smith At Random; Lance Mannion
Mightygodking; Mises.org Weblog
Neal Rubin's Blog; Neptunus Lex; News From Me; Notes from a Final Frontiersman
Oberon Zell-Ravenheart; The One Ring; Operation Yellow Elephant; Orcinus
Pangloss; Papers, Please!; PeterDavid.Net; Physorg.com; Pro Libertate
Real Live Preacher
Schneier On Security; SciFi Wire, SFScope; The Sideshow; Skippy's List; Slacktivist; Soul of Star Trek; The Space Review, Space Solar Power; Spider Robinson; Starship Dimensions; Startrekdom; Sunni and the Conspirators; Susie Bright's Journal
Tailspin's Tales; This Modern World; Thomas Jefferson Center; Threat Level; Tom Wilson USA...Large Man, Good Blog; Toonopedia; Topless Robot; Trek Movie Report; Trek Today
An Unfortunate Set of Events
View from Above; Views from the Cyberhenge
Waiter Rant; Wendy McElroy.com; The Wild Hunt; Wren's Nest News; WWdN: in Exile
Zoe Paleologa
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workingActually, the Soviets had given all sorts of clues, including a notice of to which radio frequency to tune, but nevertheless, to the Eisenhower government, it was, at least publicly, a "Surprise!"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-mZ9pKv
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surprised(Yeah, I know, just go with it, okay? The SpaceWeek Wednesday Monday Morning Video will appear this evening. Then we'll be caught up.)
Anyway, Christine Lavin posits a very important question:
"What If We Had No Moon?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyOyH9u4
Although she doesn't say it explicitly, evidently it'd be downright Lovecraftian...!
I think I like it better this way instead. Stable axial tilt is the reason for the seasons, after all.
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uncephalopodinousSo I'm watching a re-run of The West Wing on the Bravo channel. It's the last episode of the first season, "What Kind of Day Has it Been", the one which ends with the assassination attempt on President Bartlet and his body man Charlie Young, and had first been broadcast in May 2000.
All through the decade, as the Bush/Cheney administration committed one bad act after another in the name of the United States, a lot of us watching wished we had the fictional Josiah Bartlet as President rather than the unfortunately all too real George W. Bush.
I had forgotten about this: early in the episode President Bartlet is called down to the White House Situation Room as a U. S. fighter pilot flying a combat air patrol over the southern Iraq no-fly zone has been shot down. There is a short argument about whether to try diplomacy with the Iraqi government first or to launch an immediate military rescue mission. Bartlet notes there is a $14,000 bounty for shot-down U. S. aircraft, and an additional $14,000 reward for the capture of U. S. aircraft pilots. He orders that negotiations be attempted but also that preparations for the military operation begin immediately, for launch as soon as possible. As he gets up to leave, he warns the man who had argued for diplomacy only, "If that pilot is captured, I'm invading Baghdad."
Yeah. How'd that turn out?
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sourI hate this.
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orbolus does not speak for me. orbolus is and has been banned from this journal for many months, from the moment her/his intentions became obvious. orbolus is a stalker and troublemaking sockpuppet trying to create Drama between other parties and me of the "let's you and him fight" variety. I don't know what the other parties are saying behind Friend-lock. It's irrelevant. I'm not playing.
I dislike intensely having to make this public post, particularly since I doubt I will be believed by those who most need to hear it.
orbolus, GO AWAY..
This is all I will be saying on this subject.
Charles N. Brown, editor and publisher of Locus, the professional newsmagazine for science fiction for over forty years, has died.
(Thanks to kevin_standlee for the link.)
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stunnedThis is the Monday Morning Video, tenth in a series of videos intended to help you get your work week off to a better start.
This morning the music is "Vertigo" by U2, and it was recorded loud so adjust your volume before you start, and the theme of the video is "A Tribute to Space", to all the amazing things we used to do, and could choose to do again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4jD9zsU
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bouncyI'm still deciding what to do about my format for the Monday Morning Video. If you have an opinion, please share it.
Thank you.
workingOn the recent hubbub over federal building security, here's my experience with the Federal Protective Service -- true story:
February 2008, the day before the Missouri Presidential Primary. I went downtown to the Board of Election Commissioners to get my Election Judge training and credential. They asked who I was, snapped my picture, printed it directly onto a plastic clip-on badge with my name. They took my word as to who I was, no paper I.D. required.
Afterward I took thirty minutes to walk over to one of the two federal office buildings on the other side of downtown where I thought the people who administer Savings Bonds worked (they're not there any more, but I didn't know that), as I had a question about an old bond. I also needed a bathroom pretty badly by the time I got there since I had left home five hours previously. The uniformed guards x-rayed my backpack -- I made a point of stating that I was waiving my Fourth Amendment right against unnecessary search to maintain that I still retained that right -- and they asked for I.D. I presented my U. S. Passport, as it proves both identity and citizenship, and I had thought I might need it at the Election Board.
"Do you have a state I.D. card?"
"Yes, but the passport proves my identity."
"We're supposed to ask for a state I.D. card or driver's license." (This is a Federal Building at which I had presented my Federally Issued identification.)
I don't currently drive; I handed my state I.D. card over. "This is expired," he said
"It's still me. I haven't expired."
He blinked, looked at it again. "You got anything else?"
"A community college I.D., but it's expired, too, because I'm not taking classes right now." He looked at it, still hesitant to let me enter.
"Here: I got this at the Board of Election Commissioners literally half an hour ago," and gave him the Election Judge clip-on badge, with only my name, picture, and the words "Election Judge" on it, no date or other information, the badge given me upon my word alone.
With that, they let me in. Maybe the word "Judge" had some influence, despite my long hair and full beard. I grabbed it all back, asked where the men's room was, then took off at what was no doubt a suspiciously fast pace but I didn't care at that point, I had to *GO*, but they hassled me no further. If fact, they were very polite and helpful after I came back to ask where the Savings Bond office was, to the point of trying to find out to which other federal building I needed to go. (They thought maybe the federal regional offices in Kansas City, but as it turns out it might be the Bureau of the Public Debt offices in Parkersburg, West Virginia, as apparently there is no longer a Savings Bond office in St. Louis or anywhere else.)
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bemusedI didn't do a Monday Morning Video this week, as I'm re-evaluating how I want to go about doing this, whether to keep doing it here, giving it its own LiveJournal, or doing it on another weblog platform.
Comments and advice are welcome.
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contemplativeNormally I change my default icon every Sunday, deleting it, moving the next one into the default position, and adding a new one to the bottom of the list.
Not today, though. I'm skipping doing that this week, as having just made a pro-Apollo post I don't want to give up this lovely default icon painting of Buzz Aldrin on Luna by Andrew Probert (after Neal Armstrong's famous photograph).
I was wearing a picture button of that photograph, ironically enough, during my accidental meeting with Dr. Aldrin in 1982, at which -- while the rest of me remained 26 -- my mouth turned the clock back to when I was fourteen, watching him walk on the moon on live television, and gushed hero-worship of its own volition while my brain turned into mush at the enormity of the idea that I was having a close encounter with a man who had literally gone where no man had gone before.
Five minutes later he came back for something he'd forgotten, and I tried to apologize, and wound up doing it all over again while he looked at me as if I were some sort of vaguely distasteful alien life-form. He was a career military officer, a no-nonsense graduate of West Point, and I don't think he was used to the idea of someone being so awe-struck by his mere presence that they were reduced to gibberish.
I've met a couple of dozen celebrities of varying levels of importance over the years, and usually I handle myself well enough. I know that they're human beings, too, with virtues and foibles like any other person, and that makes it easy to keep balanced. But he had walked on the moon!
Thus do we discover our limits, and that even a slightly jaded perspective can vanish in an instant in the presence of a true, boyhood hero.
nostalgic"Let's Go Back to the Moon -- and Beyond"
Pro-Apollo, pro-Human-space-exploration-in-general essay by James Woudhuysen, visiting professor of forecasting and innovation at De Montfort University, Leicester, in British libertarian journal Spiked. Annotated.
http://www.spiked-online.com/index.p
workingToday I learned from watching a documentary on PBS that the entirety of the fireworks used on the Capitol Mall in Washington this evening to celebrate American Independence were manufactured in Communist China.
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disappointed"It matters not to me whether my neighbor worships one God or twenty; it neither breaks my leg nor takes money from my pocket." -- Thomas Jefferson
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