In the 1948 cartoon, Olive Oyl for President, Popeye’s main squeeze has a fantasy that she runs for and is elected President of the U.S. In her fantasy, Congress is populated by anthropomorphized elephants and donkeys whose political discourse consists of shouting either “We accept it!” or “We reject it!” When Olive Oyl [...]
The FOX News Channel will be featuring an analysis of the Iranian threat. In advance of the program, the FOX News website has a couple of articles that give a pretty good indication of what it will be about. The first is titled Iranian Nuke Dreams Challenge Bush Doctrine, which lays out the [...]
Our good friends at the MCCSC (the Monroe County Community Schools Corporation) are preparing to administer a survey of sexual attitudes and behaviors among its captive – I mean, student – population. Information about the survey (planned for May) came to light only in the past couple of weeks, at which point there was [...]
This post mortem of the Little-5 is a day late because Jim Kirkham, the Cutters’ “coach”, is also my co-worker and he took Monday off. I knew the Cutters finished 7th in the 33-team field and, ironically, had been involved in a crash. Beyond that, I had no details on the race so [...]
In yesterday’s post concerning Yuri Gagarin Day, I mentioned the threat of cosmic ray bursts (CRB) to life on earth. This article/release from NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center titled Explosions In Space May Have Initiated Ancient Extinction On Earth discusses the likely consequence to Earth from a gamma ray burst (GRB), suggesting that previous mass [...]
On this day (12 April) in 1961, at 0607 GMT, Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin lifted off from the Tyuratam launch complex in the Soviet Union and became the first human to enter Earth orbit. I’ve been commemorating this event for . . . well, I don’t know how many years exactly but for a long [...]
Our 13-year-old daughter Liana is now in 7th grade in the Monroe County Community School Corporation (MCCSC). The MCCSC is the public school system here and Liana is in a program for gifted students. Despite this, what I’ve seen thus far confirms my worst fears about the public school system. In this [...]
Jim Kirkham doesn’t like the word “coach”, even if it is the conventional term for his role on the “Cutters” team. Jim feels that calling him coach gives credit to “someone not on the bike” – it’s the riders who are important. When asked what term should be used, he answers “staff.” [...]
In 24 is a guilty pleasure despite technical flaws and propaganda, I talked about some technical errors in the TV show, "24". It is not my intention to turn this blog into a catalogue of the show’s defects but I am moved to comment about last night’s episode because the error was so egregious.
The [...]
Although I’m a great fan of the 1964 movie Zulu, starring Stanley Baker and Michael Caine (in his first major screen role), the topic of this posting has nothing to do with cinema. “Zulu” is also military-speak for the letter “Z”, which is used to denote the time at the “zero meridian”. Zulu [...]