A nightly pause from the news to give the reader/viewer a bit of classic entertainment.
An evening pause: On George Washington’s birthday, an excerpt of a speech by David McCullough from September 27, 2005. As McCullough notes, even King George III himself knew the measure of the man. “He will be the greatest man in the world.”
An evening pause: On the fiftieth anniversary of John Glenn’s orbital flight.
After putting a chimpanzee into orbit in November, NASA finally felt ready to send a man into orbit to answer the Soviets and their two manned orbital missions of Gagarin and Titov the previous year.
After Glenn’s mission and for the next few months, it looked like the U.S. was catching up with the Soviets in space. That would change before the year was summer was over.
The video below gives a nice summary of key moments in Glenn’s flight, though the special effects of the “fireflies” is poorly done. And we now know that the “fireflies” were nothing more than frozen particles of condensation coming off the capsule.
An evening pause: How about some really wild guitar playing by Preston Reed?
An evening pause:
I have a place where dreams are born,
And time is never planned.
It’s not on any chart.
You must find it with your heart.
Never never land.
An evening pause: How things will be built and manufactured in the future, on Earth and in space, though in space they probably won’t use concrete.
An evening pause: Street performer Bryson Andres performs a cover of Train’s “Soul Sister” in Spokane.
An evening pause: As poet Robert Service once wrote,
It isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
An evening pause: An original song from Mean Mary James. And damn good, too!
An evening pause: This video best expresses the direction of NASA and the American space program since the end of the Apollo program.
An evening pause: From a 2008 concert in Amsterdam. The soloist, Melissa Venema, was 13 at the time.
An evening pause: From Mel Brooks’ classic film, The Producers (1968), a good description of how our modern government functions.
