…Pope Leo just dropped his first encyclical! And it is relevant to our interests!
“Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding The Human Person In The Time Of Artificial Intelligence”.
Reminds me of a quote I rather like, and use from time to time at work:
“If you have a routine, you can always deviate from it if something comes up. But if you don’t have a routine, then everything is stuff that comes up.”
–Don Winslow, The Winter of Frankie Machine
Peter G. Neumann, computer security guru and a hero of mine.
Dr. Neumann (pronounced NOY-man), who has worked as a computer scientist and security researcher at SRI International in Menlo Park, Calif., since 1971, has long been a voice in the wilderness warning about a computer industry that has been prone to repeatedly make the same mistakes.
In 2010, Dr. Neumann launched a research project that investigated how to protect against the most common types of security vulnerabilities. Funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, the program, known as Cheri, developed a new approach to computer hardware that restricts software programs so that malicious instructions are impossible to execute.
An analogy would be replacing a master key that opens every door in a building with a set of keys that each only open the specific rooms their holder is authorized to enter — and making it physically impossible to copy or modify them.
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Beginning in 1985, Dr. Neumann served as editor for the Association for Computing Machinery Risks Forum newsgroup, an influential collection of emails from readers reporting computer failures and foibles that has an avid following of hundreds of thousands.
Since then, he has maintained the sprawling compendium of computer failures, flaws, foibles and privacy issues, annotating each of the 3,195 issues with wry comments and the occasional pun. In 1995, the list became the basis for his book, “Computer-Related Risks.”
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I’m not much of a beer drinker, but this gives me a chance to embed my favorite Sven and Ole joke.
Tom Noonan, who I think was an underappreciated actor.
Other credits include the short film “They’re Made Out of Meat” (wait, what?), “12 Monkeys” (the series), “Roadside Picnic” (the series, wait, what?), “Heaven’s Gate”, and “F/X”.
David Hays, theater designer. He also co-founded the National Theater of the Deaf. I wanted to call this one out because there’s a pretty good “Mannix” episode (“The Silent Cry“, season 2, episode 1) that features actors from the NTD, and (as I recall) was filmed with their cooperation and support.
I’ve been holding this one for a few days, looking for a place for it: Bob Croft, pioneering free diver.
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Once he passed 200 feet, he continued to 212.7 feet — the deepest point of his descent — where he activated the sled’s hand brake and fastened an alligator clip to the rope. He then climbed the rope, hand-over-hand, to the surface.
In all, he had spent 2 minutes 6 seconds underwater.
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Mr. Croft, a brawny 5-foot-8, raised his record to 217.5 feet in late 1967 and then to a remarkable 240 feet in August 1968, breaking a record of 231 feet that had been set by Mr. Mayol that January.
Mr. Croft retired from free diving after the 240-foot dive, still believing he could have gone deeper. He left his goal of 250 feet to others. It has long since been exceeded: In 2023, Alexey Molchanov of Russia set the current record of nearly 512 feet.
Bob Weir, of the Grateful Dead.
(the sound of eight confused men getting paid)
Stewart Cheifet. My older readers may remember him from back in the day as the host of “Computer Chronicles” on PBS.
Hessy Levinsons Taft. I confess she wasn’t that notable, but this is a fun story in historical retrospect.
When she was six months old, in 1934, her family hired a photographer to take a portrait of her. The photographer, feeling whimsical, submitted the photo as an entry for a contest “to find a baby representing the epitome of the Aryan race”.
Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of public enlightenment and propaganda, chose the winner.
She won the contest. Which made things rather complicated, as she and her family were Jewish.
T.K. Carter, actor. Other credits include “The Corner” (For those of you who have read the book or watched the mini-series, he was Gary McCullough. For those of you who haven’t read the book, I commend it to your attention.), “A Rage In Harlem” (1991), “Runaway Train”, and “Quincy, M.E.”.
Erich von Däniken, crank.
Mr. von Däniken was 32 and managing a hotel in Davos, Switzerland, when he published his first and by far most popular book, “Chariots of the Gods,” in 1968. In breathless prose, saturated with exclamation points and folksy interjections such as “Hey, presto!” Mr. von Däniken posited that virtually the sum of human knowledge and ability had been bestowed by extraterrestrials.
With little evidence and a lot of innuendo, he proclaimed that the Egyptian pyramids could have been built only with alien expertise. (“Is it really a coincidence that the height of the pyramid of Cheops multiplied by a thousand million — 98,000,000 miles — corresponds approximately to the distance between the earth and sun?” he wrote.)
The birdman cult of Easter Island, Mr. von Däniken declared, developed as a way to honor the supreme beings who had flitted down from the outer atmosphere to land on that remote spot in the Pacific, off the coast of South America.
Because an iron rod in a temple in Delhi, India, appeared impervious to rust, it must have been made from a celestial alloy, he insisted. Similarly, he said, when viewed from the air, the geoglyphs of Nazca, Peru, are obvious landing strips for spaceships. And artwork on a Mayan sarcophagus depicts not a king descending into the underworld, he concluded, but an astronaut-god piloting a spaceship.
It sounds ridiculous, but people bought into this [stuff]. Including me. In my defense, I was left unsupervised. Also, I was very young at the time. (See also.)
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Mr. von Däniken wrote his second book from prison. In 1970, a Swiss court convicted him of fraud, forgery and embezzlement, determining that, as a hotel manager, he had falsified financial records to subsidize what the court called a “playboy” lifestyle. He served about a third of a three-and-a-half-year sentence.
Critics pointed to Mr. von Däniken’s criminal history as proof of a penchant for deception. But Mr. von Däniken seemed unfazed, even comparing himself to Jesus. “People don’t ask if Christ was convicted of a crime,” he told Playboy in 1974. “What has that to do with the message Christ brought?”
One of my Christmas presents to myself was to take a gun off layaway at my local dealer.
I’m not ready to show it off yet. I want Mike to see it first, and I’ve warned him that his eyes are going to roll so hard they may pop out of his head. Let me just say that this gun combines 1.5 of this blogger’s obsessions. More later on.
One of my other Christmas presents to myself was a replacement for Project e. While it was (and still is, to some extent) a fine machine, the CPU and memory are quite limited. You can’t even get an Ubuntu distro for it any longer, as far as I can tell. It still powers on, but I was getting a lot of fan noise out of it, too. I think it is time for it to go into retirement.
The new machine is a Lenovo ThinkPad P15S – I believe this is a gen 2, with an i7-10510U processor and a discrete NVIDA T500 GPU. It is a lot larger (I’d say about twice the size) than Proect e, but several times more powerful. This was a Discount Electronics purchase when they were looking to dump inventory a few weeks ago, and I upgraded the SSD and RAM when I ordered it. (I also got six months free financing.)
Other than replacing Project e, I wanted to get a personal computer for myself. I’ve been doing a lot (well, pretty much all) of my personal stuff on my work laptop, and that doesn’t seem like a good situation for obvious reasons. I want to start moving files and personal stuff off the work laptop and onto this one. Of course, that’s more difficult than you might think, because Cisco, as a security measure, has locked down all the corporate machines so you can no longer use any removable media. I think I can still copy stuff to the cloud.
Right now, the new device has Windows 11 Pro on it. I’m keeping it there for two reasons:
1) I also signed up, at the end of the year, for the Certified Ethical Hacker certification from Colorado State. They specify Mac or Windows for the coursework. I didn’t want to try running the courseware on my work Mac (and possibly running into infosec issues) so I figured I’d get a dedicated Windows laptop for the course, and once I finish the cert, install some flavor of LINUX on it.
2) I also need to do my taxes this year. I think there may be a LINUX tax software package, but I’ve never used it. I can get the H&R Block tax software, which I prefer, for Windows. The past few years, I’ve installed it on my work Mac, but I think I’m going to stop doing that this year.
Why not just get a new personal Mac instead? I’m waiting for the M5 Pro Max laptops. Once those come out, and as long as everything holds together, I plan to purchase a fully blown and stoked M5 Pro Max (or whatever Apple calls it) for personal use. Project L (the Lenovo) will then become a dedicated security research machine.
I’ve messed around a little with the Windows version of hashcat so far, and I think I’m getting pretty good performance with that. I also want to see how it performs ripping DVDs with Handbrake. I do expect performance improvements in both these areas when I move Project L to UNIX.
I also want to go back to messing around more with SDR. I have one of those TV tuner based SDR kits, but I haven’t done anything with it because I felt my existing machines were too slow. Now that I have something a bit more modern than 2009…
And speaking of SDR, I also want to pick back up experimenting with Bluetooth. Though, again, I think that’s going to have to wait for UNIX. It is also going to have to wait for me to figure out what the current state of Bluetooth probing devices is: the Ubertooth One is out of production and deprecated. Just based on a preliminary Google search it looks like the state of the art has shifted to higher-end SDR devices.
Going back to guns for a minute, I do have a “gun” coming from Amazon on Monday. I’ll blog that when I can, as it answers the question: what happens to a dream deferred?
And I have a huge backlog of gun books to blog, once I can get picture uploads to work again.
Busier than a one-armed man in a calf-milking contest, indeed. I’m just hoping to hold everything together.
© Steve Ballmer, 2024.
One of my cow orkers sent me a link to a TechCrunch story (by way of Slashdot). I don’t think the actual TechCruch story is all that interesting: does the Kohler Dekoda actually use end-to-end encryption or not? The story is based on this blog post by Simon Fondrie-Teitler, a security researcher, and the answer seems to be “no”, at least in the way end-to-end encryption is defined:
What I think is more interesting is what the Kohler Dekoda actually is. Kohler, as you know, Bob, is a large plumbing and fixtures company.
The Kohler Dekoda is a camera.
Yeah. So what it’s doing is taking pictures of your bodily waste, “analyzing” them, and sending you reports on your health.
Of course it needs an app.
Thank God I can use the bathroom normally!
How much would you pay for a camera on your toilet that tracks your bodily wastes and sends you reports? $50? $100? Or would someone have to pay you?
The Kohler Dekoda sells for $600. But wait, there’s more! And I bet you already know what that “more” is!
Yes, it also requires a subscription. $7 a month ($70 a year) for a single user, or $13 a month ($130 a year) for a “family plan” that’s good for up to five users.
So if you have an average 2 1/2 bath home, and want to make sure you have coverage everywhere you “go”, you’d need to spend $1,800 on the hardware. It isn’t clear to me if the subscription covers multiple cameras, or if you need one subscription for every camera. It also isn’t clear to me how the camera would be able to distinguish between various users (husband/wife), or if you have to tell that app each time that you’re the one on the throne.
I get that there are some people with health conditions that might find this useful, though I question whether it would be $600 plus an ongoing $70 a year useful. I also get that “gut health” seems to be the next big health advance, though it seems to me that “gut health” has been a thing for a while, and what do we have to show for it?
As for hydration, you can print this and hang it above every toilet in your house for a couple of pennies worth of ink.
And if Kohler is using anonymized data to train AI models, I say: awesome! Because the last thing in the world I want is humans (outside of a specific medical context) analyzing bodily wastes, even if they are getting paid for it.
My Personal Top Ten List of Wikipedia Lists
10. “List of stoffs”. How can you not like a list with a name like that? Also, as you know, Bob, I’m both a bit of a plane geek and a military history geek. And as you also know, Bob, the famous ME-163 ran on T-Stoff and Z-Stoff (in the A variant) or C-Stoff (in the B and C variants.) (At least, I think that’s the case. The Wikipedia article is a little confusing.)
(I’ve been thinking about doing a Kickstarter for another million-dollar idea: a small rocket engine that attaches to a snowboard and runs on T-Stoff and Z-Stoff, maybe about the size of an old Apollo RCS motor. Why take the lift when you can rocket up the slope and board back down? And why just board back down when you can rocketboard back down? Think of the extreme fun!)
(No, I haven’t done the math on this. Yet.)
9. “List of lists of lists”. “This is a list of articles that are lists of list articles on the English Wikipedia. In other words, each of the articles linked here is an index to multiple lists on a topic. Some of the linked articles are themselves lists of lists of lists.” So do we need a “Lists of lists of lists of lists” entry?
8. “List of animals awarded human credentials”. This one would be higher on the list if it wasn’t just cats and dogs (well, except for one chicken and one goldfish). Really, is there nobody out there who has obtained a diploma for their sloth or slow loris? (And if the answer is “No, there isn’t” I sense a great need. Senator Shoshana, I’ve never met you and this is crazy, but here’s my number, so call me, maybe, about diplomas for sloths?) Honorable mention: “Non-human electoral candidates”.
7. “List of helicopter prison escapes“. I guess this is mostly personal nostalgia. When I was (mumble mumble) years old, “Breakout” was released. I thought a movie about a prison break by helicopter was incredibly cool. I never actually it in theaters because my parents wouldn’t let me watch PG-rated movies. I still haven’t seen it, and in retrospect it was probably a mediocre Bronson action film, But: Robert Duvall! John Huston! Randy Quaid! And it’s available on blu-ray from Kino Lorber.
Setting aside my personal nostalgia, this is still a good list. I’ve written before about the crazy Garrett Brock Trapnell story, but that’s not the only good one. “I told him it was our Minister of Defence leaving.” “The 3-passenger helicopter was so overloaded with 5 occupants that it barely cleared the fence, while flying away in a hail of gunfire that injured one guard.” “One of the skids caught on the razor wire, causing the helicopter to catapult over the fence and crash into the prison grounds.” Is it just me, or do there seem to be a disproportionate number of helicopter escapes in France and Canada?
6. “List of classical music concerts with an unruly audience response“. Everyone knows about “The Rite of Spring” (or thinks they know: I would really love to find a good reliable history of what actually happened the night of the premiere). But there are other great moments in this entry. Some of them even involve artists I like. “One woman walked down the aisle and repeatedly banged her head on the front of the stage, wailing ‘Stop, stop, I confess.'” “Artist Man Ray reportedly punched a man in the nose, Marcel Duchamp began hurling obscenities at a fellow audience member, and Erik Satie was heard shouting, ‘What precision! What precision!'”. “…Futurists led by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti fighting members of the audience in the stalls.” (Futurism! There’s a rabbit hole for you.)
5. “List of sausages“. As you know, Bob, I am somewhat food obsessed. There are a bunch of Wikipedia food lists I could probably pick, but I happen to be fond of sausages. I wonder how hard it would be to organize a sausage tour of Germany? (I’d include Volkswagen currywurst in that tour, but I’m not if VW would let a tourist group eat in their canteen.) Also, I’m wondering if there’s any way to get Noumboulo in the US…
4. “List of Latin phrases”. Because sometimes in business it is useful to be able to toss out a reference like “alea iacta est” or “fiat justitia ruat caelum” and see who picks up on it. Honorable mention: “Glossary of French expressions in English“. I don’t have as many opportunities to use any of these, except “pour encourager les autres“.
3. “List of winless seasons”. Yes, this does include the NFL, and yes, the 2008 Lions and the 2017 Cleveland Browns are on the list. But there’s more to it than just the NFL. Have you ever wondered if a cricket team has lost all of their matches in a season? What about rugby? Or “association football”? (“In the 2010–11 Ukrainian Second League (3rd tier on the Ukrainian pyramid), FC Veres Rivne lost all 14 out of 22 scheduled games before being expelled from the league due to failure of payment of league dues; in addition, they also did not score a single goal at home.” Now that’s a mark to strive for.)
2. “List of canceled Las Vegas casinos”. I’ve linked to this before, but it is still a favorite of mine. Honorable mention: “List of Atlantic City casinos that never opened”.
And at number one on the hit parade…
1. “List of television series canceled after one episode”. Not only is this a subject near and dear to my heart (epic failure) but I love the way this list is organized: “Canceled before the first episode finished airing”, “Canceled after two episodes, seen back-to-back on premiere night”, “Special cases”, and etc.
I’m sorry that today’s post is short and perfunctory. A confluence of events (Lent, eye doctor appointment, getting both eyes dialated) has left me unable to celebrate the day in the way I would like.
For those of you who are celebrating, please celebrate responsibly. Don’t contact your local math department saying you’ve squared the circle.
I didn’t manage to get everything done that I wanted to get done during my extended vacation from work. In particular, gun crankery and gun books kind of went by the wayside, for reasons of time and weather.
The gun crankery is still coming. And a thought occurred to me the other day: I can actually do some quick gun book crankery, because I have three new gun books in the stack and can just point folks to those books online. Don’t need to pull out the bibliographies or take pictures. Yes, it is lazy, and yes, there will be less lazy gun book crankery coming. Consider this a stopgap.
More seriously, I do think these new books are worth writing about and promoting to my readers.
In order to avoid disappointing my gun book buddies, I’m going to put the gun books up front. After those, I’m going to talk about one new gun-related item, and one new non-gun related item, so anyone who wants can skip over the non-book parts (or can skip to the non-book parts).
Lawrence, the Guardian, and the New York Times have all noted that two drummers for the Bee Gees have died in the past few days.
Dennis Bryon, 76, the Bee Gees’ drummer starting in 1973, died on Nov. 14, according to Blue Weaver, who played in the band Amen Corner with Mr. Bryon. He announced his death on Facebook on Thursday, but gave no cause of death for Mr. Bryon.
Colin “Smiley” Petersen, the band’s first professional drummer, died on Nov. 18 at the age of 78, according to Evan Webster and Sue Camilleri, who work on The Best of The Bee Gees Show, a tribute band. Mr. Petersen died from a fall, they said.
Mr. Petersen, who joined the Bee Gees in 1967, played on the band’s first four albums. He started playing in the The Best of The Bee Gees Show five years ago, Mr. Webster said.
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Arthur Frommer, travel book guy.
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Thomas E. Kurtz, one of the great men of history. He co-created the BASIC computer language.
Fernando Valenzuela. ESPN. NYT (archived).
As I’ve noted before, I am not a baseball fan, and I hate the Dodgers. But I remember Fernandomania. And I get the impression he was a class act.
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He stumbled on one of his most publicized discoveries accidentally, when he asked his undergraduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, to bring in a chemical of their choosing to undergo testing. All of the chemicals tested negative, except for one: contained in a bottle of hair dye a student had borrowed from his girlfriend.
Dr. Ames sent a lab technician, Edith Yamasaki, to buy out every type of hair dye at a local drugstore, and after extensive testing concluded that the dyes — used by more than 20 million Americans at the time — were very likely linked to cancer and birth defects.
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Later in his career, as Dr. Ames’s opinions about the dangers of man-made chemicals began to shift, his legacy in the environmental movement became more complicated.
He felt that some activists were overstating the risks of these chemicals and targeting chemical companies unfairly. He often said that he thought there was too much focus on substances that were technically mutagenic but that were no more likely to cause DNA damage than the “natural” chemicals found in fruits and vegetables.
“I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t real problems with some synthetic chemicals, but the environmentalists are wildly exaggerating the risks,” he told The Times in 1994. “If our resources are diverted from important things to unimportant things, this doesn’t serve the public.”
I’ve known about this one for a few days, but was waiting for something I was comfortable linking to: Ward Christensen, early computer BBS pioneer.
Then, on Jan. 16, 1978, a blizzard hit Chicago, covering the city in 40 inches of snow and stranding Mr. Christensen at his home in the suburbs. He phoned Mr. Suess, suggesting that they use the time to start building their messaging system. He wondered if they should get help from other club members, but Mr. Suess argued that involving more people would slow the project down.
“Forget the club. It would just be management by committee,” Mr. Suess said, as Mr. Christensen recalled their conversation to The New York Times in 2009. “It’s just me and you. I will do the hardware, and you will do the software.”
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By way of Greg Ellifritz: Ed Lovette, trainer and gun guy. I have a copy of The Snubby Revolver, and would recommend picking it up if you find it used.
I also wanted to link this because Mr. Ellifritz’s post contains an excellent list of other books you should have in your gun library. I will say I have many, but not all, of them: some of them I am still trying to find. (And someone should get the rights to reprint that old Paladin Press stuff, like the Lovette and Cirillo books.)
As a side note, I haven’t forgotten about gun books. I’ve just been busy, and my dealer of choice has taken some time off. I do want to try to get up a post this week, but it is probably going to be shorter than usual. The books I plan to post about are all new books, available from Amazon (with one exception). And one of those books is also going to be an entry in the “Leadership Secrets” series, too.
Keep watching the skies.
I could take this over to Lawrence’s, but I have two very good reasons not to.
One, Lawrence would tell me “Get this s–t out of my house.”
Two, I can post it here, where perhaps a handful of people who were on old school USENET will get a small chuckle (maybe) out of it. Heck, for all I know, he might even show up in the comments.
I admit, Lawrence probably isn’t going to cover this in his Linkswarm, and it is of interest to me partly because of my peculiar background. (I was with an auto insurance adjacent organization for quite a few years.)
But I do think there are some things in this story that are worth attention. Otherwise I wouldn’t be blogging it, right?
American Transit Insurance Company is an auto insurance company. They specialize in covering “for-hire vehicles”, which is basically your taxi cabs and Lyft/Uber drivers (at least, the ones who actually bother to get the specialized insurance they need to have). The paper of record claims that ATIC covers “60 percent of the available vehicles” in New York City.
American Transit Insurance Company is also insolvent. As in, “can’t pay their bills” insolvent. As in “can’t pay claims” insolvent.
Worthy quote:
“Ponzi scheme”. The words we were looking for were “Ponzi scheme”.
That’s about the point where archive.is cuts off archiving the article, so I’ll have to summarize and use unlinked pull quotes from here on out.
What does this mean for me, Al Franken? There aren’t many companies that compete with ATIC in the NYC marketplace, so if ATIC collapses, a lot of “for-hire” cars will be without insurance, or have to pay more for insurance, which means either fewer taxis/Ubers/livery cars/etc. or higher costs, or both. Plus (and it probably goes without saying), people who have valid claims against ATIC insured drivers may not actually get paid. You got hit by an ATIC insured livery driver? Fark you, we don’t have any money to pay for your hospital bill.
How did they get this much in the hole?
…the department released two reports about American Transit’s finances from 2014 to 2019, which said that the company’s books showed evidence of accounting errors, unverified expenses and potential mismanagement.
According to the reports, American Transit paid nearly $100 million in commissions to an affiliated company for work signing up new policyholders and renewing existing policies, but the department could not confirm that the work had taken place.
American Transit also paid nearly $10 million for unclear reasons to Global Biomechanical Solutions, a consulting firm in which American Transit’s chief executive, Ralph Bisceglia, and a daughter-in-law of its co-founder had controlling interests, according to the reports.
Quel fromage! And I personally think the reasons are very clear, but publically stating them here might get me sued.
The firm submitted two remediation plans, which included rate increases and setting up a blockchain platform where policies could be bought and sold as nonfungible tokens.
You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding. Me. A blockchain platform. NFTs. If I were the NY State Department of Insurance, I’d be looking in every corner for the Jerky Boys or the “Jackass” guys or even for someone trying to do a revival of “Candid Camera”.
Almost from the beginning, the company had financial problems. State regulators flagged its reserves as inadequate in 1979, and later found increasing levels of insolvency in eight examinations that were conducted between 1987 and 2020.
1979, ladies and Germans. 1979.
…in 1991, state officials again filed a petition to rehabilitate the company and later moved to liquidate it.
American Transit challenged those proceedings, and in 1996, reached a settlement with state regulators that allowed it to remain in business under certain conditions, including that it be closely monitored by state regulators.
“closely monitored by state regulutors”. How’s that working out for you?
Since then, however, the firm’s finances have continued to deteriorate. Last week, state officials said they had not been approached by any credible company seeking to acquire American Transit or its insurance policies.
Ooooooh. Maybe not so good?
To be fair…
American Transit has suggested that insurance fraud contributed to its financial problems. In response to an email from The Times seeking clarification about the company’s statement this month, American Transit said that “rampant insurance fraud” threatened the commercial market and allowed lawyers and “opportunistic medical service providers” to inflate costs, undermining the insurance system.
I’m willing to concede there may be some truth to that. I mean, this is New York City…
If it is not purchased, the company could go into receivership with the New York Liquidation Bureau, which would use American Transit’s remaining assets or a state fund to pay off active claims, said Mark Peters, a partner at the law firm Peters Brovner and a former head of the bureau.
Your tax dollars at work, New York residents. Paying off for an insolvent insurance company.
Big Boy is coming to Texas!
No, not that one.
Not them, either. They are (or were) already good Texas boys. But I threw that in because I recently discovered a fun fact about one of the Big Boys, which I will put at the bottom of this post.
This Big Boy is Big Boy 4014, the Union Pacific steam locomotive. It is the second largest steam locomotive ever built, and the largest still in operation.
You may recall that I linked to a couple of videos on Big Boy during the recent unpleasantness.
Here’s the UP schedule for the “Heartland of America Tour”. The tour has already kicked off, but it doesn’t look like Big Boy will reach Texas until September 17th.
It will be in:
Check the schedule for more details, and keep in mind that the schedule may change due to mechanical or other issues.
I’m trying to decide if I want to go to Bryan, which is slightly closer, but is “viewing only”, or Houston, which is a little further away, but seems to be more open to the public for touring. If I can pull it together to do one or the other, I’ll post a report here.
That fun Big Boys fact I promised you? Tim Kopra, who played horns with the band, went on to bigger and better things. He became a NASA astronaut. Here’s his NASA biography.
Unusual career trajectory, I think.
Major General William A. Anders (USAF – ret.), Apollo 8 astronaut.
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On Christmas Eve, during their 10 orbits of the moon, the three astronauts, whose movements were telecast to millions around the world, took photos of Earth as it rose over the lunar horizon, appearing as a blue marble amid the blackness of the heavens. But only Major Anders, who oversaw their spacecraft’s electronic and communications systems, shot color film.
His photo shook the world. Known as “Earthrise,” it was reproduced in a 1969 postage stamp bearing the words “In the beginning God …” It was an inspiration for the first Earth Day, in 1970, and appeared on the cover of Life magazine’s 2003 book “100 Photographs That Changed the World.”
Betty Anne Rees, actress. Other credits include “Lou Grant”, “The F.B.I.”, “Bearcats!”…
…and “Mannix”. (“With Intent to Kill”, season 4, epsiode 17. She was “Cora Hayden”.)