Thursday, June 17, 2004

Anniversary: Third-rate burglary It's June 17, the thirty-second anniversary of the Watergate break-in. Man, does Nixon look good now. But I digress. To mark the occasion, a minor-league baseball club in New Hampshire called the Nashua Pride is sponsoring a giveaway: The first 1,000 fans through the gates will get Richard Nixon bobblehead dolls. And that's not all! Anyone named Woodward or Bernstein will be admitted free, public-address announcements will be suspended for 18 and a half minutes. (This news by way of a segment on NPR's "Talk of the Nation.") 1:05:16 PM    comment []

We regret the error ... Well, a couple posts down, I mildly celebrated the first story in my renewed freelance writing career, about a private space launch this coming Monday. And in the first couple of hours after my story was posted on Wired News, I got a couple of very nice notes from readers. But instead of wanting to tell me what a genius I am, they wanted to point out a mistake. I reported that SpaceShipOne rode on top of its carrier plane. That's not necessarily logical, but that's the way it looked to me in the pictures, and I'm not an aerospace engineer, so that's what I wrote. It turns out that the spaceship is carried below the plane, not above it. As someone once said somewhere about a situation like this, or not at all like it, "Shitfire." One beauty of online publishing, as opposed to the print kind, is that you can fix an error like that right away. So within about 20 minutes of sending off a correction, my original prose was changed to more accurately reflect reality. 10:51:53 AM    comment []

And speaking of spaceflight BoingBoing is hosting a blog account of preparation's for Monday's launch of SpaceShipOne from Mojave. Two posts so far: part one and part two. Nice on-the-ground color, along with valuable advice for the mini- or maxi-horde that might descend on Mojave for the launch: "BRING LOTS OF WATER! ... Our rule of thumb out here: if you're not peeing every couple of hours, you're not drinking enough." 9:28:02 AM    comment []

Back in print ... Or back online. Or back in the saddle. Or something. In any case, I've got a story this morning on Wired News, about the first private manned space launch: "Something big is supposed to happen in the sky above the California desert town of Mojave early Monday. Just after dawn, a spindly white jet plane is scheduled to ascend from an airstrip with a rocket ship strapped on top. ..."  Feels good to have something out there in print, or in bits, or whatever, again. 9:13:13 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2004 Dan Brekke.