A Witness to Lincoln's Assassination

Wow. Just... wow.

Faces of Evil at Christmas

From the Daily Mail:

The pictures from December 18, which have only just come to light, show Hitler and his generals at a party for SS officer cadets in Munich.

But the Nazi Christmas was far from traditional.

Hitler believed religion had no place in his 1,000-year Reich, so he replaced the Christian figure of Saint Nicholas with the Norse god Odin and urged Germans to celebrate the season as a holiday of the ‘winter solstice’, rather than Christmas.

Two thoughts here:
1. Absolutely beautiful photos, technically speaking. I love the shallow depth of field. But look at the lack of expression on the faces of Nazi soldiers. If I had to describe it in a word, it would be "soul-less."

2. Interesting that today, almost 70 years later some people are trying to remove religion from Christmas by using the same tactics that Hitler did.

Attack Ads, Old School...

Amazingly, the statements in this video are taken from statements made by, for, and against the nation's founders.

Images of VJ Day

VJ Day, Honolulu Hawaii, August 14, 1945 from Richard Sullivan on Vimeo.

March 2: A Big Day in Texas

Happy Texas Independence Day. Today, on this date in 1836, Texas declared independence from Mexico.

Also today in 1793, Sam Houston was born.

Today ought to be a state holiday. It's a crime that it isn't.

Buddy Holly and the Walk of Fame

I walked out of my hotel room in Lubbock to see a statue of Buddy Holly, Lubbock's most famous son, staring at me. So I walked over to the Buddy Holly walk of fame.

There are plaques all the way around the statue with other famous Texans, including Mac Davis, Waylon Jennings and ... G. W. Bailey? I bet they wish they had that one back.

But somewhere around 1997 they apparently had an "oh shit!" moment. It seems that whoever mounted the plaques every year had been mounting them lower and lower. So instead of fixing them, they just started back the original height, I guess hoping no one would notice.

And then apparently they ran out of famous people in 2006 and started making up names.

Jennifer Smith???? Was John Doe not available?

And then the Walk of Fame ends abruptly after 2006. Apparently they ran out of famous Texans. It's just a shame that Willie Nelson never got famous enough to make it in...

Small Steps By Man

Today is the 40th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing and man's first steps on the moon.

I've always been intrigued by space and especially the Apollo moon missions, so this past week I've been somewhat obsessed with the photos and news stories leading up to the anniversary today.

I was especially interested on Saturday in this story: NASA has realeased photos taken by the lunar orbiter that NASA launched last year of the Apollo landing sites. This is Apollo 11:



But my favorite is this one, from Apollo 14, which shows the astronaut foot path back and forth between the LM and a scientific experiment site.




I've often wondered if you could see the landing module with a telescope. I learned this week that there's no telescope on Earth large enough because the machinery is so small in scale. Anyone who's been to the Johnson Space Center and seen the lunar lander display knows exactly how big the lunar lander isn't. But the satellite orbiting the moon could do it.

It looks like everything has been perfectly preserved for 40 years. I would love to be the guy at some point in the future who's out for a walk on the moon and gets to see that history first-hand. I think it would be terribly interesting to see the condition of the materials used to build the lander after 40 years in space in the moon's environment. Is it pristine? Are there signs of rust (which would open up all sorts of questions regarding water)? How is the integrity of the metal?

I think that would tell us a lot about the moon's environment over time and the viability of man's existence there. That would be a worthy reason to go back.

Moon Landing Footage Erased to Tape Episode of Mork & Mindy

Forty years ago today the Apollo 11 spacecraft launched, which would take Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon. Check out an incredible collection of photos from the mission here.

In conjunction with the anniversary of one of the greatest feats of mankind in the history of the world, NASA has also admitted that they apparently used up all their collective brain power on the moon missions and stumbled around like drunk fratdaddies in the late '70s and '80s. You see, they announced today that they are refurbishing copies of the moon landing tapes - taking out a lot of the grain and restoring detail using Hollywood film enhancement techniques. But not from the original tapes, you see. Because those don't exist anymore.

"NASA lost its original moon landing videotapes and after a three-year search, officials have concluded they were probably erased.

The original videos beamed to earth were stored on giant reels of tapes that each contained 15 minutes of video, along with 13 other channels of live data from the moon. In the 1970s and 1980s, NASA had a shortage of the tapes and erased about 200,000 of those tapes and reused them. That's apparently what happened to the famous moon landing footage."

I find it unconscionable that someone at NASA wouldn't have thought, "hey - here's perhaps the most valuable video footage ever. Perhaps maybe we should archive this in a safe place and, you know, NOT erase it."

Somebody better lose their effing pension over this.

The Origin of Band Names

A great list of bands and how they got their names.

WARNING: Once you start, be prepared to spend a couple of hours on the site. It's addictive.