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UPDATE:
Our nation morns the loss of the Columbia.

In my heart of hearts, though, this doesn't hit me the way the loss of the Challenger did. For one thing, something like this has happened before. Events lose some of their power when they're clearly not unique.

For another thing, post-WTC, the loss of 7 people--adventurers who knew they were taking a risk--doesn't carry the weight that the mass destruction we've seen does. And considering the mass destruction we're looking to wield ourselves in Iraq, and the dangers civillians of every nation face on an ongoing basis from violent radicals...I dunno. Maybe it's "disaster fatigue".

And of course, there's the Israeli issue, the Israeli astronaut on board. Last week NPR was reporting how excited Israel was about this, how it carried a great sense of "normal adventure". I guess that is, if you'll pardon the expression, blown to hell. (Personally, I think it's just structural failure of a very aging spacecraft, and that the way up would seem like a more likely target for terrorism than the way down. Hopefully they'll be able to investigate and reach a conclusion.)

It's like a huge field day to Islamic Propagandists, even if it is an "act of God", or Allah, or whatever. I can hear them say "See America? See what happens to your grand plans when you get in bed with Israel?"

Oy.

Heh. Good luck to China with its manned space mission plans. We're gonna be out of the race for a while.

• "A scholar is just a library's way of making anther library"
  --Daniel Dennett, a play on Anne McLaren's "A chicken is just an egg's way of making another egg."
• "I'm a child of the Cold War...I grew up believing I would never live to grow old. Now I see that I may just live to go senile...to lose all my hair...to get feeble in my old age...I'm really looking forward to that."
  --Bruce Sterling, from Gryphon's old .plan file
• A muppet FAQ
• One family has all the members' portraits taken every year since 1976.
• Salon on the perils and potential of online romance. I really think online personals are the way of the future. Seriously.
• [Reflecting upon the wording used on a formal invitation] 'October the Eighth, Nineteen Hundred and Ninety Eight, A.D.' A.D.! They're worried I might accidentally show up 2,000 years before the birth of Christ!
  --Sports Night...I got the boxed set of this for Christmas and watch it while on the stairmaster...
• Seanbaby on Grodd, the talking gorilla villain from Superfriends:
  

  	Seanbaby rocks, though he hasn't updated his site for a long while. Still, his page on the old Superfriends cartoon, is funny His NES and Hostess pages are worth the hours it takes to read 'em as well.

  
  
• Cool double views of Seattle's Waterfront, 1907 and 2002.
• Oneword is a brilliant creative idea tool: they'll show you a word, and give you 60 seconds to write on it, asking you don't think, just right. A new word each day.
• I already mentioned how much I liked Ranjit's company's Lego Spybotics game... GameFAQs finally published the FAQ/walkthrough I made for it, though they inserted a bunch of extra returns...maybe I should fix that.