THE EAGLE HAS LANDED

     

Tucson Weather Today

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On this day, July 20, 1969 at 10:56 p.m. EDT, American astronaut Neil Armstrong, 240,000 miles from Earth, spoke these words to more than a billion people listening at home: "That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Stepping off the lunar landing module Eagle, Armstrong became the first human to walk on the surface of the moon.

Neil Armstrong Steps Onto The Surface Of The Moon

 

"Buzz" Aldrin joined him on the moon's surface at 11:11 p.m., and together they took photographs of the terrain, planted a U.S. flag, ran a few simple scientific tests, and spoke with President Richard M. Nixon via Houston.

Buzz Aldrin Walking On The Moon

 

By 1:11 a.m. on July 21, both astronauts were back in the lunar module and the hatch was closed. The two men slept that night on the surface of the moon, and at 1:54 p.m. the Eagle began its ascent back to the command module. Among the items left on the surface of the moon was a plaque that read: "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot on the moon -- July 1969 A.D. -- We came in peace for all mankind."

Also on this day, July 20 in 1961 my daughter was born.
Happy Birthday, Sandi Jo!

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Now For Something Completely Different:

In her blog Greta Christina wrote:

"If you have anything at all to say about this that even remotely hints at implying that what George Zimmerman did was remotely defensible, or that this verdict was anything short of grotesque… do not comment in my blog. Now, or ever. Do not read my blog. Do not follow me on Facebook or Twitter. Do not attend my talks. Do not buy my books. Get the fuck out of my life, now. Thank you."

My response:

Well, okay, Greta. I have been reading your blog for a long time, but I will honor your request. I will not read your blog. I will not follow you on Facebook or Twitter. I will not attend your talks. I will not buy your books. I will not take part in your life. You're welcome.

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CELEBRITY BIRTHDAYS

Cormac McCarthy
(born July 20, 1933)

Cormac McCarthy is an American novelist and playwright. He has written ten novels, spanning the Southern Gothic, Western, and Post-apocalyptic genres. He won the Pulitzer Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction for The Road (2006). His 2005 novel No Country for Old Men was adapted as a 2007 film of the same name, which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. For All the Pretty Horses (1992) he won both the U.S. National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award. All the Pretty Horses and The Road were also adapted as motion pictures.

Blood Meridian (1985) was among Time magazine's list of 100 best English-language books published between 1923 and 2005 and placed joint runner-up in a poll taken in 2006 by The New York Times of the best American fiction published in the last 25 years. Literary critic Harold Bloom named him as one of the four major American novelists of his time, alongside Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon and Philip Roth, and called Blood Meridian "the greatest single book since Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying". In 2010 The Times ranked The Road first on its list of the 100 best fiction and non-fiction books of the past 10 years. McCarthy has been increasingly mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Note: I do not usually list authors since they are covered so well at The Writer's Almanac, but Cormac McCarthy is one of my top two favorite authors of all time.

Natalie Wood
(July 20, 1938 – Nov. 29, 1981)

Natalie Wood was an American film and television actress best known for her screen roles in Miracle on 34th Street, Splendor in the Grass, Rebel Without a Cause, and West Side Story.

At age 43, Wood drowned near Santa Catalina Island, California at the time her last film, Brainstorm (1983), was in production with co-star Christopher Walken. Her death was declared an accident for 31 years; in 2012 after a new investigation the cause was reclassified as "undetermined".

Omar Hashim Epps
(born July 20, 1973)

Omar Epps is an American actor, rapper, songwriter, and record producer. His film roles include Major League II, Juice, Higher Learning, Scream 2, The Wood, In Too Deep, and Love and Basketball. Epps' television work includes the role of Dr. Dennis Gant on the US medical drama series ER, and, between 2004 and 2012, Dr. Eric Foreman on the Fox medical drama series House.

Enid Diana Elizabeth Rigg
(born 20 July 1938)

Diana Rigg is an English actress. She played the roles of Emma Peel in The Avengers and Countess Teresa di Vicenzo in the 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service. She is considered a sex symbol and an icon of 1960s feminism.

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Neil Armstrong may have been the fist man to walk on the moon, but Buzz Aldrin was the first man to urinate there.
--The Telegraph

NASA TV
    

Excuses, Excuses . . .

Tucson Weather Today

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One of the reasons I have composed no entries for the last few days is that I have not been feeling well. Several days of painful chest and sinus congestion and lots of coughing and sneezing kept me away from the blog. But I am feeling better now.

Another reason is that I have been working on a separate writing project. That project is not going well. But I am not yet ready to delete it and then forget it, as is often the case with my mind's somewhat weird workings.

Not yet.

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Greta Christina writes of cognitive dissonance and of memes. Both of these words swirl fuzzily within my eternally changing realm of understanding and once again I find it necessary to look up their definitions. Wikipedia announces that cognitive dissonance is discomfort caused by holding conflicting cognitions (e.g., ideas, beliefs, values, emotional reactions) simultaneously. And Wiki declares that a meme is "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture."

Oh . . . yeah . . .  Now I remember. I knew both of those definitions at one time. Since, however, I never actively use those two words but merely occasionally read about them, their definite meanings tend to fade from the forefront of my mind with that lack of active usage.

Words . . . Words and phrases, and their presumed meanings. I have always believed that a specific word (or phrase) should have a definite meaning and that its meaning should be recognized by all who read it. How else can the information being correctly communicated from producer to recipient?

I am not sure I have a distinct point by writing the above. It seems (to me) a bit hollow. Or incomplete perhaps.

Oh well  . . .

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WORD FOR TODAY

gavage [guh-vahzh]
noun
forced feeding, as by a flexible tube and a force pump

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BORN ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Bill Moyers

Born June 5, 1934

Bill Moyers is an American journalist and public commentator. Mr. Moyers is currently 77 years old

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Don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things.
--George Carlin

Weather Outside Is Delightful

Tucson Weather Today

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Okay . . . I am back home now from my dog-sitting chores in the desert. Not that keeping company with Eva is a chore; she's a real sweetheart.

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Short Note Regarding Atheism

Why Are You Atheists So Angry? 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless is a video description of the new book written by Greta Christina -- I know that the announcement was previously posted on quarkscrew but I am repeating the announcement here in case some might have missed it.

Greta Christina is pictured in our own Writers Photo Album (she's not a member) posing alongside BT Murtagh (who is a member) and who, as I am sure all our members know, is an extremely talented fiction writer. The recent 6X6 exercise pretty well proved that.

The picture is HERE.

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Word For Today

procatalepsis

rhetorical figure by which an opponent’s objections are anticipated and answered.

The Grammarphobia blog posted several examples. Here are a couple of them: "Someone who begins by saying No offense, but … or Nothing personal, but … is about to step on your toes, and both parties know it."

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Born On This Day In History

Wernher Von Braun

Born March 23, 1912
Died on Jun 16, 1977

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Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
--Oscar Wilde

An Agglomerate Of Middling Miscellany

I strolled up to the Customer Service area at Fry's Supermarket and placed my PowerBall lottery card and my usual one-dollar bill down onto the counter before my favorite clerk (the young, pretty, well- groomed one who always smiles at me) and was horrified to hear her say, "Sorry Sweetie but a chance on the PowerBall drawing just went up to two dollars."

I know my jaw must have dropped and my eyes probably bugged out some, because she said, "do you still want one?" I told her no, that I could not afford to lose two dollars twice a week on such a long, long shot. So I just bought a ticket on the twice weekly Arizona MegaMillions drawing, which is still only one dollar, and pays out a jackpot in the multii-millions.

PowerBall can go jump in the lake.

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I try to catch Greta Christina's blog each time she posts a new entry. Greta is an outspoken atheist. Greta is happily and proudly a free- thinking lesbian. Greta is an intelligent, skillful, and much published writer.

In The Ten Main Reasons I Don't Believe In God from the Archives, Greta wrote: ". . . I’ll assume that the mind-bogglingly consistent pattern of natural explanations replacing supernatural ones is almost certain to continue."

Now that, I thought, is a fine example of constructing (coining?) a new word -- "mind-bogglingly" -- and is a somewhat subtle slap in the face of all those how-to-write mavens whose first commandment is that writers should avoid using adverbs.

(A maven is a trusted expert in a particular field, who seeks to pass knowledge on to others.)

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Sometimes I read a passage and it stays with me. Such as this one by Gustave Flaubert:

"It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself but to move in an entire universe of your own creating. Today, for instance, as man and woman, both lover and mistress, I rode in a forest on an autumn afternoon under the yellow leaves, and I was also the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words my people uttered, even the red sun that made them almost close their love-drowned eyes."

The above was copied a while back from The Writer's Almanac

See more here here about Gustave Flaubert

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From Harry Crews came another memorable passage:

"There is something beautiful about all scars of whatever nature. A scar means the hurt is over, the wound is closed and healed, done with."

(One might ask TV's Doctor House for his thoughts about that particular observation)

I suppose the reason I so often copy into this website quotations and short pieces written by published authors and famous poets is because throughout the years I have failed to write memorable poems and stories myself. But I have read and enjoyed so many works of others, and I get a tremendous amount of pleasure from sharing with those who may not have read them.

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Tucson Weather Today