Ma had spoken with Pa about the explosion this morning, but I didn't actually know what was going on until we were out and stopped to eat, and they were talking on the radio a bit about it. I just wanted to hurry up and eat and get back to the car, then, so we could listen to the radio. They had some nice coverage on NPR (WUTC 88.1, that is--the PRI station 90.5 was still playing classical music). After that we went to the library, and delayed going in because they said NASA's press conference was about to start; it didn't, for fifteen minutes, so we went in anyway. After we left, WUTC finally ended its coverage, even though NPR was still covering it.
Thanks, WUTC.
Kelly: whatcha think about the news?
Me: Ugh.
(long pause)
Me: I think "Ugh" about covers it, yeah.
Kelly: yeah.. it does
I had read on FoRK the note that Bay folk could possibly see the shuttle coming in to land this morning. Today from FoRK:
We [in Dallas] heard the sonic boom around 8am. It did shake the windows. --
CNN. The Washington Post. Thanks to Christian Crumlish, msram of LiveJournal, and Mark Kraft respectively for these three items:
Colonel Ilan Ramon... launched into space on January 16, 2003 with Holocaust-era art from Yad Vashem’s Art Museum. ...
Yad Vashem chose "Moon Landscape," created by Petr Ginz, a 14-year-old Jewish boy, during his incarceration in the Theresienstadt ghetto. ... During his incarceration Ginz traveled to places near and far within the depths of his imagination, and with great longing, he visited Prague, the city of his birth, in a poem written from behind the ghetto walls. In 1944 Ginz was killed in Auschwitz.
It was sultry, and dark, on an August evening in 1947 when Banarsi Lal Chawla [father of astronaut Kalpana Chawla], then 14, lay on a railway track, thirsty, hungry, unconscious, and bleeding. --
It's my dad. I want to tell him what i saw, the beauty of it, and he asks if i heard the news.
I crumble. --
A few more:
A nation of impressionable schoolchildren watched the Challenger lift off, and the lesson they learned when it disappeared into that fireball has stayed with them ever since. They may have forgotten such arcana as how to find the area of a triangle or who it was who delivered the Gettysburg address, but they still remember two key facts drummed into them on that cold January morning:
1. The world is falling apart.
2. The grownups can't save you. --
A Usenet thread on the next shuttle accident; even more prescient than the prediction in the above article, given the article is from March 1996 and the thread is from a week ago. (Thanks, memotomyself.)
A poem on Chattanoogan.com, included for completeness.
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i really like learning about space shuttle i wish you will write me .