Doing the News

After many years of delays and technical setbacks and even being chased back into the Vehicle Assembly Building by a hurricane, NASA has finally launched the Artemis I mission using the largest and most powerful rocket ever flown to hurl an Orion capsule to a distant retrograde orbit round the moon on a 25 day mission to test and prove the system's ability to return humans to the surface of the moon for the first…

I'll confess that I made no secret of my opinion that Mr Trump was fundamentally and temperamentally unqualified to be President of the United States prior to him standing as a candidate for that office in 2016. Whilst I'd no doubts that his years in business and taking full advantage of the loopholes offered by the tax code would be strengths he could bring to the job, I felt at the time that he lacked…

Another election done, another reprieve from the near constant carpet bombing of the phone, mailbox, and TV with political attack ads that are misleading at best and often outright lies. The political lobbyists seemed to really be out in force in this year's mid-term elections so I figured I'd survey the massive pile of political BS in slick professionally produced mailers that would drive one stark staring mad if you took their "message" at face…

On Election Day, one of the joys of running the gauntlet of political operatives hawking their candidates before reaching the safety of the "no electioneering/lobbying beyond this point" sign is pointing out to them that they might want my vote to stay as far away from their candidate as possible because it's usually the kiss of death. This year actually turned out to be better statistically than is usual for me! The ballot that I…

I’ll confess that today’s entry is probably one of the harder ones I’ve had to write of late. The easy part is being thankful for the sacrifices and service of our citizens who took an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic, so help them God…even without the constant reminder sitting on top of the entertainment centre! And make no mistake, I am very thankful for the privilege…

After all of the negative campaign advertisements bombarding the TV and carpet-bombing my phone and mailbox, it’s finally our turn to head off to the voting booth and put an end to this campaign, one way or another. Frankly, it can’t come quickly enough for me. I’m so over all of the negativity where the extremists on both ends of the political spectrum can’t be bothered to accept that people who do not agree completely…

Rishi Sunak has climbed to the top of the greasy pole of politics and has been crowned the leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party in London after a rather tumultuous week which saw the various divisions amongst the Tories laid bare for all to see. He managed to see off his final challenger Penny Mordaunt prior to the 1400 BST deadline for candidates to have 100 nominations for appearing on the ballot without a…

"I'm a fighter, not a quitter!"Liz Truss quoting Peter Mandelson during PMQs in the House of Commons, 19 Oct 2022 The question from the Leader of the Opposition Sir Keir Starmer that prompted that defiant response which included her slamming her briefing book onto the despatch box for effect was asking her if she would last in Number 10 until Christmas. I can't imagine he'd have ever reckoned that she barely lasted 24 hours after…

All Life. Every Life. We are all born as molecules in the hearts of a billion stars. Molecules that do not understand politics or policies or differences. Over a billion years, we foolish molecules forget who we are and where we came from. In desperate acts of ego, we give ourselves names, fight over lines on maps, and pretend that our light is better than everyone else's. The flame reminds us of the piece of…

A couple of weeks ago, NASA torpedoed the asteroid Dimorphos with the DART spacecraft with a direct hit. I'm still amazed at how well that went...a spacecraft that flew millions of miles to intercept a double-asteroid system and didn't even see it's target until 20 minutes prior to impact and still nail that rock dead centre blows my mind. The goal of the project was to see if they could alter Dimorphos' orbit round it's…

It's certainly been an eventful past couple of days with Hurricane Ian slamming into southwest Florida and then wreaking havoc all the way through Central Florida and out over the Atlantic Ocean before sweeping back in to Myrtle Beach and then passing just west of us. It is an old joke in Florida that no one takes hurricanes and tropical storms until Jim Cantore of the Weather Channel turned up in your city. That was…

NASA and the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Unit just scored a most extraordinary bulls-eye when they intentionally crashed the Double Asteroid Redirector Test (DART) spacecraft into the roughly 170m rock known as Dimorphos which orbits a larger asteroid named Didymos which is about 780m wide. The point of the test is to see if an impactor can significantly affect the orbit of an asteroid so that we might avoid the fate of the dinosaurs which…

The third response to the carpet bombing of official Washington about the Supreme Court's leaked first draft in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org. case came from a rather surprising place a couple of weeks after the meh response from our senior Senator. When I saw the image of this envelope in the daily briefing from the US Postal Service which shows the letters destined for my postbox, I was genuinely shocked. When I…

The second response to the carpet bombing of official Washington about the Supreme Court's leaked first draft in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org. case came from Senator Richard Burr, our senior Senator from North Carolina decidedly later than the response from our junior Senator. In fairness, he did actually respond for the first time in four official contacts to his office. And he did actually get my gender correct which Senator Tillis' staff…

The first response to the carpet bombing of official Washington about the Supreme Court's leaked first draft in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Org. case came from Senator Thom Tillis, our junior Senator from North Carolina fairly quickly after I had mailed off the letters. Shockingly quickly! It was almost as if his staff anticipated the likely negative reaction to the Court's decision and gender of those people who would contact his office and…

When I saw this post, I couldn't help but be reminded of a gent we had round in my last major project at BCBSNC where we were completely revamping the mailing and fulfillment system used to create and send out the subscriber ID cards, welcome kits, the dreaded rate notices, and essentially anything that was printed. Part of that effort was integrating a software package called "Thunderhead" which would take data from the back-end systems…

Just as my newest friend came round to the Nerdery to install Google Fibre, the BBC was reporting that Her Majesty the Queen has been placed under medical supervision at Balmoral. For the moment, she's reported as being comfortable and resting as the rest of the Royal Family make their way to Aberdeen in Scotland to be at her side. I'm hoping against hope that she'll pull through this medical scare but the reality is…

For the first time in the 15 times that Her Majesty the Queen has invited a member of the House of Commons to form a government in her name, the actual ceremony of accepting the resignation of the incumbent PM and the prospective new PM "kissing hands" was not at Buckingham Palace but rather Balmoral Castle in Aberdeenshire in Scotland. This was due in part to the Queen's comfort reported as "mobility problems" but even…

The Women's Euro 2022 tournament ended with a cracker of a fixture featuring the host nation England taking on Germany at London's Wembley Stadium. The match was finely poised with plenty of attacking play from both sides that would result in both sides in a 1-1 draw at full time necessitating thirty minutes of extra time where Chloe Kelly would stun the Germans in the 110th minute on a corner kick that bounced off Lucy…

Seeing supercars in Raleigh isn't a terribly unusual occurrence. But being done and dusted by two of them in the space of a half hour on either side of a run for groceries at Wegman's certainly is! The first one was out on Old Wake Forest Road where we caught up to a Lamborghini Huracan at the stoplight right before Capital Blvd passes over. We didn't exactly have a lot of time to enjoy the…

"Power is permanence. Impermanence is impotence!"Sir Humphrey Appleby Prime Ministers come and Prime Ministers go but everyone knows that the real power in No 10 Downing Street isn't the PM or the Cabinet but rather the Chief Mouser to the Cabinet Office. The current incumbent in that official appointment in Her Majesty's Government is named Larry and whilst he's had a rather chequered reputation for actually ridding No 10 of mice and other vermin and…

I wish I could say that the advent of Justice Alito's majority opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Org. in a substantially similar form to the first draft that was leaked a few weeks ago was a surprise but considering the current membership of the Supreme Court and their ideological and religious leanings...it really isn't. Anyone who saw Dobbs get granted certiorari to be heard in this session knew that if Dobbs didn't succeed…

Once more we're streaming "LA Flights" on YouTube but this time we're waiting for arguably the most famous plane in the world...the VC-25A (a heavily modified Boeing 747-200) known as Air Force 1 when the President is aboard. I did have a chance to see Air Force 1 live from the Observation Deck at RDU when President Obama came to town and I was rocking two cameras whilst crammed against the railing of the platform…

This afternoon was more than a little bit exciting with a pretty nasty line of storms coming through with the highlight being all of the iPhrenalia screaming about a TORNADO WARNING being issued for this area with the centre of circulation indicated in the area of the Sam's Club on South Saunders Street and heading right this way. A quick look at the radar and a peek at the direction of the clouds outside confirmed…

For the past couple of weeks as the petrol prices have been spiking, I'd been hearing of this trend where some wiseacres were attaching "I Did That!" stickers featuring President Biden to the pumps. Tonight as I was topping up the Traverse's cavernous petrol tanks, I finally saw one in the field! I'll admit, I did laugh a bit when I saw it. Sadly, the people who had the wit to poke fun at President…