Category Archives: Blog & Guest Posts

You win some…

      13 Comments on You win some…

…you lose some. Ah, well, they were both great games — reminders of why I love college football so much — and my team won the more important one. With Ohio State out of the way, USC “just” needs to go undefeated in the Pac-10 and beat Notre Dame, and they’ll be back in the national title game. It’s no… Read more »

Beat the Buckeyes!

      Comments Off on Beat the Buckeyes!

Last Saturday, we noticed that a house in our neighborhood, a couple of blocks away, had some rather conspicuous Ohio State gear in its front yard: So we resolved that, this Saturday, we’d introduce ourselves to our local neighborhood Buckeyes with a bit of friendly trash-talking. Thus, this morning, we walked over to their house with a sign in tow,… Read more »

Down with the Buckeyes & Skunkbears!

      2 Comments on Down with the Buckeyes & Skunkbears!

Here is SI.com’s always helpful TV schedule for tomorrow’s college football action. Games of particular interest to me, with times converted to Mountain Daylight Time: • North Carolina at UConn, 10am, ESPNU (so, not really televised) • Pittsburgh at Buffalo, 10am, no TV • Notre Dame at Michigan, 1:30pm, ABC • BYU at Tulane, 1:30pm, ESPN2 • UCLA at Tennessee,… Read more »

Should We Have Made Catching Bin Laden the Goal?

      1 Comment on Should We Have Made Catching Bin Laden the Goal?

One of the goals of the so called War on Terror from the very beginning was to catch Osama Bin Laden, the terrorist who did this to us. The Bush Administration made bringing Bin Laden to justice a primary goal of the Afghanistan war. I’ve always thought this was a mistake. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Bin Laden… Read more »

I remember

      7 Comments on I remember

I remember waking up at 6:50 AM Pacific Time, eight years ago today, to the sound of Becky’s voice talking frantically into my answering machine (my phone’s ringer had been turned off), saying something about how we were under attack by terrorists. I didn’t catch all the details because I was too groggy, having gone to bed around 3:00 AM… Read more »

More ISS flyover photos

      1 Comment on More ISS flyover photos

Space Shuttle Discovery’s scheduled landing was scrubbed Thursday afternoon, so in the evening, I was able to see the Shuttle and the International Space Station together in the sky for the third consecutive night. Well, sort of. This time, they were far enough apart that I didn’t actually see them both simultaneously (the Shuttle had “set” behind a nearby house… Read more »

Our collective failure

      26 Comments on Our collective failure

In the course of a FiveThirtyEight blog post on last night’s ObamaCare speech, Tom Schaller reminds us more broadly that the policies which have left our nation in a deep fiscal hole — exacerbating (and complicating the solutions to) other crises, like health care and infrastructure and the Great Recession of 2008-09, while also growing rapidly into a crisis unto… Read more »

STS-128 on Wednesday night from MA

      1 Comment on STS-128 on Wednesday night from MA

Here’s my photo of station and shuttle from Massachusetts on Wednesday evening: It was really nice seeing Brendan’s video from the shuttle overflight on Tuesday evening. I watched the pair fly over Boston two orbits earlier, and his video definitely captured the sense of what it was like to see them go past that evening. The weather forecast for landing… Read more »