August means cooler evenings, a noticeable shortening of the daylight hours as we reach the midpoint between the Summer Solstice and Fall Equinox, and (hopefully) clear skies to provide some prime sky watching conditions. It is also the time of year when people eagerly anticipate the annual Perseid meteor shower. The peak of this […]
“‘That’s some tale, old timer.’ Yeah, and it gets better everytime I tell it.” Where this conversation came from doesn’t pop to mind immediately, but I know that it has served me well for several decades. Not the part about ‘getting better every time I tell it’, mind you. I use it to remind myself […]
When their first record came out on January 29, 1968, the eponymously titled Steppenwolf album turned heads mostly because Born to be Wild became such a massive hit. The album as a whole was one of the greatest ‘first albums’ released in a period when bands were kicking out music that would become the […]
We left The King – Part 1 just as the Russian and American space programs were preparing to attempt the first manned space flights. In his 2021 book, BEYOND – The Astonishing Story of the First Human to Leave Our Planet and Journey into Space (Harper-Collins), author Stephen Walker goes deep into the inner […]
No, not Elvis. Not LeBron James. Sergei Pavlovich Korolev. If the name does not ring any bells, that is okay because any references to him were scrubbed from the records in his native Russia so thoroughly after 1957 that even the CIA could not identify him. Nobody working for him in the Soviet space […]