Monday, October 04, 2004

What a world we live in...

...and it is fantastic beyond description.

47 years ago today the Soviet Union punted a basketball-sized radio transponder into orbit. Early this morning a private company based in Mojave, California launched their third suborbital space mission, thus earning the ten million dollar purse of the X-Prize.

I watched the coverage (including feeds from Spaceship One; nothing more beautiful than the round rim of the white and blue earth against a bottomless black universe) on a live webstream. During breaks in the actions I toodled over to Michael J. Totten's blog to see what was happening there. I remain unconvinced that there existed a straight-to-the-coffers-of-the-evil-republican-apparatus money chute; if such had been the case my Google searches would have come up with more than just links to the history of public campaign funding schemes. Boredom set in so I watched Mount St. Helens do her thing for an hour or two; shuttled back and forth between the KIRO coverage, to include another live feed of a steam explosion. I followed the almost real-time siesmo reports at The Pacific Northwest Seismograph Network's site.

Jaded with reality I perused a few lefty blogs; bad, bad news for Kerry. They still don't understand that their own press releases and talking points aren't the world other people live in. Global Test is going to be right up there with Ford's Poland remark and Jimmy Carter's Rabbit Experience. Get past the happy smiling faces of Newsweak's and Gallup's efforts and the state poll standings remain about where they were last week - especially if you ditch Zogby. I highly recommend Dale's site for the detail political junkie. He has made the cut in the WaPo's Best Blogs (political/elections) nomination competition. He's going on the purser's list soon.

Work in the basement is getting easier as the actions become routine. Measure twice, cut once. That's a rule to live by, it is.

1 comment:

TmjUtah said...

Matt -

Lots and lots of rumblings about Bush polling twelve percent of the black vote. That's an amazing statistic, if accurate.

Ohio is out of play. I don't buy the New Jersey polls but that's just because they are too volatile. I think that Florida is safe.

Edwards gets to go up against Cheney tonight. I don't think he'll score any points by channeling dead babies. I also think he'll try to use the word "kill" somewhere during the debate, and the oxymoronic impact will be appreciable.

He'll be in front of a nation in wartime - not a cherry-picked jury full of Oprah fans.

Neither Kerry nor Edwards have any props for running an executive organization. None. And you can bet that "Global Test" and all the other liberal flashback eruptions from last Thursday are going to pop up front and center.