history

Chris Knight's avatar

Here’s a reminder in case you missed it…

Y’know, 2010 – Peter Hyams’ follow-up to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey – is by now a horribly dated film: the Soviet Union was long gone by the time this movie’s eponymous date rolled around, and we’ve yet to return to the Moon, much less have manned missions to Jupiter…

…but so help me, I positivalutely love this movie all the same. And that scene, where the planet Jupiter is forced by the monoliths to ignite into a new star, is on my very short list of all-time favorite science fiction moments in film. Everything about that scene is orchestrated perfectly together.

Anyhoo, fellow blogger Scott Bradford has compiled a neat list of “past” science-fiction “history”. As in, events that sci-fi foretold but somehow never quite seemed to pass (or did they?). Like, back in 1996 when Khan Noonien Singh ...

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I hadn’t wanted to revisit the issue of the Confederate Soldiers Monument in my hometown of Reidsville this soon. But earlier this morning I was led to consider something, and I think it’s worth sharing and asking others to ponder it also…

I have visited many historic battlefields, and cemeteries, and locations of monuments. Both in my own country and also abroad.

I have seen many memorials honoring soldiers who fought in war.

But I have yet to see a single memorial honoring any war....

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My original plan for this day was to head out around lunch to grab a spot at the back of the chamber and do live blogging of this afternoon’s meeting of Reidsville City Council. Agenda Item #5 was public comments on how to proceed with the Confederate Soldiers Monument, which was greatly damaged in an unfortunate vehicular accident on May 23rd. So I was going to be there and blog/tweet during the session.

In the end however, I chose not to attend, for a number of reasons. There was already going to be quite a large crowd in attendance with limited space available, and since I don’t live in the city limits proper I didn’t think it was going to be fair. Citizen journalist though I am, I’m also a citizen who’s already publicly stated that the monument should be restored. There were a number of associates who had ...

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Seventeen previously unknown pyramids are among more than four THOUSAND newly discovered sites in Egypt that have been located using infrared imaging by researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. One of the locations that is being studied is the real life city of Tanis (AKA the Egyptian city that was consumed by the year-long sandstorm and where Indiana Jones had to foil the Nazi raiders of the lost Ark of the Covenant 🙂

Meanwhile, archaeologists at the Great Pyramid outside of Cairo are using a tiny robotic probe to get the first look at the inside of a newly-found chamber within the mighty ancient wonder. Among the images that haven’t been seen in 4,500 years: red-colored graffiti that might have been left by workers building the pyramid. There is also evidence that the door to a whole new secret room has been discovered.

Maybe someday such technology will ...

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Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides opened yesterday and I am hearing extremely disparate word about it. The descriptors being most bandied about this movie are that it’s “bad” and “rotten”, and only a few saying they were entertained… but even those are pretty lukewarm about it. I’m waiting to hear from one of the coolest cats I know, who’s seen it and he’s supposed to have a review soon. So I may or may not catch it this weekend.

But seeing as how Edward Teach aka Blackbeard the Pirate is a prominent character in this latest chapter of the saga of Captain Jack Sparrow, I thought it’d be fun to reflect on a bit of North Carolina lore about the legendary pirate. Namely: the long-enduring story that Blackbeard’s skull is today being used as a wine goblet for a secret society’s dark rituals! Yes folks, depending ...

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I guess that means we can finally get rid of the Department of Homeland Security and that unforgivable abomination of bureaucracy called the Transportation Security Administration. Right?

Right???

EDIT 11:52 p.m. EST: I will make note of my thankfulness that Bin Laden has finally come to his just desserts, by humbly suggesting that his corpse be given the “Mussolini treatment”, culminating in his remains being eternally desecrated by wrapping them in pig skins.

But still: tonight, the United States has won as decisive a victory as could possibly be had against the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

Some will say that this presents an opportunity to bring our armed forces home.

I disagree.

Tonight, there is an obligation to bring them home.

A few months shy of the tenth anniversary of the attacks, and we can finally say in all truthfulness, “Mission Accomplished”.

If Americans want to feel earnest victory ...

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It was twenty-five years ago today, on the morning of April 26th 1986, that the Chernobyl disaster – the very worst nuclear accident in history – happened.

The Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, located at Pripyat in Ukraine, suffered a severe meltdown in Reactor No. 4 following an attempted experiment. The town of Pripyat was evacuated and thousands of firefighters and other workers died either during the immediate crisis or in the following weeks from radiation poisoning. The reactor ended up entombed within a “sarcophagus” and the entire area rendered a wasteland. It’ll take several thousands of more years yet before human resettlement within what has come to be known as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone will be possible again. The years since have seen some very tragic results, such as birth defects and an increase in cancer rates of those who were most in the path of the radioactive cloud (which ...

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Somewhere tonight, The X-Files creator Chris Carter is certainly licking his chops about this…

President John F. Kennedy wrote two letters to the head of the CIA, asking for highly classified files pertaining to the existence of unidentified flying objects.

And JFK sent the letters on November 12th, 1963: just ten days before he was killed by an assassin(s?) bullet(s?) in Dallas, Texas(?).

One of the letters asks for the UFO files and in the other letter, Kennedy expresses a strong desire to cooperate with the Soviet Union on space activities.

Very interesting. And no doubt going to be the fodder for a whole new industry of conspiracy theories 😛...

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Wow. Lots of history to be commemorated today. Now I’m being reminded that it was thirty years ago today that the first Space Shuttle flight – which was the orbiter Columbia – took off from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

Here’s footage of the launch…

I remember watching that! ‘Twas knee-high to a grasshopper as they say. It was supposed to have lifted off a day or two before, but the launch was scrubbed ‘cuz of technical problems. And I was about to leave for school that morning and really hoping that it would take off without any more delay and then… WHOOOOOSH!!! It was the first manned spaceflight that I ever got to watch live on television.

In case anyone’s wondering why the external tank is white in this clip, the tank was painted on the first three flights of the space shuttle, but after that it was left its ...

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Longtime readers of this blog know that one bit of history that I’m particularly fond of is Russian space exploration. Say what one might about the policies of the Soviet government during those early years, I can’t help but have huge appreciation for the engineers and pilots who took part in that endeavor. It wasn’t politics that drove those men and women: just good ol’ human adventure and tenacity.

So that said, The Knight Shift salutes the memory of Yuri Gagarin, who on this day in 1961 became the first human to journey into space… and not only that but became the first person to complete an orbit of the Earth! His flight aboard Vostok 1 would be his only spaceflight. And unfortunately a few years later Gagarin perished during a training flight in a MiG 15. He was only 34 at the time.

I don’t look at it ...

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