the frig blig

I expect I’m joining a cast of thousands of fellow baby-boomer bloggers all over this land (the boomersphere) in posting assorted personal recollections of this day 40 years ago.

I was 15 years old when I watched the Apollo 11 broadcasts with my family on our black and white TV. Since he died last week, Walter Cronkite isn’t present to add his recollections of the event — and just as well, since my memory of his comments might not jive with his (as if).

I distinctly recall, immediately after Neil Armstrong touched the lunar surface and said “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” Walter screwed up his face and announced “What did Armstrong just say? One small schlep for a man, one flying leap for the moon?”

He kept this up for at least 20 minutes — “…or was it, ‘one small flip for a man, one mindful bleep for moon pie?…’” etc. It almost drove me bonkers since the words were perfectly clear to me.

And then the following year Jethro Tull’s album Benefit contained the cut ‘For Michael Collins, Jeffrey And Me’, a bitter-sweet ballad featuring one of the crew. As a space nut in the process of becoming a rock-and-roll nut, it was almost too much to bear.

Who knew that after the Apollo program ended, there would be no further manned space flights to the moon (or places further) in my lifetime? It seemed all about to begin.

S, D & I saw two good local bands at the Tractor last night. Red Jacket Mine (above) was the warmup act, and they were every bit as talented (with a darker sound) as the headliners The Minus 5 (below) who were playing a “new CD release” gig for recording ‘Killingsworth’ published by Yep Roc Records.

Retired AT&T techie Mark Klein reported details of a room in San Francisco used for warrantless monitoring of AT&T’s network in that city — and the story was killed by the Los Angeles Times (after reporting the details to the feds) and ignored by Congress. He describes this briefly in a Computerworld interview and in more detail in a self-published book Wiring Up the Big Brother Machine…And Fighting It.

Snippet from the interview:

IDGNS: What do you think you’ve accomplished by coming forward with these documents?

Klein: My main accomplishment is to let everybody know about what exactly the government is doing to people. How the government in detail is screwing over people’s privacy and trampling over the Constitution and the Fourth Amendment, and lay out in great detail how everybody’s personal lives are being delved into by the government and stored in secret databases for future reference.

And I personally wonder if Facebook is cooperating with the NSA…and if so, how much does it slow them down (the spooks, not the geeks)?

… is a potential future one might imagine based on research reported in this Green Car Reports article. It’s so preliminary that it’s irresponsible to speculate at this point. But I’m powerless to resist such a compelling idea and image.

Curious and concerned after reading Kristof’s NY Times op-ed about the apparent link between widespread frog deformities and endocrine disruptors, I decided to learn more about the subject. I quickly discovered TEDX, a nonprofit organization with an educational website on the subject.

From the TEDX site: Endocrine disruptors are chemicals that interfere with the communication system of glands, hormones, and cellular receptors that control the body’s internal functions. A relatively unique feature of endocrine disruptors is that they exert their effects at extremely low doses, even when higher doses exhibit no adverse effects. Disorders that have increased in prevalence in recent years such as unusual male gonadal development, infertility, ADHD, autism, intellectual impairment, diabetes, thyroid disorders, and childhood and/or adult cancers are now being linked to prenatal exposure to endocrine disruptors.

My next step is to compile a list of common chemicals classified as endocrine disruptors, and determine their presence in Seattle’s public drinking water. Stay tuned.

Also from the TEDX site: The National Pesticide Information Center at Oregon State University has a phone number for pesticide related questions from the general public: 1-800-858-7378.

Geov Parrish reports in the June 25 issue of Eat The State that former KIRO-TV news anchor and current King County Executive candidate Susan Hutchison is not only a creationist — but she served on the Board of Directors of local “think tank” Discovery Institute. And he also reports that this information was removed from her website once she announced her candidacy.

Pass it on. This fact deserves widespread knowledge, fast.