Tim > Recent Status Updates

"And then we would know that we have looked back through the ivory gates into that world of wonder which was ours before we were wise and unhappy."

Collins is finally assigned to Apollo 11 - mankind's most daring adventure awaits!

"No misty days, no towering thunderheads; all that is below, and superbright in the unfiltered sunlight, which spreads a cheeriness over the whole scene below. No doom, no gloom, only optimism."

"Was the moon staying forever one step ahead of us, just as described in one of Zeno's famous paradoxes?"

"The F-104 was our toy at ARPS, and we flew it well. We flew it high and fast, and low and slow, and pretended it was a spacecraft and tried to do spacecraft-like things with it." - Collins, in 1962

"Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to 'rod' in the entire language? For days I racked my brains. There was no other rhyme."

"If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?"

"Freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength."

Glauben Sie mir, sagt der syrische Verkäufer, der über die Revolution sein Land verloren hat: Ohne Freiheit kann man Leben, aber nicht ohne Frieden.

"They gave me 'Out of Africa', by Isak Dinesen. I thought it was going to stink, but it didn't."

"To all of them [Bush administration] a book seemed safe, almost discreet. But medieval means of communication, black ink on dead trees, was still history's most authentic vehicle." - Jenkins on the 2004 book 'Plan of Attack' by Bob Woodward.

"In 1853 the explorer Richard Burton became the first Westerner to penetrate the holy shrine of Mecca." - A nice cross reference to a book I read earlier this year: 'Der Weltensammler' by Ilija Trojanow, about Burton's expeditions.

"As so often in history, the 'logic of war' was more potent than its morality. Victory, it was hoped, would ask no questions." [Jenkins on NATO strategies in Kosovo, 1999]

"Die heutige Jugend, meint er, sei keineswegs verroht, sie sei vielmehr, dank der allgemeinen Gesundung, äusserst pflichtbewusst, aufopferungsfreudig, und absolut national."

"That eastern and western races should blend seemed to him admirable; he saw it as a step towards the union of nations." (King Baldwin's chaplain Fulcher of Chartres, Jerusalem 1114 A.D.)

Slow progress on this one, it's simply fascinating history.

"In all the Moslem host outnumbered Raymond's by twenty to one as it converged on him on the plains outside the city" - Tripoli, 1101.

"Caravans from Aleppo and Mesopotamia ignored the wars between Moslem and Christian to pass through its gates on the way to the sea." (Antioch, 1099)

Abyss.

such a heavy book...