Did you know that there have been 104 children born to fathers killed on 9/11/01. (Source: Meet the Press 9/29/02) These children were robbed of the opportunity of ever meeting their fathers.
Makes you think, doesn’t it?
If you have children, spend time with them, you never know if it will be the last time that you can tell them “I love you.”
I love the fact that blogs have proliferated on the internet. It is an excellent way for people to air their views on any topic that is of interest. The biggest problem with blogs, though, is that they are one sided. There is little discourse on the site that a blog is hosted. Look at my blog, I can say whatever I want, but currently, the only way someone can disagree with me is to either, send me an email and hope that I post it, or post a counter argument on their own blog, assuming they have one and then notify the world that they disagree with me. That still doesn’t mean that I will ever know of their disagreement or have the opportunity to respond, if I desire. (As my blog matures and I become more adept with the blogging software that I am using I will be adding the ability to comment on my posts.) I feel that every blog of substance should enable the reader to comment on each post. I, hopefully, will soon add the ability for people to comment on my own posts. My blog is currently ‘immature’ at the moment, because it is new, but there are many blogs out there that I read on a regular basis that I would like to leave my own comments on, but they don’t afford me the opportunity to do so.
I recently flew through Chicago’s O’Hare airport. I was surprised when I overheard a fellow traveler ask an airport security guard where he could smoke and guard said that he would need leave the building and go outside to smoke. As a non-smoker, I normally would have said “Sucks for him!”, but we no longer live in normal times. As I thought about this more I realized that this was a really bad policy, even for non-smokers!
The Kansas City Royals’ Coach Tom Gamboa was attacked by a father/son duo during last night’s game with the Chicago White Sox. This is just a truly sad thing! To think that a person would attack a coach at a professional baseball game! I’m not a huge fan of MLB or the players, but really, I’m not that discontent about baseball. I just hope that these people go to jail for a long, long time!
The New York Times has an article called Nu Shortcuts in School R 2 Much 4 Teachers. The article details how instant messaging programs have not only become pervasive in our daily lives in the internet age, but are entering the lexicon of high school student’s term papers.
For instance:
Deborah Bova, who teaches eighth-grade English at Raymond Park Middle School in Indianapolis, thought her eyesight was failing several years ago when she saw the sentence “B4 we perform, ppl have 2 practice” on a student assignment.
“I thought, `My God, what is this?’ ” Ms. Bova said. “Have they lost their minds?”
The BBC has an article about the South African version of Sesame Street has recently introduced an HIV positive puppet. South Africa has one of the highest rates of HIV in the world. According to the article, either 1 in 9 or 1 in 5 South Africans has HIV (the author used both statistics, so I’m not sure which is correct) and there is a great need to introduce tolerance within society. From the article: “The idea is to teach children that people can live normal lives with HIV.”
Space.com has an article about a piece of space just that is expected to hit the moon next year. The space just is believed to be a “Saturn IVB upper stage from the Apollo 12 mission that flew in November 1969.” Scientists want to use seismometers that were placed on the moon during the Apollo mission to conduct experiments on the Moon’s makeup. The only problem is that the seismometers were turned off in 1977, so they need to figure out if it is even possible to turn them back on after 25 years.
Today is September 11, 2002, America’s Second Day of Infamy. I truly hope everyone had a healthy and peaceful day. My heart and thoughts go out to those who lost loved ones. I spent the day thinking about my wife, this is a day where you don’t want to be away from your family, it is especially difficult when you a required to be 500 miles apart in graduate school.
I feel the outpouring of emotions by people worldwide is a wonderful thing. In some instances last year’s events showed us that humanity is still alive, but it also showed us that there are people out there who only care about their own points of view, humanity be damned!
