Mondays, apparently, have become my least interesting day. You’re naturally riveted six days ago. OK, maybe five. (Four? Two? Any?) That being the case, we can all forgive a Monday that is spent buried in a computer screen or a book. So I’m just falling back on Twitter, here, which is something I haven’t in a long while.
And since it is Monday, and since Monday is history day around here, the On This Day section rides again!
In 1990 McDonald’s opened their first restaurant in Moscow. That means most of the college students have been able to eat a Big Mac in Russia their entire life, had they visited Pushkin Square. Here’s the scene. They serve an estimated 30,000 people a day.
In 1971 Apollo 14 launched.
They were the third mission on the moon. They almost had to try the landing without radar because of a software glitch, but an in the nick of time fix put them down closer to their original target than any of their fellow astronauts.
This was also the trip with the famous moon trees. Five of them are planted in Alabama. I’ve been near four and didn’t even realize it. Need to fix that.
Fifty-three years ago Explorer 1, the first satellite from the United States made orbit. Sure, Sputnik got there first by three months, but the value was largely propaganda. Otherwise the thing was not quite useless. It helped with some atmosphere detection and then tumbled out of the sky in three months. Explorer, on the other hand, transmitted data for almost four months and stayed in orbit for 12 years. It achieved more than 58,000 orbits, says Wikipedia, and began a series of 90 Explorer satellites.
Sputnik moment? Let’s try another Explorer moment.
And way back when, in 1930, 3M starting marketing scotch tape. Did you know? The Scotch Tape Test measures the adhesion strength of conducting polymers adhered to indium tin oxide glass slides? Neither did anyone else. Also, it can make X-rays.
Other links: Sometimes I like to find the outrage of the day and consider it’s relative merits to the big scheme of things. When you do that, you realize modern life could be a lot worse.
Dan Cathy Statement from Chick-fil-A on Vimeo.
Who else wants waffle fries?
This is a bad idea.
Pay walls! More pay walls! Also, and still, a bad idea. The problem for the industry being that there aren’t a lot of other prominent and viable ideas at the moment.
Finally I watched American Pickers tonight. (They aren’t letting you embed the episode for some strange reason.) Love that show. Love the premise, love the show, love the thing the guys do. Everything about it is fun. \
They subtitled a Kentucky man, suggesting he was unintelligible. I found this to be unnecessary. But, before I became my own outrage of the day, I called my Connecticut bride into the room and played clips of the man for her. “Don’t look, just listen.” She couldn’t make him out. So what do I know?
