NASA attached a video camera to a Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) on a 2008 Space Shuttle launch. At the beginning of the video, we’re looking at part of the Shuttle’s external fuel tank and the underside of the Shuttle’s nose. We get a wider view when the boosters separate about two minutes into the flight. The video continues until the booster splashes down.

To me, the most astonishing thing about this video is the audio track, which grows quieter as the air grows thinner, and then louder again as the booster falls into denser air.

Spaceflight isn’t magic. Spaceships are physical things, built by humans. That becomes really apparent when you hear the creaking and clanking of the booster as it settles into the water.

He said (paraphrasing), “When you want to go forward, you put it in D; when you want to go back, you put it in R.”

Gee, do you think he reads this blog?

I agree with the little guy in the corner: try to snap out of it!

Republicans ran the country into the ditch, and did nothing to help get it back out.

Finally, we get this car out of the ditch … we’re about to start driving forward again, they say, “Hold on! We want the keys back!”

You can’t have the keys back! You don’t know how to drive!

And I do want to point out: When you get in your car, when you go forward, what do you do? You put it in “D”. When you want to go back, what do you do? You put it in “R”.

You don’t want to go into reverse, back in the ditch. We want to go forward. We gotta put it in “D”.

(Click on the image to see the entire cartoon.)

The second time a nuclear weapon was used in anger was three days later, over Nagasaki, Japan. That was a plutonium bomb of a type tested just once, less than a month before, in the New Mexico desert. That design worked, too.

The third time a nuclear weapon was used in anger hasn’t happened yet, 65 years later.

I’m not sure what that tells us, but I sure hope it means something.

Look for a booming industry here in the United States soon, catering to the upscale death market.

I’ve been thinking about things I’ve known about for a long time, and letting myself be astonished all over again. Things that would make a sophisticate roll his eyes and say, “Well, duh!”

Things like this:

Ludwig van Beethoven started losing his hearing early in his career as a composer. His deafness grew progressively worse over time. Yet Beethoven wrote some of his greatest works — some of the greatest music ever written by anyone — when he was already profoundly deaf.

Or this:

During the entire time he served as President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt was totally paralyzed from the waist down. From a wheelchair, he led the country out of the Great Depression and through World War II. He died less than a month before the surrender of Germany, and about four months before the surrender of Japan.

Human beings are pretty remarkable people. There’s always more to them than meets the eye. Sometimes, a lot more.

Let me see if I have this straight: in the last few days members of the GOP have savagely screwed the unemployed, protected the bankstas, trashed Thurgood Marshall, implied rape and incest is part of God’s plan, defended BP, threatened to either end social security or screw over 20 million plus people who have paid into the system for at least 20 years by making them wait until age 70 to see their benefits, and screwed homeless veterans with children. That about it, or is there more?

There’s always more.

And yet the cable TV talking heads think Democrats are going to have an uphill fight against the GOP in November.

Learn from the past, set vivid, detailed goals for the future, and live in the only moment of time over which you have any control: now. —Denis Waitley

So, I guess you’re saying my strategy of regretting the past, dreading the future, and being paralyzed in the present isn’t the best option? If only you had told me this in the past!

In other cartoons, he examines the Republican sympathy for Bluto and asks, “Do you still want a government that’s run like a business?“