Pyrotex

As the somewhat deranged bounty hunter in the television series, Firefly, said at the very end of one episode as he found himself in his space suit, alone, abandoned millions of kilometers from the nearest planet, station or ship: "Well. Here I am."

Here I am. Sixty-two years old. I swore I would never live this long. I never saw any reason why I would want to. But life happened, you know how that is. Or maybe you don't. You'll understand some day. Or you won't....

Life is full of incidents. Well, that goes without saying. But some of those incidents are rather special, even memorable. And some of those memorable incidents actually occur on holidays. And so it was this past Monday, Memorial Day of 2009.

This coming June will mark the end, for me and my wife Gwen, of the third year in our new home in League City, Texas. By the way, League City was on the 2007 list of the Hundred Best Small Towns in America. No fooling. And our modest little...

If you're a student of History (with a capital H), then you know about "tipping points".

There's an old saying: "The Wheel of History moves very slowly, but it grinds very fine." The allusion is to the stone grinding wheel that was central to ancient flour mills. So, think of a grinding wheel, but think of it as not stuck on a fixed axle, but freely rolling down an inclined plane. The Plane of Human Events.

The Plane of Human Events appears stationery,...

We got a memo around the office this week that a new monitoring program has been installed at NASA, and that "big brother" will be taking a more active interest in our internet sojourns. The new rules forbid not just visiting sites with questionable or offensive content, but ANY site that is not directly work related.

So, my posts will (mostly) come from home now.

Only the trouble is, I don't know what to post anymore. None of the science threads seem to interest...

Second verse, same as the first.

Here we are, evacuated to Huntsville, TX, again. This time we are at my mother-in-law's apartment, fleeing the wrath of Ike. There is a difference, however. Ike makes Gustav look like a summer zephyr with insecurity problems. Ike has teeth, fills damn near the entire Gulf of Mexico, and appears to be headed directly at the Kroger parking lot just across hiway 518 from us.

Gustav was good practice, and this time the whole packing...