In my post about Lester Del Rey’s 1956 sci-fi thriller Mission to the Moon, I criticized Del Rey’s cis-lunar flight orbital mechanics. Del Rey had his moon missions leaving from a polar orbit around the earth. This struck me as very odd - all real lunar and interplanetary missions have left from a more-or-less equatorial orbit, or maybe even fly directly into an interplanetary orbit. I thought Del Rey had completely misunderstood orbital mechanics, or had mis-read von Braun.

I was wrong.

Have you ever tried to reproduce some text that contains a typo? That is, you try to type in some text that contains mistakes, for purposes of mocking whoever produced the original, mistake-laden rubbish?

You know how hard that is?

I read George Orwell’s 1984 sometime during “Junior High”, which in the 1970s was what we now call “middle school”. My district, Adair County R-III, had grades 7, 8 and 9 in their own building.

The school library had a copy of 1984. I was busy reading a lot my 7th and 8th grade years, so I read it.

Two more real fortunes, both from the same strip mall Thai and Chinese joint as my previous fortunes.

I wrote some about my rock climbing in a post about 1983.

I also did some ice climbing, between about 1984 and January, 1990.

Summer 2021 I bought a Stirling Cycle engine kit. This is a type of heat engine, and in the case of the kit I assembled, the heat came from a small alcohol lamp.

I went to the local drive-thru strip mall liquor store to buy some Everclear.

9 board tic tac toe is a tic tac toe variant played on 9, 3x3 tic tac toe boards, arranged in a 3x3 pattern:

A fine, intelligent fellow named Stephen Lindholm has written the

Smurf Research Center

You should visit it, it’s wonderful.

This is an excellent work of profound clarity.

A guest post from long-time reader and friend of this blog Henry. Henry finds Heinlein’s “moral philsosophy” might be a product of Heinlein’s own education and life experience.

Previous “moral philosophy” post.

Henry writes: