I'm Gina Smith

LA 16-year-old arrested for planning to hijack plane and crash it into concert.

The Hannah Montana concert!

Click here.

The Fonz in Bronze -- and long overdue in my opinion.

Well, it took long enough. See excerpt of news story below.

MILWAUKEE (Jan. 25) - Aaaaaaay! The Fonz will be returning to Milwaukee later this year - permanently, and in bronze.

A statue of Arthur "Fonzie" Fonzarelli, the leather-jacketed biker from "Happy Days," will be erected in the city where the TV sitcom was set, now that local groups have raised the $85,000 needed to do it, civic leaders said Friday.

A little Rilke for your Sunday.

I am thinking of Rilke today. I think this is my favorite Rilke poem (translated from the original German). Does anyone out there nominate a better one? Happy Sunday.

My favorite line is: May for once spring clear without my contriving.

Am Much Too Alone in This World, Yet Not Alone
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated by Annemarie S. Kidder

I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone
enough
to truly consecrate the hour.
I am much too small in this world, yet not small
enough
to be to you just object and thing,
dark and smart.
I want my free will and want it accompanying
the path which leads to action;
and want during times that beg questions,
where something is up,
to be among those in the know,
or else be alone.

I want to mirror your image to its fullest perfection,
never be blind or too old
to uphold your weighty wavering reflection.
I want to unfold.
Nowhere I wish to stay crooked, bent;
for there I would be dishonest, untrue.
I want my conscience to be
true before you;
want to describe myself like a picture I observed
for a long time, one close up,
like a new word I learned and embraced,
like the everday jug,
like my mother's face,
like a ship that carried me along
through the deadliest storm.

I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for

may for once spring clear
without my contriving.

If this is arrogant, God, forgive me,
but this is what I need to say.
May what I do flow from me like a river,
no forcing and no holding back,
the way it is with children.

Then in these swelling and ebbing currents,
these deepening tides moving out, returning,
I will sing you as no one ever has,

streaming through widening channels
into the open sea.

David Winer, Marc Canter, Fred Davis, Joan and Wes of Moveon.org, Sylvia Paull, etc ...

About the photo on this page, David Winer took this photo of me at a wonderful party held by tech elitinia Sylvia Paull at her new condo last night.

Winer is a revolutionary in blogging, and if you've never heard of him (which I doubt), check out his blog, Scripting News. It's linked on my Beautiful Blogs page.

Forgive me the goofy hat.

gs

Attention amateur telescope owners!

Mark next Tuesday at 12:33 PST on your calendar for this one. And grab a telescope. I love this stuff.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A small asteroid will travel relatively near to Earth next week, giving astronomers a rare opportunity for a close-up look.

Asteroid 2007 TU24 was first seen in October and is on a trajectory to pass Earth outside the Moon's orbit at a distance of 334,000 miles on Tuesday at 3:33 a.m.

NASA said it will not be visible to the naked eye but amateur astronomers with modest-sized telescopes should be able to spot it.

NASA said the asteroid is anywhere between 500 feet and 2,000 feet long, and there is no chance it could hit the planet.

Astronomers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico will be taking as close a look as they can as the building-sized object hurtles past.

"We don't yet know anything about this asteroid," Mike Nolan, head of radar astronomy at the Puerto Rico observatory, said in a statement.

He said such objects frequently pass near Earth, perhaps one every five years or so, but such advance notice is rare.

TU24 is one of an estimated 7,000 so-called near-Earth objects.

"We have good images of a couple dozen objects like this, and for about one in 10, we see something we've never seen before," said Nolan. "We really haven't sampled the population enough to know what's out there."

When snail mail really is SNAIL MAIL. (Reuters)

From Reuters today, excerpt below!

WARSAW (Reuters) - It's official. Postal delivery is as slow as snails, at least in Poland.

An IT worker, after receiving a letter on January 3 that was sent on December 20 as priority mail, calculated that a snail would have made it even faster to his home than the letter.

Daily Gazeta Wyborcza said Michal Szybalski calculated that it took 294 hours for the letter to arrive at his home. He also said the distance between his home and the sender was 11.1 kilometers.

Given the distance and the time, the speed of the letter was 0.03775 kilometers per hour. Szybalski calculated that a garden snail travels at around 0.048 kilometers per hour.

Says Martin Luther King, Jr. (on the final word in reality)

“I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I heard this Pete Townshend acoustic ukelele piece ...

on KFOG's acoustic Sunday yesterday. The words and song (Blue, Red and Grey) bear mentioning. Gorgeous. Nice to hear Pete at the top of his game, vocally. Lyrics below.

Some people seem so obsessed with the morning
Get up early just to watch the sun rise
Some people like it more when there's fire in the sky
Worship the sun when it's high
Some people go for those sultry evenings
Sipping cocktails in the blue, red and grey
But I like every minute of the day

I like every second, so long as you are on my mind
Every moment has its special charm
It's all right when you're around, rain or shine
I know a crowd who only live after midnight
Their faces always seem so pale
And then there's friends of mine who must have sunlight
They say a suntan never fails
I know a man who works the night shift
He's lucky to get a job and some pay
And I like every minute of the day

I dig every second
I can laugh in the snow and rain
I get a buzz from being cold and wet
The pleasure seems to balance out the pain

And so you see that I'm completely crazy
I even shun the south of France
The people on the hill, they say I'm lazy
But when they sleep, I sing and dance
Some people have to have the sultry evenings
Cocktails in the blue, red and grey
But I like every minute of the day

I like every minute of the day

Says Sir Edmund Hllary (on the real reason for climbing mountains).

"Nobody climbs mountains for scientific reasons. Science is used to raise money for the expeditions, but you really climb for the hell of it." Sir Edmund Hillary.

Sir Edmund Hillary died today at 88.

From AP today. Excerpted below, full story here.

WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) - Sir Edmund Hillary, the unassuming beekeeper who conquered Mount Everest to win renown as one of the 20th century's greatest adventurers, died Friday. He was 88.

The gangling New Zealander devoted much of his life to aiding the mountain people of Nepal and took his fame in stride, preferring to be called Ed and considering himself an "ordinary person with ordinary qualities."

Hillary died at Auckland Hospital about 9 a.m. Friday from a heart attack, said a statement from the Auckland District Health Board. Though ailing in his later years, he remained active.

He is survived by his children Peter and Sarah and wife June, who said Friday that her family was comforted by the messages of support from around the world.

She said Hillary had been hospitalized on Monday and died peacefully.

"He remained in good spirits until the end," she said.

Hillary's life was marked by grand achievements, high adventure, discovery, excitement - but he was especially pround of his decades-long campaign to set up schools and health clinics in Nepal, the homeland of Tenzing Norgay, the mountain guide with whom he stood arm in arm on the 29,035-foot summit of Everest on May 29, 1953.

Yet he was humble to the point that he only admitted being the first man atop Everest long after the death of Tenzing.