Tag Archives: moon

All these years later

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There is a documentary on the acting career of Tom Hanks that I recently watched. He really has an impressive portfolio of movies covering a range of characters. As a result I have been re-watching some of his movies that I particularly enjoyed. Just last week I watched “Apollo 13,” the movie versions of events that unfolded on the seventh crewed-Apollo mission during the spring of 1970. While the launch was successful, the lunar landing was aborted after an oxygen tank in the service module failed two days into the mission. The crew instead looped around the Moon in a circumlunar trajectory and returned safely to Earth on April 17 – while the nation held its breath. Continue reading →

Dark Side of the Moon

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In the beginning, there was just tohu wa’bohu –  “In the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth (lit. skies and the land) and the earth was without form or shape ( tohu wa’bohu; wilderness and wasteland | nothingness, no purpose or order) with darkness over the abyss (deep, symbolic for chaos) and a mighty wind (ruah, wind, Spirit, breath, presence) sweeping over the waters.” A lot going on there.  But “Then God said: Let there be light, and there was light.”  Simple, clean. Continue reading →

Keeping Time

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Back in the day – which in this case means last century – while serving aboard nuclear submarines, I first encountered life in two different chronological constructs. While the world continued to operate on a 24-hours cycle, life aboard the submarine was constructed around an 18-hour day based on standing “watch” on the rotation of three shifts of 6 hours each. “What time is it?” was no longer a question of UTC London, Washington DC, Honolulu,or the timezone we happened to be operating in, it was “how much time” was left in the current watch cycle or until you had to report for the next. Continue reading →