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Lunar Immortality: Vote Today!

A PLAN TO LOOP STANLEY Kubrick’s 2001: A space odyssey in the lunar crater Tycho is now ranked 413th on the website http://www.goodideas.org — and Metaphorager.Net readers can help this dream become a reality.

Although the project originally offered as incentive a million-dollar prize, today anonymous reader David S. pointed out that since the prize money doesn’t actually exist, the purpose might be better served by an appeal to like-minded nerds visionaries through GoodIdeas.org, “a web site which gathers, tags, ranks and distributes good ideas.”

Despite that most of the ideas thereon are goody-two-shoes attempts at cheap desalinization, environmental survival and feeding the hungry, we’re hoping the maginificent frivolity of Lunar Immortality comes to the notice of someone who might actually build it. If you are one, or would like to become one, vote today for “Lunar Immortality Now!” at http://www.goodideas.org/a/dtd/37744-6782. (And don’t forget to sign our online petition at http://www.petitiononline.com/2001shot/petition.html!)

Vote Lunar Immortality Now! It’s not every day you get to save a million bucks.

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Yes, It Is Named “R2”

SPACE ROBOTS JUST MAKE it harder for me to complain about the “real” 2010’s futuristic shortcomings: “A new humanoid robot capable of working side by side with people” — Robonaut 2, or R2 for short — is being developed by GM and NASA; the former gets a better way of building cars, while the latter gets a badly-needed PR boost in addition to inching millions of little nerd-boys’ (and -girls’) dreams closer to fruition.

See here: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/technology/features/robonaut.html.

Life

HY”D Janusz Korczak – 1878.1942

Last photo of Janusz Korczak

TEACHING JEWISH KIDS THEIR HERITAGE was, to me, one of life’s greatest joys; I began doing it for pre-B’nei Mitzvah students (read: 11-12 year-olds) in 2000, retiring when I got sick in 2008. It was the high point of any week; I was continually amazed and enlightened by the students’ curiosity and intelligence. I was grateful to witness and aid young minds in opening, and to be able to tell them that the truth of Judaism demands we think for ourselves.

Sometimes that truth requires some very hard choices. The hardest choice of all was made in August 1942 by Polish teacher Janusz Korczak, who chose to follow (technically, to lead and to comfort) nearly 200 of his young charges from the Warsaw ghetto into the Treblinka death camp. Rejecting friends’ offers to rescue him, Korczak chose not to abandon his kids to their killers.

I did not know about Mr. Korczak until yesterday morning, when our rabbi mentioned him in a sermon. As today is Yom Hashoa v’Gevurah 5770, Day of the Holocaust and Heroes, I wanted to tell you about him now. May we all work to make such choices unnecessary, now and in the future, bimheirah v’yameinu — in speed and in our own days.

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
— Hannah Szenes 1921-1944

(More on Janusz Korczak at Jewish Virtual Library and The Janusz Korczak Living Heritage Association.)

Life

One Nice Thing

IF YOU ARE AS SNARKED-OUT as I am, sick and tired of the recreational character assassination which passes for modern culture, please:

1.) Click on the “Comments” link below.
2.) Add either something nice someone did for you, or something nice you did for someone.
3.) Pass along the link: http://metaphorager.net/justbenice/.
4.) Enjoy the difference.

I have no illusions that this will provide some fulcrum point against the world’s ills. On the other hand, you never can tell…

Crit, Life

One Day In 2010, With Feeling

STAN CLARK IS ON FACEBOOK. That means different things to different people, and nothing at all to those who don’t know that he’s Ann’s dad, a World War II veteran and Pearl Harbor survivor who, along with his young sweetheart (and like millions of other members of that Greatest Generation) raised his children in hardwon but modest comfort.

To some, Stan’s presence on Facebook is a great way for him to find old friends and keep up with what the kids are doing; I like to think of him calling into the sewing room so his young sweetheart can keep up too.

Read more →

Writ

Stone Groove Friday

AFTER MUCH CONSIDERATION, I HAVE come to the conclusion that of all God‘s creations or man’s adjustments thereof I should most like to be a rock; not so small as to be skipped by errant boys nor so large as to make the blind stumble, smooth enough to sit on but too rough for graffitti, blended with the landscape yet not so much as to be entirely unknown, not so corporeal as to be uninteresting but solid enough to watch the world slide by for a few thousand millennia. Slow rock thoughts — bird chirps and rainsfall and mountain chains rising like silent supplicants — and under all of it, the constant whirling thrum of Earth’s viscous spin.

Let others become astronauts and firefighters, nurses and movie stars: I shall be a rock, simple and content, my inside like my outside, one with the passing stars and the clinging lichen. (After all, one needs someone to talk to.)

(Inspired by Rabbi Rami Shapiro‘s 4/2/10 Facebook post.)