Blasting Off....Getting Blasted
"Let private enterprise do it." That pretty much summed up the sentiment when private investors this week blasted a rocket into space and landed it safely in the Mojave Desert in California. The X-Prize Foundation is offering money to the group that pulls off the first privately financed manned space flight. Pilot Mike Melvill appeared among June 21's bursty people, and many of Monday's top-appearing phrases included the White Knight Jet that launched the rocket into space; Scaled Composites, the company that pulled it off; and Burt Rutan, the company's owner. Off we go, indeed.
Government intelligence-related links and phrases keep appearing with regularity, and Monday's second-most cited key phrase makes one wonder about the amount of intelligence (or lack of it?) that goes into background checks for politcal appointees. Seems Thomas B. Griffith, a Bush Administration nominee for a federal appeals court seat, has been practicing without a state law license in Utah for four years -- a habit he apparently developed during a similar three-year no-license stint in Washington D.C.
And dare I go out on a limb and admit that I actually liked playing dodgeball, lo, those many years ago in elementary school? Dodgeball the movie, which ranked first at the box office in its opening weekend, kept actor and Dodgeball star Ben Stiller alive among this week's key people in the blogosphere.
Posted by Sue MacDonald at June 23, 2004 03:39 PM
