After 34 years in space, Voyager probes launched in the late 1970s will soon “punch through the curtain” and cross the solar system boundary. Voyager 2 is only about, oh, 9 billion miles away.
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Hey, it’s great to know that while everything else is going to hell in a handbag, we’re still making progress!
Amazing stuff.
Two capsules of a far more optimistic time.
Blind Willie Johnson, born in 1897 near Brenham, Texas, told his father at the age of 5 that he wanted to be a preacher and then made himself a cigar box guitar. His mother died when he was young and his father remarried soon after her death.
Johnson wasn’t born blind, and, although it’s not known how he lost his sight, Angeline Johnson told Samuel Charters that when Willie was seven his father beat his stepmother after catching her going out with another man. The stepmother then picked up a handful of lye, a type of bleach, and threw it, not at Willie’s father, but into the face of young Willie.
Johnson remained poor until the end of his life, preaching and singing in the streets of several Texas cities including Beaumont, Texas. His home burned to the ground. With nowhere else to go, Johnson lived in the burned ruins of his home, sleeping on a wet bed in the August/September Texas heat. He lived like this until he contracted malarial fever and died on September 18, 1945. In a later interview, his wife, Angeline said she tried to take him to a hospital but they refused to admit him because he was blind, while other sources report that his refusal was due to being black.
“Dark was the Night” is included on the gold album “Music from Earth”.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNj2BXW852g&feature=fvwrel
Wow, 34 years …. and still no cabin service …… but at least their batteries will outlast mine.