From Wisconsin, land of the cheddar-heads!  The plentiful home of beers and sausages!

Apparently my new troll DayPop’d me when searching for “Kurds captured Saddam”…he didn’t like my post questioning the American press in regards to the divergent storylines about Saddam’s capture.

(BTW, my link to the story is bad in my original post; it points not to the story as it appeared in Yahoo! International Edition.)

Here’s an example, not unlike that original Yahoo! story on the same topic:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/s1014319.htm

Why is it that a MAINSTREAM American news outlet like ABC will run this story outside the U.S. but NOT inside the U.S.?

Just as Yahoo! ran a similar story in its International Edition, but not in its U.S. edition.

So?  What is the truth?  Take a gander through these Google’d news links and tell me what you think.  Is the MAINSTREAM American press to be relied upon entirely, exclusively?

Color me skeptical.  One troll from Dairyland who doesn’t provide a legitimate case isn’t enough to persuade me.  I'm blowing it off to an excess of cholesterol occluding brain function; maybe a little less cheese and sausage is in order?

2:31:39 PM    comment []

No, it wasn’t a military objective achieved.

Nope, not a terrorist threat averted.

It was the complete and utter thrill of space exploration.

NASA not only said that they’d land a rover on Mars about 11:35 pm EST last night – they actually did it, within seconds of the projected landing time, receiving fantastic photographs after landing.

If you didn’t catch it, you missed the kind of excitement I remember as a kid.

Do you remember when space exploration didn’t produce a yawn as it has over the last couple of decades?  (Did you know they launched a shuttle a couple of weeks ago? No, I didn’t hear a thing about it…)  Or worse, exemplified by the loss of the space shuttle Columbia last year or previous probes lost to Mars.  Space exploration used to mean dropping everything to watch with bated breath and pounding hearts as the countdown ticked off the seconds, as highly trained professionals calmly narrated history making events unfolding before us.  I remember watching with my entire school gathered for assemblies as rockets launched, hundreds of children frozen into one huddled mass as we counted down together.  I remember my mother gathering me and my siblings in front of the television, grainy black-and-white, watching the flames of the engines on blast-off.

One night in particular, after my father roused me from sleep, I stood in front of the same fuzzy black-and-white picture to hear Neil Armstrong talking from the moon.  It was surreal, dreamy, and ethereal to an eight-year-old; I’ll bet it was a bit like that in Houston and on the moon at that same moment.

Last night was that perfect bit of building suspense and sustained joy, listening to mission control as each of the final pre-landing objectives were met, watching all the staff at NASA twitching nervously as they waited for success or failure.  I felt that same sensation, my breath held, my heart pounding, waiting for that moment when success was realized or dashed.  It was as surreal again, in part because of the very process of watching this achievement.  I could not find this on any station; the news channels didn’t cover it until moments before the craft landed.  I watched, instead, on my PC, tapped into NASA-TV; as the landing approached, I watched on CNN and my PC simultaneously, completely enmeshed into mission control.

I held that landing in my very lap, watching as a craft arrived millions of miles away.

Mission accomplished.  I’m completely blown away.

12:54:33 PM    comment []