An unmanned spacecraft named Messenger passed within a few thousand miles of Mercury earlier this week, taking photos and measurements of unprecedented quality of which nobody took the time to notice.
The distain showed towards space exploration this week took some of the sting out of Timothy and I being pre-emptively ejected from Tuesday’s Macworld keynote address by Apple CEO, Steve Jobs.
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There’s bacon. Also, reggae artist Mr. Majestic joins Kristen and Timothy this evening to talk music and share some songs with our listeners.
The News Staff grows up, or at least thinks about it, bringing discussion of the REAL ID Act and other privacy issues. Read the full news here
We’re perched up here this evening amid the City on the Hill overlooking Santa Cruz, surrounded by thousands of students living away from home slowing waking up to the realization that they aren’t really kids anymore.
Now it’s been a while since I was a student, but I had one of those moments myself recently and it made me think about what it really means to be an adult.
We have a warming selection of Timothy Jordan Show highlights from ‘07 for our listeners on this cold, stormy night in Santa Cruz.
Grand promises are made on the News segment, and a celebration of a rover’s birthday. Read the full news here
I hope that you’re enjoying the miracle of alternating current delivered to your home if you’re one of our listeners in Northern California lucky enough to have electrical power on this first Friday of ‘08.
That’s right, ‘08. It’s been eight years. Yeah, eight years. We can drop the two-thousand. Anybody still unaware that we crossed into two-thousand B.C.E. four-fifths of a decade ago is an Alzheimer’s patient, or living in a cave.
So there will be no more use of the prefix two-thousand when describing the date on this program. That’s a promise.
It’s also not the last promise that our listeners will be hearing in the coming months. This is a presidential campaign year, when empty promises flow like water into the candidates’ mud-slinging pits.
In that spirit, we’d like to make a few promises of our own for the Timothy Jordan Show. Last year, excited about a bold redesign of the Timothy Jordan Show website, I promised our listening audience that the Staff here would be much more active online. I said that there would be even more content, with News updates posted all through the week.
Well that didn’t happen, and I can’t really blame Portuguese computer hackers this time. We just didn’t try hard enough.
So this year we’ll be posting new content three times a week.
Not enough? Okay, five times a week. Every day? No, twice per day! Hourly! Timothy will Twitter post his entire day, writing a minute-by-minute account of his life including charts of heartbeat and colo-rectal gas levels.
I myself have noticed a tendency in the media towards less coverage of hard news topics. In order to increase our market penetration, we’ll be refocusing the previous international security and privacy rights coverage of the Timothy Jordan Show News to non-stop celebrity gossip.
But that’s not everything. We’ve been working on some big plans. I’m happy to announce some coming changes in the program. Starting later this year the Timothy Jordan Show will not only increases the gas mileage of your car when it’s played on the radio, but it will also make bald spots disappear, and melt away those unsightly love handles. Simply tuning in can improve your sex life, and encourage your children to clean their rooms without being asked.
Sound great? That’s not all. We know that our listening audience is made up of busy people with a lot of time on their hands, and we’d like to give something back as a way of saying thank you for spending an hour or so with us each and every week. Starting February 30th, listeners who are savvy enough to decode the secret message hidden in each show will be eligible to win a hands-off sensual car wash by the Timothy Jordan Show crew, with all winners to be drawn from a soup-filled hat on the fifth Sunday of each month.
And it gets even better. Coming later in the year we’ll be increasing the awesome fun density of the show by 28%. I can’t reveal how we’ll actually be doing this, but I can say that it’ll be same hour of radio, only with 28% more awesomeness.
And of course we can promise our listeners that, as far as this campaign season goes, this will be a politics-free zone. There isn’t much point really, since we already called the ‘08 presidential election in favor of Barack Obama in February of last year.
This is the Timothy Jordan Show News for January 4th, ‘08, bringing our listeners the news of tomorrow, today, since sometime before yesterday.
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Some weather-related issues, like fallen trees in the storm cutting off main power to the Fortified Mountain Compound, have resulted in a smaller-than-normal News segment. We apologize to regular listeners. Unlike the previously unrealistic promises offered, we won’t have any problem offering a complete News segment next week.
And as promised we won’t be talking about the campaign, but we can talk about issues important to the candidates. The issue of issues, the 800lb guerilla with heat-seeking controversy lasers, is the ongoing war of opportunity in Iraq and other countries only loosely associated with the political tactic known as terrorism.
It’s an odd thing, this war. The President and everyone else call it a war, but despite the expected trillions of dollars that it’s going to cost, the Global War on Terror hasn’t had much of an impact on everyday life.
This is a war unlike previous wars in which our country has been involved because there has been no mobilization for war. The only people in this country mobilized for war are the soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines who volunteered for service. They and their families are the only ones bearing the direct cost of our President’s decision to use the blunt tool of military force to confront the martyrdom tactics of radical islamist ideology.
President Bush and the Republican candidates have been strident in their declarations that this is a war against a dangerous and powerful enemy. It’s time to call them out.
If it’s really a war, let’s go to war. Let’s see a million soldiers mobilized in the next year. Let’s go to war. Let’s go to war like we did sixty-five years ago to kick the Germans out of Paris. All out, full mobilization.
If this is a war, let’s go to war and win it.
There’s a reason that we haven’t gone to war. Two really, and the second follows from the first.
The first is that there really isn’t all that much to do. The second is that really mobilizing for war would draw attention to how little there really is to do.
We could call a draft and bring a million young men and women into the military service, but what would they do? The occupation of Iraq has pretty much proven that blowing crap up isn’t a solution to the economic stagnation and repressive political and religious authority that’s omnipresent in the Middle East.
Strutting about and talking tough about defense is a great way to get elected in this country, but it isn’t going to do anything for our worsening divide with the Muslim world. The candidates like to talk about how they’d be tough on terror.
When are they going to start talking about being tough on ignorance, on illiteracy, or on corruption and economic inequality? Instead of tanks, how about we buy some teachers?
The Global War on Terror is a sham and a waste of our time. Unfortunately none of the candidates have called for a Global War on Scientific Illiteracy.
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But at least our friends across the pond are giving up on the War on Terror. That’s the word of Sir Ken Macdonald, the Director of Public Prosecutions for the British government.
In an interview on BBC Radio, later quoted in the Daily Mail, Sir Macdonald said that the phrase, “war on terror” will no longer be used by any branch of the British government to describe attacks in the country. During the interview he described the perpetrators of suicide attacks as, “murders and criminals,” that needed to be treated as such.
It’s about time. Maybe our next President will take a cue from our allies and stop giving these nutjobs more credit than they deserve.
• Daily Mail, Britain Drops “War on Terror” Label, via military.com
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It’s cold and dark out there in Santa Cruz this evening, but was a four-year old celebrating a birthday last night alone in an even colder place.
Yesterday marked the beginning of a fourth year for Spirit, one of two Mars rovers that have been breaking new ground in planetary science since ‘04. Only guaranteed to last for 90 days, Spirit, and its younger twin, Opportunity, have racked up more that 1,400 days each.
They were originally expected to cover only a few hundred yards of Martian surface. They’ve each driven miles. They’ve also taught us far more than expected about the history of our red neighbor.
Only guessed at four years ago, the presence of water in the history of Mars is now a certainty. And not just a trickle of a stream here or there, oceans of water. Much of that water, it’s suspected, remains locked in the planet’s polar ice caps, or frozen into permafrost and buried under millions of years of accumulated dust.
• Spirit marks the start of a fourth year on Mars
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And you know what, could I end this program with some excellence?
It’s really hard to top what the Jet Propulsion Lab has pulled off with the Mars Rovers. So hard, that I don’t think it can be topped this week. It’s pretty likely that they’ve won it before, but this is a new day in a new year. This week’s Timothy Jordan Show Award of Excellence, the first Award of the year, goes to Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
And that’s the Timothy Jordan Show News for January 4th, ‘08.
Now it’s time to get the frack out of here and saw a path back into the Santa Cruz Mountains. The Fortified Compound is under assault by nature and we have to defiantly beat her back. Catch us again next week.
