Earlier this hour, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration posted the following to Twitter: “Stephen Colbert has astronaut Suni Williams listed as a guest next week. I wonder why?”
That would fit NASA’s stated timeline for announcing its decision on the naming of ISS Node 3, and whether or not it will be named either for the leading option amongst NASA’s own suggestions (Serenity) or for the leading option amongst the write-ins (Colbert).
Interesting item of note: Suni Williams is the other astronaut pictured here in 2007 aboard the International Space Station with fellow astronaut Steven R. Swanson as he shows off his Firefly and (yes) Serenity DVDs floating in zero gravity.
Who better (if not Swanson, obviously) than Williams to appear on The Colbert Report to break the news that Node 3 will not be named “Colbert” after all? But perhaps Colbert Nation can still get that toilet named after them.
Addendum: The latest: “NASA will announce the name of the newest space station module on Comedy Central’s ‘The Colbert Report’ April 14 at 11:30 p.m. EDT.”
Exactly why did I (and others, at my request) post a Twitter update today consisting of those words, addressed to Mike Doughty? Because this was April Fools’ Day, and for no particular reason at all I felt like summoning a ghost from the past.
Given the approach of this Friday’s rally in support of the Oregon Historical Society Research Library, take a look back at the results of my own use of the Library’s resources. First, there’s Revisiting the Great Light Way, in which I pulled together everything I’d learned about the illuminated arches which once crisscrossed intersections along SW Third in downtown Portland. Second, there’s my backgrounder on The Finger (scroll to the bottom), a zine published during World War II by Swan Island shipyard workers, which I’d discovered at a local bookstore.
Details on the full package for sale are here on Craigslist, since the Craigslister seeking one didn’t want mine.
Apparently tonight the government seized Washington Mutual and then sold it off to JPMorgan Chase.
Shareholders and some bondholders will be wiped out. WaMu deposits are guaranteed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation up to the $100,000 per account limit. Customers of Seattle-based WaMu are unlikely to be affected.
Apparently, it is the largest bank failure in United States history. I swear this has absolutely nothing to do with me quitting my job over a workplace health dispute. According to Bloomberg quting the Office of Thrift Supervision, WaMu “had ‘insufficient liquidity’ and was in an ‘unsound’ condition”.
Technically, according to the WSJ, because it was seized and then immediately emergency sold to JPMorgan, it perhaps can’t be considered an outright bank “failure”, since apparently the “transaction isn’t expected to impact the agency’s national deposit-insurance fund”.
Then again, maybe that’s just WSJ’s bias showing and not wanting to use the word “failure”, as most other reports seem, in fact, to be doing.
Yes, I’ve ended the months-long hiatus into which this site has been vanished. But don’t get excited, overly. It remains undetermined just how much I intend to do here now that I’ve brought everything back up into the light. One thing is definite: I’ve disabled comments site-wide. No time for the hassle.
