Where second is always first!
11/16/2022
With such great raw material to work from, you’d think it’d be easy to make a great series from it. Apparently it wasn’t. The BBC1 series Rogue Heroes based on the Robert MacIntyre book of the same name is an altogether silly comic-book effort to tell the incredible story of the formation of the elite British Special Air Service during…read more
11/14/2022
The Brooklyn Public Library on November 30, 2022, will celebrate its 125th anniversary. It was in 1896, two years before Brooklyn became a part of the City of New York, that the Brooklyn Common Council passed a resolution to establish the library system. As part of the library’s efforts to commemorate the occasion, the Brooklyn Public Library released a list…read more
11/01/2022
Bill Belichick is not usually known for being second to anyone — for the past 22 years, he’s been at the top of his profession as an NFL head coach — but on October 30, 2022, he gladly welcomed being second when his New England Patriots beat the New York Jets 22 to 17, making him the second-winningest coach in…read more
10/20/2022
Updated on 10/22/2022
K2 has always been considered one of the most dangerous mountains over 8,000 meters to climb. I covered most of this here in “The History of K2 — The World’s Second-Highest Mountain“. But as mountain climbing equipment improves, routes get more secured, and more highly trained guides become available, this danger may be subsiding somewhat. At least as much as…read more
10/18/2022
The silver medal won by German athlete Luz Long in the long jump at the 1936 Munich Olympics fetched $488,435 at auction on October 16, 2022, a record for an Olympic silver medal sold at public auction. In all, 20 bids were made for the medal, which had attracted a significant amount of worldwide media attention. Many other pieces of…read more
By the time astronaut James McDivitt stepped into the Apollo 9 spacecraft on March 3, 1969, he had already built a reputation as a solid and trusted American pilot and astronaut. A member of NASA’s “Second Group” of astronauts, his first trip into space came as mission commander of the Gemini IV mission in June 1965. That particular mission was…read more
05/27/2021
Just shy of 6 months after he became the second person in the UK to receive a Covid-19 vaccine (he got the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine), William “Bill” Shakespeare passed away on May 26, 2021. Shakespeare became famous on December 8, 2020 when he received his first Covid vaccine jab. It was a momentous occasion for him, as well as everyone…read more
12/08/2020
The United Kingdom on December 8, 2020 became the first nation to begin widespread distribution of a working Covid-19 vaccine. At the University Hospital in Coventry, in what hopes to be the beginning of the end for the pandemic that effectively shut down the world for most of 2020, 90-year-old Margaret Keenan became the first person in the world outside…read more
03/04/2020
For those of you who’ve never heard of Donald Mitchel, he’s a former computer research scientist and writer who also a space exploration history enthusiast. He is also an expert in the field of image resampling and enhancement. In his latest tweet (down below) Mitchel presents raw images he got from the Soviet Union’s Venera project, which sent back the…read more