July 20, 1944.

Today a conspiracy of plotters sought to assassinate Adolph Hitler and overthrow the NAZI dictatorship with a coup. The coup was generated from with Hitler’s own military and nearly succeeded. It is only by chance and a string of unlikely events that Hitler survived this attempt. (I understand there were something like 15 different attempts on Hitler’s life. He had the devils own luck in avoiding these attempts.)

A film which does a very good job of being both entertainment and capturing the events — with some alterations one should always be wary of film as history — is last year’s Valkyrie . This film is tense and dramatic with a top notch cast that give a power performance.

July 20, 1969.

Mankind landed on the moon. Forty years have passed and age has dulled my memory but I do remember lying on a narrow bed (I was nine) with a father in a trailer on one of his worksites and watching the astronauts descend to the lunar surface.
I have always been a space bug. As a child I drew Gemini and Apollo and Mercury capsules. I was six and I would watch and try to understand Star Trek. (I remember asking my sister how the Enterprise could launch, thinking at the time that everything had to go straight up from the ground like an Atlas. She explained how ships may be built in orbit and my horizons were expanded a bit. (At least until JJ Abrams got his hand on the future.)
I loved the space program and I still believe that man’s destiny lies off-planet. It may not be America’s destiny but it is mans.