[thechat] On July 20th, 1969, humans first set foot on the Moon.

[Jonathon Isaac Swiderski]

> this event ranks right up there in my memory along with
>
>   -- september 11 2001

i was in an 830 class (same timezone as NYC) and got out a bit before 10a.
I checked my email when I got out, and had one of these newspaper
breaking-headline mailers saying that two planes had flown into the WTC.
For some reason, I thought they'd be something Cessna-sized, and my first
reaction was, "You'd think that'd be rather hard to miss. . ." and went on
to run an errand to the other side of campus.  I ran into a friend of mine
over there from SoHo (lower Manhattan, about a mile above the Center) who'd
been sitting, reading, & we made some joke about the improbability of some
GenAv pilot wandering his prop plane into the side of the tallest building
in the western hemisphere.  'twasn't till i got back to the other side of
campus, nearly 1130, and saw the large numbers of kids crying & on cell
phones (of the 3000 students at Oberlin College, approx. 1% come from a
single high school in The Bronx, and more come from New York State then
anywhere else except maybe California) that it started to sink in.  Then I
got to what passes for a union on the campus, and half the College was
sitting or standing in the main hall, watching CNN on a projection
screen. . .

--
Jonathon Isaac Swiderski       jswiders at cs.oberlin.edu
cs.oberlin.edu/~jswiders \\ members.evolt.org/jswiders

The above email is carefully calculated to deprave the cultivated reader.