The Pillars of Creation

…and my idea for an art piece to celebrate it.


The Hubble Space Telescope took the first photo of the “Pillars of Creation” (a section of interstellar gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula, in the Serpens constellation about 7,000 light-years away from Earth) in 1995.

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Dick Pincsak Has Guts

by Randy Cassingham
Winter 1985

“I wondered: is this what it’s really like to be an unwanted minority in American society? It’s powerful, and that’s why it had such an impact on my life.”

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The Best Thing All Week

This isn’t a story about me, but rather something awesome that I witnessed while working at a big fire on Saturday. It was an interaction that made my night, even my week, but first I have to set the scene, and allow for a side trip to tell you the Moose Story at the end. You’ll see why it relates….

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Robertson Davies: My Favorite Author

Years Ago My Super Cool Aunt visited an old friend in Denver. I was still living in Boulder at the time, so I went down to take the ladies to lunch. Lottie really wanted to go to the Tattered Cover bookstore — one of the big, independent stores that has a huge variety of books. She wanted something to read on her travels.

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090: Rescuing Uncommon Sense

In This Episode: A story in This is True struck me as an astonishing example of Uncommon Sense, so I thought I’d tell you about it to see some really out-of-the-box thinking, and provide some practical advice that could save your life. Here’s a hint: no one thinks they’re going to get lost and need rescue. Yet there are tens of thousands of rescues every year in the U.S. alone. What will increase your odds of being safe? Uncommon Sense.

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The Cherry Rumtini

A local ice cream parlor puts cherries on its sundaes. But not some crappy maraschino cherry *. They have their cherries flown in from Italy, and they’re so fantastic I bought some, and had to find other uses for them so I don’t have to eat so much ice cream! What I came up with a buddy says I should call “The Amazing Martini”! The recipe is below.

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Kit on the Camino

I’ve mentioned here and there that my wife, Kit, is walking the Camino de Santiago — the “French Way,” starting in Saint Jean De Pied De Port, France, over the French Pyrenees to Pamplona, Spain, and then west to Santiago. The trek is about 800km, or around 500 miles. Plus any walking around to get dinner or … Continue Reading

Behind the Scenes at JPL

Long-time readers know that This is True was created while I still had a Day Job. It was a very cool job: I was on the engineering staff at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (1986-1996 — True was started in 1994, so there was a two-year overlap).

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