And remembering the great speech he wrote a little over forty years ago that fortunately never had to be given.
2 thoughts on “Bill Safire, RIP”
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And remembering the great speech he wrote a little over forty years ago that fortunately never had to be given.
Comments are closed.
I really enjoyed Safire’s language books; they were both useful and amusing (particularly Fumblerules which illustrated composition errors by committing the sin. Example: “No sentence fragments.”)
If you like historical novels, his massive doorstop Freedom is probably one of the very best novels about the Civil War in print. He documents his plot in a very long back section (that he calls “the underbook”) which leads you into a lot of great writing on the war).
R.I.P.
RIP indeed, and very grateful his speech was never needed. Of course, spending so much time and resources on trying to make sure such a speech would never be needed is one of the causes of the problems with the space programme.
Many of the commenters on the other blog want to make Mars a goal. I do not. There is nothing there we need or want that would not be more easily and cheaply available from the Moon (initially) and the asteroids. Land on Mars in a century or so, when it will be easy.
Look for life? Sure. But for that, Europa and maybe Ganymede are better targets.