Category Archives: Popular Culture

Which Is It?

This is a thing on Facebook, but I’ll do it here. I’ll list five famous people whom I’ve been within a few feet of, but one of them is a lie:

Mitt Romney

Buzz Aldrin

Fred Smith

Newt Gingrich

Bill Nelson

[Evening update]

All right, since everyone is guessing Mittens, I’ll start the slow process of elimination. I met him at the Conservative Summit in DC right after the disastrous 2006 election. I tried to talk to him briefly about space and advising him on it, but (as he later demonstrated), he didn’t give a rat’s patoot.

Monday-afternoon update]

OK, I’ve had enough guesses. I’ve known Buzz for decades; he used to call me in the middle of the night. I had lunch with Fred Smith at the Atheneum at Caltech in the 90s, when we were pitching him for funding for supersonic research. I talked to Newt for a while at a reception at the State Department a year ago. I’ve never been in physical proximity to Bill Nelson, or communicated with him.