Jack’s Winning Words  3 9/20
“The earth is blue.  How wonderful.  It is amazing.”  (Yuri Gagarin)  Gagarin, the 1^st human to travel in space, called the view, AMAZING! If anything should move us to save the planet, it’s those magnificent space photos we’ve seen..   Someone once threw acid on the Mona Lisa.  Thankfully, Lisa was able to be restored.  Our pollution-living is almost as tho we are throwing acid on our beautiful planet.  Recycling may not restore the planet, but it may keep it blue! ;-)  Jack 

FROM BB IN CHGO:  Your words always have a positive spin.  Thanks. I heard part of a story on NPR this weekend – think it was TED talks shortened about recycling in 5 places incl. the Phillipines, Haiti and other islands where people who recycle plastics sort by number and are given credits in a special type of bank where the funds can be immediately spent on needed items.  They are instituting these programs to get their countries cleaned up and help folks get by with needed income.  It sounded so amazing; guess I should listen to the entire talk.===JACK:  I miss NPR.  I've got to start listening to it again.

FROM THE FISH IN NOVA SCOTIA:  Yuri was also the first radio amateur in space===JACK:  I did not know that.  Were you ever in communication with him...or othe famous people?===FISH:no, I am sure I never had a contact with Yuri--would have loved to. Have not so far contacted other famous hams, including the late King of Jordan or Barry Goldwater. Of course, we use call letters and at most exchange first names, so I may have contacted someone famous without knowing it. Don't know how famous he presently would be considered, but I often have contacted Joe Taylor, Nobel Laureate from 1993 in deep-space radio astronomy and Princeton professor emeritus, who used some of his weak-signal expertise to develop our most common software for bouncing ham signals off the moon and decoding them. Last night, I used that software to make contact with hams in Montenegro, Australia and Japan via the moon. The signals travel about 500,000 miles and are usually too weak to even hear on the air; we exchange text messages. I also use his software to bounce signals off of meteor trails. If you two come visit us sometime, you can experience it for yourself (moonbounce is usually only feasible certain days of the lunar month).===JACK:  Fascinating!

FROM FACEBOOK LIZ:  better tell china and india the plan, bc the us has reduced our carbon footprint, but china dumps plastic right into the ocean.===JACK:  We have trouble enough telling our own politicians what to do...and gertting them to do it.

FROM EILEEN:  Very nicely put ❤️===JACK:  I wonder what his words were in Russian...and if they sounded nicely put?