I live in San Diego, California, and have to go up to Long Beach twice a month. It's a 240-mile round trip drive, and since the events I attend last only one to three hours, I don't mind doing a little exploring. Recently I explored the Port of Long Beach and the Port of Los Angeles. They are alongside each other and, together, they claim to be the largest container port in the world, which means they have a lot of huge cranes for lifting containers on and off of ships, trucks, and trains. These are called container cranes or gantry cranes . They are some 250 feet high, weigh around 9,000 tons, and can lift about 1,000 tons. One can find these cranes at container ports throughout the world. An urban legend states that George Lucas saw container cranes at the Port of Oakland and used them to create the AT-AT Imperial Walkers in Star Wars. I can see a resemblance, and since George Lucas lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, I can see it as plausible. However, George Lucas himself...
In 1970, my first year in high school (grade 10, though; 7-9 was junior high), I joined Key Club, a national high school service organization. One thing that immediately struck me was that people didn't seem to care about the hungry, the sick, women and child abuse, animal abuse. (Has anything changed?) When we went to a nursing home (now called assisted living facility), I was playing dominoes with one of my friends and two elderly women. We had a great conversation while we were playing, and something one of the women said has stayed with me all these years: People don't care about anything unless it affects either them personally or someone they know. It's generality painted with a huge brush, but I think it's true. In today's world, U.S. President #45, his supporters and enablers, the excessively rich, and the big corporations are the epitome of not caring about anything other than what will make them richer in the short term. When I read The Andromeda Evolutio...
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