Oh, no offense. I laugh at Karel's silliness all the time-- even if it is mostly at my expense.

I wuv you, Texie.

Actually, come to think about it, "grabbing a president" was pretty political.

Especially since Billy...

you'd better.

I've toured Bill Gate's house, including the secret tunnels inside the hill and his server rooms. I had to sign an NDA!

I was an extra in a movie directed by Sean Penn (he's really short) and starring Jack Nicholson (he's older looking in person).

I saw Grace Park, the Galactica hottie, walking on the seawall a few weeks ago...

The actor Earnest Borgnine called me once and said he hadn't received his Los Angeles Herald Examiner that evening. I asked his area deliery manager to get one over to him. (I was working in customer service).

Oh, and on my working for Kasparov, mentioned earlier. Yes, I started a chess web site in 1998 in California and got a job offer from the Kasparov organization in 1999. I moved to the Manhattan area (aka Jersey City); I often saw Garry at our office near Wall Street and the famous bull on Broadway. Then the dot-com bust shut down the NY office and I moved to the Moscow office, where I also met Vladimir Kramnick, among other chess elites. (I luckily moved a few months before 9/11--I passed thru the WTC daily about 9 a.m.and had a gym membership there).

I've shaken hands with and talked to Arturo Sandoval and Wynton Marsalis (both pretty famous trumpet players, especially Wynton). I saw Buzz Aldrin speak once, and almost but didn't quite shake his hand.

I had Jennifer Casolo as my GSI for a class. You may not know her name, but she was the focus of a bit of an international incident, apparently. She's on wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Casolo). Also, I've seen Robert Reich (Clinton's secretary of labor) speak several times, but that one doesn't quite count...he's a professor here.

I've got an official document with my signature and Richard Starkey's side-by-side.

Long story... and no, it isn't a Restraining Order :-)

Great post HC! I too have been totally hooked on the space shows this week because I was just a kid when they landed on the moon and the highlights you mentioned are the very ones that stood out to me, esp Armstrong. Cool doesn't even come close to describing him.

waimate: I'm jealous! I had the pjs but never got to meet him

It is especially cool to have met a moon-man, especially since nobody's gone back since the early 70s. I really wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid. But then they stopped sending people anywhere but into orbit... I'm not going to do all the astronaut training crap just to get a chance to orbit the earth. Especially since the most dangerous parts, the takeoff and landing (Sitting on a giant bomb and pressing the red button! Whee!), are still there, but the interesting bits, like going where no one has gone before, are gone. That's just lame.

I think I'm not alone; I've noticed that a lot of science fiction has stopped being about outer space and started being about cyberspace...