Today in History: July 16

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”—J. Robert Oppenheimer, paraphrasing the Bhagavad Gita after witnessing the Trinity test.

The U.S. Army detonated “The Gadget,” its first nuclear weapon, at White Sands, New Mexico, on this date in 1945. (Photo above.) The director of Los Alamos Laboratory, J. Robert Oppenheimer, gave the project the code name “Trinity,” in what he thought an appropriate literary reference to a line from John Donne: “Batter my heart, three person’d God.”
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Today in History: July 15

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The first tweet was sent out on March 21, 2006, by one of the founders of Twitter (which they were spelling “twttr”), Jack Dorsey:

The company opened to the public a few months later, on July 15, 2006, 10 years ago today.

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Six years ago today my life changed. I’m glad for that. (Photo above.)
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Step by Step

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Six years today …

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Every alcoholic in recovery has a collection of anecdotes that can be simultaneously heartbreaking, outrageous, and hilarious. Perhaps they are hilarious only to fellow alcoholics; perhaps they can not even be listened to by outsiders. For an outsider, most alcoholic anecdotes may as well conclude with the same dark punchline, an interchangeable rubber-stamped ending: “And then I got away with it again.” Or, “I didn’t die that time, either.” And then comes the next hair-raising—or eyebrow-raising—tale.

Every alcoholic in recovery is living a story with a weird ending, if they remain in recovery. It is that two-word pair there, “in recovery,” that provides the surprise, the weirdness, a period of life as surprising to behold as some of the antics, the many bizarre actions and activities and inactions and inactivities that were surprising for outsiders to watch unfold in the previous life.
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