August 1st birthdays

As I mentioned in the previous post, today is my oldest daughter’s sixteenth birthday.

On the day she was born in 1993, the TV news here in Japan showed two Japanese twins who had become famous a year earlier because the both turned 100 years old.
The day my first baby was born these twins turned 101.

Their names were 「成田きん」 (Kin Narita) and 「蟹江ぎん」 (Gin Kanie). After they became famous all over Japan, they often did TV commercials in the early – mid ’90s.
As a term of affection, they were called 「キンさん、ギンさん」 (“Kin-san, Gin-san“).

「キンさん、ギンさん」 (“Kin-san, Gin-san“) were born on 1892 August 1 and lived to be 107 and 108 years old, respectively.

「キンさん、ギンさん」 ("Kin-san, Gin-san"). (Their names mean "Gold" and "Silver")

I knew since the day my oldest daughter was born that 「キンさん、ギンさん」 (“Kin-san, Gin-san“) shared a birthday with her.

But I found out today that the Japanese astronaut, 若田光一 (Koichi Wakata), who just came back to Earth from a mission with the Space Shuttle Endeavour also has the same birthday as my daughter.

He was born on 1963 August 1.

So he returned from his mission in space just in time to celebrate his birthday on Earth. The first thing he did was eat 寿司 (sushi).

The Original Moon Walk

Today is the 40th anniversary of the first and only* manned landing on the moon. *(I’ve been corrected).

On Sunday, 1969 July 20, the world watched on live television as the Apollo 11 landed on the moon and Neil Armstrong exited the craft and walked on the surface of the moon and planted the American flag and said his famous line:

That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

U.S. astronaut Neil Armstrong (RIP August 5, 1930 – August 25, 2012)

I was born in 1969, a few months after this occurred…so I have no experience seeing it.
How about you? Did you see man land on the moon in July 1969?

***

I didn’t see the Apollo 11 land on the moon…but I grew up in Florida and I remember the first reusable Space Shuttle. It was the “Space Shuttle Columbia” and it flew it’s first mission in 1981.

Since I grew up in Florida, which is where NASA launches the Space Shuttles from, my high school used to have all of the students and teachers go outside whenever a Space Shuttle was scheduled to be launched because we could watch it in the sky from the schoolyard.

Since we were teenagers, most of us were bored of watching every single Space Shuttle launch. So on Tuesday, 1986 January 28, I remember being outside to watch another launch…this time of the Space Shuttle Challenger (which had the first female astronaut and Japanese-American astronaut on board).

It was just another launch to us teenagers…until it exploded in midair!

We all ran inside and turned on the television news.
All seven of the crew perished in that tragedy.

RIP.

(Also, the entire crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia (the original Space Shuttle) died when the craft disintegrated on re-entry in 2003).