I was in the choir that sang part of the Berlioz *Te Deum * while the Olympic flame was being lit at the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Sydney in 2000.
Neat! I watched those opening ceremonies in a bar in the Dallas airport, drinking Shiner Bock and waiting for a flight to San Diego. Wonder if I saw you?
>I just have to say that I believe you and that story is very cool but it sounds like the biggest load of bullshit I read this week. I am cracking up imagining you telling that to an actual 6 year old on your lap today or even to the person next to you in a bar.
Uh… what? You think it’s true or it’s bullshit? Would it be funny if I told it to someone on the Web asking for experiences? I’m having difficulty hearing the love in your tone.
A few years ago I did volunteer work at the Royal International Air Tatoo, the largest military airshow in the world. There was a guy named Graham Hurley writing a book about it, called Airshow. There’s a photo of me in that book. This year I did volunteer work at “The Largest Pub in the World”, the Great British Beer Festival. In 1984 I worked as a security guard at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles.
I cared for patients at Fred Hutchison Cancer Reseach Center getting Cyclosporin in the first US double blind studies. It changed all types of organ transplants, forever. One of my primary patients was the first ever sucessful, non-related bone marrow transplant.
We also did the first US studies on Acyclovir. Monoclonal antibodies, and Interferon were the brainchildren of one of our own researchers.
The director of the program recieved a Nobel Prize for medicine for that work.
I edit newspaper articles and write headlines etc that are read by millions of people each week.
No, I really do believe you. However, it sounds like an incredibly ridiculous story on its face. Think about it. Let’s say, you get drunk in a bar and start telling the person next to you how you were hired as a 6 year old to climb towers in an important mission for the U.S. space program back when the U.S. really needed to win the space race to defeat the commies. What reactions do you think that person will have? I have a couple of true stories of that type as well so I know crazy things can happen but it is still a ridiculous story. Take that as a compliment.
I’ll add one, but it involved Mrs. Mahaloth, not myself.
She was in Beijing, near Tian’anmen when the decision for the Beijing 2008 Olympics was announced.
Remember the old Straight Dope question about all the Chinese jumping off a chair at the same time? This is the closest we’ve come to it.
My wife said the cheering and celebrations, with non-stop fireworks, was completely deafening for an extremely long time. Even though many Chinese are against having the Olympics(…so expensive), they united in celebrating their good fortune.
Of course, it was only 20 million or so Chinese in Beijing and they were jumping up and down in irregular patterns, but it was the closest we’ve come to to the Straight Dope ideal.
I work for a very well known large healthcare institution where many famous and/or important people from around the world have received care.
Theoretically*, I have access to the medical records of various presidents, foreign dignitaries, actors, musicians, all from my spare bedroom upstairs (I work at home).
*I say theoretically, because I’d never access that information unless I had a legitimate need. And, a lot of the REALLY important people get code names, so I wouldn’t know it if I accessed it anyway.
>it is still a ridiculous story. Take that as a compliment.
OK, thanks. I figured it was OK to talk about, what with the fall of the Soviet Union and all. Of course, it wasn’t their fault. They did have several years of bad weather, remember? In all 11 time zones…
I built part of the Shuttle Mission Simulator at Johnson Space Center, so that every time there’s a shuttle mission, I know that I had a small part in the training of the astronauts. For that completely selfish reason, I’m in favor of continuing space shuttle flights indefinitely.
In the 1970s my father worked in Johnson Space Center on the Skylab mission - he sometimes sat in Mission Control, and was on USS Ticonderoga to retrieve Apollo 17. We lived in El Lago, a subdivision favored by various astronauts (and Red Adair), and my next-door-neighbor had walked on the moon.
Latterly, I worked with Emiel Kok.
My mother-in-law’s neighbors on base in May of 1960 were Gary Powers and his wife Sue. They were all in Sue’s living room when the confirmation of his shoot-down came in.
I transported several mock-ups and one of the final editions of the docking ring for the Apollo-Soyuz mission. This unit was needed to match up to Soyuz for the transfer of material and personnel between the two spacecraft.
I also carried one of the escape booms for the shuttle in my Dodge Ramcharger, with 2 feet of it sticking out the passenger window!
My company came up with the first ever treatment for a rare genetic disorder. Over the years I did work on various aspects of the project.
I don’t know if this is “renowned” enough, but I was on the design team for the just-released video game “BioShock.” It’s currently rated as the 6th best game of all time by GameRankings.com and (knock on wood!) should sell more than a million units worldwide during its lifetime.
-P
The Cuban Revolution. Although all I really did was attend school and take rifle practice, we were told every day that we were the “most important soldiers in the Revolution”, and communists never lie.
I formulated the recipe for and brewed a beer that is considered by at least one of the beer-ranking websites to be in the top ten beers of that style in the world, and one of the top 75 beers overall.
I wrote a letter to “All Things Considered” that was read during its “Letters” segment (heard every Thursday at this time). It involved my grandfather taking us to visit Nelson County, VA (where he was born and raised) after what was left of Hurricane Camille dumped some incredible amount of rain on the county and caused catastrophic flooding.