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The Space Shuttle Endeavour has made its final night time launch from the Kennedy Space Center on the East coast of Florida. The Space Shuttle is now on a 13-day mission to rendezvous with the ISS (International Space Station).

This was the final night launch for NASA , as there are only 4 more space shuttle missions after this one, with all of the remaining shuttle launches taking place in daylight hours.

Now that the Space Shuttle is in orbit, we will once again have a chance to get sightings of the ISS and Space Shuttle over Ireland. If you are up on Tuesday Morning at 6:20am you will see the space station cross the Irish skies and the space shuttle will only be 5 mins behind it crossing Ireland at 6:25am. The next time we see the ISS and Space Shuttle in the Irish skies, they will have docked and it will be a merged ISS+Space Shuttle which will be visible in the skies.

I have uploaded the times of the Space Station and Space Shuttle sightings for early Feb based on Sightings for Waterford, Ireland.

A very embarrassing mistake happened to Senator Donnie Cassidy when talking about the “Jack and Jill Foundation” (which is an excellent charity who provide care and support for children with severe neurological development issues).

Unfortunately the blooper happened with Senator Cassidy called the “Jack and Jill Foundation” the “Jekyll and Hyde Foundation”.

If you want to have a listen to this, Newstalk 106-108’s excellent Morning Program have been covering this for the past 2 days ;

The Donnie Cassidy Jekyll and Hyde Foundation Blooper

An unfortunate blooper but everyone’s human and it does give great publicity to a worthy cause.

At about 6pm today, a meteorite exploded over Ireland and was spotted from Cork to Donegal.

At 6pm on Wednesday 3rd Feb, emergency services all over the country received calls from people who said that there was an explosion in the skies over Ireland and that fiery debris was spotted falling from the skies. Smoke and heat trails were left in the skies for 10-20 minutes after the even as the ionised air was affected by the intense heat of the meteorite. Some people though planes had crashed and that the debris flying through the sky was aircraft engines.

People playing golf in Kerry reported it and at the same time people driving in Tullamore could see the same fire in the sky as the meteorite which would have been about 4 to 7 feet in size hit the atmosphere at hundreds of miles an hour. It would have broken into a few major bits as it fell to earth.

If anyone saw this they can place a “Fireball Report” on the Astronomy Ireland website, www.astronomy.ie and the search is now on for the pieces which fell to earth. Pieces of meteorite can sell for more than the price of gold. If you have pictures of the meteorite or video of the meteorite there are many media agencies, including RTE who are looking for spottings of the meteorite.

I have placed some YouTube Video of the actual Meteor which exploded in the skies below.

Unfortunately, I was driving south at the time and didn’t see a thing!!

In Ireland we waste so much time in school learning a language we never use!

It would be so much better if Irish children could be taught something like French that they would actually use, after-all, French is the official language of the EU. If you look at the people who come over to Ireland from Poland or Czech Republic, their English is actually very good. I’m sure they can converse in English better than most Irish people could converse in French. WHY? Because in Ireland from the age of 4 to 12, Irish is drilled into kids, instead of a language they would actually use. It is at this age that children find it easier to learn a language – so why expect them to start learning French at the age of 13 when they start secondary school? Its too late for them to be actually fluent – start them learning from a young age.

Irish – What a Terrible Language

Lets look at some of the crap you learn as a child.

I left school with an Irish Vocabulary of about 10 words which included such classics as;

Also, Whats the story with this?
Take for example the phrase “Comhartha ar an mbus” – MBUS … is this some sort of Hanson song. MBus???
What sort of crappy language puts an M before a B ??

Irish, a Dead Language

I think they should get rid of the language and get the children of Ireland speaking a European language rather than a dead language. Nobody speaks it – unless you want to get rid of the kids and shove them off to an island for 3 months during the summer.

I wish we had a language we could be proud of but we don’t – so stop hooking it up to a life support machine and leave it die so that the children in Irish schools leave with something they can use.