Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
- President Dwight D. Eisenhower

Sunday, August 05, 2007

Andrés de Urdaneta

He actually made it.

All right, so I see the world in a different manner than the average bear, right? This morning, I saw an advertisement for a GPS system called "Magellan". It's tag line was "what if you never got lost again?".

All I could think was "Magellan was the first European to try circumnavigating the globe! He was the definition of 'lost'"!

What really tore it for me was that he didn't even make it. He was killed by natives halfway through the trip. His crew members dragged his carcass back home.

I guess the owners of the GPS system are hoping that the poor state of education in North America will help them gloss over these facts...

2 comments:

Cindy-Lou said...

Maybe their point is that if you own this GPS system you will avoid being killed by natives when you get lost in Utah.

Stepho said...

Maybe it means that when you DO get lost you'll end up in a crappy, outdated Fourth grader's geography book.