Tag: David Magallane

Bilingual commentary — Modern Echoes of the Apollo Program

by Community Contributor • April 17, 2026 • Comments Off

Watching Artemis II loop around the Moon and come home felt like I too had “come home.” Some of us in my generation used to get up at 3 a.m. to watch the electrifying launches of the missions with god-like names: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. We would watch with focused fascination the black-and-white images on our small TV screens, never imagining that our grandchildren some 50 years later would be seeing mesmerizing high-definition, full-color feeds of the lunar surface on large high-tech screens during their moonshot. It all felt like a powerful injection of déjà vu. It wasn’t just about the hardware or the physics; it was that energy of the thrill of returning to the Moon.

Bilingual commentary — Bulldozing Over Tradition

by Community Contributor • June 27, 2025 • Comments Off

Throughout our country’s history during the time that I’ve been alive, we have had presidents who embraced traditional values and customs. Despite their political maneuverings and strategies, for the most part these presidents adhered to cultural norms. Some were great orators (e.g., Kennedy, Obama, Reagan) while others were not, shall we say, “out of the top grandiloquent drawer” (e.g., Nixon, Bush II, Biden, Trump).

And then there are those presidents who, for better or for worse, deviate from tradition and norms.

Bilingual commentary — The Lesson of the Hawk and the Crow

by Community Contributor • February 12, 2021 • Comments Off

The other day, as I sat through yet another Zoom meeting, I heard an unusual series of squawks outside. I thought that maybe I was hearing an angry animal, or, God forbid, an angry neighbor just outside my home.

As I stuck my head out the patio door, I looked up to see a crow persecuting a hawk, trying to make the hawk’s life miserable. The crow would fly straight toward the ascending hawk, miss it entirely on purpose, fly out circularly, only to rampage back in the direction of the hawk, screeching loudly and flying tight circles around it as if to maximize its level of irritability and arrogance. The crow was acting as if it were the ultimate gadfly, trying to provoke the hawk to do something stupid.