jcbowman

Must be Spring, there was a Robin in my back yard.

May 16, 1963. Gordon Cooper was orbiting Earth alone inside a capsule barely big enough to turn around in, moving at 17,500 miles per hour. He had been up there for over a day. Then the warnings started. First a faulty sensor screaming that the ship was falling — it wasn't. He switched it off. Then something far worse: a short circuit knocked out the entire automated guidance system. The one that kept the capsule steady. The one that was supposed to bring him home. Without it, reentry was nearly impossible. Too shallow an angle and the capsule would bounce off the atmosphere back into space. Too steep and it would incinerate. The margin for error was razor thin — and every computer that was supposed to hit that margin was dead. Down on the ground, NASA engineers watched the telemetry in silence. They could see everything going wrong. They could fix nothing. Cooper didn't panic. He uncapped a grease pencil and drew lines directly on the inside of his window to track the horizon. He looked up at the stars he had spent months memorizing and used their positions to orient the ship by eye. Then he set his wristwatch. Because when you have no computers left, you become the computer. At exactly the right moment — calculated in his head, confirmed by the stars outside — he fired the retrorockets. The capsule shook. The sky turned to fire. For several minutes, no one on Earth could reach him as plasma swallowed the ship whole. Then the parachutes opened. Faith 7 hit the water just four miles from the recovery ship — the single most accurate splashdown in the entire Mercury program. The man with a wristwatch and a few pencil marks on a window had outperformed every automated system NASA had. We talk a lot about technology saving us. And it often does. But Cooper's story is a quiet reminder that behind every machine, there still has to be a human being who can look out the window, think clearly under pressure, and decide what to do next. The final backup was never the software. It was him.

I am posting a picture of my ancestor, John Sissom. John was person of many talents, he was also a bootlegger and gambler. But I am sticking to his baseball success. John is in the middle. Taken around 1905. He was from Coffey County, Tennessee

How Southern are You?

Public education is the heartbeat of a community | #Opinion | herald-citizen.com - goo.gl/alerts/yMzcw6 @ProEdTN @jcbowman @heraldcitizen #Schools #Tennessee

Public education is the heartbeat of a community | Opinion | herald-citizen.com - goo.gl/alerts/LHJTVD #GoogleAlerts @heraldcitizen @ProEdTN

Meanwhile somewhere on Broadway here in #Nashville someone falls for this!

Tennessee bill would ban digital devices for elementary students wsmv.com/2026/03/19/ten… @SteveMehlNews @WSMV @jcbowman @ProEdTN

Nashville Driving Tip: They don't care about a "student driver please be patient" sticker. this is the jungle baby.

Teaching in Crisis: A Pipeline Run Dry therogersvillereview.com/columns/articl… via @RogReview @ProEdTN @jcbowman

.@GettinSweenered with @BethanyBowman

.@TGrahamBrown Here is one for you. See you tonight! O'Malley proposed to his girl on St. Patrick's Day. Getting down on one knee, he asked, "Will you marry me?" He held out a ring. "Yes!" she said, excitedly. He put the ring on her finger. They embraced. That night she visited her father "Daddy, look! O'Malley proposed to me," she said, holding out her hand to display the ring. The father took one look at it. "That's not a real diamond," he pointed out. "That's a synthetic cubit zirconium." She sought out O'Malley the next day. "This diamond isn't real!" she protested. "Daddy looked at it and said it was fake!" "That's right," O'Malley replied. "It's in honor of St. Patrick's Day. It's a sham rock!"

Love Runaway June. Great Band and Songwriters.

Another Lawsuit Filed Against the Tennessee Department of Children’s Services (DCS) - go.shr.lc/4rGf71w @tristardaily

Love you all!

What Are Our Priorities? - go.shr.lc/3P9LpEy @tristardaily @jcbowman @ProEdTN

The Promise and Perils of Virtual Schools | Opinion | clevelandbanner.com - goo.gl/alerts/LVabxx #GoogleAlerts @ClevelandBanner @ProEdTN

It’s 45 years now!

@HawkEmDownChris Brooks Robinson.

Age yourself by naming an MLB third baseman you grew up watching. I’ll start: Chipper Jones.