Feel The Spirit
From such humble beginnings came the Home Shopping Network (toasters, yes, but beautiful glass figurines, too!), which Paxson and partner Roy Speer sold to TCI's Liberty Media in 1993.
In between selling HSN and beginning Pax TV in 1998, Paxson experienced a religious conversion. As related in his autobiography, "Threading the Needle," he was staying at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas, mourning the dissolution of his marriage, when he found a Gideon's Bible in his bedside drawer. (The book's title comes from Luke: "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.")
The irony of accepting Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior in a hotel with a Roman theme seems to have been lost on Paxson, but he is not a man given to irony.
Sean Elder/Salon Jan.08.04
Feel The Spirit is the brand phrase for Pax TV
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Ω Undoing the confusion of Mars. Mars is a planet, the next out from the sun from us here on Earth. The British sent a probe to Mars, it was called Beagle 2. Without having read or heard this anywhere, I feel confident it was named in commemoration of Charles Darwin's voyage of discovery on the ship H.M.S. Beagle.
NASA, at the same time, sent a probe to Mars, entirely unrelated to the British one. At least the little bit of actual news coverage of these events I've read hasn't linked them except in the most cursory tangential way. The NASA probe was called Spirit.
The British probe Beagle 2 lost contact with Earth after it entered the Martian atmosphere, and is still missing as of this writing.
The NASA probe Spirit landed safely, and has been broadcasting pictures of the Martian surface.
There has been a shocking lack of explanation about these events.
Why were these technically difficult and astronomically expensive projects undertaken separately, seemingly redundantly? What is the Spirit that's being referred to by NASA? Is it a particular spirit? Or is it enthusiasm and loyalty, like "team spirit"? Is it the "Holy Spirit" of Christian mythos? Is it a universal thing, something we all share, like the "one small step for a man, a giant leap for mankind" of Neil Armstrong?
When so much of our social landscape is dominated by people who are re-enacting the Scopes Trial, why isn't someone talking about the symbolic weight of these events in the public media?
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In a world that has been turned upside down, a religion that was forged in heroic love and courageous sacrifice has become the refuge of spiteful cowards.
