John Noble Wilford, the New York Times’s science writer who wrote the front-page story about the moon landing 40 years ago, has a terrific essay about it in today’s paper.

It then occurs to me that if Columbus and Capt. James Cook were alive, they might be less astonished by two men landing on the Moon than by the millions of people, worldwide, watching every step of the walk as it happens.

Here is how he wrote his famous first sentence:

I think of what I will write. I have never made a practice of composing a draft story in anticipation of a success, or alternative drafts for failure. I trust myself to draw inspiration from what happens, thinking spontaneity will serve me better and endow the story with the energy of immediacy. But now, phrases and disconnected sentences spill out of my wakefulness.

I get up and read the articles I have written about the mission up to now. Reporters may feel impelled to write of the next day’s events as the culmination of the space race, the achievement of an ambitious national goal, a historic triumph. I swear to myself that I will not use “historic” in my top paragraph.

I reach for my notebook and try several opening sentences. They must be put on a strict diet. I cross out adjectives. I eliminate clauses that are superfluous and sound too much like heavy music for a movie soundtrack. I begin again: “American astronauts landed.” No, too restrictive and chauvinistic; it will be clear soon enough that the astronauts are American and the goal of a decade has been achieved.

I finally get to the irreducible essence in one short sentence: “Men have landed and walked on the moon.”

And an organization, founded to fight for civil rights, is disgracefully hypocritical if they refuse to recognize the civil rights of anyone other than themselves. They lose all moral authority, because then they become merely advocates for themselves. OF COURSE you are going to be advocates for yourselves – everyone is; you gain no moral authority from merely being an advocate for your own interests. So, you, hallowed civil rights organization, are “officially” neutral on the key civil rights issue of our time in this country? You are no longer a civil rights organization – you are merely an advocacy group. Like any other.

(From a Metafilter comment about this article.)

Does blog design still matter? I rarely visit actual blogs anymore, unless I want to comment on a blog post. I read most of my daily reads via RSS.

Nevertheless, I’ve redesigned my site a little bit. I started out wanting to add a Twitter feed, because I thought I’d be more inclined to tweet if they were accessible in the same place I blogged. But that meant I had too much stuff on my blog for one sidebar, so I decided I needed two sidebars in order to accommodate more data. I tried to code it by hand and it wasn’t happening. So I investigated a few different WordPress themes and decided to go with Neoclassical, which I downloaded and tweaked.

I’m still tweaking. And I still haven’t tweeted. I seem to have tweeter’s block. To those of you who already follow me on the Twitter account I set up a couple of months ago and still haven’t used, I’ve registered a new account under the name Tinmanic, so you’ll want to start following me there instead.

I’d end this post with a Twitter pun, but that would be twite.