I'd forgotten the date, so I cheated and looked it up.
I do remember that period now. I was living and working in the SF bay area. We had a visitor in our lab the following week from Amsterdam. He cut out from his local newspaper and brought to me a favorite cartoon series, one I enjoyed when I worked in Amsterdam. "Fokke en Sukke" is the cartoon, and they're two little smart-alek ducks that make fun of everything. Especially politics. Their dialogue was funny, but also simple enough for me to practice as I learned the Nederlands language. The episode of Fokke en Sukke he brought to me was particularly irreverent. It showed people searching in a field for the nosecone of the space shuttle. Then someone finds a pointy object and says here it is! Then in the next frame it says, "nevermind, it's just Michael Jackson's nose." Of course, it was much funnier at the time because the sudden detachment of Michael Jackson's prosthetic nose was big news about a year ealier. Nose news is good news.
Although, as I recall, Jackson's nose detachment turned out to be an urban legend. Still, both the irreverence and timeliness of the cartoon was stunningly clever. To this day I can't think about the space shuttle without thinking about Jackson's nose.
So wait - they did that after the shuttle disintegrated?
As for myself - I didn't write this earlier:
I had had a friend spend the night, and for some reason we turned the TV on around 8 that morning when it was just being rumored that something had happend - it wasn't confirmed - then I saw the pictures and we all knew. That and September 11th are hte only 2 things that I can still picture the video just playing through my head - and it's very eerie.
