Supposedly Charles Barkley said it. It sounds just like him though, I haven't been able to track it down myself.

6. And the Chinese manned space program is headed for the moon.

Don't laugh too loud, and too soon, barney.

Recall:
What was the language of the first Europeans on North American soil?

What was the language of the first Europeans to "officially" discover America?

What was the language of the Europeans who colonized what, eventually, came to become the most powerful nation known to human history?

This is not a trick question...

The trick for the moon is figuring out how to make it economically viable. That's no small question, either. If we can find a way, the stars await us. If we can't, then moon missions and beyond are just stunts, and, as a species, I'm not sure we ever make it very far off this mudball.

I hope we find a way.

A few weeks ago the newspaper strip Get Fuzzy had a good take on this where the characters were debating what signified the end of the world. The three signs noted were:
1. The German government is telling people not to go to war.
2. The Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox meet in the World Series.
3. Maury Povich.
:)

Hey, one correction - the tallest player in NBA at 7'6" is Shawn Bradley playing for the Mavericks - not Yao Ming.

Shanti:

Noted and corrected. Thanks!

Not sure if I miss quoted or they got it wrong but I fixed it.

Yeesh. Who cares how tall some baseball player is, anyway? Yeesh, sports...

;-)

You are welcome, Rosemary!

Dean, I know this fact just because I happen to be a hapless fan of the Dallas Mavericks, that Shawn Bradley plays for "sometimes", whenever he feels like it :-)

You know why I married Dean?

He doesn't like sports for starters...

No endless football Sundays - heaven if yer a woman.

OTOH - I'm a hockey wingnut - when hockey playoffs are going Jake (the boy) and I are glued to our seats. Dean doesn't like hockey either - though he tries - this is Detroit after all.

LOL, Rosemary - my husband is not into football either, but we fight like crazy about basketball :)

"What was the language of the first Europeans on North American soil?"

Old Norse.

"What was the language of the first Europeans to "officially" discover America?"

Italian.

"What was the language of the Europeans who colonized what, eventually, came to become the most powerful nation known to human history?"

Impossible to answer without further clarification on what you mean, but I would say English, as New England was where the US got started, and the rest of the US's current territory consists of land that has, at various times, been colonized by the Spanish, the French, and the Dutch.

I am somewhat unclear as to what you mean to imply by these questions.

If by that you mean that others beside Americans have accomplished great things, then by all means, you are correct. But when they did this, Americans did not exist, except for the ancestors of the people who would one day colonize the land.

Since America came into being, it's accomplished no less than electricity, flight, the assembly line, men walking on the moon, the computer, the laser, the splitting of the atom, television, the telephone (okay, bell was canadian-born), the internet, pizza (true italian pizza was a lump of bread with cheese on it. americans perfected it), and rock 'n roll music. I'm sure i'm leaving a great deal out, but I find at least three of these things to be as profound discoveries as the wheel or writing (computers, nuclear energy, and space flight).

The rest of the world has umm... Penicillin, the internal combustion engine, and photography are the only things that come to mind at the moment.

My point is that I truly do not see the potential of accomplishing anything truly groundbreaking in anything but the US. Even if someone else comes up with an idea, the US seems to be the only one who can see it through completely.

If you didn't mean to imply that, then I apologize for my rambling.

(FYI, I am not an American)

Yes. Americans truly are ahead in everything. Unfortunately humanity isn't.

What you get at the old timey Chinese carryout is "Chinese" food invented in San Fransisco. Likewise a lot of "Mexican" food was created in the USA. We even invented our two greatest enemies of the last fifty years, Ho Chi Min and Saddam Husein. The founder of North Korea was our ally until we wouldn't let him provide secuity for Korea. Dean Rusk came up with the dividing lines for the two Koreas and the two Vietnams. Our plainspoken President had a grandfather and great uncle who backed Hitler and created a concentration camp or two. Germany was short of oil during the War so they built a plant to turn coal into oil. "Smiley" Bush ought to consider his family"s expertise in making synthetic oil.