William I. Lengeman III - Freelance Writer

Humor - If I Had A Hammer

If I Had A Hammer
By William I. Lengeman III

I’ve always felt uneasy in the company of ball peen hammers. Perhaps I'm alone in this, my distrust of certain hand tools. At the other extreme is a guy like Dave Pahl, hammer collector extraordinaire and curator of an Alaskan hammer museum that houses more than twelve hundred of the little buggers.

Pahl has gone on record as saying, "I like hammers." Obviously, and who can fault a guy for that? Hammers are a good and useful thing and where would we be without them? We’d be running around trying to bang in nails with screwdriver handles, is
where we’d be.

Space Tourism’s First Small Steps

Space Tourism’s First Small Steps
by William I. Lengeman III
Air & Space

On Christmas Eve in 1968, when the Apollo 8 astronauts read passages of the Bible’s Genesis to an Earthbound TV audience, Juan Trippe, the PR-savvy head of Pan American World Airways, thought to phone ABC-TV. He let it be known that the airline was keeping a list of people interested in one day taking a commercial flight to the moon. By the next morning, Pan Am had received “a flurry of requests” from wannabe space tourists, adding to a list that already numbered about 100 names.

Read more at the Air & Space Web site.

Book Review - Lunar Prospector: Against All Odds

Lunar Prospector: Against All Odds
By Alan B. Binder, Ph.D.
Reviewed by William I. Lengeman III
First published in Air & Space

There are no shortage of books about space missions, but Lunar Prospector: Against All Odds is rare – perhaps even unique – in that it presents a blow by blow account of a moon mission from conception to fruition, as recounted by the man who spearheaded the project and served as its principal investigator.

Article - Ten Essential Works of Horror

Ten Essential Works of Horror
by William I. Lengeman III
Dark Scribe Magazine

1. Horace Walpole (1717-1797)
The Castle of Otranto (1764)

In his wide-ranging essay, Supernatural Horror in Literature, H.P. Lovecraft called The Castle of Otranto “thoroughly unconvincing and mediocre” and “tedious, artificial and melodramatic.” Modern-day readers not accustomed to Walpole’s archaic style might tend to agree.

Read more at Dark Scribe Magazine.