Good morning.
Saturday in Whitewater will see clouds, sun, and scattered afternoon thundershowers with a high of 79. Sunrise is 6:08 and sunset is 7:45 for 13 hours 37 minutes of daylight. The moon is a waxing gibbous with 72.7 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1963, X-15 Flight 91 reaches the highest altitude of the X-15 program (67.08 mi):
X-15 Flight 91 was an August 22, 1963 American crewed sub-orbital spaceflight, and the second and final flight in the program to fly above the Kármán line, which was previously achieved during Flight 90 a month earlier by the same pilot, Joseph A. Walker. It was the highest flight of the X-15 program.
Flight 91 was the first internationally recognized spaceflight of a reused spacecraft, as Walker had also flown plane number three on the previous sub-orbital spaceflight over the Kármán line on July 19. The flight was air-launched from a modified Boeing B-52 Stratofortress support plane over Smith Ranch Dry Lake, Nevada, United States. Walker piloted the X-15 to an altitude of 107.96 km and remained weightless for approximately five minutes.
Just as the X-15 is an exemplar of a successful modern design, a birch-bark canoe is an exemplar of a successful ancient design:
When Marvin DeFoe builds a canoe by hand he often thinks of his father and seven sisters.
“My dad always told us we’re all in the same canoe and what we need to learn is how to paddle together so we can get to where we’re going,” said DeFoe, a tribal elder with the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa.
DeFoe spent three weeks this summer doing what he has done many times over the past 50 years. The master canoe builder used birch bark, white cedar and jack pine roots to build a canoe from scratch.
[…]
Building the canoe is part of a program at the Madeline Island Museum called “Canoe Journeys,” which aims to honor and remember the 1854 Treaty of La Pointe — an agreement that stopped the removal of Ojibwe people from the area and secured permanent homelands for the tribes.
DeFoe built the canoe in front of an audience, while telling stories of Ojibwe people and the art of canoe building. At times people sang, played instruments and talked about the struggle that Ojibwe people went through to remain in the Great Lakes.
The canoe is set to take its maiden voyage on Saturday, Aug. 22. DeFoe anticipates watching the canoe float on the water for the first time.
“I hope that it tells a story of all of us,” he told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” “Don’t matter if you’re Indigenous or not. To be cognizant, to be mindful that we’re all in the same canoe, paddling together.”
See Mackenzie Krumme, Watch Red Cliff elder build birch bark canoe the way his ancestors did centuries ago, Wisconsin Public Radio, August 20, 2026.
There is ingenuity, even beauty, in both these ancient and modern designs.
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Forthcoming topics (in no particular order): Development in Downtown Whitewater (Follow-Up), the Value of a UW-Whitewater Education, A New Ethics Ordinance, Polling Places in the City (Further Considerations), and Steps for a Public Interest Campaign.
Europe’s warmer seas are appealing to swimmers – but what lies beneath is ‘alarming’, study warns: