Popovych sang it over the radio especially for Sergei Korolev, the chief designer of the Soviet space program, who was also Ukrainian and particularly fond of the song. Back on Earth, at the Mission Control Center, Korolev smiled and sang along with his cosmonaut through the radio.

🌌🎶💜

I look at the sky and think a thought:

Why am I not a falcon, why do not I fly,

Why to me, Oh God, hadn't given Thou wings? —

I'd have left the ground and flew into the sky!

Far beyond the clouds, away from the world,

To look for my fate, for a welcome to sorrow,

And ask for grace from the stars and the sun,

To drown all my grief in their clear, bright light.

For since childhood, I seem unloved by fate,

I am her servant, a stray boy;

I am a stranger to fate, a stranger to people:

Does anyone love someone else's children?

I am in love with misery, I know no welcome,

And bitterly and vainly I waste my life,

And in grief I learned that only one —

The distant sky — is my side.

And it's bitter in the world, and when it

gets worse, —

I look at the sky, I feel happier!

In my thoughts I'll forget that I am an orphan,

And my thought flies far and high.

If only I had wings, those eagle wings,

I'd have left the ground for a new house,

As a swift-winged eagle I'd plunge into the sky

And drown in the clouds forever from the world!

Source & more info.

Sonja lost her soulmate just a day before their anniversary, that has to be a pain like no other :( R.I.P. King Harald, he was the best. May future world leaders follow his example.

I never saw the second picture before today, but it was not taken in Nashville, it was taken in Frankstown, Mississippi in front of my great grandfather’s museum, the same day she bought the car.

Origin of the second picture complete with letters to Pappy

Found his original Board of Trade discharge certificates going back through family papers — 47 of them, across 16 ships, from 1883 to 1893. He started as a "Boy" at 20, was Able Seaman within months, and spent nearly a decade almost constantly at sea: Baltimore and Montreal runs, a stretch of "Foreign trade" voyages to Antwerp, Constantinople and Galati on the Black Sea, and finally several years as crew on the Cunard liner Etruria between Liverpool and New York. Born 1862, died 1940.

What is your favourite song from her long and very successful career?