Launching Ceremony Quotes

The voice welling up out of this little man is terrific, Harry had noticed it at the house, but here, in the nearly empty church, echoing off the walnut knobs and memorial plaques and high arched rafters, beneath the tall central window of Jesus taking off into the sky with a pack of pastel apostles for a launching pad, the timbre is doubled, richer, with a rounded sorrowful something Rabbit hadn't noticed hitherto, gathering and pressing the straggle of guests into a congregation, subduing any fear that this ceremony might be a farce. Laugh at ministers all you want, they have the words we need to hear, the ones the dead have spoken.

It was odd to think that he himself had once been on the threshold of that kind of life and that he had thrown it all away, as it were, to go out to Africa and study the ways of a so-called primitive tribe. For really, when one came to consider it, what could be more primitive than the rigid ceremonial of launching a debutante on the marriage market?

Make your parting a ceremony to launch them on a new journey.

Ahwahnee has hosted dozens of celebrities, including Queen Elizabeth, Eleanor Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy (who arrived via helicopter). Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, and Judy Garland stayed here while filming The Long, Long Trailer, as did William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy while filming Star Trek IV. Robert Redford worked at the Ahwahnee before launching his film career, and Steve Jobs was married on the back lawn in a Buddhist ceremony.

were held with CEOs, and a launching ceremony of a team led by public organizations to jointly monitor and prevent violations of the public interest was held on

Apple may not do customer research to decide what products to make, but it absolutely pays attention to how customers use its products. So the marketing team working on the iMovie HD release scheduled for Macworld, on January 11, 2005, decided to shoot a wedding. The ceremony it filmed was gorgeous: a sophisticated, candlelit affair at the Officers’ Club of San Francisco’s Presidio. The bride was an Apple employee, and the wedding was real. There was one problem with the footage, however. Steve Jobs didn’t like it. He watched it the week before Christmas, recalled Alessandra Ghini, the marketing executive managing the launch of iLife. Jobs declared that the San Francisco wedding didn’t capture the right atmosphere to demonstrate what amateurs could do with iMovie. “He told us he wanted a wedding on the beach, in Hawaii, or some tropical location,” said Ghini. “We had a few weeks to find a wedding on a beach and to get it shot, edited, and approved by Steve. The tight time frame allowed for no margin for error.” With time short and money effectively no object, the team went into action. It contacted Los Angeles talent agencies as well as hotels in Hawaii to learn if they knew of any weddings planned—preferably featuring an attractive bride and groom—over the New Year’s holiday. They hit pay dirt in Hollywood: A gorgeous agency client and her attractive fiancé were in fact planning to wed on Maui during the holiday. Apple offered to pay for the bride’s flowers, to film the wedding, and to provide the couple with a video. In return, Apple wanted rights for up to a minute’s worth of footage of its choosing.

Other than showing up in white tie and tails for the lavish awards ceremonies—the event is so fancy that even the traffic cops outside wear tuxedos, and the sterling silver laid out for the ensuing banquet is never used for any other function—a Nobel laureate’s only unavoidable duty during prize week is to deliver a lecture. Jack Kilby’s Nobel lecture in physics took place in a classically Scandinavian lecture hall, all blond wood and sleek modern furniture, on the campus of Stockholm University. Jack was introduced by a Swedish physicist who noted that “Dr. Kilby’s” invention had launched the global digital revolution, making possible calculators, computers, digital cameras, pacemakers, the Internet, etc., etc. Naturally, Jack wasn’t going to let that go unanswered. “When I hear that kind of thing,” he said, “it reminds me of what the beaver told the rabbit as they stood at the base of Hoover Dam: ‘No, I didn’t build it myself, but it’s based on an idea of mine.’” Everybody liked that joke, so Jack quickly added that he had borrowed the story from Charles H. Townes, an American who won the physics prize in 1964.

For the launch ceremony, there was no beribboned champagne bottle to smash against the bow and no titled dowager to pronounce “I name this ship Titanic.” That was not how White Star did things. Instead, at five minutes past noon, a rocket was fired into the air, followed by two others, and then the nearly 26,000-ton hull began to slide into the River Lagan to cheers and the blowing of tug whistles.

In the teeming crowd gathered for a ceremony outside Las Vegas on the afternoon of September 17, 1930, there must have been quite a few people hoping to see the guest of honor look ridiculous. They were not disappointed. Interior Secretary Ray Lyman Wilbur had come west for the formal launch of the Boulder Canyon Project. His role in the ritual was to drive a spike of Nevada-mined silver into a tie at the spot where the Union Pacific’s Salt Lake-Los Angeles trunk line was to branch off toward the future site of Boulder City, which was to be the staging point for the project and the hometown for its workers and their families.