Those of you who read this blog regularly may remember my photos and thoughts about my voyages over the years on The Ventura, a 1919 hunting yacht refurbished and owned by Captain Pat Harris. I’ve enjoyed a dozen or more harbor cruises on his beautiful single-masted sailboat. And my friends Kathryn and Jeff got married on The Ventura a couple of weeks ago. Captain Pat officiated.

I’m a big fan of the New York Times multimedia series called One in Eight Million, which profiles the fascinating characters who populate this city of 8 million inhabitants. Last week, I was happy to see a familiar face among them. Captain Pat was profiled with great photos by Todd Heisler.

Last Tuesday, I got up before dawn to arrive at NASA to shoot the crews moving the space shuttle Atlantis from a hangar to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) where it would be fitted to the external tank and solid rocket boosters in advance of a November launch.

As the sun rose and the air heated up on an unseasonably hot October morning, the shuttle rolled along at a snail’s pace, on top of a specially designed truck.

Dozens of people were there to watch the roll over, and their enthusiasm was infectious. To launch a shuttle, it takes teams of people to handle everything from the mission and payload, to the tiles that protect the vehicle from extreme heat on re-entry. And folks from all the various elements of the mission came to watch this journey of a hundred yards.

Some held banners for photos in front of the orbiter as it inched toward the VAB.

Inside the VAB, the shuttle is fitted into a harness and lifted off the truck.

Cranes, operated from a booth more than 400 feet above the VAB floor, will lift the shuttle up 16 stories and over to the waiting tank and booster assembly.

I was there to interview the crane operator in the VAB. That story releases Friday, when I’ll tell you all about it.

Every year, when the United Nations General Assembly meets in New York, and heads of state buzz around the city in black cars and helicopters, two things are certain: New Yorkers will grouse about street closings on the east side of midtown Manhattan as a consequence of heightened security; and world leaders will make their rounds among the major journalistic organizations in the nation’s media capital to get some face time in the news.

This week, TIME reporters and editors were fortunate to have exclusive interviews with former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan (who will be TIME’s 10 Questions interviewee in next week’s edition), Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi and Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

On Thursday morning, the day after Gaddafi’s rambling, 90-minute diatribe in front of the GA, I accompanied two of TIME’s top editors to meet the man his handlers said was to be referred to as “brother leader.” That’s easier to say out loud than King of Kings, which is the former Libyan army officer’s latest self-proclaimed moniker. (I have long wondered why this man, who has been in power since a 1969 coup when he was an army captain, has remained a colonel and never promoted himself to general.)

His staff was curious about the video camera for a magazine interview, which is pretty common. People still don’t grasp that there is practically no such thing as a print-only publication anymore. Perceptions are slowly changing. There was a Libyan TV crew there as well, documenting the Brother Leader’s every meeting. So they allowed me to shoot — at least for a few minutes. Six minutes into the interview, one of brother-leader Gaddafi’s top handlers began pointing to his watch. A few minutes later, Gaddafi said, in English, “you must stop.” I stalled to try to have a conversation about continuing, but the handlers began unplugging the audio cables from my camera and pushing me away from the scene. The editors were allowed to continue their interview, and Gaddafi became more relaxed — now that the cameras were gone — and they chatted for a half-hour longer.

Later that afternoon, Kofi Annan was warm and gracious, and had come to our offices to do the 10 Questions interview in a three-camera shoot.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had his own three-camera shoot at hotel meeting on Friday morning. Iranian state-run TV was there and had set up lights and cameras for his audience with half a dozen editors and reporters from TIME as well as the managing editor of FORTUNE. I arrived and placed my camera at the end of one of two long tables toward which the president would face from the far end.

As you likely already know, Friday was an interesting day for Iran. As the meeting with TIME was happening, President Obama, along with his counterparts from France and the UK, announced the discovery of a secret nuclear enrichment facility about 100 miles from Tehran. TIME editor Rick Stengel asked Ahmadinejad to comment about Obama’s revelation, and the Iranian president seemed a bit surprised — and a little amused — at the news. As reported on TIME.com yesterday, he basically told Obama to back off. The details unfolded throughout the rest of the day — the U-S and its allies had known about the facility for quite some time; Obama’s team wanted to have solid confirmation of  intelligence reports before going public; and Ahmadinejad continued to say it’s none of America’s business and Iran is cooperating with the inspectors of the International Atomic Energy Agency. It makes for fascinating prologue to planned talks between diplomats from the U-S and Iran, that are set to begin next week.

Oh, and Ahmadinejad isn’t as short as I thought he was.

Been a busy week at the “things that move and make noise” department at TIME.com. Producer Caitlin Thompson and host Katherine Lanpher continue to create an informative and engaging financial toolkit podcast every week. This week, TIME columnist Justin Fox and reporter Barbara Kiviat joined Katherine this week to discuss the week’s business news. The main topic is the lessons from Lehman Bros., a year after the collapse of that financial titan.

David Clair is getting his groove on, and he’s on a roll. He’s a month and a half into his Weekly Acoustic News series, and on nine-nineteen-two-thousand-nine he is seeing Biblical signs in the week’s news.

This past week, Ze Frank took on the rash of disrespectful acts in the news recently.

Ron Paul answered viewer questions.

And I’ve finished the last two of the four stories I shot at Burning Man. Barbara Traub’s photos from 1994 show a more austere Burning Man, in the days when the participants numbered in the hundreds, not the tens of thousands, and the Man himself, stood directly on the desert floor, not on a giant, decorated pedestal. I added her to the series of pieces on iconic photos.

And one of the most prominent art pieces at this year’s event was the Raygun Gothic Rocketship, a forty foot-tall metallic rocket in a retro design out of 1930s sci-fi serials like Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. I spoke to one of the artists.

Here’s the major opus from Black Rock City, newly posted on TIME.com. After chatting with Burning Man executive director Larry Harvey, I gleaned 5 things Burning Man accomplishes every year that other cities might try. Things like: getting cars out of downtown areas and creating pedestrian space; making people more responsible to pick up after themselves; promoting virtue, even if you have to shame people into it; rethinking commerce; and supporting artists.

Of course it’s a lot easier when your city is made from scratch every year and is only inhabited for a week.

Still, food for thought.

Here’s me, all dusty, trying to shoot during a sand storm at Burning Man (photo by Barbara Traub)

And below are shots of me with Dusty, my hobby horse, crafted with loving care by the amazing Ann Wood and named after my father’s old horse.

The horse/camera was a disarming ploy at Burning Man, where the participants are wary of the media and weary of all the cameras that cover this annual festival of craziness in the desert each year.

But how could you be angry at such a sweet little horse? Talk to the horsey!

The beautiful handiwork of the delightful and talented Ann Wood, will be put to work later this week. I’ll explain how later.

A collaboration with TIME reporter Nancy Gibbs:

I’m pleased and proud to announce the redesign of TIME’s video player. It’s beautifully rendered and all about serendipity (the principle by which I govern my own life). Have a look and tell me what you think. Today is also the debut of David Clair’s Weekly Acoustic News, a feature where Dave has challenged himself to write an original song every week based on news events. We’ll run it as a weekly feature for as long as Dave can last. On facebook this morning he called it “definitely an example of giving someone enough rope to hang themselves with.”

Enjoy it here:

Today on TIME.com, we created a video piece from the photographs of Elliott Landy, who was asked by one of the Woodstock Festival organizers if he wanted to take photos at the event. “It was one of the most important ‘yesses’ I ever said,” Landy says. The rest is Woodstock history. The iconic images he took are in a 7-minute piece the incorporates Landy’s thoughts, sound from the event and music that evokes the spirit of the era.

Speaking of music and spirit, the NYTimes has a Last Word video with Les Paul, the great entertainer, guitar player and inventor, who for many years held court on Monday nights at the Iridium in New York. He died yesterday at the age of 94. Matt Orr produced the video interview with Paul, who sat down with him and reporter Tim Wiener last year. You can watch it here.

I had the pleasure of meeting Les Paul a few years before, when he was a young man of 90. He had just been nominated for another Grammy award, so I met him at the Iridium and we chatted for a while. He is the the only grown man in recent memory who asked me to pull his finger, which I did willingly. He wanted to show me the effects arthritis had had on his fingers, where the joints had fused. Because his fingers were so different, he had to learn how to play guitar all over again at an advanced age.

Paul was quite a spirit, quite an inventive mind, and quite mischievous. When a teenage boy in the front row snapped a picture at the Iridium show, Paul lifted an arthritic middle finger, flipping the kid the bird while gooking for the camera. The audience howled. Would love to have the picture that kid took now.

The piece I did in 2006 is here.