Author: Uncle John

When Celebrities Meet Bad Guys

Former NBA rebounding champion (and all-around weirdo) Dennis Rodman recently made headlines during an ill-advised trip to North Korea to meet its “Supreme Leader,” Kim Jong-un.

While this sounds like a PR stunt or an article from The Onion, Rodman isn’t the first American celebrity to associate themselves with dubious elements. Here are a few more examples.

Patty Hearst. After being kidnapped by a far-left revolutionary group calling itself the “Symbionese Liberation Army,” newspaper heiress Patty Hearst succumbed to the effects of brainwashing and Stockholm Syndrome and willingly helped the SLA rob a San Francisco bank in 1974. Hearst was arrested in 1975 and imprisoned for two years before her sentence was commuted by President Carter.

Humans Have Left the Solar System (Or Not)

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And no, this is not about Charlie Sheen.

Ba DUMP.

Thank you, no really, thank you! Try the gharghmey!

Where were we? Oh yeah: Humans have left the Solar System! (Okay, they say “may have left,” but dangit, we’re not scientists, Jim!)

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft — the farthest-flung object created by human hands — has traveled beyond the sun’s sphere of influence and may even have left the solar system forever, a new study suggests.

On Aug. 25, 2012, 35 years after the Voyager 1 mission launched, Earth’s most distant spacecraft detected a sharp change in the intensity of fast-moving charged particles called cosmic rays, suggesting it had left the outermost reaches of the heliosphere marking the edge of the solar system.

“Within just a few days, the heliospheric intensity of trapped radiation decreased, and the cosmic ray intensity went up as you would expect if it exited the heliosphere,” said Bill Webber, professor emeritus of astronomy at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, in a statement.

Here’s a helpful graphic from NASA:

Well, sorta helpful. Nice colors, anyway.

And hold up – NASA says, Not so fast:

Habemus Papam! (That’s Latin for “We have a Pope!”)

This week 76-year-old Argentinean Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope on the fifth papal conclave vote. Fun fact: Bergoglio, now Pope Francis, is the first pontiff from Latin America. To mark the occasion, here are a few more bits of pope-culture.

Pope vote: The vote usually doesn’t take long. Over the past century, the conclave has never lasted more than five days. Longest on record: 33 months, spanning 1268 to 1271. An angry mob got so fed up with the indecision that they literally tore the roof off the building the college of cardinals was staying in and limited their meals to bread and water to inspire them to pick up the pace. (They picked Pope Gregory X, who reigned for four years.

The Great Hollywood Toilet Boycott

Celebrities: they’re just like us…except that they don’t use toilets.Matt Damon Toilet Boycott The great toilet boycott has started.

At least some of them. Movie star Matt Damon, who does a lot of humanitarian work on the side, co-founded Water.org, an organization devoted to bring clean water to the 2.5 billion people worldwide who lack sanitation, including 800 million who don’t have access to clean drinking water.

To promote his cause, last month Damon publicly announced that he would refuse to use a toilet until everyone in the world enjoys the same water privileges as first world nations.

Playing Music…With Ice

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Very cool!

A group of Siberian percussionists have become an internet hit with an exhibition of ice drumming on frozen Lake Baikal.

In minus 20C, they found by pure chance that the one metre thick ice has a distinctive and haunting rhythm all of its own, reported the Siberian Times.

‘I felt like we were playing on the drums that Nature has left out for us, alone under the sun on the frozen waters of the world’s most magnificent lake,’ said Irkutsk architect Natalya Vlasevskaya, 31, a mother-of-one and organiser of Etnobit percussion group.

• More here.

• Much more here:

Four Weird and Oz-Mazing ‘Oz’ Facts

Oz: the Great and Powerful crashes into movies theaters today harder than Dorothy’s farmhouse killed a witch. Brush up on your Oz knowledge before you go see the movie.

Wizard of Oz• Published in 1900, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is the first Oz book, and the basis for the classic 1939 film, but it’s not the first thing author L. Frank Baum ever published. Decades earlier, he was a chicken farmer, specializing in Hamburgs, a rare German breed. In 1886, Baum published a chicken raising guide called The Book of the Hamburgs: A Brief Treatise Upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs. (The Oz novels are much more entertaining.)

RIP Alvin Lee

Reuters:

British blues-rock guitarist Alvin Lee, who was best known for his performance with rock band Ten Years After at Woodstock in 1969, died on Wednesday at age 68, his family said.

“With great sadness we have to announce that Alvin unexpectedly passed away early this morning after unforeseen complications following a routine surgical procedure,” the family said in a statement on the singer’s official website.

Ten Years After—”Spoonful”:

Lost TV Pilots & The Nat King Cole Show

Our Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader TUNES INTO TV, which had been a reader request for many years, has turned out to be a darn big hit. An excerpt from a review over at Amazon:

Some great articles here, there are brief histories on NBC, CBS, ABC, and PBS. Inventors such as Smirnoff and Farnsworth are given their due, and since modern day tv wouldn’t be where it is without them, it’s wonderful that they’re mentioned.

I really enjoyed their piece about the 1968 showing of Heidi, and the uproar it caused. I would recommend this book, for any up and coming tv historians who need to get a quick overview of the medium. It helped refresh my memory, and introduced me to a few stories I didn’t know about.

JThree
Williston North Dakota

Why thank you, JThree, much obliged.

We thought you might like a look at what’s inside this book, so here are two excerpts for your reading pleasure.

First, some TV pilots you may not have heard about.

A Kick-in-the-Pants Note From a Fan

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Via private message on FaceBook, yesterday:

Oof, Carrie C., what a story. Sad—but with a happy ending! Hooray! It is so thoughtful of you to take the time to send us that note. We are truly touched. Thank you more than we can say – truly.

P.S. We asked Carrie exactly how she uses the Kindle to accommodate her impaired vision. We thought we’d pass it on in case it can help anybody else out there:

An Odd Holiday: National Public Sleeping Day

pillows for national sleeping dayGrab your pillows: National Public Sleeping Day is just around the corner, on February 28th. How to celebrate: take a nap in public. That’s it. The dubious, obscure holiday dates all the way back to 2011, and ever since bloggers and news organizations have used it to discuss sleep health issues, or use it as an excuse to run a cheeky photo of their boss napping while on the clock.

Meteorite Hits Frozen Lake? And a Joke

The Guardian has a great – and large – collection of videos, photos, and reports from news media and just regular folks on the wild meteor event that occurred in Russia last night. Including this shot:

Space.com says it was the largest meteor event in 100 years. The blast: it was more powrful than that produced by the nuclear weapon detonated by North Korea the other day. (Wow!)

NASA says, based on very preliminary data, the meteor was almost 50 feet in circumfrence:

Based on the duration of the event, it was a very shallow entry. It was larger than the meteor over Indonesia on Oct. 8, 2009. Measurements are still coming in, and a more precise measure of the energy may be available later. The size of the object before hitting the atmosphere was about 49 feet (15 meters) and had a mass of about 7,000 tons.

The meteor, which was about one-third the diameter of asteroid 2012 DA14, was brighter than the sun. Its trail was visible for about 30 seconds, so it was a grazing impact through the atmosphere.

But here’s what we want to note:

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