Moonbows do exist, and not only at Cumberland Falls. (Jearl D. Walker mentions them in his Flying Circus of Physics). But that photo that appears as a thumbnail in your post is labeled in the linked article as a photo of the Moonbow — right! It seems that they have an awful bright moon out at Cumberland falls, 'cause it even turns the sky blue.
In all fairness, it’s not a trivial thing to capture something as dim as a moonbow with a camera, but a rainbow is easier.
That’s a pretty horrifying story. Not just the default belief in the infallibility of the software, but the lying of the post office to each of the accused subpostmasters (“no, we’ve had no reports of problems with this software by anyone other than you”). Seems like the wrong people went to jail.
I see the US military is testing drone supply gliders. Each one can deliver over 500KG, so making an amusement park ride out of them is not out of the question.
Military gliders have been in use for decades:
I guess the natural evolution for cargo gliders was to take the pilot out, reducing human risk in hostile environments.
Military gliders have been way cool for decades.
Funny thing about gliders is that I can’t think of a single war film that features them NOT crashing and injuring/killing their occupants.
Sahara desert is only about 25% traditional desert with lots of sand.
My memory might be playing me false, but I thought there were gliders in The Longest Day (1962) that didn’t crash.
Or landing way, way off target leaving their troops lost and ineffective.
I just learned that King Kong premiered on New York TV in March of 1955 on station WOR, They ran it every day for a solid week, several times a day, for a total of 16 showings. It outdrew the prime-time shows on the network stations, including Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life, and Bishop Fulton J. Sheen’s talks.
This brought up several thoughts:
1.) I wonder if this is what persuaded Universal and Screen Gems to put together their Shock! package of (mostly) Universal horror films from the 1930s and 1940s for syndicated television in October 1957, and the subsequent Son of Shock! package in 1958. It was this flood of monster movies that caused the wave of “monster culture” in the 1960s that gave us all those Aurora Monster Model kits, the monster paint-by-number kits, posters, and other such memorabilia. The magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland and its many imitators and so forth. All because King Kong blew away the competition over two decades after it had been made.
2.) I’m not surprised to learn about this 1955 broadcast (done before most of us here at the SDMB were born), although it is a little earlier than I thought. Nevertheless, I know that Son of Kong was broadcast before 1960 – it was the first thing I recall seeing on TV. I’ll bet they either bought the three “ape movies” King Kong, Son of Kong, and Mighty Joe Young as a package deal, or else bought the latter two shortly after Kong, because WOR TV (which actually broadcasts out of Secaucus, New Jersey) used to run all three a LOT. In fact, they often ran them more than once in succession, much as many cable stations now do with big releases that they recently acquired. So I can believe them running Kong back to back that week in 1955. I recall seeing all three movies on WOR – they ran them on “Million Dollar Movie” (which opened to the theme from Gone with the Wind, although I wouldn’t know that for years). Later on, starting sometime in the 1970s, WOR would run all three Big Ape Films back to back on Thanksgiving Day every year, because it was the best they had to compete with the parades and football games.
I didn’t know that story about the frequent airing of King Kong. That’s a cool theory about the spark that started the 50s/60s Horror craze. The story I always heard is that local stations could extend their operating hours at little cost by airing public domain Horror films. Universal had a huge library of Horror films that were just sitting on the shelf and were able to sell them cheap to those stations just when the public domain stuff was starting to run out.
ETA - Vampira was already on the air in LA before the WOR broadcasts, so there was already some of the Horror craze in the ether.
But the Universal Horror films weren’t public domain, and they weren’t free. You can read about the Shock! package in many places. It even has its own Wikipedia page.
it’s true that the networks sought to bring in more revenue qith the horror movies, but they still had to pay for them. They were a good bargain, though – sough-after and popular films for lower than new movies would cost.
as for Vampira, I wondered for a long time exactly which movies she showed – she was on in 1954-55. That’s when (or even before) most of the bad monster movies I’m familiar with were even made. So what was she showing?
You can find lists of her broadcasts – they were mainly old poverty-row crime dramas and a few horror films, like Revenge of the Zombies and The Flying Serpent So, to a large degree, the Horror Host preceded the showing of Horror Films.
Here’s a listing of the movies she showed:
I noted that in my post. They were cheap, though, and were a good substitute for the public domain films that filled those time slots before the Universal packages were available. They could only show Revenge of the Zombies so many times. Cheap Universal fare became available just as the public domain films were getting to the point of being aired too frequently.
A penguin’s tongue has backward-pointing bristles on it to help it hold onto food.
New numbers seem to indicate that about 10% of young Americans are Gay (however you define that). I am eager to see if this report stands up.
A hummingbird’s tongue is downright bizarre. It’s a pair of keratinous ribbons, forked at the tip, that spontaneously curl to form tubes that capture nectar just before the tongue is retracted. On top of that, it’s so long that when it’s retracted, it spirals around the birds skull, all the way around its eye sockets.
TIL that canola oil comes from rapeseed:
It’s a particular variety that is low in erucic acid, and was originally bred in Canada. The name takes “can” from “Canada” and “OLA” meaning “oil, low acid.”
I also learned that rapeseed shares etymological roots not with rape, but with rapum, a latin reference to turnips, with which it also shares phylogenetic roots.
YouTube has an eight-hour clip of CBS Radio reporting on the D-Day landing. The accents alone are worth your time.
And that is growing wild in my Colorado back yard.
I recently stumbled across the fact that Henry Ford was pretty famously dumb.
Ford had sued the Chicago Tribune for libel after they branded him an ignorant anarchist.
While testifying, he demonstrated a quite shocking lack of what was considered common knowledge.
For example, he thought that the American Revolution occurred in 1812, that Benedict Arnold was a writer, and claimed that he had voted only once in his life: for James A. Garfield, even though Ford wasn’t old enough to vote in 1880. He also struggled reading papers presented to him, but blamed his need for his glasses.
The transcripts became popular reading. But, it didn’t necessarily hurt him, as it reinforced the idea that the Ford was a car for the common man. And Ford won the lawsuit.
He was awarded 6 cents.