Dennis Wilson and hitchhiking are a bad combination.
Not only did The Beach Boys drummer pick up two of the Manson girls and take them home (thus hosting the whole “family” including Charlie during the summer of ‘68) but he also had to resort to hitchhiking himself when the Family trashed his car. One of the people who picked him up was future Tate/LaBianca killer Tex Watson who Wilson decided to introduce to his house guests.
Today I learned about Thad Roberts and his girlfriend Tiffany Fowler. They were interns at NASA back in 2002. They stole some Moon rocks, and then put them under their bed so that they could have “Sex on the Moon.”
Have you seen the RP FLIP?
I saw that a while back. That has to be VERY unnerving every time they do it.
Here’s the upending sequence (video cued to 2:02):
The crew have to keep their wits about them while it’s happening, but at 2:20 you can see that at least some of the equipment on the ship is on bearings so that it can stay upright at all times.
This video from its 50th anniversary (it’s now 60 years old!) shows some of the special interior features. Things like sinks and toilets present an interesting challenge:
Reguarding the flipping ship, I have to ask “why”
Can’t the research/readings be done with sensors dropped down on tethers or whatever?
Educated guess: not going vertical would result in a significant decrease in accuracy due to wave action.
From the Wikipedia article:
FLIP was originally built to support research into the fine-scale phase and amplitude fluctuations in undersea sound waves caused by thermal gradients and sloping ocean bottoms. This acoustic research was conducted as a portion of the Navy’s SUBROC program. Development started in January 1960 after a conversation between MPL researcher Frederick H. Fisher and MPL Director Fred N. Spiess regarding stability problems that Fisher was encountering when using the submarine USS Baya (SS-318) as a research platform. Spiess recalled a suggestion from Allyn Vine that upending a ship might make it more stable, based on Vine’s observation of a Navy mop floating in waves.
A conventional ship bobbing up and down on surface waves would make underwater sensors also bob up and down, causing problems with the kinds of measurements they want to make. By deriving its buoyancy from a long skinny hull dangling into the relatively calm waters 300 feet below the surface, it becomes much more stable than a conventional surface ship. Note also that it’s got a very narrow cross section area at the point at the surface of the ocean: if a wave or trough rolls by, the total volume of submerged hull (and therefore buoyancy) doesn’t change by very much percentage, so the ship doesn’t bob up and down much at all as waves roll by.
Very interesting about the bobbing up an down. Huh.
I might have gone to my HS prom if they had played…
That’s a great story!
Similarly, the Grateful Dead played a debutant ball in 1966.
Or The Cramps at the Napa State Mental Hospital (1978]
A few days ago I learned there’s a species of mushroom that grows underwater.
I also learned that there are 200 species of carnivorous mushrooms.
I’m still digesting that.
Great link, thanks
Wow, just think… If the original band hadn’t backed out, instead of having Jimmy Page playing at the prom, they could have had Creed Bratton!
The kid in the video to She’s a Beauty by The Tubes is Robert Arquette, who later appeared in Pulp Fiction as the guy hidden in the bathroom. He also appeared in The Wedding Singer as George, who could only sing Culture Club. He later transitioned to female, and was known as Alexis Arquette, before dying in 2016. Her siblings are David, Roseanna, and Patricia Arquette.
(Note: The pronouns I used were to indicate which gender she was considered at the time. In no way was any disrespect intended to her, or any other trans person)
Joe Biden was born closer to Lincoln’s assassination than to his own inaguration.
The original word for Bible, Biblia, is plural.
Not surprising as the Bible has many books.