Sperm can remain viable in the female reproductive system for 5 days!
Sold at their concerts?
https://www.zazzle.com/salad_how_many_vegetables_had_to_die_to_make_u_t_shirt-235879626118804751
Charles Darwin wrote an entire book about worms:
Queen Liz’s husband Philip was in Tokyo Bay when Japan surrendered in 1945. He was in the royal navy at the time . They married in 47 and she became queen in 52. He will be 100 in June. He was born in Greece but left as a child and does not speak Greek.
The drum part for the theme song for Hogan’s Heroes was played by Bob Crane.
Huh. Well that will probably replace my current earworm which is Paradise by the Dashboard Lights. Haha, sorry.
Let’s hope, as I just read that he was hospitalized.
I knew about this because Stephen Jay Gould wrote a column about it.
It even made the cover of the colection containing it:
Before he died, the great Carl Sandburg recorded the classic worm camp song
Look at the shape of that Carl’s guitar. I’ve never seen one like that.
In 2014, activists held an open (guitar) carry event. Nice flag: “Don’t Shred on Me.”
Here’s some Prince Philip quotes.
I’m re-reading Jules Verne’s 1879 novel The Begum’s Millions (actually, The Begum’s 500 Million , Les Cinq cents millions de la Bégum in the original French), and it depicts the equivalent of a late 19th century Zoom meeting. Having just had a Zoom meeting last night, and with three coming up next week, I can relate
Three minutes it took them. For our meeting last night they allowed fifteen, and people were still straggling in afterwards.
It must have seemed the height of luxury and technology to be able to attend a meeting from home. People always see the upside, and ignore the down (like being forced to attend such meetings for hours).
Verne was describing something that was technically possible then, although most telephone systems would not be set up for it, and it would have been expensive.
Less than forty years later Bell Telephone actually was hosting such telephone conference calls, and not just across town, but across the country. There was an MIT coast-to-coadt “Telephone Banquet” celebrated in 1916:
https://alum.mit.edu/slice/1916-telephone-banquet-mits-early-teleconference
http://museum.mit.edu/150/58
Of course, there was no image. They were toying with the idea of simultaneous broadcasting of live images – there are several 19th century cartoons depicting such – and they knew how to do it by breaking down an image into what we would call pixels and sending them one at a time. They already had the equivalent of a FAX service even before they had voice over telephone, but it was a time-consuming process. They essentially lacked the technology to have the needed bandwidth. But I suppose you could always have posted an image of the speaker atop their telephone, if you really wanted to.
Today I learned that Roald Dahl, beloved children’s author, wrote the 1967 James Bond film You Only Live Twice.
I forgot to mention – the meeting lasted all of 18 minutes. Allowing for the 5 minute get-together time, the whole duration was less than half an hour. If Zoom meetings lasted no longer than half an hour – as in Verne’s utopia – people might not mind as much.
He wrote an article about the experience forPlayboy. It appeared in the June 1967 issue
If you like Dahl, check out his short stories for adults. His best known is “Lamb to the Slaughter,” which Alfred Hitchcock dramatized for his TV who (Hitchcock also did "The Man from the South). All his work is dark as night and very funny.
Roald Dahl probably, according to his neurologist friend, had acquired brain damage, with disinhibitation. He survived a serious airplane crash as a young man, and after that slept around a lot, and wrote children’s stories where crime pays, or evil people are ugly, or the leading character turns into a mouse – and stays that way.
And prior to the crash, he never showed any of the imaginative freedom that marks his work.
At the outbreak of World War II, there were a small number of U.S. B-17 bombers based in the Philippines. Some were destroyed in attacks on December 8th, but not all. As fighting intensified and newer bombers became available, those older planes were withdrawn from front line service. One of them was kept airworthy by replacing the tail with one from another aircraft. The plane was then named “The Swoose” after a character in a popular song who was half swan, and half goose. After that, it was selected by Captain Frank Kurtz to be the personal transport for the Deputy Commander of Allied Forces in Australia.
After the war, the plane was scheduled to be smelted down, but (now) Colonel Kurtz persuaded the city of Los Angeles to save the plane as a war memorial. When no suitable location was found for it, the plane was donated to the National Air Museum (now the National Air and Space Museum) which stored it for many years. In 2007 it was traded to the National Museum of the United States Air Force to undergo restoration. It is the oldest B-17, and the only B-17D still in existence.
Colonel Kurtz named his daughter after the aircraft. She grew up to be an actress, Swoosie Kurtz.
A rather trivial one for me. I happened to read the Wikipedia article on the late character actor Victor Buono and I was shocked to see he was only forty-three when he died. I remember seeing him in various roles back in the sixties (like Batman and The Wild Wild West) and I never realized he was only in his twenties.
One of my mother’s favorites.
There was an entire TV anthology series of Dahl’s dark adult stories – Tales of the Unexpected. It was a British TV series, but it ran in syndication on American TV.
And it was hosted by Dahl himself!
That article says that Dahl also hosted the American series Way Out. I recall seeing the seies as a kid, but I don’t recall a host.