The population of the world, currently at about 7.8 billion, is expected to increase by 25% to 9.9 billion by 2050. The countries of sub-Saharan Africa, which currently show 43% of their population under the age of 15, are expected to fuel the growth.
While filming the TV series Cosmos, astronomer Carl Sagan emphasized the “b” when he spoke the word “billion,” to clearly distinguish it from “million.” Johnny Carson lampooned Sagan’s pronunciation when he impersonated Sagan in skits on The Tonight Show, during which he repeated the phrase “billions and billions.”
Although Sagan himself appears to have never said the phrase (and stated that he intentionally avoided it due to Carson’s skits), it became closely associated with him, and Sagan used the phrase as the title of his final book, “Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium.”
Actor Johnny Depp is now 58 years old. His movie debut was in the horror film A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) when he was just 21 years old.
The house in the film was at the fictitious address of:
1428 Elm Street, Springwood OH
The actual house is in LA:
1428 N Genesee Avenue, Los Angeles CA
This house is now for sale, for a cool $3.3M.
If you’re interested in bidding for it, bids are due by midnight on Halloween.
Map:
The opening of the Pixar movie Up was also set in Ohio. Although the Buckeye State is not mentioned by name, its distinctive pennant-shaped flag can be seen in the movie’s sole courtroom scene.
Pixar was created in 1979, known then as the Graphics Group, part of the Lucasfilm corporation. It was spun off in its own corporation in 1986 with funding from Steve Jobs, who became its majority shareholder. It was sold to Disney in 2006 at a valuation of 7.4 billion dollars.
Just for fun…
Some 1979 history events / trivia, from wiki. A trip down Memory Lane, if you will:
04 Jan: The State of Ohio agrees to pay $675,000 to families of the dead and injured in the Kent State shootings.
16 Jan: Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi flees Iran with his family, relocating to Egypt after a year of turmoil.
21 Jan: The Pittsburgh Steelers stake their claim as the NFL team of the 1970s by beating the Dallas Cowboys 35–31 at Miami’s Orange Bowl in Super Bowl XIII.
26 Jan: The Dukes of Hazzard debuts on CBS.
01 Feb: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returns to Tehran, Iran after nearly 15 years of exile.
– and –
Former Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious is released on bail after undergoing a 55-day forcible detoxification programme at Rikers Island prison. He suffers a heroin overdose and dies around midnight.
13 Feb: The Guardian Angels are formed in New York City as an unarmed organization of young crime fighters.
18 Feb: The Sahara Desert experiences snow for 30 minutes.
26 Feb: A total solar eclipse, the last visible from the continental United States until 2017, arcs over northern conterminous USA and southeastern Canada ending in Greenland.
01 Mar: Philips publicly demonstrate a prototype of an optical digital audio disc at a press conference in Eindhoven, Netherlands. (The first CD / DVD!)
05 Mar: Voyager 1 makes its closest approach to Jupiter at 172,000 miles.
19 Mar: C-SPAN, an American television channel focusing on government and public affairs, is launched.
22 Mar: The NHL votes to approve its merger with the WHA, effective in the fall. (Yes, our New England Whalers)
25 Mar: The first fully functional Space Shuttle orbiter, Columbia, is delivered to the Kennedy Space Center, to be prepared for its first launch.
26 Mar: In a ceremony at the White House, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel sign an Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty.
– and –
Michigan State University, led by Earvin “Magic” Johnson, defeats Larry Bird-led Indiana State 75–64 in the NCAA tournament championship game at Salt Lake City.
28 Mar: America’s most serious nuclear power plant accident occurs, at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania.
01 Apr: Dale Earnhardt Sr wins his first career NASCAR race at the 1979 Southeastern 500 at Bristol Motor Speedway. He would go on to win 76 races and 7 championships during his career.
22 Apr: The Albert Einstein Memorial is unveiled at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C.
09 May: A Unabomber bomb injures Northwestern University graduate student John Harris.
21 May: The Montreal Canadiens defeat the New York Rangers four games to one to win their fourth consecutive Stanley Cup.
25 May: American Airlines Flight 191: In Chicago, a DC-10 crashes during takeoff at O’Hare International Airport, killing all 271 on board and 2 people on the ground in the deadliest aviation accident in U.S. history.
– and –
Etan Patz, 6 years old, is kidnapped in New York. He is often referred to as the “Boy on the Milk Carton” and the investigation later sprouts into one of the most famous child abduction cases of all time.
27 May: Indianapolis 500: Rick Mears wins the race for the first time, and car owner Roger Penske for the second time.
01 Jun: The Seattle SuperSonics win the NBA Championship against the Washington Bullets.
12 Jun: Bryan Allen flies the man-powered Gossamer Albatross across the English Channel.
15 Jun: McDonald’s introduces the Happy Meal.
18 Jun: Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev sign the SALT II agreement in Vienna.
22 Jun: The Muppet Movie is released.
01 Jul: The Sony Walkman goes on sale for the first time in Japan.
11 Jul: NASA’s first orbiting space station, Skylab, begins falling back Earth as its orbit decays after more than six years.
15 Jul: Jimmy Carter addresses the nation in a televised speech talking about the “crisis of confidence in America today”; it would go on to be known as his “national malaise” speech.
16 Jul: Iraqi Vice President Saddam al-Tikriti, more commonly referred to in the Western press as “Saddam Hussein” accedes to the Presidency.
21 Jul: The disco music genre dominates and peaks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, with the first six spots (beginning with Donna Summer’s Bad Girls), and seven of the chart’s top ten songs ending that week.
10 Aug: Michael Jackson releases his breakthrough album Off the Wall.
17 Aug: Monty Python’s Life of Brian premieres in the United States.
01 Sep: Pioneer 11 becomes the first spacecraft to visit Saturn when it passes the planet at a distance of 13,000 miles.
07 Sep: ESPN is launched.
16 Sep: The Sugarhill Gang release Rapper’s Delight in the United States, the first rap single to become a Top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.
01 Oct: Pope John Paul II visits the United States, starting in Boston, then NYC, ending in Washington, DC.
14 Oct: National March for gay rights takes place in Washington, D.C., involving tens of thousands of people.
04 Nov: Iran hostage crisis begins: 500 Iranian radicals, mostly students, invade the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and take 90 hostages (53 of whom are American). They demand that the United States send the former Shah of Iran back to stand trial.
07 Nov: Senator Ted Kennedy announces that he will challenge President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination.
09 Nov: Nuclear false alarm: the NORAD computers and the Alternate National Military Command Center in Fort Ritchie, Maryland, detect an apparent massive Soviet nuclear strike.
30 Nov: The Wall, a rock opera and concept album by Pink Floyd, is first released.
03 Dec: The Who concert disaster: Eleven fans are killed during a crowd crush for unreserved seats before The Who rock concert at the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati.
06 Dec: The world premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture is held at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
23 Dec: The highest aerial tramway in Europe, the Klein Matterhorn, opens.
24 Dec: The Soviet Union covertly launches its invasion of Afghanistan.
Orson Welles provided the voiceover for the trailers for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, released in December 1979: STTMP_DivinePower_HD - YouTube
In the 1984 science fiction film The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Earth is threatened by the Red Lectroids, extradimensional aliens from Planet 10. The Red Lectroids had originally arrived in New Jersey in October, 1938, and their arrival was reported on, over the radio, by Orson Welles; in order to cover their tracks, the aliens forced Welles to later state that his reporting was a hoax, and was only a dramatization of the H.G. Wells story, The War of the Worlds.
Gideon Welles (July 1, 1802 – February 11, 1878), nicknamed “Father Neptune”, was the US Secretary of the Navy from 1861 to 1869, a cabinet post he was awarded after supporting Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election.
Two Navy destroyers were named for Welles:
USS Welles (DD-257) - launched in 1919, she did not see battle. In September 1940 the Royal Navy acquired her and she became the HMS Cameron. Three months later she suffered severe, irreparable battle damage. She served as a storage hulk and was sold for scrap in 1944.
and
USS Welles (DD-628) - launched in 1942, she helped escort battleships USS Iowa and New Jersey in the southwest Pacific. She saw battle in the western and southwestern Pacific, and earned eight battle stars. She was stricken in 1968 and sold for scrap in 1969.
During WWII, the US Navy had a total of 23 battleships. By 1995, there were just four left: the Missouri, Wisconsin, Iowa and New Jersey–all launched during World War II. All four of these were decommissioned during the 2000s, and currently the Navy has no battleships.
Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, and New Jersey were all Iowa-class battleships, the last battleships built for the U.S. Navy. Two more ships, the Illinois and the Kentucky, were laid down but never completed. Another 5 battleships, the Montana-class, were planned, but canceled in favor of aircraft carriers and amphibious warfare ships. The Montanas would have been large, heavily armed and armored, the largest, best-protected, and most heavily armed U.S. battleships ever.
Triple Divide Peak is located in the Lewis Range, part of the Rocky Mountains. The peak can be found in Glacier National Park in Montana. The summit of the peak is is the point where two of the principal continental divides in North America converge. Water that falls at the summit can flow to either of the Pacific, Atlantic, or Arctic Oceans.
The five massive Montana-class battleships, if built, would have been the first U.S. Navy battleships too wide to fit through the Panama Canal. Three of the ships were to have been named after coastal states: USS Maine, New Hampshire and Louisiana. Two were not: USS Montana, the class ship, and Ohio (unless you count Lake Erie, the shores of which are sometimes called “the North Coast”).
The Roe River in Montana is recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records as the world’s shortest river. The Roe flows 200 feet between Giant Springs and the Missouri River near Great Falls.
Hydrological springs are naturally occurring places where water flows from the aquifer to the surface. Some geologists claim that Florida may have the largest convergence of freshwater springs on earth, with over 700. Wakulla Springs, located just south of Tallahassee, is one of the world’s largest and deepest freshwater springs.
Wakulla Springs is a “first-magnitude" spring, which means it is among the largest of springs. First Magnitude springs are defined as springs that discharge water at a rate of at least 100 cubic per second. Florida has 27 first magnitude springs.
“Silver Springs” is a song by Fleetwood Mac, written by vocalist Stevie Nicks. Nicks took inspiration for the title of the song while traveling through Maryland, and seeing a highway sign for the city of Silver Spring; the song itself is about the end of her romantic relationship with her bandmate, Lindsey Buckingham.
The song was written and recorded for the band’s album Rumours, but was not included in the final album, though it wound up as the B-side for the release of the song “Go Your Own Way” (which, ironically, was written by Buckingham, about the breakup with Nicks).
Silver Springs FL was where the TV show Sea Hunt, starring Lloyd Bridges, was filmed. The show ran from 1958-1961. Silver Springs FL is also where the glass bottom boat was invented.
Lloyd Bridges (1913-1998) starred in a number of television series and also appeared in over 150 movies. He is the father of actors Jeff Bridges and Beau Bridges. He was twice nominated for the Emmy Award.
Late in his career, he appeared in a number of parody movies, including one of my all-time favorites, Airplane!
The 1980 parody film Airplane! was written and directed by Jerry Zucker, David Zucker, and Jim Abrahams, as a spoof of the disaster film genre, and films such as Airport, in particular.
The trio based their script, including the plot and characters, on the 1957 drama Zero Hour!. As they developed the script for their film, they realized that, because their parody script had remained so close to the original film, they might wind up in trouble for copyright infringement; they thus decided to buy rights to do a “remake” of Zero Hour!, for which they paid $2500.