Mae West, a great and dirty writer as well as a stage and screen icon, is visited by Dick Cavett on a Hollywood backlot in 1976.

If you thought Google Glass couldn’t get any more annoying, how about listening to Noam Chomsky complain about Google Glass? That’s the sound of my brain exploding.

From a fascinating, brief portrait by Andrew E. Kramer of the New York Times of a space-age city in decline, a remnant of the collapsed Soviet Union that maintains vital importance as one of two active space-launch sites in the world:

“Baikonur, in remote western Kazakhstan, was once the pride of the Soviet Union, the home of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the launching site of Sputnik, the dog Laika and the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. But today, nomadic herders from the nearby steppe are moving into abandoned buildings.

That is just one of the signs of the city’s long fade into the sunset of post-Soviet social and economic problems, which are all the more remarkable given that much of the world, including the United States, still relies on Baikonur for manned space launchings. The only other site for such liftoffs is in Jiuquan, in the Gobi Desert in China.

‘It’s painful for me to think of my town,’ Anna Khodakovskaya, the editor of the local newspaper, said of its glum state. The first cellphones appeared here in 2004; the first M.R.I. machine in 2011. ‘We are not ahead of the planet in anything but space,’ she said.”

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A video about Laika, the first animal to orbit Earth. She did not have a happy return like Ham the AstroChimp.

Swiss researchers have produced a robot that runs like a cat, to be used in rescue missions.

Roman Polanski–wanted, desired and, now, Skyped. This April 2013 interview took place between the fugitive director and the Roxie Theater in San Francisco. In 1997, while vacationing in Paris, I was seated in a cinema on the Champs-Élysées waiting for the beginning of Howard Stern’s Private Parts. Who walked in just as the credits were about to start but Roman Polanski and an angelic-looking blond, who was either a woman who looked like a girl or a girl who looked like a woman. Polanski laughed aloud during the scene about Howard’s Bergman-esque college film.

Baba-booey.

Time-shifting, largely an excellent thing, all began with the simple VHS vs. Betamax format war. From an Ars Technica article about the most disruptive recent technologies:

“Time-shifting (or why Jack Valenti is spinning in his grave)

Time-shifting content has been with us for a long time, driving the media industry nuts ever since the invention of the video cassette recorder. In 1982, Jack Valenti—then president of the Motion Picture Association of America—testified before Congress, saying, ‘The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.’ (See the Ars series on TV for more Valenti rage.)

But Betamax and VHS were just the beginning. It was a shaky beginning at that, as I can tell you firsthand from years of prying my kids’ mangled copy of half a season’s worth of Power Rangers episodes out of the maw of a VCR tape slot. When hard drives were eventually married to video recording, it did a lot more than just change the recording mechanism. Digital recording moved time-shifting of TV and other content off tapes, virtualizing and outsourcing the recording process to the point that broadcast times are almost irrelevant.

So in some ways, Jack Valenti was right about time-shifting, or at least prescient. The virtualization of broadcast content—its separation from the tyranny of network time slots and from recording media itself—has changed the acts of viewing and listening. It’s accelerated the disintegration of network television and hastened the creation of new media outlets made purely for the Internet. If it weren’t for the move from analog VCR to bits on a disk, things like Netflix’s on-demand service and its all-at-once release of the original series House of Cards would never have happened.”

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Time-shifting in 1977:

Gilda Radner with a live version of “Let’s Talk Dirty to the Animals.”

Steve Wozniak explaining, among other things, how putting information in the cloud is surrendering your rights.

Aga Khan visting Los Alamos in 1959.

Aga Khan IV, spiritual leader and one of the world’s richest royals, cut quite a cosmopolitan, dashing figure in his younger days, marrying models, skiing competitively, racing horses and posing for photo ops. Here’s a hypnotic documentary about him from 1964.

The dream of dying by telephone-wire decapitation lives on in Czechoslovakia. Information about a flying bicycle from Digital Trends: “The radio-controlled flight was made possible by the bicycle’s six battery-powered propellors, which makes the contraption look a bit like an enormous RC quadcopter. Though the bicycle looked pretty stable during its flight, its large propellors make it look cumbersome to ride and its size means such a bike would face limitations as to where it could go, especially in urban areas. And then there’s all those aforementioned overhead hazards to think about.

Speaking about the project to local news site Ceske Noviny, project participant Ales Kobylik said, ‘Our main motivation in working on the project was neither profit nor commercial interest, but the fulfillment of our boyish dreams.’

The team said they hope to stick a real life human in the saddle this fall, doing away with the need for a radio controller.”