Immanuel Velikovsky’s theories about our planet’s history, which came into vogue during the 1970s, are catastrophist nonsense but a whole lot of fun if you recognize they’re fictional. Philip Kaufman realized this and used them to forward the plot of his excellent version of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, which was released in 1978, the year before the scientist died at age 84. Below is an amusing 1972 BBC doc about the Velikovsky phenomenon.
A 1950 Popular Science note about Velikovsky: “Astronomers at Harvard consider the sensational theory of Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky that the earth stood still a couple of times in Biblical days sheer nonsense.”
"Without you, Mom, that would not have been possible." (Image by Alvesgaspar.)
iso Birthmother
I was born April 7th 1955 at Meadowbrook Hospital in East Meadow.You named me Noreen Mary .You were single,22y/o,Irish,your mother deceased,Father left when you were 2, & lived in Levittown when I was born.You were unemployed at this time and my birthfather not in the picture.You wanted to keep me and came to visit me, you were trying to find a job and a place to live.You realized too much time had lapsed and you didn’t want me to grow up without a father as you did, I was relinquished in July of 1955.I was adopted by good parents who lived in Levittown at the same time you did,about a mile apart,I had a good life and I am a mother of a wonderful 29 y/o son.Without you Mom,that would not have been possible. I just can not imagine your pain and what you suffered back then. I just wanted to thank you, tell you HAPPY MOTHERS DAY and that I love you so very much. And so does your grandson Matt.I think of you everyday,I pray that you are well and happy and have had a good life. And I know if we never meet on earth,we will meet in Heaven someday. I love you Mom! Forever your daughter–Noreen
"His clothes differed in no respect from a 'wharf-rat's,' except that they were raggeder."
The nineteenth-century Pennsylvania-born preacher and orator Henry Clay Dean (not to be confused with the statesman Henry Clay) lived in roughly the same time frame as Horatio Alger, which made sense, since Dean was Algeresque, a poor and ragged lad who made his way in the world, though he never lost the raggedness.
Mark Twain, another contemporary, had this to say about Dean: “He began life poor and without education. But he educated himself – on the curbstones of Keokuk. He would sit down on a curbstone with his book, careless or unconscious of the clatter of commerce and the tramp of the passing crowds, and bury himself in his studies by the hour, never changing his position except to draw in his knees now and then to let a dray pass unobstructed; and when his book was finished, its contents, however abstruse, had been burned into his memory, and were his permanent possession. In this way he acquired a vast hoard of all sorts of learning, and had it pigeonholed in his head where he could put his intellectual hand on it whenever it was wanted. His clothes differed in no respect from a ‘wharf-rat’s,’ except that they were raggeder, more ill-assorted and inharmonious (and therefore more extravagantly picturesque), and several layers dirtier.”
"He was a man who put on a clean shirt every New Year's Day and didn't take it off until the 31st of December."
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle took notice of Dean’s death with an article in its February 10, 1887 edition. An excerpt:
“Who was Henry Clay Dean? According to a legend familiar in every newspaper office at the mighty West he was a man who put on a clean shirt every New Year’s Day and didn’t take it off until the 31st of December. But that does not fully describe him. Mr. Dean had a useful and honorable career. In the first place he was a preacher of the Gospel and expounded the simple and beautiful truths of the Sermon on the Mount with an unction never surpassed. It was said of him by a Chicago admirer that his fervid eloquence ‘was enough to make the pin feathers of an heretical rooster quiver.’ In the second place he was a political orator whose addresses from the stump often recalled the extemporary speeches of Tom Benton. In the third place he was chaplain of the United States Senate at a time when Senators feared God more than they do to-day, and when their hearts and minds afforded a richer soil for the seeds of divine knowledge. Lastly, Mr. Dean was a Democrat, pure and undefiled–one of the ‘old timers,’ who believed that although Noah was justified in taking a Republican and Democrat into the ark, he ought to have thrown the former overboard before the waters subsided. He was a good man and true. Peace to his ashes.”
The opening of “Mind vs. Machine,” Brian Christian’s recent Atlantic article about the author’s particpation in the Turing Test, an annual event in which computers compete to exhibit intelligent behavior that can pass for human:
“BRIGHTON, ENGLAND, SEPTEMBER 2009. I wake up in a hotel room 5,000 miles from my home in Seattle. After breakfast, I step out into the salty air and walk the coastline of the country that invented my language, though I find I can’t understand a good portion of the signs I pass on my way—LET AGREED, one says, prominently, in large print, and it means nothing to me.
I pause, and stare dumbly at the sea for a moment, parsing and reparsing the sign. Normally these kinds of linguistic curiosities and cultural gaps intrigue me; today, though, they are mostly a cause for concern. In two hours, I will sit down at a computer and have a series of five-minute instant-message chats with several strangers. At the other end of these chats will be a psychologist, a linguist, a computer scientist, and the host of a popular British technology show. Together they form a judging panel, evaluating my ability to do one of the strangest things I’ve ever been asked to do.
I must convince them that I’m human.
Fortunately, I am human; unfortunately, it’s not clear how much that will help.” (Thanks to The Electric Typewriter.)
Retro-Futurist expert Matt Novak uses his amazingPaleoFuturesite to catalog wild predictions from the past that never panned out. For instance: The article below from a 1937 San Antonio Light opined that advances in chemistry would make gigantic babies a reality in the near term. Sadly, that hasn’t happened. Not yet, anyhow. It seems like anything we dream, no matter how unlikely, can come true given enough time. (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)
"I went from working at a television station with a car and a place of my own to working at a pizza joint with no vehicle living w/my aunt " (Image by Axelv.)
T Shirts-all proceeds to fund college – $15 (NYC)
I created a Cafepress site in the hopes of raising enough money to go to college. Long story short-over two years ago I broke up w/my girlfriend and have regretted it ever since. I went from working at a television station with a car and a place of my own to working at a pizza joint with no vehicle living w/my aunt and then my sister. My ex, a brilliant musician who has been hurt her whole life, is still someone I care very deeply for. When we were together I always told her I wanted her to get out of the small pond she is in and let her talent shine. She has so much to offer and so much to experience. Years ago, she told me (in a fit of anger I will admit) that if I ever got the money to pay for her college tuition/living expenses, she’d go with me and get a degree in Music Business. I really feel it would help her take off with her career-find value to her life. I created the cafepress site because, well, because people don’t want to just give a stranger money because he claims he’ll use it for college–with this site, you buy T shirts, and I get 10% of the sale. I’m going to use it all to fund the degree. The idea is to come to her front door, holding a boquet of flowers and a money order for the amount of tuition that I raised and just say something beyond romantic, something about coming with the idiot who held on for these many years and let’s start a new life far away and look what I’ve done because what I believe you can do. At the very least, if she says no, I’ll use it to attend college myself. Obviously the break up still haunts me and going to college myself would at least give me a new start-after the depression and the lost jobs I just don’t want to feel like a loser anymore. Please buy some shirts and please tell ALL your friends to do the same–myspace, facebook, linked in, the guy on the street with hotdogs, any way possible to get everyone possible to buy a shirt! Thank You.
On this Kentucky Derby weekend, we look back more than three decades ago when Bluegrass State native Steve Cauthen collected record earnings in 1977 as a 17-year-old jockey and followed it up by winning the Triple Crown the next year astride Affirmed. Cauthen became an international sensation, featured in Peopleas well as Sports Illustrated. But he couldn’t maintain jockey weight as he continued growing and moved to England to compete for a few years, as that country’s jockeys ride at a heavier weight.
Cauthen and Affirmed triumph in 1978 at Churchill Downs:
From a 1977 SI issue in which Cauthen was crowned Sportsman of the Year: “It is not enough to marvel that at the age of 17 he has accomplished more in a year than any jockey in history. It is not enough that already there exists the mad school of thought that this little boy is the finest rider of all time. These are incredible things to ponder about someone so young, but somehow, as young as he is—and younger-looking still—the immensity of his achievement in 1977 cannot be properly understood until you stand in his high school and see the open country faces of the other children of Walton and realize that Steve Cauthen should be there among them still. He should be a senior in high school this day, hearing the bells and whiffing the smell.
And he would be…but for the coincidence of his size and his family background, but for the depth of his desire and some amazing gift of God that no one can comprehend.
Instead, almost at this very moment, several hundred miles away, when a bell rings, Steve Cauthen will burst from the starting gate at Aqueduct, bound to his horse in consummate harmony, seamless, one with the creature—a prodigy like none we have ever seen before, the leading money rider of any year, a fearless athlete, a resolute little doll-person, Sportsman of the Year, so very tiny, so very young, so very extraordinary and ageless in his grace at this one thing he does that he always calls ‘race riding.'”
Willie Mays, one of the five best players in baseball history, probably made many catches and throws as good as the one he made in the 1954 World Series on a fly ball by Vic Wertz. But on the grand stage of the Fall Classic, it became legend. Say hey.
Retronaut dug up this fun print ad for the first commercially successful laptop microcomputer, the 1981 Osborne 1.
From the ad copy: “The guy on the left has two file folders, a news magazine, and a sandwich. The guy on the right has the Osborne 1, a fully functional computer system in a portable package the size of a briefcase. Also in the case are the equiva;lent of 1600 typed pages. stored on floppy diskettes. The owner of the Osborne 1 is going to get more work done–and better work done with less time and with less effort.”
You hear the drumbeat from Tea Party activists and pandering politicians about how government is getting too much control of our lives, gaining too much power. Of course, the opposite is true. As technology continues personalizing and proliferating, government is going to have an increasingly harder time regulating business, communications and individuals. That implies both good and bad things. Personal liberties are paramount, but the ability to marshal the force of government is often crucial during crises.
In “City of Fear,” an excellent 2007 Vanity Fair article by the routinely great William Langewiesche, the writer looks at how a Brazilian prison gang used cell phones to coordinate the shutdown of a city, and what this implies for the future of central control in general. Subsequent uprisings in Middle Eastern countries have made this piece seem prophetic. The article’s opening:
“For seven days last May the city of São Paulo, Brazil, teetered on the edge of a feral zone where governments barely reach and countries lose their meaning. That zone is a wilderness inhabited already by large populations worldwide, but officially denied and rarely described. It is not a throwback to the Dark Ages, but an evolution toward something new—a companion to globalization, and an element in a fundamental reordering that may gradually render national boundaries obsolete. It is most obvious in the narco-lands of Colombia and Mexico, in the fractured swaths of Africa, in parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan, in much of Iraq. But it also exists beneath the surface in places where governments are believed to govern and countries still seem to be strong.”
••••••••••
William Langewiesche and Stephen Colbert discuss the spread of nukes:
From his 1992New York Times obituary: “Benny Hill, the English television comedian whose mischievous grin and cherubic looks somehow made him a master of double-entendre, British bawdy style, and ultimately gained him a kind of international cult status, was found dead last night at his home in southwest London. He was 67 years old.
While the cause of death was not determined, Mr. Hill’s chronic heart condition had been well publicized in the London newspapers. The police in Teddington, his hometown, discovered the body after neighbors grew concerned after not seeing Mr. Hill for two days, a spokeswoman for Scotland Yard said last night.
Mr. Hill’s humor, a cross between a leer from W. C. Fields and the naivete of Charlie Chaplin, with a large dose of the Keystone Kops thrown in, found a devoted audience in England, at least among those who confessed to having an appetite for his madcap sight gags and for the young women in skimpy outfits in most of his routines. Though he became a television star in England in the 1950’s, it was not until 1979, when a series of variety specials appeared as a half-hour series in the United States, that Mr. Hill gained worldwide acclaim.”
for sale are a home made pocket pussy. this product is home made and very effective and efficient. it is a good for masterbation or as a prank. product is new and unused.
"The curiosity was bagged for further use in the dime show."
Manhattan’s Grace Church has had some unusual eventsin its storied history, but the Grace Church in Providence, Rhode Island, had a strange one of its own in 1887. On February 6 of that year, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reprinted the following story about the house of worship from the Providence Journal:
“One of the early occupants of Grace Church on Sunday afternoon fit in in an unusual and surprising way, although common to its kind. When the janitor had about prepared the house of worship for the reception of the rector and the congregation he was startled by something aloft–a something that made his eyes open and caused wonder in his mind. There was a wide range, and a most propitious one, for the fancy of a sprightly monkey up in the high cornices, arches and the extensive organ loft that mark the architectural beauties of the edifice. The janitor was in a quandary. It was about church time, just before 10:30, when the morning service is celebrated by Rev. Dr. Greer.
The lively brute would not ‘come down,’ as he was commanded, and he took advantage of his short spell of liberty. He swung from one arch to the next, and when his would be captor had bestirred himself and succeeded to frightening the fugitive from one place to another, a quick, silent contemplation of the scene below would follow. The janitor grew angry as the minutes flew by and the time was approaching for the hour of worship. Then he bethought himself of the police, and he resolved to call for an officer. That was done and more than one came. That janitor was fully confident that it would take more men and a good deal of coaxing to rid the church of the unwelcome visitor before Dr. Greer opened morning prayer.
"Constable Handy proposed that he should try his skill at marksmanship right in Grace Church and with the elusive monkey for a target, but the police officers suggested cookies and coaxing."
The fugitive curiosity stayed on high; he’d swing this way and that by his prehensile tail, and jumped from one place to another, always going in the direction where least expected, and usually going higher up when the officers expected him to come down. His antics were well calculated to vex all his pursuers, and it was thought that every plan, of which the officers had but one or two, was useless. Constable Handy proposed that he should try his skill at marksmanship right in Grace Church and with the elusive monkey for a target, but the police officers suggested cookies and coaxing. No shooting was done and no bloodshed was caused. Then the crowd of the pursuers took up a retreat and the fugitive monkey swooped down from a lofty pier in a rectangular course and seemed to seek a closer inspection of the operations of the police. The monkey came down closer and closer, and finally, by strategy and an adroit movement of the whole force of captors moving in a semi circle, the curiosity was bagged for further use in the dime show. It was an exciting hunt, and it is admitted by all the pursuing party that the unwelcome visitor at the Grace Church just slightly escaped being present at divine service, when doubtless he would have caused great consternation in the congregation, if he did not disperse the whole gathering.”
The best science book I read during the aughts was Alan Weisman’s 2007 theoretical tome, The World Without Us. Weisman, a journalist not a scientist, imagines what would happen to all we’ve built if human beings suddenly disappeared from the face of the Earth. What would become of oil wells and subways and bridges and apartment buildings if they were untended? Weisman’s findings are fascinating.
mmmmm
An excerpt about New York City sans people from the book: “In the first few years with no heat, pipes burst all over town, the freeze-thaw cycles move indoors, and things start to seriously deteriorate. Buildings groan as their innards expand and contract; joints between walls and rooflines separate. Where they do, rain leaks in, bolts rust, and facing pops off, exposing insulation. If the city hasn’t burned yet, it will now. Collectively, New York architecture isn’t as combustible as, say, San Francisco’s incendiary rows of clapboard Victorians. But with no firemen to answer the call, a dry lightning strike that ignites a decade of dead branches and leaves piling up in Central Park will spread flames through the streets. Within two decades, lightning rods have begun to rust and snap, and roof fires leap among buildings, entering panel offices, filled with paper fuel. Gas lines ignite with a rush of flames that blows out windows. Rain and snow blow in, and soon even poured concrete floors are freezing, thawing, and starting to buckle. Burnt insulation and charred wood add nutrients to Manhattan’s growing soil cap. Native Virginia creeper and poison ivy claw at walls covered with lichens, which thrive in the absence of air pollution. Red-tailed hawks and peregrine falcons nest in increasingly skeletal high-rise structures.”
I never knew until recently that astronaut Frank Borman, after completing his Apollo 8 mission in 1968, became a target of anti-authority campus radicals. A post-mission tour of American universities didn’t go splendidly for Borman, and Carl Sagan apparently didn’t help matters when the spaceman made his way to Cornell. An excerpt from Collect Space about the ill-fated meeting:
“After Borman returned from Apollo 8 NASA sent him on a good will tour of colleges and universities across the country. Borman took his wife Susan along so she could share in the event. At Columbia no sooner than Borman started to talk, the audience started pelting him with marshmallows and two students dressed in gorilla costumes climbed onto stage with him to reenactthe opening of the movie 2001.
But as Borman said, ‘Then there was Cornell.’
At Cornell Borman and his wife Susan were guests of Carl Sagan. Sagan invited them to his house for the evening so that they could meet some of the students from Students for a Democratic Society. Sagan explained that he was their faculty advisor.
As Borman explains it, they spent the evening sitting on the floor of Sagan’s living room where Sagan orchestrated an attack, egging the students on when they asked questions such as, ‘Col. Borman, were you aware that on such and such a date American troops massacred hundreds of helpless Vietnamese woman and children? Just what is your opinion of this heinous atrocity? Surely you must have some thoughts on the subject!’
I always wondered why Sagan (a very well-loved man) set Borman and his wife up like that. The best answer I have been able to come up with is Sagan saw Borman as a trespasser. Sagan made no secret of the fact that as a university professor he saw himself as superior to any military officer.”
••••••••••
Apollo 8 crew reads biblical passages from space on Christmas Day 1968:
From “First at Ninety,” a 2007 New Yorker article about the debut novel of nonagenarian Millard Kaufman, by the always excellent Rebecca Mead:
“Kaufman grew up in Baltimore. After graduating from Johns Hopkins, he moved to New York and became a copyboy at the Daily News for thirteen dollars and seventy cents a week. When the Second World War broke out, he enlisted in the Marines, with whom he participated in the campaign to win Guadalcanal and landed at Guam and Okinawa. ‘I weighed a hundred and eighty-two pounds when I went overseas, and when my wife met me afterward she didn’t recognize me—I weighed a hundred and twenty-eight,’ Kaufman said. ‘I had dengue fever and malaria, and I didn’t really feel like I could spend the heat of the summer or the cold of the winter in New York anymore.’
He moved to California, where he took up screenwriting, winning an Oscar nomination in 1953 for a movie called Take the High Ground. (He was nominated again two years later, for Bad Day at Black Rock.) He lent his name to Dalton Trumbo, who had been blacklisted, for a movie called Gun Crazy. ‘The only time I ever met him was at a meeting of the Writers Guild,’ Kaufman said. ‘It was such a bore, and I left and went into a bar at the hotel, and Trumbo was there. We met because some guy was standing between us who was fairly drunk, and he said, ‘What’s all that noise?’ One of us said, ‘It’s a writers’ meeting.’ He said, ‘What do they write?’ and we said, ‘Movies.’ He looked aghast and said, ‘You mean they write that stuff?” Kaufman’s most enduring contribution to entertainment, at least thus far in his career, is as co-creator of Mr. Magoo, whom he modelled in part on an uncle. ‘That is what we thought the character was based on until, twenty years later, we were accused of being nasty about people with bad eyesight,’ he said.
Kaufman began the novel after his most recent screenplay, which he undertook at the age of eighty-six, came to nothing. His alliance with McSweeney’s was a product of circumstance. ‘My literary agent, who was younger than me, had died suddenly, and I had nobody,’ Kaufman said. He is now writing a second novel. ‘Years ago, I was working in Italy, and Charlie Chaplin and his family came from Switzerland,’ he recalled. ‘We were at a beach north of Rome, and it was a very foggy day and the beach was lousy. At about three o’clock it cleared up, and Chaplin said, ‘I’m going back to the hotel. Unless I write every day, I don’t feel I deserve my dinner.’ That made an impression on me.’
Kaufman writes longhand and has a secretary type up his work. ‘The only promise to myself that I have ever kept was no more typewriters,’ he said. ‘I hate the damn thing.’ (When it was suggested to Kaufman that he might want to check his Amazon ratings after Bowl of Cherries comes out, he said that he wasn’t sure what Amazon ratings were.)”
"If you have 3 puppies only I will pay 75$." (Image by Cartman0052007.)
Rent your Puppies for a Day $100 – $100 (Queens)
Hi,
My Girlfriends Birthday is coming up and I want to do something special for her. She is a huge animal lover and shes crazy about puppies. I’m looking to rent your puppy litter ( 3puppies or more) for a few hours in a day. I will pick them up and drop them off if that is convenient for you. I will probably pick them up in the AM and drop them off before it gets dark. Any food and supplies I will provide with your advise.
Im looking to Pay a Max of 100$ for a litter of 4 or more. if you have 3 puppies only I will pay 75$.
