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Presenting
Michael Egan
took the day off.
has returned to semi-retired status.
In memory.
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Chocolate
David
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from Bruce
Anecdotes
• Comedian Red Skelton sometimes did not give enough credit to his writers, although he did pay them well. On The Tonight Show, host Jack Parr asked him where he got his jokes. Red replied, "All my jokes are put in my head by the voice of God." His writers asked Red why he had not given them credit. Red replied, "You're just sore because I gave God top billing." The writers figured that if God was going to get top billing, He had better work for it, so they gave Red the script for his next show: fifty blank pages. They also gave him this note: "Dear Red: Please have God fill in the empty pages. Thanks. Your Writers." By the way, maybe God did deserve some credit for putting jokes into Red's head. Red once fell very ill and needed an operation. He was wheeled into the operating room, and the surgeons found this note written on a piece of tape on his chest: "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL CHRISTMAS." By the way, when Red's movie Half a Hero turned to be very bad, Red complained, "They were afraid to show it at Grauman's Chinese Theater for fear the footprints would get up and walk away."
• Artist James Montgomery Flagg painted Mark Twain's portrait although at first Mr. Twain said that he would "rather have smallpox than sit for his picture." Of course, Mr. Twain told funny stories during his sittings and at times Mr. Flagg could not paint because he was laughing so hard. Mr. Flagg remembers that once Mr. Twain cussed softly and then said, "My wife cusses, too-not the same words. She says 'Sugar!' and the Recording Angel will give her just as black marks as he does me!" One of Mr. Twain's eccentricities was to spread his mail in a long line on the floor. He would walk down the line and choose the letters that he wanted to read. In his old age, Mr. Twain always wore white suits. He told Mr. Flagg, "I don't like to be conspicuous, but I do like to be the most noticeable person!" Mr. Twain and his friend William Dean Howells once attended a performance by singer Adelina Patti. Mr. Howells asked him what he thought of Ms. Patti, and Mr. Twain replied, "I would rather sleep with that woman stark naked than with General Grant in full uniform."
• Kathryn Stockett wrote the novel The Help, which was a major success both as a book and as a movie. The book was rejected - and rewritten - many times before an agent read it and agreed to try to sell it to a publisher. Ms. Stockett remembers meeting published authors who advised her, "Just keep at it. I received fourteen rejections before I finally got an agent. Fourteen! How many have you gotten?" Unfortunately, the answer was 55 - and counting. She did not give up. Even while pregnant in the hospital, she was working on doing research to incorporate in her book to make it better. A nurse told her, "Put the book down, you nut job - you're crowning!" Finally, after 60 rejections and five years of writing and rewriting, she got an agent: Susan Ramer. Three weeks later, Ms. Ramer sold The Help.
• At times, Nathaniel Hawthorne, author of the classic The Scarlet Letter, was short of money. During one such time, his lawyer friend George Hilliard collected money from several friends and fans of Mr. Hawthorne. When Mr. Hilliard gave him the money, he said it was a payment on "the debt we owe you for what you have done for American Literature." Later, Mr. Hawthorne got a job as a diplomat in Liverpool, England, and was much more flush with money. He was charitable. As a diplomat, he ran into many Americans and helped them with loans that were usually not repaid. When several American sailors were shipwrecked in the Atlantic Ocean, he used his own money to help them.
• Neil Gaiman, who wrote Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch with Terry Pratchett, says about his co-author, "Terry is that rarity, the kind of author who likes Writing, not Having Written, or Being an Author, but the actual sitting there and making things up in front of a screen." Mr. Pratchett was working as a press officer while he wrote his first novel, and each night he wrote 400 words. He needed to write 300 words to finish his first novel, and after he had written the 300 words, he put another sheet of paper in his typewriter (in the days before screens) and wrote 100 words of his second novel.
• Early in her adult life, Ruth Rendell, who also writes using the pen name Barbara Vine, had a job as a reporter for the Chigwell Times. She was fired after she wrote an article about a local tennis club's dinner without actually attending the dinner-and therefore did not know that the speaker had died while giving his speech. As an author, she writes often about death and murderers, but says, "I've never met a murderer as far as I know. I would hate to. It's just not necessary." By the way, she married Don Rendell, her former boss at the Chigwell Times.
• Hugh Troy was a noted practical joker. He once held a party for his friend Stephen Potter, author of Gamesmanship. He invited many guests, and each of them brought a Potter book for Mr. Potter to sign, but all of the books were by other authors who had Potter for their last name. At another of his parties in which an author was the guest of honor, Mr. Troy's guests all brought a copy of the author's book to sign, but when the guests left the party, they left behind piles of the autographed books.
• Miguel de Cervantes wrote Don Quixote: Part 1 and Don Quixote: Part 2, with 10 years passing in between the books. In fact, he might not have ever written Don Quixote: Part 2 if another writer had not made him angry by writing his own Don Quixote: Part 2 first.
• "I'm writing a book. I've got the page numbers done." - Steven Wright.
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Recipients Named
Honorary Oscars
Directors David Lynch and Lina Wertmüller and actors Geena Davis and Wes Studi have been named recipients of this year's Governors Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the Academy announced on Monday.
Lynch, Wertmüller and Studi will receive honorary Oscars and Davis will receive the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award at a ceremony at the Ray Dolby Ballroom at Hollywood & Highland on Oct. 27.
The Academy's Board of Governors chose the recipients at a special meeting on Saturday, with the announcement delayed until AMPAS President John Bailey could reach all the recipients to tell them of the honor.
The four awards reflect the Academy's recent push for a more international and diverse membership. Wertmüller followed Agnes Varda, Hayao Miyazaki and Jean-Luc Godard as non-American directors to win the award. Studi was awarded as a pioneering Native American actor, and Davis' Hersholt Award came because of her advocacy of gender equality.
The Governors Awards ceremony was first held in 2009, as a way to move honorary presentations off the Academy Awards show while allowing more time to showcase the recipients. Since then 30 people have been given honorary Oscars, five have been given the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award and four have been awarded the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.
Honorary Oscars
World's Oldest Astronomical Movie
Solar Eclipse
Magicians are known for making things disappear, but when the sun vanished from the sky on May 28, 1900, it happened not through a sleight of hand, but because of a solar eclipse.
There was magic in the air that day after all - movie magic. Nevil Maskelyne, a performing magician who also happened to be a pioneering filmmaker, preserved the spectacular event - as the moon passed between Earth and the sun - on celluloid, from a location in North Carolina.
More than a century later, Maskelyne's film of the eclipse has been digitally scanned and restored in a collaboration between the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) and the British Film Institute (BFI), and is free to view online. The film, titled "Solar Eclipse," is thought to be the world's oldest surviving astronomical film, Joshua Nall, chair of the RAS Astronomical Heritage Committee, said in a statement.
The film is brief, lasting just over a minute. On the right of the screen, the sun is covered by the moon's shadow, with only a thin band of light visible around the upper right portion of the dark disk. Gradually, the glowing ring extends around the perimeter of the disk, until the sun emerges from the left.
Maskelyne designed a special lens attachment - called a cinematograph telescope - for his movie camera to film the eclipse, said Bryony Dixon, BFI curator of silent film.
Solar Eclipse
Divorce Not Annulment
Nicolas Cage
Lloyd, 30, brought to life the role of Anakin, who was destined to become the fearsome villain Darth Vader in later films. Lloyd left Hollywood in 2001 and no longer acts.'Star Wars: Episode I' turns 20! See the cast then and now
TMZ reports that 69 days after Nicolas Cage married Erika Koike in a quickie Las Vegas wedding, a Clark County, Nevada, judge has granted the exes a divorce.
The Oscar winner wed the makeup artist on March 23. They were seen arguing as they applied for a marriage license minutes before they tied the knot, and were spotted fighting near the valet at the Bellagio hotel in Vegas just hours after the ceremony, TMZ has reported.
Nic filed for an annulment four days after the ceremony, claiming he was too intoxicated to grasp the fact he was marrying Erika. In documents seen by Us Weekly, Nic said he "lacked understanding of his actions in marrying [Erika] to the extent that he was incapable of agreeing to the marriage" and that "prior to obtaining a marriage license and participating in a marriage ceremony, [they] were both drinking to the point of intoxication."
Erika was Nic's fourth wife. He was previously married to Alice, Lisa Marie Presley and Patricia Arquette.
Nicolas Cage
Could Fetch $1M At Auction
Chessman
A chess piece purchased for a few pounds (dollars) by an antiques dealer in Scotland in 1964 has been identified as one of the 900-year-old Lewis Chessmen, among the greatest artifacts of the Viking era.
Sotheby's auction house said Monday that the chess piece is expected to bring between 600,000 pounds ($670,000) and 1 million pounds ($1.26 million) at an auction next month.
The Lewis Chessmen are intricate, expressive chess pieces in the form of Norse warriors, carved from walrus ivory in the 12th century.
A hoard of 93 pieces was discovered in 1831 on Scotland's Isle of Lewis. It is now held in both the British Museum in London and the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh - but five of the chess pieces were missing.
The 3 1/2-inch (8.8-centimeter) piece to be auctioned July 2, the equivalent of a rook, is the first of the missing chessmen to be identified. It was passed down to the family of the antiques dealer, who did not realize its significance.
Chessman
Indigenous Women
Canada
The deaths in Canada of more than a thousand aboriginal women and girls in recent decades was a national genocide, a government inquiry into murdered and missing indigenous women concluded in a report on Monday.
The 1,200-page report, which resulted from an inquiry launched by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government in 2016, blamed the violence on long-standing discrimination against indigenous people and Canada's failure to protect them.
The Royal Canadian Mounted Police revealed in 2014 that 1,017 aboriginal women had been murdered between 1980 and 2012.
The inquiry, which was beset by delays and staff resignations, opened painful wounds as it heard testimony from 468 family members of missing or murdered women.
The final report, called "Reclaiming Power and Place," was presented during an often emotional ceremony in Gatineau, Quebec, near the Canadian capital, and was attended by some of the hundreds of family members of those missing or murdered, and by government officials including Trudeau.
Canada
Opal-Laced Fossils
Australia
Paleontologists in Australia have identified a previously unknown plant-eating dinosaur from the mid-Cretaceous. Remarkably, the fossilized bones of these creatures, which glisten in hues of blue and green, are preserved in opal.
New research published today in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology describes Fostoria dhimbangunmal, a dinosaur species that's closely related to Iguanodon and Muttaburrasaurus. Fossils of four specimens were found in Lightning Ridge, a small town in the Australian Outback. As reported in The Australian, paleontologists recovered the opal-encrusted fossils in 1984 after being alerted to their presence by an opal miner, Robert Foster, who was working 10 meters (33 feet) below a field known as the "Sheepyard."
After the excavation, these fossils went on display at the Australian Museum in Sydney, where they remained for decades. The Foster family recently donated the fossils to the Australian Opal Centre, where researchers recognized the opalized items as deserving of further investigation. The analysis, led by Phil Bell from the University of New England in Armidale, Australia, revealed the fossils belonged to a new species. The researchers named the dinosaur in honor of Foster and the field above the deposit where the bones were found; the name dhimbangunmal (pronounced dim-baan goon-mal) translates to sheep yard in Yawaalaraay, the local indigenous language.
Lightning Ridge is famous for its opal gemstones, which form underground over long timescales from a solution of silicon dioxide and water (more about the process here). It's not uncommon to find the odd bone or tooth that has undergone opalization, but the discovery of around 60 opal-encrusted bones (including the braincase) from a single individual-an adult Fostoria-is without precedent.
The opalized fossils of another three individuals, all juveniles, were also identified in the new study. The remains were all found jumbled together in the opal mine, leading Bell to speculate that the individuals were once part of a herd or a family, as reported in National Geographic. The researchers used a CT scanner to analyze the fossils without having to damage them.
Australia
Scientists Save
Schrödinger's Cat
One of the hallmark predictions of quantum mechanics is that particles behave unpredictably-but a new experiment seems to complicate some of those core ideas.
Researchers were able to predict a kind of atomic behavior called a quantum jump and even reverse the jump in a new experiment on an artificial atom. Such research could bring up bigger questions about the nature of physics and could have important implications for improving quantum computers that rely on the rules of quantum mechanics in order to function.
Quantum mechanics' core assumption is that on the smallest scales, atomic properties are quantized, meaning that particles take on discrete, rather than continuous states-their properties exist along a staircase rather than a ramp. For example, an electron can be in a lowest-energy state, but if you add a little more energy, it doesn't slowly transition into the new higher-energy state. Rather, it unpredictably snaps into the new state. If you're not looking at it, the atom can take on intermediate states-but these aren't midway points. The atom would be in both states at the same time, and then once you observed it, it would immediately snap into one state or the other.
The team's artificial atom is an experimental apparatus composed of a circuit made from wire that carries charge without resistance with a special kind of insulating fence, called a Josephson junction, placed in the middle of the wire. In regular atoms, "states" are represented by the location of the electron around the atom's nucleus, but in this artificial atom, the state is represented by a quantized property whose value changes as electrons pass the insulating fence. This is a quantum system (it's technically a two-qubit quantum computer) and follows the same rules as other quantum systems, including electrons around atoms.
You might be familiar with Schrödinger's cat. It's a thought experiment in which a cat's life depends on some two-state quantum process, and according to the rules of quantum mechanics, once the experiment is set in motion, the cat is alive and dead simultaneously until you open the box. In this case, the cat being alive is the ground state, and the cat being dead is the excited state. The implication of this research is that the scientists can indirectly watch the "cat" move from the alive state to the alive-and-dead simultaneously state, and intervene to save the cat.
Schrödinger's Cat
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