Random Facts

[Artemis]

Back to science for a bit - today in 1959 NASA announced the seven astronauts they would shoot into space in the Mercury programme. Not the first humans in space (props to the USSR and specifically Yuri Gagarin for that), but I'm a big fan of early NASA, and Mercury was pretty amazing in itself, and as the first stage of the whole Mercury-Gemini-Apollo saga.

[Artemis]

Happy birthday today to Daisy Ridley, who I thought did a pretty great job as Rey in the Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

[Artemis]

Looking into the future, happy birthday from 2154 onwards to Commander Shepard, the greatest badass in the galaxy. Even if you're not a gamer, go pick up the first Mass Effect - it'll run on any reasonably capable computer, and it's just incredibly fun and involving. (Several of the years I wasn't here, I spent most of my writing time on a Mass Effect roleplaying forum - I'm 'retired' now but I'm still solo-writing a wiki for my character, because I love the Mass Effect world just that much. I know wikis aren't supposed to be solo things, but eh, whatever, I like encyclopedias.)

[Artemis]

And still in the future, but a different one, today in 2161 the Psi Corps was founded, forcibly conscripting all human telepaths into the organisation, which was overseen by the most powerful telepaths with no outside scrutiny of their methods. Can't possibly turn out badly. (Although a lot of the lower-level teeps, like Willow in Strawberries and Ice Cream, are perfectly nice people.)

[Emms]

I'm back!

[Artemis]

Emms! Welcome back!

I did have a daily fact for today, but 'Emms is back' takes priority (Ron Perlman's birthday, if anyone was curious).

[Laragh]

I am loving this swarm of old school kittens returning!

[Artemis]

Daily fact for today, it's Ashley Williams' birthday, in 2158. Not the one with the chainsaw and shotgun, the one from Mass Effect (although she is deliberately named after him, and even makes an offhand comment about her 'boomstick' at one point).

[Artemis]

Today in 1952 the B-52 Stratofortress took its maiden flight, and owing to upgrades it's expected to remain in service until the 2040s, which makes me think, huh, maybe it's not so ridiculous that they had all those Excelsior and Miranda class ships still in Starfleet in TNG. Clearly I don't engage with the real world very much. Apart from noting an engineering achievement, I also learned something from today - according to wikipedia, the B-52 is commonly referred to as the BUFF, which if you check wikipedia to see what it stands for you'll see is probably not what its designers really wanted.

[Artemis]

Eek it's late - but it's still the 17th in the rest of the world, which is just as well because we Kittens are all storytellers or fans of storytellers, and this is a relevant one: today (on average) in 1397 Geoffrey Chaucer entertained the court of Richard II by telling his Canterbury Tales for the first time. I like to picture the Paul Bettany version of Chaucer from A Knight's Tale (a really fun film, if you haven't seen it), so Rich-2 and pals would have been very entertained indeed.

[dtburanek]

It's how I picture Chaucer as well...

[Artemis]

Oops, I got confused and skipped a day - I blame the new banner and gifs, being all distracting and gorgeous Anyway the Battle of Culloden happened on Saturday quite a while back, if you've been watching Outlander you've probably got the gist of it. (The TV show Outlander, about the sexy WWII nurse stuck in 18th Century Scotland, that is, not the movie about the space marine teaming up with Vikings to fight alien monsters. They're yet to specify if those two things are set in the same world, although there's nothing that explicitly rules it out...)

Anyway, today we celebrate the birthday of the Doctor, specifically David Tennant. I keep catching glimpses of him on some crime drama nowadays and wondering why the Doctor's pretending to be Scottish.

[Artemis]

Quite a relevant one today - back in 1770 Lt. James Cook (no relation), sailing west after mapping the coastline of New Zealand, had a look out front and found Australia. He subsequently encountered the locals, decided to claim the whole place for Britain anyway, and discovered the Great Barrier Reef by smashing HMS Endeavour's hull into it.

[sweet satin lover]

I should be in America right now

[Artemis]

Happy birthday to George Takei, Lt Sulu (later Captain Sulu, and - according to some of William Shatner's novels - eventually Federation President Sulu, which is a pleasant thought). Oh my!

[Artemis]

Kind of a run of birthdays at the moment - today's is Michelle Gomez, aka the magnificent Missy/The Master from Doctor Who. I hear they're going to do a Master crossover with her and John Simm, which I can only imagine will be like Doctors Three and Two, the arch dry wit vs the devious clown.

[Artemis]

Late today, my mum's off on another holiday (back to Italy this time) so I saw her off at the airport. But better late than never, today's fact is that on this day in 1977 optical fibre was first used to carry a telephone signal. Not only is it better than crummy old metal wire, it glows, so it's clearly part of the future.

[Artemis]

Another sciencey one today - in 1967 the USSR launched the first Soyuz spacecraft, which was a pretty cool achievement at the time, but even better is that the Soyuz line remains in service: the 133rd Soyuz mission, MS-04, is currently up there delivering new crew to the ISS.

(Also, commemorated by Starfleet's Soyuz-class USS Bozeman, captained by Kelsey Grammar.)

[Artemis]

It's ANZAC Day today, but that's an easy one, there's a holiday to remind you. So today's sciencey fact is that today in 1954, the first practical solar cell was demonstrated at Bell Labs. Not only environmentally friendlier, but compared to setting fire to stuff you dug up out of the ground, it's undeniably cooler to charge your gadgets from a giant fusion ball a million times the size of the planet you're on.

[Emms]

Hi

[Emms]

Hi

[Artemis]

Hi Emms

Today's fact: on this day in 1564 William Shakespeare was baptised in Stratford-upon-Avon, thereby starting the sequence of events that would one day lead to Willow and Tara's A Midsummer Night's Dream

[Artemis]

Today in 1975 the world was given Death Race 2000, a sort of mishmash of Robocop-before-Robocop-existed and Wacky Races, starring David Carradine in leather and Sylvester Stallone in a sharp suit with a giant bowie knife bolted to the front of his car.

[Artemis]

Today's another one of those days when I confuse my customers, with the sign up front of the store currently noting that today in 2185 turian separatists carried out the Vallum Blast attack, destroying the capital city of the colony Taetrus with a freighter impacting the ground under FTL drive. It's got some odd looks so far, but nobody's asked; maybe on some subconscious level even regular people know that it's better to not even mention turian separatism because oh my god they will not shut up about it once you get them started, it's worse than who'd win out of a Star Destroyer and the Enterprise.

[Artemis]

Back to birthdays - happy birthday to Kate Mulgrew, aka Captain Janeway of the USS Voyager, one of Starfleet's most fearless, resolute... and possibly unbalanced captains, owing to the writers never really bothering to get on the same page with each other as to her character, but Mulgrew never let that get her down, and really made it work regardless. She made a great dragon in Dragon Age too (speaking of dragons, I'm working on a little something at the moment...)

(Because of one episode where the crew of Voyager were brainwashed into thinking they were just random people on some planet, if Mulgrew decides to leave Orange Is The New Black I really want them to write her character out by having Tuvok run in with a phaser, slap a combadge on her prison overalls, and they both transport away before she can ask what's going on.)

[Artemis]

Another birthday - happy birthday to Gal Gadot, our current Wonder Woman (since Lynda Carter's busy being president on Supergirl - how does one get to Earth 38 again?) For those who haven't seen Batman v Superman, well, she was only in it a little bit, but she was okay, and created what appeared to be a minor plot hole by looking too in charge of the big fight at the end, so at least you can't accuse them of toning her down. One month to go until her film... fingers crossed.

[gorn]

One of the more appropriate holidays for this place - a very happy Walpurgis Night to any witchy kittens out there!

[Artemis]

I'm sure all kittens are witchy kittens

Less kitten-related (although still slightly) but still kinda neat, on this day in 1851, Queen Victoria opened the Crystal Palace - the Great Exhibition building, not the football club. The kitten-relatedness is because one of the items exhibited was the Tara Brooch, which'd be a pretty nifty bit of jewellery nowadays, never mind around the 8th Century when it was actually made.

There was also a race held in conjunction with the exhibition that kicked off the America's Cup; as an Australian, I'm required to remind everybody that we won that one time.

[Artemis]

It's movie time - today in 2008 we got Iron Man, and it's a pretty remarkable achievement that since then even the worst of the MCU films (Thor 2, for me) is still pretty good fun; not many franchises can boast winning records like that. I remember thinking back when Tobey Maguire was Spider-Man, it'd be really cool if they could do movies more like the comics, with a whole bunch of heroes all popping up in each other's adventures. Now we just need a She-Hulk series (c'mon Netflix, Daredevil vs She-Hulk courtroom showdown).

[Artemis]

Today in 1996... ugh... Barb Wire was released. If you haven't seen it, well, ask yourself, do you want to see Pamela Anderson get her boobs out and do a pole dance? Because that is legitimately the best bit of the movie, I'm not even joking (it's also the first bit of the movie, so you can save a lot of time if that's all you want to see).

Getting kind of back to the original point of this thread though, random facts about us (I'm kind of hiding under the pretext that everything I put on my shop sign is 'about me' insofar as it's something I decided to put on the sign instead of whatever else happened that day), I used to collect action figures - mostly done with it now, except the occasional new figure who really deserves it - and the Triad Toys version of Barb Wire (here) is actually one of the best I've got. Triad sadly shut up shop a while back, but they were insane about level of detail - that doll's 12" tall, and every single bullet on the belt is an individual piece you can take out on its own.