Random Facts

[Artemis]

Today in 1966 Surveyor 1 touched down on the moon - the first US probe to do so and keep working afterwards, with earlier ones just slamming into it any old how. This wasn't the first craft to do so, the Russian Luna 9 got there quicker, but Surveyor paved the way for manned missions - in part, by demonstrating that the moon wasn't really covered by a miles-deep layer of moon dust that would swallow anything that landed on it (seriously, that was a worry some people had - when images showed rocks sitting on the surface, they worried that maybe they were really light rocks, and even after Surveyor landed, they worried that maybe it had only stayed on the surface because it had been made so light just in case there was a dust layer, and a heavier spacecraft would sink anyway... at which point, so far as I know, the rest of the NASA community just said 'you know what, screw you guys' and got on with business).

[Artemis]

It's a weekend so unfortunately I can't confuse my customers with this, but today in 2122 the commercial towing vessel USCSS Nostromo set down on LV-426 to investigate an unknown signal, and things went rapidly downhill for them from there.

[Artemis]

Today in 1982: beyond the darkness... beyond the human evolution... is Khan. They really knew how to overblow a tagline back then, but if anything deserves some nice juicy hyperbole, it's Ricardo Montalban's performance, without a doubt one of the finest blockbuster villains ever committed to film. (For the non-Trekkies - it's the day Star Trek 2 came out.)

[Artemis]

Not quite as big as the seaQuest, but still cool: today in 1964 DSV Alvin was commissioned. The little guy's rated to dive down six and a half kilometres, explored the wreck of the Titanic, was once attacked by a swordfish, and if everything goes wrong can even do its own version of saucer separation by ditching its engineering section to let the crew compartment rise on its own (so far it hasn't had to - the only time it's been in sinking trouble is when the boat it was being transported on had a couple of cables snap and dropped it while the hatch was still open; DSV Aluminaut eventually went down and fished it out 1.5km down).

[Artemis]

Today in history - in 1654 Queen Christina abdicated the Swedish throne (also Operation Overlord started (not in 1654, of course) but that's a sombre topic and doesn't at all look like Greta Garbo).

[Artemis]

Happy birthday today to Anthony Simcoe, the man behind the extensive makeup of Ka D'Argo - hopefully he spent it indoors, the weather here's awful today.

[Artemis]

Today in literature - in 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published, and it'd be nice if that didn't seem relevant.

[Artemis]

Today in 1928 Sir Charles Kingsford-Smith decided he'd seen enough of LA and felt like going home, but couldn't be bothered with all that mucking about on boats, so he hopped in a three-engine Fokker he had lying around and flew across the Pacific Ocean to Sydney. (Actually, of course, he bought Southern Cross specifically to attempt the crossing - funded by an American who 'bought' the plane and loaned it back to Kingsford-Smith when the NSW government pulled out of the venture, because it went against their core principle of being rubbish, which they proudly maintain to this day.)

[Artemis]

Science! Today in 2003 a Delta II launched MER-A 'Spirit' on a seven month trip to Mars. The little guy's mission after landing was scheduled for 90 Martian days (they're slightly longer than ours); it kept at it for 2208 local days before finally shutting down in March 2010. (And lest anyone think that's a fluke, MER-B 'Opportunity', which landed on the opposite side of Mars three weeks after Spirit, is still going, which I think technically means it owns the planet now.

[Artemis]

Today (slightly yesterday now, but still the right day UK time, which is relevant) in 1932 was the birthday of Ed Bishop, best known (to me anyway) as Commander Straker in Gerry Anderson's UFO, which I've probably mentioned a time or two before is a great show that's worth finding on dvd if you can.

[Artemis]

Missed yesterday - it was of course the day that justifies us remaining subjects of the British crown, because so long as we get a public holiday out of it, we'll have whoever you like as head of state. And on my personal calendar, it was the day in 1987 that the original Predator was released. And today's the birthday of Ralph McQuarrie, the illustrator who designed the look of Star Wars (in the firm belief that it would all wind up being way too expensive to ever get made). Bringing it back to the action figure collection again, I've got a set of C-3P0 and R2-D2 in their original McQuarrie designs (looking, respectively, a lot like Maria from Metropolis, and pretty much the design they ended up using for Chopper on Rebels), and they're pretty cool.

[Ariel]

Went to Squaw Valley last week with my Mom, heard a presentation about an Olympic Figure Skater named Carol Heiss who dedicated her skate at the 1960 Olympics to her Mother, who had died of cancer. She won gold and was given the top score by every single judge and this in the midst of the cold war! Made me think of my own Mom and what a fine person she is.

[Artemis]

Today in 1947 - William Brazel found various bits of debris scattered about the homestead he was working on, mainly tinfoil, rubber, and sticks. Or was it?!? Yup, Roswell, apparently the site of so many alien landings that the aliens must think the place is some kind of UFO Bermuda Triangle given how many of their saucers have faceplanted into the desert down there. (My favourite alien abduction reference: there's an episode of Babylon 5 where the station ombudsman is hearing a case from a human suing a Vree because the Vree's grandfather abducted the human's grandfather.)

[Artemis]

And this is one of the days I confuse customers - today in 1993 Captain Darien Lambert arrived in the 20th Century, on a mission to track down criminals from his own time (2193) who had escaped to the past courtesy of evil mastermind Doctor Mordecai Sahmbi (epic villain name there). Time Trax was a very 90s show about a detective and his prim and proper schoolmistress supercomputer credit card (it makes sense in context) running around trying to stop people interfering with history, although given that America suddenly looked an awful lot like Queensland, he may have needed to try harder.

[Artemis]

Happy Captain Picard Day, kittens!

[Artemis]

Today in 1579 - Sir Francis Drake, tooling around the Pacific during his circumnavigation of the globe, stopped for a bite to eat in the New World and decided the whole place now belonged to the Queen, and would henceforth be known as Nova Albion; Britain didn't really follow up on the west coast at the time, so the Spanish ignored him and persisted in calling it California.

[Ariel]

So for me, my random fact is that I chose my own middle name. My parents said my two-part last name was long enough so they didn't give me a middle name. When I was 13 I chose Ariel (this was before The Little Mermaid movie!) because I liked Ariel from The Tempest and the quote, "And for thou was a spirit too delicate to act her earthy and abhorred commands . . . " I felt unworthy sometimes and thought I'd love to be someone too good to act selfishly or wrongly. The good news is that I just kept writing it and signing it and it ended up as part of my legal name. Can't do that now but back then it worked!

[Artemis]

Nice! I just got my dad's name as a middle name (Edward).

History fact for today - in 1178 a meteor smacked into the moon to create the Giordano Bruno crater, which we know because five monks in Canterbury just happened to be watching at the right time to see it happen.

And closer to the present, I just came home to find a mouse in the kitchen.

[Ariel]

Chris,

Thanks for keeping this alive - I've been loving getting a daily fact or two - and thanks for sharing your middle name.

Here's a two-for-one to honor your efforts to keep us informed:

In 1863 on this date Abraham Lincoln watched Dr. Thaddeus Lowe demonstrate and fly in a hot air balloon.

Oh and in 1972 five men were arrested for burglarizing some headquarters . . . and Watergate begins!

[Laragh]

In 1863 on this date Abraham Lincoln watched Dr. Thaddeus Lowe demonstrate and fly in a hot air balloon.

Today I killed a fly with a balloon filled with hot air!

[Artemis]

I feel like the other half of the sentence needs to be rearranged too, so, Thaddeus 'Doc' Abraham fitted hydraulics to the suspension of his Lincoln Continental to make the first lowrider?

In slightly more verifiable history, today is the birthday of Virginia Hey, who appeared in a bunch of Australian film and tv during the 80s and 90s (including Mad Max 2 as the Warrior Woman), but is probably most famous as the gorgeous priestess and occasional anarchist Pa'u Zotoh Zhaan from Farscape. (As an aside, I photoshopped Zhaan as the mother of my Mass Effect roleplay character, because she was blue even before the asari made it mainstream.)

[Ariel]

Your version is a lot funnier!

So Monday a.m. woke before crack of dawn and am attempting to find my brain so - I'll flip that from Spacey Woman to Woman in Space:

1963 Soviet cosmonaut, Valentina Tereshkova, becomes the first woman in space.

[Artemis]

Sciencey! I checked Memory Alpha because of course there's a shuttlecraft named for her, and in fact there were two, one on the Enterprise-D and one on Voyager. There's also a Tereshkova System in Mass Effect - first game, in the Armstrong Nebula, six planets, one with terraforming potential, and I wish they'd hurry up because it was freezing. The places I'll go to complete fetch quests...

Anyway, today's Fact From The Shop is that in this day in 1975 the world was introduced to Jaws, which codified the 'blockbuster movie' as we know it today; not the first, but the one that cemented the name, thankfully, because other alternatives floating around were 'spectacular' (a bit too quaint) and 'super-grosser' (just invites jokes). Before Jaws the term had been in use, among others, for successful films and theatrical productions generally, after a grim origin during WWII as a type of bomb capable of destroying an entire city block.

[Artemis]

More science (a teensy bit closer to the ground, but still valid) - today in 2004 SpaceShipOne (inheriting the Soviet Union's imaginative naming practices) became the first commercial vehicle to reach 'space' (more than 100km up). It wasn't a proper orbiter, just a high-flying rocket plane, but still, pretty cool.

[Ariel]

Lord Mountbatten resigns as Governer General of India. This was the end of British colonial rule and the start of Indian independence. The United States has been a world power for a long time - no idea how long that will last and don't necessarily believe it should; we've made plenty of mistakes, many of them on purpose.

On a lighter note, I officially bow down to Artemis and say it ain't easy to do these updates! Thank you.

Ariel

[Artemis]

Aww Actually at the moment I'm just coasting, I made the whole year's list back in September/October. But I don't want to start repeating myself when that rolls around again, so I guess at some point I'll have to get back to work on the next batch.

And appropriately the Store List is doing history as well. On this day in 1633 the Holy Office passed sentence on Galileo, forcing him to recant his belief that the Earth orbited around the Sun and not the other way around (in case you were wondering why the Vatican space programme never really got anywhere); his works were banned, and he was kept under house arrest for the rest of his life. Popular folklore (with some basis in evidence) has it that he added 'e pur si muove', "and yet it moves", in a mutter after his statement, inventing the mic-drop tweet centuries before the invention of either microphones or Twitter.

[Artemis]

Techy today - in 1969 IBM decided to let its software side do things on its own, rather than hardware/software being a single unit, thus pretty much creating the software industry as we know it today. In other fields it's also the anniversary of the Brexit vote, and the start of the Battle of Bannockburn (it kept going overnight), so for good or ill it seems to be a go-your-own-way kind of day.

[Artemis]

On this fine day (actually it's night here, and kinda freezing, but there wouldn't be a 'hyper' in hyperbole if it wasn't cool to use them) in 1949 Hopalong Cassidy premiered on NBC to become the first tv western, paving the way for successors such as Star Trek and Westworld. Hopalong, played by William Boyd, also appeared in 66 films, so as far as cinematic longevity goes James Bond's got some catching up to do. In other news, in 2010 Julia Gillard became Australia's first female Prime Minister (by way of party room manoeuvring, not an election, but that's just how we do changes of leadership here most of the time, she was pretty good), and in 1813 the Battle of Beaver Dams took place, sadly between the UK and USA, not rival tribes of beavers fighting for control of a river.

[Artemis]

Today in 1978: the rainbow flag was flown for the first time, at the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade. The first version, designed by Gilbert Baker, had eight stripes - separate turquoise and indigo stripes in place of the blue one, and hot pink on top of the red one - and was modified over the next year or so into the current form because apparently hot pink flag material is really difficult to find, and that left them with seven stripes which meant the middle one got obscured when it was hung on vertical poles, so they went with six in the end. It's also the national flag of the Gay and Lesbian Kingdom of the Coral Sea Islands (it's real, you can google it).

[Artemis]

Today (and tomorrow) in 1906 a bunch of lunatics driving tin breadboxes with bicycle wheels gathered outside Le Mans for the 1906 Grand Prix de l'Automobile Club de France, a 12-hour 1,200km race that is commonly regarded as the first Grand Prix (one earlier race used the name in 1901, but the 1906 one was a big international do, so people sat up and took notice). Renault won, to the relief of the French car industry which had set the whole thing up to boost sales. After that the timeline split, and one Earth went on as described in the 2008 documentary Speed Racer, while the other (ours) got saddled with boring old stuff like physics and obeying gravity - but we did get the 1992 F1GP computer game, which was fantastic. I mean sure it looks primitive nowadays, but back then it was incredible, and even if the buildings were just grey blocks and you steered using the keyboard, the attention to detail in replicating the tracks, including changes in elevation, and the position of all the background scenery, I still can't watch a Monaco GP without recognising it all (this was back when McLaren and Williams were the big two, I always used to pick Williams for the snazzy blue and gold).