Dandee --- Yeah; I was also surprised her name wasn't mentioned in that writeup. Carmen Miranda.

Also, does anyone remember Snapple's brief (no pun intended) ad run involving Fruit of the Loom-style fruit-costumed people? These costumes lacked faces --- they were just the fruits, with legs on them. The lemon had some great gams on her...

I agree with bean on that; what works for the legal system does not necessarily apply in liguistics. I accept certain alternate spellings (by the by, "misspelt" is a word: the British version of the American "misspelled"), but not carelessness. Admittedly, corruptions often become the official spelling over time. But a great many common misspellings are simply a display of ignorance --- ignorance of the root word, or of how word endings are applied when conjugating or showing possession.

The results can be comical (such as a sign outside a certain "cemetAry" in Blackwood, New Jersey), confusing or even dangerous in certain situations. Once I failed the written test portion of a job application because of a grammatical screw-up in a question. It was unclear exactly what the question was asking, and depending on the spelling of a word and the placement of a comma, there were three possible (and very different) meanings! All of them were probable as well. When I asked for clarification, I was tersely told to "just answer the question." (I've discovered that this response translates to "I don't know, and I'm angry that you asked the question.") So I re-wrote the question all three ways, and provided three different answers. Apparently, this was the cause of my failing the test. The store folded in three months --- whether this was due to poor communication skills, I may never know.

Re: "Let the cat out of the bag" --- The less-frequently used expression "to buy a pig in a poke" comes from the same con game. I know a couple of people who bought electronics at public auctions or yard sales without testing them first, only to discover that they were broken. They could be said to have bought a pig in a poke.

Re: "Lay an egg" --- The term "love," when used in the game of tennis, comes from the same etymology, but a different language. The French slang for "zero" is "goose egg" or simply "the egg" (en francais, "l'oeuf"). To an English-speaking tennis opponent not up on their French, a call of "L'ouef!" sounds a lot like "Love!", and thus...

Not a bumper sticker, but a funny telegram concerning growing older: Movie star Cary Grant lived into his late 70s, but because he retired before he hit 40 or so, he'll always be remembered as a dapper young man. A few years before he passed away, a news reporter sent him a telegram on his birthday that read:

HOW OLD CARY GRANT

to which Mr. Grant replied:

OLD CARY GRANT FINE. HOW YOU?

Probably not a faked death, but an incident of the obituary being published pre-humously (Did I just coin a new word?): P.T. Barnum felt he was at death's door and was curious as to how he would be remembered. So he convinced a prominent newspaper to publish his obituary while he was still alive. The obituary was so flattering it put him into a better mood, and he lived a few days or weeks longer.

I don't have specific details on this story; it's entirely possible that he had a friend contact the newspaper to report him dead, and thus it was indeed a faked death. But I think I remember that the folks at the newspaper knew he was alive, and went along with it to humor him.

Ajolote are an example of an "intermediate" phase between lizards and snakes. Modern snakes are descended from at least one type of lizard, which initially found the loss of first back, then the remaining front, legs to be advantageous when burrowing. Although snakes later subdivided into many more varieties, some of which do not burrow, the legs do not seem to have returned. (There were several legless prehistoric reptiles that superficially resembled snakes, but which are extinct.)

On a less technical note, it sure is cute! So's the unrelated amphibian axolotl (with the nearly identically-pronounced name).

Re: LH --- Keratins, the proteins that are present in hair and give it its color, are also present in irises. Therefore, in the off-chance that some of these proteins were fossilized, it may give us a hint about the eye-color of the organism. (This would be a rarer occurrence than feather fossilization, though, so don't hold your breath.)

The Jedi knight looking out the window reminds me of that famous photograph of Malcolm X...

Also, I couldn't help but notice how many Klingons were accompanied by infants... wearing red shirts!

The Capt. Picard look-alike is almost spot-on. "Make it so."

I've heard that dressing in traditional Native American ceremonial garb is also very popular in Germany.

(Release dates are approximate; my video collection is still in boxes, and I can't leave this website without losing my spot. I should be close enough...)

"Much Ado About Nothing" (1992). I know, it was a play long before it was a movie. But the director decided to end it in a very cinematic way, in a single moving camera shot that takes us through rings of dancers, showers of rose petals, and up over the Tuscan villa. When this film played at the cinema where I worked at the time, the audience applauded at the end!

"Time Bandits" (1980). "Mom! Dad! It's Evil! Don't touch it!" BOOM!

"Excalibur" (1981). The last five minutes of the film alone are worth the price of admission, especially with the sword hurtling through the air into the hand of the Lady in the Lake, and the vision of Arthur's body borne away to Avalon, accompanied by three faery women... very much a cinematic ode to Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites. The use of Wagner's music was also very inspired.

"The Thief of Bagdad" (1926 and 1940). Both the original silent version and the remake with Sabu have wonderful, mythic endings, with the hero riding off on the flying carpet. If you can find it, be sure to watch the silent version in which music by Rimsky-Korsakov was used for the soundtrack; the music is used most effectively during the final shots. And of course Miklos Rosza's score for the 1940s remake brings a tear to the eye as well. "You got what you wanted. Now I'm getting what I want --- an adventure, at last!"

Quite a few Hitchcock films when he was in his prime: "Rear Window," "North by Northwest," "Vertigo," even his remake of "The Man Who Knew Too Much." --- "Sorry we're late; we just had to pick up our son."

Looks way cool, and reminds me of a Google Earth-like tool my sadly deceased pen-pal Ewa and I came up with. This technology might actually allow it to come to fruition, as it provides the basic platform.

However, it does not look like the hologram is actually projected into the air yet! The video makes it difficult to see just what is happening, but I keep seeing vertical lines with differing light levels on either side, indicating a glass prism of some kind being used as a projection surface. If you watch the video of the pretty young "assistant" on their website, notice that she materializes in the same location and "disintegrates" within a rectangular boundary; and in the shots from the reverse angle one can see the reflection of the camera operator --- the "assistant" is projected into a glass prism, like most holograms.

I had imagined using a modified light-pen as an interface; but it appears that the computer's ability to track finger-movements is quite adequate.

Projecting the globe into the air would have allowed the controller to zoom in and out almost indefinitely while an audience watches from any number of angles. But I suppose a projection into an appropriately large prism would be almost as rewarding, and would not diminish the tool's effectiveness.

Certainly not to belittle his efforts, which are noble indeed --- but the U.N. actually did designate an International Day of Peace a number of years ago: September 11th. Unfortunately, a bunch of terrorist morons went and wrecked it for everyone in 2001 (before the observation of IDoP could really gather steam).

For all his formidable skill as a sculptor, and modest skill as a painter, I have doubts that Michelangelo knew much about Judaism outside of the teachings of the church in Rome at the time. His famous statue "David" portrays David as uncircumcised; and his statue "Moses" boasts a pair of horns (from a mis-translation of a Hebrew word meant to connote "rays of light"). (He also didn't use female nude models, which is why his nude women look like young boys with strange fake breasts.) I'm pretty sure any resemblance between the shapes of the figures and the shapes of Hebrew letters is purely circumstantial. If you study the dynamic poses of figures in many Renaissance and Baroque paintings, you'll see the shapes of letters from various alphabets if you want to. As for the strictly Old Testament motif on the ceiling, that was the Pope's idea.

Whoops --- Paragraph 7: That should read "You’d have to go back in time TEN thousand centuries to reach one million years in the past." Mea culpa.

Wow --- these things still prompt huge discussions! The chart is obviously meant to be a joke, its barbs aimed at "Intelligent Design" and at wishy-washy school boards who seek to somehow reconcile "ID" and evolutionary theory despite their mutual exclusivity.

And now I explain. Evolutionary theory does not deny the possibility of a God or gods, creator, sustainer, destroyer or otherwise. It merely posits a possible (and as far as we can tell extremely likely) chain of events based on observation of the fossil record, geology, geography, archaeology and various empirically provable physical laws (such as thermodynamics). Yes, there are gaps in the fossil record due to the steep odds against getting fossilized. Fossils of small arboreal creatures are extremely rare because when a little critter dies in the woods it's usually dismembered within days by scavengers; this is why human ancestry (and all primate ancestry) is difficult to map in the absence of DNA.

One common mistake both critics and proponents of evolutionary theory make is that it is "improvement." While it is true that the earliest organisms were quite simple, and more complex forms evolved later, keep in mind that simple organisms are still here in vast numbers, and (with the possible exception of our abstract reasoning capabilities) complexity has not really increased since the Devonian Period (before the dinosaurs). Rather, evolution is the story of adaptation and mutation. "Adaptation" is actually misleading, because it implies a deliberate attempt to improve a species. In actuality, an individual that happens to have an advantageous feature may be more likely than its buddies to reproduce and pass on the gene that codes for that feature. In some instances, this can allow that particular bloodline to survive a cataclysm that wipes out the others (or allow it to BE that cataclysm as it out-eats the others!) --- or it may make no difference at all, depending on what happens. If a faster breed of jackalope takes over the island, rendering other jackalopes extinct, only to get wiped out by a volcanic eruption that re-paves the whole thing with hot lava and poison gas... well, you see how complex the story of life can get.

Various features can appear, disappear and reappear. Flight began with insects, and showed up in pterosaurs, birds and bats. Could some dinosaurs fly? Dromaeosaurs and a few others had feathers, but their ability to fly seems questionable. Also, just as some modern birds are flightless, the ability to fly may become lost in some species if the need to keep it vanishes and it becomes an unnecessary expense or a liability.

Evolution is a constant flow of activity, prompted mainly by small mutations in DNA. These mutations can be caused by radiation, or by cellular mechanisms as yet poorly understood (transcription factors, to name but one). In viruses and unicellular organisms, natural evolution can be observed by humans. In multicellular organisms, noticeable changes occur over much longer spans of time. The oldest known hominid fossils (found in Africa) may be over five million years old. Despite the fact that rapid transit only became possible in the past century, a LOT can happen in five million years. More than one hominid branch may arise, sometimes simultaneously. Groups may migrate over vast distances. Europe was home to both Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon only a few hundred thousand years ago. Despite their larger brains, Neanderthals seem to be gone. Could they mate with our ancestors? We're still not sure how closely-related they were. All humans alive today can trace their ancestry back to one hominid line from Africa that produced the Cro-Magnon. This family has since split up, migrated, re-combined, re-split, etc. and populated Oceania, Australia and the Americas via shallow seas and land-bridges --- all within the past million years or two.

Humans did not begin recording their histories, as far as we know, until less than 10,000 years ago. Even today, there are cultures (sadly dwindling) that record their histories orally, not in written form.

When one talks of thousands and millions of years, many people merely nod, take notes, and hope they remember this for Friday's test. Instead, one should take a tape measure, go out to a large field, and start measuring to get a feel for the huge spans of time. Measure 100 inches. A human life is about 100 years now (during American colonial times and before, it was half that. In some parts of the world, it's still brutal & short). Ten times that is a thousand years --- Medieval times. Another ten centuries back, and the Roman Empire is rising. You'd have to go back in time a thousand centuries to reach one million years in the past. Your tape measure ran out of tape long ago. In fact, to find a million unbroken inches of land for comparison, you'd need a desert.

As for cultural creation myths --- I take them for what they are: man's attempt to explain our origins. Considering that most of those attempts are at least 10,000 years old if they are a day, they're pretty good. Some are similar, some vastly different. All reflect truths about ourselves and how we see the Universe and our place in it. However, I see no reason to proclaim one myth more or less valid than another simply because the culture that produced it is or is not currently thriving.

"Jupiter - and Beyond the Infinite"... As I looked at those photographs, my brain began to automatically play Gyorgi Ligeti's "Lux Aeterna" as used in Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey." Indeed, many of the trippy FX shots for the "stargate" sequence were done by dripping oils & dyes into tubs of fluid and filming the results.