Link here.
Some of these are not that unbelievable, but numbers 4 and 9 are really cool. And number 1 was already reported here on BtB.
Link here. Honoring Winston Churchill on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
Archeologists made the astonishing discovery of a 132 year old Winchester rifle leaning against a tree in Great Basin National Park in Nevada during a survey sweep.
“The 132 year-old rifle, exposed to sun, wind, snow, and rain was found leaning against a tree in the park. The cracked wood stock, weathered to grey, and the brown rusted barrel blended into the colors of the old juniper tree in a remote rocky outcrop, keeping the rifle hidden for many years,” Great Basin National Park said in a statement.
They hope with some historical research they might be able to identify who left the rifle there more than a century ago.
Link here.
Link here.
To me the amazing thing about these stories is how easily these capsules became forgotten. History is a fragile thing. If you don’t record it properly it will be forgotten very quickly.
An evening pause: From the 1955 Jimmy Stewart film Strategic Air Command. The B-36, with both propeller and jet engines, was soon superseded, but the takeoff, as captured so well in the movie, is impressive. It was a big plane.
Hat tip again to Phil Berardelli, author of Phil’s Favorite 500: Loves of a Moviegoing Lifetime.
DNA experts are now calling into question the recent DNA evidence that supposedly identified Jack the Ripper.
An evening pause: He plays this with the verge and style of the best bluegrass fiddlers.
Hat tip again to Phil Berardelli.
An evening pause: A classic, and even better if you are familiar with the Marx Brothers movies.
Hat tip to Phil Berardelli.
Link here. The one about MTV was especially funny.
An evening pause: On the anniversary of one of the darkest days of both American history and Western civilization, this simple message echoing down from World War II tells us exactly what we should do.
Hat tip to Tim.
Excitement continues to build as archeologists dig deeper into a massive tomb discovered two years ago in northern Greece.
This past weekend the excavation team, led by Greek archaeologist Katerina Peristeri, announced the discovery of two elegant caryatids—large marble columns sculpted in the shape of women with outstretched arms—that may have been intended to bar intruders from entering the tomb’s main room. “I don’t know of anything quite like them,” says Philip Freeman, a professor of classics at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.
The curly-haired caryatids are just part of the tomb’s remarkable furnishings. Guarding the door as sentinels were a pair of carved stone sphinxes, mythological creatures with the body of a lion and the head of a human. And when archaeologists finally entered the antechamber, they discovered faded remnants of frescoes as well as a mosaic floor made of white marble pieces inlaid in a red background.
Archeologists believe this tomb is connected somehow to Alexander the Great and could very well be the burial site of one of his relatives or close allies. They will not know more until they actually enter the tomb.
Link here. Many of these could easily be an evening pause, other than the fact that they don’t have visuals. If you want to get a feel for the beginnings of electronic music, check them out. The styles range from space music to jazzy. The sampling even includes the electronic music from Forbidden Planet (1956), one of the best science fiction films ever made. I have put one as an example below the fold.
» Read more
A Canadian expedition thinks it has located one of the ships from John Franklin’s lost 1845 Arctic expedition.
The Canadian government began searching for Franklin’s ships in 2008 as part of a strategy to assert Canada’s sovereignty over the Northwest Passage, which has recently become accessible to shipping because of melting Arctic ice. Expedition sonar images from the waters of Victoria Strait, just off King William Island, clearly show the wreckage of a ship on the ocean floor.
Government spending on healthcare has skyrocketed in the past few decades, and due to Obamacare, will rise much higher in the coming decades.
Note that this spending is not on innovation or the actual care of patients, but on bureaucracy and regulatory bodies based in Washington and elsewhere. And isn’t that just what patients need, more bureaucracy?
Note also that one of the Democratic Party’s justifications for passing Obamacare was to reduce costs, but the data outlined in this article strongly suggests that it is exactly this kind of government interference since the Great Society in the 1960s that has caused healthcare costs to rise. Look especially at the graph at the link.
Using DNA evidence from a shawl that is believed to have been at one of the Jack the Ripper’s murders, forensic scientists think they have finally identified the serial killer.
The story is fascinating, but what makes it even more convincing to me is that the person they name is hardly the wild romantic suspect that many books and movies have proposed in past decades. Instead, he was one of Scotland Yard’s prime suspects.
An evening pause: From the 1954 Jimmy Stewart film, The Glenn Miller Story. They play on, even as a German V1 buzz bomb comes flying in.
Hat tip Edward Thelen.
Link here. I especially like Buckley’s comment to Gore Vidal.
Link here. And the story is surprisingly not much different than the movie itself.
As Winston Churchill wisely wrote, “In wartime truth is so precious that she should be attended by a bodyguard of lies.”
Read it. The story is amazing, especially for the fact that the man who did it did so because he had consciously chosen the right side to support.
Action #1, the first ever appearance of Superman, is for sale on ebay.
The auction itself can be found here. As of Sunday morning, bidding was over $2.3 million. Update: Sold for more than $3.2 million.
When American forces liberated Paris from Nazi occupation seventy years ago today, one Parisian schoolgirl described what happened.
An idea took hold – we needed flags; a collective idea, as if everyone had the same thought at the same time. We would make the flags and hang them at the windows. But how were we going to do it? Quick, tea towels, old sheets cut in strips. A piece of luck, there was a shop that sold dyes in the courtyard. We ran down and started boiling water in the tubs. Some red dye. Some blue dye. The red didn’t work very well, the material came out pinkish red, not the flamboyant red we had hoped for. Too bad. How many stars are there on the American flag? But never mind, we’ll have to just put some on, and that will be good enough.
Read it all. It is important to note that this has been the kind of reaction of practically every oppressed nation when American troops have arrived.
Using restored images taken by Voyager 2 when it flew past Neptune’s moon Triton 25 years ago, scientists have produced a new map and movie of the moon.
Link here.
Link here.
Link here. I agree with the first commenter that another sound no longer heard and not included in the list is the sound of a dial-up modem getting online. There is also the sound of rotating the radio dial past many stations.
Archeologists have uncovered the largest tomb ever discovered in Greece and think it is linked to the reign of Alexander the Great.
The tomb, dating to around 300 BC, may have held the body of one of Alexander’s generals or a member of his family. It was found beneath a huge burial mound near the ancient site of Amphipolis in northern Greece. Antonis Samaras, Greece’s prime minister, visited the dig on Tuesday and described the discovery as “clearly extremely significant”.
A broad, five-yard wide road led up to the tomb, the entrance of which was flanked by two carved sphinxes. It was encircled by a 500 yard long marble outer wall. Experts believe a 16ft tall lion sculpture previously discovered nearby once stood on top of the tomb.
The excavations began in 2012, and by this month hope to identify who actually was buried there.
Link here. By far #1 is the most astonishing.
