Happy birthday, Daniel Dae Kim!

Gorgeous and sexy Daniel Dae Kim, born August 4, 1968, is a native of South Korea but grew up in Pennsylvania.  (This is a trip to the Far East that I'd like to take! :{D- ) What more can an actor ask for? Two of the television shows he's starred in are filmed in Hawai'i:  Lost and Hawai'i Five-O.  I first fell in love with him when he played telepath Lt. John Matheson on Crusade, the spin-off mini-series from Babylon 5.  He has also appeared in Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise.

MESSENGER, spacecraft to Mercury, launched 2004

Artist's rendering of MESSENGER in orbit around Mercury.

MESSENGER (Mercury Surface, Space Environment, Geochemistry and Ranging) launched August 3, 2004 was the first spacecraft to orbit the planet closest to the sun in our solar system. On March 18, 2011 it achieved orbit. It was planned to orbit Mercury for only a year but lasted over four. With seven scientific instruments on board, the craft sent back over 10TB of data, including almost 300,000 images and numerous map products.

In May 2016, NASA released a 3-D image of the first global topographic model of Mercury (see video below).  The extent of the data received from MESSENGER will keep scientists busy for years to come.

First photo from orbit.

On April 30, 2015, MESSENGER yielded to Mercury’s gravity and crashed on the surface just north of the Shakespeare basin. It created a crater estimated to be 52 feet in diameter.

The last photo taken before impact.

Mystery writer P. D. James born 1920

 

Phyllis Dorothy James, better known as P.D. James, born August 3, 1920, was the author of the Adam Dalgliesh detective novels.  The first mystery of hers I read was Death of an Expert Witness, published in 1977.  The story centered around a laboratory of forensic experts involved in a murder of one of their own.  It was made into a mini-series in 1983 by the ITV network in Britain with Roy Marsden as Dalgleish and Geoffrey Palmer (As Time Goes By) as Dr. Lorrimer.  Many of her works were transferred to television and movies, but I found them to be slow because they tended to follow the novels too closely.

Death of an Expert Witness and The Black Tower were my favorites.  I read her novel Innocent Blood but had trouble staying awake while reading it.  She wrote 14 Adam Dalgliesh novels and dystopian novel The Children of Men, made into a movie starring Clive Owen and Julianne Moore.

P.D. James passed away November 27, 2014 in Oxford.

Happy birthday, Eddie Munster!

Butch Patrick, born August 2, 1953, is best known as his role as Eddie Munster in the iconic television show, The Munsters.  He was very close to Yvonne DeCarlo (Lily Munster) until her death.
One thing I always wanted to know about the Munsters:  Why did Marilyn look normal?

Rhea(lly) beautiful - Saturn's moon

 

The Cassini spacecraft, currently hanging out in Saturn's neighborhood, has sent back stunning images of the planet's second largest moon, Rhea.  Discovered December 23, 1672 by Giovanni Cassini, Rhea is named after the Titan Rhea, mother of the gods in 1846 by John Herschel (son of William Herschel).

The dazzling image above was taken June 3 and is a result of the water ice that covers most of the surface.

Rhea is 949 miles in diameter and the most heavily cratered of all of Saturn's moons.   In 2010, NASA discovered a thin atmosphere consisting of oxygen and carbon dioxide.

Rhea's horizon.

Inhofe (R-OK): Dumber than Mary Failing?

Doc Hoc of the blog Okie Funk reported that the week before last, Republican Senator Jim Inhofe from Oklahoma went on the radio and proved to the listeners just how stupid he is.  The reason Inhofe is anti-education is because he thinks students are "being brainwashed" in our schools with all that sciencey stuff and those "fact" things.  He still manages to cling to his uneducated notion that global warming is a hoax, despite tons of data from NASA, NOAA and other scientists around the world.

He even wrote a book which has not been well-received, and in it he can't explain why we should believe a stupid, uneducated senator and not the thousands of experts on the subject.  As if he wasn't getting through to enough people, he brought a snowball to the Senate floor in February 2015 and threw it to prove there was no such thing as global warming.

I don't know who is dumber - Inhofe or Failing.  Perhaps they're auditioning for "Dumb and Dumber 3"?

http://okiefunk.com/content/right-question
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/07/26/3802201/inhofe-granddaughter-climate-understanding/
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/03/04/3629466/snowball-inhofe-meet-the-press-climate/

Happy birthday, 'Screaming' Joe Elliott!

Joe Elliott, born August 1, 1959 in Yorkshire, England, is best known as the lead singer for Def Leppard. He is one of the two founders of Def Leppard with Rick Savage.  With Elliott at the helm, Def Leppard has been nominated for numerous American Music Awards and won Favorite Heavy Metal/Hard Rock Artist in 1989 and their album Hysteria won Favorite Heavy Metal/Hard Rock Album the same year.  I've been a fan of theirs ever since Pyromania was released in 1983.

Here's Joe and the gang in Slang.