EVERYTHING OLD IS NEW AGAIN
You may have noticed that more and more that the media and entertainment industries are falling back on what was once popular.
E.T. is back in the theatres...now that is not so bad, and I will go to see it again...mainly because I fell asleep when I saw it as a kid.
But there seems to be a recent lack of creativity in popular music, attempting to re-make some songs that were done perfectly the first time (such as Space Cowboy by the Steve Miller Band). Why is this?
I thought I would come up with a list of thing that I would like to see again, and I would like to hear your suggestions...being a child of the 80s, mine will have that tilt naturally.
1. Square One TV-Do you all remember this show? The "mathematics is cool" show that was produced out of the University of Michigan? "Mathman, Mathman, Mathman..." I want to see this show again.
2. 3-2-1 Contact-This may very well be the show that got me into science.
3. Cabbage Patch Kids, and the inevitable take off, the Garbage Pail Kids.
4. Tom Osborne with a headset on, pacing the sideline. I miss seeing him on Saturdays in Lincoln.
5. Those awful, awful shows on Nebraska PBS about Marian the Librarian, the pirate, the guy who flew his plane all around Nebraska (I am still mad that they never made a show about Minden!), and the show about the Treehouse Storyteller...that was the one with the groovy theme song (Do-do-do-dweet-dweet-dweet-dweet-dweee-doo-doot).
I guess I just miss the way PBS was when I was a kid. I am not too keen on the Magic School Bus, but those Tele-tubbies are pretty cool, I guess.
XXV
Happy Corkscrew Day!!!
Oh, and I turn twenty-five today. Waa-hoo. My big question is, when do I get to start calling myself an "Old Fart"? At 30?
I got a neat present from my sister Ruth and her husband, Andy. They are coming to visit in June and that is about as neat a gift as I could have hoped for. I have already started a list of thing that we can do in their time here, which will be, I am afraid, all too short.
They are coming over solstice, so we will do all of that Solstice-related non-sense such as the Midnight Sun Run/Walk and the Midnight Sun Baseball Game.
It will be great.
More on that in upcoming emails.
I was thinking about my birthday, or the date of March 27th in particular, and it seems that bad things happen on March 27th.
On March 27th, 1964, Valdez, Alaska was rocked by the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in North America...a 9.2 on the Richter scale. The entire city was leveled, and the new city of Valdez lies 4 miles from where it stood 38 years ago. 131 died in the earthquake and resulting tsunami.
Also for those of you who are seismically inclined, in 1980 Mt. St. Helens awoke from dormancy after 123 years...it would eventually erupt on May 18th, 1980 taking 60 lives. Also on this day in 1980, the North Sea oil platform "Alexander Keilland" capsized, killing 123 men.
On the day that I was born, in 1977, a Pan Am 747 and a KLM 747 collided on the runway in the Canary Islands, killing 574.
Yuri Gagarin, the first man into space, was killed in an airplane crash in 1968 on this day.
Of course, who can forget the great tragedy that befell the rest of my family on this day 15 years ago...those of you who were there will remember it all too well. March 27, 1987...a date which settled once and for all the issue about whether our house would ever again host a slumber party.
For my 10th birthday, I was going to host a small gathering of friends for a Friday night sleep-over...you know the drill...come home after school, spend the night all sugared-up, then everybody goes home sometime Saturday morning. Well, Old Ma Nature had a thing or three cooked up for us.
It snowed like a banshee that night and we awoke to a full blown blizzard, and Nebraska being a rural, tree-less wasteland, and I, having friends who mostly lived in the country, got to have much more of a slumber party than anybody was comfortable with. I think that the last boy to leave was Jeremy Bill, and that was sometime on Tuesday afternoon. If I recall, we didn't have school that whole week, and I remember that the phone system was a permanent party line "Pick up your phone, talk to 50 people" type of setup. Ask yourself, how long could you survive in a house with 6 10-year old boys?
Anyway, I don't want to make it sound like it is all bad history. The corkscrew was invented on this day, and the shoelace. Kerosene was patented on this day, as was the urinal. The first long-distance phone call was placed, and the first successful blood transfusion was performed. I share a birthday with two early Nobel Laureates, Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered the X-ray and received the first Nobel Prize for Physics in 1901, and Otto Wallach who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1910. James Dewar, the Scottish physicist who invented the thermos died on this day in 1923.
Well, anyway, I just want to leave you with some of the things you SHOULD have been celebrating during the past month...
March is:
Foot Health Month
International Hamburger and Pickle Month
National Frozen Food Month
National Furniture Refinishing Month
Did you remember to refinish your furniture?
ICE ALASKA
I promise that I will have pictures from the Ice Art Festival up soon.
COPPING OUT
Since I am copping out of the Ice Alaska stuff, I guess I could always blame that on work. Work is going well, and I will now take the time bore you with the details...
Research: As some of you heard, the research that I was performing with the temperature inversion at Barrow got put on hold because of a study that was performed in 1989. There are possibilities that a new study could be performed on the dynamics of the inversion, but that will have to wait.
Since Gerd, my boss, returned from his trip, he and I have starting working through the data from the last research trip to Antarctica, so I am keeping very busy with that and I am learning a lot of new things and getting another chance to perfect data control and analysis.
I am also doing some basic level research with Judie Triplehorn, the head research librarian at the Mather Library, which is the geosciences library at the Geophysical Institute. We are doing some cataloging and classing of all of the polar data regarding weather and climate. We are putting together a poster for the Polar Libraries Colloquy, which will be held in Copenhagen in June...you guessed it, right when Ruth and Andy are coming to visit, so I will miss out on that trip. No matter, I am not sure that I will have gotten to go, and I would rather have visitors than visit someplace else.
Website: I am still working to get the new Alaska Climate Research Center website online and working. It is a big process, especially when the site that already exists is very large and you have to keep track of everything during the move. I will let you know when it is up and running.
INJECTIONS D'HUMEUR ET VENANT MASSE INFUSION D'HUMEUR
Well, I only have one joke for you this time, but that doesn't mean you are getting off easy...as the title of this section implies, there is something more on the way. By the way, the rough translation is "Injections of humor and coming mass infusion of humor."
First, your regular dose...
So, the lawyer was cross-examining a doctor during a malpractice lawsuit, and the lawyer asks "Did you take the pulse of the patient before you pronounced him dead?"
The doctor replied "No, I did not."
"Did you listen for a heartbeat?"
"No, I did not."
"So, you are telling me that at the time you signed the death certificate, you had not taken full procedure to make sure that he was dead?!?!?!"
To which the doctor replied, "Well, let me put it this way...the patient's brain was in a jar on the operating table, but for all I know, he could be out practicing law somewhere."
OK, now for the mass infusion...on April 6th (next Saturday), Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" will hold its annual "Joke Show". If you love jokes as much as I do, and why shouldn't you?, you will want to tune this in. You can hear it on most public radio stations, or you can listen on the internet at http://www.prairiehome.org
Ok, well, I am out of here.
Just a reminder that you can always access my website at http://www.qsl.net/kc0hoj/bmh/home.html
Have a great day!
Brian "No more sleepovers!" Hartmann