Outside magazine has a feature on “The 10 Greatest Adventure Biographies,” a list that includes books on Henry Morton Stanley, George Mallory (pictured) and Ernest Shackleton.Their big list comes with brief reviews of the books and backgrounds on all the adventurers.
In this brief video film director David Lynch tells the story of when George Lucas offered him the job of directing Star Wars: Return of the Jedi.
Wild man and entrepreneur Richard Branson of Virgin Airlines unveiled his newest space ship this week in California, a passenger craft called the Virgin Enterprise.According to the Virgin Galactice site, flights into space are scheduled to begin in 2011. For a couple of hundred thousand dollars you can spend a couple of hours in space — without having to become an astronaut.
Jeepers, it’s hard to believe that Doug Kenney would still be only 62 today.He was 32 when he fell from a cliff in Hawaii in 1980, possibly under odd circumstances. But by then he had already founded National Lampoon magazine, launched the stage show Lemmings, and co-written the films Animal House and Caddyshack. Those two films, nothing more than larks at the time, have since become landmarks of the Early Ironic Age.
The GOP candidate for Ted Kennedy’s old Senate seat posed nude for Cosmo in 1982.
Caricature artist John Kascht draws and talks about the face of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani in a very entertaining video, found here.Kascht also draws and talks in other videos about Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and others (links go to our profiles, not those videos).
California has a Chihuahua problem:In what appears to be strictly a California phenomenon, Golden State animal shelters have been deluged with Chihuahuas. The trembling, pop-eyed canines have replaced pit bulls as the dogs most likely to turn up at the pound.”A couple years ago if a little one came in it’d be adopted before it touched the ground,” said Kate O’Connor, director of the Berkeley shelter.
Sideshow chanteuse Lady GaGa met Queen Elizabeth II last night after the Royal Variety Performance in Blackpool, England.God bless the Queen in these situations. Nothing fazes her. She’s seen it all.
Jeepers, what a story. Terrence Watanabe blew $127 million in a “year-long gambling binge at the Caesars Palace and Rio casinos in 2007,” according to The Wall Street Journal.
The official death certificate of World War I ace pilot Manfred Richthofen has turned up in the Polish town of Ostrow Wielkopolski.Richthofen was one of the most famous aviators of the 20th century.A German fighter pilot, he was known as “The Red Baron” to the English because of the color of his plane. The English were quite familiar with his work: by the time Richthofen was shot down in 1918 he’d been credited with 80 kills..