George Walton Lucas, Jr. (May 14, 1944 – )
George Lucas is an Academy Award-nominated American film producer, screenwriter, director and chairman of Lucasfilm Ltd. He is best known for being the creator of the epic Sci-Fi franchise Star Wars and the archaeologist-adventurer character Indiana Jones.
Posted in The Big Screen, The Little Screen (Television)
Douglas Noël Adams (March 11, 1952 – May 11, 2001)
Douglas Adams was an English author, comic radio dramatist, and musician. He is best known as author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. Hitchhiker’s began on radio, and developed into a “trilogy” of five books (which sold more than fifteen million copies during his lifetime) as well as a television series, a towel, a live theater show, a drink, a comic book series, a computer game and a feature film that was completed after Adams’ death. He was known to some fans as Bop Ad (after his illegible signature), or by his initials “DNA”.
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is the fourth book of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy “trilogy”. Its title is the message left by the dolphins when they departed Planet Earth just before it was demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass, as described in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. The phrase has since been adopted by some science fiction fans as a humorous way to say “goodbye.”
Carroll Hall Shelby (January 11, 1923 – May 10, 2012)
The one-time chicken farmer had more than a half-dozen successful careers during his long life. Among them: champion race car driver, racing team owner, automobile manufacturer, automotive consultant, safari tour operator, raconteur, chili entrepreneur and philanthropist.
“He’s an icon in the medical world and an icon in the automotive world,” his longtime friend, Dick Messer, executive director of Los Angeles’ Petersen Automotive Museum, once said of Shelby.
“His legacy is the diversity of his life,” Messer said. “He’s incredibly innovative. His life has always been the reinvention of Carroll Shelby.”
Shelby first made his name behind the wheel of a car, winning France’s grueling 24 Hours of Le Mans sports car race with teammate Ray Salvadori in 1959. He already was suffering serious heart problems and ran the race “with nitroglycerin pills under his tongue,” Messer once noted.
He had turned to the race-car circuit in the 1950s after his chicken ranch failed. He won dozens of races in various classes throughout the 1950s and was twice named Sports Illustrated’s Driver of the Year.
Soon after his win at Le Mans, he gave up racing and turned his attention to designing high-powered “muscle cars” that eventually became the Shelby Cobra and the Mustang Shelby GT500.
The Cobra, which used Ford engines and a British sport car chassis, was the fastest production model ever made when it was displayed at the New York Auto Show in 1962.
A year later, Cobras were winning races over Corvettes, and in 1964 the Rip Chords had a Top 5 hit on the Billboard pop chart with “Hey, Little Cobra.” (“Spring, little Cobra, getting ready to strike, spring, little Cobra, with all of your might. Hey, little Cobra, don’t you know you’re gonna shut ’em down?”)
In 2007, an 800-horsepower model of the Cobra made in 1966, once Shelby’s personal car, sold for $5.5 million at auction, a record for an American car.
“It’s a special car. It would do just over three seconds to 60 (mph), 40 years ago,” Shelby told the crowd before the sale, held in Scottsdale, Ariz.
It was Lee Iacocca, then head of Ford Motor Co., who had assigned Shelby the task of designing a fastback model of Ford’s Mustang that could compete against the Corvette for young male buyers.
Turning a vehicle he had once dismissed as “a secretary car” into a rumbling, high-performance model was “the hardest thing I’ve done in my life,” Shelby recalled in a 2000 interview with The Associated Press.
That car and the Shelby Cobra made his name a household word in the 1960s.
Posted in Because I Can, News, Planes Trains and Automobiles
Robert Anson Heinlein ( July 7, 1907 – May 8, 1988 ) was one of the most popular, influential, and controversial authors of “hard” science fiction. He set a high standard for science and engineering plausibility, and helped to raise the genre’s standards of literary quality. He was the first writer to break into mainstream general magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post in the late 1940s with unvarnished science fiction. He was among the first authors of bestselling novel-length science fiction in the modern mass-market era. For many years, Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke were known as the “Big Three” of science fiction.
Posted in Literary
On the afternoon of May 7, 1915, the British ocean liner Lusitania is torpedoed without warning by a German submarine off the south coast of Ireland. Within 20 minutes, the vessel sank into the Celtic Sea. Of 1,959 passengers and crew, 1,198 people were drowned, including 128 Americans. The attack aroused considerable indignation in the United States, but Germany defended the action, noting that it had issued warnings of its intent to attack all ships, neutral or otherwise, that entered the war zone around Britain.
Posted in On This Day, Planes Trains and Automobiles
On this day in 1937, the airship Hindenburg, the largest dirigible ever built and the pride of Nazi Germany, bursts into flames upon touching its mooring mast in Lakehurst, New Jersey, killing 36 passengers and crewmembers.
Posted in On This Day, Planes Trains and Automobiles
Dominick “Dom” DeLuise (August 1, 1933 – May 4, 2009)
Dominick “Dom” DeLuise (August 1, 1933 – May 4, 2009) was an American actor, comedian, film director, television producer, chef, and author.
Posted in Humor, The Big Screen, The Little Screen (Television)
Miracle on 34th Street (also titled The Big Heart in the UK) is a 1947 film which tells the story of a gentle old man, working as a Santa Claus at Macy’s department store in New York City, who contends that he is the real deal.
Posted in Because I Can, On This Day, The Big Screen
Cephalotes atratus
Darth Vader Ant
Mycalesis gotama
Hello Kitty Caterpillar
Family Pentatomoidea
Elvis Presley Bug
Megalopyge opercularis
Donald Trump Caterpillar
Calcarifera ordinate
Wattle Cup Caterpillar
Hemaris thysbe
Hummingbird Moth
Alien Caterpillar
Synchlora aerate
Flower Caterpillar
Oncopeltus fasciatus
Darth Maul Caterpillar
Deilephila elpenor
Snake Caterpillar
Posted in Critters
