Kurt Thomas, gymnast.
He competed in the 1976 Olympics, but didn’t win any medals. He won a gold medal at the world championships in 1978: he was the first American to do so.
He was a favorite to medal in the 1980 Olympics, but we all know what happened there.
He also starred in the 1985 film, “Gymkata“, a fact the NYT curiously omits from their coverage.
Science Sunday!
I’m drawing pretty heavily on AT&T/Bell System stuff, but they do have some of the best science videos on YouTube. Not just about phone stuff, either.
For example, lasers.
From 1969, “Lasers Unlimited”. If you want to skip the introduction, fast forward to about 2:25.
Bonus video #1, since that one was short: a 1978 interview with Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias, right after their Nobel Prize was announced.
If you don’t know the story, Penzias and Wilson were Bell Labs employees working on microwave receivers, specifically ultra-sensitive and cryogenically cooled ones. Since they were trying to pick up really really weak signals (bounced off Echo balloons), they eliminated all the noise they could from their equipment. But there was still some noise that persisted and that they couldn’t find a source for. Finally, and with the help of some astronomers, they figured out that what they were hearing was the cosmic microwave background radiation, which is taken to be evidence in favor of the Big Bang theory. Penzias and Wilson won the Nobel Prize in Physics for this discovery. (It was shared with Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa, who was awarded the prize for unrelated work on low-temperature physics.)
I know it’s talking heads, but I think the Penzias and Wilson story is a great one. You go chasing faint radio signals, you come back with one of the keys to the universe. How cool is that?
(Apparently, their receiver was quite cool. Thank you, I’ll be here all week. Try the veal and remember to tip your waitress.)
Bonus video #2: This one is equally short, and silent: “A Computer Technique For the Production of Animated Movies”. This is how computer animation was done…in 1964.
Since it is June 6th, I thought I’d put up some D-Day related videos from the National Archives.
“D-Day to Germany”.
Bonus #1: “D-Day to D Plus 3”.
Bonus #2: “Normandy, The Airborne Invasion of Fortress Europe”.
Two by way of Hacker News:
Akira Kurosawa’s storyboards. Oh, wait, I’m sorry: Akira Kurosawa’s painted storyboards.
(They keep saying “hand-painted storyboards”. As opposed to what: machine painted? Foot painted?)
The early history of computer chess, including the first national computer chess tournament.
I’m fascinated by computer chess, so I would probably have posted this anyway. Interestingly, though, this article also features (and quotes) an unexpected appearance by a now very prominent science fiction and fantasy writer, who at the time had recently graduated from Northwestern University and was interested in both computers and chess.
Bruce Jay Friedman, noted writer.
He also wrote the screenplays for “Splash” and “Stir Crazy”, and the works that were turned into “The Lonely Guy” and “The Heartbreak Kid”.
For the historical record: Hutton Gibson, Mel Gibson’s father.
Hutton Gibson belonged to a splinter group of Catholics who reject the reforms of the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, known as Vatican II. These traditionalists seek to preserve centuries-old orthodoxy, especially the Tridentine Mass, the Latin Mass established in the 16th century. They operate their own chapels, schools and clerical orders apart from the Vatican and in opposition to it.
But even among these outsiders, Mr. Gibson, who had early in life attended a seminary before dropping out, was extreme in his views. He denied the legitimacy of John Paul II as pope, once calling him a “Koran Kisser,” and said Vatican II had been “a Masonic plot backed by the Jews.” He called Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre, a traditionalist leader until his death in 1991, a “compromiser.” Mr. Gibson earned the nickname “Pope Gibson” for his outspoken, dogmatic opinions on faith.
After he was expelled from a conservative group in Australia, where he had moved with his family from New York State in 1968, Mr. Gibson formed his own, Alliance for Catholic Tradition. Beginning in 1977, he disseminated his ultra-Orthodox views in a newsletter, “The War Is Now!,” and through self-published books, including “Is the Pope Catholic?” (1978) and “The Enemy is Here!” (1994). The Wisconsin Historical Society library and archives holds Mr. Gibson’s published works among its extensive collection of religious publications.
…
In 2003, as Mel Gibson was directing “The Passion of the Christ,” his film about the crucifixion, Hutton Gibson gave an interview to The New York Times laced with comments about conspiracy theories. The planes that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001, had been remote-controlled, he claimed (without saying by whom). The number of Jews killed in the Holocaust was wildly inflated, he went on.
“Go and ask an undertaker or the guy who operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body,” Mr. Gibson said. “It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six million?”
In a radio interview a week before the February 2004 release of “The Passion,” Mr. Gibson went further, saying of the Holocaust, “It’s all — maybe not all fiction — but most of it is.” The comments added to an already simmering controversy that the film was anti-Semitic; the chairmen of two major studios told The Times that they wouldn’t work with Mel Gibson in the future.
This is another “no real theme” day, just a couple of things that came up in my recommendations that I thought were diverting.
“The White House: Past and Present”, one of those old Coronet films from the 1960s that you may remember from school (if you were a certain age). I don’t recall ever seeing this one, personally…
Bonus video: “Behind the Ticker Tape”, a 1957 film about the American Stock Exchange (now the NYSE American). If you ever wondered what stock trading was like in the 1950s…
I haven’t put up any Canadian content (CanCon) in a while, so let’s fix that today. Plus: explosives!
“Handle With Care”, a 1943 documentary about TNT production during the war.
Bonus video #1: “Birth of a Giant”. From 1957, about the construction of the Canadair Argus, a massive Canadian built anti-submarine aircraft.
Bonus video #2: This is a little longer, but at least one reader might enjoy it: “Challenger: An Industrial Romance”, about the design and construction of the Canadair Challenger executive jet. This is also from 1980, so at least you’ve got color. Plus, you know, I kind of like the National Film Board of Canada.
I haven’t thrown FotB RoadRich a bone in a while, so this one is dedicated to him. It combines two! two! two! things in one: planes and Japan!
“So Small My Island”, a 1960s Pan Am promo film for travel to Japan.
Bonus: More Pan Am! From 1959, “Jet Terminal”, about the opening of Terminal 3 (aka “Worldport”) at Idlewild.
Bonus #2: Heh, heh. He said “Idlewild”.
Wes Unseld, NBA center.
There are only two players who have been named MVP and rookie of the year in the same season. The other one is Wilt Chamberlain.
Pat Dye, Auburn football coach.
Elsa Dorfman, photographer. She specialized in taking portraits with the giant 20×24 Polaroid camera, about which I have written previously.
By way of Hacker News (and I don’t think the WSJ link is going to work for many people): Irene Triplett. Ms. Triplett was 90 years old, and was the last person still receiving a Civil War pension.
According to the WallyJ, which I can read but can’t link here, her father (Moses Triplett) started out fighting for the Confederacy, then defected to the Union side in 1863. He married a woman named Elda Hall in 1924, had Irene Triplett in 1930 (he was 83, his wife was 34), and died in 1938 at 92.
Her pension was apparently $73.13 a month, though she received other benefits as a ward of the state. In addition, “…a pair of Civil War buffs visited and sent her money to spend on Dr. Pepper and chewing tobacco, a habit she picked up in the first grade.”
I believe I promised an exotic destination yesterday. I hope you all have your bags packed, because what could be more exotic than…
…Vietnam?
From 1967, “You In Vietnam”, a Marine Corps training/orientation film for new recruits in country.
Bonus: from 1986, “Combat Leadership: The Ultimate Challenge”.
Lee Marvin shows up at about the three minute mark.
Do you like jam?
Do you like Jam Handy?
Do you like soup?
From 1962, “The Ballad of Soup Du Jour”.
Warning: folk music.
And here’s a bonus for those of you who haven’t had enough already, or who are big fans of “The Gallery of Regrettable Food“: “The Magic Shelf”, a 1950s promo film for Campbell’s Soup. In glorious (?) color.
Tomorrow: pack your suitcase for an exotic destination!
Yesterday was a big day, but I wanted to give the news time to shake out.
For “Valley Curtain” he strung orange nylon fabric along steel cables over a narrow pass in Rifle, Colo.; a large semicircular opening allowed cars on the state highway below to pass through.
Fierce winds ripped the curtain to shreds two days later, a setback that Christo shrugged off. “I as an artist have done what I set out to do,” he said. “That the curtain no longer exists only makes it more interesting.”
Then came “Running Fence,” a series of white nylon fabric panels that snaked their way over ranchland in Sonoma and Marin counties in Northern California and crossed Highway 101 on their way to the ocean in Bodega Bay.
For “Valley Curtain,” Christo and his lawyer devised the system that made all of his subsequent works possible. For each project a corporation was created, with Jeanne-Claude as director and Christo as a salaried employee. Financing came from the sale of drawings and small models to collectors and museums; Christo never accepted grants or public money. When the art work was taken down, the corporation dissolved itself, having earned zero profit.
…
Even more difficult, politically, was Christo’s plan to wrap the Reichstag in Berlin. The first drawing was made in 1971. For decades thereafter he encountered nothing but resistance from West German officials. But with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, momentum shifted his way, and in 1995 the work was completed.
In between the Pont Neuf and Reichstag Projects, Christo and Jeanne-Claude simultaneously placed 1,760 yellow umbrellas in the Tejon Pass, just north of Los Angeles, and 1,340 blue umbrellas on a hillside near Ibaraki, Japan.
“The Umbrellas, Japan-U.S.A.” came to grief when one of the 485-pound umbrellas in California came unmoored in high winds and killed a woman and injured several other people. The two artists ordered the umbrellas in both countries to be taken down immediately. As a Japanese crane operator prepared to remove one of the umbrellas, his crane made contact with a power line, electrocuting him.
Herb Stempel, of quiz show scandal fame, has passed at 93. I’ve written about the quiz show scandal previously, so I won’t recap the whole story here.
Mr. Stempel apparently passed on April 7th, but his death was not confirmed until yesterday. It’s mildly interesting that he passed almost exactly a year after Charles Van Doren.
Science Sunday!
You know what else I thought was really cool when I was six years old?
From 1962 and the Bell System, by way of the AT&T Tech Channel, “Telstar”, the story of the satellite’s development.
Bonus science video, also by way of the AT&T Tech Channel, but covering a totally different aspect of science: “The Year They Discovered People”, a 1973 documentary about the Hawthorne Effect.
Marge Redmond. She was perhaps most famous as “Sister Jacqueline” on “The Flying Nun”, but she did a fair amount of other TV: “Barnaby Jones”, “The Rockford Files”, “Quincy, M.E.”, “Matlock”, and more. She was also in “The Fortune Cookie”, “Manhattan Murder Mystery”, and “Family Plot”.
She was married to Jack Weston, and they were both good Cleveland people. Apparently, she died in February, but her death was only recently reported.
Here’s something a little different and shorter. “Coast Guard Lighthouses”, a film about…Coast Guard lighthouses, as of 1960.
Bonus: since the theme today is “something a little different”, here’s a promo film from the American Radio Relay League, also from the 1960s: “The Ham’s Wide World”. Noted: one of America’s most famous hams, Barry Goldwater (K7UGA and K3UIG), shows up at about 15:40.