Clear Water Bad
Lake Michigan has become dramatically clearer in last 20 years — but at a steep cost
by Tony Briscoe
In this May 3, 2007 photo, Inland Seas Education Association instructor Conrad Heins holds a cluster of zebra mussels that were taken from Lake Michigan off Suttons Bay, Mich. (John L. Russell / AP)
Decades ago, Lake Michigan teemed with nutrients and green algae, casting a brownish-green hue that resembled the mouth of an inland river rather than a vast, open-water lake.
Back then, the lake’s swampy complexion was less than inviting to swimmers and kayakers, but it supported a robust fishing industry as several commercial companies trawled for perch, and sport fishermen cast their lines for trout. But in the past 20 years, Lake Michigan has undergone a dramatic transformation.
In analyzing satellite images between 1998 and 2012, researchers at the Michigan Tech Research Institute were surprised to find that lakes Michigan and Huron are now clearer than Lake Superior. In a study published late last year, the researchers say limiting the amount of agricultural and sewage runoff in the lake has had an immense impact. However, the emergence of invasive mussels, which number in the trillions and have the ability to filter the entire volume of Lake Michigan in four to six days, has had an even greater effect.
“When you look at the scientific terms, we are approaching some oceanic values,” said Michael Sayers, a research engineer at Michigan Tech and co-author of the study. “We have some ways to go, but we are getting a lot closer to Lake Tahoe. A lot of times, you’ll hear from people that the water is so blue it compares to something in tropical areas.”
Hereditary
Erect Knotweed
Hunting for the ancient lost farms of North America
2,000 years ago, people domesticated these plants. Now they’re wild weeds. What happened?
Adventurers and archaeologists have spent centuries searching for lost cities in the Americas. But over the past decade, they’ve started finding something else: lost farms.
Over 2,000 years ago in North America, indigenous people domesticated plants that are now part of our everyday diets, such as squashes and sunflowers. But they also bred crops that have since returned to the wild. These include erect knotweed (not to be confused with its invasive cousin, Asian knotweed), goosefoot, little barley, marsh elder, and maygrass. We haven’t simply lost a few plant strains: an entire cuisine with its own kinds of flavors and baked goods has simply disappeared.
By studying lost crops, archaeologists learn about everyday life in the ancient Woodland culture of the Americas, including how people ate plants that we call weeds today. But these plants also give us a window on social networks. Scientists can track the spread of cultivated seeds from one tiny settlement to the next in the vast region that would one day be known as the United States. This reveals which groups were connected culturally and how they formed alliances through food and farming.
Juliette Lewis Joins Billy Bob Thornton in ‘A Million Little Pieces’ Cast
Juliette Lewis Takes Over Acne Studios Instagram
The actress was spotted filming other guests, among which Isabelle Huppert, Sara Forestier and Stephen Jones
Juliette Lewis front row at Acne Studios / Stephane Feugere/WWD
Juliette Lewis was busy capturing the scene at the first Acne Studios women’s show to be held during couture week in Paris on Wednesday, before sitting in the front row alongside Sara Forestier, Isabelle Huppert, Stephen Jones and Michel Gaubert.
The actress caught Casey Spooner jumping up on a bench to shake things up. Earlier in the week, he and partner-in-crime Violet Chakchi had joked about wanting to have their own reality TV crew.
“I’m doing the Instagram takeover for Acne Studios,” said Lewis, known for such films as “Cape Fear” and “From Dusk Till Dawn.”
Lewis hinted at further projects with Acne, and then clammed up. In the meantime, she is flying back to Los Angeles to start filming on Monday a screen adaptation of “A Million Little Pieces,” the infamous James Frey book, with Billy Bob Thornton.
Spice World Redux
CREW MEMBERS EXPLAIN WHY SPICE WORLD IS STILL SO WEIRD, 20 YEARS ON
By Rachel Hodin
Turn on Spice World today, and I promise it will confound you. So many things about the movie don’t make sense. So many things defy the basic rules of narrative, with characters left unexplained and subplots unresolved—but that’s what makes it so captivating and fun. How exactly did this poppy, cinematic romp get made? It’s one of the greatest mysteries of pop culture, and one that, on the occasion of the movie’s 20th anniversary, I’m determined to resolve.
As pointed out on the podcast How Did This Get Made?, Spice World got away with ignoring the most basic tenets of moviemaking and screenwriting. Spice World has no real plot, and no end goal—there’s no real story arc at all, for that matter. The girls pinball from place to place, studio to studio, and rehearsal to rehearsal, each one suited up in her respective coat of character armor. Then, with 10 minutes to go in the movie, the band’s “first live show at the Royal Albert Hall”—fleetingly mentioned in one of the film’s first scenes—becomes the movie’s climactic narrative. Will they or won’t they pull off their first live concert? Thing is, the girls have already performed live only a couple scenes prior—not to mention in the first scene—but this is the grand finale, the moment we’ve all been waiting for. Apparently.
Then, there’s the Spice Bus—which, while certainly a sight to impress even Austin Powers, tricked-out with fairytale ’90s-era gadgets and toys—is also about 12 times the absolute maximum size that any bus interior could feasibly be. It’s a full-on dreamscape, and one that production designer Grenville Horner remembers fondly. “The Spice Bus was fantastic,” he told me over the phone. “It was just fun. You totally invent it; it’s not like anything you’ve ever come across.”
A MILLION LITTLE PIECES Casts Billy Bob Thornton, Carla Juri, Charlie Hunnam, Giovanni Ribisi
Billy Bob Thornton, Carla Juri & Charlie Hunnam Join Aaron Taylor-Johnson In ‘A Million Little Pieces’
REX/Shutterstock/Nan A. Talese
EXCLUSIVE: A Million Little Pieces, the screen adaptation of the James Frey book, is fast assembling for a January 25 production start. Billy Bob Thornton has joined Aaron Taylor-Johnson and director Sam Taylor-Johnson for the first film to go into production for Brad Weston’s producing/financing company Makeready. Thornton will be joined by Carla Juri, who emerges from Blade Runner 2049 to play the female lead, and Charlie Hunnam. Giovanni Ribisi was already set. Makeready’s Pam Abdy is producing with The Picture Company partners Andrew Rona and Alex Heineman.
Thornton plays the role of Leonard, whom fans of Frey’s book will recall as a mysterious tough guy who became the guardian angel at a rehab facility for the protagonist, who tried to end his addiction problems before they killed him. Frey later wrote Leonard’s life story in a followup book.
Sunset
Where the Real Los Angeles Meets the Dream
On Sunset Boulevard, two Californias — the lived place and the one seen on screen — run parallel for 22 snaking miles.
Photographs by Jake Michaels / Text by Steven Kurutz / Produced by Eve Lyons
Like Broadway in New York and Ocean Drive in Miami, Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles is both a real street and a myth. It’s where you go to gas up at the Arco station (5007 Sunset Boulevard) or grab a meal at In-N-Out Burger (7009 Sunset), and also to chase the dream of fame and eternal sunshine. Remarkably, Sunset lives up to the postcard.
Drive east to west, from where the street begins downtown to where it ends 22 twisting miles later at the Pacific Ocean, and at any point along the route, you will see the images that movies, TV shows and magazines have implanted in your brain.
In hip and historically Mexican Echo Park and Silver Lake, you’ll find trendy boutiques beside a 99 Cents Only store (3612 Sunset), and cool kids scarfing down tacos at Guisados (1261 Sunset).
In Hollywood, there are always weird Hollywood people, and tourists hoping to see weird Hollywood people, walking around near where Sunset meets Vine.
Moving west into Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, the street becomes wide and lush and curving. The sidewalks and pedestrians disappear, and the wealthy residents in their mansions hide from the celebrity-home bus tours behind walls of hedgerow — the Sunset of “Sunset Boulevard” and “Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles.”
They’re Coming
Earthquake-causing meteor leaves southeast Michigan residents awestruck
By KARMA ALLEN
Residents of southeast Michigan were left a bit shaken Tuesday night after a big bright flash lit up the sky and the ground beneath them shook.
A flying saucer? No. A shooting star? Not quite.
The National Weather Service eventually solved the mystery, tweeting “USGS confirms meteor occurred around 810 pm, causing a magnitude 2.0 earthquake.”
“After reviewing several observational datasets, the NWS can confirm the flash and boom was NOT thunder or lightning, but instead a likely meteor. We continue to monitor feeds from astronomical agencies for official confirmation of a meteor,” read a tweet posted nearly two hours before the NWS confirmed it was a meteor.
Bocuse Gone
‘Nouvelle cuisine’ pioneer Bocuse dies at 91
Reuters Staff
PARIS (Reuters) – Paul Bocuse, one of France’s most celebrated chefs, has died at the age of 91, the interior minister said on Saturday.
Bocuse was an early exponent of “nouvelle cuisine”, which reinterpreted traditional French cooking using less butter and cream and focusing on fresh ingredients and stylish presentation.
Dominance & Submission (Radios Appear)
How the internet controls you
Corporate giants have created an entirely new surveillance capitalism. And we’re too hooked to care
by John Naughton
The “dust of exploded beliefs,” the English aphorist Geoffrey Madan once wrote, “may make a fine sunset.” We’re beginning to see that glow over the internet which, if you count back to the design phase in the autumn of 1973, is now over four decades old.
From the moment the internet first opened for semi-public use in January 1983, it evoked utopian dreams. It was easy to see why. Cyberspace—the term coined by the novelist William Gibson for the virtual space behind the screen—really did seem to be a parallel universe to “meatspace,” the term invented by Grateful-Dead-lyricist-turned-essayist John Perry Barlow for the messy physical world that we all inhabit. Cyberspace in the 1980s was a glorious sandpit for geeks: a world with no corporations, no crime, no spam, no hate speech, relatively civil discourse, no editorial gatekeepers, no regulation and no role for those meatspace masters whom Barlow called the “weary giants of flesh and steel.”
But then, gradually, the internet was commercialised and those two parallel spaces merged to create our networked world, in which the affordances of cyberspace combine with surveillance and corporate control. Of course, the internet has brought huge benefits in terms of access to information and efficiency of communication: try imagining our home or work lives without it. But there are serious worries. The online world is populated by several billion mostly passive addicts of devices, apps and services created by a handful of corporate giants. Prying governments and giant companies have acquired the capacity to surveil our every move, both on the internet and, now that so many devices have built-in GPS, in the real world too. Through their ability to monitor our searches these companies—as well as the governments they co-operate with—are able to see our innermost thoughts and desires. (Yes, even our desires: what people search for on Google is incredibly revealing.)
747 Gone
The 747 Had a Great Run. But Farewell Doesn’t Mean the End.
By Zach Wichter
MARANA, Ariz. — There may be no airliner as recognizable as the Boeing 747, the world’s first jumbo jet, with its iconic hump of an upper deck. For aviation fans, the introduction of the “Queen of the Skies” was a triumph of engineering and grace: unprecedented size and speed with spiral-staircase international glamour.
But the airline business has changed, and the giant plane has become more expensive to operate. A couple of weeks ago, the final 747 flight by any commercial United States airline took to the sky.
Like so many others before it, the plane was heading to the Southwest to retire.
A passer-by at Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport might have noticed something unusual as Boeing 747 No. 6314 pushed back from the gate for the last time. Onlookers in the terminal waved farewell as the plane, operated by Delta Air Lines, taxied out to the runway. Undeterred by the chilly weather, even members of the ground crew pulled out their phones to memorialize this flight in photos.
Dad Rap
Hip-Hop’s Generation Gap: ‘Emo’ vs. ‘Dad’ Rap
As the music genre has become a commercial juggernaut, some worry about a cultural divide between younger and older artists
By Neil Shah
Rap has become the most-consumed music in America, according to industry data, but with its growth comes a new concern: a widening generation gap.
Just as rock ‘n‘ roll splintered in the 1970s when punk arrived, a beef between some young hip-hop artists and “dad rappers” is dividing fans. Some music insiders worry that the schism will hurt the unity of the hip-hop community when its music is at its cultural and commercial peak by splitting fans into opposing camps.
Dolores O’Riordan Gone
The Ferocious, Sublime Dolores O’Riordan, of the Cranberries
The Irish singer Dolores O’Riordan, who fronted the alt-rock band the Cranberries since 1989, died on Monday, at the age of forty-six. O’Riordan was managing several health issues at the time of her death—she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2015 and had been suffering from back pain, which resulted in the cancellation of a Cranberries reunion tour last year. Her body was found in a hotel on Park Lane, in central London; her death was described as sudden and unexplained.
O’Riordan was born in Ballybricken, in County Limerick, in 1971. She was the youngest of seven children and just eighteen when she joined the Cranberries. Her folks were strict: as a teen-ager, she wasn’t allowed to wear makeup or buy her own clothes. In an interview with the Irish Times, she recalled how the guitarist Noel Hogan brought her a pair of Doc Martens to wear for the band’s first photo shoot. “They were too big for me, but I put them on anyway,” she said. “Suddenly I looked like an indie girl.”
Like many people, the first time I heard her sing was on “Linger,” an early single that ended up in fairly heavy rotation on MTV in 1993. The black-and-white video, directed by Melodie McDaniel, was based loosely on Jean-Luc Godard’s “Alphaville,” a film that considers the potency of desire. It’s a hazy, sentimental song about realizing that you’re on the bummer end of a lopsided relationship. “You know I’m such a fool for you,” O’Riordan sings. She’s asking, in a way, for mercy—a final show of kindness: “You’ve got me wrapped around your finger / Do you have to let it linger?” I wasn’t old enough to understand the particular humiliation of being duped and strung along by someone you loved and trusted, but I nonetheless recognized the deep agony and confusion in her voice when she asked, “Why were you holding her hand?”
Still, it wasn’t until “Zombie,” the first single from the band’s second album, “No Need to Argue,” that the sublime recklessness of O’Riordan’s voice became fully evident. By then, the Cranberries were the most successful Irish rock band since U2. Most of the other rock singers I admired at the time (Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth; Kim and Kelley Deal, of the Breeders; Kathleen Hanna, of Bikini Kill) sounded plainly and hopelessly cool—disaffected, vaguely antagonistic, and aloof. O’Riordan sounded like a maniac. “Zombie” was written as a memorial for two children—the twelve-year-old Jonathan Ball and the three-year-old Tim Parry—who were killed in an I.R.A. street bombing, in Warrington, England, in 1993 (the explosives were hidden in garbage cans). She goes feral on the chorus: “Zombie-ie-ie-ie-oh-oh-oh-oh!” It’s all terrifically guttural—ugly, wild, and paralyzing. For an American kid, her round Irish accent made the word seem even stranger, as if she were conjuring something otherworldly, only to vanquish it.
Record Sierra Wind
from The San Francisco Chronicle
199-MPH Sierra wind gust sets California record
A gust that blasted the summit of a peak at Alpine Meadows in February was the fastest non-tornado wind recorded in the United States in 2017.
The 199-mph gust was also the fastest ever recorded in California, according to the National Climate Data Center’s Extremes Committee, which sanctioned the mark last week.
For comparison, 140-mph winds have been known to pick up and hurl baseball-sized rocks.
“Even in winds of 120 mph you can’t stand under your own force,” says Tom Padham, a meteorologist with the Mount Washington Observatory. “You’re knocked over pretty quickly. You wouldn’t be able to stand back up.”
New Hampshire’s Mount Washington holds the record for fastest wind speed on U.S. soil — 231 mph.
The powerful 199-mph gust whipped Ward Peak in Alpine Meadows ski resort at about 11 p.m. Feb. 20 during a fierce storm driven by an atmospheric river that pummeled the northern Sierra Nevada mountain range.
Love Love Deuce
Why Is Tennis Scored So Weirdly?
Do you have a question about history? Send us your question at history@time .com and you might find your answer in a future edition of Now You Know.
All sports have their own vocabularies, the shorthand lingo to communicate intricacies of rules and how play proceeds. But usually the scoring can at least be counted on to be fairly straightforward. Not so much for tennis.
For the unfamiliar, tennis starts with both players at zero, called love: “Love-all.” One person scores: 15 to love. The server’s score is said first, the receiver’s second. The other now scores, and they’re tied at “15-all.” The next point is 30, then 40, and the following point wins that game. If they tie at 40 it’s called a deuce. From that tie the next person to get a point has the advantage, but generally has to win by two points — that is, to score twice in a row — to win the game. And it doesn’t stop there. Six of these games make a set, and the set must be won by two games or it goes to a tiebreaker. After the set is over, it repeats. To win the whole match requires either winning best of five sets or best of three sets, depending on the competition.
With the Australian Open set to begin on Monday, observers may once again ponder an inevitable question: Why count this way?
Pharaoh’s Meteorite
Giza Pyramid mystery chamber may hold Pharaoh’s ‘meteorite throne’
© Mohamed Abd El Ghany / Reuters
A huge void discovered inside the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt late last year may hold an iron throne carved from meteorites, according to new analysis of ancient religious texts.
Giulio Magli, Director of the Department of Mathematics and Professor of Archaeoastronomy at the Politecnico di Milano, studied the Pyramid Texts, religious writings carved into pyramid walls around 2400 BC. Based on his studies, Magli proposes that it’s possible the throne of Pharaoh Khufu – or ‘Cheops’ – lies inside the chamber.
Of course it would not be melted iron but meteoritic iron, that is, fallen from the sky in the form of iron meteorites and again cited in the Texts,” Magli says in his paper.
Explaining the structure of the pyramid, Magli states that before arriving at the funerary chamber there is a gallery. “The newly discovered room is over this gallery, but does not have a practical function of ‘relieving weight’ from it, because the roof of the gallery itself was already built with a corbelled technique for this very reason,” he explains in a statement.
So what was this room used for? Magli offers a possible interpretation that falls in line with existing knowledge on Egyptian funerary religion as documented in the Pyramid texts: “In these texts it is said that the pharaoh,before reaching the stars of the north, will have to pass the ‘gates of the sky’ and sit on his ‘throne of iron.’”
Hardcore Wrestling
BLOODY VIOLENT: Inside the bloody world of hardcore wrestling where fighters brawl with shards of glass, barbed wire bats and fan-made weapons in ultra-violent ‘death matches’
These shocking pictures show hardcore wrestlers fighting until they are dripping with blood and hurling themselves into fiery pits full of glass.
By Emma Parry, Digital US Correspondent
IT’S been dubbed the bloodiest sport in the world – where men and women beat each other to a pulp with glass lighting tubes, fan-made barbed-wire bats and other deadly weapons.
This is hardcore death-match wrestling and, according to fans, it’s 100 per cent more brutal than anything you’ve seen on WWE.
With a large and loyal following, these fighters travel across America – and the world – taking part in ultra-violent wrestling events – such as barefoot thumbtack matches – before patching themselves up with superglue and hitting the road.
Others hurl themselves off rooftops or scaffolding into pits of fire, glass, barbed wire – or all three – in front of wild, cheering crowds.
These graphic pictures were taken by photographer Marc McAndrew who spent two years following the wrestlers and documenting their lives….
Stick History
The Stick Is an Unsung Hero of Human Evolution
Stone’s silent sister in the archaeological record.
BY ALEXANDER LANGLANDS
In April 1997, at the snooker world championship held at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, Ronnie O’Sullivan stepped up to the table to play a frame in what was expected to be a routine victory in his first-round match against Mick Price. What happened in the next 5 minutes and 20 seconds sent shock waves through the world of snooker and ripples of respect through the wider world of professional sport. To the uninitiated, there is a sequence of 36 balls that must be potted in order to achieve the highest score possible in a frame: 147—what aficionados call a “maximum break.” Up until 1997, this had been achieved in official competition snooker on a handful of occasions, in a sport that had effectively turned professional in the late 1960s. It was only a matter of time before the gifted O’Sullivan scored his first competition 147, but it was the manner in which he did it that created such a stir. As he glided around the table he played with a pace and confidence that belied his 21 years. A man at one with the stick in his hands and in a trancelike engagement with his art, he was demonstrably thinking four or five shots ahead and, in playing with such fluidity of movement, O’Sullivan had found a new zone within which the game could be played.
It may seem crude, but to put the achievement into context, it can be compared on pure financial terms with other sports. For a frame that lasted a mere 320 seconds, O’Sullivan was awarded bonus prize money of £165,000. Few can brag that they’ve ever earned £515.63 per second for the work they do—especially at such a tender age. At its most basic, he makes his money with a length of polished wood and a lump of chalk. For many people, earnings aside, O’Sullivan’s feat ranks among the very best sporting achievements in the world. But for me, it’s a celebration of mankind’s perfection at stick usage: a poetically beautiful combination of craft, genius, nerve, and swagger.
Mars Is Where We Were At
Deep, buried glaciers spotted on Mars
By the 2030s, NASA hopes to send human explorers to Mars, the surface of which is seen in a May 2017 handout photo covered in carbon dioxide snow and ice, different from the buried glaciers researchers have spotted (AFP Photo/HO)
Miami (AFP) – Buried glaciers have been spotted on Mars, offering new hints about how much water may be accessible on the Red Planet and where it is located, researchers said Thursday.
Although ice has long been known to exist on Mars, a better understanding of its depth and location could be vital to future human explorers, said the report in the US journal Science.
Erosion has exposed eight ice sites, some as shallow as a few feet (one meter) below the surface, and going as deep as 100 meters or more, it said.
These underground cliffs appear “to be nearly pure ice,” said the report, which is based on data from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, launched in 2005.
“This kind of ice is more widespread than previously thought,” said Colin Dundas, a geologist at the US Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona.
The First Animations
Early Humans Made Animated Art
How Paleolithic artists used fire to set the world’s oldest art in motion.
BY ZACH ZORICHILLUSTRATION BY MIKO MACIASZEK
Stone steps descended into the ground, and I walked down them slowly as if I were entering a dark movie theater, careful not to stumble and disrupt the silence. Once my eyes adjusted to the faint light at the foot of the stairs, I saw that I was standing in the open chamber of a cave.
Where the limestone wall arched into the ceiling was a line of paintings and drawings of animals running deeper into the cave. The closest image resembled a bison, with elongated horns and U-shaped markings on its side. The bison followed several horses painted solid black like silhouettes; above them was an earthy-red horse with a black head and mane. In front of that was a very large bison head that was completely out of scale with respect to the other images.
It was the summer of 1995, and in the dim glow, I gazed at the ghostly parade just as my ancestors did roughly 21,000 years ago. Radiocarbon dates from Lascaux cave suggest the art is from that period, a time when wooly mammoths still roamed across Europe and people survived by hunting them and other large game. I stood in silence as I tried to decode the work of the ancient people who had come here to express something of their world.
When Lascaux cave was discovered in 1940, more than 100 small stone lamps that once burned grease from rendered animal fat were found throughout its chambers. Unfortunately, no one recorded where the lamps had been placed in the cave. At the time, archeologists did not consider how the brightness and the location of lights altered how the paintings would have been viewed. In general, archeologists have paid considerably less attention to how the use of fire for light affected the development of our species, compared to the use of fire for warmth and cooking. But now in Lascaux and other caves across the region, that’s changing.
SpaceX Mystery Messages
Top SECRET US satellite launched by SpaceX aims to send ‘unknown group’ MYSTERY messages
SPACEX are to launch a top-secret satellite codenamed project Zuma this Friday, the US Air Force confirmed.
SpaceX cut the feed to the second stage of the launch to keep the Zuma mission top secret during launch.
The mysterious project will see the private space agency launch the satellite allowing an unnamed government organisation to send messages or take photos.
One of the few scraps of information currently available has revealed Zuma will enter into a low orbit around Earth.
What the orbiter’s mission is and who will be operating it is unknown with US authorities so far refusing the release any more information.
Anderson .Paak
The Deadliest Car In History
THE DEADLIEST RACE CAR IN HISTORY HAD LOOKS THAT COULD KILL, TOO
Let’s hope this one handles better than the original
BY EVAN BLEIER
At the 1955 edition of Le Mans, a ‘53 Austin-Healey 100 was at the center of a horrific crash that left 85 people dead and dozens more maimed and injured. The Austin-Healey that RM Sotheby’s is putting up for auction next month in Arizona is not that car, which holds the ignonimous title of being the world’s deadliest.
But it is modeled after it.
Manufactured in February of 1956 and one of only 640 factory-built Healey 100 Ms ever made, the roadster is built to the specifications of the 100s that were first raced successfully — and safely — at Le Mans in 1953.
Scratch Chocolate
Freddie’s Bash
Freddie Mercury’s Saturday Night in Sodom
a night of debauchery
In the colossal Imperial Ballroom inside the Fairmont New Orleans, Freddie Mercury—expert partier who lived by the mantra “excess all areas”—overwhelmed 400 guests at the launch of Queen’s fourth album, Jazz. This party had it all: “voluptuous strippers who smoked cigarettes with their vaginas, a dozen black-faced minstrels, dwarfs, snake charmers, and several bosomy blondes who stunned party revelers by peeling off their flimsy costumes to reveal that they were, in fact, well-endowed men,” it was described in Pamela Des Barres’s Rock Bottom: Dark Moments in Music Babylon.
It was Halloween 1978. The ballroom was outfitted with 50 dead trees rented especially for the occasion, which made it look like “a skeletal forest. It had a kind of witchcraft theme,” said EMI’s Bob Hart. Bourbon Street’s biggest freaks and eccentrics were hired to entertain, leaving other bars and clubs forced to close for the night.
Earth Slows Down, Earth Quakes
Powerful earthquakes to ravage Earth in 2018 as planet’s rotation temporarily slows
Experts believe there is a correlation between the slowing of the Earth’s rotation and more powerful earthquakes
The world is entering a period of higher seismic activity this year that will bring more earthquakes with it, scientists have predicted.
While that’s undoubtedly bad news for those living within affected areas, the ability to accurately predict when and where earthquakes will occur is growing all the time.
This prediction comes from the fact that the Earth is currently experiencing a periodic slowdown of its rotation.
Historically, these slowdowns have coincided with peak times for earthquakes and seismic activity.
“So far we have only had about six severe earthquakes [in 2017]. We could easily have 20-a-year starting in 2018,” said Dr Roger Bilham from the University of Colorado.
Cleveland Browns Implicated In Fan’s Death
Ohio Man’s Obituary Blames Browns For His Demise
HURON, OH (AP) – An Ohio man’s tongue-in-cheek obituary blames the winless Cleveland Browns for contributing to his demise.
The obituary published in the Sandusky Register says Paul Stark died Wednesday at a hospice facility after a brief illness “exacerbated by the hopeless condition of the Cleveland Browns.”
The football team was 1-15 last season and 0-15 this year ahead of Sunday’s finale in Pittsburgh.
1968 Predictions on 2018
The 1968 Book That Tried to Predict the World of 2018
By Paul Collins
For every amusingly wrong prediction in “Toward the Year 2018,” a speculative book from 1968, there’s one unnervingly close to the mark. / Illustration by Robert Beatty
If you wanted to hear the future in late May, 1968, you might have gone to Abbey Road to hear the Beatles record a new song of John Lennon’s—something called “Revolution.” Or you could have gone to the decidedly less fab midtown Hilton in Manhattan, where a thousand “leaders and future leaders,” ranging from the economist John Kenneth Galbraith to the peace activist Arthur Waskow, were invited to a conference by the Foreign Policy Association. For its fiftieth anniversary, the F.P.A. scheduled a three-day gathering of experts, asking them to gaze fifty years ahead. An accompanying book shared the conference’s far-off title: “Toward the Year 2018.”
The timing was not auspicious. In America, cities were still cleaning up from riots after Martin Luther King, Jr.,’s assassination, in April, and protests were brewing for that summer’s Democratic National Convention. But perhaps the future was the only place left to escape from the present: more than eight hundred attendees arrived at the Hilton. “They met in the grand ballroom,” the reporter Edwin Yoder wrote at the time, “which is not so much futuristic as like a dimly remembered version of the 1920s small-town grand movie house.”
Invitees were carefully split by the F.P.A. between over-thirty-fives and under-thirty-fives—but, less carefully, they didn’t pick any principal speakers from the under-thirty-fives. As their elders mused on a future of plastics and plasma jets, without mention of Vietnam and violence in the streets, there was muttering among the younger attendees. Representatives from Students for a Democratic Society demanded time at the mike and circulated a letter questioning whether the conference was for “discussion or brain washing.” Waskow, today the rabbi of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia, was an S.D.S. alumnus attending the conference out of a sincere interest in the future—but he was skeptical of futurism. By 1968, he’d already been working for more than a decade on a never-finished epistolary sci-fi novel, “Notes from 1999.” “But,” Waskow explains, “I was interested in changing the world—not trying to predict the future, but to create the future.”
Ice Bowl 50
from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
The Ice Bowl, 50 years later: An oral history of the Packers-Cowboys 1967 NFL Championship Game
ON DEC. 31, 1967, THE PACKERS EDGED THE COWBOYS, 21-17, IN A GAME FOR THE AGES. HERE’S THE STORY OF THE ICE BOWL AS TOLD BY THOSE WHO PLAYED IN IT AND WITNESSED IT.
by Gary D’Amato
It would have been a great game if it had been played on a sweltering September afternoon or on a crisp autumn day in November or even indoors, if there were domed football stadiums in 1967.
That year, the NFL Championship Game pitted Vince Lombardi’s proud but aging Green Bay Packers, seeking an unprecedented third consecutive title, against Tom Landry’s Dallas Cowboys, an ascending team out for revenge after losing narrowly to the Packers in the ’66 championship game.
Eight Packers and four Cowboys who took the field that day would be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Both coaches would be enshrined, too. The Packers had guile and experience and a field general named Bart Starr. The Cowboys had youth and superior team speed and their “Doomsday Defense.”
Yes, it would have been a great game on any day, in any kind of weather.
It would be played, though, on New Year’s Eve day in Green Bay, in the kind of weather that tested the limits of what a man could endure.
The official low temperature at Austin Straubel Airport that day was 17 below zero. With Arctic winds whipping out of the northwest, the wind chill dipped to 50 below at Lambeau Field, its turf frozen solid and topped by a layer of ice, so that players slipped and slid and fell on what felt like jagged concrete.
The game would be decided in the closing seconds, at the conclusion of a drive that bordered on the mystical, with Starr plunging into the end zone to put a symbolic exclamation mark on the Lombardi era.
Fifty years ago Sunday, on Dec. 31, 1967, the Packers edged the Cowboys, 21-17, in a game for the ages.
The Ice Bowl.
It was and remains the coldest game in NFL history. It is among the most memorable games in league annals because of the wretched conditions, what was at stake and the dramatic way it ended.
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