Few stars of any art form are as polarizing as Michael Jackson in my opinion. As an advocate of responsible adult behavior and somebody with a certain amount of experience with victims of clever sexual abusers, I can never separate Michael Jackson the musical genius from Michael Jackson the never-criminally-convicted but civilly financially liable pedophile.
I’ve been buying his records since I was ten and will always enjoy his catalogue of hits up to the time when he started paying off kids with millions in hush-money.
He relished his eccentricities so I think it’s fair for us to talk about them a little bit up front. Some of his issues--like his drug and sex problems--were traits we see in many great modern men. Elvis Presley could be classified as a pedophile for his romantic relationship with Priscilla Presley started when he was in the U.S. Army stationed in Germany and Priscilla was just fourteen. There is some dispute about when they got sexually serious but the general consensus is that Cilla and Elvis did everything but intercourse years before their marriage. Elvis’ drug use is well-do****ented. What is lesser known is that Priscilla has said in the past that Elvis appeared to have lost interest in her romantically shortly after the birth of Lisa Marie. Of course, Lisa Marie and Michael Jackson were married later and he was worried about dying like Elvis--addicted and in career trouble--for years.
Much can said of John F. Kennedy. His sexual appetites ran the course from hookers to mob girls to friends’ wives, starlets, etc, and his drug addictions have been well do****ented. Once more, the woman that Kennedy leaves behind also intersects with Michael Jackson in his long friendship with Jackie O.
So weird, isn’t it? Three larger-than-life men, icons all, and each one of them connects again through the life of Michael Jackson?
That’s not all that weird in the news this week, however. We may have been contacted!
AFTER you've spent more than 20 years hunting for an alien signal, you think you'd be celebrating if you noticed a mysterious pulse suddenly rising up on your computer readouts. A regular pulse, amid the random clatter of the cosmos, suggests that someone very smart at the other end is sending a message.
But when Ragbir Bhathal, an astrophysicist at the University of Western Sydney, who teaches the only university-based course on SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) in Australia, detected the suspicious signal on a clear night last December, he knew better than to crack open the special bottle of champagne he has tucked away for the history-making occasion.
Instead, he's spent the past few months meticulously investigating whether the unrecognised signature was caused by a glitch in his instrumentation, a rogue astrophysical phenomenon, or some unknown random noise.
Even if he picks up the signal again - he's been scouring the same co-ordinates of the night sky on an almost daily basis since - the scientific rule book dictates he'll need to get it peer-reviewed before he can take his announcement to the world. "And that is a lot of ifs," he concedes.
The hunt for extraterrestrial life has been boosted recently by the discovery last month of a rocky world not unlike our own, about 20 light years away, which its Swiss discoverers have dubbed Gliese 581e, the latest in a long line of planet discoveries during the past decade (350 and counting).
Although Gliese 581e is too close to its host sun to support life, it's the first planet believed to be rocky like our own, a kind of super-hot Earth quite unlike the long line of gas and ice giants discovered to date.
And if that doesn’t sound enough like an episode of the X-Files, this one actually was!
BEIJING, June 26 -- Do twins have telepathy? When twin sisters got the same scores on this year's national college entrance examination, villagers in Shaoxing, east China's Zhejiang Province started to wonder if the girls read one another's minds, according to a story on Zjol.com.
The twin sisters, Zang Jiahuan and Zang Jiale, took the annual college entrance exams at the beginning of this June. When they received the results showing they both scored 644 points, they were shocked.
"We never expected it," the girls said in unison, telling a reporter who asked if anything like this had ever happened before, "this is the only case." (Chinese News Service)
The case is being investigated to determine that it’s not a hoax. This next story definitely IS a hoax but I think you need to see it anyway. This scary, e-mail text that’s going around teen cell phones has no known origin. Here’s exactly how it looks as it appears on the cell phone screen:
And on this Gay Pride weekend in many place around the country, here’s the latest science on whether or not gay people are “normal” and how futile it is for some people to try to find ways to “fix” gay people.
Examples of same-sex behavior can be found in almost all species in the animal kingdom — from worms to frogs to birds — making the practice nearly universal among animals, according to a new review of research on the topic.
"It's clear that same-sex sexual behavior extends far beyond the well-known examples that dominate both the scientific and popular literature: for example, bonobos, dolphins, penguins and fruit flies," said Nathan Bailey, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Riverside.
Interesting about bonobos. Not sure you’ve ever heard of this website but I had to pass along this link that the last story reminded me of--how much the veteran broadchaser--er, I mean broadcaster, Larry King looks is morphing into something not human:
And a new understanding for the expression "a wrinkle in time . . ."
Last week a woman called to tell me that “toasted food” was responsible for any number of different health problems and I tried to be a good sport about that lecture but from the get-go I wasn’t interested. I use a bowl a sugary cereal like that as a self-rewarding treat a couple of times a week and I’m just not ready to give that up.
I wish I had had this study in my pocket last week when she called:
Health experts have long warned of the risk of obesity, but a new ****anese study warns that being very skinny is even more dangerous, and that slightly chubby people live longer.
People who are a little overweight at age 40 live six to seven years longer than very thin people, whose average life expectancy was shorter by some five years than that of obese people, the study found.
"We found skinny people run the highest risk," said an associate professor at Tohoku University's Graduate School of Medicine who worked on the long-term study of middle-aged and elderly people.
"We had expected thin people would show the shortest life expectancy but didn't expect the difference to be this large," he told AFP by telephone.
"There had been an argument that thin people's lives are short because many of them are sick or smoke. But the difference was almost unchanged even when we eliminated these factors," Kuriyama said.
Main reasons for the shorter lifespans of skinny people were believed to include their heightened vulnerability to diseases such as pneumonia and the fragility of their blood vessels, he said.
So there! Maybe “toasted foods” are this huge, silent killer but they help keep me just a few pounds overweight so, really, they’re like a health food.
Which is not to say that fast food can’t kill you:
(CBS 4) A Denver police officer has been suspended after allegedly brandishing his gun at a McDonald's restaurant in Aurora after his order took too long to fill.
So, take that algae eaters. My Cocoa Krispies are keeping me alive! Let’s keep the algae where it belongs--in our gas tanks:
(Physorg.com) Scientists in Canada and India are proposing a surprising new solution to the global energy crisis —“milking” oil from the tiny, single-cell algae known as diatoms, renowned for their intricate, beautifully sculpted shells that resemble fine lacework. Their report appears online in the current issue of the ACS’ bi-monthly journal Industrial Engineering & Chemical Research.
“We propose ways of harvesting oil from diatoms, using biochemical engineering and also a new solar panel approach that utilizes genetically modifiable aspects of diatom biology, offering the prospect of “milking” diatoms for sustainable energy by altering them to actively secrete oil products,” the scientists say. “Secretion by and milking of diatoms may provide a way around the puzzle of how to make algae that both grow quickly and have a very high oil content.”
And where did you hear that first? Right here on this show back in January.
We’ve talked about it a couple of times, actually. Long before the mainstream media was on it, you knew that OPEC is terrified of pond s****.
And if that isn’t cool enough for you . . .
(Yahoo.com) Pardon the cliche, but it's one of the holiest of Holy Grails of technology: Wireless power. And while early lab experiments have been able to "beam" electricity a few feet to power a light bulb, the day when our laptops and cell phones can charge without having to plug them in to a wall socket still seems decades in the future.
Nokia, however, has taken another baby step in that direction with the invention of a cell phone that recharges itself using a unique system: It harvests ambient radio waves from the air, and turns that energy into usable power. Enough, at least, to keep a cell phone from running out of juice.
Finally, a use for all those other radio stations that don’t carry my show! Now, they’ll actualy serve a purpose.
(Physorg.com) An Australian stroke victim paralysed for more than 20 years has walked again thanks to anti-wrinkle drug botox, in a case hailed as extraordinary by his medical team.
Russell McPhee, 49, was confined to a wheelchair after suffering a severe stroke 23 years ago that left him so disabled that doctors initially told him he would never leave hospital.
But after being injected with botox, McPhee can walk around his home unaided and travel up to 100 metres (330 feet) using a walking stick.
"I thought I was going to die in a wheelchair," McPhee told AFP.
Botox, or botulinum toxin, blocks the nerve signals which tell muscles to contract, flattening wrinkles when used on the face. But it can also help patients left immobile by brain injuries, multiple sclerosis, spinal problems or strokes.
"You usually see results in someone who has recently had a stroke but we've never has such a good response from someone so far down the track (decades after a stroke)," his doctor said.
"The botox provided the kickstart needed to start the treatment."
If Botox can help this guy walk then Melanie Griffith should be able to fly . . .
(physorg.com) What dog owner has not come home to a broken vase or other valuable items and a guilty-looking dog slouching around the house? By ingeniously setting up conditions where the owner was misinformed as to whether their dog had really committed an offense, Alexandra Horowitz, Assistant Professor from Barnard College in New York, uncovered the origins of the "guilty look" in dogs in the recently published "Canine Behaviour and Cognition" Special Issue of Elsevier's Behavioural Processes.
Horowitz was able to show that the human tendency to attribute a "guilty look" to a dog was not due to whether the dog was indeed guilty. Instead, people see 'guilt' in a dog's body language when they believe the dog has done something it shouldn't have - even if the dog is in fact completely innocent of any offense.
During the study, owners were asked to leave the room after ordering their dogs not to eat a tasty treat. While the owner was away, Horowitz gave some of the dogs this forbidden treat before asking the owners back into the room. In some trials the owners were told that their dog had eaten the forbidden treat; in others, they were told their dog had behaved properly and left the treat alone. What the owners were told, however, often did not correlate with reality.
Whether the dogs' demeanor included elements of the "guilty look" had little to do with whether the dogs had actually eaten the forbidden treat or not. Dogs looked most "guilty" if they were admonished by their owners for eating the treat. In fact, dogs that had been obedient and had not eaten the treat, but were scolded by their (misinformed) owners, looked more "guilty" than those that had, in fact, eaten the treat. Thus the dog's guilty look is a response to the owner's behavior, and not necessarily indicative of any appreciation of its own misdeeds.
This study sheds new light on the natural human tendency to interpret animal behavior in human terms. Anthropomorphisms compare animal behavior to human behavior, and if there is some superficial similarity, then the animal behavior will be interpreted in the same terms as superficially similar human actions. This can include the attribution of higher-order emotions such as guilt or remorse to the animal.
The editor of the special issue, Clive D.L. Wynne of the Department of Psychology, University of Florida, explained, "this is a remarkably powerful demonstration of the need for careful experimental designs if we are to understand the human-dog relationship and not just reify our natural prejudices about animal behavior." He pointed out that dogs are the oldest domesticated species and have a uniquely intimate role in the lives of millions of people. Recent research on dogs has indicated more human-like forms of reasoning about what people know than has been demonstrated even in chimpanzees.
I don’t know about you but it’s been a long week for me. My great problem with doing a radio show like Coast to Coast at the end of five crazy days of husband/father/church guy/morning show host is that the material is so interesting to me, I can’t stand NOT reading it.
Typically every week I read at least one book cover-to-cover and on weeks like this one where I am doing C2C x 2, I am sometimes reading as many as three books at a time.
I don’t always finish on time for the show. I still have about a third of Saturday’s “Spymaster” to read which I am excited about because the stories he tells definitely put another spin on the news/history. I also never got to the last five chapters of “The Scalpel and the Soul” for Sunday night’s show and there is no way I am not finishing that.
But that means that I will start Monday morning needing to go back and get caught on two books from last weekend before I start to read the material I have to get to because this coming Saturday night’s show!
I am hoping for a couple of sunny days so that I can sit in my lawn chair and get ‘er done.
In the meantime, sometimes I need a good chuckle and the following were all suggestions/links that people sent me this week that just cracked me up.
The first goes back to the shows we did a couple times about Phil Spector with Mark Ribowsky the author of “He’s A Rebel” the book that, among many things, catalogued the number of times the eccentric record producer had pulled guns on people and how likely he was to be guilty in the death of that down-on-her-luck Hollywood starlet. He was the first guy I ever heard say that not only was Phil Spector wearing toupees from an early age (no shame in that) but he was wearing intentionally outrageous wigs and pretending it was his own hair (definitely on goofier end of the spectrum).
The first time Phil Spector had been booked, the police allowed him to keep his hairpiece on for the photo. Mark said that this broke with police policy but it was a courtesy they extended to him that he likely wouldn’t get if he were convicted.
Mark was right. That’s a long way from the “electrocuted Mozart” look he had at trial.
That’s a long way from the “electrocuted Mozart” look he had during his trial.
Speaking of hair: Adam Lambert is the flamboyant runner-up to this year’s “American Idol” who was recently featured on the cover of Rolling Stone as he discussed his music, his sexuality and his hair.
One of you very bright observers thought that they had seen Adam Lambert’s much-discussed hairdo on another famous icon and put two and two together:
Freaky, huh? I didn’t know that Lambert was from South Park too. Don't remember seeing him around the playground after school.
Finally, you had to love this shot of the luckiest man on the planet.
Just two days after winning $181 million dollars in the Powerball Lottery, he then meets the love of his life. I hope these two young people will be very happy.
I hope you’ve been well since I last wrote. I’ve been traveling the last three out four weekends. It was delightful just to have a night off the air last Saturday night so thank you, Art Bell, for returning the favor after all these years of me jumping in for you. I’m sure having Art on was a treat for everybody.
One of those weekends I traveled, you might remember, was to Milwaukee to be backstage for the last night of the “Spinal Tap: Unwigged and Unplugged” tour. Last week I was forwarded a fun photo with me, 2/3 of the band, the best chocolatier in Chicago who happens to be a huge nighty fan of C2C and my friend, Judith Owen, who happens to be married to Harry Shearer.
And while I was on vacation, so was my dog, Jack. Since a few of you have asked for an updated shot of this emotionally needy wreck of a shelter dog, I give you photo proof that even on “Jack-cation” this dog never seems able to relax.
Maybe he too can’t seem to get those poor people on Air France Flight 447 off his mind.
(LA Times) Inside the sleek ****pit of Air France Flight 447, according to aviation experts, the crew (was) confronted with a cascade of mysterious system failures.
The atmosphere of a routine international flight would vanish. Warning lights would be flashing and alarms would sound as one high-technology system after another of the highly automated jetliner began going off line.
At the same time, the Airbus A-330 was flying through turbulence caused by a tropical storm rising from the equator 35,000 feet below that was capable of jostling the pilots so strongly that they may have had difficulty reading the ****pit instruments.
Were the wings level? What speed were they traveling? Why were the computers reducing their ability to move the plane's control surfaces? As the pilots frantically worked to understand what was happening during the chaotic final minutes before the plane crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on May 31, the sky was illuminated by sporadic flashes of lightning.
"It would tax a really experienced pilot," said Robert Ditchey, a pilot, aeronautical engineer and former U.S. airline executive. "All hell is breaking loose."
All hell was breaking loose inside the ****pit, sure, but was the plane breaking loose itself?
(Bloomberg) -- The Air France plane that crashed June 1 may have partly broken up in the air before hitting the Atlantic Ocean, O Estado de S. Paulo reported, citing investigators it didn’t identify.
Most of the 16 bodies examined in preliminary stages of the probe into the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris were found naked or with minimal clothing, suggesting the wind may have removed the garments, the newspaper said. The possibility of an explosion or fire in the jet is also unlikely because the bodies showed no sign of burns, Estado said.
Almost all of the bodies had multiple fractures, the paper reported. Investigators haven’t found water in the victims’ lungs, which would indicate drowning, Estado said. Bodies were found 85 kilometers (53 miles) apart, which may also indicate the Airbus A330-200 broke up before reaching the ocean, Estado reported.
It’s going to be some time before we know the mysteries of the deep on this one, we ought to be prepared for that. But if you are one that seems agitated all the time because time in your head seems to pass at a very different rate than those around you, maybe you’ve got ADHD.
CHILDREN with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder might appear rowdy and indisciplined, but they are actually trying to cope with a faulty perception of time.
What to most of us seems like a short stretch of time would drag unbearably for someone with ADHD, says Katya Rubia of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London. Her team's research, reported this week, adds to a growing body of evidence for the importance of time perception in a wide range of psychological disorders. (New Scientist)
And speaking of the body of time . . .
June 12, 2009 -- A half-nude painting has surfaced that looks much like the Mona Lisa, sparking debate over just how far Leonardo daVinci took his iconic painting.
The newly revealed painting, hidden for almost a century within the wood wall of a private library, shows a portrait of a half-naked woman with clear links to the famous (and clothed) Mona Lisa.
The work, which do****ents suggest was at least based on never-seen similar work by Da Vinci, is now on exhibit at the Museo Ideale in the Tuscan town of Vinci, where Da Vinci was born in 1452.
The lady in the portrait does not exactly resemble the original Mona Lisa, but there is little doubt it has parallels with the painting hanging at the Louvre museum in Paris.
"The frontal look, the position of the hands, the spatial conception of the landscape, with columns at the sides, show a clear link with the Mona Lisa's iconographic theme," Alessandro Vezzosi, director of the museum, told Discovery News.
Doesn’t that just like the Mona Lisa IF Leonardo had painted her at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally?
Expected soon: the discovery of a lost DaVinci’s “Last Supper” where Jesus and the Disiples are all portrayed by dogs . . .
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