R.I.P. retread — Baby, It’s Cold Outside: Happy Holidays from Cynthia Myers, Miss December 1968

Been buried in academic work, but I needed to throw out a quick, sad retread of Ms. Myers’ “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” post. Beautiful, adventurous Cynthia passed away yesterday of undisclosed causes, per Hef.

R.I.P., Ms. Myers (9/12/50-11/4/11).

Photographed by Pompeo Posar.

“Wholly Toledo!” is the name of the article that accompanies the pictorial for the lovely and talented Cynthia Myers, Playboy’s Miss December 1968. Her wildly popular centerfold shot her to stardom among the troops in Vietnam, and a pinup of her is featured in the film Hamburger Hill. She has been a teen model, a television personality, played a lesbian songstress in one of the most famous camp films out there, and become an unwitting space cowgirl in her 60 years on this planet. Buckle up, because here we go!

Cynthia wrote to Playboy a few years ago, informing us that she’d like to be considered as a centerfold beauty. Assistant Picture Editor Marilyn Grabowski answered with a reminder that our Playmates must be of legal age but that Cynthia should keep in touch. She did just that.

Well, kind of.

The shoot was in June of ’68, and Ms. Meyers was born in September of ’50, but Playboy waited until Cynthia was comfortably 18 to publish her pictorial. It had become common practice for the magazine after the scandal with Elizabeth Ann Roberts.

In fact, the most recently featured “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” playmate, the fantastic Susan Bernard, was also 17 at her photoshoot and saw her spread published after she turned 18.

Posing underage for Playboy is not the only common ground between Ms. Bernard and Ms. Myers. While Ms. Bernard was featured in Russ Meyers’ cult classic Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!, today’s special gal starred in his 1970 film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.

I promise to have a full-out Movie Moment for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls one of these days. For my friend’s recent 31st birthday, I sent him a picture of the cast of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls with him tagged as Dolly Read and me as Cynthia Myers. I explained that I originally had me as Dolly and him as Cynthia, but I switched it because it was his birthday.

You know Roger Ebert wrote it? I don’t think he ever gets to criticize a movie again.

Cynthia is pictured reading a five-year-old palmistry pamphlet about what the following year once held for her because she placed a large credulity in psychic phenomenon.

“I’ve known since I was 15 that I’d be a Playmate. It’s almost as if this had been fated to happen.” Cynthia’s penchant for precognition can be traced to her early teens.

(Ibid.)

“A junior high school friend of mine in Toledo,” she says, “was a nut on palmistry, astrology and even reading tea leaves and crystal balls. Like most people, I thought is was just a bunch of baloney. But when I began reading about prophets like Edgar Cayce, I began to realize that there are strange spiritual forces in the world undreamed of even in The Playboy Philosophy.”

(Ibid.)

Ms. Myers, I think you’d be surprised by what the Playboy philosophy can dream of.

In 1994, it was revealed that a picture from Ms. Myers’ centerfold pictorial was among several that crafty NASA jokesters have launched in to space over the years. Ms. Myers, together with Leslie Bianchini, Angela Dorian, and Reagan Wilson, was snuck in to the checklist for the Apollo 12 mission that was placed in astronauts’ suit cuff on their trip to the moon in November of 1969. Ms. Myers specifically took her space journey with astronaut Al Bean.

Don’t forget: Describe the protruberances.

Boobs : Geeks :: Horse : Carriage. I think it’s kind of funny and sweet.

And the gals didn’t just go up in the lunar landing module: they straight moon walked. The astronauts found their pictures while fulfilling their extravehicular (read: outside the module on the lunar surface) mission duties on the moon itself.

Pete Conrad got Miss September 1967, Angela Dorian, (“Seen any interesting hills and valleys?”) and Miss October 1967, Reagan Wilson (“Preferred tether partner”). Al Bean got Miss December 1968, Cynthia Myers (“Don’t forget — Describe the protuberances”), and Miss January 1969, Leslie Bianchini (“Survey — her activity”).

(“Playboy Playmates pranked into Apollo 12 mission checklists.” January 13, 2007. BoingBoing.net.)

Conrad told us in 1994: “I had no idea they were with us. It wasn’t until we actually got out on the lunar surface and were well into our first moon walk that I found them.” Bean recalled: “It was about two and a half hours into the extravehicular activity. I flipped the page over and there she was. I hopped over to where Pete was and showed him mine, and he showed me his.”

(Ibid.)

A large, color version of the shot of Cynthia that was smuggled up to the moon in the Apollo 12.

Lest we forget, the lovely and talented DeDe Lind, Miss August 1967 and, like Cynthia, one of the most popular Playmates in the magazine’s history, also rode shotgun on the Apollo 12 mission. She was in the control console, her picture labelled, “Map of a heavenly body.”

I always feel compelled when talking about the Playmate pictures and NASA to bring up the fact that my sorority’s badge is on the moon. Neil Armstrong put it there for his wife. It’s my sorority’s badge and it is on the moon. The moon that is in space. Sorry, but I get pretty cocky and excited by that. Tell a friend.

This much more recent picture of Ms. Myers just might get her kicked out of the Red Hat Society.

Can our prescient Playmate predict anything about her future? “I’m going to be an actress,” she says simply. “Notice I didn’t say ‘I’d like to be,’ but ‘I’m going to be.’ I don’t know how good I’ll be as an actress, but I’ll be one.”

(“Wholly Toledo!” Playboy. December 1968.)

Judging from her track record as a prophetess — and from her already abundant attributes — we’d like to venture a prediction of our own: Playmatehood should be just the beginning for the remarkable Miss Myers.
(Ibid.)

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Talk Nerdy to Me and Science Friday — New set of prime operatives

Two-step plan for becoming the only species in the multiverse.

Art installation by Lori Hershberger.

We’ve already got cracking on this, really. Well done … Earth. Let’s see what we can do with the rest of the Milky Way, and maybe Intergalactic Viceroy Hawking* will okay a mission to the Large Magellanic Cloud.

You know. Just to see what’s what over there with those guys. Kick the tires, shoot the breeze, strip mine a couple of planets and turn them in to dumps.

*You didn’t actually think he was human, did you? Tell me you didn’t buy that hype.

Daily Batman: Vintage snippet edition

via.

Fight Club Friday: So old school that she’s bringing back consumption

Fight Club (David Fincher, 1999).

I can’t believe that I’m even raising the issue of immunizations in this public venue, because I know it’s like setting a loaded pistol on the table, but I have been feeling very, very strong Ways about a Thing that happened to me recently and this is my journal, and other than posting up my old Playboy paraphernelia, venting is what my journal is here for. I need to share. If it makes you hate me, then, well … we must henceforth agree to disagree on this matter and remain friends in all other ways. Also, you’re an idiot.

Last week, I had a tuberculosis test and clearance performed by my doctor to satisfy the requirements of a new job. (Result: I am not consumptive. Huzzah.) During that same week, I had a training in a nearby city to which several of my new colleagues and I drove together. In the car, I innocently remarked that I was waiting for the results of my TB test but joked that I was probably in the clear since I hadn’t visited Dickensian London lately.

One of my new colleagues — let’s call her Annette, although that is not her name — then snorted, folded her arms, and said, “I haven’t done that. I don’t believe in immunizations. They can’t make us get them.”

I chuckled nervously and said, “Pretty sure you have to do it in order to work with kids in this state. And it’s not an immunization, technically; it’s just a test for tuberculosis.”

“Tom [not her husband’s name] and I haven’t immunized any of the kids,” she said, because why should she respond to the logical thing I had just said? “You know that those shots cause autism, right?”

TB ward. My grandmother’s twin died in one of these.

This was the wrong thing to say to me because I’m close to several children with autism spectrum disorders and their mothers, and I do not personally know a single well-informed parent or guardian of an autistic child who buys this. Yes. Yes, autism is caused. It can’t possibly be due to genetic and neurological factors that we simply don’t yet understand.

I love Jenny McCarthy as much as the next guy (more, probably), but, come on: like I said, this might make you hate me, but there is zero — zero — evidence, as the American Association of Pediatricians, the American Medical Association, and even the American Psychiatric Association have repeatedly reported, that there is a link between autism spectrum disorders and vaccines required by public schools in most developed nations — required because they’re intended to protect our children from the communicable diseases that have, in the past, devastated infant and child populations. Let’s be scientific for about half a second, all right?

And this is a test. For tuberculosis. Who objects to that? Realistically, who in the name of easter seals objects to being simply tested for freaking consumption, in order that you do not spread it to little children who will die of it?

X-ray of pediatric tuberculosis in a near-morbid case. For the record. Jesus Christ, Annette.

At this stage of the conversation, I backed out, because when I’m offended, I freak out and shut down. However, another woman in the car said tentatively, “Annette, you know, whooping cough is really bad this year. There’ve been deaths.”

“I know, but I just don’t believe in immunizations.”

The driver and one of our immediate supervisors, who had minutely shook her head through most of the conversation, then said, “The school is actually asking for pertussis shot records during re-enrollment. Didn’t you get the kids their shots?”

“No. If everyone else has them, then it shouldn’t be a problem,” Annette snapped, and rolled her eyes. Because, you know, we’re the tiresome ones.

Wow.

I don’t believe in immunizations.

That’s okay, Annette — smallpox believes in You. What a straight-up cunt.

People landing on this by searching the internet for blogs about links between autism and vaccines in order to start a fight or brag about your opinion, you may officially commence hateration.

via.

… But please know that if we don’t know each other and you start talking a bunch of bullshit about obscure studies that no major, legitimate sources support, and acting like you for-sure know a speck of a jot of a modicum about what causes autism, which people who’ve gone to college for over half your life cannot yet figure out and are dedicated to trying to concretely discover rather than accept mediocre malarkey in order to feel like there is a satisfactory scapegoat to make it all better, I am going to probably make fun of you. Not even kidding. I’m at a stage in my life where I’ve grown sick of sugar-coating my opinion of other people’s ignorance. Especially when it might make a child, whether I know him or not, gravely sick. Get ready for a whole lot of “go fuck yourself.”

Talk nerdy to me — Heinlein Month: This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race

via.

This is the great day. This is the greatest event in all the history of the human race, up to this time. That is — today is New Year’s Day of the Year One. If we don’t change the calendar, historians will do so. The human race — this is our change, our puberty rite, bar mitzvah, confirmation, from the change of our infancy into adulthood for the human race.

And we’re going to go on out, not only to the Moon, to the stars; we’re going to spread. I don’t know that the United States is going to do it; I hope so. I have — I’m an American myself; I want it to be done by us. But in any case, the human race is going to do it, it’s utterly inevitable: we’re going to spread through the entire universe.

(Robert Heinlein. Interview with Walter Cronkite. CBS News. July 20, 1969.)

Is it gauche to use a Clarke cover in a Heinlein entry?

Happy forty-second birthday to the Apollo 11 mission (Hey, 42!). Which was apparently for nothing since we’re not going to colonize it even at all. Not under the aegis of organized government-funded scientific think-tanks, at any rate, which it seems are going the way of the Betamax and Karen Carpenter*. Privatizing space travel/exploration is about as dicey an idea as any I’ve heard in this life. There will be a Wal-Mart on the moon before a fucking hospital. Depend on it.

(I’m just bitter because I have always wanted to live on the moon. Sorry. This is not a joke: my ultimate fantasy would be to make love on the back lawn of my terra-formed moon house — by EARTHLIGHT. Picture it, you look up and the planes of your lover’s face are illuminated by light from Earth. HOW AMAZING WOULD THAT BE? Crazy amazing. Crazy. Plus outside sex.)





*Oh, my god, why would you even make that joke? Because I am a terrible person.

Blinding you with Science: “Music Is My Hot, Hot Sex” — Breaking news you can use

Tell a friend.

via.

We all knew that, right? I mean, that’s why I can’t stand what I consider to be monotonous or repetitive, flat, uncreative music. I’d rather listen to nothing than something that doesn’t pull me in and start making me feel things. It makes me frustrated and mad. I really need music to take me There. You know?

Take-two Tuesday — Daily Batman: Enter the Bookworm and Up With Love plus Surprise Connections and Zodiac-quackery

This post originally appeared on January 5, 2010 at 8:05 pm.

Roddy McDowall and Francine York, Batman, “The Bookworm Turns,” Season 1, Episode 29. Original airdate April 20, 1966. Well, that’s inauspicious. Shit.

I hate to come off as a down-at-the-mouth grump on the topic of love. I am a romantic. Here is the Bookworm and his lady, the lovely librarian Miss Lydia Limpet, and may I add that I rooted like gangbusters for this pair to win?

via Batman villains database — I love clunky contraptions on men’s heads. I find it so fucking cute. I really do.

In fact, I remember pretty strongly wanting him for myself (girls like a boy who reads!), but I rightly understood Miss Limpet having him was almost the same thing. Later, when I figured out he was in Planet of the Apes, I was even more impressed, but, being a fickle little girl, I soon made way for other crushes, like Matthew Broderick and the Great Mouse Detective — shut up, because that could work — to the point that, when I stayed at La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona several years back and was given the “Roddy McDowall room,” I merely remarked that I’d “once thought he was cute,” and meant nothing more by it.

Interestingly, after his role as the Bookworm in the live-action television series, McDowall continued to wreak villainy in the DC world. He voiced Jarvis Tetch/the Mad Hatter for both Batman: The Animated Series and The New Batman Adventures, as well as performing him in a brief cameo for the late ’90s animated Superman.

In the original television series, the Mad Hatter was played by David Wayne. More on the Mad Hatter another day cause he was really depressed as a character and had some killer-great deadpan lines, even though no one matches King Tut in my estimation for the male villains’ comedic value. But back to love, because that is what I’m trying to prove is probably more important than trivial details of cartoons and old lunchbox-selling serials.

No, I can’t stop talking about it. Okay, because I’m looking at his page on the imdb to make sure I had the dates and titles right and it ends up Roddy McDowall was also the Breadmaster on Edlund’s masterwork The Tick, which is of grave emotional significance to me, and, moreover, had cameos on Darkwing Duck, Quantum Leap, and mother-effing Gargoyles. Also, he was monumentally in to photography and experimental camerawork. So, holy hell, I was smart to have a crush on him as a kid and now I’m going to have to get back to Roddy McDowall another day; he’s obviously been far more of an important thread in my life than I ever could have possibly understood … y’all please excuse me because Roddy McDowall has just now blown my mind.

Finally, according to authorities on these matters, the Catwoman outfit regularly worn by Julie Newmar appears to have been “upcycled” and worn by Francine York (who played librarian Miss Limpet on Batman) for the Lost In Space episode “The Colonists.” Also, in looking for pictures of her, I stumbled across a page where a woman had collected a bunch of pictures of famous Virgo women and though I always claim to put almost zero stock in that stuff, I have to say that they/we all have the faces of birdlike closet freaks who are too shy to smile with our lips parted but rock straight-up crazy do-me eyes despite our distrust of other people — to say nothing of the number of patron saints in her gallery of too-close-to-home horror. Good thing I think that’s largely bunk, or the unnerving similarities might have me concerned that my chakras weren’t aligned with the downward dog position of my chi and I’d have to bury a peeled potato under a full moon or some shit.

Truly the end of this post. Moving on for my own sake.

PSA: Gotta keep ’em separated — “Keming” edition

PSA: I would like to impart some valuable knowledge about kerning and keming. Kerning is a typography term used to describe the process of spacing out a font to make it visually pleasing and easy to read.

fig. 1: “keming,” illustrated by me.

When type becomes too narrow, it can be difficult to read and even unintentionally misleading. Sometimes disastrously. This is called “Keming.” The name is damn clever and originated with this guy. See how the ‘r’ and ‘n’ of Kerning might, if crowded, look like “keming”? There you go. Clever.

fig. 2: “keming,” inadvertently illustrated via yimmyyayo.

Do you understand why I am bringing this up?

Keming: Don’t let it happen to you.

Science Friday: Groupies edition

Noble sweater girls of yore using their chests … for science.

via.

Boy’s Life, February 1965. Girls Like A Boy Who Reads — physics books.

I would totally have been right there.

Daily Batman: Caterpillars < Butterflies < the Bat

“Batman Shadow” photographed by Lee Houser.

Nature hides her secrets because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.

(Albert Einstein)

Seeing only the chrysalis, we never know which is going to contain Batman, at any stage of the game. By extension of this metaphor, all caterpillars are Batman until proven otherwise. Dr. Einstein points out that Nature unfolds the mystery in her own time. With such a potentially optimistic end in mind, it’s ludicrous to give up the search. So don’t?

Truth in advertising: Vintage ed. — For fun and profit

Popular Science Vol 133, No. 5. 1938, via.

A light bulb just went off over Norman Bates’ head. A boy’s best friend is his mother, but everyone needs a hobby. I’ve always said that. Miss D can attest.

Take-two Tuesday and Yesterday’s News — Movie Moment: Une femme est une femme, Zodiac quackery and cock-gobbling Virgos edition

edit: Since this post’s original appearance, I’ve been reclassified as a Leo by … the sometimes-I-tune-in Zodiac powers that be? Not actually sure whom. Fellow fabulously-damaged Virgin Panda tried to explain it to me over soosh bombasticos last week but she is much, much better at understanding this stuff than I am.

This post originally appeared on February 7, 2010 at 9:14 a.m., so practically one year ago. Synchronicity in Yesterday’s News!

Romance, science, and zodiac quackery in Une femme est une femme/A Woman Is A Woman (Godard, 1961).

Virgo is a hard worker, a neglected mother, a quotidian task master, and a selfless martyr. Virgo is also a reality TV train wreck, a drunken psychopath, and a self-abusing anorexic. Virgo is analytical on a good day. Virgo is self-critical, self-loathing, self-deprecating, self-flagellating, and self-defeating on a bad day.

The Virgin, contrary to what her title may suggest, is the resident cock gobbler of the zodiac — never a topper, always a bottom. If you’re looking for a woman who will abuse herself, party like it’s Greek harvest time and she’s drunk on mead, please you sexually without so much as a nod to her own hungry genitalia, and perform all the humiliating duties you’ve assigned to her as wife and mother, look no further than the drunken Virgin of the zodiac.

And yes, more often than not, this naughty little maiden is getting crunked at the club or downing daiquiris at the Mommy and Me block party, an attempt to drown to death the echoes of self-loathing that usually prevent her from embodying the female charm and charisma she labors to possess.

The Virgo vibratory pattern is restrictive, effective, judgmental, exact, helpful, and neurotic. Virgos are a lot of things, socially charismatic not being one of them.

Usually, when I meet a Virgo, my natural reaction is, ‘this person must have Aspergers.’ They fixate on minutiae like Rainman [and] have more clicks and ticks than a malfunctioning android attempting to process human emotion.

Virgos rule the house of diet, perfectionism, and nourishment. Just glance at a list of famous Virgos and you’ll find more self-flagellating, adulthood suppressing skeletors than you can shake a stick at: Amy Winehouse, Rachel Zoe, Nicole Ritchie, Karl Lagerfeld, Twiggy, Fiona Apple, Aimee Mann, Peggy Guggenheim, etc.

[personally adding Anne Bancroft, Evan Rachel Wood, Lauren Bacall, Ricki Lake, Greta Garbo, and Rose McGowan to that list].

Yes, that is pretty much the way of it.

Virgo is the embodiment of human turmoil.

Insightful and amusing zodiac sign analysis by Carly, whose blog “Do you think I’m smart? Astrology and other Ass Munchery” is right here on the wordpress. Usually I say that I don’t believe in all that large astrological nonsense, but I have to admit that’s the first one I’ve ever read that was right on. Maybe I just needed to read all the horrible things I already know about myself confirmed, instead of the butt-licking backhanded compliments in most horoscopes, in order to start giving it some credence.

Final thought.

How to Spot a Virgo Woman:

They have an eating disorder.

They give rigorous handies.

They have acid reflux.

They’ll do “anything for my man.”

They want your love, but don’t deserve it.

(more, if you’re into that — she is very clever and scathingly funny)

Daily Batman: Introduce a little anarchy, but make sure you’ve got an end in sight

via.

But the extraordinary thing is that they did not do. As much as the Joker hoped people would eat each other, that his introduction of anarchy would bear fruit in an ugly cannibalistic scene, people proved him wrong. He was so disappointed! Shocked, chagrined! But people, despite being handed a catalyst for their own manifestation of destructive doubt and discontent with the world around them, acknowledged that world’s foibles, and forgave one another. For me, this is a beautiful and redeeming script. The angry, sore, raw ones — the Joker, Harvey Dent, Bruce Wayne, and the newly-commissioned Gordon — assumed the worst of the citizens of Gotham and their fears were proven wrong. What a good and special, redemptive moment for humanity that the misters Nolan rightly wrote.

Talk nerdy to me: What’s wrong with this picture?

via fyeahst on the tumblr.

What’s wrong with this picture?

Uhura is sitting in the captain’s chair. She’s a girl. Get real!

Comics crit: Magneto and Sartre edition with bonus ill-conceived insomniacal condemnation of what pigs we humans are

I do not believe in God; his existence has been disproved by Science. But in the concentration camp, I learned to believe in men.

(Jean-Paul Sartre.)

Magneto: I remember my own childhood … the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the guards joking as they herded my family to their death. As our lives were nothing to them, so human lives became nothing to me.

Storm: If you have a deity, butcher, pray to it.

Magneto: As a boy, I believed. As a boy — I turned my back on God forever.

(Uncanny X-Men #150. October 1981. Qtd in Jacobs, Rivka. “The Magneto Is Jewish FAQ.” 11 Nov 1998.)

Right?

I think it’s interesting that while Sartre takes it as given that there is no God, Magneto doesn’t say he doesn’t believe in God: just that he’s turned his back on God.

Do you believe there are events so breathtakingly beyond our tiny human processing powers in their scope that even the fallout we ourselves witness is tiny compared to the ripples they create in the universe? Do you think those ripples can become so powerful as they reverbate out in their effect that they can negate the existence of God? I’m not explaining my question well.

Okay. Obviously there are events that can make a person declaim God’s existence, as Sartre does, just as those same events might crystallize another person’s faith, reaction to the primal scene taking a different effect on each in their turn. That part I do not question or debate. But suppose that there was certainly a God: could something happen that was so bad it could kill God? Would not the events of the second World War, the Holocaust and the bombing of Hiroshima, be such a thing? And have we not compounded that as humanity daily ever since with the usual million atrocities and ungrateful offenses that people have committed toward one another and their environment since they first slithered on to land and grabbed hold, just continually jackhammering cracks in the material of the universe? It’s like two in the morning, why am I even writing this. I guess if Nietzsche’s right and God is dead, I’m saying we killed Him. Right? Don’t shoot the messenger, baby.

Dr. King’s Day: Talk nerdy to me, “Trek” connection

“Uhura” comes from the Swahili word “uhuru,” which means freedom.

via Gorgeous Black Women right here on the wordpress.

[Nichelle] Nichols planned on leaving the role after her first season but was persuaded by Martin Luther King Jr. to stay. Dr. King felt like her character was a great role model for the African-American community.

(source)

Liberated Negative Space o’ the Day: Breaking News — this time it’s personal, “Send in the clones” edition

(Send in the clones. There ought to be clones.)

Baby, when you talk about eukaryotes, you know you send me straight in to my S phase! Won’t you please take me to my Hayflick Limit? Ow! P.S., You misspelled “dependents,” geek. My football captain boyfriend and I are pointing at you and laughing.

Aw, I’m just kidding. I’d tumble for a biology dork long before an athlete. Don’t tell the squad.

Screw you, Thursday — redux.

Nice to know I’m not the only one who finds Thursday so flabbergasting.

Photographed by Pieke Bergmans.

This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

(Douglas Adams.)

I think I just may go back to bed and give it a go again in an hour or so. Catch you Thursday-understandin’ jive turkeys on the flip.

Take-two Tuesday — Talk nerdy to me: LeVar Burton “The science of peace” edition

This post originally appeared on April 25, 2010, at 2:18 pm.

I have mentioned before that I follow me the shit out of some LeVar Burton on the twitter, which keeps me abreast of his doings. I have these pictures up mainly to get your attention.

From LeVar Burton’s twitpic account. With the Shat-man. Look at those OG’s! Super-cute!

It is obvious, accepted, manifest fact that LeVar Burton is one of the coolest and best human beings to walk the earth. Duh. Would you like to be as basically all-around amazing and centered and loving and a vessel of karmic groove in this universe Just Like Him? Then let’s talk about LeVar’s involvement with the extremely cool documentary The Science of Peace, dudes!

What if …

…science discovered a unified field of consciousness which affected the way people think and behave?

…we could find a way to consciously impact this field with our thoughts and feelings?

…a global media event would succesfully enroll millions of people to participate in an unprecedented world peace experiment?

(official site)

with the amazing STEVIE WONDER!!

Great minds from Tesla to Kant to Rosseau to Jung have believed in this tantalizing possibility of reaching a positive meta-energy which just might happen to be God’s will for mankind, so don’t dismiss it straight out of hand as tree-hugging hippie crap! There is some real Science to this, guys.

Hosted by LeVar Burton, The Science of Peace features pioneering physicists, biologists, and philosophers who are established in the emerging new field of Peace Science.

The film effectively illustrates how each person, when bringing peace in to his or her own life, becomes an instrument for global peace.

He is also the executive producer. Putting this post together lead meto some really neato-terrific and amazing sources.

Yes.

I hope to share more about Peace Studies soon but here is the essential lowdown on relative newcomer Peace Science, which is the subject of the documentary: it is a hard-science effort to unify the threads of ideas that run through the incredibly important social sciences movement of Peace Studies. The Peace Science Society has an explanation of the various philosophies and social sciences that comprise the touchstones of the “argument” for peace studies at Penn State, and it is always well-spent time to give the latest articles in The Acorn a spin. (The Acorn is the official journal of the Gandhi-King society. If you don’t feel like subscribing, it’s on ProjectMUSE and the JSTOR.)

Great picture with Nichelle Nichols. Remember on Dr. King’s Day when she came up? In case you forgot, the factoid that was related then was how she was thinking of leaving the TOS cast and Dr. King told her to stay because Lt. Uhura was a wonderful role model for people of color, especially women. Soooo great.

Anyway, check the documentary’s official site out and show some love by visiting the “How You Can Help” section — it’s too late to participate in the documented experiment, but you can still donate and help subside costs for production, travel, distribution, etc. Cool beans!

Daily Batman: Teevee Time, “Family Guy”

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(Family Guy. “Fast Times at Buddy Cianci Jr. High.” Season 4, Episode 2. Original airdate May 8, 2005.)

For the longest time through the late 1980’s and early ’90’s I thought the world would end on May 8, 1995 at 7:05 PM. The source of this highly specific information was, I was sure, Nostradamus, but a solid line on finding it again eludes me. Maybe after his prophecies fail to come true they erase themselves.

Anyway, I used to mope around about it and try to imagine exactly what I would be doing when whatever cataclysm the Fates had in store struck on that date, but the evening itself found me in a van on the way to a play in a nearby small town. At the appointed hour, my friends and I clasped hands in the backseat and squinched our eyes shut and … nothing happened. Shocker.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: The end of the world and the end of ourselves in the world are two very different, and ultimately non-corollary, things.

But may I add that the Newman community theater put on one hell of a production of Hello, Dolly! that night?