Remembering Deborah Kerr

(Cross-posted at the TudorHistory.org blog)

While this is only tangentially Tudor-related, Foose reminded me in comments to the Elizabeth open thread that I wanted to comment on the passing of Deborah Kerr. (And yes, I'll do some more "open threads" in the future on some other topics, since it was kind of fun to read other people's thoughts on "The Golden Age").

I first really got into the Tudors when I was about 14 years old, which was also about the time that I really got hooked on watching old movies. I think it was around this time that American Movie Classics and channels like that starting popping up and I fell in love with some of the old movies (not to mention forming crushes on some of the actors, in particular Cary Grant and Yul Brynner). So, of course, I started seeking out old historical movies, and I'm pretty sure the first Tudor one I watched was "Young Bess" (1953). Jean Simmons and Stewart Granger (who were married to one another at the time) star as the young Elizabeth and Thomas Seymour, Charles Laughton reprises his role from "The Private Life of Henry VIII" (1933) as the big king himself and Deborah Kerr played Katherine Parr. Interestingly, the boy who played Edward VI in "Young Bess" would go on to play the son of Kerr's character in "The King and I" (one of my all-time favorite movies).

When the news came out the Deborah Kerr had died, the coverage mostly mentioned the famous kiss on the beach in "From Here to Eternity" and her roles in "The King and I" and "An Affair to Remember", but I also thought of her in the role I first saw her - Queen Katherine Parr in "Young Bess".

Image from Wikipedia

Confessions of a Nobel Prize junkie

Yep, it's true, I'm a Nobel Prize junkie. I eagerly await the announcements every year, especially Physics and Peace. This year the Nobel folks set up RSS feeds so you can find out almost instantly when the prizes are announced (provided you are sitting at your computer in the early morning hours US time) and have links to videos of the announcements, summaries of the work the prizes are awarded for, etc. They have more info on the prizes and my favorite sections - "Memories of the magic call".

So, given this, you can imagine how thrilled I was to be able to sit and chat briefly with last year's Physics co-winner, John Mather, who was here to give a couple of lectures and receive the Antoinette de Vaucouleurs memorial medal. Like an idiot though, I forgot to ask him about "getting the call"! D'oh! I also have never asked Steven Weinberg about his call for some reason. Well, if he asks me to help him with graphics for a Power Point presentation again, I'll have to turn into a fangirl and ask him. :)

And yes, I was very pleased with this morning's announcement of the Peace Prize, given jointly to Al Gore and the IPCC. To show what a total Nobel geek I am, we typically flip the TV on as soon as the alarm goes off and turn it over to the news. Knowing that the announcement was made about two hours before we got up, I instantly started reading the "crawl" across the bottom of the screen (something that usually annoys the heck out of me but was quite useful this time!). About the third or fourth story that came across started "Vice President Al Gore..." and I knew that he had won. I wonder if this the first time someone has won an Oscar and a Nobel in the same year?

And to finish my thoughts about the Physics prize in particular, it still amazes me that some of the experiments we did in the first year quantum physics lab won people Nobel prizes a century earlier. It just goes to show you how quickly science advanced in the 20th century!

Happy Birthday Sputnik!

I was going to say a few things about the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, but it looks like Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy already wrote a lot of stuff along the lines I was thinking!

Here's a NASA page (where I took the picture from) about the spacecraft and a Science@NASA page where you can hear the beep and learn more about communicating with spaceprobes, like the one on its way to Pluto.

Dragonflies!

Central Texas got off easy this summer. The temperatures were relatively mild and we got enough rain for everything to stay green instead of turning to a dusty brown. Okay, so maybe at times we got too much rain... One of the side effects of this is an interesting change in the behavior of birds (the hummingbirds have hung around a lot longer this year) and in the insects, in particular the dragonflies. I've seen at least 5 different types this year and in higher numbers than in the past. I haven't had a lot of luck getting photos of them, but this magenta-colored one was nice enough to keep landing on my car antenna and holding still long enough for me to get some photos. Click above to go to the Flickr photoset (which I hope I'll be able to add to in the future!).

Storm photos from last week

We have had some spotty popcorn showers over the past couple of weeks, a lot of them coming from moisture sweeping up from the Gulf. By the time they get to central Texas, it's usually close to sunset, so we can get some really amazing skies in the evenings. I've added the most recent photos (including the one above) to my "Sunsets and Weather from Elgin" Flickr set linked through the photo. (The new photos are at the bottom of the set.)

Introducing...

Lara's Loose Threads

I was trying to figure out how to incorporate my needlework and quilting stuff into the re-worked version of my homepage and I realized that the answer was staring me in the face. A blog! There isn't a whole lot up over there yet, but I'll be posting more photos in the future.

Today's Best Spam Subject Line

Today's winner is: sandwich 376 fetishists - This one has a lot of comedic potential. I'm picturing 376 peanut butter and jelly fetishists being squeezed together.

Start of a semi-regular series "Best Spam Subject Line of the Day"

Between the four email accounts I use regularly, I get a lot of spam. While it annoys me greatly to have to spend so much time sorting through it to make sure that some real mail hasn't been caught in the filters, I've found that the subject lines can sometimes be quite amusing and sometimes even profound in an existentialist sort of way. Most of my amusement comes from the emails where they take two or three words and randomly pair them in the subject heading, but I do have to admit that I'm also getting a chuckle out of the fact that even the spammers are riding Harry Potter's robe-tails and now "enhancement" products are using "magic wand" as a euphemism for a certain part of male anatomy.

So here are some from today's haul of spam that made me grin:

Worldly tripod - this one actually kind of works for me. Makes me think of travel photography.

A pretty-pretty fly - What happens when an insect ends up in a supermodel's teleportation device.

Dirt-encrusted squid - What happens when you drop your calamari

A few photos from West Texas

I didn't get a chance to take a lot of photos when I was out in West Texas last month, but I did post the few that I did take over on my Flickr page. If you click the photo above, it will take you to the West Texas photo set, which also includes photos from when I was out in December 2003 (and has a lot more photos of actual telescopes!).

As you can see from the photos, it was the rainy season in West Texas. While that isn't great for using telescopes or having outdoor functions at a meeting, it does make for pretty green scenery and nice sunsets. The last night I was out there though was crystal clear and beautiful. I ended up not even looking through a telescope ... just sitting on a porch and looking at the Milky Way!

On travel for a few days

I just wanted to let folks know that I'm going to be traveling for work through Sunday, so I won't be answering emails or making blog posts in that time period. I'll have internet access, but I don't think I'll have a lot of time to deal with non-work stuff!