[MaxBigfoot]

LOL!  Groooooooooan.   

[Shadowmuse Blown]

Moebius

[TheZookie007]

Beauty and brains. 

"By the time American audiences were introduced to Austrian actress Hedy Lamarr in the 1938 film Algiers, she had already lived an eventful life. She got her scandalous start in film in Czechoslovakia (her first role was in the erotic Ecstasy). She was married at 19 in pre-World War II Europe to Fritz Mandl, a paranoid, overly protective arms dealer linked with fascists in Italy and Nazis in Germany. After her father’s sudden death and as the war approached, she fled Mandl’s country estate in the middle of the night and escaped to London. Unable to return home to Vienna where her mother lived,  and determined to get into the movies, she booked passage to the States on the same ship as mogul Louis B. Mayer. Flaunting herself, she drew his attention and signed with his MGM Studios before they docked.

Arriving in Hollywood brought her a new name (Lamarr was originally Kiesler), fame, multiple marriages and divorces and a foray into groundbreaking work as a producer, before she eventually became a recluse. But perhaps the most fascinating aspect of Lamarr’s life isn’t as well known: during WWII, when she was 27, the movie star invented and patented an ingenious forerunner of current high-tech communications. Her life is explored in a new documentary, Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story. Director Alexandra Dean spoke with Smithsonian.com about Lamarr’s unheralded work as an inventor."

Here's a copy of US Patent # 2,292,387 for a "Secret communication system", issued to Hedy Kiesler Markey and George Antheil, another fascinating person in his own right.

[solvegas]

 

[MaxBigfoot]

The ultimate speed trap!   

[TheZookie007]

 

[MaxBigfoot]

Amazing what weird neat stuff you can find in nature.   

[TheZookie007]

Amazing what weird neat stuff you can find in nature.   

There's similar phenomena in Brazil and in the Democratic Republic of Congo, among other places. Always amazing to witness.

[rtpoe]

So I got it into my head to wonder how you get people on postage stamps.

Turns out you have to write an actual physical letter to the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee (475 L’Enfant Plaza SW, Room 3300, Washington DC, 20260-3501).
https://about.usps.com/who/csac/#overview

Don't go thinking you can get them to put adult entertainers on stamps; first of all, you have to have been dead for at least three years. And it's so tough to make it through the process that they rejected a campaign to put Walter Cronkite on a stamp to mark the centennial of his birth. WALTER GODDAM CRONKITE got rejected!

So anyway, I'm thinking we need to get some Great American Writers on stamps. So I'll be writing letters for Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Others that will get letters from me come under the "umbrella" of "Legends of Television" - Dick Clark, Mary Tyler Moore, and Gertrude Berg.

"Who The Fuck is Gertrude Berg?" I hear you ask.

* She created, produced, wrote, and starred in the radio & TV show The Goldbergs - for the 25 (or so) years it was on air. It was the first "family sitcom", and many of the tropes we see in sitcoms today - neighbors entering without knocking, character catchphrases - came from her show.
* She won the very first Emmy Award for "Best Actress".
* Her popularity led to a whole series of stuff - a line of house dresses, cookbooks, a newspaper column - kind of like Oprah's media empire.
* She did this years before Lucille Ball came on the scene....
* At a time when anti-Semitism was not only commonplace but even accepted, the show was unashamed and unafraid to be Jewish. The radio show openly discussed Kristallnacht and Hitler; one of the TV episodes even had the family going to their synagogue for Yom Kippur services – and they showed the service. After the show left the air, it would be some two decades before there’d be another TV show with an openly Jewish lead character.

I sent along a mockup in my letter, too....

[solvegas]

This happened 9 years ago, no one died. 

[TheZookie007]

So I got it into my head to wonder how you get people on postage stamps.

Turns out you have to write an actual physical letter to the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee (475 L’Enfant Plaza SW, Room 3300, Washington DC, 20260-3501).
https://about.usps.com/who/csac/#overview

Don't go thinking you can get them to put adult entertainers on stamps; first of all, you have to have been dead for at least three years. And it's so tough to make it through the process that they rejected a campaign to put Walter Cronkite on a stamp to mark the centennial of his birth. WALTER GODDAM CRONKITE got rejected!

So anyway, I'm thinking we need to get some Great American Writers on stamps. So I'll be writing letters for Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison, and Kurt Vonnegut.

Others that will get letters from me come under the "umbrella" of "Legends of Television" - Dick Clark, Mary Tyler Moore, and Gertrude Berg.

"Who The Fuck is Gertrude Berg?" I hear you ask.

* She created, produced, wrote, and starred in the radio & TV show The Goldbergs - for the 25 (or so) years it was on air. It was the first "family sitcom", and many of the tropes we see in sitcoms today - neighbors entering without knocking, character catchphrases - came from her show.
* She won the very first Emmy Award for "Best Actress".
* Her popularity led to a whole series of stuff - a line of house dresses, cookbooks, a newspaper column - kind of like Oprah's media empire.
* She did this years before Lucille Ball came on the scene....
* At a time when anti-Semitism was not only commonplace but even accepted, the show was unashamed and unafraid to be Jewish. The radio show openly discussed Kristallnacht and Hitler; one of the TV episodes even had the family going to their synagogue for Yom Kippur services – and they showed the service. After the show left the air, it would be some two decades before there’d be another TV show with an openly Jewish lead character.

I sent along a mockup in my letter, too....

100% agree with you - Ms. Berg was a huge pioneer of American radio and television. She definitely deserves to be commemorated by a postage stamp!

[solvegas]

Farmer cow. 

[MaxBigfoot]

You've been warned!   

[TheZookie007]

You've been warned!   

That's probably a sign for Crazy Woman Creek, in Johnson County, Wyoming.

[solvegas]