BBC News - Doctor Who Dalek designer Ray Cusick dies after illness ↪
Former BBC designer Ray Cusick died of heart failure in his sleep on Thursday, Claire Heawood added.
The Daleks became the iconic villains in cult science fiction series Doctor Who, which is due to mark its 50th anniversary with events this year.
Mr Cusick, from Horsham, West Sussex, leaves two daughters and seven grandchildren, his family said.
This Makes Homework Look A Whole Lot Easier
As bored as you were during cursive lessons, at least you weren’t stuck in a coal mine!
(Original by The Other 98%.)
(via wilwheaton)
I urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, ‘If this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is.’
― Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country. (via nedhepburn)
this song has been stuck in my head all day. which is hard to explain when people ask what i’m humming.
(from chicagoist)
Can I get confirmation on this from Chicago tumblrers?
Incredibly correct - the joke being that for all the NY toughness, not one of you sallies could stand on the corner of Augusta and Central Park for longer than 15 seconds. BOOM.
Also, they forgot the Chicago version of New Jersey. We call it “Indiana.”
And that’s why the South Side is the best side - also the worst side. ;-)
Kids, be berry careful. I think that clown is setting you up for the ultimate trust fall.
Lights Out: Who better to teach child abduction safety than Blueberry, the time-freezing ghost clown?
Those kids are “berry safe” indeed.
[fff]
None of us will ever be as bad ass as Vladimir Kamarov.
NPR:
In 1967, Vladimir Kamarov and Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space, were assigned to the same Earth-orbiting mission, and both knew the space capsule was not safe to fly. Komarov told friends he knew he would probably die. But he wouldn’t back out because he didn’t want Gagarin to die. Gagarin would have been his replacement.
The story begins around 1967, when Leonid Brezhnev, leader of the Soviet Union, decided to stage a spectacular midspace rendezvous between two Soviet spaceships.
The plan was to launch a capsule, the Soyuz 1, with Komarov inside. The next day, a second vehicle would take off, with two additional cosmonauts; the two vehicles would meet, dock, Komarov would crawl from one vehicle to the other, exchanging places with a colleague, and come home in the second ship. It would be, Brezhnev hoped, a Soviet triumph on the 50th anniversary of the Communist revolution. Brezhnev made it very clear he wanted this to happen.
The problem was Gagarin. Already a Soviet hero, the first man ever in space, he and some senior technicians had inspected the Soyuz 1 and had found 203 structural problems — serious problems that would make this machine dangerous to navigate in space. The mission, Gagarin suggested, should be postponed.
The question was: Who would tell Brezhnev? Gagarin wrote a 10-page memo and gave it to his best friend in the KGB, Venyamin Russayev, but nobody dared send it up the chain of command. Everyone who saw that memo, including Russayev, was demoted, fired or sent to diplomatic Siberia. With less than a month to go before the launch, Komarov realized postponement was not an option. He met with Russayev, the now-demoted KGB agent, and said, “I’m not going to make it back from this flight.”
Russayev asked, Why not refuse? According to the authors, Komarov answered: “If I don’t make this flight, they’ll send the backup pilot instead.” That was Yuri Gagarin. Vladimir Komarov couldn’t do that to his friend. “That’s Yura,” the book quotes him saying, “and he’ll die instead of me. We’ve got to take care of him.” Komarov then burst into tears.
On launch day, April 23, 1967, a Russian journalist, Yaroslav Golovanov, reported that Gagarin showed up at the launch site and demanded to be put into a spacesuit, though no one was expecting him to fly. Golovanov called this behavior “a sudden caprice,” though afterward some observers thought Gagarin was trying to muscle onto the flight to save his friend. The Soyuz left Earth with Komarov on board.
Once the Soyuz began to orbit the Earth, the failures began. Antennas didn’t open properly. Power was compromised. Navigation proved difficult. The next day’s launch had to be canceled. And worse, Komarov’s chances for a safe return to Earth were dwindling fast.
All the while, U.S. intelligence was listening in. The National Security Agency had a facility at an Air Force base near Istanbul. Previous reports said that U.S. listeners knew something was wrong but couldn’t make out the words. In this account, an NSA analyst, identified in the book as Perry Fellwock, described overhearing Komarov tell ground control officials he knew he was about to die. Fellwock described how Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin called on a video phone to tell him he was a hero. Komarov’s wife was also on the call to talk about what to say to their children. Kosygin was crying.
When the capsule began its descent and the parachutes failed to open, the book describes how American intelligence “picked up [Komarov’s] cries of rage as he plunged to his death.”
(Source: maxistentialist, via wilwheaton)
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