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OK, here’s a Friday fun quiz from The History Channel. How fast can you answer questions on American history? Challenge yourself, or your friends with the Ultimate History Quiz. I scored 1,332 in the first game. I’ll be playing this again! Link -via Digg
NASA managed to put a man on the moon and broadcast the event live to half a billion people on earth. The footage wasn’t great, but we were glad to see it anyway. It turns out that the images from the moon to the earth were pretty good, but when they were relayed to NASA and then to broadcast TV, the quality degraded. However, the earth receiving station in Australia recorded the signal in rather good quality. But where is that tape? Stan Lebar, who was in charge of the original broadcast in 1969, and Apollo video engineer Dick Nafzger went searching.
After schmoozing his way into the stacks and sifting through boxes for months, Lebar found evidence that more than 140,000 tapes from the Apollo era had been checked out of the Records Center between 1979 and 1985 and sent back to the Goddard Space Flight Center. But from there, Lebar fell straight into a black hole. At Goddard, there was no record of where the footage had gone. So the tape hunters hit the phones and the Net, scouring the globe for Goddard retirees who might recall the boxes. It didn’t go well. “We’re dealing with memories here,” Nafzger says, “and those are pretty frail.”
Personally, I think they should look in the big warehouse next to crate that holds the Ark of the Covenant. Link -via Dark Roasted Blend
(image credit: Flickr user evalin)
Update: We may see those original tapes yet. -Thanks, Ivan!
Even ancient folks expressed their appreciation for mothers -maybe not enough, but mothers have been celebrated for a long time.
While some complain that Mother’s Day is a Hallmark holiday, celebrations of motherhood can in fact be traced back to ancient times. Ancient Greeks celebrated Rhea, the mother of the gods, while ancient Romans had a holiday to celebrate Cybele, a mother goddess. The tradition of celebrating mothers in springtime can be traced back to the celebrations of the goddess Brigid, which occurred at the first milk of the ewes. This brief history traces the way embarking on motherhood moved from being women’s sole purpose, to an assumption, to a duty to produce heirs, and finally, to a decision for the woman
herself.
From the Upcoming 
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