we won’t be detecting - not even with the most powerful telescopes - the new Chinese space probe Chang’e 4 that just landed on the moon? The reason being of course that it landed on the other side of the Moon. The side we never see. And did you know that the video taken with the help of the most powerful telescope does get us surprisingly near this side of the Moon? Continue reading

Jerry Springer - whose show The Jerry Springer Show just recently ended after having run for close to 27 years - was born in a London bomb shelter in 1944 to two Jewish refugees who had fled from the Nazi holocaust? And that he, after having majored in political science, and then getting his law degree in 1968, worked as a political campaign adviser for Robert F. Kennedy till Kennedy was assassinated? Continue reading

in Istanbul, Turkey, you can take your empty plastic bottles and cans to your local metro station, recycle them, place your transit card on the screen to collect the amount, and then pay all or part of your fare with that? Now that is hats off to Turkey - even if there are lots of less desirable things happening in that country. Smart environmental thinking, for we all need to get from A to B, and this is such a good method to get people to take those bottles with them instead of creating more waste. Continue reading

when the Olympic Gold Medalist in men’s javelin, Jan Zelezný, threw his world record of 98.48 meters in Jena, Germany back in May 1996, there was a little boy of four years of age living in that same city who would become a future Olympic Champion in his own right?  That little boy was Thomas Röhler, and he won his Olympic Gold in Rio Janeiro 20 years later in August 2016. Continue reading

[caption id=“attachment_3048” align=“alignleft” width=“227”]Golda Meir at age 16 in 1914[/caption] Golda Meir (1898-1978), the fourth Prime Minister of Israel, attending the Fourth Street Grade School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin (now called Golda Meir School) organised a fund raiser to pay for her classmates' textbooks? A future leader. Or that she lived all her formative years in the United States before moving to Palestine in 1921? And that she strongly identified with Judaism culturally, but when it came to her religious beliefs, she was actually an atheist. Continue reading

the kid in Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid is the same guy who played Uncle Fester in the 1960s TV-series The Addams Family? The Californian actor Jackie Coogan (1914-1984). And that he was one of the first child stars in film history who upon reaching adulthood sued his parents (actually his mother and stepfather) over his squandered film earnings. That provoked the state of California to enact in 1939 the first known legal protection for the earnings of child performers, widely known as the Coogan Act - last revised in 2004. Continue reading

[caption id=“attachment_2622” align=“alignleft” width=“223”]Jack London in 1903[/caption] Jack London was one of the first writers to become a worldwide celebrity and earn a large fortune from writing? He was born in 1876, died fairly young at the age of 40, but amassed a fortune from novels such as The Call of the Wild (1903) and White Fang (1906), and the short story To Build a Fire (1902/1908) which many critics assess as his best. Continue reading