The Clock
The artist Christian Marclay has made a movie that’s 24 hours long composed entirely of scenes from other movies that reference the time. If you go to see it tonight at 7.30 p.m., it will also be 7.30 p.m. in the scene playing onscreen. At midnight it will be midnight. There’s scenes from Taxi Driver, Pulp Fiction, Gone With the Wind and Frankenstein along with hundreds of others.
Nicolas Cage gets his Comic Book Back
About 10 years ago someone stole a comic from actor Nick Cage. Last month the comic was recovered when some bidders purchased an abandoned storage locker in the San Fernando Valley. It’s a pretty special comic: Action Comics No. 1 features the first
appearance of Superman. In 2010 a copy sold for one million dollars.
Stand-by to Eject
The Lockheed Martin F-35 fighter jets are facing challenges with cost and schedule overruns. They’re definitely an election issue. But there’s no issue with the safe ejection technologies. Engineers tested the F-35 ejection seat on a rocket-sled speeding down a track at 966 km/h. All tests have so far been flawless. But no humans have yet ridden the demon sled.
The Two Hour Marathon
Three years ago a new world record was set during the Berlin marathon — 26.2 miles in 2.03.59. Four minutes stand between humans and a two-hour marathon. Runners all around the world believe it can be done. A professor at the University de Montreal has been looking at the math and believes a two-hour marathon will be run by 2028.
Canada’s Nowhere Place
The Lonely Planet has compiled the Top 10 Middle of Nowhere places on Earth. Only one of them is in Canada. Representing Canada is Quttinirpaaq National Park, second-largest in our park system and definitely the most northerly, stretching along the top half of Ellesmere island to Cape Columbia, the tip of North America.
Nuke the Tar Sands
In 1959, Richfield Oil Corporation formally asked the permission of the Canadian government to detonate nuclear bombs underneath the Athabaskan sands. They claimed the nukes would liquefy the oil and allow it to be slurped out. In his new book Here on Earth, Tim Flannery says Canadian politicians nixed the idea when they imagined trying to sell it to Canadian voters.
