Month: March 2007

With five entries, Memphis is second only to Pigeon Forge with the most offbeat tourist attractions in Tennessee, according to Roadside America.

The authors of the popular book series and now the online version were sufficiently intrigued by Graceland, The Peabody Ducks, the First Church of the Elvis Impersonator (now defunct, unfortunately), the Crystal Shrine Grotto in Memorial Park Cemetery, and — our latest entry — the giant Statue of Liberation erected by the World Overcomers Outreach Ministries Church on Winchester.

Pigeon Forge, with seven entries, wins out with such oddities as the Debbie Reynolds Museum, Dollywood, and something called the Bear Pits. Quite a few of the attractions in that area have closed in recent years, though, so Memphis’ may reach the top of the list any day now.

At any rate, we’ve got more weird stuff to brag about than Murfreesboro. Roadside America gave that city a nod for owning — ho hum — the World’s Largest Red Cedar Bucket. That’s just sad.

Check out the Tennessee list.

Life, the once seminal American magazine, which in recent years has been relegated to an insert in Sunday newspapers (including The Commercial Appeal), is dead.

From today’s Editor & Publisher: “Time Inc. announced today that it will close Life magazine, now distributed as a weekend newspaper supplement. The print issue dated April 20, 2007 will be the magazine’s last.

“Life was carried in 103 newspapers with a total circulation of 13 million, the company said. It was re-launched for the third time in 2004.

“‘The decision was made within the last week,’ Dawn Bridges, senior vice president of corporate communications at Time Inc., told E&P. ‘Unfortunately the newspaper ad environment has not been a good one. We were fighting the same battle.'”

More from E&P.

Some Shelby County officials are springing into fitness, some quite literally.

Shelby County government’s Health and Wellness Committee is hosting a “Spring Into Fitness” day at Wellworx on Main Street for county employees and their families Saturday, March 31st. The event, which will kick off National Public Health Week, includes a basketball shoot-out with Sheriff Mark Luttrell, line dancing with Health Department head Yvonne Madlock, and a push-up challenge with Mayor A C Wharton.

We’ve never seen the mayor in anything but his elegant suit-and-tie combos, so if anyone gets pictures of Wharton in a sweatsuit, we’d be mighty interested. Just saying.

Memphis, like so many cities today, is a community beset with problems. Crime seems out of control, our transportation system seems to operating at maximum capacity, and we still fret about diseases that should have been brought under control decades ago (such as the flu). Sometimes it’s just too much trouble to get through the day.

Well, years ago the world’s top scientists put these same issues under the microscope and came up with some innovative, if not downright bizarre solutions. And now, thanks to a company called Synchronicity, we can take a look at the “World of Tomorrow,” as people in the 1950s envisioned it might be.

Fresh from Hollywood’s historic film vault, the POPULAR SCIENCE Cinema Series is now available. These extraordinary, rare and timeless film shorts, produced with the cooperation of the editors of Popular Science magazine, brought the “future” to over 100 million information-hungry moviegoers during the Golden Age of Hollywood each week.

Originally produced in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s as entertainment novelties and shown before Paramount Pictures’ major feature film releases, these wonderfully retro cinema shorts contain thousands of iconic images of inventions, scientific breakthroughs, lifestyles and American pop culture — “The Birth of TV Dinners,” “The Space Age Ice Gun with Bullet Ice Trays,” “The Batchelor Gal Pad,” “The Flying Wing,” “The Angora Swimsuit,” “The All Glass Bathroom,” “The Hitchhikers Secret Suitcase,” “Moon Rockets,” “The Three-Wheeled Car” and many, many more.

Some are awe-inspiring, others more whimsical, and some downright bizarre, but all possess a unique, retro and inimitable quality that sets them apart. These films capture the wide-eyed wonder of American ingenuity and optimism as the country began to dream about what technology had in store for us and our future.

The series has been digitally restored by Shields Pictures, owners of the original archival 35mm silver nitrate Masters. “Because these films were shot in full 35mm film Magnacolor, high-resolution images can be extracted to create fabulous retro pictures and products,” explains Cynthia Hall Domine, president of Synchronicity, Shields Pictures’ licensing agent. “It’s yesterday’s World of Tomorrow — today.”

Learn more here.

— Michael Finger

Back in the early 1800s, a series of earthquakes leveled the town of New Madrid, Missouri, and made the Mississippi River flow backwards for 4 days. Some people said the quakes made bells ring in Philadelphia.

There weren’t Richter counters back then, but seismologists say the quake could have been anywhere from 7.0 to 8.9 on the scale. Now, some scientists say, we can rest assured that the New Madrid fault is dying.

Probably.

Seth Stein, a scientist at Northwestern University, believes that the New Madrid fault is running out of steam. The series of deep cracks produces hundreds of small earthquakes every year, very few strong enough to be felt. Due to a lack of unusual heat flows within the fault, Stein believes that it is reaching the end of a recent pulse of activity. And the hundreds of tremors felt per year? Simply aftershocks of the 1811/1812 earthquakes.

But don’t start building that 15 foot-high Jenga tower you’ve been planning for years. Many other scientists disagree with Stein’s findings.

Memphis geophysicist Robert Smalley’s professional opinion is that arguing about “a temperature effect” on the New Madrid “is just a waste of time.” Ouch. Stein probably felt that one.

Eugene Schweig of the U.S. Geological Survey is a bit more generous. He states that Stein’s study relies on incomplete data. Why the faultline produces quakes at all is still a mystery, and until it is better understood, he says that people should focus on preparing for the next big one.

So, to sum up, Memphis may or may not have a large magnitude earthquake in the future. We don’t really know. It’s a good thing we have experts to tell us these things. We might be a little confused otherwise.

— Cherie Heiberg