Phobos Up Close
Astrobiology Magazine ~  November 14, 2004

. . . In 1912 Edgar Rice Burroughs published a story entitled "Under the Moons of Mars" (printed in book form in 1917 as 'A Princess of Mars') in which he referred to the "hurtling moons of Barsoom" (Barsoom being the "native" word for Mars in the fictional account). Burroughs was inspired by the fact that Phobos, having an orbital period of slightly less than 8 hours, would appear from Mars to rise in the west and set in the east only five and a half hours later. (Despite Burroughs' phrase, the outer moon, Deimos, does not "hurtle" -- it takes nearly 60 hours to cross the sky from east to west, rising on one day and not setting again for over two more.) . . .

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Mars moon emerges from the dark
BBC NEWS  2004/11/11
Europe's Mars Express spacecraft has taken its most detailed image yet of the Red Planet's largest moon, Phobos (Thuria). The photo was taken from a distance of about 200km (124 miles) from the irregular-shaped satellite and shows the side of the object that faces Mars. Scientists hope to explain the origin of a network of grooves that extend from the equator to the north pole. Phobos is slowly falling down to Mars and is expected to crash into the planet in the next few million years. 
Competing theories 
Measuring about 27km by 19km, Phobos (from the Greek for fear) is the larger of two moons in orbit around Mars. Its smaller companion, Deimos, is about half Phobos' size and orbits Mars more distantly. Phobos is locked in a so-called "death spiral", which means it is in an orbit that is gradually pulling it on a collision course with the surface of the planet. It orbits the Red Planet three times a day, and is so close to the planet's surface that in some locations on the Red Planet, it cannot always be seen. There are competing theories of Phobos' origin. One theory proposes that the satellite is a captured asteroid. The moon appears to be composed of C-type rock, similar to blackish carbonaceous chondrite asteroids. But some scientists say there is evidence that Phobos and Deimos are by-products of the break-up of a huge moon that once circled Mars. The Mars Express image has a resolution of about seven metres per pixel. 
© BBC MMIV

 
ARTHUR SUYDAM
THE LEGACY EXHIBIT
Gallery Viewing November 28-January17, 2005
SPECIAL GALA EVENT!
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 4TH, 5:00-9:00 PM

Special performance by the all-star lineup of 
Suydam's own band, Red Suydam & the Crocodiles, 
playing Suydam's original compositions for 
Thomas Berger's film The Feud!
Band plays from 5:00-6:45 only! Don't Miss It!

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Arthur Suydam is a master draftsman and haunting storyteller who is numbered among America's finest illustrators. Arthur Suydam burst onto the comic art scene in the 1970s with his creative innovation of marrying classical painting to the art of comics. His work revolutionized the industry and began the comic art renaissance of the 1980s, opening doors for mainstream writers and artists to create literature for a more mature readership. A consummate artist, Suydam has used the past two decades to quietly build a body of work that is truly second to none. MoCCA is proud to present this rare opportunity to view a unique retrospective of Arthur Suydam's life and work. 

Suydam's Tarzan art may be seen in the Dark Horse Tarzan Comics 1-6 and in their Tarzan: The Lost Adventure series:

~ News item submitted by Rob Greer

Dum-Dum 2005 is slated for Chicago/Oak Park 
~ August 10-14 ~

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Scholars spend as much time with 
`The Love Boat' as with Shakespeare By Robert Trussell ~ Tue, Nov. 30, 2004 ~ FortWayne.com
. . . In the last couple of years respected universities have awarded doctorates for dissertations on an amazing range of cultural phenomenon. They include a study of "the figure of the murderous lesbian in 1990s film"; consumer response to pop-up advertising; the "iconography of Clint Eastwood"; Playboy magazine; "the making of modern American manhood" by novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs through his pulp hero Tarzan; teenage girls' shopping habits in the '50s; and "women's rights rhetoric" in country music videos in the '90s. . . . 

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Finding her space
Whether in life or art, 
Cecil Herring has always defied the gravity of convention. By Jean Patteson ~ Orlando Sentinel Staff Writer
November 27, 2004
Thousands of artists are inspired by Florida's flora and fauna, sandy beaches and showy sunsets. . . .Not Cecil Herring. "Space is my inspiration," says Herring, a diminutive firebrand of an artist from Deltona, who first touched brush to canvas almost 50 years ago." . . .  Her unusual first name, Cecil (SEE-sill), is from her father, Cecil J. Darby, who first sparked her interest in space. He pointed out the constellations in the night sky over their Miami home, she recalls, and read her bedtime stories from Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Princess of Mars. . . . 

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GARDENERS BLAME ‘DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES’ 
FOR BEING TREATED LIKE “SEXUAL OBJECTS”
Backlash from hit ABC show leads to lawsuit against network DatelineHollywood.com ~ November 29, 2004
In Tarzana, California, 42 year old gardener Manuel Moralez says he has been living a nightmare since the show started airing on ABC. “I’m trying to plant the wild daffodils, but I’m not having any luck because of all the harassment,” says Moralez. “The lady I work for can’t keep her hands off me. All she wants is hot, animal sex, but I need to start mulching. She doesn’t understand.”

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Hollywood producers are scouring children's literature 
in the race to bag the next Harry Potter-style blockbuster
Garry Maddox ~ November 27, 2004
Sidney Morning Herald ~ Australia  ". . . Filmmakers also have plans for Edgar Rice Burroughs's A Princess of Mars series . . . "

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Durban's 'Tarzan' robbers pounce from trees By Carvin Goldstone ~ November 26, 2004
IOL: South Africa
Robbers operating in the Fyfe Road park in Morningside are ambushing their victims by swinging from trees or emerging from holes. Residents, from the Morningside Village flats and houses along Fyfe Road are afraid to leave their homes after more than 20 muggings in the park over the last six months. One victim, Connie Jenneker, said she was on her way to work when two men, with knives, pounced from a tree and attacked her. 

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Potboilers wear racy look of classic pulp fiction
A new publisher tries to revive the genre, including vivid and titillating cover art. By John Jurgensen ~ The Hartford Courant ~ Orlando Sentinel
November 24, 2004

About the time of World War I, when books were costly and talkies hadn't yet taken over cinema, the demand for prose that cruised at a quick pace broke a wave of new writers whose stories, published in serialized installments, kept readers coming back for more. Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose Tarzan of the Apes first appeared in 1912, helped touch off the genre. Vivid cover art depicting Tarzan's struggles with the beasts of the jungle brought Burroughs' exotic tales to life for the readers of a more isolated America.

Other publishers jumped into the game, pushing the pulp equation into other genres -- hardboiled detective stories, Westerns, science fiction and heroics from the likes of Doc Savage and the Shadow. Some names endure from the pulp era. Both Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler popularized their Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe characters, respectively, in the pages of Black Mask, a detective pulp.

But many authors -- and cover artists -- toiled in obscurity, especially during the Depression when publishers slashed their payment rates along with newsstand prices. The result was an arms race at the newsstand with hundreds of pulps competing for consumers' precious nickels and dimes. "It was a sort of social Darwinism. Only the artist that could reach the public and pull out the dimes got steady work," says Robert Lesser of New York, the foremost -- and, until recently, one of the only -- collectors of original pulp art canvasses.  . . .

. . .  But the irony is that many of the vintage covers would be too risqué or offensive to appear in the modern marketplace. 

Read the whole story 

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HOT PROPERTY
He'll trade Tarzana for Texas By Ruth Ryon ~ LATIMES.com
November 21, 2004
Chuck Norris, star of the longtime CBS series "Walker, Texas Ranger," has listed his gated Tarzana compound at $5.3 million. The 64-year-old action-adventure TV and movie star has decided to live full time in Texas, where he has a Dallas home he just finished remodeling and a Houston-area ranch he plans to expand. 

 'Original' great ape discovered
By Paul Rincon ~ BBC News science reporter ~ 2004/11/18

Scientists have unearthed remains of a primate that could have been ancestral not only to humans but to all great apes, including chimps and gorillas. The partial skeleton of this 13-million-year-old "missing link" was found by palaeontologists working at a dig site near Barcelona in Spain. The new specimen was probably male, a fruit-eater and was slightly smaller than a chimpanzee, researchers say.

Palaeontologists were just getting started at the dig when a bulldozer churned up a tooth. Further investigation yielded one of the most complete ape skeletons known from the Miocene Epoch (about 22 to 5.5 million years ago). Salvador Moyà-Solà of the Miquel Crusafont Institute of Palaeontology in Barcelona and colleagues subsequently found parts of the skull, ribcage, spine, hands and feet, along with other bones. They have assigned it to an entirely new family and species: Pierolapithecus catalaunicus .

Monkey business
Great apes are thought - on the basis of genetic and other evidence - to have separated from another primate group known as the lesser apes some time between 11 and 16 million years ago (The lesser apes include gibbons and siamang).It is fascinating, therefore, for a specimen like Pierolapithecus to turn up right in this window.Scientists think the creature lived after the lesser apes went their own evolutionary way, but before the great apes began their own diversification into different forms such as orang-utans, gorillas, chimps and, of course, humans.

" Pierolapithecus probably is, or is very close to, the last common ancestor of great apes and humans," said Professor Moyà-Solà. The new ape's ribcage, lower spine and wrist display signs of specialised climbing abilities that link it with modern great apes, say the researchers. The overall orthograde - or upright - body design of this animal and modern-day great apes is thought to be an adaptation to vertical climbing and suspending the body from branches.

The Miocene ape fossil record is patchy; so finding such a complete fossil from this time period is unprecedented. "It's very impressive because of its completeness," David Begun, professor of palaeoanthropology at the University of Toronto, Canada, told the BBC News website. "I think the authors are right that it fills a gap between the first apes to arrive in Europe and the fossil apes that more closely resemble those living today."

Planet of the apes

Other scientists working on fossil apes were delighted by the discovery. But not all were convinced by the conclusions drawn by the Spanish researchers. Professor Begun considers it unlikely that Pierolapithecus was ancestral to orang-utans. "I haven't seen the original fossils. But there are four or five important features of the face, in particular, that seem to be closer to African apes," he explained. "To me the possibility exists that it is already on the evolutionary line to African apes and humans." . . .

. . . During the Miocene, Earth really was the planet of the apes. As many as 100 different ape species roamed the Old World, from France to China in Eurasia and from Kenya to Namibia in Africa.

© BBC MMIV

World-renowned Conservationist Jane Goodall 
Talks about Animal Rights in Seoul One of the world's most prominent conservationists was in Seoul to promote animal rights. Ms. Jane Goodall spent nearly 50 years of her life pioneering primatology and living with the great apes in Africa. 

A young Jane Goodall, growing up in war-battered England in the 1940s, was inspired by the story of Tarzan. At the age of 25, a determined Jane went to the African jungle where she found the love of her life: not Tarzan, but the chimpanzee, especially one named David Greybeard 
 

Tolley ERB Collection Stolen
Sacramento Bee
November 8, 2004

Bad timing: Tom Tolley's car picked a bad time to get stolen. The car was packed with 25 boxes of Tom's priceless Edgar Rice Burroughs collection - silent-film ads, books, music scores, even $100 worth of Mylar covers to protect the goods. "One of the items stolen was a book I worked on, an Edgar Rice Burroughs bibliography, available only online from myself and a dealer in Grass Valley," Tom said. "No one else should have them." Him Tarzan. Want stuff back. ... 

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Tarzan vaulted into Hall
NJ.com  Sunday, November 07, 2004
By Giuseppe Ungaro

BRIDGETON --Don Bragg ended his acceptance speech at the Southern New Jersey All Sports Museum with a Tarzan yell. It might sound like a strange thing to do, but those that know Bragg well or at all understand it was a perfect ending for him. Bragg, who was inducted into the Hall of Fame Saturday, along with Robin L. Sheppard, for his accomplishments as a pole vaulter has been a big fan of Tarzan for roughly 62 years.

In fact, the 1953 Penns Grove High School graduate had several chances to play the role, even signing a contract once, but something always seemed to get in his way of living out his life-long fantasy. Bragg has been known as "Tarzan" since his childhood because he could be seen swinging from tree to tree in the woods behind his house in what he called "Tarzanville."

"You see the television series, and we used to come down from the movie theater in Penns Grove, there were some trees down there and next door was (a meat market) and they used to wrap boxes with this fuzzy string," said Bragg, 69. "We used to get the string off the boxes and tie the string together and use that. That didn't last too long because they would break occasionally. But that started it."

Playing Tarzan in his backyard helped Bragg get into shape, and he eventually would become the best pole vaulter in the world. He won the gold medal in the 1960 Olympics, was the only vaulter to hold all of the world records in the metal vault competition, and was a three-time national All-American at Villanova before graduating in 1957.

"People always ask me what it was like to be on the victory stand (at the Olympics), but no matter what I say they can only semi-vicariously feel what it's like," said Bragg. "It's a feeling that very little in life feels like that." Bragg expected to have an opportunity to go for gold four years earlier, but missed the Olympics because of am injury. "You almost cry for four years and when you finally get back and win you say, 'The gods were just messing with me,'" said Bragg. "It's almost impossible to define it." "The gods have to be smiling on you, but I also worked like hell. I worked harder than any other pole vaulter. That's why I won the gold medal."

During his speech Saturday, Bragg spoke more of his experiences than his accomplishments. The track and field star traveled the world and made lasting friendships with some famous athletes, including Muhammad Ali and Johnny Weissmuller. "Amateur athletes in those days visited foreign countries when professional athletes didn't even know anything more than their own state," said Bragg. "Our depth of knowledge increased fantastically because of our exposure to different cultures."

Sheppard, a 1970 Bridgeton graduate, coached field hockey, lacrosse and basketball, at Trinity College (Conn.). She won more than 200 games in both field hockey and lacrosse and coached Trinity to two Final Four field hockey appearances. Sheppard, who also has the Trinity field named after her, thanked the coaches she had, including Sophie Amarento, Louise Corson, Sara Livingston, and Fanny Cowell. "People at Trinity have said that that I'm a pioneer for women's sports," said Sheppard, 52. "But that is not the case. There were people before me. I had role models that were the real pioneers."

Copyright 2004 NJ.com. All Rights Reserved.

[mythfolk] Re: Edgar Rice Burroughs as Cryptozoologist
"With his 18-inch-tall "Ant Men," Burroughs anticipated more recent rumors of supposed ultra-pygmies only 2 or 3 feet tall, like the "alux" of Yucatán, the Yushe along Peru's Curanja River, and Hawaii's 
"menehune", as well as reports of encounters with "Mini-Men" only 6 to 18 inches tall"
http://www.mail-archive.com/mythfolk@yahoogroups.com/msg00005.html

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Update from Lord Passmore:
Interesting notation, but it must have been made before last week's discovery -- no mention of the 30-inch tall skeletons they've unearthed in Indonesia. These are believed to be a dwarf version of homo erectus (See Time magazine, Nov. 8 issue for the story). Interestingly, they were named homo florensis, not in honor of Komodoflorensal, as I thought when I first heard this, but for the island of Flores, where they were discovered. The miniature humans hunted dwarf mammoths and giant rats, and fled from Komodo dragons. Unlike pygmies, which have normal-sized craniums, these miniature humans had proportionately small skulls.

    It's believed the isolation of being trapped on the island let only the smallest of the homo erectus survive. Generations of island living also produced dwarf mammoths. As the ERB citation noted, numerous primitive tribes around the world have legends of miniature people, as noted in the writings of Bernard Heuvelmans, Loren Coleman, and other cryptozoologists. The Flores pygmies were contemporary with homo sapiens; it is believed a volcano wiped out the pygmies 12-18k years ago.

Passmore

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Explore Mars Now Website:
www.exploremarsnow.org
"Explore the planet Mars with realistic
 Mars habitats, rockets, ground cars and robots."

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From Conan to Tarzan, 
artist explores the fantastic
Foster's Sunday Citizen Online ~ NH October 31, 2004 Today, Northwood artist David Burton brings the excitement of these Burroughs’ adventures to life with detailed illustrations that accompany the text in a new serialized edition of the classic novels. Burton’s take on Burroughs’ famous characters, which include John Carter, the Warlord of Mars, and Dejah Throis, the Princess of Mars, have been hailed by some top science fiction authors and artists for being perhaps the most realistic attempt to date to capture this alien world and its inhabitants.

See the David Burton ERB Artist Profile in ERBzine 0535

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Pop goes the academic
Scholars spending as much time with ‘The Love Boat' as with Shakespeare
Kansas City Star ~ Oct. 31, 2004  . . .  In the last couple of years respected universities have awarded doctorates for dissertations on an amazing range of cultural phenomenon. They include a study of “the figure of the murderous lesbian in 1990s film”; a “reassessment” of women in science fiction films and television; consumer response to pop-up advertising; the “iconography of Clint Eastwood”; Playboy magazine; the history of pinups; “the making of modern American manhood” by novelist Edgar Rice Burroughs through his pulp hero Tarzan; teenage girls' shopping habits in the '50s; and “women's rights rhetoric” in country music videos in the '90s. . . .

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Tom Jicha Column
Florida Sun-Sentinal.com ~ October 31, 2004  Q. After Tarzan was canceled on the WB, I remember reading something about a new series that would have Travis Fimmel playing a surfer. Can you tell me a little more about this and when it's coming on? I absolutely love him, so any information on him would be greatly appreciated. I haven't seen him in many Calvin Klein ads lately. -- M.H., e-mail

A. Did you hear he was playing a surfer or a surfboard? Judging by what I saw of his acting ability in Tarzan, the latter would be more in tune with his acting skills. The reason he comes off so well on billboards is he doesn't have to move or speak. In any case, the show you heard about is a pilot called Rocky Point, which isn't scheduled to debut until next year. As of now, the cast also includes Bill Campbell, Lauren Holly and Chyler Leigh.