Cuppacafe

Forget Chariots of the Gods! forget Jack Kirby's Eternals! Forget M. Knight Shamalam!

It has just been revealed that we have been visited from the great beyond, only it isn't what we thought it was:

The Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn has caught an interesting new view of the tiny moon Mimas.

The probe measured temperature differences across the object's surface and produced a map that looks just like the 1980s Pac-Man video games icon.

Scientists are unsure why Mimas should display such variations but say it is probably related to the diversity of textures in the surface materials.

The Perfessor

Have you ever noticed that since everyone now has a digital camera in their cell phone UFO sightings hav dropped to almost nil?

Oh yeah, why is it that Aliens never land in New York or Tokyo (except in movies), but always pick searchlight, NV, or Cowtip, OH?

Yeah, me too.

The Perfessor

Yep, apparently there either was (or was not) a ship of some sort hovering above the Kremlin. Yep, you heard that right, there was (or was not) a mile-wide ship of some sort that was hovering over the Kremlin for several hours the other day:

Sitting motionless in the sky above the Kremlin in Moscow, clips of the unexplained object have become the most-viewed videos on Russia’s YouTube.

The two videos, one taken at night from a car and one during the day, were both filmed by amateurs.

The Perfessor

OK, OK, all the uber-Trek Geeks already know that JJ Abrams new vision of Trek hits DVD and Blu-Ray any moment now, and virtually everybody else knows that there were two pilots of Trek (the first, if not only TV show in history to have two pilots) The first, The Cage, which was rejected by NBC for being “too cerebral” and the second, Where No Man Has Gone Before, which replaced Jeffrey Hunter (who played the captain) with William Shatner.

Well, it has just been learned that there was actually a third pilot with an alternate version that was largely lost and has before never aired. According to reports, a film collector in Germany recently acquired this print and brought it to the attention of CBS/Paramount. CBS is now releasing this version on Blu-ray Dec. 15.

Here are some clips that have been previously circulated from the alternate version....

While I’m not going to go out and buy a Blu-Ray player just to see this full episode, I’m guessing that there are some that just might.

The Perfessor

So, Did you hear the story about the team of scientists that created a super particle accelerator that in turn created a micro-black hole? Yeah, you know the story, its the one where they wind up creating this black hole that grows exponentially into an Earth-eating behemoth, ultimately destroying all life as we know it.

Nope, it isn’t the latest Roland Emmerich Earth-destroying disaster flick, it is basically what some scientists though would happen when the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) when on-line back in September of 2008, only it (obviously) didn’t quite happen that way. Well, we now know that the Earth-munching, LHC-generated black hole theory has more flaws in it than Europa’s crust, but scientists do think the next-generation particle accelerator could generate tiny black holes.

This is actually rather exciting. If micro-black holes are generated after the high-energy collisions inside the LHC, they could provide the first experimental evidence of Hawking Radiation, the only radiation predicted to be emitted from a black hole's event horizon. If the radiation predicted by Stephen Hawking is discovered (via the detection of evaporating black holes), a Nobel Prize for Physics wouldn't be far away.

To learn more about the LHC go here. To read about the end of the world as we know it go here.

I don’t know about you, but even though I didn’t waste any of my time watching CNN follow the Balloon Boy’s flight, I am happy to announce that it seems that the parents are going to wind up being brought up on charges for the event after all.

The parents of a 6-year-old boy who was thought to be trapped in a runaway balloon but was later found hiding in his family's garage will probably face criminal charges, authorities said Saturday night -- the latest indication that the surreal drama that captivated the nation might have been a publicity stunt.

Larimer County Sheriff James Alderden, who previously said he thought the boy’s parents, Richard and Mayumi Heene, had not staged the escapade, told reporters Saturday night, “We anticipate at some point in the future there will be some criminal charges filed in this incident.’

I seriously couldn’t be happier. Like I said, I didn’t waste any of my time watching, but I know that quite a few of you folk out there did, and I know that several Federal, State, and local law enforcement folk were rounded up trying to track and “rescue” the kid only to have the boy admit on TV “you told me to do it for the show.”

The Perfessor