Watching last night’s star-studded American Idol telethon took me back fifteen years. A Concert for Life – The Freddie Mercury Tribute – took place in London’s Wembley Stadium on April 20, 1992. I was twelve and had been a Queen fan for roughly two months, dating back to the theatrical release of Wayne’s World.

I have trouble gaging this AIDS benefit’s cultural significance. My memory may be skewed by the fact I recorded the concert (VHS); that well-worn tape likely still looms in my parents’ basement. The reviews were mixed. The Times of London put it this way: “Def Leppard led a rally call of ‘Let’s Get Rocked,’ which seemed blissfully unaware that anything as unpleasant as AIDS might impinge on a man’s urgent need for casual sex.”

From a trivia perspective, this concert marked the only time David Bowie ever performed “Under Pressure” live with Queen (well, 3/4ths of Queen). And it was bassist John Deacon’s last full concert with the band. Annie Lennox is the only person to sing at A Concert for Life and last night’s Idol Gives Back, though Seal and Bono were both involved in both events (and I could be missing somebody else — let me know).

What follows are a handful of clips I found on YouTube.

David Bowie, Annie Lennox & Queen singing “Under Pressure.”
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I don’t know how to change the toner cartridge. Paper jams also confuse me. The printer, in general, is over my head. And therefore, off-limits.

In an unfortunate case of office planning, I sit within shouting distance of the freight elevator – the shouting of the person with the shipments, locked inside. If I knew the ins and outs of our shipping and receiving policies, I’d spend half my day dealing with deliveries. Lucky for me, I’m baffled by the whole situation.

Who knew there was a term for this? Let me turn things over to Jared Sandberg of the Wall Street Journal.

Strategic incompetence isn’t about having a strategy that fails, but a failure that succeeds. It almost always works to deflect work one doesn’t want to do — without ever having to admit it.

In all cases, it’s a ritualistic charade. The only thing the person claiming not to understand really doesn’t understand: That the victim ultimately stuck with the work sees through the false incompetence.

I guess he’s right. I could probably figure out where to sign for those packages. But I swear, I really do struggle with the printer.

What tasks are you pretending are too complicated?

Whenever my parents are stressed, they’ll head to the shooting range. My cousins will throw darts, and my brother and sister will lean their anxiety into endless rounds of World of Warcraft. I’d love to be able to say I shoot marbles into simulated lunar soil at 16k mph, like NASA scientist Bill Cooke, but I don’t. Not yet, at least.

“We are simulating meteoroid impacts with the lunar surface,” he explains. Cooke and others in the Space Environments Group at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center have recorded the real thing many times. Their telescopes routinely detect explosions on the Moon when meteoroids slam into the lunar surface.

 A typical flash involves “a meteoroid the size of a softball hitting the Moon at 27 km/s and exploding with as much energy as 70 kg of TNT.”

Cooke’s time at NASA’s Ames Vertical Gun Range is going to help astronauts who plan to live on the lunar surface for extended periods of time–NASA’s shooting for six months. Meteoroid impacts are especially powerful on the Moon since it doesn’t have the atmosphere to retard their descent.

Now, I read a lot of blogs. I do. And these days, bloggers have gotten pretty hip to what people want to read about (see the new book No One Cares What You Had for Lunch for examples). But one of my all-time favorite blogs celebrates the notion that the most boring topics can be made riveting: witness the dullest blog in the world. With perfectly calm comic pacing, this blog makes art of the mundane.

Here’s a sample entry:

About the correct temperature - May 9

As I was sitting down I became aware that the temperature was neither too hot nor too cold. This being the case I made no adjustments to the temperature control on the central heating.

Do you have a favorite dull blog?

It’s not just a fictional superhero-retardant anymore. Recently, scientists discovered a strange new mineral deep in a remote Serbian mine, the unique chemical makeup of which just happened to match that of comic-book legend. Turns out sodium lithium boron silicate hydroxide was the name written on a case of rock containing kryptonite stolen by Lex Luther from a museum in the film Superman Returns. So what’s the real skinny on kryptonite? Its white, not green, and it doesn’t glow, either. According to minerologist Chris Stanley, though, it could have some commercial value: “Borosilicate glasses are used to encapsulate processed radioactive waste, and lithium is used in batteries and in the pharmaceutical industries.” Whether or not it can kill Superman, however, remains to be seen.

I know it sounds like a belated April Fools joke, but apparently astronomers announced yesterday that they’ve discovered a real planet 120 trillion miles outside our solar system that very well might be “habitable.” Now, understand that Mars is also classified as habitable and, so far, no one has found life there either. But this new planet, which is called 581 c, has Earth-like temperatures and might have water on the surface, as well.

The folk who discovered it, actually just refer to it as “c,” which by my way of thinking is pretty darn lame. I mean, what if Saturn were called J^8-9 instead? What if Martians were called 4t-ians? What kind of universe would this be? We might not know as much as the average astronomer about stars and such, but we’re certainly more creative, right? Come on flossers! Let’s come up with some better names for the new planet, and make the C-ians feel at home in the universe, shall we?

The next time you’re drinking Campari, or certain kinds of fruit juices (cranberry, grapefruit, et al.), give some props to the cochineal bug. (And not, as some urban legends attest, cockroaches.) The cochineal is a parasite that dwells mainly in cacti, and is harvested for the carminic acid it secretes. The resulting dye is then used to enhance drinks, candy, make-up, and fabric. Using cochineal for decorative purposes has been going on since the height of the Aztec Empire, and in 1991 scientists finally came up with a way to synthetically produce carminic acid…Not nearly as fun as soliciting the services of bugs that look like Nerds. But because some people are allergic to the extract, the FDA may soon require manufacturers to be straightforward about the origin of all these cheery pink hues. What do you think–would you like to be alerted to bug-based ingredients?

On the wall of a simple Romanesque church in the tiny French village of Lavardin, there is a strange fresco. It depicts the figure of an uncannily calm St. Anthony ministering to a horde of writhing, sufferers of what is today known as “St. Anthony’s Fire.” Anthony was a hermetic monk who lived in third century Egypt, and was known to suffer great psychological trials, regarded as assaults on him by Satan. These included horrific visions, hallucinations and frightening voices. The psychological condition was named when, in another remote French village in 1151, hundreds of people went mad. They had hallucinations, writhed in agony in their beds, vomited, ran crazily in the streets and suffered terrible burning sensations in their limbs. It was eventually discovered, however, that rather than being tortured by the Devil, the townspeople had consumed bread tainted by a fungus that grows on rye grass, called ergot. Check out The Temptation of St. Anthony, and get the skinny on ergot, after the jump:
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YOU WILL NEED
1 Alligator, un-sedated and unbowed
1 Person, just a little bit crazy
1 Rope, preferably strong

Do: Check the Classifieds
In 2000, members of the Seminole tribe near Hollywood, Florida put an ad in a local paper. They were looking for a new alligator wrestler. While mano-y-gator conflict is nothing new to the Seminoles (the leathery beasts were once a valuable—and traditionally hand-caught—food source), it’s only recently that the tribe has had such hard luck finding people willing to jump in there (i.e. the swamp) and go for it (i.e. pin several-hundred-pound, sharp-toothed creatures to the ground with only their soft and presumably tasty bodies). However, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Wrestling alligators for the benefit of white tourists used to be one of the few Seminole-friendly job markets in Florida, but that’s changed. Seminoles now have improved access to higher education and better paying (and significantly less lethal) jobs. They also tend to own their own tourist attractions now, instead of working for outsiders. All of this adds up to fewer Seminoles willing to meet the continued tourist demand for alligator wrestling—thus, the need for a classified ad.

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Eight months ago, we looked at the HD DVD vs. Blu-ray format war through the lens of the Netflix Top 10 in each category. At that time, Million Dollar Baby topped the HD DVD charts, and Crash led the way in Blu-ray.

The charts look very much the same today.

Blu-ray

1. Crash; 2. Mr. & Mrs. Smith; 3. Million Dollar Baby; 4. Finding Neverland; 5. The Da Vinci Code; 6. Syriana; 7. Click; 8. Hitch; 9. The Devil Wears Prada; 10. Failure to Launch

HD DVD

1. Million Dollar Baby; 2. Ray; 3. Syriana; 4. Failure to Launch; 5. The Break-Up; 6. Batman Begins; 7. Firewall; 8. The Lake House; 9. Rumor Has It; 10. Ocean’s Twelve

I don’t know a single person with either a Blu-ray disc player or its HD DVD rival. Anyone want to come to the defense of either format?

See you around Christmas with another update.