The Think Tank

So most of you probably heard that there was a Lunar eclipse last Monday night, August 27th.  According to the news, those of us lucky enough to live here in Oregon and Washington were in the absolute prime viewing area, peak viewing for the whole planet!  (Or at least the half that was experiencing night).  It started a little before 2:00AM and finished up around 5:30AM, just before sunrise.  Mom and I decided to take a drive up to Crown Point and Vista House to catch a glimpse of this beautiful event and were shocked to find that nearly 100 other people had the same idea!

We took a bunch of photos and managed to get a few pretty good ones, including the one at the top of this post, where I arranged a series of shots into one image with the eclipsed moon at the center.

I had never seen a total Lunar eclipse before, and I was surprised to discover that it was nothing like I thought it would be.  Instead of the Moon disappearing altogether as I expected, or being darkened and wreathed in light like a total solar eclipse, Lunar eclipses only change the appearance of the Moon, leaving it a dark rust color and making it difficult to distinguish her familiar characteristics.  It was a fascinating experience, so I thought I’d share a few interesting facts with you.  Enjoy!

Total Lunar Eclipses happen at least twice per year and like Solar events are only visible to a portion of the world for prime viewing.  In the August 28th eclipse, the west coast, British Columbia, Alaska and the southeastern tip of Australia were the only places on Earth where the full effect could be seen.

Lunar eclipses occur when the Moon passes through the Earths shadow, and because of the physics involved can only occur during a full Moon.  Given that there is a full Moon every 29 days (plus some change), you’d think we’d see a lot more eclipses then we do.  The reason for this is that the Moons orbit does not match the orbital plane of the Earth (called the ecliptic): its off by about five degrees.  That means that Lunar eclipses most often occur near the two intersections where the Moons orbit comes close to the ecliptic.  There are other types of eclipses that happen away from these intersections, but they are extremely rare.

Lunar eclipses come in two varieties: Umbral and Penumbral.  Most of the time during a Lunar eclipse the Moon passes through the Penumbra (think of it as the outer edges of Earths shadow), resulting in a slight yellow color and very little change in the Moon’s luminance.  The other kind of eclipse is when the Moon passes through the very heart of the Earth’s shadow, called the Umbra, where it receives very little solar radiation and darkens dramatically.  Umbral eclipses usually cause the Moon to turn a dark rust or maroon color, although Umbral eclipses that occur on the outer edges closer to the Penumbra can cause the edges of the Moon to turn blue or turquise.  The Moon won’t disappear completely from the sky, however, as it still receives some refracted light from Earths atmosphere.  If the Earth were a dead rock floating through space without any gases surrounding it, total Umbral eclipses would make the Moon vanish.

As it stands, Umbral eclipses like the one on the 28th leave the Moon dark red, and very eerie looking.  The red color comes around for much the same reason that sunsets turn red: the longer wavelengths are reflected off of the atmosphere, leaving the shorter (redder) wavelengths to dominate our senses.  The luminance is rated on a scale called the Danjon Scale of Lunar Eclipse Brightness, named for the French astronomer Andre-Louis Danjon (1890-1967) who created it.  Using a telescope equipped with a prism which split the image in two, Danjon was able to dial down the intensity of the side which was sunlit to match the side which was earthlit, giving him a scientific scale on which to measure the brightness of Lunar eclipses. His scale was a five point system, where 0 equated to a nearly invisible Moon, 1 was very, very dark (red/brown) and 5 was very, very bright (white).  The 28th eclipse that I witnessed saw the Moon very deep into the Umbra and rated somewhere around a 2 on the Danjon Scale, with the Moon passing only a few degrees south of the absolute center of Earths axis.

Because the Moon was so far into the Umbra, and because it was near its apogee (farthest point from Earth in its orbit), the totality of the eclipse on the 28th lasted more then an hour and a half, longer then any eclipse visible to the Northwest in more then 150 years.  The longest lunar eclipse on record occurred in January of 2000, with totality lasting 108 minutes, but sadly totality was blocked for viewers in the US by sunrise.  The previous best record was in May of 1505 when totality lasted 107 minutes.

The next Lunar eclipse visible to North America will be on February 21, 2008, and the Northwest will again be in a very good spot to view it, though we may miss part of the start as it will be taking place during moonrise.  Sadly totality will only last for 25 minutes (as opposed to 91 minutes this month), since the Moon will only narrowly pass inside the edge of the Umbra.  On the upside, if the February 2008 eclipse rates higher on the Danjon scale, there is a better chance of seeing some blue flame up around the edges, which should make for some really interesting pictures!

Not that I have too much hope, though.  There have been 6 total Lunar eclipses visible to North America since 1997, and all of them have either been hidden to Oregon and Washington by poor weather or obscured by moonset or sunrise.

There are roughly 25,000 wild polar bears in the world, divided between 19 primary populations in the US, Canada, Greenland and Russia.  On average a male polar bear is eight feet long and weighs about one thousand pounds.

They live in one of the few corners of this world that has been largely unaffected by world turmoil… but that is changing.  Global warming – or “climate change” as it is called now – is one of those things not even polar bears can escape.  In fact, its effecting them sooner and with greater impact then anywhere else.

The most studied group of polar bears is the Western Hudson Bay population, which scientists have been observing since the 1960’s.  For decades that groups numbers held steady at approximately 1,200 adults and cubs.  But between 1987 and present, the average number of bears has fallen to 935.  That’s a 22% decrease.  The reason?  Several environmental factors play a role, but the unmitigated champion of the polar bears demise is global warming.  As the world heats up, the ice floes and Arctic ice shelves that the bears hunt and live on are shrinking.

Unlike most bears polar bears do not hibernate, though they do retreat to dens during the harshest parts of the Arctic winter.  When they emerge from the dens with their cubs, stockpiling calories is a vital necessity if they are to survive the still frigid spring and summer months.  Thanks to global warming, however, the ice shelf retreats an average of three weeks earlier then it did just twenty years ago, meaning that the polar bears have that much less time to bulk up.  If they fail to get enough food, they freeze to death.  Other bears find themselves themselves marooned on ice floes that have broken off of the mainland and carried them upwards of 50 miles from their usual territories.  While they are fantastic swimmers, these immense distances are too much for many of them.  Drowned bears are a common site today, the numbers passing 50 drowned bears per season.  Others still find themselves victims to cannibalistic bears, a highly uncommon characteristic for these animals only found during times of severe starvation.

The polar bear situation is dire, and to me seems like a harbinger of our own impending difficulties.

But there is a glimmer of hope on the horizon.

More then a year ago there was a petition made to the Department of the Interior to list the polar bear as an endangered species.  Not surprisingly the petition was ignored, prompting a lawsuit by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace and the Center for Biological Diversity to force the DOI to rule on whether or not polar bears were endangered due to human contributions to global warming.  And shockingly, the answer that came back was “yes.”  This is a truly amazing development, given that the Bush Administration has staunchly maintained not only that global temperatures were within normal ranges, but that human beings were not effecting the global climate at all.

The decision by the DOI does not immediately grant polar bears protection under the Endangered Species Act, but instead sets in motion a one year investigation to determine if the polar bears plight is indeed caused by human contributions to global climate change.  Skeptics would argue that the investigations finding will be cherry-picked or doctored as many other now infamous environment studies pertaining to global warming have been.  But the simple fact that the petition for the study was granted gives many people hope.

Should the polar bear be listed as endangered due to man-caused global warming, the Endangered Species Act would come into play.  That would be a real boon to the environmental movement, primarily because the ESA not only prevents building new hazards to the endangered animal, but also calls for the government to produce proactive legislation to foster regeneration of the species – in this case, that would have to be by reducing greenhouses gasses that lead to global warming.  Sadly the ESA has no provision to force retrofitting of existing equipment, but it does require that any new construction be compliant with the new standards set forth by governmental scientific studies.  Given that the US contributes more greenhouse emissions then South Korea, Russia, Great Britain, Canada, Brazil, India and China combined, this could conceivably have far reaching implications: from cars with higher fuel efficiency standards to new requirements for “green” energy production, to CO2 caps and tax credits for CO2 reductions – all things that have been talked about in recent years but have failed to come to fruition only for lack of political will.

So by saving the polar bear, we may inadvertently save ourselves in the process.

If you would like to sign the petition to encourage the Bush Administration to add polar bears to the Endangered Species Act or for further information, please visit www.polarbearsos.com.

Catchy title, eh?  Well, let me explain how I came by it.  I was driving down the road the other day, listening to a radio talkshow discussing, among other things, the latest Ann Coulter controversy.

(If you are one of the three people in the country who haven’t heard about this yet, she intimated that John Edwards was a “faggot”, then later claimed that the epithet was not a slur against homosexuals at all, but was simply a “school yard” slang for “Wussy”.  What I found most abhorrent about the whole thing, more even then the comment itself, was that it was met not with disdain but with laughter and applause.)

The question posed by the talkshow host was this: “Should we play the clip and thereby lend credibility to this nutjob’s luny ideas, or should we not?”  They put it to the callers, and took a vote.  In the end, “Play it” won out, but one of the callers from the minority “Don’t Play It” contingent had a truly unique view.  He said that by playing the clip and discussing it instead of simply dismissing it as the angry rantings of an insane person, the media was “Justin Timberlake to her Janet Jackson, revealing the ugly nipple of homophobia for the world to gawk at.”

Wow.

While I can see the legitimacy of his claim, I have to disagree with this random person and his not-so-eloquent statement.  I think we need to flash these ugly nipples as often and with as much fanfare as we can, simply to point out that people like Ann Coulter, author of many best selling hate books, and everyone who thinks like her is precisely what is wrong with humanity.  I think we need to get her comments out there for the whole world to see, rather then allowing them to be limited to the select individuals  who agree with her narrow philosophy of hatred and intolerance.  And furthermore, I think that we not only need to flash these ugly nipples, I think we need to stop acting as if every nipple is the same as every other nipple in the world.

Okay, so maybe the nipple analogy has gone to far…

What I’m trying to say is that one belief is not equal to every other belief.  We should be damn embarrased that one of our countrymen is on national television making the rest of us look like morons to world.  Sure, she is entitled to her opinion, but I think if she chooses to express it in a national forum, then she deserves national ridicule.

To that end, I have assembled a selection of some of her comments for you to peruse.  While reading them, you must remember that Ann Coulter is a highly respected advocate of the Republican Party and the Conservative movement.  Her latest attack on John Edwards was made while speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, which is sort of like recruitment conference hosted for young people.  All of the big wigs in the Republican party were there, including presidential hopefuls Rudolph Giulianni, John McCane and Mitt Romney, as well as various other commentators and Republican Party leaders.  In the past she has received the Media Research Center’s Conservative Journalist of the Year award, and the Clare Boothe Luce Policy Institute bestowed upon her its annual Conservative Leadership Award “for her unfailing dedication to truth, freedom and conservative values and for being an exemplar, in word and deed, of what a true leader is.”

Please bear these facts in mind when you read the following statements.
Just to make my own, personal views known I want to point out that I am completely fair and balanced.  I have no personal feelings about Ann Coulter other then thinking that she is a vile, evil, deplorable hate monger who’s uses these outrageous and slanderous comments to sell books and make obscene amounts of money off of a narrow wedge of the population who share her mean spirited, ignorant ideology and suffer from the same shriveled up soul that she does.  If her loathsome words were hot lava, her mouth would be like Mount Vesuvius endlessly erupting a fiery cascade of abhorrent filth and insecurities upon the world, boiling straight up from the white-hot core of the new American Conservative movement.

But I have no opinions.

Please read on and see what I mean:

“I was going to have a few comments on the other Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards, but it turns out you have to go into rehab if you use the word “faggot”, so I – so kind of an impasse, can’t really talk about Edwards.” (Met with applause and laughter from the crowd)
– Speaking at Conservative Political Action Conference, March 2, 2007

“Whenever you have to go to the argument “Oh, would you use the N word”… I mean that is part of this, of this symantic totalitarianism, to compare everything to the N word.  No, if you weren’t brought here as slaves, if you weren’t legally discriminated against – you hear this when people say “you can’t use the word illegal alien because that’s like using the N word!”  No, those are words that are specifically used to demean a particular race.  The word I used has nothing to do with sexual preference.  It is a schoolyard taunt.  And unless you are going to announce here on national TV that John Edwards, married father of many children is gay, it clearly has nothing to do with that!  It’s a schoolyard taunt!”
– excerpted from Hannity and Colmes show, March 6, 2007

“I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.”
– from her newspaper column, December 21, 2005

“We were terrified that Jones would settle. It was contrary to our purpose of bringing down the president.”
– Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story (1998), pg. 183, referring to Paula Jones.

“If Americans support abortion, let’s vote. . . Just this past term, in Stenberg vs. Carhart, the court expanded the apocryphal abortion right to an all-new right to stick a fork in the head of a half-born baby.”
– Her column, December 28, 2000

“Not all Muslims may be terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims.”
– Her column, September 28, 2001

“These broads are millionaires, lionized on TV and in articles about them, reveling in their status as celebrities and stalked by grief-arazzis… These self-obsessed women seemed genuinely unaware that 9/11 was an attack on our nation and acted as if the terrorist attacks happened only to them… I’ve never seen people enjoying their husbands’ deaths so much.”
– Excerpted from Godless: The Church of Liberalism June, 2006

“If Gore had been elected president, right now he would just be finding that last lesbian quadriplegic for the Special Forces team.”
– Fall Fashion Preview: Cowboy Boots In, Flip-Flops Out; October 14, 2004

“I don’t know if Bill Clinton is gay. But Al Gore – total fag.”
– Media Matters; July 26, 2006

“Airports scrupulously apply the same laughably ineffective airport harassment to Suzy Chapstick as to Muslim hijackers. It is preposterous to assume every passenger is a potential crazed homicidal maniac. We know who the homicidal maniacs are. They are the ones cheering and dancing right now.”
– Her column This Is War; September 12, 2001. Referring to video of Arabs dancing in the streets after the terrorist attacks of 9/11/01

“Six imams removed from a US Airways flight from Minneapolis to Phoenix are calling on Muslims to boycott the airline. If only we could get Muslims to boycott all airlines, we could dispense with airport security altogether.”
– AnnCoulter.com; November 22, 2006

“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpet-bombed German cities; we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.”
– Her column This Is War; September 12, 2001

“Bill Clinton was a very good rapist”
– New York Observer, January 10, 2005

“I’m getting a little fed up with hearing about, oh, civilian casualties”
– New York Observer, January 10, 2005

“I think we ought to nuke North Korea right now just to give the rest of the world a warning.”
– New York Observer, January 10, 2005

“The Episcopals (sic) don’t demand much in the way of actual religious belief. They have girl priests, gay priests, gay bishops, gay marriages – it’s much like The New York Times editorial board. They acknowledge the Ten Commandments – or “Moses’ talking points” – but hasten to add that they’re not exactly ‘carved in stone.'”
– Her column The Jesus Thing; January 7, 2004

“Being nice to people is, in fact, one of the incidental tenets of Christianity (as opposed to other religions whose tenets are more along the lines of ‘kill everyone who doesn’t smell bad and doesn’t answer to the name Mohammed’).”
– Her column; March 4, 2004

“Few failures have been more spectacular. Illiterate students knifing one another between acts of sodomy in the stairwell is just one of the many eggs that had to be broken to make the left’s omelette of transferring power from states to the federal government.”
– Discussing desegregation with Attorney General Ashcroft, Hannity & Colmes show.

“There are a lot of bad Republicans; there are no good Democrats.”
– Interview with Brian Lamb; August 11, 2002

“Here at the Spawn of Satan convention in Boston, conservatives are deploying a series of covert signals to identify one another, much like gay men do. My allies are the ones wearing crosses or American flags. The people sporting shirts emblazened with the “F-word” are my opponents. Also, as always, the pretty girls and cops are on my side, most of them barely able to conceal their eye-rolling.”
– On the 2004 Democratic Convention; July 26, 2004

“The Democrats are giving aid and comfort to the enemy for no purpose other than giving aid and comfort to the enemy. There is no plausible explanation for the Democrats’ behavior other than that they long to see U.S. troops shot, humiliated, and driven from the field of battle. They fill the airwaves with treason, but when called to vote on withdrawing troops, disavow their own public statements. These people are not only traitors, they are gutless traitors.”
– New Idea for Abortion Party: Aid the Enemy; November 23, 2005

“The ethic of conservation is the explicit abnegation of man’s dominion over the Earth. The lower species are here for our use. God said so: Go forth, be fruitful, multiply, and rape the planet – it’s yours. That’s our job: drilling, mining and stripping. Sweaters are the anti-Biblical view. Big gas-guzzling cars with phones and CD players and wet bars – that’s the Biblical view.”
– Oil Good; Democrats bad; October 12, 2000

“They’re [Democrats] always accusing us of repressing their speech. I say let’s do it. Let’s repress them. Frankly, I’m not a big fan of the First Amendment.”
– University of Florida speech; October 20, 2005

“I’d build a wall. In fact, I’d hire illegal immigrants to build the wall. And throw out the illegals who are here. […] It’s cheap labor.”
– The O’Reilly Factor;  April 14, 2006

“I was not enthusiastic about the last Gulf war. Of course, it goes without saying, I rooted for our team once the shooting started. But I wasn’t for that war. I was also against sending Americans to the Balkans. My point is, I’m genuinely against America deploying troops without a really, really good reason. I just can’t imagine anyone not seeing 9/11 as a really good reason for wiping out Islamic totalitarians.”
– Her column, May 17, 2003

” as for catching Osama, it’s irrelevant. Things are going swimmingly in Afghanistan.”
– Hannity and Colmes, August 24, 2006.  Responding to assertions about problems with Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan

“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”
– Her Column, This Is War; September 12, 2001

“Point one and point two by the end of the week had become official government policy. As for converting them to Christianity, I think it might be a good idea to get them on some sort of hobby other than slaughtering infidels. I mean perhaps that’s the Peace Corps, perhaps it’s working for Planned Parenthood, but I’ve never seen the transforming effect of anything like that of Christianity.”
– The Drudge Report; June 26, 2002, referring to the preceding comment.

“I think our motto should be, post-9-11, ‘raghead talks tough, raghead faces consequences.'”
– At Conservative Political Action Conference; February 10, 2006

“Perhaps we could put aside our national, ongoing, post-9/11 Muslim butt-kissing contest and get on with the business at hand: Bombing Syria back to the stone age and then permanently disarming Iran.”
– Muslim Bites Dog; February 15, 2006

“The presumption of innocence only means you don’t go right to jail.”
– Fox News; Hannity & Colmes; August 24, 2001

“When contemplating college liberals, you really regret once again that John Walker is not getting the death penalty. We need to execute people like John Walker in order to physically intimidate liberals, by making them realize that they can be killed, too. Otherwise, they will turn out to be outright traitors. ”
– Conservative Political Action Conference; February 26, 2002

“Would that it were so! … That the American military were targeting journalists.”
– CNBC; Kudlow & Cramer; February 7, 2005

“Press passes can’t be that hard to come by if the White House allows that old Arab Helen Thomas to sit within yards of the president”
– Anncoulter.com, “REPUBLICANS, BLOGGERS AND GAYS, OH MY!”, February 23, 2005

“My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times building.”
– New York Observer article; August 26, 2002

“Of course I regret it. I should have added ‘after everyone had left the building except the editors and the reporters.'”
– rightwingnews.com; June 26, 2003, referring to her preceding statement.

“We need somebody to put rat poisoning in Justice Stevens’s creme brulee. That’s just a joke, for you in the media.”
– Philander Smith College January 26, 2006, referring to US Supreme Court Justice Stevens.

“I think [women] should be armed but should not vote…women have no capacity to understand how money is earned. They have a lot of ideas on how to spend it…it’s always more money on education, more money on child care, more money on day care.”
– Politically Incorrect; February 26, 2001

“It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact. In fact, in every presidential election since 1950 – except Goldwater in ’64 – the Republican would have won, if only the men had voted.”
– Her column, May 17, 2003

“I think the other point that no one is making about the [Abu Ghraib] abuse photos is just the disproportionate number of women involved, including a girl general running the entire operation. I mean, this is lesson, you know, number 1,000,047 on why women shouldn’t be in the military. In addition to not being able to carry even a medium-sized backpack, women are too vicious.”
– Fox News; Hannity & Colmes; May 5, 2004

“I think there should be a literacy test and a poll tax for people to vote.”
– Fox News; Hannity & Colmes; August 17, 1997

“Liberals’ only remaining big issue is abortion because of their beloved sexual revolution. That’s their cause: Spreading anarchy and polymorphous perversity. Abortion permits that.”
– Slander (2002); ISBN 1400046610

“Liberals hate America, they hate flag-wavers, they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam, post 9/11. Even Islamic terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do. They don’t have the energy. If they had that much energy, they’d have indoor plumbing by now.”
– Slander (2002) ISBN 1400046610, p. 5-6

“I’m here, I’m not queer, and I’m not going away.”
– Godless: The Church of Liberalism (2006); ISBN 0978602412

…And sadly, this is but a few of the quotes available.  I’m sure the full list would rival the complete US tax code in page volume.  If you aren’t now convinced that Ann Coulter is in fact the devil spawn, then I can only assume that you can’t read.

While it is very depressing to think that with only a few minutes of searching I was able to find such a collection of horrible quotes from one of this country’s most prominent and syndicated writers, I did find one website that made me laugh.  If you don’t mind foul language and enjoy revealing in the sort of untrue garbage that Ann Coulter sends forth, you might want to check out http://ifuckedanncoulterintheasshard.blogspot.com/.  The title alone pretty much says it all.

So Christmas has come and gone again leaving us all a little dazed, a little poorer and, at least in my case, a little fatter.  Okay, a lot fatter.  And how can it be helped?.  I mean with the grand Thanksgiving feast, a bevy of Christmas parties, a birthday and then the grand Christmas Eve and Christmas Day dinners I figure I consumed maybe a billion calories in the last six weeks.  Not to mention the the keg of beer and vat of Champagne to ring in the new year.

The good news is, we are are all done with the damn eating.  Right?  Well… not really.  There’s one left.

I am speaking of Epiphany.  Its celebrated on January 6th and is known by many different names, including Kings Night, the Feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, and many others.  It’s a holiday that has largely fallen from grace, but for an awfully long time it was celebrated as Christmas Day proper.  Here in the New World it was decided that December 25th was the big day, but Epiphany still hung around as the infamous 12th day of Christmas.  There are many traditions, most of them concentrating on the arrival of the Three Kings (Melchor, Gaspar, and Balthazar) in Bethlehem.  They are said to have brought gifts of Gold, Frankinscence and myrrh to the baby Jesus, but in most Latin countries they will also bring gifts to good little boys and girls who set their shoes outside the door or under the tree.  And should you leave some hay for their camels and elephants, you’ll get an extra special present from the Kings, much as Santa will leave you a little something extra if you leave him some cookies and carrots for the reindeer.

But that’s not a feast.  And what is Christmas without eating yourself into a new weight class?  As if our fabulous, seven course Christmas Eve dinner weren’t a monumentous enough event, I now find that in order to properly celebrate Epiphany we are not just supposed to eat yet another giant meal, we are supposed to celebrate the whole octivus: 8 full days chowing down on fruit cake layered with whipped cream while drinking a sweet tea thickened with corn flour, called atole.  It’s like an incredible conspiracy between the fitness industry and the heart surgeons association.

So I for one will do my part to fulfill tradition.  I will eat and drink and be very merry this weekend as the last official feast of the Holiday Season comes and goes.  I will put hay in my shoes and set them outside the door and I might even try a sip of that vile sounding tea.  But then we had all better work our asses off in the pagen days to follow… soon enough it’ll be time to waddle up to the Easter table and start all over again.

Who hasn’t heard those famous words?  Surely if you live in the US or UK you have heard at least that 007 phrase, and probably many more.  If you were ever a young man, chances are you stood in front of a mirror and uttered that line more then once.  After all, it seems to work on the ladies in the movies, right?

The dashing and stylish British spy has been a cult hero since the 1950’s and has been the main character in 21 (official) feature films.  The 007 series is the second largest grossing film franchise in history at $3.9 BILLION world-wide (bested only by Star Wars) and one of the longest running too: there has been a new Bond film every year or two since 1962, save for a few exceptions when legal battles delayed a films release.

With his suave mannerisms, roguish good-looks, witty one-liners and downright awesome gadgetry – who wouldn’t want a car that turns into a submarine or a watch that has a built-in laser beam – James Bond is a staple of American pop culture.  But unless you are a real Bond aficionado like myself (read “geek”), there is some confusion about the franchise.  Many people are unsure of who portrayed the first Bond, what was the first film, and even how many films there have been total.  So, here are the facts about Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.

Ian Fleming invented James Bond in 1952 while staying at his Jamaican resort named Goldeneye.  Bond was named after an American ornithologist who wrote several books on Caribbean birds.  (This was later referenced in Die Another Day when Bond poses as an ornithologist during a foray to Cuba).  Fleming himself was an avid bird enthusiast and was a fan of the real James Bond’s works, so he barrowed the name for his infamous hero.  When asked about the choice of names, Ian Fleming was quoted as saying “I wanted the simplest, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find, James Bond was much better than something more interesting like ‘Peregrine Maltravers.’ Exotic things would happen to and around him but he would be a neutral figure – an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a Government Department.”

There is great debate about who served as inspiration for the character of James Bond, but the most likely conclusion is that Bond was based on Ian Fleming himself:  Both served in British Naval Intelligence, both rose to the rank of Commander, and both were renowned for drinking, smoking and womanizing.  Fleming himself would never comment on Bond’s inspiration however, so I guess we’ll never know.  What we do know is that Fleming said the plot for his first novel Casino Royal was based on real (or at least partially real) events from a trip he took to Lisbon with the Director of Naval Intelligence.

The first “Official” Bond film was 1962’s Dr. No, starring Sean Connery.  Other possible choices for 007 were James Mason or Carey Grant.  Fleming eventually settled on Connery after first having dismissed him as being a “overgrown stuntman”, and came to like Sean Connery’s portrayal so much that he rewrote James’ history to include having a Scottish father.  Interestingly, Bond’s mother was named Monique Delacroix, after a young woman Ian Fleming was once engaged to marry.

So… Dr. No was the first “official” film appearance of James Bond.  But what about “unofficially”?  In 1954, CBS paid Ian Fleming $1000 for the rights to produce a made for TV version of Casino Royal, starring American actor Barry Nelson as fledgling CIA agent Jimmy Bond.  This TV movie is not widely known and is not considered to be a real James Bond movie since it was not produced by Albert Broccoli’s EON Productions or MGM, which has produced every “official” film since Dr. No.  (Albert – or “Cubby” as he was known – passed away shortly after the 1995 blockbuster Goldeneye, but his legacy has been carried on by his daughter Barbara, who has produced all of the Bond films since).

In addition to this years release of the new, gritty, series-reinventing version of Casino Royal, there was one other adaptation of of Ian Fleming’s first novel.  It was a very peculiar spoof movie released in 1967, starring David Niven as Sir James Bond and 5 other actors as “fake” Bonds, most notably Peter Sellers.

Another Bond flick that has been reincarnated is 1965’s Thunderball.  The first “official” version starred Sean Connery and is considered in many circles to be finest Bond movie of all time (the other usual front runner being the 1964 smash Goldfinger.)  Thunderball was revamped and re-released in 1983 as Never Say Never Again, also starring Sean Connery and produced by Sony Pictures instead of MGM, who owns the rights to the 007 legacy.  The legal wiggle-room came about because Ian Fleming had some help in writing the screenplay for Thunderball, from a man named Kevin McClory.  With the success of the James Bond Franchise, McClory claimed a right to part of the series and petitioned the courts for the ability to start a rival Bond series with Sony Films.  The courts granted the claim in a limited fashion, allowing McClory to produce the remake in 1983.  Afterward McClory tried again to get permission to start a rival series starring Liam Neeson as 007 in a screenplay tentatively titled Doomsday 2000, but ultimately EON Productions and MGM prevailed, leaving Sony and McClory both shaken and stirred.  These legal battles were the primary reason for the six year lapse between Licence To Kill and Goldeneye.

One of the most consistent traits of all the Bond films is his transportation.  Always sleek, always stylish and always hot off the production lines, James Bond can always be found behind the wheel of a damn nice ride.  The true classic of the franchise is the silver Aston Martin DB5 that first debuted in Goldfinger and made special appearances in 4 other films, despite Bonds penchant for Bentley’s in the novels. In addition to being a beautiful piece of machinery, the DB5 also introduced us to such lavish amendments as ejector seats, radar capabilities, machine guns behind the headlights, rotating license plates, and a special compartment for chilled champagne.  Over the course of the franchise, several DB5’s have been used, one of which sold this year to a collector in Arizona for a whopping $2 million bucks.

Other cars include the Lotus Esprite, the Toyota 2000 GT and the Citroen 2 CV.  Beginning with GoldenEye BMW became a marketing partner, and James started driving Bavarian beauties.  The Z3, Z8, 750iL and even BMW’s first motorcyle, the R 1200 C Cruiser made everyone’s mouths drool in the 90’s.  But come the new millenium 007 was back to his good old English Aston Martins, racing around the ice in Die Another Day behind wheel of a V12 Vanquish (complete with cloaking device) and then demolishing the absolutely stunning new rendition of the DB S in Casino Royal.

To date there have been a total of six actors who portrayed James Bond in the official films.  Sean Connery starred in 6 (plus the unoffical Never Say Never Again for a total of 7) and Roger Moore did 7 films as well.  George Lazenby wore the tuxedo only once for On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, after which he voluntarily left the series because he felt it was losing its audience.  Timothy Dalton took the reins in the late 1980’s for two films before he was replaced by Peirce Brosnan in 1995.  Brosnan had been offered the job prior to Dalton, but was unable to disengage himself from his Remington Steele contract.  He starred in 4 films before being replaced by Daniel Craig in this years rendition of Casino Royal.  I will admit that at first I was very skeptical of Craig, who, Like George Lazenby, does not have the traditional suave appearance we’ve come to expect from Double Oh Seven.  But having seen this new, gritty, reinvention of the series that Casino Royal seems to be, I am quite pleased.  It feels like the production crew is trying to steer Bond back to his roots, casting him as more of the “blunt instrument” that Ian Fleming talked about and concentrating less on the technical wizardry of Q Branch (which did not appear at all in Fleming’s first novel or this latest film.)  All in all I think I am happier with the grittier, more realistic version of Bond even if it means losing the ejector seats and laser-beams, and I think Daniel Craig fits this new bill very well. 

Interesting trivia:

The longest bungee jump ever recorded was for the opening scene of GoldenEye.  Wayne Michaels jumped more then 750 feet from the top of the Verzasca hydroelectric dam in Switzerland.  The stunt took more then two weeks to set up and resulted in less then one minute of film.  And of course there was only one take.

James Brolin, Robert Wagner and Burt Reynolds were all considered and auditioned for the role of James Bond.

Every actor who auditions for James Bond is required to do the same scene, out of From Russia With Love.

Joe Don Baker and Charles Gray are the only people ever to play both a Bond villain and ally.  Baker played the evil Brad Whitaker in The Living Daylights and later CIA agent Jack Wade in GoldenEye and Tomorrow Never Dies. Gray played Bond’s contact in You Only Live Twice and the infamous Earnst Blofeld in Diamonds are Forever.

Desmond Llewleyn, who played Bond’s gadget man Q, was the only person to appear in 18 official James Bond films.  Until his death in 1999, he had been in every film except Dr. No, in which the only gadgets were a watch that glowed in the dark and a Geiger counter.

Five Ian Fleming book titles have never made it to the big screen: The Property of a Lady, Quantum of Solace, Risico, The Hildebrand Rarity, and 007 in New York.

Only one Bond vixen has returned to play the same role in more the one film.  Eunice Gayson played Sylvia Trench in both Dr. No and From Russia With Love.

Both the 2006 Casino Royal and the 1965 Thunderball were filmed at the casino resort on Paradise Island in the Bahamas.

George Lucas based his Indiana Jones title character on Sean Connery’s Bond, which is why he asked Connery to play Dr. Jones’ father in The Last Crusade.

The phrase “My name is Bond.  James Bond” was honored in 2005 by being ranked the 22nd greatest quotation in cinematic history, by the American Film Institute.

“Vodka martini.  Shaken, not stirred” was ranked 90th on that same list.

Only one James Bond title song has become a #1 hit: “A View to a Kill” by Duran Duran.  Several other have made the Top 10 list.

Chris Cornell, who performed “You Know My Name” for the 2006 version of Casino Royal was the first male lead vocalist for a Bond film since A-Ha in 1987.  The song is also only the 5th song to have a different title then the film it appears in.

Shirley Bassey is the only singer to ever perform more then one opening theme.  She has performed three.