Cynthia Jane Williams (August 22, 1947 – January 25, 2023) was an American actress and producer, known for her role as Shirley Feeney on the television sitcoms Happy Days (1975–1979), and Laverne & Shirley (1976–1982). She also appeared in American Graffiti (1973) and The Conversation (1974).
Early life Williams was born in the Van Nuys district of Los Angeles, California, on August 22, 1947. She was Italian on her mother’s side, Francesca Bellini. The family moved to Dallas, Texas when she was a year old and returned to Los Angeles when she was ten years old. She had one sibling, a sister named Carol Ann.
Williams wrote and acted during childhood at a church and later acted at Birmingham High School, graduating in 1965. She attended Los Angeles City College where she majored in theater .
Just after sunrise, Manitoba Merv, the rodent forecaster at Oak Hammock Marsh Interpretive Centre made his Groundhog Day prediction, and it’s grim.
Merv saw his shadow, so Manitobans will have another six weeks of winter.
Oak Hammock Marsh staff say Merv’s predictions have been amazingly accurate.
For the past 23 years, Manitoba Merv has correctly predicted the arrival of spring and only made one error.
The groundhog may well be correct about this year’s prediction. Six weeks from now is mid-March, which is typically when the first geese return, Oak Hammock Marsh staff say.
I don’t trust groundhogs anyway, or gophers and badgers for that matter. All they’re doing is guessing. And more and more of the guessing is being made by puppeteers.
Now it’s over, we can say it: a biggish asteroid passed by Earth a short while ago.
About the size of a minibus, the space rock, known as 2023 BU, whipped over the southern tip of South America just before 00:30am GMT.
With a closest approach of 3,600km (2,200 miles), it counts as a close shave.
And it illustrates how there are still asteroids of significant size lurking near Earth that remain to be detected.
This one was only picked up last weekend by amateur astronomer Gennadiy Borisov, who operates from Nauchnyi in Crimea, the peninsula that Russia seized from Ukraine in 2014.
Follow-up observations have refined what we know about 2023 BU’s size and, crucially, its orbit.
That’s how astronomers could be so confident it would miss the planet, even though it came inside the arc occupied by the world’s telecommunications satellites, which sit 36,000km (22,000 miles) above us.
The chances of hitting a satellite are very, very small.
The time of lowest altitude was accurately calculated to be 19:27 EST on Thursday, or 00:27 GMT on Friday.
Image caption,Artwork: We still have a lot to learn about the near-Earth environment
Even if 2023 BU had been on a direct collision course, it would have struggled to do much damage.
With an estimated size of 3.5m to 8.5m across (11.5ft to 28ft), the rock would likely have disintegrated high in the atmosphere. It would have produced a spectacular fireball, however.
For comparison, the famous Chelyabinsk meteor that entered Earth’s atmosphere over southern Russia in 2013 was an object near 20m (66ft) across. It produced a shockwave that shattered windows on the ground.
Scientists at the US space agency Nasa say 2023 BU’s orbit around the Sun has been modified by its encounter with Earth.
Our planet’s gravity pulled on it and adjusted its path through space.
“Before encountering Earth, the asteroid’s orbit around the Sun was roughly circular, approximating Earth’s orbit, taking 359 days to complete its orbit about the Sun,” the agency said in a statement.
“After its encounter, the asteroid’s orbit will be more elongated, moving it out to about halfway between Earth’s and Mars’ orbits at its furthest point from the Sun. The asteroid will then complete one orbit every 425 days.”
There is a great effort under way to find the much larger asteroids that really could do damage if they were to strike the Earth.
The true monsters out there, like the 12km-wide rock that wiped out the dinosaurs, have likely all been detected and are not a cause for worry. But come down in size to something that is, say, 150m across and our inventory has gaps.
Statistics indicate perhaps only about 40% of these asteroids have been seen and assessed to determine the level of threat they might pose.
Such objects would inflict devastation on the city scale if they were to impact the ground.
Prof Don Pollacco from the University of Warwick, UK, told BBC News: “There are still asteroids that cross the Earth’s orbit waiting to be discovered.
“2023 BU is a recently discovered object supposedly the size of a small bus which must have passed by the Earth thousands of times before. This time it passes by only 2,200 miles from the Earth – just 1% of the distance to the moon – a celestial near miss.
“Depending on what 2023 BU is composed of it is unlikely to ever reach the Earth’s surface but instead burn up in the atmosphere as a brilliant fireball – brighter than a full moon.
“However, there are likely many asteroids out there that remain undiscovered that could penetrate the atmosphere and hit the surface to cause significant damage – indeed many scientists think we could be due such an event.”
Gogol Bordello is an American punk rock band from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, formed in 1999 by musicians from all over the world and known for theatrical stage shows and persistent touring. Much of the band’s sound is inspired by Romani music mixed with punk and dub, incorporating accordion and violin (and on some albums, saxophone).
Eugene Hütz born Yevgen Oleksandrovych Nikolayev-Symonov, Ukrainian: Євген Олександрович Ніколаєв-Симонов, on 6 September 1972) is a Ukrainian-born singer, composer, disc jockey and actor, most notable as the frontman of the Gypsy punk band Gogol Bordello.
An airliner passenger traveling from Los Angeles to Atlanta captured footage of what appears to be a cluster of UFOs flying alongside the plane. The intriguing sighting reportedly occurred earlier this month shortly after the unnamed witness’ flight had departed from California. Although they were uncertain of exactly where they were along the trip, they indicated that it occurred as the airliner was “at 41,000 feet above possibly Nevada or Arizona.” While gazing out their window, the passenger was stunned to see “something flying in tandem with us” in the form of four glowing orbs that were tightly clustered together and seemingly rotating.
Fortunately, the bewildered witness managed to capture footage of the curious cluster, which some UFO enthusiasts have likened to the famed Phoenix lights case from 1997. That said, more skeptical observers have offered more prosaic explanations for the odd orbs with some suggesting that they could be lights from a community beneath the aircraft or another plane that only appears unusual due to the angle of the witness.
The MarkoZen Blog 