Indiana Jones and the Mysterious Package

Fictional characters can turn out to be real, at least in part.

Seems the University of Chicago got a package addressed to Henry Walton Jones, Jr. Recognize the name? Would it help to cross out Henry and Walton and write in Indiana?

Yes, that Indiana Jones (not the dog).

Inside the package was a very official-looking journal lookalike for Abner Ravenwood, the Egyptologist, archaeologist, and U of Chicago professor who counted among his proteges Indiana Jones.


This package also contained photos of Ravenwood's daughter, Marion, who was certainly a person known to Indiana Jones.

How do we know all of this? Because someone opened the package, twice.


See, a guy in Guam put the journal and photos, your basic movie fan's collector's collection, up on eBay, and somebody in Italy bought it. Seller threw it all in a package, addressed to the buyer, and off it went,  until it got to Hawaii, where the original packaging came off.

Apparently, a helpful postal employee saw the University of Chicago, looked up the ZIP code, wrote it on the package, and put it back in the mail.

The seller has said that he will get another package off to the original buyer and that the U can keep the one that has been delivered to them.

Pay It Again, Sam: Casablanca Piano Sold on Film's 70th Anniversary

An anonymous buyers agreed to pay more than $600,000 for the piano used by Dooley Wilson in Casablanca.

Its keys are immortalized in cinema visuals. Now, the piano itself has changed hands.

The collector, who paid $154,000 a few decades ago, had offered it up for sale to mark the 70th anniversary of the release of the iconic film. Auction-watchers had expected a sale price of more than $1 million.

Wilson played Sam, the pianist who was a friend of bar owner Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart). Sam played the piano many times for both Sam and Ilsa Lund, Rick's now-and-again flame played Ingrid Bergman. Sam and his piano are instrumental in many scenes in the film, including the one in which Rick utters the famous line, "Here's looking at you, kid."

Just a bit of trivia, though. Hollywood lore to the contrary, Rick never utters the line "Play it again, Sam."

Noah's Ark Afloat in Holland

You'd have to figure that a Dutchman would know a thing or two about holding back the waters. Nevertheless, Johan Huibers has completed a 20-year construction odyssey resulting in a full-scale functioning model of Noah's Ark.

Just in time for the end of the world it is, although Huibers insists that the timing is coincidental. He's not actually planning to get into the big boat and sail away anytime soon, but he probably wouldn't mind giving a tour or two in the next week or so.

Measurements match up with the popular scheme advanced in the Bible, so there's lots of room for two or more animals of lots of different varieties. The stalls are ready and able to support animal life, although those stalls are filled with stuffed or plastic animals at the moment. But wait, real, breathing animals are onboard as well, and Huibers and his family are having to look after them. The curious can go aboard and pet dogs, ponies, sheep, birds, and rabbits. (My suspicion is that the number of any of those animals won't remain at two for long.)

He's also included hatches that can be closed and sealed off, on the order of the Titanic and other large ships, in case icebergs or humpback whales or other curious things come into contact with the big boat for more than a glancing blow.

Where's the boat? you ask. Why, it's moored in some water in Dordrecht, a city just south of Rotterdam, awaiting sailing orders.

Huibers began his quest in 1992, after he had a nightmare that included large-scale flooding of his home country. In the 20 years, the quest has evolved into including some modern comforts, just in case we modern people need to make use of "Johan's Ark." So he's included a restaurant and 50-seat movie theater. Will they be showing the movie 2012? Who knows?

JFK Portrait Discovered at Garage Sale

So you're at a garage sale, and you have a gut reaction that something on offer has more to it than immediately meets the eye. What do you do? If you're like Pam Dwyer, an Arizona woman, you pay a few dollars, get the knick-knack, and wait till you get home to investigate your hunch.

Dwyer certainly did that, and in between a picture of a horse and the frame it was in she found a portrait of John Kennedy. Yes, that John Kennedy, the one with F for the middle name, the President one.

Not too many of those are left lying around, certainly not hidden behind random horse pictures. Not too many of the ones that are left lying around are done by a forger, either. Yet that's what Dwyer found when she researched the artist, who did time for writing forged checks.

While behind bars, the "creative writer" took up stained glass windows and, apparently, drawing. Somewhere along the way, he produced the portrait that Dwyer found tucked away in a homely frame on offer in a garage.

An appraisal listed the value at between $2,500 and $5,000. She plans to sell.

Honest: Kitten Rescued from Inside Lincoln Statue

No doubt using up a few of its potentially nine lives, a kitten has managed to stay alive inside a statue of Abraham Lincoln long enough to be emancipated from its self-made trap.

The kitten, all of 3 weeks old, scurried its way into a replica of the Lincoln Memorial at the Clermont (Fla.) Presidents Hall of Fame but then got stuck. Museum officials scratched their heads as to how the kitten could have possibly gotten trapped inside the statue, but no doubt a small hole was available somewhere and the nosy kitten got stuck in — literally.

Anyway, the Humane Society and the local fire department were soon on the scene and had drilled a hole large enough for a person. A fire fighter dropped down inside the statue, retrieved the kitten, and delivered it back into the real world.

The kitten was hungry and dehydrated after being stuck inside the statue for three days. A local veterinarian took the kitten away for nursing duties but planned to put the adventuresome young feline up for adoption.

John Zweifel, curator of the museum, planned to adopt the cat and call him, what else, Abe.

Dutch Engineers Touting Glow-in-the-dark Highway

I like this idea of a glow-in-the-dark highway. It saves all kinds of things like money and lives.

So some Dutch engineers have come up with a scheme to make driving at night a whole lot easier, via a "smart highway." See, the outside lines on the highway glow by themselves, no high beams needed. I would say that you wouldn't need your headlights at all anymore, but I'm not sure the Dutch designers would agreed with that proposition, especially in the light of road safety and all. Still, it couldn't hurt to have more nighttime road lighting that doesn't come from another driver's high beams.

Another fun feature of the proposal is that it posits painted lines that could display snowflakes when the road is, well, snow-covered, or icicles when the road is icy. Now wouldn't that be useful information to have, if you hadn't figured it out already given the driving conditions.

But wait, there's more: The interior lines, dotted or otherwise, would recharge by soaking up sunlight. It's all part of a dynamic, user-friendly roadway that could even recharge using under-road coils powered by the very vehicles going by overhead. In the same energy-saving vein, the road "lighting" would switch to low-light mode when traffic ceases.

Tests are expected in the Netherlands next year. I'm hoping that we are en-light-ened soon.

Robotic Car Comes in 2nd on Track

Here we go again. Human bests, computer for now. Have we learned nothing Garry Kasparov? (He couldn't beat a computer, and now he's taking on Vladimir Putin. Good luck to him.)

The story is this: A robotic car developed at Stanford's Center for Automotive Research (which has the handy acronym of CARS) just lost out to a human-driven car in a test at the aptly named Thunderhill Raceway (which sounds like it belongs in a Bond movie anyway). The three-mile course had its share of twists and turns, 15 of them, in fact, ——and the guy driving the other car undoubtedly had lots of practice on the course, so the humans probably stacked the deck.

The result was that the human won, finishing in slightly less time than the robotic car. The victim of human deck-stacking this time around was Shelley, an autonomous vehicle kitted out quite proudly and loudly with a bevy of sensors that transmit road position, tire grip, and all manner of other necessary information to the computer-in-charge, so the car can effectively make real-time, split decisions about how to move the wheel and how much to stomp on the brake and things like that.

The stated goal was to improve on the utility of computer-driving cars. That's the idea, really. It wasn't about who won the race, or so the scientists say. After all, as with Deep Blue, it's only a matter of time until the computers win the race.

The race was run on Thunderhill Raceway in California between an Audi TTS that can drive itself and a racing car driver familiar with the circuit.

The human driver completed a lap around the circuit a few seconds faster than the robotic car.

The race was part of research to develop control systems that will help to make domestic cars more autonomous.