TODAY IN NETWORK AWESOME MAGAZINE

Most car accidents happen close to home, a truism that holds up in space travel. The actual travel itself has proved much less fatal than actually getting there and back, which requires nerves and heat shields and complex math. Out of the hundreds of manned missions we’ve sent into space, including a number that required astronauts to untether themselves in low earth orbit and nine that actually sent them to (or around) the moon, the only people to have actually died in space were the unlucky cosmonauts of Soyuz 11, who perished when a valve jolted loose during preparations for re-entry. The three men, none of whom were wearing full protective suits at the time, asphyxiated within seconds from the rapid loss of pressure inside their capsule...

A frog, a bear, a pig, and a whatever make for a strange mix of characters to serve as the core group of a popular prime-time series; yet this group -- Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy, and Gonzo -- along with their felt, fur, and feather-covered cohorts brought a mix of workplace and vaudevillian comedy to television screens from 1976 to 1981.  Thirty years later fans still watch the old shows, buy DVD compilations, and eagerly await another big screen appearance by the Muppets.  What is it about the Muppets that keeps fans coming back for more?  The answer is as diverse as the Muppets themselves, and it begins with one man’s fascination with television.

Jim Henson’s fascination with television has been chronicled in a number of books including Christopher Finch’s Jim Henson: The Works - The Art, the Magic, the Imagination and Of Muppets and Men: The Making of the Muppet Show. These books explore Henson's early forays into the possibilities of using puppets on television.  In 1955 Henson produced and performed in a 5-minute series called Sam and Friends.  The series became a way for him to work out skits and perfect puppets as well as explore the new medium of television...

Right off the bat here, I’d like to make a confession: I’m not what you’d call a foodie. I could try to bamboozle you into thinking otherwise, by throwing in fancy words like apéritif or gastronomy or some hoity-toity nonsense, but this is a safe space and I’d rather give it to you straight. It’s not that I don’t like good food -- good food is good – but dining out costs money, which I don’t have, and at home I’m such a lousy cook it’s a fire hazard for me to attempt anything beyond boiling water (and even then…). Plus I just don’t care that much; if you put some Duck a l’Orange in front of me, I’ll gladly tuck in, but a frozen pizza would do the trick just as nicely. What then, you may reasonably ask, qualifies someone who takes his culinary cues from hobos and people trapped in bomb-shelters to write anything about legendary gourmet Julia Child? Well, while I may not know much about food, I know far, far too much about TV, and though she remains synonymous with French Cuisine in America, it’s doubtful that’d be so if she didn’t become an unlikely television star first.

Believe it or not, Child, born Julia McWilliams on August 15, 1912 in Pasadena, California, didn’t display an innate flair for cooking at first either. She was very good at eating, impressing people with the voracious appetite that her husband later described as an effort “to eat all she could hold at every meal”, but in the kitchen she seemed hopelessly clumsy, and indeed she didn’t pursue any sort of education or employment in that field until later in life. She was a goddamn spy though, or at least kind of; during WWII, after being deemed unfit for Navy service, she was hired by the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor of today’s CIA, established by Franklin Roosevelt. There probably wasn’t a whole lot of cloak-and-dagger involved in her tenure with the OSS (even if it’s fun to...

“Once in a great while, a natural phenomenon occurs that is so beautiful, so dramatic, it overshadows everything else. Sergio Valente has created a phenomenon the whole world will be watching: Sergio Valente black denim jeans. They’re more than beautiful. They’re out of sight.” This is the narration for a Sergio Valente denim ad in the jeans collection. The voiceover is so deeply impassioned. The slowly-revolving pan shots around a backlit, denim-clad behind are so intensified. The tight shots of tight asses are so all encompassing. The ad is dramatic to the point that it must be hyperbole. But you can tell that it’s actually in earnest. And the funny thing is that behind the inflated language, there’s a grain of truth to the ad. Jeans have become an unstoppable phenomenon in the world of fashion and apparel. The ubiquity of jeans has become so universal that they are almost hidden in plain view. The phenomenon really is "out of sight..."

It was around 1957 when Dr. Humphrey Osmond coined the term “psychedelic”. Osmond was researching the effects of LSD and the onset stages of schizophrenia, and it was he who dosed author Aldous Huxley for the first time, which in turn led to Huxley’s tome about stumbling around Hollywood trippin’ balls and groovin’ on paintings, The Doors of Perception. When Osmond proposed the term, he said it meant “mind manifesting” and went on to call it “clear, euphonious and uncontaminated by other associations.” I don’t think Osmond, with his synapses firing and his turned-on mind buzzing with delusions of blissful utopias, could have envisioned just how far out Madison Ave would go to sell the world a stick of deodorant...