KHAAAAAAN!
Jul. 12th, 2006 03:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
filkertomThe 800th anniversary of Temüjin's uniting of the Mongolian tribes. This is primarily celebrated in the US with the traditional do-it-yourself stir fry and epic space opera. Unfortunately, there are other commemorations as well.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 09:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 11:50 am (UTC)And then, a few minutes later, someone new shows up, and a character onscreen asks something like, "Who approaches?" And half of us go, "It's JACK FROM CLEVELAND!"
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 12:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 01:00 pm (UTC)I didn't know about the radiation thing...
Date: 2006-07-12 01:18 pm (UTC)----
The movie was mostly shot on location in St. George, Utah, downwind of the U.S. Government's Nevada Test Range, the site of extensive above-ground nuclear weapons testing during the 1950s. The cast and crew spent many difficult weeks on the site, from which Hughes later shipped 60 tons of dirt back to Hollywood for reshoots. The cast and crew knew about the nuclear tests (there are pictures of Wayne holding a geiger counter during production) but the link between exposure to radioactive fallout and cancer was less understood then.
All of the performers named above died of cancer. Powell died only a few years after the picture's completion. Hayward, Wayne, and Moorehead all died in the mid 1970s. Pedro Armendáriz was diagnosed with kidney cancer four years later and committed suicide after he learned the cancer was terminal. Skeptics point to other factors such as tobacco use (Wayne was a heavy smoker, as was Moorehead) and the notion that cancer resulting from exposure to radiation does not have such a long incubation period. The cast and crew totaled 220. Of that number, 91 had developed some form of cancer by 1981 and 46 had died of cancer by then. However, striking as this seems, it is unclear if the incidence of cancer among them was truly higher than might be statistically expected for any group of people working in that profession during the 1950s.
Dr. Robert Pendleton, professor of biology at the University of Utah, has described the incidence of cancer among cast and crew of The Conqueror as an "epidemic".
Noting that 91 members of the cast and crew had contracted cancer by 1984, with more than half of them dying, Dr. Pendleton stated, "With these numbers, this case could qualify as an epidemic. The connection between fallout radiation and cancer in individual cases has been practically impossible to prove conclusively. But in a group this size you'd expect only 30 some cancers to develop...I think the tie-in to their exposure on the set of The Conqueror would hold up in a court of law."
----
That's so weird. I always chalked John Wayne's death up to smoking but it's entirely plausible that it was cause by radiation exposure. Yet more proof that I've been asleep at the wheel all these years...
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 01:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 01:54 pm (UTC)Where else can you find evil rampaging sunflowers on wheels? ;-)
*imagines filk of "Attack of the Killer Triffids" done to "Attack of the Killer Tomatoes"*
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 01:59 pm (UTC)"Bet you couldn't do what THEY did"
But Howard Keel, the Voice of Steel
Did Thwart their evil plan...with a gun in his hands.
"Attack of the Killer Triffids"
That's as far as I can get this morning...someone else add to it please.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 02:14 pm (UTC)"Book or movie?"
"Movie!"
"Salt water!"
-- the trivia-off from "Welcome To Eltingville (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welcome_to_Eltingville)"
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 02:23 pm (UTC)I did find the one for the icon here. (http://homepages.paradise.net.nz/triffid/)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 02:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 02:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 03:11 pm (UTC)FWIW I've never seen the BBC one and have added it to my list of "Things to search for on Amazon/E-Bay". ;-)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 02:42 pm (UTC)Oh well, I got my fix during Origins. I guess I'll go watch The Shadow and marvel at how far the apple fell from the tree.
"...a pronounced stoutnessa bout the tum and a predilection for little fur hats."
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 02:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 03:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 08:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-12 07:46 pm (UTC)And somewhere in the remainder of the restaurant, someone had a birthday.
The wait staff clapped and sang the standard theme-restaurant "happy, happy birthday" song, which we didn't think was terribly... Mongolian... of them. Glances were exchanged.
And a couple of beats after the wait staff finished singing, at least a third of the restaurant broke into the Barbarian Birthday Dirge.
That was fun.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-13 04:35 am (UTC)