How a convent schoolgirl became queen of the jungle
You... Jane: Roscommon girl Maureen shot to fame in Tarzan 
Independent ~ May 17 2011 
Having your convent-school-educated daughter ravished by an ape-man was not high on the list of ambitions of many parents in rural Ireland in the 1920s. Nor was having her apparently naked on the cinema screen. Such, though, was the fate of the O'Sullivans of Boyle, Co Roscommon, thanks to a chance encounter at the Horse Show Ball between their beautiful 18-year-old daughter, Maureen, and an American movie director. The director, Frank Borzage, was casting about for talent for a Hollywood Irish musical, Song O My Heart, starring the tenor John McCormack. Maureen (who was born 100 years ago today) had just returned from finishing school in Paris, and agreed to do a screen test. 

She got the part and moved to Hollywood, where her big break came quickly: in 1931, she was cast opposite the five-time Olympic gold swimming champion, Johnny Weissmuller, and alongside Cheeta, a chimpanzee, in Tarzan The Ape Man. "Sensational news!" proclaimed the trailer for the movie (which is available on YouTube). "The demand of the picture public for another giant romance of primitive life and unfettered love has been answered!" (Tarzan followed a hit jungle-themed movie from the previous year, called Trader Horn.) "Tarzan, the Ape Man, knows only the laws of the jungle -- to seize what he adores!" He apparently seized her off screen as well, as the screen couple allegedly had a brief affair during the 1930s.

But it wasn't just Tarzan who adored her -- international cinema audiences thrilled to the stories and stars of Tarzan, and Weissmuller and O'Sullivan would make six of the films together. (Weissmuller later changed studio, and made another six, lower-budget versions without O'Sullivan.) These were not the first Tarzan films, but they were the first to feature the iconic ululating cry. Weissmuller revealed years later that his extraordinary cry had in fact been three vocalists spliced together.

Another iconic feature of their early movies together was Jane's skimpy costumes (not to mention Tarzan's flapping loincloth). But in 1934 the studio pushed it too far with a nude swimming scene. The scene sees Tarzan and Jane perched in a tree above a river. Tarzan drops Jane in, but (no doubt concerned for her clothes), keeps hold of her dress. Jane plunges, naked, into the water, and Tarzan plunges in after her. By this stage, it was no longer Maureen O'Sullivan on screen, but a double, Olympic swimmer Josephine McKim. Her scene with Weissmuller, featuring various underwater acrobatics, was visually stunning and cinematically inventive -- but it was too erotic for the American censor, who ordered the scene cut.

In the early 1940s, O'Sullivan retired from the movies to look after her husband, John Farrow, who had returned from the war with typhoid. Though she returned to the business later on, and also on stage and in television, her celebrity was eclipsed by her daughter, Mia Farrow, who married Frank Sinatra and Andre Previn before her long relationship with Woody Allen. (Another daughter, Prudence, inspired the Beatles song 'Dear Prudence', having met them in India in 1968 while studying meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.)

O'Sullivan took a small but well reviewed role in Allen's classic Hannah and her Sisters in 1986, playing mother to her own daughter. One of her last appearances, in 1994, was in a feature-length TV movie in the Hart to Hart series, Home Is Where the Hart Is. She died in 1998, in Arizona, having appeared in over 70 movies, and having been Ireland's first movie star. 

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See also the report at Legacy - complete with YouTube Vids:
Maureen O’Sullivan – Ireland’s First Movie Star
Legacy.com ~ May 17, 2011
VIDEO 1 ~ VIDEO 2

Tyrannosaurs 'hunted in packs'
Yahoo! News ~ May 19, 2011

Prof Philip Currie with a Tyrannosaurid fossil  Tyrannosaurus Rex and his relatives hung out and hunted in bloodthirsty gangs which included young and older members, experts now believe. Scientists say they have evidence that the top predator dinosaurs were highly intelligent pack animals, despite T-Rex being popularly depicted as a dangerous but dim-witted loner. This is a myth that has grown up because for many years their fossil skeletons tended to be found on their own, researchers claim.

The new theory follows an analysis of skeletons of the tyrannosaur Tarbosaurus bataar from 90 sites in the Gobi Desert, Mongolia. At least half a dozen of the animals appear to have belonged to a single social group that died together and included adults and juveniles. Lead researcher Professor Philip Currie found more possible evidence of social behaviour among tyrannosaurs on a previous expedition in Canada. At a site on the Red Deer River, Alberta, his team uncovered the bones of up to two dozen Albertasaurus specimens.

There was insufficient evidence then to prove the dinosaurs were from a single group, but several of the Gobi Desert skeletons were found lying side-by-side in the same rock layers, implying that they died together. Further research involving CT scans of tyrannosaur skulls indicated highly developed senses for hunting, and enough brain power for co-ordinated pack behaviour.

Prof Currie, from the University of Alberta, believes tyrannosaurs probably hunted in groups with adults and juveniles adopting different roles. The swifter, more agile young dinosaurs would have chased down potential prey leaving the adults to deliver crushing fatal bites. "Tyrannosaurids, I believe, were far more complex and more dangerous than we ever could have imagined," said Prof Currie, whose theory and research are the subject of a new documentary film, Dino Gangs, to be shown on the Discovery Channel. "I believe these tyrannosaurids hunted in deadly, bloodthirsty packs. It's definitely time to rewrite the dinosaur books."

SIMON AND SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS 
TO PUBLISH NEW ANTHOLOGY BASED ON 
THE CLASSIC JOHN CARTER OF MARS SERIES BY EDGAR RICE BURROUGHS

New York, NY, May 19, 2011-Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing announced today it will publish a new original anthology called The New Adventures of John Carter of Mars, edited by John Joseph Adams and based on the characters created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Publication will be in the spring of 2012 and will coincide with the 100th anniversary of A Princess of Mars, the first book to feature John Carter. The anthology envisions all-new adventures set in Edgar Rice Burroughs' fantastical version of Mars (known in the series as "Barsoom.") This anthology not only imagines new or the lost adventures of John Carter, but also explores the other characters and niches not fully explored by Burroughs. David Gale is the acquiring editor, and Joe Monti of Barry Goldblatt Literary Agency brokered the deal. Simon & Schuster holds World English rights.

Celebrated fantasy writer Tamora Pierce will write the foreword to the anthology, and John Joseph Adams will write the introduction and header notes. The collection will include stories by Joe R. Lansdale; Jonathan Maberry; David Barr Kirtley; Peter S. Beagle; Tobias S. Buckell; Robin Wasserman; Theodora Goss; Genevieve Valentine; L. E. Modesitt, Jr.; Garth Nix; Chris Claremont; S. M. Stirling; Catherynne M. Valente; and Austin Grossman. There will also be a "Barsoomian Gazetteer," a who's who and what's what on Barsoom, written by science fiction author and noted Barsoom expert Richard A. Lupoff. In addition, each story will feature an original illustration by noted artists such as Charles Vess, John Picacio, Michael Kaluta, and Misako Rocks.

At the same time, Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers will publish John Carter of Mars, a bind-up of the first three John Carter books: A Princess of Mars, The Gods of Mars, and The Warlord of Mars, with all-new illustrations by Mark Zug, Scott Fischer, and Scott Gustafson.

"I still vividly recall the summer as a teenager that I read all eleven of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Mars novels in one enthusiastic gulp," said Jon Anderson, Executive Vice President and Publisher of Books for Young Readers. "The opportunity to revisit that experience with new stories from this stellar roster of authors was too much to resist!"

Important breakthrough in mole-cruiser technology
Good news for mole-cruiser fanciers today,
as boffins reveal important new developments in
the technology of burrowing subterranean machines. Traditional mole cruiser in action.
The Register/Science ~ 10th May 10,  2011
The new underground locomotion tech comes from Professor Daniel Goldman of Georgia Tech and his colleagues, funded in their mechanical mole research by the US Army and National Science Foundation. The prof and his team were inspired by the sandfish lizard of the Sahara desert, which "swims" through the sand seas there. "We were intrigued by the sandfish lizard’s wedge-shaped head that forms an angle of 140 degrees with the horizontal plane," explains Goldman. "We thought its head might be responsible for or be contributing to the animal’s ability to maneuver in complex environments."

The boffins fashioned a small unmanned demonstrator mole-craft featuring seven articulated segments powered by servo motors. These were apparently "packed in a latex sock and wrapped in a spandex swimsuit". The necessary wedgey "tapered snout" was furnished by attaching a suitable block of wood. In trials during which it was submerged in a chamber filled with tiny plastic balls, the mole machine's ability to direct its course by changing the angle of its doorstop proboscis was explored. "The ability to control the vertical position of the robot by modulating its head inclination opens up avenues for further research into developing robots more capable of maneuvering in complex environments, like debris-filled areas produced by an earthquake or landslide," says Goldman. More>>>

Update from Andy Briggs on the New Tarzan Novel: 
TARZAN - THE GREYSTOKE LEGACY The book is officially out on June 2nd and we are launching it at the Hay Literary Festival (which is open to the public). More UK tour dates as they appear can be found on andybriggs.co.uk
Most notable ones for the public are: June 5th The Wychwood Festival  ~ June 16th Bristol Zoo ~August 28th-29th Edinburgh Literary Festival

Tarzan the Greystoke Legacy is available for pre-order at the Amazon sites in the UK, Canada and the USA. The books will probably slowly start appearing in UK stores from the end of this week. Amazon always deliver first.   It will be out a month later in Canada. Kindle books are also available to pre-order across Amazon, released the same time.

Exclusive: Tarzan fans in Israel will be able to get the Hebrew version from Kinneret.  They were one of the first countries to bid!  We are not sure of the release date, but will keep you posted.

We are donating money to the YEAR OF THE APES campaign, which is run by EAZA (European Association of Zoos and Aquaria) - which will help conservation for apes around the globe - from Orang-utans in Borneo, to Chimps, Bonobos, Gibbons, and of course, Gorillas, in Africa. This will come from the cover price of every book sold.

Exclusive: The second book will be out 5th January 2012. It will be called: TARZAN: THE JUNGLE WARRIOR

Hollywood, CA — Twenty-four writers and artists from around the globe were honored Sunday night, May 15, 2011,  at the 27th Annual L. Ron Hubbard Achievement Awards at the famed Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, in the very room the first Academy Awards was held. Names for Vol 27 Grand Prize full from left to right: Director NASA Ames Research Center Dr. Pete Worden; Writer Coordinating Judge KD Wentworth; Snr Vice President Author Services Gunhild Jacobs; Grand Prize Writer Winner Richard Johnson; President Galaxy Press John Goodwin; Grand Prize Illustrator Winner Irvin Rodriguez; Contest Director Joni Labaqui; Illustrator Coordinating Judge Ron Lindahn, Senior Editor Booklist Magazine Keir Graff

Prior to the awards ceremony, the winners were flown in from as far away as Australia  and South Africa, to attend a week long workshop taught by contest judges —including New York Times bestselling author Kevin J. Anderson (Dune series), World Fantasy Award winner Tim Powers (“On Stranger Tides,” adapted as the 4th Pirates of the Caribbean film), multiple Hugo and Nebula award winner Robert J. Sawyer (The WWW Trilogy), Hugo and Nebula award winning author Larry Niven (the Ringworld series), and internationally acclaimed artists, Dave Dorman (Star Wars and Batman artist), Stephen Hickman (over 350 book and magazine covers), Robert Castillo (S.P.I.C. The Storyboard of my Life), and Cliff Nielsen (cover artist for Chronicles of Narnia), the cover artist for this year’s anthology—each one an experienced professional in the field providing sound advice based on hard-won experience. 

The Writers of the Future writing contest (www.writersofthefuture.com) was initiated by L. Ron Hubbard in 1983 to provide a means for aspiring writers to get that much-needed break. Due to the success of the Writing Contest, the companion Illustrators of the Future Contest was created in 1988. 

Washington Post reporter Elizabeth Tenety points out that Camping previously (and wrongly) predicted the rapture would occur “between September 15 and 27, 1994.”

Even if Camping is right, Fuller Theological Seminar President Richard Mouw clarifies that May 21 is Rapture Day — the day Christians, dead and alive will meet Jesus in the sky. According to Camping, the world won’t end until Oct. 21, 2011