Cleaning out the inbox-Non-Sports Version

After a night of work and following a meeting at the real road office, I have a bit of insomnia to deal with.
Considering that I have time on my hands,I thought that I would bang out the promised inbox cleaning of the non-sports variety and wipe some things out...

The rare Northern White Rhino took another step closer to extinction as 34 year old Siri passed away in Kenya.
That leaves just one breeding male in the sub-species left in the world and as you can guess,when he goes,they go.
Of course there is always artificial insemination,but still that would take some luck as well.
The Southern White Rhino is not quite so endangered with 17,000 in the wild and I suppose some cross breeding could be done with some genetic material,but the pure Northern White is on its last legs.
We really are a most greedy of species....

The rare event of literally once in a million years occurs as a comet the size of a small mountain will zoom around Mars.
Siding Spring will get as close to Mars as 87,000 miles at a speed well over 100,000 miles per hour.
87,000 miles away may seem like a large distance,but it is actually only a third of the way from Earth to our moon!
Imagine how that would look in our sky!
The Oort Cloud resident makes its home on the extreme edge of the solar system and takes just that long to make a swing around the inner planets.
It will be the first chance for humanity to have an opportunity to observe just what an Oort Cloud well,anything is comprised of and could give a wealth of information on the beginnings of the solar system.
I'm sure I'll have more on this from the various Mars orbiters,rovers etc in a future inbox cleaning...

I'm super excited about next summer's flyby Pluto by the New Horizons spacecraft and now I am even more excited about NASA's decision to possibly select one or more of three Kuiper (No,not Duane) Belt targets to flyby after Pluto!
The Hubble Space Telescope found these three possibilities and now it's a matter of time before which or more gets selected for a visit.
This is the type of science that I can dig into and it only makes sense to get the most value out of New Horizons as we possibly can....

Nashville and the country music world is up in arms after the parole of John Brown.
Who's John Brown?
Brown was one of two brothers that broke into and then murdered Hee Haw and Grand Ol' Opry star David "Stringbean "Akeman  and his wife after an Opry appearance in 1973.
The article in the Nashville Tennessean by Peter Cooper was very well done, interesting and I learned a lot about the case that I never knew.
I faintly remember the incident ( I was five at the time),but remember my beloved late Aunt Edna watching the show and commenting how awful it was that Hee Haw continued to show all of these taped episodes starring a dead man.
I often feel conflicted about life sentences.
Should there be hope for rehabilitation in prison? Or should life mean life not 40 years?
I see both sides and I go back and forth on things,but I lean towards life means life.
I mean,Stringbean Akeman doesn't get to return after 40 years,so why should John Brown??

Finally a goodbye to Gerard Parkes at the age of 90.
Parkes,a well known Canadian actor,was best known in the United States for playing Doc the only non-puppet on the Jim Henson produced Fraggle Rock,which always a favorite of me with both Ryan and Rachel.
Fraggle Rock was terrific children's programming and Gerard Parkes was part of the reason that it was so loved....

I plan on something special later tonight,if I get a chance from the road office!!