Cleaning Out the Inbox-Non-Sports edition

I told you that there was a large amount of items in the inbox and here we are for part two with more of a non-sports slant.

Another Apollo astronaut has passed away with Apollo 14's Edgar Mitchell being the latest.
Mitchell,who was best known for his personal experiment with ESP while on the mission,started the Institute of Noetic Sciences to better study the paranormal.
Mitchell was 85 and leaves the living Apollo astronauts numbering just seven,The Atlantic memorializes Mitchell here.

A man that was part of my life almost on a daily basis for years passed at the age of 88 as Sam Spence died on Saturday.
Who was Sam Spence?
Spence was the composer and the man behind all of the great scene setting music for NFL Films and their iconic soundtracks to football that made so many fans from the 1970's on.
Spence might not have been the name that came to mind when you were humming some of those sounds that meshed so perfectly with the highlights,but clearly he had a huge impact...


The Blood-Horse may be a magazine about horse racing and that may be a sport,but the article Taking Shergar is about more than the horse.
The great Irish racehorse Shergar was kidnapped in 1983 and was never seen or heard from again as the most famous cold case in Irish history.
The article discusses the various theories on how and why this happened (The IRA is a huge suspect) from an insider perspective with one of the main detectives on the case...

Some volunteers in Miami spent time restoring the Ferdinand Magellan,the famous railway car that was used by Presidents to get around before airplanes became commonplace.
The car was the main mode of transport for Presidents Roosevelt,Truman and Eisenhower before being retired in 1954.
The car has been in Miami since 1959 and didn't need a ton of structural work,but had a few dings taken out and some paint touchups to keep rust away!

Here is a list of great restaurants that didn't survive the 1980's.
I ate at all but three on the list,but four hit home for personal reasons.
Burger Chef was my first job,Gino's was a favorite stop of my dad's on the way home from Orioles or Bullets games,Howard Johnson's was a staple of the Pennsylvania and Ohio travel areas when we visited Ohio and Bob's Big Boy?
Well,that one was my favorite Aunt Becky's favorite and myself and Cherie went there with them when Cherie was carrying Ryan in one of the craziest days of our lives!

This is a sports story from Hardball Times,but it's more about how the Topps company got into selling baseball cards as a business and the decisions behind it.
Topps is celebrating its 65th year with baseball cards and it's a good read even if you don't collect cards...

That just about cleans things up for a while,so hopefully you found something interesting worth linking to!!!