Disney Brings Oswald Home

February 9th, 2006 by Mox

As part of a deal between Disney-owned ESPN and NBC Universal that allows sportscaster Al Michaels to move to NBC Sports, the Walt Disney Company has reacquired the rights to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit.

From the Yahoo! News article:

“Oswald is definitely worth more than a fourth-round draft choice,” Michaels said, referring to what the Kansas City Chiefs gave the New York Jets as compensation for releasing coach Herm Edwards from his contract. “I’m going to be a trivia answer someday.”

…

“When Bob was named CEO, he told me he wanted to bring Oswald back to Disney, and I appreciate that he is a man of his word,” Walt Disney’s daughter Diane Disney Miller said in a statement. “Having Oswald around again is going to be a lot of fun.”

What happened to Oswald and how that led directly to the creation of Mickey Mouse is one of the great Disney anecdotes. So it’s pretty cool that after all these years he has been brought back under the Disney umbrella.

SuitSat Falls Silent

February 5th, 2006 by Mox

Friday, the astronauts aboard the International Space Station “launched” a satellite made from an old spacesuit outfitted with sensors and a radio transmitter. This “SuitSat” was to be a proof-of-concept for recycling used spacesuits into useful satellites. Transmitting on a frequency of 145.990 MHz, SuitSat was to broadcast a pre-recorded greeting followed by telemetry information to anyone listening on a ham radio or police scanner over the course of a couple of days. Unfortunately, transmissions have reportedly been very faint and, for a little while, it was even thought to have failed completely.

I was hoping to get a chance to listen to it myself, but so far I have only picked up static. Hopefully some useful information can be gleaned from this experiments and there will be more like it in the future.

More articles:
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