29 August: Michael Jackson

Michael Jackson  was born on this date in 1958, meaning today would have been his 60th birthday. Here are 10 facts about Michael Jackson.

1. Michael Joseph Jackson was born in Gary, Indiana and was the eighth of ten children born to Joseph Walter "Joe" Jackson, a steelworker and former boxer, and Katharine (née Scruse). Both his parents were musical – his mother played Clarinet and Piano and once aspired to be a country-and-western performer, and his father played Guitar with a local rhythm and blues band.
2. Michael Jackson won more awards than any other music artist alive or deceased: 23 Guinness World Records, 40 Billboard Awards, 13 Grammys, and 26 American Music Awards. In 1984 he won eight Grammys – the joint highest amount ever won by one person in a single year. He has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (one for himself and one as part of the Jackson Five). He's possibly also the best selling: Thriller is the world’s best-selling record of all time with an estimated 50 million copies sold worldwide.
3. On the subject of Thriller, the video, narrated by Vincent Price, almost never saw the light of day. Michael had been brought up as a Jehovah's Witness, and the church objected to the subject matter. They threatened to banish Michael and he was going to destroy the video, but instead he compromised by adding a disclaimer: "Due to my strong personal convictions, I wish to stress that this film in no way endorses a belief in the occult." Even so, it was the beginning of the end for Michael and the Jehovah's Witnesses – he disassociated himself from the church in 1987. A final fact about Thriller – the costumes worn by the zombies came from the Salvation Army.
4. Michael was an inventor, too. He patented a Shoe device which allowed dancers to lean forward at gravity defying angles.
5. He hated the nickname “Wacko Jacko”, given him by the press due to his eccentric lifestyle. That said, he knew well enough that the wacky label only helped when it came to self-promotion. He never actually tried to buy the bones of the Elephant man, but he didn't deny the story. He even leaked made up stories to the press himself, like the one which said he slept in an Oxygen tent in order to defy ageing.
6. In 1988, he bought 2,700 acres of land in California for $17 million, which became his Neverland ranch. The ranch had a theme park, a menagerie, and a movie theatre, and was protected by a security staff of 40. By 2003, the property was worth $100 million.
7. Michael was known for his exotic pets, the most famous of which was Bubbles the chimpanzee, adopted from a Texan research facility. For a while Michael took Bubbles everywhere with him, but as the chimp got bigger he got more aggressive and had to be given away. He's been living in Florida since 2005. Other exotic pets included a boa constrictor called Muscles, a python called Crusher, two llamas called Louis and Lola and a pet ram called Mr Tibbs.
8. Ever wonder why he often wore a Black armband? It was to remind people of children suffering around the world.
9. His vocal range as an adult was F2-E♭6. As a child, he was a boy soprano. When he listened to his songs with the Jackson 5 from those days, he said that he thought he sounded like Minnie Mouse.
10. St Vincent, an island in the Caribbean, once issued Michael Jackson stamps, while the residents of Gabon, Cote d'Ivoire went even further and gave Michael Jackson a royal title - making him a king of a village.

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Over the Rainbow

'We're not in Trinity anymore,' says Leonard Marx, quoting a line from an old Innovian  movie. The moon is different; the planes flying overhead are different. Nobody has any idea where they are or if it's possible to get home. 

In this strange new world, people from the highly technical Innovia and the less advanced Classica must co-operate in order to survive. In addition, travel through the inter-dimensional wormhole has given some people unusual and unexpected powers.

Innovia mourns the loss of its superhero, Power Blaster, last seen carrying a nuclear bomb to the upper atmosphere away from the inhabited Bird Island. They don't believe he could possibly have survived.  Power Blaster has survived, but is close to death and stranded in the new dimension. He is nursed back to health by a Classican woman, Elena. She has no idea who he is, only that she is falling in love with the handsome stranger.  

Shanna sets out to discover what happened to Nathan Tate, who didn't return from his hiking holiday, not knowing her life is about to be turned inside out and upside down. 

Meanwhile, Desi Troyes, the man responsible for the catastrophe, is at large on the new world, plotting how he can transfer his plans for world domination to the planet he now finds himself on - Earth. 

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