Wikipedia can be an amazing thing. It often reminds me of how the web used to be, where you would start out on one page, and end up some place completely different. We used to call it “surfing”, but I don’t think that anyone ever says that they’re “surfing the web” anymore. This afternoon, I surfed Wikipedia.
It started out with looking at National Historic Landmarks within Iowa for a project at work. That led me to The James B. Weaver House in Bloomfield, Iowa. I’m not actually sure what it was about this that caught my eye, but it got me reading about James Weaver, an Iowa politician who twice ran for President of the United States. Reading about Weaver led me to The Unassigned Lands, a plot of land in the middle of the Indian Territory that apparently hadn’t been properly given to any Indians and a lot of white people were trying to take.
Towards the end of the century, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad began to build through this area, and this got my attention because a while back my mom gave me a pen knife she had found that had belonged to my grandfather. The handle of the pen knife was an ad for “The Katy”, a line on the Missouri-Kansas-Texas that ran from St. Louis on south. This train is the “Katy” from the song “She Caught the Katy,” which is the song that plays during the opening credits of The Blues Brothers, one of my favorite movies.
According to John Belushi’s widow, it was Belushi’s favorite blues song.
From there I started reading about John Belushi, and I learned that he’s actually buried in Martha’s Vineyard, but that his name was placed next to his mother’s name on her tombstone in Chicago to act as a cenotaph, which is essentially an empty grave that acts as a memorial for someone.
But it was there that I found my cool fact for the day: in 2016 after David Bowie died, a group of Belgian astronomers created a cenotaph for Bowie in the stars:
Belgian astronomers have gazed skyward to find a fitting way to pay tribute to David Bowie following the rock legend’s death at 69, dedicating a constellation to the self-proclaimed “Starman.” The constellation boasts seven stars that, when connected, form the iconic lightning bolt seen on the cover of Bowie’s Aladdin Sane. The interstellar tribute, which appropriately features celestial bodies in the vicinity of Mars, was engineered by Belgium’s MIRA Public Observatory and the radio station Studio Brussels, PSFK reports.
— Belgian Astronomers Pay Tribute to David Bowie With New Constellation – Rolling Stone
Seriously, how cool is that?