Bees On A Plane!

Maybe these bees were too tired to fly for themselves.

A gang of honeybees landed on the wing of a plane used for flight school training at Beverly Airport in Danvers, Mass. At first, the 10,000 or so bees swarmed over the left side of the aircraft, then landed on top of the left wing. The owner of the flight center called police, who said to call local bee removal expert Al Wilkins.

Wilkins used a specially designed vacuum to suck the bees off the plane, and then relocated them to hives where they will produce honey.

Wilkins guessed that the queen may have stopped to rest on the plane, and the other bees congregated around to protect her.

Star Trek Rules The Box Office

Now, that’s how you live long and prosper.

A bigger-than-expected Sunday box office delivered Star Trek a $75.2 million opening weekend, per final numbers from Exhibitor Relations. That gross is nearly $3 million greater than the weekend estimate of $72.5 million.

The retooled Trek’s four-day, Thursday-Sunday haul now stands at just under $80 million, or $79.2 million, to be tricorder precise.

Figured on making about $18 million on Sunday, Trek ended up with about $21 million instead.

Two weekends ago, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, which picked up about as many bad reviews as Trek picked up good ones, felt the sting of the final numbers when its projections came up $2 million shy of reality.

One Of The Last Surviving Munchkins Passes Away

Mickey Carroll, one of the last surviving diminutive “Munchkins” in the 1939 movie “The Wizard of Oz,” has died of natural causes in Missouri at age 89.

Carroll, who stopped growing at a young age, was an entertainer early in life and befriended actress Judy Garland, leading to a role alongside her in classic “The Wizard of Oz,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported.

He was a violin-playing Munchkin “Town Crier” in the movie, dressed in purple with a yellow flower in his vest. There were dozens of Munchkins in all.

In 2007, Carroll and a few other surviving Munchkins attended a ceremony to dedicate a Munchkin star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Born to Italian immigrants in 1919, Carroll’s given name was Michael Finocchiaro, the Post-Dispatch reported. He died at a caretaker’s home in Crestwood, Missouri, and he lived in the state nearly his entire life, the newspaper said.

Bollywood Triumphs In Hollywood

Hollywood has met Bollywood at the Academy Awards, and the makers of Oscar champ “Slumdog Millionaire” hope it’s a sign of future melding between the U.S. dream factory with its counterparts in India and elsewhere in the world.

The low-budget production was a merger of India’s brisk Bollywood movie industry, which provided most of the cast and crew, and the global marketing reach of Hollywood, which turned the film into a commercial smash, said British director Boyle.

“We’re Brits, really, trapped in the middle, but it’s a lovely trapped thing,” Boyle said backstage. “You can see it’s going to happen more and more. There’s all sorts of people going to work there. The world’s shrinking a little bit.”

Though set in a foreign land, the film tells a universal story of optimism that has been eagerly embraced by U.S. audiences.

“This country has changed, from the moment we started making the film to the moment it was released,” “Slumdog” producer Christian Colson said. “I think America is cool again, for the first time in my lifetime. … I think this is a symptom of how it’s beginning to embrace a more-globalized view of the world.”

Gene Roddenberry And Majel Barrett To Spend Eternity In Space

The creator of “Star Trek” and his wife will spend eternity together in space. Celestis Inc., a company that specializes in “memorial spaceflights,” said Monday that it will ship the remains of  Gene Roddenberry and Majel Barrett into space sometime in 2012.

After Gene Roddenberry died in 1991, his wife commissioned Celestis to launch a part of his remains into space in 1997. She died Dec. 18, 2008.

Barrett is best known for playing Nurse Christine Chapel on the original series.  She will be providing the voice of the ship’s computer in the 2009 move “Star Trek.”  The voiceover work was completed shortly before her death.

See The Movie ‘Defiance’

If you’re looking for a good move to see on the Martin Luther King Day holiday then go see ‘Defiance’ with Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber and Mark Feuerstein.  It’s an inspiring story and a great movie.

Movie site: 

 http://www.defiancemovie.com/

More about the true story:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bielski_partisans