Some Stuff: Monday, August 17, 2009

1970: Venera 7 launched. It would later become the first spacecraft to successfully transmit data from the surface of another planet (Venus).

Actress Alyssa Milano is a married woman. The 36-year-old Charmed star walked down the aisle with her agent boyfriend (David Bugliari) Saturday in New Jersey. Check our blog for some photos of Alyssa in Playboy:

It's finally here! Although the trailer will be online in about a week Fox has released the first official production photo from James Cameron's Avatar featuring Sam Worthington and his Avatar (in the background).

My source is reporting that Universal is developing another adaptation of Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles, to continue on that franchise that first hit the big screen back in 1994 with Interview with the Vampire. They don't have any details on what's going on with the reboot or which Anne Rice novel(s) they're going to be drawing from, but they do say that Robert Downey Jr. is in "close talks" to play the vampire Lestat.

Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire, and Kirsten Dunst are all on-board once again for Spiderman 4 set to release in 2011, and it turns out things are moving ahead for Spider-Man 5 and 6. A writer has been hired James Vanderbilt, of The Losers and David Fincher's Zodiac, will write an over-arching storyline that will extend from the fifth movie into the sixth - which might mean both films could even be shot back-to-back.

Study shows UFO sightings increase whenever a movie about UFOs is released
Back in 1996 there was a spike in UFO sightings in the UK: 609, up from 117 the year before. David Clarke, a UFO historian and consultant to the National Archives, said it was probably no coincidence that the supernatural TV show The X Files was popular in Britain at the time, and that alien-invasion movie Independence Day came out the same year. "It's evident there is some connection between newspaper stories, TV programs and films about alien visitors, and the numbers of UFO sightings," Clarke said. "Aside from 1996, one of the busiest years for UFO sightings reported to the Ministry of Defence over the past half century was 1978 - the year Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released."

Motola, an elephant in Thailand who lost a foot and part of her leg when she stepped on a land mine 10 years ago, happily stepped out Sunday after being fitted with an artificial limb. In her first stroll with the permanent prosthesis, the 48-year-old female walked out of her enclosure for about 10 minutes, grabbed some dust with her trunk and jubilantly sprayed it in the air. Motola was injured in 1999 while working at a logging camp near the Myanmar border, a region peppered with land mines after a half-century of insurgency. Her mangled left front foot was subsequently amputated. Motola had been wearing a temporary device for three years to strengthen her leg muscles and tendons and to prepare her for the permanent prosthesis.