My dad was a military brat - my grandpa was in the Navy so my dad found himself uprooted a few times. He was born in Virginia but ended up in Iowa where he decided to stay put. Although he doesn’t quite make the list of famous people (sorry, dad), these brats do:

10 Famous Military Brats

1. Photographer Annie Leibovitz’s father was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force.
2. R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe’s dad was in the U.S. Army.
3. Actor Tim Curry (one of my favorites) traveled quite a bit with his dad, who was a Chaplain in the Royal Navy.
4. Xuxa, a Brazilian Icon who is sometimes called “The Madonna from South America”, was quite worldly at a young age. Her father, who was in the Brazilian military, wasn’t stationed in one place (Rio de Janiero) until Xuxa was seven.
5. Michael J. Fox was born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and didn’t settle in one place until his dad retired from the Canadian Forces in 1971.
6. Elton John comes by his musical talents honestly - his dad was a trumpter with the Royal Air Force Band.
7. Bruce Willis was born in Iber-Oberstein, West Germany. His father was a soldier in the U.S. Army and met his mother while stationed there.
8. Emmylou Harris’s dad was a Marine Corps pilot who went missing in action in Korea in 1951. He was a prisoner of war for for somewhere between 10 and 16 months (different reports say different things) before he was released and sent home.
9. Michelle Bachelet, the President of Chile, was born to an archaeologist mother and a father who was a Chilean Air Force Brigadier General. She moved all around Chile, and spent two years in Maryland while her father was serving at the Chilean Embassy in Washington, D.C. They then moved back to Chile where Michelle graduated high school.
10. Luke Skywalker himself, Mark Hamill, moved numerous times because of his dad’s career with the U.S. Navy. Although he started high school in Annandale, Virginia, he graduated from Nile C. Kinnick High School in Japan. And then he went on to save the world from his evil father. No, wait, I’m confusing fantasy and reality again…

As baseball season cranks up, so will talk about hardballs various paranormal activities. This year will likely feature more talk than ever about the Curse of the Billy Goat, the hex thats supposedly played a role in the Chicago Cubs not winning the World Series in a century. The Billy Goat and Babe Ruth arent sports only prominent ghosts, though. Here are a few spooks that might not have frightened you yet.

1. Eddie Plank

Plank was Major League Baseballs first left-handed pitcher to win 300 games, and he ended his illustrious career in1917 with an impressive 326 victories against just 194 losses. Youd think all that pitching would have made him eager to move on to other endeavors, but apparently not. Although Plank passed away in 1926, hes still trying to pitch.

In 1996, the Hall of Famer apparently got the urge to start pitching again. In the middle of the night, the owner of the Gettysburg, PA, house where Plank had died heard a repetitive series of noises. A man would grunt, then there would be a thud and the sound of footsteps. Apparently, Plank was launching pitches to a catcher, who would occasionally have to chase down an errant toss. The owner determined that not only must the noises have come from Planks ghost, but that the ball was traveling sixty feet, six inches, exactly the distance from the pitchers mound to home plate in baseball. The noises supposedly stopped within a month of the first pitch, possibly because ghosts play a shorter season than living baseball players.

2. The Hockey Hall of Fame

The Toronto home of the Hockey Hall of Fame is a repository of memorabilia and anecdotes about some of the greatest players in hockey history. However, the ghost that allegedly haunts the building probably never skated a shift in her life.

Since moving to its current digs in 1993, the Hall has enjoyed the company of Dorothy, the ghost of an employee of the Bank of Montreal branch formerly housed in the building. As the legend goes, Dorothy was a vivacious teller at the bank when, in 1953, she showed up for work early and promptly shot herself. Legends cant seem to agree on exactly where or why the young woman took her own life, but whatever her motivations, Dorothy wasnt gone long. Soon after her death, employees started hearing noises in the bank late at night and noticed that things were inexplicably moving around on their desks. Visitors and employees continue to report hearing Dorothy walking around, encountering cold spots, and feeling a presence while in the Hall.

3. Owen Hart

Professional wrestler Owen Hart tragically fell to his death while he was being lowered into the ring for a WWF show in Kansas Citys Kemper Arena in 1999. Earlier this year the Kansas City Star ran a small item commenting on a Haunted America column that suggested Harts ghost now haunts the arena.

The reports were somewhat vague, but employees claimed to have seen Hart walking the rafters while dressed in his Blue Blazer costume, the gimmick he was portraying when he died. The same witnesses claimed to have seen the cable that Hart used for his descent into the arena, and some claimed lights in the arena flickered during these sightings.

4. George Gipp

The Notre Dame football star who inspired Knute Rocknes famous Win one for the Gipper speech may still be lurking around campus. Gipp was the first Fighting Irish player to make the All America team, but his life was tragically cut short when he contracted pneumonia and died in 1920 at just 25 years old. Gipp allegedly caught the illness that ended his life while sleeping on Washington Halls steps one evening; soon after his death, students started hearing strange noises throughout the building. Papers would rustle under doors late at night, and horns would mysteriously sound with no apparent source.

By 1925, there were reports of Gipp riding a white horse up the same steps, and Gipps spectral legend started to grow. Others have claimed Gipp materializes on Washington Halls dramatic stages and set rooms. If its truly the ghost of Gipp stalking around the building, he has a fresh reason to be upset; last November his body was exhumed and stripped of a femur to settle a long-standing paternity suit.

5. Frontier Field

Frontier Field was built in Rochester in 1996. Its currently the home to the Rochester Red Wings of baseballs International League. Its also home to a whole slew of ghosts. According to a 2005 report aired by ESPN, construction of the stadium unearthed some human bones, and soon stadium workers suspected that the grounds might be haunted.

In 2004, these suspicious employees brought in a team of ghost experts from Rochester Paranormal to have a look at the stadium. The investigators claimed that they encountered a number of ghosts of people who had previously lived in the area, some of whom were ecstatic that their old haunts had been converted into something as much fun as a baseball stadium. Research director J. Burkhart also took several photographs during the investigation that showed floating heads, smoky entities, and other paranormal activity. Given their experiences at the stadium, Rochester Paranormal concluded that the stadium was definitely haunted, making Frontier Field the worlds first officially haunted stadium.

Ethan Trex grew up idolizing Vince Coleman, and he kind of still does. Ethan co-writes Straight Cash, Homey, the Internets undisputed top source for pictures of people in Ryan Leaf jerseys.

The public radio show This American Life has just begun its second season as a TV program on Showtime. If you’re not watching, you’re missing out. (Or you can’t afford Showtime — and you can’t be blamed for that.) But today you can get a little free content from the show, in the form of an animated segment that hasn’t aired yet.

But first, a little more about the new season. To mark the beginning of its second season on TV, TAL hosted a live event in movie theaters around the US — though for those of us on the West Coast it was tape-delayed by three hours. The show consisted of a live performance of the radio show by Ira Glass in front of a theater audience, filmed and simulcast to movie theaters. It was an interesting format, combining stage show (with various guests and interactive bits, including questions from the audience) and radio show, and even showing Glass flubbing a few cues as he mixed the music and interview clips live.

One of the best pieces shown that night was an animated segment by Chris Ware and John Kuramoto, illustrating a story that originally appeared on the radio show some time back. In the segment, NPR’s Robert Krulwich (whom you may know from Radiolab) and his wife tell a story they’ve been telling all their married lives…then talk about which one of them has it all wrong.

Although this segment won’t hit Showtime until June 1 (in the fifth episode of the second series, “Every Marriage is a Cortroom”), you can watch it now:

See also: This American Live Season 1 on iTunes. ($10.99 in the US for the six-episode season.)

Unlike Dungeons and Dragons, this game is simple. We’ll give you a name, you choose if it’s a skin disease or a character from the realm of Dungeons and Dragons. You shouldn’t need a sixteen-sided die or a medical dictionary, though the latter may not hurt. Get all 16 right and you’re essentially qualified to be either a dermatologist or a dungeon master, so pretty much all doors are open.
Take the quiz.

We don’t usually cover straight-up news as such here on the floss, but this particular item was so out there — and so geeky at the same time — I just couldn’t let it fall through the cracks. For the first time ever, Vatican astronomers have admitted the possibility — even the probability — of intelligent life on other planets. Vatican official Father Gabriel Funes, a respected astronomer in his own right, released an article titled, literally, Aliens Are My Brother, detailing various extraterrestrial scenarios as they relate to Christian theology. He compares the potential multiplicity of life forms in the universe to that here on Earth, and goes on to speculate that such alien life forms could even be “free from Original Sin … [remaining] in full friendship with their creator.” (In short, expect to hear lots more conspiracy theories about how Jesus and the angels were aliens in the near future.)

But it’s not just the Catholic Church that has aliens on the brain — also this week, the British government released years’ worth of newly-declassified documents pertaining to UFO sightings in British airspace. “The Ministry of Defence does not deny that there are strange things to see in the sky,” one internal memo explains, “but it certainly has no evidence that alien spacecraft have landed on this planet.” (Suuuure, guys.) You can check out the newly-released records here, the most hilarious bits of which, in our opinion, are the vigorous and exceedingly formal tiffs between various dukes, lords and viscounts in the British House of Lords regarding UFOs, like this one:

Viscount Long: My Lords, if the Noble Earl is suspicious that the Ministry of Defence is covering up in any way, I can assure him … the sole interest of the MoD in UFO reports is to establish whether they reveal anything of defence interest.
Lord Wynne-Jones: My Lords, does the Answer given mean that since there has been a Conservative Government the UFOs have done a U-turn and departed?
The Earl of Kimberley: My Lords, as my noble friend said that 600 UFOs had been officially reported or acknowledged by the MoD in 1984, may I ask him how many of those sightings still remain unidentified?
Viscount Long: My Lords, we do not have the figures. They disappeared into the unknown before we got them.
Lord Hill-Norton: My Lords, may I ask the noble Viscount whether or not it is true that all of the sighting reports received by the MoD before 1962 were destroyed because they were deemed “to be of no interest”? And if it is true, who was it who decided that they were of no interest?”
Viscount Long: My Lords, my reply to the noble and gallant Lord — I was wondering whether he was going to say the the Royal Navy had many times seen the Loch Ness monster — is that since 1967 all UFO reports have been preserved.

Conspiracy/comedy gold!