Proud American is a new docudrama (of sorts) chronicling “five powerful singular stories” magnifying “the pillars that make America a truly grand society.” Directed by award-winning corporate media producer Fred Ashman, this “loving look at the American Dream” is beautifully shot in 75mm thanks to some charitable funding by Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, MasterCard, and American Airlines. Of course, with two of the five stories follow the founding of Wal-Mart and Coca-Cola, having their money in the project might go without saying.

This movie is a farce. Somehow it has managed 14% on Rotten Tomatoes. And somehow it has 2.3/10 stars on IMDB, where one user rightly called the movie the “World’s Most Expensive After-School Special”. But it is a farce. Right? It has to be. Otherwise it is the world’s longest commercial; another disgusting, disturbing attempt by corporate America to leverage patriotism into consumerism.

Why do I eerily foresee this film making its ways into classrooms, shown right beside those lame school videos during social studies?

Fun fact: “Opening in 750 theaters, Proud American managed to earn only $96,076, or $128 per venue — the worst for any wide release in the United States since at least 1982.”

Yahoo! News Photos: Cycling

A car collides into cyclists participating in a race in Mexico’s northern border city of Matamoros, Sunday June 1, 2008. At least one person was killed and 14 injured when a driver slammed into a bicycle race.

In one of the most surreal sequences of events, texting the wrong “i” led to the death of two in Turkey, and the jailing of three. While “ı” and “i” are separate letters in the Turkish language, not all cell phones have the appropriate characters to display both.

So when 24-year-old Ramazan Çalçoban sent a text message to his 20-year-old wife Emine, the results were a sad mixup:

The use of “i” resulted in an SMS with a completely twisted meaning: instead of writing the word “sıkısınca” it looked like he wrote “sikisince.” Ramazan wanted to write “You change the topic every time you run out of arguments” (sounds familiar enough) but what Emine read was, “You change the topic every time they are fucking you” (sounds familiar too.)

If the two had not already been arguing, perhaps leveler heads would have prevailed. Perhaps Emine asked for clarification, or defended herself against the accusation, and maybe even laugh about it once she realized the mistake. We can all imagine acting this way in less heated situations.

But what followed is too devastating and absurd to imagine:

Emine then showed the message to her father, who—enraged—called Ramazan, accusing him of treating his daughter as a prostitute. Ramazan went to the family’s home to apologize, only to be greeted by the father, Emine, two sisters and a lot of very sharp knives.

Ramazan managed to escape with his life, but mortally wounded Emine after defending himself with a knife he pulled from his chest after being stabbed. Later, Ramazan would commit suicide in jail, confused by the unreality of the events.

On April 11, Moscow unveiled a statue commemorating the first living creature to fly into space: Laika, a stray dog stolen from the streets of Moscow. Gizmodo has a good overview of one of the saddest stories ever, with photo accompaniment provided by Flickr.

John A. Wheeler, Physicist Who Coined the Term ‘Black Hole,’ Is Dead at 96

Dr. Wheeler was a young, impressionable professor in 1939 when Bohr, the Danish physicist and his mentor, arrived in the United States aboard a ship from Denmark and confided to him that German scientists had succeeded in splitting uranium atoms. Within a few weeks, he and Bohr had sketched out a theory of how nuclear fission worked. Bohr had intended to spend the time arguing with Einstein about quantum theory, but “he spent more time talking to me than to Einstein,” Dr. Wheeler later recalled.

Max Tegmark, a cosmologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said of Dr. Wheeler, “For me, he was the last Titan, the only physics superhero still standing.”

Update: Cosmic Variance has a very moving goodbye post by one of Wheeler’s graduate students and friend.