Results tagged “rainman”

Many things happened last Tuesday night at a CUNY Graduate Center auditorium lobby reception. Kim Peek, the 55 year-old savant who inspired Rain Man, walked through the crowd to answer strangers' questions about forgotten rural highways, old telephone directories, and birthdays. His father Fran talked about Kim’s abilities and home life in Utah, and passed the nine-pound Academy Award given to him by Rain Man’s screenwriter to anyone who wanted to hold it. Elsewhere at the reception, the inventor Nate True chatted about his Time Fountain, a breadbox-sized contraption pumping with highlighter dyed water and ringed by ultraviolet strobes. When everything works right, it appears to the observer that time is slowing down, stopping, and even reversing for the fountain's falling droplets. Standing near to the cheese plate and chicken finger buffet was Joe Kittinger, who in 1960 jumped off a rickety Air Force gondola hitched to a big weather balloon, and free fell 102,800 feet back to earth, breaking the sound barrier in the process. Yes, this was all part of the inaugural meeting for the Athanasius Kircher Society, a mysterious group of people devoted to understanding the curious, obscure, and spectacular. The group is named for a 17th century German Jesuit scholar, an early adopter of Egyptology, volcanology, and a pioneer of germ theory.

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