Off-Kilter

The Diamond Planet?: Men might be from Mars, but women are not from Venus. They’re from BPM37093. That’s the name of a star that astronomers at Iowa State University believe is made entirely of carbon and crystallized oxygen, the same material as diamonds. Located 17 light-years from Earth, BPM37093 is roughly the same size as our planet and the same weight as the sun.

If it truly is a diamond (personally, we think Iowa State should bring in a jeweler to make sure it’s not one of those cubic-zirconium stars), it would weigh 10 billion trillion trillion carats, according to astronomer Steve Kawaler. And the DeBeers shadow ad for it would require an eclipse.

For Pete’s Sake: Only 26% of Americans think the Pete in Pete’s Wicked Ale is a real person, according to a survey by the beer company. (He is, and to prove it, he sat atop a billboard in San Francisco on Friday.) The survey found that more people believe there is a Chef Boyardee (40%) and a Mr. Whipple (27%), even though both are fictitious. And 1% actually think Tony the Tiger is real.

Asteroid Revisited: We are beginning to think some of our beloved Off-Kilterites might have a little too much time on their hands. After reader John Roehrig’s recent suggestion that a mile-wide asteroid crashing into Earth would be about as lethal as a bug hitting a car windshield, several readers bombarded us with multi-page physics equations and bibliographies proving that such an asteroid would, in fact, be more like Marlon Brando hitting a windshield. This, of course, assumes a joule-velocity factor of 327x2.5 megahertz, using refined magnetic and gravimetric techniques. Or something like that.

To be honest, the only part we could really follow was reader Thom Cate’s comparison to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. It was a mere 10 kilometers thick, but its impact was “enough to empty the Gulf of Mexico like a wash basin, overturn the sea floor and raise it into the stratosphere before dumping it back to Earth hundreds of miles away.”

Exposing the Flash: Readers keep asking us, “What is Wireless Flash” (from the contributors list at the end of our columns)? And we keep answering, “Uh, we aren’t exactly sure, but it does come up with some great stories.”

Finally we dug a little deeper and discovered that one of the Flash’s editors used to work as a “psychic” for a 900 number. So now it’s official: Wireless Flash complies with our exacting journalistic standards.

The San Diego-based news service is also used by Jay Leno, David Letterman, the BBC, Comedy Central and hundreds of other TV, radio and print media outlets searching for quirky news. Founded in 1980 by radio newsman Patrick Glynn, it was originally owned by Copley News Service (an affiliate of the San Diego Union-Tribune and its sister newspapers), but was spun off as an independent company five years ago. Today, Glynn and two other editors, David Moye and Elaine Camuso, cull their reports from obscure journals, small-town papers, publicists and assorted tipsters. As for the name, Glynn says it was chosen because most of the original clients were radio stations (wireless). “It sounded catchy back then,” he explains, “but now some people think we sell wireless pagers or remote-controlled camera flashbulbs.”

Best Supermarket Tabloid Headline: “New Breed of Head Lice Bores Into Victims’ Brains!” (Weekly World News)

* Roy Rivenburg’s e-mail address is roy.rivenburg@latimes.com.

Contributors: Wireless Flash News Service, Ann Harrison