Ali’s fight to save a life
QUESTION Boxer Muhammad Ali was pictured talking down a man attempting to commit suicide by leaping from a building. Did he succeed?
On THE afternoon of January 19, 1981, a troubled 21-year-old called Joe, who was sporting a hooded sweatshirt and jeans, climbed the fire escape of a building on Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles.
On reaching the ninth floor, he clambered onto a ledge and shouted that he intended to take his own life by jumping off.
Police were called. And as Joe shouted that the Vietcong were coming to get him, the commotion drew a crowd.
Howard Bingham, a photographer and good friend of Muhammad Ali, happened to be there. Against police advice, he called the boxer to try to save the situation.
‘I went back to my car and called Ali anyway,’ recalled Bingham. ‘I told Ali there was a guy up here on a building about a mile from his house and maybe he could get through.’
Minutes later, Ali appeared in his RollsRoyce. Initially, the police refused to allow him access, but eventually relented.
‘He said he was going to jump and actually came close to jumping,’ said Sgt Bruce Hagerty. ‘We decided to give Muhammad a chance at talking to the man.’
When Ali poked his head out of a nearby window, Joe cried out: ‘It’s really you!’
Ali established Joe was depressed (he was too young to have fought in Vietnam), jobless and had fallen out with his family.
Joe eventually allowed the boxing legend to move to the fire escape. He said: ‘I won’t shoot you, I don’t even have a gun.’
The conversation continued with Ali standing in the fire escape, and after 20 minutes he eventually talked him down. ‘you’re my brother,’ said the champ. ‘I love you and I wouldn’t lie to you. you got to listen, I want you to come home with me, meet some friends of mine.’
‘Why do you worry about me?’ asked Joe. ‘I’m a nobody.’ Ali, in tears, replied: ‘you ain’t a nobody!’ Eventually Joe fell sobbing into Ali’s embrace and the pair went back into the building together and to safety. Joe was admitted to a psychiatric hospital.
When asked about Joe’s well-being, Ali said: ‘Joe knows my address, I’ve told people to bring him to me when they let him go. I’ll help him. He knows he’s got a home, my home.’
Jacob Lewis, Willenhall, W. Mids.
QUESTION Is our universe spinning? If this is the case, in which direction?
ScIEnTISTS generally believe that the Universe is isotropic (the same in all directions). Thus, from our perspective, half of all spiral galaxies should spin clockwise and half counter-clockwise.
It has been established, however, that light coming from the cosmic microwave background (cMB, the ‘echo’ of the Big Bang) is uneven, which does raise the possibility of an axis of rotation.
Shi chun and M. chu, researchers at the Department of Physics and Institute of Theoretical Physics at the chinese University of Hong Kong, tested this theory by looking at the Sachs-Wolfe effect, a measure of how many photons from the cMB are affected by gravity. They theorised their results could indicate whether there was rotation. In their paper Is The Universe Rotating?, they decided the data were consistent with a non-rotating universe. But not all agree.
In a 2013 study, Professor Michael Longo and his team at the University of Michigan catalogued the rotational direction of tens of thousands of spiral galaxies photographed in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. They found about 7 per cent more anti-clockwise rotating spirals in the sky near the north pole of the Milky Way.
This would suggest that the Big Bang began with rotational momentum rather than as a spherically symmetric explosion. Because the Sloan telescope is in new Mexico, data for the paper came mostly from the northern hemisphere of the sky.
It has yet to be established if there is an excess of right-handed spiral galaxies if viewed from the southern hemisphere.
Martin Smith, Bodmin, Cornwall.
QUESTION The Frank Sinatra album All Alone (1962) features, on two tracks, an uncredited performance by lady soprano. Who was she?
FURTHER to the earlier answer, even with songs written by Irving Berlin, Sammy cahn and Jimmy Van Heuson, All Alone did not sell well, but has been lauded since as one of Sinatra’s finest albums.
This was a classic case of an extremely poor record sleeve putting people off the content. It featured a portrait of Sinatra that bore very little likeness, making him appear even a little cross-eyed.
This amateur attempt at graphic design can be seen on the still available cD version (above).
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