During Thursday's installment of Today With Hoda & Jenna, co-host Jenna Bush Hager recounted how she nearly lost ALL of her fine jewelry — including her sapphire and diamond engagement ring — at JFK Airport in New York City.
The 42-year-old daughter of former President George W. Bush recalled how she lost track of a bag of jewelry as she was "racing to a shoot" while on assignment for the Today show.
Hager explained to co-host Hoda Kotb, "I don't have much nice jewelry, but everything I had was in there."
When Hager finally arrived at the shoot, she realized her precious keepsakes were nowhere to be found.
“I was stressed," she said. "I get to the shoot and I’m looking around. I’m like, ‘Oh no, I had a whole bag of jewelry.’”
Hager quickly reached out to Jack, a member of the NBC morning show's security team.
She explained: “I said, ‘Jack, I just took off at JFK. I know it’s gone, but can you just see what the airport says?’"
In a stroke of good fortune, a fellow traveler had spotted the unattended bag and did the right thing.
“Some lovely man who I’ve never met returned it to security,” she said.
Even though the story had a happy ending, Hager didn't share it with her husband of 15 years, Henry Chase Hager. He only learned about the incident on Thursday morning — at the same time as Kotb and the show's five million viewers.
“I couldn’t even tell Henry because if I lost our engagement ring, it’s priceless,” she said. “So, I harbored a secret from Henry, too, which was hard.”
Jenna and her twin sister, Barbara, were 20 years old when their dad, George W. Bush was inaugurated as President of the US in January of 2001. Henry popped the question to Jenna in 2007, and the couple tied the knot the following year. They have three children.
Seven-time All Pro center Jason Kelce revealed on Wednesday that he lost his 2018 Super Bowl ring in a kiddie pool full of chili during the "Lombaby" Games on the campus of the University of Cincinnati (UC).
The Lombaby Games pit UC student-athletes against academics in goofy, Olympic-style games, including one where contestants searched two pools filled with Skyline Chili for Kelce's Super Bowl ring along with other decoy rings.
In the end, the decoys were found, but the authentic Philadelphia Eagles ring emblazoned with 219 diamonds and 17 green sapphires had disappeared.
"I legitimately lost my Super Bowl ring in this event," Jason Kelce said during Wednesday's episode of "New Heights," a podcast he hosts with his brother, Kansas City Chiefs star, Travis. "They could not find it."
The rings were hidden in socks and submerged in the chili. Jason Kelce feared that the sock containing his Super Bowl ring might have been kicked out of the inflatable pool and thrown away by mistake.
"What did you expect to happen?" Travis said. "You're such [an]… imbecile."
"So I think we safely assume that my Super Bowl ring is now in a landfill somewhere in the Cincinnati tri-state area," Jason told his brother.
Jason and Travis had served as referees and commentators for the UC event.
Jason had hoped that his support team might be able to use a metal detector to scan the chili after the event was over. As it turns out, Skyline Chili has trace amounts of iron in it, which rendered the metal detector useless, according to the recently retired 36-year-old center.
He has since submitted an insurance claim and hopes that the ring manufacturer, Jostens, can supply a replacement.
Each 10-karat championship ring boasted a gemstone total weight of 9.15 carats and contained symbols on every surface that told the story of an underdog team that overcame all obstacles to roll through the playoffs and eventually defeat the Tom Brady-led Patriots by a score of 41-33 in Super Bowl LII. It was the first time the Eagles raised the Vince Lombardi Trophy aloft in the team's 85-year history.
Jason, who is considered one of the best centers of all time, announced his retirement on March 4, 2024, after 13 NFL seasons with the Eagles. Younger brother, Travis, 34, just claimed his third Super Bowl ring as a tight end for the champion Kansas City Chiefs. He is famously linked romantically to pop princess Taylor Swift.
Welcome to Music Friday when we like to shine the spotlight on inspirational songs with jewelry, gemstones or precious metals in the title or lyrics. Today, five-time Grammy nominee Brandon Heath seeks divine intervention in “Diamond,” his 2012 song about a young coal miner who "has only scratched the surface." He wants to be a better man, but needs God’s help to find the “diamond” buried deep inside.
He sings, “I got something down inside of me / That only You can see / Help me dig a little deeper now / And set that diamond free.”
For Heath, the diamond symbolizes the ability to bring his life to the next level — a life of clarity, not confusion, of compassion, not cruelty, of ambition, not excuses.
In the last lines of the song, Heath invites the Almighty to seek him out in the coal mine: “Come down with your old flashlight / Underground, black as night / No telling what you’re gonna find in me.”
“Diamond” is the fourth track on Heath’s fourth studio album, Blue Mountain. The album is unique because each song takes place in the Blue Mountains and is told from the point of view of a particular character. The real and fictional players featured in the songs include his grandfather, his mentor, a farmer, a coal miner and a death-row inmate. Each song weaves a message of hope, love and redemption.
When it was released in 2012, the album earned strong reviews and a #5 spot on Billboard‘s US Christian Albums chart. It also reached #97 on the Billboard 200 albums chart.
“[The songs] are all kind of telling my story a little bit,” Heath revealed to The Clarion-Ledger. “[They talk] about my own fears, and my own desires. As a songwriter, it was more fun to give someone else my own voice. I think the best way to describe a place is to describe its people. And so, all these characters tell a story about what Blue Mountain is and who lives there.”
Born in Nashville, TN, Brandon Heath Knell turns 45 in July. The son of a police officer dad and hairdresser mom, Heath received his first guitar as a Christmas gift when he was 13. In high school, he converted to Christianity and explored his spirituality by participating in faith missions to India and Ecuador. Those trips helped inspire a career in contemporary Christian music.
Please check out the audio track of Heath performing “Diamond.” The lyrics are below if you’d like to sing along…
“Diamond”
Written by Brandon Heath, Ross Copperman and Lee Thomas Miller. Performed by Brandon Heath.
My father’s father broke this ground
Daddy mined till we laid him down
Only God knows what they found beneath
Now here I stand in my own boots
Ax to grind and a point to prove
Tangled up in my own roots, it seems
I got treasure up in Heaven
I got dirt all over me
I have only scratched the surface
Of the man I’m meant to be
I got something down inside of me
That only You can see
Help me dig a little deeper now
And set that diamond free
Why do I do the things I do
All the things that I don’t want to
Act like I don’t fear You at all
Hard head and a heart of stone
Older now but I haven’t grown
Any riches that I have to show are small
I got treasure up in Heaven
I got dirt all over me
I have only scratched the surface
Of the man I’m meant to be
I got something down inside of me
That only You can see
Help me dig a little deeper now
And set that diamond free
Set it free
Set it free
Set it free
Set it free
Come down with your old flashlight
Underground, black as night
No telling what you’re gonna find in me
Set it free
Set it free
Lord, set it free
Set it free
Come set it free
Set it free
I got treasure up in heaven
Set it free
I got dirt all over me
Set it free
I got treasure up in heaven
Come dig a little deeper now
And set that diamond free
Back in October of 2017, thousands of astronomers from around the globe joined together to confirm the first-ever sighting of two neutron stars colliding in space. In just one second, the “kilonova” located 130 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Hydra triggered the equivalent of 50 Earth masses of silver, 100 Earth masses of gold and 500 Earth masses of platinum.
The scientists estimated that the gold alone was worth more than $100 octillion. That’s $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (1 followed by 29 zeroes).
The astronomers aimed their equipment at the super-dense kilonova, looking for the signatures of heavy metals. They recorded visible light, radio waves, X-rays and gamma rays. The data confirmed the birth of massive amounts of precious metals and seemed to put to rest the long-standing mystery of how these and other “heavy” elements are formed.
A newly published study, however, is challenging conventional wisdom and deepening the mystery.
Northwestern University researchers using NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to study a mammoth stellar collapse were stunned when they found absolutely no evidence of heavy elements.
The collapse, first registered on October 9, 2002, resulted in the brightest gamma-ray burst (GRB) ever recorded. Scientists gave it the nickname B.O.A.T. (“brightest of all time”).
“When we confirmed that the GRB was generated by the collapse of a massive star, that gave us the opportunity to test a hypothesis for how some of the heaviest elements in the universe are formed,” said Northwestern’s Peter Blanchard, who led the study.
“We did not see signatures of these heavy elements, suggesting that extremely energetic GRBs like the B.O.A.T. do not produce these elements. That doesn’t mean that all GRBs do not produce them, but it’s a key piece of information as we continue to understand where these heavy elements come from. Future observations with JWST will determine if the B.O.A.T.’s ‘normal’ cousins produce these elements.”
“This event is particularly exciting because some had hypothesized that a luminous gamma-ray burst like the B.O.A.T. could make a lot of heavy elements like gold and platinum,” added second author Ashley Villar of Harvard University and the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. “If they were correct, the B.O.A.T. should have been a gold mine. It is really striking that we didn’t see any evidence for these heavy elements.”
The findings were published last week in the journal Nature Astronomy.
According to a Northwestern University press release, the powerful B.O.A.T. explosion occurred approximately 2 billion light-years from Earth, in the direction of the constellation Sagitta and lasted a few hundred seconds. It was so bright that it saturated most of the world’s gamma-ray detectors.
“The event produced some of the highest-energy photons ever recorded by satellites designed to detect gamma rays,” Blanchard said. “This was an event that Earth sees only once every 10,000 years. We are fortunate to live in a time when we have the technology to detect these bursts happening across the universe.”
Credit: Image by Aaron M. Geller / Northwestern / CIERA / IT Research Computing and Data Services.
A Kansas baker warned her customers on Facebook last week to bite down gently on cookies purchased from Sis’ Sweets Cookies and Café in Leavenworth. You see, the owner's engagement diamond fell out of her ring at some point between rolling the dough and placing the uncooked treats in the oven — so there's a chance the bauble was baked right into a batch.
Baker Dawn "Sis" Monroe broadcast her alert via the store's Facebook page on the morning of Friday, April 5, just after she prepared the day's cookie dough and scoured the prep area unsuccessfully for her precious keepsake.
"Bonus if you buy cookies today. My diamond is missing," she wrote on Facebook. "My heart is beyond broken. It’s been on my hand for 36 years. If you happened find it, I would forever be in debt if you would return it. It’s a marquise cut."
She was particularly concerned about the customer who might bite down onto the precious stone, which Monroe estimates to be worth $4,000.
”Mainly ‘cause I don’t want anybody to break a tooth,” Monroe told Kansas City ABC-affiliated KMBC.
Based on the variety of cookies she prepared that Friday morning, she is certain the diamond would be one of three batches: chocolate chip, sugar or peanut butter.
She also said there might be "a ton" of free cookies for the person who returns the diamond.
The baker told KMBC that her husband had picked out the marquise-cut center stone especially for her and that she hadn't take the ring off in 36 years.
“I was crying, and all [my husband] could say was, ‘You still have me,’ so that made it all better," Monroe said.
On Thursday, April 11, Cherokee Street neighbor First City Cheese Market injected some levity into a sad situation when proprietor Ryan popped into Sis’ Sweets Cookies and Café with a "diamond" cookie. Essentially, it was an Oreo with a diamond-shaped decoration protruding from the cream center.
Monroe shared a pic of Ryan and the cookie on Facebook and wrote, "Someone came in [and] brought me a cookie with a diamond in it. It’s a Topaz! We have great neighbors. We all work together to help each other!! Love our community, it’s the best! Thanks Ryan."
The baker added a final note about the missing diamond: "NO it still hasn’t been found."
As of Sunday evening, April 14, the diamond had yet to turn up. The story, on the other hand, has gone viral and circulated around the globe — delivering unmeasurable publicity to the Leavenworth baker.
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