I took an astronomy course once, and the teacher had been to a meeting of some type in Boston. She was down there, and saw a bunch of people outside a hospital, with signs saying "Get Well, Prof Hawking" and thought it was in supremely bad taste, as, after all, he must've been there dying. She was happy to find out she'd been wrong.

That was in the 80s. The Simpsons, playing poker on Star Trek, you never knew where he was going to turn up. I heard on the radio (it was NPR, and might've been BBC news) this morning that he got to ride in the aircraft and be weightless and free from his chair for a while.