Clear some time in your schedule

Watch this very clever short film



Possibly the best russian-werewolf-submarine film you'll see all day!


Guacamole may never be the same again for you



Who knew that the Monopoly house had so many other uses?


March 9, 1948 -
John Ford's thinly veiled retelling of Custer's Last Stand, Fort Apache, premiered on this date.



This film was the first of John Ford's famed "Cavalry Trilogy," followed by She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande, though it was not originally intended as a trilogy.


Today in History:
March 9, 1170 -
In Essex, a UFO is spotted over St. Ostwyth, manifesting itself as a "wonderfully large dragon ... borne up from the Earth through the air". The craft kindled the air and destroyed a house.



And all of that was before LSD.


March 9, 1454 -
Amerigo Vespucci was born on this date. He was an Italian explorer who made many voyages to the new world at about the same time as Columbus.



The two continents of the new world were therefore named for him, and it wasn't until the seventeenth century (Greenwich time) that North and South Vespucci were renamed the Americas.


March 9, 1556 -
David Rizzio, the secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, was stabbed 56 times by a gaggle of Scottish nobles on this date.

http://images.arcadja.com/thumann_friedrich_paul-the_murder_of_david_rizzio~300~10157_20090401_2818_408.jpg
Her husband Henry Lord Darnley had orchestrated the murder with Mary witnessing, hoping to precipitate a miscarriage.

Isn't love among the royalty grand?


March 9, 1954 -
"No one familiar with the history of his country can deny that Congressional committees are useful. It is necessary to investigate before legislating. But the line between investigating and persecuting is a very fine one, and the junior senator from Wisconsin has stepped over it repeatedly."



Edward R. Murrow, cigarette smoking, gin guzzling reporter took on the cigarette smoking, whiskey drinking junior senator and demagogue from Wisconsin, Joseph McCarthy and the Red Scare hysteria on his program, See It Now, on this date.

Besides being arguably television's finest hour, it clearly demonstrates the powers of gin.


March 9, 1954 -
The first local color television commercial was aired on WNBT television, now WNBC television, in New York. Castro Decorators of New York City, Castro were the folks who made the Castro convertible sofa beds.



The television commercial featured Bernadette Castro opening a big couch into a bed (only the B & W kinescope exists.)

It was so-o-o easy! Let me see you try it.


March 9, 1961 -
Korabl-Sputnik-4, also known as Sputnik 9, was launched with a dog named Chernushka (Blackie) on a one orbit mission. Also onboard the spacecraft was a cosmonaut dummy (whom Russian officials nicknamed "Ivan Ivanovich"), mice and a Guinea pig.



The dummy was ejected out of the capsule during re-entry and made a soft landing using a parachute. The animals were recovered unharmed inside the capsule. Chernushka went on to a successful career as the provincial governor of the Kazakhian region. The Cosmonaut dummy could not be used again as 'Blackie' had spent the entire flight 'having a brief but intense' relationship with the leg of Ivan Ivanovich.


March 9, 1967 -
Josef Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, walks into the U.S. Embassy at New Delhi and asks to defect (some reports have it that she defected on the 6th of March - does it really matter - you don't give a damn.)



Isn't parental love grand?


March 9, 1981 -
Dan Rather succeeds Walter Cronkite as anchor and managing editor of the CBS Evening News.



He was the third person to occupy that seat since the program's 1948 launch. His last broadcast was March 9, 2005.


March 9, 1996 -
Nathan Birnbaum, the comedian Gracie Allen carried around for years, forgot to have his daily martini and died on this date.



Kids, let this be a lesson to us all - not only does alcohol taste good, it's good for you - even if you are 100 years old.


March 9, 1997 -
Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace) was killed in a drive-by outside the Soul Train Music Awards in Los Angeles. The murder has never been officially solved, though an ongoing feud with Death Row Records may have had something to do with it.



Are we lucky that most of us aren't hip hop stars.



And so it goes

This will linger in your mind

I'm not quite sure this commercial works in the way they intended -



I'm not sure the worse thing in the world you might do if you found yourselves naked in a Turkish bathhouse with Charlie Sheen would be is to reenact scenes from Platoon. Remember, Charlie spent $500,000.00 on cocaine and escorts last year.


It's International Women's Day today. It is a major day of global celebration for the economic, political and social achievements of women.



It's convenient that it occurs during Women's History Month.


Purim started last night:



The festival of Purim is celebrated every year on the 14th of the Hebrew month of Adar (late winter/early spring). It commemorates the salvation of the Jewish people in ancient Persia from Haman’s plot “to destroy, kill and annihilate all the Jews, young and old, infants and women, in a single day.”



It's sometimes referred to as the Jewish Mardi Gras or Halloween. (I still like the Poppy seed Hamentaschen more than the fruit filled ones.)


March 8, 1945 -
George Michael Dolenz, Jr., actor, musician, director and circus boy was born on this date.




March 8, 1996 -
The film that put the Coen Bros. into the mainstream consciousness, Fargo, went into limited release on this date.



William H. Macy begged the directors for the role of Jerry Lundegaard. He did two readings for the part, and became convinced he was the best man for the role. When the Coens didn't get back to him, he flew to New York (where they were starting production) and said, "I'm very, very worried that you are going to screw up this movie by giving this role to somebody else. It's my role, and I'll shoot your dogs if you don't give it to me."


Today in History -
March 8, 1933 -
The quintessential backstage musical, 42nd Street, premiered in New York City on this date.



Ginger Rogers took the role of Anytime Annie at the urging of director Mervyn LeRoy, whom she was dating at the time. Illness prevented Mervyn LeRoy from directing, so he handed the reins over to Lloyd Bacon.


March 8, 1941 -
Sherwood Anderson and his fourth wife, Eleanor, were enjoying a well deserved vacation on a ocean liner bound from from New York to Valparaiso, Chile. During a cocktail party on the ship, Anderson was enjoying his olive from a well chilled martini: it would be his last.



Anderson soon became very ill and he and his wife had to disembarked at Colon in Panama and head to a local hospital. He died in agony, two days later on this date. An autopsy revealed that he had accidentally swallowed a small piece of a toothpick (presumably in the martini olive), which had perforated his colon and caused a fatal case of peritonitis.

Not a great way to go.


March 8, 1950 -
Marshal Voroshilov announces the existence of the Soviet atomic bomb.

This baffled the western powers, who were sure they had left it somewhere safe.



33 years later, on this date, the ever swift President Ronald Reagan gets around to calling the Soviets, "an evil empire."


March 8, 1959 -
The apex of the golden age of Television was achieved on this date when Groucho, Chico and Harpo make their final TV appearance together.



It was all down hill from here.


March 8, 1968 -
The Soviet submarine, K-129, sinks in the Pacific Ocean, killing all 97 crewmembers aboard. Later in the year a U.S. submarine secretly retrieves an encryption machine, codebooks, and nuclear warheads from the Soviet vessel.



A further bold attempt is made in 1974 to bring up the entire submarine using the CIA ship Glomar Explorer, built by Howard Hughes. That mission supposedly fails, and is made public by the Los Angeles Times to the great embarrassment of the Agency.


March 8, 1969 -
Mad Monster Party was released by Embassy Pictures for Rankin/Bass Productions, Inc on this date.



The heads of the "Boris" and "Monster" figures are the same basic shape, appropriately enough, with Boris's fine-tuned for a more human appearance and the Monster's for that monsterish look (look at the figures' heads when they're in the same shot, both more or less in profile, during the "greeting the guests" scene!)


March 8, 1999 -
Joseph Paul "Joe" DiMaggio passed away in his Florida home on this date in 1999.



We actually know where he's gone? And since he's been dead for 13 years, we should take our lonely eyes off of him. It's giving me the creeps.


And so it goes.

It is now confirmed - they are Lovey and Thurston Howell III

Yeah, yeah, I know she really didn't mean it, but

saying, I don’t even consider myself wealthy, in any context, when your net worth is well over $200 million dollars, is a tad tone deaf.


March 7, 1936 -
Walt Disney's Mickey's Grand Opera, premiered on this date.



I'm not a big Disney fan (especially Mickey Mouse) but this one is pretty funny. Donald Duck undergoes a major face lift after this cartoon.


March 7, 1962 -
Alain Resnais' enigmatic masterpiece, L'année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad), opened in the US on this date.



I'll tell you the plot - a man meets a woman at a European spa and tries to convince her (and himself) that they met one year ago. According to screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet, the movie is a pure construction, without a frame of reference outside of its own existence - just watch it.


March 7, 1964 -
John Frankenheimer's under- appreciated almost documentary-like thriller set set during WWII, The Train, premiered on this date.



In real life the museum's paintings were indeed loaded into a train for shipment to Germany, but fortunately, the elaborate deception seen in the movie was not really required. The train was merely routed onto a ring railway and circled around and around Paris until the Allies arrived.


March 7, 1986 -
This was a Red Letter Day for Daniel Day Lewis. The stars somehow aligned for him and both My Beautiful Laundrette and A Room With A View, opened in NYC on this date.





Lewis was relatively unknown in the US at that time and critics raved about how great the range of his talent was to play such vastly different characters. (It's called acting)


Today in History:
March 7, 1933 -
Charles Darrow, for some reason claims that he invented The Monopoly board game on this date. Thank your rich Uncle Pennybags.



(Quite truthfully, the history of the Monopoly game is so complicated, for legal reasons, just go with this date, don't ask about Elizabeth Magie's 'The Landlord Game' and her patent of March 23, 1903.)


March 7, 1945 -
Gen. George Patton urinates in the Rhine after the U.S. Third Army takes the bridge at Remagen on this date.

So remember, you can't slap a soldier for cowardice but you can piss in your enemy's river.


March 7, 1955 -
Peter Pan, the first full-length Broadway production broadcast in color, (starring Mary Martin and the show's original cast) was shown on this date.



It was so well received that the musical was restaged again live for television on January 9, 1956. Both of these broadcasts were produced in color, but only black-and-white kinescope recordings survive.


March 7, 1988 -
Transvestite actress Divine (Harris Glenn Milstead,) who appeared in several John Waters films, died from sleep apnea on this date. Divine was about to join the cast of Married with Children when she unexpected stopped breathing.



The producers of Married With Children sent flowers to the funeral, along with a humorous card that read, If you didn't want to do the show, you could have just SAID something!


The Crazy Mixed-Up Russian Revolution
March 7, 1917 -
Russia's 1917 February Revolution began on March 7, which was then the middle of February, in the city of St. Petersburg, which was then Petrograd, in what was then Russia, but would soon be the Soviet Union.



Tsar (or Czar) Nicholas II of the Romanov (or Romanoff) line had been away from St. Petersburg (or Petrograd) most of the winter, leading his army against the German Empire's Eastern Front (or Russia's Western Front).

Russia's peasants and workers had become exhausted by the war and its attendant famine and were exasperated by the Tsarina's indifference to their suffering. They were furious with the government, which had become two governments and therefore twice as bad. And they were tired of all this nonsense about March being February, St. Petersburg being Petrograd, the Czar being Tsar, and all those crazy, mixed-up fronts.



In short, the peasants were revolting. And so these poor bastards began a series of riots and strikes that eventually led to what is now known as the February Revolution.

With her usual delicate touch, the Tsarina tried to assuage the rioters by having them shot, but her soldiers refused to fire on the crowds. She therefore ordered the soldiers to shoot themselves and was disobeyed again.



It was a bleak moment for the House of Romanov, which like most monarchies had endured through the centuries largely as a result of its soldiers' willingness to shoot people.

One Year later:
On March 7, 1918 the Bolsheviks changed their name to the Russian Communist Party.



Bolsheviks is Russian for majority, as opposed to Mensheviks, which means minority. The Mensheviks, however, were in fact the majority party in 1918, and the Bolsheviks the minority, so the name change helped ease the work of journalists, who had become so confused they'd begun writing stories about children and ducks.



And so it goes.