I was hoping for showgirls

Well, Barack Obama ran his infomercial last night and while it wasn't a complete snorefest, he's no Ron Popeil. He was very funny though on The Daily Show with John Stewart.




Here's your Today in History -

October 30, 1863 -
OK kids, try to follow this ...



Danish Prince Wilhelm was a middle child of very famous siblings. His older brother was to become the King of Denmark. His older sister was married to Edward VII, making her the Queen consort of England. His younger sister was married to the Tsar (czar? csar?) of Russia. His parents didn't know what just to get for him. They thought and thought about it and decided that he shopuld become the King of Greece?

Wilhelm arrives in Athens, changes his name to a good Greek name and assumes his throne as George I, King of the Hellenes, on this date. As mentioned previously, Wilhelm/ George's grandson was a sailor named Philip, whose parents were related to themselves and half the other nobility in Europe. Philip had no real prospects of a career, so he did what any blue blooded aristocrat would do with no real prospects, he married up by marrying his second cousin (Elizabeth II of England).

October 30, 1938 -
The War of the Worlds was an episode of the American radio drama anthology series Mercury Theatre on the Air. Directed by boy wonder, Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells' classic novel The War of the Worlds (1898), and was performed as a Halloween special on this date. Welles's adaptation is arguably the most well-known radio dramatic production in history. Both the War of the Worlds broadcast and the panic it created have become textbook examples of mass hysteria and the delusions of crowds.



It has been suggested in recent years that the War of the Worlds broadcast was actually a psychological warfare experiment. In the 1999 documentary, Masters of the Universe: The Secret Birth of the Federal Reserve, writer Daniel Hopsicker claims that the Rockefeller Foundation actually funded the broadcast, studied the ensuing panic, and compiled a report that was only available to a chosen few. A variation of this conspiracy theory has the Princeton Radio Project and the Rockefeller Foundation as co-conspirators.

There has been continued speculation that the panic generated by the War of the Worlds broadcast inspired officials to cover up unidentified flying object evidence, to avoid a similar panic. Indeed, U.S. Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt wrote in 1956, "The [U.S. government's] UFO files are full of references to the near mass panic of October 30, 1938, when Orson Welles presented his now famous The War of the Worlds broadcast."

It's also possible that the aliens hypnotizing Welles and causing him to pass the broadcast off as a drama, when it was indeed factual. You never know.

October 30, 1968 -


Silent film star, Ramon Navarro is brutally beated and left for dead by his assailants, on this date. Novarro's life ended when two Catholic brothers, Tom and Paul Ferguson, whom he had paid to come to his Laurel Canyon home for sex, murdered him. According to the prosecution in the Novarro murder case, the two young men believed that a large sum of money was hidden in Novarro's house. The prosecution accused them of torturing Novarro for several hours to force him to reveal where the nonexistent money was hidden. They left with a mere twenty dollars they took from his bathrobe pocket before fleeing the scene. Novarro died as a result of asphyxiation, choking to death on his own blood after being brutally beaten. According to filmmaker and scandal monger, Kenneth Anger, Navarro actually died after suffocating on a wooden (or silver) dildo (a gift from Rudolf Valentino) the two brothers crammed down his throat.

A very unpleasant end, indeed.



And so it goes