Kids, you can take a quick check of the whole naughty/ nice thing and see how you are doing.
Michael Jackson, resplendent in his celestial robes, has been singing in Heaven for a decade now. More importantly to his earth bound relatives, Michael continues to support the various members of the Jackson factions quite nicely. Death hasn't put a crimp in his record sales.
Farrah Fawcett also died ten years ago today. I don't believe she's singing with any heavenly children's choir.
There is no connection between these two events but it's also the birthday of Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou:
George would have been 56 this year.
June 25, 1938 -
Another in the series of 'books come alive', Have You Got Any Castles? was released on this date.
Among the many entertainment personalities caricatured in relation to book titles are: Bill Robinson/The Thirty-Nine Steps, Greta Garbo/So Big, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, The Mills Brothers/The Green Pastures, William Powell/The Thin Man, Clark Gable/The House of the Seven Gables, Paul Muni/The Story of Louis Pasteur, Charles Laughton/Mutiny on the Bounty, and Victor McLaglen/The Informer.
June 25, 1949 -
That's the nice fat opera singer ...
One of Chuck Jones famous Bugs Bunny opera parodies, Long Haired Hair, premiered on this date.
Leopold Stokowski never conducted with a baton. This is the reason why Bugs Bunny, impersonating Stokowski, promptly breaks the baton before conducting, and conducts using such dramatic hand gestures.
June 25, 1963 -
One of Federico Fellini's greatest films,Otto e mezzo, (8½ ), opened in the US, on this date.
8½ was shot, like almost all Italian movies at the time, completely without sound recording on set. All dialogue was dubbed during post production. Fellini was known for shouting direction at his actors during shooting, and for rewriting dialogue afterwards, making a lot of the dialogue in the movie appear out-of-sync.
June 25, 1982 -
The greatest dystopian Sci- Fi film (at this point), Blade Runner, opened on this date.
Ridley Scott was dismayed to discover that American crews operated very differently from British ones (this was Scott's first American film). In his native UK, Scott was primarily a camera operator and would always step behind the camera to see through the viewfinder himself. This wasn't common practice in America and led to much tension between director and crew. Scott also frustrated cast and crew by continuously making changes to sets and story. Screenwriter David Webb Peoples, who was asked to re-write the screenplay throughout the shoot, often found that his re-writes were already obsolete by the time he handed them in.
On the same day, Universal Pictures releases the sci-fi horror film John Carpenter's The Thing directed by John Carpenter and starring Kurt Russell.
The producers consider the film's disappointing box office performance was down to the fact that people were flocking to a more benign interpretation of an alien presence on earth - Steven Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial which was released several weeks beforehand.
Besides the fact that both films opened on this date, the similarities don't end there: both movies met with unfavorable reactions at the premiere but became widely loved sci-fi classics in the years to come.
June 25, 1993 -
Possibly the greatest Meg Ryan 'chick flick' (which may seem redundant to some,) Sleepless in Seattle, premiered on this date.
In Everything Is Copy, the 2015 documentary about Nora Ephon's life and career, Tom Hanks reveals that there was another child actor cast as his character's son, Jonah, before Ross Malinger, but Ephron thought the first kid was not working out and she fired him. Hanks avoided specifying who that first child actor was.
Today's moment of Zen
Today in History:
June 25, 841 -
June 25, 1876 -
This is a little cautionary tale about pissing off the wrong people.
This is the native way a sending a very serious message.
June 25, 1903 -
Eric Arthur Blair was born on this day in eastern India, the son of a British colonial civil servant. He burned to be a writer but had no success get people to look at his work, so he was forced him into a series of menial jobs.
Finally he became a Famous Author and even a Great Writer, but by then he was dead, whatever his name was.
June 25, 1906 -
A love triangle came to a violent end atop the original Madison Square Garden as architect Stanford White, the building's designer, was shot to death by Harry Thaw, for an alleged tryst White had with Thaw's wife, Florence Evelyn Nesbit.
Thaw, tried for murder, was acquitted by reason of insanity. At the time this was called "The Crime of the Century."
June 25, 1910 -
The Mann Act, sometimes known as the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910, makes it a federal crime to convey or assist in transporting women across state lines for prostitution, debauchery, or "any other immoral purpose." Men convicted of this heinous (if vague) statute face up to five years and a $5,000 fine for each count. Penalties are doubled if the female is underage, (but men and boys are apparently not covered.)
Unless you're into guys - then it's smooth sailings.
June 25, 1967 -
The first live, international, satellite television production, Our World, was broadcast on this date. Among the featured performers were opera singer Maria Callas, artist Pablo Picasso and a small English skiffle group called The Beatles.
When the The Beatles' appearance on the program was announced, John Lennon wrote the song especially for the occasion. He was told by the BBC: it had to be simple so that viewers would tune in.
I guess he was right.
June 25, 1978 -
The rainbow flag, created by Gilbert Blake, was flown for the first time in the San Francisco Gay Freedom Day Parade, on this date.
Mr Blake, 65, passed away last year in his sleep at his home in New York.
Begin to scare the children -
And so it goes.
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