So let's hear it for all the generic Presidents, just remember that we now have to include Trump in this celebration.
February 21, 1964 -
The Rolling Stones release their first single in America, a cover of the Buddy Holly song Not Fade Away.
Phil Spector is credited with playing maracas on the record but in fact he was playing an empty cognac bottle with a 50 cent piece.
February 21, 1967 -
One Million Years B.C., starring Raquel Welch, her pre-historic brassière and a bunch of dinosaur puppets, premiered on this date.
As I've mentioned in the past, folks going to the Creation Museum, this is NOT a documentary.
February 21, 1970 -
The Jackson 5, led by 11-year old Michael Jackson, introduced themselves to America with their TV debut on American Bandstand.
The performances showed not only that the group were amazing performers, but that Michael was a superstar in the making.
February 21, 1981 -
Charles Rocket, first in the long line of performers on Saturday Night Live to drop the f-bomb, cursed live at the end of the episode in response to a question about how it felt being shot during a skit.
Due partially to the violation of broadcast standards, along with Saturday Night Live's low ratings, Rocket and most of that seasons cast and writers were fired shortly thereafter.
(the clip from SNL is no longer available from NBC.)
Little remembered that same evening, Prince appeared, unbilled, late on the show and performed Party Up. It was his first appearance on the show.
February 21, 2008 -
Paul Mawhinney's collection of 3 million vinyl records, amassed over 40 years while he owned a record store in Pittsburgh, was sold on eBay for $3,002,150, on this date. The bid is a sham, it turned out to be an unsuspecting Irishman who said his account had been hacked.
Mawhinney held onto his collection until 2013, when he sold it to the Brazilian collector Zero Freitas.
Mr. Freitas currently now owns over six million records, a collection which he intends to catalogue for public use and transform into a vast listenable archive.
Word of the Day
Today in History:
King James I of Scotland was assassinated on February 21, 1437. (Please feel free to chart the following genealogy, as it may be on the test) James I's grandfather, Robert II, had married twice and the awkward circumstances of the first marriage (the one with James's grandmother Elizabeth Mure - he didn't get around to marrying her until several years and children into their relationship) led some to dispute its validity. Conflict broke out between the descendants of the first marriage and the unquestionably legitimate descendants of the second marriage over who had the better right to the Scottish throne.
Matters came to a head on February 21, 1437, when a group of Scots led by Sir Robert Graham assassinated James at the Friars Preachers Monastery in Perth. He attempted to escape his assailants through a sewer. However, three days previously, he had had the other end of the drain blocked up because of its connection to the tennis court outside, balls habitually got lost in it.
February 21, 1803 -
Edward Despard and six co-conspirators were executed at Horsemonger Lane Gaol, in front of a crowd of at least 20,000 spectators, for plotting to assassinate England's King George III and to destroy the Bank of England. Despard was originally sentenced, with six of his fellow-conspirators (John Wood and John Francis, both privates in the army, carpenter Thomas Broughton, shoemaker James Sedgwick Wratton, slater Arthur Graham and John Macnamara,) to be hanged, drawn and quartered.
This must have been a very pretty sight indeed.
February 21, 1878 -
The first telephone directory was issued with 50 subscribers, by the District Telephone Company of New Haven, Connecticut on this date.
February 21, 1885 -
America's greatest phallic symbol, the Washington Monument, was dedicated by President Chester A. Arthur on this date. The shaft towers over 555 feet into the air and sports an aluminum foreskin.
The monument was the tallest structure in the world when completed.
Talk about feeling inadequate (and talk about smegma.)
February 21, 1916 -
The Battle of Verdun began today, which in nine months yielded 975,000 casualties and almost no change in the front line.
It is the bloodiest battle in history, and often the one remarked as having the "highest density of dead per square yard."
February 21, 1918 -
The last Carolina Parakeet, Incas, died at the Cincinnati Zoo on this date, the only native parrot species in the Eastern US. The species went extinct through a combination of loss of environment and overhunting for their decorative feathers.
Coincidentally, the last Carolina Parakeet died in the same cage in which the last Passenger Pigeon, Martha died.
February 21, 1922 -
The Italian built airship Roma crashed to the ground in Norfolk Virginia after the explosion of the hydrogen caused by the airship coming into contact with power lines turned the dirigible into a blazing inferno causing it to crash 1,000 ft to the ground.
Only 11 passengers and crew survived the crash by jumping from the airship before it hit the power lines.
February 21, 1925 -
97 years ago, the top hatted character Eustace Tilley first appeared on a magazine cover on this date. Eustace Tilley, the mascot of The New Yorker magazine, was based on an engraving of Compte Alfred d'Orsay, interpreted by house cartoonist and art director Rea Irvin.
February 21, 1931 -
Oh, what a relief it is!...
Miles Laboratories introduced Alka-Seltzer® on this date.
February 21, 1933 -
When I was studying... there weren't any black concert pianists. My choices were intuitive, and I had the technique to do it. People have heard my music and heard the classic in it, so I have become known as a black classical pianist.
Singer, songwriter, pianist, arranger, and civil rights activist, Nina Simone (Eunice Kathleen Waymon) was born on this date.
February 21, 1937 -
The first successful flying car made its maiden flight on this date. Developed by Waldo Waterman, the Arrowbile was a hybrid Studebaker-aircraft.
The three-wheeled car was powered by a typical 100-horsepower Studebaker engine. The wings detached for storage. It flew safely but generated little customer interest, and only five were produced.
February 21, 1947 -
Edwin H. Land first demonstrated, the first instant camera, the Polaroid Land camera, during a meeting of the Optical Society of America (OSA) at the Hotel Pennsylvania, in New York City.
The camera produces a black and white photograph in sixty seconds, using development and fixer chemicals sandwiched in pods with the photographic paper and film.
February 21, 1953 -
Francis Crick and James D. Watson came up with a key insight in their discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule on this date. (And yes, they stole information from Rosalind Franklin and James D. Watson is a racist but I'm not going to wade into that thicket.)
At first they were going with a squiggle or smiley face structure until they hit upon the double helix.
February 21, 1965 -
Former Black Muslim leader El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, aka Malcolm X was shot to death on this date, in front of 400 people in New York by assassins identified as Black Muslims.
He was murdered at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan. His wife, Betty Sha-bazz, pregnant with twins, was sitting in the audience along with his 4-year-old daughter Quibi-lah at the time. (New information has come to light, raising questions about two of the three men who were convicted of the 1965 murder, has prompted the Manhattan district attorney's office to take another look at the evidence.)
February 21, 1972 -
Only Nixon could go to China - old Vulcan proverb
To celebrate the 1848 publication of The Communist Manifesto in London on this date, (written by Karl Marx with the assistance of Friedrich Engels) -
Richard M. Nixon (and St. Pat of the Good Republican Cloth Coat) visited the People's Republic of China to normalize Sino-American relations, becoming the first US president to visit a country not diplomatically recognized by the US.
February 21, 1988 -
Television evangelist Jimmy Swaggart of the Assemblies of God, with tears streaming down his face, confessed sinning with a prostitute (Debra Murphree) in a Louisiana hotel room.
A second scandal with yet another prostitute emerges in 1991, further killed his evangelical career. It may not have anything to do with the situation but Jimmy is related to both Mickey Gilley and Jerry Lee Lewis.
February 21, 1995 -
Steve Fossett, a 50-year-old stock broker from Chicago, became the first person to make a solo flight across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon, on this day.
The American businessman, aviator, sailor, and adventurer landed in Saskatchewan, Canada, after taking off from South Korea - and he used the same balloon that successfully carried him across the Atlantic two years earlier. Unfortunately, he was killed in a crash in 2007 while piloting a light aircraft over the Great Basin Desert in California.
And so it goes.
3 comments:
My childhood was spent (or misspent) near the Miles Laboratories main factory. The air usually smelled of vitamins (1-A-Day) as Alka Seltzer was odorless. My uncle ran the shipping department at Miles, so we were never without their various products. A friend somehow acquired the rights to the weird character Speedy Alka Seltzer and made a little money selling them back to Miles' corporate overlords. Memories are made of this.
Ah, those Proustian rushes of childhood. Some come flooding back to us by dipping a cookie into a cup of tea others come back to us by taking our morning vitamins.
an aluminum foreskin, indeed
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