Today is National Vice President's Day -

It's the day to consider the succession plan of the President of the United States.





The day also acknowledges the one president who was neither elected vice president nor president –



Gerald Ford.


August 9, 1930 -
A forerunner of the cartoon character Betty Boop made her debut in Max Fleischer's animated short Dizzy Dishes on this date.



In later films she loses the dog ears and becomes the familiar human character we know today.


August 9, 1944 -
Another brilliant war-time effort by Preston Sturges, Hail the Conquering Hero, once again starring Eddie Bracken premiered on this date.



When the six Marines, led by Sgt. Heffelfinger (William Demarest) are in the nightclub and go to see who bought them a beer, the scene at the bar lasts for 5 minutes, 11 seconds in one continuous shot. Eddie Braken as Woodrow Truesmith impressively manages to include in his dialogue a long list of battles the Marines fought in from 1775 through 1944 when the film was in production.


August 9, 1963 -
The first ever edition of Ready Steady Go! was shown on UK TV. Introduced by Keith Fordyce and 19 year-old Cathy McGowan. The first show featured The Searchers, Jet Harris, Pat Boone, Billy Fury and Brian Poole and The Tremeloes.



The final show was in December 1966 after 175 episodes. Originally 30 minutes long, it expanded to 50 minutes the following year, and soon attracted the most popular artists, including The Beatles, The Lovin' Spoonful, The Rolling Stones, The Four Tops, The Kinks and many others.


August 8, 1969 -
Three Dog Night released a cover version of the song Easy To Be Hard, on this date.



The song was from the 1967 rock musical Hair. It was written by Galt MacDermot, James Rado, and Gerome Ragni, who put the musical together in the mid-1960s.


August 9, 1969 -
Sly and the Family Stone released the single Hot Fun In The Summertime, on this date.



The song was released as a standalone single but has shown up on many compilations. It came at a time when Sly & the Family Stone were at their peak, shortly before Sly Stone slid into a drug-induced abyss, taking the band down with him. Sly became very unreliable and their music suffered. In 1972, key members Larry Graham and Gregg Errico left, and in 1975 the band broke up. Over the next 30 years, Stone made sporadic appearances but never staged a full-fledged comeback.


August 9, 1975 -
The Bee Gees single, Jive Talkin', reached No. #1 on the Billboard charts on this date.



This was the first big disco hit for The Bee Gees. They became icons of the era, singing in falsetto harmonies over dance beats. They had seven more #1 hits in the disco era, but the band went out of style at the same time as white leisure suits. The group, which had considerable success in the late '60s and early '70s, took a lot of heat in the press. This criticism - accusations of selling out and creating popular schlock - stung, and took a toll on the group. They would often point out that disco became homogenized in the years after they got to it, and that their sound was really an extension of R&B.


August 9, 1988 -
Edie Brickell & the New Bohemians release their debut album, Shooting Rubberbands At The Stars, the title a reference to their longshot chances of making it big, on this date.



The first single is the easygoing, introspective What I Am, which stands out from the dance music and hair metal on the charts and becomes a surprise hit.


Today's moment of Zen


Today in History:
August 9, 378 (Or what ever the hell the date was on the calendar they were using at the time) - Valens, the Roman Emperor of the East, led an army of 30,000 men against a horde of Visigoths outside Adrianople, on this date. The Romans got off to a good start, but soon the Visigoth cavalry returned from its foraging mission. The Roman infantry was no match for the Visigoths on horseback and two-thirds of the Romans, including the Emperor, were slaughtered.



Military strategists were at last compelled to acknowledge that guys on horses were stronger than guys who weren't on horses. This was the most significant development in western warfare since the discovery of the big stick and European warfare was permanently and irreversibly altered in favor of guys on horses.


Construction began on Il campanile della Cattedrale di Santa Maria Assunta (Tower of Pisa) began on this date in 1173. Unfortunately it was still the Dark Age and without the proper illumination, tower started to lean almost immediately after construction began because of an improperly laid foundation (this was possibly the only thing improperly laid in Italy.)



Construction was delayed almost 200 years because the Pisans were almost constantly working on other projects like inventing Marinara sauce and The Renaissance.


August 9, 1492 -
Rodrigo Borgia allowed the Cardinals of Rome to inspect his genitals (a practice subsequently bequeathed to Bishops). Only after he had proved to the Cardinals' satisfaction that he was, indeed, a man, was Mr Borgia permitted to be Pope Alexander VI.



As the noted historian Orson Welles observed in The Third Man: "In Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love -- they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."



Rodrigo Borgia had earned the papacy the old-fashioned way: through nepotism and bribery. Once he had it, he turned it into a family institution. His two legitimate children, Cesare and Lucrezia, were alternately married off to cement alliances, divorced or widowed to initiate hostilities, or dispatched with poison to conduct diplomacy.

When out of town on business, he left Lucrezia in charge of the Papacy. In gratitude, she bore him a son.



(Many scholars repudiate this charge, insisting that the Pope could not possibly have fathered his own daughter's child. They assign paternity to Lucrezia's brother Cesare.)

By 1503, Alexander VI had expanded Rome's powers considerably and was therefore poisoned. Three years later Cesare died while fighting as a mercenary in Spain. Lucrezia died in 1514 from complications of pregnancy. That was more or less the end of the Borgias, and the Papacy has become less and less interesting with the passing of every year since.


August 9, 1944 -
Smokey Bear debuted on this date, when the U.S. Forest Service and the Ad Council agreed that a fictional bear would be the symbol for their joint effort to promote forest fire prevention.



Artist Albert Staehle was asked to paint the first poster of Smokey Bear. It depicted a bear pouring a bucket of water on a campfire and saying “Care will prevent 9 out of 10 fires.”


August 9, 1945 -
Just three days after Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, a second atomic bomb (a 22 kiloton Atomic Bomb) called Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, population 270,000, by the U.S. B-29 bomber Bockscar. Though the amount of energy generated by the bomb was significantly larger than that of the Little Boy, the damage to the city was slighter than that inflicted upon Hiroshima due to the geographic structure of the city.



The blast kills 24,000 immediately, but another 46,000 perish from radiation-related illnesses over the next four months.



Interesting side note - One man survived both the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and then later Nagasaki.



Tsutomu Yamaguchi was a 29-year-old Naval Engineer on a three-month business trip to Hiroshima. On August the 6th 1945, the Enola Gay dropped its atomic payload on the city. Yamaguchi was less than 2 miles from ground zero and was thrown into a potato patch. He survived the blast and was able to make a perilous journey through the devastated city to the railway station.



From there, on August the 7th, he boarded a train on an overnight ride to his hometown of Nagasaki. On the morning of August 9th, he was with some colleagues in an office building when another boom split the sound barrier. A flash of white light filled the sky. Yamaguchi emerged from the wreckage with only minor injuries on top of his current injuries. He had survived two nuclear blasts in two days.


August 9, 1969 -
Charles Manson and his band of "children" committed the first in a series of grisly murders high in the Hollywood Hills on this date. The unfortunate victims, including Sharon Tate, were probably not the intended targets of this crime.



Rumors have it that Charlie was looking for record producer Terry Melchar (Doris Day's son) who turned him down for a record contract. Melchar was away and rented the house to Tate at the time.


August 9, 1974 -
After President Richard M. Nixon resigned from office,



his successor, Gerald Ford, assures the American people that their "long national nightmare is over."



Ford was the only person to hold the office of US Vice President and US President without being elected to either office. He also served on the Warren Commission.

Coincidence, you decide!


August 9, 1995 -
Jerry Garcia died of a heart attack at Serenity Knolls near Novato, California, on this date.



He had checked himself into the drug rehab center a few days prior, in hopes of kicking his longstanding heroin habit.



And so it goes.