The truth can now be told about Ugle Christmas Sweaters

(Sorry for the delay in posting - technical issues)

The first Christmas-themed sweaters made an appearance in 1950, produced on a grand scale and quickly becoming popular, but it wasn‘t until the 1980s that the unique piece of clothing made a cultural impact, after appearing in different TV sitcoms.



Shockingly, nearly six million dollars are spent during the holiday season on ugly Christmas sweaters.


December 13, 303 -
It the feast of St. Lucy (Santa Lucia) today. (Early depictions show Lucy offering her eyes on a platter; she is now the patron saint of Sicily and of Opticians.)

Because her extreme beauty attracted too many admirers, Lucy gouged her own eyes out (she had body issues). Miraculously they grew back. After refusing to marry, the Romans forced her to become a whore. She wasn't particularly thrilled with that choice, so she went for door number two and her Roman guards stabbed her to death but not before gouging out her eyes, again.



Oh those wacky early Christians.


December 13, 1950 -
James Dean begins his career with an appearance in a Pepsi commercial on this date.



From the amount of energy all the performers have, it appears they were drinking the original Coke formula.


December 13, 1956 -
The comeback film for Ingrid Bergman, Anastasia, co-starring Yul Brynner, Helen Hayes, and Akim Tamiroff premiered in the US, on this date.



This movie was based on the story of Anna Anderson, a woman who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia. It was later discovered that, in fact, she was not who she claimed to be; the mystery was solved through DNA examination of a small piece of tissue cut from Anna in an operation years before.


December 13, 1975 -
Patti Smith released her debut studio album Horses on this date.



Produced by John Cale, Horses has since been viewed by critics as one of the greatest and most influential albums in the history of the American punk rock movement, as well as one of the greatest albums of all time.


December 13, 1975 -
Richard Pryor hosted NBC-TV's Saturday Night Live on this date.



Fearing Pryor would say things that were too offensive for television at the time, the show was placed on seven-second delay for the very first time



As mentioned in the opening sketch, Pryor requested that Garrett Morris say "Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!" instead of Chevy Chase. Morris' was the only cast member besides Chase to say it during the entire first season.



Gil Scott-Heron was the musical guest that evening.


December 13, 1985 -
The very silly comedy, base on the board game of the same name, Clue, starring Eileen Brennan, Tim Curry, Madeline Kahn, Christopher Lloyd, Michael McKean, Martin Mull, and Lesley Ann Warren premiered on this date.



Three endings were shot, and a different one shown at each theater. All three are included on video. The DVD, however, aside from all three endings, also offers the option to play the movie with one randomly selected ending. In some cities, the newspaper print ads indicated which version ("Ending A", "Ending B", or "Ending C") was being shown at each theater.


December 13, 1995 -
Ang Lee's superb adaptation of Jane Austen's 1811 novel, Sense and Sensibility, starring Emma Thompson (who also wrote the screenplay,) Kate Winslet, Hugh Grant, and Alan Rickman, opened in Canada on this date.



Ang Lee originally was considering Kate Winslet only for the smaller part of Lucy Steele, even though she really wanted to play Marianne. When Winslet arrived at her audition she pretended that her agent had sent her to read for Marianne, and her reading won her the role.


December 13, 1996 -
Cameron Crowe's romantic comedy, Jerry Maguire, starring Tom Cruise, Cuba Gooding Jr., Bonnie Hunt, and Renée Zellweger premiered on this date.



The story for Jerry Maguire is reportedly based on real-life Orange County agent Leigh Steinberg (who makes a cameo in the film as Troy Aikman's agent, which he was in real life). Steinberg's ex-partner David Dunn tried to lure away many of Steinberg's clients, just as Jay Mohr's Bob Sugar does in the film.


December 13, 2003 –
Shake it like a polaroid!

Outkast's single Hey Ya! hit #1 on the Billboard charts on this date.



Andre 3000 wrote the first version of the song around 1999, and it almost made it onto their 2000 album Stankonia. At the time the song was called Thank God For Mom And Dad. He started working on it again in 2002, doing lots of experimentation along the way. A lot of lyrics he wrote for the song didn't make the cut.


December 13, 2013 -
David O. Russell's comic take on the ABSCAM sting of the late 70's, American Hustle, starring Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, Jeremy Renner, and Jennifer Lawrence opened in limited release in the US on this date.



David O. Russell told an interviewer that Robert De Niro didn't recognize Christian Bale on the set, even after they were introduced to each other. De Niro pulled Russell aside, pointed to Bale and asked who he was. First De Niro didn't believe it was Bale, but after Russell convinced him of that De Niro noted, "Wow, he looks really different", and nodded his head as a sign of approval. Russell then had to re-introduce the two, now that De Niro knew who Bale was.


December 13, 2008 –
Beyonce's song, Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) hit #1 on the Billboard charts on this date.



The video has become an internet phenomenon with thousands of homemade versions posted on YouTube. Beyoncé explained to The Sunday Times May 10, 2009 that the idea for the promo was a 1960s film of a Bob Fosse routine, Mexican Breakfast, which featured his wife, Gwen Verdon. She recalled; "I saw a video on YouTube. They had a plain background and it was shot on the crane; it was 360 degrees, they could move around. And I said, 'This is genius.' We kept a lot of the Fosse choreography and added the down-south thing - it's called J-setting, where one person does something and the next person follows. So it was a strange mixture, kind of like the song, which is almost like a nursery rhyme, the 'oh-oh-oh's, and the sinister chords. So it's like the most urban choreography, mixed with Fosse - very modern and very vintage. We'd spent all the budget on the video for (the previous single) If I Were a Boy, and with this song, we didn't even have a treatment. So, it's the least expensive video I've done. Not for a moment did I think, 'This is going to be a movement.'"


Today's Moment of Zen


Frank wasn't the only Rat Packer who celebrated Christmas.


Today in History:
December 13, 1577 -
Sir Francis Drake set out on a three year (and not three hour) long journey around the world, on this date. He had started his career as a sailor in the slave trading business, but after some run-ins with the Spanish, he decided to devote his life to taking vengeance on the Spanish by disrupting their trade routes.



He became a semi-official pirate for Queen Elizabeth I, plundering Spanish ships, gathering intelligence about their naval activities and creating delicious little dessert cakes.


December 13, 1809 -
The first successful abdominal surgery procedure was performed in the US on this date. Dr. Ephraim McDowell removed a 22 pound (about 10 kg) tumor from the ovary of Jane Todd Crawford. Crawford had previously been misdiagnosed as being pregnant with twins. The surgery was performed without anesthetic or antiseptics, but Crawford made a complete and quick recovery.

(Now that you've gotten up off the floor, clutching you belly,) McDowell was called the "father of the ovariotomy," after that and went on to perform similar surgeries, including a hernia repair for President James Polk.


December 13, 1913 -
The initial section of the Lincoln Highway, the first automobile road across United States, was dedicated on this date.



It ran from Newark, New Jersey, to Jersey City, New Jersey. On completion, the Lincoln Highway ran coast-to-coast from Times Square in New York City west to Lincoln Park in San Francisco.


December 13, 1928 -
The Clip-on tie was invented on this date. Productivity soars as time lost in tying knots is made up and accidental strangulation rates drop as fewer workers ties are caught in the gears.



Legend has it that it was a mortician who had too hard of a time tying ties onto his corpses.

Little know fact - the term, Dork, was also coined on this date.


December 13, 1962 -
NASA launches Relay I, the first active repeater communications satellite, aboard a Thor-Delta rocket from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral.

It would transmit its first test patterns on January 3, 1963, once its solar cells are fully charged. Once in service, it would transmit facsimile, telephone, television, and teleprinter signals.


December 13, 1972 -

Astronaut Gene Cernan climbed into his Lunar Module Challenger on the Moon and prepared to lift off on this date. He currently is the last man to set foot on the moon. Besides his footprints, the astronaut left his daughter's initials scrawled in the lunar dust.



The last official words on the moon, as Cernan climbed the ladder, were "God willing, we shall return," he said. What Cernan to his crew, as they prepared to launch from the lunar surface: "All right, let's get this mother out of here and go home."


December 13, 1973 -
Claude Vorilhon, former French race car driver, began the Rael movement in France on this date.

While commuting to his job as a sportswriter, he decided to drive past the office and stop at a nearby volcano in Auvergne. During his stop, Vorilhon saw the flashing red light of a space ship, which opened its hatch to reveal a green alien with longish dark hair. Once aboard the spaceship, he said he was entertained by voluptuous female robots and learned that the first human beings were created by aliens called Elohim, who cloned themselves.



Vorilhon said that he was instructed to take the name Rael and spread the news that humans were placed on Earth by extraterrestrials who had engineered our DNA. In 1997 Rael founded Clonaid, a company dedicated to cloning people. In 2013 the Raelian movement numbered about 90,000 members world-wide.

The French, they are a funny race.


December 13, 1989 -
Taylor Swift was born in West Reading, Pennsylvania on this date. She was named after musician James Taylor.



Swift's mother believed that a gender-neutral name would help forge a business career. Taylor Swift's maternal grandmother, Marjorie Finlay, was a professional opera singer, and inspired Taylor to become a singer.


December 13, 2003 -
Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s nine-month long run from the US military finally came to an end when he was discovered hiding in a hole just nine miles away from his hometown of Tikri, five months after his sons Uday and Kusay were killed in a raid in Mosul.



Following his capture, Saddam was put in Iraqi custody and charged with the deaths of nine villagers, the razing of farmlands, the wrongful arrest of almost 400 Dujail residents and the torture of women and children. He was sentenced to death.

And so it goes