Friday, March 10, 2023

Spring is just around the corner

Every year March 10th is the Festival of Life in the Cracks Day, celebrating the first signs of spring weather, such as the green sprouts sprouting from cracks in the pavement. (Spring is in 10 days)


It a nice way to honor the rebirth and renewal in life, and see beauty and life everywhere as well. It's also the birthday of Chuck Norris



Remember, Chuck Norris can do a wheelie on a unicycle.


March 10, 1938 -
Bette Davis won her second Academy Award and re-ignited her sagging career when Jezebel, premiered in New York City on this date.



Following a quarrel with William Wyler, with whom she was having an affair, Bette Davis embarked on an affair with Henry Fonda that greatly increased tensions on the set. After a phone call from Fonda's pregnant wife, she called things off.


March 10, 1958 -
Big Records released the single, Our Song, by a teenage duo from Queens, New York, Tom and Jerry, on this date.



The duo in a few years will become famous in the '60s under their real names, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.


March 10, 1972 -
Peter Bogdanovich's valentine to screwball comedies, What's Up, Doc?, starring Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Kenneth Mars, and Madeline Kahn, premiered in the US on this date



This film was morphed from the screen adaptation of Herman Raucher's novel, A Glimpse of Tiger. It was to star Elliott Gould and Kim Darby and be directed by Anthony Harvey but Gould behaved erratically during production and, after four days, walked off the set. The project eventually came into the hands of Peter Bogdanovich, who, conceiving it as a remake of Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby switched the genders of the lead couple, making the wild, unpredictable Gould character a woman, who would be played, coincidentally, by Gould's ex-wife Barbra Streisand.


March 10, 1972 -
Universal Pictures released the science fiction film Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull (who just passed away last week,) and starring Bruce Dern, on this date.



To keep costs down, Douglas Trumbull hired college students for modelmaking and other such special effects work. One of them, John Dykstra, went on to a distinguished special effects career of his own.


March 10, 1977 -
The TV movie A Circle of Children, starring Jane Alexander, Rachel Roberts, and David Ogden Stiers and based on the life and book about this by Mary Mac Cracken premiered on CBS TV, on this date.



The film was one of the first to deal sympathetically with the issue of autism


March 10, 1978 -
TV audiences get to see for the first time, the trials and tribulations of Dr David (and not Bruce) Banner and his travels to find the cure for his gamma ray exposure accident when The Incredible Hulk, starring Bill Bixby, Jack Colvin and Lou Ferrigno, premiered on CBS TV on this date.



First appearance of the Hulk making his escape by breaking through a wall and running down an alley (wearing blue pants). This scene was re-used many times over the course of the series.


March 10, 1989 -
Terry Gilliam's fourth film, The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, starring John Neville, Eric Idle, Uma Thurman, and a whole bunch of other people, premiered on this date.



A moon city set was to have been built at Pinewood Studios. However, since there was no money left to do this, Terry Gilliam took the sketches of the designs, and stuck them to a board. The 2D buildings were then moved forwards/backwards and left/right. The result is bizarre and effective.


March 10, 1994 -
The surprise Australian independent hit, Muriel's Wedding, starring Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, and Bill Hunter went into limited release in the US on this date.



The writer/director P.J. Hogan wanted to use the music of ABBA in the film. At first, permission for the music to be used was denied. When the director promised to fly to Europe to plead his case to the founders of the band, permission was granted, as long as the band received a percentage of the film profits. The film turned out to be a big international hit, and thus helped inspire the very successful Broadway show which became the movie Mamma Mia!.


March 10, 1997 -
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon and starring Sarah Michelle Geller premiered on WB Television Network on this date.



The entire first season was filmed before the first episode went to air, giving them the opportunity to go back and re-shoot various scenes. The scene in the library where Buffy states "it's my first day..." was actually filmed on the last day of shooting, after they decided her original performance was too forceful and aggressive. Another scene added to the pilot (to fill in time, as it was shorter than expected) was the infamous "you have something in your eye" scene, where The Master blinds a vampire who had failed him.


Another unimportant moment in history


Today in History:
March 10, 1876 -
It was on this date in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell (Don Ameche) conducted the first successful experiment on a radical new technology. He put a "transmitter" in one room of his home and a "receiver" in another. He connected them with wire. He then shouted into the mouthpiece of the transmitter, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you."



A moment later, his assistant, who had been waiting in the room with the receiver, came into Bell's room and said he had heard and understood everything.



When Alexander Graham Bell finished his invention of the telephone, he noticed he had two missed calls from Chuck Norris.



The invention didn't enjoy much commercial success because the market for persons with out-of-earshot assistants named Watson was not as large as Bell had hoped, but it did serve as a major stepping-stone to one of Bell's most significant inventions, the Watson Detonator.


March 10, 1914
At London’s National Gallery, suffragette Mary Richardson slashes Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver: “I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas. Mrs. Pankhurst seeks to procure justice for womanhood, and for this she is being slowly murdered by a Government of Iscariot politicians.” — her statement was published in The Times, London, the next day.



Emmeline Pankhurst and other members of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), while serving sentences for their activities, went on hunger strikes to protest the horrible conditions at Holloway Prison; the government begins violent force-feedings to prevent them from dying as martyrs.


March 10, 1948 -
The State owned Communist newspaper reported that the Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk was thrown from a window at his apartment in Prague under mysterious circumstances on this date.


Authorities rule his death was a "suicide" and then decide to rule the death as accidentally because he seems to have "fallen while sitting in a yoga position on a window sill to combat insomnia". But most likely he was suffocated first, judging from the fact that he had lost control of his bowels and the deep nail marks on the window sill.

I hate when that happens.


March 10, 1948 -
...By the time a person has achieved years adequate for choosing a direction, the die is cast and the moment has long since passed which determined the future....


Author and artist, Zelda Fitzgerald died in a fire at Highland Hospital, NC, along with eight other inmates on this date.



She was locked in on the 3rd floor while undergoing insulin-induced coma therapy.


I really hate when that happens.


March 10, 1951 -
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover announces that he has turned down an offer to become commissioner of baseball on this date.


The governor of California, Earl Warren, (and soon to be proponent of 'The Magic Single Bullet Theory',) had previously rejected an offer to become baseball's leader. Think how the nation would be different if baseball was able to fit Hoover with a pair of high heel cleats.


March 10, 1977 -
Roman Polanski gave a 13 year old girl Quaaludes and has sex with her during a photo shoot at Jack Nicholson's home on this date. He later fled the country to avoid statutory rape charges.


He would currently be living in Los Angeles (and probably having more fun) if he just went into the bathroom and auditioned his hand puppet alone.


March 10, 1977 -
Astronomers James L. Elliot, Edward W. Dunham and Douglas J. Mink discover rings around Uranus on this date.


Allow yourself to titter and guffaw like a school boy.


March 10, 1980 -
Jean Harris shot and killed her unfaithful lover, cardiologist Herman Tarnower, co-author of The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet in his Purchase N.Y. home on this date.



She was granted clemency on December 31, 1992 by Governor Mario Cuomo after she served 12 years of a 15 year sentence. Harris was released in January 1993. Mrs Harris died in December 2013.

Sometimes, diets make you a little hangry



And so it goes.


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