Cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake

Today is Alfred Hitchcock Day. Since Hitchcock was born in August, and died in April, I have no clue why we celebrate in March - its arbitrary and capricious, which makes me like it even more. (It may have to due to the fact that March 12 is the televised anniversary of his American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Awards.) Besides, it's an hour later than you think, so why not.







But please, feel free to bludgeon someone to death with a leg of lamb and serve it to the police when they come to investigate, in his honor, if you so choose. Save a serving for me (I'll bring the homemade tzaktiki.)


Today is the day to participate in National Plant a Flower Day.



Each year this day is dedicated to the planting of flowers and looking forward to the spring season.


March 12, 1941 -
One of Frank Capra's most iconic films, Meet John Doe, starring Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward Arnold, premiered in New York and Los Angeles on this date.

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Frank Capra didn't want anyone to play John Doe except Gary Cooper, who agreed to the part (without reading a script) for two reasons: he had enjoyed working with Capra on Mr. Deeds Goes to Town and he wanted to work with Barbara Stanwyck.


March 12, 1953 -
John Huston's very off-beat comedy, Beat the Devil, starring Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre and Bernard Lee, premiered in New York City on this date.



John Huston suggested to Humphrey Bogart, that Lauren Bacall might play his wife. "I read your insidious and immoral proposals to my wife," Bogie wrote to Huston in mock anger. "I have instructed Miss Bacall to disregard your blandishments..." Anyway, she was busy shooting How to Marry a Millionaire.


March 12th, 1967 -
The Velvet Underground released their debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, on this date.



The album’s back cover originally featured a shot of the band playing with an image of Eric Emerson’s face from The Chelsea Girls projected prominently in the background. Emerson either needed drug money or was simply broke, so he threatened to sue the record label because he hadn’t signed a photo release. Verve Records pulled the album from record stores and redacted Emerson’s face from the back cover, which was a disaster for the band.


March 12, 1971 -
Robert Wise's taut Sci-Fi Thriller, The Andromeda Strain, opened on this date. (A fun film to watch while you're self-quarantining.)



Screenwriter Nelson Gidding broached the idea to director Robert Wise that one of the four scientists should be a woman. Wise initially envisioned female character being something like Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage and objected strenuously to the change. However, after Gidding described in detail the character eventually played by Kate Reid, and after Wise conferred with actual scientists, he became convinced that it was a positive addition to the story. .


March 12, 1973 -
After six seasons, the last episode of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In aired on NBC TV, on this date.



George Schlatter did not produce the final season, but he won the rights to those episodes in a subsequent court battle. For many years, he neither allowed those episodes to be re-aired, nor any clips to be included in retrospectives. On March 13, 2017, Decades TV was allowed to begin airing the final season.


March 12, 1971 -
John Lennon released Power to the People in the United Kingdom on this date.



Around the time this song was recorded and released, film cameras were constantly recording John and Yoko for the Imagine documentary. Among the footage is John Lennon giving this concise explanation of the song's meaning: "The people are the government, and the people have the power. All we have to do is awaken the power in the people."


March 12, 1982 -
Columbia Picture released the concert film Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, starring Richard Pryor, on this date.



The film was edited together from two live performances that were filmed back to back on December 9 and December 10, 1981. Richard Pryor admitted in his autobiography that he completely messed up his performance during the first filming of the show. Pryor lost his train of thought and forgot most of his material. He apologized to the audience and ended the show early leaving the audience angry. Pryor pulled himself together and gave a much better performance the next night. Most of the footage in the film is from the second performance.


March 12, 1991 -
Warner Bros. Records released the seventh studio album by R.E.M., Out of Time, on this date.



The opening track on Out of Time, Radio Song features the influential rapper KRS-One. R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck explained to Guitar School in 1991: "When we wrote it out, we only had acoustic guitar, bongos, bass, organ, and a 12-string over the chorus. When we got to the studio we added drums, and I put down some funk guitars and we thought, 'Well, gee, now it's kind of a funk song.' And Michael suggested bringing in KRS, since he'd worked with him before" (KRS-One appeared in a public service announcement for Stipe's C-Hundred film production company).


March 12, 1994 -
The Swedish group Ace Of Base's single, The Sign, was No. 1 on the Billboard Charts on this date.



The song went on to be ranked as the number one song of 1994 on Billboard's year-end chart. It was also Arista Record's most successful Billboard Chart single in the label's history, selling over nine million copies in America.


March 12, 2001 -
The Chris Isaak Show, a television sitcom which follows a fictionalized version of the life of American rock musician Chris Isaak, premiered on Showtime on this date.



The character of Mona is based on a real woman at the Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco known as "Dolphina". In the 1930s, a magician worked the joint and rigged up a series of mirrors that would project an image of anyone who was lying on a rotating table in the basement up into the fish tank located behind the bar.


March 12, 2002 –
The Fox Searchligh Pictures sleeper hit Bend It Like Beckham, starring Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, went into limited release in the US on this date.



The chauffeur driver of the Rolls Royce in the wedding scene was not an actor, but an actual chauffeur, and was unaware he was in a film. He believed instead that it was simply a wedding with a lot of cameras. It was only discovered he was in the film when, to their surprise, one of his relatives saw him in the background.


March 12, 2002 -
The Chris Wedgee's film, Ice Age, starring Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Jack Black, and Cedric the Entertainer premiered in this date in the US.



John Leguizamo tried 30 different voices for Sid. After viewing a documentary about sloths, he learned that they store food in their mouths; this led to him wondering what he would sound like with food in his mouth. After attempting to speak as if he had food in his mouth, he decided that it was the perfect voice for Sid.


March 12, 2007 -
Amy Winehouse made her US television debut on the Late Show with David Letterman performing Rehab on this date.



On August 14, 2007, Winehouse entered The Causeway Retreat, a rehab center in Essex, England, with her new husband (and fellow addict), Blake Fielder. Addiction specialists know that admitting a couple to rehab together is a bad idea, but The Causeway was not an ethical institution: it was shut down amid a host of violations in 2010. Winehouse did a few more stints in rehab to treat her drug and alcohol addiction, but it was ultimately unsuccessful. She was found dead in her London home on July 23, 2011.


Another little known Monopoly card


Today in History:
March 12, 538 –
After a year and nine days, the First Siege of Rome during the Gothic War ended when, Vitiges, king of the Ostrogoths retreated to the Gothic capital of Ravenna, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy, leaving the city in the hands of the victorious Byzantine general, Belisarius, on this date.



But what the hell do you care.


March 12, 1888 -
The day before started off seemingly fine - the temperature was mild as a light rain began to fall on March 11th, 1888. And then the weather changed. The rain became heavier and by the next day, the rains changed to heavy snow and buried the unprepared city in drifts of up to thirty feet deep! The temperature plunged and winds reached over eighty miles per hour.



On the first day of 1888 blizzard, Roscoe Conkling, former congressman and US Senator (from NY) was at his law office at 10 Wall Street. Despite the severity of the storm, Conkling decided to walk from his office to his club on Madison Square, even though it was 6:00 PM and already dark, rather than pay the outrageous rate of $50 for a cab ride.



He made it up Broadway as far as Union Square where he (as he later put it): “got to the middle of the park and was up to my arms in a drift…. For nearly twenty minutes I was stuck there and I came as near giving right up and sinking down there to die as a man can and not do it.” But somehow Conkling freed himself and continued up Broadway to Madison Square, where the people at the New York Club could “scarcely believe” he had walked from Wall Street.



Conkling developed a slight cold a few day later and a few weeks later on April 18th, became one of most famous victims of the blizzard. Conkling friends immediately set about to memorialize him with a statue in Madison Square Park. (Apparently the city fathers balked at commemorating Conkling in Union Square amidst George Washington and Abraham Lincoln - he was not that well liked.) Aside from the statue, Roscoe Conkling's greatest legacy was perhaps silent film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, who was reportedly named for Conkling by Fatty's father, who thought that his son was the product of an affair between his wife and Conkling.


March 12, 1894 -
Bottled Coca-Cola was sold for the first time on this date.

Since its initial creation in 1886, Coca-Cola was sold only as a fountain drink unti Vicksburg, Mississippi confectioner Joseph Biedenharn thought of bottling the beverage in the same manner he had been bottling soda water and offering it for sale to those who could not always make it to town to visit one of his three soda fountains.


March 12, 1912 -
Juliette Gordon Low organized the Girl Guides, which later became the Girl Scouts of America, at the 1848 Andrew Low House in Savannah, Ga. on this date.



Mrs. Low rented a carriage house for "club rooms" for the Girl Guides on the property of a prominent family in Georgia, the Nash family. Ogden Nash, 10 years old in 1912, grew up to be a well-known poet; he immortalized "Mrs. Low's House" in one of his poems. The Nash family continued to pay rent for the carriage house even after it was converted for use by the Girl Guides, becoming one of the first financial supporters for the fledgling movement.



On May 29, 2012, the centennial of the Girl Scouts was commemorated when Low was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.


March 12, 1918 -
Today episode on the Wacky World of the Russian Revolution -

Russia's peasants and workers are still exhausted by the war and its attendant famine. The Tsar and Tsarina are past caring about their suffering - they were under arrest. The Russian peasants and workers are still furious with the government, which had become two governments and therefore twice as bad. And they were tired of all this nonsense about March being February, St. Petersburg being Petrograd, the Czar being Tsar, and all those crazy, mixed-up fonts.

So what does the country do - move the capital from Petrograd to Moscow, as well as move the central headquarters of the Red Army there, on this date


March 12, 1922 –
At the end of the Second World War, America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. Each bomb killed so many people so quickly and made the world so safe for peace-loving democracies that America began feeling pretty good about things and forgot all about being depressed, etc. This caused the hula-hoop, the soda fountain, and the young Annette Funicello.



Not everyone could master the hula-hoop, however, and the alienation experienced by those who couldn't resulted in the development of an American counterculture.



Scoffing at the traditional values of mainstream America, the counterculturalists experimented with bold new ideas. They forsook the established middle-class pleasures, such as wine, women, and song, in favor of radical new ones, such as sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll.



Born 103 years ago today, Jack Kerouac was a child of the Depression and a veteran of the Second World War. He was therefore torn between these competing value systems and roamed the country aimlessly in search of grammar and punctuation.



The adventures described in On the Road were based loosely on his real-life travels with the infamous Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, whose insatiable appetite for borscht led Kerouac to dub them "The Beet Generation."


March 12, 1930 -
Mahatma Gandhi began his historic Salt March to the sea, a protest against British salt taxes in India.



The crowd of marchers grew as Gandhi walked for 24 days, a 240-mile trek (390 km) to the beach at Dandi where he produced salt without paying any tax to the nation’s British rulers, sparking similar acts nationwide.


March 12, 1932 -
Ivar Kreuger, the so-called Swedish Match King, (at one time, he controlled two thirds of the worldwide match production) committed suicide in Paris on this date, leaving behind a financial empire that turned out to be a massive Ponzi scheme.



The 'Kreuger crash’ shook Wall Street and led to a 1933 Securities Act, which strengthened disclosure requirements for all companies selling stock.

Bernie Madoff, who pleaded guilty to 11 federal felonies on this date in 2009, was a piker compared to Kreuger.


March 12, 1938 -
Germany enters Austria in the Anschluss, to annex it as part of Grossdeutchland.



Oh those wacky Germans and their World Domination Tour.


March 12, 1945 -
...The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be....



Annelies Marie Frank was thought to have died, a day after her sister, Margot, at Auschwitz on this date.


March 12, 1955 -
Bird Lives.

Charles Parker, Jr., one of the most influential jazz musicians, died on this date while while watching Tommy Dorsey on television.



Due to many years of drug and alcohol abuse, the coroner who performed his autopsy mistakenly estimated Parker's 34-year-old body to be between 50 and 60 years of age.


March 12, 1969 -
Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman on this date.



George Harrison and Patti Boyd missed the ceremony because they had been arrested earlier that day when a very large amount of hashish was found in their home. I guess their wedding gift never got to the newlyweds.


The World Wide Web turns 37 today (or not, please you get your own blog and post what you want.)



When Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal, his boss was the first of many people who didn’t get it initially. His manager described the web as “vague but interesting”.


March 12, 2000 -
Pope John Paul II asked God's forgiveness for the many wrongs committed by the Roman Catholic Church on this date. The pardon he requested divided into seven categories of Church sin, including sins against the Jews, against native peoples of the world, the crimes of the Inquisition, and general crimes against humanity.

This pardon was requested only for past sins, and apparently did not ask for it to apply to the Church's many, many, many ongoing sins. Let us continue to pray that Pope Francis has the strength to continue asking for all of that forgiveness.


Before you go - Please say Happy Birthday to Mike Geier,



best friend of Puddles Pity Party -



And so it goes.

Assumptions are Dangerous Things

Most people believe that dropping a penny off the top of the Empire State Building would kill a pedestrian walking below - scientists determined that a penny "traveling at terminal velocity cannot penetrate concrete or asphalt." It won't cause serious damage to a person, and even at the speed of sound, will still not damage flesh. At most, it could sting a little.



Some people still believe that you can see the Great Wall of China from outer space. NASA confirmed that you actually can't see it from the final frontier. Although the fact was debunked by Chinese astronaut, Yang Liwei, the textbooks were never changed, and will often still claim this as true.



Today is Debunking Day. The day gives everyone the chance to set the record straight on whatever false and inaccurate pieces of information have been troubling them the most. There should be a little bit more truth in the world after today because much that is untrue will have been debunked.

So now you know


Today is also World Plumbing Day. It is an international event, initiated by the World Plumbing Council, held on March 11 each year to recognize the important role plumbing plays in societal health and amenity.





I should make sure I'm wearing a belt today.


March 11, 1950 -
A very funny Bugs Bunny cartoon, directed by Chuck Jones, Homeless Hare, was released on this date.



When Bugs falls into the rain water barrel and regains his senses after taking an I-beam to the head, he laments that "This isn't Saturday night." Bugs is referring to the common practice of rural and farm people of taking one bath a week, usually on Saturday night, so they can be clean for church the next day.


March 11, 1956 -
Laurence Olivier's version of William Shakespeare's Richard III became the first film to have its U.S. premiere in theaters and on TV simultaneously, when NBC-TV broadcast the film on the same day it had its U.S. premiere in New York, on this date.



Laurence Olivier used long takes throughout this movie to allow the actors and actresses to build their scenes more theatrically. His opening soliloquy was shot in one nine-minute take. When he almost dropped the King's crown in the first scene, rather than re-shoot, he used the accident to create a motif for the movie.


March 11, 1961 -
Kenneth Sean Carson, the cultural icon from Willows, Wisconsin and Barbie’s go-to counterpart, was introduced at the American International Toy Fair, on this date.



For those wondering where Barbie and Ken met, their official story is that they met on the set of their first commercial together in 1961.


March 11, 1967 -
Pink Floyd released one of the best songs about underwear stealing transvestites, Arnold Layne on this date.



Pink Floyd's first single; it was not used on an album. In promotional materials to accompany the single, the band's record company, EMI, wrote: "Pink Floyd does not know what people mean by psychedelic pop and are not trying to cause hallucinatory effects on their audience."


March 11, 1968 -
In the episode of The Monkees, Monkees Blow Their Minds that aired on this date, Frank Zappa appeared as Mike Nesmith and vice versa, debating qualities of each other's music. Many a young mind was blown today.



The song heard while Michael Nesmith and Frank Zappa play the car is Mother People by Frank's band The Mothers of Invention from the 1968 album We're Only in it for the Money.


March 11, 1970 -
Federico Fellini's take on ancient Rome, Fellini - Satyricon (Another movie had registered the title Satyricon first. Federico Fellini fought to use the title for his movie but lost the case. Subsequently the title was changed to Fellini - Satyricon) premiered in the US on this date.



According to an episode of the NPR-WNYC radio program Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!, future fitness guru Richard Simmons is in this film. An American student living in Rome in the late 1960's, he was cast as an obese nobleman in the banquet scene.


March 11, 1970 -
The first album by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, Déjà Vu was released on this date.



Rolling Stone magazine ranked it #148 on the 500 greatest albums of all time. It was certified 7-times platinum with over 8 million copies sold, and spent 88 weeks on the Billboard chart. It remains the highest-selling album of each member’s career to date.


March 11, 1974 -
The beloved Emmy and Peabody winning children's TV special, Free To Be ... You and Me, produced by Marlo Thomas premiered on ABC-TV on this date.



The basic concept was to encourage post-1960s gender neutrality, saluting values such as individuality, tolerance, and comfort with one's identity. A major thematic message is that anyone—whether a boy or a girl—can achieve anything.


March 11, 1994 -
The Coen Bros. send-up of '30s screwball comedies, The Hudsucker Proxy, starring Tim Robbins, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Paul Newman went into general release in the US on this date.



Paul Newman had been approached about the project in 1984 but turned it down due to not having done much comedy work before although he liked the film and encouraged the Coens to go ahead without him. The Coens instead waited ten years until he agreed to do it.


March 11, 1994 -
One of the most successful Rom-Com films of all times, Four Weddings and a Funeral, starring Hugh Grant, Andie MacDowell, Kristin Scott Thomas, Simon Callow, Corin Redgrave and Rowan Atkinson went into limited release in the US on this date.



For several years after its release, this movie was the highest-grossing British movie in history, with worldwide box office in excess of $260 million.


March 11, 2006 -
James Blunt's single You're Beautiful goes to No. #1 on the Billboard charts on this date.



This song is often heard as very romantic, but there's something a little unhinged about this subway encounter that leads him to near obsession and compels him to make "a plan."


Another episode of ACME's Little Known Animal Facts


Today in History:
March 11, 222 -
Most of you with teenagers think that yours are the worst, but no, Ancient Rome had the worst by far, the Emperor Elagabalus.

His real name was Varius Avitus Bassianus but as he developed an intense interest in worshiping the Syrian god Elagabal, became High Priest of the cult and so had his name changed to Elagabalus. After the death of his grandfather, father and cousin within a year, Elagabalus, all of 14, found himself the Emperor of the known world (this is not to say, the millions of people living in Asia, Africa, Australia and the New World, even had a clue who this snarky teen was.) Rather than even thinking of governing, Elagabalus immersed himself in heavy drinking and self-worship (very intense sodomy - it is rumored that he had engaged in a sexual act ever hour he was awake for the entire four years he was Emperor - think about it - he had sex over 23,000 times in four years), leaving the affairs of the state mostly in the hands of his grandmother Julia Maesa,



Elagabalus was probably the first famous transsexual, rumored to have consulted his physicians about an early version of a sex-change operation. Having found this impossible, he took a series of male lovers, chosen by the enormous size of their private parts. When Elagabalus was involved in a rigorous diet of sodomy, he also was getting drunk. Legend has it that he and his friends had gotten so drunk that when Elagabalus had a shower of rose pedals dropped on his dinner guest, many of them had suffocated under the weigh of the flowers.



Finally the Pretorian guard had enough of Elagabalus notorious excesses (but let's be clear about this; like most of the GOP, the Roman elite professed a disgust of homosexuality yet vigorously engaged in it.)

On this date, the Praetorian Guard hunted down the young emperor in a private bathroom and executed him as he clung desperately to his mother.



March 11, 1302 -
This is the anniversary of Romeo and Juliet's wedding day, according to Shakespeare.



I've seen all of these websites that can offer to help you plan a romantic wedding 'just like Romeo and Juliet', does that mean you have to kill yourself shortly after the honeymoon?


March 11, 1669 -
After a series of premonitional earthquakes near, the largest volcano in Europe spectacularly erupted, destroying the Sicilian town of Nicolosi and killing 20,000 people.

Were there no virgins to toss into the volcano to appease the gods back in 1669?


March 11, 1811 -
Ned Ludd (not a real person) led a group of workers in a wild protest against mechanization on this date. Members of the organized bands of craftsmen who rioted against automation in 19th century England were known as Luddites and also Ludds. The movement, began near Nottingham as craftsman destroyed textile machinery that was eliminating their jobs. By the following year, Luddites were active in Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire and Leicestershire.

Although the Luddites opposed violence towards people (a position which allowed for a modicum of public support), government crackdowns included mass shootings, hangings and deportation to the colonies. It took 14,000 British soldiers to quell the rebellion. The movement effectively died in 1813 apart from a brief resurgence of Luddite sentiment in 1816 following the end of the Napoleonic Wars.



I'm still waiting for the anti-Tesla movement - Smash the cars! (Or just get them soaking wet - that's what I hear anyway.)


March 11, 1818 -
Frankenstein, "The Modern Prometheus," was published on this date. The book started out as basically a scary story told on a rainy night. That is, if you are telling scary stories to England's greatest romantic poet and his best friend, Europe's most notorious clubfooted, bisexual poet.



The book, by 21-year-old Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, is frequently called the world's first science fiction novel.


More on the Wacky Russian Revolution:
On March 11, 1917 the Russian Cabinet finally became indignant and tried to dissolve the Duma, but the Duma refused to dissolve. The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies also refused to dissolve, even though the Cabinet had not asked them to dissolve.

(The Cabinet could not ask them to, because the Cabinet had determined that The Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies did not exist.)


March 11, 1927 -
Samuel Roxy Rothafel opened The Roxy Theatre in New York City, a 6,214 seat movie theater at 153 West 50th Street at 7th Avenue, on this date. It was designed by Chicago architect Walter W. Ahlschlager.

The opening night film was The Love of Sunya produced by and starring Gloria Swanson. The Roxy was overshadowed by the opening of Radio City Music Hall in the Rockefeller Center in NYC in 1932.

The Roxy closed and was demolished in 1960, and Swanson was famously photographed on October 14, 1960 by Time-Life photographer Eliot Elisofon in the midst of the ruins during the theater's demolition.


March 11, 1931 -
F. W. Murnau (born Friedrich Wilhelm Plumpe,) one of the most influential German film directors of the silent era, was out for a relaxing drive with his fourteen-year old Filipino valet Garcia Stevenson, when Mr. Murnau failed to heed one of the basic tenets of auto safety - it was rumored that Murnau decided to perform fellatio on the young driver.

Mr. Murnau and Mr Stevenson were involved in a car crash and both died on this date.

Kids, let this be a lesson to us all - for heaven's sake, please pull over if you decide to polish the knob of the driver of your automobile. (Also insist on a more secure grave - back in 2015, grave robbers stole Murnau's skull, in some quasi-occult ritual.)


March 11, 1957 -
Charles Van Doren, darling of the American public, lost to Vivienne Nearing on the rigged TV quiz show Twenty One when both are asked to name the kings of Norway (Olav V), Denmark (Frederick IX), Sweden (Gustaf VI Adolf), Jordan (Hussein), Iraq (Faisal II), and Belgium (Baudouin).



Doren "missed" - the king of Belgium.


March 11, 1958 -
A B-47 bomber drops a nuclear bomb in the town of Mars Bluff in South Carolina. While it did not detonate a nuclear explosion, conventional explosives within the bomb left a 75 foot crater, destroying one house and damaging five others.



The government has to send out hundreds of 'oops' letters to the town's residents.


March 11, 1969 -
Levi Jeans added Bell Bottoms to their line of Jeans which had become fashionable as part of the hippie counterculture movement.



Though the actual creation of the first pair of bell-bottoms is unknown, the first mention of bell-bottom pants was in 1813 in reference to the uniforms of U.S. Navy sailors.


March 11, 1997 -
Thirty years after being admitted as a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), Paul McCartney was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for his contributions to popular music and to British culture, and for his charity work.



"Proud to be British, wonderful day and it’s a long way from a little terrace in Liverpool," McCartney told reporters.


March 11, 1977 -
After gunmen held three buildings in Washington, D.C. during a 39-hour siege, all 149 hostages were freed on this date, thanks to ambassadors from three Islamic nations - Egypt, Iran, and Pakistan.



They, the diplomats, courageously intervened with police, reading to the 12 Hanafi Muslim gunmen passages from the Quran to demonstrate Islam’s compassion and mercy, and urging them to surrender.


March 11, 2004 -
In Madrid, Spain, a series of 10 bombs hidden in backpacks exploded in quick succession at three stations, blowing apart four commuter trains on this date. 191 people were killed and over 1,450 were wounded. Spanish leaders were quick to accuse Basque terrorists but a shadowy group claimed responsibility in the name of al-Qaeda.



On October 31, 2007, three lead defendants were convicted of murder. Four other top suspects were acquitted of murder but convicted of lesser charges. In all 21 of the 28 defendants were convicted. On July 17, 2008, a Spanish court cleared four of the 21 people charged for crimes related to the train bombings. In 2009, seven people were indicted for helping the bombers flee.


March 11, 2011 -
An earthquake and a tsunami sparked one the most severe atomic accident since Chernobyl at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant in Japan.



Over 81,000 jobs were lost due to the tsunami and the future of the plant and surrounding area still remains uncertain.



And so it goes.

You can not hold back nature

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.

Today is also International Day of Awesomeness. It's a day for celebrating all things awesome, and everything awesome that you, your friends, and everybody else does.



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, 1956 -
The musical adaptation of the play High Tor, starring Bing Crosby, Nancy Olsen and Julie Andrews (in her TV debut) aired on the Ford Star Jubilee program on CBS, on this date.



Stephen Sondheim also set a musical version of the play High Tor, but Maxwell Anderson refused permission, so the Sondheim musical adaptation was never produced. Subsequent copyright extension acts mean the Stephen Sondheim music will be illegal until 2042.


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, 1960 -
The crime thriller based on the novel The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, Purple Noon starring Alain Delon, and directed by René Clément, opened in France, on this date.



Author Patricia Highsmith, expressed satisfaction with the film, which she called "very beautiful to the eye and interesting for the intellect," and with Alain Delon's performance as Tom Ripley. She was, however, disappointed with the film's ending, calling it "a terrible concession to so-called public morality."


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



Peter Bogdanovich did not get permission from the city of San Francisco to drive cars down the concrete steps in Alta Plaza Park; these were badly damaged during filming and still show the scars today. Because of the damage to city property during the filming of this movie, San Francisco now requires productions to provide with its filming permit application a very detailed scene-by-scene breakdown of everything that the company is asking permission to film.


March 10, 1972 -
Universal Pictures released the science fiction film Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull , 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, 1979 –
Poco's single Crazy Love went to No. 1 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary charts on this date.



Crazy Love was the first single by Poco to reach the Top 40 and remained the group's biggest hit.


March 10, 1983 –
Despite the production value and Michael Jackson's star quality, MTV didn't play the video Billie Jean until the song was already a #1 hit. Les Garland, who ran the network at the time, claims that they loved the video and played it as soon as they could, but interviews with executives at Jackson's record company and with others familiar with the matter suggest otherwise.



In the book I Want My MTV, multiple sources who worked at MTV claimed that the network wanted to air the Beat It video first, because Eddie Van Halen played on it and the song fit their format. Walter Yetnikoff, who was head of CBS Records (Jackson's was signed to its subsidiary, Epic), recalls threatening to pull all CBS videos from MTV if they didn't play Billie Jean. He says he threatened to bring Jackson's producer Quincy Jones in on it as well, and the network acquiesced. MTV broadcasted the video of Michael Jackson’s song Billie Jean for the first time, on this date.



When MTV started playing the clip, it was first put in medium rotation, then promoted to heavy rotation when viewers loved it. The video for this song is often credited with breaking the color barrier on MTV. When the video for Beat It was delivered, that one also went into hot rotation. For a two-month stretch in the summer of 1983, both videos were getting constant airplay, establishing Jackson as a video star. His next video effort was for Thriller, which revolutionized the form.


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.


Today's moment of Zen


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.


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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 -
... Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold ....

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


March 10, 1988 -
An avalanche hit the British royal party including King Charles (Prince of Wales at the time,) as they were ski-ing off piste above the resort of Klosters in Switzerland, on this date.



Charles and several other members of the party, including their guide, were able to ski to safety, but one of the Prince's closest friends Major Hugh Lindsay, former equerry to the Queen is not so lucky.



And so it goes.