It's time once again for Mama Bear TV

Children, it's time once again for Sarah Palin Explains History, don't ya' know.



I believe Piper Palin has expressed it in the most elegant way, "Mommy, can we go home now?"

Yes Piper, it's time for mommy to go home.


June 4, 1070 -
Roquefort cheese was accidentally discovered in a cave near Roquefort, France, when a shepherd found a lunch he had forgotten several days before.



This was a very brave (or very hungry) shepherd. Remember, this is an estimated date - the Post wasn't around to document this momentous event.


June 4, 1938 -
Another extremely funny Warner Bros. Cartoon, Porky the Fireman, was released on this date.



The director, Frank Tashlin, is one of the few directors to successfully make the transition from animation to live-action, noted especially for his work with Jerry Lewis.


June 4, 1963 -
The Nutty Professor, arguably Jerry Lewis' best directorial effort, was released on this date.



While the film is a loose parody of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it has been said that the character of Buddy Love was a skewering of his former show business partner Dean Martin.


June 4, 1982 -
Paramount released the epic Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (which should have been titled, Battle of the Outrageous Toups) opened on this date.



According to Mr. Montalban - that's his own chest, baby! During publicity for the movie, during an appearance on The Tonight Show, Montalban explained that he was able to achieve the look seen in the film by doing push-ups. "A lot of push-ups."

On the same day, Paramount released the horror classic, Poltergeist.



The skeletons that emerge from the swimming pool while Diane searches for help are actual skeletons. JoBeth Williams didn't know this until after the scene was shot.


Today in History:
The Freemasons were officially founded in London on June 4, 1717.

The Freemasons are not a secret society of assassins. They do not have Cesar Borgia's head preserved in an urn. They were not responsible for the French Revolution. They did not kidnap Anastasia Romanov. They are not in control of the Hale-Bopp comet. They did not invent horseradish.

They were masters of masonry, however, and they ushered in a golden age of making things out of rocks.

Freemasons first appeared in England and Scotland in the 1300s, not long after the first appearance of the Loch Ness monster but well before the advent of crop circles. Most laborers of the era were villains and therefore prohibited from travel; since most stone masonry projects (such as cathedrals, churches, and big piles of rocks) required specialized training and large numbers of workers, however, stone masons were permitted to travel freely. They became known as Freemasons; their curious lunchboxes came to be known as mason jars.



Whenever the freemasons arrived in town to start work on a new project, they set up a common area where they could meet one another, receive their pay, get food, train apprentices, rest, and get roaring drunk. These came to be known as lodges.



As the centuries passed, the Freemasons did less and less work with rocks and more and more drinking at lodges. Today, the Freemasons are a friendly social organization with a secret handshake, and are therefore believed to be responsible for selling out the governments of the world to an invading extraterrestrial army.


June 4, 1783 -
I have not been washing very thoroughly for many years now.



The Montgolfier brothers publicly demonstrate their montgolfière (hot air balloon) on this date. (It's always a red letter day when you can have Monty Python illustrate a date in history for you.)


June 4, 1798 -
Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt, Venetian adventurer and author, died in relative obscurity as the librarian of Count Waldstein of Bohemia on this date. The Count often ignored him at meals and failed to introduce him to important visiting guests. More over Casanova, the testy outsider, was thoroughly disliked by most of the other inhabitants of the Castle of Dux. Casanova’s only friends seemed to be his fox terriers.



In despair, Casanova considered suicide, but instead decided that he must live on to record his memoirs, which he did until his death.



His main book Histoire de ma vie (History of My Life), part autobiography and part memoir, is regarded as one of the most authentic sources of the customs and norms of European social life during the 18th century. His last words are said to have been “I have lived as a philosopher and I die as a Christian.”


June 4, 1965 -
The Rolling Stones release Satisfaction on this date.



In 2004 Rolling Stone magazine placed Satisfaction in the second spot on its list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.


June 4, 1984 -
Bruce Springsteen releases Born in the USA on this date.



The song was in part a tribute to Springsteen's friends who had experienced the Vietnam War, some of whom did not come back; it also protests the hardships Vietnam veterans faced upon their return from the war. The song, unfortunately, was widely mis-interpreted as purely nationalistic by those who heard the anthemic chorus but not the bitter verses.


June 4, 1989 -
Tiananmen Square protests (also know as the "June Fourth Incident") were ended in the typical manner of a totalitarian regime - with the People's Liberation Army soldiers and tanks.



Amnesty International estimated anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 Chinese democracy advocates were killed on this day. The Chinese government puts the death toll at 241. To celebrate the 20 year anniversary of the massacre, critics have been put under house arrest, newspapers and popular web sites and search engines have been censored by the Chinese government, in an effort to 'erase' the incident from the public conscience.

Once again, I'm not making any friends with the Chinese government.



And so it goes.