Feel good about wasting your time

More than six months after Hurricane Sandy, people in the Rockaway area are still in need of food.  The Toyota Company has helped an emergency food distribution company, Metro World Child, to develop ways to deliver more food, more quickly, to more New Yorkers in need, using their production systems. Filmmakers Henry Joost & Ariel Schulman, creators of the feature films Catfish and Paranormal Activity 3 and 4, have made a short documentary about this charity's effect to become more efficient.



More importantly, Toyota will donate one meal to The Food Bank for every view the clip gets (up to 1.25 Million Meals.)  Yes, Toyota is monetizing your eyeball but are you doing anything more important with it at the moment?


It's National Chocolate Eclair Day. While the eclair is a delicious dessert, their charms escape me.

Maybe it's the fake vanilla pudding most bakeries use rather than Bavarian cream.


June 22, 1946 -
Another of the classic 40's Daffy Duck cartoons, Hollywood Daffy, was released on this date.



The director of the cartoon was an uncredited effort by Friz Freleng.


June 22, 1949 -
Possibly, the most talented actress of her generation, Mary Louise Streep,was born on this date.



She has a deviated septum, which she refuses to have fixed.

Imagine if she took her looks more seriously, how far her career would go.


June 22, 1961 -
A great old-fashion thriller, The Guns of Navarone, was released on this date.



Despite the narrated prologue setting the "historical background", this is a work of fiction. There was no such mission, because there never were any guns of Navarone.


June 22, 1966 -
Mike Nichol's first film, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, opened on this date.



The movie was one of a series of films in the 1960s to successfully challenge the Production Code Office. In addition to the compromise on language described below, Warner Bros. studio head, Jack L. Warner, undercut the Code's usefulness by arranging to have the film released with the "For Adults Only" and required theaters to prohibit selling tickets to unaccompanied minors, which in effect unofficially created the Restricted rating years before the Motion Picture Association of America abandoned the Production Code for a classification system (G-GP-M-X) in 1968.


June 22, 1966 -
The first screenplay of Woody Allen's produced, What's New Pussycat?, starring Peter O'Toole, Peter Sellers (and co-starring Woody Allen) premiered in the US on this date.



Richard Burton appears in a cameo with Peter O'Toole in a scene in a bar where Burton asks O'Toole "Don't you know me from someplace?" and O'Toole responds "Give my regards to what's her name." The dialogue is a reference to their appearance together in Becket and to Burton's wife at the time, Elizabeth Taylor. Woody Allen later said of the Burton cameo, "It was so cute, you want to vomit."


June 22, 1969 -
The patron saint of bachelors of a certain age, Judy Garland died of a barbiturate overdose in her London apartment, either by accident or suicide.



Folks, she did not do a header into the toilet and drown.


June 22, 1993 -
I have sacrificed everything in my life that I consider precious to advance the political career of my husband ...



The patron saint of long suffering political wives and good Republican cloth coats, Thelma Catherine "Pat" Ryan Nixon died on this date.


Today in History:
June 22, 1633 -
The Holy Office in Rome strong-armed Galileo Galilei into recanting his scientific view that the Sun, not the Earth, is the center of the Universe.

This was the second time he was forced to recant Earth orbits Sun by the Pope. Almost immediately, on October 31, 1992, the Vatican admitted it was wrong.


June 22, 1906 -
Billy Wilder was born on this date. Not surprisingly, Mr. Wilder would go on to produce Some Like It Hot, starring Marilyn Monroe, Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon, all of whom frolicked giddily on the beach in bikinis. Mr. Wilder, you see, was comfortable in his season.



Not like some people. Some people had to force it. Some people had to prove something. Some people were like Brian Wilson, who was born the day before summer (June 20) in 1942, and subsequently became a "Beach Boy" and released an album called Endless Summer.


June 22, 1918 -
The worst circus train wreck in history occurred just outside Hammond, Indiana on this date. A seriously over-tired engineer, Alonzo Sargent, fell asleep at the throttle of a trainload of empty Pullman cars and slammed into the rear of the 26-car Hagenbeck-Wallace circus train.

86 of the 400 performers and workers on board were killed. There were no reports on whether or not the crowd at the previous days performance was greater than the gawkers at the scene of the wreck.


June 22, 1933 -
German chancellor Adolf Hitler banned every political party on this date, except his own Evil Nazi Bastards from winning elections.



The Evil Nazi Bastards swept the next elections, demonstrating the public's strong support for this measure.


June 22, 1940 -
Eight days after German forces overran Paris, France is forced to sign an armistice on this date; hilarity ensues.



Adolf Hitler forces the instrument of surrender to be signed in the very railcar in which the French inflicted the humiliating World War I Treaty of Versailles upon the Germans. (In a bizarre co-incidence, it was also the anniversary of Napoleon's second abdication in 1815.)


June 22, 1941-
The German Army invades Russia, quickly destroying five Russian armies and one fourth of the Red air force. At completion of the war in 1945, nearly 27 million Soviets were dead.



Thus ended the German- Soviet "Peace and Friendship" Treaty.


June 22, 1968 -
This Guy's in Love with You by Herb Alpert topped the charts on this date.



Alpert's previous material consisted of instrumental songs recorded with The Tijuana Brass Band. This was his first released on A&M Records that contained vocals. He had released vocal recordings for another label, Dot Records, under the assumed name of Dore Alpert.



And so it goes.