Better late than never

(Just got back and am just able to post)

It's Milk Chocolate Day today. In 2000, chocolate consumption was 3.323 billion lbs; in 2010, chocolate consumption was 3.616 billion lbs. If you don't keep this increase in chocogorging, the terrorist have won.



(Psst, I've mentioned this before - it is a conspiracy organized by a large Mid Western Syndicate of Big Sugar corporations and dentists.)


July 28, 1948 -
Bud and Lou's biggest box-office success, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, opened on this date, (this was one of my favorite childhood films.)



Marks the first time Universal-International stopped using the effective but lengthy application time of make-up artist Jack P. Pierce for the monster make-up, using Bud Westmore and Jack Kevan's more cost-effective rubber appliances. The rubber head appliance that Glenn Strange wore to play the Frankenstein monster fitted him so tightly that, after a few hours under the hot lights, he could shake his head and hear the sweat rattling around inside it.


July 28, 1954 -
The Elia Kazan classic, On the Waterfront, premiered in New York on this date.



Elia Kazan was loath to do business with Darryl F. Zanuck who had insisted on multiple cuts on Man on a Tightrope. Fortunately when Kazan and writer Budd Schulberg met with Zanuck, he started talking about widescreen Technicolor pictures. Zanuck eventually came clean and said he didn't like a single thing about it, stating "Who's going to care about a bunch of sweaty longshoremen?" This led Kazan and Schulberg to meet with independent producer Sam Spiegel who set up a deal with Columbia.


July 28, 1954 -
One of Bogart's best late work, The Caine Mutiny, premiered in New York on this date. (Bogart was already seriously ill with esophageal cancer, although it would not be diagnosed until January 1956.)



This marked a spectacular comeback for director Edward Dmytryk, formerly one of the "Hollywood Ten" who had been jailed for contempt of Congress and for lying under oath while being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee because of his former membership in the American Communist party. The irony should not be lost on anyone that this film and Kazan's On the Waterfront opened on the same date.


Today in History:
July 28, 1540 -
King Henry VIII married his fifth wife, Catherine Howard on this date.



To celebrate his nuptials, Henry had his chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, executed.

It must have been some reception.


July 28, 1794 -
Maximilien "The Incorruptible" Robespierre who had dominated the Committee of Public Safety during the 'Reign of Terror,' was having an extremely bad day. The day before, lobsters throughout France grew tired of his dictatorial ways and staged the Coup of Thermidor, relieving him of his power.



Maximilien Robespierre was relieved of his head and guillotined for having ravaged the French meteorological cycle with his nefarious Rain of Terror on this date.


July 28, 1835 -
King Louis Philippe of France survived an assassination attempt by Giuseppe Maria Fieschi, who rigged 25 guns together and fired them all with the pull of a single trigger, killing approximately 18 people but not his intended target

Fieschi was wounded in the attack and the King spared no expense in tending to the injuried of his trigger happy would be assassin. Once Fieschi was deemed medically fit, he was tried, condemned to death and was guillotined on February 19, 1836.

Perhaps he should have spent more time on the practice range.


July 28, 1841 -
James Boulard and Henry Mallin pull the decomposed body of a young woman from the Hudson River near Hoboken, New Jersey. Mary Cecilia Rogers, who worked at a popular cigar store, is initially thought to have been killed in the course of a brutal gang rape, but ultimately it seems more likely that she died from a botched abortion.

Years later, novelist Edgar Allen Poe adapts the sensational news story about "The Beautiful Cigar Girl" into the short story The Mystery of Marie Roget.


July 28, 1914 -
One month after the recent assassination of the Archduck Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, on this date.



World War One was underway. In just four years, it would claim 8.5 million lives and leave 21.2 million wounded, and lay the groundwork for an eventual rematch.

Sometimes family feuds just get out of hand.


July 28, 1945 -
A US Army B-25 bomber crashes into the Empire State Building between the 78th and 79th floors. An engine plunges down an elevator shaft, sparking a fire in the basement. Eleven people in the building are killed, in addition to the three man bomber crew. Elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver survived a plunge of 75 stories inside an elevator, which still stands as the Guinness World Record for the longest survived elevator fall recorded.



And as of this morning, it's still standing.

(And folks - Please, this clip doesn't prove or disprove any 9/11 Conspiracies.)


July 28, 1957 -
A C-124 Globemaster II cargo plane of the US Air Force left Dover AFB in Delaware, carrying three nuclear weapons jettisons its precious cargo into the Atlantic, somewhere east of Delaware and New Jersey, on this date. The bombs are never recovered.

Remember every time you go to a beach off the Jersey Shore, a 200 foot radioactive mutant Blue Crab is lurking. Either that or Governor Christie is skinny-dipping again.



And so it goes.