It's National Peanut Butter Day

Why not celebrate the lowly legume Arachis hypogaea. Except for the 1.5% of students allergic to peanuts, children will eat 1,500 peanut butter and jelly sandwiches before they graduate high-school.



It takes 550 peanuts to make a 12 ounce jar of peanut butter. So unless the goober, which by itself, is an incomplete protein; your day is complete.


January 24, 1927 -
Alfred Hitchcock's first film, The Pleasure Garden, went into general release on this date in England.



Although shot in 1925, and shown to the British press in March 1926, the film wasn't actually released in the UK until after The Lodger, his third film, was a massive hit in 1927.


January 24, 1939 –
George Stevens' adaption of Rudyard Kipling's Poem, Gunga Din, starring Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen, Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Sam Jaffe premiered in Los Angeles on this date.



Budgeted at almost $2 million, this was the most expensive film RKO had produced to that date. It was nearly a half million over budget. The film was second only to Gone with the Wind as the biggest money-maker of 1939.


January 24, 1940 -
John Ford's film version of John Steinbeck's novel, The Grapes of Wrath, starring Henry Fonda, premiered in New York City on this date.



Henry Fonda kept the hat he wore in the movie for the rest of his life, until before he passed away in 1982 he gave it to his old friend Jane Withers. Apparently he and Withers, when she was an eight year old girl and he a young man, did a play together before Fonda made movies. Fonda was so nervous to go onstage that little Jane took his hand, said a little prayer to ease his nerves, and the two of them became good friends for life.


Another moment of zen


Today in History:
January 24, 41 -
Roman emperor and crackpot Caligula was assassinated by his bodyguards on this date. His last words apparently were, "I am still alive! Strike again."



Yeah, yeah, I know you know that the Roman Emperor Caligula made his horse a senator and a god, married his sister, slept with the horse, slept with the potted plants ...



I guess this guy got more unnatural things done in a day then most of us do in a lifetime.


January 24, 1848 -
James W. Marshall found gold at Sutter's Mill near Sacramento, starting the California Gold Rush on this date.



According to the Gold Institute, less than two million ounce's of gold were mined during the height of the California Gold Rush in 1849.


January 24, 1908 -
The first Boy Scout troop was organized in England on this date, by its founder, Robert Baden-Powell, a man who enjoyed seeing and photographing, just a little too much, naked boys swimming.



I wonder what Baden-Powell would think (a noted repressed homosexual) now that girls and openly gay boys (but not transgender boys) can join the scouts.


January 24, 1922 –
Christian K. Nelson of Onawa, Iowa was granted a patent (US patent No.#1404539) for his ice cream dessert covered in chocolate ( The ‘Eskimo Pie’.)



Mr Nelson invented Eskimo Pie, America's first chocolate covered ice cream bar, in his home laboratory in 1920. The ice cream bar quickly rose in popularity in America. By 1922, Nelson was earning $2000 per day in royalties on his product.


January 24, 1925 -
A motion picture of a solar eclipse was recorded by the United States Navy from the dirigible USS Los Angeles, about nineteen miles east of Montauk Point, Long Island, New York on this date.



It is the first time a dirigible has been used for astronomical observations in the U.S.


January 24, 1947 -
...I missed jazz, kind of. And by the time I came to it in life, it was too intimidating to enjoy thoroughly.







Warren William Zevon, singer-songwriter and musician, was born on this date.

Remember kids - keep enjoying every sandwich.


January 24, 1949 -
It's all false pressure; you put the heat on yourself, you get it from the networks and record companies and movie studios. You put more pressure on yourself to make everything that much harder.



John Adam Belushi, actor and comedian, was born on this date.


January 24, 1961 -
Mel Blanc, The Man of a Thousand Voices, was involved in a near-fatal auto accident on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, California on this date. Hit head-on, Blanc suffered a triple skull fracture that left him in a coma for three weeks, along with fractures of both legs and the pelvis.



The accident prompted over 15,000 get-well cards from anxious fans, including some addressed only to "Bugs Bunny, Hollywood, USA", according to Blanc's autobiography. One newspaper falsely reported that he had died. After his recovery, Blanc reported in TV interviews, and later in his autobiography, that a clever doctor had helped him to come out of his coma by talking to Bugs Bunny, after futile efforts to talk directly to Blanc. Although he had no actual recollection of this, Blanc learned that when the doctor was inspired to ask him, "How are you today, Bugs Bunny?", Blanc answered in Bugs' voice. Blanc thus credited Bugs with saving his life.


January 24, 1965 -
After telling his son-in-law, Christopher Soames: "I am so bored with it,"  Winston Churchill, at age 90, never again makes an intelligible remark to anyone and died on this date.



Churchill died at his home at 28 Hyde Park Gate in London shortly after 8:00 a.m. on the seventieth anniversary of the death of his father, Sir Randoph Churchill.


January 24, 1972 -
Shoichi Yokoi, despite the fact that the war had been over for more than 27 years, was still at his post in Guam. Yokoi was unaware that the war had ended, and had been hiding out in the jungles of Guam since American troops occupied the island in the 1940s.

He refused to surrender until his old commanding officer, who had retired from the military for more than 20 years, was found and told him to stand down on this date. He was the last Japanese soldier from World War II to surrender.


January 24, 1978 -
The nuclear-powered Soviet Cosmos 954 satellite plunges through Earth's atmosphere and disintegrates, scattering radioactive debris over parts of Canada's Northwest Territories. Much of the satellite landed in the Great Slave Lake; only about 1% of the radioactive material was recovered.

Hey, I hope we all enjoyed that smoked salmon from Canada in the late 70s.


January 24, 1986 -
Note to Leah Remini: keep fighting the good fight - otherwise nothing to read here, move on.

Crackpot and founder of the fraudulent Scientology movement, L. Ron Hubbard died on this date (laughing his ass off about the crap he made up.) His bad science fiction writing has grown alarmingly prolific in the years since his death.



And so it goes.


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