Friday, February 23, 2018

No doubt people are celebrating -

Today is Curling is Cool day.  I'm not sure how many millions will be lost with the number of people are taking the day off from work.

I will not make the rookie mistake Kirstie Alley did; I will just encourage all those involved, Celebrate Responsibly.



The Eighth Lunar day of the first month is also the birthday of Yen-Lo King, who is fifth king of Legendary Hell in the fifth palace. The fifth palace of the hell is under the northern-east side of the big scorching and burning stone in the sea (location, location, location.) The palace covers an area of 64,000 square miles (cleaning up this place is the work for all those idle hands.) It contains 16 divisions of the small hells.

Yen-Lo King was once in charge of the first palace of the hell. Many times, he sent death people, who died  falsely accused of crimes, back to the human world to have a chance to clear their names. Because of this, he was demoted to the fifth palace of the hell (so literally, there is no rest for the wicked.)


February 22, 1950
-
A nearly forgotten Alfred Hitchcock film, Stage Fright starring  Marlene Dietrich, Jane Wyman, Richard Todd, and Michael Wilding, premiered in New York City on this date.



In an extraordinary move for the normally controlling director, Alfred Hitchcock provided Marlene Dietrich an exceptional amount of creative control for the film, particularly in how she chose to light her scenes. Hitchcock knew that Dietrich had learned a great deal of the art of cinematography from Josef von Sternberg and Günther Rittau, and allowed her to work with this film's cinematographer, Wilkie Cooper, to light and set her scenes the way that she wished.


February 23, 1964 -
The Beatles
appear for the third consecutive appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on this date.  They performed Twist and Shout and Please Please Me and closed the show once again with I Want to Hold Your Hand.



The third broadcast, February 23, showed a performance taped earlier in the day of the original February 9th appearance.


February 23, 1980 –
The Queen's
song Crazy Little Thing Called Love hit the No. #1 spot on the Billboard Charts on this date.



Freddie Mercury
wrote this while Queen were recording in Germany. He wrote it while taking a bubble bath in his room at the Munich Hilton. This sounded a lot more like Elvis Presley than Queen. It was a different sound for the group, but the song is a big fan favorite.


Febrauary 23, 1991
-
Oliver Stones bio-pix about Jim Morrison and his group, The Doors, starring Val Kilmer, Meg Ryan, Kyle MacLachlan, Frank Whaley, Kevin Dillon, and Kathleen Quinlan premiered in Los Angeles on this date.



Prior to production, Val Kilmer lived and breathed Jim Morrison for nearly a year, dressing in his clothes and hanging around his old haunts on Sunset Strip. Morrison biographer Jerry Hopkins says that he saw Kilmer one day when meeting Oliver Stone for lunch, using a payphone in the restaurant, and was so convinced that the first thought that entered his head was, "I'd forgotten how tall Jim was."


Sometimes it shouldn't be 5pm somewhere in the world


Today in History:
February 23, 303
-
Roman Emperor Diocletian issues an edict to suppress Christianity, "to tear down the churches to the foundations and to destroy the Sacred Scriptures by fire". Further edicts require that church officials engage in animal sacrifice to appease traditional Roman gods.



One can only weep that they did not have the lubricant concessions given the kind of orgies that when on that night.


February 23, 1821
-
English poet John Keats died in Rome on this date. Mr. Keats was Romantic and therefore wrote an Ode to a Nightingale, an Ode to Psyche, and even an Ode to a Grecian Urn.



None of them would have him, so the poor man died alone.


February 23, 1861 -
President-elect Abraham Lincoln arrived secretly in Washington D.C. to take office after an assassination plot was foiled in Baltimore on this date. Allan Pinkerton, founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, may have saved Lincoln’s life by uncovering the plot to assassinate the president-elect in Baltimore, Md.



At the detective’s suggestion, Lincoln avoided the threat by secretly slipping through the city at night.


February 23, 1836 -
The Siege of the Alamo began on this date. It was quite an adventure. For years afterward people would sigh, Remember the Alamo?



And they'd kind of nod and smile, but eventually they forgot.


February 23, 1885 -
The British hangman at Exeter Gaol tried three times on this date, to hang John Lee of Devonshire, for the murder of Emma Keyse. The trap refused to open.

His sentence was commuted to life, and he was eventually released.


February 23, 1896 -
The Tootsie Roll
was introduced by Leo Hirshfield an Austrian immigrant, in his small candy shop located in New York City on this date.



He was America's first candy maker to individually wrap penny candy. Current production is over 49 million pieces a day. For many, this day should be a Federal holiday.


February 23, 1903
-
Tomás Estrada Palma, the first president of Cuba, leased Guantanamo Bay to the US in perpetuity on this date.  Guantanamo Bay was the only US military base in a country with which the US did not have diplomatic relations, until the year before last.

Guantanamo Bay is also home to Cuba's first and only McDonald's restaurant.  I'm guessing it's McDonald's fault that we're still in Gitmo.


February 23, 1915 -
Nevada enacts a law reducing the quickie divorce residency requirements down to six months,



a figure further reduced in 1931 to six weeks.


February 23, 1945
-
U. S. Marines raised the flag on Mt. Suribachi (Battle of Iwo Jima) on this date.



The photograph of the event was extremely popular, being reprinted in thousands of publications. Later, it became the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication, and ultimately came to be regarded as one of the most significant and recognizable images of the war, and possibly the most reproduced photograph of all time.


February 23, 1954 -
The students of Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania participated in the first mass vaccination of children against polio with the vaccine (using the dead virus to induce immunization) developed by Jonas Salk, on this date.



Poliomyelitis
is a viral attack of the central nervous system and can cause paralysis and death by asphyxiation (I have nothing else to say.)


February 23, 1996 -
The Freeway Killer William G Bonin was executed at San Quentin on this date. He was the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the history of California.

For his last meal, Bonin requested two large pepperoni and sausage pizzas, three pints of coffee ice cream and three six-packs of regular Coca Cola.

That kind of diet will kill you.



And so it goes.


1064

No comments: