How large is the fries statue?

Other things to occupy your mind with other than COVID-19 - There’s a Big Mac Museum in Pennsylvania.



The Big Mac Museum Restaurant is located in North Huntingdon, Pa. in Westmoreland County, just about 20 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. It was opened by McDonald’s themselves in 2007 to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Big Mac, featuring exhibits such as a 14-foot tall Big Mac and an and 18-foot electronic world map, identifying other McDonalds frachises.


Today is International Animation Day. The day commemorates the first public performance of Emile Reynaud’s Theatre Optique at the Grevin Museum in Paris in 1892.



So Kids make sure you grab a bowl of the sugary breakfast cereal and watch your favorite cartoons.


October 28, 1947 -
An overlooked yet still powerful film-noir, Nightmare Alley, starring Tyrone Power was released on this date.



Twentieth Century-Fox bought the film rights to William Lindsay Gresham's novel in September of 1946 for $50,000 ($626,000 in 2019) at the request of the studio's star Tyrone Power - who wanted to change his screen image as a romantic lead or swashbuckler.


October 28, 1950 -
The eternally 39-year old Benjamin Kubelsky (who was actually 56 at the time,) transitioned his successful radio program to television on this date when The Jack Benny Show premiered on CBS-TV.



In the early years, the program was originally titled The Lucky Strike Program after the show's sponsor, Lucky Strike cigarettes, which had also sponsored Jack Benny's radio program.


October, 28, 1957 -
Federico Fellini's Le Notti di Cabiria (Nights of Cabiria) opened in the US on this date. (A good friend of mine named her daughter after Giulietta Masina. )



Federico Fellini cast film editor Leo Catozzo as the "man with the sack" and wanted to keep that sequence in the release print over the objections of producer Dino De Laurentiis. De Laurentiis thought the scene slowed the film down, finally had to resort to stealing the scene from the editing room. According to DeLaurentiis, about 5-7 years after its original release, Fellini rang him, and begged to get the scene back, so he could restore it. As Cabiria had now achieved a classic status, the producer agreed.


October 28, 1978 -
The group KISS, may have thought that they had dodged a huge career bullet when they turned down appearing in the disasterous BeeGee's Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band fiasco, due to being contractually obliged to star in another feature. Karma though had other thoughts - The Hanna-Barbera produced KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park premiered on NBC-TV on this date.



All four members of KISS deeply regret that they acted in it. They hate the movie and still despise it being created.


Another failed ACME product


Today in History:
October 28, 4004 BC -
You never call, you never write - God.



According to Biblical calculations by our pal, Archbishop James Ussher,



God created Adam and Eve five days after finishing the rest of the universe.


October 28, 1886 -
The Statue of Liberty was dedicated at Liberty Island, New York, by President Grover Cleveland on this date. The statue weighs 225 tons and is 152 feet tall. It was originally known as Liberty Enlightening the World. Lady Liberty, as she came to be called, quickly become a symbol of America, partly because she was such a striking visual symbol of our national reverence for liberty, partly because of the five-dollar hot dogs and ten-dollar plastic replicas sold at her feet.

The statue's inscription was written by poet Emma Lazarus, and attributes the following exhortation to Lady Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!



(Certain misinformed administrative officials misunderstand exactly for whom the light of liberty shines. May I humbly suggest the light shines directly for certain administration officials to be shown the door.)


Exactly thirty-three years later, in 1919, Congress passed a law prohibiting alcohol (The Volstead Act.)



Ultimately, it resulted in toxic, bootlegged alcohol that killed more people than legal alcohol had. With alcohol outlawed, only outlaws had drinks and the atmosphere fosters Mafia encroachment into legitimate businesses. Fortunately there were an awful lot of them and they overturned the law as soon as they were sober enough to vote.


October 28, 1922 -
Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini seizes power in Italy, with the assistance of the Catholic Church. Pope Pius XI declared Mussolini is a man sent by divine providence.



In return for this endorsement, the silly dictator signs the Lateran treaty, restoring papal sovereignty over the Vatican.

But at least the trains ran on time.


October 28, 1948 -
The Nobel committee announces that Swiss chemist Paul Müller had won the 1948 chemistry prize on this date.



He discovered the unusual insecticidal properties of 1,1,1-trichloro-2,2- bis(p-chlorophenyl)ethane. Thanks to Mueller, the world embraces the phenomenal bug-killer... until somebody discovers that the hydrocarbon, popularly known as DDT, also excels at causing cancer.


October 28, 1955 -
William Henry Gates III was born in Seattle on this date.



With the world uneasiness, Bill's agressive coupon clipping has helped him deal with his drop from the number one position to number two on Forbes' world billionaire list. I believe he is holding his own with the 1%ers.


October 28, 1962 -
The Cuban Missile Crisis officially ended when Nikita Khrushchev formally agreed to dismantle the Soviet missiles and remove them from Cuba. In exchange, the US agreed not to invade Cuba and respect its sovereignty.



The world breathed a sigh of relief as the tense situation that almost caused a nuclear war came to an end.


October 28, 1963 -
A New York DJ, Murray Kaufman, played a song from a little known British group on this date.

It is believed that Murray the K's playing of She Loves You by The Beatles on this date, was the first time a Beatles song was played on an American radio station.


October 28, 1965 -
Pope Paul VI issued a decree, Nostra Aetate, which among other things, absolved Jews of collective guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

I can chart my moral decline to this date. When informed of this a few years later, I told my seventh grade religious teacher, "Gee, that was awfully big of him."


October 28, 1965 -
The Gateway Arch in St. Louis, Missouri, the tallest memorial in the US, was completed on this date. The famous arch, designed by architect Eero Saarinen and structural engineer Hannskarl Bandel, is 603 feet (about 184 meters) tall and 630 feet (about 192 meters) wide.



The memorial was built as a monument to Thomas Jefferson and all those pioneers for who St. Louis was the Gateway to the West.


And on a personal note:

Happy Birthday Olivia


And so it goes

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