As always, we here at ACME wish to quote that great theologian, my mother, during this holiday season:
Today is Hot Tub Day. Hot Tub Day is an annual “holiday” that serves as a reminder to relax and unwind after a hard day’s work.
Or you could just listen to James Brown.
March 28, 1935 -
Leni Riefenstahl's influential Nazi Propaganda film Triumph of the Will premiered in Germany on this date.
Leni Riefenstahl had been given carte blanche by Adolf Hitler in the making of the film: effectively, the party rally was the first produced-for-camera event.
March 28, 1941 -
Universal Pictures released the B movie, Man Made Monster starring Lionel Atwell and Lon Chaney, Jr. on this date.
Budgeted at a mere $86,000 on a 3-week shooting schedule. It was the cheapest feature film produced by Universal in 1941.
March 28, 1942 -
Another fine Looney Tunes cartoon, The Wabbit Who Came to Supper, was released on this date.
As Bugs steps out of the bathtub and readjusts his towel (at appx 3:00 in), the white tub in the gap between his legs creates the illusion that he is exposing himself.
Try not to go back and look.
March 28, 1963 -
Alfred Hitchcock's follow-up to Psycho, The Birds, starring Rod Taylor and Tippi Hedron premiered in New York on this date.
The classic scene in which Tippi Hedren watches birds attacking the townsfolk was filmed in the studio from a phone booth. When Melanie opens the phone-booth door, a bird trainer had trained gulls that were taught to fly at it.
March 28, 1967 -
NBC broke new ground in television programming by using a world-premiere, feature length movie as the preview of a potential new television series called Ironside, on this date.
I've often wondered what the line item budget was for nipple rouge on this film?
March 28, 1974 -
Writer and comedian, Pat McCormick, carrying a cocktail streaked nude across the set of The Tonight Show starring Johnny Carson, forcing NBC censors to black out the lower half of the screen.
the streaker was arrested and later released, said Carson, for "lack of evidence."
March 28, 1981 –
Blondie's venture into rap, the song Rapture hit no. #1 on the Billboard charts, on this date.
This was the first #1 hit song with a rap. Artists like Grandmaster Flash, Afrika Bambaataa, and Kurtis Blow had been rapping since the mid-'70s, and The Sugarhill Gang cracked the Hot 100 in 1979 with Rapper's Delight, but until Rapture, rap had never been incorporated into a hit pop song.
Another book from the back catalog of ACME Books
Today in History:
March 28, 4 BCE -
According to Des Pascha Comutus, a treatise written in 243 CE (because you know, I sit around and read old Latin treatises all the time,) Jesus Christ's birthday was March 28. It later became the familiar December 25 after the Catholic Church changed it in 336 AD.
So, Merry Christmas everybody.
March 28, 37 -
Caligula took a break from the close relationship he had with his sisters and the unnatural congress he engaged in with his horse, to accepts the titles of the Principate awarded by the Senate and entered Rome triumphantly as Emperor.
Unlike his predecessors, Caligula was the first of the men who would serve as full-fledged emperors, with unlimited power. And luckily for the Roman empire, he was cruel, probably insane and a sexual deviant.
The weekends must have been a blast at the Palace.
March 28, 193 -
The Roman ruler Pertinax was at his palace when a contingent of some three hundred soldiers rushed the gates. Pertinax was somewhat distracted. Ancient sources suggest that the soldiers had received only half their promised donativum (pay or bribe money not to kill him). Pertinax had only been emperor for 86 days and didn't have enough time to sell off the previous Emperor Commodus' property (including the concubines and youths Commodus kept for his sexual pleasures) in the giant fire sale he was having.
Both of the films, The Fall of the Roman Empire and Gladiator, take the same historical event as a starting point.
March 28, 1515 -
... Don't let your sins turn into bad habits....
March 28, 1921 -
Dirk Bogarde (Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde), actor and the epitome of coolness, was born on this date.
Going to the wrong room for a British Broadcasting Corporation audition, the young Bogarde accidentally got a part in a stage play that proved so successful he was hailed as a star overnight.
March 28, 1930 -
Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople
Been a long time gone, Constantinople
Why did Constantinople get the works?
That's nobody's business but the Turks.
(I can't help myself - I just love this song) Constantinople and Angora change their names to Istanbul and Ankara on this date.
March 28, 1941-
Virginia Woolf drowned herself by weighing her pockets with stones and walking into the River Ouse near her home because she had a dream that Nicole Kidman would portray her in a film with a truly horrifying fake nose, on this date.
Lesser writers would have done the same.
March 28, 1964 -
The first pirate radio station began to broadcast off the coast of England on this date. Radio Caroline debuted with a combination of rock music and lively disk jockey who's patter played to a huge audience in Great Britain.
British authorities, tried unsuccessfully, to shut down the radio station ship. Radio Caroline had become competition to the staid and usually dull British Broadcasting Corporation.
March 28, 1979 -
The Unit 2 nuclear power plant (a pressurized water reactor manufactured by Babcock and Wilcox) on the Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania near Harrisburg suffered a partial core meltdown on this date.
The Three Mile Island accident was the worst accident in American commercial nuclear power generating history, even though it led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community.
And so it goes.
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