Because of a legacy of Mao Tse-tung and the Communist Party’s desire for unified control, China, almost as wide as the continental United States, has officially only one time zone — Beijing time.
September 9, 1966 -
ABC-TV premiered, at the time, the highest budgeted science fiction series, The Time Tunnel, Rendezvous with Yesterday, on this date.
Each episode of the show ended with a cliffhanger to the next episode. The final episode had a cliffhanger leading to the repeat of the first episode. Thus each episode had its own unique cliffhanger, both coming and going.
September 9, 1967 -
The animated sci-fi series Birdman and the Galaxy Trio produced by Hanna-Barbera debuted on NBC on this date. (An easy bar bet to win: Birdman and the Galaxy Trio never appeared together in any of the episodes.)
In 2000, the Carton Network premiered a series Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law, a parody of the Birdman series, featuring cameos by many Hanna-Barbera cartoon characters, usually appearing as parody versions of "themselves". For example, one episode featured The Flintstones mixed with elements of The Sopranos.
September 9, 1971 -
Imagine, John Lennon's second solo album and most popular of his solo works, was released on this date.
The imagine concept came from Yoko Ono, who was very much into open-mindedness and using your imagination. In 1964, she published Grapefruit, a book of "instructions and drawings" that established the lyrical concept for the song.
September 9, 1975 -
The sitcom Welcome Back Kotter, starring Gabe Kaplan, debuted on ABC-TV on this date.
The original title of the series was to be simply Kotter, but that was before composer John Sebastian had difficulty writing the theme song lyrics. He couldn't find enough rhyming words for the title. Giving up on that tack, he decided to compose lyrics that illustrated the premise of the show in a song called, Welcome Back. The producers were so impressed with the song that they decided to change the series title to Welcome Back, Kotter. The song was also released on a single which went to #1 on the charts.
September 9, 1977 -
David Bowie taped an appearance on Marc Bolan's ITV show, Marc, on this date, singing Heroes as well as a duet with Bolan, Standing Next To You, which was prematurely terminated when Bolan fell from the stage, much to Bowie’s amusement. (The show aired on September 28.)
After the show, the pair recorded a rough outline of a new song, Madman, which were never finished because Bolan was killed in a car crash a week later.
September 9, 1978 -
A Taste of Honey's song Boogie Oogie Oogie topped the charts on this date.
A Taste of Honey were a US R & B group formed in Los Angeles in 1972 by Janice Marie Johnson (bass/vocals), Hazel Payne (vocals/guitar), Perry Kibble (keyboards) and Donald Johnson (drums). They won the 1978 Grammy Award for Best New Artist, beating out Elvis Costello and The Cars. A Taste Of Honey had one other hit: their cover of Kyu Sakamoto's Sukiyaki went to #3 in the US.
September 9, 1978 -
The Rolling Stones released their hit, Beast of Burden on this date.
Keith Richards wrote this, but a lot of the lyrics were improvised in the studio. While the band played, Mick Jagger came in with different lines to fit the music. As a result, some of the lyrics are less than meaningful and a little repetitious. This song could be allegorical - it was written by Keith as a kind of homage to Mick for having to carry the band while Keith was strung out on heroin: "All your sickness I can suck it up, throw it all at me, I can shrug it off."
September 9, 1992 -
During a performance at the MTV Video Music Awards, Nirvana played Lithium, ending in a grand finale where bassist Krist Novoselic tosses his instrument high into the air. When he tries to catch it, he misses, and the bass whacks him in the head.
Nirvana wanted to play Rape Me at the Video Music Awards but MTV wanted Smells Like Teen Spirit. Kurt Cobain had to check out of rehab to attend the show, and had made comments disparaging MTV in the past. At rehearsals, a standoff ensued where MTV threatened to go nuclear, banning not just Nirvana, but other acts from their label if they didn't fall in line. Lithium was the compromise, but Nirvana made the network sweat, playing a few seconds of Rape Me before going into their agreed-upon song.
September 9, 1995 -
Coolio's classic, Gangsta's Paradise (from the movie Dangerous Minds), featuring L. V. topped the charts on this date.
Gangsta's Paradise was a reworking of Stevie Wonder's 1976 song Pasttime Paradise. Coolio updated the lyrics to make it relevant to life on the streets in the mid-'90s.
Another moment of edifying culture
Today in History:
September 9, 1087 -
William the Conqueror died of internal injuries, sustained six weeks prior in a horse riding accident at Mantes-la-Jolie.
Don't you just wish they had television back then.
September 9, 1890 -
131 years ago today a little boy named Harland was born in Kentucky.
When Harland was six, his father died and his mother was forced to go to work. Little Harland did most of the cooking for his younger siblings. By the age of seven he was a master of the local cuisine.
There was no stopping the ambitious Harland, who had his own highway service station in Corbin, Kentucky, by the time he was forty.
He began cooking for hungry travelers who stopped at his service station. He didn't own a restaurant, so he served them at his own dining table. Word of his excellent cooking spread (secret combination of eleven herbs and spices) and soon he moved across the street to a restaurant that seated 142 people.
His cooking soon became so well known that his state's governor, Ruby Laffoon, made him a colonel.
In an independent 1976 survey, Colonel Harland Sanders was ranked as the world's second most recognizable figure.
September 9, 1947 -
At the Naval Weapons Center in Dahlgren, Virginia, Grace Murray Hopper records the discovery of the first actual computer “bug” by the computer’s operators at 3:45pm in her log book with the explanation, “First instance of actual computer bug being found.” The bug is literally just that, a moth which had become stuck in Relay #70 on Panel “F” of the Harvard Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator. When they extracted the culprit with tweezers, they taped it into the logbook along with the official report.
Legend has it that Hopper, a naval officer and famous mathematician, was the one who found the bug, but she will state categorically that she wasn’t there at the time. The urban legend will crop up that this was the first-ever use of the word ‘bug’ in this context, but that’s not true. Thomas Edison used the term bug when discussing electrical circuits as early as the 1870s. It is, however, the first time the term “debug” is used. The log book will later be preserved by the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
September 9, 1956 -
Elvis Presley made his first-ever appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, performing four songs for guest host Charles Laughton on this date.
Ed himself had vowed never to have Presley on his show, but Sullivan was at home this evening, recuperating from a severe head injury, from a drunken fall.
September 9, 1971 -
1,300 inmates riot inside the Attica Correctional Facility in western New York state, commandeering the prison and taking 40 guards hostage on this date.
The national guard staged an assault five days later, killing 42 people in the process (10 of them being captives).
September 9, 1976 -
A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery.
In 1965, he launched the controversial Cultural Revolution, an often-brutal campaign to reform Chinese society. He was later held responsible for over 70 million deaths. Mao Tse- tung’s death triggered a two-year power struggle. The Cultural Revolution's chief architects, Mao’s widow (Jiang Qing) and three others, the so-called Gang of Four, were jailed. Deng Xiaoping returned from disgrace and eventually seized power.
September 9, 2003 -
Edward Teller, the "Father of the Hydrogen Bomb" and purported model for Dr. Strangelove (or Dr. Kissinger, take your pick), died at the age of 95 at his home on the Stanford University campus.
His role in the destruction of colleague J. Robert Oppenheimer's career during the McCarthy era resulted in his own ostracism by many of his peers.
And no, he didn't utter, Mein Fuhrer, I can walk just before his death.
September 9, 2015 -
Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor-Mountbatten had been the head of her family owned business for more than 23,227 days - surpassing the reign of her great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria, on this date. (She has been currently working 25,420 days.)
The BBC noted that the Queen did not want a fuss to be made. “It is evidently viewed as bad form for one long-lived queen to be seen in any way to be celebrating the passing of a record set by another long-lived queen.”
Before you go -
And so it goes.
an intolerable stench indeed
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