The More You Know

(Unless you are tight with the Thursday afternoon, rosary praying old ladies - you may not know this;) today is the third Sunday of Advent. It is known as Gaudete Sunday.

One of the candles in the Advent wreath is rose colored for Gaudete Sunday. Gaudete is Latin for Rejoice, as in Gaudete in Domino semper (rejoice in the Lord always,) because the birth of Jesus is coming.



But Wait!
December 12, 1531-
It's the Feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin, an indigenous peasant, had visions of the Virgin Mary. Legend held that the Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego outside Mexico City and left an imprint on his cactus-fiber poncho. The poncho became an icon for the Virgin of Guadalupe.

It's early and I'll stop hurting your brain with too much info but go impress those ladies with your new found knowledge later.


December 12, 1954 -
BBC Television aired the landmark adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighy-Four on this date. It is the most expensive drama produced to date.



The program was first aired on December 12th 1954 then repeated live on December 16th. This second transmission was telerecorded (filmed as broadcast) and is the version which survives. However the repeat nearly did not happen due to the hysterical reaction from some newspapers to the "horrific" and "subversive" nature of the play. Fortunately the BBC did not cave in and the re-staging went ahead as planned, but only after a narrow vote in favour by their Board of Governors.


December 12, 1966 -
Fred Zinnemann's adaptation of Robert Bolt's play about Sir Thomas More, A Man for All Seasons starring Paul Scofield premiered in New York on this date.



Paul Scofield did not attend the Oscar ceremony, believing Richard Burton would win the Best Actor award for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?. When he won, the statuette had to be mailed to him, and was broken in transit.


December 12, 1967 -
Stanley Kramer's controversial film (for the time,) Guess Who's Coming To Dinner, starring Spencer Tracy (in his last role), Sidney Poitier, and Katharine Hepburn, was released on this date.



Katharine Hepburn had to use her salary as backing in order to make this movie because Spencer Tracy was so ill that the studio didn't think that he would make to the end of the picture. Katharine Hepburn never saw the completed movie. She said the memories of Tracy were too painful.


December 12, 1972 -
Irwin Allen's ocean disaster movie, The Poseidon Adventure, premiered in NYC on this date.



Shelley Winters gained 35 pounds for the part of Belle Rosen. Afterward, she complained that she was never able to get back to her original weight, no matter how hard she tried.


December 12, 1973 -
Columbia Picture released the Hal Ashby film The Last Detail, starring Jack Nicholson, Randy Quaid, Carol Kane and Michael Moriarty, on this date.



The script was completed in 1970, but contained too much profanity to be shot as written. Columbia Pictures waited for two years trying to get writer Robert Towne to tone down the language. Instead, by 1972, the standards for foul language relaxed so much that all the profanity was left in.


December 12, 1980 -
Well, whip it good!



When MTV launched in 1981, they had very few videos to choose from. Some European and Australian artists had been making videos, but very few came from US artists, and most of those were concert videos. Devo had been making interesting videos for a while because they thought Laser Discs were going to catch on and wanted to make film shorts with music soundtracks that people could watch on them. Laser Discs never caught on, but MTV did, which gave this video lots of exposure.


Another gift suggestion from the back shelves of the ACME Catalogue


Today in History:
December 12, 1870 -
Joseph H. Rainey of South Carolina was sworn in as the second African American congressman (after Hiram Revels) in the U.S. House of Representatives, on this date.

Born into slavery in South Carolina, he was freed in the 1840s by his father, a slave who had been allowed to work as a barber and split the profits with his “master”. With his savings, he purchased the freedom of his entire family.

As a respectable leader in Charleston, Joseph Rainey joined the Republican Party and eventually won four elections to Congress, where he worked hard to gain passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.


December 12, 1899 -
Dentist George Grant was granted a patent (U.S. patent No. 638,920) for the modern golf tee on this date. The design, basically, lifts a golf ball slightly off the ground.

This additional height gives the golfer better control in his hit. Before the invention of the golf tee, golfers would often make a small mound of dirt or sand to serve as a tee. Groundskeepers everywhere rejoice.


December 12, 1915 -
It's the birthday of Francis Albert today. I have been advised by legal council to stop making jokes about Mr. Sinatra's alleged organized crime connection, especially if I would like to make it home tonight (Please note - I did not use the word, Mafia.)



And once again, We here at ACME would to remind the various gentlemen from Bensonhurst with whom we had occasion to speak with - we did not resort to any cheap gimmicks to slander the Chairman of the Board, greatest singer of the 20th century. (Now will you please return our cat - the children are quite attached to her and the cat is quite old and very confused.)


December 12, 1917 -
With a rent payment of $90 borrowed from a friend, Father Edward Flanagan founded Boys Town outside Omaha, NE in an old Victorian mansion on this date.



Flanagan's archbishop allowed Flanagan to focus on the boy's home and assigned nuns to help him.


December 12, 1937 -
Japanese aircraft shell and sink US gunboat Panay on the Yangtze River in China. Japan apologized, disciplining those involved and paying $2.2M reparations.



You think we might have seen something was brewing.


December 12, 1968 -
If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.



After a long and well enjoyed life, Tallulah Bankhead died in St. Luke's Hospital in New York City of double pneumonia, complicated by emphysema and malnutrition, on this date.



Her last coherent words reportedly were "Codeine... bourbon." (I will be stealing that, except substituting gin for bourbon at the end.)

And so it goes