Always chew your pretzels before swallowing

National Pretzel Day celebrates pretzels of all shapes and sizes. Pretzels are believed to be the world's oldest snack. (This appears to be a legitimate celebration, there are many stores giving away free pretzels today.)



Wake me up when it's Very Dry Martini, straight up with Olives Day.


April 26, 1935 -
The Tod Browning MGM comedy-horror film Mark of the Vampire, starring Lionel Barrymore, Elizabeth Allan, Bela Lugosi, Lionel Atwill, and Jean Hersholt, premiered in the US on this date.



The film was banned in Poland, and censors in Hungary excised the screams, shots of bats and other gruesome scenes. The movie was also banned in Sweden by the Swedish Censorship Board. MGM never came back with an alternative cut down version.


April 26, 1945 -
United Artists wartime drama, Blood On The Sun, starring James Cagney and Sylvia Sidney, premiered in the US on this date.



The Tokyo Imperial Hotel bar seen at the start of the movie is apparently an exact replica of the actual bar situated in the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.


April 26, 1950 -
Twentieth Century-Fox released the Cold War drama, shot on location in Berlin, The Big Lift, starring, Montgomery Clift, and Paul Douglas, on this date.



When shooting at the Brandenburg Gate, which was inside the Russian zone of occupation, authorities there erected a large loudspeaker that blared communist propaganda. The scenes were shot without sound and voices were dubbed in later.


April 26, 1954 -
68 years ago, one of the greatest films in world cinema, Akira Kurosawa's iconic Seven Samurai, starring Toshiro Mifune, was released in Japan on this date. A technical and creative marvel, it became Japan’s highest-grossing movie but also was highly influential among Hollywood filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and George Lucas.



This was the first film on which Akira Kurosawa used multiple cameras, so he wouldn't interrupt the flow of the scenes and could edit the film as he pleased in post-production. He used the multiple-camera set-up on every subsequent film.


April 26, 1956 -
Godzilla debuted in America on this date. (Gojira premiered in Japan on November 3, 1954.)



The American version of the film had 40 minutes of the original excised (mostly the content dealing with World War II or the anti-nuclear message,) and had 20 minutes of the masterful deadpan stylings of Raymond Burr. The American version was released in Japan with Japanese subtitles and did very well.


April 26, 1967 -
CBS broadcast the documentary, Inside Pop - The Rock Revolution, with the host Leonard Bernstein, on this date.



The program marked the first time that television presented pop music as a legitimate art form.


April 26, 1978 -
The concert billed as The Band's "farewell concert appearance", was held on November 25, 1976, at Winterland Ballroom in San Francisco. The concert film, The Last Waltz, directed by Martin Scorsese, starring members of the band and many of their friends, premiered in the US on this date.



The Band's management had overbooked the show. Two days before the show, they tried to have Muddy Waters taken off the bill. Levon Helm, The Band's drummer, threatened not to play the show if Muddy Waters was asked to leave. Muddy Waters is in the final cut of the film. Every camera but one ran out of film during his performance of Mannish Boy. It resulted in the longest shot of the film, while Martin Scorsese scrambled to get the film cans reloaded.


April 26, 1978 –
NBC aired a a musical version of The Prince and the Pauper, Ringo, starring Ringo, Art Carney, Angie Dickinson, Carrie Fisher, Vincent Price, John Ritter, and George Harrison narrating, on this date.



Really, don't feel you have to watch the whole thing (it's not very good.)


April 26, 1988 -
We were back in Nam (again) when the the pilot episode of China Beach, starring Dana Delaney, Nan Woods, Michael Boatman, and Marg Helgenberger, premiered on ABC TV on this date. (For some reason this series has almost faded into obscurity.)



Several of the storylines, and even some of the dialogue were taken directly from the experiences and recollections of actual Vietnam era military nurses.


Today's moment of Zen


Today in History:
April 26, 1865 -
Discovered hiding in a farmer's tobacco shed, John Wilkes Booth was shot in the neck by a complete lunatic. Dying and paralyzed from the neck down, he whispers: Tell my mother I did it for my country.



As his hands are held up to his face, Booth mutters "useless...useless..."



They were his last words.


On April 26, 1923 (almost 88 years previously to the date of his great-grandson's nuptials,) the Duke of York married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in Westminster Abbey.



This wedding might have slipped into the ephemera of time had the Duke's brother not wanted to marry a woman reported so ugly, many thought her a man in drag. And calling a woman ugly in England is really saying something, as many of the British upper crust often marry their horses out of confusion.

That's British royalty.

Count Basie died on April 26, 1984; Duke Ellington was born on April 29, 1899; Ella Fitzgerald, the "First Lady of Song," was born on April 25, 1917.

That's American royalty.


April 26, 1933 -
Hermann Goering founded the Geheime Staatspolizei, otherwise known as the Gestapo on this date.



The original purpose of this "Secret State Police" is to disrupt and harass opponents of National Socialism, but it will later come to adopt many additional responsibilities.


April 26, 1933 -
You have to go through the falling down in order to learn to walk. It helps to know that you can survive it. That's an education in itself.





Carol Creighton Burnett, the funniest woman in America was born on this day - don't argue with me, I will come to your home and hurt you. I was forced to watch The Carol Burnett Show in my bedroom and not with my family because I laughed so loudly and so hard, no one could hear it.


April 26, 1937 -
It was a beautiful Monday afternoon in Guernica, Spain on this date. At about 3:30 pm the day took a tragic turn. For over three hours, twenty-five or more of Germany's best-equipped bombers, accompanied by at least 20 more Messerschmitt and Fiat Fighters, dumped one hundred thousand pounds of high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the village, slowly and systematically pounding it to rubble.



Guernica had served as the testing ground for a new Nazi military tactic - blanket-bombing a civilian population to demoralize the enemy. It was wanton, man-made holocaust.



The bombing was the subject of a famous anti-war painting by Pablo Picasso.


April 26, 1937 -
Due to a publishing error, LIFE magazine was printed without the word "LIFE" on the cover on this date.

It was the only time that LIFE was nameless.


April 26, 1962 -
The NASA Ranger 4 spacecraft crashes into the Moon after sixty-four hours of flight, on this date.



The probe’s mission was to rough-land a seismometer capsule on the Moon, to collect gamma-ray data in flight, to study the radar reflectivity of the lunar surface, and to continue testing the Ranger program for development of lunar and interplanetary spacecraft.

So now you know, (this may be on the test.)


April 26, 1977 -
Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager open Studio 54 the world famous New York nightclub, renowned for being extremely difficult to get in unless you were famous / well known or considered one of the beautiful people over the years.



Studio 54 closed with a final party on February 4, 1980.


April 26, 1986 -
44 seconds into a late-night experiment at the Chernobyl nuclear power station, reactor number four sustains two large explosions. The exploded at Chernobyl burned for 10 days. About 70% of the fallout fell in Belarus. Damage was estimated to be up to $130 billion. The Soviet news agency TASS held off reporting the incident for almost 48 hours.



A 300-hundred-square-mile area was evacuated and 31 people died as unknown thousands were exposed to radioactive material that spread in the atmosphere throughout the world. By 1998, 10,000 Russian liquidators involved in the cleanup had died and thousands more became invalids. It was later estimated that the released radioactivity was 200 times the combined bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It was later found that Soviet scientists were authorized to carry out experiments that required the reactor to be pushed to or beyond its limits, with safety features disabled.

Oops.



And so it goes.