Once again it is Teddy Bear Picnic Day -

It's a day set aside for you to take a stroll in the woods with your favorite bears.

Perhaps I'm mistaken in which bears you should be taking with you.


July 10, 1916 -
Charlie Chaplin further develops his 'Tramp' character with the release of The Vagabond, on this date.



The film was restored in 2013 at the L'Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in Italy.


July 10, 1942 -
RKO Pictures released Orson Welles' butchered masterpiece, The Magnificent Ambersons, on this date. (Like El Dorado or Shangri-La, a work print of Welles' version supposedly exists in a vault somewhere in Brazil, tantalizingly, just out of reach. I have just read the TCM is still sponsoring an exhaustive search through a major Brazilian film vault.)



RKO chopped 50 minutes of the film and added a happy ending while Orson Welles was out of the country. The consensus of opinion according to nearly everyone who saw the original conclusion - which included a tour of the decaying Amberson mansion - was that it was much more powerful than the tacked-on "happy" ending. The footage was thought to have been subsequently destroyed; the only record of the removed scenes is the cutting continuity transcript.


July 10, 1947 -
One of Jules Dassin's post-war film-noir classics, Brute Force, starring Burt Lancaster, Hume Cronyn, Yvonne De Carlo, Ann Blyth, and Charles Bickford, premiered in Los Angeles on this date.



The second of three films that Burt Lancaster made for Mark Hellinger, the writer-producer who discovered the former acrobat and turned him into a movie star. The first of these was The Killers and the three-picture contract was completed with Criss Cross, a film Hellinger never lived to see, as he died before production began. His widow insisted that Lancaster honor the contract he had with her husband.

July 10, 1972 -
Harry Nilsson's eighth album, Son of Schmilsson was released on this date.



It featured George Harrison under the name George Harrysong and Ringo Starr, listed as Richie Snare, on some of the tracks. Peter Frampton also played guitar on most of the album.


July 10, 1976 -
Starland Vocal Band's song about afternoon nooky – Afternoon Delights topping the Billboard Pop charts on this date.



Despite having only this one hit, the Starland Vocal Band were given their own summer replacement TV series on CBS called The Starland Vocal Band in 1977. An unknown comic named David Letterman appeared on the show.


July 10, 1978 –
World News Tonight with anchors Frank Reynolds, Peter Jennings and Max Robinson (the first black anchor on a network newscast in the US) premiered on ABC TV on this date.



The program has been anchored at various times by a number of other presenters since its debut in 1948. It also has used various titles, including ABC Evening News from 1970 to 1978, World News Tonight from 1978 to 2006, World News from 2006 to 2009, and ABC World News from 2009 to 2014. Since 2014 the program has been called ABC World News Tonight.


July 10, 1981 -
John Carpenter sci-fi thriller, Escape from New York, starring Kurt Russell, Lee Van Cleef, Donald Pleasence, Ernest Borgnine, Isaac Hayes, Adrienne Barbeau, and Harry Dean Stanton, premiered in the US, on this date.



The shot where the helicopter flies over Central Park was actually filmed in San Fernando, California. The buildings in the background were matte-paintings by James Cameron.


July 10, 1985 -
The third offering in the Mad Max series, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, starring Mel Gibson and Tina Turner (and directed by George Miller and George Ogilvie) premiered in the US on this date.



The film was originally not a Mad Max film, but a post-apocalyptic Lord of the Flies film about a tribe of children who are found by an adult. It became the third Mad Max film when George Miller was suggested that Max is the man who finds the children.


Another book from the back shelves of the ACME Library


Today in History:
July 10, 1553 –
Lady Jane Grey, the great-granddaughter of Henry VII, ill-advisedly took the throne of England, upon the death of Edward VI, on this date.



Hopefully she didn't buy any green bananas. She wasn't going to be in the position to see them ripen.


July 10, 1559 -
Heed the prophecies of Nostradamus!

Henry II of France had a splitting headache today. Henry was having a friendly joust with the captain of the Scottish Guards, Gabriel de Lorges de Montgomery, when he was momentarily blinded by the visor on the captain's helmet.



The captain's lance was somehow broken and Henry II was pierced through the eye socket and temple on June 30 (Ouch!). The King writhed in agony until he died from his wounds on this date. Nostradamus wrote a poem about a lion and a cage and somehow that tripe predicted Henry II's death.


July 10, 1856 -
Inventor and electromechanical genius Nikola Tesla, the man who invented the 20th Century, was born to Serbian parents in what is now Croatia on this date.



Remember, if we could only harness the free floating electricity,



we could do away with the electric companies.


July 10, 1871 -
Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom..



Marcel Proust, French novelist, tea enthusiast and master procrastinator was born on this date.


July 10, 1938 -
Aviator Howard Hughes (you know his C.V.) made a record flight around the world on this date, completing the trip in just 91 hours, breaking the previous record by more than four days.



Taking off from New York City in a Lockheed Super Electra he continued to Paris, Moscow, Omsk, Yakutsk, Anchorage, Minneapolis, ending back at New York City.


Pops always taught us that family is the strongest unit in the world. If you stick with your family, nobody can break you, nobody can harm you. You'll always have your family..



Happy Birthday to the gospel and blues singer Mavis Staples born in Chicago on this date. She started singing with her family’s band The Staple Singers as a young girl, and her deep-throated voice catapulted the group to the top of the charts eight times between 1971 and 1975, with songs like I’ll Take You There, Let’s Do It Again, and Respect Yourself.


July 10, 1958 -
I think it is very ironic that most people think that the banjo is a southern white instrument. It came from Africa and even for the first years that white people played banjo they would put on blackface.



Béla Fleck, American banjo player extraordinaire and songwriter was born on this date.


July 10, 1958 -
The first parking meter was installed in London, England on this date in 1958, along with the second through 625th. It took nearly two dozen years for the parking meter to travel across the Atlantic: the first American parking meter had been installed in Oklahoma City on July 16, 1935.

It was invented by Oklahoma City's Carl C. Magee, the head of that city's chamber of commerce, as part of an effort to free more parking spaces for daytime shoppers. Downtown parking spaces had typically been taken by office workers who left their cars parked on the street all day, making it difficult for shoppers to find open spaces and thereby causing incalculable pain and suffering. (Double-parking was not invented until 1963.)



I, personally, considers the parking meter one of the great instruments of totalitarian control, and cannot understand how conspiracy theorists who lose sleep over Roswell, the Masons, and black hawk helicopters can walk blithely past dozens of parking meters every day.



Current estimates ("wild guesses") suggest there are now more than five million of these coercive devil machines deployed across the United States. They absorb millions of dollars in small change every day, and generate still more ill-gotten revenue by means of fines levied against persons who refuse to kneel before them.



I urge my readers to recall the words of Alexander Hamilton, who observed in the Federalist Papers that "no people are free who must pay for municipal parking."

The first concrete-paved street was built 130 years ago today in Bellefontaine, Ohio.

Paved streets are good. I have no problem with paved streets, unless they're lined with parking meters.


July 10, 1962 –
Launched by NASA aboard a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, Telstar, was launched into orbit, becoming the world's first communications satellite, on this date.



Telstar 1 was placed in low Earth orbit and circled the planet every two and a half hours, only in the right position to beam transmissions between Europe and the U.S. for 20 minutes each orbit. This is in contrast to contemporary communications satellites, which fly in geosynchronous orbit, staying above one spot on the Earth.


July 10, 1985 -
Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior was blown up by in Auckland Harbor, killing a photographer, Fernando Pereira, on this date.



After the New Zealand government determines that French secret agents were responsible, the French Defense Minister Pierre Lacoste, resigned and agents, Captain Dominique Prieur and Commander Alain Mafart, were jailed.


July 10, 1989 -
Mel Blanc, whose career spanned over 60 years doing voice over work for many Warner Brothers characters died on this date.



Shortly before his death, executives of Time Warner (owners of Warner Brothers) asked him if there was anything, literally anything, that they could give him to thank him for his life's body of work. He asked for--and received - a Ford Edsel.


Before you go - It's Manhattanhenge time once again - tomorrow the sun will be perfectly lined up with the east-west streets of New York.

(If you miss it on the 11th, you get another shot the next day on the 12th.)



And so it goes.