There's a lot of them to avoid stepping on

The first ever LEGO Minifigure was the Police Officer Minifigure, introduced in 1978.

Since 1978, over 4 billion Minifigures have been made, if they were people, they would be the largest population on Earth, more than double of China’s current population!


July 16, 1948 -
John Huston's version of Maxwell Anderson's play, Key Largo, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall premiered in New York on this date.



Lionel Barrymore was severely disabled by arthritis (clearly visible in his hands) and was confined to a wheelchair, making the scene in which his Mr. Temple character gets up and falls taking a swing at Toots more than a dramatic moment.


July 16, 1951 -
One of the best adaptations of a Charles Dickens' novel, David Lean's Oliver Twist was released in the US on this date.



John Howard Davies was only eight at the time, and child labor laws prohibited children under the age of thirteen from working in movie studios, but David Lean managed to get around the restriction. Davies recalled that Lean "was unfailingly nice, unfailingly courteous. He used various devices on me. When I felt inhibited about doing something, he would often shoot the rehearsal. He wasn't silly enough not to do the take. But I pretty soon cottoned on to this because my hearing was even better than his, with his large ears, and I could detect the sound of a Mitchell turning over."


July 16, 1958 -
The classic Vincent Price Sci-Fi film, The Fly, opened in San Francisco on this date.



Charles Herbert, who plays the Delambre's son Phillipe, was one of the busier child actors of the late 1950s and early 1960s. He also had prominent roles opposite Cary Grant and Sophia Loren in Houseboat, co-starred with Doris Day and David Niven in Please Don't Eat the Daisies, and interacted with witches, goblins and ghouls in William Castle's 13 Ghosts.


July 16, 1966 -
Tommy James and the Shondells' single Hanky Panky goes to No. #1 of the Billboard Charts on this date.



Tommy James & the Shondells initially formed in 1959 as Tom and the Tornadoes, with the then 12-year-old Tommy Jackson as lead singer. In 1963, he renamed the band The Shondells, after one of his idols, guitarist Troy Shondell. At first, they played straightforward rock and roll (as their first hit proves), but soon became involved in the budding Bubblegum music movement. From 1968, the group members tried themselves as songwriters, penning the psychedelic classic Crimson And Clover. The group carried on with constant success until early 1970, when James became exhausted from the strenuous touring and decided to drop out.


July 16, 1999 -
Stanley Kubrick final film, Eyes Wide Shut, was released on this date.



Due to Stanley Kubrick's fear of travel, virtually the entire film was shot in and near London (despite the movie's New York City setting). Elaborate street sets built at Pinewood Studios were used for all the scenes showing Tom Cruise walking around the city.


July 16, 2000 -
Coldplay went to No. #1 on the UK album charts on this date with their debut release Parachutes.



The album produced four singles: Shiver, Yellow, Trouble, and Don't Panic. Parachutes later went on to earn the British outfit their first Grammy Award for Best Alternative Music Album in 2002.

Don't forget to tune into The Eagle Hand Soap Radio Hour today


Today in History:
July 16, 1054 -
The 'Great Schism' between the Western and Eastern churches began over rival claims of universal pre-eminence.



Remember kids, there's no schism like a great schism.

(In 1965, 911 years later, Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I met to declare an end to the schism.)


Mary Baker Eddy was born on this date in 1821.



Ms. Eddy invented Christian Science, and was elected to the National Women's Hall of Fame in 1995 for having been the only American woman to found a worldwide religion without exposing her breasts.


July 16, 1860 -
A decree from Emperor Norton I of San Francisco, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, ordered the dissolution of the United States of America on this date.

(More on the good Emperor next month.)


July 16, 1945 -
...If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One - I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.... - thus began the Atomic Age.



Fittingly, in a desert named Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death,) code-named Trinity, the first experimental plutonium bomb (The Gadget) was detonated in a United States test of an atomic explosion at Alamogordo Air Base, Los Alamos, New Mexico on this date. The explosion yields the equivalent 18,000 tons of TNT.


July 16, 1951 -
The Catcher in the Rye was published 71 years ago today. The book contained secret code words by means of which its author, J.D. Salinger, was able to communicate diabolical commands to his evil minions.

Exactly six years after the Trinity test,

and fourteen years later, the tunnel connecting France and Italy through Mont Blanc was opened to the public.

Draw your own conclusions.

Salinger was a one-hit wonder. (He did write several other books, but these are of interest only to insomniacs and those with wobbly furniture.) The Catcher in the Rye was published in 1951, and Salinger subsequently hid himself away in the hills of Vermont, emerging from this self-imposed cloister only briefly, to serve as Prime Minister of Canada and then again, to appear as a corpse at his own funeral. For nearly half a century, The Catcher in the Rye has captured the imagination of the American teenager like no other book without pictures.



Holden Caulfield, the hero and narrator of Salinger's slim classic, may be the finest portrait of twentieth-century American teenage angst bequeathed to posterity.



Either him or Archie, it's hard to say.

(although Archie gave up his life to save a friend.)


July 16, 1964 -
In accepting the Republican presidential nomination in San Francisco, Barry M. Goldwater said "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice" and that "moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue."



Goldwater's speech ultimately doomed his candidacy but revived the American Conservative movement and gave birth to the political rise of Ronald Reagan.


July 16, 1969 -
53 years ago on this date, the 363-foot-tall Apollo 11 space vehicle was launched from Pad A, Launch Complex 39, Kennedy Space Center, at 9:37 a.m. (As I have gotten older, I have only now put it together that some sick puppies at NASA (probably some of the 'Good Germans') arranged to have the launch on the anniversary of the Trinity test.)



It carried Mission Commander Neil Alden Armstrong, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins and Lunar Module Pilot Edwin Eugene 'Buzz' Aldrin, Jr.

I couldn't afford the Revell kit,

so I had to satisfy myself with working on my 18-inch-tall Gulf Oil cardboard lunar module model kit while watching the launch.


July 16, 1973 -
In testimony before the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities (the Ervin Committee on Watergate), former presidential assistant Alexander Butterfield disclosed that President Richard Nixon had tape recorded all of his conversations in the White House and Executive Office Building.



Bad, Nixon, bad.


July 16, 1999 -
23 years ago today, John F.Kennedy Jr. was killed along with his wife Carolyn and sister-in-law Lauren Bessette when the aircraft he was piloting crashed into the Atlantic Ocean. (Don't hitch a ride with a Kennedy.)



He was flying a Piper Saratoga II HP from Essex County Airport in New Jersey to Martha's Vineyard. Kennedy and his wife were traveling together to the wedding of his cousin Rory in Hyannis, Massachusetts, while Lauren was to have been dropped off at Martha's Vineyard en route.



And so it goes.