There is no political or religious significance to La Tomatina, it's just good, messy fun. The tradition’s beginning remains a mystery but this event is estimated to have begun in 1945. The event has become one of the highlights on Spain’s summer festivals calendar with thousands of people flocking to this little Valencian town for this chaotic event. Prior to 2013 anywhere from 40,000 to 50,000 (reported to be 50,000 in 2012) people crammed into this huge tomato fight, greatly expanding Bunol's normal 9,000 person population. Since 2013 official ticketing has been in place limiting the number of participants to just 20,000 lucky people.
Today is National Toasted Marshmallow Day
August 30, 1935 (It could have been on the 29th, I don't know, I wasn't there.) -
RKO released the fourth Astaire and Rogers, Irving Berlin tune filled musical, Top Hat, in New York, on this date.
Fred Astaire supervised every other aspect of the development of a dance number from orchestration through final shooting and editing. He was particularly adamant about how a number should be filmed. He disliked interrupting the flow of the dance with unusual camera angles, cuts to the face or feet of the dancer, or reaction shots of people watching.
August 30, 1959 -
Bobby Darin's jazzy interpretation of Mack The Knife began its 26-week stay on the pop-singles charts.
The original German version of this song is called Theme from The Threepenny Opera, or Moritat, which is the German word for Murder Ballad. The lyrics have been translated in various ways on different versions, but the most popular translation was by the lyricist Marc Blitzstein for the 1954 off-Broadway revival of The Threepenny Opera, which ran until 1961 and played in Greenwich Village, New York.
August 30, 1965 -
Bob Dylan's sixth studio album, Highway 61 Revisited was released on this date. It was his first album to feature other rock musicians backing him on the album.
The Highway 61 Revisited album marks not only a milestone in Dylan's career, but a turbulent time for the culture surrounding him. Before releasing this album, Dylan played the notorious Newport Folk Festival, which is famous for all the wrong reasons (the crowd there was upset because Dylan was only going to play for 15 minutes), and afterwards was the Forest Hills concert, which is less-well known but had a much more turbulent crowd doing a lot more booing for reasons that weren't clear to anyone.
August 30, 1967 -
John Boorman's crime drama thriller, Point Blank, premiered on this date.
Lee Marvin didn't think John Vernon was good for the role, as the actor "wasn't strong enough to contend with him." It came to a head during filming when Marvin punched Vernon in the stomach during a fight scene, causing Vernon to cry and protest that he was an actor not a fighter. Vernon followed it, though, with a visibly increased energy and anger.
August 30, 1968 -
Apple Records released its first single, Hey Jude by The Beatles on this date.
Paul McCartney wrote this as "Hey Jules," a song meant to comfort John Lennon's 5-year-old son Julian as his parents were getting a divorce. The change to "Jude" was inspired by the character "Jud" in the musical Oklahoma! (McCartney loves show tunes)
August 30, 1968 -
Columbia Records released the sixth studio album of The Byrds, Sweetheart of the Rodeo, on this date.
The first major album widely recognized as country rock, it represented a turning point for the 1970s country rock movement, which influenced the outlaw country and new traditionalist movements.
August 30, 1975 -
KC & The Sunshine Band's single Get Down Tonight reached No. 1 on the Billboard Charts (the first of five chart-toppers for the group,) on this date.
Written and produced by Harry Wayne (KC) Casey and his writing partner (and bass player) Richard Finch. Casey and Finch would sneak into nightclubs in the Miami area and get a taste of that culture, which influenced their sound. The song features a distinctive introduction, in which a recorded guitar solo is rendered at double speed over a normal-speed guitar line in the background. After observing someone else slowing down a tape machine, Richard Finch had the idea of using this technique to create the guitar riff, as a way of adding to the song something "that really keeps the buzz, that really keeps the excitement going all the way through without being too artificial sounding." Finch states that he was "always doing weird science" in those days, referring to his various experiments with sound.
August 30, 1986 -
Steve Winwood single, Higher Love went to No. 1 on the Billboard Charts on this date.
Winwood played many of the instruments on Back In The High Life and wrote the music for the songs, but for this and many other songs on the album, Will Jennings wrote the lyrics. Jennings is a very successful songwriter who also collaborated with Winwood on the albums Arc Of A Diver and Talking Back To The Night, and went on to write My Heart Will Go On with James Horner for the movie Titanic.
August 30, 1993 -
Moving himself and his gang of cohorts from NBC-TV, The Late Show with David Letterman premiered on CBS-TV, on this date.
David Letterman originally wanted to call Paul Shaffer's musical ensemble "The NBC Orchestra," but that name was already taken by Doc Severinsen and company on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Letterman settled for the name "Paul Shaffer and the World's Most Dangerous Band," but he got his way in the end: when Letterman and Shaffer defected to CBS, they changed the name of Shaffer's ensemble to "The CBS Orchestra."
August 30, 2018 -
Yorgos Lanthimos' black comedy The Favourite, starring Olivia Coleman, Rachel Weisz, and Emma Stone premieres at the Venice Film Festival on this date.
The historical Abigail entered Queen Anne's service in 1704. Anne's husband, Prince George of Denmark, is never seen or mentioned, even though he died in 1708. His death, as well as the deaths of their children, was among the reasons for Anne's depression.
Another job posting from The ACME Employment Agency
Today in History:
August 30, 1780 -
General "Eggs" Benedict Arnold secretly puts into motion a plot to surrender the West Point fort to the British army during the American Revolution. The measure of Arnold's treachery was made worse by the fact that he was considered by many to be the best general and most accomplished leader in the Continental Army.
In fact, without Arnold's earlier contributions to the American cause, the American Revolution might well have been lost; notwithstanding, his name, like those of several other prominent traitors throughout history, has become a byword for treason and a brunch staple.
August 30, 1859 -
At the University of Göttingen, PhD candidate Albert Niemann isolates the alkaloid C17H21NO4 from leaves of the plant Erythroxylum coca.
Oh, that's what cocaine does. Now I know.
August 30, 1918 -
Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin should have been having a great day on this date. Six weeks earlier, Lenin had the previous tenant of Kremlin, Tsar Nicholas II, permanently taken off the lease. After speaking at a factory in Moscow, Lenin was shot twice by Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Social Revolutionary party. Lenin narrowly survived an assassination attempt, but was severely wounded.
As Lenin was a 'godless' communist, he did not turn the other cheek. The assassination attempt set off a wave of reprisals by the Bolsheviks against the Social Revolutionaries and other political opponents. Thousands were executed as Russia fell deeper into civil war.
August 30, 1930 -
Warren Edward Buffett often called the "Sage of Omaha", "Oracle of Omaha", or "Omaha Steak", American investor, businessperson and philanthropist is born on this date. Buffett has amassed an enormous fortune from astute investments managed through the holding company Berkshire Hathaway, of which he is the largest shareholder and CEO.
With an estimated current net worth of around $119.1 billion (please note, these numbers are all from earlier this year - their wealth seem to have only continued to climb,) he was ranked by Forbes as the fifth-richest person in the world as of this past March, falling behind Elon Musk (with a net worth of $254 billion, even with his losses from X), Bernard Arnault (with a net worth of $215.8 billion, but this includes his familes wealth), Jeff Bezos (with a net worth of $157.3 billion), and Larry Ellison (with a net worth of $150.2 billion). Mark Zuckerberg has inched his way up to 9 (with a net worth of only $104.9 billion.)
I, on the other hand, did not make a blip on the list.
August 30, 1963 -
Almost a year after the world barely averted World War III during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Hotline between the Pentagon and the Kremlin went live, on this date.
The system consists of two teletype machines, with a full-time communications link routed through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki.
August 30, 1967 -
Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who was best known for arguing the Brown v. Board of Education case before the Supreme Court, became the first black US Supreme Court Justice.
The US Senate voted 69 to 11 to appoint Marshall (20 senators did not vote.) He served on the Court from 1967 to 1991.
August 30, 1983 -
The first black astronaut, Guion S. Bluford Jr., a US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel, flew on the third mission of the Space Shuttle Challenger.
Bluford had entered the US Astronaut program in 1979; this was his first mission. This was also the first mission to launch and land at night.
August 30, 1984 -
Originally scheduled to lift off in June, Discovery (STS-41-D), the twelfth space shuttle mission, launched on this date. The Discovery carried six crew members to space: Commander Henry Hartsfield, Pilot Michael Coats, Mission Specialists Judith Resnick, Steven Hawley, Richard Mullane and Payload Specialist Charles Walker.
During the mission, three communications satellites were deployed. The shuttle safely completed it's mission on September 5, 1984.
And so it goes
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