Each year this day is dedicated to the planting of flowers and looking forward to the spring season.
Today is Alfred Hitchcock Day. Since Hitchcock was born in August, and died in April, I have no clue why we celebrate in March - its arbitrary and capricious, which makes me like it even more. (It may have to due to the fact that March 12 is the televised anniversary of his American Film Institute's Lifetime Achievement Awards.) Besides, it's an hour earlier than you think, so why not.
But please, feel free to bludgeon someone to death with a leg of lamb and serve it to the police when they come to investigate, in his honor, if you so choose. Save a serving for me (I'll bring the homemade tzaktiki.)
March 12, 1941 -
One of Frank Capra's most iconic films, Meet John Doe, starring Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, and Edward Arnold, premiered in New York and Los Angeles on this date.
Well into production, Frank Capra refused to reveal publicly what the film was about. Part of the motivation for his secrecy was fear that powerful US fascist organizations would pressure Warner Bros. not to make the film, but he also did not have a completed screenplay, and keeping mum on the film's subject was his way of keeping Warner Bros. from pulling out of its agreement.
March 12, 1953 -
John Huston's very off-beat comedy, Beat the Devil, starring Humphrey Bogart, Jennifer Jones, Gina Lollobrigida, Robert Morley, Peter Lorre and Bernard Lee, premiered in New York City on this date.
John Huston suggested to Humphrey Bogart, that Lauren Bacall might play his wife. "I read your insidious and immoral proposals to my wife," Bogie wrote to Huston in mock anger. "I have instructed Miss Bacall to disregard your blandishments..." Anyway, she was busy shooting How to Marry a Millionaire.
March 12th, 1967 -
The Velvet Underground released their debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, on this date.
The album’s back cover originally featured a shot of the band playing with an image of Eric Emerson’s face from The Chelsea Girls projected prominently in the background. Emerson either needed drug money or was simply broke, so he threatened to sue the record label because he hadn’t signed a photo release. Verve Records pulled the album from record stores and redacted Emerson’s face from the back cover, which was a disaster for the band.
March 12, 1971 -
Robert Wise's taut Sci-Fi Thriller, The Andromeda Strain, opened on this date. (A fun film to watch while you're self-quarantining.)
Screenwriter Nelson Gidding broached the idea to director Robert Wise that one of the four scientists should be a woman. Wise initially envisioned female character being something like Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage and objected strenuously to the change. However, after Gidding described in detail the character eventually played by Kate Reid, and after Wise conferred with actual scientists, he became convinced that it was a positive addition to the story.
March 12, 1973 -
After six seasons, the last episode of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In aired on NBC TV, on this date.
George Schlatter did not produce the final season, but he won the rights to those episodes in a subsequent court battle. For many years, he neither allowed those episodes to be re-aired, nor any clips to be included in retrospectives. On March 13, 2017, Decades TV was allowed to begin airing the final season.
March 12, 1971 -
John Lennon released Power to the People in the United Kingdom on this date.
"Power to the People" was a popular phrase in the 1960s and early '70s. It indicated a need for individuals to take control from governments and institutions, which is something Lennon advocated.
March 12, 1982 -
Columbia Picture released the concert film Richard Pryor: Live on the Sunset Strip, starring Richard Pryor, on this date.
The film was edited together from two live performances that were filmed back to back on December 9 and December 10, 1981. Richard Pryor admitted in his autobiography that he completely messed up his performance during the first filming of the show. Pryor lost his train of thought and forgot most of his material. He apologized to the audience and ended the show early leaving the audience angry. Pryor pulled himself together and gave a much better performance the next night. Most of the footage in the film is from the second performance.
March 12, 1991 -
Warner Bros. Records released the seventh studio album by R.E.M., Out of Time, on this date.
The opening track on Out of Time, Radio Song features the influential rapper KRS-One. R.E.M. guitarist Peter Buck explained to Guitar School in 1991: "When we wrote it out, we only had acoustic guitar, bongos, bass, organ, and a 12-string over the chorus. When we got to the studio we added drums, and I put down some funk guitars and we thought, 'Well, gee, now it's kind of a funk song.' And Michael suggested bringing in KRS, since he'd worked with him before" (KRS-One appeared in a public service announcement for Stipe's C-Hundred film production company).
March 12, 1994 -
The Swedish group Ace Of Base's single, The Sign, was No. 1 on the Billboard Charts on this date.
The song went on to be ranked as the number one song of 1994 on Billboard's year-end chart. It was also Arista Record's most successful Billboard Chart single in the label's history, selling over nine million copies in America.
March 12, 2001 -
The Chris Isaak Show, a television sitcom which follows a fictionalized version of the life of American rock musician Chris Isaak, premiered on Showtime on this date.
The character of Mona is based on a real woman at the Bimbo's 365 Club in San Francisco known as "Dolphina". In the 1930s, a magician worked the joint and rigged up a series of mirrors that would project an image of anyone who was lying on a rotating table in the basement up into the fish tank located behind the bar.
March 12, 2002 –
The Fox Searchligh Pictures sleeper hit Bend It Like Beckham, starring Parminder Nagra, Keira Knightley, and Jonathan Rhys Meyers, went into limited release in the US on this date.
The chauffeur driver of the Rolls Royce in the wedding scene was not an actor, but an actual chauffeur, and was unaware he was in a film. He believed instead that it was simply a wedding with a lot of cameras. It was only discovered he was in the film when, to their surprise, one of his relatives saw him in the background.
March 12, 2002 -
The Chris Wedgee's film, Ice Age, starring Ray Romano, John Leguizamo, Denis Leary, Jack Black, and Cedric the Entertainer premiered in this date in the US.
Despite the Dodo's less than brilliant survival instincts, they outlived all of the major character's species.
March 12, 2007 -
Amy Winehouse made her US television debut on the Late Show with David Letterman performing Rehab on this date.
On August 14, 2007, Winehouse entered The Causeway Retreat, a rehab center in Essex, England, with her new husband (and fellow addict), Blake Fielder. Addiction specialists know that admitting a couple to rehab together is a bad idea, but The Causeway was not an ethical institution: it was shut down amid a host of violations in 2010. Winehouse did a few more stints in rehab to treat her drug and alcohol addiction, but it was ultimately unsuccessful. She was found dead in her London home on July 23, 2011.
Today's moment of Zen
Today in History:
March 12, 538 –
After a year and nine days, the First Siege of Rome during the Gothic War ended when, Vitiges, king of the Ostrogoths retreated to the Gothic capital of Ravenna, in the Emilia-Romagna region of Northern Italy, leaving the city in the hands of the victorious Byzantine general, Belisarius, on this date.
But what the hell do you care.
March 12, 1888 -
The day before started off seemingly fine - the temperature was mild as a light rain began to fall on March 11th, 1888. And then the weather changed. The rain became heavier and by the next day, the rains changed to heavy snow and buried the unprepared city in drifts of up to thirty feet deep! The temperature plunged and winds reached over eighty miles per hour.
On the first day of 1888 blizzard, Roscoe Conkling, former congressman and US Senator (from NY) was at his law office at 10 Wall Street. Despite the severity of the storm, Conkling decided to walk from his office to his club on Madison Square, even though it was 6:00 PM and already dark, rather than pay the outrageous rate of $50 for a cab ride.
He made it up Broadway as far as Union Square where he (as he later put it): “got to the middle of the park and was up to my arms in a drift…. For nearly twenty minutes I was stuck there and I came as near giving right up and sinking down there to die as a man can and not do it.” But somehow Conkling freed himself and continued up Broadway to Madison Square, where the people at the New York Club could “scarcely believe” he had walked from Wall Street.
Conkling developed a slight cold a few day later and a few weeks later on April 18th, became one of most famous victims of the blizzard. Conkling friends immediately set about to memorialize him with a statue in Madison Square Park. (Apparently the city fathers balked at commemorating Conkling in Union Square amidst George Washington and Abraham Lincoln - he was not that well liked.) Aside from the statue, Roscoe Conkling's greatest legacy was perhaps silent film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, who was reportedly named for Conkling by Fatty's father, who thought that his son was the product of an affair between his wife and Conkling.
March 12, 1894 -
Bottled Coca-Cola was sold for the first time on this date.
March 12, 1912 -
Juliette Gordon Low organized the Girl Guides, which later became the Girl Scouts of America, at the 1848 Andrew Low House in Savannah, Ga. on this date.
Mrs. Low rented a carriage house for "club rooms" for the Girl Guides on the property of a prominent family in Georgia, the Nash family. Ogden Nash, 10 years old in 1912, grew up to be a well-known poet; he immortalized "Mrs. Low's House" in one of his poems. The Nash family continued to pay rent for the carriage house even after it was converted for use by the Girl Guides, becoming one of the first financial supporters for the fledgling movement.
On May 29, 2012, the centennial of the Girl Scouts was commemorated when Low was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
March 12, 1918 -
Today episode on the Wacky World of the Russian Revolution -
March 12, 1922 -
At the end of the Second World War, America dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. Each bomb killed so many people so quickly and made the world so safe for peace-loving democracies that America began feeling pretty good about things and forgot all about being Depressed, etc. This caused the hula-hoop, the soda fountain, and the young Annette Funicello.
Not everyone could master the hula-hoop, however, and the alienation experienced by those who couldn't resulted in the development of an American counterculture.
Scoffing the traditional values of mainstream America, the counterculturalists experimented with bold new ideas. They forsook the established middle-class pleasures, such as wine, woman, and song, in favor of radical new ones, such as sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.
Born 101 years ago today, Jack Kerouac was a child of the Depression and a veteran of the second world war. He was therefore torn between these competing value systems and roamed the country aimlessly in search of grammar and punctuation.
The adventures described in On the Road were based loosely on his real-life travels with the infamous Ken Kesey and his band of Merry Pranksters, whose insatiable appetite for borscht led Kerouac to dub them "The Beet Generation."
March 12, 1930 -
Mahatma Gandhi began his historic Salt March to the sea, a protest against British salt taxes in India.
The crowd of marchers grew as Gandhi walked for 24 days, a 240-mile trek (390 km) to the beach at Dandi where he produced salt without paying any tax to the nation’s British rulers, sparking similar acts nationwide.
March 12, 1932 -
Ivar Kreuger, the so-called Swedish Match King, (at one time, he controlled two thirds of the worldwide match production) committed suicide in Paris on this date, leaving behind a financial empire that turned out to be a massive Ponzi scheme.
The 'Kreuger crash’ shook Wall Street and led to a 1933 Securities Act, which strengthened disclosure requirements for all companies selling stock.
March 12, 1938 -
Germany enters Austria in the Anschluss, to annex it as part of Grossdeutchland.
Oh those wacky Germans and their World Domination Tour.
March 12, 1945 -
...The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be....
Annelies Marie Frank was thought to have died, a day after her sister, Margot, at Auschwitz on this date.
March 12, 1955 -
Bird Lives.
Due to many years of drug and alcohol abuse, the coroner who performed his autopsy mistakenly estimated Parker's 34-year-old body to be between 50 and 60 years of age.
March 12, 1969 -
Paul McCartney married Linda Eastman on this date.
George Harrison and Patti Boyd missed the ceremony because they had been arrested earlier that day when a very large amount of hashish was found in their home. I guess their wedding gift never got to the newlyweds.
The World Wide Web turns 35 today (or not, please you get your own blog and post what you want.)
When Tim Berners-Lee submitted his proposal, his boss was the first of many people who didn’t get it initially. His manager described the web as “vague but interesting”.
March 12, 2000 -
Pope John Paul II asked God's forgiveness for the many wrongs committed by the Roman Catholic Church on this date. The pardon he requested divided into seven categories of Church sin, including sins against the Jews, against native peoples of the world, the crimes of the Inquisition, and general crimes against humanity.
Before you go - Please say Happy Birthday to Mike Geier,
best friend of Puddles Pity Party -
And so it goes.
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