Today is Velociraptor Awareness Day. Velociraptors are small vicious dinosaurs that usually ruin everyone's day at your local millionaire's amusement park.
April 18, 1971 -
The first solo television special of Diana Ross, Diana!, premiered on ABC TV on this date.
The special also featured appearances by Danny Thomas and Bill Cosby, plus performances by The Jackson 5, and also included Jackson 5 lead singer Michael Jackson's solo debut.
April 18, 1975 -
John Lennon released Stand by Me on this date.
Lennon's cover was his last hit prior to his five-year retirement from the music industry.
April 18, 1979 -
For some reason, never clearly explained by TV professionals, the George Schlatter produced weekly series profiling human interest stories, Real People, premiered on NBC TV on this date.
Forms of reality television had been done in the past but Real People blended profiles of everyday citizens, comedic studio commentary and viewer interaction. And for some reason, the series was a huge hit.
April 18, 1986 -
Universal Studios releases the fantasy film Legend, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, Tim Curry, David Bennent, Alice Playten, and Billy Barty, premiered in the US on this date.
Tim Curry had to wear a large, bull-like structure atop his head with three-foot fiberglass horns supported by a harness underneath the make-up. The horns strained the back of Curry's neck because they extended forward and not straight up. Rob Bottin and his crew finally came up with horns that were hollow and lightweight. At the end of each filming day, Curry spent an hour in a bath in order to liquefy the soluble spirit gum that served as the adhesive for his make-up. At one point, he got too impatient and claustrophobic that he pulled the make-up off too quickly, tearing off his own skin in the process. Director Ridley Scott felt both horrified and sorry for Curry, and immediately tried to find an easier way to make up his character. Since he didn't want Curry to put more make-up on his torn skin, he shot around him for a week. Scott also realized that it added a dramatic build-up for the character, so he re-shot some of his opening scenes this way. The footage of Curry in the opening to the U.S. Theatrical release was filmed before any of this took place.
April 18, 1987 -
Aretha Franklin and George Michael duet I Knew You Were Waiting (for Me) hit no. #1 on the Billboard charts on this date.
The Queen of Soul had fallen out of favor and her fortunes were revived by her 1985 album Who's Zoomin' Who, which contained two US Top 10 hits: the title track and Freeway of Love. It took this duet with George Michael, however, to return her to the top of the chart, where she had not been for 20 years (with Respect).
April 18, 2003 -
Walt Disney Studios' adaptation of the children's novel, Holes, starring, Sigourney Weaver, Jon Voight, Patricia Arquette, Tim Blake Nelson and Shia LaBeouf, went into general release in the U.S. on this date.
A screenplay was initially written by Richard Kelly, who greatly departed from the source material by writing a dark, violent adaptation of the story set in a post-apocalyptic world. The studio reportedly found the script far too disturbing for a children's movie, rejecting it in favor of the final script written by the novel's author, Louis Sachar.
April 18, 2004 -
Eamon hits no. 1 on the Billboard Charts with F*ck It (I Don't Want You Back), on this date. The song holds the record for the most expletives ever in a #1 song.
(Kids, ask your folks if you can listen to this song.)
There are 33 profane words in the lyrics, which is one reason why most radio stations didn't play the song when it first came out. The following year an edited version arrived which had all the swears silenced. The DJs referred to the song as simply I Don't Want You Back.
April 18, 2008 -
Universal's Forgetting Sarah Marshall, starring Jason Segel, Paul Rudd, Kristen Bell, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand, and Bill Hader, premiered in the US on this date.
The film is based on script-writer Jason Segel's experience breaking up with Linda Cardellini, as well as three other breakups with unspecified women. Segel has said that the 'naked breakup' did not involve Cardellini, and that she was a great girlfriend.
Another ACME Safety Film
Today in History:
It was a tense April in Boston in 1775. The colonists were simmering with resentment toward the motherland, on account of King George III having strewn the colonies with excessive tacks, painful to step on and bothersome to the horses. Furthermore, British cabbies had refused to unionize, and the colonists were adamantly opposed to taxis without representation.
King George III tried to assuage the riled colonists by sending them boatloads of tea. (King George III was insane.) The colonists dressed up like Indians and poured all the king's tea into Boston harbor, proving they could be perfectly insane without any help from the king.
The king's colonial representatives overheard some of these discussions, and decided to arrest as many of these patriots as possible, unless they could kill them first.
Anticipating colonial unrest, British officers had deployed Regulars on all the key roads between Boston and Lexington. (The Regulars had previously proved effective even where the Irregulars and Extra Longs had failed.)
Revere told some friends to hang two lanterns in Boston's Old North Church, in order to signal his wife that he'd be late for dinner, and immediately set out for Charlestown. Once there, he mounted a horse and began the ride to Lexington.
He found himself almost immediately pursued by Regulars, whom he eluded by means of wily Boston riding tactics: he took a series of lefts from the right lane and a series of rights from the left, utterly confounding his pursuers, who were anyway accustomed to riding on the other side of the street and still weren't sure what to do at a blinking red light. One of the Regulars rode straight into a fruit stand and ended up covered in produce. Another rode through a big plate glass window that two workmen were carrying across the road. It was pretty funny.
Just before midnight, Revere finally arrived at Jonas Clarke's Lexington home, where he breathlessly informed Adams and Hancock that the British were coming. This confounded Adams and Hancock, who, like Revere, were themselves British.
Once the confusion was cleared up, Adams and Hancock fled for safety while Revere and two others rushed on to Concord. Many memorable and important historical events ensued, such as the American Revolution, but by then it was April 19th, and therefore no longer appropriate to this date's entry.
Although Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem immortalized Paul Revere alone. Revere was the least heroic, he was captured by British patrols and held for awhile before he was released without his horse.
Please indulge your local tea party members today, Sara Palin has already hinted that she wouldn't mind running again as someone's VP.
April 18, 1882 –
A painter paints his pictures on canvas. But musicians paint their pictures on silence. We provide the music, and you provide the silence.
Leopold Stokowski, conductor, and long-time music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra was born on this date.
But, what the hell do you care?
April 18, 1906 -
A devastating earthquake struck San Francisco at 5:13 a.m., followed by a major aftershock three hours later. More than 3,000 people were killed from either collapsing structures or any of the 59 separate fires which burned over the next three days.
In the downtown area, the U.S. Army was forced to dynamite whole city blocks in order to contain the flames, due to the lack of water pressure.
April 18th, 1923 -
On the first day of the new baseball season, the gates of Yankee Stadium were opened and 74,200 people flooded through turnstiles, while another 25,000 were turned away – an amazing number, given that previous attendance record for a single game was 42,000 for the 1916 World Series in Boston. In an ironic twist, the first game was fittingly played against the Boston Red Sox, Babe Ruth’s former team. Even more fitting was that Ruth hit the first homerun in the stadium on the opening day of the new ballpark – a three-run homerun, giving the Yankees the 4-1 win.
Before Yankee Stadium opened in 1923, the Yankees rented from their cross-town rivals, the New York Giants and shared the space at the Polo Grounds. Threatened with eviction, the Yankees were forced to build their own stadium in the Bronx. The ballpark became the first to have three tiers of seating, consisting of 58,000 seats. It was also the first ballpark to be called a stadium due to its enormous size.
April 18, 1930 -
As impossible as this may seem, at 8:45 pm on this date, a BBC news announcer told the British public 'there is no news', and played piano music for the rest of the 15-minute interval.
The wireless service then returned to broadcasting from the Queen's Hall in Langham Place, London, where the Wagner opera Parsifal was being performed.
April 18, 1942 -
The Doolittle raids took place over Tokyo (the first U.S. air raid to strike the Japanese home islands during WWII,) and were led by Lieutenant Colonel James H. Doolittle, who received a congressional medal of honor for his actions.
Though the raid did not do much material damage to Japan, it demonstrated how vulnerable the Japanese home islands were to air attack just four months after their surprise attack on Pearl Harbor.
April 18, 1955 -
Nobel Prize recipient Albert Einstein died in his hospital bed from a ruptured aortic aneurysm on this date.
Seven hours later, Dr. Thomas Harvey, chief pathologist at Princeton Hospital, performed Albert Einstein's autopsy. He removed the brain and took it home. Thus began a 40 year journey of "They Stole Einstein's Brain".
April 18, 1963 -
Harvard's most successful 'failure' Conan O'Brien was born on this date
Don't worry, some day Coco will find himself.
April 18, 1968 -
Robert P. McCulloch, American entrepreneur and chairman of McCulloch Oil Company, bought London Bridge on this date, from the Corporation of London for $2,460,000 plus shipping costs of around $240,000.
He bought the structure as a tourist attraction to entice people to vacation and potentially retire in Lake Havasu City, Arizona, a planned community he established a few years earlier. Rebuilding London Bridge took three years and several million dollars more, which strained McCulloch's finances.
April 18, 1983 -
62 people were killed and more than 100 injured in a suicide bombing against the U.S. Embassy in Beirut on this date. The attacker used a van packed with one ton of high explosives. Included among the dead was the CIA's entire Middle East bureau.
The group Islamic Jihad claims responsibility, although the intelligence community believes it was actually the work of Hezbollah.
April 18, 1988 -
American auto worker John Demjanjuk was convicted of crimes against humanity by an Israeli court on this date. They determined that he was Treblinka's notorious Ivan the Terrible. The court sentences him to hang one week later, but the conviction is later overturned when it appears to have been a case of mistaken identity.
Mr. Demjanjuk died on March 17, 2012, still attempting to appeal his case. Since his appeal was not heard at the time of his death, his conviction was invalidated and he died without a criminal record.
I'm not sure how that helped him when he approached the gates of hell.
And so it goes.
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