What you plant now, you will harvest later.

It's International Plant Appreciation Day.



Cut flowers fade away, while a potted plant, especially a flowering one, brings long-lasting pleasure. But after the clip you may want to see some plants cut down.

So now you know.


April 13, 1964 -
Sidney Poitier became the first African-American male to win the Best Actor Academy Award for the 1963 film Lilies of the Field, on this date.



However, whatever satisfaction Poitier felt winning this award was undercut by his concern that he won not because Hollywood had shown enlightened thinking, but rather he was being treated as Hollywood's token African-American. Furthermore, Poitier was concerned that he would not be able to ask for special consideration given his success since he would be accused of being ungrateful for being so honored along with similar racist condescensions, and indeed Poitier did not work for some time after winning the award.


April 13, 1967 -
A very silly film, loosely Loosely based on the first James Bond novel by Ian Fleming, Casino Royale, directed by John Huston, Ken Hughes, Robert Parrish, Joe McGrath and Val Guest and starring (among others) Peter Sellers, Ursula Andress, David Niven, Woody Allen, Joanna Pettet, Orson Welles, Daliah Lavi, Deborah Kerr, William Holden, Charles Boyer, Jean-Paul Belmondo, George Raft, and John Huston, premiered in London, on this date.



Producer Charles K. Feldman originally intended to make the film as a co-production with official Bond series producers Harry Saltzman and Albert R. Broccoli, with Sean Connery as James Bond and Shirley MacLaine as Vesper Lynd. Saltzman and Broccoli had just co-produced Thunderball  with Kevin McClory, and didn't want to do it again. United Artists supposedly offered Feldman $500,000 for the rights to Casino Royale in 1965, but the offer was rejected. Forced to produce the film on his own, Feldman approached Connery to star as Bond. Unwilling to meet Connery's $1-million salary demand, Feldman decided to turn the film into a spoof, and cast David Niven as Bond. After the film went through numerous production problems and an exploding budget, Feldman met Connery at a Hollywood party and reportedly told Connery it would've been cheaper to pay him the $1 million.


April 13, 1973 -
The Wailers, led by Bob Marley, release their fifth studio album, Catch a Fire on this date.



The first album on their new label, Island Records, it makes Marley and the Wailers international recording stars and brings reggae music to the forefront.


April 13, 1984 -
Jonathan Demme's look at the homefront during WW II, Swing Shift, starring, Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, Christine Lahti, Fred Ward and Ed Harris, premiered in the US on this date.



In an early scene, Ed Harris, clad only in a towel wrapped around his waist, plops down on a chair. For a split second, his genitals are fully exposed. This scene somehow evaded the censors (and in a PG-rated film) and in the first video release, the scene is intact. The scene has now disappeared from subsequent releases. However, it is included on the print shown on Turner Classic Movies.


April 13, 1994 -
Another black comedy from John Waters, Serial Mom, starring, Kathleen Turner, Sam Waterston, Ricki Lake, Matthew Lillard, Patty Hearst, Suzanne Somers, Joan Rivers, Traci Lords, and Brigid Berlin premiered in the US on this date.



The copyright holders of the song Tomorrow, as heard when Mrs. Jenson watches Annie in her living room, charged $60,000 for the rights to use the song because of the explicit content of John Waters' past films.


April 13, 1996 -
Seconds before their first Saturday Night Live performance, Rage Against the Machine's roadies place upside-down American flags on their amplifiers in a band-sanctioned protest of the American political system - billionaire candidate Steve Forbes is hosting the show.



The SNL crew quickly tears them down, and the band is booted from building without a second song. Regarding the message of the upside-down flags, lead singer Zack de la Rocha said: "American democracy is inverted when your only choice is between wealthy representatives of the privileged classes."


April 13, 2001 -
The film version of Helen Fielding's rom cam bestseller, Bridget Jones's Diary, starring Renée Zellweger, Hugh Grant, and Colin Firth, premiered in the US on this date.



In order to make her English accent seem more natural, Renée Zellweger retained it on set even while not shooting. Hugh Grant once noted that he did not hear her speak in an American accent until the wrap party, after this movie was completed, where he heard her speak "in a very strange voice" that he soon found out was her own natural tone.

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


Today in History:
April 13, 1598 -
King Henry IV of France signed the Edict of Nantes, which granted political rights to French Huguenots.



The edict was revoked in 1685 by King Louis XIV, who declared France entirely Catholic again.

Oops.


April 13, 1796 -
Captain Jacob Crowninshield, (member of one of Salem’s elite families, and future member of Congress who would go on to serve as Secretary of the Navy,) arrived with the first (or possible second) elephant in America on this date. The elephant, named Old Bet, was brought back from India to America by a sea captain who hoped to sell her.

Old Bet was eventually bought by Hackaliah Bailey, one of the founders of Barnum and Bailey, and stayed with the circus until she was shot and killed by a boy who had heard that her hide was bulletproof, and wanted to see if it was true.


April 13, 1883 -
Alferd Packer, one of the few people in the US ever to be jailed for cannibalism, having allegedly killed and eaten five of his traveling companions while trapped in the Rocky Mountains during fierce winter weather, was sentenced to death in Colorado. During the trial, the judge supposedly said:

"Damn you, Alferd Packer! There were seven Dimmycrats in Hinsdale County and you ate five of them!"

An alternate version of the judge's outburst is -

"Packer, you depraved Republican son of a bitch! There were only five Democrats in Hinsdale County and you ate them all!"

The actual sentencing statement, of course, was a little more in character for an educated state judge:

"Close your ears to the blandishments of hope. Listen not to the flattering promises of life, but prepare for the dread certainty of death."





Packer is a legend in popular culture. He has been quoted as having said, in jest, "the breasts of man...are the sweetest meat I ever tasted." In 1968, students at the University of Colorado at Boulder named their new cafeteria grill the Alferd G. Packer Memorial Grill with the slogan "Have a friend for lunch!" Even today students can enjoy the meat-filled "El Canibal" underneath a giant wall map outlining his travels through Colorado.



Trey Parker, co-creator of South Park and graduate of University of Colorado, made a student film - Cannibal: The Musical, based loosely on Packer's life.


April 13, 1909 –
The events in our lives happen in a sequence in time, but in their significance to ourselves they find their own order the continuous thread of revelation.



Eudora Welty, American author, was born on this date.


April 13, 1919 -
The Jallianwala Bagh Massacre, also known as the Amritsar Massacre, was named after the Jallianwala Bagh (Garden) in the northern Indian city of Amritsar, where, British Indian Army soldiers under the command of Brigadier-General Reginald Dyer opened fire on an unarmed gathering of men, women and children on this date.



The firing lasted about 10 minutes and 1,600 rounds were fired. Official sources place the casualties at 379. According to private sources, the number was over 1,000, with more than 2,000 wounded, and Civil Surgeon Dr Smith indicated that they were over 1,800.

And the British wonder why they lost an empire.


April 13, 1943 -
On the bicentennial anniversary of the birth of Thomas Jefferson, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt dedicated the Jefferson Memorial on this date.



The memorial was designed by John Russell Pope. The statue of Jefferson housed inside was designed by Rudolph Evans. At the dedication in 1943, the statue was made of plaster. The bronze version had to wait until wartime restrictions on the use of metals ended.


April 13, 1943 -
Given the current situation in Ukraine - this is an important historical reminder:
Katyn Forest is a wooded area near Gneizdovo village, a short distance from Smolensk in Russia where, in 1940 on Stalin's orders, the Soviet secret police shot and buried over 4000 Polish service personnel that had been taken prisoner when the Soviet Union invaded Poland in September 1939 at the start of WWII in support of the Nazis.



On April 13, 1943 the Nazis having overtaken the area, exhumed the Polish dead and blamed the Soviets in an effort to sour the West's relationship with the Kremlin. In 1944, having retaken the Katyn area from the Nazis, the Soviets exhumed the Polish dead again and blamed the Nazis. The rest of the world took its usual sides in such arguments.



In 1989, with the collapse of Soviet Power, Premier Gorbachev finally admitted that the Soviets had executed the Poles, and confirmed two other burial sites similar to the site at Katyn. Stalin's order of March 1940 to execute by shooting some 25,700 Poles, including those found at the three sites, was also disclosed with the collapse of Soviet Power.

Oops


April 13, 1970 -
56 hours and 205,000 miles from planet Earth, the crew aboard Apollo 13 heard "a pretty loud bang" when oxygen tank number two spontaneously exploded. Astronaut Jack Swigert informs Mission Control in Houston: "Hey, we've had a problem here."



Miraculously, the crew manages to return home in their crippled spacecraft.


April 13,1973 -
Henry Darger, janitor and "outsider artist", died in Chicago on this date.

He had spent as many as 40 years working on a 15,000 page novel titled The Story of the Vivian Girls, (in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion).



He illustrated the work with some 300 watercolors that were lifted and recomposed from popular sources.


April 13, 1992 -
Chicago's downtown business center was crippled by massive flooding, when the damaged wall of a utility tunnel beneath the Chicago River opened into a breach which flooded basements and underground facilities throughout the Chicago Loop with an estimated 250 million gallons of water on this date.



Workers attempted to plug the hole, with 65 truckloads of rocks and cement as well as old mattresses. In an attempt to slow the leak, the level of the Chicago River was lowered by closing the locks at Lake Michigan and opening them downstream of Chicago,and the freight tunnels were drained into the Chicago Deep Tunnel system.


April 13, 1994 -
The United Nations Human Rights Committee declared Sodomy to be a basic human right on this date. The committee determined that laws against buggery (particularly in Tasmania) breach articles of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.



So now you know what they do all day at the UN.


Before you go -
April 13, 2029 -
Mark this date in your calendars. A meteor will pass by the Earth, we hope, breaking the record for the closest passing by of any other previous meteor. Unless it goes wildly off course and crashes into Earth.



Have a good day.



And so it goes