Today is also International Day of Awesomeness. It's a day for celebrating all things awesome, and everything awesome that you, your friends, and everybody else does.
It's also the birthday of Chuck Norris
Remember, Chuck Norris has a diary, it is called the Guinness Book Of World Records.
Today is National Napping Day, the holiday is observed the day following the return of daylight saving time.
National Napping Day provides everyone with the opportunity to have a nap (by themselves or with a friend) and catch up on the hour of sleep they lost due to the spring forward time change. (Remember the true sign that you are an adult - you don't need to be encouraged to take a nap.)
March 10, 1938 -
Bette Davis won her second Academy Award and re-ignited her sagging career when Jezebel, premiered in New York City on this date.
Bette Davis first met William Wyler in 1931 when she auditioned for a part in his film A House Divided. She was late and had hurriedly put on a size 8 dress that was cut very low. As she walked by she heard Wyler say to one of his crew members "What do you think of these dames who show their tits and think they can get jobs?". Davis was completely humiliated by his comment and hadn't forgotten it when they later met to discuss working on Jezebel. The irony was that Davis had a reputation for foregoing her sex appeal - often appearing without makeup.
March 10, 1956 -
The musical adaptation of the play High Tor, starring Bing Crosby, Nancy Olsen and Julie Andrews (in her TV debut) aired on the Ford Star Jubilee program on CBS, on this date.
Stephen Sondheim also set a musical version of the play High Tor, but Maxwell Anderson refused permission, so the Sondheim musical adaptation was never produced. Subsequent copyright extension acts mean the Stephen Sondheim music will be illegal until 2042.
March 10, 1958 -
Big Records released the single, Our Song, by a teenage duo from Queens, New York, Tom and Jerry, on this date.
The duo in a few years will become famous in the '60s under their real names, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel.
March 10, 1960 -
The crime thriller based on the novel The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith, Purple Noon starring Alain Delon, and directed by René Clément, opened in France, on this date.
Author Patricia Highsmith, expressed satisfaction with the film, which she called "very beautiful to the eye and interesting for the intellect," and with Alain Delon's performance as Tom Ripley. She was, however, disappointed with the film's ending, calling it "a terrible concession to so-called public morality."
March 10, 1972 -
Peter Bogdanovich's valentine to screwball comedies, What's Up, Doc?, starring Barbra Streisand, Ryan O'Neal, Kenneth Mars, and Madeline Kahn, premiered in the US on this date
Peter Bogdanovich did not get permission from the city of San Francisco to drive cars down the concrete steps in Alta Plaza Park; these were badly damaged during filming and still show the scars today. Because of the damage to city property during the filming of this movie, San Francisco now requires productions to provide with its filming permit application a very detailed scene-by-scene breakdown of everything that the company is asking permission to film.
March 10, 1972 -
Universal Pictures released the science fiction film Silent Running, directed by Douglas Trumbull (who just passed away last week,) and starring Bruce Dern, on this date.
The model of the Valley Forge space freighter was 26 feet in length and was constructed with steel, wood, plastic, and over 650 army tank model kits. After filming was completed, the model was placed into storage. However, as the expense to store the model continued to mount, it was later disassembled and destroyed in the mid-1970s. The bulk of the model was sent to a landfill in the Sepulveda Pass next to Interstate 405 in Los Angeles, but several large pieces survived, including at least two of the domes, one of which is in the collection of the Museum of Pop Culture in Seattle, Washington, USA.
March 10, 1977 -
The TV movie A Circle of Children, starring Jane Alexander, Rachel Roberts, and David Ogden Stiers and based on the life and book about this by Mary Mac Cracken premiered on CBS TV, on this date.
The film was one of the first to deal sympathetically with the issue of autism
March 10, 1978 -
TV audiences get to see for the first time, the trials and tribulations of Dr David (and not Bruce) Banner and his travels to find the cure for his gamma ray exposure accident when The Incredible Hulk, starring Bill Bixby, Jack Colvin and Lou Ferrigno, premiered on CBS TV on this date.
First appearance of the Hulk making his escape by breaking through a wall and running down an alley (wearing blue pants). This scene was re-used many times over the course of the series.
March 10, 1979 –
Poco's single Crazy Love went to No. 1 on Billboard's Adult Contemporary charts on this date.
Crazy Love was the first single by Poco to reach the Top 40 and remained the group's biggest hit.
March 10, 1983 –
Despite the production value and Michael Jackson's star quality, MTV didn't play the video Billie Jean until the song was already a #1 hit. Les Garland, who ran the network at the time, claims that they loved the video and played it as soon as they could, but interviews with executives at Jackson's record company and with others familiar with the matter suggest otherwise.
In the book I Want My MTV, multiple sources who worked at MTV claimed that the network wanted to air the Beat It video first, because Eddie Van Halen played on it and the song fit their format. Walter Yetnikoff, who was head of CBS Records (Jackson's was signed to its subsidiary, Epic), recalls threatening to pull all CBS videos from MTV if they didn't play Billie Jean. He says he threatened to bring Jackson's producer Quincy Jones in on it as well, and the network acquiesced. MTV broadcasted the video of Michael Jackson’s song Billie Jean for the first time, on this date.
When MTV started playing the clip, it was first put in medium rotation, then promoted to heavy rotation when viewers loved it. The video for this song is often credited with breaking the color barrier on MTV. When the video for Beat It was delivered, that one also went into hot rotation. For a two-month stretch in the summer of 1983, both videos were getting constant airplay, establishing Jackson as a video star. His next video effort was for Thriller, which revolutionized the form.
March 10, 1989 -
Terry Gilliam's fourth film, The Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, starring John Neville, Eric Idle, Uma Thurman, and a whole bunch of other people, premiered on this date.
According to Eric Idle when he was told to shave his head for the role he responded that he didn't want to. So, the director Terry Gilliam said that he would shave his as well. Idle agreed but when he did it, Gilliam didn't keep his promise.
March 10, 1994 -
The surprise Australian independent hit, Muriel's Wedding, starring Toni Collette, Rachel Griffiths, and Bill Hunter went into limited release in the US on this date.
Bill Hunter was filming The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and Muriel's Wedding at the same time, each requiring him to have different length hair, beard and to be in different parts of the country. Both films developed international cult followings and prominently featured the music of ABBA.
March 10, 1997 -
Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Joss Whedon and starring Sarah Michelle Geller premiered on WB Television Network on this date.
Entertainment Weekly magazine named Buffy the number three character of all time, coming behind Homer Simpson and Harry Potter. (issue #1105/1106, June 4/11, 2010).
Word of the Day
Today in History:
March 10, 1876 -
It was on this date in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell (Don Ameche) conducted the first successful experiment on a radical new technology. He put a "transmitter" in one room of his home and a "receiver" in another. He connected them with wire. He then shouted into the mouthpiece of the transmitter, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you."
A moment later, his assistant, who had been waiting in the room with the receiver, came into Bell's room and said he had heard and understood everything.
When Alexander Graham Bell finished his invention of the telephone, he noticed he had two missed calls from Chuck Norris.
The invention didn't enjoy much commercial success because the market for persons with out-of-earshot assistants named Watson was not as large as Bell had hoped, but it did serve as a major stepping-stone to one of Bell's most significant inventions, the Watson Detonator.
March 10, 1914 –
At London’s National Gallery, suffragette Mary Richardson slashes Diego Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver: “I have tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the Government for destroying Mrs. Pankhurst, who is the most beautiful character in modern history. Justice is an element of beauty as much as colour and outline on canvas. Mrs. Pankhurst seeks to procure justice for womanhood, and for this she is being slowly murdered by a Government of Iscariot politicians.” — her statement was published in The Times, London, the next day.
Emmeline Pankhurst and other members of the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), while serving sentences for their activities, went on hunger strikes to protest the horrible conditions at Holloway Prison; the government begins violent force-feedings to prevent them from dying as martyrs.
March 10, 1948 -
The State owned Communist newspaper reported that the Czech foreign minister Jan Masaryk was thrown from a window at his apartment in Prague under mysterious circumstances on this date.
I hate when that happens.
March 10, 1948 -
... Nobody has ever measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold ....
She was locked in on the 3rd floor while undergoing insulin-induced coma therapy.
I really hate when that happens.
March 10, 1951 -
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover announces that he has turned down an offer to become commissioner of baseball on this date.
March 10, 1977 -
Roman Polanski gave a 13 year old girl Quaaludes and has sex with her during a photo shoot at Jack Nicholson's home on this date. He later fled the country to avoid statutory rape charges.
March 10, 1977 -
Astronomers James L. Elliot, Edward W. Dunham and Douglas J. Mink discover rings around Uranus on this date.
March 10, 1980 -
Jean Harris shot and killed her unfaithful lover, cardiologist Herman Tarnower, co-author of The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet in his Purchase N.Y. home on this date.
She was granted clemency on December 31, 1992 by Governor Mario Cuomo after she served 12 years of a 15 year sentence. Harris was released in January 1993. Mrs Harris died in December 2013.
Sometimes, diets make you a little hangry
March 10, 1988 -
An avalanche hit the British royal party including King Charles (Prince of Wales at the time,) as they were ski-ing off piste above the resort of Klosters in Switzerland, on this date.
Charles and several other members of the party, including their guide, were able to ski to safety, but one of the Prince's closest friends Major Hugh Lindsay, former equerry to the Queen is not so lucky.
And so it goes.
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