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Blog Posts from June 2008:

Wall-E
June 30th, 2008

courtesy electricityandlust.com and PIXAR/Disney


Congrats to Andrew and the PIXAR gang for going 9 for 9 out of the starting gate with Wall-E. I saw it on a weekend we also saw MONGOL! go figure. I had worried about the resemblance to Short Circuit and how the death of Joe Ranft would effect the Story Dept.. But the results speak for themselves.

It was great! It's like a broken record already, nice animation, beautiful cinematography, nice story. A little long, but I thought the last few PIXAR films were overlong, except for the INCREDIBLES.

I find it interesting how since CARS Pixar is exploring this new nether region inbetween pure cartoons and live action. Those shots of Wall-E going through the bleak Earth landscape had a photo-real feel, but keeping it's integrity as a cartoon film, much like the racetrack shots in CARS. It'll be cool to see where they go with this.

And Mr Eggleston and Capobianco, thanks for the Art History lesson in the end titles. Very well done. Saul Bass and Abe Levitow would be proud.


July 30th, 2008 mon
June 30th, 2008

Quiz: What is bilge?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: We hear of Zion, The Last Zion, the Children of Zion and Zionists. So, just what is Zion, anyway?
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History for 6/30/2008
Birthdays: Buddy Rich, Lena Horne is 91, Czeslaw Milosz, Susan Hayward, Mike Tyson is 42, Deanna Durbin, Howard Hawks, William Goldman, Martin Landau, Essa-Pekka Salonen, David Alan Grier, Vincent D’Onofrio, Monica Potter, Rupert Graves

1520- " La Noche Triste- THE NIGHT OF SORROWS" at Tenochtitlan. The Aztecs finally realize that Cortez and his conquistadors aren’t visiting gods and drive them from the capitol with great slaughter. Almost half of his men were killed this one night. Some Spaniards attempted to escape by diving into the lake and swimming but were dragged down by the weight of their stolen gold and drowned. Cortez forced his hostage the Emperor Montezuma to go out and quiet the multitudes, but the crowd killed him with a shower of stones. During the fighting, captured Spaniards were dragged up the steps of the great pyramid of Huitzilopochtli and sacrificed while their comrades could only watch in horror. The temple towered over the city so everyone could see. After the ritual sacrifice the Aztecs would eat barbecued strips cut from the man’s thighs. Remember this the next time you order fajitas. Diarist Bernal Diaz de Castillo remembered that during a lull in the fighting the Aztecs would call out :'You Spaniards better go home. I'm stuffed!" Cortez would regroup his forces and with the aid of allied Indian tribes and a terrible smallpox epidemic eventually reconquer the city.

1559- King Henry II of France is warned by a weirdo named Michel de Nostre Dame or Nostradamus, to beware of lances. Henry laughed it off because nobody fought that way anymore. However to celebrate a dynastic marriage and peace treaty with Spain part of the Rue Saint Antoine in Paris was closed off for a joust with blunt lances–kind of a Renaissance version of a "Medieval Times" party. Forty year old King Henry jousted with the Dukes of Guise and Savoy and knocked them down. He complained they let him win and ordered his Scottish body guard Montgomery to lay on for real. In a freak accident, on impact Montgomery’s lance splintered and shot through the king’s gold helmet visor and through his brain, killing him. Nostradamus was quickly put on the royal payroll.

1643- In Paris the son of an upholsterer named Jean Coquelin signed a contract to establish the Ilustre Theatre. Jean also took on a stage name- Moliere .

1832- The Great Pierce Island Rendezvous- In the Old West the end of June marked the one time of the year the solitary Mountain Men would come down out of the Rockies and meet together. At the rendezvous they contacted fur company representatives to turn in their furs and pelts for gunpowder, blankets, trade trinkets and whiskey. There were several rendezvous sites including Bent's Fort and Papoagia but Pierce Island was one of the more celebrated

1856- Charles Dickens does his first public reading from his works in London.

1859- Daredevil Emile Blondin crossed Niagara Falls on a tightrope.

1870- The dictator of the Dominican Republic had offered to sell his entire nation to the United States.

1882- Charles Guiteau, assassin of President Garfield and major league fruitcake, was hanged. He had acted as his own lawyer on a defense that God had ordered him to kill the president. One prison guard hated Guiteau so much he took a shot at him but missed, prompting a Congressman to order an investigation of the marksmanship of government officers. Tickets to the execution went for as much as $300 Each. Guiteau’s last words as the gallows trapdoor dropped was "Glory Halelieuyah!"

1894 - London Tower Bridge opened.

1908-A mysterious explosion occurs in remote Tunguska Siberia with the estimated strength of several atom bombs. No meteorite remains was ever discovered. Soil at the epicenter had been turned to glass. It was speculated as a comet impact or a UFO crash. But it has never been completely explained.

1914 – A young English trained Indian lawyer named Mohandas K. Ghandi was arrested for the first time, trying to win equal rights for non-European citizens in South Africa. Years later in India he would earned the name the Mahatma, or the Great Soul.

1933- A group of actors meet in secret at Frank (the Wizard of Oz) Morgan and form the Screen Actors Guild. The secrecy was because studios threatened to blacklist anyone who so much as breathed the word union. Among the founding members that night are James Cagney, Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Franchot Tone, Frederic March, Robert Montgomery and Boris Karloff.

1934-"NIGHT OF THE LONG KNIVES"- Chancellor Adolf Hitler arrested his own stormtroopers during their convention and had them all shot. Hitler was placating the top industrial and military powers to consolidate his hold on Germany.

1936- Margaret Mitchell's bestseller 'Gone With the Wind" first published.

1936- the 40 hour work week made a federal law. But nobody in animation found out about it until 1941.

1937- Congress voted to shut down the Federal Theater Program, the division of the government funded WPA that produced plays for Depression wracked poor people. The FTP produced cutting edge works of Orson Welles, Clifford Odets and Eugene O’Neill and at it’s height reached 25 million people. But conservative senators thought it had become too radicalized by lefties for a government program. Theater actors working in L.A. on a hit production of Pinocchio held a mock funeral for the puppet. Over it’s casket was the headstone FTP: Born 1934, Killed by an Act of Congress, June 30th 1937.

1940- Cartoonist Dale Messick takes over the Brenda Star comic strip and adds the trademark sparkles.

1948- Bell Laboratories announced the Transistor, a possible substitute for radio-vacuum tubes.

1953- The first Chevy Corvette rolled off the assembly line. Only three thousand were made, all white with red interior selling for $3500.

1975 - Cher, just 4 days after divorcing Sonny Bono married rocker Gregg Allman.

1996 - Margaux Hemingway, considered the first modern Supermodel, committed suicide at 41. Her grandfather Ernest Hemingway committed suicide, and his father before him.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: We hear of Zion, The Last Zion, the Children of Zion and Zionists. So, just what is Zion, anyway?

Answer: Several times in the Old Testament, the promised land of Israel is called in Hebrew Tsiyon or Sion. Zion has grown to become a metaphor for a promised land of peace, in the real or spiritual sense. To the Rastafarians of Jamaica Zion is the land of Africa. To Mormons at first Jackson County Missouri was called Zion, then the Salt Lake area, as well as a metaphor for a state of spiritual utopia. The Back to Zion movement among European Jews began in the 1880s, and followers were called Zionists. The Mount Zion near Jerusalem today is a name given in modern times.


June 29th, 2008 sun.
June 29th, 2008


There is a nice feature article about the Click & Clack show in today's Sunday NY Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/arts/television/29jens.html?_r=1&ref=television&oref=slogin


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Quiz: We hear of Zion, The Last Zion, the Children of Zion and Zionists. So, just what is Zion, anyway?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What language did King Richard the Lionhearted speak?
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history for 6/29/2008
Birthdays: Bernard Hermann, Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle, Slim Pickens, Nelson Eddy, Gary Busey is 46, John Hench, Little Eva, Harmon Killabrew, Antoine de Saint Exupery, Anna Sophie-Mutter, Leroy Anderson would have been 100, Maria Conchita Alonso, Robert Evans, Ray Harryhausen is 88

65 AD- Feasts of Saints Peter and Paul. Supposing to be the date they were executed by order of Nero. Paul was beheaded in the Mamertine prison. He had the right to die quickly because he had honorary Roman citizenship- Civitas Romanum Sum! Peter was taken to Vatican Hill and when he expressed joy that he would die as Jesus had the Roman guard conceived of a variation and crucified him upside down. When later Roman Emperor Commodus learned the Christians venerated Vatican hill because of that event, he had his favorite racing horse, Incetatus, buried there.

1762- Catherine the Great overthrew her husband Tsar Peter III in a palace coup. When Catherine received word that Peter intended to depose her to marry his mistress she decided to strike first. The Russian troops worshipped their “little mother” because her first order after the coup was to cancel Peter’s planned war with Denmark, which the men thought foolish. Tsar Paul was beaten and strangled, and Catharine became one of Russia’s great rulers.

1776- SO YOU WANT INDEPENDENCE EH?- This day outside New York Harbor near Sandy Hook New Jersey an immense British fleet was sighted. 500 ships bringing 32,000 redcoat troops and supplies 3,000 miles. It was led by the Howe brothers- General Lord Willam Howe and Admiral Richard Howe, nicknamed “Black Dick”. One American soldier wrote:” There must be no one left in London, they are all here.” Simultaneous forces were headed for the Carolinas and at the mouth of the Chesapeake to menace Philadelphia. The British regulars were augmented by regiments of Hessian German mercenaries, trained in the schools of Frederick the Great, reputedly the finest in the world. Amateur General George Washington with his little army of amateur farmers were going to face the largest amphibious invasion of that century.

1776- THE BATTLE OF SULLIVAN’S ISLE. At the same time, Colonial Minutemen repulsed another English seaborne attack, this one at Charleston, South Carolina. A rebel song of the time poked fun at the British commander, Sir Peter Parker's Lament :

" With Much Labor and Toil
Unto Sullivan's Isle
Came I like Falstaff or Pistol.
But the Yankees ('Od rot'em)
I could not get at 'em
And they terribly mauled my poor Bristol! (-HMS Bristol)

But My Lords do not fear
For before the next year,
('Though a small island could fret us)
The continent whole
We shall take by my soul,
If the cowardly Yankees will let us!"



1801- Composer Ludwig van Beethoven confessed to a friend that he was going deaf.

1927- The first commercial plane reached Hawaii from the US mainland. It was a seaplane and at one point it ran out of fuel, landed in the water and the crew rowed the final few miles.

1935- Disney’s short “Who Killed Cock Robin?” Disney animators considered this film a breakthrough for them in the development of realistic personality acting in animation . Around this time Disney artists forbade the use of black exclamation marks popping out of the characters heads to express alarm like they are used in print comics.

1936- Pope Pius X published the encyclical warning of the evils of Motion Pictures. “They glorify Lust and Lascivious behavior.”

1940 – ROBIN THE BOY WONDER- According to Batman Comics, this day mobsters rubbed out a circus highwire team known as the Flying Graysons, leaving their son Dick an orphan. He was taken in by millionaire Bruce Wayne so Batman could have his Robin. As early as 1954 with the Kefhauver Committee on Comics and Juvenile Delinquency there were accusations that Batman and Robin were gay. The proof set out in the book The Seduction of the Innocent was that whenever Batman and Robin weren’t fighting crime there were always panels depicting Dick sitting up in bed with Bruce sitting at his bedside wearing a silk robe!

1940- First day shooting on the film Citizen Kane.

1950- The Hollywood Ten are given jail sentences for contempt of Congress.

1956- President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highways Act, allocating millions of dollars to build a system of interstate freeways connecting all the major U.S. cities. Ike was an engineer in the 1920s and saw the deplorable condition of American roads and during World War Two he saw the Germans use autobahns to move heavy mechanized units quickly Many innovations for smooth traffic transitions like the cloverleaf intersection and blending lane were first developed by German Bauhaus engineers for the autobahn.
The Interstate System had at first a definite Cold War logic to it. The Interstates would be commandeered in time of war and every few miles there had to be a five mile straitaway at least so planes could use them for an emergency landing.

1956- Marilyn Monroe married writer Arthur Miller.

1966- Operation Rolling Thunder. US B-52s bomb Hanoi for the first time.

1967-Actress Jane Mansfield and her dog are decapitated in a car crash when their car slammed into a parked tractor-trailor. Her children include Marisa Hargitay.

1968 - "Tip-Toe Thru' The Tulips With Me" by Tiny Tim peaks at #17.

1978- Actor Bob Crane, best known as the star in the television series Hogan’s Heroes, was found beaten to death with an electric cord around his neck in a Scottsdale Arizona hotel room. Around his body were pornographic literature and a large library of home made porn tapes.

2002- President George W. Bush formally turned over presidential power for two hours to Vice President Dick Cheney while he underwent a colonoscopy- i.e. a fiber optic camera is shoved up his butt.
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Quiz: What language did King Richard the Lionhearted speak?

Answer: French, as did all Norman aristocracy in England until the 1300s.


June 28th, 2008 Sat.
June 28th, 2008

Quiz: What language did King Richard the Lionhearted speak?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered below: If a puta is a prostitute, what is puttanesca sauce?
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History for 6/28/2008
Birthdays: King Henry VIII, Luigi Pirandello, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Dillinger, Mel Brooks is 82, Richard Rogers, Gilda Radner, Cartoonist George Booth, John Elway, Don Baylor, Leon Panetta, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kathy Bates is 60, John Cusack is 42

1751- The first volume of the ENCYCLOPAEDIA appeared in print. French philosophers Diderot, D’Alambert and Voltaire inspired by the ideas of English scholars Newton and Francis Bacon decided to put a summary of all human knowledge into one work. Encyclopedie is from the Greek “Knowledge all in the Round”. It took thirty years to write all the volumes, the last volume the index was published in 1780. But in those days the Encyclopedists were as much a political and anti-clerical movement as a fount of trivia. That these humanist scholars should attempt to define concepts like “God” The Soul” “Heaven and Hell,” without Church permission was considered a declaration of philosophical war. The liberal thinking in the Encyclopaedia did a lot to advance the thinking of the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions.

1868- Artist Claude Monet was broke and so depressed he jumped in the Seine River. After splashing around for a while, he decided its silly to drown himself so he swam to the riverbank and went for a drink. He outlived all the Impressionist painters of his generation, dying in 1926.

1914-WORLD WAR ONE STARTS- commenting on 40 years of European peace, Otto Von Bismarck had said:" The next European war can only happen if some damn fool thing happens in the Balkans." The Austro-Hungarian Empire was muscling the little kingdom of Serbia. Austria had already annexed Bosnia in 1909 and Serbia claimed it as theirs. The heir of the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz-Ferdinand went on a provocative tour of the Bosnian town of Sarajevo in an open limousine. One terrorist Nedjelko Cabrinovic, hurled a bomb at the car but the driver avoided it and took another route. The Archduke stopped at city hall where he and the mayor got into an argument. The mayor claimed:”This city is absolutely safe!”
The motorcade proceeded until it was stopped by traffic at an intersection. Then 18 year old Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princeps stepped out of the crowd and fired his pistol. The first bullet hit the Archduchess Sophie Chotek who slumped lifeless over her husbands lap. Franz Ferdinand cried out: "Mama don't die! For the children!" when another bullet killed him. The bullet holed car and uniforms are still preserved in Vienna today. Austria and Germany and Turkey declared war on Serbia and Russia and France and England. Later the whole world joined in the lunacy, about 58 nations and 22 million deaths, the last declaration was Honduras declaring war on Germany two months before the armistice. Gavrilo Princeps died of tuberculosis in an insane asylum in 1918, unaware that he had set the world on fire.



1919- The VERSAILLES TREATY is signed, finally ending the First World War. President Wilson had wanted a peace based on mutual respect and self-determination, but the winning powers led by Clemenceau and Lloyd George brushed aside his naive suggestions and wanted revenge. The German delegate was Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, a stiff monocled Prussian who’s autocratic demeanor annoyed Wilson and lost probably the only sympathetic ear there.“ Isn’t it always the same with those people?” Wilson complained. Economist John Maynard Keynes warned the penalties heaped upon postwar Germany by article #232- The War Guilt Clause- would create a grave economic crisis for her and the world, all but predicting the Great Depression to come. The terms imposed on the defeated Germany were so crushing and humiliating that they were a major factor in the German public turning to Adolf Hitler. World War Two has sometimes been called the "War to settle the Treaty of Versailles"

1928- Louis Armstrong & Earl Hines recorded West End Blues.

1969-THE STONEWALL UPRISING- New York City Police got a false tip about a stabbing in a mob owned transvestite bar in Greenwich Village. When they raid the Stonewall bar without warning the patrons fight back. Poet Allen Ginsburg said it was marvelous that the first to openly battle for Gay rights were the Drag Queens. In the 60’s era of social revolution and liberation movements the fight caused three days of unrest and a new movement, the Gay Pride Movement, was born.

1971- Mobster Joe Columbo tells a Italian/American Unity Day rally in Columbus Circle, NY that the "Mafia" is a myth invented to insult people of Italian ancestry. A minute later hitmen sent by "Crazy Joe"Gallo, assassinated him on the speakers platform.

1971- The Supreme Court overturned the conviction of prize fighter Mohammed Ali for draft evasion.

1997- Heavyweight prizefighter Mike Tyson was banned from boxing and fined $3 million bux for biting off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a match.

2000- Little Cuban boy Elian Gonzales was taken by his father back home to Cuba after being in the US for 7 months. The 6 year olds estranged mother took the child and fled to Miami on a raft of refugees. She and her boyfriend drowned and the child was cared for by distant cousins and uncles. The Cuban boy’s fate became sensationalized by the US media and the vocally militant anti-Castro Cuban community of Miami. Fidel’s regime also had fun making publicity out of the traumatized boy’s plight. Finally Attorney General Janet Reno ordered the family home raided by US Marshals to unite the boy with his father. Back in Havanna Juan Miguel Gonzales said:”I never want anyone to stick a camera in my sons face again!”
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Yesterday’s Quiz: If a puta is a prostitute, what is puttanesca sauce?

Answer sent in from my friend J. Hoffner: In Italy, Puttanesca sauce was the food served by Ladies who serviced, serviceman. Since they were Putanna's, the sauce was "nicknamed" after them...They were only allowed to shop for ingredients one day a week, so as not to mingle with respectable women. So they learned to make do with leftover ingredients.

anybody have some extra garlic powder?

Sophia Loren has a famous recipe
Mushroom (Puntanesca) Sauce. \

In pan over heat add olive oil, then drop in several anchovy filets
mushing them with your wooden spoon until they are a paste. Add garlic,
then 1 pound of sliced, cleaned mushrooms. Once they have wilted, add 28
ounces of roughly chopped plum tomatoes, cook together for 25 minutes.
IN the last 5 minutes, add 1-2 tablespoons of worchester sauce, a
teaspoon of oregano and freshly ground pepper. Just before taking off
the heat, I add a few tablespoons of chopped fresh flat parsley.


June 27th, 2008 fri FINITO
June 27th, 2008

On Thursday we put the finishing touches on the last episode of the first season of CLICK & CLACK'S AS THE WRENCH TURNS. I began work on the project in late January 2007 and have been at it almost constantly since, in snow and heat, on the East Coast and West. Meetings, recordings, fires to put out, arguments, disappointments and triumphs. Planes, trains and automobiles. Late nights, early morning meetings.

We're done, and now it's up to the public.

It's funny, when it's all over, you feel like a toothpaste tube thats been rolled up to the nozzle and squeezed empty.

But the strangest feeling of all, is the quiet. I am never quite prepared for that part. Oh sure, if you are lucky there is some kind of officially scheduled wrap party or ceremonial launching premiere. But I mean the actual day you stop. For a creative person it's a strange experience. One moment going at full speed surrounded by co-workers, the next at a complete stop.



Owing to my sense of the melodramatic, one would expect the end of such an epic two year effort to come to a crashing climax, massed drums, the orchestra booms, the conductor snaps his baton, the crowds erupt, the rocker smashes his guitar.

But nothing like that happens. You stand up, shake hands with the mixing editor, pack your briefcase and hail a taxi.

I remember my last day at Walt Disney's, how quiet it was as I walked to my car with my box of belongings. Almost no one was around to say goodbye. After 8 years, Mermaid, Roger, Lion King, Aladdin. I was alone with my thoughts.

Same at Warners and Dreamworks. No one raises you on a shield to the cries of Roma Victor! You don't get to toss your laurel wreath on to the spearpoints of your cheering legions.

In filmmaking, as in death, at the end you are alone.

But there is that warm sense of satisfaction of a job done. Something that will be around making people smile, long after you've moved on.

I like an anecdote German director Fritz Lang once told:

"We once wrapped up a picture by shooting an all nighter in the streets. As the first rays of dawn appeared over the chimney pots, we packed up our filmmaking equipment for the drive home. We were all exhausted, cranky, dirty and irritable. All we wished was to be done and in bed. We sullenly drove through the dark streets, when we came upon another location crew toiling away.
Suddenly, all pain and fatigue left us and our hearts jumped at the thought- Oh look! They are making a movie...."


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Quiz: If a puta is a prostitute, what is puttanesca sauce?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: What is a coup d’ etat?
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History for 6/27/2008
Birthdays: Swedish King Charles XII "the Madman of the North", Helen Keller, Norma Kamali, Charles Stuart Parnell, Bob" Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan, Emma Goldman, Walter Johnson, Ross Perot, Isabella Adjani is 53, Lauren Hill, Alice McDermott, Tobey McGuire is 33, Tony Leung Chu Wai is 46.

1542- Juan Cabrillo set sail from Mexico to explore the unknown California Coast. He was told he might find a magic kingdom of Califa, a land of brown amazons with golden swords. One reader said he must have arrived in West Hollywood for the Halloween Parade.

1787- English historian Edward Gibbon completed his most famous work-"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". The massive history ran thousands of pages and took twenty years to write. When he presented the first volume bound in gold to mad King George III, the King said: -" What's this? Another damn big, black, square book, eh Mr. Gibbon? Scribble, Scribble!! "

1804-The Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr challenges former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton to a duel. Hamilton (the guy on the ten-dollar bill) had slandered Burr in the press and on previous occasions he had also challenged James Monroe and General Charles Lee (a critic of George Washington’s). Between this challenge and the duel on July 11th, Aaron Burr fought another one with his cousin. The two men still had to sit side by side at an Independence Day banquet on July 4th.

1829- James Smithson died. The English scientist had amassed a huge fortune from patents yet was snubbed by polite London society because of his illegitimate birth. So he turned his back on his mother country and willed his money to the United States, specifically asking a museum be set up in his name. The Smithsonian Institute was the result.

1844- Mormon leader Joseph Smith and his brother Hyram were killed by a mob in Illinois. After being shot down Smith was propped up and used for target practice. A man drew his Bowie knife to decapitate the body but Mormon folklore says his hand was stopped by a thunderbolt.

1876- Major Gibbon's column discovered the remains of Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn. It was near one hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the dry sun. At first from a distance they thought the naked bloated bodies were skinned buffaloes. Custer’s men had all been paid their monthly wages before riding out of Fort Lincoln. The Indians were uninterested in paper greenbacks, so among the carcasses little piles of money were blowing through the greasy grass. Because hostile Indians were still in the vicinity Gibbon's men hastily buried the soldiers where they fell. A few years later when a proper burial detail arrived to re-inter the bodies and remove Custer's remains to West Point they had trouble telling just who was who. So they shoveled a few bones and some yellow hair into a box and called it Custer. As late as 1991 Gen. George A. Custer III has refused to have the West Point tomb opened for DNA testing.

1949 - "Captain Video & His Video Rangers," debut on DUMONT-TV.

1966- TV soap opera Dark Shadows premiered, starring Barnabas Collins the Vampire.

1973- Senior White House Counsel John Dean testified to the Watergate committee that President Richard Nixon maintained an Enemies List. The list ran from Senator Ted Kennedy to journalists like Daniel Shore to June Foray who did the cartoon voice of Rocky the Flying Squirrel.

1984- Hollywood introduced the PG-13 rating to indicate graphic violence, invented for the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

1995- Boyishly proper British actor Hugh Grant is busted for soliciting sex from a Sunset Blvd. street hooker named Divine Brown. Grant had just released a film called the Englishman " Who went up a Hill and Came down a Mountain". Pundits had fun changing the title to "The Englishman who went to L.A. a Hugh and Came Back a John."

2007- British Prime Minister Tony Blair stepped down after ten years. His first nickname in office was Bambi.
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Yesterday’ s Quiz: What is a coup d’ etat?

Answer: An overthrow of a government by force. Literally “to strike a blow at the state.”


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