My esteemed friend and colleague Jerry Beck of Cartoon Brew, annually sets his clock to 5:00AM this morning to get the Academy nominations news- sheesh! So here is the hot poop from his site:



Nominated for BEST ANIMATED FEATURE were:

Bolt - Walt Disney
Kung Fu Panda - Dreamworks
Wall•E - Pixar

The Pixar hit WALL-E was also nominated for Best Screenplay (congrats to Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter and Jim Reardon), sound mixing (Tom Myers, Michael Semanick and Ben Burtt), sound editing (Ben Burtt and Matthew Wood), music (Thomas Newman) and Original Song.

WALTZ WITH BASHIR was nominated for Best Foreign Film. I personally liked this film, but I have met many a divergence of opinion on it among the animation community. This might be the rare case of it being helped by dubbing into English. The large block of subtitles became a challenge, when you wanted to study the images.

Nominated for BEST ANIMATED SHORT are:

La Maison en Petits Cubes - Kunio Kato - my favorite.
Lavatory - A Love Story - Konstantin Bronzit
Oktapodi - A Gobelins, L’école de l’image Production
Presto - Pixar, Doug Sweetland
This Way Up - Alan Smith and Adam Foulkes

I'm bummed Skhizein by Jérémy Clapin wasn't nominated, but dem's the breaks.

the Visual Effects Category continues it's tradition of no surprises - noms for DARK KNIGHT, IRON MAN and BENJAMIN BUTTON

As the Romans said:"Die Gustibus Non Et Disputandem" You cannot argue personal taste." The winners will be announced Feb. 22 at the Oscar telecast at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood.

Quiz: When did the NY waterfront west of Times Square become known as Hell’s Kitchen?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Why is a heroic story called a saga?
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History for 1/22/2009
St. Vincents Day- "If Vincents Day be Rainy Weather, shall rain then 30 days together.”

Birthdays: Sir Francis Bacon, D.W. Griffith, Charles Gordon Lord Byron, August Strindberg, Andre Marie Ampere (electric Amps), 1960’s UN Secretary General U- Thant, Ann Southern, Sam Cooke, John Hurt, George McManus, Joseph Waumbaugh, J.J. Johnson, Jim Jarmusch is 56, Linda Blair is 50, Piper Laurie, Diane Lane is 44

1503- Pope Alexander VI Borgia has his enemy Cardinal Orsini, poisoned while imprisoned in the Vatican.

1506- THE SWISS GUARDS. Many European monarchs hired foreign mercenaries to be their personal bodyguards. They were often more reliable than their own subjects. The most famous were the Swiss. While the Swiss home cantons stayed at peace, her hardy men hired out as mercenary troops all over Europe. This day the warrior Pope Julius II hired a troop of Swiss and had Michelangelo design their uniforms. The Swiss Guards still guard the Vatican today, and are still recruited in Switzerland.



1555- THE FIRES OF SMITHFIELD. When Mary the Catholic daughter of Henry VIII became queen she at first tried to be lenient towards her Protestant subjects. But continuous plots by Protestant nobility and her own desire to restore England to the old faith hardened her heart. This day began the mass trials and executions of those accused of Protestant heresy. Six clergymen including the Bishop of Gloucester were sentenced and burned at the stake. Hundreds more would follow. Even Spanish King Philip II urged Mary to calm down.

Mary’s executioners added a new twist to an old system of Burning at the Stake. If they liked you, before lighting the fire, a bag of gunpowder was stuffed between your legs, so you could go out with a bang. Musta been hard on spectators, being showered with little bits of flaming Anglicans. Bloody Mary and her cruelty in the name of Roman Catholicism all but convinced the English people to stay Anglican.

1787- 17 year old French cadet named Napoleon Bonaparte, on furlough in Paris, noted in his diary that after exhausting negotiations with a streetwalker he "…sampled the joys of Woman for the first time.."

1840- The first English colonists reach New Zealand. They set up a special effects house.

1863- THE MUD MARCH- Union General Ambrose Burnside (who created the fashion for "side-burns") tried to avenge his humiliating defeat at Fredericksburg by a winter march up the Rappahannock River to maneuver around Robert E. Lee. In so doing he discovered why all pre-industrial age armies took the winter off. Burnsides army was pelted by blinding sleet storms and bogged down in oceans of gooey mud. When Burnside finally called it quits he had as many casualties from sickness as had he fought a battle. A bitter army joke based on a children’s prayer went:
"Now I lay me down to Sleep, In mud that’s eighteen fathoms Deep."
"If you can’t see me when we Awake, please dig me up with an oyster Rake."

1879-Battle of ISHANDLWANA- The worst defeat ever inflicted by native peoples on a modern western army. The British thought they were brushing out of the way just another African spear throwing tribe when they attacked the Zulu Empire. They were unconcerned that the Zulu marched in regiments -impis, had generals -indunas and practiced strategy and tactics. Lord Chelmsford had invaded Zululand searching for the Zulu army when he was tricked by a simple diversion into dividing his forces. The Zulu then flanked Chelmsford’s force in a maneuver Napoleon would have admired, fell on his camp and wiped out two regiments of the 24th Welch Fusiliers. It was a massacre similar to Custer at the Little Big Horn.

1901- Queen Victoria died after a reign of 64 years, the longest ever for a British monarch. When she assumed the throne at 19 in 1837 there were still many alive who remembered the Battle of Waterloo and white periwigs, and she died in a world of electric lights, autos and motion pictures. The current Queen Elizabeth II has to reign ten more years to catch up to her.

1918- A Manitoba judge tries to outlaw movie comedies, because they tend to make the public "too frivolous".

1938- On a bare stage, Thorton Wilder’s play Our Town premiered.

1944-Argentine Colonel Juan Peron first met radio actress Eva Duarte or Evita.

1944- ANZIO- The Allied armies advancing up the Italian boot had been fought to a standstill by fierce German resistance around Monte Cassino north of Naples -the Gustav Line. So the decision was made to amphibiously land a large invasion force in the rear of the German army with the intention of taking Rome. They completely surprised the enemy and their scouts reported the road into Rome was wide open. But the American commander General Lucas hesitated. In the meantime the Germans recovered and rushed up elite SS divisions that turned the battle into a bloody stalemate. Churchill said: "I thought we were hurling a wildcat onto the shore, but all we got was a beached whale !" Instead of two days the allies didn’t take Rome until June 4th, five months later.

1947- Hollywood's first commercial television station, KTLA, went on the air. At the time in all of Los Angeles there were only 350 TV sets.

1949- Mao Tse Tung (MaoZseDong) and the Communists capture Peking (Beijing).

1949-Tex Avery’s cartoon "Bad Luck Blackie".

1951- During Winter baseball tryouts a promising young left-handed pitcher from Cuba was scouted by the New York Yankees. But after losing a game for the Washington Senators and getting dropped from their roster he gave up on pro-sports to pursue other careers- Fidel Castro.

1959- Former 'Our Gang' child star Charles 'Alfalfa" Switzer was killed in a bar in Studio City. He pulled a knife on a man over a $50 debt on a hunting dog. The man then shot him. He was 32. According to fellow Little Rascal Darla Hood, Switzer was a brute who bullied the other children and bitter his adult acting career never blossomed.

1968-T.V. comedy review show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh In premiered. It launched the careers of Lilly Tomlin, Goldie Hawn and Eileen Brennan.

Hey, isn't that Kate Hudson's Mom? You bet your sweet Bippy!


1972- In an interview with Melody Maker magazine, rocker David Bowie outed himself and said he was gay. Technically he would be bi-sexual since his wife Angela did catch him in bed with Bianca Jagger.

1975- Hollywood agents Ron Meyer and Michael Ovitz leave William Morris and form the Creative Artists Agency, or CAA.
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Yesterday’s Question: Why is a heroic story called a saga?

Answer: Ancient stories of the Vikings handed down by storytellers fell into two kinds- poems about the Norse Gods, called Skalds, and prose stories about heroes and kings, Sogurs or Sagas. In the 1300s an Icelandic writer named Snorri Sturlusson finally wrote this stuff all down, so we can have handed down to us the stories of ShapeChangers, Asgard, The World Serpent, Siegfried and Brunnhilde, Leif Ericsson and his dad Eric the Red.

Pat and I watched the inauguration. We stood by the TV when the oath was administered. We still couldn't quite believe it was happening. We cheered and jumped up and down when it happened. Pure joy!
We felt like a great dark cloud had lifted after 8 years. More than a few cartoonist friends said it felt like we had been stuck in Superman's BizzaroWorld, where values were upside down. And now it's right.
Finally we can travel abroad and not be embarrassed when someone asks us about politics" Look, I didn't vote for that dummy! I don't like him either!"No kidding, I once had to explain the 2000 election to a French Duchess over cognac in her chateau.

Like Bill Maher, I don't care if the President is the kind of guy I want to have a beer with, I feel more secure knowing that my president is way smarter than me!

Observations: The most Port-O-Pottys ever assembled for a public event. Barack is left-handed, as is Bill Clinton. It felt uplifting to see the multi-cultural crowd so happy. When Obama and Michelle walked down Pennsylvania Ave, the only other presidents to do that were Jimmy Carter and Thomas Jefferson. One commentator noted that Barack is the first president in a long time who is a real city dweller, that actually took mass transit to work! Barbara Bush once said she dreaded whenever Bush Sr tried to drive, since he was chauffeured his entire life, and only steered a golf cart by himself.

The media wouldn't report it, but on the NBC feed, when they showed Bush's helicopter leaving, tens of thousands of throats sang "NA NANA NA, HEY HEY, GOOD-BYE!!!

It was nice that when Senator Ted Kennedy had that emergency, one of his colleagues most concerned was Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, a Republican so far right he makes Nixon look like Flava Flave. It shows the Senate really are a closed little club, regardless of political philosophy.

Years ago, historian Geoffrey Ward wrote for the opening of Ken Burns series The Civil War" For four years Americans made war on one another, if only to create the kind of American where such a thing would be unthinkable." I think in the future, the idea that a black person or woman can't be president only because they are black or a woman, has now become equally unthinkable.

America is in a bad state, but at least we are now on the right track. Best of Luck to the Obama Administration and to us all. I'll lay off politics now, and go back to being an artist.

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Quiz: Why is a heroic story called a saga?

Question: One achievement of the outgoing George W. Bush Presidency is that it forever broke the Curse of Tecumseh. What is that?
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History for 1/21/2009
Birthdays: Leadbelly (Harlan Ledbetter),Thomas J."Stonewall" Jackson, J.Carol Naish, Tele Savalas, Christian Dior, Wolfman Jack, Akeem Olajuwon, Paul Scofield, Robby Benson, Jack Nicklaus, Benny Hill, Emma Bunton- Baby Spice of the Spice Girls, Gena Davis, Placido Domingo is 68

1198- THE THIRD CRUSADE DECLARED- In reaction to the news of Salladin's capture of Jerusalem, King Henry II of England, Phillip Augustus of France and Conrad the Emperor of Germany "take the Cross", decide to invade the Holyland. Henry died before the army departed and was replaced by his son Richard the Lionhearted. Every morning before breakfast and every night before retiring, all the knights of the Crusade would raise one steel-clad fist towards the east, and to the sound of massed trumpets and drums, they shout: " AEIDEUVA, AEIDEUVA, SANCTUS SEPULCHORUM!!" "Help, Help to the Holy Sepulchre!".

1535- Fun-loving King Francis Ist of France had been tolerant to the Reformation until overzealous French Protestants tried to assassinate him. This day he answered them by holding a solemn Catholic Mass in Notre Dame. The highlight of the show was the burning of six heretics. Francis had them tied to ladders and raised and lowered over a fire, to prolong their agony before dying.

1793- KING LOUIS XVI GUILLOTINED- Citizen Capet, so named for an old family name of French kings, mounted the scaffold at Place de La Concorde currently where the U.S. Embassy is. He tried to speak to the people but the drummers were ordered to drown him out. As the blade fell his chaplain shouted: "Son of Saint Louis, ascend to Heaven!" The revolutionaries then stuck his severed head between his legs and threw him in a hole. The court executioner, Charles Henri Samson, wore pistols under his coat in case people tried to rush the guillotine. He usually never felt remorse for his victims ( "I am not killing them, the State is" ) but this one upset him. He stayed away from home for two nights and would later hide escaped political prisoners in his cellar.

1861- SECESSION! COLLAPSE! President-elect Lincoln was still packing his bags in Springfield and writing out the luggage tags in his own hand "A.Lincoln, White House, Washington, D.C.", while state after state of the South voted to leave the Union and join the new Confederacy. On this date Mississippi senator and former Secretary of War Jefferson Davis resigned from the Congress. As he left the Senate Georgia senator Robert Toombs declared out loud to the Speakers chair:" The Union sir, is Dissolved !"
Toombs had to hire a carriage to take him South because his personal servants had taken the opportunity to run off to be free.
The Mormons of Utah were in an open state of rebellion, New Jersey and New York City talked of secession, California talked of pulling out of the union and joining Oregon to make a new country called TransPacifica. American mercenaries under a renegade named Walker were trying to set up an independent country in Baja California. Outgoing President James Buchanan said gravely: "I fear I may be the Last President of the United States.."

1899- The Opel motorcar company opened for business.

1916- The National Board of Review outlawed nudity in Hollywood movies.

1923- LENIN DIED. The Soviet dictator died of respiratory failure and cerebral hemorrhage at 54. As Lenin lay dying Leon Trotsky, Zioniev, Kamieniev, Krupskaya and a dozen others began a backroom scramble for power. Finally a minor bank robber and terrorist from Tblisi in Georgia who had risen rapidly in the last two years came out above them all- Comrade Kobal, also called Josef Stalin.

1938 -Max Fleischer tells his New York cartoon studio they are relocating to Florida.

1938- George Melies, the father of Motion Picture Special Effects, died selling chocolates in a Paris train station -Gare du Norde.

1950-After a highly publicized trial top State Department official Alger Hiss was found guilty of perjury in a trial that accused him of covering up his connections to Communist agents in Washington. The trial made a national figure of a then little known congressman named Richard Nixon. Hiss served four years in prison, and lived the rest of his life maintaining his innocence.

1958- BADLANDS- Teenagers Charlie Starkweather and Carol Ann Fugate kill her family and go on a Bonnie & Clyde style crime spree throughout Nebraska killing 11 people. When they were caught Starkweather pleaded self defense, even against the murder of Fugates infant baby brother. He went to the electric chair. Carol Ann Fugate did twenty years, yet always denied she was anything more than an unwilling accomplice. Starkweather had a 'James Dean-Marlon Brando' leatherjacket look and the two teen killers seemed to typify America's dread of juvenile delinquency and the 'degenerate Rock and Roll' culture of the 1950's. Their story inspired several films including 'Badlands".

1991- Disney's Beauty and the Beast becomes the first animated film ever nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.
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Yesterday’s answer: One achievement of the outgoing George W. Bush Presidency is that he broke the Curse of Tecumseh. What is that?

Answer: THE CURSE OF TECUMSEH-
The legend goes in 1828 when the great Seneca Indian leader Tecumseh was killed trying to stop white expansion, he supposedly put a curse on the entire white tribe in America. He declared every Great White Chief selected in a decade year would die. Here is the record so far:
1840- President William Henry Harrison- died in office of pneumonia.
1860- Abraham Lincoln- assassinated.
1880- James Garfield- assassinated.
1900- William McKinley- assassinated in his second term.
1920- Warren Harding- died in office.
1940- Franklin Roosevelt- a stretch-Roosevelt lived to win re-election in 1944, then died in office in 1945.
1960- John F. Kennedy- assassinated.
1980-Ronald Reagan- shot full of bullets and almost died.
2000-Bush- nothing happened!
UNLESS….Tecumseh meant GORE was supposed to have won..?

Take that, WhiteMan! What, Barack-who..? And he's what..?

Washington taking the oath
More inauguration facts below Jan 19th-
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Question: One achievement of the outgoing George W. Bush Presidency is that it forever broke the Curse of Tecumseh. What is that?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered: Americans have their Presidential inauguration the third Tuesday of January. When do the British traditionally swear in their Prime Minister?
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History for 1/20/2009
Birthdays: King Charles III of Spain, Richard Henry Lee- signer of the Declaration of Independence, Frederico Fellini, Patricia O’Neal, Mario Lanza, David Lynch, George Burns, DeForest Kelly, Edwin Buzz Aldrin the second astronaut to walk on the moon, Arte Johnson, Lorenzo Lamas.

661 A.D. -Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, was assassinated by a partisan of Muyawiah Ibn Abi Suffian- the founder of the Ummayad Dynasty of Caliphs. Ali’s supporters were called Ali's SHIAH or Ali's Partisans – which became the branch of Islam called Shiite, the rest of Islam is known as Sunnite. It became a split as fierce as the one between Catholic and Protestants in Christianity.

1779- The English dramatic actor David Garrick died. Supposedly his last words were when asked “Is it hard to die?” Garrick replied:” Dying is not Hard. Comedy is Hard.”

1920- The American Civil Liberties Union founded by Roger Baldwin.

1924- WAR ON THE MAFIA- In 1924 the Mafia was almost completely destroyed. By who? Benito Mussolini. While not yet Il Duce but merely Italy’s Prime Minister Benito had had enough of the crime family clans in Sicily and sent a huge army to crush them. The blackshirted jackbooted regiments marched across the island arresting 11,000 and executing hundreds. Mussolini declared victory and many of the surviving dons fled to America where Prohibition was providing great new opportunities for crooks.

1936- King George V of England died. In great pain from incurable cancer, only recently a doctor admitted getting obeying instructions from Edward VIII to euthanize him with a strong shot of cocaine and morphine. The doctor timed his offing of the king so the news would be out with the morning newspapers instead of the trashier afternoon tabloids.
His Majesties last words were reported to be:" How goes the Empire? " He actually winced at the sloppy way the injection was done and said: " Oww! G--Damn You!".

1937- Franklin D. Roosevelt inaugurated for his second term after defeating Gov. Alf Landon of Kansas. He is the first president to be inaugurated in January instead of the customary March 4th. The Depression was still going, despite many of his efforts, he gives the inaugural speech decrying the rampant poverty in the U.S. "I see one third of the nation, ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed, living in conditions far beneath the minimum standards we regard as decent, etc."

1938-The first true animator, Emile Cohl, died while headed for the Paris premiere of Disney's"Snow White and the Seven Dwarves". Cohl was so poor that the electricity in his flat had been turned off and the candles had ignited his beard. Angry he was never recognized in his time, he once said: "the French prefer their artists with marble and flowers on top." An Italian sculptor subscribed funds to build a statue to Cohl in Paris. Walt Disney and Dave Fleischer donated money. The sculptor took the money and skipped town, the statue was never built.

1942- The Wanasee Conference-Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann and other top Nazis have a lunch conference in a suburb in Berlin. Over cocktails invented The Final Solution. Zyclon –B gas chambers instead of electrocution or carbon-monoxide. They set a target goal of ten million Jews to be murdered by 1946.

1949- FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover gave Shirley Temple a pen that shoots tear gas.

1953- The Birth of Little Ricky on the I Love Lucy show drew a larger viewing audience than the televised inauguration of President Dwight Eisenhower.

1961- John F. Kennedy gave his famous inaugural speech:”Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Outgoing President Eisenhower disliked JFK personally and was angry that his election seemed a repudiation of his policies, so almost nothing was said between them in the limousine during the drive to the ceremony. John Kennedy also went through that day mostly hatless, inaugurating the fashion. Before JFK, a man was not fully dressed without a fedora or cap of some sort.

1965- Alan Freed, the disc jockey who coined the term Rock & Roll, died at 43 of uremic blood poisoning. He was broken by the Rock payola scandal and died so poor his friends passed the hat to pay for his funeral.

1968- Young U.S. infantryman Ron Kovic was wounded near the Vietnamese demilitarized zone the DMZ. The black soldier who carried him to safety was killed shortly after and Kovic never learned his name. The incident put Kovic in a wheelchair for life and changed his attitude towards the righteousness of the war. He wrote the bestseller " Born on the Fourth of July" and became a passionate antiwar activist.

1969- Richard Nixon sworn in as President capping one of the most amazing comebacks in political history. After losing to Kennedy in 1960 Nixon lost yet again to Pat Brown for the governorship of California and was considered politically finished. Anybody remember Michael Dukakis, Dan Quayle or Fritz Mondale,? Yet Nixon worked on his image over the years and re-emerged in 1968 as “The New Dick”.

1981- As President Reagan was being sworn in, the hostages taken at the United States Embassy in Teheran were released after being held for 444 days. Years later it was revealed a deal was made with the Iranian militants to release the hostages in exchange for a ransom of weapons. But at the time, all the American public knew was that all the Old Gipper had to do was show up, to make the Mad Mullah’s hightail-it outta town.

1982- Rock star Ozzie Osbourne was hospitalized in Des Moines Iowa after biting the head off a dead bat thrown on stage during a concert. At another concert with Lou Reed, Ozzy picked up a straw filled with ants and snorted it up his nose so his kids could watch ants crawling out of his mouth, nostrils and tear ducts. ROCK AND ROLL BABY!!

1982- SONY introduced the Camcorder, the personal video camera.

1986- The worlds first computer virus, Brain, was sent out over the internet.

2001- George W. Bush inaugurated as the 43rd President. He is only the second son of a president to be elected, the other being John Quincy Adams, the son of John Adams. Benjamin Harrison was the grandson of William Henry Harrison. Franklin D. Roosevelt was a second cousin of Teddy Roosevelt.

2009- Standing in front of the U.S. Capitol, a building built mostly by slaves, Barack Obama is inaugurated 44th President of the United States. The first African-American.

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Yesterday’s Quiz: Americans have their Presidential inauguration the third Tuesday of January. When do the British traditionally swear in their Prime Minister?

Answer: The British don’t have a regular time to inaugurate a PM. In fact, there is no swearing in ceremony. Ceremonies are for the monarch. A time for General Elections are called, and the leader of the winning majority party is invited by the monarch to form a new government. He or She does a public announcement in front of Ten Downing St on the way to meet with the Queen. Viscount Mersey, historian of the Prime Ministers explained “…He accepts his place from the King, not by delivery of staff or a seal, nor by declaration in a council…..but by kissing the monarchs hands like an ambassador. He receives no letters patent, his appointment being merely notified in the Court Circular..”
Until the late 1700’s the appointment of a new Prime Minister barely rated a small mention in the society pages of the Times.

Some Thoughts on PRESIDENTIAL INAUGURATION DAY- Because we had an elected executive instead of a monarch, the Founding Father’s felt we needed some kind of ceremony to give the installation of the head of state the proper dignity.

From 1792 to 1933 US. Presidents took office on March 4th. "March Forth with a New President" (get it ?) Transportation being what it was in early America and the time it took to count votes and the Electoral College to ratify the election results, March seemed a convenient time. In 1937 Franklin Roosevelt moved the inauguration date to the third week in January, and with the bad economic times we’re experiencing, maybe they’ll move it to Dec 1st soon.

- When John Adams was sworn in, he still waited for outgoing president George Washington to descend the steps first. Washington deferred:" No sir, you are the president now". At Lincoln's first inaugural the man who stepped forward to offer to hold Lincoln's hat while he took the oath was his political rival Steven Douglas.

-The simplest ceremony was Tom Jefferson addressing a few guests indoors, then returning to have dinner alone at Conrad's Tavern. He was a widower and his children were away at school. John Adams was taking his time moving out of the Presidential Mansion, so Jefferson spent that night at the inn.

- George W. Bush in 2005- $40 million dollar 8 inaugural balls- Barrack Obama’s has ten balls at a cost of $140 million.

-At Jefferson' 1801 inaugural John Adams was so mad he lost, that he refused to attend the ceremony. Truman wouldn't speak to Eisenhower, Eisenhower wouldn't speak to Kennedy.

- John F. Kennedy spent most of his 1961 inauguration not wearing his top hat, which many in the fashion world saw as the fatal blow to the men’s haberdashery industry. Before JFK, a well dressed man was not considered complete without some kind of hat on.

-In 1841 President William Henry Harrison insisted despite his great age on attending the ceremony without his hat and overcoat in the March chill and caught pneumonia and died a month later, the shortest term in office. His inaugural address was 2,000 words while George Washington's was 137.

-The wildest Inauguration was Andrew Jackson's in 1829. Common folks were invited into the White House and went wild breaking crystal, muddying the carpets and spitting tobacco juice on the floor, and the men were worse! Jackson jumped out of a back window to avoid being crushed and the butlers got the crowd out only by moving tubs of liquor onto the south lawn.

- Calvin Coolidge’s inaugural by contrast was so low key that humorist Will Rogers wrote:” The party was so dull there was a call to open the Churches early to liven things up.”

-At Abe Lincoln's second inaugural in 1865 he switched vice presidents. Outgoing V.P. Hannibal Hamlin encouraged new V.P. Andrew Johnson to calm his nerves with whiskey, knowing the man had a low tolerance for alcohol. So before Lincoln's beautiful speech 'With Malice Towards None, With Charity for All..." Johnson went up drunk- burbled incoherently and was seen dribbling on the Bible until Lincoln angrily ordered him pulled off the stage.
- In the Brady photo of the audience attending on the capitol steps was actor John Wilkes Booth.

-In 1877 Rutherford Hayes wife "Lemonade-Lucy" banned all alcohol from the White House and it was said of the party:” The Water flowed like Champagne!"

-In 1973 2nd term President Richard Nixon debuted his White House Palace Guard, all with new red uniforms,, and gold braid, blaring trumpets like for an emperor. After Watergate the uniforms were sold half price to a High School Marching Band.

-In 1977 President Jimmy Carter set the style for a more people’s presidency by walking to his inaugural. When Reagan drove with Carter after defeating Carter, he tried to lighten the mood by chatting on about his Hollywood days and movie anecdotes. Later Carter asked an aide:" Who is this Jack Warner he kept going on about..?"

Enjoy the festivities! We're watching history!