I'm producing and hosting this years Marc Davis Lecture at the Motion Picture Academy.
Entitled the Development of the Digital Animator, we'll go through the last fifty years of CGI invention, and how it transformed those who make animation.

Guest panelists include John Lasseter(Toy Story), Phil Tippett( Jurassic Park), Bill Kroyer (Tron), Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walzack, Rebecca Allen, Tim Johnson, Philippe Bergeron, and David Ems. Tickets on sale now.


http://www.oscars.org/events-exhibitions/events/2012/05/animator.html

Question: What does D.C. Comics stand for?

Yesterday’s question answered below: In 1967 The Russian film of War & Peace used 100,000 extras. But one film used more, the most ever in a motion picture. What was it?
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History for 5/1/2012
Birthdays: Mary Harris a.k.a. Mother Jones, Marshal Vauban 1633, Benjamin Latrobe, Calamity Jane, Joseph Addison, Kate Smith, Jack Paar, Joseph Heller, Rita Coolidge, Steve Cauthen, Judy Collins, Glen Ford, Ray Parker Jr., Maurice Noble, Fyodor Khytruk, Louis Nye, John Woo, Wes Anderson is 43, Joanna Lumley is 66, Eric Goldberg is 57

May or Maius is named for Maia, Roman god of flowers, daughter of Fauna and Vulcan.

This day Romans celebrated the LARALIA- the feast of the Lares, your personal domestic gods who watch over you and your family. Many times they included the founder of your house, a famous family member or a particular allegiance to one deity, for example Julius Caesar claimed to be descended from Venus. It’s also the Roman festival for the Bona Dea or the Good Goddess, a deity of fertility.

Feast of Saint Phillip and Saint James the Lesser

62BC- Publius Clodius Pulcher- The Handsome, seduced the wife of Julius Caesar by dressing like a woman and sneaking into Caesars home while the women were celebrating the secret sacred mysteries of the goddess Bona Dea. Caesar wasn’t too upset because he was sleeping around as well. Part of Greco-Roman religious mysteries was the drinking of a wine mixed with herbs like Ergot, approximating the effect of modern LSD. Sex, Drugs and Latin Conjugations!

305AD- The Abdication of Roman Emperors Diocletian and Maximian- Diocletian attempted to solve the problem of Roman emperors being chosen by means other
than murder or civil war. He split the Empire into two pieces and took a colleague, Maximian, as Emperor of the West. They would each select a vice-emperor or Caesar and after a set number of years retire and the succession moves up. This system worked while Diocletian was around but it began to unravel almost as soon as he retired to his estates in Yugoslavia to grow cabbages. When the emperors started to fight and kill each other the Senate tried to recall Diocletian. He responded: "If you could but see my cabbages, you would not ask me to do so ! "

1152- Henry II Plantagenet, king of England and Duke of Normandy (grandson of
William the Conquerer) married Eleanor of Aquitaine, divorced wife of King
Louis VI of France and heiress of half of France. This union created the
powerful state called the Angevin Empire, so named because one of Henry's
family titles was Duke of Anjou. They would bear those rather interesting offspring
Richard the Lionhearted and John Lackland.

1373- Dante Alighieri met the love of his life Beatrice at a MayDay party in Florence. Although she married another he was inspired to write his Divine Comedy to her.

1516-The poor of London band together and stage a demonstration, complaining of their harsh life. The King's Chancellor, Cardinal Woolsey, replied by having 60 of them hanged.

1776- THE ILLUMINATI- In Ingolstadt Germany a former Jesuit named Adam Weishaupt created a radical fringe off-shoot of Freemasonry called the Illuminati. Their program of anti-religion, anti-royalist pro-democratic secular humanism gained great influence over intellectual Freemason lodges in Europe before being suppressed by the Bavarian government in 1785. A new Order of Illuminati formed in 1880 and the members roster claimed to have included Alastair Crowley ( The Great Outer Head ) ,King Arthur, Sir Francis Bacon, Goethe, Gaugin, Cocteau, Nietzche and King Ludwig the Mad. Today Christian Fundamentalists who see pro-Satanic Secular-Humanist conspiracies under every bed point to the Illuminati as proof.

1786- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozarts opera THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO premiered in Vienna. So many encores and bows were demanded that the evening went on twice as long.

1798- The Birth of American Industry- Cotton Gin maker Eli Whitney proposes
to the U.S. government that he could make the army 10,000 muskets by a new automated
machine process. He gets the contract but delivers only 500, many of them
handmade the old fashioned way. The first Defense department cost overrun.

1813- On the first day of the Saxon Campaign outside of Bautzen Germany one
of Napoleon's top generals, Marshal Bessieres, is struck dead by a rebounding
cannonball. Marshal Ney stood over him and said:" It's a Good Death. It's Our kind of
Death!" Bessieres was one of the last of his generation to wear his hair long, powdered white and in a tied que long after it was out of fashion.

1851- Queen Victoria and Prince Albert open the Great Exhibition of 1851 at the new Crystal Palace in Hyde Park. This first World's Fair would last until October and have exhibits and inventions from all around the world. Many European crowned heads stayed away for fear of all their revolutionary exiles England had given asylum to. A touching moment was when the Chinese ambassador did a public kowtow or prostrated himself before the Queen, symbolizing China's submission to England. The fact that the diplomat wasn't a diplomat but a local London resident named Hai Sing who gave tours of his Junk on the Thames for a shilling a head didn't seem to bother anybody. The Queen at one point was frantic that the Crystal Palace was attracting hordes of sparrows whose droppings were covering the glass roof with an unwanted glazing. The elderly Duke of Wellington came upon a solution :"Try sparrow hawks, M'am.".

1863- The Confederate Congress reacted to the Union Army enlisting black soldiers by passing a resolution that any African-American captured in battle would be considered a slave in insurrection and hanged. I can’t recall any such executions taking place but in several battles Rebs refused to take black soldiers prisoner and just killed them outright. This did not deter 180,000 black volunteers, 85% of the eligible free black male population.

1869- LEE & GRANT MEET AGAIN- Ulysses Grant was U.S. President and Robert E. Lee was dean of Washington University. They had not seen each other since Appomattox when Lee surrendered to him and ended the Civil War. Grant invited Lee to the White House where they sat together and chatted amiably for an hour. No one was allowed to hear or record what they said to each other. On the train passing through Arlington was the only time Lee saw his family mansion, now the centerpiece of a giant national cemetery. He said nothing about it. Robert E. Lee died of angina the following year, Grant of throat cancer in 1885.

1886- MAYDAY- In most of the world except the U.S. this is Labor Day. Ironically the tanks and red banners that used to parade down Tianamehn or in Havanna celebrate events that began in the United States. In 1886- The Knights of Labor- an underground movement of unions came out in the open and announced itself America's first national labor organization. On this day they called for strikes against all employers who wouldn't institute an 8 hour workday. The norm in America was 12 hours, 7am to 7pm six days a week. 500,000 people go out on 1,700 strikes and paralyze the nation's economy. The authorities crushed the strikes with violence, shootings, arrests and firings with a brutality that shocked the rest of the world. Karl Marx said: " Isn't it amazing what's happening in America ?". The 8 hour day doesn't become normal in America until 1913. In 1889- in Europe the International Socialist Congress declaring itself in sympathy with the embattled American worker designated May 1st as International Worker's Day. In 1894 American Federation of Labor, a less militant successor to the Knights, ask President Cleveland to move Labor Day from May 1st to the end of August. This was so people can have a holiday between Independence Day and Thanksgiving, but also a Labor Day free of "radical politics".

1893- The WORLD COLUMBIAN EXHIBITION opened in Chicago. A great White City topped by the first Ferris Wheel, a giant that carried passengers higher than the crown of the Statue of Liberty. Worlds Fairs then still had a certain amount of cheap sensationalist burlesque to attract customers uninterested in dynamos and new farming exhibits. Candy maker Milton Hershey inspected some new German milk chocolate machines and was inspired to build his business around chocolate. This exhibition was made famous by the erotic gyrations of belly dancer Little Egypt. the famous tune "In the Land of Oz Where the Ladies Smoke Cigars" was not written in Egypt but by a local songwriter named Joe Blume. It also displayed the World’s Largest Red Cedar Bucket, then filled with lager beer. In 2001, I had the pleasure of seeing the Bucket at Mufreesboro Tennessee, minus the beer.

1894- COXEY'S ARMY- Retired colonel Jacob Coxey was a progressive spokeman for the rights of the underprivileged and a socialist. He organized led several marches of hundreds of hungry and unemployed on Washington, proclaiming them the Army of the Commonwealth of Christ . He loudly demanded on the steps of Capitol Hill workers compensation, unemployment insurance and national works projects to put the unemployed back to work. All these goals were achieved by the New Deal in 1933 but for now all Coxey got was 20 days in jail for disturbing the peace.

1898- BATTLE OF MANILA BAY- Admiral Dewey's fleet sinks the Spanish fleet when
he gives the order to the captain of the USS Olympia :"You may fire when ready, Gridley:" I'm sorry, Bugs Bunny didn't say it first. The Spanish admiral Marquis de Montijo is remembered in Spain as a hero for even trying to engage the Americans with his outdated and outgunned fleet. Forgoing the support of shore batteries he deliberately drew his ships up away from the city of Manila so civilians wouldn't get hurt in the battle and his ships could sink in shallow water. Hundreds of Spanish sailors were killed but the only Yankee swab who died was an engineer who had a heart attack from all the excitement.

1902- Richard Outcault's comic strip Buster Brown and Tige first appeared. Outcault, the creator of the first hit cartoon the Yellow Kid was so famous that as part of his deal to do this strip he negotiated the first back-end deal for a percentage of the merchandise sales.

1914-THE BIRTH OF THE BIG BLUE- Thomas Watson got a job at a little business machine company called CTR, the Calculating, Typewriter and Regulating Company. He quickly rose to the top and renamed the company International Business Machine or IBM. When he retired in 1956 it employed 60,000 and is one of largest companies in the world.

1926- Satchel Page pitched his first baseball game. His nickname came from Satchel-mouth.

1930- Marry Harris- AKA Mother Jones, union activist and child labor crusader made her last speech on her 100th birthday: " I was born of the struggle, of torment and pain. A child of the wheel, a brat of the cogs, a woman of the dust. Whenever a worker weeps tears of blood, I am his remedy !"

1931- The Empire State Building in New York dedicated. For fifty years it was the worlds tallest office building and King Kong’s hangout. It’s topmost deck was designed to be a dirigible mooring post but despite several tries no zeppelin has ever been able to park there. A Goodyear Blimp attempted mooring there in 1976 but the highwinds bobbed it around like a bucking bronco. The building was dedicated during the depths of the Great Depression when business was so bad it was nicknamed the 'Empty State Building'.

1935- Lou Gehrig, the Yankee "Iron Man" who had never missed a baseball game, takes himself out of a game because of illness. It is the first sign of the degenerative muscular disease that would be called Lou Gehrig's Disease.

1939- The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia exports it's first barrel of crude oil.

1939- The first Batman comics created by Bob Kane appear on newsstands.

1939- The New York World’s Fair, themed the World of Tomorrow, opened in Flushing Meadows Queens.

1941- Orson Welles film "Citizen Kane" debuted at the Paramount theater (the El Capitan) in Hollywood. At the last minute William Randolph Hearst's friend Louis B. Mayer tried to buy and destroy every print of the film and the Hearst press went crazy attacking it. Hearst spokesperson Louella Parsons threatened "A Beautiful Lawsuit" if the film was not pulled. Despite winning some Oscars the film didn't do well in it's initial release, but it remains one of the greatest films of all time. Welles said later:" The problem I've always had is my movies become classics ten years later."

1942- The last execution by hanging at San Quentin Federal Prison.

1945- THE SECOND FUEHRER- Grand Admiral Doenitz, leader of the Nazis u-boat campaigns is informed of Hitler's death and that he was the Fuehrer's handpicked successor. Hitler was mad at Himmler and Goring and everybody else had shot themselves. Doenitz was leader of what was left of the Third Reich for 23 days. Even with Berlin fallen his country overrun he deliberately dragged out negotiations so he could smuggle as many people as he could away from to the Anglo-American zones.

1960- THE U-2 INCIDENT Soviet authorities shoot down a high observation U-2 spy plane violating Soviet airspace and capture the pilot Francis Gary Powers. Ironically President Eisenhower had ordered a halt to the U-2 spy program but the Pentagon tried to get one more flight in. After 1989 the US Government admitted the overflights of Russian airspace had been going on since 1950.

In those ten years the Soviets had shot down around 20 planes with a loss of 100-200 U.S. servicemen killed or sent to die in Siberian Gulags, ignored by their government to whom they did not officially exist. Powers’s plane was hit and disintegrated. He fell 70,000 feet but miraculously he survived. Before he was captured he at first hitchhiked a ride from a Russian couple going to a wedding. They saw nothing strange in the uniformed man and when they noticed he couldn’t speak Russian in the middle of Russia they decided he must be Bulgarian.

1967- Elvis Presley marries Priscilla Beaulieu at the Aladdin Casino in Las Vegas.

1989- Walt Disney Feature Animation in Orlando Florida opens. It closed in 2006.

1993- The Florida Animation Union Local 843 chartered.

1997- Frank Gifford, ABC television sportscaster and husband of morning show celebrity Kathy Lee Gifford, was caught on videotape doing the nasty with stewardess Suzie Johnson. She got paid by a tabloid and posed nude for Playboy.

1997- Bebe, the dolphin who played Flipper on the television show, died at age 40.

1997- Tony Blair defeated Tory John Major to become Prime Minister of Britain.

2003-MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. President George W. Bush lands a military jet onto the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln to deliver a speech declaring the war in Iraq to be officially over. In the next 8 years thousands more Americans would be killed and wounded. A large banner on the carrier read Mission Accomplished. The White House said it was set up spontaneously by crewmen, but later admitted it was conceived, printed and hung by the presidents men.

2004- The European Union expanded from thirteen to twenty five countries, including Estonia and Malta.

2005- The Sunday Times of London first printed the Downing Street Memo. It was minutes of a meeting between US and British strategists, that proved that the Bush White House was irrevocably settled on attacking Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein in 2002. This while the official spin in the media was that America was only going to war as a last resort. In an earlier generation, the Downing St. Memo would have been as important as the Watergate Smoking Gun, but the US mainstream media buried it’s importance.
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Yesterday’s Question: In 1967 The Russian film of War & Peace used 100,000 extras. But one film used more, the most ever in a motion picture. What was it?

Answer: Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film Gandhi. When filming the great funeral of the Mahatma, a call went out for people of New Delhi to come recreate the event. They got between 200-500,000 people. Now with CGI filling in for crowds, that record will probably never be broken.

Quiz: In 1967 The Russian film of War & Peace used 100,000 extras. But one film used more, the most ever in a motion picture. What was it?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: The leading birdseed company is called Hartz Mountain. Where are the Hartz Mountains
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History for 4/30/2012
Birthdays: Elector Johann-Frederich the Magnanimous, Franz Lehar, Joachim Von Ribbentropp, Max Skladanowsky, Jaroslav Hasek, Eve Arden, Jill Clayburgh, Alice B. Toklas, Isaiah Thomas, Cloris Leachman, Jane Campion, Al Lewis, Bill Plympton is 66, Lars von Trier, Burt Young, Willie Nelson is 79, Kirsten Dunst is 30

Walpurgisnacht- In the Hartz Mountains of Germany the eve the Feast Day of St. Walpurga the demon chaser is a Halloween kind of party, when the Devil can romp for a night. It's part of the inspiration for Mussogorsky's "Night on Bald Mountain".

535 A.D. STRANGULATION OF ARMALASUNTHA, queen of the Ostrogoths. One hundred years after the fall of Rome the nomadic Gothic peoples had settled in Southern Europe.The West-Goths or Visigoths across southern France and Spain, the East Goths or Ostrogoths across central Italy under their leader Totila.

But Totila had now died and his Vandal wife Armalasuntha was trying to fend off rivals to her throne. She had concluded and alliance with the Byzantine Emperor Justinian just before she was overthrown and killed by Totila’s brother Witimer. She was supposedly strangled in her bath, the latest fad among barbarians ( baths I mean, they always had strangulation).

Justinian used her death as the pretext to invade Italy and try and get back the western half of the old Roman Empire. The Ostrogothic nation was at last destroyed by the Byzantine general Narses, who was a eunuch-little person.

1524- The Chevalier Bayard, called the Knight without Equal and above Reproach, was killed covering the French rearguard after the battle of Romagnano. Bayard was considered the last of the great Knights of the Realm. France uses his death to count as the End of the Middle Ages. Fittingly the armored knight was shot by a rifle- a harquebus to be exact. When the fatal bullet struck him Bayard drew his sword and kissed the handle skyward as a sign of the Cross.

As the Chevalier’s remains were brought out of Italy to Grenoble, simple peasants came out to carry the coffin aloft from hand to hand for miles. At a time when nobles were despised, Bayard was beloved of all people.

1598-Conquistador Don Juan de Onate claims for Spain all of "New Mexico", a province comprising all of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Utah and California. He began an aggressive colonization policy among the Pueblo Indians.

1789-FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES-wearing a suit of Connecticut homespun and a sword on his hip, George Washington was inaugurated on the balcony of Federal Hall in New York as the first President.

John Hancock and John Adams were always annoyed that they weren't made first president before him. Thomas Jefferson originally thought the position of elected ruler ridiculous "So they've saddled us with a Polish King." (The Kings of Poland at the time were elected figureheads with little power). Jefferson was made first Secretary of State and felt the position was so useless since we had no foreign policy he asked to also be made attorney general so he could do something to pass the time. Alexander Hamilton wanted to be first Secretary of the Treasury so he could manipulate it into something resembling a Prime Minister. This was the way the Exchequer had evolved in England. At the same time Vice President Adams was hoping for the same kind of power.

But Washington had his own ideas. His animosity with Adams may explain why the Vice Presidency evolved into the useless position it is. And Congress set up the Ways and Means Committee to curb the autocratic methods of Hamilton's Treasury Department. It's amazing that despite all this intrigue the system worked out the way it did....

1803- THE LOUISIANA PURCHASE - Spain had governed Louisiana since the French defeat in the Seven Years War. At first Napoleon dreamed of rebuilding France’s colonial empire, but after his naval defeats and the long war against rebels in Haiti he soured on the project. He had duped the King of Spain into giving him back Louisiana in exchange for the Italian Duchy of Parma. The King of Spain’s only stipulation was that should France ever wish to unload Louisiana it must come back to Spain. Napoleon said:" Trust Me!" then figured he could do the British most damage by selling it to the Yankees. Spain never did get Parma either.

The US wanted to buy New Orleans from France the way they bought Alabama from Spain and Maine from England. America's nightmare was England taking Louisiana from France the way they took away Canada in 1759. Then American expansion would be permanently confined to the east coast and the U.S. would be a one time zone country. Napoleon decided not jut to sell them The Big Easy but the entire Deep South and Midwest up to Montana ! At the stroke of a pen the land mass of the United States doubled. Such a deal!

Napoleon later wrote: "I have confirmed the might of the United States and in her raised a Rival to England, that will one day Humble her Pride !"

1859- CAMARONE DAY- National Holiday of the French Foreign Legion.
It commemorates a battle during the French Empire in Mexico. 175 legionaries were attacked at a little ranchero called Camarone by thousands of Juaristas. The legionaries fought until only 12 were left alive with no more bullets. When the Mexican commander called upon them to surrender Capt. Danjou ordered "Fix bayonets and Charge!"

Today the wooden hand of Capt. Danjou is a relic at the Legions headquarters outside Marseilles. Since then to do a gutsy action in Legion parlance is a Camarone. In 1951 in Korea when the Foreign Legion rose from their trenches to fight hand to hand with human wave attacks of Red Chinese, their war cry was "Camarone! Camarone!"

1897- The Discovery of the Electron. English Professor J.J Thompson discovered a subatomic particle 100 times smaller than a proton. He called it a 'corpusle' but later changed it to 'electron'.

1900- John Luther Jones, called CASEY JONES died in a spectacular train crash near Vaughn Mississippi. Jones' freight train was running 75 minutes late so he stoked up his engine to 100 mph. Suddenly a switching error put a passenger train in his path. Jones stayed at the controls trying to stop the train while his crew jumped to safety. There was a head on collision but because of Jone’s bravery his was the only death. A brakeman later wrote the famous folksong.

Union activists prefer to remember that Jones was a strikebreaker running his train recklessly in defiance of a strike to impress his employers. The union still paid his widow his $3000 dollar life insurance. Folksinger Joe Hill in his song "Casey Jones the Union Scab." tells how when he went to heaven the Angel’s Union Local #23 "fired Casey down the Golden Stair.."

1905- At Evansville Illinois, future baseball umpire Cy Rigler began the practice of raising his right arm to indicate strikes, so that friends in the outfield could distinguish calls.

1934- In Berlin hotel, Chancellor Hitler met Dr. Ferdinand Porsche, who showed him the plans for a cheap inexpensive car the average German worker could afford. A people’s car or VolksWagen. It would become the VW beetle.

1939- The 1939 World’s Fair opened in Flushing Meadows, NY. The Trylon & Perisphere presided over the gleaming Art-Deco paean to optimism, even as the world waited nervously for Hitler’s next move. With President Franklin D. Roosevelt in attendance the NBC network began regular television broadcasting. It only went to a few homes. Experts were not optimistic." It requires a darkened room and constant attention." one said.

1943- The body of an American Major named Martin washed up on shore in Italy. On the intelligence officer’s body was found sensitive documents outline the coming Allied Invasion of Italy through Sardinia. It was all an elaborate hoax set up by the OSS to fool Nazi strategists on Allied intentions. The body used was an unidentified corpse. It worked. In July when the Anglo-American forces invaded Sicily many of the German heavy forces were waiting in Sardinia.

1945- BERLIN FALLS. Sergeants Yegorov and Kantariya raise the red flag over the Reichstag as the last Nazi resistance in the capitol was stamped out. After a late supper of spaghetti and a tossed salad Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun bit down on cyanide capsules and Hitler put a revolver in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Dr. Josef Goebbels and his family took poison but secretary Martin Bormann decided to take his chances making a run for it. For years it was thought he had made it to Latin America but in the late 1980's excavations in Berlin found his skeleton under a collapsed building crouching behind a tank.

Hitler even left instructions to have his Alsatian dog Blondi poisoned. The bodies were taken out to a ditch and burned with gasoline. A famous photo of a dead man with a Hitler mustache, was in reality a body double shown to the Russians to throw them off the track. Today, Adolf Hitlers’ skull is sitting in a filing cabinet in Moscow somewhere.
When Marshal Zhukov informed Soviet leader Josef Stalin by telephone of Hitler's death, Uncle Joe said:" Doigralsya, podlets!" So, that's the end of the bastard!"

Soviet troops found in Hitler’s office that he did possess a large world globe like Charlie Chaplin’s film the Great Dictator. The globe had arrows drawn in red pen pointed at England and the United States with Hitler’s handwritten scribbles "Look out! Here I come!". Russians covered the Reich Chancellery building with graffiti- the most popular being "Svenia went to Berlin" a version of the American "Kilroy was Here".

1945- "Arthur Godfrey Time" debuts on CBS radio. Godfrey was a local Washington D.C.deejay who gained nationwide fame for his emotional coverage of the funeral of FDR. He then went from radio to television, hosting the first regularly successful television entertainment program. Godfrey in later life got increasingly hard on his employees and in an infamous incident actually fired singer Julius LaRosa live on the air.

1948- The first civilian Land Rover automobiles produced.

1948- David Ben-Gurion read the declaration of independence of the State of Israel to a cheering crowd in Tel Aviv.

1952 - Mr Potato Head is 1st toy advertised on television. In 2000 Rhode Island declared itself the Mr Potato Head State. the Hasbro Toy Company is headquartered in Pawtucket, a city just outside of Providence.

1961- In Moscow, Lee Harvey Oswald married Marina Prusakova. He later moved back to the US and is alleged to be the lone assassin of President John Kennedy.

1970- President Nixon announced the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. The announcement from a President who ran on a Peace platform was greeted by an explosion of nationwide anti-war protests, climaxing in the Kent State murders.

1973- As the Watergate Scandal accelerates, President Nixon tells all his senior White House Staff- H.R.Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, Nicholas Katzenbach and attorney general John Mitchell that they were all fired.

1975 -SAIGON FELL. As Huey helicopters lifted the last panic stricken evacuees off of the US embassy roof, the South Vietnamese capitol city Saigon was taken by the Communist North Vietnamese army. Over 7000 people were lifted out by helicopter to the U.S. fleet, the largest helicopter evacuation ever.

One of the last out was US ambassador William Martin, with the Stars & Stripes folded under his jacket. As North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Thin accepted the surrender of the city he told acting South Vietnamese President Big Minh “ Do not be sad. Only the Americans are defeated. Consider this a moment of Joy.” The Vietnam War ends. Vietnamese call it the War of Unification. Saigon was renamed Ho Chi Minh City.

1980- Bert Lance, White House budget director for President Jimmy Carter was cleared of nine charges of fraud. Lance had once explained the economy thus: " Think of the Inflationary Spiral as a giant Corkscrew, and think of yourselves as the Cork."

1988- Tom Hanks married actress Rita Wilson.

1993- In Hamburg, young tennis star Monica Seles had just completed a match when lunatic fan named Gunter Parche jumped out of the crowd and stabbed her in the back with a knife. He didn’t want Monica to overtake Stephy Graff, whom he was stalking . Monica Seles recovered and resumed competition but never again regained her world championship poise. Parche spent a little time in prison but was soon released. Stephy Graff did stay the number one seed.

1992- BERN, the Geneva particle lab where the World Wide Web was developed by Tim Berner, declared that WWW. aka the Web would be open and free to all with no restrictions or royalties to be paid to them.

1993- The Walt Disney Company announced its’ purchase of top independent film producer Miramax. Ten years later a feud with Michael Eisner caused Miramax founders the Weinsteins to leave and form another company. By the time Miramax was sold in 2010, it was a shadow of it’s former self..

1997- In the last show of the season, comedian Ellen Degenere’s character Ellen admits to Laura Dern that she’s gay. Disney promptly cancelled the Ellen Show. Ellen returns with a talk show that is even more popular.
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Yesterday’s Question: The leading birdseed company is called Hartz Mountain. Where are the Hartz Mountains

Answer: The Harz Mountains are in lower Saxony in Germany. The founders of the seed company emigrated from there in the 1920s.

Question: The leading birdseed company is called Hartz Mountain. Where are the Hartz Mountains?

Yesterday’s Question Answered Below: Computer geeks! What is Moore’s Law?
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History for 4/29/2012
Birthdays: Emperor Hirohito, Duke Ellington , Duke Wellington, Sir Thomas Beacham, Zuben Mehta is 75, Tom Ewell, Rod McKuen, Fred Zinnemann, Jerry Seinfeld is 56, Michelle Pfeiffer is 53, Daniel Day Lewis is 54, Uma Thurman is 41

Today is the feast day of the Patron Saint of Italy, no, not Frank Sinatra, Saint Catherine of Sienna.

1429- At around 8:00PM, the Royal French Army entered the City of Orleans surrounded on three sides by the besieging English. The torchlight glinted off the armor of the great warriors like the Duke DuAlencon, Giles Des Rais, Etienne LaVignoles” the Angry-One”. But all eyes were on their warchief, a little 17 year old peasant girl in white armor- Joan La Pucelle, Joan the Maid. Since she was illiterate she immediately dictated a letter to the English army : “Surrender to the Maid, sent by God the King of Heaven, the keys to all the French towns you have despoiled and go home!”

1749- In Philadelphia inventor Ben Franklin hosted a dinner party where he used his new battery to electrocute the turkeys to be roasted for the amusement of his guests. .

1771- Artist Benjamin West unveils his painting of the “Death of General Wolfe” at the Royal Academy in London. Wolfe was killed in the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, which decided that Canada would be English. West’s portrayal of Wolfe in his actual uniform instead an idealized Grecian god was considered scandalously realistic and revolutionized painting.

1786- The day before his opera THE MARRIAGE OF FIGARO was to premiere, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart sat down after dinner and wrote the famous overture. Friends said he liked to think while playing billiards.

1818- The ARBUTHNOT & ARMBRUISTER INCIDENT- Henry Arbuthnot was a 70 year old British merchant who sympathized with the Seminole Indians of Florida. Together with a former Major Armbruister they aided this tribe in it's struggle with the expanding United States. When U.S. Gen. Andy Jackson invaded Spanish Florida in 1818 he captured these men. Jackson nursed a hatred of English people since as a young boy in the Revolution he was humiliated and slashed with a saber by a redcoat officer. Jackson’s mother and older brother died in an English prison.

So Jackson was not interested in hearing essays on native rights or the eccentricities of Britishers. He executed them on the spot, hanging old Arbuthnot from the mast of his own schooner. This mistreatment of foreign nationals proved an embarrassment to President Monroe and earned Jackson a reputation for cruelty that would follow him to his own presidential runs.

1861- "All we wish is to be left alone." In a speech Southern President Jefferson Davis spells out the policy of the Confederacy with regard to the war with the United States. The speech was aimed at Britain and France for international support. Davis was adopting the traditional defensive strategy of insurgents, that not being crushed out of existence is a victory in itself. However by yielding the initiative and not occupying Washington D.C. after the U.S. army was destroyed at Bull Run, the rebels probably lost their best chance to win the Civil War.

1862- Admiral Farragut captured New Orleans. Farragut was a Southerner so at first the War Department doubted his loyalty. He was only able to swing a fleet command through his father-in-law, Admiral David Dixon Porter.

1863- General Stonewall Jackson had spent the last three weeks peacefully enjoying the company of his wife Ann and his baby boy. They had celebrated his 38th birthday together. On this day Jackson received word that the Yankee Army was on the move. He said good bye to his family and rode off. When Ann saw him again he was shot and dying.

1914- THE SILENT PROTEST- Writer Upton Sinclair gained national prominence as an activist by standing with other intellectuals silently in front of the Standard Oil headquarters in Washington D.C.. The protest was to accuse the company of the infamous Ludlow Massacre, when company hired vigilantes set upon a camp of striking unionists and murdered them and their families including 11 children. When loud protests in front of Standard Oil’s office were outlawed by DC marshals, Sinclair resorted to this silent protest.

1916- The phase of World War One in Mesopotamia (Iraq) effectively ended when Lord Townshend surrendered his Anglo-Indian invasion force to the Turks after being surrounded at the Iraqi city of Kut.

1929- The film "All's Quiet on the Western Front" premiered. The world war one battlefield was constructed on a California ranch and dozens of veterans hired to be extras. When the antiwar film debuted in Germany, Nazis agitators were sent out to Berlin theaters to release rats, skunks and snakes in the theaters to scare people away. The star of the movie Lew Ayres ruined his career when he declared himself a conscientious objector during World War Two.

1939- It’s strangely ironic that Adolf Hitler’s Government while murdering millions also waged campaigns against cancer and smoking. This day the Nazi Party officially banned smoking in all their offices because of health concerns. The rest of the world wouldn’t even begin to think of linking cancer with cigarette smoking until the 1960’s.

1944- Dancing Romeos, the last Our Gang comedy short was produced by MGM, which had bought the franchise in 1938 from Hal Roach.

1945- ADOLPH AND EVA'S WEDDING- With the Red Army knocking on the door, Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun get married in their bunker. They celebrate by having dinner of spaghetti and a small green salad and then commit suicide.

1945- DACHAU liberated- American combat troops of the 45th Rainbow Division shot their way into the concentration camp and liberated 32,000 survivors like future Nobel Laureate Eli Weisel.

The Americans were so horrified by the nightmare they found, including 30 railroad cars packed with decomposing corpses, that when a clean cut, blonde haired SS commander surrendered by snapping a crisp Seig-Heil salute, the American major he had directed it to pulled out his pistol and shot him dead on the spot. 346 SS guards were killed by the U.S. troops and camp survivors.

Many of the U.S. troops there were African American and Nisei (Japanese American) so when the newsreels sent back images back home, they were careful to film the backs of their helmets so you didn't see their faces.

1962- President John Kennedy hosted a dinner for a group of Nobel Prize winners at the White House. Kennedy said: “ I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent and human knowledge that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone.”

1975- In the wee hours of the morning Communist North Vietnamese began their final attack on the South Vietnamese capitol of Saigon. Missiles struck the runway at Tahn Sun Nhut Airport so the big Air Force C-130 cargo planes could not land. The evacuation out to the US 7th Fleet offshore would be done all by helicopters. It was the biggest helicopter airlift in history. The signal on the radio to begin the air evacuation was Bing Crosby’s recording of White Christmas.

1981-Marylin Barnett “outs” tennis champion Mrs. Billy Jean King, the most famous American female athlete of her time. She said they had a lesbian affair for seven years.

1986- Los Angeles Central Library burns down. A lot of the costs of rebuilding was raised by private donation, much raised by a wild local televangelist named Dr. Gene Scott. Scott would preach his own strange brand of Bible study while smoking a cigar and wearing funny hats on camera.

1988- On this day many Midwestern evangelicals awaited the Rapture and Apocalypse that the Bible foretold within one generation of the restoration of the Temple -- which
they took to mean within forty years of the re-institution of the Nation of
Israel... and guess what? we're still waiting.

1992- THE GREAT LOS ANGELES RIOT- Los Angeleanos go berserk after an all white jury in Simi Valley acquitted the policemen who beat up drunk motorist Rodney King while being videotaped. 58 killed, 2500 businesses destroyed, $1.5 billion dollars in damage, 13,200 arrests and large sections of Los Angeles put under martial law. Even Rodney King was moved to go on TV and proclaim: " Can't we all just get along?"

Part of the reason the disturbance spun out of control was the autocratic chief of the LAPD Darryl Gates was incommunicado for several hours at the beginning of the crisis at a fundraising party in Bel Air to get money to fuel his quarrel with Mayor Tom Bradley. One irony was the loot-crazed mob ran right past the L.A. County Art Museum to sack a department store on the next corner. I guess they felt that there was nothing of value in it, which is in agreement with many art critics. The Beverly Hills Police, a separate entity, kept the peace by simply arresting everyone they saw.

2001- Pioneer 10 was a space probe launched to the outer planets in 1972. After sending the first photos of Jupiter and Pluto in 1973 Pioneer 10 left our solar system and headed for deep space in 1997. It’s aimed for the Constellation Taurus. This day 7 billion miles away Pioneer 10 phoned home to say it was fine. It’s last message was received in 2003. I wonder if it asked if Richard Nixon was still president?

2011- Prince William married Catherine Middleton in Westminster Abbey.
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Yesterday’s Question: Computer geeks! What is Moore’s Law?

Answer: Scientist co-founder of Intel Corporation, Gordon Moore, predicted in 1965 that the computing power of computer transistors (later chips) would double in power every two years, and as they grew more powerful, the price would fall. So far, his ideas have been uncannily accurate.

Quiz: Computer geeks! What is Moore’s Law?

Answer to yesterdays Quiz- Who were Castor & Pollux?
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History for 4/28/2012
Birthdays: English King Edward IV (1442), President James Monroe, Lionel Barrymore, Carolyn Jones-aka Morticia Addams of the TV Addams Family, Ann Margaret is 71, Jay Leno is 62, Sadam Hussein, Jean Redpath, James Baker III, Penelope Cruz is 38, Jessica Alba is 33, Godzilla is 57- see below.

In ancient Egypt today was Wake up and Smell the Breeze Day, The first known Spring Festival in history. As part of the holiday, Egyptians ate a small dried fermented fish called Fessig, which they thought prevented diseases blown in by the desert.

357AD- Roman Emperor Constantius II visited Rome for the first time. Like his father Constantine he was now ruling the Empire from Constantinople. Later Western emperors preferred to rule from Milan for faster access to the Rhine or Danube frontiers.

1192- CONRAD OF MONFERRAT SLAIN BY THE ASSASSINS OF ALAMUT-
The word "assassin" comes from "hash-a-shin" or "eaters of Hashish". Their leader Sheik Ibn-Abdel Sinan, was called :"The Old Man of the Mountain" established his cult on a mountain fortress in Lebanon. He got his followers stoned in a pleasure garden filled with pretty girls, telling them they had just spent time in Paradise. And if they were good he’d let them in for more visits.

Sheik Abdel Sinan ran his sect like an extortion racket throughout the Middle East. In exchange for gold he wouldn't have one of his stoned followers knife you. When the Crusaders arrived in the Holyland, no one had clued them in to this system. So when Conrad laughed off the Assassin's emissary, he was stabbed by hitmen disguised as Christian monks.

Conrad was the other leader of the Third Crusade with Richard Lionheart and Phillip Augustus of France. Many believed Richard had bribed Abdel Sinan to murder Conrad. That's the reason Richard was imprisoned on his way home by Leopold of Austria, Conrad's uncle. The Assassins were finally exterminated a century later by the Mongols, whose horde happened to be riding by when they thought their fortress would be fun to destroy.

1376-The Good Parliament- English parliaments in the Middles Ages were held so rarely that they were remembered by nicknames "The Rump, The Mad, The Thoroughly Bollucks'd-Up, etc. This parliament achieved new rights by electing the first speaker and demanding the impeachment of a bad minister who was an appointee of the King.

1686- Sir Issac Newton published the first volume of his Principia Mathematica, outlining the Theory of Gravity. The earliest account of the apple story was in 1738. Voltaire writing about Newton claimed his niece told him the scientist had left Cambridge for the country during the Great Plague of 1666. "He observed an apple falling from a tree and fell into a deep meditation on what was this force that drew all objects in a straight line that until interrupted would continue to the center of the Earth."

1789-THE MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. The HMS Bounty had been sent around the world to bring back breadfruit samples to see if the plant could be a nutritional supplement for slave laborers in Jamaica and Bermuda. During the return voyage from Tahiti the crew led by first mate Fletcher Christian, set upon the Captain, William Bligh, and set him adrift in a rowboat to die. They then sail with their Tahitian families to settle permanently on an island.

They choose Pitcairn Island because of it's remoteness. Squabbles arose among the British and natives and their leader Fletcher Christian was killed while tending his sweet potato patch. Today a majority of the islands inhabitants claim ancestry from the Bounty mutineers.

Captain Bligh got to safety after navigating his little rowboat 1,500 miles to East Timor with almost no food, an unparalleled feat of seamanship. He was cleared by an Admiralty board and served with distinction in the Napoleonic Wars, although another ship mutinied on him. On top of everything else, when Bligh got home he discovered his wife had been made pregnant by the nephew of the Duke of Wellington -'Wicked Willie' Wellesley.

Like many 'famous' incidents, this passed by it's time with little or no notice. What made the Mutiny on the Bounty world famous was a best selling novel written in the 1920's by two Americans, Charles Nordoff and James Norton Hall, who met when pilots in World War One's Lafayette Escadrille.

1813- Marshal Kutusov, the one-eyed Russian general who chased Napoleon out of Russia, died of exhaustion.

1881- Notorious gunfighter Billy the Kid had given himself up to New Mexico authorities on condition he would get a fair trial. That fair trial sentenced him to hang. He was being kept shackled in the town of Maisella New Mexico by two deputies. One guard named Pecos Bob Ollinger enjoyed tormenting the Kid with descriptions of how gruesome his death was going to be- dancing in the air, slowly choking, eyes bulging, etc. At one point Ollinger left his shotgun by the door and crossed the street to have dinner.

The Kid asked the other deputy to unshackle him so he could use the outhouse. A friend had secretly planted a gun in the outhouse. When Ollinger returned he found his deputy dead and Billy the Kid pointing his shotgun right at his face. "Hello Bob !" the smiling kid said, then blew his head off.

1897- The first distress signal sent by wireless at sea. The S.O.S. (Save Our Ship) code wasn't invented until 1912.

1925- Tory minister Mr. Winston Churchill announced in Parliament that Britain was going back on to the Gold Standard. The result was an economic panic, nationwide strikes and a widening of the postwar depression already affecting Germany and France. Churchill's party led by Stanley Baldwin would be kicked out of office in the elections of 1926, and Churchill would remain in political oblivion until 1940.

1925- T.S. Elliot landed a job at Faber & Fabers Publishing. His enabled the poet to quit his job as a bank teller at Lloyds and continue his literary career.

1937- Italy’s famed movie studio Cinecitta’ opened.

1944- EXERCISE TIGER-The greatest coup of Axis espionage. German spies discovered that the allies were going to rehearse their D-Day invasion landings off Slapton Sands, England. They sent a surprise attack of torpedo boats across the Channel to catch the defenseless transports packed with troops, bobbing in the water unawares. They sank several drowning hundreds of men in the 44 degree f water.

Another big mistake was many of the GIs were wearing their life belts incorrectly around the waist instead of under the arms so when they leapt into the water the belt was useless and their heavy packs dragged them down. More G.I.s died in this incident than at Utah Beach on D-Day. Yet until recently it was all kept top secret. After WWII the head of German espionage, Reinhard Gehlen, had a long happy career in the CIA.

1945-BENITO MUSSOLINI DIED- Il Duce was on the run with his mistress Clara Petracci when they were apprehended by a roving band of Italian Partisans and stood up against a wall. Mussolini's last words before the guns went off were: "-But, but Colonel...."

My father in the US Army Air Corps remembered driving into Milan to see his body hanging upside down with townspeople invited to spit, shoot at or otherwise deface the body.

1947- Thor Heyderthal set out on a balsa wood raft called Kon Tiki to prove ancient Peruvians could have used the ocean current to reach Polynesia.

1952- The American military occupation of Japan ended, and Japan was restored to full self government.

1954- Happy Birthday Godzilla!.The movie by Ichjiro Honda was inspired when a Japanese fishing boat was fatally exposed by radioactive fallout from a U.S. hydrogen bomb test. Godzilla is an Anglicized version of the Japanese Kohjira, which is a combination of Gorilla and Whale. The parallels to the Hiroshima experience reached eerie levels when the film has a long sequence of a funeral dirge sung to the dead of Tokyo as we survey the devastation.

The famous roar was done by rubbing a resin-covered glove down some bass fiddle strings. The film was later released in the U.S. with American actor Raymond Burr (actually, Canadian actor..) acting in inserted scenes. The complete Japanese version of the film was not seen in North America until 2004.

1961-When tenor Guiseppi Di Stefano took ill, a young schoolteacher from Modena took the lead role in the opera La Boheme. Lucciano Pavarotti debuted.

1965- At the same time he was sending the first combat troops to Vietnam, President Lyndon Johnson also sent 22,000 Marines to overrun the Dominican Republic. He said it was to save it from "Communist Dictatorship", but no Communist ties to the rebels was ever proven.

1967- Citing his Black Muslim religion, world champion prizefighter Cassius Clay, now renamed Muhammad Ali, refused to be drafted into the army to fight in the Vietnam War. "I’m not mad at any Vietnamese person over there." The World Boxing Federation stripped Ali of his championship title but he won it back during the 'Rumble in the Jungle" prizefight against George Foreman in 1974.

2004- ABU GHARIB-American network news confirmed a story first aired on Arab TV that U.S. and British soldiers were torturing Iraqi prisoners in violation of the Geneva Convention. The government asked the compliant American media to sit on the story, until after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified to the 9-11 Commission.

Graphic photos went around the internet from a prison called Abu Gharib. It was once a prison used by dictator Saddam Hussein. President Bush and Rumsfeld claimed they had no knowledge the abuses, while in reality documents released later said they knew and approved it all in detail. The Pentagon investigations in 2004 cleared all the top officials of any wrongdoing. Just a few low level National Guard soldiers were blamed, and their commander General Jane Kaminski was reprimanded.
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Yesterday’s Question: Who were Castor & Pollux?

Answer: The Gemini twins. Their mother was Leda of the famous "Leda and the
Swan" seduction by Zeus, which produced Pollux. Castor was the mortal
twin, by Leda (when she wasn't fooling around with swans) and her
husband, the King of Sparta. The story goes that, after their various
adventures, when Castor died, Pollux petitioned Zeus to make his twin
immortal so they could remain together. Zeus, as he was so fond of
doing, put them in the heavens as the Gemini constellation. (Thanks FG)