{courtesy BV}

SPOILER ALERT---IF YOU HAVEN'T SEEN IT, AVERT THINE EYES LEST YE BE CORRUPTED!

Well, I finally saw Bolt last night. It was very nice, with some great character work, particularly the pigeons and the hamster. The art direction was pretty striking in the more urban settings. The country stuff was bland. The last ten years of Disney films and I've never seen a cloudy day. I know we live in SoCal, where the sky is blue 300 days of the year, but the rest of the world does not. So how about a cloudy day sometimes?
The moving across the retro map of the US was cute. Overall I felt it could have been funnier, and I never quite got into Bolt's head enough to feel I knew him. I wanted the network exec-director thread to be paid off somehow the way the agent was. They just disappeared from the end of the film. There wasn't enough pipe laid to understand Mom, especially when SHE is the one who has the turn of heart and ends things. I am also surprised that there were not more movie-TV parody jokes, especially since you went through so much trouble to set up the Hollywood theme. The Pigeons doing the pitch was the closest, and it was funny.

But I agree with the common reaction among my colleagues that it came out better than expected.

My own personal request to our industry is to now please retire the idiomatic expletive "AWESOME!"

In recent films it's become as over-used as McCauley Culkin's " YESSSS" was in the 1990's.

In fact, all the male-adolescent-Surfer-Valspeak is getting kinda old. I last liked it in the turtle in Finding Nemo. Storypeople and writers, mark me well. Time to move on!

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Question: Who first decided that Santa Claus is from the North Pole?

Yesterday’s Quiz: :” There’s a method to his madness..”?
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History for 12/23/2008
Birthdays; Joseph Smith -Founder of Mormonism, Paul Hornung, Ruth Roman, Otto Soglow -cartoonist creator of 'the Little King', Frank Morgan (the Wizard of Oz actor was also the first president of the Screen Actor's Guild) Jose Greco,Elizabeth Hartmann, Harry Guardino, Claudio Scimone, Vincent Sardi of Sardi’s restaurant in NY, Harry Shearer is 65, Bob Barker is 86, Japanese Emperor Akihito is 75

According to the TV show Seinfeld, today is the holiday FESTIVUS- So Happy FESTIVUS for the RESTOF-US! Time to perform feats of strength around the Festivus Pole.

1740-King Frederick the Great of Prussia attended a masked ball. He finished his coffee, said good night, mounted his horse and invaded Silesia. He described it as “my own little masquerade".

1753- A twenty year old buckskin clad surveyor from Virginia almost drowned when a raft his party was pulling across the Allegheny River capsized. Miraculously, despite his inability to swim and the icy water, he made it to safety. His name was George Washington.

1786- HMS Bounty sets sail from Portsmouth. Their mission to the South Seas was to bring back breadfruit plants and see if the breadfruit could be a cheap dietary staple like potatoes from America, except these would be used to extend the lives of the slaves in Jamaica and Barbados tending the sugar cane fields. But Mr. Christian and the crew would mutiny against tyrannical Captain Bligh and set him adrift in a rowboat.

1823- SANTA CLAUS BORN. This day the poem "A Visit from St. Nicholas" was published anonymously in The Troy Sentinel, a New York newspaper. . Several years after the authorship was claimed by a Bronx Bible teacher, the Reverend Clement Clarke Moore, and he was celebrated in his time as the father of Santa Claus until his death in 1863.The poem completed the synthesis of English and Dutch folk traditions that were merging in New York into our modern concept of Santa. The Dutch Klaus-in-the-Cinders" or Kris Kringle was an elf who climbed down chimneys to give children toys. He merged with the British Father Christmas or Saint Nicholas who was a big fat jolly bishop with a white beard in a red suit. In an 1859 reprint of the famous poem famed cartoonist Thomas Nast (who created the Republican elephant and Democratic donkey) drew the first likeness of Santa Claus. The likeness we all recognize was created by illustrator Haddon Sundblom for a Coca-Cola ad campaign in 1934.



1834- In London Joseph Hansom patented Hansom cabs. This is the one horse, two wheeled cab with the driver in back. Cab is shortened from Cabriolet.

1857- Ex-army officer, failed businessman and town drunk Ulysses Grant pawned his watch so he could buy Christmas presents for his wife and kids. From this rock bottom he would eventually rise to win the Civil War, become President of the United States and the most famous American of his time.

1893- Humperdinck's opera "Hansel und Gretel" debuts in Weimar Germany.

1894- Claude DeBussey’s “Afternoon of a Faun” premiered in Paris.

1912- France’s leading literary magazine Nouvelle Revue Francaise rejected a new novel by an author named Marcel Proust “A La Recherche du Temps Perdu” “Remembrance of Things Past”. One critic wrote: “Maybe I’m dead from the neck up, but I can’t see why the author needed 20 pages to describe how he got out of bed in the morning!” Remembrance of Things Past became one of the great works of the Twentieth Century.

1912- The Max Sennett short comedy “Hoffmeyer’s Release” premiered, the first comedy featuring the Keystone Cops.

1913- Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, creating the first federal banking reserve since the Bank of the United States was dismantled by Andrew Jackson in the 1830's.

1913- Young Italian Rudolph Valentino arrived in America to seek his fortune. He was so poor that after a year he sent his parents a photo of himself in a borrowed tuxedo to allay their fears. He worked as a nightclub dancer and gigolo until becoming a Hollywood film star in 1921.

1930- Young actress Betty Davis signed her first contract with Universal Studio.

1935- Walt Disney sent a detailed memo to art teacher Don Graham outlining his plans for retraining his animators to do realistic feature films.

circa-1935- This was the traditional day for Republic Pictures to fire all their employees and hire them back after New Years so they wouldn't have to pay them holiday pay. Republic billed itself on it’s business cards as The Friendly Studio.

1941- WAKE ISLAND FELL. A large Japanese invasion force finally overwhelmed the tiny garrison of Marines and construction workers defending Wake Island. The hopeless stand of Col. Devereux , Hammerin-Hank Elrod and their men inspired the country still shocked by the relentless Japanese advance across the Pacific since the Pearl Harbor attack. The Marines were shipped to POW camps in Korea but civilian construction workers were kept on the island to build an airbase for the Japanese. After they finished they were all executed. The Japanese commander responsible was hanged for war crimes in 1948.

1941- A meeting of business leaders and union officials make a deal that there would be no strikes or lockouts in American industry for the duration of World War Two.

1942- The German Sixth Army was surrounded at Stalingrad and could not hold out much longer. General Von Manstein’s 16th Panzer Division was trying to break through and rescue them. But after two weeks of heavy fighting in blizzard like conditions, the 16th was bogged down. Hitler ordered Von Manstein to break off the attempt and stabilize the front in other areas, in effect, abandoning 250,000 men to their deaths. This day while frozen, hollowed eyed men scanned the horizon for some sign of rescue, the tanks of the 16th Panzer turned back. The commander of the last tank stood in his turret, solemnly snapped a crisp salute in the direction of his doomed comrades, then dropped down the hatch and drove off.

1944-The Germans had timed their surprise offensive “The Battle of the Bulge” to coincide with a heavy storm system over northern Europe. The snow and poor visibility kept Allied airforces helpless and grounded. As Third Army was moving northward to rescue soldiers trapped in the surrounded Belgian town of Bastogne General Patton called the Third Army’s chaplain to him. “Captain!” Old Blood & Guts growled:” I want a prayer for good weather! Have it in my hands in an hour!” Dutifully the prayer was written and recited throughout the army. This day on cue the sky cleared and the sun shined for the first time in a week. The slow moving German Tiger Tanks proved easy pickings for Allied fighter planes. Gen. Patton’s reaction: “That chaplain! Make him a Major!”

1947- Two Bell laboratory scientists invent the Transistor. Nobody was quite sure what to do with the little thing until Texas Instruments invented the portable radio in 1954.

1954-the First Organ Transplant. 23 year old Richard Herrick was dying of kidney disease. Dr Joseph Murray of Harvard removed a kidney from his brother Ronald Herrick and used it to replace his brothers diseased one. The idea of operating on a healthy person just so he could help someone else was a radical idea. Tens of thousand of organ transplants of kidneys, hearts, livers and corneas followed.

1972- The Immaculate Reception. Football’s Pittsburgh Steelers were trailing the Oakland Raiders 7-6 with one second to go when they scored a touchdown and won.

1973- Soap Opera “the Young and The Restless” premiered.
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Yesterday’s Question” There’s a method to his madness..”?

Answer: In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. When Hamlet feigns madness, Polonius is dubious- ”Though this be madness, yet there is method in it…”