At long last, proof that my long lost family must be Chinese. Here is a fun snap clowing around with a senior designer at Digimax Taipei named Scott Wong. It was taken by a talented young animator we called TMC.




Birthdays: John Brown, James Barrie the creator of Peter Pan, Henry J. Kaiser of Kaiser Aluminum, Glenda Jackson, Billy Joel, Candice Bergen, Mike Wallace is 89, Pancho Gonzales, James L. Brooks, Albert Finney is 71


1754- THE FIRST AMERICAN NEWSPAPER CARTOON- Ben Franklin in his Pennsylvania Gazette printED a drawing of a segmented snake with each piece named for a colony with the inscription: Join or Die.
Okay, it's not Calvin and Hobbs, but it's a start.

1887- Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show did it’s first performance in Europe. In London the English public thrilled to displays of trick riding, wild red Indians, cowboys and little Annie Oakley the trickshooter. Buffalo Bill is sometimes considered America's first media star.

1932 – London’s Piccadilly Circus first lit by electricity.

1935- The First Belch heard on nationwide radio. Melvin Purvis (the FBI man who killed John Dillinger) was doing an ad for Fleischmann’s Yeast when he committed the offense, which was dubbed “The Burp Heard Round the World”.

1937- ACTOR’S SHOWDOWN WITH L.B.MAYER- In a dramatic confrontation the heads of the Screen Actor’s Guild Robert Montgomery and Franchot Tone go to MGM boss Louis B. Mayer’s beach house during a Sunday garden party. While IATSE-Capone mob gangster Willie Bioff stood by to give Mayer moral support, Montgomery told Mayer he had a 96% strike vote from the actors, so if Mayer didn’t recognize SAG as the sole bargaining agent for actors they would paralyze Hollywood monday morning! Mayer considered, then gave in. Bioff got from the actors a deal that the IA would back off if the actors would withdraw their support from a rival union to IATSE’s organizing the behind the scene’s technical artists. That night 5600 actors and friends celebrated at Hollywood Legion Stadium. Next morning 200 waited in line to get their SAG cards including Garbo and Jean Harlow.

1937- Burne Hogarth began drawing the Tarzan comic strip. Hal Foster had been in contract negotiations with the syndicate over money and the right to his originals. He had created Prince Valiant as a bargaining chip when the syndicate called his bluff by giving the Tarzan job to Hogarth. Foster went on to greater glory with Valiant but never forgave Burne.

1955- HAPPY BIRTHDAY KERMIT THE FROG! Washington D.C. station puts on a young Univ of Maryland grad named Jim Henson as filler before the TODAY Show. He antics with his green frog called Kermit, fashioned from fabric from one of his mothers old green coats. The Muppets are born.
original Muppet designs in the Smithsonian.

1961- John F. Kennedy's newly appointed head of the FCC, Newton Minow, did his first major address to a luncheon of top television executives. In his speech he blasted them for t.v.'s mindless content and violence and called television: " A Vast Wasteland."
What makes it historic is it's the first time anybody had noticed just how lousy t.v. is and how badly we are all addicted to it.

1970- THE MORATORIUM DAY- Largest of the nationwide youth protests against the U.S. war in Vietnam and Cambodia. President Nixon was obsessed by the protests. He had a bunker command post built under the White House where video monitors observed the “long haired peaceniks” outside. When Nixon told his staff he was going to go watch some football, he meant he was going to brood over the monitors. Retired CIA director Bill Gates confessed in his memoirs that as a young operative he took the day off to go protest as well as did a lot of other CIA agents. In Chicago young student and future comic John Belushi was dragged off by friends after being struck in the chest with a fired tear gas shell.
In 2000 it was revealed that President Nixon was so depressed at this time he was taking a mood altering prescription barbiturate named Dilantin. It was given him by Jack Dreyfus of the Dreyfus Fund without a doctors permission. Tricky Dicky was so whacked out that Secretary of Defense John Schlesinger ordered military and nuclear installations to ignore the orders of the President unless first cleared by the Defense Department.

1995- The Center of Disease Control published findings on a new deadly strain of virus appearing near Kinshasha Zaire and called it the Ebola Virus.