News of the start of production on a Mo-Cap film of the French comic Tintin.....As my old friend Lurch would say.....

Uhh..hhhhh.hhhhhhhhhhhh

P.S. I met Ted Cassidy in the parking lot of Hanna & Barbera in 1978. I was working on the Godzilla Power Hour and he was the voice of Godzilla. He was a pleasant man, and yes, extremely tall.Well over six foot.

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Birthdays: French King Louis X The Stubborn 1314, President Rutherford B. Hayes, Frederick Remington, Jean Millet, Buster Keaton, Charlton Heston is 84, Susan Sarandon, Armand Assante, Damon Runyon,Anne Rice, Alicia Silverstone, Liev Schreiber

1648- Happy Birthday NYFD! Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam Peter Stuyversant established the first regular municipal fire department in the New World. Fire departments were volunteer brigades until the late 1800s.

1777-BATTLE OF GERMANTOWN-George Washington tried a dawn surprise attack on the British army around Philadelphia. The same tactic had worked at Trenton, but here things went wrong from the start. In the morning fog the Yankee right flank got turned around and started shooting at the Yankee center. The Center thought they were being attacked by Loyalists and returned fire. Two thirds of the American army shot itself to pieces and ran away before the British even knew what was happening. Washington realized he was going to need some drill instructors....

1798- Lyrical Ballads, a small book of poems published jointly by English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The book opened with the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and finished with Wordsworth’s Lines composed a few miles above Tinturn Abbey.” Despite all the book didn’t sell that well. Wordsworth blamed Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner poem for being too long. Some of the best sales of the book were by sea captains who thought a Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner was a collection of sea shantys.

1869-Henry J. Heinz begins his condiment company, bottling horseradish in a little shop in Pittsburgh. He was later called the Catsup King, -or Ketchup, if you prefer. One of the Heinz Company's greatest stunts was in the 1920s they placed a 40 foot tall electrified pickle on the corner of 23rd and 5th Ave. in Manhattan.

1931- Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy" comic strip debuts.

1943- Actor Clark Gable was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal for flying combat missions over Germany. It was said Gable took these deliberately dangerous missions instead of doing USO shows out of a death-wish in grief for his wife Carole Lombard, who was killed in a plane crash.

1950- The first Peanuts comic strip introducing Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy.

1955- The Brooklyn Dodgers a.k.a. "Da Bums" win the World Series for the first time, and the only time they ever won it while inhabiting the precincts of Flatbush. The name Dodgers came from the fact that several main trolley car lines intersected in front of Ebbets Field on Atlantic Avenue. To get into the ballpark you had to cross this area dodging the traffic. So they were known as the Brooklyn Trolley-Dodgers, then Dodgers.

1957-FIFTY YEAR AGO-SPUTNIK- Russia inaugurates the Space Age and first shoots an object into space orbit. A basketball sized satellite called" Sputnik-1" . Sputnik means Satellite and the word spawned pop words like Beatnik, Nudnik and Peacenik. Americans used to thinking of themselves as the leaders in all technology reacted with shock. Why weren’t we first? We were losing the space race! Senate leader Lyndon Johnson complained “I don’t want to sleep under a Commie Moon!” Wild rock & roll star Little Richard Penniman thought Sputnik was an omen of the end of the world and resolved to give up sex, drugs and rock & roll and become a Born Again Christian preacher. Good Golly Miss Molly!

1957-"Leave it to Beaver' debuts on CBS.

1971- Janis Joplin was found dead at the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood. She was 27 and died of a heavy drug overdose. Her song “Me and Bobby McGee” was as yet unreleased but soon topped the pop charts. Joplin left a considerable sum in her will for a party for her friends. The invitation read “ The Drinks are on Pearl”.

1986- On a New York street a man named William Tager walked up to CBS News anchor Dan Rather and mumbling “Kenneth, whats the Frequency?” started furiously punching Rather. He thought CBS was beaming microwaves at his brain and it was Dan’s fault. Who Kenneth is remains a mystery.

2001- James Hemingway, the youngest son of writer Ernest Hemingway, was found dead in the women’s wing of a Miami jail. A cross-dressing transsexual , he had gone by the name of Gloria and was picked up by Miami cops for drug use and exposing himself in public. He was 69.