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The San Diego Comicon was a lot of fun.
The great sombrero wearing donut & IEric Goldberg signing books

I saw a lot of old friends and met lots of Click and Clack CarTalk fans. We saw Eric Goldberg signing his new book Character Animation Crash Course, and J.R. Goldberg signing her book as well. Plus Dean Yeagle, Stephen Silver, Bat Lash and Sergio Aragones signing their works. Heard Frank Miller speak at the Eisner Awards. Lots more tables of comic books dealers than I saw last year.
I heard 160,000 attended. Compare to SiGGRAPH that has 30,000.

Favorite costume this year was the 5 year old little girl Star Wars Imperial Storm Trooper. With a lovely blond braid sticking out from under her helmet.

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Quiz: Who created the first comic book?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Who said: First in War, First in Peace, First in the hearts of his countrymen?
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History for 7/28/2008
Birthdays: Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis, Richard Rogers, Ibn al’ Arabi- philosopher 1165, Marcel Duchamp, Rudy Vallee. Sally Struthers Peter Duchin, Vida Blue, Joe E. Brown, Jim Davis the creator of Garfield, Frank Yankovic the Polka King, Elizabeth Berkley, Earl Tupper the inventor of Tupperware

1586 - Sir Thomas Harriot introduced potatoes to Europe from America.

1609- Sir George Somers was shipwrecked on the uninhabited island of Bermuda
and stayed to found a settlement, claiming the island for Britain.

1655- Poet, playwright and duelist Cyrano de Bergerac died in Paris. The famous play about him and his big nose was written by Edmond Rostand in 1895.

1750-Composer Johann Sebastian Bach died. He had suffered blindness in his old age but is eyesight returned shortly before his fatal stroke. Elderly and ill, he one of his final compositions was a chorale prelude: "Come, Kindly Death- come for my life is dreary, and of earth I am weary, etc." He and his wife Anna Magdelena had 17 children,, and 7 more by his first wife. Many of whom became composers Johann Christian Bach, Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach, etc. Bach’s music was soon forgotten until rediscovered by Mendelsson and others in the 1820s.. Albert Einsteins brother Alfred said Bach’s music" almost makes one want to become Christian."

1788- Master British portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds visited the other master British portrait painter Sir Thomas Gainsborough, who was dying or cancer. They had been enemies for years but now at the end they made up. When Reynolds left him Gainsborough said "Goodbye until we meet in the Hereafter, Van Dyck in our company."

1808- The Turkish Janissaries, the royal guard, depose Sultan Mustapha VI and replace him with his cousin Mehmed II. The Janissaries were the real power in Istanbul at this time, keeping a supply of royal princes in the harem like cold storage, to be taken out as needed. The signal Jannissaries gave for their Palace insurrections was to overturn their large soup kettles. Sultans sometimes picked what Harem girl they would favor that night by how many cloves she could hold in her bellybutton. that’s my method too.

1858- The French photographer Nadar went up in a balloon and took the first aerial photograph.

1896- Happy Birthday Miami! The City of Miami incorporated.

1933- The first singing telegram. It was delivered to singer Rudy Valee by Western Union operator appropriately named Lucille Lipps.

1945-A B-25 Mitchell bomber flying in thick fog struck the 78th floor of the Empire State Building in New York City. It killed a dozen people, including some when one of it's 1,500 lb engines shot through the building and down onto 33rd street. One woman in an elevator had the cables cut and fell 80 stories at 200 miles an hour to the basement. Miraculously she lived. Despite the devastation, the building did not collapse but stayed sound. As a result, US and World air traffic control standards were stiffened. Air traffic controllers got the power to order planes down, and large planes kept from flying over large urban areas.



1948- In honor of the death of D.W. Griffith, all Hollywood studios observed three minutes of silence.

1948- The Premiere of that utterly memorable film " ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN." For you hardcore film trivia fans, this film is the only other time than the original Tod Browning movie that Bela Lugosi played Count Dracula on film. After this Lou Costello, who was an ardent admirer of Senator Joseph MacCarthy, insisted all his staff sign loyalty oaths. He fired the two writers of this movie Robert Lees and Frederic Rinaldo, over their refusal to comply. Unfortunately for Abbott & Costello, they were their best writers. They never had a successful movie again.

1965-VIETNAM- President Lyndon B. Johnson had been wrestling with a problem since June 5th. In Vietnam the war against the Commie Viet Cong was going badly. Strategic bombing of the North has failed to stop incursions in the South and the latest government in Saigon had fallen and been replaced by a group of generals led by Ngyen Kao Key. Johnson had to decide to pull out or expand US commitment. This day at a routine 12:30 PM press briefing, calculated to not be well attended, LBJ made the announcement that US forces in Vietnam would be expanded dramatically from 75,000 to 125,000- eventually to 450,000 by the end of 1967. What LBJ wasn’t saying was he had now decided that US ground troops would carry the bulk of the fighting and not just to prop up the South Vietnamese government but to defeat the Communists outright. He would still try to do his Great Society Programs while running a trillion-dollar war that in private even he doubted was winnable. This one decision destroyed Johnson’s Presidency, gave America it’s first military defeat and cracked the thriving post war economy, creating recessions and domestic political turmoil for the next twenty years.

1971- Photographer Diane Arbus probed increasingly darker subject matter, circus freaks, severe birth defects. This day she committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, then slitting her wrists.

1998- The Taliban, Afghan fundamentalist leaders ordered mass destruction of television sets. The also forbade the Internet and shaved the heads of their national soccer team for daring to wear shorts to play.

1999- Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco declared today Marylin Chambers Day, in honor of the star of porn films like Behind the Green Door.

2061- The next predicted appearance of Halley’s Comet.

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Yesterday’s Question: Who said: First in War, First in Peace, First in the hearts of his countrymen?

Answer: Revolutionary War General Light-Horse Harry Lee. He said it at the funeral of George Washington in 1799. Lee was the father of Civil War leader Robert E. Lee.


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