Did Adolf Hitler try to draw Disney characters? Check out this interesting article animator Tom Roth spotted in a British newspaper.

-http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/02/23/whitler123.xml

I once saw Schickelgrubers portfolio, the one he made that was turned down by a Viennese art academy. I thought his stuff was better suited for background layout.

Quiz: Who are these men? Schuyler Colfax, Hamilton Fish, Cactus Jack Garner, Charles GoodTime Charlie Curtis and Alban Barkeley?

Answer to yesterdays question below: What is meant by Balkanization?
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history for 2/23/2006
Birthdays: George Fredrich Handel, Samuel Pepys (pronounced 'peeps'), Mayer Amschel Rothschild-1743- founder of the Rothschild banking dynasty, Victor Fleming director of Gone With the Wind, Tom Bodet, W.E.B. DuBois, Johnny Winter, Peter Fonda, Ed Too Tall Jones, Barry Bonilla ,William Shirer, Allan MacLeod Cormack-inventor of the CAT Scan, Kelly MacDonald, Steve Jobs.

Roman Festival Terminalia, god of borders and boundries.
Not to be confused of course with Janus god of portals and doorways.

303 A.D. -DIOCLETIAN RENEWS THE BAN ON CHRISTIANITY. The Roman Empire recognized a cult as ‘religo’ ( officially sanctioned ) or “supersticio” ( banned ). It's a paradox that those men history called good Roman emperors were big Christian killers while the evil tyrants like Caligula ignored Christians, probably because they were too busy abusing their own subjects to focus on a minor Eastern cult. After Nero's death the pattern of Christian persecution raised and lowered with each emperor, at one time so mild that two bishops of the outlawed religion even asked the emperor Aurelian to arbitrate a dispute! When Diocletian became emperor he made it his mission to stop the Roman Empire's decline. So if weirdo cults like Christianity were considered part of the problem then it had to be stamped out. While Nero tortured people only in Rome Diocletian demanded a systematic quota of arrests and executions in every province of the Empire. A lot of saints date their martyrdom’s around 295-305 AD. Saint George was George of Nicomedia, a Yugoslav who strode up to Diocletian's palace in modern Split, Serbia and tore the edict from the walls. Then Diocletian had George torn up. Where the dragon slaying comes in is a bit of medieval invention. What Diocletian couldn't foresee was that ten years later the son of one of his own generals, Constantine, would make Christianity the state religion of the Empire 312 A.D.

1819- The CATO STREET CONSPIRACY- English radicals led by Sir Roger Thistlewood plot to murder the entire British cabinet including the Duke of Wellington as they supped after the opening of Parliament. Then would institute a French Revolutionary style republic in Jolly-Old England ! Ods Bodkins! But fear not, an informer disclosed the plan to the government and on this night constables raided the nefarious plotters at their Cato-Street hideout and nabbed the whole bunch! By Godfrey, Britain was safe once more!

1836- Santa Anna's Mexican army of 4,000 surrounds the mission called the Alamo, which had 185 Texas defenders. Santa Anna ordered the buglers to call to parley. Col. Travis answered with a cannon shot which Jim Bowie thought was rather rash. Santa Anna then called for the raising of a red flag from a church steeple in San Antonio de Bejar and his trumpeters sounded the Deguello, signifying that he intended to take no prisoners.

1861-Warned of death threats President-elect Abraham Lincoln sneaked into Washington D.C. at 3:15 AM. Abe, with his newly grown beard, was dressed in disguise and escorted by his bodyguard Lehman and Charles Pinkerton, a former Scottish barrel maker who had set up the first detective agency in the United States.

1871- C.B. Stone, the mayor of Seattle, embezzled the town’s treasury, $15,000 and skipped town.

1926- President Calvin Coolidge said he was against the creation of a large US Airforce because it “would be a menace to world peace.” And Coolidge was a Republican!

1935- Walt Disney Mickey & Donald cartoon "The Band Concert". This was the first color Mickey Mouse cartoon.

c-WDP

1940-Woody Guthrie had just arrived in New York City and was staying in a fleabag hotel in Manhattan. He overheard on the radio Kate Smith singing Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” and was annoyed because he felt it was overtly patriotic and corny. It was everything he hated about Tin Pan Alley, a rose-colored tune denying the class injustice and suffering of the Great Depression. So Woody took out some paper and his guitar and composed six stanzas he originally called God Blessed America, but he later changed to 'This Land is Your Land". It became the song he’s best remembered for and today it’s considered just as patriotic as God Bless America.

1942- In the dead of night a Japanese submarine surfaced off the California coast and fired it's cannon at lights it thinks is a city. In reality it's an oil refinery near Goleta (Ellwood) just north of Santa Barbera. The brief bombardment caused $150 dollars in damage. The sub breaks radio silence to report to Tokyo that " Enemy coast sighted. Los Angeles is in Flames." The incident fueled the panic that Californians had that the West Coast was ripe for enemy invasion. The incident was lampooned in the Steven Spielberg comedy "1941."

1960 - The Day Brooklyn Cried'- After the Dodgers move to Los Angeles, Flatbushs’ Ebbets Field baseball stadium went under the wrecking ball and became a low income housing project.

1994- The Russian Mir space station had been in space since 1986 but was starting to show it’s age. A booster ship sent with supplies collided with Mir during a bad docking maneuver. This day an oxygen fire fills the Mir Space Station with smoke. The fire is put out but it’s just the beginning of 6 months of privation, accidents and hair-raising close-calls for the joint Russian-German crew and lone American astronaut Jerry Leninger. Mir was retired in 2002 and fell back to Earth.
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Yesterday’s Question: What is meant by Balkanization?

Answer: The Balkan Area of South Eastern Europe is a loose collection of ethnic peoples of very different languages, cultures and religions, once all held by the Ottoman Turkish Empire. After World War One the Great Powers pressed them into two polyglot countries, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. As long as they were held down by Communist or fascist central authority they lived as one. But as soon as that authority was weakened they broke apart to found their own states- Slovenia, Montenengro, Slovakia, Croatia and four days ago – Kossovo.
So Balkanization means a region breaking up into ever smaller geo-political entities.

Quiz: What is meant by Balkanization?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: Why is your little finger called a pinky?
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History for 2/22/2008
Birthdays: Hungarian King Ladislas the Posthumous-1440, Shah Tahmasp Ist-1514, George Washington, Frederic Chopin, Edward St. Vincent Millay, John Mills, Edward Gorey, Luis Bunuel, Ted Kennedy, Dr. J- Julius Erving, Dwight Frye- Renfield in Dracula, Sparky Anderson, Sheldon Leonard, Charlie O. Finley, Nicky Lauda, Don Pardo, Jonathan Demme, Jeri Ryan, Kyle McLachlan is 49, Rachael Dratch, Steve Erwin, Drew Barrymore is 33

1732-GEORGE WASHINGTON born- Until 1969 Washington’s Birthday was a national holiday in the USA. Despite his immense reputation George Washington is still quite an enigmatic figure. You can remember great sayings of Kennedy -"Ask not what your country can do for you..") and Lincoln "Government by the people, for the people, etc." but can you recall anything of Washington's? That's because he was a stuffy, by-the-book type who used XVIII Century prose." Conscript Fathers, it would behoove me greatly if you wouldst see fit to provide victuals whereof..".Alexander Hamilton, called him "Talented but Dull". Thomas Paine's opinion: "A compleate hippocryte". John Adams came to call him “Old Muttonhead” that he’d rather strike leadership poses than actually lead, But Thomas Jefferson called him the" Indispensable Man" who assured that this strange new system of elected president would not lapse into a dictatorship or royalty.
SO HERE’S TO a General who lost more battles than won them,
-Who donated much of his personal fortune to the Revolution, accepted no pay, yet ended the war with a profit;
-who had a whiskey still behind Mt.Vernon and grew hemp -for rope;
-Who had few close friends and despised people touching him;
-Who’s first real ambition was to be an officer in the British Army.
-Who much preferred conversation about methods of raising squash to discussing his military campaigns.
-Who never went to college.
- Who was turned down for a bank loan the day he was elected President.
-Who went to Church every Sunday but never used the word God or quoted the Bible in any of his letters, and refused Last Rites at his deathbed...
- And without whom the U.S. would not be the same. Happy Birthday G.W. !..

1774- The English House of Lords announced that authors do not have a perpetual copyright on their works but it must be periodically renewed.

1836- Texans defending the Alamo held a big fiesta in San Antonio to celebrate Washington’s Birthday. Dancing, tequila and corn whisky flowed. Davey Cockett played his fiddle. But the party was interrupted when scouts brought word that the first elements of General Santa Anna’s huge Mexican Army were coming, only 8 miles away.

1848- John Quincy Adams had a stroke on the floor of Congress and died shortly after. He was the son of John Adams and was one of the only U.S. presidents to go back to being a congressman after losing his re-election bid. I believe the only other was Andrew Johnson re-entered the Senate. Quincy Adams got his stroke speaking out on a bill to award Mexican War officers a ceremonial sword -he was anti-war.

1879- Frank Winfield Woolworth opened his first Five & Ten Cent-store in Utica, New York.

1911-The Kester Ranch in the San Fernando Valley becomes the town of Van Nuys, named for early settler Issac Newton Van Nuys.

1912-”MY HAT IS IN THE RING!” Teddy Roosevelt announced his intention to challenge for the Republican Presidential nomination against his own hand picked successor William Howard Taft. Roosevelt and Taft were once close friends but now Teddy called Taft a “Puzzlewit” and “Fathead”. The Taft -Roosevelt feud split the Republican party and allowed Democrat Woodrow Wilson to defeat them both. Roosevelt also split the progressive left wing off the Republicans that completed the process began in the Gilded Age of turning the radical party of Lincoln into America’s Tory conservatives. When Theodore Roosevelt was buried in 1919 the last mourner to linger weeping over his grave was William Howard Taft.

1980-Underdog U.S. Olympic hockey team defeated Soviet team 4-3 for the gold medal. The summer games in Moscow were boycotted, not the winter. The two teams did not meet again until the 2002 games in Utah where they skated to a 2-2 tie.
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Yesterday’s question below: Why is your little finger called a pinky?

Answer: Pinkjye is a Dutch word for little finger.

Twenty years ago, in a land far away...from LA, anyway........ A organization was formed in Brussels to advance and encourage European animated filmmaking. They called it CARTOON.

I was invited by my friends Jacques Muller and Shelley Page to one of the first events at the Gobelins Center in Paris in 1988. Back then Ed Jones and I were asked about a little film we had just finished called WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT?. We had a press conference in a little cafe with Jacques Chirac having lunch in the next room. He wasn't French President yet, but was the Mayor of Paris. I was on my best behavior to use the silverware in the right order ( from the outside in). Then the journalist on my right from the magazine LePointe bobbled her fork and splashed us with gravy. Sito au jus! Later I got to tour the Ecole Grande Gobelins animation school and was asked by a Danish journalist if this new LITTLE MERMAID movie Disney was doing would be any good.



Since then CARTOON has held numerous events and symposia around Europe. In that time I've been invited back to be a keynote speaker at events held in Anghouleme France and Erfurt Germany.



It was a wonderful opportunity to meet a lot of animation artists from around the world and gain an understanding of the contemporary European animation scene. It makes you aware just what an international artform cartooning and animation is, and how much we cartoonists are all of the same crazy tribe. My thanks to Corrine Jeanart, Monsieur deBrocart, Tim LeBourgne and the late, great Pierre Aymar for all their great work on behalf of the organization.

BON ANNIVERSAIRE EURO/CARTOON!!

To read more about CARTOON visit their site- http://www.cartoon-media.be/

Quiz: Why is the smallest finger on your had called a Pinky?

Yesterday’s Question Answered below: In New York City, people call the borough of the Bronx, The Bronx. No one calls the others The Brooklyn or The Manhattan. Why is it The Bronx?
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HISTORY for 2/21/2008
Birthdays: Leopold Delibes, C. Brancusi, Anais Ninn, W.H. Auden, Hubert de Givenchy, Era Bombeck, Sam Peckinpah, , Nina Simone, Robert Mugabe, Joe Oriolo, David Geffen, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Kelsey Grammar is 53, Jennifer Love Hewitt is 29, Alan Rickman is 62

1838- The first telegraph message sent by Samuel Morse "What hath God wrought?" He strung electric cables up and down several floors of his art studio using wood stretchers normally used for oil paintings. Morse was an artist and never wanted to be an inventor, he just did it to finance his painting.

1848- THE COMMUNIST MANIFESTO- In Brussels Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published their revolutionary work the Communist Manifesto, redefining history in terms of economic class warfare and creating the terms communist and communism. Interestingly enough they picked Brussels to publish because that year 1848 there were revolutions happening in most of the other cities in Europe. In the 1998 to celebrate it’s anniversary an international publishing conglomerate issued a deluxe designer edition complete with trendy graphics and gilt cover. What would Marx have thought?

1885- The completed Washington Monument was dedicated by Pres Chester Allan Arthur. Plans for the obelisk were first drawn up in 1792 by Pierre L’Enfant and the cornerstone laid in 1840 but construction was constantly suspended. For a time because of the Civil War, another time because strict Presbyterian workers refused to handle Italian marble blocks donated by the Vatican.

1901- Yankee outlaws Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with prostitute Hedda Place, sometimes called Mrs. Sundance, left New York City by ship for Latin America and hopefully a new life. They built a ranch in the Patagonian foothills of Argentina, but 4 years later took up their outlaw ways again, eventually fleeing to Bolivia. Hedda Place returned to the US and disappeared from history.

1916-VERDUN began- One of the most horrible battles in world history. World War One German commander Eric Von Falkynhen had planned to draw France into a battle that would ‘bleed her white”, but he wound up bleeding his German Army just as badly. German and French troops battled over some stone fortresses for ten months. Hundreds of thousands of men died in one battle. Names like Petain, Rommel, DeGaulle, the Red Baron, even Bavarian Lance-Corporal Adolf Hitler were all there. The French fired 1 1/2 million shells in this thirty mile square area and the Germans even more. Regiments would be marched into the trenches, blown to bits, then another marched in. One whole French regiment was buried alive by shellfire. Today in a shrine you can see their bayonets sticking out of the soil, still in a straight line waiting to attack.
In the fortresses like Donaumont and Vaux men fought underground in 12 foot high concrete tunnels in total darkness with grenades and flamethrowers, their ears bleeding from the concussions and choking on the fumes and stench of rotting corpses. The French commander of Douamount went mad after the war and shot himself. The surrounding countryside was turned into a shellhole pocked lunar hell. Frenchmen are still digging up unexploded bombs 90 years later. It is said even birds would not fly over Verdun and nothing could grow there. Even their monument by Rodin is macabre. The Verdun Tourist Office was trying to emphasize the positive sites of the city, like they are the birthplace of those candy-covered almonds you get at weddings.

1945-MARINES RAISE THE FLAG- During the Battle of Iwo Jima the Marines raise the flag on Mt. Suribachi. Associate Press photographer Joe Rosenthal takes the most famous image of the war. It's now the Marine monument at Arlington Cemetery. Actually, he photographed the second flag raising. The first was a small flag stuck on a piece of pipe to get the artillery below to stop shelling and to give the Marines pinned down on the beach some hope. The second larger flag raising was done for the press. It was still plenty dangerous, two of the six flag raisers were later killed in battle that same day. Rosenthal almost missed the shot because he turned around momentarily to see if he was in the way of another cameraman. Actor Lee Marvin was one of Marines in the furious fighting and was decorated for his gallantry. He was quoted as saying in an interview later the toughest most heroic Marine he saw that day on Suribachi was the man who ended his life as a kiddie show host- Bob Keeshan known as Captain Kangaroo- but that was a joke that has since become urban myth.

[Photographer Joe Rosenthal

1965- MALCOLM X was assassinated at the Audubon Meeting Hall in Washington Heights Manhattan. His last words were trying to quiet the crowd he was about to address-"Brothers, be cool." Three men then stood up and fired pistols and a shotgun killing him instantly. It has never been proven who ordered the killing.

1988- Televangelist Jimmy Swaggert tearfully confessed to his Baton Rouge congregation “Ah Have Sinned!!”. He had been busted for soliciting a prostitute. They forgave him, A year later he was busted again for the same reason but continues to preach morality on t.v. today.
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Yesterday’s Question: In New York City, people call the borough of the Bronx, The Bronx. No one calls the others The Brooklyn or The Manhattan. Why is it The Bronx?

Answer: In colonial times, Breucklyn was a Dutch village, but the rural areas above Manhattan were dominated by a large farm owned by a Danish man named Jonas Bronk.
So going to visit him and his family was going to see The Bronxs’. In 1819 when Mayor DeWitt Clinton was codifying the plans for New York City, he fixed the name of the area as The Bronx.