courtesy of Brightcove.com

The Comicon is more crowded than I ever saw it before. And yesterday is usually the slow day! The Hanna Barbera Panel was fun. Nice talking to Andrea Romano and Gary Owen. Met Tom Hatten backstage where he was going to do a show with Jerry Beck on the new Popeye DVD release.

Shared a glass with my old bud Mike Ploog, in from Old Blighty. Also said hi to Paul Dini, and Floyd Norman and Mark Farquhar and Yuri Senoo-Farquhar.

Lots of fun costumes. My favorite so far the the Star Wars Imperial StormTrooper-Elvis Impersonator!
Took some picture but they all suck. I'll try again today.
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Birthdays: Confucius, Alexander Dumas fils, Enrique Granados, Hillaire Belloc, Norman Lear, Maureen McGovern,, Keenan Wynn, Leo Durocher, Peggy Fleming, Bobby Gentry, Jerry Van Dyke, Vincent Canby, Betty Thomas, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Ilya Salkind, David Swift –director of the Haley Mills Disney films like The Parent Trap

1586- Sir Walter Raleigh brought the first tobacco pipe home to England from America.
Columbus had of course brought cigars and other duty-free home years earlier but tobacco was one of the goodies that kept England interested in American colonies after everyone realized there weren’t any more gold-rich Aztec-Inca Empires to plunder. King James I called smoking a filthy and unhealthful habit, but Raleigh persisted. He even paused for a few last puffs before putting his head on the executioners block.

1880-BATTLE OF MAIWAND: The Afghan leader Ayub Khan's tribesmen destroy a British invasion force. Dr. Watson told Sherlock Holmes he was there . One of the heroes of the battle was a little terrier named Bobbie who was a regimental mascot and was wounded several times . He was brought to London and received a medal from Queen Victoria, but was later run over by a London taxi . I guess Afghanistan was safer.

1900- THE BIRTH OF THE "EVIL HUN"- Kaiser Wilhelm II addresses a contingent of German marines about to embark from Bremerhaven to go to China to help in the international effort to put down the Boxer Rebellion. Caught up in the spirit of the moment, Wilhelm said: "Take no prisoners! Kill all those who fall into your hands! As the deeds of the Huns of Atilla resound through history for their ruthlessness, so like the Huns make the name of Germany live in Chinese annals for a thousand years!" His embarrassed chancellor Von Bulow called it "The worst speech of the year and possibly of the Kaiser's career." He tried to release an edited version to the press but someone leaked the true text. When the Kaiser read the edited speech he said: My dear Bulow! You left out all the good parts!" Germans got the nickname "Huns" for years afterwards.

1921- Two Toronto scientists, Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate the hormone Insulin to treat diabetes.

1921- SHAKESPEARE & CO. opens in Paris. The English language bookshop on the Seine owned by Sylvia Beach was the most famous hangout for the U.S. expatriate intellectuals between the World Wars. Shakespeare & Co. championed writers like James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Carlos Santayanna, Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson and more. After the Nazi occupation the shop was liberated personally by Ernest Hemingway who shot snipers off it's roof. After paying his respects to Sylvia, Hemingway and his G.I.buddies went on to liberate the Ritz hotel and it's famous wine celler.

1940- HAPPY BIRTHDAY BUGS BUNNY. Warners short-"A Wild Hare”-There were several earlier prototypes of the famous rabbit, white with a different voice, but this is the short that launched his career. Bugs says “Whats Up Doc?” for the first time, co-opting a line uttered by Clark Gable while chewing a carrot in the Frank Capra film “It Happened One Night”. Interestingly enough Mel Blanc the creator of his voice was terribly allergic to carrots. He found he couldn’t recreate the crisp sound of chewing with any other vegetable. So he kept a bucket next to his microphone to quickly spit out the carrots after recording.

1946- Writer Gertrude Stein dies. Her last words to Alice B. Toklas were:"What is the Answer?" When Alice said nothing, Gertrude said:" Well then, What's the Question?"

1953- THE KOREAN WAR ENDS- The Treaty of Panmunjom. After 170,000 Americans casualties and millions of Koreans & Chinese killed, the treaty fixed the border basically where it was when the war started in 1950. At one point in the negotiations, a Chinese general tried to light a Russian cigarette. But his People's New Era of Revolutionary Prosperity and Freedom lighter wasn't working. So his American counterpart offered his capitalist but always dependale Zippo.

1953- The Tonight Show debuted on NBC. It's first host was Steve Allen.

1986- Gregg Lemond became the first American to win the Tour de France bicycle race. He won the final length by 8 seconds.

1993- IBM announced it would eliminate 35,000 jobs. Downsizing becomes a popular sport in corporate America. The more worker careers ruined, the higher your stock rose. The chairman of General Electric Jack Welch, was nicknamed “Neutron Jack” after the neutron bomb that kills off people but leaves buildings intact.

1996- A bomb goes off during Olympic celebrations in Atlanta Georgia. The bomb was in a bag packed with nails and put in a crowded area designed to hurt as many people as possible. One woman was killed and dozens injured. The perpetrator was not known when the mass media decided to focus on an overweight security guard named Richard Jewel. Ironically Jewell was the one who first alerted police to the suspicious package tried to evacuate the area, otherwise more people would have been killed. After weeks of merciless hounding by the world media the FBI announced Jewel was completely innocent. Jewell sued and the television networks had to pay out hefty settlement costs. It wasn’t until 2003 that the police finally caught the real culprit, abortion clinic bomber and backwoods fruitcake Eric Rudolph.

Headed down to San Diego for the Comicon. I'll try to get in some reports from the convention floor.

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Birthdays: Salvador Allende, Serge Koussevitsky, George Bernard Shaw, Gracie Allen, Carl Jung, Stanley Kubrick, Blake Edwards, George Grosz, Pearl Buck, Jason Robards Jr, Aldous Huxley, Jean Shepard, Vivian Vance, Emil Jannings, Sandra Bullock is 43, Kevin Spacey is 48, Kate Beckinsdale, Mick Jagger is 64,

1656 – Rembrandt van Rijn declared bankruptcy.

1694- The Bank of England opened on London's Threadneedle Street. It issued the first bank checks.

1861- Mark Twain left St. Jo Missouri to go west and sit out the Civil War. He went with his brother Oren Clemmens who had been appointed to administer the Nevada territory.

1887 - 1st Esperanto book published.

1903 –FIRST TRANSCONTINENTAL AUTO TRIP- Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson, mechanic Sewell J. Crocker and Bud the Wonderdog in their Winton Touring Car rode into New York City, having left San Francisco sixty-three days before. They are the first to cross the United States by automobile. They did it to win a $50 bet that you could cross the country by auto in 90 days. Jackson won the bet but spent $8,000 of his own money to do it. He was hailed as the Great Automobilist and his car was put on display bedecked with flags.

1917- The last two-horse street car made it’s final run down Broadway in New York City. There were now more automobiles than horses on the streets of American cities.

1947- HAPPY BIRTHDAY CIA ! Pres. Truman signs the National Security Act, creating the CIA, the NSC ,The Joint Chiefs and all those other groups that draw unscrutinsed gov't budgets and tick off all the folks at Air America Radio.

1951- Charlie Chaplin driven into exile by red-baiters. He was on a holiday to Britain when he learned his visa had been revoked by the U.S. government. He didn't return until 1972. Despite his immense achivements in Hollywood History, when the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated later that year, Chaplin’s name was deliberately excluded.

1952- Evita Peron the beautiful First Lady of Argentina died at age 33.

1953- Fulgensio Batista had suppressed the evolution of democracy in Cuba and ruled as a dictator. This day a 25 year old lawyer and part time left handed baseball pitcher named Fidel Castro with a few followers tried to start a revolt by raiding the impregnable Morcado Barracks. The pathetic assault was immediately crushed and the survivors including Castro jailed. But the event was seen by the people and the world that Cubans would not submit quietly. When Castro was released in 1956 and started his more organized guerrilla campaign he called his group the July 26th Movement.

1959- KPFK , Los Angeles lefty radio, starts up.

1984- Edward Gein died peacefully in a prison for the criminally insane. Gein was arrested in 1957 and sentenced to life for mass murder. Police found his farm in Wisconsin decorated with human body parts and heads in the freezer and in the stove, and the dried cadaver of his mother. His story inspired "Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs".

1991 – Childrens comic Paul Reubens aka Pee Wee Herman was arrested in Florida for masterbating in an adult movie theater. The film was Naughty Nurse Nancy. In 2003 he was busted a second time for collecting kiddy porn. Paul Reubens was a graduate of the Disney program character animation department of the Cal Institute of the Arts, the same program that graduated Tim Burton and John Lassiter

1995- After a year of investigation the General Accounting Office noted that all documents pertaining to the Rosswell UFO Incident of 1947 had disappeared or been destroyed. Hmmm.

Ray &Tom Magliozzi, aka Click and Clack, clowning with Berman in the boys' Room courtesy of http://www.CarTalk.com

Our Car Talk the Animated Series writers visited today from Boston to look over the artwork for our animated series and discuss more story premises. Doug Berman and Doug Mayer not only produce the Click and Clack Show, they also create the hot radio show on NPR- Wait Wait, Don't Tell Me! They thought our stuff is looking pretty cool. To accommodate their fragile East-Coast biosystems, we made LA suitably humid as well as hot. PBS, our network, will hold a contest to name the new show, so stay tuned for details!
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Birthdays: Thomas Eakins, Maxfield Parrish, Walter Brennan, David Belasco, Adnan Khashoggi, Imam, Jack Gilford, Illeana Douglas, Estelle Getty, Matt LeBlanc, Louise Brown the first invetro-"test-tube" baby-1978

1788- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completed his Symphony #40 in G minor.

1871 An electric Carrousel was patented by Wilhelm Schneider of Davenport, Iowa

1897- Young writer Jack London went to the Klondike to look for gold. He didn’t find much but did get material for a lot of good stories like the Shooting of Dan McGoo.

1909-THE WRISTWATCH- Frenchman Charles Bleriot flew the English Channel. Bleriot had no fuel gauge in his plane since they hadn't been invented yet. He knew the rate that his plane burned fuel, so he kept a clock in his cockpit to mark the time. But a problem was the engines vibrations would rattle the clock to uselessness. So he asked his friend Charles Cartier the jeweler to make him a reliable timepiece free from vibrations. Cartier created a pocketwatch that you could strap to your wrist with the clockface showing- the Wristwatch. By World War One wristwatches supplanted pocketwatches as the standard male accessory.

1936-Orchard Beach opened in the North Bronx.

1940- In Nazi occupied Paris a Gestapo agent walks into the French offices of MGM studios and confiscates the release prints of "Gone With The Wind." They are taken to Berlin for a screening for top Nazis officials. Gone with the Wind was one of Hitler’s favorite movies.

1943- The Birth of L.A. Smog! A newspaper headline from this date mentions a 'gas-attack' of exhaust and haze that reduced visibility to three short blocks.

1951- CBS conducts the first broadcast of color television. Still NBC made color tv popular in the mid 1960's.

1953-Chuck Jone's "Duck Dodgers in the 24 and 1/2 Century".

1953- New York City Subway fares rise from 10cents to 15 cents. Subway tokens are issued for the first time.

1959-"The Kitchen Debates" Vice President Richard Nixon traded catty comments with Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev at the American kitchen of the future exhibit in a Moscow Trade Show.

1965 – Folk Music star Bob Dylan was booed off stage at the Newport Folk Festival for using an electric guitar. Alan Lomax the great Smithsonian Folk Music historian got into a fistfight over it and Pete Seeger threatened to pull the electric plugs.

1968-Pope Paul VI published the encyclical Humane Vitae, which set the Church policy against all forms of birth control other than the Rhythm Method. No,No to the Pill and other contraception. This made the Pope a real buzzkill to the Swinging Sixties.

1969 - 1st performance of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young at the Fillmore East in NYC.

1975 - "A Chorus Line," longest-running Broadway show (6,137), premiered.

1984- Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became 1st woman to walk in space

1985- Movie star Rock Hudson publicly acknowledged that he had AIDS.

1990 - Roseanne Barr sings the National Anthem at a San Diego Padre game, joke- impersonating ball players by spitting , grabbing her crotch and screeching during her rendition. It didn’t go over well with the more patriotically minded.

2000- An Air France Concord supersonic airliner exploded on takeoff, killing everyone on board. The investigation proved a piece of metal debris that fell off the previous Continental Airliner exploded one of the Concords tires and the resultant wreckage was sucked into the planes engine. Both Britain and France suspended SST flights for over a year and in 2003 discontinued them forever as being too expensive. Recently France has considered bringing back the Concord.

Birthdays: Simon Bolivar, Aemilia Earhart, Alexander Dumas fils, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Graves, cartoonist Pat Oliphant, Bela Abzug, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ruth Buzzi, Lynda Carter, Chief Dan George, Robert Hays, Gus Van Sant, Anna Paquin, Michael “Kramer” Richards, J-Lo from the Block- Jennifer Lopez is 38

1701- HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOTOWN!- After paddling in birchbark canoes 49 days from Quebec settlement, French explorer Antoine de al Mothe-Cadillac founded the City of Detroit.

1784- On his way home from France after the American Revolution, Dr Benjamin Franklin stopped on the British Isle of Wight. While there he met his only son William Franklin, the former Royal Governor of New Jersey. While Franklin was a leading patriot William stayed loyal to Britain and suffered imprisonment and exile. The two men loathed one another, they only agreed to meet to humor grandson Temple Franklin. After an all night conversation nothing was settled and Franklin never spoke nor wrote to him ever again. When Franklin died he wrote William out of his will. “ It’s only what he would have done to me.” Temple never recovered any salaries Congress owed Ben Franklin, but he did inherit lands in New Jersey from his Tory father.

1824- The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian published the results of the first ever US public opinion poll- a clear lead for Andrew Jackson for president.

1934- Cecil B. DeMille’s epic film Cleopatra premiered. It starred Claudette Colbert wearing skimpy metal brassieres that Madonna could envy.

1938 - Instant coffee invented.

1948-HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARVIN THE MARTIAN- Warner's "Haredevil Hare" featuring the first Marvin the Martian.


1965- Bob Dylan released the song “Like a Rolling Stone”.

1966- Actor Montgomery Clift died at age 45.

1969- After successfully landing on the moon and returning, Apollo 11 safely splashes down in the ocean.

1980- In London’s Dorchester Hotel, comedian and actor Peter Sellers died of his second heart attack. He was 46.

1984-Walt Disney's "The Black Cauldron" premiered. PigBoy!! Munchins and Crunchins!

1998- Russell Weston was a schizophrenic who believed Navy Seals were hiding in his cornfield. He had shot his mothers twentyfive cats because they had fleas. This day he went to Washington and tried to shoot his way into the US Congress, He killed two security guards before he was brought down in a hail of bullets.
I wonder if the Congress was debating gun control at the time?

2002- Only once since the Civil War had a U.S. Congressman been officially expelled. Today the House of Representatives voted 420 to 1 to expel Congressman James Trafficante for his conviction on Bribery and extortion charges and having the worst haircut on Capitol Hill.

2005- American Lance Armstrong won the Tour du France bicycle race for an unprecedented 7th time, even after surviving testicular cancer that had spread to his spine and brain.

Producers, Popes and Princes, who's signing my check this week?

The other day I was discussing old movies with another artist when we both professed a love of the 1964 Carol Reed film THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY. It is the story of Michelangelo's tumultuous relationship with his employer Pope Julius II, the Warrior Pope.
At first I liked the film because one of my life goals was to be a Warrior Pope, but age has cooled such ambitions. I also liked that Charlton Heston looks disturbing like the real Michelangelo, with a less broken nose.

But more than that, it is one of the few movies to capture the strange relationship between artist and patron, or producer to you animation folks. Renaissance Artists loved to make art, but they still had to haggle for their fees, pay rent, and buy supplies. Many belonged to artists unions, like the Guild of St. Luke in Rome. Even Michelangelo and Leonardo were sued and Rembrandt declared bankruptcy. It shows that Patrons feel that their input, although not as tactile as the creators, was equally vital to the creation of a famous work. Maecenas, Peggy Guggenheim, Lorenzo de Medici, Nelson Rockefeller, all were famous patrons who were the cause of a lot of artists making a living making great art. Whether they and the artists drove each other nuts is another story.

So check it out. The DVD has all the 1960's tschatskis that made going to a big theater an event- overture, intermission, wide screen, accompanying trailors and features.
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Birthdays: Ethiopian Emperor Rastafari Halie Selassie "the Lion of Judah", Raymond Chandler, Raymond Booth, Don Drysdale, Gloria DeHaven, Arthur Treacher, Woody Harrelson, Pee Wee Reese, Bob Fosse, Harry Cohn, Don Imus, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Charisma Carpenter, Slash, Marlon Wayans, Monica Lewinsky , Daniel Radcliffe the Harry Potter star is 18

Today is the Ancient Roman Festival of Neptune, God of the Sea.

1599- Michel Caravaggio received his first commission for a painting.

1846- Because he did not believe in the War with Mexico, writer Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his taxes. A Concord Mass constable fined him. The event caused him to write his famous piece "On Civil Disobedience" which inspired Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela.

1886- This was the day Bowery saloonkeeper Steve Brodie claimed he jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge. Was Bugs Bunny there..?

1904 – The Ice Cream Cone created by Charles E Menches during the LA Purchase Expo.

1927 – Reacting to a public finally tired of the Tin Lizzy Model T and increased competition, the Ford Motor Co sells 1st the first Model A car.

1932-The Birthday of Fritos. Texas ice cream maker Elmer Doolin buys a recipe for corn chips from a Mexican fry cook for $100 dollars and starts the Frito-Lay Company.

1962- The first simultaneous television broadcast via the new TelStar communications satellite from America to Europe.

1966- The comedy song "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha, Ha!" released. The singer was Napoleon XIV.

1968- Fred Blasie won an unprecedented fifth World Wrestling Championship belt. Blasie later gained more fame for recording the comedy song "Pencil Necked Geeks".

1982- Actor Vic Morrow and two children are killed by a stunt helicopter while filming "Twilight Zone, the movie". The last scripted line before his death was "I’ll Keep you safe kids, I swear to God!" The children were being worked into the early morning hours without a caretaker supervisor in defiance of the Coogan Laws, child actor laws named for Jacky Coogan the kid who played with Chaplin in "The Kid". Director John Landis was investigated but exonerated.

1984- Vanessa Williams the first black Miss America resigned after a photo spread of her in a nude lesbian scenario in Penthouse magazine. She denied any impropriety until the facts were obvious and she resigned.

1986 - Britain's Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson called Fergie. They divorced later and she moved to the US and became the spokesperson for Weight Watchers.

1995- The Discovery of Comet Hale-Bop. It’s called that because it was discovered almost simultaneously by two separate astronomers-Alan Hale in New Mexico and Thomas Bop in Arizona. The comet’s passing close by the Earth was the signal for a messianic cult in San Diego called the Heaven's Gate to commit mass suicide by eating poison laced Jello pudding. They felt that their suicide would enable them to join aliens flying in UFO’s flying in the comet’s tail. Media mogul Ted Turner said of the cult: "Oh well, one hundred fewer nuts in the world.."

2004 – two armed men enter the Munch Museum in Norway and steal Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream at gunpoint. It was recovered in 2006 but damaged by water.