Tomorrow in the U.S. is Election Day. Among other things I tried to show in my book DRAWING THE LINE, was how external conditions like national politics could effect your career, regardless of how talented you are. Artists like Michelangelo,Leonardo Benjamin West, Jacques Louis David, Daumier, Siqueros and many more at one point in their careers were involved in politics.

Even if you don't care about abortion, gay marriage or who your governor is, it's what politicians really plan to do next year that should worry about.

Baby Boomers should know that Washington insiders have dropped hints that they want to go after Social Security again next year. Students should be aware that as the US military gets stretched thinner and thinner to cover world crises, the call for a Draft may again come up. The cost of going to school has risen alarmingly as has health costs. All should be concerned that the House of Representatives and the Governors office have tried several times to reclassify overtime as being after forty hours, instead of the Eight Hour Day. So an employer could work you ten hour days for days without any additional compensation.

John Adams once said: "One Useless Man in a Disgrace; Two Useless Men are a Law Firm; Many Useless Men are a Congress."

So tomorrow is your best chance for two years to show them what you think. It only takes a few minutes.

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Birthdays: Sophocles 495BC, Joanna La Loca (the Mad- 1479), John Phillip Sousa the March King, Joseph Smith the founder of the Mormons, Ignacz Paderewski, Charles Dow of Dow Jones, Adolphus Sax inventor of the Saxophone, James Naismith the inventor of Basketball, film director Mike Nichols, Edsel Ford, Terrytoons animator and strike leader Eddie Rehberg, Sally Field is 61,John Olsen of the comedy duo Olsen & Johnson, Harold Ross the founder of the New Yorker magazine, Maria Shriver is 52, Ethan Hawke, Rebecca Romjin

1566-Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe got his nose cut off in a duel. Thereafter he wore a gold cup over the scar held in place by a string.

1812- On this day during Napoleons Retreat from Moscow, it first began to snow.

1869- Rutgers beat Princeton 6-4 in the first college football game.

1916- The elderly cowboy showman Buffalo Bill made his next to last public appearance in El Paso Texas. El Paso had been as wild and bloody a frontier town as Deadwood or Tombstone, but now it was a quiet modern city. Telephone and electricity wires crisscrossed overhead and streetcars clattered down the streets where gunfighters once shot it out. Buffalo Bills parade seemed to make plain to all the final passing of the Old West to the New. The wild cheers brought tears running down the old scout's long white mustache. It was a fitting final bow. He died of prostate cancer within a few weeks.

1966- A great flood hits the City of Venice. An international effort is mounted to save her priceless artifacts. Venice never suffered floods until the end of the nineteenth century when a deep channel was dug in the Venetian lagoon to accommodate modern heavy shipping to the new harbor of La Spezia. This imbalance messed up the natural flood cycle from the Adriatic. Added to that the whole darn city is resting on thousands of wooden pilings pounded into a sand bar when Attila the Hun was still running around. Venice is still sinking a few inches each century.

1975- First appearance of the band the Sex Pistols.

Birthdays: Eugene V. Debs, Art Garfunkel, Roy Rogers, Tatum O'Neill, Elke Sommer, Ike Turner, Vivien Leigh, Will Durant, Joel McCrea, Sam Shepard, Bill Walton, John Berger

In Jolly Old England it is
HAPPY GUY FAWKES DAY!

in -1605 Sir Guy Fawkes, a Catholic nobleman, was caught digging a tunnel under the English Parliament and filling it with gunpowder. His goal was no less than blowing up the King and the entire blinkin' government! Sir Roger Catesby was actually the mastermind of the plot, but Sir Guy gets the fame.
Modern day Brits commemorate this as a kind of April Fools Day with bonfires and merrymaking. Children go from door to door asking : "A penny for Sir Guy, please." But in olden times it was also a let's have a good laugh on the Roman Catholics day.
This is why George Washington was against transplanting the holiday in America. Pope Day was celebrated in some American colonies but it died out after the Revolution. In 1775 Washington called it :A ridiculous and childish festival, burning effigies of the Pope." Many English folks I know told me they celebrate the day they tried to blow up the government because wouldn't things have been lovely if he had succeeded !

1940- President Franklin Roosevelt was re-elected to an unprecedented 3rd term. His defeated Republican opponent- Wendell Wilkie, became the butt of jokes in many Looney Tunes.

1954- THE WRONG DOOR RAID- Baseball great Joe DiMaggio was stewing over the collapse of his marriage to sexy movie star Marilyn Monroe. He was especially sensitive to the rumors that she was seeing other men. This night Joltin Joe was having dinner with Frank Sinatra and a few friends when a detective brought him a report that Monroe’s car was spotted parked in front of an apartment complex on Kilkea Dr.. Enraged, he drove out to the building and kicked in the back door hoping to catch her en-flagrante. But Marilyn was staying in a girlfriend’s apartment upstairs. This was the home of a terrified old lady named Mrs Florence Klotz. We don’t know what she thought about her door suddenly kicked in by Joe DiMaggio, Frank Sinatra and the RatPack but the tabloids had a field day.

1977- George W. Bush married Laura Welsh. Laura was a lefty Democrat who campaigned for George McGovern in 1972.

1979- National Public Radio’s news show Morning Edition started.

QUIZ:

Which artist never worked in animation?

a- Jack Kirby
b- Milt Gross
C- Frank Frazetta
D- Salvador Dali'
e- Jules Feiffer
f- Charles Addams

answer below-

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Birthdays: Will Rogers, Walter Cronkite is 90, Art Carney, Loretta Swit, Martin Balsam, Gig Young, Darla Hood, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ralph Maccio,Andrea McArdle, Matthew McConnaghey,P-Diddy is 37 Laura Bush is 60

1913- William Mulholland's great aqueduct starts bringing water 200 miles from Northern California to L.A. by the force of gravity alone. Without the extra water L.A. would never have grown any larger than 140,000 people.by L.A. Times estimate.

1927- HOWARD CARTER OPENED THE TOMB OF KING TUT-ANKH-AMON ( King Tut ). Other royal tombs had been opened before but they had always been cleaned out centuries ago by grave robbers. King Tut’s was the first unspoiled Pharoah’s tomb to be discovered in modern times. The site was discovered under a house built for workers excavating the tomb of King Ramses IV. There was King Tut's Curse guarding the door, and a few folks like Lord Carnaervon did go to an early grave: allegedly from scratching a zit and getting blood poisoning, legend has it the same zit was found on King Tut’s mummy. But Howard Carter, the man who broke the seal, rifled the tomb and did everything but stick his fingers in Tut’s ears, lived to a merry old age and even pocketed a few artifacts he didn't feel like sharing with the Cairo Museum. They were recently returned by an embarrassed family descendant.

1939- Packard introduced the first air-conditioned automobile.

1952- UNIVAC, the first electronic business computer, accurately predicted Dwight Eisenhower would win in a landslide. The first computer projected results for an election. Eisenhower was such a low key figure in politics that pundits referred to the White House as "The Tomb of the Well-Known Soldier'.

1955- In Arizona Willie Bioff, former IATSE union official, who tried to hijack the Hollywood unions (Including the Disney cartoonists) for Frank Nitti's gang, turns the key in his Ford pickup and explodes. He had turned informer and was in the Wittness Protection plan. He had changed his name to Bill Nelson and was a friend of Republican Senator Barry Goldwater.

1963- The Beatles are part of the Queens Royal Command performance in London. John Lennon tells the audience: “ Will the people in the cheap seats clap their hands?, and if the rest of you would just rattle your jewelry..”

1968- the first issue of Screw Magazine. Former reporter Jim Buckley and former industrial spy for the Bendix Corporation Al Goldstein named their magazine Screw after trying Hump, Love and being told they couldn't name it F**k.

1993- The Topanga-Malibu fires., Huge brush fires burn expensive homes in Malibu. The fires reached from the Santa Monica Mountains down to the ocean. Eyewitnesses said the 200 foot flames were reflected in the sky and water turning everything orange and the landscape looked more like Mars than Malibu.
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QUESTION Which artist never worked in animation?

ANSWER- They ALL worked in animation.


a- Jack Kirby- Max Fleischers 1935-37
b- Milt Gross- MGM 1937
C- Frank Frazetta-Bakshi's Fire & Ice
D- Salvador Dali'-Disneys Destino 1953
e- Jules Feiffer- Terrytoons- 1957-58
f- Charles Addams- Max Fleischers 1936-37

Tonight is the Little Mermaid Crew Reunion.

Me as the Little Mermaid Mo-Cap Model. Don't hate me because I'm beautiful!

A Benefit to aid the ASIFA/Hollywood Archives.7:00PM at the Van Eaton Gallery at 13613 Ventura Blvd in Sherman Oaks east of Woodman. Ten dollars at the door.
Panelists include the writer-directors John Musker and Ron Clements, Sebastian animator Duncan Marjoribanks, Ariel animator Mark Henn and his key asistant Luriline Kohler, King Triton animator Andreas Deja, Ursula animator Ruben Acquino and CG supervisor Tina Price. I will moderate.

Don't be a Guppy, come on over and say Hi!

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Birthdays: The Roman writer Lucan 39AD, John Montague the Earl of Sandwich and inventor of the same, Walker Evans, William Cullen Bryant, Stephen Austin, Bronco Nagurski, Andre' Malraux, Vincenzo Bellini, Bob Feller, Karl Baedeker author of the Baedeker guidebooks, Ken Berry, Michael Dukakis, Roseanne Barr, Astroboy creator Osamu Tezuka, animator/director Terry Gilliam

1503- MONA LISA- Leonardo Da Vinci was hired by a Florentine senator Francesco del Giocondo to paint a portrait of his third wife Madonna Elizabetha or Lisa. He fussed over the painting for four years and never gave it to Francesco, he said it was still unfinished and kept it for himself. Eventually he needed money so he sold it to the King of France and today it sits in the Louvre. Was her enigmatic smile because she had lost a child earlier that year and Leonardo was trying to cheer her up? He used to have musicians playing in the room when she posed. Or is she emblematic of Woman smiling at all the foibles of Men? One historian called Mona Lisa “ the Face that Launched a Thousand Reams Upon a Sea of Ink.”

1930- Amadeo Gianini changed the name of his San Francisco based Bank of Italy to the Bank of America.

1963- THE FIRST ALL COSMONAUT WEDDING- Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in Space, marries cosmonaut Andrisyan Nikolayev.

1971- The first UNIX manual released. And I still can’t make heads or tails of them.

1971- Carly Simon married James Taylor.

1977- Disney's Pete's Dragon starring Helen Reddy and Red Buttons. “Passamaquody, Passamaquody..”

1979- T.V. sitcom Different Strokes premiered, featuring 2003 gubernatorial candidate Gary Coleman..

1990- GM's new car line the Saturn announced. The last Saturn was made in Oct. 2006.

1981- WALLY WOOD was one of the most influential cartoonists of the 1950’s and 60’s. His amazing versatility enabled him to draw everything from superhero comics to very cartoony to playfully naughty girls like Sally Forth. He drew EC Comics, the Mars Attacks series, Mad Magazine, Weird Science, THUNDER Agents and much more.
He had done a famous drawing of the Disney characters having sex that brought down upon him the wrath of the Disney legal dept. (I cna't show it but do a Google image search and you'll find it.) But hard living and deadlines took their toll. Suffering from a stroke, failing kidneys and on dialysis, this day Wally Wood put a 44 cal pistol to his right temple and pulled the trigger. Police say the bullet passed through his head and was lodged in the pillow.

Quiz:

What is ASIFA?

a- An Israeli underground militia.

b- An international animators society founded by UN charter in 1961.

c-A coffee supplement.

d-A male potency enhancement pill.


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Birthdays: Daniel Boone, Pres. James Knox Polk, Jean Chardin, Luchino Visconti, Giusseppi Sinopoli, Burt Lancaster,Pat Buchanan, Steve Ditko, Ray Walston, Stephanie Powers, k.d.lang, David Schwimmer

this is Dio de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. It derives from the Aztecs, who believed the life you are living now is a dream, when you die you awake to your real life.

1904- London newspaper The Daily Mirror first published.

1917- Britain passed the Balfour Declaration, calling for a national home for Jews in Palestine. Sit Arthur Balfour was the British Foreign Secretary under David Lloyd George. Britain once considered Uganda and Argentina for a Jewish homeland before settling on Palestine, then a sleepy border province of the Ottoman Turkish Empire. Balfour had the powerful former prime minister Robert Lord Salisbury as his uncle. No matter how his fortunes rose or waned his uncle ensured his career path was steady. This originated the English slang term for having good connections:” So Bobs’ yer uncle.”

1920- Radio station KDKA in Pittsburgh began the nation’s first broadcasting with news of election results.

1930- Ras Tafari crowned Halie Selassie Ist, Ethiopian Emperor. The Jamaican movement Rastafarians are named for him.

1932- Young star Katherine Hepburn first shines in the film A Bill of Divorcement, co- starring with John Barrymore.

1937- Laguardia Airport opened. New York City’s first municipal airport.

1947- Howard Hughes pilots his monster wooden airplane, the "Spruce Goose" for it's only test flight, one minute over Long Beach Harbor. Two hundred tons, Eight engines, a wingspan longer than a football field, it was conceived as an aid to win World War Two but was completed two years after it ended.

1950- Writer George Bernard Shaw died at 94. His last words were:" Oh well, it will be a new experience anyway."
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ANSWER TO QUIZ:

What is Asifa?

Answer b.- In 1961 Several leading animators including John Hubley (USA) Dusan Vukotic'(Yugoslavia) Paul Grimault(France), John Halas(UK),Fyodor Khytruk(USSR), Norman McClaren(Canada)and Marcel Jankovic'(Hungary) were granted a charter by the United Nations agency UNESCO to form chapters of a non-profit society to propagate interest in animation and sharing information across Cold War Boundaries. Because in the UN French was the common language of Diplomacy, They called it l' Association Internationale du Film d'Animation or ASIFA. Today there are ASIFA chapters all across the world. ASIFA/Hollywood was formed in 1965 by Bill Littlejohn, June Foray,Prescot Wright and Bill Scott. The Annie Awards were begun in 1972.