FROM ANIMATION MAGAZINE: Charles Rivkin, CEO of the animation studio Wildbrain, has been tapped by President Obama to be the United States’ ambassador to France.

The move has prompted Rivkin to step down from his position at the studio, best known for creating the hit Nick series Yo Gabba Gabba! Rivkin served as Obama’s campaign finance co-chairman for Southern California during last fall’s election.


I didn't quite believe this until I read it twice. Not that Mr Rivkin is probably more than worthy and up to the task. It's just rare to see such honors bestowed upon animation people. Bravo et Bon Chance Monsieur Rivkin!

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Quiz: What was the original colonial name for Alabama?

Yesterday’s Quiz: What were LaSalle, DeSoto, Nash, Maxwell and Duesenberg?
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History for 6/1/2009
Welcome to June, from Iunius, the month of Juno, queen of the Roman gods.

Birthdays: Brigham Young, Marilyn Monroe would be 83!, Pat Boone, Mikhail Glinka, Red Grooms, Karl Von Clausewitz, Andy Griffith, Morgan Freeman is 72, Nelson Riddle, Lisa Hartman, Cleavon Little, Frederica Von Stade, Powers Booth, Rene Aubergjenois, Lisa Hartman, Brian Cox is 63, Heidi Klum is 36, Josef Pujol *

*Pujol was famous throughout late Victorian Europe as Le Petomane- The Fartiste- who could fart musical melodies and snuff candles at great distances. He performed an entire concert for crowned heads, and would finish by farting La Marseillaise.

193 AD- Roman General Septimius Severus defeated his rival for the Empire Pescennius Niger “Black Pescennius”, massacred his family, and carried his head around on a spear. Septimius used the corpse of another rival as a doormat to his tent. Pretty severe guy.

1660- Boston Puritans had passed a law that preaching any religion other than that accepted by the Massachusetts Bay Puritan group was heresy and forbidden. When Quaker Mary Dyer refused to cease, leave or recant her views she was hanged this day. Her death and that of another Quaker Anne Hutchinson shocked the colonies so that soon after the King Charles II of England issued an order forbidding hanging for heretical preaching.

1813- In battle with a British warship, HMS Leopard, dying Captain Lawrence, of the U.S.S. Chesapeake, cried:" Don't Give Up the Ship!" They don't, but he died anyway.

1876- Eighteen-year old Milton Hershey opened his first candy store. Hershey's goes on to become the largest candy maker in the U.S. The Hershey’s chocolate kiss is so named because the machine that creates the candy looks like it is kissing the conveyor belt.

1880 - 1st pay telephone installed; this one in a bank.

1879-After falling from the French throne in 1870 the Emperor Louis Napoleon III and his family lived in England. Young Louis Napoleon IV, only son of Napoleon III and Eugenie, went with the British Army to South Africa to fight Zulus. While waving his granduncle's sword around on patrol, he falls off his horse during a skirmish and is speared to death by 17 Zulu’s. The direct Bonaparte family line disappears .

1909- The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, formed. W.E.B. Dubois edited their newsletter The Crisis.

1931- Swiss artist Albert Hurter joined the Disney staff, giving the look of cartoons like Snow White a more Germanic storybook look.

1933 - Charlie Chaplin wed actress Paulette Goddard

1939- HAPPY BIRTHDAY SUPERMAN- Joe Seigel and Jerry Shuster, two aspiring cartoonists in High School create a character called “Superman”. Jewish kids, they had read about the Nazis racial concept of the Aryan Superman. They wanted to show a Superman could be on the American side. On this day they sell all the rights to their characters to Detective Comics (D.C.) for $130. When the first megabudget Superman movie was being made in the 1976, the National Cartoonist's Society pointed out that Seigel and Schuster were now poverty stricken. They never shared a nickel of the multi-millions their creation had generated. Seigel was blind and Schuster delivered sandwiches from a local deli. The publicity forced Warner Bros and DC Comics to award them and their families pensions for life.

1942- British actor Leslie Howard, who played Ashley in" Gone with the Wind " and Henry Higgins in the first film of "Pygmalion", was shot down and killed by the Luftwaffe over the Bay of Biscay. He was such an effective emissary for English interests that when Nazi agents in Mardrid reported he was en route home in a commercial Dc-3, Eight JU-88 fighters were dispatched to kill him.

1961 FM multiplex stereo broadcasting 1st heard

1966 George Harrison is impressed by Ravi Shankar's concert in London.

1967–Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the US and it immediately goes gold.

1968 - Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" hits #1

1979- Gannett News Services began USA Today, called by some critic's- 'MacPaper'.

1980- Ted Turner started CNN news channel. Hard to believe now, but before Larry King, Nancy Grace and Glenn Beck, it delivered only hard news, every twenty minutes, 24 hours a day.

2001- In Katmandu, Nepal Crown Prince Dipendra quarreled so much with his mother and father, the King Birenda and Queen Aiswarya, about his upcoming marriage that he came to dinner and shot them to death. He also killed four other members of the royal family and then himself. This was the largest massacre of a royal family since Czar Nicholas II’s family was executed in 1918. Next day, a Nepalese government spokesman labeled the incident an “accident”. Dipendra was in a coma for several days before dying and in those few days a government council declared him king anyway. In 2008 the Nepalese Monarchy was officially deposed.

2009- General Motors, once the world's largest car company, declared bankruptcy.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What were LaSalle, DeSoto, Nash, Maxwell and Duesenberg?

Answer: In honor of General Motors, they were also failed American car companies.