TODAY WOULD HAVE BEEN THE 100TH BIRTHDAY OF FAMED CARTOON DIRECTOR

HE WAS ONE OF THE GREAT ANIMATION DIRECTORS OF HOLLYWOOD'S GOLDEN AGE. HIS TIMING AND MANIC, SURREAL HUMOR IS STILL INFLUENCING ARTISTS TODAY. HIS SIGNATURE CHARACTER REACTIONS, THE TEX AVERY TAKE, HAS INSPIRED FILMS LIKE JIM CARREY'S THE MASK, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT? TINYTOONS AND CATS & DOGS.

HAPPY 100TH BIRTHDAY!
ALL HAIL FREDERICK BEAN AVERY aka TEX AVERY, KING OF CARTOONS!

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Quiz: Famed cartoon director Fred Avery was nicknamed Tex Avery. Why?

Answer to yesterday’s question below.
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History for 2/ 26/ 2007
Birthday: Old and Good King Wenceslas of Bohemia-1361, Victor Hugo, Buffalo Bill Cody, Emma Destin, Levi Strauss, Jackie Gleason, Fats Domino, Betty Hutton, Johnny Cash, William Frawley (Fred Murtz), Robert Alda (Alan's dad), Tony Randall, Erhyke Bahdu

500¹s BC to 391 AD, Ancient Greek festival of ANTHESTERION- the festival of death and exorcism. The ancient Greeks believed ghosts weren’t as scary as they were annoying. If you didn’t bury the dead properly with spices and a coin in the mouth for the Chaeron the Boatman of the River Styx, they became ghosts. They would haunt you by moping around, turning up at inappropriate moments, predicting your death, bleeding on your lunch, etc. So this festival was a sort of ³visiting hours² for the other world. You left your door open and cooked a meal for the spirits so they could spend a day visiting their old haunts (forgive the pun).This way they would not bug you the rest of the year. This festival was also considered a festival of flowers to usher in Spring. Most Greeks spent all three days of the festival drunk.

1854- Composer Robert Schumann went mad and jumped off a bridge into the Rhine River. He was fished out and institutionalized. His schizophrenia grew out of advanced syphilis. He said he was not committing suicide but had thrown his wedding ring into the river to free his wife Clara of him, then he relented and leaped into the raging ice filled water to get it back. Ironically this drama was played out during his towns winter carnival celebrations. The tragedy of seeing his friend and teacher collapse moved young Johannes Brahms to write his First Piano Concerto.

1907- British Oil and Royal Shell merge to form the British Petroleum- B.P. company.

1919- Congress established Grand Canyon National Park.

1965- First day of shooting on the Beatle's second film 'Help!".

1983- Michael Jackson’s album Thriller went to #1 in the pop charts and stayed for weeks.

1985- New York Police under District Attorney Rudy Giuliani arrested most of the leaders of the New York Mafia families called ³The Commission². Giuliani went on to have two successful terms as New York¹s mayor and run for President in 2007.

1990- Cornell Gunther, lead singer for the DooWop group the Coasters, was shot dead at a Las Vegas traffic intersection."Yakkety-Yak, Don't Talk Back!"

1991- At a meeting in Switzerland Tim Berners-Lee introduced the first Web Browser.

1991-The Highway of Death- During Gulf War One, U.S. airforces caught a long column of Iraqi army vehicles fleeing on an open desert road. Their attacks became an easy turkey-shoot. No one is sure how many Iraqis were killed.

1993- THE FIRST WORLD TRADE CENTER ATTACK. Followers of Moslem extremist cleric Omar Abdel Rahman set off a large truck bomb in New York's World Trade Center. The bomb created a five story crater in level B-2 of the underground parking structure. It killed 7 and injured over one thousand. 50,000 had to be evacuated from the twin towers for smoke inhalation. It has been speculated that one reason there were not even more deaths in the collapse of 9-11-2001 was because much of the office workers experienced this 1993 attack, so knew exactly how to evacuate the towers quickly. President Clinton’s Justice Dept had all the perpetrators in jail within a year. When planner Ramsay Youssef was being flown out of New York to his 240 year imprisonment the plane flew over Manhattan by the World Trade Center. A he looked down he was reported to have sighed:²Should have used more dynamite.²
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yesterday’s question: Animation director Brad Bird has now won Oscars for The Incredibles and Ratatouille. Why did he not win one for The Iron Giant?

Answer: There was no category yet for feature animated film when the Iron Giant came out- 1999. The first year for the category was 2001. It was won by Shrek.