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March 6th 2008 Thurs
March 6th, 2008

courtesy Simon Tofield

An UK animator from Tandem Films named Simon Tofield is getting a lot of buzz on the net with his clever little shorts about his cat.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4rb8aOzy9t4

He wouldn't be generating this heat if his films weren't so clever and his animation so funny. This guy should put these together into a short and enter it into some festivals, win some awards, clutter up your mantle. Bravo Simon!

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Quiz: In Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, the colonel portrayed by Robert Duval says:” Charlie don’t surf!” Who is this Charlie?

Question: Political pundits are saying about Hilary and Barack’s tactics: “ it’s time to go to the mattresses. What does that mean?
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History for 3/6/2008
Birthdays: Michaelangelo Buonarotti, Cyrano De Bergerac-Servignan, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, General Phil Sheridan, Lou Costello,Ivan Boesky, Ring Lardner, Gabriele Garcia-Marquez,, Valentina Tereschkova the first woman in space, Tom Arnold, Kiri Te Kanawa, Rob Reiner, Alan Greenspan, DC Mayor Marion Barry, Stephen Schwartz,Shaquille O’Neal is 36, Ed McMahon is 88

1834- The Ontario settlement of York is incorporated as the new City of Toronto.

1836- THE ALAMO- The Mexican army of General Santa Anna overwhelmed a small garrison of rebellious Texans in an old mission. The tragic stand of 189 men led by colorful frontiersmen like Davey Crockett and Jim Bowie against 5,000 troops has become part of American mythology. That they ignored Sam Houston's direct orders to blow up the mission and join his main army with their valuable cannon is forgotten. Apologists contend that if they didn’t stall, Santa Anna's army he would have swooped down on Washington-on-the-Brazos and squashed the whole Texas Rebellion while they were still quibbling over their constitution.
The attack began at 4:30 a.m. in the predawn darkness and was over in 90 minutes, a little after 6 a.m.. Jim Bowie was bayoneted in his hospital bed. The notes of a Texas officer named Dolson who interviewed a Mexican officer named Sanchez after the battle were discovered in 1961. It revealed that maybe Davey Crockett didn't go down heroically using his rifle "Old Betsy" as a club- like in the movies, but tried to surrender. His wife was Mexican and he was a politician after all. Santa Anna had him and any other surviving men shot. Sanchez wasn’t sure if it was Crockett. We'll never know for sure. There were 16 Alamo survivors, the women and children and Colonel Travis' black servant Joe. Santa Anna made sure they were each given two pesos and a blanket and set free. The rally cry of Texans became Remember the Alamo!

I visited the Alamo a few years ago when we were in San Antonio for a National Cartoonists Society convention. I was surprised to see the main building was as small as a Taco-Bell. And inside locals are as quiet as if it was sacred ground, which I guess it is to many.

1837- Col Travis black slave Joe fought on the walls of the Alamo alongside his master. After the battle Joe was thanked for his services by being returned to Travis’ family in Alabama to remain a slave. On the one year anniversary of the battle Joe escaped to freedom. He remained in hiding for 30 years, long after the Civil War and Emancipation,, emerging for a newspaper interview in 1877.

1856- Mr. Simon met Mr. Schuster while buying a piano in New York City and discovered they had a common love of books, They formed Simon & Schuster, one of the largest publishers in the U.S.

1860- Presidential candidate Abe Lincoln in a speech said:" Thank God we have a system where workers have the Right to Strike."

1899- The wonder drug of the age and the first patent medicine- Aspirin, is patented. Felix Hoffman isolated the compound salicin from ground willow bark, an old Indian pain remedy. Ancient Romans drank willow water for pain.

1911-THE YELLOW PERIL- In the bizarre game of diplomatic chess the great powers played before World War One, the race issue was a favorite topic. The" Battle between the White Forces of Christian Civilization against the limitless Yellow Hordes of Asia" was an idea the German Kaiser Wilhelm liked to talk at length on. On this day the Kaiser's agents convinced the U.S. public via the sensationalist press that Japan had concluded an alliance with Mexico and was preparing to seize the Panama Canal, and that a Japanese Army was even now marching up Baja to attack California! To quiet public fears President Taft was actually forced to mobilize 2/3 of the U.S. Army and Navy and sent it to the Mexican border "for maneuvers". When the Great War did come Japan was on the American side and the Kaiser tried fruitlessly to make an alliance with an unsympathetic Mexico.

1917- Woman’s rights advocate Margaret Sanger is released from prison where she was jailed for trying to open the first Planned Parenthood/ abortion clinic. She married the inventor of the Three-In-One Oil Company and used to smuggle abortion medicines in cans of oil. During prohibition she smuggled diaphragms in cases of innocent illegal booze. She lived into the 1960s long enough to see the Birth Control Pill and the Women’s Movement.

1927- Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis opened in the US.

1936- Mr. Clarence Birdseye introduced frozen vegetables.

1966- William Frawley, the bald, gravel-voiced neighbor Fred Murtz on I Love Lucy, was staying at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. He went outside of the lobby, lit a cigar, and fell over dead of a heart attack.

1978- Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt was shot and crippled by a lunatic.

1979- The film The China Syndrome premiered. It was about an accident at an American nuclear power plant.. Three weeks later the Three Mile Island accident occurred, boosting the box office. " It's spooky, it's enough to make you religious" said star Michael Douglas.

1981- CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite retired. Dan Rather succeeded him after CBS learned ABC was offering Rather big buxs to jump networks. Roger Mudd, who was thought to be the real successor to Cronkites job, left the network to anchor the History Channel. Rather was the CBS anchor until 2004.

1989- Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications to become Time Warner, the largest media conglomerate in the world. They were bought by AOL in 2000 but AOL proved to be dead weight and they resumed control as TimeWarner in 2003.
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Yesterday’s Question: Political pundits are saying about Hilary and Barack’s tactics: “ it’s time to go to the mattresses.” What does that mean? Wrestling?

Answer: In the movie the Godfather, the signal to the Mafia families that they had to go to war with one another was to “go to the mattresses”. That meant the men involved in the fighting would live in a undisclosed safe-house and sleep on mattresses on the floor.

Leave the Gun! Take the canolli!


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