Our friend actress Kellie O'Hara has scored a big hit as the lead in the Broadway revival of South Pacific. Kellie is doing the voice of Beth in our upcoming Car Talk animated series CLick & Clack, as the Wrench Turns. She was also Belle in the Broadway version of Beauty & the Beast. Congrats Kellie!

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/theater/reviews/04paci.html?scp=2&sq=South+Pacific&st=nyt

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Quiz: What is a fait d’accompli?

Quiz: Everything sounds nicer in French. What do these words mean- Pamplemousse, framboise, Chevaux du Frise.?
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History for 4/6/2008
Birthdays: Raphael of Urbino, Sacajawea, Ram Dass, Butch Cassidy, Gustav Moreau, Lowell Thomas, Merle Haggard, Billy Dee Williams, George Reeves, Michelle Phillips, Andre Previn, Barry Levinson is 66, Roy Thinnes, Zach Braff is 33

1327- Italian poet Petrarch first saw the love of his life- Laura de Sade at the Church of Sants Clara in Avignon France. Even though Petrarch was a monk and she was married, he loved her from afar and wrote some of the first Great Italian Love Poetry, preparing the way for the Renaissance. Laura de Sade was the distant ancestor of the famous sadist the Marquis de Sade, who will be born 400 years in the future.

1453-Turkish Sultan Mohammed II," The Scourge of Christendom", planted his standard before the St. Romanus Gate, and began the great siege of Constantinople, capitol of the Byzantine Empire. The siege was as long as that last sentence. The Turkish Army went to battle to the sounds of heavy percussion, drums and cymbals, reintroducing them into European music.

1520- Renaissance artist RAPHAEL of Urbino, died at 37 on his birthday. Vasari wrote of the great artist " He pursued pleasures and love affairs without moderation. On one occasion he went to excess, and returned home with a violent fever whereof he died soon after." Michelangelo, Leonardo and Titian lived to great old age.

1672- THE LAST DITCH EFFORT. French King Louis XIV invaded Holland with a huge army. England and Germany also declared war and piled on the tiny country. When the Duke of Buckingham advised the Dutch:” Don’t you see your country is lost?” The young William III of Orange replied defiantly” The best way to avoid seeing your country lost is to fight until you die in the last ditch” He coined the phrase “the last ditch effort”. The Dutch under William threw back the invaders from the gates of Amsterdam and eventually recovered all their land back.

1808- JOHN JACOB ASTOR founded the American Fur Company. Almost on the tail of Lewis and Clark Astor established a line of fur trading posts to the Pacific and set the basis for the Astor Family fortune.

1896- The first OLYMPIC GAMES of the modern era opened in Athens Greece. The last was closed by the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius in 391 A.D as a pagan festival. The Games were revived as the idea of Baron Pierre Coubertin, who became the first president of the IOC. These games also saw the first modern Marathon race. Appropriately it was won by a Greek- Spyridion Louis.

1906-THE FIRST ANIMATED FILM- Cartoonist James Stuart Blackton created sensation when Edison filmed him doing sequential drawings and they seemed to come alive. The film was The Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. Blackton made a fortune, lost it and was hit by a bus in 1941. But his animated antics paved the way for Mickey, Bugs,and Bart.

Blackton making like an artist

1909- Commander Robert Peary and his African American assistant Matthew Henson claimed to have been the first to reach the North Pole. Their claim was challenged but confirmed by the US Government in 1911. Today scholars say they were slightly off.

1917-THE UNITED STATES ENTERS WORD WAR ONE. Congress approved President Woodrow Wilson’s call for a declaration of war against Germany and her allies Austria, Turkey and Romania. In 19 months the war would cost two hundred thousand U.S. lives, cost $56 billion, and created dozens of millionaires. If you owned any stock in chemical companies like Dupont or gun makers like Remington, your stock went up 400%. Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to sit in Congress, voted against war. Twenty four years later in 1941 she was the only vote against World War Two. At first there was sincere doubt America could go into the Allied camp, after all they had as citizens one and one half million German, Hungarian and Austrian immigrant plus millions more of Jewish Americans who hated the Czar of Russia and 16 million Irish Americans who hated England plus American Isolationists who felt America's should not get involved in overseas arguments. So it was a difficult sell to the public, to say the least.

1929- Mahatma Ghandi and his thousands of followers complete their Salt March and make salt on the shores of the Indian Ocean in violation of the British State monopoly. This was the Indian equivalent of the Boston Tea Party. Ghandi was arrested soon after.

1931- The Little Orphan Annie radio show premiered. Remember kids to drink your Ovaltine and get out your de-coder rings.

1933- the Screen Writer's Guild, later the WGA, formed. It took about seven years for them to unionize screenwriting in Hollywood. Jack Warner called them : "Communists, Radical Bastards and Soap Box Sons of B*tches !" David O. Selznik, who prided himself on running a writer-friendly studio, when told of the Guild's formation told them: "What? You put a picket line in front of my studio and I'll mount a machine gun on the roof and mow you all down !!" Despite these protestations the Guild today represents all Hollywood writers.

1945- OPERATION FLOATING CHRYSANTHEMUM- The Japanese attack the U.S. Navy around Okinawa with 355 Kamikazi suicide planes. The concept seems nutty today but it had effect. More U.S. ships were sunk at this battle than in any time since Pearl Harbor. Casualty rates of sailors were so high that the War Dept. ordered a news blackout. The navy actually meditated a withdrawal from Okinawa at one point. Before the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Japanese High Command had 2,200 kamikaze planes hidden in mountain bunkers to await the US invasion of the Japanese home islands.

1951- Happy Birthday AstroBoy! According to the 1951 comic book by Osamu Tezuka, today Professor Elephant completed the little boy with the suction cup feet and pointed hairdo. Originally called Tetsuwan Atomo, he was named Astro Boy when Mushi Prod released the animated version theatrically in 1961.

1956- Elvis Presley signed his first movie deal with Paramount Pictures.

1968- Two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, police attacked the Black Panther Party at their Oakland HQ. In the furious shootout a member named Billy Hutton was killed, Eldridge Cleaver wounded and Bobby Seale arrested. This incident seemed to prove the black militants claims of police harassment and caused a firestorm of civic protest. The Black Panthers forged an alliance with the Anti-Vietnam War white students, SDS, and later the Hispanic militants the Young Lords and AIM, the American Indian Movement.

1974- ABBA, a new disco phenomenon from Sweden is introduced to the world when they win a Eurovision song contest. Mama Mia!

1994-The Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi are both killed when their plane crashed. It is never proved why the plane went down but violence broke out in the Rwandan capitol. The ethnic Hutus began a systematic killing of the Tutsi people. It was one of the worst genocides since the Holocaust.
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Yesterday’s Question: Everything sounds nicer in French. What do these words mean- Pamplemousse, framboise, Chevaux du Frise.?

Answer: Grapefruit, strawberries, a grisly wall of sharpened stakes in front of cannon for horsemen to impale themselves on.