Pop Culture Institute

POPnews - March 20th

2011-03-20T00:01:00.000-07:00

[When John Lennon and Yoko Ono first met in November 1966 at an exhibition of hers in London's Indica Gallery she claimed to have never heard of either him or the Beatles, which isn't quite as disingenuous as it sounds; he was still married to Cynthia Lennon when he wrote The Ballad of John and Yoko, which is about the early stages of their relationship, by which time she was better informed.]
1760 - The first Great Fire of Boston destroyed 349 buildings; another even greater fire would cause considerably more damage to that city in November 1872.

1815 - Napoleon entered Paris after escaping from Elba - with a regular army of 140,000 and a volunteer force of around 200,000 - to begin his so-called Hundred Days rule.

1848 - Bavaria's King Ludwig I abdicated during the Revolutions of 1848 which swept through the German states; he was succeeded by his son, Maximilian II.

1852 - Harriet Beecher Stowe's controversial novel Uncle Tom's Cabin was published, having first appeared in June 1851 as a 40-week serial in the abolitionist newspaper National Era.

1888 - Children of the Forests, the very first Romani language operetta, was staged at Moscow's Maly Theatre; to call it a success would be an understatement, as it would eventually run for 18 years.

1899 - Having been sentenced to death for killing her stepdaughter Ida in February 1898 - and having been denied clemency by New York Governor Theodore Roosevelt - Martha M. Place became the first woman to be executed in an electric chair; executioner Edwin Davis did the deed at Sing Sing prison. Although she was the first woman to die in this way, the first woman sentenced to die in the electric chair was Maria Barbella, who following her acquittal disappears from history.

1913 - Sung Chiao-jen - founding member of the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang - was wounded in an assassination attempt; he died 2 days later.

1922 - The USS Langley was commissioned as the US Navy's first aircraft carrier, having previously served as the collier USS Jupiter.

1933 - Giuseppe Zangara was executed in Florida's electric chair for fatally shooting Chicago mayor Anton Cermak in an assassination attempt against President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt the month before.

1951 - Fujiyoshida - a city located in Japan's Yamanashi Prefecture, in the center of that country's main island of Honshū - was founded.

1956 - Tunisia gained its independence from France.

1964 - The precursor of the European Space Agency (once it merged with ELDO in 1975) the European Space Research Organization (ESRO) was established when the ESRO Convention - signed on June 1962 - went into force.

1966 - Football's World Cup trophy was stolen from where it was being exhibited at Westminster Central Hall; it was found a week later in a garden in the South Norwood neighbourhood of London by a dog named Pickles.

1969 - John Lennon married Yoko Ono in Gibraltar.

1985 - Libby Riddles became the first woman to win the 1,868 km (1,161 mile) Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race.

1995 - A sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway killed 12 and wounded more than 1,300.

1999 - Legoland California opened in Carlsbad, California.

2004 - Stephen Harper won the leadership of the newly created Conservative Party of Canada, thus becoming the first leader in the party's history.

2006 - Cyclone Larry made landfall near Innisfail in the eastern Australian state of Queensland, destroying most of the country's banana crop for that year.
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"Rock Lobster" by The B-52s

2011-03-19T00:20:00.000-07:00

Ricky Wilson - born on this day in 1953 - was one of the founding members of The B-52's, a band whose sound was sorta punk and sorta New Wave but mostly lotsa fun; the band's early records, such as this one (their first), featured Wilson's buoyant guitar stylings, which were influenced by surf rock pioneers The Ventures.

Brother of bandmate Cindy Wilson, and along with the other two men in the band - Keith Strickland and Fred Schneider - openly gay, Wilson's untimely death in October 1985 from AIDS-related causes struck the band at the crucial mid-career point, scuttling their album Bouncing Off the Satellites (and its accompanying tour) and almost destroyed everything the five of them (including Kate Pierson) had worked so hard to achieve.

After a two-year hiatus in which Wilson battled depression (in the form of survivor's guilt) and Strickland taught himself to play guitar the way Wilson had once done, the band went on to release its magnum opus, the luminously loony album Cosmic Thing in 1989. Both a tribute to their fallen comrade and a triumph over adversity, it represents nothing less than a testament to the power of positive thinking.
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Happy Birthday Philip Roth

2011-03-19T00:15:00.000-07:00

Catapulted to literary fame by his 1959 book Goodbye, Columbus, Philip Roth has been slaughtering sacred cows by the herd ever since; in 1969 he tackled the still-touchy subject of adolescent sexuality with his third novel, Portnoy's Complaint, one of the few books I've ever read that promises funny on the cover and actually delivers funny on almost every page between those same covers.

Endlessly inventive in terms of form as well as content, Roth's books could be counted on to challenge as well as amuse and enrage, often through the person of his literary alter ego Nathan Zuckerman. Yet every voice raised in complaint against him was handily drowned out by the ringing of cash registers; for the last four decades his books have been the ones readers have wanted to read, along with those of Mailer, Vonnegut, Vidal, Updike, and Oates.

Coming to terms with the post-WWII era hasn't been easy, and in order to do it, Roth has had to train his laser-like mind on themes as close to himself as Judaism and masculinity, raising hackles at the same time as surely as he drove himself to the brink of madness. One of the first to blur the line between character and author (at least in his first-person narrations) for better or worse Roth was one of the towering talents who, in the latter half of the twentieth century, made the English-language novel an infinitely more self-aware animal than it had been.

Of them all, though, my favourite remains one of the most recent - namely The Plot Against America; published in 2004, it presents a conterfactual or alternate history in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt is defeated in the presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. The ensuing Fascism and anti-Semitism which sweeps the nation makes it an interesting counterpart to Sinclair Lewis' still entirely readable 1935 novel It Can't Happen Here, both of which I read at the height (or, if you prefer, depth) of the previous Administration - namely its re-election.
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POPnews - March 19th

2011-03-19T00:01:00.000-07:00

[Although the Sydney Harbour Bridge was set to be officially opened by Jack Lang, the Labour premier of New South Wales, on this day in 1932 it was actually opened by a nutjob named Francis de Groot, himself a member of the ultra-right New Guard, who interrupted the ceremony by riding up on horseback and slashing the ribbon with a sword, declaring the bridge open 'in the name of the decent and respectable people of New South Wales'. He was promptly arrested and, after being declared sane, fined £5 for trespassing. Meanwhile, the ribbon was promptly retied and dutifully re-cut by Lang.]
1279 - A Mongolian victory at the Battle of Yamen ended China's Song Dynasty.

1286 - Scotland's King Alexander III died; his succession, by his grand-daughter Margaret, the 'Maid of Norway', was disputed to the degree that is has been held responsible for the Wars of Scottish Independence - a situation not even settled by her death in 1290 and the inauguration of her successor John Balliol in November 1292.

1687 - While searching for the mouth of the Mississippi River along the Gulf Coast of Texas, explorer Robert Cavelier de La Salle was murdered by Pierre Duhaut, one of his own men, during a mutiny.

1721 - Pope Clement XI died; he was succeeded by Pope Innocent XIII on May 8th.

1863 - The SS Georgiana - said to have been the most powerful Confederate cruiser - was sunk on her maiden voyage with cargo of munitions, medicines and merchandise then valued at over $1,000,000; the wreck was discovered on the same day and month, exactly 102 years later by then teenage diver and pioneer underwater archaeologist E. Lee Spence.

1865 - The Battle of Bentonville began, during the American Civil War; by the end of the battle two days later, Confederate forces had retreated from Four Oaks, North Carolina.

1915 - Pluto was photographed for the first time - at the Lowell Observatory - but was not recognized at the time as a planet.

1931 - The Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra played its first concert at the William Penn High School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

1932 - Australia's Sydney Harbour Bridge was opened.

1941 - The 99th Pursuit Squadron - also known as the Tuskegee Airmen, the first all-black unit of the Army Air Corp - was activated.

1943 - Frank Nitti - Chicago Outfit second in command under Al Capone - committed suicide at the Chicago Central Railyard.

1945 - Allied forces having irrevocably turned the tide of World War II against him, Adolf Hitler issued the Nero Decree, ordering all industries, military installations, shops, transportation facilities and communications facilities in Germany to be destroyed.

1958 - The Monarch Underwear Company fire in Manhattan left 24 dead and 15 injured.

1969 - The 385 metre (1,263 ft) tall television mast at Emley Moor collapsed due to ice build-up.

1979 - The US House of Representatives began broadcasting its day-to-day business via the cable television network C-SPAN.

1982 - Argentinian naval forces landed on South Georgia, precipitating the Falklands War.

1987 - Televangelist Jim Bakker resigned as head of the PTL Club due to a brewing sex scandal; he handed over control to Jerry Falwell, himself a bastion of those Christian virtues of forgiveness and tolerance.

2004 - Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian was shot the day before that country's presidential election; relatively unharmed, he went on to win the next day's election by a slim margin.

2008 - A gamma-ray burst dubbed GRB 080319B that was the farthest object visible to the naked eye was briefly observed.
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Pop History Moment: Pluto Was Discovered

2011-03-18T00:25:00.001-07:00

On this day in 1930 Pluto was discovered by Clyde W. Tombaugh - based on calculations by Urbain Le Verrier, who first posited there was a planet beyond Uranus (in other words Neptune) and therefore trans-Neptunian objects... Tombaugh's astronomical enthusiasm would also lead to the discovery of numerous asteroids and extend to a fascination with UFOs.

Pluto and its largest moon Charon are sometimes treated as a binary system because the barycentre of their orbits does not lie within either body; no such conflict exists with the planetoid's other two moons, Nix and Hydra - which were discovered in 2005, just in time to witness Pluto being controversially stripped of its planetary status by the International Astronomical Union in 2006.
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Happy Birthday Queen Latifah

2011-03-18T00:25:00.000-07:00

When I was 19 I was living in Ottawa, dating Morgin (soon to become Lisa), and had only a vague idea what I wanted to do with my life. (Hint: it had something to do with writing.)

One day, while hanging out at Morgin's place we were watching a show on MuchMusic (which, like MTV, once used to actually show music videos*) called Rap City. That particular episode was a pretty listless one, until a new video by a new performer was announced. Given how smart my readers are, they'll have already guessed that the performer was Queen Latifah; the song was Come Into My House, from her groundbreaking 1989 album All Hail the Queen. At 19 she was doing what she wanted to do, and I was having sex with a woman trapped in a man's body.

In the years since my own ambitions have gradually crystallized while the lady has gone from strength to strength (not without a few bumps along the way, which she handled admirably). She has since received a well-deserved Oscar nomination - for setting the screen alight in Chicago - so it's really time I started playing catch-up.

*I realize this will be difficult for some of you to comprehend but I assure you it's true... If you don't believe me, ask your parents.
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"Fame" by Irene Cara

2011-03-18T00:20:00.000-07:00

Fame is one of those songs I am constantly rediscovering; I'll hear a snippet of that devastating bass line somewhere when I've almost forgotten it and be instantly transported to those halcyon days of yesteryear when I first used to dance around my bedroom, dreaming of the promise inherent in its very title...

Here then, on the occasion of Irene Cara's birthday, is the very song itself, performed by her - probably on the show Solid Gold in what looks like 1980. The video quality's not great, but then if you'd ever seen 1980 for yourself, you'll be glad of that; nevertheless the campiness shines through, as it will...
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Remembering... Edward Everett Horton

2011-03-18T00:15:00.000-07:00

In the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s, nothing ensured success for an actor like their ability to play a type; Edward Everett Horton's ability to portray meek, hen-pecked - even effeminate - men meant that he never lacked for work. Oh sure, he might have missed out on the overtly heroic scenes and the passionate embraces, but he also missed out on the insecurity that came along with leading roles as well...

Born on this day in 1886, Horton got the usual start on Broadway and in vaudeville, but by the time performers of every kind began flooding into Hollywood in 1929 at the advent of the sound era he'd already been there for a decade, and because he was a character actor, he made the transition from silents to sound with ease.

In his heyday he had supporting roles in some of the finest films of the era, including The Front Page (1931), Top Hat (1935), Lost Horizon (1937), Holiday (1938), Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941), and Arsenic and Old Lace (1944).

Like many people of my generation, though, I experienced Horton's career in reverse, having heard his narration on Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons first (which he did in the 1960s towards the end of his life), and only then discovered the earlier film work which had secured his reputation.

Horton died in September 1970 at the age of 84.
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In Memoriam: Princess Mary, Duchess of Suffolk

2011-03-18T00:10:00.000-07:00

Seeing as the majority of history is written by men (or had been, at least until the advent of the social history revolution of the past two decades) it's no surprise that Mary Tudor - sister of Henry VIII, unwilling Queen to Louis XII of France, lover of her brother's best friend Charles Brandon and eventually Duchess of Suffolk, in addition to a noted hellion whose trouble-making outlived her in the form of her daughters and granddaughters - has been all but expunged from the historical record (if and when historians had been bothered to include her in the first place). Yet as interest in the Tudors continues to grow, she is one of the many exemplary women of her age whose life and accomplishments are being rediscovered...

Born on this day in 1496 at Richmond Palace, for a long while Mary was Henry's cherished baby sister. He named his eldest daughter after her, as well as the Mary Rose, once the pride of the British fleet. Initially betrothed to Charles of Castile, the woman described as the most beautiful princess in Europe - indeed, the Dutch humanist Erasmus said of her that 'Nature never formed anything more beautiful' - could have become wife of the Holy Roman Emperor; instead, at the age of 18, she was sent to marry the King of France.

Royal lore has it she extracted a promise from her brother that once her political obligation was met she could marry anyone she wanted, a concession begrudgingly assented to by Henry. She then proceeded to wear out her ageing husband with lovemaking, or so the rumours have it; he died three months after their marriage without managing to impregnate her, at which point Mary was secretly wed to Charles Brandon in March 1515 when he was sent to France to bring her home. Since royalty - then as now - are the property of the State, such an act was treasonous, and could have resulted in his and hers executions; instead they were heavily fined, and in May 1515 were remarried at Greenwich Palace. Following their marriage she lived principally at her husband's country seat, Westhorpe Hall.

The Suffolks had three children: Henry Brandon, Lady Frances Brandon, and Lady Eleanor Brandon, and of these it was the middle one who gave the Crown the most grief in the years to come. Lady Frances Brandon's daughter - the ill-starred Lady Jane Grey - was briefly the pretender to the English throne, proving a thorn in the side of Mary I in much the same way (although to a much lesser extent) that Mary, Queen of Scots - granddaughter of Henry VIII's other sister Margaret Tudor - would for Elizabeth I.

Mary's convivial relationship with her brother became strained in the 1520s over his attempted (and eventually successful) reformation of the English church; Mary had grown close to Catherine of Aragon during her years at court, and was one of the first to take a strong disliking to the woman her brother had in mind to replace her, Anne Boleyn, whom she'd met during her brief tenure as Queen of France. Even following her death at Westhorpe Hall in June 1533 (aged only 37) she was troubled by the Dissolution of the Monasteries, as she was forced to quit her original burial spot at the abbey in Bury St Edmunds for the nearby St. Mary's Church.

Mary Brandon has been portrayed by two of the movies' loveliest stars - first, by Marion Davies, in a 1922 silent version of When Knighthood Was in Flower, and again in 1953 by Glynis Johns in the Disney film The Sword and the Rose (which is sadly only available on VHS); both were derived from the same source material, the 1898 novel When Knighthood Was in Flower by Edwin Caskoden (the pen name of Charles Major). Currently she is being portrayed by Gabrielle Anwar in the Showtime series The Tudors, although the character there is both heavily fictionalized and a composite of Henry VIII's two sisters, Mary and Margaret.
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"Kiss An Angel Good Morning" by Charley Pride

2011-03-18T00:05:00.000-07:00

When I was growing up, Charley Pride was a regular feature on my mother's stereo; even when, as a teenager, I rebelled against everything my parents liked and stood for (a fit of pique still going strong even in its twenty-fifth year) there were a few things - and people - who survived the rebellion. Charley Pride was among them; one of the few African-Americans to excel in the whiter-than-white world of country music - although his invitation to join the Grand Ole Opry didn't come until 1993 - he remains the only black member in the history of that august institution. In other words, the sort of person tailor-made for me to admire.

During the 1960s and 1970s his sound was described as Countrypolitan, and Pride was one of those responsible for helping to bring country music into the mainstream, as well as the first - and some would say, only - one to bring it to black audiences. This song was one such smash hit; Kiss an Angel Good Mornin' went to number 1 in the country chart, in addition to grazing the bottom of the Top Twenty on the pop charts in 1971. It remains one of Pride's signature tunes.

Born on this day in 1938, before Pride was a singer, he was a baseball player, pitching for the Memphis Red Sox of the Negro American League in 1952. In 1974, at the height of his fame, Pride faced legendary Baltimore Orioles pitcher (and underwear pitchman) Jim Palmer for the Texas Rangers during that season's training camp in Florida; he grounded out and singled during his two at-bats, helping the Orioles cinch the game 14-2.

Now in his 70s, Pride still performs concerts around the world, wowing audiences wherever he appears...
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POPnews - March 18th

2011-03-18T00:01:00.000-07:00

[The globular cluster in the constellation Hercules now known as M92 was first discovered by Johann Elert Bode in 1777, but was named for Charles Messier who independently rediscovered it* in 1781; located 26,000 light years from Earth, it contains a shitload** of stars and potentially an equal number of inhabited Earth-like planets. Although one of the larger globular clusters visible from the Northern Hemisphere, it is easily outshone by the even bigger and brighter Messier 13, just like Nick Jonas outshines his equally talented brothers Joe and the ugly one***.]

1227 - Pope Honorius III died; he was succeeded by Gregory IX the following day.

1229 - Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II was crowned King of Jerusalem during the Sixth Crusade.

1314 - Jacques de Molay - the 23rd and last Grand Master of the Knights Templar - was burned at the stake at Paris' Île de la Cité on the orders of France's King Philip IV.

1608 - Susenyos was formally crowned Emperor of Ethiopia.

1781 - Charles Messier rediscovered the global cluster M92.

1871 - Following the Declaration of the Paris Commune, Adolphe Thiers - the President of the French Republic - ordered the evacuation of Paris.

1913 - Greece's King George I was assassinated by Alexandros Schinas in the recently liberated city of Thessaloniki.

1922 - The first public celebration of a Bat mitzvah, for the daughter of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan, was held in New York City at the headquarters of the Society for the Advancement of Judaism.

1937 - An explosion caused by a natural gas leak killed and/or injured hundreds, most of them children, at a school in New London, Texas; of the approximately 600 students and 40 teachers in the building at the time, only about 130 escaped without serious injury.

1940 - Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini met at Brenner Pass in the Alps, when they agreed to form an alliance against France and the United Kingdom.

1950 - The Belgian government fell after a referendum in which 57% of Belgians favoured the return of King Leopold III from exile in Switzerland; his return to Belgium was nevertheless met by widespread unrest, following which he abdicated in favour of his son Baudouin in July 1951.

1962 - The Evian Accords put an end to the Algerian War of Independence, which had begun in November 1954.

1967 - The oil supertanker Torrey Canyon (chartered by British Petroleum) ran aground on Pollard's Rock in the Seven Stones reef off the Cornish coast, spilling 100,000 tons of crude oil; 15,000 sea birds were killed in the aftermath, many from the toxic detergents used in an attempt to clean them.

1982 - Britain's Attorney General Sir Michael Havers halted an obscenity trial brought by Mary Whitehouse against director Michael Bogdanov and the National Theatre for its production of Howard Brenton's The Romans in Britain.

1990 - In the largest art theft in US history, 12 paintings (collectively worth around $300 million) were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts.

1992 - South Africa voted to end apartheid in a special referendum.

2003 - British Sign Language was recognized as a language, but not as an official language of Britain, meaning it has no legal protections.

2005 - Terri Schiavo's feeding tube was removed at the request of her husband, fueling a worldwide debate on euthanasia; Schiavo died less than two weeks later.

2009 - Iranian blogger Omid Reza Mir Sayafi was murdered in Tehran's Evin Prison, where he'd been incarcerated for telling the truth about the mullahs and their Islamic Republic. He was 29. Despite the removal of his blog - which was ostensibly concerned with traditional Persian music - by the authorities, his work will live on thanks to the power of the Internet and foes of tyranny like the Pop Culture Institute. The March 18 Movement was created to honour his memory, and to oppose any attempts to silence new media and citizen journalists; it's a movement which this humble blog is proud to have joined.

*Hard as it may be for modern minds to comprehend, in the olden days e'rybody wasn't up in e'rybody else's bidness like they are today; there was no Twitter in 1781 - except by birds - so two different people could easily discover something at around the same time without it devolving into a spate of name-calling on YouTube. Geez, huh? Old-timey guys were some messed up shizzle!
**In Canada, a 'shitload' is an official measure; all's I know is it's bigger than a 'buttload'. Maybe it's metric... Look it up!
***Ummm... In the interest of full disclosure I should say that this photo caption is a blatant hit grab... Not unlike the Jonas Brothers themselves!
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In Memoriam: Bayard Rustin

2011-03-17T01:15:00.000-07:00

Routinely described as the architect of the American Civil Rights Movement, Bayard Rustin is just as routinely denied his legacy today by the offspring of the Baptist ministers who were his lieutenants in this most noble undertaking because Rustin was openly - even unashamedly - gay at a time when he could still be jailed in many jurisdictions for being so...

Born on this day in 1912, Rustin was raised by his maternal grandparents; both were active in their community - Rustin's grandmother was a Quaker, his grandfather belonged to the A.M.E. Church - as a boy he was taken by them to meetings of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Not only would he have heard W.E.B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson speak there, but these legendary civil rights pioneers were also frequent guests in his grandparents' home.

Originally enrolled at Wilberforce University, Rustin's academic career took on a peripatetic quality following his work on behalf of the Scottsboro Nine in 1936; the outrageous bigotry directed at nine black men unfairly imprisoned lit the fuse of the civil rights movement in America - not to mention lighting a fire under one of its most tireless proponents - a fuse which would eventually detonate a generation later in another corner of Alabama during the Montgomery Bus Boycott.

The idea for a march on Washington first occurred during World War II, when the military was still officially segregated; with his typical aplomb President Franklin D. Roosevelt deftly defused that situation before it got out of hand by implementing Executive Order 8802, following which Rustin went to California to advocate on behalf of interned Japanese-Americans. Imprisoned for violating the Selective Service Act, he continued to agitate on behalf on civil rights while incarcerated.

As Rustin's star rose, questions about his sexuality and past affiliation with Communism began troubling the civil rights leadership, notably Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (D-NY), who forced Rustin's resignation from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which Rustin had founded with Martin Luther King, Jr.; undeterred, Rustin went to work on realizing his other dream. At the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963 Dr. King made his famous I Have a Dream speech, but the dream had been Rustin's first, a fact too often overlooked today. In response to the March on Washington, President Lyndon Baines Johnson bullied the Civil Rights Act (1964) and the National Voting Rights Act (1965) through both houses of Congress.

Following King's assassination, Rustin eschewed the angry tactics (and blatant homophobia) of the Black Power movement by turning his attention to gay rights, stating: 'The barometer of where one is on human rights questions is no longer the black community, it's the gay community. Because it is the community which is most easily mistreated.' Bayard Rustin died of complications following surgery in August 1987; he was survived by Walter Naegle, his partner of 10 years.

The memoir of record is Jervis Anderson's Bayard Rustin: Troubles I've Seen; the PBS documentary Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin by Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer - a clip of which can be seen here - draws heavily on this work. My thanks to keithboykin.com for this additional information.
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Ed Byrne on Drinking

2011-03-17T00:45:00.000-07:00

Irish comedian Ed Byrne sounds off on what is stereotypically (as well as statistically) Ireland's favourite hobby - behind slagging off the English, of course - on this, the drunkard's highest holy day.
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Dara O'Briain Confronts 'The Troubles'

2011-03-17T00:35:00.001-07:00

To my mind the only thing the Irish do better than music is comedy, which accounts for the day's second St Patrick's Day video hat trick...

Here, comedian Dara O'Briain discusses the one incident of anti-Irish sentiment he's encountered in England, at (of all places) the Model Railway Museum in York.
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Politics and Religion With Dylan Moran

2011-03-17T00:35:00.000-07:00

Dylan Moran is just one of a crop of talented Irish comedians entertaining audiences around the world; a talented stand up, he's also proven himself capable of anchoring a sitcom, as the star of the BBC programme Black Books.

In fact, he's so popular, I've lost track of the number of times I've featured him on the Pop Culture Institute, which is an honour usually reserved for obscure 'Newfoundland royalty of the 1930s'* and the like.

*As Mr Barr is so fond of describing my content...
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Shades of Green

2011-03-17T00:30:00.000-07:00

"The Hands That Built America" by U2

2011-03-17T00:25:00.000-07:00

What St. Patrick's Day Irish music video hat trick would be complete without U2? Not this one, I can tell you that right now!

From the 2002 film Gangs of New York - itself loosely based on Herbert Asbury's 1928 book of the same name which was itself only loosely based on actual history - it's the Oscar-nominated The Hands That Built America.
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"Bonny Portmore" by Loreena McKennitt

2011-03-17T00:20:00.000-07:00

Since it's St. Patrick's Day (more on that later) I feel compelled by a serious case of Anglo guilt to highlight the cultural accomplishments of the Irish on this fine, green day. Despite centuries of Papist oppression and almost constant drunkenness they've managed to crank out quite a quaint little culture for themselves. (What else can I say? Once an English bastard, always an English bastard.) Plus they kind of saved Western Civilization during the Middle Ages, which was pretty cool of them all things considered...

This song, though, has long been one of my favourites; I first heard it in 1992, when Loreena McKennitt's album The Visit (on which it appears) was released. Bonny Portmore describes the rape of Ireland by the British, who decimated the oaken forests of Ireland so as to build ships with which to set about conquering the world. Which, need I remind you, they very nearly did, or at any rate did better than anyone before them until American capitalism beat them at their own game.

What was I talking about?

Oh yeah... Great song... Have a listen...
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"The Celts" by Enya

2011-03-17T00:15:00.000-07:00

I can hear you purists groaning, but I've long been a fan of Enya, and since I think this is the most Irish of her songs that surely qualifies it for placement here; certainly I've posted things on flimsier pretexts before, which to be quite honest I did so as to later justify stuff like this.

Just be grateful I'm not wearing orange.*

A n y w a y... The song you see above, The Celts, is taken from Enya's 1987 self-titled debut album, which was re-released in 1992 as The Celts, remastered and with a couple of the tracks altered.

*Not even I would be that stupid.
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What's The Occasion? St. Patrick's Day

2011-03-17T00:10:00.000-07:00

As with many holidays of relatively long-standing, there is considerable lore surrounding St. Patrick's Day; for instance, did you know that the colour associated with St. Patrick is blue? The whole green thing is purely Irish, and what better, as it's said that there are more shades of green in any view of the Irish countryside than the human eye can register. It probably took someone at the Irish Tourist Board ages to come up with that, but it's still a pretty sentiment nonetheless...

My personal favourite annual tradition is the dyeing of the Chicago River green, which makes a pleasant change from grey speckled with chunks of brown; later in the evening even the alleys and gutters of the city run green, so persistent is the presence of food colouring used in beer that it lends its joyous hue to urine and vomit alike.

Of course, St. Patrick himself wasn't Irish at all, but Roman-born, and brought to Ireland as a slave. This is in marked contrast to many Irish, who left Ireland because they felt like slaves of the British, only to face 'No Irish Need Apply' signs in Canada, the United States, and Australia. The Irish diaspora has become so successful - even in the face of that grievous bigotry - that even Glasgow holds a St. Patrick's Day parade; no word yet on what sort of St. Andrew's Day parade Dublin will be having come November, but it's likely to be a darn sight better than the one they hold on St. George's Day.

These parades are commonplace around the world, but the most famous one is in New York City, where annually millions gather to practice their homophobia under the watchful eye of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Here at the Pop Culture Institute, of course, we celebrate things a little differently, as you might have guessed if you've been following our coverage; here March 17th is St. Passive-Aggressive's Day, he being our patron saint. We light a candle to Brigid and I exchange the red paint-ball pellets I normally use to take potshots at the drunken frat-boys in the alley behind my apartment for green ones. A good time is had by all (or, in this case, me).

The image used in this post was taken (by me) from a mural on the side of St. Patrick's Secondary School in Vancouver.
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"Danny Boy" by The Muppets

2011-03-17T00:05:00.000-07:00

What better way to kick off St. Patrick's Day than with a touching (in so many ways) performance by three of The Muppet Show's finest singers - including Beaker, Animal, and the Swedish Chef as The Leprechaun Brothers - performing that Irish classic Danny Boy; originally the UK Spot of Episode 520, whenever it's played around the Pop Culture Institute there's nary a dry eye (or, indeed, seat) in the place.
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POPnews - March 17th

2011-03-17T00:01:00.000-07:00

[As Attorney-General of New York, Eliot Spitzer led (amongst others) a campaign against high-end prostitution; his promising career as governor - which some said could have taken him all the way to the White House - cooled when, within weeks of his taking office in 2007, his inner douchebag (which had been so useful in his previous job) began to emerge and terrorize the sensitive burghers of Albany. A year later, on this day in 2008, Spitzer was busted for hypocrisy and hounded from office to live out the rest of his days in tabloid ignominy and on a very short leash indeed - one which his wife, alas, would be holding. Not hot...]

45 BCE - In his last victory, at the Battle of Munda - two days short of one year before his murder - Julius Caesar defeated the forces of Titus Labienus (who was killed that day, alongside 3,000 of his men) and Pompey the Younger (who was later captured and executed for treason).

180 CE - Marcus Aurelius died, leaving Commodus the sole emperor - although he wasn't murdered by Commodus as depicted in the Ridley Scott film Gladiator (2000).

1337 - Edward, the Black Prince, was made the first Duke of Cornwall; this was also England's first duchy - although it is not intended to be passed around the left hand side, but rather automatically to the eldest son of the sovereign by birthright.

1776 - At the outset of the American Revolution, following the 11-month long siege of Boston, British forces under General William Howe evacuated several thousand troops and loyalists after George Washington and Henry Knox fortified Dorchester Heights by placing artillery overlooking the city in order to secure what was then the busiest port in the Thirteen Colonies; the day is still commemorated there as Evacuation Day, which ties in quite nicely with the after-effects of drink copious quantities of green beer.

1805 - The Italian Republic, with Napoleon as president, became the Kingdom of Italy, with Napoleon as King. Coincidence? No... Not at all.

1845 - The rubber band was first patented, in England, by Stephen Perry.

1861 - The Kingdom of Italy (1861-1946) was proclaimed; its first King was Victor Emmanuel II of the House of Savoy. This is not to be confused with the Kingdom of Italy declared on this day in 1805 - see above - which was a vassal state of France, and did not comprise the entire Italian Peninsula (which even this one would not control until 1870).

1941 - The National Gallery of Art was officially opened by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in Washington, DC.

1950 - Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley announced the creation of element 98, which they named Californium.

1957 - A plane crash in Cebu killed Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay and 24 others.

1958 - The United States launched Vanguard 1 as part of Project Vanguard; the first solar-powered satellite, it is still aloft (although no longer is use), and is thus the oldest piece of space junk orbiting the Earth.

1959 - One week after an unsuccessful uprising in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, fled Tibet for India, hotly pursued by the Chinese, who have illegally occupied his country since 1950.

1966 - Off the Mediterranean coast of Spain the Alvin submarine found the fourth 70-kiloton warhead accidentally dropped during the Palomares Incident two months earlier, the other three having fallen on land, thankfully without detonating.

1969 - Golda Meir was sworn in as the first woman Prime Minister of Israel.

1979 - The Penmanshiel Tunnel - first opened in 1846 - collapsed during engineering improvements, killing two workers; the tunnel is no longer in use, its collapse having rather effectively, if drastically, closed it.

1985 - Having already raped and murdered Jennie Vincow, serial killer Richard Ramirez - aka the 'Night Stalker' - committed the second and third of his 14 murders, killing Maria Hernandez and Dayle Okazaki in a spree which terrorized Los Angeles prior to his capture on August 24th.

1992 - A suicide car-bomb killed 29 and injured 242 during an attack on the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires.

2000 - The Ugandan cult Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God - a breakaway Catholic sect founded by Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibweteere - celebrated what they considered to be the apocalypse by roasting and eating three bulls washed down with 70 crates of soft drinks before killing more than 800 of its members in an explosion.

2008 - New York Governor Eliot Spitzer resigned after a scandal involving a high-end prostitute; he was succeeded by Lieutenant-Governor David Paterson, whose own past was also less than pristine.
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"Ain't No Mountain High Enough" by Tammi Terrell and Marvin Gaye

2011-03-16T00:25:00.000-07:00

There are two different clips of this song on YouTube, and now both of them are on the Pop Culture Institute as well...

Probably the most famous of Tammi Terrell's duets with Marvin Gaye, Ain't No Mountain High Enough was written by an equally famous duo - Nickolas Ashford & Valerie Simpson - in 1966, and was recorded by Terrell and Gaye in 1967. It was an even bigger hit for Diana Ross in 1970, as she was separating from The Supremes; personally I prefer the less bombastic arrangement being used here.
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Remembering... Tammi Terrell

2011-03-16T00:15:00.000-07:00

Tammi Terrell was both prettier than Diana Ross and had a better voice than Diana Ross; so what did Diana Ross have that made her a major star, while Terrell laboured in relative obscurity until her tragically early death?

The short answer, of course, is 'Berry Gordy's dick inside her', but given that the long answer is 'Berry Gordy's dick way up inside her' doesn't even begin to address either the unfairness that is the music industry or the epic unfairness that was Motown Records, let alone the most unfair thing of all - namely life.

Had Terrell not succumbed to a brain tumour on this day in 1970 - at the age of only 24 - she might be performing still as her chief rival continues to innovate her own brand of crazy. The point is, we will never know; still, it's pondering those unknowables that keeps things interesting around the Pop Culture Institute.

In the meantime, Terrell's music lives on; her duets with another tragic Motown star named Marvin Gaye set the standard for the Motown sound. Following the death of his lovely young singing partner - and at the height of his career - Gaye took a hiatus; when he finally re-emerged from his grief he'd produced his 1971 album What's Going On, which was a major hit, and thought to be inspired by her death.

Tammi's story is told in the memoir My Sister Tommie, written by Terrell's sister Ludie Montgomery (with Vickie Wright).
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Pop History Moment: The Taking of Aldo Moro

2011-03-16T00:10:00.000-07:00

On this day in 1978, terrorists with Italy's extreme left Red Brigades carried out a daring daylight kidnapping of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro, killing his retinue of five bodyguards in the process.

The kidnapping occurred in Rome, in the Via Fani; as Moro was being driven to Parliament his car was overtaken by a white Fiat and a man on a motorcycle. The Fiat then braked hard, causing Moro's driver to crash into it. Before his men could begin firing they were all killed, and Moro was taken hostage. The Red Brigades immediately took responsibility for the crime, stating that their aim was to 'hit at the heart of the state'.

Since all known members of the Red Brigade were then in jail for other crimes, this group was sometimes called the Second Red Brigade; their leader at the time was Mario Moretti.

In the days following Moro's abduction the country descended into a virtual police state, especially in the vicinities of Rome and Naples, where it was thought Moro was being held; at the same time the country erupted in a general strike. In the tense days that followed Pope Paul VI even offered himself as a hostage in exchange for Moro's release.

One concession to compassion offered him by his captors is that Moro was allowed to send letters to his family and colleagues while in captivity; these were not published in their entirety until the 1990s, when it was discovered that more than a few of them were critical of Giulio Andreotti, a Christian Democrat who was then Prime Minister whose alleged ties to the Mafia made him a chief suspect in the Moro Affair.

Moro was seen as one of the country's most patient diplomats, and at the time he was taken he was on his way to vote on what was known as the Compromesso storico (the 'historic compromise') which would have seen the Communists - who had won big in that country's June 1976 general election - sharing power in Italy for the first time; Moro, as the former leader of (and still one of the leading lights in) the Christian Democrats, had brokered this bill. His abduction put an end to it.

For 55 days the country waited on tenterhooks, until May 9th - when the rest of the story will be told...
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"All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You" by Heart

2011-03-16T00:05:00.000-07:00

Birthday wishes go out today to Nancy Wilson - whom dupes to the patriarchy like me might refer to as Mrs. Cameron Crowe, even despite their recent divorce - but whom rock fans will best know as the blonde half of the trailblazing rock duo Heart.

Heart's output contains much quality material, from gentle ballads to hard rock, but far and away the worst of them is this little ditty which, while it was their biggest hit, was also their last; it turns out, rock fans did not respect them in the morning. Released in March 1990 from their album Brigade, All I Wanna Do Is Make Love To You was written by Robert 'Mutt' Lange - whom dupes to the matriarchy like me (turns out I'm easily duped - who knew?) will know as Mr. Shania Twain, even despite their somewhat less recent divorce - and it features such an egregious display of male fantasy female behaviour that I just couldn't resist holding it up for ridicule here.

Keeping in mind the song was released in 1990, the woman in the video a) picks up a hitch-hiker on a dark, deserted road, b) takes him to a motel, and c) fucks his brains out. Nowhere in the video is there a condom (let alone pepper spray). We're expected to believe that because the guy's hot he's okay ('cause Ted Bundy was such an uggo); the lyrics are similarly icky, but I won't repeat them here because a) you can listen to them for yourself, and b) I'm trying to keep my dinner down*.

In the end, though, it's alright because she simply needed a sperm donor; the man she loves can't give her a baby, and she really wants one, so she's forced to conduct this brazen spunk mugging to get one**. This sort of thing happens all the time, apparently. Yeah, maybe in porno.

*From yesterday!
**Because then as now there are no sperm banks...
*

POPnews - March 16th

2011-03-16T00:01:00.000-07:00

[From its commanding position on the western bank of the Hudson River adjacent to Highland Falls 80 km (50 miles) north of New York City, West Point has been witness to the sweep of American history from the treason of Benedict Arnold in July 1780 (during which he attempted to turn the fort over to the British, an event known to history as the Betrayal at West Point) to the first graduate Joseph Gardner Swift in 1794 right through to the current day, although it's a little-known fact that most of its pupils have been trained as engineers. The entire site was made a national landmark in 1960.]
1190 - At least 150 Jews were massacred at York (on the day of the Jewish feast of Shabbat ha-Gadol, which is the shabbat before Passover) when an angry mob led by Richard de Malbis which had been laying siege to a building on the site of Clifford's Tower - a prominent part of York Castle where they'd earlier sought and been granted refuge - breached their ersatz Masada*; it was more likely his massive debt with agents of the banker Aaron of Lincoln**, though, that inspired de Malbis to encourage the frenzy in the first place, rather than any religious conviction***. Many of those trapped inside, including Yom Tov of Joigny, committed suicide rather than submit to the worst ravages of the mob; it turns out they didn't honour the promise they made to not harm the survivors after all...

*Eventually setting it ablaze with all the compassion and integrity we've come to associate with his co-religionists ever since the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE made them as uppity as all get out!
**Who had - under the aegis of his bank - made possible the building of the Abbey of St. Albans, Lincoln Minster, Peterborough Cathedral, and no fewer than nine Cistercian abbeys, and who was, at the time of his death in 1186, the second wealthiest man in England, after only the King, Henry II, who was nevertheless heavily in his debt.
***Religious self-righteousness being the most convenient cover for a multitude of sins, including greed.

1322 - At the Battle of Boroughbridge during the First War of Scottish Independence Edward II's troops led by Sir Andrew Harclay defeated forces loyal to the King's cousin, Thomas, Earl of Lancaster; also killed in the fracas was Humphrey de Bohun, 4th Earl of Hereford. The rest of the rebellious nobles were captured, charged with treason, and executed - three of them (the Lords Clifford, Mowbray, and Deynville) by being hung in chains from York Castle.

1521 - Ferdinand Magellan reached the Philippines during his circumnavigation of the world.

1621 - Samoset, of the Mohegan nation, visited the settlers of Plymouth Colony, greeting them in their own language with the words 'Welcome, Englishmen! My name is Samoset' - which gave them quite a shock let me tell you.

1660 - England's aptly-named Long Parliament - originally called in November 1640 - finally disbanded itself after having executed Charles I, survived Oliver Cromwell, and made way for the triumphant return of Charles II.

1689 - The 23rd Regiment of Foot or Royal Welch Fusiliers was founded to oppose the impending Catholicization of England under James II, finally earning the honorific 'royal' during the War of the Spanish Succession in 1713. Having seen much action during the American Revolution, the Boer War, and World War I, in February 2006 they were amalgamated with the Royal Regiment of Wales to form a new large regiment called the Royal Welsh.

1792 - King Gustav III of Sweden was fatally shot by Jacob Johan Anckarström (aided by Claes Horn and Adolf Ribbing) during a masked ball at the Royal Opera House in Stockholm, finally succumbing to his injuries on March 29th.

1802 - The United States Military Academy at West Point was established.

1815 - Prince Willem of the House of Orange-Nassau proclaimed himself King Willem I of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, making him Holland's first constitutional monarch.

1861 - Edward Clark became Governor of Texas, replacing Sam Houston, who was evicted from office for refusing to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederacy.

1939 - Egypt's Princess Fawzia married Iran's Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; they were divorced 'for her safety' in November 1948 following the birth of their only offspring, Princess Shahnaz Pahlavi. In March 1949 Her Majesty married Ismail Hussain Shirin Bey and thus forfeited her Iranian titles; her ex-husband, meanwhile, would marry Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiari and Farah Diba in turn.

1952 - In Cilaos - a town on the tiny French holding of Réunion in the Indian Ocean - 1,870mm (73 inches) of rain fell in one day, setting a new world record.

1953 - Yugoslavia's Marshal Josip Broz Tito arrived for a five-day State Visit to the United Kingdom, during which time he was entertained by Her Majesty The Queen.

1968 - Between 350 and 500 Vietnamese villagers - men, women, and children - were killed by American troops during the My Lai massacre.

1976 - Britain's Labour Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, resigned, taking the Nation quite by surprise; unbeknownst to most people, Wilson was then in the first stages of Alzheimer's disease.

1978 - The supertanker Amoco Cadiz split in two after running aground on Portsall Rocks, three miles off the coast of Brittany, resulting in what is now the 5th-largest oil spill in history - but which was then the largest. In all 1.6 million barrels (219,797 tons) were lost, of which less than 20% was recovered...

1985 - American Associated Press journalist Terry Anderson was taken hostage in Beirut; after six years and nine months in captivity he would be released in December 1991.

1988 - On the orders of Saddam Hussein the Kurdish town of Halabjah in Iraq was bombed with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents during the Halabja poison gas attack, killing thousands of people in the process. On the plus side, the attacks used up the weapons of mass destruction Hussein had bought from the very same Western powers who years later invaded Iraq in search of those very same weapons!

1995 - Mississippi formally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, becoming the last state to approve the abolition of slavery, 130 years after such a measure had been approved by Congress.
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Beware The Ides of March...

2011-03-15T00:05:00.000-07:00

...They just might make you laugh yourself silly!

I've posted Wayne and Shuster's classic sketch Rinse the Blood Off My Toga before, but never more aptly than this - the day it's supposedly taking place, the dreaded Ides of March. It was on that date in 44 BCE Julius Caesar was killed by Gaius Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Brutus at the head of a conspiracy numbering at least 40 (and as many as 60) noble Romans. The event is most famously depicted in William Shakespeare's play, Julius Caesar, which was written circa 1599.

The sketch manages to parody Shakespeare, police procedural dramas like Dragnet, and even the gladiator movies which were so popular when it was first written, in 1958. This 1970s version, however, is truncated by at least two minutes; alas, the original version - which the Canadian comedy duo performed on their own show as well as on The Ed Sullivan Show, does not seem to exist on YouTube.

It lives on today thanks at least as much to the vocal skills and comedy timing of Johnny Wayne and Frank Shuster as it does to those of one Sylvia Lennick, who as Caesar's widow Calpurnia Pisonis utters a line almost as timeless at that of Caesar's own* - Et tu, Brute? - in 'I told him, Julie! Don't go!'
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POPnews - March 15th

2011-03-15T00:01:00.000-07:00

[Considered a detached object but too far out to be considered a scattered disk object, the planetoid Sedna is the largest body so far detected in the Oort cloud, almost a quarter of the way to the next star, Proxima Centauri.]
44 BCE - Roman dictator perpetuo (or 'dictator in perpetuity') Julius Caesar was stabbed to death by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, Decimus Junius Brutus and several others on this, the Ides of March. Even though the assassins popularized the world's rockingest reason for murder - tyrannicide! - for some reason their actions have cast a pall on the day ever since...

351 CE - Constantius II elevated his cousin Gallus to the rank of Caesar, putting him in charge of the Eastern part of the Roman Empire.

933 CE - After a ten-year truce, German King Henry I defeated a Hungarian army at the Battle of Riade, near the Unstrut river.

1311 - At the Battle of Halmyros the Catalan Company defeated Walter V of Brienne to take control of the Duchy of Athens, a Crusader state in Greece.

1493 - Christopher Columbus returned to Spain at the end of his First Voyage of Discovery to the Americas.

1672 - England's Charles II issued the Royal Declaration of Indulgence, which many Protestants in Parliament construed as being proof of his own latent Roman Catholicism.

1781 - During the American Revolutionary War, at the Battle of Guilford Courthouse - near present-day Greensboro, North Carolina - 1,900 British troops under General Charles Cornwallis defeated an American force numbering 4,400.

1783 - In an emotional speech in Newburgh, New York, George Washington asked his officers not to support the Newburgh Conspiracy; the plea was successful and the threatened coup d'etat never took place.

1820 - Maine became the 23rd US state.

1827 - The University of Toronto was established by a royal charter from George IV, mainly due to the efforts of John Strachan, who became the school's first president.

1909 - London's Selfridges department store opened.

1917 - Nicholas II abdicated the Russian throne, initially in favour of his son the Tsarevich Alexei, and later still his brother the Grand Duke Mikhail, although a republic was declared before he could become Tsar.

1931 - The SS Viking exploded off the coast of Newfoundland (near the Horse Islands) killing 27 of the 147 on board including Varick Frissel, who had chartered the vessel in order to make a film of that year's seal hunt. Alas, in amongst the cameras and lights, the erstwhile producer had also brought along a considerable quantity of dynamite in order to sex-up his footage... The bodies of Frissel and his dog Cabot have never been found.

1952 - In Cilaos, a city on the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, 1,870 mm (73 inches) of rain fell in a single day, setting a new world record.

1956 - My Fair Lady opened on Broadway at the Mark Hellinger Theatre and ran for 2,717 performances, setting a record for the time.

1961 - South Africa was kicked out of the Commonwealth due to its adherence to a policy of apartheid.

1972 - Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, based on the novel by Mario Puzo, premiered.

1990 - The government of Saddam Hussein hanged Iranian-born UK-based journalist Farzad Bazoft as an Israeli spy, having arrested him during his investigation of a mysterious August 1989 explosion at the al-Iskandaria military complex, 48 km (30 miles) south of Baghdad, which may have killed as many as 7000 people while badly damaging the Al Qaqaa munitions plant; Bazoft had been tried and convicted by a kangaroo court five days earlier, on March 10th, despite assurances to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher by the Iraqi president himself that Bazoft would get a fair trial. Mere months later the West undertook the first Gulf War against the rogue regime - not due to their judicial murder of a member of the press doing yeoman service by exposing a dangerous tyrant's nuclear capabilities (a feat intelligence agents around the world hadn't even thought to do, let alone done, for themselves) or for any such righteous reason - but because its tin-pot dictator had jeopardized their precious oil supply by ordering an invasion of Kuwait.

2004 - The discovery of Sedna was announced; whether categorized as a dwarf planet or merely a trans-Neptunian object, it is the farthest thing from Earth ever discovered. Named for the Inuit goddess of the sea, Sedna is (in technical terms) a bloody great long way away. One year on Sedna lasts 12,000 Earth years, giving it something in common with where I grew up.
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"Where's The Love" by Hanson

2011-03-14T00:35:00.000-07:00

Birthday wishes go out today to Taylor Hanson, one-third of tweeny-bopper garage band Hanson, whose first album came out of the Middle of Nowhere to become a huge hit in 1997; rather than posting their huge hit MMMBop, though, I decided to post their second single, Where's the Love, which I always liked better anyway.
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In Celebration of Johan Paulik

2011-03-14T00:30:00.000-07:00

Ask most men if they enjoy porn and they will insist they do not, no way; which is why porn makes more money annually than either the movies or video games. No one's watching it, and those who do all seem to download it for free, which I guess means those profits are being laundered by organized crime and the preponderance of stores that sell it are fronts of some sort. Honestly, there's no other explanation, unless it can be believed that men are capable of lying.

Well, I watch porn, and I'm not some pussy who's afraid to admit it either; Hell, I'll even admit that the porn I watch has absolutely no pussy in it whatsoever. In fact, given that I am interested in all aspects of pop culture, I can even be said to study porn, once I'm done using it for its intended purpose. I've been known to discuss, conversationally, the relative merits of William Higgins versus Kristen Bjorn with very little prompting; like Jack McFarland (in the words of Grace Adler) I 'have a porn collection that requires its own storage facility'.

Defying all expectations, I am just as likely to favour the models found in Titan Media as I am those of Bel Ami; I simply cannot bring myself to be open-minded in every aspect of my life only to be narrow-minded when it comes to my sexuality. Which is why today I am marking the birth of one of the most charismatic porn stars of the past decade, Johan Paulik, with this silly little essay.

Paulik represents a seismic shift in the porn industry, away from the meth-addicted steroid aficionados of Southern California to a healthier, more athletic, altogether human ideal represented by Europeans, especially in countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. Like many of his fellow models, he claims to not partake in those activities offscreen which have made him so rightly famous on it, a claim I have no trouble believing. It makes sound business sense to hire models who are unaroused by their circumstances, as a 20-minute scene can take as long as three hours to film, during which someone who's entirely into what they're doing might accidentally spoil the take.

(Plus, I kind of like the idea of straight guys having sex with each other; just don't tell anyone, okay? ~ MSM)
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In Memoriam: Albert Einstein

2011-03-14T00:25:00.000-07:00

Physics - that unholy combination of beautiful science with horrifying math - is almost the only topic of conversation that will cause my eyes to glaze over instantly; in fact, whenever it comes up, I know I have about three seconds in which to brace myself on something sturdy or risk falling over. It stands to reason, then, that physicists ought to be the very last people I would write about on the Pop Culture Institute, where our editorial policy consists of the unholy combination of beautiful history with horrifying entertainment (or, if you prefer, vice versa).

Yet every so often - okay, twice, but technically that still counts as 'every so often' - a physicist also becomes a pop culture icon, putting me in the kind of awkward position of which a sadistic Pilates instructor (or is that a tautology?) can only dream.

It's happened before, with Sir Isaac Newton; unable to suitably gird myself I passed over his birthday without remarking on his extraordinary life. Today, though, I decided to man up and tackle the life of Albert Einstein, whose remarkable achievements I cannot hope to understand but am still able to admire.*

The man who made E = mc² famous was born on this day in 1879; best known for his theory of relativity, Einstein's early marriage - to Mileva Marić - ended in divorce in 1919 (after a five-year separation), having produced two sons: Hans Albert in 1904 and Eduard in 1910. A daughter named Lieserl, about whom very little is known, was born before they were married. It was during this time (1905) that he also produced the Annus Mirabilis Papers, on which the majority of his early fame was built; these writings did much to overthrow the ideas of that other physicist I've heard of, Newton. Several months after his divorce, Einstein was remarried, this time to his second cousin Elsa Löwenthal, a relationship which endured until her death in 1936.

When, in 1921, Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, he gave the considerable award money to his ex-wife, as had been stipulated in their divorce papers; the following year he made his first trip to New York City. Unlike many people who are savants in their field but idiots in life (say, me, for instance) Einstein was canny enough both to have taken out Swiss citizenship (as early as 1901) and gotten the Hell out of Germany long before Hitler's rise to power in March 1933, having more or less settled at Princeton University by then (although he often spent his winters in Pasadena at the California Institute of Technology).

As war threatened, then broke, and especially after the nuclear genie had been let out of the bottle, Einstein was increasingly concerned with peace, which naturally outraged many who were enamoured of the pro-war position (including much of the US government); Einstein's FBI dossier was soon more than 1400 pages thick, and his enlightened views on race relations, world government, even vegetarianism, meant it became difficult to obtain funding for his work.

Einstein's April 1955 death should have been the end of it, but 45 years later he was voted Time magazine's Person of the Century, his name having long since become synonymous with the word 'genius'; part of the reason for his renown, of course, was his considerable charm, as demonstrated by the 1951 photograph of him which adorns this post, which was taken by UPI photographer Arthur Sasse. When Marilyn Monroe expressed her attraction to him the hearts of every geek in the world were considerably gladdened. He was most famously portrayed in Fred Schepisi's 1994 film I.Q. by another charming uggo, Walter Matthau.

*Hopefully by the time it's Nils Bohr's birthday I'll be over it all!
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Pop History Moment: Queen Opens Heathrow's Terminal 5

2011-03-14T00:15:00.000-07:00

More than half a century after she ceremonially laid the first paving stone (in 1953) and opened the first permanent terminal at London's Heathrow Airport (in 1955), Her Majesty The Queen toured its swanky new Terminal 5, which opened to passengers amid much chaos the following March 27th; the first flight to arrive at the cavernous, light-filled £4.3 billion structure hailed from Hong Kong.

In addition to speeding up the bottleneck in security, streamlining baggage handling, and being more aesthetically pleasing, the new building features an array of posh shops - including Fortnum & Mason and Cartier.

First suggested in 1982, the new terminal will be occupied exclusively by British Airways, which will vacate its current premises in Terminals 1 and 4 as part of a sweeping reorganization of Europe's busiest airport. Terminal 5 will also be linked to the capital by its own rail and Tube connections.

Not everyone is ecstatic about the new terminal building, though; since its use will be reserved exclusively for British Airways, Richard Branson's Virgin Atlantic for one will have to remain in the same dowdy quarters; similarly, environmentalists fear that its opening will pave the way for a third runway - and a commensurate rise in noise and other pollution in the vicinity. To read more, click here.
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Happy Birthday Your Serene Highness

2011-03-14T00:10:00.000-07:00

A celebratory 101-gun salute was fired in Monaco after Princess Grace (formerly film star Grace Kelly) gave birth to a son, Albert, on this day in 1958; the following day was declared a holiday in the tiny principality - a wealthy enclave basking in the Mediterranean sun - by his father Rainier III.

The 'bonny, bonny Prince' - as his Grandmother Kelly declared him - automatically took precedence over his older sister Princess Caroline, giving the House of Grimaldi (which has ruled Monaco since 1297) another generation of life, thanks to that universal Holy Grail of the aristocracy, a male heir.

Ironically enough, though, she's the one who may have provided for the survival of the dynasty, as thus far none of Albert's children have been born in wedlock; despite a high profile relationship with model Claudia Schiffer, His Serene Highness has preferred to splash out the fruits of his fertility illegitimately - whether on real estate agents or air hostesses or porn stars, causing necessary changes to be made to Monaco's constitution to ward off any danger of extinction to the royal line.

Currently, the Prince is scheduled marry South African Olympic swimmer Charlene Wittstock in July, one of three royal weddings the Pop Culture Institute will be following in 2011*.

*The others, of course, being Wills and Kate in April and Zara Phillips and Mike Tindall in July.
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"Disco Duck" by Rick Dees

2011-03-14T00:05:00.000-07:00

Years before Rick Dees became a respected purveyor of acclaimed popular music via his syndicated radio show The Rick Dees Weekly Top 40 Countdown he managed to shovel this unholy drivel into every ear it reached; in fact, more than six million copies of Disco Duck were sold in 1976, making it very nearly one of the worst hate crimes in history. Naturally, I couldn't resist including it here on his birthday...

This clip is practically the song's definitive performance, from a little show called The Midnight Special; produced by Dick Ebersol, it was eventually canceled so that he could take over Saturday Night Live after the departure of Lorne Michaels. After Michaels' return to SNL, Ebersol went on to produce Friday Night Videos, which wouldn't have showed anything this louche.
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POPnews - March 14th

2011-03-14T00:01:00.000-07:00

[The final resting place of President John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery is adorned with this Eternal Flame, intended to represent both his undying spirit and the legacy of his presidency; Kennedy shares the grave site with his widow, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, and two of their children - Patrick Bouvier Kennedy and John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Jr. - while two of his brothers, slain New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy and long-serving Massachusetts senator Edward M. Kennedy, are buried nearby.]
1457 - China's Jingtai Emperor died, having ascended the throne in September 1449 after his older brother the Zhengtong Emperor was militarily defeated and taken prisoner by the Oirat Mongols of Esen Khan, and just three days after abdicating in favour of that same brother, who for some reason took the unprecedented step of changing his regnal name to the Tianshun emperor upon his ascension.

1590 - Henry of Navarre (the future Henri V) and his army of Huguenots defeated the forces of the Catholic League under the Duc de Mayenne at the Battle of Ivry during the French Wars of Religion.

1647 - Bavaria, Cologne, France and Sweden signed the Truce of Ulm, ending the Thirty Years' War.

1757 - On-board the HMS Monarch, Admiral John Byng of Britain's Royal Navy was executed by firing squad for neglecting his duty in failing to prevent Minorca falling to the French following the Battle of Minorca.

1794 - Eli Whitney was granted a patent for the cotton gin.

1889 - German Ferdinand von Zeppelin patented his Navigable Balloon.

1903 - The Hay-Herran Treaty, granting the United States the right to build the Panama Canal, was ratified by the US Senate, although it would later be rejected by the Colombian Senate.

1910 - The Lakeview Gusher, the largest oil well gusher in US history, vented to atmosphere near Bakersfield, California; in all an estimated 9 million barrels (1.4 billion liters/378 million gallons) of oil were spilled before the gusher was brought under control within 18 months, by about September 1911.

1915 - Cornered off the coast of Chile by the Royal Navy after fleeing the Battle of the Falkland Islands during World War I, the German light cruiser SMS Dresden was abandoned and scuttled by her crew.

1942 - John Bumstead and Orvan Hess became the first in the world to successfully treat a patient, Anne Miller, using penicillin.

1943 - The Kraków Ghetto was declared liquidated after less than 48 hours.

1958 - When Prince Albert (a male heir to the House of Grimaldi and therefore the throne of Monaco) was born to the reigning Prince Rainier III and his wife, the former Hollywood film star Grace Kelly, the populace of the tiny Mediterranean principality became very publicly overjoyed at the disinheritance of the couple's previous child - Princess Caroline, born in January 1957 - who ever since her brother's April 2005 ascension has nevertheless been heiress presumptive.

1960 - The Lovell Telescope at the UK's Jodrell Bank Observatory contacted the Pioneer 5 probe, which was then 655,000 km (407,000 miles) from the Earth.

1964 - A jury in Dallas found nightclub owner Jack Ruby guilty of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, assassin of John F. Kennedy, and sentenced him to death.

1967 - The body of President John F. Kennedy was moved to a permanent burial place at Arlington National Cemetery.

1978 - The Israeli Defense Force invaded and occupied southern Lebanon during Operation Litani.

1984 - Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Féin, was seriously wounded during an assassination attempt carried out by the Ulster Freedom Fighters in central Belfast.

1991 - The so-called Birmingham Six were freed after spending 16 years in jail for the Birmingham pub bombings; all were eventually awarded damages from £840,000 to £1.2 million.

1995 - Astronaut Norman Thagard became the first American to ride into space on-board a Russian launch vehicle.
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"Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo" by Bloodhound Gang

2011-03-13T00:20:00.000-08:00

Birthday wishes go out today to Spanky G, one of the founding members of - and former drummer with - alt-pop funsters Bloodhound Gang; Mr. G(uthier) and his fellow Gang-mates parted ways in 1999, during the recording of the band's breakthrough album, Hooray for Boobies, which contained the uber-catchy hit The Bad Touch.

Prior to the huge success of their breakthrough hit, though, Bloodhound Gang was offending uptight people with this paean to cunnilingus, Kiss Me Where It Smells Funny, which originally appeared on the band's 1997 2nd album One Fierce Beer Coaster. Undoubtedly my favourite song of theirs, though, is Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo - from their 2005 reunion album Hefty Fine, and was written by the group's bassist Evil Jared Hasselhoff.

In keeping with the anarchic spirit of this blog and the 'fuck-you' spirit of the band, Spanky G had nothing to do with this number.
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Pop History Moment: Mata Hari Makes Her Debut

2011-03-13T00:10:00.000-08:00

She wasn't the first woman to use her sexuality to improve her opportunities in life, nor would she be the last, but Mata Hari just might be the first to be famous for it, at least in this media age; for all her fame, though, little is known about her except her name and her reputation - and what you think of her reputation says far more about you than it ever could about her...

Whether, for instance, you think of her as a strong, determined woman who did what she could to survive as long as she could in a world which was in every way allied against her or whether you think of her as a mercenary slut with no sense of right or wrong you'd be partly right and partly wrong in either case, for she was undoubtedly both of these and yet neither, since neither opinion quite grasps either the subtleties or the complexities of the way she chose to move through the world.

Born Margaretha Zelle in Holland in August 1876, at the age of 18 she married a Dutch naval officer named Rudolf MacLeod and soon enough found herself in Java, then a Dutch possession. Following the death of their son in 1899 the couple moved back to Amsterdam, and divorced in 1903. Alone in the world and still a young woman, she removed herself to Paris, adopted a Malay stage name (Mata Hari means 'Eye of the Day') and on this day in 1905 took to the stage with an act that was remarkable for its exoticism - along the way concocting an equally outrageous offstage identity to match.

From dancing nude or semi-nude in front of a statue of Shiva it's not a very great leap to doing other stuff nude or semi-nude in front of a flesh-and-blood industrialist - in her case Emile Etienne Guimet; from there it was a saucy game of leapfrog over generals and politicians to the Crown Prince of Germany, a man denied the chance to be Wilhelm III by a little matter called World War I - the same war that would also provide her own downfall.

Less than a dozen years after she elevated exotic dance to an art form - one for which Paris would thereafter become renowned - she was under lock and key in one of that city's jails, accused of being a double agent. Whether she was or not (there remains some doubt) she made an excellent scapegoat; in October 1917 she faced a French firing squad and blew them a kiss before they blew her away. By then, of course, her infamy had become fame; they could take her life, only by then her life had taken on a life of its own. The French government is set to open its file on her in 2017, after which we may learn more; in the meantime we may luxuriate in her myth for another few years.

So strong was that myth that the best-known movie made about her life could only have starred a woman equally exotic, equally mysterious: Greta Garbo. In many ways, while the film fails to grasp the facts of her life, it conjures the spirit of it perfectly, so even though film Mata Hari (1931) is a hot mess, it's also a hot mess, y'know?
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"Colors" by Crossfade

2011-03-13T00:05:00.000-08:00

If you know me (and now, even if you don't) you know that all you need to do to earn my eternal gratitude is to be nice to me... You don't even have to be all that nice, either; I mean, just don't be a total jerk and I'll tell anyone who'll listen how great you are in perpetuity...

The entire reason this video is being posted here today, then, is that during my tenure as a night porter, birthday boy Ed Sloan - lead singer of Crossfade - was nice to me; turns out a couple of $5 tips and the occasional friendly nod in my direction is all it takes to earn yourself some prime real estate on the Pop Culture Institute. Hopefully this admission won't subsequently lead to a rash of celebrity abuse aimed in my direction; I guess, only time will tell.

Anyway, this song - Colors - originally appeared on the band's self-titled 2004 debut album, and is my favourite from that collection, which I purchased with the largesse supplied to me by its vocalist.
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POPnews - March 13th

2011-03-13T00:01:00.000-08:00

[Although mentions of Uncle Sam first occurred during the War of 1812 - when he was a counterpart to the British John Bull - this more common representation first appeared in 1917, when J. M. Flagg created it for a US military recruitment poster, which itself was based on a similar poster of Britain's Lord Kitchener, designed by Alfred Leete.]
1138 - Cardinal Gregorio Conti was elected Antipope as Victor IV, succeeding Anacletus II.

1781 - Sir William Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, along with a raft of puerile jokes.

1845 - Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto was premièred at the Gewandhaus in Leipzig, featuring soloist Ferdinand David.

1852 - Uncle Sam made his debut as a cartoon in the New York Lantern, according to The New York Times.

1881 - Tsar Alexander II of Russia was killed* near his palace when a bomb was thrown at him by Ignacy Hryniewiecki, with the radical group Narodnya Volya, who also died in the attack; it had been the fifth attempt on the Tsar's life.

1884 - Troops loyal to Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad led the siege of Khartoum, which would continue until January 1885 when the commander of the city's defense - Charles George Gordon - was killed.

1897 - San Diego State University was founded.

1900 - British forces occupied Bloemfontein, in the Orange Free State, during the Second Boer War.

1920 - The Kapp Putsch briefly ousted the government of the Weimar Republic from Berlin.

1921 - Mongolia, under Baron Roman Ungern von Sternberg, declared its independence from China.

1925 - A law was passed in Tennessee known as the Butler Act which prohibited the teaching of evolution in that state's schools; the law would later be challenged during the famous Scopes Trial.

1943 - Nazi forces began liquidating the Jewish ghetto in Kraków under the supervision of SS-Sturmbannführer Amon Goth, who sent 8,000 to the Plaszow labor camp, ordered some 2,000 whom he deemed unfit to work summarily executed, and sent the remainder to Auschwitz; among the survivors of this horrific event was famed film director Roman Polanski.

1947 - The musical Brigadoon opened on Broadway at the Ziegfeld Theatre, where it ran for 581 performances.

1957 - Cuban student revolutionaries stormed the presidential palace in Havana in a failed attempt on the life of President Fulgencio Batista.

1962 - Lyman Lemnitzer, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, proposed committing either simulated or real acts of terrorism or other false flag operations against US forces in Guantanamo Bay (only to then blame them on Cuba) to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara in a document called Operation Northwoods; not only was the proposal rightly scrapped but President John F. Kennedy refused to re-appoint Lemnitzer to his position. Far from being forced to live the rest of his life in disgrace, Lemnitzer later served as Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.

1969 - Apollo 9 returned safely to Earth, having successfully tested the Lunar Module.

1986 - Microsoft made its initial public offering.

1996 - At the Dunblane Massacre in Dunblane, Scotland, 16 children and 1 adult teacher were shot dead by a spree killer named Thomas Watt Hamilton, who then committed suicide.

1997 - India's Missionaries of Charity chose Sister Nirmala to succeed Mother Teresa as its leader, apparently.

*Although Russia was then on the Julian calendar - meaning this event took place on March 1st for them - Pop Culture Institute is on the Gregorian calendar; we therefore always try to post POPnews events accordingly.
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Happy Birthday Ron Jeremy

2011-03-12T00:35:00.000-08:00

Under normal circumstances, Ron Jeremy is not someone I would imagine myself liking, let alone even knowing about; he does, after all, appear in those weird pornos that have - get this! - women in them*. But every interview I've seen of his impresses me all the more, to the extent that I may even someday avail myself of his memoirs and documentary to learn (and, no doubt, be impressed) even more.

Born on this day in 1953 in Bayside, Queens, Jeremy first began appearing in adult films in 1979, having attained a bachelor's degree in education and theatre and a master's degree in special education. Ironically, it's his education (as much as his other - ahem - endowments) which best suits him for working with porn stars, many of whom are lovely people I'm sure but rarely possessed of that all-important three-digit IQ**.

Having appeared in hundreds (maybe thousands) of pornos, Jeremy was the ideal creative consultant for Paul Thomas Anderson's 1997 film Boogie Nights - which is as much a tribute to the 1970s and the sun-drenched vistas of southern California as it is to the laughably amateurish films which combined the two with a frenzy of tanned limbs thrown in for a bit of variety.

*A fad, surely, or a 'flash in the pants' at very least.
**You can always tell which ones are the smart ones, because they inevitably get involved either directing, or producing, or both - since that's where the money is.
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"New York, New York" by Liza Minnelli

2011-03-12T00:30:00.000-08:00

Live from Radio City Music Hall in New York City, Liza Minnelli's electrifying performance of just one of her theme songs was the highlight of a program called Night of A Hundred Stars, which originally aired in March 1982 and to which I was glued for the entire evening the night it was first on.

New York, New York was written for her by the creative team of Kander and Ebb, and is the theme from Martin Scorsese's 1977 film of the same name; in fact, she can be considered their muse, since they also wrote Flora the Red Menace, Cabaret, and The Rink with her in mind.
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"Copacabana" by Liza Minnelli

2011-03-12T00:25:00.000-08:00

Originally aired in November 1979, Episode 414 of The Muppet Show features much quintessential zaniness, and opened with Liza Minnelli's rendition of Copacabana, a song originally made famous by Barry Manilow and written by Jack Feldman, Manilow, and Bruce Sussman.
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Happy Birthday Liza Minnelli

2011-03-12T00:15:00.000-08:00

Liza Minnelli is one of the first non-royals to have been famous from the day she was born, on this day in 1946; her mother Judy Garland was then (and indeed, still is, at least in the opinion of the Pop Culture Institute) possibly the greatest singer-actress in history, and her father Vincente Minnelli was an equally esteemed film director. They met on the set of Minnelli's film Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), which was a triumph for both of them.

As Hollywood royalty their greatest triumph, however, was a little black haired bundle of neuroses named Liza, whose abundant neediness was an adjunct of her mother's and whose frantic desire to entertain has endeared her to three generations of gay men, with their equally frantic desire to be entertained. Although her first appearance onscreen was as a toddler in her mother's film In the Good Old Summertime (1949), her career is considered to have begun with the 1963 revival of the Broadway musical Best Foot Forward; she won her first Tony Award two years later for Flora the Red Menace.

Yet Minnelli's life has been a rollercoaster of tragedy and triumph; her mother died in 1969, when Liza was just 23, and because of the mess her estate was in Liza was forced onto the concert circuit to pay off her debts. Smash concert appearances and great film roles (such as her Oscar-winning turn as Sally Bowles in the 1972 musical Cabaret) were offset by bouts with addiction, health woes, and terrible marriages; they say women like to marry men like their father, which Liza did well enough when she married Peter Allen, who was a fan of her mother's in the usual mold. In recent years Liza has continued entertaining thanks in part to a recurring role on the instant-classic sitcom Arrested Development.

Still, in an industry which eats its young, there is much to be said for survivors, and in that regard Liza is in an elite group, alongside Cher, Bette Midler, and Patti Labelle, with whom she has more in common than career longevity - she has the undying affection and therefore eternal protection of the Gay Mafia.
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Pop History Moment: FDR's First Fireside Chat

2011-03-12T00:10:00.000-08:00

On this day in 1933 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt addressed the American people on radio for the first time since his Inauguration the previous week; it was to be the first of his so-called Fireside Chats, with which he so often soothed frayed nerves during the worst days of the Great Depression...

In all FDR delivered 30 such addresses on issues as diverse as the New Deal and its stated aim of relieving the economic situation, the impending war in Europe and then later the ongoing war in Europe; the last one was delivered in June 1944, announcing the fifth War Bond Drive. He died the following April, six months after having been elected to an unprecedented fourth term of office.

The text of the first Fireside Chat - in which the President explains the Banking Crisis - is available here, while all the rest of them are available behind the image.
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Jack Kerouac on "The Steve Allen Show"

2011-03-12T00:05:00.000-08:00

I've posted this clip before, but I enjoy it so much I've decided to post it again on what, let's face it, was never gonna be Jack Kerouac's 89th birthday; it features a performance of On the Road by Kerouac on The Steve Allen Show in 1959.
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POPnews - March 12th

2011-03-12T00:01:00.000-08:00

[It doesn't really matter what I write here, does it? In fact, I can even forego a caption altogether since the succulent image of this Girl Scout cookie - called a Samoa, probably because once you have one you want samoa - came on screen. Well, just click on the image and you can enjoy one or two (boxes, let's face it) as soon as those short little legs can carry her and her iconic badge-studded sash/unflattering green smock combo to your home or office.]
1832 - Filippo Taglioni's ballet La Sylphide had its première performance at the Paris Opéra.

1868 - Henry James O'Farrell attempted to assassinate Queen Victoria's second son Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, during a royal visit to a Sailor's Home at Clontarf (near Sydney) by firing a revolver into his back. Not only was he unsuccessful, it was only the quick actions of the Prince's police escort who saved O'Farrell from suffering rough justice on the spot; after two weeks in hospital the Prince returned to England, having made a full recovery, whereas his putative assassin wasn't so lucky. He was executed on April 21st despite the insanity plea of his barrister Butler Cole Aspinall and even the intercession of the Prince himself!

1881 - Andrew Watson made his Scotland debut as the world's first black international football player and captain.

1894 - Coca-Cola was sold in bottles for the first time, allowing busy people the opportunity to get tooth decay and diabetes without having to waste time standing at a counter in a drug store.

1912 - The Girl Guides (later renamed the Girl Scouts of the USA) are founded in the United States.

1913 - On the first Canberra Day (today celebrated in the Australian Capital Territory on the second Monday in March - same as Commonwealth Day) the future capital of Australia was officially named Canberra by Lady Denman, wife of the Governor-General; Melbourne would remain the temporary capital until 1927 while the new capital was still under construction.

1928 - California's St. Francis Dam - built as part of the Los Angeles Aqueduct - failed, killing 400 people in Santa Clarita.

1930 - Mahatma Gandhi led the Dandi March 200 miles from Sabarmati Ashram to the sea at the village of Dandi to protest the British monopoly on salt.

1938 - Nazi troops occupied Austria during the Anschluss; the country's annexation was declared the following day.

1947 - The Truman Doctrine was proclaimed to help stem the spread of Communism.

1967 - Suharto assumed the Presidency of Indonesia, having taken over from Sukarno.

1968 - Mauritius achieved its independence from Britain; on the same day in 1992 the country became a republic within the Commonwealth of Nations.

1969 - Beatle Paul McCartney married photographer Linda Eastman at London's Marylebone Register Office.

1971 - The March 12 Memorandum was sent to the Demirel government of Turkey, prompting their mass resignation; this second coup in the history of modern Turkey came 11 years after the first one.

1993 - 13 bombs exploded in Mumbai, killing about 300 and injuring hundreds more; the attacks are thought to have been plotted by Dawood Ibrahim, head of the organized crime syndicate D-Company.

1994 - The Church of England ordained its first female priests.

2003 - Zoran Đinđić, Prime Minister of Serbia, was assassinated in Belgrade.

2004 - South Korea's President Roh Moo-hyun was impeached by its national assembly, a first in that country's history.

2005 - Tung Chee Hwa, the first Chief Executive of Hong Kong, stepped down from his post after his resignation was approved by the Chinese central government.
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"Stay (I Missed You)" by Lisa Loeb

2011-03-11T00:35:00.000-08:00

Birthday wishes go out today to Lisa Loeb - the pixie-ish, bespectacled singer-songwriter whose breakthrough debut single Stay (I Missed You) marked the first time a performer hit the #1 spot without benefit of a recording contract.

Loeb has since parlayed her five best-selling albums into her own non-profit foundation; the Camp Lisa Foundation helps underprivileged kids have the experience of a lifetime by sending them to summer camp.
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Pop History Moment: The Bombing of Atocha

2011-03-11T00:30:00.000-08:00

Estacion Atocha, the main railway terminus in Madrid, was first opened by Spain's Queem Isabella II in February 1851; 40 years later the original edifice was destroyed by fire, and extensively rebuilt in its current glass and wrought-iron form by Alberto de Palacio Elissagne, who'd collaborated with Gustave Eiffel. In 1977, during the country's transition to democracy following the death of Franco, the area was the site of a massacre of labour leaders; in 1992 the old station was taken out of service and repurposed for commercial use, the centrepiece of which is an indoor palm garden (shown above) and a new station was added to the complex.

It was at this new station on this day in 2004 when Spain got its first taste of modern terrorism, having spent the previous thirty years getting over being governed by it; al-Qaeda inspired operatives set off a coordinated series of 7 suicide bombs aimed at disrupting the morning commute, killing 191 people and wounding 1,755 - exactly 911 days after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York City.

The following day Spaniards in their millions took to the streets in protest, still thinking the bombing had been the work of Basque separatists with the ETA; three days later there was a General Election, at which the ruling right-wing People's Party was defeated by the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party, owing in large part to Prime Minister José María Aznar's mishandling of the situation. Not only had he supported the war in Iraq (which many in Spain felt was to blame for the attack), he then blamed the ETA for the bombings (when it was already clear that it had been the work of jihadists); he'd also asked King Juan Carlos I to postpone the election which His Majesty, being better versed in constitutional law, refused to do.

Today there is a 'virtual shrine' at the front of the station, which was unveiled by the King and Queen and Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero on the third anniversary of the attack; within its cylinder are contained thousands of messages of condolence. Visitors to the site may also leave their handprints via special computer consoles.
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Remembering... Betty Hutton

2011-03-11T00:25:00.000-08:00

I must confess, when I heard she'd died - on this day in 2007 - I thought she was already dead... I hate it when that happens!

For fans of the brassy and manic female performance of musical comedy, Betty Hutton is it. During World War II she was America's Incendiary Blonde, whose high-voltage performances inspired - among others - Debbie Reynolds who, as a child, used to entertain her family by miming to Hutton's records (which goes a long way towards explaining Debbie's popularity amongst drag queens).

No broad ever played it broader than her, but her ego got the better of her, and she burnt through her share of the limelight fast, leaving behind a legacy of film and recordings that is long overdue for rediscovery. Few people, for instance, know that Bjork's biggest hit (at least chart-wise) was It's Oh So Quiet, which is a remake of Betty Hutton's song Blow a Fuse.

Buy or rent her best known film The Miracle of Morgan's Creek tonight, just for the scene in which Betty stutters her character's name - Gertrude Kockenlocker; I'm ashamed to admit, it always cracks me up.
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"Girls and Boys" by Good Charlotte

2011-03-11T00:20:00.000-08:00

On the birthday of Good Charlotte's guitarist Benji Madden and singer Joel Madden I'm glad to post this live version of the band's biggest hit - Girls & Boys, from their 2002 album The Young and the Hopeless - rather than the official video, which is unavailable for a reason I'm already tired of bitching about.

Good Charlotte was one of a cadre of bands who rose to prominence in the early years of the 21st Century, among them the band's mentors Lit and Blink-182; in the brothers Madden's case, their rise was accompanied by their well-photographed flirtations with such tabloid show-offs as that blonde one (for Benji), as well as Hilary Duff and babymama Nicole Richie for Joel.
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POPnews - March 11th

2011-03-11T00:01:00.000-08:00

[Try as they might to imagine they'd achieved dominion over the Earth, the Victorians were too often let down by their early attempts at civil engineering; one such event was the flood caused by a dam failure at Low Bradfield, which destroyed 800 houses and killed 240 as it swept inexorably down the River Loxley toward Sheffield.]
1708 - Queen Anne withheld Royal Assent from the Scottish Militia Bill, apparently; it was the last time a British monarch vetoed legislation.

1801 - Eccentric, tyrannical Paul I (the son of Catherine the Great) was assassinated by a group of thirty Russian nobles led by Count von Benningsen (on the orders of the Tsar's most trusted advisor, Count Peter Alekseyevich Pahlen) after refusing to abdicate; he was succeeded by his son Alexander I.

1824 - The United States War Department created the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which ought to give one some idea of the US government's attitude towards its indigenous peoples.

1845 - In New Zealand, Chiefs Hone Heke and Kawiti led 700 Māoris to chop down the flagpole and drive settlers out of Kororareka owing to the British settlers there having breached 1840's Treaty of Waitangi; the incident would cause the so-called Flagstaff War.

1848 - Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine and Robert Baldwin became the first Prime Ministers of the Province of Canada to be democratically elected under what was then a uniquely Canadian interpretation of the Westminster system known as responsible government.

1851 - Giuseppe Verdi's opera Rigoletto made its debut at La Fenice in Venice.

1861 - The Constitution of the Confederate States of America was adopted.

1864 - The Great Sheffield Flood - the worst man-made disaster in English history - killed over 240 people when the newly-built Dale Dyke Dam broke; these events have formed the basis for Phil Parkin's 2004 documentary The Forgotten Flood.

1867 - Giuseppe Verdi's opera Don Carlos debuted at the Paris Opéra.

1872 - Japan's Meiji government officially annexed the Ryukyu Kingdom into what would become the Okinawa prefecture.

1888 - What later became known as the Great Blizzard of '88 began along the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, blanketing parts of New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts and Connecticut in more than 100 cm of snow, shutting down commerce and killing more than 400.

1927 - Samuel Roxy Rothafel opened the Roxy Theatre in New York City.

1941 - President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Lend-Lease Act into law, allowing American-built war supplies to be shipped to the Allies on loan.

1959 - The original Broadway production of A Raisin In The Sun by Lorraine Hansberry - and starring (among others) Sidney Poitier, Ruby Dee, and Louis Gossett Jr. - opened at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in New York City.

1985 - Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader following the death of Konstantin Chernenko.

1990 - Lithuania declared itself independent from the Soviet Union during the so-called Singing Revolution.

1993 - Janet Reno was confirmed by the US Senate as the first female Attorney General of the United States; she was sworn in the following day.

1996 - John Winston Howard became the 25th Prime Minister of Australia; his would be the 2nd longest term in Australian history - only Sir Robert Menzies served longer - lasting until December 2007, when his Liberal/National coalition was defeated at the polls by the Australian Labor Party, led by Kevin Rudd.

2006 - Michelle Bachelet was inaugurated as the first female president of Chile.
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Pop History Moment: The Wedding of Princess Beatrix and Claus von Amsberg

2011-03-10T01:00:00.000-08:00

Despite the throngs of well-wishers lining the streets of Amsterdam to cheer the marriage of Crown Princess Beatrix to Claus von Amsberg on this day in 1966, perhaps because of the country's renowned propensity towards politeness history tends to remember the more sensational aspects of the event - the protestors chanting 'Claus raus'*, the throwing of an occasional stink bomb, and in general the antics of a disorganized albeit highly entertaining rabble...

At its core, though, the discontent highlighted a legitimate concern that a Dutch Princess was marrying a German (however sophisticated and suitably aristocratic) who had served in both the Hitler Youth and the Wehrmacht; only a generation had passed since the brutal Nazi occupation of Holland ended, and there were bound to be some lingering bad feelings. Perhaps time (in the form of the four decades that have since passed) offers a kind of perspective the youthful exuberance of the day does not, but I can think of no better way to heal such a hurtful rift than the solemnization of a love pact on such a grand scale. It is, after all, one of the functions of monarchy to act as the national spirit writ large. As pastor Pastor J.H. Sillevis Smit said during his sermon 'May this marriage, that has caused so many tension, be a cause of harmony in the future, a proof that the nations can together build a lasting peace.' It certainly did that, as Prince Claus eventually became one of the country's more popular royals.

In a dress designed by Caroline Bergé-Farwick of Maison Linette and wearing some seriously ornate jewellery, the Princess did everything to reward the congregation of visiting royalty by appearing throughout the festivities as every inch the princess; the calm demeanour she displayed throughout the day** may be inconsistent with the stereotype of a jittery bride but it's entirely in keeping with what's expected of princesses in general and specifically the sensational poise of Princess (now Queen) Beatrix.

*Meaning 'Claus, out' - in all a pretty witty slogan to chant (if you really must chant slogans at all)...
**Not to mention during the week of banquets and parties that preceded it.
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Remembering... Corey Haim

2011-03-10T00:55:00.000-08:00

I think the life of Corey Haim - which ended around 2:15 AM on this day in 2010 at the age of 38 - best represents the place where the disparate threads of celebrity discourse most commonly present here at the Pop Culture Institute weave themselves from nebulous concepts into something very nearly concrete*... Which is not to say that if he'd stayed in Canada, avoided the pitfalls of youthful fame, or even remained out of show business altogether that Haim would not have met the precise demise he did today. It's just that, you know, I'm pretty sure he'd have had a kajillion times better chance at surviving his life without everyone around him consistently feeding his every self-destructive whim is all. In my opinion.

Haim's first feature film role was in 1984's Firstborn, which starred Sarah Jessica Parker and Robert Downey Jr, which he followed with minor roles in Secret Admirer and Murphy's Romance (both 1985) and the lead in a feature film version of Stephen King's novella Silver Bullet, opposite Gary Busey, in the same year. His breakthrough, though, was probably in the 1986 film Lucas, with Kerri Green, Charlie Sheen, and Winona Ryder; the role with which he will always be best associated (especially given his tragic demise) is Joel Schumacher's 1987 film The Lost Boys.

Now, I realize that hindsight is 20/20, but given the number of red flags Haim worked with in just the first half decade of his career - before turning 16 even! - would have been enough to send me screaming for a job application form at 7-11. Fame, as we have learned, is probably the most intoxicating drug of all; for someone with the propensity for addiction it all became more than he could bear...

*If you can find a way to say this without sounding so pompous, help me out...
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"There's A Girl" by Jan and Dean

2011-03-10T00:50:00.000-08:00

Birthday wishes go out today to Dean Torrence, one half of California's pioneering surf rock duo and golden gods Jan and Dean; in the video above that's him on the right - the one with the cleft chin. Having met while both were enrolled at Los Angeles' University High School, Jan and Dean came by their SoCal cred honestly; at the height of their fame they performed only sporadically, since they were attending university at the same time, as well as taking the time out to, you guessed it, surf.

Yet it was almost all for naught; in April 1966 Jan Berry was badly injured at Dead Man's Curve, the same spot in Bel Air north of UCLA's Drake Stadium they'd sung about so successfully just two years before. The event was immortalized in a 1978 TV-movie called Deadman's Curve, in which Berry was played by Richard Hatch and Torrence by Bruce Davison.
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"Circle" by Edie Brickell and New Bohemians

2011-03-10T00:35:00.000-08:00

Birthday wishes go out to Edie Brickell, formerly a New Bohemian and currently Mrs. Paul Simon; her second album, 1988's Shooting Rubberbands at the Stars, yielded an abundance of the kind of grace seldom present in pop music, and is a must-have for any music collection. In addition to the chart-smashing hit What I Am and my personal favourite Little Miss S (a spritely ditty about Edie Sedgwick) the album yielded this lovely track...
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Gratuitous Brunette: Jon Hamm

2011-03-10T00:30:00.000-08:00

Most of the available hotness in 2008 belonged to one man: Jon Hamm, who was born on this day in 1971. Fortunately for those of us among his admirers, that streak of hotness prevails into 2011...

As advertising executive Don Draper in the AMC TV series Mad Men, Hamm inhabited the compromised soul of the early Sixties suburbanite like few have done before; his performance netted him a Golden Globe Award, as well as a shot guest hosting Saturday Night Live. That led to his being cast opposite comedy goddess Tina Fey as a love interest for her character, lucky bitch Liz Lemon, in the third season of 30 Rock. His other credits include roles in the movies Space Cowboys, Kissing Jessica Stein, and the recent remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still as well as on TV's Providence and Gilmore Girls.

In real life, Hamm is in a long-term relationship with lucky bitch Jennifer Westfeldt who is - it scarcely needs to be said - One. Lucky. Bitch.
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Pop History Moment: James Earl Ray Found Guilty

2011-03-10T00:25:00.000-08:00

On this day in 1969 - his 41st birthday - James Earl Ray was sentenced to serve 99 years in prison by Judge Preston Battle in Memphis, Tennessee, after admitting to the murder of the American civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.; although he recanted his confession three days later, it was too late. On the advice of his attorney, Percy Foreman, Ray had copped a guilty plea to avoid a trial and therefore a possible death sentence; Ray later hinted that he was merely part of a conspiracy to kill King. He reasserted this claim before the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

The manhunt to capture James Earl Ray had lasted two months, and come to an end at London's Heathrow Airport, where he was caught traveling with two false passports - one of them a Canadian one in the name of Ramon George Sneyd - in June 1968; having fled Memphis following the assassination, Ray spent a period of time in Montreal.

James Earl Ray would return to the headlines occasionally during the remainder of his life, most notably in June 1977, when he escaped from Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary; he was recaptured three days later. In latter years the King family would lobby for Ray's retrial and/or release - even maintaining that he was not King's killer - and while Ray may have been involved on some level in a conspiracy to kill King no further evidence to support this claim has emerged in the ensuing 40 years.
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"Magic" by Robin Thicke

2011-03-10T00:20:00.000-08:00

Whereas most of the offspring of faded celebrities seem to prefer to haunt the glossier places of Los Angeles trailing an entourage of douchebags* while spending their parents' residuals before estate taxes take whatever's left, Robin Thicke has instead forged himself a career as a singer-dancer. Not that he hasn't had the occasional coke-fuelled binge with a passel of hookers** - and I couldn't say one way or the other whether or not he has (or hasn't) - at least he's managed to record himself a few songs along the way.

The only child of fellow pop culture icons Alan Thicke and Gloria Loring, Thicke is responsible for the sultry blue-eyed soul of Magic (and the lithe moves that accompany it in the video, as well) which originally appeared on his 2008 third album Something Else.

*In case you were wondering what the collective noun for douchebags was...
**'Passel' is not the collective noun for hookers; I believe it's 'hip-hop video'.
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Happy Birthday Your Royal Highness

2011-03-10T00:15:00.000-08:00

The birth of the Queen's youngest child at Buckingham Palace on this day in 1964 was greeted with the then-usual tizzy of excitement by the British Press in what now seems like a halcyon time; 1964 produced a bumper crop of royal babies, beginning with James Ogilvy on Leap Year Day and concluding with Lady Helen Taylor at the end of April and Lady Sarah Chatto (the daughter of Princess Margaret) three days later on May Day.

The fourth child and third son of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, after the age of seven Prince Edward was schooled outside the Palace, at Gibbs School in Kensington; he later attended Heatherdown Preparatory School near Ascot and the dreaded Gordonstoun School in Scotland. After a gap year at Collegiate School in Wanganui, New Zealand, he went to Jesus College at Cambridge, where he became only the fourth member of the Royal Family to earn a university degree.

Enlisted in the Royal Marines in 1987, he later dropped out (in what would be the first major scandal of his life) when it became obvious that he was ill-suited to military life. Instead he joined Andrew Lloyd Webber's Really Useful Theatre Company, during which time he dated singer-actress Ruthie Henshall.

Further scandal dogged him in his efforts to lead a normal (ie: non-royal) life, which given the improbability of such a thing should have seemed inevitable, even then; he produced the well-televised fiasco It's a Royal Knockout and breached a media blackout when his company was caught filming his nephew Prince William at St. Andrew's University. Given unprecedented access to the archives at Windsor Castle he attempted to produce a series of documentaries (mainly on the Royal Families of Europe) - that is, until he was accused of using his royal connections unfairly.

Following his marriage to Sophie Rhys-Jones in June 1999 at St. George's Chapel, Windsor he was created Earl of Wessex, and it was then announced that he would one day become the next Duke of Edinburgh* following that title's extinction upon the death of the present bearer; as such, he has been working extensively with the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme in recent years. After one further scandal involving a News of the World reporter named Mazher Mahmood disguised as an Arab sheik and an obvious incident of entrapment, the Earl and Countess of Wessex joined public life as full-time royals.

Currently residing at Bagshot Park, His Royal Highness is the father of two children: Lady Louise Windsor (born in November 2003) and James, Viscount Severn (born in December 2007). Although neither child now bears the title of HRH, they are entitled to, and will one day have to decide whether or not they want it.

*Naturally, the title will not pass directly to the Earl of Wessex but first lapse to the Crown before theoretically being re-granted.
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Pop History Moment: Bell Makes An Important Call

2011-03-10T00:10:00.000-08:00

On this day in 1876 Alexander Graham Bell made the first successful telephone call by saying 'Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.'

Bell's innovation - the first successful use of a machine apparently designed by Elisha Gray, who was given no credit in Bell's application for U.S. Patent 174,465 - would later lead to some controversy as to whether Bell 'stole' Gray's patent or not, whether their discoveries had been simultaneous and independent of each other, or indeed which of them got to the patent office first. Surely the fact that Bell later became hugely rich as a result of the telephone company (and ensuing monopoly) he founded only added fuel to the fire, as there's nothing like a spot of greed to make a scandal really hum.

Nevertheless, it was Bell who made the first telephone call, clearing the way for every ninny on the bus to chatter away inanely about the intimate details of their lives as if no one around them can hear; which, indeed, they cannot - provided the volume on their iPod is up high enough.
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"Buffalo Stance" by Neneh Cherry

2011-03-10T00:05:00.000-08:00

Birthday wishes go out today to Neneh Cherry, whose 1988 hit Buffalo Stance was not only the highlight of her debut album Raw Like Sushi but among the first portents of a sound which would come to dominate the musical landscape of the next twenty years: hip-hop. That the song should have been so successful is even more amazing when considering that it had first been the B-side of a song recorded in 1986 by the obscure Stock Aitken Waterman-produced pop band Morgan-McVey, one half of which was Cameron McVey - who is, coincidentally*, Neneh Cherry's husband.

*Or not, depending entirely upon how cynical you are...
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POPnews - March 10th

2011-03-10T00:01:00.000-08:00

[Today the Chinese occupiers of Tibet operate Lhasa's Potala Palace as a museum; until the flight into exile of the 14th Dalai Lama on this day in 1959 it served as his official residence. Begun by the 5th Dalai Lama, Lozang Gyatso, in 1645, it wouldn't be finished in 1694, 12 years after his death; it was the 6th Dalai Lama, Tsangyang Gyatso, who was first to use it, which he did as a winter palace. Slightly damaged in the uprising of 1959, it was spared total destruction during the Cultural Revolution of 1966 by Zhou Enlai although as many 100,000 of its literary and artistic treasures were destroyed.]

1629 - England's King Charles I dissolved Parliament for the fourth and final time - which was nonetheless his Royal Prerogative - thereby beginning the Eleven Years Tyranny, during which era the King ruled without the advice of the 'people'.

1762 - French Huguenot Jean Calas, who had been wrongly convicted of killing his son Marc-Antoine, died after being tortured on the Catherine wheel; the event inspired Voltaire to begin a campaign for religious tolerance and legal reform, which would later lead to Calas' posthumous exoneration in March 1765, when it became clear the younger Calas had committed suicide and not been murdered.

1804 - A ceremony was conducted in St. Louis to formalize the Louisiana Purchase, thereby officially transferring ownership of the Louisiana Territory from France to the United States.

1814 - Napoleon was defeated by the Prussian forces of Blücher at the Battle of Laon.

1831 - The French Foreign Legion was established by King Louis-Philippe to support his war in Algeria.

1846 - Prince Osahito, fourth son of deceased Emperor Ninko of Japan, became Emperor Kōmei.

1848 - The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo was ratified by the US Senate, thus ending the Mexican-American War.

1864 - The Red River Campaign began as Union troops under Major-General Nathaniel P. Banks reached Alexandria, Louisiana; there they would clash with a Confederate army led by Major-General Richard Taylor until May, with the aim of cutting off supply lines from Texas.

1893 - Côte d'Ivoire became a French colony.

1906 - The Courrières mine disaster - Europe's worst ever - killed 1099 miners in Northern France's Pas-de-Calais département.

1922 - Mahatma Gandhi was arrested in India; he was later tried for sedition and sentenced to six years in prison, although he would be released after only two years in February 1924 following an operation for appendicitis.

1945 - American forces conducted the firebombing of Tokyo; the resulting firestorm killed more than 100,000 people, mostly civilians.

1948 - The Indian Union Muslim League was founded by remnants of the old Muslim League.

1952 - Fulgencio Batista led a successful coup in Cuba.

1959 - An unsuccessful uprising against ten years of unlawful Chinese occupation in Lhasa - a pivotal moment in the Tibetan resistance movement - resulted in the massacre of thousands of Tibetans by occupying soldiers and the exile of the 14th Dalai Lama to the Indian city of Dharamsala. China continues its illegal occupation of Tibet to this day.

1969 - James Earl Ray pleaded guilty to assassinating Martin Luther King Jr; he recanted his guilty plea three days later, but pleaded guilty anyway and was sentenced to 99 years in prison for the crime, even though in later years the King family lobbied for his release.

1977 - Astronomers discovered rings around Uranus, which the planet's discoverer William Herschel first claimed to have seen in 1798; the same day those same scientists rediscovered how those jokes never gets old.

1990 - Prosper Avril was ousted 18 months after seizing power in Haiti following the departure of Jean-Claude Duvalier; he was succeeded by Herard Abraham.

2006 - The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter arrived, appropriately enough, at Mars.
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Pop History Moment: The Birth of Penny Currie

2011-03-09T00:30:00.000-08:00

On this day in 1948 one of the most important figures in modern pop culture - my mum! - was born. Now, I can already hear you asking: what role exactly does your mother (whom I've never even heard of until just now) play in pop culture? Well, she gave birth to me, your Blogmaster of Ceremonies, for one...

Also, she early on instilled in me a deep sense of kitsch, for which I am eternally grateful. Had she been a tasteful minimalist there's very little chance this blog would have come about, as I'd be far too busy now standing around and smugly admiring my surfaces to write it. As it is, she (like me) is an exuberant maximalist, and therefore as seemingly invigorated by clutter as I must be.

I have no doubt that my acute interest in everything arose from our early trips to the library; while she was signing out Harlequins by the dozen she always knew where to find me - busily memorizing the encyclopedia. When she struggled as a single mother to keep body and soul together (even while occasionally on welfare) I never once felt that myself; usually I was too busy preparing my nightly skit based on the 6 O'Clock News, which would be enacted for her enlightertainment every evening promptly at 6:31.

Still, the greatest gift anyone can give is unconditional love, which is the one thing I have never lacked, no matter how little money was around; as cluttered as our lives are there's always been room for me in both her heart and her home, which remains to this day the only thing I know for certain.

Which is not to say we haven't tested each other over the years... I know it may be hard for some of you to believe, but I'm actually a monster in person, and she's been living in Kelowna so long she can occasionally make Phyllis Schlafly sound like a liberal which, to someone who makes Nancy Pelosi sound like Phyllis Schlafly, can be a trial for each of us to deal with at times.

Yet our unconditional love for each other (not to mention the occasional brisk bit of shopping) soon makes everything alright.
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"The Look of Love" by ABC

2011-03-09T00:25:00.000-08:00

Birthday wishes go out today to Martin Fry, the noted clotheshorse and vocalist who was lead singer of the 80s pop band ABC; the band scored a major hit in 1982 with The Look of Love (Part One), from their debut album The Lexicon of Love. All told there were four different versions of the song on the album, including an instrumental one, thus the subtitle.

Previously, ABC had released Poison Arrow; their subsequent singles would include All of My Heart, (How to Be a) Millionaire, and Be Near Me. Still active, Martin Fry is the only remaining original member of ABC.
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