POPnews - November 6th

[The Hawker Hurricane was as instrumental in winning
the Battle of Britain as the brave flyboys who flew them.]
1528 - Shipwrecked Spanish conquistador Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca became the first known European to set foot in Texas, apparently.

1789 - Pope Pius VI appointed Father John Carroll as the first Roman Catholic bishop in the United States, to serve the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

1844 - The Dominican Republic adopted its first constitution.

1860 - Abraham Lincoln was elected 16th US President over Southern Democrat John C. Breckinridge, Constitutional Unionist John Bell, and Northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas.

1861 - Jefferson Davis was elected President of the Confederate States of America.

1865 - CSS Shenandoah, commanded by the Confederate Navy's Captain James Waddell, became the last combat unit of the American Civil War to surrender - to the HMS Donegal's Captain James Aylmer Dorset Paynter of Britain's Royal Navy - after circumnavigating the globe on a voyage during which it sank or captured 37 vessels; the Shenandoah fired the last shots of the war off the Aleutian Islands.

1869 - Rutgers College defeated Princeton University (then known as the College of New Jersey) 6-4 at the first official intercollegiate American football game, held in New Brunswick, New Jersey.

1888 - Benjamin Harrison was elected 23rd US President over Democratic incumbent Grover Cleveland.

1900 - William McKinley was elected to a second term as US President over Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

1928 - Herbert Hoover was elected 31st US President over Democrat Al Smith.

1935 - The first flight of the Hawker Hurricane occurred at Brooklands, during which the prototype fighter plane was flown by P.W.S. 'George' Bulman.

1942 - Carlson's Patrol - undertaken by the 2nd Marine Raider Battalion under the command of Evans Carlson during the Guadalcanal Campaign - began; lasting until December 4th, the patrol would prevent troops of the Imperial Japanese Army under Toshinari Shōji from escaping the island, inflicting losses of around 500 while sustaining only 16 fatalities.

1947 - Meet The Press - which had begun on radio on the Mutual Broadcasting System in 1945 - made its television debut, before settling into a weekly schedule by September 12th of the following year. The show's first moderator was Martha Rountree, who had created the show's format along with Lawrence E. Spivak.

1956 - Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected to a second term as US President over Democrat Adlai Stevenson.

1975 - The Green March began when as many as 350,000 unarmed Moroccans converged on the southern city of Tarfaya and waited for a signal from King Hassan II to cross into Western Sahara with the aim of putting pressure on Spain to hand over the province to Morocco; the terms of the Madrid Accords, which were signed by Spain, Morocco, and Mauritania, did not solve the impasse over Spanish Sahara, and the region remains in political limbo.

1977 - The Kelly Barnes Dam - located above Toccoa Falls Bible College near Toccoa, Georgia - failed, killing 39.

1984 - Ronald Reagan was elected to a second term as US President over Democrat Walter Mondale, who had previously served as Vice President under Jimmy Carter.

1999 - Australians voted to retain Elizabeth II as Queen of Australia in a referendum, although there remains some debate as to whether or not Her Majesty or Her Majesty's Governor-General is currently head of state there.

2004 - An express train collided with a stationary car near the English village of Ufton Nervet, killing 7 and injuring 150.
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"Bridge Over Troubled Water" by Simon & Garfunkel

The title track from Simon and Garfunkel's final album Bridge over Troubled Water has long been renowned for its healing properties; the combination of kind words and angelic vocals have assuaged untold broken hearts and frazzled nerves in the past...

The Pop Culture Institute is proud to post this song today as a public service both in celebration of the birth of its vocalist Art Garfunkel (for once, without the harmonies of Paul Simon) and in the hopes that it can provide some measure of healing from the numerous wounds of those eight terrible years.

The clip is taken from the duo's highly popular Concert in Central Park, held in September 1981.
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Pop History Moment: The Gunpowder Plot

The most serious terrorist threat in British history wasn't last month or even last year, nor was it even remotely Islamic in nature; in fact, it was over 400 years ago - and it was a band of Roman Catholics, fine Christians all, who were responsible for plotting mass murder most heinous...

On this day in 1605 a certain Justice of the Peace named Thomas Knyvet discovered Guy Fawkes in the undercroft of the Houses of Parliament among 36 barrels of gunpowder, kindling, and touchpaper. Although he said his name was 'John Johnson' when he was captured, Fawkes didn't try to deny what he was doing; the point of the Plot was to kill the King and Queen along with most of the Protestant aristocracy at the State Opening of Parliament, then install the nine-year-old Princess Elizabeth on the throne as a Catholic monarch.

Typically, the thwarted plot unleashed a wave of hatred directed at all Catholics in Britain, who were persecuted for more than 200 years as a result; the hatred of Papists was then imported to the American colonies, where it lasted a hundred and fifty years longer still. Although England had been on the threshold of Catholic Emancipation the day before it, the day after the Gunpowder Plot such an action had become unthinkable. The terrorists had, in true terrorist tradition, succeeded brilliantly in undermining their own cause even as they failed to undermine Parliament in any way.

The plot itself had been masterminded by Robert Catesby, who was by then no stranger to treason; four years earlier he had conspired with the Earl of Essex to assassinate Elizabeth I, but because his role in that matter was minor he was merely deprived of his property and not his head as was Essex. Immediately after the arrest of Guy Fawkes, Catesby (along with a few of his fellow plotters) fled to Holbeach House near Kingswinford in Staffordshire, where he died two weeks later during a fracas with arresting officers under Richard Walsh, the sheriff of Worcester.

Other plotters included Thomas Winter (also spelled Wintour), Robert Winter, Christopher Wright, Thomas Percy (also spelled Percye), John Wright, Ambrose Rokewood, Robert Keyes, Sir Everard Digby, Francis Tresham, Father Henry Garnet (the group's confessor), and Catesby's servant, Thomas Bates; for his part, Fawkes was the demolitions expert, having had much experience in the use of explosives when he served as a mercenary in the army of Archduke Albert of Austria, during the Dutch Revolt.

Had the plot been successful it would have not only destroyed the Palace of Westminster but the equally priceless Westminster Abbey as well, and would have blown out every window in a 1 km radius; as it is, the old palace stood for another couple of centuries, when in October 1834 it was destroyed by an accidental fire.

Amazingly, Fawkes was rated #30 on a 2002 list of the 100 Greatest Britons, which shouldn't surprise me since Oliver Cromwell came 10th, but it does dismay me nonetheless; I wonder if, 400 years from now, Britons will feel the same about Abu Hamza al-Masri or even Osama bin Laden...
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Good Riddance: The Death of Robert Maxwell

Normally, of course, I love a rags-to-riches story; it gives me something compelling to think about as I'm sitting here in this pile of rags. Whenever the ascent of a person from poverty to wealth and fame involves perseverance, creativity, and even good fortune, it gives me at least a reason to cheer. There is, however, a dark side to the myth of a self-made man...

Of course, ambition in and of itself is not so bad; in the case of Robert Maxwell (whose capacity for rapacity is well-documented), when ambition comes with a side-order of ruthlessness and cruelty, that's not so good. Perhaps his years in Westminster (as a Labour Party MP for Buckingham of all things, from 1964-70) rendered him physically incapable of telling the truth; no matter, as scandal dogged him throughout his endeavours in the book trade he made the leap into newspapers, purchasing the UK's Daily Mirror, where having to tell the truth would be less of a bugbear. Even his attacks on Rupert Murdoch - which normally would be enough to make me admire anyone, even Hitler - do nothing to assuage the smarminess and corruption of the man in my eyes.

In this instance I am with Ian Hislop (although I'm sure I'd hate to know what he'd think of me and my little enterprise), TV personality, editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, and the only person in British media at the time with the stones to take him on; as such, the magazine was successfully sued by Maxwell several times. One of those times Private Eye said that Maxwell looked like a criminal, for which he was awarded a substantial sum; no word yet on what happened when it turned out the criminal actually was a criminal. Not that it would have mattered, as by the time it was revealed that the criminal in question had engaged in stock manipulation schemes, diverted pension funds into his own pocket, and generally mucked about in the favourite pastimes of the kleptocracy (a la Lord Black, another swell guy) he was dead.

The end came on this day in 1991, at the age of 68; Maxwell is presumed to have fallen overboard from his luxury yacht, Lady Ghislaine, while cruising off the Canary Islands. Whether you think his death was an accident, suicide, or murder probably says as much about you as how you feel about him. Whatever fate befell him, he was lauded by the mucky-mucks and given a veritable state funeral in Israel, even though rumours that he was killed after trying to blackmail Mossad still linger; as do allegations that at the time of his death Germany had been investigating him for his role in possible war crimes committed there in 1945.

Perhaps, then, it's not so far-fetched an idea that this was one self-made man who could also have merely self-destructed...
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"Mrs. Brown, You've Got A Lovely Daughter" by Herman's Hermits

Birthday wishes go out today to Peter Noone, the face and voice of British Invasion stalwarts Herman's Hermits, whose songs weren't the hits they might have been, considering their enduring popularity to this day...

One such tune is Mrs. Brown, You've Got a Lovely Daughter which, like the video clip above, hails from 1965; it, along with another of the band's signature numbers, I'm Henry VIII, I Am, were never even released as singles in the UK even though both would end up topping the Billboard Hot 100 chart in the US.
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In Memoriam: Vivien Leigh

For all that actors decry being type-cast, there may be something to it; in Vivien Leigh's case, it gave her a deep well from which to draw... Whether playing Ophelia in Hamlet on the West End stage or Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) - which was neither her first role nor even her first notable role but nonetheless the one that made her a star - Vivien Leigh's chillingly honest portrayal of moody women made her so much more than just a pretty face, which otherwise might have been her fate.

Even when cast against type - as, say, a prostitute in Waterloo Bridge (1940), or a higher class of prostitute now called a socialite, Emma Hamilton in That Hamilton Woman (1941) - she brought hidden depths to these roles that the general public could scarcely fathom. Those who worked with her, though... They knew. They knew that she could be happy and smiling one moment and then turn on a dime into a shrieking harpy. Temperament, they called it in those days; today we call it bipolar disorder.

Even though manic-depression occasionally affected her career, she continued to act through the Fifties and Sixties, in such classic films as A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone (1961) and the oft-overlooked classic Ship of Fools (1965); in all three (but as Blanche DuBois in Streetcar especially) she brought equal parts fury and frailty to her portrayals which make them simultaneously difficult to watch and impossible to ignore.

In another time, our own for instance, she could have served as a great role model for people who are similarly afflicted; her second husband, Laurence Olivier, gave her credit for how hard she struggled to control and conceal her condition. As it was, the stigma attached to mental illness would have surely ended her career before it had begun, had she not had the good fortune to be born one of the most beautiful women who ever lived. The standard wisdom is that her looks hampered her career, while it is my opinion that they allowed her any career she did have at all, possibly even sparing her a lobotomy and life in an institution.

Born on this day in 1913, Leigh died of tuberculosis in July 1967, aged only 53.
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Happy Birthday Sam Rockwell

This is not an age in which quirky actors do well, which makes the success of Sam Rockwell all the more satisfying; his choices are daring and varied, his portrayals go further than they need to, and his fans - myself, obviously, among them - reap the reward.

Rockwell's films, which veer wildly between indie and studio fare, include Galaxy Quest (1999), The Green Mile (1999), Charlie's Angels (2000), and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005); all four currently reside in the collection of the Pop Culture Institute.

In Charlie's Angels he plays a seemingly meek dot-com industrialist who morphs into a venal LA douchebag so convincingly I found myself in the theatre scratching my head as to why they'd cast two different actors to play the same role; in Galaxy Quest he turns the role of the thankless ensign who gets killed early on in the episode into a star turn; in The Green Mile he plays a racist psychotic named 'Wild Bill' Wharton, who watches an innocent man preparing to die for a heinous crime Wharton committed; and in Hitchhiker he plays one of the greatest characters of modern times, Zaphod Beeblebrox, with the exact quantities of aplomb and arrogance necessary.

Expect more of the same from Sam Rockwell in the years to come; which means, of course, not knowing what to expect except that it'll be different from anything else he's ever done...
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"Cuts Like A Knife" by Bryan Adams

Seen here rocking out on stage at Live Aid in July 1985, it's birthday boy Bryan Adams at just about the peak of his cool; shortly thereafter his work would devolve into moribund balladry, culminating with a spot of blah intended to clarify the matter of his sexuality, courtesy of a single with a laughably rhetorical title, Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman?. In recent years, only Cloud Number Nine and When You're Gone have come close to re-capturing the sound he'd once had.

Cuts Like a Knife was the title track to Adams' 1983 third album, which also spawned the monster hit power ballads Straight from the Heart and This Time; while he'd already had a modicum of success in Canada with his first two albums - 1980's Bryan Adams and You Want It You Got It from 1981 - both the Cuts Like a Knife album and its successor Reckless elevated Adams into the ranks of international superstardom.
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POPnews - November 5th

[Sometime between 1892 and 1896 editorial cartoonist Charles Lewis Bartholomew rendered this amusing image pertaining to the Election of 1872, in which suffragist Susan B. Anthony voted for Ulysses S. Grant, despite his protestations against women being allowed that very right; she's seen here chasing him while Uncle Sam laughs in the background. For her temerity, Anthony was arrested two weeks later; little more than a hundred years later, she could have paid the fine she eventually got with money bearing her image.]

1530 - St. Felix's Flood destroyed the Dutch city of Reimerswaal; the oft-flooded city was completely abandoned by 1632, and today nothing but the name remains, preserved as the name of a municipality in that country's province of Zeeland.

1605 - A plot led by Robert Catesby to blow up the English Houses of Parliament was thwarted when Sir Thomas Knyvet, a justice of the peace, found Guy Fawkes amid barrels of gunpowder in a cellar beneath the Palace of Westminster; the event is still celebrated in England and the more English parts of the Commonwealth (such as Newfoundland) as Bonfire Night.

1688 - The so-called Glorious Revolution began when William of Orange landed at Brixham, in Devon; the invasion had been ready to go sooner, but was delayed to coincide with the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot, giving England's anti-Catholic movement the necessary symbolism to justify its sectarian warmongering.

1768 - The Treaty of Fort Stanwix - the purpose of which was to adjust the boundaries between Indian lands and white settlements set forth in the Thirteen Colonies' Proclamation of 1763 - was signed by Sir William Johnson and representatives of the Iroquois Six Nations (the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora) at Fort Stanwix in Upstate New York .

1831 - Nat Turner, leader of an abortive-yet-bloody slave rebellion the previous August, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death.

1872 - Ulysses S. Grant was elected to a second term over Democrat Horace Greeley*; the Equal Rights Party had also nominated Victoria Woodhull to the presidency with former slave Frederick Douglass as her running mate. The first election held after the foundation of the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association (both in 1869) it was during this election that suffragist Susan B. Anthony, in defiance of the law, voted for the first time. She was later fined $100 for her effrontery, although her uppity-ness remains priceless...

*Who died on November 29th, less than a month after the election.

1895 - George B. Selden was granted the first US patent - US patent 549160 - for an automobile; Selden's hideously polluting invention would later most famously bring an end to human life on the planet, and in the meantime cause untold suffering and destruction.

1912 - Woodrow Wilson was elected 28th US President, defeating Republican incumbent William Howard Taft and Progressive former Republican President Theodore Roosevelt.

1913 - King Otto of Bavaria was deposed by his cousin, Prince Regent Ludwig, who assumed the title Ludwig III.

1916 - The Everett Massacre took place as mis-communication led to a shoot-out between IWW organizers and local police in Washington state, killing as many as 12 and wounding more than 20.

1925 - British secret agent Sidney Reilly - considered to be among Ian Fleming's inspirations for the super spy James Bond - was executed by the OGPU, the secret police of the Soviet Union.

1940 - Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented third term as US President over Republican Wendell Willkie.

1942 - The Second Battle of El Alamein was won by an Allied force under Britain's Harold Alexander and Bernard Montgomery at El Alamein, in Egypt; Axis commanders Ettore Bastico of Italy and Erwin Rommel of Nazi Germany escaped the hostilities unscathed, while Rommel's countryman Georg Stumme perished in the fighting.

1967 - The Hither Green rail crash killed 49 people in the United Kingdom; among the survivors was Robin Gibb of the Bee Gees.

1968 - Richard M. Nixon was elected 37th US President over Democrat Hubert Humphrey and Independent George Wallace.

1987 - Govan Mbeki was released from custody at Robben Island after serving 24 years of a life sentence for terrorism and treason; one day his son, Thabo Mbeki, would follow his fellow prisoner, Nelson Mandela, into the presidency of South Africa.

1990 - Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the far-right Kach movement, was assassinated after a speech at a New York City Marriott hotel; his suspected killer El Sayyid Nosair was later acquitted of murder but convicted on gun possession charges. Later he and Shaikh Omar Abdel Rahman would receive life sentences for the 1993 World Trade Center bombing; their defense in that instance was funded by Osama bin Laden. In December 2000, Kahane's son and daughter-in-law would also be assassinated, but their five daughters were somehow spared in the same attack.

1995 - André Dallaire made a (thankfully) lacklustre attempt to assassinate Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien at the Prime Minister's official residence, 24 Sussex Drive, but was thwarted when the PM's quick-thinking wife Aline encountered Dallaire and rushed back into the bedroom, locking the door behind her. While waiting for the RCMP detail on duty to get their shit together - it took them as long as seven minutes to respond - one or the other of the Chrétiens is said to have been armed with a particularly pointy bit of Inuit sculpture, just in case...

1996 - Bill Clinton was elected to a second term as US President over Republican Bob Dole.
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Happy Birthday Kathy Griffin

The all-too-meagre birthday wishes of this rinky-dink blog can't mean a hill of beans to D-List superstar Kathy Griffin, but that's not going to stop me from offering them...

I never would have thought - all those years ago when I was glued to the television watching Suddenly Susan in order to perv on Nestor Carbonell - that a decade later I would instead be hanging on every word the red-headed office loudmouth had on offer, not least of which appear on Bravo's Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List.

Here Kathy Griffin appears on one of the last talk shows that'll still have her - The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson - in order to show off her growing family of Emmy Awards, dish the dirt, and generally be fabulous!
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"Anthem for Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
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Remembering... Wilfred Owen

The idea that war is somehow glamourous is not an opinion common among fighting men, no matter what the politicians who wage it at their expense would have us think; for striking a killing blow at the heart of such a misguided notion we have men like Wilfred Owen to thank.

In verses like Anthem for Doomed Youth, Owen decries the horrors of modern warfare in no uncertain terms. Thematically daring, Owen's works are also structurally innovative; although only five of his poems were published during his lifetime, he is now generally thought of as one of the foremost poets of the era. To a large extent, Owen used poetry to help him recover from the worst effects of war which, in addition to its value in disabusing society at large of the nationalistic and patriotic brainwashing behind every bullet and bomb, makes his a very great talent indeed.

Born in March 1893, and enlisting in October 1915, by January 1917 he was back in England, suffering from shell-shock; when his friend and hero Siegfried Sassoon returned from the Front with a head injury, Owen decided it was his duty to take his place, so as to continue cataloguing the inhumanity of humanity's oldest sport at close range.

Alas, he got a little too close; Wilfred Owen was killed in action on this day in 1918, at the crossing of the Sambre-Oise Canal - one of the last Allied victories of World War I - just a week before the Armistice was signed. He was 25. As the bells of peace were ringing, his parents were receiving the telegram that their elder son wouldn't be coming home; he is buried in the communal cemetery at Ors, in France, near where he fell.

After Owen's death his brother and literary executor Harold Owen tried to eradicate all evidence of Wilfred Owen's homosexuality, failing miserably as this post attests; in doing so, Harold Owen gave aid and comfort to the myth that a man who loves men cannot be noble. It is a testament to Wilfred Owen's friends Robbie Ross, Osbert Sitwell, and C. K. Scott-Moncrieff (not to mention Siegfried Sassoon himself) that, even half a century before there was a community to do so, there was a culture that would nurture his whole memory.
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In Memoriam: Will Rogers

Maybe it's just my natural cynicism talking, but there's something about the homespun aw-shucks folksiness of Will Rogers that's never sat right with me; he is most famous for saying 'I never met a man I didn't like', yet every time I hear it my bullshit-detector starts a-quiverin' somethin' fierce. I mean, I am well into men, and I've met literally thousands of them I fairly despise...

Of course, he is a product of a different time and place than I am, which is the same Will Rogers-esque homily I often use to explain away any incongruities I might encounter, wherever whenever and in whomever I might encounter them.

Born on this day in 1879, Oklahoma's favourite son never let a lack of interest in book-learning slow him down; he left the Dog Iron Ranch where he was born (near present-day Oologah, Oklahoma) in 1901, setting out for Argentina, where he planned to be a gaucho. When that plan fell through, he headed to South Africa, where he broke horses for the British until the end of the Boer War.

Once his services were no longer needed, he hired himself out to a series of circuses - visiting Australia in the process. By the time he returned Stateside a few years later he was already a seasoned performer, doing tricks with a lariat while discussing the news of the day in a gentle, conversational tone and with a commonsensical insight which was in every way wiser than (and therefore preferable to) the more overtly intellectual (and therefore somewhat off-putting) approach favoured by the other pundits of that era.

By 1915, Rogers was appearing in Florenz Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic, a nightly revue at a cabaret built on the top floor of the fabled New Amsterdam Theatre in the heart of Times Square, which was then the epicentre of American show business; contacts he made there quickly became fans, and those fans in high places were to serve him very well indeed as he made his way from stage to screen and then to radio.

Friend to Kings and cowboys, Presidents and postmen alike, when Rogers died in August 1935 at the outset of a round-the-world flight with his friend Wiley Post, it was said to be the greatest single outpouring of public grief America had seen since the death of Lincoln; to this day tributes to him abound throughout Oklahoma and beyond. He's been revived on Broadway (portrayed by Keith Carradine) and lives on through the magic of DVD, even within the collection of the Pop Culture Institute, which is curated by none other than cynical old me.
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POPnews - November 4th

[Anyone who thinks former California governor Ronald Reagan's landslide victory over incumbent Democratic president Jimmy Carter on this day in 1980 is too much Republican red for their liking should definitely not click on the image and see the mandate he was given upon his 1984 re-election over Carter's former Vice President Walter Mondale.]
1501 - Catherine of Aragon met Arthur Tudor - to whom she'd been betrothed and married by proxy for years - at the Hampshire village of Dogmersfield; they were married at St. Paul's Cathedral ten days later, and following Arthur's death in April 1502 she married his younger brother, who would grow up to become Henry VIII.

1677 - The woman who would later become England's Queen Mary II married William, Prince of Orange; during their brief co-reign (less than six years) they would be known as William and Mary, and after her death in 1694 he would reign alone as William III.

1737 - The Teatro di San Carlo was inaugurated; built by Giovanni Antonio Medrano and Angelo Carasale for Charles III of Naples it was the largest opera house in its day, seating 3,300, and today it is the oldest still-active opera house in Europe.

1856 - James Buchanan was elected 15th US President over Republican John C. Frémont and former Whig president Millard Fillmore of the Know-Nothing Party.

1861 - The University of Washington opened in Seattle as the Territorial University, just a decade after the arrival of the first white settlers to the area.

1884 - Grover Cleveland was elected 22nd US President over Republican James G. Blaine.

1918 - The German Revolution began when 40,000 sailors took over the port in Kiel, and ended just days later with the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II.

1921 - Japanese Prime Minister Hara Takashi was assassinated in Tokyo.

1922 - British archaeologist Howard Carter and his men found the entrance to the tomb of King Tutankhamun in Egypt's Valley of the Kings following a fifteen year search, although he would wait three weeks for his patron, Lord Carnarvon, to arrive before opening it.

1924 - Calvin Coolidge was elected to a second term as US President over Democrat John W. Davis and Progressive Robert M. La Follette, Sr.. Also in that election, both Nellie Tayloe Ross of Wyoming and Miriam 'Ma' Ferguson of Texas were elected governor of their states; since Ross was inaugurated 16 days before Ferguson, though, she wins the title of the first female governor in US history.

1928 - Arnold Rothstein, New York City's most notorious gambler, died of injuries he received the previous day when he was shot while playing poker at the Park Central Hotel.

1952 - Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected 34th US President over Democrat Adlai Stevenson.

1960 - Filming wrapped on the troubled production of The Misfits - written by Arthur Miller and directed by John Huston - starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable, Montgomery Clift, Eli Wallach, and Thelma Ritter. It would be the last film for Monroe and Gable.

1970 - 'Genie', a 13-year-old feral child whose actual name is Susan Wiley, was seized by the authorities in Temple City, California, having been locked in a bedroom for most of her life.

1979 - The Iran hostage crisis began when Iranian radicals, mostly students, invaded the US embassy in Tehran and took 90 hostages (53 of whom were American).

1980 - Ronald Reagan was elected 40th US President in a landslide over Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, independent John B. Anderson, and Libertarian Ed Clark.

1993 - Jean Chrétien took office as Prime Minister of Canada.

1995 - Israel's Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by Yigal Amir, an extreme right-wing Israeli opposed to Rabin's support for the Oslo Accords.

2008 - Barack Obama was elected 44th US President over Republican Senator John McCain.
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"To Sir, With Love" by Lulu

Before she was Edina Monsoon's only client she was a fresh-faced gamine with a taste for interracial (and intergenerational!) hanky-panky; in recent years, Lulu has endured failed marriages - first to a Bee Gee then to a hairdresser - and performances with Take That to become a bonafide fame survivor.

Happy Birthday Lulu!
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Roseanne, Bar None

When she first burst onto the scene in the late 1980s, courtesy of the era's comedy club boom, hers was a decidedly working class shtick; calling herself the 'domestic goddess' and dressed in schlumpy clothes, Roseanne Barr wowed the audience and host alike during her first appearance at The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson and almost overnight, it seems, she had hit the big time...

As sitcoms go Roseanne was unrepentantly working class, an ethos which was as evident in the wardrobe and set design as it was in the writing. The blend of family and workplace scenarios on the show was unprecedented, and served to highlight just how hard working class people - especially moms - struggle to balance the two. Plus, the first season of the show features occasional appearances by a young George Clooney - with a head of hair you could lose a hand in!

The show became as famous for its backstage politics and Barr's own tussles with the network as it was acclaimed for the quality of its writing and acting, especially by the likes of Laurie Metcalf and John Goodman; Barr's midseries marriage to Tom Arnold - while it served to amp up the tabloid headlines - eventually threatened to disrupt the success of the show.

After Roseanne had run its course, Barr tried her hand at a variety of other TV formats, including the potentially career-killing talk show; yet two years as host of The Roseanne Show only served to sharpen the lady's perspective. Always a magnet for controversy - who can forget the national anthem debacle? - it's inevitable that anyone that outspoken seemingly without shame will occasionally give offense; for my part, I can't wait to see who she's going to offend next, even if it might be me.

Born on this day in 1951, Roseanne Barr has lately made a return to the stand-up stage, in addition to recording music for kids and appearing as a panelist on the sorts of shows where opinions matter most - from The View to Real Time with Bill Maher.
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Remembering... Marie Rudisill

From my perspective, there's nothing better than a dirty talking old lady - that's comedy gold, right there... Half the fun is in the shocked audience reaction, as if a person could get to the age of 70, 80, or 90 and not have already heard and said everything. Hell, I'd got there by the age of 12; if you think anything I say is shocking now, wait 'til I'm 80 motherfucker.

Marie Rudisill, who passed away on this day in 2006 at the age of 95, was one such lady - a fearlessly outspoken woman with impeccable comedy timing, who began appearing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno in 2000; what I didn't know until I began researching this post, though, is that Marie Rudisill was Truman Capote's Aunt Tiny, about whom he frequently wrote - not much of it nice. I have to admit, that kinda blew my mind a little bit.

Rudisill wrote a book about life with her famous relative - which is how she came to be invited on The Tonight Show in the first place - entitled Fruitcake: Memories of Truman Capote & Sook; another book - The Southern Haunting of Truman Capote - followed. In all Rudisill published 8 books late in her life, including cookbooks and juvenile fiction.  Her memoirs, however, have been frequently rubbished by others who had been there...
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Happy Birthday Dylan Moran

Irish comedian Dylan Moran spent eight years in the comedy clubs of Dublin honing his conversational, absurdist mumblings before he hit the big time with the BBC's Black Books in 2000. In 1996, he was the youngest person to win the Perrier Comedy Award, the highest honour at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival; and now, as the highlight of his career, a coveted profile on the Pop Culture Institute.

(Okay, so that last one isn't true... But the rest is!) Breithlá Sona Duit Dylan Moran!
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POPnews - November 3rd

[A few hours after returning from her history-making space flight Laika died from stress and overheating, which fact wasn't made public for decades; while her presence in pop culture has long been felt, now not only does she appear in bas-relief on the Monument to the Conquerors of Space (built in 1964) at Russia's Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics, in November 1997 a plaque honouring Laika was unveiled at the Star City cosmodrome, and since April 2008 a statue of her has adorned the military facility near Moscow where she'd been prepared for her fatal adventure.]
1493 - Christopher Columbus first sighted the Caribbean island of Dominica.

1783 - John Austin, a highwayman, was the last person to be publicly hanged at London's Tyburn gallows.

1793 - French playwright, journalist and feminist Olympe de Gouges was guillotined during the Reign of Terror for criticizing the tyrannical regime of Maximilien Robespierre as well as daring to write Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

1817 - The Bank of Montreal, Canada's oldest chartered bank, opened in, of all places, Montreal.

1838 - The Times of India, the world's largest (in terms of circulation) English-language daily broadsheet, was founded as The Bombay Times and Journal of Commerce.

1868 - Ulysses S. Grant was elected 18th US President over Democrat Horatio Seymour.

1896 - William McKinley was elected 25th US President over Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

1908 - William Howard Taft was elected 27th US President over Democrat William Jennings Bryan.

1930 - The Detroit-Windsor Tunnel was opened to traffic.

1935 - Greece's King George II regained his throne following a plebiscite.

1936 - Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to a second term as US President over Republican Alf Landon.

1954 - Gojira - the first in the Godzilla series of films - was released in Japan.

1957 - The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 2; onboard was a dog named Laika, a 6 kg (13 lb) stray abducted from the streets of Moscow.

1964 - Lyndon Baines Johnson was elected 36th US President over Republican Barry Goldwater.

1970 - Salvador Allende was inaugurated as president of Chile.

1978 - Dominica gained its independence from the United Kingdom.

1979 - Five members of the Communist Workers Party - Sandi Smith, Dr. James Waller, Bill Sampson, Cesar Cause, and Dr. Michael Nathan - were shot dead and seven were wounded in 88 seconds by a group of Klansmen and neo-Nazis during a 'Death to the Klan' rally in what came to be known as the Greensboro massacre. One of the gravest miscarriages of justice in American history occurred without the presence of the police, who normally would have been present; of the 40 thugs involved only sixteen were arrested, only six of them were ever brought to trial and all were acquitted.

1986 - The Federated States of Micronesia gained its independence from the United States of America.

1992 - Bill Clinton was elected 42nd US President over Republican incumbent George H. W. Bush and third-party candidate Ross Perot.
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"Right Back Where We Started From" by Maxine Nightingale

Birthday wishes go out today to Maxine Nightingale, whose 1975 hit Right Back Where We Started From is oh-so emblematic of those heady times... Nightingale later had hits in 1977 with Love Hit Me and in 1979 with Lead Me On, while her success with this particular number continues unabated...

The song - written by written by Pierre Tubbs and J. Vincent Edwards - was featured prominently in Paul Newman's 1977 film Slap Shot, and has appeared in numerous other films over the years as well; it's also been covered by Sinitta, Marcia Hines, and Cleopatra.
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Pop History Moment: The Coronation of Haile Selassie

[This gorgeous gold medal was struck in 1955, to commemorate of the 25th anniversary of Haile Selassie's coronation.]
It's always been a matter of curiosity to me how exactly an Emperor of Ethiopia could become a potent religious symbol, first to the people of Jamaica, and thence to the Rastafari movement - which currently numbers some 600,000 people worldwide. Clearly there is much more than meets the eye in Haile Selassie I, for although he was an eminently civilized and cultured person there is nothing in him that would, outwardly at least, seem to inspire the fervent devotion to HIM*. Imagine: a cult of personality formed around a modest, devout figure!**

Selassie's reign actually began in the reign of his aunt, Empress Zewditu, when he was elevated to the rank of heir apparent and eventually came to serve as regent from 1916 onward. While serving as Crown Prince, Selassie (then known as Ras Tafari) continued the modernization begun under Menelik II, and certainly Selassie's rejection of colonial norms and support for pan-Africanism must have struck a chord with blacks everywhere, especially in the 1920s. Nevertheless, there were constant power struggles between aunt and nephew, culminating in a near-coup over Selassie's brokering of the Italo–Ethiopian Treaty of 1928.

Zewditu's death, in April 1930 - under mysterious and never satisfactorily explained circumstances - set the stage for Ethiopia's greatest moment of glory - the coronation of Haile Selassie and Empress Menen, on this day in 1930; held at the Cathedral of St. George in Addis Ababa, the splendid affair (with a rumoured price tag of $3 million) was attended by royalty and dignitaries from around the world.

The introduction of the country's first written constitution in July 1931, providing for a bicameral legislature, would give the Kingdom an all-too short-lived crack at modern democracy; the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and ensuing war of 1935-6 was a brief interruption (during which HIM lived in exile in the UK, at Bath's Fairfield House), but a brief coup in 1960 which installed his son Asfa Wossen as Emperor, the deposition of the Emperor in March 1974 following the Wollo Famine and the 1973 oil crisis, tenure of Communist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam, and a severe famine in the 1980s*** all served to undermine what Ethiopia could have become, as well as what it dreamt of becoming on that day.

*Rastafarians refer to Selassie by many names, including HIM, the acronym of His Imperial Majesty.
**Sarcasm! Selassie's Christ-like attributes are made abundantly clear on any number of Rastafarian websites.
***No doubt caused or at least exacerbated by central planning - which does. not. work.
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In Memoriam: Marie Antoinette

Born in Vienna on this day in 1755 and raised under the stern gaze of Empress Maria Theresa - one of the most formidable monarchs in European history - Marie Antoinette, as she came to be known, had a sheltered, regimented childhood; her only value, as must have been made clear to her again and again as a girl, was as a pawn in the royal marriage game.

And so it was. In 1767 she was formally betrothed to the Dauphin of France (later the hapless Louis XVI), and finally married by proxy in 1770 following three years of negotiations over dowries and the other fine points of royal marriage. Then the shy yet regal girl began her journey from the heart of Europe to Versailles - out of the frying pan, into the fire.

Court life at Schönbrunn and Hofburg was downright private compared to the same at her new French home, where anyone from peasant to noble might just wander into the palace seeking an audience. It was a highly political place (in both senses - namely, concerned with the politics of the country and the world yet riven with its own factions and issues) and Marie Antoinette was no politician. Had she been, she might have survived what was to come.

Originally much beloved by the people, especially for her patronage of the fine arts (especially music) - her former teacher, Christoph Willibald Gluck, went on to much fame - as history was to show it didn't take long for that mob to turn ugly, blaming all the failings of its French politicians on its most high-profile Austrian possession. Outrageously slandered throughout her lifetime and for many years afterward, it's taken centuries for the light of truth to be shone on the life and character of Marie Antoinette.

The quintessential revisionist text (and I use the word here in its most positive sense) is Lady Antonia Fraser's Marie Antoinette, The Journey (2001) which, with solid research and sterling insight, offers a glimpse into the life of a woman tragically caught in the crossfire of history.
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Happy Birthday Your Majesty

Erudite and multi-lingual, Queen Sofia of Spain (born on this day in 1938) has been a constant, serene presence at the side of her husband King Juan Carlos during turbulent times...

Born in Athens the eldest child of King Paul I of the Hellenes and his wife Queen Fredericka, Sofia's childhood witnessed the many travails which have beset that royal house from its inception in 1863 (the main one being, of course, that they are Danish and therefore merely squatters). A great deal of uncertainty shaped Her Majesty's childhood, including two bouts of exile, the first one during World War II and finally, for good, in 1964 (which, naturally, didn't affect her, except as a family matter).

Yet with the fortitude (or sense of entitlement) which is a family trait of the House of Schleswig Holstein Sonderburg Glücksburg, she ended up not doing too badly for herself. In 1954 she met and enchanted then-Prince Juan Carlos on a Mediterranean cruise, she competed in the 1960 Olympics (representing Greece in sailing), and in 1962 she married her Prince, who assumed the throne in 1975 after the death of Francisco Franco.

Since then she has concerned herself with charity, the rightful occupation of royalty. Through her Foundation she carries out numerous engagements, and is in particular interested in refugee relief, the treatment of drug addiction, fine arts, and micro-finance (working closely with Muhammad Yunus the Nobel laureate in the process).
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In Memoriam: James K. Polk

I must confess that I didn't know anything about the 11th US President until I heard the song about him by They Might Be Giants, from their 1996 album Factory Showroom. The song itself is a triumph of pop - not just music but culture - presenting history as it does in such an interesting and memorable way; hear it once, I guarantee you'll be humming it forever. A real earworm, as Mr. Barr would say.

Considered the best solution to an impasse in the Democratic Party, the former Speaker of the House and governor of Tennessee James K. Polk (born this day in 1795) was one of the first so-called dark horse candidates when he was nominated. Once elected, rather than merely serving as a caretaker president, he became one of the young nation's solidest leaders, fulfilling the Manifest Destiny inherent in President James Monroe's famous doctrine by completing most of the contiguous 48 states during his single term in office, save for the tiny Gadsden Purchase, which was finally bought for $10 million in 1853.

Neither the first slave-holding President nor the last, his position on slavery (especially involving the prevention of its expansion into new territories north and west of Missouri) made him equally unpopular among slavers, abolitionists, and compromisers alike; Polk favoured the extension of the Missouri Compromise over implementation of the Wilmot Proviso.

From the start Polk was resolved to serve only one term, and he set four clearly defined goals for his administration: the re-establishment of the Independent Treasury System, the reduction of tariffs, acquisition of some or all the Oregon boundary dispute, and the purchase of California and the Southwest from Mexico. It was also during his term that the Republic of Texas was admitted to the Union.

He did all of that in the time he allotted himself, kept to his word by shirking his incumbency, and then to seal the deal, died in June 1849, just three months after leaving office; the Presidency has been shown time and again to take its toll on those who assume it, but it took even more from the once-handsome Polk, who worked tirelessly to implement his agenda, even while reportedly suffering from cholera. At the time of his death he was only 53.

His home is now a museum, in Nashville.
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"Constant Craving" by k. d. lang

It was 1992 when the pride of Consort, Alberta, revealed that she was a lesbian; soon enough the same town that had once praised her shamed itself with hateful graffiti... The place that had already defamed itself once before - when lang came out as a vegetarian - did it all over again, only this time with homophobia. Footage of a billboard featuring her picture scrawled with the words 'Eat Beef Dyke' was shown all over the world.

k. d. lang was one of the first big stars to come out mid-career, and to do so involved a terrible risk; career suicide is what people (usually 'straight' record executives - if they can be considered people) called it. Small town and corporate bigots alike be damned; Ingénue became her biggest selling album to date, and Constant Craving was the biggest single on it. Suddenly the shame of Consort, Alberta, was the pride of the world.

It was the end of May; I remember because the issue of The Advocate in which she came out - now one of the most sacred relics in the collection of the Pop Culture Institute - was (and still is) dated June 3rd. I was then co-hosting a show at Dalhousie University's CKDU-Radio called The Word Is Out, when the producer - the inimitable Brenda Barnes (which, with a Halifax accent, is one hell of a name) - called me half off her nut with excitement to break the news.

I suggested that we should host a coming out party for k. d., she loved the idea, and so that's what we did; I quickly came up with a playlist of songs both old and new, wrote some thoughtful but humourous commentary to intersperse between them, and together we produced a half hour of college radio gold. Unwittingly - and more than a dozen years before the Pop Culture Institute was born - its style emerged, fully-formed and rarin' to go.

Not unlike k. d. lang herself, I might add, who emerged not so fully formed but still rarin' to go on this day in 1961.
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