Month: September 2010

Time Flies September 22

Arrivals:

1885 – Erich von Stroheim, an actor and director much honoured and wildly overrated (mostly by people who’ve never seen his work).  He was the persona of evil as a Hollywood German in films made during World War I and he was really good in Sunset Boulevard but that’s it — the rest is reputation.   He was however, the first actor to be referred to as “the man you love to hate” and the quote “In Hollywood…you’re only as good as your last picture.”

1903 – Joe Valachi, a cheap crook in an expensive suit.  It was Joe Valachi’s testimony before Congress in 1963 that confirmed what everybody already knew – that there was a socio-economic group in America called the Mafia and that they were mad, bad and dangerous to know.  He was lionized by Peter Maas in his book The Valachi Papers and nobody really knows why he suddenly decided to rat out all his old buddies.

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1957 – The cowboy world was turned upside down when Maverick premiered on ABC.  The show was full of Old West faux pas.  First of all, Bret Maverick (James Garner) showed up wearing a black hat, a good guy no-no in 1957.  A self-confessed coward, our hero was more apt to talk his way out of trouble than shoot it out with the bad guys.   Worse he didn’t even appear in every episode!  He was often replaced by his brother Bart (Jack Kelly).  Despite all this, the show was incredibly successful — even when it committed the ultimate frontier sin and permanently replaced Bret with his cousin Beau — Roger Moore (with a heavy English accent).

 1927 – One of the greatest controversies in 20th century sports is the famous Jack Dempsey – Gene Tunney “Long Count” Heavyweight Championship boxing match at Soldier Field in Chicago.  The fight was literally the event of the decade.   There was coast-to-coast radio coverage, newsreel cameras and gate receipts that totalled more than two million dollars.  There were even rumours of an Al Capone fix.  Long before instant replay and video review the controversy was fuelled around the world because it was against the law to transport boxing films across state lines.  So if you didn’t live in Illinois you never saw the fight.  Today, we don’t have that problem, so just go to YouTube and make up your own mind.

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Departures:

1989 – Irving Berlin, the greatest American songwriter of all time.  He started in Tin Pan Alley where he wrote “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” in 1911 – an instant success.  Over the next 4 decades he wrote more than 1,500 songs including “Blue Skies,” “What’ll I do,” “There’s no Business like Show Business,” “Happy Holidays,” “White Christmas” and “God Bless America,” and on and on.  No other songwriter even comes close.  Oddly enough Berlin could neither read nor write music.

2007 – Marcel Marceau, a world famous French entertainer who had one serious drawback: he was a mime.  All of his acting was done in mimodramas (that’s a real thing), like The Glass Cage, Walking against the Wind and Climbing a Rope.  He is still considered without peer in mimedom, and legend has it that when he died, mimes all over the world honoured him with a moment of noise.

Times Flies September 21

Author’s Day

Arrivals:

1866 – H. G. Wells, an author who, like Jules Verne, was one of the greatest science fiction writers of all time.  His novels and non-fiction (Anticipation [1901]) successfully predicted all kinds of things that we take for granted in the 21st century.  He also wrote two books, Floor Wars and Little Wars, which virtually invented that notorious time eater: recreational war gaming.

1947 – Stephen King, a contemporary novelist.  His books are so frightening that you don’t even have to read them.  Even if they just sit on your bookshelf in the basement, they scare the hell out of you.

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1897 – To all those people yippin’ and moanin’ when Christmas shows up at Costco and Wal-mart the day after Hallowe’en this appeared in the New York Sun newspaper on this date in 1897.  It was written by Virginia O’Hanlon and Francis Pharcellus Church.

“DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
“Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
“Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’
“Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?
VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
“…. Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. …”

Now don’t you feel foolish.  So just shut up and enjoy yourself.

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1937 – J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was published by George Allen & Unwin Ltd.  The original press run was 1,500 and the book contained original drawings by Tolkien who also designed the cover and the dust jacket.  In 2010, if you had a copy of that 1st Edition in mint condition, you would have enough money to buy the Shire and put all of the hobbits to work as slaves.

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19 BCE – Virgil, whose epic poem The Aeneid ranks with The Iliad and The Odyssey as the bases of all European literature.  Although he was once considered essential reading for any educated person, he is mostly ignored today.  He is not even remembered for his contribution to the clichés of our language – “Omnia vincit amor” or “Love conquers all” and “Facilis descensus Averni” (“the road to Hell is paved”).

1832 – Sir Walter Scott, an early 19th century, Scottish author, who re-invented chivalry with his novel Ivanhoe (1819) and invented Scottish Highland culture with Rob Roy (1817).  His works were so popular that by the time Queen Victoria showed up in 1837, his romantic version of history was widely accepted and set the standard for many of the attitudes of the Victorian Age.

Time Flies September 20

Arrivals:

1934 – Sophia Loren, undoubtedly the sexiest grandma on the planet.  She has been in the spotlight for six decades as an actress, a business woman, an author and a singer.  She was the first person to market her own perfume, Sophia.  She has won an Oscar for Best Actress, served a short prison term for tax evasion, written cookbooks and designed jewellery.  Her marriage to Carlo Ponti was annulled to avoid criminal charges of bigamy (they remarried after Ponti’s divorce was final) and her latest adventures include the movie Nine, a promise to do a strip tease if her favourite soccer team S.S.C. Napoli won the Serie B championship and an incredible (even with airbrushing) cheesecake photo appearance on the Pirelli Calendar 2007.

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1519 – Ferdinand Magellan, with five ships and 234 men, set sail from Spain, going west to the Spice Islands.   The voyage ended 3 years later when one ship and 18 crewmen returned to Spain from the east.  Magellan has been honoured ever since as the first man to circumnavigate the globe — except… he didn’t do it.  Magellan was killed in the Philippines, and it was his navigator, Juan Sebastian Elcano, who decided, after a year or so at sea, that Spain had to be closer if they just kept sailing west.  Obviously it worked, but Magellan got credit for it.  Rumour has it that, unfortunately, Elcano was a Basque, and the Spanish didn’t much like them — even in those days.

1973 – The Battle of the Sexes tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs took place at the Houston Astrodome in front of a huge (for the time) worldwide audience of 50 million.  Billie Jean had been goaded into the match by self-proclaimed tennis hustler 55-year-old Bobby Riggs, who’d been yipping about how bad women’s tennis was for years.  King, who was at the top of her game, beat the old bugger in straight sets, and he was never heard of again.

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1863 – Jakob Grimm, who, with his brother Wilhelm, wrote Kinder-und Hausmachen or Children’s and Household Tales in 1812.  They are the Brothers Grimm, and their book, in its many incarnations, is called Grimm’s Fairy Tales.  Oddly enough, the abundant references to sex and violence in the original had to be toned down for children in subsequent editions.   These days, even some of the toned-down versions are considered unsuitable for kids by the politically correct crowd, and many of the stories are out of favour.

1973 – Jim Croce, a spectacular musical talent.  In the two or so years before his death, he recorded three albums with a number of hit songs, including, “Bad Bad, Leroy Brown”, “Time in a Bottle”, “Operator” and “I Have a Name.”  He was killed, flying from Louisiana to Texas, when the pilot of the airplane had a heart attack during take-off.