THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― SEPTEMBER 30

September 30 is the 273rd day of the year (274th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 92 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Wednesday, Friday or Sunday (58 in 400 years each) than on Monday or Tuesday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Thursday or Saturday (56).

NATIONAL MUD PACK DAY  

1541 – Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto and his forces enter Tula territory in present-day western Arkansas, encountering fierce resistance.

1791 – The first performance of The Magic Flute, the last opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to make its debut, took place at Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in Vienna, Austria.

1882 – Thomas Alva Edison's first commercial hydroelectric power plant (later known as Appleton Edison Light Company) begins operation on the Fox River in Appleton, Wisconsin, United States.

1931 – Start of "Die Voortrekkers" youth movement for Afrikaners in Bloemfontein, South Africa.

1935 – The Hoover Dam, astride the border between Arizona and Nevada, is dedicated.

1941 – World War II: Holocaust in Kiev, Ukraine: German Einsatzgruppe C complete the Babi Yar massacre.


1954 – The U.S. Navy submarine USS Nautilus is commissioned as the world's first nuclear reactor powered vessel.

1968 – The Boeing 747 is rolled out and shown to the public for the first time at the Boeing Everett Factory.

1972 – The Pittsburgh Pirates' Roberto Clemente records the 3,000th and final hit of his career. On December 31, 1972, he died in a plane crash while en route to deliver aid to earthquake victims in Nicaragua. On March 30, 1973, the Baseball Writers' Association of America held a special election for the Baseball Hall of Fame. They voted to waive the waiting period for Clemente, due to the circumstances of his death, and posthumously elected him for induction into the Hall of Fame, giving him 393 out of 420 available votes, for 92% of the vote.

1980 – Ethernet specifications are published by Xerox working with Intel and Digital Equipment Corporation.

1993 – The 6.2 Mw Latur earthquake shakes Maharashtra, India with a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe) killing 9,748 and injuring 30,000.

1999 – Japan's second-worst nuclear accident at a uranium reprocessing facility in Tōkai-mura, northeast of Tokyo.

2005 – The controversial drawings of Muhammad are printed in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.

2009 – The 7.6 Mw Sumatra earthquake shakes central Sumatra with a maximum Mercalli intensity of VIII (Severe). This dip-slip (reverse) earthquake left 1,115 people dead, and was followed several days later by a 6.6 Mw strike-slip event.

TODAY'S BIRTHS

1870 – Jean Baptiste Perrin, French-American physicist and chemist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1942)

1883 – Nora Stanton Blatch Barney, American civil engineer, architect, and suffragist (d. 1971)

1901 – Thelma Terry, American bassist and bandleader (d. 1966)

1928 – Elie Wiesel, Romanian-American author, academic, and activist, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2016)

1945 – Richard Edwin Hills, English astronomer and academic

1951 – Barry Marshall, Australian physician and academic, Nobel Prize laureate

From Wikipedia and Google, except as noted.

TODAY'S GIFS

From gifly

THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― SEPTEMBER 29

September 29 is the 272nd day of the year (273rd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 93 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday (58 in 400 years each) than on Sunday or Monday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Wednesday or Friday (56).

NATIONAL COFFEE DAY   

61 BC – Pompey the Great celebrates his third triumph for victories over the pirates and the end of the Mithridatic Wars on his 45th birthday.

1789 – The United Sates War Department established a standing army.


1829 – British Home Secretary Sir Robert Peel establishes London's Metropolitan Police - hence the nicknames "bobbies" and "peelers".

1916 – Oil Magnet and founder of the Standard Oil Company, John D Rockefeller, becomes the world's first billionaire.

 

1936 – Radio is used for first time for a presidential campaign (President Franklin D. Roosevelt versus Governor Alf Landon of Kansas).

1953 – An article in the New York Times claims that Russian citizens want the "American Dream": private property and a home of their own. The article was one of many that appeared during the 1950s and 1960s, as the American media attempted to portray the average Russian as someone not much different from the average American.

1963 – Cardinal's celebrate Stan Musial Day in St Louis, for Stan Musial's final game, where he gets his 3,629th and 3,630th lifetime hits. Of those career hits, 1865 were at home and 1865 were on the road.

1965 –  Hanoi publishes the text of a letter it has written to the Red Cross claiming that since there is no formal state of war, U.S. pilots shot down over the North will not receive the rights of prisoners of war (POWs) and will be treated as war criminals.

1982 – Flight attendant Paula Prince buys a bottle of cyanide-laced Tylenol. Prince was found dead on October 1, becoming the final victim of a mysterious ailment in Chicago, Illinois. Over the previous 24 hours, six other people had suddenly died of unknown causes in northwest Chicago. After Prince's death, Richard Keyworth and Philip Cappitelli, firefighters in the Windy City, realized that all seven victims had ingested Extra-Strength Tylenol prior to becoming ill. Further investigation revealed that several bottles of the Tylenol capsules had been poisoned with cyanide.

1987 – Stacy Allison of Portland, Oregon, becomes the first American woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest, which at 29,035 feet above sea level is the highest point on earth. Allison, a member of the Northwest American Everest Expedition, climbed the Himalayan peak using the southeast ridge route.

1988 – 26th Space Shuttle mission, Discovery 7 launched.

2008 – Following the bankruptcies of Lehman Brothers and Washington Mutual, The Dow Jones Industrial Average falls 777.68 points, the largest single-day point loss in its.


TODAY'S BIRTHS

106 BC – Pompey, Roman general and politician (d. 48 BC)

1571 – Caravaggio, Italian painter (d. 1610)

1758 – Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson, English admiral (d. 1805)

1882 – Lilias Armstrong, English phonetician (d. 1937)

1901 – Enrico Fermi, Italian-American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1954)

1915 – Vincent DeDomenico, American businessman, founded the Napa Valley Wine Train (d. 2007)

1931 – James Cronin, American physicist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 2016)

1942 – Janet Powell, Australian educator and politician (d. 2013)

From Wikiped29a and Google, except as noted.

EACH BAND'S TOP 10 SONGS ― THE YARDBIRDS

The Yardbirds with Eric Clapton

1. For Your Love (Video)

2. Happenings Ten Years Time Ago  (Video)

3. Still I'm Sad  

4. Heart Full of Soul  (Video)

5. Think About It  

The Yardbirds with Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page

6. Turn Into Earth (Video) 

7. Knowing  (Video)

8. Over Under Sideways Down (Video)

9. Putty (In Your Hands) (Video) 

10. I Ain't Done Wrong (Video)

The Yardbirds with Jeff Beck (only)

Yardbirds discography  

From topten.com, Google and Wikipedia

THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― SEPTEMBER 28

September 28 is the 271st day of the year (272nd in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 94 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Monday, Wednesday or Friday (58 in 400 years each) than on Saturday or Sunday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Tuesday or Thursday (56). 

NATIONAL DRINK BEER DAY  


48 BC – Upon landing in Egypt, Roman general and politician Pompey is murdered on the orders of King Ptolemy of Egypt. ― From Enclyclopedia Britannica

1542 – Portuguese explorer Juan Rodriguez Cabrillo sails into present-day San Diego Bay during the course of his explorations of the northwest shores of Mexico on behalf of Spain. It was the first known European encounter with California.


1781 – General George Washington, commanding a force of 17,000 French and Continental troops, begins the siege known as the Battle of Yorktown against British General Lord Charles Cornwallis and a contingent of 9,000 British troops at Yorktown, Virginia, in the most important battle of the Revolutionary War.


1863 – Union Generals Alexander M. McCook and Thomas Crittenden lose their commands and are ordered to Indianapolis, Indiana, to face a court of inquiry following the Federal defeat at the battle of Chickamauga in Georgia.

1918 – On this day in 1918, a Liberty Loan parade in Philadelphia prompts a huge outbreak of the flu epidemic in the city. By the time the epidemic ended, an estimated 30 million people were dead worldwide. The pandemic originally started in rural Kansas.

1930 – The Yankees' Henry Louis "Lou" Gehrig's errorless streak ends at 885 consecutive games.

1941 – On this day in 1941, the Boston Red Sox's Theodore Samuel "Ted" Williams plays a double-header against the Philadelphia Athletics on the last day of the regular season and gets six hits in eight trips to the plate, to boost his batting average to .406 and become the first player since Bill Terry in 1930 to hit .400. No one has hit .400 since.

1960 – On September 28, 1960, at Boston’s Fenway Park, Ted Williams hits a home run in the last at-bat of his 21-year career.Williams retired with a lifetime batting average of .344, a .483 career on-base percentage and 2,654 hits. His achievements are all the more impressive because his career was interrupted twice for military service: Williams was a Marine Corps pilot during World War II and the Korean War and as a result missed a total of nearly five seasons from baseball.

1972 – On this day, weekly casualty figures are released that contain no U.S. fatalities for the first time since March 1965. There were several reasons for this. President Nixon's troop withdrawal program, first initiated in the fall of 1969, had continued unabated even through the height of the fighting during the 1972 North Vietnamese "Easter Offensive." By this time in the war, there were less than 40,000 U.S. troops left in South Vietnam. Of this total, only a small number, mostly advisers, were involved in ground combat. 

1991 – All US Air Force Minuteman II ICBM's plus certain bomber and tanker aircraft are taken off of standing alert by the US Secretary of Defense.

1994 – The cruise ferry MS Estonia sinks in Baltic Sea, killing 852 people.

1995 – Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat sign the Sinai Interim Agreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

2008 – American aerospace manufacturer and space transport services company SpaceX launches the first private spacecraft, the Falcon 1 into orbit.

2014 – Hong Kong protests: Benny Tai announces that Occupy Central is launched as Hong Kong's government headquarters is being occupied by thousands of protesters. Hong Kong police resort to tear gas to disperse protesters but thousands remain.

TODAY'S BIRTHS

551 BC – Confucius, Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher of the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history. (d. 479 BC)

1860 – Paul Ulrich Villard, French chemist and physicist (d. 1934)

1887 – Avery Brundage, American businessman, 5th President of the International Olympic Committee (d. 1975)

1925 – Seymour Cray, American computer scientist, founded the CRAY Computer Company (d. 1996)

1930 – Immanuel Wallerstein, American sociologist, author, and academic

1943 – George W. S. Trow, American novelist, playwright, and critic (d. 2006)

1947 – Rhonda Hughes, American mathematician and academic

From Wikipedia and Google, except as noted.

MOVIE DIALOG OF THE DAY ― CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (2007)

Connection with the previous post (THE SOCIAL NETWORK): Aaron Sorkin wrote both screenplays.

RATINGS: IMDB ―7.1/10, Rotten Tomatoes ― 82%, ME ― 80%

Charlie Wilson: You mean to tell me that the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is to have the Afghans keep walking into machine gun fire 'til the Russians run out of bullets?
Gust Avrakotos: That's Harold Holt's strategy, it's not U.S. strategy.
Charlie Wilson: What is U.S. strategy?
Gust Avrakotos: Well, strictly speaking, we don't have one. But we're working hard on that.
Charlie Wilson: Who's 'we'?
Gust Avrakotos: Me and three other guys.

Tom Hanks as Charlie Wilson and Phillip Seymore Hoffman as Gust Avrakotos


Trivia (From IMDB):

Charlie Wilson said in a USA Today article that he had no qualms about the film, saying "Anything I might have objected to, was provable".

Though recuperating from heart transplant surgery, the real Charlie Wilson made it to the red carpet premiere of the film.

Towards the end of the movie, Charlie Wilson is presented with one of the Stingers he helped provide to the Afghanis. In an interview, the real Charlie Wilson said the Stinger is one of his most prized possessions, kept in "a very honored spot in my home."

Charlie Wilson and Joanne Herring were engaged to be married at one point.

Charlie Wilson's aides were all beautiful well-endowed women nicknamed Charlie's Angels (1976) after the television show. In real life, his chief aide was a man named Charlie Schnabel.

In addition to the lifestyle portrayed on screen, Charlie Wilson had a DUI Hit-and-Run charge on the Key Bridge, outside Georgetown. He was never indicted; otherwise, he would have been far less successful securing money for his project in Afghanistan. The History Channel documentary about his life suggests that he drank that night (and other nights) to ease the pain he felt for the Afghan people.

A special effects assistant was seriously injured when a hand-held mock-up of a Stinger missile exploded as it was being prepared for use in a scene aboard a helicopter.

Near the end, while Charlie Wilson is standing on the balcony with Gust Avrakotos during a party celebrating the defeat of the Soviet army in Afghanistan, Gust warns Charlie of future problems if he and the other members of Congress do not follow up on giving economic aid to the Afghani's. As Gust finished this warning, Charlie thinks about what he said, and you hear an airliner flying over Washington, D.C. It is an obvious, ominous reference to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

A vintage Miss Texas photo of Mary Nell Hubbard (1958) was used for a scene in the movie because Julia Roberts plays a former beauty queen. Hubbard wouldn't take payment for the photo she provided. She privately joked, "I've gone from a headline to an archive to an artifact," and her daughter gently teases her that she is a body double for Julia Roberts.

Director Mike Nichols' final theatrical film.

At the function thrown by Joanne Herring (Julia Roberts) for President Zia (Om Puri), Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) denies to President Zia that he can guarantee anything, saying that he has already come close to violating the Logan Act. The Logan Act was enacted in 1799, at the beginning of the U.S.'s history, and prevents any individual from attempting to negotiate with, or influence, any foreign government over any matter of interest or significance to the U.S. government without the U.S. government's authorization. Since its adoption, there has never been a successful prosecution under the Logan Act, and no member of Congress has ever been charged with a violation of the Logan Act, despite public outcries over efforts by various members of Congress to express their own views about certain U.S. policies.

Charlie Wilson openly admitted he never objected to the idea of his cocaine habit being portrayed in the movie. No scenes of Tom Hanks snorting cocaine on screen existed, however.

An early draft of the script made the connections between the mission in Afghanistan and the rise of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks much more explicit. It was dropped when both Mike Nichols and Tom Hanks cut those scenes and made the subjects present but more implicit.

Charlie Wilson is invited to Joanne Herring's home for a party. In her house, we see a full length painting of her. Except for Julia Roberts's features, this painting is a copy of John Singer Sargent's "Madame X".

Emily Blunt filmed her part in two days.

The movie makes a point of citing Charlie Wilson's close ties to the Israelis, including his contact with a Mossad agent who helps arrange the Stinger transfers with Pakistan, but an early draft of the script had a sequence taken directly from Joseph Crile's book, in which Charlie suspends working with Israel for a long time over his anger and disgust over events in the 1982 Lebanon War. The script dropped this, because Wilson and the Israelis got back to the point of working closely together, and it was decided the 1982-set subplot was unnecessary.

The film cast includes three Oscar winners: Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Philip Seymour Hoffman; and two Oscar nominees: Ned Beatty, and Amy Adams.

One of three films starring both Philip Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams. They also appeared in Doubt (2008) and The Master (2012).

Denis O'Hare plays a character called Harold Holt. Harold Holt was an Australian Prime Minister who went missing off a beach in Australia, and is presumed to have drowned.

In one scene, Joanne (played by Julia Roberts) mentions that the campaign film she presented to Charlie wasn't a quality film to be submitted to the Golden Globes. Coincidentally, this film managed to get nominated in five categories at the Globes.

Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin was very happy that Mike Nichols directed Charlie Wilson's War.

Marks the third character Tom Hanks has played with the surname "Wilson", he also played Kip and Buffy Wilson on the television show Bosom Buddies.

This is the first film where Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts worked together. They would later star together in Larry Crowne (2011).

Philip Seymour Hoffman and director Mike Nichols both passed away in 2014, Hoffman in February and Nichols in November. Julia Roberts (Joanne Herring) previously starred in the movie "Hook" (1991), in which the titular character was played by Dustin Hoffman (Philip Seymour Hoffman and Dustin Hoffman are the only Oscar winners to have the same last name). Roberts' "Hook" co-stars Robin Williams and Bob Hoskins also both passed away in 2014.

Amy Adams and Emily Blunt also star together in Sunshine Cleaning (2009)

THIS DAY IN HISTORY ― SEPTEMBER 27

September 27 is the 270th day of the year (271st in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar. There are 95 days remaining until the end of the year. This date is slightly more likely to fall on a Tuesday, Thursday or Sunday (58 in 400 years each) than on Friday or Saturday (57), and slightly less likely to occur on a Monday or Wednesday (56). 

NATIONAL CRUSH A CAN DAY  

1529 – The Siege of Vienna begins when Suleiman I attacks the city.

1669 – The Venetians surrender the fortress of Candia to the Ottomans, thus ending the 21-year-long Siege of Candia.

1822 – Jean-François Champollion announces that he has deciphered the Rosetta Stone.

1905 – The physics journal Annalen der Physik received Albert Einstein's paper, "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?", introducing the equation E=mc².

1908 – The first production of the Ford Model T automobile was built at the Ford Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit,Michigan.

1940 – World War II: The Tripartite Pact is signed in Berlin by Germany, Japan and Italy.

1944 – The Kassel Mission results in the largest loss by a USAAF group on any mission in World War II.

1962 – Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring is published, inspiring an environmental movement and the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.


1996 – In Afghanistan, the Taliban capture the capital city Kabul after driving out President Burhanuddin Rabbaniand executing former leader Mohammad Najibullah.

2003 – SMART-1 (Small Missions for Advanced Research in Technology-1) ESA satellite is launched. The spacecraft was intentionally crashed into the Lunar surface at the end of its mission in 2006.


2007 – NASA launches the Dawn probe with the mission of studying two of the three known protoplanets of the asteroid belt, Vesta and Ceres. Dawn is the first spacecraft to orbit two extraterrestrial bodies

TODAY'S BIRTHS

1389 – Cosimo de' Medici, ruler of Florence (d. 1464) 

1722 – Samuel Adams, American philosopher and politician, 4th Governor of Massachusetts (d. 1803)

1838 – Lawrence Sullivan Ross, American general and politician, 19th Governor of Texas, Sul Ross University (d. 1898)

1894 – Lothar von Richthofen, German lieutenant and pilot, The Red Baron (d. 1922)

1919 – James H. Wilkinson, American mathematician and computer scientist (d. 1986)

1932 – Oliver E. Williamson, American economist and academic, Nobel Prize laureate

1939 – Carol Lynn Pearson, American author, poet, and playwright

From Wikipedia and Google, except as noted.

TODAY'S GIFs

From Gifhy