Actor, comedian, director, screenwriter, author and activist Gene Wilder was born on June 11, 1933. After his first film role playing a hostage in Bonnie and Clyde, he went on to star in such memorable films as Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, The Producers, Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles.
“Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple.” — Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
“The clue obviously lies in the word “cheddar.” Let’s see now. Seven letters. Rearranged, they come to, let me see: “Rachedd.” “Dechdar.” “Drechad.” “Chaderd” – hello, chaderd! Unless I’m very much mistaken, chaderd is the Egyptian word meaning “to eat fat.” Now we’re getting somewhere!” – Sigerson Holmes in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes Smarter Brother
“You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. They’re people of the land. The common clay of the New West. You know – morons.” – The Waco Kid in Blazing Saddles
“This is a nice boy. This is a good boy. This is a mother’s angel. And I want the world to know once and for all, and without any shame, that we love him. I’m going to teach you. I’m going to show you how to walk, how to speak, how to move, how to think. Together, you and I are going to make the greatest single contribution to science since the creation of fire.” – Dr. Frankenstein in Young Frankenstein
I’m in pain and I’m wet and I’m still hysterical! – Leo Bloom in The Producers
An air of excitement certainly gripped London on June 10, 2000, as 90,000 people queued up to cross the first new bridge to span the Thames River in over a hundred years, a bridge for pedestrians only, stretching from the Globe Theatre to St. Paul’s Cathedral, aptly named the London Millennium Footbridge. It didn’t take long for the bridge to become more known by its nickname, the Wobbly Bridge. Seems the designers had not given enough attention to a phenomenon with the catchy title, synchronous lateral excitation. Even if you’ve never heard of it, it doesn’t sound like anything you’d want to be on a bridge with. People, according to engineers, sway when they walk. People walking and swaying cause sideways oscillations in lightweight bridges. These, in turn, cause the people (some two thousand on the bridge at any given time) to sway even more to keep from falling over. And they all sway at the same time. It’s as if two thousand Londoners were doing the tango above the Thames. Result? Wobbly. Access to the bridge was limited later in the day, and on June 12 the bridge closed for modifications. It reopened in 2002 (with tango forbidden). It was again closed in 2007 because of strong winds and a worry that pedestrians foolish enough to cross might be blown off the bridge. The footbridge was not the only British millennial faux pas: a little number called the Millennium Dome elicited this derision from MP Bob Marshall-Andrews: “At worst it is a millennial metaphor for the twentieth century. An age in which all things, like the Dome itself, became disposable. A century in which forest and cities, marriages, animal species, races, religions and even the Earth itself, became ephemeral. What more cynical monument can there be for this totalitarian cocksure fragile age than a vast temporary plastic bowl, erected from the aggregate contribution of the poor through the National Lottery. Despite the spin, it remains a massive pantheon to the human ego . . .”
At the Zoo
Originally created as a royal herb garden in the 1600s, the Jardin des Plantes opened in 1793. During the following year a ménagerie was added, the world’s first and, still in existence, today the world’s oldest. The 58-acre botanical garden and zoo is located in the center of Paris, next to the Seine.
The zoo was founded during the height of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The National Assembly decreed that exotic animals in private hands – rare antelopes, tigers, Louis XIV, and the like — were to be donated to the menagerie or guillotined, stuffed and donated to the natural scientists of the Jardin des Plantes . The Jardin was free for all visitors and tourists right from its inception.
While the menagerie at first was just provisional, it grew in the first three decades of the 19th century to be the largest exotic animal collection in Europe – as they describe it in France (or somewhere): monkey honnete, girafe pas sincere, elephant plein mais stupide, orang-outang sceptical, zebre reactionaire, antilope missionaire.
A well-run place, but this being France the menagerie gardiens are usually quite fond of their aperitifs.
Someone told me it’s all happening at the zoo. — Paul Simon
In 1909, a diminutive 22-year-old housewife from Hackensack, New Jersey, hopped into her dark green, four-cylinder, 30-horsepower Maxwell touring car and headed west. Alice Huyler Ramsey and her companions, two older sisters-in-law and a 16-year-old friend, were beginning a 59-day, 3,600-mile transcontinental odyssey that would end on August 9 in San Francisco, California.
It was an easy journey. After all, 152 miles of the roads were paved. The trip required only 11 tire changes, some new spark plugs and a brake pedal replacement. Most nights they were able to sleep in beds, although on one occasion in Wyoming they shared them with bedbugs.
And they had maps covering part of the journey, although for a good portion of the route they relied on printed guides giving directions using local landmarks that weren’t always that up-to-date. In one case, they were supposed to make a turn at a yellow house and barn, but it seems the owner, not an automobile enthusiast, had repainted them green.
In Ohio, they reached the breakneck speed of 42 miles per hour. But in Iowa, they encountered mud and flooded out roads. In Nebraska, a manhunt for a killer. And in Nevada a group of heavily armed Indians, who fortunately were not on the warpath but hunting.
But in the end, Ramsey and her friends arrived to cheering crowds in San Francisco and drove into history, the first woman to drive coast to coast. She was named the “Woman Motorist of the Century” by AAA in 1960. She repeated the trip another 30 times — in shorter periods of time — before her death on September 10, 1983, at the age of 96.
Japanese carrier All-Nippon Airways announced in 1988 that painting eyeballs on its jets cut bird collisions by 20 percent. The menacing-looking eyes painted on the engine intakes of its jet aircraft frightened away the birds, preventing them from throwing themselves at the plane during takeoff.
This conclusion was drawn after a controlled experiment in which the Japanese domestic
Another misstep: passengers in the rear compartment complained about congestion and lousy meals, passengers up front (ten to a wing) were annoyed by collisions with birds
airline painted the evil eyes on 26 of its Boeing 747’s and 767’s, leaving the rest of its fleet eyeless. After a year, an average of only one bird had hit each of the eyeballed engines while nine birds struck each unpainted engine.
The airline estimated that the reduction in bird strikes during the testing period reduced the damage to its aircraft from $910,000 to $720,000. Consequently, All-Nippon said it would paint eyes on all its large-body aircraft.
Continuing its program of thinking outside the fuselage to reduce costs, the company in 2009 planned to ask all passengers to use restrooms before boarding. During a four-week test, agents at the gates suggested that passengers use terminal restrooms to relieve themselves before getting on the plane. All-Nippon’s bathroom experiment was a way to cut fuel consumption, thereby resulting in decreased carbon emissions and lower costs. Travelers, however, did not warm up to the plan, finding it embarrassing and offensive. The plan went the way of the eyeballs. Oh yeah, the eyeballs were removed from planes in 2000 because – well, the company didn’t say why – just eye strain, perhaps.
The Killer Bee Chronicles Continue
When last we visited our gang of killer bees (yesterday) they were holding our happy home hostage. Having attacked me and left me swollen up like a giant bullfrog, they were celebrating, getting a real buzz on, so to
Killer bees at two o’clock
speak.
The hive, I might point out, was in the wall behind our bed. They were in there – not just a handful but a whole army – trying to tunnel their way through the plaster and lath to mount a massive shock and awe attack as we slept.
They might have been the depraved, cowardly black hats from a vintage western movie who have driven the last bit of law and order out of town. We needed that staple of vintage westerns, the guy in the white hat on a silver horse – the guy who would ride in during the last reel to vanquish the evildoers and save the day in an action-packed climax.
Enter the Beebusters. They didn’t exactly ride in in the last reel and race to an action-packed climax. They studied a lot. They took pictures. They discussed, made plans, took more pictures.
Finally, after an eternity of waiting, the day of reckoning arrived. The Beebusters themselves arrived late morning with loads of paraphernalia and a plan. First they would seal off our bedroom. Then from the outside, they would seal off the entrance so that no one could enter or leave. Then they would open up the wall and start vacuuming like crazy, capturing the critters in their specially rigged shopvac. It
Beebusters at work
sounded a bit reckless to me, but I wasn’t vacuuming, so let them be reckless.
I should point out that it’s all about the Queen Bee who sits on her throne inside the hive while all the drones bow a lot and buzz “Yes your majesty. How high, your majesty?” If the Beebusters can capture this Queen Bee, all the obsequious, bootlicking drones will follow her wherever she goes (Sort of like the obsequious, bootlicking Republicans bowing before Queen Donald).
But what if you can’t find the Queen Bee, I asked. It seems they were prepared for this possibility. They would use a make-believe queen if necessary. The little girls across the street both began jumping up and down and shouting “I want to be a make-believe queen. I want to be a make-believe queen.” until we hosed them down and got on with our work. The make-believe queen is actually a drone in drag who will lure his fellow drones into “The Box.”
“The Box”
“Come into the box, my dears. It’s nice in the box. Nothing bad in here. Just me. And I’m sooo hot. C’mon handsome. Fly right in and we’ll have such a good time.” They will eagerly follow this siren into the bowels of “The Box” just as if he were the real thing. Bees are industrious, but they’re none too smart.
It was a big job – there were approximately 43,267 bees in our wall, and the Beebusters were able to bring most of them back alive. They now live in a pleasant retirement community on a farm far, far away.
But the killer bees hadn’t been gone two weeks when I discovered a gigantic anthill in one of our flower beds. Radioactive fallout and steroids have made the ants themselves monstrous, capable of carrying off small dogs and children. We gave them the little girls from across the street and a few strays that wandered into the yard, but they’re not satisfied. Does anyone know where I can get a giant anteater?
Local newspapers reported an amazing altercation in the village of Cargo in Cumberland, England, in 1827, a battle really (or a battle royal), between two opposing hordes – of bees. The home bees, it seems, were happily hived in the village, going about their bee business when, on June 7, a swarm from a neighboring village flew over the garden in which the first hive was situated. Without warning or so much as a by-your-leave, the interlopers darted down upon the hive and completely covered it, then began to enter the hive, pouring into it in such numbers that it soon became as crowded as happy hour at the local pub.
Then the terrible struggle began. With ear-splitting humming, two armies of combatants rushed forth, besiegers and besieged alike spilling out of the beleaguered hive into the open air. The bee-on-bee battle raged with such fury that the ground below was soon strewn with corpses. Not until the visiting swarm was vanquished and driven away did the battle end. The victors resumed possession of the hive.
The local chronicle did not attempt to explain the motivations involved, but naturalists, adding a scientific perspective, suggested that sometimes bees fight.
Rodgers and Hammerstein Are Frauds. Irving Berlin Too.
Julie Andrews and Von Trapps running from killer bees
It’s barely spring, and the hills of Vermont are alive with the sound of seventy degree temperatures, giving us a chance to venture out into the great outdoors. A little maintenance, clean out a flower bed or two, rake. Our resident swarm of bees had the same idea — without the raking. We’ve long debated whether these bees are honey bees or some less desirable species.
I have ended the debate. They are killer bees — murderous, cutthroat, bloodthirsty killer bees. And one of their crack snipers got me. I was tending to a bed, not threatening them in any way, and he swooped in and stung me on my eyelid. Before long I looked like I had caught a baseball with my right eye. I tried to recall what I had seen or heard about treating a bee sting and the Rodgers and Hammerstein cure came to me. I spent the rest of the day remembering my favorite things, even drinking a couple of them. It did nothing for me.
I spent a while standing out in front, stooped over, looking very much like Quasimodo, frightening away passing neighborhood children. But I soon tired of this game.
Eventually I toddled off to bed. But sleep wouldn’t come. Finally I remembered Irving Berlin’s prescription for insomnia and began methodically counting my blessings instead of sheep. As it turns out, one’s blessings and one’s favorite things are pretty much the same. Three a.m. I’m on my 137th blessing and wide awake. I won’t bore you with the details of my 137 blessings, but I
Waiting for passers by
will tell you that Rodgers and Hammerstein and bees are not among them.
Today I will perch atop the rock wall out front on hands and knees pretending to be a radiation-mutated giant bullfrog, croaking at passers by. Life goes on.
Be my little baby bumble bee. Buzz around. Buzz around. Keep abuzzing round.
Ed Sullivan was to the golden age of television what Google is to searching. He ruled Sunday night TV for 23 years – from 1948 to his very last broadcast on this day in 1971. Sullivan presented acts from the era’s biggest stars to acrobats, dancing bears, puppets, contortionists, you name it. Ten thousand in all – if they were entertainers, an appearance on the Sullivan show was their holy grail.
Musical performances from rock to opera were a staple of the program. Even its first broadcast, when it was known as Toast of the Town, made music history as Broadway composers Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II previewed the score of their upcoming musical, South Pacific. And after that, West Side Story, Cabaret, Man of La Mancha – if it was on Broadway, it was on Sullivan. One of those Broadway musicals, Bye Bye Birdie, was all about making it on the Sullivan show.
Sullivan also chronicled the history of rock and roll from Elvis Presley’s appearance in 1956 through the Supremes, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, the Mamas and the Papas, and on June 6, 1971, the last program, Gladys Knight and the Pips.
When CBS canceled the show, the network let it end with a whimper. But in the 33 years since cancellation, numerous tribute shows and DVDs have kept Sullivan in the public eye.
Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world. — General Dwight D. Eisenhower, June 6, 1944
When the sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, resigned in 1880, the county appointed Pat Garrett, a former bartender known as something of a gunman to replace him. Garrett was immediately given the task of apprehending a friend from his saloon keeping days, jail escapee Henry McCarty, aka Henry Antrim, aka William Harrison Bonney, but more widely known as Billy the Kid. The Kid had supposedly killed 21 men, one for every year of his life, but no one could actually name more than nine.
Later that year, Garrett captured the Kid and his companions at the posh New Mexico spa, Stinking Springs, but the Kid escaped from the Lincoln County Jail, killing his two guards. Garrett learned that the Kid was hiding out at the house of a mutual friend, Pete Maxwell. Late one night, Garrett went to Maxwell’s house while the Kid was sleeping. Accounts differ as to what happened next. Either the Kid woke up and entered Maxwell’s bedroom, where Garrett, standing in the shadows, shot him as he asked “Who is it?” (“It is I” or even “It’s me,” being the more gentlemanly response). Or Garrett went into Maxwell’s wife’s room and tied her up, and when the Kid walked into her room (for what purpose, we can only guess), Garrett blasted him with a single rifle shot. Either account pretty much tarnished Garrett’s reputation as a straight shooter.
Conspiracy theorists maintain that Billy the Kid was not killed at all and that Garrett staged it all so the Kid could escape. They also insist that Garrett was born (on June 5, 1850) in Kenya.
At about the same time (1878, to be exact) Pancho Villa was born on this same day a bit farther south in the northern Mexican state of Chihuahua. During the early 20th century, he pretty much ran the state. He and his supporters played Robin Hood, seizing haciendas and land for distribution to peasants and soldiers. They robbed and commandeered trains, and printed their own money to pay for the 1910-20 revolution.
After Villa’s rather infamous incursion into New Mexico in 1916, U.S. Army General John J. Pershing pursued Villa for nine months unsuccessfully (probably because he refused to ambush him in a lady’s bedroom) before turning his attention to World War I. Villa retired in 1920 on a large estate where he could have spent a gracious hero’s retirement, sipping Margaritas in comfort, had he not decided to get back into politics, whereupon he was assassinated.
A few years later, back in the US, William Boyd (born June 5, 1895), was making a name for himself as a straight shooting, white-hatted good guy, that name being Hopalong Cassidy. Hoppy, as his friends called him, eschewed the role of a hard-drinking, rough-living wrangler, opting instead to be the very model of a cowboy hero, one who did not smoke, drink or swear and who always let the bad guy strike the first blow (and never ever ambushed a bad guy in a lady’s bedroom).
Conspiracy theorists maintain that Boyd was not a real cowboy, that Hoppy was a fictional character. They point to the 66 Hopalong Cassidy films and the memorabilia such as watches, comic books, dishes, Topps trading cards, and cowboy outfits as proof. Next they’ll say he was born in Kenya.
There’s always a man faster on the draw than you are, and the more you use a gun, the sooner you’re gonna run into that man. — Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
Even in 1411, the people of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon had been making cheese as long as anyone could remember. And all because a young man was lured away from his lunch by a fair young maiden. Or so the story goes.
The cheese-making folks of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon were probably the only ones making the tangy, crumbly sheep’s milk cheese with its distinctive veins of green mold. Nevertheless on June 4, 1411, French King Charles VI granted them a monopoly for the ripening of the Roquefort cheese.
What makes Roquefort Roquefort is its aging in the Combalou caves of Roquefort-sur-Soulzon. Popular legend suggests that the cheese was discovered when a young man eating his lunch of bread and ewe’s milk cheese spied a hot young woman in the distance. Naturally, he ran off to pursue her, leaving his lunch in the cave. Legend leaves the results of his amorous pursuit to our imaginations, but his appetite must have been somehow satisfied since he didn’t return to the cave for several months. When he did, the mold present in the cave – Penicillium roqueforti to be exact – had done an ugly duckling number on his lump of cheese transforming it into a cheese of beauty. The bread, however, was another story.
The French take their wine and their cheese seriously. A ruling in 1961 decreed that although the Roquefort-sur-Soulzon method for the manufacture of the cheese could be followed across the south of France, only those cheeses ripened in the natural caves of Mont Combalou could bear the name Roquefort. Today, its production involves some 4,500 people who herd special ewes on 2,100 farms in a carefully defined grazing area. In 2008, 19,000 tons were produced, with 80% of it consumed in France. It’s a laborious process — 4,500 folk dropping their 4,500 lumps of ewe’s milk cheese and running off in hot amorous pursuit of 4,500 other folk.
A dance party in the beach town of Santa Cruz, California, a quiet oasis 70 miles south of San Francisco, back in 1956 (years before it became a counterculture capital), led to a bit of overreaction by the town’s conservative adult authorities. Two hundred teenagers had taken over the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium on a Saturday night to dance to the music of a group called Chuck Higgins and his Orchestra, regional favorites with a few hit rock recordings. Shortly after midnight, Santa Cruz police entered the auditorium to check on the event, and didn’t like what they saw: a crowd “engaged in suggestive, stimulating and tantalizing motions induced by the provocative rhythms of an all-negro band.” Although that sounds like a pretty good endorsement for the affair, the police did not view it as a positive. Without so much as a “save the last dance for me,” they shut the place down and sent everyone home to bed.
And they didn’t stop there. On the following day, June 3, city fathers further endeared themselves to city teenagers and captured national attention when they announced a total ban on the playing of rock and roll and other forms of “frenzied music” at public gatherings (the other forms probably meant to pull Wayne Newton into the loop). Such music was, they said, “detrimental to both the health and morals of our youth and community.”
Not everyone saw this as an absurdity, it’s concern with “undesirable elements” not so subtly racial, and an effort that was bound to fail. Within two weeks, similar bans were enacted in Asbury Park, New Jersey, and in San Antonio, Texas. But in spite of such valiant efforts, rock and roll would soon dominate the Billboard Hot 100, and teenagers everywhere would be singing “It’s got to be rock-roll music, if you want to dance with me.”
In the early 1850s, the city of Portland, Maine, with a population of 21,000 might be called a sleepy little burg. But that was about to change thanks to a Maine law enacted in 1851 outlawing the manufacture and sale of alcohol anywhere in the state, except for medicinal and mechanical purposes.
Portland Mayor Neal S. Dow was an outspoken prohibitionist who fully supported the law, so much so that he was dubbed the “Napoleon of Temperance. ” However, Dow had authorized a large shipment of “medicinal and mechanical alcohol” that was being stored in the city vaults for distribution to pharmacists and doctors (authorized under the law). The good citizens of Portland got wind of this cache of alcohol and suspected the worst, that Dow was a hypocrite and a secret sot.
The Maine law had an interesting little clause allowing any three voters to apply for a search warrant if they suspected someone was selling liquor illegally. Three men did just that, appearing before a judge who issued a search warrant.
On the afternoon of June 2, a crowd of several hundred people, already irate over the law coming between them and their Harvey Wallbangers, gathered outside the building where the alcohol was being held. The crowd grew larger and surlier as it became obvious that the police were not going to seize the booze. As the crowd swelled, jostling became shoving, and the hurling of angry words became the hurling of rocks. The infamous Portland Rum Riot of 1855 was in full swing.
Police were unable to control the mob, and Mayor Dow called out the militia. When the protesters ignored the order to disperse, the militia, on Dow’s orders, fired into the crowd killing one man and wounding several others.
Dow was widely criticized for his strong-arm tactics during the incident and was later prosecuted for improperly acquiring the alcohol but was acquitted. The Maine Law was repealed the following year.
Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple.” — Willy Wonka in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory
Wretched Richard's Almanac 