~★~♥~♥~★~ El Morno! ♥~★~★~♥ ~
December 1, 2014
★~ Today’s Quote: Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons. ~ Woody Allen
★~ Aids Awareness Day:
The first World AIDS Day was on December 1, 1988, and every year since, it’s served as an opportunity to increase awareness, educate, raise money, and fight prejudice. It is estimated that over 33.4 million people are currently living with HIV, and countless others are affected by it. The 2013 theme for World AIDS Day is “Shared Responsibility: Strengthening Results for an AIDS-Free Generation.”
★~ Red Apple Day:
“The taste for apples is one of the earliest and most natural of inclinations,” according to Botanical.com. Today we honor the simple red apple with a heartfelt crunch.
Apples have high nutritional value and make for an extremely healthy snack — unless, of course, you’re a certain raven-haired beauty living with seven tiny men, in which case maybe you should lay low today.
The Kitchen Witch has a wonderful apple butter recipe that I spread on my popovers!
★~ Today in History:
[youtube]http://youtu.be/G_Nzs_AYQDA[/youtube]
♥~ 1891 – James Naismith was a physical education teacher at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, MA. To create an indoor sport that could be played during the winter months, he nailed up peach baskets at opposite ends of the gym and gave students soccer balls to toss into them and basketball was born.
♥~ 1913 – The first modern gas station opened in Pittsburgh on December 1, 1913. Gas sold for 27 cents per gallon — $6.39 in today’s dollars.
♥~ 1929 – The game of Bingo was invented by New York toy salesman Edwin S. Lowe.
♥~ 1945 – Burl Ives made his concert debut. He appeared at New York’s Town Hall. We lovingly listen every year for the voice of this old-time radio personality as the narrator and banjo-pickin’ snowman in TV’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.
♥~ 1963 – The Beatles’ first single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” was released in the United States.
♥~ 1976 – The Sex Pistols used profanity on the British Today show, and became branded as “rotten punks.”
♥~ 2009 – A rare, 5-carat pink diamond was auctioned off for a record $10.8 million in Hong Kong. The stone, of a ‘vivid pink’ hue and considered near perfect, triggered brisk bidding at Christie’s in Hong Kong
★~Born Today:
♥~ 1847 – Julia A. Moore, She grew up on a Michigan farm, dropped out of school at the age of 11, bore 10 children, and is famous for writing really bad poetry — so famous for it, in fact, that Mark Twain modeled a character after her in The Adventures of Huck Finn, and he wrote a parody of Moore’s bad poetry for that character, Emmeline Grangerford, to recite.
She’s sometimes referred to as a “poetaster,” which the Oxford English Dictionarydefines as “a petty or paltry poet; a writer of poor or trashy verse; a rimester.” This distinction usually entails things like the use of awkward meter, painfully sappy sentimentality, words that rhyme in an unpleasant way, or poor taste in subject matter. Other poetasters famous enough to be anthologized include J. Gordon Coogler, William McGonagall, and James McIntyre.
As for Moore, her favorite topics included abstinence, temperance, sudden death, terrible destruction, obituaries of small children, and big disasters, such as train wrecks or fires. One of her most famous poems is about the Chicago Fire. She wrote:
The great Chicago Fire, friends,
Will never be forgot;
In the history of Chicago
It will remain a darken spot.
It was a dreadful horrid sight
To see that City in flames;
But no human aid could save it,
For all skill was tried in vain.
♥~ 1935- Woody Allen, born Allen Stewart Konigsberg, director and screenwriter. His parents wanted him to become a doctor or a dentist. Woody Allen said, “I loathed every day and regret every day I spent in school.”
As a teenager, he started reading classics by Faulkner and Nietzsche because he was embarrassed when he took girls on dates and they asked him about writers whom he’d never read. But he also told them jokes. When he was 15, he started submitting his best jokes to gossip columnists. He went to NYU, but he got an F in English and a C-plus in film, and he was expelled because he never went to class.
After leaving college he decided to teach himself about making movie and bought the rights to a Japanese spy film, inserted all new dialogue, and released the film as What’s Up, Tiger Lily? (1966). It’s about a man trying to find to the recipe for the world’s greatest egg salad.
Woody kept making movies, but when he was 40, he felt like a failure. He thought his films were too goofy. So he made a more serious film, filled with scenes from his own life. It was called Anhedonia, it was several hours long, and it had almost no plot. Allen played the main character. He cut it down, and ended up cutting out almost everything except scenes with Diane Keaton, who played the love interest. So they named the movie after her character, and it became Annie Hall (1977), winning the Academy Awards for best picture, best director, and best actress.
♥~ 1761 – Marie Tussaud (Grosholtz) museum curator and creator of wax figures: Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in 1834
♥~ 1933 – Lou Rawls (Louis Allen) Grammy Award-winning singer
♥~ 1940 – Richard Pryor comedian, actor
♥~ 1945 – Bette Midler Grammy Award-winning singer:
★~ Madame Tussaud Gallimaufry:
♥~ Madame “Marie” Tussaud (born Anna Maria Grosholtz in Strasbourg, France) was an artist known for her wax sculptures and the wax museum she founded in London.
♥~ Her father, a soldier named Joseph Grosholtz, was killed in the Seven Years’ War just two months before Marie was born.
♥~ Her mother, Anne-Marie Walder, took her to Bern where she moved to work as a housekeeper for Dr. Philippe Curtius. There she took the Swiss nationality.
♥~ Curtius was a physician, and was skilled in wax modelling, which he used to illustrate Anatomy. Later, he started to do portraits. Tussaud called him uncle.
♥~ Curtius moved to Paris in 1765, starting work to set up a cabinet de cire . In that year he made a waxwork of Louis XV’s last mistress, Madame du Barry, a cast of which is the oldest work currently on display.
♥~ In 1767, Tussaud and her mother joined Curtius and also moved to Paris.
♥~ The first exhibition of Curtius’ waxworks was shown in 1770, and attracted a big crowd. In 1776, the exhibition moved to the Palais Royal and, in 1782, Curtius opened a second exhibit, the Caverne des Grands Voleurs, a precursor to the later Chamber of horrors, on Boulevard du Temple.
♥~ Curtius taught Tussaud the art of wax modelling; she showed a lot of talent and started to work for him.
♥~ In 1778, she created her first wax figure, that of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
♥~ Madame Tussaud was imprisoned during the French Revolution and made death masks of executed nobles
♥~ She eventually inherited Phillippe Curtius’ wax exhibition and for the first time took her exhibition on tour in the British Isles in 1795.
♥~ Madame Tussaud’s Wax Exposition in London debuted on April 26th, 1928.
♥~ Before modern times when news was communicated largely by word of mouth, Madame Tussaud’s exhibition was a kind of traveling newspaper providing an insight into international events and bringing people face to face with people in the headlines.
♥~ It takes six months, more than 250 precise measurements and photographs, 2,400 lbs of wax and $45,000 to make each of Madame Tussaud’s wax portraits.
♥~ Each strand of hair is inserted individually, taking approximately five weeks to complete each head.
♥~ Two maintenance teams inspect and primp each figure daily before the museum opens.
♥~ To add authenticity to the portraits at Madame Tussaud’s New York, many artifacts have been donated from the celebrity or purchased from auctions.
♥~ All portraits have their hair washed and make-up retouched regularly.
♥~ All celebrities’ vital statistics are kept confidential, despite repeated requests from the public and media.
♥~ Because wax shrinks, wax figures are made two percent larger than the real life subjects they portray.
♥~ Dating back to the early 1900, members of the British Royal Family have routinely participated in sittings for portraits by Madame Tussaud’s. This tradition continues today, including a sitting with Diana, Princess of Wales just months before she died.
♥~ More than 500 million people worldwide have visited a Madame Tussaud’s, that’s more than the population of North America and Australia combined.
♥~ Currently, over 2.5 million people a year visit Madame Tussaud’s, mingling with celebrities of all types, from sports heroes like Muhammad Ali to Hollywod celebrities like Marilyn Monroe to models like Naomi Campbell and politicians like Bill Clinton.
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RABBIT! RABBIT! Welcome to El Morno December!
Odd Loves Company,
I am playing catch up – so I’ve closed comments on back dated posts. Thanks you for reading!