"Give me a minute! I have
to finish this
"Stanley and Livingstone" cue!
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Wednesday:
Today's most notable event may be the 41st anniversary of the debut of Sesame Street on what was then known as "National Educational Television," but is now called PBS. (We guess the powers that be didn't want their audiences
think they might be getting smarter while watching the boob tube.) In the
decades since, the show has educated generations of Americans through its use
of humor,
music,
and pop culture
references.
Some of those references are calculated to appeal less to kids than to their
parents, just like the ones in the Warner Bros. cartoons of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s. And being of a cartoonish
disposition, we couldn't help but notice that it's the 119th birthday of Carl Stalling, the man who wrote the scores for all those Looney Tunes
and Merrie Melodies. How many did he write? Well, over 22 years, he
wrote complete scores for more than 700 animated shorts -- or one every
ten days. That's a lot of notes.
More succinct was journalist Henry Morton Stanley, who on this date in 1871 located missing missionary Dr. David Livingstone in what is now Ujiji, Tanzania.
After an eight-month, 7,000-mile trip, Stanley allegedly greeted the good doctor with the words, "Dr. Livingstone, I
presume?," a phrase familiar to even those people who have no idea who either Stanley or Livingstone was.
Lucky was the person who lived in ignorance of the alleged curse
of the Hope Diamond. Despite little hard evidence, in the late 19th and early
20th centuries, all sorts of ill-fortune was attributed to the stone.
Supposedly, it was responsible for any number of suicides and deaths among
those who had owned it since the 17th century. Its last owner was New York diamond
merchant Harry Winston,
who donated it to the Smithsonian Institution on this day in 1958 – something that seems to have harmed
neither the museum nor Winston's company in the years since.
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