"That's
"Hedy," not "Hedley!"
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Tuesday:
As mysterious as Dorothy Kilgallen's death on November 8, 1965, is the 1965 blackout that overtook much of the Northeast United States and Ontario, Canada the following day. While the official cause was a series of
mistakes and blown relays, there were also reports of UFOs near some of the power stations. (We don't necessarily
believe the reports; we're just saying ... ) Not all of the Northeast was
affected, however, and a full moon that night kept things surprisingly safe,
with New York City reporting only five instances of looting.
When one speaks of New York, it's difficult to not think of Stanford White (whose 157th birthday falls on this day). White's
distinctive architectural fingerprints can still be found all over Manhattan
more than a century after his death. Such structures as the Municipal Building, the Washington Square Arch, and the Metropolitan Museum of
Art – not to mention many of the millionaires' mansions
on Fifth Avenue - were his designs.
While White's firm designed things to be built, it's a demolished object that
we take special notice of today, as it's the 21st anniversary of the fall of
the Berlin Wall. The wall itself was the literal dividing line between East
and West Berlin, constructed to keep East Germans from escaping the
Communist regime, and when that government fell, so did the wall.
Something that irritated those killjoy East German officials was rock music, and on this day in 1967, the first issue of Rolling Stone was
published. While Rolling Stone was originally dedicated to rock,
pop, and blues music, as well as musicians – and those are still its primary focus – it's expanded in the
decades since to become one of America's most respected magazines, known for
its reporting on politics and other forms of entertainment.
Speaking of respect, we throw a little of it to the creative community today
as it's Inventor's Day, celebrated today because it's the birthday of actress Hedy Lamarr, who was not only one of the most glamorous and beautiful actresses of the 1930s and '40s, but was also something
of a scientific genius. In 1942, she was granted a patent for a communication system that would "hop"
frequencies in order to make radio-guided torpedoes harder to detect. While
the technology went basically unused until the '60s, today it forms the basis
for wi-fi networks and cell phones.
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