Grand Torino

Fans of "The Tracey Ullman Show" -- a sketch comedy series that ran on Fox from 1987-1990 -- were in for a treat on April 19, 1987, though they may not have known it at the time. It was during that show that the first-ever "Simpsons" animation aired, with the almost two-minute-long "Good Night" short. As show producer James L. Brooks recently told The Hollywood Reporter, he wanted "Ullman" to feature short animated interstitials, and had liked Matt Groening's "Life in Hell" comics so well he invited the cartoonist to submit some ideas. Groening decided at the last minute to try a whole new idea, and quickly sketched up "The Simpsons," his take on a dysfunctional but ultimately loving family, and named many of the characters after his own family members. They've come a long way since: The earliest drawings were jumpy and crudely-drawn, and the while the characters' mouths looked like they might split their heads in half when they spoke, other visual characteristics (like hair) were essentially already in place. But many refinements were to come: It's hard to imagine the current Bart Simpson having pre-bedtime metaphysical discussions with today's Homer, for example. But it's easy to forget just how subversive the clips were at the time -- animation geared at a more adult audience had been gone from broadcast airwaves for many years, and the cynical, modern tone the show took to something as time-honored as tucking your kids into bed was brand new, even on the upstart Fox network.

Space Invaders is a Japanese shooting video game released in 1978 by Taito. It was developed by Tomohiro Nishikado, who was inspired by other media: Breakout, The War of the Worlds, and Star Wars. The games was one of the forerunners of modern video gaming and helped expand the video game industry from a novelty to a global industry. The game Space Invaders became an immediate hit when it was released in 1978. In the original planning for the game, they had planned to have the aliens be human soldiers. Taito figured that they did not want to send the message that shooting humans was ok, so they changed it to aliens. Shortly after being released, Space Invaders grew in popularity. In 1980, it was licensed for use in the United States. It was released in coin-operated arcades, the Atari 2600, and the Nintendo Entertainment System. Throughout its lifetime it has generated more than 500 million dollars in revenue. Fun facts... The game was so amazingly popular in Japan that it caused a coin shortage until the country's Yen supply was quadrupled. Entire arcades were opened in Japan specifically for this game. Space Invaders, along with Pac-Man and Pong, shares the notorious distinction of being one of the most duplicated, bootleged and/or hacked arcade games.

The Tet Offensive was a series of surprise attacks by the Vietcong (rebel forces sponsored by North Vietnam) and North Vietnamese forces, on scores of cities, towns, and hamlets throughout South Vietnam. The attacks began on January 31, 1968, the first day of the Lunar New Year, Vietnam's most important holiday. It took weeks for U.S. and South Vietnamese troops to retake all of the captured cities, including the former imperial capital of Hue. North Vietnamese leaders believed they could not sustain the heavy losses inflicted by the Americans indefinitely and had to win the war with an all-out military effort. In addition, Ho Chi Minhwas nearing death, and they needed a victory before that time came. The combined forces of the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Regular Army (NVA), about 85,000 strong, launched a major offensive throughout South Vietnam. I was at DaNang loading bombs on these back then.....what a mess it was during those attacks.

Jaws opened across North America on 464 screens amid an unprecedented publicity blitz: $2.5m was spent on promotion, a substantial chunk of which went on TV advertising, still a novelty at that time. Promotional tie-ins, including Jaws-themed ice-creams, were everywhere. I remember being on holiday in the Isle of Man long before the film’s UK opening (it didn’t arrive here until December) and buying the novel, the T-shirt and a garish Jaws pendant, all on the strength of the insane levels of news coverage that the film’s US opening provoked. “Lifeguards were falling asleep at their stations,” remembered the film’s other producer, Richard Zanuck, “because nobody was going in the water; they were on the beach reading their book”. In the first 38 days of its release, Jaws sold 25m tickets; its rentals in 1975 were a record-breaking $102.5m. When adjusted for inflation, the film’s total worldwide box office is now estimated at close to $2bn.

There were no digital cameras, no personal computers, and certainly no Internet in 1973. But there were cell phones. Well, one anyway. On April 3, 1973, from a Manhattan street corner -- 6th Ave. between 53rd and 54th -- Motorola’s Martin Cooper placed the world’s first mobile phone call. To his rival, no less. “I was running the whole Motorola cellular program, I was a division manager at that time, and he was the AT&T equivalent,” Cooper told tech site the Verge last year, on the 39th anniversary of that phone call. “I have to tell you, to this day, he resents what Motorola did in those days.” Cooper called Joel Engel from Bell Systems to tell him that the race to perfect cellular tech was over -- Motorola had done it first. Cooper's exact words on that call weren’t recorded the way Samuel Morse’s first telegraph message was (“what hath god wrought”) or Alexander Graham Bell’s first phone call (“Watson, come here. I want to see you”). He reportedly said something like, "I'm ringing you just to see if my call sounds good at your end." The gadget he used is well known, however. The prototype version that would become the Motorola DynaTAC 8000x weighed 2.5 pounds, had a single-line, text-only LED screen. It would take a decade before Motorola’s DynaTAC finally reached consumer hands. On September 21, 1983, Motorola made history when the FCC approved the 8000X, the world's first commercial portable cell phone. It cost consumers a whopping $3,995 at the time. And the hunk of cream-colored plastic and wires Cooper used looks preposterous next to the sleek modern iPhones and Androids today’s consumers rely upon, of course.

June 9, 1973 - In one of the most awesome displays of dominance in sports history, Secretariat wins the Belmont Stakes by 31 lengths, winning the Triple Crown of United States Thoroughbred Racing for the first time since 1948. Hard to put this into context, but when sports writers put the greatest achievements in sporting history in perspective, somewhere on that list, will likely be a non-human participant, and that participant will be Secretariat. By winning the Belmont Stakes and therefore, the first Triple Crown in twenty-five years, Secretariat became a legend in the horse racing world. But it was in the world in general, when the horse won that race in record time, 2:24 flat for the 1.5 mile race, and won by thirty-one lengths, it was perhaps the most dominant sport achievement in history. Over fifty-two percent of the television viewing public watched the race, fifteen million viewers. He had been the prohibitive favorite, at 1 to 10 odds in the five horse race with jockey Ron Turcotte at the helm. The time of the race is still, more than forty years later, the Belmont Stakes record, as well as the American record on dirt for one and one half miles.

A cloud of vapor engulfs the space shuttle Challenger in a picture taken on the morning of January 28, 1986. The disaster claimed the lives of all seven astronauts on board, including high school teacher Christa McAuliffe, and brought NASA's human spaceflight program to an abrupt but temporary halt. MYTH 1: CHALLENGER EXPLODED For example, one commonly repeated myth is that Challenger exploded 73 seconds after launching from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. "The shuttle itself did not explode," said Valerie Neal, space shuttle curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. "I think the origin of that myth is that it looked like an explosion, and the media called it an explosion." Even NASA officials mistakenly called the event an explosion as the tragedy unfurled. For example, NASA public affairs officer Steve Nesbitt said at the time that "we have a report from the flight dynamics officer that the vehicle has exploded." Investigations would later reveal, however, that what actually happened was much more complicated, curator Neal said. The space shuttle's external fuel tank had collapsed, releasing all its liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen propellants. As the chemicals mixed, they ignited to create a giant fireball thousands of feet in the air. The shuttle itself, however, was still intact at this point and still rising, but it was quickly becoming unstable. "The shuttle orbiter was trying very hard to stay on its path, because it sensed something very irregular was happening underneath it," Neal said. "Finally it broke off the tank and—moving so fast but without its boosters and tank—it couldn't tolerate the aerodynamic forces. "The tail and the main engine section broke off. Both of the wings broke off. The crew cabin and the forward fuselage separated from the payload pay, and those big chunks fell out of the sky, and they further broke up when they hit the water." Read more here. https://www.nationalgeographic.com.au/space/5-myths-of-challenger-shuttle-disaster-debunked.aspx

The killer’s motives remain unknown, but his — or her, or their — technical savvy is as chilling today as it was 30 years ago. On Sept. 29, 1982, three people died in the Chicago area after taking cyanide-laced Tylenol at the outset of a poisoning spree that would claim seven lives by Oct. 1. The case has never been solved, and so the lingering question — why? — still haunts investigators. According to TIME’s 1982 report, Food and Drug Administration officials hypothesized that the killer bought Extra-Strength Tylenol capsules over the counter, injected cyanide into the red half of the capsules, resealed the bottles, and sneaked them back onto the shelves of drug and grocery stores. The Illinois attorney general, on the other hand, suspected a disgruntled employee on Tylenol’s factory line. In either case, it was a sophisticated and ambitious undertaking with the seemingly pathological goal of killing strangers entirely at random. Their symptoms and sudden deaths confounded doctors until the link was discovered, traced back to identical pill bottles that each smelled like almonds — the telltale scent of cyanide. The perpetrator left no margin for error, filling the capsules with poison at thousands of times the amount needed to be fatal. Without a suspect to revile, public outrage could have fallen squarely on Tylenol — the nation’s leading painkiller, with a market share greater than the next four top painkillers combined — and its parent corporation, Johnson & Johnson. Instead, by quickly recalling all of its products from store shelves, a move that cost Johnson & Johnson millions of dollars, the company emerged as another victim of the crime and one that put customer safety above profit. It even issued national warnings urging the public not to take Tylenol and established a hotline for worried customers to call.

The United States presidential election of 1980 featured a contest between incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter and his Republican opponent, Ronald Reagan, as well as Republican Congressman John B. Anderson, who ran as an independent. Reagan, aided by the Iran hostage crisis and a worsening economy at home, won the election in a landslide. Carter, after defeating Ted Kennedy for the Democratic nomination, attacked Reagan as a dangerous right-wing radical. For his part, Reagan, the former Governor of California, repeatedly ridiculed Carter, and won a decisive victory; in the simultaneous Congressional elections, Republicans won control of the United States Senate for the first time in 28 years. This election marked the beginning of what is popularly called the "Reagan Revolution." 1980 Election Results Candidate Party Electoral Votes Popular Votes ✓ Ronald Reagan Republican 489 43,901,812 Jimmy Carter (I) Democratic 49 35,483,820 John Anderson Independent 0 5,719,850 Ed Clark Libertarian 0 921,128

America finally signalled its intention to become fully committed to war in Vietnam with the arrival of 3,500 combat troops just north of Da Nang, on March 8, 1965. Men of the 9th Marine Expeditionary Brigade were met by South Vietnamese officers, girls carrying leis, sight-seers and four US soldiers holding a sign saying ‘Welcome, Gallant Marines’. It was all much to the dismay of General William Westmoreland, the senior US officer in the country at that time. Both Westmoreland (pictured below) and General Nguyen Van Thieu, chief of the South Vietnamese Armed Forces Council, had asked for the troops to be "brought ashore in the most inconspicuous way feasible".

So for some reason you think I'm promoting a movie launch of something that happened like 41 years ago that most everyone has seen like 10 times. However......if anyone else feels I'm using "clickbait" to somehow fool you into looking at something I am promoting either here or in any of my past posts let me know and I'll delete this post. And if you (BlessTheUSA) see a post from me in the future just don't click on it cause heaven forbid I don't want to waste your time.

What? It did happen in '77....how else would you put it? It's history...

There need to be limits and consequences for continual repeat offenders or else they may as well quite citing people in the first place. For some reason it reminds me of giving trophies for participation rather than winning.

Star Wars was released in theatres in the United States on May 25, 1977. It earned $461 million in the U.S. and $314 million overseas, totaling $775 million. It surpassed Jaws (1975) to become the highest-grossing film of all time until the release of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982).

Fawcett and her friend tried various poses around her pool, but nothing was working for them. McBroom then grabbed a worn Mexican blanket from his battered 1937 Chevy truck. He was using it as a seat cover. The photographer realized the stripes would match the suit, so he yanked the blanket from his cab. Who needs a fancy studio with lights?

Purdy

Well if everyone knows then it wouldn't be a conspiracy then would it? Just sayin'.....

G10 makes a nice handle material for knives and a lot of other things as well. I think the aluminum could work as well although it tends to gum up files and other stuff but it can be done.

In today's world there are so many problems...people problems dealing with life, moral objectivity, and so on. I found this old story applicable for some reason since to me people seem more self centered and absorbed than ever. A POUND OF BUTTER There was a farmer who sold a pound of butter to the baker. One day the baker decided to weigh the butter to see if he was getting a pound and he found that he was not. This angered him and he took the farmer to court. The judge asked the farmer if he was using any measure. The farmer replied, amour Honor, I am primitive. I don’t have a proper measure, but I do have a scale.” The judge asked, “Then how do you weigh the butter?” The farmer replied “Your Honor, long before the baker started buying butter from me, I have been buying a pound loaf of bread from him. Every day when the baker brings the bread, I put it on the scale and give him the same weight in butter. If anyone is to be blamed, it is the baker.” ” We get back in life what we give to others.”

JC Higgins (Marlin) Model 103.18 .22 bolt action single-shot...circa 1959 I believe.

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