Author Archives: dcaligari

It’s St. Sithney Day. He is the patron saint of mad dogs. Make of this what you wish: A Breton folk story, states that God asked Sithney to be the patron saint of girls seeking husbands, but Sithney said he would rather be the patron saint of mad dogs and get some rest. (And youContinue reading “Scratch a dog and you’ll find a permanent job”

August 3, 1963 –Allan Sherman released Hello Muddah, Hello Faddah (A Letter from Camp), in the US on this date. Sherman was a writer on The Steve Allen Show and created the game show I’ve Got a Secret. He went on to record comedy albums. The song won a 1964 Grammy Award for comedy. AndContinue reading “Ah, sweet mysteries of life.”

August 3, 1929 –Four famous vaudevillian performers took a chance on the new medium of ‘talking pictures‘ with the general release of the film, The Cocoanuts, starring the Four Marx Brothers — Chico, Groucho, Harpo and Zeppo, on this date,. Filmed on a stage in New York City. Sound films were still so new thatContinue reading “The Cocoanuts”

August 2, 1100 –You may often wonder when this phrase came into being – Act of God. You’ve all seen it long enough and you may unfortunately experienced it when you went to collect on you home insurance policy. As with most things, the English can pinpoint the first popular usage of the phrase. WilliamContinue reading “Force Majeure:”

August 2, 1989 –Universal Pictures released Ron Howard’s film, Parenthood, starring Steve Martin, Mary Steenburgen, Dianne Wiest, Martha Plymton and Keanu Reeves on this date. This movie is based on Ron Howard, Brian Grazer, Lowell Ganz, and Babaloo Mandel’s experiences as parents. And so it goes

August 1, 1769 – Spain sent an exploratory expedition from San Diego to Monterey to survey the area and identify places worth sending more people to become Catholic. The expedition was led by Gaspar de Portola, nephew of the celebrated Spanish comedian Uncle Porky, and included a number of religious missionaries assigned to imposing afternoonContinue reading “The weather is either magnificent or unusual”

The festival of Lammas marks the beginning of the harvest, when people go to church to give thanks for the first grain to be cut. This is the long way of saying that it’s August again. How did a single month become so important? Like almost everything else that’s difficult to understand, the history ofContinue reading “That last flicker of fun and heat before everything fades and dies”

July 31, 1964 –The American space probe Ranger 7 transmitted the first photo moon’s surface ever taken by a U.S. spacecraft, mapping the surface for a future lunar landing, on this date. Ranger 7 carried six slow-scan vidicon TV cameras capable of transmitting high-resolution television pictures of the lunar surface. A total of 4,308 photographsContinue reading “Wait, don’t go – there’s a lovely view of Earth tonight”

It was on this day in 1954 that human feet first stood upon the summit of Pakistan’s K2 mountain, the second-tallest mountain in the world. K2 was known to the Chinese as “Great Mountain” and to Indian and Pakistani locals as “That Big Thing Over There.” It was not until 1856, when T.G. Montgomerie ofContinue reading “All rock and ice and storm and abyss….”

Prague has always been a tough town for elected officials. On July 30, 1419, Jan Zelivsky, a Hussite priest at the church of the Virgin Mary of the Snows, led his congregation on a procession through the streets of Prague to the Town Hall. The town council members had refused to exchange their Hussite prisoners,Continue reading “It’s tough to be an elected official in Prague.”