Dateline June 28, 1926 – Melvin Kaminski is born in Brooklyn, New York. It will be many years before he changes his name to Mel Brooks and makes the world laugh. Born only in 1926? Feels like Mel Brooks is as old as The Bible.
I’m not sure I believe that birth year. Mel Brooks has offered proof over and over he is at least a 2,000 Year Old Man.
Deep down inside, Mel Brooks wants to be known as a song and dance man. Over the years he’s given us some terrific Musical numbers.
No one in Pop Culture, including Glenn Beck, has made more references to Nazis.
Brooks has also mined Rap more than once, with equally fun results.
And, this is why people call me Hedley Lamarr:
However, my favourite Mel Brooks movie is the little known The Twelve Chairs, which was released in 1970 between The Producers and Blazing Saddles. Here is the whole movie:
Dateline June 23, 1912 – Alan Turing was born on this day. Who dat? Oh, just the man who saved millions of lives and maybe the world during World War Two by cracking the Nazi U Boat codes and building the Enigma machine. Doesn’t ring a bell yet? Surely you know him. He’s the guy who, in 1936, built the Universal Turing Machine, which used stored programs, making it a direct descendant of whatever device you are reading this on at this exact moment; essentially a modern computer.
Yet, why have so few people heard about Alan Turing? He died young to start with, at 42, by his own hand after (rumor has it) he ate a poisoned apple in 1954.* But here’s the real reason we don’t know his name: In 1952 Turing was prosecuted as a homosexual, which was a crime at the time. In order to avoid a prison term he agreed to be chemically castrated. However, his security clearances were revoked and he could no longer carry on his work for the government. He committed suicide on my birthday, June 7, 1954. * In 2009 British Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologized for Turing’s treatment at the hand of the government, which he called “appalling.”
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him … So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.
To honour the centenary of a very important, but almost forgotten, person, Google produced one of it’s most comprehensible doodles ever:
Events are planned all around the world today, and for the next year, which has been dubbed Alan Turing Year. As well, the Science Museum in Kensington opened a year-long exhibit this week called “Codebreaker – Alan Turing’s Life and Legacy.” The web site states:
Alan Turing is most widely known for his critical involvement in the codebreaking at Bletchley Park during the Second World War. But Alan Turing was not just a codebreaker.
This British mathematician was also a philosopher and computing pioneer who grappled with the fundamental problems of life itself. His ideas have helped shape the modern world, including early computer programming and even the seeds of artificial intelligence. This exhibition tells the story of Turing and his most important ideas.
At the heart of the exhibition is the Pilot ACE computer, built to Turing’s ground-breaking design. It is the most significant surviving Turing artefact in existence.
It offers a small documentary on Turing’s life and work:
Is there any doubt that had Alan Turing not been labeled homosexual, everyone would know his name today?
* At a conference at Oxford today, Professor Jack Copeland was sheduled to present his theory on why Turing’s death might not have been a suicide after all.
Dateline June 19, 1897 – Moe Howard, future leader of The Three Stooges, was born Moses Harry Horwitz on this date. He would be joined later in life with older brother Samuel (Shemp) and younger brother Jerome (Curly) at different times in one of the longest-running comedy teams in show bidnezz.
Moe Howard began in vaudeville with “Ted Healy and his Stooges,” along with brother Shemp. Soon Healy hired violinist Larry Fine and the Three Stooges were born, more or less, even tho’ they weren’t called that yet. Shemp made one ‘Stooge’ movie with Healy and quit the Stooges to start a solo career. Moe suggested younger brother Jerome/Curly and, after they managed to get rid of Healy, this was the trio that starting making all those Columbia shorts over the years, starting in 1934, and eventually running to 190 with a few cast changes.
In 1946 Curly had a stroke and was replaced by Shemp, who returned to the act where he started. According to the WikiWackyWoo the three Howard brothers made one movie together: 1949’s Hold That Lion. However, further strokes led to Curly’s death in 1952, the year of my birth. Yet, he was very much alive for my childhood.
Shemp died in 1955, yet appeared in four more Three Stooges movies after that, since there was enough footage in the can, but was eventually replaced by Joe Besser. Columbia sold off the Stooge film library to tee vee through the company Screen Gems and that’s when and where subsequent generations learned how to poke people’s eyes out and hit each other over the head with hammers.
Their tee vee poularity led to Moe forming a new Three Stooge ensemble, replacing Joe Besser with Joe DeRita, or Curly-Joe. This trio made several feature length movies and a few guest appearances until they were reduced to a cartoon with filmed live segments bookending the whole dealie.
When he died Moe Howard left behind an unfinished autobiography that was tentatively entitled I Stooge To Conquer, which I would have loved to have been able to read. For many years I belonged to The Official Three Stooges Fan Club [and recently came across all the newsletters in my file cabinet] and read a great deal about their history. The Three Stooges occupy a very narrow niche in Show Biz: Vaudevillians who transitioned to movies who transitioned to tee vee. There were many comedians, none of them slapstick comics for obvious reasons, who transitioned to radio before taking on tee vee.
Yet, despite my love for all things Stooge, this was the worst idea for a remake ever:
There is no denying that Paul McCartney has written a wealth of music that will stand the test of time. As we listen to Beethoven and Bach long after their lifetimes, we will be listening to the music of Paul McCartney.
And, just because it pisses Mark Koldys-Johnny Dollar off, I am going to link to otherversions of this story again.
Uncle Russ Gibb
Here’s what I find funny: I have made no claims, yet Johnny Dollar has gone out of his way to refute them.
J$ asked one person one question (or had a confederate ask one
question) and then spun out an entire new conspiracy theory. While, that’s
hardly journalism, it’s par for the course for Markie K and the Sycophant Five.
I only ever told this to ONE journalist. The resultant article that came
out was so garbled, I never told it again “on the record.” Therefore, every other
version I have read is second hand, or a re-writing of the
original post. Each has managed to garble the story further.
However, and I stress, only one person ever bothered to ask me any questions and I answered them all honestly.
However, I am most grateful that Markie K and the Sycophant Five, along with their patron Mark Koldys-Johnny Dollar are such loyal followers of my Aunty Em Ericann Blog.
What’s left of The Grande Ballroom; Picture by author 2010
The Grande Ballroom on opening night of a whole new era.
