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rtpoe

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #825 on: March 14, 2017, 09:58:27 PM »
THIRTY YEARS AGO (1987):

Al Lowe, a former high school teacher, suggests to Sierra Games that they remake Chuck Benton's computer game "Softporn Adventure". Sierra's Ken Williams agrees.

Given the adult nature of the game, Sierra releases it without any publicity at all.

It didn't help. Thanks to the plentiful humor, and honestly rather tame adultness, the game became a smash hit.

"Leisure Suit Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards" would win "Best Adventure or Fantasy/Role Playing Game" from the Software Publisher’s Association the next year.
rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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rtpoe

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #826 on: May 10, 2017, 08:41:44 PM »
MAY 10, 1967

While testing an M2-F2 "lifting body" at the Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards, California, NASA research pilot Bruce Peterson regains control of the craft after a "Dutch roll", only to find that a rescue helicopter was too close to his craft. Distracted, he drifted away from the test area to a section of the Rogers Dry Lakebed where it was too difficult to judge the height of the craft (not part of the test area, there were no markings to help any pilots). Peterson misjudged his altitude, and crashed. The wingless M2-F2 flipped over six times after it hit the dry lakebed. Peterson survived, but not without the loss of vision in his right eye.

Footage from the crash was used in the opening of the TV series "The Six Million Dollar Man".


rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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TheZookie007

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #827 on: May 25, 2017, 09:59:29 PM »
1977: A farm boy, a smuggler, a princess, a Wookie, and two droids go off on an adventure.
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rtpoe

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #828 on: June 01, 2017, 08:08:28 PM »
JUNE 1, 1977:

Kathy Dumas got a summer job at a Carvel Ice Cream store in Yonkers, NY. Founder Tom Carvel started thinking about a fish-shaped cake to celebrate Fathers' Day, he asked the staff to come up with some designs. Nothing worked, until Carvel liked a squarish design Dumas had come up with. The only problem was that the "tail" kept breaking off. The team figured out that if they covered it in fudge, the fudge would act as a sort of cement that would hold it all together.



A TV commercial (not the one above) was shot in-house.....and Fudgie the Whale was born. They could barely keep up with demand. These days, they sell about 50,000 a year.

As part of the anniversary, Carvel is partnering with Save The Whales (which, coincidentally, is also celebrating its 40th anniversary this year) with a fundraising raffle.

Oh, and Kathy Dumas? She's now the VP of Production at a specialty bakery chain in the NYC/Connecticut area. Throughout the years, Carvel let Dumas work in all aspects of the business from equipment, supply purchase, contracts and, of course, making ice cream. "I learned my skills from Carvel," Dumas said. "I was able to get a better education than I got anywhere."

http://www.ctpost.com/food/article/Carvel-s-Fudgie-the-Whale-turns-40-11185326.php
rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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rtpoe

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #829 on: June 06, 2017, 10:40:29 PM »
FIFTY YEARS AGO: June, 1967

The Six-Day War

Good luck trying to find an unbiased account of the events leading up to the war, and the aftermath.

This one seems to be OK: http://sixdaywar.org/index.asp
rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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rtpoe

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #830 on: June 14, 2017, 08:43:30 PM »
FIFTY YEARS AGO: June 12, 1967

Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.

Chief Justice Earl Warren, in the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia

At the time, sixteen states had "anti-miscegenation" laws on the books. You can easily guess in which region of the country they were all located. Most of them soon stopped enforcing them, but still kept them on the books. It wasn't until 2000 that the last state (Alabama) finally and formally repealed their laws.
rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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rtpoe

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #831 on: June 15, 2017, 07:21:56 PM »
THIRTY YEARS AGO: June 15, 1987

In an effort to create an image file format that would work with the slow Internet speeds of the day, Steve Wilhite and a team of CompuServe developers invent the GIF.

(Wilhite says it with a soft G (like the "Jif" brand of peanut butter), but most people say it with a hard G (as in gift), because it's GRAPHICAL Image Format)

The simplicity and compression ratio of the format allowed for simple animations. So when Netscape Navigator 2.0 came out in 1995, it supported the .GIF format - allowing people to decorate their websites with animated graphics.

Some animations gained a sort of fame online. The "Dancing Baby" was adapted by John Woodell from a short video used by 3-D modelers in 1996. The "Hamster Dance" website - a full page of dancing hamster GIFs - was created by Deidre LaCarte in 1998. 2001 became "Peanut Butter Jelly Time" with a GIF of a dancing banana.

In 2004, the patent expired. And suddenly it became just too easy to convert video clips into GIFs. Like "Leave Britney Alone", which became a meme in 2007. It also helped that the platforms of  Reddit, Twitter, and Tumblr (launched in 2005, 2006, and 2007, respectively) allowed people a place to share their work.

These days, there are websites like Giphy that are solely devoted to GIF animations. Artists have been taking advantage of the format to add simple animation to their images (see attatchement).

So let's raise a glass to Steve Wilhite, CompuServe, and the GIF!

rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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TheZookie007

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #832 on: June 19, 2017, 04:35:19 PM »

FIFTY YEARS AGO: June 12, 1967


This day now has a grassroots celebration behind it, called Loving Day. While not an official national public holiday, the celebrations have occurred across the country, and in cities worldwide. This year, for instance, there were Loving Day celebrations in the UK, in France, in the Netherlands and in Japan. And this map of the United States, showing interracial marriage rates, is interesting to see.
 
Quote

Chief Justice Earl Warren, in the unanimous Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia


I first heard about Loving v. Virginia in college, and being that it came down in the 60s I wondered what Thurgood Marshall's opinion on the case was. That's when I learned that he was not sworn in as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court until June 13, 1967 -- the day after Loving v. Virginia was decided.

Speaking of Justice Marshall, when his first wife died, he began to court a co-worker at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Cecilia Suyat, who was Filipino-Hawaiian.

Quote

She had a flower in her hair. He wore his trademark black horn-rimmed glasses and gazed down at her. She was a 4-foot-11 woman of Philippine descent married to a black legal giant.

“He was 6-foot-2. He would always say, ‘How’s the weather down there, gal?’ I’d say, ‘Same as up there, man!’ I’d keep telling him: ‘I don’t care how tall you are. I could still beat you up. I’ll get on a chair,’ ” she says, laughing...

Cissy’s journey here was an unlikely one. Born in Hawaii to immigrant parents, Cecilia “Cissy” Suyat moved to New York after her father balked at her marrying a Filipino whose family spoke a different dialect.

“For my father, that was a no-no,” she said. “Imagine that? Another dialect, instead of another race?”

“So he said, ‘You go to New York with your aunt and uncle and take some business courses. And if you still love him in a year, come back and marry him.’ ”


Instead, she says, she decided she wanted to stay in New York. Her father agreed but told her, “You’ve got to support yourself.”

She went to the employment office.

“The clerk, she saw my dark skin, and she sent me to the national office of the NAACP,” she says. “That is the only reason I can think of that she sent me to the NAACP for my first job. And to this day, I thank her, because had it not been for her, I wouldn’t have known anything about a race problem.”

She also wouldn’t have met Thurgood Marshall, the head of the NAACP’s legal team.

In 1948, she started working as a stenographer, then was promoted to be the secretary to the director of the NAACP’s branch offices. She earned $35 a week and played a supporting role in the historic Brown v. Board of Education decision...

Nine months after the Brown decision, his first wife, Vivian “Buster” Burey, died of cancer at the age of 44. One of the country’s most accomplished black men was suddenly a widower.

He soon began courting Cissy, who resisted when he proposed. “I said, ‘No way. No way. People will think you are marrying a foreigner,’ ” she says. Her own family would raise objections, too.

“He said, ‘I don’t care what people think. I’m marrying you.’ He was so persuasive. So we got married. And, actually, there was no repercussion because people knew me.”

On Dec. 17, 1955, Roy Wilkins, then executive secretary of the NAACP, gave her away at St. Philip’s Episcopal Church in Harlem. At their New York apartment, the couple’s visitors included the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.


Quote

At the time, sixteen states had "anti-miscegenation" laws on the books. You can easily guess in which region of the country they were all located. Most of them soon stopped enforcing them, but still kept them on the books. It wasn't until 2000 that the last state (Alabama) finally and formally repealed their laws.


Speaking of Alabama:
Quote

In Alabama, it took until 2000 to remove these laws. A referendum was passed that removed this article from the Alabama State Constitution:

    "The Legislature shall never pass any law to authorize or legalize any marriage between any white person and a Negro, or a descendant of a Negro." (Alabama State Constitution, Article IV, Section 102)

This section was introduced in 1901. According to a poll conducted by the Mobile Register in September of 2000, 19% of voters said that they would not remove section 102. This is comparable to the 22% in South Carolina. However, 64% said that they would vote to remove it. While this is a majority, it is still far from a unanimous vote.


Nearly one out of every five Alabama voters in 2000 were against removing the words against "miscegenation". Surely things have improved since then, right?

Well, yes, and no. A few facts:
  • According to a 2013 Gallup poll, 11% of Americans still do not approve of interracial marriages;
  • One-in-six American newlyweds (17%) are married to a person of a "different race or ethnicity" according to a May 2017 Pew Research Center analysis. This is five times more than in 1967, the year of the Loving decision.
  • One-in-ten of all married Americans are in an interracial or interethnic marriage (about 11 million).
  • According to a 2015 Pew Research analysis, 6.9% of adult Americans (22 million) are multiracial. Compare this to the percentage of Americans who are Asian American (5.6%).
  • In 2011, 46% of Mississippi Republicans thought interracial marriage should be illegal.
Finally, according to a May 2017 Pew Research report:
Quote

The view that the rise in the number of interracial marriages is good for society is particularly prevalent among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents; 49% in this group say this, compared with 28% of Republicans and those who lean Republican. The majority of Republicans (60%) say it doesn’t make much of a difference, while 12% say this trend is bad for society. Among Democrats, 45% say it doesn’t make much difference while 6% say it’s bad thing. This difference persists when controlling for race. Among whites, Democrats are still much more likely than Republicans to say more interracial marriages are a good thing for society.


In other words, twice as many Republicans as Democrats say that interracial marriage is a "bad thing". More interesting is that that ratio holds up, no matter what race the Democrat  respondent or the Republican respondent is.

Much progress has been made, but we still have some ways to go.
« Last Edit: June 19, 2017, 04:50:13 PM by TheZookie007 »
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TheZookie007

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #833 on: June 19, 2017, 04:38:46 PM »
1865:

Enslaved blacks in Texas were finally informed that, two and a half years earlier, Pres. Abraham Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation, thus "freeing" them. This good news led to the celebration we now call Juneteenth.
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rtpoe

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #834 on: June 19, 2017, 07:37:39 PM »
I have to get all technical on you there, Zook.

The Emancipation Proclamation DID NOT free a single slave. It simply stated that the Union would no longer recognize slavery in the areas currently in rebellion. That's like JFK saying Communism was illegal in Cuba. A good sentiment, but nothing more. Lincoln had to tread carefully, since a couple of slave states did not secede. It wasn't until the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on December 6. 1865, that slavery was made illegal.

What the E.P. *did* do was make it absolutely clear to any nations thinking about supporting the Confederacy that the War was about slavery, and nothing more. If you supported the rebels, you supported slavery....

I suspect that "Juneteenth" is going to become the African-American equivalent of Cinco de Mayo or St. Patrick's Day. A celebration of the culture - and hopefully not one co-opted by merchandisers....
rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie

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TheZookie007

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #835 on: June 19, 2017, 11:50:55 PM »

I have to get all technical on you there, Zook.

The Emancipation Proclamation DID NOT free a single slave. It simply stated that the Union would no longer recognize slavery in the areas currently in rebellion.


Oh, I know. That's why I put the word "freeing" in quotation marks. The E.P. was one of those infernal Executive Orders that certain politicians are always railing about...and then end up signing over and over and over with great fanfare, almost to the exclusion of doing anything else like actually help get legislation passed ;)

Quote
I suspect that "Juneteenth" is going to become the African-American equivalent of Cinco de Mayo or St. Patrick's Day. A celebration of the culture - and hopefully not one co-opted by merchandisers....

The main difference between Juneteenth and Cinco de Mayo/St. Patrick's Day is that Juneteenth is part of the culture and is celebrated as such. Irish-American celebration of St. Patrick's Day is totally unlike how it is "celebrated" back in Ireland. As for how Americans "celebrate" Cinco de Mayo -- well, it's now become mainly an excuse to get **92** and trot out their most offensive Mexican stereotypes, as well as a chance to display how totally ignorant they are of the importance of the day to Mexico. ("Cinco de Mayo? Isn't that Mexican Independence Day? Hic!")
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CarlTL

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #836 on: June 28, 2017, 07:46:07 PM »
Forty Years Ago Today:

Me  ;D

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TheZookie007

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #837 on: June 28, 2017, 10:40:01 PM »
Forty Years Ago Today:

Me  ;D

Happy birthday! :)
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TheZookie007

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #838 on: June 28, 2017, 10:47:32 PM »
Missed this anniversary by about a month but:

1967: On May 26 (in the UK) and on June 2 (in the US):
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rtpoe

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Re: 2017: The Anniversaries
« Reply #839 on: June 29, 2017, 07:11:56 PM »
Forty Years Ago Today:

Me  ;D

Happy B-Day, you breast-lover, you!
rtpoe

The last fling of winter is over ...  The earth, the soil itself, has a dreaming quality about it.  It is warm now to the touch; it has come alive; it hides secrets that in a moment, in a little while, it will tell.
-  Donald Culross Peattie