Today I am launching a website. My name is Frank A. Bennetto. I'm a 24 year old and that's enough for you to know about me for now. I'm launching this website as a sort of oddball "today in history"-ish project. Each day, I'll have a short passage on a specific topic on the site. Topics will include both the dorky and the bizarre. In these first three days I'm talking about anime robots, a horror ARG, and a NASA spacecraft, and topics spiral from there.
I do have a few disclaimers before we begin. Don't expect anything in depth. We are just inspecting the entrances to rabbit holes, not going down them. Obscurity is subjective. you might have heard of everything on this site before or you might have heard of none of it depending on your age, location and how much you look for this kind of stuff, and how strict your parents were/are. If I make any mistakes, message me at: ([email protected]) so I can correct them and put the mistake in the "Human Error Gallery". Same email also works for any other questions, suggestions, complaints or other inquiries.Â
Today, 70 years ago, the first chapter of Astro Boy (Mighty Atom In Japan) was published. Astro Boy is a good series to get into if you want to get sad about robots. It's about a man who replaces his dead son with a weaponized robot, and then starts being an abusive father to said robot for not being exactly like his dead son. Anyway Astro ends up getting sold to the circus, but the Japanese government gets him out of there and he ends up becoming a superhero.
For the record I don't specifically recommend the original manga, because while it was considered progressive when it was first published in 50's -70's Japan, and was intended to be anti-racist, nowadays⊠well, there are a number of individual stories that have aged like milk. If you are interested, I recommend the 80's anime that I haven't watched in ten years (I need to rewatch it) but I know is a lot milder, or even the Naoki Urasawa manga "Plutoâ, which retells the "The Greatest Robot on Earth'' story arc in a very 00's way.
Today is the birthday of the fictional character Alex Kralie from Marble Hornets. Marble Hornets is a horror web series and alternative reality game that ran from 2009-2014 for five years on the date. It's about a Something Awful goon named Jay Merrick investigating why an indie rom com he worked on in college never got finished. The answer is Slenderman, and he has to deal with the answer being Slenderman.
The web series debuted 10 days after the original Slenderman pictures were posted on the Something Awful "make paranormal images" board and honestly I wonder how weird that was for the guy who made Slenderman. Like, you post a photoshop, and two weeks later some guys in Alabama have a video of your photoshop monster. Anyway, I know Slenderman isn't real, because he would have killed me in 2014 if he was.
Today is National Caramel Day. Caramel is what happens when sugar is heated up, usually with an amount of usually dairy-based fat, enough so it gets brown and tastes great but not hot enough it burns and tastes awful. Because of this, it is probably one of the easiest places to point in a kitchen and exclaim like, "yep, that's chemistry".Â
Caramel is easily as pretty as it tastes. Something about that golden transparent color just always catches my eye.Â
One funny thing about caramel is people like to argue about how it's pronounced. The argument is usually whether it has two or three syllables, and in the United States at least usage is regional enough that people have made maps of where people say it which-way-where. Turns out it's an "east coast vs everyone else" split. Personally, I say both interchangeably.Â
Today is the anniversary of the first Tony Award ceremonies. For the unaware, the Tonys is the big boy award show for Broadway theater. It maintains its place as the least culturally relevant of the "Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, Tony" combo by being a form of media where unless you live in the right place with enough money to go to these things regularly (or are knee deep in theatrical bootlegging) you definitely haven't seen anything getting an award that year, and can only hope to pick out someone to root for based off soundtracks or the media that the play is based on.Â
The Tony awards are named for Antoinette "Tony" Perry, an actress best known for having the Tony awards named after her. There wasn't really a "best play" at the first awards, more of a lot of general honors for a bunch of plays I've never heard of before, and unless you are a theater buff that already knows more about this than me, you probably haven't heard of em either. One of them was titled "Happy Birthday" though, so that's fun. Regardless, I hope anyone who was there in 1947 had a good time.Â
Today in 2001, a bunch of NASA scientists sent up the Mars Odyssey off to Mars. Its mission is to hang out around the outside of Mars with a bunch of science tools and both record its own data and help earth communicate with the rovers. As of 2022, the craft is still in operation over twenty years later.
The craft shares its name with the classic Greek epic, but it was named for the book "2001: A Space Odyssey", which is best known for its film adaptation. It was kinda too perfect not to do, and plus they politely asked the guy who wrote the book if they could call it that and he was honored so they went for it.
Today I'll be telling you about one of the first animations. Ever. "Winsor McCay: The Famous Cartoonist of the N.Y. Herald and His Moving Comics" aka "Little Nemo" was an early theatrical short made in 1911, when cinema was still a baby and animation was but a metaphorical fetus.Â
The animation itself is very fluid, and while some of the character designs look kinda "aged bad" they are extremely animated for being from a time when animation wasn't really a thing, and some versions of the short have a prelude of McCay's friends laughing at him for trying to make comics move. And the animated part is even in color.
Today is the birthday of the guy that invented Jell-o shots and "Geek Rock", Tom Lehrer. As of writing, Lehere is still with us and is turning 94 today. Lehere is best known for his satirical music stylings and "The Elements Song", in which the periodic table is recited to the tune of "Modern Major General.
One thing that's really cool is that Leher has put all his music in the public domain, which means you can do whatever you want with it pretty much. This is really great; he did that because the public domain system is constipated for no good reason. If I ever do anything cool, I'll put it in the public domain when I die. If this website is the cool thing, well, I don't have anyone else to run it if anything happens to me at the moment. I'll look into fixing that.Â
[EDITORâS NOTE: You do now, Tom.]
Today we are talking about probably one of the most recent topics I'll cover, because only two years ago, scientists got the first actual image of a black hole. And the image was mostly orange, which is kinda a contrast to most people making them purple or blue beforehand.
I remember hearing a few people say the images looked a bit blurry when they came out, but you also have to realize how far away it was. 55 million light-years away, which technically means the imagery as it hit our planet was 55 million years old. After they get big enough numbers start to feel fake, but you have to appreciate how old and far away it was just for us to manage to take its picture.Â
Today is National Pet Day. Pets are a thing I'm glad exist. We really went right when we decided to just have animals around for companionship and started the process now known as domestication. They say unlike most other domestic animals, cats domesticated themselves by just showing up on farms and eating the mice and moles that would eat the crop and the farmers would let them stay because of free pest control.
People tend to forget pigeons are domestic animals, being domesticated doves. I don't know if any of the reptiles, amphibians and fish we keep as pets are domesticated the way mammals or birds are, but a number of them make good pets from us simulating their habitats for them in our own homes to sadly mixed results. Always do research before getting a new pet because the needs of an animal can be very specific.Â
Today Disneyland Paris opened for the first time, but it wasn't Disneyland Paris yet. When it first opened it was called Euro Disneyland. Out of the 6 "Castle Parks" Disney has, it is the third and the first one outside of the US. Disneyland Paris is the only Disney park in Europe.
[EDITORâS NOTE: OBJECTION! EuroDisney, as it was colloquially called, opened today in 1992, but Tokyo Disneyland opened on April 15th a whole nine years earlier. The Parisian park was the FOURTH castle park, and the second non-US park. You better put on this little green hat and several questions about your anthropomorphic relationship to Pluto, Tom, because youâre a goof now.
Also, while Iâm here? Nobody in Europe uses âEuroâ to refer to continental matters, so Disney was being extra cultureblind here. They named their failed moneymaker âDollar Disney.â Appropriate.]
When it was built a lot of people were pissed off that they were bringing the very American concept of a Disney park to France, and nobody showed up until they made Space Mountain. This space mountain was themed to the book " From the Earth to the Moon" by Jules Verne. A lot of people said it was even better than a regular space mountain!Â
So then they took out the cool parts and changed it to be Star-Wars themed. Because Star Wars.
Today is the birthday of a board game I'm bad at: Scrabble. Scrabble started off as a game called Lexiko, which got reworked into Criss-Crosswords, which got reworked into Scrabble. And then Captain Macy's got into it and now it belongs to Hasbro.
My friend Mouse, who is in a board game club, says the key to being good at Scrabble is to memorize the dictionary. I think she's right because of a guy named Nigel. Nigel Richards won the French scrabble championship after memorizing the French dictionary, and he didn't even speak French.
[EDITORâS NOTE: While itâs come in handy at Tabletop Tuesdays, I actually learned the dictionary thing from my dad. Itâs true. And to everyone who has a different, much stronger association of what this day is? Donât tell Tom. We must keep some innocence in the world.]
Today, 2001 ago, the first Animal Crossing game came out on the Nintendo 64 in Japan, a game that never hit the states, DĆbutsu no Mori, or Animal Forest in English. Unlike the GameCube game that came to the English speaking world a year later, Animal Forest was deemed too wordy and Japanese to translate, but they changed enough content when they ported it to GameCube that they decided to translate it.
While not an entirely different game, there were a lot of little and less little changes. They didn't have the clothing store or the boat rides. Holidays were reworked. They removed a blood splatter shirt and replaced it with a fish bones shirt. Stuff like that.
Today a bunch of years ago Cartoon Network got it's first tv show, not counting the Moxy show which was more of a tv block, but that's it's own can of worms. We are talking about "Space Ghost Coast to Coast" today. A show with the simple premise of having "Celebrities" interviewed by old Hana Barbara characters.
The show did remarkably well, running for 11 seasons and 108 episodes, 2-5 spin off shows, and it's also the reason Adult Swim is a thing. It's hard to decide what to say about this one as the show did a lot of weird and fun stuff, but this one sticks out off the top of my head. They had an episode where the episode didn't really have an ending, and if you wanted to know the ending you had to buy the script off eBay. I think that script is lost in the lost media dimension now, assuming it was ever real.
Today is the birthday of an artist you have probably seen the work of but don't know by name. Florentijn Hofman is an Dutch artist best known for his giant, often inflatable statues. While his 21 meter inflatable hippopotamus "Hippopothames" and his 82 ft tall "Moon Bunny" are marvels in their own right, he is best known for a particular duck.
If you have ever seen that picture online of a giant rubber duck in a harbor, dwarfing boats and making men look bug sized, you have already seen "Rubber Duck", Hofman's best known work. Sponsored by " Yogho!Yogho!" This giant duck was actually 4 or so different ducks varying in size, situated in different cities, but they were all modeled after the same base duck designed by Tolo Toys.
Today is Bat appreciation day and if you think we need to wait till October to be talking about bats get off my website. Anyway bats are mice evolved to have superpowers that would be extraordinarily powerful if it wasn't still mouse sized. They have two main tricks. The first is that they can fly with weird wing arms, not gliding like squirrels or sugar gliders but flying like birds do. The second is echolocation which is self explanatory, they use echoes to location.
All of this might be painfully obvious If you are old enough to be on this website (it's 14+ here if you skipped the FAQ) but sometimes it's worth restarting the obvious, just for calibration. That being said, the biggest type of bats are known as flying foxes and those guys are pretty big. The actual vampire bats that eat blood are actually really tiny, like golf ball sized.Â
Today is the release anniversary of a classic video game, Portal 2. It's actually turning 20 this year. Portal 2 is such a classic at this point it feels weird looking back on that first playthrough, I got it because I had thought the robots looked cool and man I was blown away. I kinda wish I played Portal 1 first but I was like, kinda young when it came out.Â
It's hard to pick out one detail of portal two to point out as something odd and wonderful. I mean everything from the ratman to the music to the potato ARG, to the old 2013 online culture around it. Or it's weird crossovers in the Poker Night 2 and LEGO Dimensions games. I'm just going to heavily suggest you play it if you haven't before.
[EDITORâS NOTE: Nintendo and Valve recently announced a re-release of both games as part of the Portal Companion Collection for the Nintendo Switch, if youâd like to pick up both for a total of $20, though they havenât given a release date outside of â2022â. Also, if you think weâre sponsored, youâre insane.]
Today is the publication anniversary of a very interesting case of someone predicting the future and being fairly accurate. In 65', Gordon Moore, who is now known for co-founding Intel, made the prediction that "the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years".Â
If you don't know what that means, it means the power number on a microchip, well, doubles about every two years. The funny thing is he was right. Was being the key word. Scientists are about to the wall where we can't get 'em small enough fast enough. That being said we did go from that transistor number from the 10âŽs to the 10Âčâ°s in that time, and that's nothing to sneeze at.Â
Today is National Banana Day. Bananas have a dark secret I'd love to talk about. We might lose bananas as we know them and it wouldn't be the first time something like this happened. Until the 1950's the go too banana was the "Gros Michel". The problem was disease struck the variety and wiped out the crop.
The reason the problem got so big was because of the way bananas are grown, as there's not a ton of genetic variety from the asexual way they usually reproduce. Anyway, they swapped banana varieties to "Cavendish" and it's been going great for years but Cavendish has the same genetic vulnerability of its successor. We can only hope the bananas stay healthy.
Today is the anniversary of the Broadway debut of the musical Annie. You probably already know this one but on the off chance you don't it's the story of a little red haired orphan girl who's adopted by some rich old guy who wants a boy but starts to adjust to being a girl dad. I won't spoil the rest for you but if you've somehow seen the Stuart Little movie before this one the plot will feel familiar even if it did it first.
There's two places where it gets weird. The first is that it's actually based on a comic strip where her foster dad's wife keeps kicking her out of the house, until he died because he hated that Franklin D. Roosevelt got re-elected as president. But her on-and-off dad wasn't really dead, just in a coma, that he came out of once FDR died. The second is that in the musical Roosevelt is the big good guy who fixes everything. I don't know who made that change but they definitely knew what they were doing.
Today is Earth day. A day dedicated to that lovely little rock in an ocean of void we all call home. If you don't call earth home, e-mail me. Anyway, Earth. I'm going to share some classic Earth Day fun facts, true of 2022 when this was posted.Â
The highest mountain is Mount Everest at 29,031.7 ft tall. The lowest trench is the Mariana Trench 36,037 feet deep. The biggest animal is the blue whale, and they are usually 80 feet long and 300,000 pounds heavy. About 71% of the surface of the earth is oceans and water.
Today, too many years ago by now, the first YouTube video was posted. "Me at the zoo" was posted on a blank YouTube, a website barely resembling the current juggernaut of a website it is now.Â
The video itself is exactly what you'd expect from something called "me at the zoo". It's a 19 second clip of home footage of YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. He's standing in front of the elephants and telling the camera they are cool because of their long trucks. You gotta apprentice how mundane it is. A video that would have just been sentimental at best if not weaved into the history of one of the most popular websites on the internet.
Today in 2006 Pluto got demoted from an outer circle planet to a dwarf planet. A lot of people say Pluto is no longer a planet but I feel like this is misleading. Pluto is now classified as a dwarf planet and is one of 5 named dwarf planets,the other four being: Ceres, Eris, Haumea, and Makemake.
Personally I think we should count the dwarf planets in discussions of our solar system, as even if they are small and wild, they have enough of a level of consistency among themselves. If anyone asks me how many planets there are, I'll tell them 8, still, probably, if I don't have time to explain. But if I do have a chance to make my case, my answer is 13.Â
Today we celebrate a funny little bird. That's right it's Penguin Day. Penguins are funny little dudes who live south of the equator, and contradictory to popular belief, they don't all live at the south pole. Along with one variety that lives on the equator, and there are a number of Australian penguin subspecies.Â
Probably the best known penguin breed is the emperor penguin. Of all the kinds of penguins they are the tallest and they are known for doing this egg thing. The thing is the male penguins hold the eggs a majority of the incubation while the mama penguins go hunt. On the flip side, the smallest type of penguin is the blue penguin, and it is actually blue.
Today is the oldest date I can find for a YouTube video that won't leave my head. One that objectively has meaty organs in it but it always makes me feel something. Teddy Has An Operation by ZeFrank was a video made for the BuzzFeed website and true to the name a guy performs surgery on a teddy bear.Â
The thing is the bear has organs. Non plush organs. This is not a video for a squeamish and I've seen people kinda compare it to "Don't Hug Me I'm Scared", but it's kinda a different flavor of irony.
There's just something oddly genuine to the short. It feels childlike in a "what kids are actually like" way. Like if you asked a kid what happens at a stuffed animal hospital this is what they would describe as what would happen there, or maybe just me. I was a weird kid.Â
Today is the anniversary of a famous television broadcast interruption that isn't the Max Headroom incident. In 1986, a man going by Captain Midnight hacked the satellite video feed of the channel HBO, his message was one of frustration:Â
GOODEVENING HBO, FROM CAPTAIN MIDNIGHT, $12.95/MONTH? NO WAY !
[SHOWTIME/MOVIE CHANNEL BEWARE!].
Nobody who watched it was really that concerned but the HBOFCCFBI combo definitely were. The guy got hit with a fine and probation, and they made the laws stronger to make sure people didn't do it again. To this day, the guy who did it maintains he just wanted to give HBO a polite message and he was just disappointed with the $13 a month.Â
Today Pink Floyd's "Dark Side of the Moon'' was first unleashed to the masses. Aside from its iconic album art and being a good record, it's best known for people playing it over the Wizard of Oz, and there being some points where it lines up too well. Some people swear the band somehow did it on purpose but it's all coincidence.
The thing is it is all just confirmation bias, as people have tested the album with other, silly movies like Shrek and Paul Blart 2. So I think the album just lines up with stuff well. I like the one guy who did different They Might Be Giants songs over the Wizard of Oz, that was cool.
Today it's time to get down. It's International Dance Day. Chosen for the birthday of Jean-Georges Noverre aka the guy who invented "modern ballet", this holiday is about dancing. I'm going to use this as an excuse to tell you about the dancing plague of 1518.
So in 1518 a lot of people, usually guessed to be around 50-400 people, just started dancing and kept going for a couple months. A lot of people say most of them died but other sources say that's bullcrap and there were no casualties reported at the time, and it was so long ago I imagine there was a lot of telephone game about the situation either way. But regardless, the 1500's were wild.
Today Pokémon Emerald was first released in the United States. Now I'll admit I probably care about Pokémon more than the next guy. Not the most spicy confession but if you haven't figured out I'm a dweeb yet, I can't help you. Anyway yeah Pokémon.
But this is a mostly sentimental entry because Emerald was my first video game. I had gotten hooked on the anime, and there was a Gen 2 Pokédex book in my elementary school library I had already memorized by the time November hit. So My folks decided a black Gameboy SP with the new Pokémon game would be a good gift. I wish I still had that Gameboy.
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