Today Is...It's A Wonderful Life Premieres

A film about a man who tries to commit suicide by jumping off a bridge into a river before being saved by an Angel who hasn't won his wings yet isn't the most festive sounding of movies but that is what 'It's A Wonderful Life' ended up as which is one of the Christmas staples on our televisions every year.
The movie is based on the short story 'The Greatest Gift' by Philip Van Doren Stern which is loosely based on A Christmas Carol and involves a man called George who is contemplating suicide and is approached by a stranger who tries to talk him down and when he says he wishes he had never been born, the stranger tells him that his wish has been granted and hands him a bag and tells him to pretend to be a door-to-door brush salesman.
George returns to his town, and discovers that no one knows him and discovers that his wife has married someone else and he offers her a complimentary upholstery brush and returns to the bridge to beg the stranger to return his life and George returns home and finds everything restored to normal.
The story was refused by publishers but was seen by Cary Grant's agent who thought it would be perfect for his client and handed it to RKO Pictures who in turn handed it to their script writers who rewrote most of it and added Clarence the Angel and made George a Banker before passing it on to the Director Frank Capra who rewrote it some more to make it more palatable for the cinema going audience although an argument over the ending meant that the scene with the bell tingling on the tree and Clarence getting his wings was a hurried last minute addition during filming.   
In the confrontation between Mr. Gower and young George, the actor playing the chemist was drunk at the time of the scene and slapped the young boy for real but it was kept in the film because no acting could beat the man actually whacking the child for real.
Henry Fonda was considered for the George Banks role but he had to pull out due to filming commitments elsewhere so James Stewart was bought in and apparently said: 'If you want to do a movie about me committing suicide, with an angel with no wings named Clarence, I'm your boy' and Olivia de Havilland and Ginger Rogers was offered the role of his wife but they turned it down as the role was too bland so Donna Reed was given the role.
The film was unsuccessful at the box office on it's release in 1946 although it did receive a special award from the Motion Picture Academy for creating a new artificial snow effect.

Today Is...A Christmas Carol Published

The Internet Movie Database lists more than 100 versions of Charles Dickens 'A Christmas Carol', including four operas and two ballets and is probably my favourite Christmas film, the 1951 version with Alastair Sim as Scrooge and a very young George Cole as the younger Scrooge is the definitive version in my opinion which isn't bad for a book which was dashed out in six weeks. 
Charles Dickens was suffering from financial problems and his publisher was threatening to reduce his royalties as sales of his books dropped so in October 1843 he sat down and tried to dip into the recent rebirth of Christmas under Queen Victoria and borrowing from his own short story about a man who undergoes a Christmas conversion after being visited by goblins who show him the past and future titled 'The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton', he reworked it into A Christmas Carol.
Scrooge was based on British MP John Elwes who was famous for his miserly behaviour while the name came from an inscription Dickens saw on a tombstone of Ebeneezer Scroggie while writing the story, Tiny Tim was based on his disabled nephew and a local cheesemonger called Marley provided the name for the first ghost of Scrooge's long dead business partner to visit.
The book was a roaring success but Dickens did not make much money from it mainly because he took legal action against his publisher for making illicit copies which he won but which bankrupt the publisher and further reduced Dickens's small profits from the publication.
One huge faux pas in the book is the confusion around Scrooges sister Fan because the book states that Scrooges mother died giving him life and his father blamed him and his sister died the same way and he blamed the nephew and as his father never allowed him to come home for Christmas holidays, he hated Christmas and thought it all 'humbug' but at the end of the film he comes to the realisation that he was blaming Fred for Fan’s death the same way Ebeneezer's father blamed him for his own mother’s death.
But...Fan was Scrooges younger sister, Dickens himself said when Fan came to collect him from the boarding school: 'a little girl, much younger than the boy, came darting in, and putting her arms about his neck, and often kissing him, addressed him as her 'Dear, dear brother.'
Hmmm...mother died giving birth to older brother which is the background to everything that happens after but somehow manages to have another child and call her Fan.
Maybe we should put it down to Dickens being distracted by being called away to drag a child out the chimney or something midway through writing that scene and try to ignore it.

Today Is...Arabic Language Day

After a night on the ALCOHOL, with a mouth like the SAHARA, i dragged myself from the MATTRESS to the SOFA, stopping briefly to grab a very strong COFFEE with plenty of SUGAR and opened my phone to CHECK what national Day it was today.
I could see in my screens reflection that i had drank one to many SHERBETS last night as my MASCARA was still on which would mean my COTTON pillowcase would need to be changed but that is always a HAZARD of not removing your make up before going to bed and it you get it on your SILK sheets then nothing is shifting that mark.
My phone showed that today was Arabic Language Day and as my AVERAGE brain cell count was probably lower than that of our pet GERBIL at that point, i could TELL looking up Arabic words was going to be about as much fun as having a WISDOM TOOTH pulled unless i had something to eat first but all we had in our cupboard was a JAR of SYRUP and a limp SPINACH leaf while in the fruit bowl sat a funky looking ORANGE, a squashed LIME and a LEMON which had seen better days.
I knew that left to me the total word count for this day would be ZERO and i could wave SO-LONG to that bet about writing a post for every day of the year so that would be CHECKMATE unless i bought in some help so i called my Egyptian friend, JASMIN.
She said that she was away on SAFARI in her CARAVAN but would send me a link to a MAGAZINE article which has a list of Arabic words which are common in English when they next stop which gave me time to brush myself up so i felt less like a GHOUL and sip my SODA water while waiting for my phone to ting to tell me it had arrived.
Within 30 minutes i was looking at photos of her and her family stroking a GAZELLE and a GIRAFFE but most importantly the all important Arabic words but i only recognised a couple so today's post is about the time i played my GUITAR at the local ALGEBRA club which isn't a gripping tale but fulfills my
obligation and i'm back in the game for that that years worth of Beanies COFFEE bet.

Today Is...First Christmas Card Sent

Brits spend an average of £43 on Christmas cards and we have Henry Cole to blame for that additional expense as it was he who designed and sent the first card today in 1843.
The Festive greeting card sent today as part of the traditional celebration of Christmas in order to convey between people a range of sentiments related to Christmastide and the holiday season ranging from 'I wish you a very Merry Christmas' to 'I have no idea who you are nor care if you have a Merry Christmas orif your house burns down but you sent me a card last year so i am now sending you one this year' and usually depict wintry scenes and snowmen but the first cards were not quite so cheery, they had children riding giant bats, dead robins, and a bloody battle between sword-wielding insects.
Cole began the custom of sending Christmas cards when he just couldn't face writing out long letters which was the custom of the time so he asked a designer buddy to create something with 'To' at the top, a picture in the middle and 'From' at the bottom which he sent to his grandmother and aunt.
That Cole was in charge of the newly created 'Post Office' and was promoting the penny post service to get more people to use it had nothing to do with it, it was a an act of charity, for which he sold the cards at 1 shilling each.
The first cards were not allowed to feature anything religious but were just large enough to stick money in the envelope which was a great way to let someone know that due to your jam-packed social calendar and the festive binge-drinking, you couldn't be arsed to bother buying them a present and care about them as much as the sandwich you grabbed while waiting in line to pay for the card in the supermarket.
He can therefore lay claim to two Christmas firsts, the card so you don't have to write to people and the laziest, easiest, least personal gift you can give someone which is also the one they look forward to getting the most because that removes all doubt about whether or not they'll get the right thing, cash always fits nicely.

Today Is...Worst Day To Have A Birthday

I always thought that December 26th or January 1st are the worst possible days to have a Birthday on, just after everyone has just finished exchanging presents and eating and drinking themselves silly but apparently there is a worst day, December 16.
Being born nine days before Christmas you share a birthday with Jane Austen, Noël Coward, Arthur C Clarke, Philip K Dick, Quentin Blake and Christopher Biggins but a survey by Interflora say it is basically a write-off.
What makes it especially worse according to the flower delivery service is that the days are dark and cold but it is very close to Christmas, which means people are busy with pre-Christmas parties and you get combined presents usually wrapped in Christmas paper.
Although i agree that it’s bad to have a birthday that close to Christmas, they don't expand on why 16 December is worse than the 8 days this side of December 25th which are even closer i'm going to stick with my original dates as being worse and be thankful that my birthday usually coincides with Easter and i get double the amount of Chocolate Eggs in that period.
So if it is your birthday today then Happy birthday and if you are really, really careful, you can use the Christmas wrapping paper that your Birthday present came in to send back to the person who couldn't be arsed to find proper Birthday paper for you.

Israeli Support Dwindling

A week after the Biden administration used an emergency authority to allow the sale of 14,000 tank shells to Israel, it is now warning them about their 'indiscriminate bombing of Gaza' using the same 14,000 shells they sold them because maybe Biden thought they wouldn't use them against the defenceless civilians they have been pulverizing and murdering for the past 60 years.
The US national security adviser, Jake Sullivan, today said the US would pressure Israel to hold 'extremist settlers accountable for violence against Palestinian civilians in the West Bank' and was joined by the UK, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the European Union who have signed a letter to the Israeli Government calling on them to take 'immediate steps' to tackle settler violence in West Bank which has seen more than 350 violent attacks, killing eight Palestinian civilians, injuring more than 83, and forcing 1,026 Palestinians from their homes.
The Settler violence has stepped up since the Hamas attacks in October but the settler violence has been going on for decades, usually with police and army cover who do nothing to stop the attacks and have been known to join in.
The long suspected plan has always been to force the Palestinians off their land and then move their own people into it in settlements, hence the suggestions that the Palestinians move into Egypt and surrounding nations and that has been laid bare this week when the two state solution was torpedoed by the Israeli Government who have said that there will be no Palestinian state and that Israel believes there is no prospect of a two-state solution.
The Western world continues to insist two states with Palestine and Israel side by side is the only answer but Israel seem to have decided that their is only enough room for one state, and that is Israel and they are razing the homes and infrastructure of the 2m people in Gaza and evicting the 3m people in the West Bank.
Biden has said that Israel is losing support in it's war with Hamas as the death toll nudges now 19,000 civilians with many more dead and buried under the rubble and it is although i am sure that this will be twisted into either supporting Hamas or antisemitism and that is untrue, it is more about not supporting the blatant and horrific bloody genocide of one nation by another that has been going on for far too many decades.    
The dwindling number of Israeli supporters point to Hamas wanting to wipe Israel off the map and that is true, but then Israel is escalate it's long term plan of wiping Palestine off the map whether by killing them or violently forcing them off their rightful land.

Today Is...The Second Amendment Established

James Madison was the shortest American President at only 5'4" so he had to compensate somehow so what he did was insert the second amendment into the Constitution although it is always the second part quoted by American gun nuts, the bit about 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed' although the first part of that sentence is never heard, the part that states the right to bear arms belongs to 'a well regulated militia'.
From where i am sitting, admittedly safely thousands of miles away from the gun toting lunatics, the arms bearers are anything but well regulated because the vast majority of the mass killings that we see are perpetrated by guns that are legally owned and the militia as mentioned was at the time the US didn't have a standing army, which it does now therefore rendering the need for an irregular army composed of ordinary citizens obsolete.
Whenever the newsreader starts a story with 'There has been a mass shooting...' you just know the end of that sentence is going to be '...in America' because like Mom's Apple Pie, words without a U in them and pick up trucks, shooting kids while they attend school is a purely American thing as is doing absolutely nothing about it ever happening again because to some the right to own a gun is much more important that your kids surviving their education.
To be fair after each mass shooting they do do something, they offer thoughts and prayers but dinky little Madison wasn't thinking of military grade weapons being used to shoot up schoolchildren back in his day, he was always very suspicious of the British invading again so insisted on the clause but the problem was that the British never invaded again and Americans just ignored the well regulated bit and went on collecting bigger and more dangerous weapons and with a lack of British soldiers to aim at, they began blowing big holes in each other instead.
As the right to bear arms was introduced in case us British invaded again, i think the only solution is for the British Government to put out a press release stating that we have no intention to invade in the foreseeable future and those yankee's can therefore make another amendment to that previous bat-shit crazy amendment to say put the guns down, the Brits ain't coming.

Cheers

 COP 28 in Dubai  ended with what was described as an 'historic agreement' to transition away from fossil fuels.
With a devastating 1.5C being the long term temperature goal, and bear in mind that the 2022 heatwave led to 62,000 deaths in Europe in 2022 and we are still only building up to 1.5C, it would still be would catastrophic, the latest UN analysis has the world was on course for 2.8C of warming which will have
consequences which doesn't bear thinking about but we can't say we haven't been warned.
So in Dubai after agreeing to the historic agreement, the EU's commissioner for climate action said it is was 'a moment of true satisfaction' and the US climate envoy John Kerry was photographed hugging the German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock and i was sitting thinking, are we supposed to congratulate
them for agreeing not to literally set our planet on fire?
Are we meant to be celebrating that the heads of Government have got together and finally done something about a problem which has been talked about for a century and we waited until now to do something about it?
Yeah, thanks a lot.

Today Is...Last Moon Mission Returns

Today in 1972, the Apollo 17 mission plopped down into the Pacific Ocean and two of the astronauts aboard, Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt, became the last humans to leave their footprints on the Moon because we never bothered going back.
For three days they carried out experiments, collected 741 rock and soil samples and drove around in the lunar rover but they almost never made it at all as President Richard Nixon's was concerned that if the thing didn't make it then it would effect his re-election campaign so held back funding for Apollo 17 until a compromise was reached that it wouldn't take off until after the election.
NASA had hoped to continue with more Apollo missions and eventually establish a permanent moon base but public interest waned and funding for the space program was cut and with the Space Race win under their belt, the US government shifted its priorities towards other endeavors but in total twelve men walked on the moon over the course of six Apollo missions.
Of the 12 only 4 are still alive: Buzz Aldrin (Apollo 11), David Scott (Apollo 15), Charles Duke (Apollo 16), and Harrison Schmitt (Apollo 17) and as the the youngest is 88 we could very soon have nobody alive who has walked on anything other than our own planet. 
NASA is now planning its return to the moon through the Artemis program and one of the first things they should do is haul down the flags which were planted in it's surface because at some point Aliens will pass by the moon on the way to Earth and there they will see the six former large stars and stripes not billowing in the lunar breeze and which are by now large white flags which will either reassure intergalactic travelers that us humans are a lovely bunch of pacifists but if they are coming armed with intergalactic lasers to take over our planet and enslave us all then it isn't really the signal we want to send out before they arrive.

Today Is...Francis Drake Sets Off On World Voyage

As the good Lord said 'Love thy neighbour as thyself, unless he's Spanish, in which case, kill the bastardo' and Drake killed plenty of them but his CV had plenty of other things on it, he was also a slave trader, pirate, politician and explorer.  
His career as a salty sea dog began when he was apprenticed to Sir John Hawkins, the first Englishman to become heavily involved in the slave trade and transporting them to Spanish plantations in the New World but he came into his own when he was given his own fleet and decided that slaves were not lucrative enough for him so began a career in piracy, even teaming up with the French pirates currently operating in the Spanish Main transporting gold back to Spain.
One time he robbed a Spanish mule train loaded with gold and silver and killed them all including the mules but then realised that it was too heavy to carry back to the ship in one trip and regretting killing all the mules, he buried the treasure and made a map marked with a big X which began that particular Pirate thing but by the time him and his men came back to retrieve it, the Spanish had found it and dug it up again.
A Pirate's life is so dark and shadowy and full of fear and trepidation but then so was going to the toilet on a Pirate ship in the middle of the night so he returned to England and was hailed a hero before turning his hand to Exploring.
Leaving Plymouth today in 1577, he sailed around the World in the Golden Hind, stopping off at a few places to teach johnny foreigner good wholesome British values like stealing other peoples land by force and wearing crotch hugging tight pants while you do it.
After his triumphant return to England, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth I and made Vice Admiral of the Navy just as the Spanish were getting bolshy again.
He was famously playing bowls when they attacked England with their Armada so he finished the game and then set out to create what will become the year 6 syllabus centuries later.
He was buried at sea off the coast of Panama but nobody has been able to find his body, someone should have made a map and put a big X on it i guess.