Today worldwide (except for the United States), Google celebrated what would have been Queen lead singer Freddie Mercury's 65th birthday with an animated doodle using an embedded YouTube video (see below)
France24 also had an excellent article about it, excerpt
"It has a lot of fun, goofy stuff to celebrate what an incredible song writer, fashion icon, and musical innovator he was," doodle team creative lead Ryan Germick told AFP during a visit to their base at Google's headquarters in the California city of Mountain View.
"Freddy Mercury was an awesome performer, an ambitious creator and pioneered really audacious concept records," Germick said. "We just love him; we've been blasting Queen for the last couple of months and it is always joyful."
Read more.
See also, Queen guitarist Dr Brian May's post in the Google blog.
Previously, the animated doodle for Lucille Ball's 100th birthday was also very creative, allowing for interaction with different 'channels'.
On 13 August 1961, East Germany closed its border between East and West Berlin, dividing Berlin for the next 28 years until the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989.
The 50th anniversary is a sobering commemoration.
The Wall was a 1962 short documentary film directed by Walter de Hoog for the US Government
It is a great day for the South Sudanese people who have struggled through five decades of civil wars. In Australia, which has one of the largest South Sudanese populations outside of Africa (some 30,000), community celebrations are being held across country.
See websites of the Government of the Republic of South Sudan and the Embassy of the Republic of South Sudan in Washington DC.
Dr Carl Sagan would have turned 76 today but died very much prematurely from myelodysplasia on 20 December 1996.
Dr Sagan is best known for his work on astronomy and his television series Cosmos which was shown world-wide during the 1980s.
Although he did not have the same effect in astronomy as Johannes Kepler, Nicolaus Copernicus, Tycho Brahe or Galileo Galilei (and they were fighting against conventional religious thinking at the time), Dr Sagan brought an understanding of astronomy and science to a lot of people. He was a major proponent of the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project.
"the earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena"
The Goodies was a comedy series that was first broadcast on 8 November 1970 (40 years ago) on BBC2. It was also screened in Australia on the ABC, including on repeat even this year. From BBC
The Goodies was the creation of Graeme Garden, Bill Oddie and Tim Brooke-Taylor. Having won a big audience for their children's show, Broaden Your Mind, they were let loose on a series with the simple premise that the trio were an agency offering to do "anything, anywhere, any time" - a premise they abandoned as soon as they could, leaving behind a tale of three very different men, all living in a giant office-cum-laboratory, usually either completely broke or amazingly rich, and always coming up with whacky schemes.
At its best the programme had the wit and inventiveness of a golden-era Tom and Jerry or Warner Brothers cartoon, lightly sprinkled with satire and the odd song.
Visual invention was a particular hallmark, with the team making great use of chroma-key and models for effects like Kitten Kong and the famous sequence in The Movies where attempts by each of the three to make a film (a silent, a western and a Roman epic) at the same time results in a picture that sees them flow rapidly from movie to movie, breaking through frames, busting down genres and bringing in everyone from Charlie Chaplin to Julie Andrews.
Even today, it still makes me laugh.
Here is a trip down memory lane, or in the case of those who had missed out, a taste...
Today, Australia's multilingual/multicultural network Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) marked its 30th anniversary of television broadcasting. Its first full-time television transmission began at 6.30pm on 24 October 1980 as Channel 0 in Melbourne and Sydney. The late Mr Bruce Gyngell, who first introduced television to Australia back in 1956, welcomed Australians to the new channel. See below
In 1985, the network then known as Channel 0-28 was renamed SBS and began to expand its coverage nationally.
Today, aside from some local productions, SBS rebroadcasts programs from all over the world, fulfilling its former slogan from 1983 of 'Bringing the world back home'. With the onset of digital broadcasting, there are now two channels, SBS One and SBS Two, with Three and Four reserved.
The news schedule this morning on SBS One looked like this
07:00 Hungarian News from Duna TV (DTV) Budapest
07:30 Latin American News via satellite from Television National de Chile, in Spanish
08:00 Polish News Wydarzenia from Polsat in Warsaw via satellite
08:30 Dutch News via satellite from BVN
09:00 Portuguese News via satellite from RTP Portugal (Lisbon)
09:30 Urdu News from PTV Pakistan in Islamabad
10:00 Maltese News from Public Broadcasting Services Limited, Malta
On weekdays, the news schedule on SBS One includes news from YTN Korea, NHK Tokyo, TVB Hong Kong, CCTV Beijing, DW Berlin, RAI Rome, ABS-CBN Manila, RTVE Madrid, ERT Athens, FT2 Paris, NDTV India, DRTV Dubai, NTV Moscow and TRT Turkey. All up, there are news bulletins from 26 countries in 25 languages.
Tonight, on SBS One is a French film Un vrai bonheur (The Wedding Day) and on SBS Two, two more French films Ensemble, c'est tout (Hunting and Gathering) and La maison de Nina (Nina's Home). During the coming week there are films from Spain, China, Italy, Israel, India, Croatia and Norway. All films are subtitled in English.
Some of the regular series broadcast on SBS that are popular include Kommissar (Inspector) Rex from Austria (in German with English subtitles), police drama Rejseholdet (Unit One, from Denmark, in Danish with English subtitles) and the American South Park, which is deemed too offensive to be shown on the commercial stations.
SBS is wonderful in reminding us that we in Australia are just a small part of a larger world and indeed that Australians come from all parts of the world.
30 years on, SBS television is as relevant as ever if not more so. It is unique in being the only national (public-funded with some advertising revenue) multilingual/multicultural broadcaster in the world.
May Day has traditionally been the workers' holiday, celebrated as labour day.
Berlin appears to be the place with most significance, the day used in the past for political demonstrations. Now it's a showdown between liberal lefties and neo-Nazis.
Every year, Australia's SBS screens a famous 18 minute sketch called Dinner For One. In it, the late actor Freddie Frinton plays butler James who serves an elderly upper-class English woman called Miss Sophie who is celebrating her 90th birthday.
As her dinner guests are not actually there, James impersonates each one, toasting on behalf of each when it is their turn and getting more drunk with each toast.
The sketch was written in the 1920s and recorded in 1963 by a German television station NDR and has since become embedded in the New Year rituals of Germany, other European countries and Australia.
The following dialogue has also become part of the German vernacular.
James: The same procedure as last year, Miss Sophie?
Miss Sophie: The same procedure as every year, James!
Sesame Street Google with the ensemble. Where is Mr Snuffleupagus?
People all over the world between the ages of 20 and 50 are probably reminiscing about their childhoods with Sesame Street. I don't know when I stopped watching, but with younger siblings, I was still watching well into my teens.
Richard Termine/Sesame Workshop
I remember the opening sequences below (first two) from when I was a kid.
episode 1575 opening
episode 2178 opening
Having stopped watching, as most grown ups without young children do, I am not familiar with the new sequence from 1998-2001, but do understand that something as important as the opening sequence theme music must evolve with the times.
episode 3940
Promotion for the new series
Elmo's new best friend is Jake Gyllenhall (from New York Post) photo by Jesse Grant
He's called Count von Count because he loves to count. After he finishes counting, the Count would laugh like a maniac "ah ah ah ah ah" and there would be thunder and lightning.
In October 1884, an international conference was held in Washington DC for the purpose of fixing a prime meridian and universal day.
The result was the conference agreed the prime meridian (at longitude 0° 0' 00") would be located at Greenwich, United Kingdom.
The conference also agreed Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) would be used as the standard for the world, with the day beginning at midnight at Greenwich and counted on a 24-hour clock.
This was at the height of the British Empire, a great sea-faring nation, so it was not surprising. Imagine if this was on the agenda at the United Nations today. It would be a complete debacle as national egos come into play.
Today marked the 20th anniversary of the Pan-European Picnic, when Hungary momentarily opened its border with Austria and allowed hundreds of East Germans to cross over to the west. From Wikipedia (factual)
In a symbolic gesture agreed to by both countries, a border gate on the road from Sankt Margarethen im Burgenland (Austria) to Sopronkőhida (Hungary) was to be opened for three hours. About 6 km away from this spot on 27 June 1989, Austria's then foreign minister Alois Mock and his Hungarian counterpart Gyula Horn had together cut through the border fence, in a move highlighting Hungary's decision to dismantle its surveillance installations along the border, a process started on 2 May 1989.
More than 600 East Germans seized the opportunity presented by this brief lifting of the Iron Curtain, and fled into the west. In the run-up to August 19th, the organisers of the Pan-European Picnic had distributed pamphlets advertising the event. The Hungarian border guards, however, reacted judiciously to the growing number of people fleeing, and, despite their orders to shoot anyone who attempted to cross the border, did not intervene.
In Budapest and around the Lake Balaton, thousands of more East Germans were waiting for their chance to cross to border, not believing that the border would be opened, and not trusting the procedures in place. The number of people who crossed the border into the west on the day of this event was therefore limited to no more than a few hundred. Over the next few days, the Hungarian government increased in the number of guards patrolling its western border, so that only a relatively small number actually reached the west successfully. On 11 September 1989, Hungary finally opened its borders for citizens of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) for good.
The Pan-European Picnic is considered a highly significant milestone in the efforts that led to the end of the GDR and to the German reunification. Commemorative ceremonies are held each year on 19th of August at the place where the border was opened.
The picnic was organised by members of four Hungarian opposition parties, the Hungarian Democratic Forum the Alliance of Free Democrats, the FIDESZ and FkgP. The event's patrons were, CSU MEP Otto von Habsburg, and the Hungarian Minister of State and reformer Imre Pozsgay.
One of the great things about the old long play (LP) vinyl record was the artwork. One of the best was The Beatles' Abbey Road. The photo by the late Iain Macmillan was taken on 8 August 1969.
It is probably the most copied or parodied album cover.
The idea for the cover of the Beatles' Abbey Road album was initially to call it Everest, after the favourite brand of cigarettes smoked by their engineer Geoff Emerik.
Then the thought of doing a Himalayan cover helped kill the idea, and instead they considered doing shoot closer to home.
"There's a sketch Paul McCartney did with four little stick men crossing the Zebra," says Brian Southall, author of the history of Abbey Road Studios.
"It gave a pretty good idea of what they wanted."
On the 8 August 1969 that the Fab Four walked out of No 3 Abbey Road, having finished basic work on what would be - and they subsequently said they knew would be - their last album.
The photographer who took the famous cover shot was the late Iain Macmillan, a close friend of Brian Southall's, who knew the Beatles through working with Yoko Ono.
"He was given about 15 minutes," says Mr Southall.
"He stood up a stepladder while a policeman held up the traffic, the band walked back and forth a few times and that was that."
He only took seven or eight pictures, now in the Apple archive, but they're fascinating for their difference to the end product we all know.
Conspiracy theories
Most striking is the one of the band walking in the opposite direction (right to left), caught mid-stride in different poses.
It looks all wrong of course, and draws attention to the accidental symmetry - despite Paul being out of step - of the final cover shot with its pattern of four firm inverted V shapes.
In one of the alternative takes Paul McCartney is wearing sandals he kicked off during the shoot.
This matters if you remember how the album cover was taken as evidence for the conspiracy theories that "Paul is Dead."
Barefooted, out of step, the car number plate behind him referring to his age - 28 if he'd lived - the Beatles forming a funeral procession for him.
George was cast as the gravedigger, Ringo the undertaker, and John the priest.
Years later in 1993, the very much alive Paul McCartney would spoof the cover and the rumours for his "Paul is Live" concert album.
A lesser noted curiosity is that the album cover has no writing on it and is just the picture.
That is thanks to John Kosh, who at the time, was creative director at Apple.
"I insisted we didn't need to write the band's name on the cover," he says.
"They were the most famous band in the world after all - EMI said they'd never sell any albums if we didn't say who the band was, but I got my way, and got away with it."
Zebra stripes
And it is hard to think of an album cover that has been so thoroughly repeated.
Dozens of bands have put stripes on their cover, like the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, but of course the biggest tribute comes from the thousands of fans and tourists who go to leafy north London every year.
If you want to check the crossing now, there's a webcam.
Watch it for a while and you will see scampering fans snatching at a gap in the traffic to recreate the shoot - much to the annoyance of local drivers.
One black taxi cabbie, Ron, who also used to drive a bus down Abbey Road, told the BBC World Service: "I come here all the time and its always been the same - it really does annoy you."
"All they're doing is posing on the crossing. Someone's going to get mown down one of these days there's no doubt about it."
Here's hoping Ron avoids the crossing on Saturday morning when Beatles fans will stage a mass crossing in honour of the photo shoot.
It is not known how many of those fans are injured on the crossing every year.
But the council have to repaint the wall next to the crossing every three months to cover over fans' graffiti.
And the Abbey Road street sign has now been mounted out of reach up a wall, so often has it been defaced or stolen.
If there was a way to steal the stripes off the zebra you can bet Beatle's fans would have taken them too.
Or maybe they haven't thanks to the rumour that the famous crossing you now see isn't actually the original and has been moved for safety reasons.
And who would want to steal the wrong zebra crossing?
30 years ago, Sony invented a device that so revolutionised the way people listened to music that even Time magazine wrote about its significance. By Meaghan Haire
On July 1, 1979, Sony Corp. introduced the Sony Walkman TPS-L2, a 14 ounce, blue-and-silver, portable cassette player with chunky buttons, headphones and a leather case. It even had a second earphone jack so that two people could listen in at once. Masaru Ibuka, Sony's co-founder, traveled often for business and would find himself lugging Sony's bulky TC-D5 cassette recorder around to listen to music. He asked Norio Ohga, then Executive Deputy President, to design a playback-only stereo version, optimized for use with headphones. Ibuka brought the result — a compact, high-quality music player — to Chairman Akio Morita and reportedly said, "Try this. Don't you think a stereo cassette player that you can listen to while walking around is a good idea?"
All the device needed now was a name. Originally the Walkman was introduced in the U.S. as the "Sound-About" and in the UK as the "Stowaway," but coming up with new, uncopyrighted names in every country it was marketed in proved costly; Sony eventually decided on "Walkman" as a play on the Sony Pressman, a mono cassette recorder the first Walkman prototype was based on. First released in Japan, it was a massive hit: while Sony predicted it would only sell about 5,000 units a month, the Walkman sold upwards of 50,000 in the first two months. Sony wasn't the first company to introduce portable audio: the first-ever portable transistor radio, the index card-sized Regency TR-1, debuted in 1954. But the Walkman's unprecedented combination of portability (it ran on two AA batteries) and privacy (it featured a headphone jack but no external speaker) made it the ideal product for thousands of consumers looking for a compact portable stereo that they could take with them anywhere.
Just as today's generation of young people have no idea what a vinyl LP (long play) record looks like, there will be many wondering what a cassette tape looks like.
