Today is the anniversary of the first performance of Tchaikovsky’s famous ballet – The Nutcracker – in 1892. The plot is an adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’s 1844 short story The Nutcracker, itself a retelling of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 short story The Nutcracker and the Mouse King.
Since the late 1960s, The Nutcracker has been danced by many ballet companies, especially in North America. Major American ballet companies generate around 40% of their annual ticket revenues from performances of the ballet. Its score has been used in several film adaptations of Hoffmann’s story.
The Nutcracker is one of the composer’s most popular compositions. The music belongs to the Romantic period and contains some of his most memorable melodies, several of which are frequently used in television and film. (They are often heard in TV commercials shown during the Christmas season.
(Left to right) Lydia Rubtsova as Marianna, Stanislava Belinskaya as Clara and Vassily Stukolkin as Fritz, in the original production of The Nutcracker (Imperial Mariinsky Theatre, Saint Petersburg, 1892)
Today is the anniversary of the first sustained flight by a heavier than air powered and controlled aircraft – the Wright Flyer. Invented and flown by brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright, it marked the beginning of the pioneer era of aviation.
The aircraft is a single-place biplane design with anhedral (drooping) wings, front double elevator and rear double rudder. It used a 12 horsepower (9 kilowatts) gasoline engine powering two pusher propellers.
The Wrights built the aircraft in 1903 using spruce for straight members of the airframe (such as wing spars) and ash wood for curved components (wing ribs). The fabric for the wing was 100% cotton muslin called “Pride of the West”, a type used for women’s underwear. Since they could not find a suitable automobile engine for the task, they commissioned their employee Charlie Taylor to build a new design from scratch, a lightweight 12-horsepower gasoline engine, weighing 180 pounds, with a 1-US-gallon fuel tank.
A sprocket chain drive, borrowing from bicycle technology, powered the twin propellers, which were also made by hand. In order to avoid the risk of torque effects from affecting the aircraft handling, one drive chain was crossed over so that the propellers rotated in opposite directions.
First successful flight of the Wright Flyer, by the Wright brothers. Orville Wright was at the controls of the machine, lying prone on the lower wing with his hips in the cradle which operated the wing-warping mechanism. Wilbur Wright ran alongside to balance the machine, and just released his hold on the forward upright of the right wing in the photo.
Today is the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Disguised as Native Americans, on the night of December 16 members of Sons of Liberty boarded the Dartmouth, a merchantman that had docked in Boston carrying a major shipment of EIC tea, and set about throwing 342 chests of the tea into Boston Harbor.
The source of the protestors’ anger was the passage of the Tea Act by the Parliament of Great Britain on May 10, 1773, which allowed the East India Company (EIC) to sell Chinese tea in the colonies without paying taxes apart from those imposed by the Townshend Acts – a series of taxes and regulations to fund British administration of the colonies.
Parliament responded in 1774 with the Intolerable Acts, which, among other provisions, ended local self-government in Massachusetts and closed Boston’s harbor to commerce. Colonists throughout the Thirteen Colonies responded to the Intolerable Acts with additional acts of protest, and by convening the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia, which sent a Petition to the King for repeal of the acts and coordinated colonial resistance to them, culminating in the October 1774 Continental Association.
Less than two years later, on April 19, 1775, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, also in Massachusetts, launched the eight-year American Revolutionary War, which resulted in the independence of the colonies as the United States.
Boston Tea Party, W.D. Cooper, 1789
I miss editors…
BADA BING!
Can’t wait to add my pretend $2,000 tariff check to my pretend $5,000 DOGE check so I can stock up on my pretend $2.00 a gallon gas.
Somebody just asked me if I’m ready for Christmas … hell, I’m not even ready for this afternoon.
Calling autism a disorder assumes neurotypicals have some kind of order. They don’t — they’re just the majority.
“TikToker gets plastic surgery on her nose so her future children will inherit her new nose.” US: We’re not going to make it, are we? Humans, I mean.
A genie granted me one wish, so I said, “I just want to be happy.” Now I’m living in a cottage with six dwarves and working in a mine.
Where do plants invest their money? In the stalk market.
What do you call a happy cowboy? A jolly-rancher.
What kind of undergarments does a lawyer wear? Legal briefs.
Why can’t the bank manager ride a bike anymore? He lost his balance.
What do you get when you cross a parrot with an elephant? An animal that tells you everything it remembers.
What do you call a short cow? Condensed milk.
What’s a cat’s favorite song? Three Blind Mice.
If you need help building an ark… I Noah guy.
Want to hear a joke about construction? I’m still working on it.
ICE is asking people to quit calling its hotline to report an undocumented girl named Anne Frank hiding in the attic of a republican lawmaker.
At Ford we listen to our customers. You asked for a place to nap while waiting for the tow truck and we delivered. Fold flat front seats!
I used to think adulthood was one crisis after another. I was wrong. It’s multiple crises. Concurrently. All at once. All the time. Forever.
Let’s admit that drinking bleach and shoving a UV light up your ass is the closest we’ve gotten to a republican healthcare plan in the last 16 years.
Milking stools only have three legs because the cow has the udder.
Gynecologist: What are you using for birth control? Her: My personality.
Today is the birthday, in 1862, of Alexandre Gustave Eiffel, one of the most remarkable and groundbreaking engineers of the Victorian era. He made his name with various bridges for the French railway network, most famously the Garabit Viaduct. He is best known for the Eiffel Tower, designed by his company and built for the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris, and his contribution to building the Statue of Liberty in New York.
The Maria Pia bridge over the Douro – 1877
The Garabit Viaduct in the Massif Central Region completed in 1884
On this day in 1937, Japanese bombers attacked and sank the U.S. Navy river gunboat Panay and three Standard Oil Company tankers on the Yangtze River near the Chinese capital of Nanjing. Japan and the United States were not at war at the time. The boats were part of an American naval operation called the Yangtze Patrol, which began following the joint British, French, and American victory in the Second Opium War.
Public reaction was mixed in the U.S., with Franklin D. Roosevelt weighing various diplomatic and military responses only to settle for an apology and compensation.
A flat-bottomed craft built in Shanghai specifically for river duty, Panay served as part of the US Navy’s Yangtze Patrol in the Asiatic Fleet, which was responsible for patrolling the Yangtze River to protect American lives and property in China. Since November, the Panay had been evacuating U.S. citizens from the battle zone around Nanjing. On 11 December, the Panay evacuated some of the last remaining Americans from the city, bringing the number of people aboard to five officers, 54 enlisted men, four US embassy staff, and 10 civilians.
USS Panay
Today is the birthday, in 1946, of Denny Dias, American guitarist, best known for being a founding member of Steely Dan. Dias placed an ad in The Village Voice in the summer of 1970 that read: “Looking for keyboardist and bassist. Must have jazz chops! Assholes need not apply”. Donald Fagen and Walter Becker responded to the advertisement. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vptlTsgu9p0
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