Charles Crooks @CharlesCrooks

The Smiths - There Is A Light That Never Goes Out (credits to: thedigitalassembly)

On the day John Ratzenberger walked into an audition room in 1982, he had a plane to catch. He had been living in London for nearly a decade — acting, writing, performing improv comedy across Europe with a two-man theatre group that had played to standing-room-only audiences for 634 consecutive shows. He had appeared in small roles in some of the biggest films of the era: *Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back*, *Superman*, *Gandhi*, *A Bridge Too Far* He was a working actor, but nobody's idea of a household name. That day, he was in Los Angeles on a writing assignment, and his ticket back to London was already booked. He had one audition before he left. A new sitcom about a bar in Boston. Both Ratzenberger and another actor, George Wendt, were reading for the same role — a minor patron named George who had a single line: "Beer!" It was barely a part at all. But Ratzenberger wanted the work, so he went in, and the moment director Jimmy Burrows told him he was there to audition, not have a conversation, he felt the energy in the room go cold. By his own account, all the blood rushed out of his body. He delivered a forgettable read. The casting director thanked him on the way out — the polite, final kind of thank you that everyone in show business learns to recognize. He was almost through the door when something stopped him. Not calculation. Not strategy. Just the instinct of a man who had spent a decade doing improv and knew that the moment before you leave a room is sometimes the best moment you'll ever have. He turned around. "Do you have a bar know-it-all?" The producers didn't know what he was talking about. So he told them. Every bar in New England, he explained, has one — some guy who acts like he has the knowledge of all mankind stored between his ears and is not even slightly shy about sharing it. He had grown up around exactly this type: a man named Sarge at his father's regular bar, who could answer any question with absolute confidence whether he actually knew the answer or not. The room would ask Sarge the length of a whale's intestine and Sarge would shoot back: "Baleen or blue?" And somehow, everyone deferred to him anyway. Ratzenberger launched into an improvisation right there — the Boston accent, the lean against an imaginary bar, the slightly too-long explanations of facts nobody had asked for. The producers watched. Then they laughed. Then they asked him to do more. George Wendt got the role of the bar regular, renamed Norm Peterson. And the producers, convinced by five minutes of improv from a man on his way out the door, wrote an entirely new character into the show. His name was Clifford Clavin. United States Postal Service. Cheers debuted on NBC on September 30, 1982, to nearly catastrophic ratings — finishing 77th out of 100 shows that week. The network came close to canceling it in the first season. But the show found its audience, and then it found a much bigger one, and then it became one of the most beloved television series ever made. It ran for 11 seasons. Ratzenberger appeared in 273 of 275 episodes. Cliff became the man at the end of the bar with the white socks and the questionable facts and the magnificent certainty — the guy everyone tolerated and secretly enjoyed, the kind of person every room has and everyone pretends to find annoying and would immediately miss if he disappeared. Ratzenberger was nominated for Emmy Awards in 1985 and 1986. By the time the show ended in 1993, Cliff Clavin was embedded in American culture as one of the great comic characters in the history of the medium. Cheers! 🍻

@eagameover @MargeEusden I’ve got Clint Eastwood walking point for me on this mission called getting old. 🇺🇸

84 years ago today, four Japanese aircraft carriers were burning in the Pacific because of a man who went to work in a smoking jacket and slippers. Washington took his job, buried his name, and blocked his medal for 44 years. This is the story of Joseph Rochefort, the codebreaker who saved Midway. December 7, 1941. Pearl Harbor burns. Rochefort, head of a Navy codebreaking unit on Oahu, takes it personally. He tells a colleague that an intelligence officer has exactly one job: to tell his commander today what the enemy will do tomorrow. On December 7, he believes he failed at it. He decides he will never fail at it again. His unit is Station HYPO, hidden in a windowless basement at Pearl Harbor that his men call "the Dungeon." It is cold, damp, and lit like a morgue. Rochefort wears a smoking jacket over his uniform to fight the chill and slippers because the concrete floor wrecks his feet. He works 20 hour days, sleeps on a cot in the basement, and lives on coffee. His team is just as strange. Brilliant misfit cryptanalysts like Joe Finnegan and Ham Wright, plus the surviving bandsmen of the battleship USS California, sunk on December 7. The musicians turn out to be naturals at running the IBM punch card machines. Sailors who played trombones in November are reconstructing an enemy cipher by March. Their target: JN-25, the Imperial Japanese Navy's operational code. Tens of thousands of code groups, layered with additives, changed regularly. On a good day HYPO can read maybe 10 to 15 percent of any message. They rebuild the rest from fragments, traffic patterns, callsigns, and Rochefort's freakish memory. He had spent three years in Japan learning the language. He could hold months of intercepts in his head at once. By May 1942, processing up to 140 decrypts a day, HYPO sees something enormous taking shape. Admiral Yamamoto, the architect of Pearl Harbor, is massing nearly 200 ships for one decisive battle. The target appears in the intercepts as two letters: AF. Rochefort is certain AF is Midway Atoll. Washington is certain he is wrong. The Navy's own codebreaking office, OP-20-G, argues for the South Pacific. Others fear Hawaii again, or even the West Coast. The Army wants planes held back to defend San Francisco. If Nimitz bets his last carriers on Midway and Rochefort is wrong, the Pacific is lost. So HYPO sets one of the great traps in the history of intelligence. The idea comes from staffer Jasper Holmes. The order goes to Midway by undersea cable, which the Japanese cannot tap: broadcast by radio, in plain language, that your water distillation plant has broken down. Midway sends the fake distress call. Two days later, HYPO decrypts a Japanese intelligence report to fleet commanders: AF is short of fresh water. Two letters, confirmed. The argument is over. Now Nimitz goes all in. The carrier Yorktown, mauled in the Coral Sea and given 90 days of repairs, is patched up in 72 hours and sent back out. Three American carriers slip northeast of Midway and wait at a spot on the map they name Point Luck. On May 27, HYPO cracks the Japanese date and time cipher, the final piece. Nimitz's intelligence officer Edwin Layton, Rochefort's closest friend and partner, gives Nimitz a prediction of nearly insane precision: the Japanese carriers will be spotted on bearing 325 degrees, 175 miles from Midway, around 0600 on June 4. On the morning of June 4, 1942, a PBY scout plane radios in the sighting. Nimitz turns to Layton and says: well, you were only five minutes, five degrees, and five miles out. What follows are the most consequential ten minutes of the Pacific war. American dive bombers catch the Japanese carriers with fueled planes and stacked ordnance on their decks. By nightfall, Akagi, Kaga, Soryu, and Hiryu, four of the six carriers that hit Pearl Harbor, are gone, along with thousands of men and the irreplaceable core of Japan's elite naval aviators. Six months after Pearl Harbor, Japan's advance across the Pacific is broken. It never recovers. A basement full of misfits had handed the US Navy the greatest ambush in its history. Then came the knives. The same Washington officers who had called Midway wrong now claimed the credit. They whispered that Rochefort was difficult, an ex-enlisted man without the right pedigree. Nimitz recommended him for the Distinguished Service Medal. Washington killed it. Nimitz tried again. Killed again. In October 1942, four months after the victory he made possible, Rochefort was pulled from HYPO. The man who outwitted Yamamoto spent much of the rest of the war commanding a floating dry dock in San Francisco Bay. He never lobbied for himself, never wrote a self-serving memoir, and rarely spoke of it. He said his real reward came at Midway itself. He died in 1976, unknown to the public, medal denied. His old shipmates refused to let it go. Layton and others fought the Navy bureaucracy for years with the declassified record. In 1985 the Navy relented, and on May 30, 1986, President Reagan presented the Distinguished Service Medal to Rochefort's children in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. 44 years late. One man in slippers, in a basement, out-thought an empire and was punished for being right.

Stuart Sutcliffe collapsed in his art class in Hamburg, Germany, in February 1962. He had been complaining of headaches for months, and they were steadily getting worse. He couldn't see clearly anymore, and the light hurt his eyes. When he fell to the floor, the class panicked. Stuart was only 21 years old—a young Scottish painter, engaged to a beautiful German photographer, and studying under one of the most famous artists in Europe. He also had a secret life he had just left behind. He used to be in a band. That band was called the Beatles. Six months later, they would have their first hit. Eighteen months later, they would change music forever. But Stuart wouldn't live to see any of it. Here is how he got there. Stuart was born on June 23, 1940, in Edinburgh, Scotland, the son of a schoolteacher and a civil servant. The family moved to Liverpool when Stuart was three. His father went to sea, and his mother raised the children. Stuart was different from other kids—quiet, smart, sensitive, he drew constantly and painted obsessively. In 1956, at age 16, he started at the Liverpool College of Art. That was where he met John Lennon. John was loud and rough; Stuart was quiet and elegant. Despite their differences, they became best friends. John was already trying to start a rock band with his school friend Paul McCartney. They called themselves the Quarrymen, then the Silver Beetles, and went through a few other names. The band desperately needed a bass player. Stuart didn't play any instrument and didn't really care about rock music, but he had just sold one of his paintings for £65—big money for a teenager back then. John talked him into spending that money on a Höfner bass guitar, and then taught him three basic chords. Stuart officially joined the band in May 1960. He couldn't really play, so he would often stand on stage with his back to the crowd so people couldn't see his fingers. He couldn't sing well either, but he had something the rest of the band didn't have: he was incredibly beautiful. Tall, with dark hair, sharp cheekbones, and wearing Ray-Ban sunglasses before anyone else, he looked like a movie star. Whenever Stuart sang Elvis Presley's "Love Me Tender," girls in the audience screamed louder than they did for any of the other Beatles. It even made Paul McCartney a little jealous. Stuart and John also invented something else: the band's name. Both were huge fans of Buddy Holly's band, the Crickets, and wanted a similar name with a double meaning based on a bug. They came up with "Beetles," and John tweaked the spelling to "Beatles"—like a musical beat. In August 1960, the band got an offer to play in Hamburg, Germany. It meant playing eight hours a night, six nights a week—a few months of brutal, exhausting work. They took the gig. Hamburg changed everything. The Beatles played in seedy clubs and lived in tiny, cramped rooms behind a movie theater. They slept on bunk beds, and through the grind, they grew tougher, faster, and much better. It was also where Stuart met someone special in the audience: Astrid Kirchherr. A German photographer, she was 22, tall, blonde, and exceptionally cool, specializing in taking photos of art-school groups. She came to a Beatles show, and she and Stuart locked eyes. By November 1960, they were engaged, exchanging rings in the German tradition. Astrid was the first person to take serious photographs of the Beatles. Her black-and-white shots later became legendary: the young Beatles in leather jackets, smoking, looking dangerous. She did something else, too. Stuart asked her to cut his hair, and she gave him a French art-school cut, brushed forward and cut straight across the forehead. At first, the other Beatles laughed at him and called him a "mop top." A few months later, they all wanted the same look. It became the most famous haircut in music history, and Stuart wore it first. © Reddit #drthehistories

LITMW

@Lady_FanAccount The power of art’s commentary on life.

Talking Heads performing “Once in a Lifetime” at The Pantages Theatre in 1983 feels like watching a nervous breakdown turn into art. The groove keeps moving, David Byrne looks like he’s receiving messages from another planet, and the whole performance captures that strange feeling of waking up inside your own life and wondering how you got there.

I remember when this was released. John Lennon’s songs were usually about his lived experience.

This is the movie scene with the smartest kids ever. They are Genius! And this is also a motivation to keep creating and pushing. 🎬

Just a dog taking a moment to smell the roses

Stevie Nicks - Stop Draggin' My Heart Around This song was written by Tom Petty. Stevie Nicks didn't want to record it because she only wanted her own compositions on the album, but it ended up becoming the biggest hit of her solo career, reaching the Top 3 in the US

Neil Peart sharing a lesson taught to him by his teacher Freddy Gruber. This is from his 1996 tape called 'A Work In Progress'

Just Right 👌😌

Jimi Hendrix live with ‘Red House’ — raw, slow-burning blues straight from the soul.

x.com/JukeBoxNonStop…

Sean Connery’s entrance in Dr. No (1962) is pure screen legend. Even better, that iconic “Bond… James Bond” moment wasn’t overthought at all, they just let Connery walk in, play it cool, and history handled the rest.

cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic

3 months ago

What is the greatest character entrance into a scene?

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