Today, April 10, marks the date of two famous anniversaries in 20th century history.
Each has left an indelible mark on our civilization, but in very different ways.
On this date in 1912, the soon-to-be-ill-fated RMS Titanic set sail from Southampton, England, on its maiden voyage.
It stopped first at Cherbourg, France, and then at Queenstown, Ireland, to pick up passengers before heading out on its voyage on the open sea.
Of course, you know what happened after that.
Filled to the gills with very wealthy passengers, like John Jacob Astor, but mainly with poor people seeking safe passage, the ship hit an iceberg, thousands died, and it was the first modern cruise ship disaster.
Heck, we can even see it play out in 3D in the "Titanic" film in our local theater.
Also on this date, in 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers purchased the contract of Jackie Robinson from its minor league affiliate, the Montreal Royals.
When Robinson played his first game, he broke the color barrier in baseball.
Now, all players, regardless of color, could play major league baseball. And Robinson showed just how talented he was, helping to change the game forever.
Two incredible instances happening on the very same day, 35 years removed from one another.
To this day, I think the Titanic disaster has been somewhat overplayed by the media.
Yes, it truly was a horrible thing to have happened.
It just proved that no matter how rich you are, your money isn't good when such a disaster strikes.
Everyone is, literally, in the same boat when this happens, no matter if you are a millionaire, billionaire, or just normal folk.
And James Cameron's "Titanic" movie, no matter how good it was, kind of amplified the fact that we have had a fascination with this disaster for years, now reaching 100 years. And we just can't let go.
Heck, there is an even a cruise ship which headed out to sea the other day, which will be following the same exact route the Titanic took when disaster struck.
How morbid!
The Jackie Robinson story hasn't been overplayed at all. I don't think anyone from the succeeding generations, mine included, can realize the power of this move that the Dodgers made, and its reverberations throughout so many facets of our lives, way beyond just sports.
Sports is the field where two sets of teams or players meet, and major league baseball supposedly showcases the best baseball players in the world.
But without black players, baseball only showcased the best white players, so you weren't getting the best of the best, until Jackie Robinson came into the game.
Much more importantly, this move was really the first step toward acceptance of blacks as equals in our country. I really believe that Jackie Robinson had as much to do with the civil rights movement as Martin Luther King did, but Robinson did it on the baseball diamond.
So, two interesting anniversaries on the same day ... one having a far-reaching impact on our lives, the other one, merely a point of fascination that will never go away.
April 10 is a very interesting date in history, isn't it?
He looks kind of silly today, having phony relationships with girls that can be his great granddaughters and wearing his sailor hat, but during the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, this guy was a trailblazer.
There had been "girly" mags before Playboy, but when he started up that magazine, he added a touch of class to the big breasts that were featured in the magazine.
He took a real journalistic approach to the whole thing, figuring that since most men would buy the magazine for the pictorials, why not put something a little "heady" into the magazine for men to read before they got to the treasure trove of skin.
And he was right on the money.
Playboy's legacy is not only the beautiful women who have adorned its pages, but the interviews, stories, words and other material that has been featured in the magazine during the last 50-plus years.
Everyone from Martin Luther King to George Clooney has had his words and thoughts published, and you had to read those before you got to the good stuff, so to speak.
And he was smart. He used the magazine as his personal platform for everything from human rights to sexual rights to his own rights as a publisher of what some simply referred to as a skin mag.
And he allowed others to voice their opinions too.
He was a trailblazer.
And today, in this Internet-driven world where magazines are almost something of a relic of a prehistoric age, he continues to oversee the entity that his empire started from.
Playboy has branched out, first into men's clubs and records and now into subscription television, but it all comes down to the magazine.
And yes, Hefner does look like a dirty old man now, and yes, his phony behavior with young girls is pretty much appalling.
But he is still around, still kicking, still trying to keep viable as he comes closer to his ninth decade.
I still remember the first Playboy magazine I ever saw.
I must have been eight years old, and I had a friend who was one of about six kids, with him being the only boy.
We were in his room, and he asked me if I wanted to see something. He reached under his bed, and took out a Playboy.
He opened up the magazine, and actress Kim Novak was posing provocatively on the page he opened to.
She wasn't nude, but it was enough for these two eight year olds to snicker like any eight year olds would at the sight of a nearly naked lady who was old enough to have been our own mother.
We had our laugh, he shoved the magazine back under his bed, and that was that.
It's funny how vividly I remember that incident, but probably every male in America can recall his own story of the first time he saw Playboy magazine.
That's how vivid the magazine stands out in our culture, even to this day.
And for that, I salute you, Hugh Hefner, on your birthday.
Happy Number 86, and have many, many more birthdays.
But take off the sailor hat, please. We can all live without that.
With a full moon out brightly this morning, I want to wish everyone a Happy Easter and a Happy Passover.
It's kind of weird that Good Friday and the first night of Passover are on the same date, but that is how it is this year.
I don't remember the last time this happened, but it makes it kind of nice.
Now many of us have holidays to celebrate and those holidays begin on the same day.
I guess there is some type of benefit to being in a leap year, with the one extra day positioning the two holidays together.
And these are nice holidays, minus the crazed gift giving that highlights those other holidays at the end of the year.
The significance of these holidays stand out, as family oriented events.
And I like that.
Sure, Easter has been commercialized to a certain extent, and Passover is getting there, but right now, the two holidays are kind of unique and unto themselves as far as crass commercialization is concerned.
Easter has to do with the resurrection of Jesus, and Passover has to do with the flight of Jews out of Egypt.
Those are the basics, there's much more to the holidays than that, of course.
But they are holidays where families get together, actually sit at the table together and eat and talk and go over the various rituals each holiday literally brings to the table.
In our world, it is so rare for families to sit down and eat meals together, so these holidays are a brief respite from the everyday run-and-gun eating that we normally do.
And when you don't eat meals together, you don't talk with each other, so these holidays give us occasion to do that.
My family only eats together on the weekend. During the week, I eat at one time, my wife another, and my son another.
We haven't eaten with my daughter in months.
But finally, on this first and the second night of Passover, we will all eat together, and celebrate the holiday together.
I am sure it is a similar situation for other Jews, and for others who celebrate Easter.
So when we celebrate these holidays, take it all in and enjoy yourself, because these occasions don't come around very often during the year.
Have a great holiday, and I will speak to you again on Monday.
Ah, with the scent of tree pollen and allergens throughout the air, and with a winter that never was behind us, we know that the warm weather is coming because the Major League Baseball season, for all intents and purposes, starts today.
Yes, the Mariners and the A's actually opened the season last week in Japan, but how many of us really paid any attention to that?
And yes, the Marlins officially opened their new stadium yesterday with a game against the World Champion Cardinals, but although their 500 real fans paid attention to that, most of us didn't.
Today is the day, and I can't wait.
You just know that summer is around the corner when baseball begins.
Sure, there is a little nip in the air this morning in my neck of the woods, but baseball almost brings out the warmth.
It's like the two go hand in hand.
Baseball is the game that brings me back to my childhood (see photo). I can be a kid again when I watch a major league game, not the 55-year old that I nearly am right now (we'll have to wait 23 more days for that occasion to happen).
It's just such a fun game, with nuances that only fans can truly understand.
The Cardinals will be looking to defend their title without Albert Pujols, who went for the money to the greener pastures of California with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim, or whatever they call themselves now.
The Texas Rangers have won the American League pennant two years running after never having won anything under that name. Remember, they are the descendants of the old Washington Senators, so losing is almost their middle name ... but not for the past two seasons.
The New York Yankees, my team, won't begin their season until tomorrow, when they play the Tampa Bay Rays. That is a good way to begin the season: two of the best teams in baseball facing off against one another.
I just hope that they get some fannies in the Tropicana Field seats for these games, and that the Yankees come out on top, of course. When you go to a Yankees-Rays game in Tampa, you swear you are in Yankee Stadium South, with so many Yankee fans at the game. I've done it, and it really is amazing.
Right now, the only game I know I am going to is at the Trop. When my family goes on vacation, we will be seeing the Rays and the Mariners. Not the best matchup, but I hope to fulfill my quest to get a foul ball this year, a quest that began in 1965 at my first game.
We have seats right behind the Mariners' dugout, so maybe our wish will come true this year. I will have to wait until July to find out.
We will go to a Yankees game, but that won't be for a while. I will get tickets later in the season, probably through a secondary source. The Yankees basically sell out every home game, or at least sell out in the seating areas that are barely affordable for people like me, so I have to go through a broker to get a seat.
My predictions: I think the Yankees and the Cardinals will face each other in the World Series, and the Yankees will bring home another World Series championship to the Bronx.
We'll know if I'm right in about six months.
Anyway, let's not jump ahead of ourselves: the 2012 season is about to begin, and I can't wait.
In 1968, 44 years ago today, civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.
I remember that day, and its aftermath, as clearly as one can remember an event that happened at least a generation ago.
My family and I lived in that unique community I have talked about so often here, Rochdale Village, in South Jamaica, Queens, New York. It was a mixed community surrounded by one of the longest standing black communities in the United States.
I was 10 years old, just a few days away from my 11th birthday. I don't remember what we were watching on TV, but my parents, myself and my sister were in our living room all watching the same program. We had a black and white Dumont TV, and although it was a pretty old TV even by the standards of 1968, it still played pretty well.
Whatever we were watching was on Channel 2, the local CBS outlet and the flagship station of the entire network.
Anyway, an announcer broke into the program we were watching, and said something like the following:
"Reports are that civil rights leader Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has been fatally shot in Memphis, Tennessee."
I honestly don't remember if the word "fatally" was used, because I don't remember whether at that time whether it was announced if he was dead yet.
But it was at least announced that he was shot.
(The video that accompanies this Rant was not what I just described, but it is the best I can do to bring this all into perspective. I remember that whatever we were watching was broken into as a "Special Report," so I don't think this was it, but I use it to illustrate my point.)
"Oh my God, oh my God," said my mother over and over and over again.
You have to understand the delicate balance that my family and I, and hundreds of other families both black and white, lived in within this community.
Rochdale Village was an experimental community. Very basically, it was created to see if white middle class families could live, and prosper, within a predominantly black community.
Yes, there were many blacks who lived in Rochdale Village, but the majority of people living in this community were white, and a majority of the whites were Jews, so it was something of a novel community.
We did not live in a gated community, welcomed those living on the outskirts of the community into our schools, our retail establishments, and into our community as a whole.
Many on the outside welcomed us, but probably many more hated us for infiltrating their community.
So any incident, however large or small, that would tip this delicate balance was sure to be something to pay close attention to.
So when it was made public that Martin Luther King Jr. was shot, my mother pretty much knew that it was the beginning of the end of our time in this community.
And oh how right she was.
I was a kid, and maybe I didn't fully get it. I had white friends and black friends there, Jewish friends and non-Jewish friends, and really, all that I cared about at the time was whether we had enough kids for two full teams in stickball, or punchball, or what team we were playing against in Little League.
Sure, I guess I did see some interesting things beyond that, but heck, I was 10 years old, so my world was a pretty small one.
But my world changed the very next day at school.
What I remember from that day was that the Black Panthers demanded that the name of our school be changed to the Martin Luther King Jr. School, and it that request wasn't complied with, then they were going to blow up the school. (No, it wasn't complied with and no, the school was never bombed.)
I remember being addressed in school that day about the incident that had happened, and we all seemed to take it in for what it was, a horrible event that impacted us all.
Leaving school that day, I remember someone I knew being chased by another person with a long knife or machete, with the weapon holder yelling, "You killed my father."
I remember most of us, myself included, running home after school that day.
I also remember the sorrow I felt about the whole thing. Maybe that was the time where I changed from a little kid to a much more mature human being, but the aftermath kind of made one grow up quickly.
It was as if the heart and soul of the development died with King, a man who would have applauded this development I lived in as a step in the right direction.
(I also seem to remember that King was scheduled to visit our community later in the year, recognizing that this was a place that he wanted to know more about, and on our side, elevating our community, showing the world a community that could work if given the chance.)
Living there was never the same.
Those who hated us from the outset continued to hate us, but they had something to point to for their festering hate.
They felt that all whites were to blame for his murder, and don't tell me about profiling; many of us became targets because we were white and Jewish.
And I have found out in recent years that the antagonism towards blacks who lived in the development also ramped up; many who hated us hated them too, characterizing them as "Uncle Toms" and probably much worse.
Crime ran rampant in our community, mainly smaller crimes like being hit up for money and having things stolen from us. A lot of this crime, due to its petty nature, never got reported, but it existed. I was a victim any number of times.
Anarchy ran rampant in the schools. I can't tell you how many times we were mugged, assaulted and pointed out for being white within the walls of the public school and junior high school.
Look, times were changing to begin with, but the day Martin Luther King died was the beginning of the end for this community. It was our "American Pie" in a way; not to lessen the day's importance, but for comparison's sake, it was our "Day the Community Died."
After a number of incidents involving every member of my family, we had had enough, and by July 1971, we moved to Long Island, where initially, we found that things weren't that much better than they were in Queens. We were the first Jewish family on our block, and yes, the prejudicial treatment continued for several years afterward.
Many of my friends moved out of the old neighborhood by the mid 1970s, and quite frankly, I haven't been back there in about 36 years or so. I am still friendly with many people from that development, but we have all scattered, throughout New York or in Florida or other parts of the country and overseas.
It was a wonderful place to grow up in, but you grew up fast there ... very fast.
So I remember Martin Luther King's death with sadness on several levels. First, a man who had something positive to say was vanquished by a madman's bullet, and secondly (and honestly, almost more important to me), because it signaled the end of my neighborhood, or at least the neighborhood as I knew it.
Rochdale Village still stands today, but as a nearly all-black neighborhood. It is strong in that regard, but the experiment in black and white was over years ago. Whether it passed or failed is up to further examination, and I still don't have a clear answer myself.
But I can tell you that Martin Luther King's death was both my coming of age and also the breaking point for the community that I lived in, and even these 40-plus years later, it still reverberates with me, and for many others who lived there, both blacks and whites.
It was a day and time period that I will never forget.
My right eye is in bad shape today. I guess it is its turn, as yesterday, my left eye was bothering me.
I shaved with basically one eye open today, and did a lousy job as a result.
My allergies are at it again, and I guess I can blame the excessive tree pollen for that.
I actually saw it on the ground today near my car.
Oh woe is me!
As I was suffering, I watched last night's broadcast of the WWE Hall of Fame induction ceremonies.
It is always a fun show to watch, because you never know what the inductees will say, and it's also the only WWE show that is broadcast during the year where the wrestlers can be themselves, not their characters.
Mike Tyson went into the "Celebrity Wing" of the HoF, which is funny, because there is no actual building for the WWE Hall of Fame, so there is no wing.
Tyson's comments appeared to be heavily edited, but he did bring up one point.
He noted that if he didn't appear in one of the Wrestlemanias, he would have lost his house.
Obviously, that payday made the mortgage payment a bit easier.
I would love to have heard Tyson's entire speech, because he was truly "Ranting and Raving" about everything, and then some. I guess I will have to wait for the full induction ceremony until it is released on DVD, probably on the Wrestlemania DVD which should be out by June.
While I ponder what Tyson might have said on the show, I must congratulate Alec Baldwin and Bruce Willis, two emerging altacockas who are acting like guys 30 years younger than they are.
Alec Baldwin is getting married again, this time to his yoga instructor, who at 28, is slightly more than half of the actor's age of 54.
And Bruce Willis, 57, just became a dad again, with his 33-year old wife. They had a baby girl, and named her Mabel.
God, when are these celebrities going to learn that naming kids isn't like naming your dog or cat?
Anyway, that's it for me today. Hopefully, my eyes will be better tomorrow, and I can stop blinking and trying to focus like I am now.
Pardon me for this short Rant today, because my eyes are killing me, due to the winter that almost wasn't.
We are now in April, and the summer months, and warmer weather, are just around the corner.
Now that we are in spring, everything from the non-winter winter season carried over to the spring.
I guess the tree pollen is killing me today, because I am having trouble seeing clearly out of my left eye.
It feels as if someone punched me in the eye, but without the pain.
It is tearing, not heaving, and it is better than when I woke up, but it is still bothering me.
And it effects my entire body. My left side feels in disarray, out of place, and not functioning correctly due to the way I feel today.
I am sure this all has to do with allergies--and I just got my shots last week. They don't appear to be helping me any today.
I hope I can get through the day.
If I have to have this type of malady, I wish I could have had it yesterday, as my family and I saw another piece of trash that Hollywood is pushing as entertainment.
"Wrath of the Titans" is a sequel to "Clash of the Titans," which itself was a remake/reboot from the 1980s movie of the same name.
It is about mythological figures, and whatever the name of the film, it is bad, really bad, as bad as "John Carter" was and not worth the money, whether you see it in 3D--like we did--or not.
I should have known something was coming, because when we saw the film yesterday, I couldn't really see the 3D clearly. Some scenes I saw it, some scenes not.
Now, I can barely see 2D via my left eye.
I will be OK. It will probably do as it normally does, get better throughout the day.
It is annoying, but at least I didn't have to shave today.
Ever shave with just one eye open? Try it the next time you shave, you will see how uncomfortable that can be.
And I'm talking to the guys here. Heaven knows what ladies do when they have this same eye-sore and they have to get themselves ready for the day.
