Film of the Day
We Live in Public
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 12 November Tim Berners-Lee publishes World Wide Web proposal, 1990 On this day in 1990, Tim Berners-Lee, an employee of the European research organisation CERN, published the formal proposal to create a more efficient information management system which would connect up hypertext documents on different computers running different operating systems, to be viewed by client-server applications (ie browsers). Building on a prediction by Arthur C Clarke that satellites would allow global access via console to vast amounts of information, telephony, video conferencing and so on, Berners-Lee took practical inspiration from the Dynatext electronic book system – which used a rigorous and … Read more
The Snowtown Murders
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 17 February Jeffrey Dahmer sentenced, 1992 On this day in 1992, Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer, aka the Milwaukee Cannibal, was sentenced for the murder of 15 men and boys. Dahmer had pleaded guilty at the trial and the case had revolved around the question of his sanity. The jury had found him sane, and that his cannibalism and necrophilia were a result of badness rather than madness, a verdict Dahmer entirely agreed with. Dahmer had committed his first murder aged 18, and over the following years was frequently arrested on charges of indecent exposure and sexual assault, all the while luring men … Read more
The Ice Storm
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 8 August President Nixon resigns, 1974 On this day in 1974, facing impeachment for his involvement in the Watergate affair, Richard Nixon went on air to declare that he would resign the next day. His speech admitted no wrong-doing and spent at least half of its duration cataloguing the achievements of his administration, especially in foreign policy. Watergate brought Nixon down not because he admitted what he knew – he possibly didn’t know that Republican hirelings had broken into a Democrat HQ to steal vital documents – but because he didn’t admit that he had learned about it some days later … Read more
The Hi-Lo Country
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 July Potsdam Conference, 1945 On this day in 1945, Joseph Stalin, Winston Churchill and Harry Truman arrived in Potsdam, where they were over the next two weeks to decide the shape of the world in the wake of the Second World War. The three powers had met before, at Yalta, in 1945 while the war was still coming to an end, when Franklin Roosevelt was still alive, and before then in Tehran in 1943, when it had started to look like the Allies might be triumphant. Germany had surrendered nine weeks before Potsdam, and the conference largely was about Germany’s … Read more
Moonrise Kingdom
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 1 August First Scout camp, Brownsea Island, 1907 On this day in 1907, a camp organised by British national hero Lieutenant-General Baden-Powell to test the ideas he’d laid out in his book, Scouting for Boys, opened on Brownsea Island, just off the south coast of the United Kingdom. It lasted a week, and was made up of 20 or 21 boys of varying social backgrounds who spent their time camping, learning woodcraft, chivalry, lifesaving and patriotism. Each day started at 6am with Baden-Powell blowing a reveille on a kudu horn, after which the boys would have cocoa, do exercise, raise the … Read more
The House I Live In
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 December Prohibition ends, 1933 On this day in 1933, the USA ended one of its most disastrous experiments. The Volstead Act, or National Prohibition Act, had been passed on 28 October 1919. It banned “the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States…” It had required a change in the US Constitution to get the act passed, which the Congress had finally done on 16 January 1919, when it ratified the 18th Amendment. On 17 January 1920, America went dry. Except it didn’t. What happened instead is that … Read more
Her
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 22 August Storm botnet maximum, 2007 Today marks the day when, in 2007, activity by the Storm Worm Trojan horse reached its maximum. Having been identified in January 2007, the worm spread via emails with catchy subject lines such as “230 dead as storm batters Europe”. Once the recipient had clicked on it, the Trojan horse would go to work, replicating itself and emailing itself out to others as spam. No one is really sure where the Trojan horse came from – some suggest the US, others Russia – but it was designed to work on Microsoft Windows systems, turning each … Read more
Martyrs
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 28 February Beginning of the Waco Siege, 1993 On this day in 1993, the Waco siege got underway. It started when the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) tried to raid the headquarters of the Branch Davidian sect, a breakaway of the Seventh Day Adventists. Housed in a compound east of Waco, Texas, after their numbers had grown, the Branch Davidians had originally been founded by Victor Houteff in 1929. They believed in imminent apocalypse. On Houteff’s death in 1955, leadership passed to Houteff’s widow. Florence predicted that the world would end in 1959. When this failed to happen … Read more
Into Eternity: A Film for the Future
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 5 August Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, 1963 On this day in 1963, the “treaty banning nuclear weapon tests in the atmosphere, outer space and under water” was signed by the governments of the USSR, the United Kingdom and the USA in Moscow. Though there was general unease about the increase in radiation on planet Earth, the ban had been proposed first by the USSR in the early 1950s, though in its version of the treaty, no rigorous procedures would have been included to verify whether signatories were keeping their end of the bargain. The USSR finally yielded to the US and … Read more
Inglourious Basterds
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 16 April Colditz liberated, 1945 On this day in 1945, the infamous Colditz Castle PoW camp was relieved by the US Army. Dating back nearly a thousand years, though extensively rebuilt in the 19th century, the castle had been a workhouse, a mental asylum and a sanitarium for the well-to-do before being pressed into service as a prison for high security captives during the Second World War – often people who had broken out of other prisons. Known as Oflag IV-C, it is the source of many myths and stirring stories about escape attempts during the Second World War. It was … Read more
Without Limits
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 3 November Adolf Dassler born, 1900 On this day in 1900, Adolf Dassler, known to his friends as Adi, was born, in Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, Germany. A cobbler by training he started making his own sports shoes after returning from the First World War. He got his big break at the Amsterdam Olympics of 1928, where his running shoes were popular with athletes. At the 1936 Olympics Dassler offered Jesse Owens a pair of his running shoes, the first time an African American had had a sponsor. Dassler joined the Nazi party, along with his brother Rudolf, but later left the party … Read more
Way of the Morris
A movie for every day of the year – a good one 8 May First commemorative period of silence proposed, 1919 On this day in 1919, Edward George Honey, an Australian former soldier and journalist, first proposed the idea of a silence to honour the dead of the Great War. He was living in London at the time, and suggested it in a letter written to the London Evening News. Honey mooted a five minute silence, to commune with “the Glorious Dead who won us peace”, having been upset by the sight of people dancing in the streets on Armistice Day in 1918. Honey’s idea was either taken up by Sir Percy Fitzpatrick, or … Read more
