comicsofme: October 2011

Halloween 2011

Yes people, this is our pumpkin
photographed, obviously, in the dark
in full glowering glow
HAPPY HALLOWEEN

Ka$hing In With Kim Karda$hian

Hi...remember me?
Yeah, I know, it's been a while since I posted anything on BHB

I've been busy, really busy
But I just couldn't not comment on this

The celebrity wedding of the year
rumored to be putting over a million dollars into the pockets of Kim Kardashian and Kris Humphries
was apparently a full on hoax planned and executed just for Kim$ reality televi$ion $how.
I don't believe everything that I read on Radar online and neither should you
but somehow this doesn't surprise me

She wore a lot of serious jewelry for a non serious occasion

Don't you agree?

Orange County costumes

Okay, here's my favorite Orange-County-history-related Halloween costume so far this year. This is Jody Daily at yesterday's Anaheim Halloween Festival dressed as the former Anaheim Chamber of Commerce spokescritter, "Andy Anaheim." This character was created for Anaheim by Walt Disney Studios in 1954, as the opening of Disneyland drew near. The image below is a 1955 newspaper ad for the Festival featuring Andy dressed in his own costume: Davey Crockett!

Learn more about Andy Anaheim on Kevin Kidney's always delightful Miehana blog.

Feel free to email me photos of your own Orange-County-history-related Halloween costumes so I can share them here. I will post the best 20 or 30 received.

Halloween at the Orange County Archives

Yes, it's Halloween at that hub of history, the Orange County Archives. This is, of course, a pretty easy report to file, because I work there. But I thought this might be a good time to introduce you to Archie the Archives Cat. Archie is a life-sized photo of an orange tabby cat, adhered to a magnet, which is, in turn, stuck to the side of our best library cart. It wasn't enough that County Archivist Susan Berumen introduced Archie to the Archives, but she also has little outfits for him, depending on the season and the holidays. Some of them are fairly amusing. He's wearing his Halloween ghost costume in the photo below, along with a top hat and handlebar moustache. Perhaps he is a "steampunk" ghost cat? I may share more of his other seasonal attire in future months,... Depending on how desperate I am for bloggable material.

The eagle-eyed among you may have noticed the gold witch trophy in the photo at the top of today's post. A closeup is provided below. Although its unclear who originally won this trophy, or when they won it, we do know it's an old trophy for the best "Horse Drawn Entry" in the traditional Anaheim Halloween Parade. I sort of had to talk someone into donating this to the Archives, and I'm so glad I did.

For those who want to use the Archives to dig into the history of Halloween in Orange County, we luckily have plenty of old newspapers, history books, and historic photos. The image below is a 1940s newspaper clipping about the Anaheim Halloween Parade, given to us by the family of the late Orange County Supervisor, James A. Baker. Supervisor Baker is shown on horseback as the grand marshal.

Have a happy Halloween! Put up decorations and pass out candy to the trick-or-treaters, or at least go out and do something that adds to the kooky/spooky fun. If you don't, the Great Pumpkin may question your sincerity.

Kate Beckinsale

Kate Beckinsale Biography:

Kathryn Bailey "Kate" Beckinsale is an English actress. After some minor television roles, her first widely seen appearance was in Much Ado About Nothing (1993), filmed while she was a student at Oxford University. She then appeared in British costume dramas such as Prince of Jutland (1994), Cold Comfort Farm (1995), Emma (1996) and The Golden Bowl (2000), in addition to various stage and radio productions. She began to seek film work in the United States in the late 1990s and, after appearing in small-scale dramas The Last Days of Disco (1998) and Brokedown Palace (1999), she had a breakout year in 2001 with starring roles in war epic Pearl Harbor and romantic comedy Serendipity. She built on this success with appearances in The Aviator (2004) and Click (2006).

She has also worked occasionally as a model in television and print campaigns to promote Gap denim, Diet Coke, Absolut Vodka and Lux shampoo. Publications such as Esquire and People Magazine have repeatedly included her in their annual rankings of the world's sexiest and most beautiful women.

She is the only child of actors Richard Beckinsale (1947–1979) and Judy Loe and was raised in London, England. She had an eight-year relationship with Welsh actor Michael Sheen from 1995 until 2003. Their daughter, Lily Mo Sheen, was born in London, England in 1999. She married American film director Len Wiseman in 2004 and they live in Los Angeles, California.

Beckinsale was born in London, England, the only child of actor Richard Beckinsale and actress Judy Loe. She made her first television appearance at the age of four in an episode of This is Your Life dedicated to her father. When she was six years old, her 31-year old father died suddenly of a heart attack. Beckinsale was deeply traumatised by the loss and "started expecting bad things to happen". While she has seen her father "more on television than I have in life," "there are certainly enough memories for me not to feel that it's somebody I didn't know." Her widowed mother moved in with director Roy Battersby when Beckinsale was nine and she was raised alongside his four sons and daughter. She has a close relationship with her step-father: "I couldn't have knitted a better one ... He wasn't pushy, he let me come to him." She has a paternal half-sister, actress Samantha Beckinsale, but they have never had regular contact.

She read French and Russian literature at New College, Oxford University and was later described by a contemporary, journalist Victoria Coren, as "whip-clever, slightly nuts and very charming". She was involved with the Oxford University Dramatic Society, most notably being directed by fellow student Tom Hooper in a production of A View from the Bridge at the Oxford Playhouse. She spent her third year in Paris as part of Oxford's study-abroad program, after which she decided to leave university to concentrate on her burgeoning acting career: "It was getting to the point where I wasn't enjoying either thing enough because both were very high pressure. I was burning out and I knew I had to make a decision.

Beckinsale was educated at Godolphin and Latymer School in West London and was involved with the Orange Tree Youth Theatre. In her teens, she twice won the W. H. Smith Young Writers' competition—once for short stories and once for poetry. She has described herself as "a late bloomer": "All of my friends were kissing boys and drinking cider way before me. I found it really depressing that we weren't making camp fires and everyone was doing grown-up stuff." "I loathed being a teenager." She had a nervous breakdown and developed anorexia at the age of fifteen and underwent Freudian psychoanalysis for four years.

Kate Beckinsale garnered a reputation as an action star following an appearance as a vampire in 2003'sUnderworld and has since starred in Van Helsing (2004), Underworld: Evolution (2006) andWhiteout (2009). She has also continued to work on smaller independent projects such as Snow Angels (2007), Winged Creatures (2008), Nothing But the Truth (for which she earned a Critic's Choice Award nomination in 2008) and Everybody's Fine (2009). She has three films set for release in 2012: the fourth installment of vampire franchise Underworld: Awakening, crime thrillerContraband and sci-fi remake Total Recall.

Kate Beckinsale

Sputnik comes to Laguna Beach for Halloween

Got your Halloween costume ready? The two old ads in today's post both come from the Oct 29, 1957 edition of Laguna Beach's South Coast News. Both ads also reference Sputnik -- a subject I'll get back to in a moment.

The newspaper's editor clearly liked the large photo in the Zenith ad (above) as much as I do, and ran it again, a few pages later, in a features section, with the following caption:

"SPACEMAN VISITS! It's not Superman. And it's not an over-grown 'trick or treat' operator practicing for Thursday night's Halloween festivities. It's popular Laguna businessman Roy Arntson modeling a Zenith Space Commander helmet about town Friday."

Space travel was a popular topic for fiction in the 1950s, but it was still theoretical. In 1957, crazy-looking helmet designs like this seemed as reasonable as any other design. But that would soon change.

Just weeks before these ads appeared, on Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first man-made satellite -- called Sputnik 1 -- into Earth's orbit. Unlike today's complex satellites, Sputnik did only two things while in orbit: 1) It beeped at a radio frequency that could be heard on short-wave radio, and 2) It sent metaphorical shock waves through the free world.

The free peoples of Earth were shocked at what seemed proof of Soviet technological superiority. And of course, the commies took the opportunity to gloat. Indeed, Sputnik served as the opening salvo in a "space race" between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.

Unhappily, that race (and the technology it generated) paralleled a more critical arms race that threatened to destroy the world. If the Soviets could send satellites around the world, couldn't they also send atomic bombs into our backyards? Talk about an extra-scary Halloween surprise.

More happily, the space race also led the U.S. to create ARPA, which gave us the Internet, and NASA, which gave us all kinds of great stuff, including Velcro, an understanding of the structure and history of the universe, Tang, modern telecommunications, freeze-dried ice cream, solar power cells, pens that write upside-down, and astronauts walking on the moon.

Strangely enough, Sputnik also led to a bunch of new words, including "beatnik" (coined by writer Herb Caen in 1958), "refusenik," "peacenik," "computernik," and "neatnik."

For the record, Sputnik's beeping stopped when its battery died; Just three days before these ads were printed.

Dealing Up in Hyperfuse 2011 Shoes

New O.C. "History Hikes" & San Juan Hot Springs

If you're reading this blog, I assume you have at least some interest in Orange County history. Do you also enjoy the great outdoors?

If so, you should check out the Orange County Historical Society's (OCHS) first "History Hike," which will take place on Nov. 20th. This first trek will be to historic (and seldom-seen) San Juan Hot Springs. From a sacred Indian site to a century of different resorts at this location, these springs have been drawing visitors for thousands of years. The buildings that once stood here (as shown in the 1890 photo above, courtesy the Anaheim Public Library) are long gone, but ruins can still be found, as can the occasional ancient artifact. And of course, the hot water still bubbles and flows.

The color photos above and below come from my last visit to the springs, with a fascinating group of historians, archaeologists, and local Indians. The area is quite beautiful.

About the History Hike program, OCHS writes,...

"To help expose, educate and connect people to Orange County’s fascinating history, the Orange County Historical Society is launching a new program — Orange County History Hikes. These hikes will take place at least a couple times per year, and are open to the public. Each hike will showcase an Orange County historical destination, allowing history and hiking enthusiasts to see some of these destinations in a new way. Hikes will vary in distance, topography and difficulty, but will stay within a range that most reasonably fit people can accomplish."

For a lot more information about this event and how to sign-up, link on over to Colleen and Jeff Green's great blog: Greene Adventures!

The Exhibition of Sneakers Shoes

funny sneakers shoes

The Exhibition of Sneakers Shoes

Deep Look Over Cat Shoes

Vampires in Orange County

You did know there were vampires in Orange County, didn’t you? Well,… vampire bats at any rate.

Although our State and Federal governments agree that vampire bats live only in Central and South America, other sources indicate that vampire bats can be found in Southern California and Texas.

Jim Sleeper’s 3rd Orange County Almanac of Historical Oddities backs this up. Jim writes, “Several well documented cases reveal [vampire bats’] presence in O.C. In December, 1896, ‘a vampire bat of enormous size’ was killed by a farmer named Bandini on the Irvine Ranch after menacing his family several nights running with its eerie flapping and piercing cries. In September of 1908, a family on South Lemon in Anaheim reported the death of a vampire bat after a brief but desperate struggle with its cat. ‘The body measured 7-inches long, while its wings stretched 21-inches from tip to tip.’”

Sure, that was over a century ago, and there haven’t been a lot of sightings since then. But they might be coming back! Now the government – this time wearing its Centers for Disease Control hat – warns that “the range of these bats might be expanding as a result of changes in climate.”

So if you’re attacked by vampires you can blame Al Gore for inventing climate change. Or was that the Internet he invented? I can never remember which.

[The image above is an 1882 cartoon depicting the landlords of San Francisco as vampire bats. It's really the only image relating to both California and vampires bats that I could find.]

The Most Sought ; Prada Shoes 2012

leather prada 2012

glossy men's prada 2012

The Most Sought ; Prada Shoes 2012

Knott's, Fullerton, place names, silent films, etc.

Today's image was the cover of the Fall 1973 issue of the Knott's Berry Farm employee magazine, The Knotty Post. (Note that it was a real magazine, not just a newsletter!) This issue corresponded with the very first Halloween Haunt at Knott's, which makes it a bit more significant than some. Besides, with a rocket-powered witch and a grizzled prospector (another appearance by Whittles) on this cover, what's not to love?

At Casa Romantica in San Clemente, Oct. 26, at 7pm, Jean Pasco and Susan Berumen of the Orange County Archives will give a talk about the creation of the Archives' “On Location: Orange County in Silent Film” exhibit. (Part of the exhibit is currently on display at Casa Romantica through the 26th.) The evening will include a showing of the first movie shot in Orange County: "Two Brothers," featuring Mary Pickford, Mack Sennett, and Mission San Juan Capistrano. Adults $7. Students/Children: Free.

I'm told the new Fullerton History Room at the Fullerton Public Library has already been open for business for a while. The room has moved to a larger space on the main floor rather than the small-but-much-loved nook upstairs. Check their new website for hours of operation.

Is seems strange that these "History Rooms" at city libraries lose their names when they move. When Anaheim's moved, it stopped being the Elizabeth Schultz Room. Now, Fullerton's collection no longer has Albert Launer's name attached to it. But in both cases the collections moved into a larger and better space -- and that's the really important thing.

Speaking of the Fullerton Public Library, they will host historian Phil Brigandi on Oct. 25th at 7pm. He'll speak about Orange County Place Names A-Z. Phil will also be among the many notable speakers at this weekend's CCPH Conference in Riverside.

Dana Point, El Toro, Newport and gambling ships

The Dana Point Historical Society will celebrate (a little early) the 100th birthday of longtime Capistrano Beach local Bertha Henry Taylor at the Dana Point Community House on San Juan Ave., Oct. 26, 7pm. Taylor will share her memories of the area in the 1950s. Also, Society member Mary Crowl will explain DPHS' oral history program.

Speaking of Dana Point, three 1928 "Woodruff Homes" on Avenue of the Blue Lantern have been placed on the city's Historic Resource Register. If you'd like to drive by for a look, they are at 33771, 33792 and 34051 Blue Lantern. Sidney Woodruff tried to develop Dana Point in the late 1920s, and these homes feature the Spanish Colonial Revival architecture he envisioned for his new community. Woodruff is better known for developing a residential area in Los Angeles called Hollywoodland, which he advertised with a huge sign atop Mount Lee. You may have seen it. (The letters "L-A-N-D" disappeared a long time ago.)

The photos in today's post come from the City of Dana Point and depict the clifftop gazebo at the end of Blue Lantern during the late 1920s. I assume those are real estate salesmen gathered together for a big sales pitch in the photo below -- unless they aren't.

The Saddleback Area Historical Society will hold their annual Pioneer Roundup on Oct. 23, 2-4pm at Heritage Hill Historical Park in El Toro. Members of local pioneer families attend this event "to greet long-time friends and reminisce about old times in the Saddleback Valley. Come meet them, hear their stories and learn about the early days of the area."

The re-re-resurrected Newport Beach Historical Society and the Newport Harbor Nautical Museum will present a lecture by Ernest Marquez about his book, Noir Afloat, at the Nautical Museum, Oct. 27, at 7pm. Marquez will discuss the gambling ships that once stood off the coast of Newport and the rest of Southern California. For details and reservations, visit the Newport Beach Historical Society's NEW website.

The Upcoming Lebron 9

Changes at the Placentia History Room

The photo above shows the wonderful Placentia History Room at Placentia Public Library in 2005, during the presentation of a printed oral history to Fred Agurrie. (Photo courtesy Placentia Library District.)

Pat Jertberg, Marie Schmidt and Pat Irot -- the three volunteers who created the Placentia History Room in 1991, and who contributed the lion's share of what's been accomplished in there in the 20 years since -- have "retired." This follows closely on the heels of the retirement of Gary Bell, the librarian who staffed the collection in recent years.

Pat Irot recently wrote a friend about the story of Placentia's community historical collection:

"The Placentia History collection might NOT have happened had not the Board of Trustees questioned the use of a room called 'The California Room', so designated with the opening of the building in 1974.

"...As President [of the Friends of the Placentia Library], I...did an inventory and reported that the room was somewhat a 'warehouse' for things historical. The Trustees accepted my suggestion to rename it the Placentia History Room, and I dug in. It was 1991.

"Bringing organizational skills to the task but no knowledge of local history, I enlisted the assistance of our city's Historical Committee, with the result that we became a volunteer staff of three, each contributing to the work our individual talents. In a search for direction, I visited as many as ten libraries with history collections, asked questions, and got ideas. My visit to the Santa Ana Library History Room resulted in an invitation to attend the upcoming Heritage Coordinating Council meeting. At that and subsequent meetings, we were welcomed and encouraged, and we learned from each other.

"...We created an archive of text and media. We sought a complete collection of local high school annuals and created a local authors collection. Donations were sought. Organizations and agencies in the community were urged by our presentations to maintain an archive or deposit their materials with the Placentia History Room. As additional assistance became available...we directed the activity of interns from CSUF and volunteers from the community.

"After thirteen years with just volunteer staff, the library extended its support by assigning a reference librarian for ten hours per week. A welcome action, this provided a staff presence to serve patrons and to communicate History Room needs to library administration.

"At our departure, we provided a verbal and hardcopy report of the current status of holdings to the Library Trustees and to the City Council which included CDs and flash drives that held our EXCEL program cataloged inventory. With the report, we highlighted major projects that were accomplished as the result of Placentia History Room's archives. These include four published books, a Power Point program on Placentia, two DVDs and the recent 'Placentia History Wall' on display in our City Hall. The archives have [also] provided background material for several Downtown Renewal projects. For the school district, we have written local history information for Third Grade Teacher curriculum along with short histories of Placentia schools and also bio's of their namesakes where applicable. And participation in the Calisphere photo project was made possible as a result of our extensive digitized photograph collection."

The people of Placentia should know what a treasure they have in the Placentia History Room, and should know what treasures they're losing with the retirement of Pat, Marie, and Pat. Moreover, it's now time for the next generation of Placentians to step up to the plate and keep things going.

This story is a great example of how it's not always the people you expect who end up making the biggest difference when it comes to local history. None of these three ladies (to my knowledge) had degrees in either library science or history. But they're sharp, learned fast, were self-directed, and accomplished something worthy of a whole community's respect and admiration. (Although they certainly weren't fishing for it or expecting it.)

Never underestimate the power of volunteers. Yes, sometimes you'll run across a dud, but often they turn out to be the best "employees" you ever had.

More North O.C. history

Here's a shot of from Jack Lindquist's talk at Thursday's OCHS meeting. He's an outstanding speaker, as you'd expect. Our members had some good questions for him too.

Interested in another historical program? The Fullerton Public Library will host a program entitled, "Fullerton's Fender Guitar Legacy," tomorrow, Wed., Oct. 19th, at 7pm. Here's the blurb they sent me:

"Leo Fender was born at his family ranch on what is now La Palma Ave. in Anaheim. While attending Fullerton High School in the 1920s, he turned his hobby, electronics, into a radio repair business. By the early 1940s, he was designing and creating electric guitars and amplifiers at his downtown shop. This talk by Richard R. Smith, curator of the Fullerton Museum, will detail Fender's success story and his contribution to music. Smith is the author of Fender: The Sound Heard 'Round the World, and is a distant cousin of Fender."

The Library is located at 353 W. Commonwealth Ave. They also have more local history programs coming up, which I'll post about soon.

Array Shoes of Jeffrey Campbell

Kim Kardashian in Dubai

The Us reality Tv star Kim kardashian is now a days in Dubai for spending beautiful days of her life with her husband Kris Humphries. she ride on camel and wearing burqa. here's her some photos hope you like them