Garry Shandling – Comedian and Ham Radio fan  

Garry Emmanuel Shandling (November 29, 1949 – March 24, 2016) was an American actor, comedian, writer, director, producer and amateur radio operator.

Shandling began his career writing for sitcoms, such as Sanford and Son and Welcome Back, Kotter. He made a successful stand-up performance on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson where he became a frequent guest host. Shandling was, for a time, considered the leading contender to replace Johnny Carson. In 1986, he created It's Garry Shandling's Show, which aired on Showtime. It was nominated for four Emmy Awards (including one for Shandling) and lasted until 1990.

Shandling's second show, The Larry Sanders Show, began airing on HBO in 1992. He was nominated for 18 Emmy Awards for the show and won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series in 1998, along with Peter Tolan, for writing the series finale. In film, he had a recurring role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, appearing in Iron Man 2 and Captain America: The Winter Soldier. He also lent his voice to Verne the turtle in Over the Hedge. Shandling's final performance was as the voice of Ikki in the live-action remake of The Jungle Book, and the film was dedicated to his memory.

During his four-decade career, Shandling was nominated for 19 Primetime Emmy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards, along with many other awards and nominations. He served as host of the Grammy Awards four times and as host of the Emmy Awards two times.

Garry Emmanuel Shandling was born into a Jewish family in Chicago on November 29, 1949, the son of pet store proprietor Muriel Estelle (née Singer) and print shop owner Irving Shandling. He grew up in the Casa Loma Estates area of Tucson, Arizona, having moved there with his family so that his older brother Barry could receive treatment for cystic fibrosis. Barry died of the disease when Shandling was 10. After graduating from Palo Verde High School, Shandling attended the University of Arizona to major in electrical engineering, but instead completed a degree in marketing and pursued a year of postgraduate studies in creative writing.

Shandling preferred to reveal little about his personal life during interviews. He was a Buddhist who enjoyed meditating, playing basketball, and boxing four times per week. He co-owned a boxing gym in Santa Monica, TSB 44 (Tough Strong Bold No. 44), with actor and director Peter Berg. He was also a licensed amateur radio operator. Starting as a teenager, he held the callsigns WA7BKG, KD6OY, and KQ6KA. The latter he held with a pseudonym, Dave Waddell, to avoid undue attention when he operated.

Net Discussion Questions:

1. Rationing, do you think it would or could work today?

2. Garry Shandling, did you know he was a Ham radio operator?

• If you liked Shandling, what was your favorite show?

November 22, 1906: SOS international code was adopted officially in 1908. The SOS code was conceived by delegates who attended the Radiotelegraphic Conference in Berlin, Germany. Many people think that SOS is short for ' Save Our Ship ' or ' Save Our Soul.' These opinions are not correct. SOS has no special meaning; SOS was created to simplify sending morse code signals during a state of emergency.

Because of the presence of radio communication technology, in 1927 International Radio Convention stated the distress phrase "Mayday" as the equivalent of an SOS code. "Mayday" is the French "M'aidez" (help me).

The famous SOS call came out of Germany which was the first country to use it. The sequence of three dots, three dashes and three dots were adopted because it was easy to identify and remember. It was very distinctive and could not be confused with other sequences.

The SOS distress call was adopted by Germany from 1 April 1905, and later started to be adopted internationally. The process started in 1906 at the first International Radiotelegraph Convention which met in Berlin. Realizing the need for international coordination over distress calls, an agreement was produced and signed on 3 November 1906 to use the SOS call. This became effective on 1 July 1908.

The adoption of SOS as the Morse code distress call did not start to be used by everyone immediately. However, possibly the first reported ship to use the new SOS call was the Cunard liner RMS Slavonia which was shipwrecked off the Azores on 10 June 1909. Two other ships received her signals and went to the rescue.

Even as late as 1912 when the Titanic sank, it was not uniquely used as the wireless operator, Harold Bride, used both CQD and SOS in distress messages.

The Morse code SOS signal remained the maritime radio distress signal until 1999, when it was replaced by the Global Maritime Distress and Safety System which provided more universal and immediate communications for distress communications.

Assassination of John F. Kennedy - 1963 

On November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of the United States, was assassinated while riding in a presidential motorcade through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. Kennedy was in the vehicle with his wife, Jacqueline, Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally's wife, Nellie, when he was fatally shot from the nearby Texas School Book Depository by former U.S. Marine Lee Harvey Oswald. The motorcade rushed to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where Kennedy was pronounced dead about 30 minutes after the shooting; Connally was also wounded in the attack but recovered. Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson assumed the presidency upon Kennedy's death.

After the assassination, Oswald returned home to retrieve a pistol; he shot lone Dallas policeman J. D. Tippit shortly afterwards. Around 70 minutes after Kennedy and Connally were shot, Oswald was apprehended by the Dallas Police Department and charged under Texas state law with the murders of Kennedy and Tippit. At 11:21 a.m. on November 24, 1963, as live television cameras covered Oswald's being moved through the basement of Dallas Police Headquarters, he was fatally shot by Dallas nightclub operator Jack Ruby. Like Kennedy, Oswald was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital, where he soon died. Ruby was convicted of Oswald's murder, though the decision was overturned on appeal, and Ruby died in prison in 1967 while awaiting a new trial.

After a 10-month investigation, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald assassinated Kennedy, that Oswald acted entirely alone, and that Ruby acted alone in killing Oswald. Four years later, New Orleans DA Jim Garrison brought the only trial for Kennedy's murder, against businessman Clay Shaw; Shaw was acquitted. Subsequent federal investigations—such as the Rockefeller Commission and Church Committee—agreed with the Warren Commission's general findings. In its 1979 report, the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) concluded that Kennedy was likely "assassinated as a result of a conspiracy". The HSCA did not identify possible conspirators but concluded that there was "a high probability that two gunmen fired at [the] President". The HSCA's conclusions were largely based on a police Dictabelt recording later debunked by the U.S. Justice Department.

Kennedy's assassination is still the subject of widespread debate and has spawned many conspiracy theories and alternative scenarios; polls have found that a majority of Americans believe there was a conspiracy. The assassination left a profound impact and was the first of four major assassinations during the 1960s in the United States, coming two years before the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965, and five years before the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Kennedy's brother Robert in 1968. Kennedy was the fourth U.S. president to be assassinated and is the most recent to have died in office. 

Net Topics Discussion:

Morse Code

1. Are you proficient with CW?

2.  Did you know SOS “means nothing”, it was chosen because it’s easy to remember; three dots, three dashes, three dots. 

Kennedy Assassination

1. Where were you when it happened?

2. Do you think there was a conspiracy surrounding the shooting? 

Double Eagle V was the first balloon to make a successful crossing of the Pacific Ocean. It launched from Nagashima, Japan on November 10, 1981, and landed in Mendocino National Forest in California 84 hours and 31 minutes later, travelling a record 5,768 miles (9,283 km).

The four-man crew consisted of Albuquerque balloonists Ben Abruzzo, Larry Newman, and Ron Clark, and thrill-seeking restaurateur Rocky Aoki, who helped fund the flight. The helium-filled Double Eagle V spent four days crossing the Pacific before the balloon, weighed down by ice and buffeted by a storm, crash-landed in northern California, ending the nearly 6,000-mile flight. No one was hurt. Abruzzo and Newman had previously been two of the pilots of Double Eagle II, which in 1978 became the first balloon to cross the Atlantic.

Double Eagle V failed to attract the same degree of media attention as the earlier flight, in part because it was overshadowed by the concurrent Space Shuttle mission STS-2.

-Wikipedia

The first film adaptation of J.K. Rowling's best-selling Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, premiered in London.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (also known as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) is a 2001 fantasy film directed by Chris Columbus and produced by David Heyman, from a screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the 1997 novel of the same name by J. K. Rowling. It is the first instalment in the Harry Potter film series. The film stars Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter, with Rupert Grint as Ron Weasley, and Emma Watson as Hermione Granger. Its story follows Harry's first year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry as he discovers that he is a famous wizard and begins his formal wizarding education.

This would be the first of eight movies in the collection.

The film The Wizard of Oz (1939) aired on television for the first time and was seen by an estimated 45 million viewers; its repeated airings on TV helped make the movie an enduring classic.

The Wizard of Oz is a 1939 American musical fantasy film produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). An adaptation of L. Frank Baum's 1900 children's fantasy novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the film was primarily directed by Victor Fleming, who left production to take over the troubled Gone with the Wind. It stars Judy Garland, Frank Morgan, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr, Jack Haley, Billie Burke, and Margaret Hamilton. Noel Langley, Florence Ryerson, and Edgar Allan Woolf received credit for the screenplay, while others made uncredited contributions. The music was composed by Harold Arlen and adapted by Herbert Stothart, with lyrics by Edgar "Yip" Harburg.

It is the image that almost didn’t occur. For fifty years, the dating of this fateful image remained in question. It was approaching twilight on an autumn day in 1941. Ansel Adams and his companions were traveling by car, after an uneventful outing in the Chama Valley. The stormy skies had cleared over the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, with a ghostly gibbous moon rising above an old adobe church and graveyard in the approaching distance. “We were sailing southward along the highway not far from Espanola when I glanced to the left and saw an extraordinary situation – an inevitable black & white photograph! I almost ditched the car and rushed to set up my 8 x 10 camera. I had a clear visualization of the image I wanted, but I could not find my Weston exposure meter! The situation was desperate: the low sun was trailing the edge of clouds in the west, and shadow would soon dim the white crosses.”

Ansel Adams knew intuitively that “Moonrise, Hernandez” was an unusual photograph, but he had no idea that it would become his most popular single image. Original 16” × 20” gelatin silver prints that sold for $500 during his lifetime, now sell for over $50,000. Although he could remember some of the most minute details, Ansel admittedly neglected to record when his negatives were exposed, and this iconic and timeless image was often incorrectly dated. “Because of my unfortunate disregard for the dates of my negatives I have caused considerable dismay among historians, students, and museums – to say nothing of the trouble it has caused me. Moonrise is a prime example of my anti-date complex. It has been listed as 1940, 1941, 1942 and even 1944. Dr. David Elmore of the High Altitude Observatory at Boulder, Colorado, put a computer to work on the problem.”

In 1981, solar physicist David Elmore calculated the exposure day and time for “Moonrise, Hernandez” based on the position of the moon and the surrounding landscape. He concluded that it had been made on Halloween Day, October 31st, 1941 at 4:03 pm.  Although a harrowing effort, Elmore’s calculations were off by a day. His computer screen distorted the height to width ratio, and his location coordinates for the town of Hernandez were off.  Dennis di Cicco, an astronomer and former writer for Sky and Telescope magazine, pursued the enigma for ten years until he came up with a new date: November 1st, 1941 at exactly 4:49:20 pm Mountain Standard Time. Di Cicco discovered that “Adams had been at the edge of the old roadbed, about 50 feet west of the spot on the modern highway that Elmore had identified”. Visits to the site and modern computing software would aid in his calculation in 1991, fifty years after the making of Ansel’s historic photograph.

Ansel Adams Moonrise Hernandez” stands as one of the most famous and iconic photographic images in history. Ansel was a perfectionist in the creation of each individually hand-produced gelatin silver photograph, and his darkroom techniques were unparalleled in terms of skill and adeptness. Today, his original prints are as powerful and poignant as ever.   The fame of the photograph grew when a 1948 print sold at auction for $71,500 in 1971 ($516,700 in 2022); the same print sold for $609,600 in 2006 ($884,900 in 2022) at a Sotheby's auction. 

A mural-sized print of the same photograph sold for $930,000 at Christie's New York in October 2021. 

On November 1, 1800, President John Adams, in the last year of his only term as president, moved into the newly constructed President’s House, the original name for what is known today as the White House.

Adams had been living in temporary digs at Tunnicliffe’s City Hotel near the half-finished Capitol building since June 1800, when the federal government was moved from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington, D.C. In his biography of Adams, historian David McCullough recorded that when Adams first arrived in Washington, he wrote to his wife Abigail, at their home in Quincy, Massachusetts, that he was pleased with the new site for the federal government and had explored the soon-to-be President’s House with satisfaction.

Although workmen had rushed to finish plastering and painting walls before Adams returned to D.C. from a visit to Quincy in late October, construction remained unfinished when Adams rolled up in his carriage on November 1. However, the Adams’ furniture from their Philadelphia home was in place and a portrait of George Washington was already hanging in one room. The next day, Adams sent a note to Abigail, who would arrive in Washington later that month, saying that he hoped “none but honest and wise men [shall] ever rule under this roof.”

Although Adams was initially enthusiastic about the presidential mansion, he and Abigail soon found it to be cold and damp during the winter. Abigail, in a letter to a friend, wrote that the building was tolerable only so long as fires were lit in every room. She also noted that she had to hang their washing in an empty “audience room” (the current East Room).

John and Abigail Adams lived in what she called “the great castle” for only five months. Shortly after they moved in, Thomas Jefferson defeated Adams in his bid for re-election. Abigail was happy to leave Washington and departed in February 1801 for Quincy. As Jefferson was being sworn in on March 4, 1801, John Adams was already on his way back to Massachusetts, where he and Abigail lived out the rest of their days at their family farm.

Nicholas James Mavroules (November 1, 1929 – December 25, 2003) was an American Democratic Party politician from Massachusetts. He served as Mayor of Peabody, Massachusetts for a decade, then represented Peabody and much of the surrounding North Shore region in the United States House of Representatives from 1979 until 1993. In 1993, he pleaded guilty to 15 counts of racketeering and extortion and later served 15 months in prison.

Early life and career

Mavroules was born in Peabody, Massachusetts, November 1, 1929.

He graduated from Peabody High School and was employed by Sylvania Electric Products from 1949 to 1967 as supervisor of personnel.

He was elected to the Peabody Council and served from 1958 to 1965. In 1966, he was elected mayor of Peabody and served until his election to Congress in 1978. He was a delegate to the 1976 Democratic National Convention.

Congress

In 1978, he won the election to take over the seat of retiring Rep. Michael J. Harrington. After his election, an FBI informant testified that he had offered Mavroules a $25,000 bribe when he was the mayor of Peabody in connection with liquor licensing. Mavroules denied the accusations and the FBI did not charge him in the matter. 

In Congress, he was a longtime member of the House Armed Services Committee and chaired the Subcommittee on Investigations, where he led the House investigation into the deadly USS Iowa turret explosion. He also helped expose cost overruns in the Navy’s aircraft programs. He was also instrumental in making certain that the crew of USS Pueblo obtained prisoner of war status.

During the 1980s, Marvoules was a leading supporter in the House for a nuclear freeze and an opponent of the MX missile. 

In August 1992, a federal grand jury indicted Mavroules on 17 charges of bribery, racketeering, and extortion. The allegations against him included extortion, accepting illegal gifts, and failing to report them on congressional disclosure and income tax forms. He survived a Democratic primary election the following month, but was defeated by Republican Peter G. Torkildsen.

Conviction

In April 1993, after his departure from Congress, Mavroules pleaded guilty to 15 of the 17 counts and was sentenced to a fifteen-month prison term. At his sentencing, he apologized to his family "who have endured enormous, enormous pain" and to supporters and friends "for any hurt I have brought upon them". He served his prison term at the federal penitentiary at Bedford, Pennsylvania. 

Death

Mavroules died on December 25, 2003, in Salem, Massachusetts after gastric surgery. He was buried in Cedar Grove Cemetery, Peabody, Massachusetts. Over 6,000 people attended his wake and funeral which was held at St. Vasilios Church Greek Orthodox church in Peabody. Several current and former members of Congress attended the services. The eulogy at the funeral mass was offered by Rudy de Leon, a former staffer. At the graveside service, another eulogy was made by local reporter and talk show host Dan Rea.