On October 25, 1964, after recovering a fumble against the 49ers in San Francisco, Minnesota Vikings star defensive end Jim Marshall runs 66 yards the wrong way into his own end zone. The four-year veteran believes he has scored a touchdown, so he throws the ball out of bounds in celebration, resulting in a safety for San Franscisco and putting an exclamation point on one of the worst gaffes in NFL history. Despite Marshall's error, the Vikings win, 27-22.
“It was the nuttiest thing I’d ever seen,” said Minnesota offensive tackle Grady Alderman.
On the return flight to Minnesota, teammates ribbed Marshall, who said he simply got confused. "They kept telling me to get up in the cockpit and fly the plane," he told The Minneapolis Star. "That way we'd end up in Hawaii instead of Minnesota."
Marshall, part of the Vikings' famed "Purple People Eaters" defensive line, played 20 seasons in the NFL. In addition to registering 130 sacks, he played in 282 straight games—one of the longest streaks in league history. Despite a stellar career, Marshall became best known for his wrong-way run.
“It was tough when it happened,” Marshall told the St. Paul Pioneer Press in 2015. "I took my football career very seriously and to make a mistake, of course, it’s something that you don’t want on your resume. But mistakes happen.
“Norm Van Brocklin (then Minnesota’s coach) was known to be tough on mistakes, but that didn’t cause us to lose the game. And he just said, ‘Hey, Jim, just forget about it.’ "
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Pablo Picasso, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, is born in Malaga, Spain in 1881.
Picasso’s father was a professor of drawing, and he bred his son for a career in academic art. Picasso had his first exhibit at age 13 and later quit art school so he could experiment full-time with modern art styles. He went to Paris for the first time in 1900, and in 1901 was given an exhibition at a gallery on Paris’ rue Lafitte, a street known for its prestigious art galleries. The precocious 19-year-old Spaniard was at the time a relative unknown outside Barcelona, but he had already produced hundreds of paintings. Winning favorable reviews, he stayed in Paris for the rest of the year and later returned to the city to settle permanently.
The work of Picasso, which comprises more than 50,000 paintings, drawings, engravings, sculptures, and ceramics produced over 80 years, is described in a series of overlapping periods. His first notable period–the “blue period”—began shortly after his first Paris exhibit. In works such as The Old Guitarist (1903), Picasso painted in blue tones to evoke the melancholy world of the poor. The blue period was followed by the “rose period,” in which he often depicted circus scenes, and then by Picasso’s early work in sculpture. In 1907, Picasso painted the groundbreaking work Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, which, with its fragmented and distorted representation of the human form, broke from previous European art. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon demonstrated the influence on Picasso of both African mask art and Paul Cezanne and is seen as a forerunner of the Cubist movement, founded by Picasso and the French painter Georges Braque in 1909.
In Cubism, which is divided into two phases, analytical and synthetic, Picasso and Braque established the modern principle that artwork need not represent reality to have artistic value. Major Cubist works by Picasso included his costumes and sets for Sergey Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes (1917) and The Three Musicians (1921). Picasso and Braque’s Cubist experiments also resulted in the invention of several new artistic techniques, including collage.
After Cubism, Picasso explored classical and Mediterranean themes, and images of violence and anguish increasingly appeared in his work. In 1937, this trend culminated in the masterpiece Guernica, a monumental work that evoked the horror and suffering endured by the Basque town of Guernica when it was destroyed by German war planes during the Spanish Civil War. Picasso remained in Paris during the Nazi occupation but was fervently opposed to fascism and after the war joined the French Communist Party.
Picasso’s work after World War II is less studied than his earlier creations, but he continued to work feverishly and enjoyed commercial and critical success. He produced fantastical works, experimented with ceramics and painted variations on the works of other masters in the history of art. Known for his intense gaze and domineering personality, he had a series of intense and overlapping tumultuous relationships in his lifetime. He continued to produce art with undiminished force until his death in 1973 at the age of 91.
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On October 25, 1944, during the Battle of the Leyte Gulf, the Japanese deploy kamikaze (“divine wind”) bombers against American warships for the first time. It will prove costly–to both sides.
This decision to employ suicide bombers against the American fleet at Leyte, an island of the Philippines, was based on the failure of conventional naval and aerial engagements to stop the American offensive. Declared Japanese naval Capt. Motoharu Okamura: “I firmly believe that the only way to swing the war in our favor is to resort to crash-dive attacks with our planes…. There will be more than enough volunteers for this chance to save our country.”
The first kamikaze force was in fact composed of 24 volunteer pilots from Japan’s 201st Navy Air Group. The targets were U.S. escort carriers; one, the St. Lo, was struck by a A6M Zero fighter and sunk in less than an hour, killing 100 Americans. More than 5,000 kamikaze pilots died in the gulf battle-taking down 34 ships.
For their kamikaze raids, the Japanese employed both conventional aircraft and specially designed planes, called Ohka (“cherry blossom”) by the Japanese, but Baka (“fool”) by the Americans, who saw them as acts of desperation. The Baka was a rocket-powered plane that was carried toward its target attached to the belly of a bomber.
All told, more than 1,321 Japanese aircraft crash-dived their planes into Allied warships during the war, desperate efforts to reverse the growing Allied advantage in the Pacific. While approximately 3,000 Americans and Brits died because of these attacks, the damage done did not prevent the Allied capture of the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
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In a MOST insignificant event in the context of world history but quite a significant event in the life of my parents, on October 25th 1971 they had a baby boy. They had great hopes for him but unfortunately nothing came of him. As he is still alive - there is YET HOPE!!!! 馃榾馃槉
He loves exclamation points [!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!] and sends lots of emojis especially with smilies and kissing faces馃槂馃槝. He has a MOST unpopular blog but it provides him with a source a self-entertainment which effectively keeps him away from drugs and excessive alcohol consumption and off the streets.
So please join me in blessing me him with many more years in good health and prosperity. He might die at any moment and is well aware of that but is VERY grateful for the fact that he is still here, in reasonably good health, with a roof over his head, food to eat and a family.
THANKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK YOU HASHEMMMMM!!!!!!!!馃槂馃槝馃槝馃槝
