Pop Culture
Concert Review: James Taylor at the Broadmoor World Arena, Colorado Springs I’ve seen James Taylor perform perhaps a dozen times over the last 43 years in venues large and small. While I’ve previously seen him at the Broadmoor World Arena, it was back when it was just the World Arena, an ice rink in Colorado…
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HISTORY OF THE 1ST MOON LANDING: APOLLO 11 Fifty-three years ago today, at 3:17 Eastern Time, July 20, 1969, the first human stepped out of the Apollo 11 lunar module onto the moon. With the immortal words of the 38-year-old Neil Armstrong: “That’s one small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind.” …the…
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HISTORY OF FRENCH FRIES: NATIONAL FRENCH FRY DAY Today is National French Fry Day. While no one knows who began this celebration, placing it on July 13 is significant because the important French holiday is the next day, July 14, for Bastille Day.
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HISTORY OF ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE, BY THE BEATLES On June 25, 1967, The Beatles released the song “All You Need Is Love.” At that time, they participated in the Our World TV show, which used the recently constructed communication satellite system and broadcast their performance across the globe. Beatles drummer Ringo Starr said…
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HISTORY OF THE SUMMER OF LOVE — 1967: PART 4, ROCK & ROLL It was twenty years ago today Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play They’ve been going in and out of style But they’re guaranteed to raise a smile Rock & Roll in the late ’60s was exemplified when The Beatles…
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HISTORY OF THE SUMMER OF LOVE — 1967: DRUGS When I was a Resident Assistant at U.C. Berkeley in the early ’70s, a local police officer I knew gave me a tour down nearby Telegraph Avenue. He told me: “All the major drug deals on the West Coast go down within a two block stretch…
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HISTORY OF THE SUMMER OF LOVE — 1967: PART 2, SEX “Make love, not war” and the call for “free love” represented a cultural shift in mores in 1967. Even The Beatles sang “All You Need Is Love.” If the ’60s was the time of the “sexual revolution,” the natural question is: who won? There were…
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HISTORY OF THE SUMMER OF LOVE — 1967: SEX, DRUGS, AND ROCK & ROLL The Summer of Love was fifty-five years ago, the Summer of 1967, with its epicenter in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. It was a summer of sex, drugs, and rock & roll. Both San Francisco and Liverpool celebrated 30-year anniversaries in 1997. While…
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HISTORY OF THE NATURAL: A Father Returns A classic movie with a timeless topic comes to mind in celebration of Father’s Day. The 1984 film The Natural asks the question: Can you return? If the movie Field of Dreams was epic, then The Natural was mythic, as I’ll explain below. The Natural: The Story…
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HISTORY OF FIELD OF DREAMS: A Father’s Day Treat One of my all-time favorite movies is not an action movie, a science fiction movie, a comic book blockbuster, or a fantasy film. It’s a baseball movie. Or is it? Is it a movie about Berkeley, Iowa, Fenway Park, or America? It’s all of them, and…
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History of Explo ’72: The Apex of the Jesus Movement, 50 Years Ago Fifty years ago, Explo ’72 was held in Dallas, Texas, from June 12 to June 17, 1972. It was the most conspicuous event of the Jesus Movement, at least in the media. Sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ, it was initially called…
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HISTORY OF D-DAY Why has D-Day captured the imagination of American consciousness for over three-quarters of a century? Seventy-eight years ago, on June 6, 1944, the Allies launched an offensive on the Normandy coast of France to liberate continental Europe from the Nazi German occupation. On Twitter, the hashtag is #DDay78 D-Day was the largest invasion…
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