users are losers

Commissioned by the US National Crime Prevention Council as a mascot to raise public awareness on personal safety and security in 1979 and named the following July in a nation-wide contest, McGruff the Crime Dog has waged a on balance a helpful outreach campaign. Though best remembered for his message to prevent kidnapping and taking common-sense precautions to deny crime the chance to occur in the fist place, McGruff was also enlisted to discourage bullying and as on this 1986 gem of an album below, the use of drugs.

the silicon chip inside her head gets switched to overload

On this day in 1979 a sixteen-year old Brenda Spencer opened fire at a neighbouring elementary school as pupils were arriving for the day in Santa Barbara, California, killing the principal and a janitor and injuring nine others, tragically marking one of the first in a painfully legacy of senseless gun violence and school shootings, well-covered in the media but resulting in no change in attitudes.  The rifle and ammunition an unbidden Christmas gift from her father, interrogators asked Spencer why she had committed such an atrocity, to which she responded, “I don’t like Mondays. This livens up the day.” Musician and activist Sir Robert Frederick Zenon (Bob) Geldof and his band The Boomtown Rats were touring in the area about a month after the incident occurred with legal proceedings on-going and was inspired to pen the song after the unreality of the call of the reporters and Spenser’s response. Far from wanting to glorify the act through infamy, Geldof hoped his song would help prevent acts like this in the future.

public access

The always engrossing Kottke directs our attention to the untold story of Philadelphia television producer, social justice activist, librarian and prolific hoarder Marion Stokes (*1929 - †2012) whose obsession for preserving the present as it happened for future generations was transmuted into a secret personal campaign to record live news broadcasts and archive them, netting some seventy thousand VHS tapes spanning the years from 1979 to 2012.
The Iranian hostage crisis (previously here and here) which spawned the 24/7 news coverage cycle was Stokes’ initial impetus and she planned her professional and family life around the recording time of a long-play cassette, around six hours so she would be present to exchange tapes and keep the archives—having expanded into CNN and others—going. It was not merely a hobby or a way of taking work home, however, as Stokes knew that television stations were losing their independence and doing a horrendous job at conservation, even given the tools available to them. Her thirty-three years of continuous footage ended with her death that coincided with the taping of the massacre at Sandy Hook. Learn more about the documentary in development at the links up top and peruse the video archives here as well.

der kuss oder glasnost coast to coast

This kiss that has launched a thousand homages occurred during the fraternal encounter between Soviet statesman Leonid Brezhnev and DDR General Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party Erich Honecker in October of 1979—celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the creation of East Germany with pledges of mutual support.

The graffiti version that features prominently on the Berlin Wall (My God, help me to survive this deadly love), however, came much later. Dmitri Vrubel completed his mural on this date in 1990 and has been conserved as a testament to the times since. The photographer who captured the kiss on film, a French free-lancer named Régis Bossu, and the artist Vruble met themselves in March of 2009 when the curators of the East Side Gallery invited back all the still living artists to repaint their works in more durable colours and undo thirty years of vandalism and weathering—and the updated attribution credits them both.