I received this question via email from a reader. Having no idea what the answer is I’m posting it in case someone else knows.
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Could you please tell me if you could find out the name of an adagio acrobatic trio that appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show?
It definitely was not The Bal Caron Trio or The andrea dancers, or the Keoni Dancers or The Saddri Dancers or The Three Wiles or Trio Gypsys. or The Dior Dancers. It was the best adagio act I had ever seen.
It consisted of Two six ft tall men wearing regular black tuxedos and shiny black patent leather dress shoes that tied. The girl was a tiny petite blonde haired girl she wore a black bathing suit outfit with black ballet slippers she must have been a
tiny double jointed contortionist because she was just like rubber. One man circled her around his waist like she was his belt or tuxedo cummerbun wrapped around his waist as her body was facing outward wrapped around his waist tightly and he spun around and around in fast circles while she was wrapped around his waist like a belt or tuxedo cummerbund.
Both men took his turn of doing different acrobatic lifts and spins to her one man used her as a single jumprope and her jumped over her body several times while he was holding onto her two ankles in one hand and in his other hand he
held onto her two wrists and she was in a horizontal position like a real jumprope and her brought her body up and down and around and jumped over her like a jumprope.
One man put her body across his shoulder like the letter T and spun around and around in circles  then she locked her feet
around the other man’s neck and hung upside down on the front of him as he spun her around and they did other adagio lifts and spins and balancing to her even both men used her body as a double jumprope too.
It also was not the three Cottas either In 1951 the trio Hurricanes were on the Ed Sullivan Show maybe it could be them or there was another act called Kay, katchas, and Kay see if it was them or The Hermanos Williams trio or see if you can find out what the name of their act was.
The great trio I saw danced to the music of The Can Can or The Sabre Dance song please find out and email me back soon as I will be looking forward to hearing from you soon. Thanks.
Wayne
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If you have any knowledge about this, please post a note here on the blog. Thank you!
Today is the 100th anniversary of the Bubonic plague outbreak in San Francisco, California.
Today is the anniversary of the jukeobox (so I am told).
And today is my birthday.
Gratulerer med dagen!
Grattis pŒ fšdelsedagen
Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag
Events on May 27th
1120 – Richard III of Capua anointed as prince a fortnight before his untimely death.
1153 – Malcolm IV becomes King of Scotland.
1328 – Philip VI is crowned King of France.
1703 – Tsar Peter the Great founds the city of Saint Petersburg.
1812 – South American Wars of Independence: In Bolivia, the battle of La Coronilla, in which the women from Cochabamba fought against the Spanish army.
1813 – War of 1812: In Canada, American forces capture Fort George.
1849 – The Great Hall of Euston station, London opened.
1860 – Giuseppe Garibaldi begins his attack on Palermo, Sicily, as part of the Italian Unification.
1883 – Alexander III is crowned Tsar of Russia. 1895 – Oscar Wilde is sent to prison for sodomy.
1896 – The F4-strength St. Louis-East St. Louis Tornado hits in St. Louis, Missouri and East Saint Louis, Illinois, killing at least 255 people and incurring $2.9 billion in damages (1997USD).
1905 – Russo-Japanese War: The Battle of Tsushima begins. 1907 – A Bubonic plague outbreak begins in San Francisco, California.
1919 – The NC-4 aircraft arrives in Lisbon after completing the first transatlantic flight.
1927 – The Ford Motor Company ceases manufacturing the Ford Model T and begins to retool plants to make Ford Model A’s.
1930 – The 1,046 feet (319 meters) tall Chrysler Building in New York (tallest man-made structure at the time) opens to the public.
1933 – New Deal: The U.S. Federal Securities Act is signed into law requiring the registration of securities with the Federal Trade Commission. 1933 – The Walt Disney Company releases the cartoon The Three Little Pigs, with its hit song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf?”
1933 – The Century of Progress World’s Fair opens in Chicago.
1935 – New Deal: The Supreme Court of the United States declares the National Industrial Recovery Act to be unconstitutional in the case A.L.A. Schechter Poultry Corp. v. United States, (295 U.S. 495).
1937 – In California, the Golden Gate Bridge opens to pedestrian traffic, creating a vital link between San Francisco and Marin County. 1939 – DC Comics publishes its second superhero in Detective Comics #27; he is Batman, one of the most topical comic book superheroes of all time.
1940 – World War II: 97 out of 99 members of a Royal Norfolk Regiment unit are massacred while trying to surrender at Dunkirk. The German commander, Captain Fritz Knoechlein, is eventually hanged for war crimes.
1941 – World War II: U.S. President Roosevelt proclaims an “unlimited national emergency”. 1941 – World War II: The German battleship Bismarck is sunk in the North Atlantic killing 2,300 men.
1942 – World War II: Operation Anthropoid – assassination of Reinhard Heydrich in Prague.
1957 – Toronto’s 1050 CHUM AM becomes Canada’s first radio station to only broadcast top 40 Rock n’ Roll music format.
1960 – In Turkey, a military coup removed President Celal Bayar and the rest of the democratic government from office. 1963 – Folk music singer Bob Dylan releases The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan album, which features “Blowin’ in the Wind” and several other of his best-known songs.
1964 – Prime Minister of India Jawaharlal Nehru dies in office.
1965 – Vietnam War: United States warships begin bombardments of National Liberation Front targets within South Vietnam for the first time.
1967 – Australians vote in favour of a constitutional referendum granting the Australian government the power to make laws to benefit Indigenous Australians, and to count them in the national census.
1967 – The U.S. Navy aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy (CV-67) is christened by Jacqueline Kennedy and her daughter Caroline.
1968 – the meeting of the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France (national Union of the students of France), most outstanding of the events of May 1968, proceeds and gathers 30.000 to 50.000 people in the Stade Sebastien Charlety.
1971 – The Dahlerau train disaster, the worst railway accident in West Germany, kills 46 people and injures 25 near Wuppertal.
1977 – An Aeroflot plane crashes, killing 69 people.
1980 – The Gwangju Massacre: airborne and army troops of South Korea retake the city of Gwangju from civil militias, killing at least 207 and possibly many more.
1994 – The Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn returns to his native Russia after 20 years of exile in the United States. 1995 – In Charlottesville, Virginia, actor Christopher Reeve is paralyzed from the neck down after falling from his horse in a riding competition.
1996 – First Chechnya War: Russian President Boris Yeltsin meets with Chechnyan rebels for the first time and negotiates a cease-fire in the war.
1997 – The F5-strength Jarrell Tornado slams into the small town of Jarrell, Texas, killing 27 people.
1997 – The U.S. Supreme Court rules that Paula Jones can pursue her sex harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton while he is in office.
1998 – Oklahoma City bombing: Michael Fortier is sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined $200,000 for failing to warn authorities about the terrorist plot.
1999 – The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands indicts Slobodan MiloÅ¡ević and four others for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo.
2006 – The May 2006 Java earthquake strikes at 5:53:58 AM local time (22:53:58 UTC May 26) devastating Bantul and the city of Yogyakarta killing over 6,600 people.
366 – Procopius, Roman usurper (b. 326)
735 – Bede, English historian and theologian (b. 672 or 673)
866 – Ordoño I of Asturias, King of Asturias (b. 831)
927 – Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria (b. 864 or 865)
1039 – Dirk III, Count of Holland
1444 – John Beaufort, 1st Duke of Somerset, English military leader (b. 1404)
1508 – Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan (b. 1452)
1525 – Thomas Muentzer, German rebel leader
1541 – Margaret Pole, 8th Countess of Salisbury (b. 1473)
1564 – John Calvin, French religious reformer (b. 1509)
1610 – François Ravaillac, French assassin of Henry IV of France (b. 1578)
1615 – Marguerite de Valois, queen of Henry IV of France (b. 1553)
1661 – Archibald Campbell, Scottish religious dissident (b. 1607)
1675 – Gaspard Dughet, French painter (b. 1613)
1690 – Giovanni Legrenzi, Italian composer (b. 1626)
1702 – Dominique Bouhours, French critic (b. 1628)
1707 – Marquise de Montespan, French mistress of Louis XIV of France (b. 1641)
1781 – Giovanni Battista Beccaria, Italian physicist (b. 1716)
1797 – François-Noël Babeuf, French revolutionary and early socialist (b. 1760)
1831 – Jedediah Smith, American explorer (b. 1799)
1840 – Niccolò Paganini, Italian violinist and composer (b. 1782)
1896 – Aleksandr Grigorievich Stoletov, Russian physicist (b. 1839)
1910 – Robert Koch, German physician, Nobel laureate (b. 1843)
1919 – Kandukuri Veeresalingam Social Reformer of Andhra Pradesh, India (b. 1848)
1926 – SreÄko Kosovel, Slovenian poet (b. 1904)
1947 – Ed Konetchy, American baseball player (b. 1885)
1949 – Robert Ripley, American cartoonist (Ripley’s Believe It or Not!) (b. 1890)
1953 – Jesse Burkett, American baseball player (b. 1868)
1960 – James Montgomery Flagg, American illustrator (b. 1877)
1964 – Jawaharlal Nehru, Indian politician (b. 1889)
1963 – Gregoris Lambrakis, Greek physician and politician (b. 1912)
1967 – Ernst Niekisch, German politician (b. 1889)
1969 – Jeffrey Hunter, American actor (b. 1926)
1986 – Isma’il Raji’ al-Faruqi, Palestinian-born philosopher and scholar (b. 1921)
1987 – John Howard Northrop, American chemist, Nobel laureate (b. 1891)
1989 – Arseny Tarkovsky, Russian poet (b. 1907)
1990 – Robert B. Meyner, American politician (b. 1908)
1991 – Leopold Nowak, Austrian musicologist (b. 1904)
1992 – Uncle Charlie Osborne, American fiddler (b. 1890)
1993 – Mary Philbin, American actress (b. 1903)
1993 – Werner Stocker, German actor (b. 1955)
2000 – Crawford Murray MacLehose of Beoch, British Governor of Hong Kong (b. 1917)
2000 – Maurice Richard, Canadian hockey player (b. 1921)
2001 – Ramon Bieri, American actor (b. 1929)
2003 – Luciano Berio, Italian composer (b. 1925)
2006 – Craig Heyward, American football player (b. 1966)
2006 – Paul Gleason, American actor (b. 1939)
2006 – Alex Toth, American cartoonist (b. 1928)
2006 – Rob Borsellino, American columnist (b. 1949)
Holidays and Observances
Lag Ba’omer in Judaism (2005)
Feast day of the following saints in the Christian Church:
o Augustine of Canterbury
o Venerable Bede
o Saint Julius the Veteran
o Pope John I
o Hildebert
o Bruno, Bishop of Würzburg
o Eutropius
Mother’s Day in Bolivia (DÃa de la Madre) and Sweden (Mors Dag)
Children’s Day in Nigeria
From Michael Shermer’s “Why People Believe Weird Things”.
Five Pre-Points
1. They concentrate on their opponents’ weak points, while rarely saying anything definitive about their own position.
2. They exploit errors made by scholars who are making opposing arguments, implying that because a few of their opponents’ conclusions were wrong, all of their opponents’ conclusions must be wrong.
3. They use quotations, usually taken out of context to buttress their own position.
4. They mistake genuine, honest debates between scholars about certain points within a field for a dispute about the existence of the entire field.
5. They focus on what is not known and ignore what is known, emphasize data that fit and discount data that do not fit.
25 Reasons People Believe Weird Things
(1) Theory influences observation. Heisenberg wrote, “What we observe is not nature itself but nature exposed to our method of questioning.” Our perception of reality is influenced by the theories framing our examination of it.
(2) The observer changes the observed. The act of studying an event can change it, an effect particularly profound in the social sciences, which is why psychologists use blind and double-blind controls.
(3) Equipment constructs results. How we make and understand measurements is highly influenced by the equipment we use.
(4) Anecdotes do not make science. Stories recounted in support of a claim are not scientific without corroborative evidence from other sources or physical proof of some sort.
(5) Scientific language does not make a science. Dressing up a belief in jargon, often with no precise or operational definitions, means nothing without evidence, experimental testing, and corroboration.
(6) Bold statements do not make claims true. The more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinarily well-tested the evidence must be.
(7) Heresy does not equal correctness. Being laughed at by the mainstream does not mean one is right. The scientific community cannot be expected to test every fantastic claim that comes along, especially when so many are logically inconsistent. If you want to do science, you have to learn to play the game of science. This involves exchanging data and ideas with colleagues informally, and formally presenting results in conference papers, peer-reviewed journals, books, and the like.
(8.) Burden of proof. It is the person who makes the extraordinary claim who has the burden of proving the validity of the evidence.
(9) Rumors do not equal reality. Repeated tales are not of necessity true.
(10) Unexplained is not inexplicable. Many people think that if they themselves cannot explain something that it must be inexplicable and therefore a true mystery of the paranormal.
(11) Failures are rationalized. In science, the value of negative findings is high, and honest scientists will readily admit their mistakes. Pseudoscientists ignore or rationalize failures.
(12) After-the-fact reasoning. Also known as “post hoc, ergo propter hoc,” literally “after this, therefore because of this.” At its basest level, this is a form of superstition. As Hume taught us, the fact that two events follow each other in sequence does not mean they are connected causally. Correlation does not mean causation.
(13) Coincidence. In the paranormal world, coincidences are often seen as deeply significant. As the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner proved in the laboratory, the human mind seeks relationships between events and often finds them even when they are not present.
(14) Representiveness. As Aristotle said, “The sum of the coincidences equals certainty.” We forget most of the insignificant coincidences and remember the meaningful ones. We must always remember the larger context in which a seemingly unusual event occurs, and we must always analyze unusual events for their representiveness of their class of phenomena.
(15) Emotive words and false analogies. Emotive words are used to provoke emotion and sometimes to obscure rationality. Likewise, metaphors and analogies can cloud thinking with emotion and steer us onto a side path. Like anecdotes, analogies and metaphors do not constitute proof. They are merely tools of rhetoric.
(16) Ad ignoratum. This is an appeal to ignorance or lack of knowledge, where someone claims that if you cannot disprove a claim it must be true. In science, belief should come from positive evidence, not a lack of evidence for or against a claim.
(17) Ad hominem and tu quoque. Literally “to the man” and “you also,” these fallacies redirect the focus from thinking about the idea to thinking about the person holding the idea. The goal of an ad hominem attack is to discredit the claimant in hopes that it will discredit the claim. Similarly for tu quoque. As a defense, the critic is accused of making the same mistakes attributed to the criticized, and nothing is proved one way or the other.
(18.) Hasty generalization. In logic, the hasty generalization is a form of improper induction. In life it is called prejudice. In either case, conclusions are drawn before the facts warrant it.
(19) Overreliance on authorities. We tend to rely heavily on authorities in our culture, especially if the authority is considered to be highly intelligent. Authorities, by virtue of their expertise in a field, may have a better chance of being right in that field, but correctness is certainly not guaranteed, and their expertise does not necessarily qualify them to draw conclusions in other areas.
(20) Either-or. Also known as the fallacy of negation or the false dilemma, this is the tendency to dichotomize the world so that if you discredit one position, the observed is forced to accept the other. A new theory needs evidence in favor of it, not just against the opposition.
(21) Circular reasoning. Also known as fallacy of redundancy, begging the question, or tautology, this occurs when the conclusion or claim is merely a restatement of one of the premises.
(22) Reductio ad absurdum and the slippery slope. Reductio ad absurdum is the refutation of an argument by carrying the argument to its logical end and so reducing it to an absurd conclusion. Surely, if an argument’s consequences are absurd, it must be false. This is not necessarily so, though sometimes pushing an argument to its limits is a useful exercise in critical thinking; often this is a way to discover whether a claim has validity, especially when an experiment testing the actual reduction can be run. Similarly, the slippery slope fallacy involves constructing a scenario in which one thing leads ultimately to an end so extreme that the first step should never be taken.
(23) Effort inadequacies and the need for certainty, control, and simplicity. Most of us, most of the time, want certainty, want to control our environment, and want nice, neat, simple explanations. Scientific and critical thinking does not come naturally. it takes training, experience, and effort. We must always work to suppress our need to be absolutely certain and in total control ands our tendency to seek the simple and effortless solution to a problem.
(24) Problem-solving inadequacies. All critical and scientific thinking is, in a fashion, problem solving. There are numerous psychological disruptions that cause inadequacies in problem solving. We must all make the effort to overcome them.
(25) Ideological immunity, or the Planck Problem. In day-to-day life, as in science, we all resist fundamental paradigm change. Social scientist Jay Stuart Snelson calls this resistance an ideological immune system: “educated, intelligent, and successful adults rarely change their most fundamental presuppositions.” As individuals accumulate more knowledge, theories become more well-founded, and confidence in ideologies is strengthened. The consequence of this, however, is that we build up an “immunity” against new ideas that do not corroborate previous ones. Historians of science call this the Planck Problem, after physicist Max Planck, who made this observation on what must happen for innovation to occur in science: “An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out and that the growing generation is familiarized with the idea from the beginning.”