Wikipedia:Main Page history/2021 December 17b

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From today's featured article

Rick Wakeman

Hunky Dory is the fourth studio album by English musician David Bowie, released on 17 December 1971 by RCA Records. It was co-produced by Bowie and Ken Scott and featured the Spiders from Mars backing band and Rick Wakeman (pictured) on piano. The songs are melodic and piano-based, with lyrics reflecting themes of artistic reinvention and occult philosophies. It also contains three tributes to American artists. The cover artwork was inspired by actresses of the Golden Age of Hollywood. Despite positive reviews, the album initially failed to chart, becoming a commercial success following Bowie's breakthrough with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars in 1972. Retrospectively, Hunky Dory has been acclaimed as one of Bowie's best works and features on several lists of the greatest albums of all time. Within the context of his career, it is considered to be the album where Bowie definitively discovered his voice and style. (Full article...)

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Did you know ...

Roland Böer

... that Roland Böer (pictured), who made his debut at La Scala in Milan with Mozart's Die Zauberflöte, was the artistic director of the Cantiere Internazionale d'Arte in Montepulciano?
... that Dan Finnerty was cast in Single All the Way so that he could cross the Canada–U.S. border and join his wife, Kathy Najimy, on the set of the film?
... that the specific epithet of Platycephalus endrachtensis is from an old word for Australia?
... that Nandivada Rathnasree, who ran Delhi's planetarium, proposed that astronomers could be taught using India's stone-built observatories?
... that the documentary film Boycott includes the stories of three Americans who sued their state governments after being affected by anti-BDS laws?
... that the mediaeval English tables game of Ticktack has several ways of winning, including Toots and Rovers?
... that William Hunter Dammond became the first African-American graduate of the University of Pittsburgh in 1893, but was not recognised as such until 2000?
... that there are more than 200 manhole covers featuring Pokémon in Japan?

In the news

Siaosi Sovaleni

Siaosi Sovaleni (pictured) is elected as prime minister by the Legislative Assembly of Tonga.
A fuel tanker truck explodes in Cap-Haïtien, Haiti, killing at least 75 people.
In Canadian football, the Winnipeg Blue Bombers defeat the Hamilton Tiger-Cats to win the Grey Cup.
In motor racing, Max Verstappen wins the Formula One World Championship, while Mercedes win the constructors' title.

On this day

December 17

Demonstrators in the Darwin rebellion

546 – Led by Totila, the Ostrogoths sacked Rome after a nearly year-long siege.
1583 – Cologne War: Forces under Ernest of Bavaria defeated Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg's troops at the siege of Godesberg.
1918 – About 1,000 demonstrators marched (pictured) on Government House in Darwin, Australia, where they burned an effigy of Administrator John Gilruth and demanded his resignation.
1951 – The Civil Rights Congress presented a document to the United Nations Genocide Convention charging the United States government with genocide against African Americans.
1983 – The Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated a car bomb just outside Harrods in London, killing six people and injuring about 90 others.

Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba (d. 1663)
Aubrey Faulkner (b. 1881)
Eva Ekvall (d. 2011)

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Richard Nafzger, June Lockhart and Buzz Aldrin accepting the 2009 award on behalf of NASA

The Philo T. Farnsworth Award is a non-competitive award presented as part of the Primetime Engineering Emmy Awards to "an agency, company or institution whose contributions over time have significantly impacted television technology and engineering". Named for Philo Farnsworth, the inventor of the first fully working all-electronic television system and receiver, the winner is selected by a jury of television engineers from the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences' Engineering Emmy Awards Committee who consider "all engineering developments which have proven their efficacy during the awards year and determines which, if any, merit recognition with an Engineering Emmy statuette". The award was first presented at the 55th Primetime Engineering Emmy Awards ceremony in September 2003. The motion picture equipment company Panavision was selected as the inaugural recipient for its work in developing "specialty camera items, cranes and dollies, video assists, 35 mm optics, cameras, lighting, trucks and grips". Since then, another 15 agencies, companies and institutions have received the award; none have won more than once. (Full list...)

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Today's featured picture

The Wright brothers – Orville (1871–1948) and Wilbur (1867–1912) – were American aviation pioneers generally credited with inventing, building, and flying the world's first successful motor-operated airplane. They made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft with the Wright Flyer on December 17, 1903, 4 mi (6 km) south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The brothers were also the first to invent aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight possible. These portrait photographs of Orville (left) and Wilbur (right) were taken by the brothers themselves in 1905.

Photograph credit: Orville Wright and Wilbur Wright; restored by Scewing and Bammesk

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