Daily Archives: July 9, 2010

TGIF: Three by Andy Kaufman

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C570byQCLpI

Mighty Mouse

Andy Kaufman died of cancer 26 years ago at the tragically young age of 35.  These performances are more than 30 years old but they still retain their liberating strangeness: mime-singing the refrain from a Mighty Mouse record, reading The Great Gatsby to an audience that doesn’t want to be read The Great Gatsby, and conducting a variety show in a sort of Mediterranean/Aegean gibberish, and then leading his audience through a sing-along in the same language.

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“Act Against Slavery”

simcoe_jg

Lieutenant-Governor John Graves Simcoe of Upper Canada, anti-slavery advocate

On this date in 1793, the Act Against Slavery was passed in Upper Canada (present day Ontario), also prohibiting the importation of slaves into Lower Canada (present day Quebec).  This was a full fourteen years before the British Empire outlawed the slave trade, forty years before it outlawed slavery altogether, and sixty-nine years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.