HISTORICAL CLIP
On February 16, 1959, Fidel Castro is sworn in as prime minister of Cuba after leading a guerrilla campaign that forced right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista into exile. Castro, who became commander in chief of Cuba's armed forces after Batista was ousted on January 1, replaced the more moderate Miro Cardona as head of the country's new provisional government.
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WORD FOR TODAY
verisimilitude
noun
1. The quality of appearing to be true or real.
2. Something that has the appearance of being true or real.
Verisimilitude is a philosophical or theoretical concept that distinguishes truth and falsity of assertions or hypotheses. The problem of verisimilitude is the problem of articulating what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory.
This problem was central to the philosophy of Karl Popper, largely because Popper was among the first to affirm that truth is the aim of scientific inquiry while acknowledging that most of the greatest scientific theories in the history of science are, strictly speaking, false. If this long string of purportedly false theories is to constitute progress with respect to the goal of truth then it must be at least possible for one false theory to be closer to the truth than others.
American author, David Simon once said:
"My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell."
Born Feb 16, 1957
Age: 55 years old
Age: 55 years old
Levardis Robert Martyn Burton, Jr., professionally known as LeVar Burton, is an American actor, presenter, director, producer, and author.
For those over 50 years of age, Burton is best known for portraying the young Kunta Kinte in the 1977 award-winning ABC television miniseries Roots, based on the novel by Alex Haley. For those between the ages of 35 to 50, he is best known for his role as Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: The Next Generation. For those under the age of 35, he is best known as the co-creator and host of the PBS children's program Reading Rainbow.
Born Feb 16, 1954
Died: Jul 1, 1996
Died: Jul 1, 1996
She supported herself later in life by appearing in a few direct-to-video films, autographing her nude photos from Playboy magazine, and endorsing a psychic telephone hotline owned by her cousin Adiel Hemingway. Shortly before her death, she was set to host the outdoor adventure series Wild Guide on the Discovery Channel.
On July 1, 1996, one day before the anniversary of her grandfather's own suicide, Hemingway was found dead in her studio apartment in Santa Monica, at age 42. She had taken an overdose of phenobarbital, according to the Los Angeles County coroner's findings one month later.
Born Feb 16, 1958
Age: 54 years old
Age: 54 years old
Tracy Marrow, better known by his stage name Ice-T, is an American rapper and actor. He began his career as a rapper in the 1980s and was signed to Sire Records in 1987, when he released his debut album Rhyme Pays, the first hip-hop album to carry an explicit content sticker. The next year, he founded the record label Rhyme Syndicate Records (named after his collective of fellow hip-hop artists called the Rhyme Syndicate) and released another album, Power.
Since 2000, he has portrayed NYPD Detective Odafin Tutuola on the NBC police drama Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Born Feb 16, 1935
Died: Jan 5, 1998
Died: Jan 5, 1998
Salvatore Phillip "Sonny" Bono was an American recording artist, record producer, actor, and politician whose career spanned over three decades.
Bono began his music career working at Specialty Records where his song "Things You Do to Me" was recorded by Sam Cooke, and went on to work for the record producer Phil Spector in the early 1960s as a promotion man, percussionist and "gofer". One of his earliest songwriting efforts was "Needles and Pins" which he co-wrote with Jack Nitzsche, another member of Spector's production team.
Later in the same decade, he achieved commercial success, along with his then-wife Cher, as part of the singing duo Sonny and Cher. Bono wrote, arranged, and produced a number of hit records with singles like "I Got You Babe" and "The Beat Goes On", although Cher received more attention as a performer. He also played a major part in Cher's early solo career with recordings such as "Bang Bang" and "You Better Sit Down Kids".
Bono entered politics and become the new mayor of Palm Springs, where he served four years (1988 to 1992). Later, Bono was elected to the United States House of Representatives in 1994 to represent California's 44th congressional district.
Bono died on January 5, 1998 of injuries sustained when he hit a tree while skiing.
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"What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?"
--Joseph Conrad
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