50th Anniversary of JFK's Death

[Jameerthefear]

Lot of documentaries coming on today.

[KevinNYC]

Lot of documentaries coming on today.

This one about recreating the ballistics of the assassination is pretty darn good.

Showed the type of rifle found in the book depository can shoot through 3 feet of pine boards and its full metal jacketed round would still look pretty straight.

http://video.pbs.org/video/2365118537/

They also show how a human skull reacts to a bullet. You get two separate forces. The initial fractures radiate out from the point of impact. Then the shockwave expands through the skull and those fractures are perpendicular to the fractures from the impact.

They also used 20,000 frame per second video during their ballistics tests. You can clearly see the bullet start to "yaw" or turn end over end after in leaves ballistic gel. The back of Connally's coat show an oval hole not a round hole.

[KevinNYC]

I also had forgotten until my wife reminded me today, that I'm three degrees of separation from the guy who filmed the assassination. Abraham Zapruder' son is a friend of a friend.

[KevinNYC]

The NY Daily News reprinted their entire issue from Nov 22, 1963.

http://assets.nydailynews.com/polopoly_fs/1.1522310.1384891695!/img/httpImage/image.jpg_gen/derivatives/landscape_635/reprint20n-1-web.jpg

The coolest part was the entertainment ads. Playing that week in NYC were such classic movies as It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, Fellini's 8 1/2, How the West was Won, 2 Women for which Sophia Loren won an Oscar. Also playing was Liz Taylor in Cleopatra which cost $44 million dollars or $320 million in today's dollars.

Sam Cooke was playing at the Apollo that week. Here's what Sam Cooke sounded like live in 1963. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEmAW2yE9RE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HiTzG5FLgo

The other you can see from the movie ads is that you could see the beginnings of what Time Square would become. Movies, like The Conjugal Bed, The Amorous Sex were starting to play. The ad for Traveling Light promises "Nudists at Play." You can see that one up on YouTube.

These movie ads appear on the same page as tiny three paragraph story on Vietnam, Viet Suspends Diem Officers, that I didn't even see the first time I looked. It's about an purge of officers loyal the first President of South Vietnam, who had been executed in coup on Nov 2, 1963