Dr. Bob Smith, a surgeon in Akron, Ohio, had his last drink on this date in 1935. His alcoholism had bedeviled him for decades. The organization that he and a stockbroker named Bill Wilson founded, Alcoholics Anonymous, considers this to be its founding moment.

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The final episode of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s television series Twin Peaks aired on ABC 25 years ago today. It was the 22nd episode of the show’s second season and its 29th episode overall. The wrong Agent Cooper appeared to have exited the Black Lodge. (Next year, Showtime will run a new series of 18 episodes, all written by Lynch and Frost and directed by David Lynch.) The show’s credits (below the jump):
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Les Paul (above) was born 101 years ago today. Even if you do not remember or can not name any of his couple dozen hit songs, if you are listening to music at this moment, you are listening to his influence, no matter what style of music you have on. For one thing, he invented multi-track recording in the 1940s, so unless you are listening to a monaural recording on an acetate disc from before that era, you are listening to a multi-track recording.

It is true that multi-track recording is one of those things that someone was going to invent out of necessity, but Les Paul is the man who responded to that necessity with his own ingenuity.
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For several years in a row, if one encountered a television set on a Tuesday night in America, and if that television set was turned on, it was tuned to NBC and Texaco Star Theatre hosted by Milton Berle. On June 8, 1948, when the show and its new host made their debut, finding a television set was easier dreamed about than done: fewer than a million were owned in the entire country.

By the end of Berle’s run in 1956, some 30 million sets had been purchased in the subsequent years and many sources pay him at least partial credit for this sales success. The show had been a hit on NBC radio with Fred Allen as host; on TV, it was career-defining, for Berle certainly, but for the executives who hired him as well.
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