On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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Steve Kirsch, entrepreneur who has been waging crusade to eliminate unwelcome faxes, filed $2.2 trillion class-action suit against Fax.com, while consumer advocate Robert H Braver has filed 36 cases against junk fax industry; Congress in 1991 passed law, which, among other things, prohibits practice of unsolicited advertising by fax; photo (M)
After the galloping intelligence displayed in the first two parts of "The Lord of the Rings" series, your fear may be that Peter Jackson would become cautious and unimaginative with the last episode of his trilogy. But Mr. Jackson crushes any such fear. His "King" is a meticulous and prodigious vision made by a director who was not hamstrung by heavy use of computer special-effects imagery. The final installment follows the hobbit Frodo (Elijah Wood), increasingly fevered as the ring exercises its power over him, on the last leg of his perilous journey to Mordor to destroy the sinister object. The wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen), in a voice sodden with mellow sadness, believes that Frodo is on a suicide mission: "There never was much hope. Just a false hope." Mr. Jackson takes his time with the story, but he's not sloughing off here. Rather he is building toward a more than solid conclusion. The grandiloquence that sustained the second installment, "The Two Towers," with its pounding and operatic martial fury — a movie that actually created a state of siege and left audiences hanging — can be found here. By its end, "King" glides to the gentle bonhomie that opened the "Ring" movies, but its epilogue is tinged with regret: "You can't go back. Some wounds don't heal." It's an epic about the price of triumph, a subversive victory itself in a large-scale pop-action film. — Elvis Mitchell
New York Yankees offseason acquisitions of outfielders Kenny Lofton and Gary Sheffield and pitcher Kevin Brown give team some of American League's best players, but their abrasive personalities could add undesirable volatility to clubhouse relations (M)
SECOND SWEEP THE KEY -- Soldiers said they missed Saddam Hussein on their first sweep through the garbage-strewn compound where he was hiding. PAGE A20
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of December 10, 2003, covering December 16, 2003.
Jay-Z
No Doubt
Britney Spears
Hilary Duff
Various Artists
2003Robert Stanfield, Canadian economist, lawyer, and politician, 17th Premier of Nova Scotia (born 1914)[†]
Robert Lorne Stanfield was a Canadian politician who served as the 17th premier of Nova Scotia from 1956 to 1967 and the leader of the Official Opposition and leader of the Progressive Conservative Party of Canada from 1967 to 1976.
2003Gary Stewart, American singer-songwriter (born 1945)[†]
Gary Ronnie Stewart was an American musician and songwriter, known for his distinctive vibrato voice and his outlaw country sound influenced by southern rock. At the height of his popularity in the mid-1970s, Time magazine described him as the "king of honkytonk." He had a series of country chart hits from the mid- to late 1970s, the biggest of which was "She's Actin' Single ", which topped the U.S. country singles chart in 1975.
In 2003, the world population was approximately 6,420,361,634 people[†]