On this day
Revisit the music, news, notable people, and historical moments connected to this date.
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The Fabulous Palm Springs Follies features showgirls in their 60's, 70's and 80's who wow audiences with high-kick numbers, splits and sexy, age-defying choreography at Plaza Theater in Palm Springs (Calif); photos (M)
Andrew Ross Sorkin surveys merger and acquisition highlights of 2004, contending 2004 was great year for deal making; cites Oracle Corporation's Larry Ellison's hostile takeover bid for PeopleSoft; cites Brian Roberts's and Comcast's bid for Walt Disney as among most poorly thought out deals; lauds Lehman Brothers comeback as 'big-shot' bank of year; lauds Kirk Kerkorian for pulling off two blockbuster deals, buying Mandalay Resort Group, and selling Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; cites Gary Forsee as biggest underachiever, for Sprint's acquisition of Nextel; photo (L)
Gretchen Morgenson column awards this year's Augustus Melmotte Memorial Prizes, named for charlatan who parades through The Way We Live Now, novel by Anthony Trollope; those honored for dubious achievement include Franklin D Raines, former chief executive of Fannie Mae, Michael D Eisner, chief executive of Disney, and Michael S Ovitz, Disney's former president; New York Atty Gen Spitzer is honored for uncovering corruption in insurance industry; photos (L)
Saturday Night Live, once forum for political humor, shifts its focus to celebrity foibles, ceding considerable ground to popular rivals like The Daily Show With Jon Stewart; some of show's devoted viewers agree and are losing interest; producer Lorne Michaels warns against wallowing too deeply in nostalgia for show's formative years; says his basic philosophy in running SNL has not changed; photos (L)
They have met on the Internet and on cross-country road trips. But mostly they find one another at the funerals. As the number of American troops killed in Iraq has risen above 1,300, mothers of the dead have built a grim community of their own, mostly invisible to outsiders and separated by geography, but bound together by death. Some have met in pews, recognizing one another from newspaper photographs or with the simplest introduction: I lost my son, too.
Music on My Birthday
The Top 50 albums for the chart week of December 29, 2004, covering January 2, 2005.
2Pac
Various Artists
Eminem
Shania Twain
U2
2005Maclyn McCarty, American geneticist and physician (born 1911)[†]
Maclyn McCarty was an American geneticist, a research scientist described in 2005 as "the last surviving member of a Manhattan scientific team that overturned medical dogma in the 1940s and became the first to demonstrate that genes were made of DNA." He had worked at Rockefeller University "for more than 60 years." 1994 marked 50 years since this work's release.
In 2005, the world population was approximately 6,586,970,132 people[†]