Des Moines IA, likely from Riviere des Moines, or River of the Monks. I like it! Good trivia. It’s right on I-80 and I’ve driven through it a handful of times on cross-country road trips.
In play —
To be shit faced is, typically, to be quite drunk. Its meaning may have extended to other forms of causes of being under the influence, but this particular meaning likely originated from American student slang in the 1960s which, in turn, evolved from 1800s usage denoting an ugly or messy face. The 1960s decade is often referred to as “The Swinging Sixties,” “The Counterculture Era,” or “The Age of Aquarius”.
So, yeah, the 1960s. It was an interesting decade.
Even more remarkable was that most of the cultural milestones of the decade happened in the last four years:
The Swinging Sixties began in 1966, in London’s West End, where fashion and hedonism gave way to the Sexual Revolution.
In the US, 1967 was the Summer of Love, when young people hitchhiked to San Francisco’s Haight Ashbury district to experience ways to expand their minds on LSD.
In 1968, Chicago set the stage for discontent: first were the riots in the wake of Martin Luther King, Jr’s assassination on April 4; four months later came the riots during the Democratic National Convention, where progressive liberals and free-spirited hippies clashed with Chicago police under orders from Mayor Daley’s office to keep the peace, at any cost.
In 1969, a small music festival was set to occur on a remote farm in upstate New York. An estimated 460,000 people attended, far more than organizers expected, and threatened to overrun both the festival and nearby towns and villages. And even though food, water, and sanitation was scarce, the attendees managed to share the space in relative harmony, and Woodstock would be remembered fondly by those who were there.
Also in 1969, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first human beings to set foot on the moon, fulfilling a promise made eight years earlier by JFK.
Behind all of this the War in Vietnam raged on, and would continue for another five years.
The Haight-Ashbury district in San Francisco is named for the intersections of Haight Street and Ashbury Street, within the district. The streets are named for exchange banker and pioneer Henry Haight, and member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors Munroe Ashbury; both men were involved in the initial planning of the neighborhood.
The Golden Gate Bridge, one of the most iconic landmarks of the San Francisco area, is destroyed in Nevil Shute’s novel On the Beach, badly damaged in both an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the movie X-Men: The Last Stand, and still in use but with its deck covered over in the film Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Nevil Shute was unhappy with the film version of his novel On the Beach, feeling that a central character’s motivations had been changed too much. While the film, starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins, was fairly well received, and regarded as important, it recorded a loss of $700,000.
In 1959 Sir Neville Marriner was one of the founders of ASMF, the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, a London orchestra. He was a longtime conductor and, until his death in 2016, held the title of its Life President. In 1988 ASMF officially dropped the hyphens from its name.
For almost fifty years (1930 - 1979), Arthur Fiedler led the Boston Pops orchestra as its conductor, the eighteenth person to do so. During this time the Boston Pops had sold more commercial recordings than any other orchestra in the world, with total sales of albums, singles, tapes, and cassettes exceeding $50 million.
The 130th running of the Boston Marathon took place on April 20, 2026. John Korir and Sharon Lokedi, both of Kenya, repeated as men’s and women’s division champions, while Marcel Hug of Switzerland won the men’s wheelchair division for the ninth time, and Eden Rainbow-Cooper of Britain took the women’s wheelchair division for the second time. Korir set a course record with a time of 2:01:52.