Jaws is a 1975 horror–thriller film directed by Steven Spielberg, based on Peter Benchley's best-selling novel of the same name. The novel was inspired by the Jersey Shore Shark Attacks of 1916. In the film, the police chief of Amity Island, a summer resort town, tries to protect beachgoers from the predations of a huge great white shark by closing the beach, only to be overruled by the money-grubbing town council. After several attacks, the police chief proceeds to enlist the help of a marine biologist and later a professional shark hunter to kill the shark. The film stars Roy Scheider as police chief Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as marine biologist Matt Hooper, Robert Shaw as the shark hunter Quint, Lorraine Gary as Brody's wife Ellen, and Murray Hamilton as the greedy Mayor Vaughn. Jaws is regarded as a watershed film in motion picture history, as it is the father of the summer blockbuster movie.

Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaws_%28film%29

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1777: San José de Guadalupe, the first town in the Spanish colony of California, was founded. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose%2C_California)

1854: The Eureka Flag was flown for the first time during the Eureka Stockade rebellion in Australia. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Flag)

1877: Thomas Edison demonstrated the phonograph, his invention for recording and replaying sound, for the first time. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonograph)

1890: The Diet of Japan, modelled after the German Reichstag, first met, when the Meiji Constitution went into effect in Japan. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diet_of_Japan)

1947: The United Nations General Assembly voted to approve the Partition Plan for Palestine, a plan to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict in the British Mandate of Palestine. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_UN_Partition_Plan)

_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:

The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. There's not one of them which won't make us into devils if we set it up as an absolute guide. You might think love of humanity in general was safe, but it isn't. If you leave out justice you'll find yourself breaking agreements and faking evidence in trials "for the sake of humanity" and become in the end a cruel and treacherous man. -- C.S. Lewis (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C.S._Lewis)