Pearl Jam is an American rock band that formed in Seattle, Washington in 1990. Since its inception, the band's line-up has consisted of Eddie Vedder (lead vocals, guitar), Jeff Ament (bass guitar), Stone Gossard (rhythm guitar), and Mike McCready (lead guitar). The band's current drummer is Matt Cameron, formerly of Soundgarden, who has been with the band since 1998. Formed after the demise of Ament and Gossard's previous band Mother Love Bone, Pearl Jam broke into the mainstream with its debut album Ten. One of the key bands of the grunge movement in the early 1990s, Pearl Jam was nevertheless criticized early on as being a corporate cash-in on the alternative rock explosion. However, its members became noted for their refusal to adhere to traditional music industry practices as their career progressed, including refusing to make music videos and engaging in a much-publicized boycott of Ticketmaster. Rolling Stone described the band as having "spent much of the past decade deliberately tearing apart their own fame." Since its inception, the band has sold 30 million records in the U.S., and an estimated 60 million albums worldwide. Pearl Jam has outlasted many of its contemporaries from the alternative rock breakthrough of the early 1990s, and is considered one of the most influential bands of the decade, and "the most popular American rock band of the 1990s".

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_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1500: Portuguese explorer Pedro ??lvares Cabral and his crew became the first Europeans to sight Brazil when they spotted Monte Pascoal. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedro_%EF%BF%BD%EF%BF%BDlvares_Cabral)

1889: Over 50,000 people rushed to claim a piece of the available two million acres (8,000 km??) in the Unassigned Lands, the present-day U.S. state of Oklahoma. Within hours, both Oklahoma City and Guthrie had established cities of around 10,000 people. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Land_Run_of_1889)

1915: The Germans released chlorine gas as a chemical weapon in the Second Battle of Ypres, killing over 5,000 soldiers within ten minutes by asphyxiation in the first large-scale successful use of poison gas in World War I. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poison_gas_in_World_War_I)

1930: France, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States signed the London Naval Treaty, regulating submarine warfare and limiting military ship building. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Naval_Treaty)

1945: About 600 prisoners of the Jasenovac concentration camp in the Independent State of Croatia revolted, but only 80 of the managed to escape while the other 520 were killed by the Croatian Usta??e regime. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasenovac_concentration_camp)

1993: The first version of Mosaic, created by computer programmers Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, was released, becoming the first popular World Wide Web browser and Gopher client. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_%28web_browser%29)

_____________________ Wiktionary's Word of the day:

johnnycake: (US) A dense baked or fried flatbread made of cornmeal. (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/johnnycake)

_____________________ Wikiquote of the day:

There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew. -- Marshall McLuhan (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan)