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".
Read the rest of this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Jam
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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)
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Wiktionary's Word of the day:
johnnycake: (US) A dense baked or fried flatbread made of cornmeal.
(
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/johnnycake)
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Wikiquote of the day:
There are no passengers on Spaceship Earth. We are all crew.
-- Marshall McLuhan
(
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan)