95px|Rivers Cuomo, frontman of Weezer

Pinkerton is the second studio album by American alternative rock band Weezer, released on September 24, 1996. After finishing tours in promotion of their 1994 album Weezer, the band originally planned to record a space-themed rock opera entitled Songs from the Black Hole. However, this project was eventually abandoned, and the group used some of the songs from the discarded album on Pinkerton. Much of the album was written while frontman Rivers Cuomo (pictured) was studying at Harvard University, which influenced the themes addressed on the record. The album was seen as a departure from the band's original power pop sound for a darker and more abrasive sound. On its release in 1996, the album was initially considered a critical and commercial failure; Pinkerton has since risen in stature to become one of the most highly regarded albums of the 1990s, receiving much critical acclaim, and is now considered one of the most important albums of the decade. The album was certified gold in the United States in 2001. As of August 2009, Pinkerton has amassed US sales of 852,000, and went gold in Canada with sales of over 50,000. It was the last Weezer album to feature bassist Matt Sharp. (more...)

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_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

1645:

English Civil War: Royalists under the personal command of King Charles I suffered a significant defeat in the Battle of Rowton Heath. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Rowton_Heath

1890:

Wilford Woodruff, President of the Mormon Church, wrote the first draft of a manifesto which officially disavowed the continuing practice of plural marriage. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1890_Manifesto

1946:

Clark Clifford and George Elsey, military advisers to U.S. President Harry S. Truman, present him with a top-secret report on the Soviet Union that would form the basis of the U.S. policy of containment. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/containment

1957:

Barcelona's Camp Nou , currently the largest stadium in Europe with a seating capacity of 99,354, opened. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_Nou

1996:

Representatives from 71 nations signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, which has not yet come into force because not enough signatories have ratified it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban_Treaty

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

heretofore (adverb): Prior to now, until now, up to the present time http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/heretofore

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

Once one is caught up into the material world not one person in ten thousand finds the time to form literary taste, to examine the validity of philosophic concepts for himself, or to form what, for lack of a better phrase, I might call the wise and tragic sense of life. --F. Scott Fitzgerald http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/F._Scott_Fitzgerald