IN: Daniel Irvin Rather, Jr. was born on October 31, 1931, in Wharton County, Texas, the son of Daniel Irvin Rather, Sr., a ditch digger, and the former Byrl Veda Page. The Rathers moved to Houston, where Dan attended Love Elementary School and Hamilton Middle School. He graduated in 1950 from John H. Reagan High School in Houston. In 1953, he earned a bachelor's degree in journalism from Sam Houston State University where he was editor of the school newspaper, The Houstonian.

On September 8, 2004, Rather reported on 60 Minutes Wednesday that a series of memos critical of President George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard service record had been discovered in the personal files of Lt. Bush's former commanding officer, Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian. Once copies of the documents were made available on the Internet, their authenticity was quickly called into question. Much of this was based on the fact that the documents were proportionally printed and displayed using other modern typographic conventions usually unavailable on military typewriters of the 1970s. The font used on the documents has characteristics that exactly match standard font features of Microsoft Word. This led to claims that the memos were forgeries. The accusations then spread over the following days into mainstream media outlets including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and the Chicago Sun-Times. Rather and CBS initially defended the story, insisting that the documents had been authenticated by experts. CBS was contradicted by some of the experts it originally cited, and later reported that its source for the documents - former Texas Army National Guard officer Lt. Col. Bill Burkett - had misled the network about how he had obtained them. On September 20, CBS retracted the story. Rather stated, "If I knew then what I know now, I would not have gone ahead with the story as it was aired, and I certainly would not have used the documents in question." The controversy has been referred to by some as "Memogate" and "Rathergate." Following an investigation commissioned by CBS, CBS fired story producer Mary Mapes and asked three other producers connected with the story to resign. Many believe Rather's retirement was hastened by this incident. On September 20, 2007, Rather was interviewed on Larry King Live commenting "Nobody has proved that they were fraudulent, much less a forgery. ... The truth of this story stands up to this day."
QUESTION: were they verified?
IN: Highway 61 Revisited is the sixth studio album by the American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. It was released on August 30, 1965, by Columbia Records. Having until then recorded mostly acoustic music, Dylan used rock musicians as his backing band on every track of the album, except for the closing 11-minute ballad, "Desolation Row".

In May 1965, Dylan returned from his tour of England feeling exhausted and dissatisfied with his material. He told journalist Nat Hentoff: "I was going to quit singing. I was very drained." The singer added, "It's very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don't dig you." As a consequence of his dissatisfaction, Dylan wrote 20 pages of verse he later described as a "long piece of vomit". He reduced this to a song with four verses and a chorus--"Like a Rolling Stone". He told Hentoff that writing and recording the song washed away his dissatisfaction, and restored his enthusiasm for creating music. Describing the experience to Robert Hilburn in 2004, nearly 40 years later, Dylan said: "It's like a ghost is writing a song like that ... You don't know what it means except the ghost picked me to write the song." Highway 61 Revisited was recorded in two blocks of recording sessions that took place in Studio A of Columbia Records, located in Midtown Manhattan. The first block, June 15 and June 16, was produced by Tom Wilson and resulted in the single "Like a Rolling Stone". On July 25, Dylan performed his controversial electric set at the Newport Folk Festival, where some of the crowd booed his performance. Four days after Newport, Dylan returned to the recording studio. From July 29 to August 4, he and his band completed recording Highway 61 Revisited, but under the supervision of a new producer, Bob Johnston.
QUESTION: Was anyone featured on Highway 61?
IN: Stephen Russell Davies was born on 27 April 1963 at Mount Pleasant Hospital in Swansea. His father, Vivian Davies (1925-2015), and his mother, Barbara (1929-1999), were teachers. Davies was the youngest of three children and their only son. Because he was born by C-section, his mother was placed on a morphine drip and was institutionalised after an overdose resulted in a psychotic episode.

Davies' next project was The Grand, a period soap drama set in a Manchester hotel during the interwar period. It was designed to be a valuable show in a ratings war with the BBC and was scheduled at 9 pm on a Friday night. After the original writer abandoned the series, Granada approached him to write the entire show. His scripts for the first series reflect the pessimism of the period; each episode added its own emotional trauma on the staff, including a soldier's execution for desertion, a destitute maid who threatens to illegally abort her unborn child to survive, and a multi-episode storyline centred on the chambermaid, Monica Jones (Jane Danson), who kills her rapist in self-defence, is arrested, and eventually hanged for murder. The show was renewed for a second series despite the first's dark tone. The second series had a lighter tone and greater emphasis on character development, which Davies attributed to his friend Sally, who had previously warned him of the adult humour in Breakfast Serials; she told him that his show was too bleak to be compared to real life. He highlighted the sixth and eighth episodes of the second series as a time of maturity as a writer: for the sixth, he utilised then-unconventional narrative devices such as flashbacks to explore the hotel barman's closeted homosexuality and the societal attitudes towards sexuality in the 1920s; and he highlighted the eighth as when he allowed the series to "take on its own life" by deliberately inserting plot devices such as McGuffins to enhance the comic relief of the series. Although well received, the series' ratings were not high enough to warrant a third series. After its cancellation in September 1997, Davies had an existential crisis after almost dying from an accidental overdose; the experience persuaded him to detoxify and make a name for himself by producing a series that celebrated his homosexuality.
QUESTION:
Did the show do well ?