Question: Who was Haddon Sundblom and why was he important to Christmas?

Yesterday’s question answered below: What is a dilettante?
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History for 11/30/2021
Birthdays: Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain, William Enos Berkeley aka Busby Berkeley, Winston Churchill, Jonathan Swift, Shirley Chisholm, Gordon Parks, G. Gordon Liddy, Alan Sherman, Abbie Hoffman, Virginia Mayo, Ephram Zimbalist Jr, Richard Crenna, Robert Guilliame, Rex Reason, Mandy Patinkin, Ridley Scott is 85, David Mamet, Shuggie Otis, Billy Idol, Joan Ganz Cooney the creator of Sesame Street, Dick Clark, Ben Stiller is 56, Kaley Cuoco is 36, Henry Selick

1731-An huge earthquake killed 100,000 in Peking (Beijing).

1750- Marshal Saxe died. Maurice de Saxe was born an illegitimate son of Polish King Augustus the Strong, but grew to become one of the top generals of French King Louis XV. Louis gave him the magnificent palace of Chambord for his retirement. The old soldier spent the summer nights camping out Cossack style and letting wild steppe ponies gallop the grounds.
A notorious ladies man, this night he was found dead after an all-night tryst with eight actresses at once. The king's physician wrote as the cause of death: "Une surfeit des femmes - an overdose of women.”

1776- As George Washington’s minuteman army retreated across New Jersey to escape the pursuing British Army, a third of his troop’s enlistment’s were up. In a cold rain 2,000 New Jersey and Maryland militiamen, one third the army, left and went home. Writer Thomas Paine was serving Gen. Nathaniel Greene as a secretary. He was moved by this pitiful sight to write the pamphlet: “The Crisis”: ”These are times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shrink in this crisis from the service of his country. But he that stands now deserves the love and thanks of both man and woman. “Washington called his downcast soldiers together and had the pamphlet read aloud to them.

1782- On a dark, snowy day in an upstairs room on the Rue Bonaparte on Paris’ Left Bank, The United States and Britain signed the first of several protocols leading up to the treaty ending the American Revolution. John Adams, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin and Richard Lawrence signed for America, a parliamentary delegation led by Lord Oswald signed for the Crown. On British diplomat said:” The Americans are the greatest quibblers I have ever dealt with, and I pray never to again in the future!”

1809- Napoleon told Josephine he wanted a divorce. She was the love of his life, but at 46 she could no longer bear children and he desperately wanted a son to establish a dynasty. Even though she long suspected something like this might happen, eyewitnesses said when she heard the news she swooned. The French Army called Josephine Our Lady of Victories, and marked the end of their good luck from this moment. Although his second wife Marie Louise gave him a son, Napoleon never forgot her. In exile he once admitted,” I loved her, but I did not respect her.” On his deathbed in 1821, one of his last words was “Josephine.”

1864- THE BATTLE OF FRANKLIN. Confederate General John Bell Hood had lost Atlanta to Sherman, then failed to lure him out of Georgia. Now his subordinate officers missed an opportunity to entrap a different Yankee army outside of Nashville. That army now was facing them in an impregnable defensive position across open ground. Cavalry leader Nathan Bedford Forrest urged a maneuver around the enemy, but Hood had had enough of his insubordinate officers. He ordered a full frontal attack. The attack was a complete fiasco.
General Patrick Cleburne, the blue-eyed Irish immigrant, called the Stonewall of the West, thought the order stupid, but couldn't send his men out without leading them.” Oh well lads, if we are to die today, let us do it like men.” After the battle he was found on the Yankee breastworks with 49 bullets in his body. Writer Ambrose Bierce was serving on the Union army staff. He was amazed at such a ‘ghastly carnival of death’ was being enacted on such a beautiful Autumn day.

1869- Paris’ famed naughty nightclub the Follies Bergere opened. The home of the Can-Can, Toulouse Lautrec, Josephine Baker, Bricktop, and Maurice Chevalier.

1900- Oscar Wilde died of meningitis in a hotel in Paris. He was 46. His last words; "This wallpaper is appalling! Either it goes or I do.”

1918- Three weeks after the Kaiser was toppled, the new German government grants women the vote.

1922- The great actress Sarah Bernhardt made her last performance in Turin Italy. She was still considered sexy despite advanced age and a wooden leg.

1924- The first fax message sent. A photo of the Prince of Wales was wired across the Atlantic by radio transmission.

1935- Hitler’s government passed a law that non-belief in Nazi doctrine could be grounds for legal divorce in Germany.

1939- Soviet Russia invaded Finland. The gallant Finns fought back fiercely with skiing hit and run attacks, and gasoline bottle bombs nicknamed for Stalin's Foreign Minister, Vachyeschav Molotov, the "Molotov Cocktail".

1940- Actress Lucille Ball married Cuban band leader Desi Arnaz. Together they pioneered the new art of Television Situation Comedy. They divorced in 1960.

1941- President Franklin Roosevelt left Warm Springs Georgia and traveled by special train to meet that evening with Japanese ambassadors Hamada and Kurusu at the White House in a last effort to prevent war.
Meanwhile the main Japanese carrier fleet weighed anchor and left Yokohama for the North Pacific. It’s code name was Kido Butai. It was officially scheduled for military exercises, but once out at sea Admiral Nagumo ordered radio silence, and following his instructions from Admiral Yamamoto, turned his ships south-southeast towards Pearl Harbor Hawaii.

1944- The Red Army invaded Nazi held Austria.

1954- Mrs. Elizabeth Hodges of Sylacauga Alabama was hit by a meteorite. It shot through her roof, bounced off her radio and hit her on the hip. It gave her a nasty bruise and one heck of a story to tell. Broke the radio too. Today it is called Hodges Meteorite.

1961- President-elect John F. Kennedy signed a secret memorandum creating Operation Mongoose. It ordered the CIA under the direction of Attorney General Robert Kennedy to eliminate Cuban leader Fidel Castro by any means necessary. The CIA tried everything from Mafia assassins, to poison cigars, to chemicals to make his beard fall out. Nothing worked and Mongoose was discontinued after Kennedy’s assassination.

1966- Barbados got its independence from Britain.

1968- “Love Child” by Diana Ross and the Supremes hit #1 in the pop charts.

1970- First day shooting on William Freidkin’s film The French Connection.

1974- The Missing Link. In a dry gully in Ethiopia Dr Donald Johannsen discovered the perfect skeletal remains of one of the earliest human ancestors, an ape that walked upright. Australiopithicus Afrancenis. He called it Lucy. Johannsen liked the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

1976- After doing such a fine job lowering the journalistic standards of the London press, Australian tabloid king Rupert Murdoch turned his attention to America. Today he bought the New York Post. The Post, a newspaper originally started in 1794 by Alexander Hamilton, quickly gains notoriety as the trashiest newspaper in the U.S. In an interview, Murdoch admitted the only reason he didn’t put in the Post his “Page Three Girls” -nude photos of young women so successful in the London Daily Sun, was because his wife objected...He later replaced his wife. Rupert then bought New York Magazine and the Village Voice, whereupon half their staff immediately quit.

1979- ESPN, the 24 hour sports channel began broadcasting.

1982- Nova Pictures is founded, but due to conflict with a PBS TV show of the same name they change theirs to TriStar Pictures. In 1994 TriStar was merged into Sony Pictures.

1985- Punk band The Dead Kennedys released their album Frankenchrist.

1987- John Lasseter’s Pixar short Red’s Dream released.

1991- Battered wife Mrs. Omeima Nelson killed her abusive husband, dismembered his body and ate him. “I did his ribs just like in a restaurant.” she said.

1993- President Clinton signed the Brady Handgun bill into law. The bill was named for Ronald Reagan press secretary James Brady, who received a debilitating head wound in the assassination attempt on Reagan in 1981. In 2001, President George W. Bush let it expire without renewing it.

1999- THE BATTLE OF SEATTLE- protesters trying to disrupt the World Trade Organization battled riot police and turned the downtown area into a battle zone. For the next several years wherever the WTO met they were surrounded by thousands of protestors, although the mainstream media tends to pooh-pooh their message.

2003- Roy Disney Jr, the last serving member of the Disney family, was forced to resign from the Walt Disney Company. It was claimed to be the mandatory retirement policy, but more likely he was forced out by the exec he himself hired to run the company in 1984- Michael Eisner. Roy built a successful grass roots stockholders campaign SaveDisney.com. In 2005 Eisner was compelled to retire. Roy Disney kept an emeritus board position until his death in 2009.

2010- Don Hahn’s doc Waking Sleeping Beauty was released on DVD.
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Question: What does it mean to be dilettante?

Answer: A dilettante is someone who assumes a position while having only a passing interest in learning what the position entails. A willful ignorance.

QUESTION: What is a dilettante?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Who were the Roundheads?
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History for 11/29/2021
Birthdays: Gaetano Donizetti, Busby Berkeley, C.S. Lewis (Clive Staples Lewis), Louisa May Alcott, Chuck Mangione, Yakima Canutt, Gary Shandling, Cathy Moriarity, Don Cheadle, Joel Coen is 65, Jacques Chirac, Howie Mandell, Susee “Chapstick” Chafee, Chadwick Boseman, Anna Faris is 45, Vin Scully is 94

1830- The November Uprising. Polish nationalists rise up against the Russian occupiers in one of their many valiant but ultimately hopeless efforts. In America, literary figures like Hawthorne, Poe, and Longfellow were romantically moved to write lots of epic poems, but not much else could be done to help.
Edgar Allen Poe in his opium induced delirium, would run out of his Bronx cottage and march up and down the street with a musket in his hand shouting: "To Warsaw! To Warsaw!" Luckily, the local constable was well aware of Mr. Poe's eccentricities and sent him home to bed.

1864- Colorado militia killed over 150 Cheyenne Indians in the Sand Creek Massacre. Local garrison commander Col. John Chivington was depressed that he was not back east winning glory in the Civil War. So he attacked a peaceful Cheyenne village. He later held a victory parade in Denver displaying the scalps of the Indians, mostly women, old men and children. His actions sparked a needless war with the Cheyenne that raged for years afterwards.

1887- The US Navy received permission from the Hawaiian King David IV Kalakaou to lease land for a base at Pearl Harbor.

1890- The first Army-Navy football game held at West Point. Midshipmen beat the cadets 24-0.

1914- In the first years of animated films, one artist like Winsor McCay drew everything alone, and may have hired a cameraman or assistant. This day, John Randolph Bray's cartoon "Colonel Heeza Liar in Africa" debuted. Bray adapted Henry Ford's assembly line system to making animation, today known as the Production Pipeline. He created the job classifications of layout, animator, inbetweener, background painter, inker, blackeners (cel painters), and camera. In the 1920s the job of gag man (storyboarder), cleanup and checkers. After 1919, Bray shifted his studio focus from entertainment to technical and training films. J.R. Bray started the careers of Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, Max & Dave Fleischer, Dick Heumer, and Shamus Culhane.

1929- Commander Richard Byrd radioed he'd made the first airplane flight over the South Pole. Today its estimated he was probably wrong. Commander Byrd had flown over the North Pole in 1926 with his friend Floyd Bennett, but Bennett had since died. When Byrd made it over the South Pole he dropped a small American flag weighted with a stone from Bennett’s grave.

1932- Cole Porter’s musical The Gay Divorcee’ opened on Broadway.

1935- Physicist Edwin Schrodinger published his thought experiment “ Schrodinger’s Cat”.

1941- In occupied Russia, Nazi troops first raped and then hanged Zoia Kosmodemianskaya. She led a team of partisans guerrillas behind German lines at 18 years old. Before she died, she cried defiance at the Nazis:” You cannot hang all 200 million of us!”

1942- During WWII, the U.S. declared coffee would be rationed along with sugar, gasoline and rubber. And lots more. People put their cars up on blocks "for the duration". Gas Ration cards were listed as C, B & A. The C card meant essential defense worker so they had unlimited access to gasoline. B cards police & fire. An A card was the least important, i.e. us.

1944- A Detroit man named Malcolm Little was busted for larceny. He later reformed his life around the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Malcolm X.

1947- THE UN DECIDES. Since 1897 European Jewry had focused on buying land and relocating to Palestine. In 1936 the Egyptian Parliament issued an open letter to all Jews to come live amongst them, but rising Arab nationalism since 1919 tended to resist Jewish immigration. Since World War I, the British held Palestine as a mandate but after World War II they dumped the whole problem in the United Nations hands. The Peel Report, a Foreign Office paper published in 1937 said maybe creating two new states was the solution.
This day The United Nations voted 33-13 to partition the British Mandate of Palestine into Jewish and Arab independent states with Jerusalem under international supervision. On May 14th 1948 British forces completed their withdrawal and Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel.

1959- The Second Grammy Awards, broadcast for the first time on television. Bobby Darin’s rendition of Mack the Knife won top honors.

1961- NASA sent Enos the Chimp into orbit.

1963- THE WARREN COMMISSION announced- President Lyndon Johnson set up the Warren Commission to investigate the murder of John F. Kennedy. He had originally thought the Dallas Homicide Squad was sufficient, but public outrage demanded more.
The Commission was headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren and participants included future president Gerald Ford, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State Alan Foster Dulles and future Senator Arlen Spector, then a young attorney who argued the validity of the "magic bullet" theory”. That one bullet went through Kennedy, bounced, went through Kennedy, ricocheted, went through Connolly, zinged, and wound up sitting in Gov. Connolly's bedsheets in the hospital with no surface dents or marks on it -or something like that. Why the first bullet went through Kennedy intact while the second bullet exploded inside his skull was never explained.
After ten months the Warren Commission concluded that President Kennedy was killed by a lone nut, so there was no conspiracy. In 1975, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded the contrary view, that Kennedy probably was the victim of a conspiracy but what it was is unknown. To this date there are still two million documents pertaining to the case kept classified. In the end the Warren Commission’s unsatisfying conclusions spawned a generation of conspiracy buffs.

1963- A week after the Kennedy assassination, comedian Vaughn Meader announced he was giving up his act impersonating the dead president. Meader’s comedy album The First Family sold 7.5 million copies and won a Grammy in 1962, but now it wasn’t funny anymore. Meaders career faded, and he ended up managing a bar in Maine. He died of emphysema in 2004. When Lenny Bruce first took the stage after the Kennedy assassination, he opened with a long drag on his cigarette and sighed:” ….Man…. Vaughn Meader is really screwed!”

1967- Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, stepped down to become president of the World Bank.

1972- Atari announced Pong, the first popular mass-marketed interactive game.

1981- Actress Natalie Wood drunkenly toppled off her yacht near Catalina Island and
drowned. She was 43. Her husband Robert Wagner, and friend Christopher Walken were onboard having an argument and unaware of her predicament. Wood had once confessed to a friend that she had a horror of drowning.

2001- Beatle guitarist and composer George Harrison died of cancer. He was 58.

2017- Matt Lauer, the well-known host of NBC’s Today Show, was fired after allegations of sexual misconduct with staffers.

2018- Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns opened.
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Question: Who were the Roundheads?

Answer: When the English Civil War broke out, then nobility who were loyal to the king referred to the Parliamentary soldiers, mostly Puritans, as Roundheads. While Cavaliers wore their hair fashionably long, Puritans kept their hair shorter, to fit under a helmet.

Question: Who were the Roundheads?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: One thing that caused Vikings anxiety was Ragnarok. What was that?
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History for 11/28/2021
Birthdays: Jean Baptiste Lully, William Blake, Frederick Engels, Stefan Zweig, Ernst Roehm, Brooks Atkinson, Berry Gordy the founder of Motown Records, Anton Rubinstein, Gary Hart, Vern Den Herder, Paul Warfield, Hope Lange, Ed Harris is 71 Paul Schaefer, Joe Dante, Michael Ritchie, Anna Nicole-Smith, Randy Newman, John Stewart is 59

885 A.D. est. date that the VIKINGS ATTACKED PARIS-Viking warchief Ragnar Lothbrock had attacked Paris a generation earlier. Now dragonships led by his sons Sigfred and Sinric rowed up the Seine to attack again. The Parisians under Duke Odo and Bishop Gozlin put up a stout resistance from the city walls until the summer, when the plague and an army Frankish King Charles the Fat, son of Charles the Bald, rescued the city.

1493- On his second voyage to the New World, Christopher Columbus returned to discover his first colony La Natividad, had been wiped out by angry local Indians.

1520- Having recovered and refitted from navigating the Straights of Magellan around the tip of South America, Fernan Magellan struck out across the Pacific.

1812-THE CROSSING OF THE BEREZINA- Napoleon' army on it's frozen Retreat from Moscow had to get across two rickety spans over an ice swollen river while Russian armies fire down on them from all sides. Napoleon said to his chief of staff Berthier, ” Well, how do we get out of this?”
Engineer General Eble, the artillery chief who called his cannon “my children” oversaw the maintaining of the bridges. He constantly waded into waist deep frigid water and with his men worked feverishly to keep patching up the rickety span. The bridges broke down frequently and the span of a wooden board was the difference between life and death. General Eble made it out of Russia, but soon died of pneumonia and exhaustion.

1815- After Waterloo and a prisoner on the island of St. Helena, Napoleon Bonaparte for the first time put away his uniform, and appeared in civilian clothes. It was his admission that after more than twenty-five years of politics and war, his career was indeed over.

1870- Painter Jean Bazille was shot and killed while serving in the French Army fighting the Prussians. He was only 29. He had been one of the leaders of the new Impressionists painters. Had he lived he might have produced many masterpieces and would’ve been as famous as Degas, Monet or Cezanne.

1895- The Chicago Times-Herald Race- the first American auto race. Two electric and four gas powered cars raced from Chicago to Evanston and back, 54 miles despite several inches of snow on the ground. The winner Car # 5 driven by inventor Charles Duryea reached a top speed of 7 miles an hour! Only one other car finished, the rest broke down. Duryea won $2,000, and caught a cold.

1905- The Sinn Fein political party founded in Dublin by Arthur Griffiths. Sinn Fein –pronounced “shinn-fain”is gaelic for “We ourselves alone”. Griffiths signed the Anglo-Irish treaty with Michael Collins the IRA chief. The subsequent outcry over giving up the six counties of Ulster hounded him into an early grave, Griffiths died of a heart attack and Collins was assassinated.

1907- 23 year old Russian-Canadian scrap metal dealer Lazar Meir, now renamed Louis B. Mayer, bought an old burlesque house in Haverhill Massachusetts to show the new moving picture shows. Originally called The Gem, it was such a dump locals called it The Germ. Mayer renamed it The Orpheum, and on Thanksgiving Day opened with the film “ From the Manger to the Cross”. L.B. Mayer grew his film business to become MGM, and at the time of his death in 1950 was the most powerful man in Hollywood. The Motion Picture Academy was his idea.

1911- The Chevrolet Automobile Company founded by the brothers Chevrolet.

1919- Nancy Viscountess Astor became the first woman ever elected to the British Parliament. She succeeded her husband William Waldorf Astor as Conservative MP for Plymouth. Although a fellow Tory, Lady Astor was the political as well as verbal nemesis of Winston Churchill. She once said to him "Mr. Churchill, if I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee!" To which Churchill replied:" Madame if I were your husband, I would drink it!"

1922- The first skywriting display. Former RAF pilot Cyril Turner wrote HELLO USA, CALL VANDERBILT 7-200 in the skies above New York City. 47,000 people immediately telephoned the number.

1925- First radio broadcast from the Grand Ol' Opry in Nashville.

1926- California oil tycoon Edward Doheny went on trial for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal. That he and Harry Sinclair had bribed the Secretary of the Interior to lease them U.S. Navy strategic oil reserves. And like most millionaires, he was acquitted.

1942- THE COCONUT GROVE FIRE-The U.S. public was distracted for awhile from war news by reports of a terrible disaster in Boston. A fire broke out at a popular nightclub called the Cocoanut Grove and killed 492 people in only twelve minutes. The clubs decorations caught fire and created carbon monoxide gas and there were only two exits. Among the dead was western movie star Buck Jones. The tragedy created the first mandatory laws requiring public buildings to have fire exits opening outwards and safety testing of decorative materials.

1946- During the traditional Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade in NYC, Hollywood cameras filmed the Macy Parade scenes for the movie “The Miracle on 34th St.” At this time, Hollywood movies were rarely filmed on location. But the studio had little faith the film would be a success, and did not want spend a lot of money building big sets on their lot.

1947- Disney's cartoon "Chip and Dale".

1948- Hopalong Cassidy premiered on television.

1951-Truman held a crisis cabinet meeting over the War in Korea.
U.S and United Nations forces had been attacked by 180,000 Communist Chinese, lost the capitol Seoul and were being driven back down the Korean peninsula. Gen. Douglas MacArthur recommended dropping ten atomic bombs on Chinese cities, spreading a belt of nuclear waste across the Sino-Korean border and inviting Chiang Kai Shek's Nationalist Chinese to attack and restart the Chinese Civil War. This would mean Russia would step in with its nuclear weapons, and World War III would result.
Truman made the decision to keep the Korean War a "limited war", and not let it expand, no matter how bad allied losses became.
Gen. MacArthur was horrified. He was told we are not at war with Communist China, even though thousands of Chinese soldiers were even now locked in deadly battle with his troops. At first, his call for nuclear weapons sound crazy, but his argument was it was crazy to fight wars to preserve a status-quo. If you go to the extreme of risking men's lives, do it to win or don’t go to war at all. In 1964 from his deathbed, MacArthur sent a note to Pres. Johnson begging him not to go into Vietnam.

1953- Dr. Frank Olson, one of the US Army’s foremost experts on biological warfare, smashed out of a window of the New York Statler Hotel and fell 9 stories to his death. In 1975 it was revealed Olson had been given LSD by Dr Sidney Gottlieb, as part of a government “mind-control” experiment. Gottlieb had the drug spiked into Olson’s after dinner glass of Cointreau without his knowledge. At the time the gov’t thought LSD under controlled conditions could expand the human mind. The CIA kept the truth from his family until compelled to do so by congressional hearings over twenty years later.

1953- Cartoonist & writer Milt Gross died.

1989- Opposites Attract, Paula Abdul dancing with cartoon MC Skat Kat, was released. It became one of the most popular R&B & dance-pop singles of 1990 and won a Grammy.

1994 –At the Columbia State Penitentiary in Portage Wisconsin, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer was cleaning the prison bathroom when he was attacked and beaten to death with a broomstick by inmate Christopher Scarver. Scarver explained God told him kill him. Dahmer’s brain was preserved in formaldehyde, but a year later his mother ordered it destroyed.
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Yesterday’s Question answered below: One thing that caused Vikings anxiety was Ragnarok. What was that?

Answer: Ragnarok was the name for the Viking Apocalypse story. Odin would lead all the heroes of Valhalla against the forces of evil in one last titanic battle where everything and everyone would be destroyed. The World Serpent would arise out of the sea and devour all Midgard (our world). Etc. etc.

Question: One thing that caused Vikings anxiety was Ragnarok. What was that?

Yesterday’s answer below: In Pixar’s Toy Story, who are the characters Woody and Buzz named after?
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History for 11/27/2021
Birthdays: Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jimi Hendrix would have been 79, Bruce Lee-original name Lee Jun Fan, would have been 81, James Agee, Chaim Weizmann, Mobster Vito Genovese, Czech leader Alexander Dubcheck, David Merrick, Marshal Thompson, Robin Givens, Judd Nelson, Buffalo Bob Smith, William Fichtner, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg is 64, Kathryn Bigelow is 70

43BC-THE SECOND TRIUMVERATE- Marc Anthony, Octavian Caesar and Marcus Lepidus compel the Roman Senate to declare them The Board of Three with Consular Powers for the Reorganizing of the State. This legitimized what they were in fact anyway, the rulers of the Roman Empire. They used this new pact to hunt down the killers of Julius Caesar, and they published a list of "Proscribed Persons" who were declared enemies of the state. An estimated 4,000 Roman politicians and noblemen were executed, including the philosopher Marcus Tullius Cicero.

176AD- Marcus Aurelius named his son Commodus as co ruler and heir to the Roman Empire. He died four years later. This ended Rome’s second Golden Age of Peace and prosperity called the Augustan Age. The Augustan Age was successful in part because the Emperors, who were mostly gay or bi-sexual, would adopt the best man for the job instead to rule Rome. So Rome enjoyed a series of excellent leaders- Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius and Marcus Aurelius. But Marcus Aurelius spoiled the whole system by letting his natural son Commodus succeed him. Commodus turned into another sicko-tyrant like Nero and Caligula. It was rumored Commodus wasn’t even Marcus’ son but the Empress Faustina sired him with a gladiator, thus his fondness for the profession.

221AD- Today is the Feast Day of Saint James Intercisus, or Saint James "Chopped up into little pieces", which leave little doubt about the method of his martyrdom.

1519- Martin Luther squared off with Catholic scholar Dr. Johann Eck in a grand public debate in Leipzig. Audiences sat in bleachers and cheered like a sports match. The debate about Luther’s new Protestant views would go on until July 8th. Luther won the audience with his superior eloquence and logic but Eck succeeded in getting Luther to publicly speak heresy against Rome. The Reformation now moved from a small local argument about indulgences to a major challenge to the authority of the Vatican to own the Christian Faith.

1582- William Shakespeare 18, married Ann Hathaway 26. They married quickly, and their first child Susannah was born after only six months. They had a son who died and two daughters. Three year later Will left Ann in Stratford on Avon, and by 1591 was known as an actor in London. He invested in land in Stratford, and in 1616 retired to the country to spend time with his daughters and grandchildren, but he never went back to Ann. It’s been speculated that she was a Puritan and disapproved of his profession. Shakespeare enjoyed making fun of Puritans in his comedies like "Twelfth Night"."

1868- THE GREAT BATTLE ON THE WASHITA -as it was called in those days. Generals Sherman and Sheridan had had enough of chasing small bands of Indian warriors all over the prairie. They now ordered George Armstrong Custer to introduce to the plains their style of "Hard War"- that burned Atlanta and brought the Confederacy to it’s knees. With the sound of a band playing " Gary Owen" shattering the pre-dawn quiet Custer and his 7th Cavalry surprise attacked the village of Chief Black Kettle. The warriors were out foraging so they mostly killed women and children. They even shot the their ponies.
Chief Black Kettle had recently signed a peace treaty with the white-eyes and felt so safe he flew a U.S. flag over his teepee. Black Kettle had survived a similar attack in 1864 called the Sand Creek Massacre. The excuse for the attack was that a white woman homesteader kidnapped by renegade Cheyenne may have been deposited for awhile at Black Kettle's encampment. The Victorian horror over inferred sexual outrages committed on Christian maidens goaded the troopers to ruthless fury, however after the battle Custer freely encouraged his officers to divide up the prettiest squaws for themselves.
One legend says Custer took a mistress named Meotzsi who bore him a child. When Custer died at the Little Big Horn, his body was not scalped and mutilated like the others. Because the Cheyenne considered him family.

1910- New York’s Penn Station opened.

1921- English writer Alastair Crowley proclaimed himself Outer Head of the Order Templeis Orientalis- or Order of the Temple of the East. Alastair Crowley had spent years studying and mastering various occult devotions- Freemasons, Rosicrucians, Gnosticism, Bavarian Illuminati, and others in order to fuse them into his own form of devotion- Thelema he called it, based on the satires of the 1500’s French poet Rabelais. He boasted often that he wanted Crowleyism to eventually replace Christianity. His own mother called him: "The Wickedest Man in the World".

1924- The First Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York. The marvel of the parade were large displays that moved down the street thanks to small automobiles concealed under them. They seemed to "float", so they were called parade floats today. The huge balloons were added in 1927. Originally after the parade the balloons were let go to float away into the sky. Macy’s offered a bounty to people who found them after they landed, usually in rural New Jersey.

1932- Former Terrytoons animator Art Babbitt, now at Walt Disney, wrote to fellow animator Bill Tytla, encouraging him to come out to California. "Terry owes you a lot and Disney has plans for a full length color cartoon!"

1936- Max Fleischer's cartoon featurette, "Popeye meets Sinbad the Sailor".

1941-While Admiral Yamamoto’s carrier fleet was preparing to put to sea, at Pearl Harbor the U.S. army commander General Short received a top secret coded message from Washington: " Negotiations with Japan seem at an end for all practical purposes...future moves unpredictable but hostile action possible at any moment. If hostilities cannot be avoided the United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act...Measures should be carried out so as not to alarm the civilian population or disclose intent."

1942- Admiral Laborde had received orders from Vichy to put the French fleet at the Nazis disposal so they attack the Allied beachheads in North Africa. Instead Laborde scuttled the French fleet in Toulon Harbor.

1950- THE CHOSIN RESEVOIR- In Korea this day the US First Marine Division and British Commando 411 was cut off and attacked on all sides by massed Red Chinese armies. Commander Chesty Puller, a veteran of Guadalcanal, when told he was surrounded replied: "That just simplifies our problems of finding these people and killing them." The Marines slowly fought their way the trap in subzero cold, across the frozen ice, bringing out most of their wounded and some POWs. Survivors of the epic march refuse to call their campaign a retreat, they said they merely attacking in another direction. They called themselves "The Chosin Few" and the "Frozen-Chosin".

1953- Playwright Eugene O'Neill died of pneumonia, Parkinson's Disease, and alcoholism at 65. He had been writing on cardboard laundry shirt boards because he needed something large to write on because his hands trembled so violently. When O’Neill realized his end was near he tore up six plays he was writing because he wanted no one else to complete them. He was staying at the Shelton Hotel in Boston. As his father was an actor his family traveled frequently. O'Neill's last words were: "I knew it! Born in a hotel room, and goddammit, I'm dying in a hotel room! "

1960 – Gordie Howe became the first NHL player to score 1,000 goals.

1963- The Beatles release the single “ I Wanna Hold Your Hand.”

1967- The Beatles release Magical Mystery Tour.

1973- Conjunction Junction, by Jack Sheldon, first played on the TV show Schoolhouse Rock.

1973- According to the X-Files this was the night Fox Mulder’s sister Samantha was abducted by aliens.

1975- Ross McWhirter, publisher of the Guinness Book of World Records, was assassinated by the IRA.

1978- San Francisco Mayor George Mosconi and openly gay City Supervisor Harvey Milk were shot and killed by embittered city councilman Dan White. Councilwoman Diane Feinstein discovered their bodies, and took over as mayor. Dan White was acquitted on an insanity plea using the "Twinkie Defense", that junk food raised his blood sugar to such an extent that he went berserk. He served only 5 years in prison, moved to Orange County, then committed suicide.

2002- Disney’s animated feature Treasure Planet opened in theaters.

2009- Tiger Woods was the greatest golfer of his time and could have been the greatest in history. He didn’t just win tournaments, he dominated the entire sport. While other athletes were tainted with drugs and scandal, Tiger had a squeaky clean image.
This Thanksgiving night at 2:30AM, Tiger Woods crashed his SUV into a tree as a result of an argument with his Swedish bikini model wife, who chased him from their home waving one of his golf clubs. This incident revealed Woods as a compulsive philanderer. More than a dozen women- cocktail waitresses, bimbos and porn stars came forward to admit riding the Tiger. His reputation in tatters, Tiger Woods’ game never again really regained his champion form.

2013- Disney film Frozen premiered. Let it Go! Let it Go!
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Yesterday’s Question: In Pixar’s Toy Story, who are the characters Woody and Buzz named after?

Answer: Woody was named for African American actor Woody Strode, who appeared in many westerns like Sgt. Rutledge. Buzz is named for Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the Moon.

Question: In Pixar’s Toy Story, who are the characters Woody and Buzz named after?

Yesterday’s question answered below: What is the difference between sweetbreads, and sweetmeats?
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History for 11/26/2021
Birthdays: John Harvard 1607(founder of Harvard University), Bat Masterson, Eugene Ionesco, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, Marian Mercer, Charles Schulz, Cyril Cusak, Eric Severaid, Rich Little, Wendy Turnbull, Robert Goulet, Don Hahn.


311A.D. Saint Peter of Alexandria, was the last saint to be martyred before Roman Emperor Constantine lifted the ban on Christianity in 312.

1539- Fountains Abbey, the largest and richest Cistercian abbey in England, was surrendered to the officers of King Henry VIII.

1716- In Boston, the first African lion ever seen in America was put on exhibit.

1804- Napoleon Bonaparte made public the results of a national referendum held to decide whether the French people wanted him to be crowned emperor. 3.5 million votes for yes, 2,500 for no. Since Napoleon was a dictator who was kicking the butts of most of the nation of Europe, most Frenchmen wouldn’t argue much, and he had been planning his coronation for months anyhow.

1825-Kappa Alpha of Union College NY is established. The first college Greek Letter fraternity house.

1832- In New York the first public transportation began, a streetcar pulled along iron rails by a team of horses. A ticket cost 12 pennies. The last horse car bus stopped in 1926.

1865- Lewis Carroll sent a copy of the completed manuscript of his fantasy Alice in Wonderland to his 12 year old friend and inspiration Alice Liddell. Carroll later published the book with his own money. This is one of the first books written solely to amuse children, and not to educate or discipline them.

1868- At first baseball games were played in a convenient cow pasture. Today the baseball game was played in an enclosed field. It was in San Francisco at Folsom & 25th St..

1896- AA. Stagg of The University of Chicago invented the football huddle.

1913- THE DISAPPEARANCE OF AMBROSE BIERCE- Ambrose Bierce was one of the more popular U.S. writers of the late 19th century. A savage wit and social critic, he pioneered sardonic anti-war fiction long before Kurt Vonnegut. But by 1913 the 71-year-old curmudgeon found himself alone, ill, his creative powers failing and not looking forward to old age. So on November 6th he announced his intention to travel to Mexico at the height of the revolution there and hopefully get killed:
“Ah, to be an old gringo stood up before a Mexican firing squad, now that is Euthanasia!” This day he gave his last known newspaper interview in Laredo Texas, then disappeared forever. A niece claimed he sent her a letter from Chihuahua on Dec. 26th but that letter has never been found. The popular story is that he was executed by Pancho Villa. But Villa and his people never recalled meeting Bierce. Plus Villa was followed around by so many American news correspondents and newsreel cameras that a person as famous as Ambrose Bierce was sure to be noticed. Bierce’s family believed he was killed in action at Oijinaga in early 1914 and his body burned with the others.
As he planned, Ambrose Bierce has the last laugh. “I want no one to find my bones!” And no one ever has.

1917- The National Hockey League-NHL, was founded in Montreal. The first teams The Quebec Bulldogs, Ottawa Senators, Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Arenas, and Montreal Maroons.

1926- Potato Chips, or Crisps in the UK, were invented in the 1880’s and served in restaurants and fairgrounds. This day Mrs. Laura Scudder was the first to put potato chips in a bag and sold them as a handy snack food. She sold them out of the back of her pickup truck until the business picked up. She ran her own company until 1959.

1940- Woody Woodpecker first appeared in an Andy Panda cartoon "Knock-Knock.’

1942- Rommel's "Dash to the Wire"- After months of inconclusive melee' in the Libyan desert, Gen. Rommel's German Afrika Korps broke through the British 8th Army and made a beeline for the Egyptian border. His plan was to cut the Suez canal, overrun the Middle East oilfields and link up with Vichy troops in Lebanon and Syria, and Nazi units rolling down from southern Russia into Iraq. But the German army in Russia never got that far and on the road to Egypt, Rommel would finally be stopped at an Egyptian railroad crossing called El Alamein.

1945- Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie recorded KoKo, the first bebop Jazz single. Instead of big bands as was the fashion, they used a smaller quintet. The pianist at the session didn’t have his New York union card, so after his solo, Dizzy dropped his trumpet and did the piano backup to Birds’ solo. The term Bop came from an earlier Lionel Hampton hit “Hey-Bop-A-ReBop”. Jazz critic Ira Gitler picked up on the witty interplay between musicians, and wrote of the new sound as BeBop.

1963- The day after John Kennedy’s funeral at a secret location in Lindenhurst New Jersey a meeting was held of Mafia under bosses to get a briefing on just what the heck just happened in Dallas? Jack Ruby, who had killed JFK’s assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, was a known Mafia hitman used for “clean up jobs”.
Retired Mafia Don Bill Bonano, the son of Joe Bananas, claims he and other crime bosses were told by representatives of Tony Marcello and Santos Traficante that they were behind the JFK shooting and it was all “a local matter”. Both men were the targets of heavy government racketeering probes pursued by Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. They explained that there were four shooters that day including the patsy.
Dallas officer Tibbet was supposed to take out Oswald the patsy right after the shooting but Oswald had killed him first, so Jimmy Roselli had arranged for Jack Ruby to go in to fix things. Believe it or not!

1965- France launched its first space rocket, the Dianant-1, into orbit.

1970- During a visit to Manila, Pope Paul VI was attacked by a lunatic wielding a knife. The Pope was unhurt and continued his journey.

1975- Former Charles Manson follower Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme is convicted of trying to assassinate President Gerald Ford with a starters pistol.

1976- Sex Pistols Punk single “Anarchy in the UK” released.

1990- Acting on the example of Sony’s purchase of MGM-Columbia studios, Matushita (Panasonic) bought MCA- Universal studios for $6.6 billion. After a few fruitless years they sold it to the Bronfman’s group, the distillers of Seagram’s Whiskey.

1998- Tony Blair became the first British Prime Minister to address the Irish Parliament.
He said: We can no longer afford to be the Prisoners of History.”

2001- Columnist William Kristol proclaimed:” The endgame in Afghanistan is in sight!” The war went on instead for 20 more years.

2008- Terrorists attacked several top hotels in Mumbai (Bombay). They focused on trying to capture or kill American and British citizens and they shot up an Orthodox Jewish Chabad charity house, killing a rabbi and his wife. After four days of battle with Indian forces, they were all killed.
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Yesterday’s Question: What is the difference between sweetbreads, and sweetmeats?

Answer: Sweetbreads are offal food taken from the thymus gland, pancreas or genitalia of young animals, most often calves, pigs or lambs. They are roundish in shape and are a favorite ingredient in many European dishes. Sweetmeats are an archaic term for confectionery. The Elizabethans loved their sugared treats, and it could be fruit, fruit skins, nuts, ginger, or other spice roots, etc.