July 26th, 2008 sat
July 26th, 2008

No question for today as I am busy wrapping up my business at the San Diego Comicon.

---------------------------------------------------------
History for 7/26/2008
Birthdays: Salvador Allende, Serge Koussevitsky, George Bernard Shaw, Gracie Allen,
Carl Jung, Stanley Kubrick, Blake Edwards, George Grosz, Pearl Buck, Jason Robards Jr, Aldous Huxley, Jean Shepard, Vivian Vance, Emil Jannings, Sandra Bullock is 44, Kevin Spacey is 47, Kate Beckinsdale, Mick Jagger is 65-!

1533- Athawuallpa, Emperor of the Incas, was executed by Francisco Pizzarro. The Great Inca was captured by ambush at Cajamarca and forced to fill a large room with gold and two of silver to get his release. This was accomplished but Pizzarro decided to kill him anyway as a heretic. Athawallpa accepted baptism out of fear of being burned alive, the Inca mummified their kings and carried their remains around like saints relics, being burned denied you access into the next world. So he was generously garroted-strangled with a twisting stick behind the rope. The Spaniards burned his body anyway. The Inca didn't completely submit but withdrew deeper into the Andes and fought on for 70 more years. Pizzarro became first governor of Peru and lived in Lima, where he was run through with a sword during a feud with another Spanish noble family.

1656 – Rembrandt van Rijn declared bankruptcy.

1694- The Bank of England opened on London's Threadneedle Street. It issued the first bank checks.

1826- School teacher Cayetano Ripoll became the last person executed for heresy by the Spanish Inquisition, which had been raging since 1492. Napoleon had suspended their activities when he occupied the country in 1808, but they restarted after he left.

1861- Mark Twain left St. Jo Missouri to go west and sit out the Civil War. He went with his brother Oren Clemmens who had been appointed to administer the Nevada territory.

1887 - 1st Esperanto book published.

1903 The FIRST TRANSCONTINENTAL AUTO TRIP- Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson, mechanic Sewell J. Crocker and Bud the Wonderdog in their Winton Touring Car rode into New York City, having left San Francisco sixty-three days before. They are the first to cross the United States by automobile. They did it to win a $50 bet that you could cross the country by auto in 90 days. Jackson won the bet but spent $8,000 of his own money to do it. He was hailed as the Great Automobilist and his car was put on display bedecked with flags.

1917- The last two-horse street car made it’s final run down Broadway. There were now more automobiles than horses on the streets of American cities.

1925- Exhausted by his verbal battle with Clarence Darrow in the just concluded Scopes Monkey Trial, famed statesman William Jennings Bryan died in his sleep.

1947- HAPPY BIRTHDAY CIA ! Pres. Truman signs the National Security Act, creating the CIA, the NSC ,The Joint Chiefs and all those other groups that draw unscrutinsed gov't budgets and tick off all the folks at Air America.

1951- Charlie Chaplin driven into exile by red-baiters. He was on a holiday to Britain when he learned his visa had been revoked by the U.S. government. He didn't return until 1972. Despite his immense achivements in Hollywood History, when the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated later that year, Chaplin’s name was deliberately excluded.

1959- KPFK , Los Angeles lefty alternative radio of the Pacifica Network, starts up.

1984- Edward Gein died peacefully in a prison for the criminally insane.
Gein was arrested in 1957 and sentenced to life for mass murder. Police found his farm in Wisconsin decorated with human body parts and heads in the freezer and in the stove, and the dried cadaver of his mother. His story inspired "Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs".

1991 – Childrens comic Paul Reubens aka Pee Wee Herman was arrested in Florida for pleasuring himself in an adult movie theater. The film was Naughty Nurse Nancy. In 2003 he was busted a second time for collecting kiddy porn.

1995- After a year of investigation the General Accounting Office noted that all documents pertaining to the Rosswell UFO Incident of 1947 had disappeared or been destroyed. Hmmm.






http://blogs.kpbs.org/index.php/comic-con/comments/pbs_as_the_wrench_turns/

Great feedback from our show at the San Diego Comicon!


SORRY I'VE BEEN OUT OF TOUCH,the Comicon has been pretty hectic. Both my panels went very well, and there was a great audience of Car Talk stalwarts to see the Click & CLack show. Hooked up with old friends like Sergio Aragones, and Berni Wrightson.

http://www.helintheworld.blogspot.com/good photos on friend Helen's blog.

More when I get home. This entry is over a latte at Starbucks in Oceanside,Ca.



-------------------------
Quiz: To Berliners, what is Die Mauer?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Who are the Jews of China?
----------------------------------------------------------

History for 7/25/2008
Birthdays: Bishop Theitmar of Merseberg-975AD, Arthur Balfour, Thomas Eakins, Maxfield Parrish, Stuart K. Hine 1899- missionary who wrote the hymn "How Great Thou Art", Walter Payton, Walter Brennan, David Belasco, Adnan Khashoggi, Imam, Jack Gilford, Illeana Douglas, Estelle Getty, Matt LeBlanc, Louise Brown the first "test-tube" baby-conceived by invetrofertilization-1978

1570- Czar Ivan IV once more demonstrated why his got the name Ivan the Terrible by ordering mass executions of his supposed enemies in Moscow. This day he had Boyar Prince Viskavati hanged from a gallows and slowly sliced up with knives, allowing him to live just long enough to watch Ivan rape his wife and daughter.

1593- Henry IV, after a long religious-civil war had made himself King of all of France except Paris, which was holding out against him. When he asked why they were so stubborn in their resistance they said it was because he was a Protestant. "Well then," the King said-"Paris is well worth a Mass!" and he converted to Catholicism.

1788- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completed his Symphony #40 in G minor.

1822- General Augustin Iturbide has himself crowned Emperor of Mexico.

1846 -The Spanish-Californios residents of Los Angeles chase the U.S. occupying force out of town a second time.

1871- Samuel Colt patents the "peacemaker", the most famous Western sixgun. Gunfighters filed off the barrel sight so it wouldn't catch on your clothes during a quickdraw, and carried it "5 beans in the wheel" meaning while walking they kept it set at the one empty chamber, so it doesn't accidentally go off in the holster and shoot you in the foot, which might look embarrassing. Most shootists carried it in their belts or a waist high holster. Wild Bill Hickok carried his 1860 Navy Colts backwards in a red sash. The familiar low-on-the-hip two gun holsters didn't become common until cowboys saw them in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show in the 1880’s. Colonel Colt got very rich from his invention, and had an annoying habit of shooting his guns off in courtrooms and restaurants like Yosemite Sam. His private collection of sixguns is on exhibit at the Gene Autry Western Museum.

1871 An electric Carrousel was patented by Wilhelm Schneider, Davenport, Iowa

1897- Young writer Jack London went to the Klondike to look for gold. He didn’t find much but did get material for a lot of good stories.

1898- The US army invaded Puerto Rico. Spain had granted the island home rule but America got possession of it in the treaty ending the Spanish American War. It’s been a US commonwealth ever since. Puerto Ricans were given full US citizenship in 1917 and self government in 1942. As of the last referendum in 1993 Puerto Ricans still preferred the status of commonwealth.

1909-THE WRISTWATCH- Frenchman Charles Bleriot flew the English Channel. Bleriot had no fuel gauge in his plane. He knew the rate that his plane burned fuel so he kept a clock in his cockpit to mark the time. But a problem was the engines
vibrations would rattle the clock to uselessness. So he asked his friend Charles Cartier the jeweler to make him a reliable timepiece free from vibrations. Cartier created a pocketwatch that you could strap to your wrist with the clockface showing- the Wristwatch. By World War One wristwatches supplanted pocketwatches as the standard male accessory.

1920- The French Army occupies Damascus after Lawrence of Arabia and Faisal's All-Arab Congress government fail. Faisal's son was given the Kingdom of Mesopotamia (Iraq) after his claims to the Hejaz region was trumped by Saudi King Ibn Saud. The French would hold Syria as a colony after World War Two which is why the Syrians have never been very pro-western since.

1936-Orchard Beach opened in the North Bronx.

1940- In Nazi occupied Paris a Gestapo agent walks into the French offices of MGM studios and confiscates the release prints of "Gone With The Wind." They are taken to Berlin for a screening for top Nazis officials. Gone with the Wind was one of Hitler’s favorite movies.

1943- The Birth of L.A. Smog! A newspaper headline from this date mentions a 'gas-attack' of exhaust and haze that reduced visibility to three short blocks.

1944- Operation Cobra- The Allies break out of the Normandy beachheads and hedgerows and unleash Patton's fresh Third army into the French interior countryside. Between now and the Battle of the Bulge the German Army can do little more than retreat to the Rhine.

1951- CBS conducts the first broadcast of color television. Still NBC made color tv popular in the mid 1960's.

1953-Chuck Jone's "Duck Dodgers in the 24 and 1/2 Century".

1953- New York City Subway fares rise from 10cents to 15 cents. Subway tokens are issued for the first time.

1959-"The Kitchen Debates" Vice President Richard Nixon traded catty comments with Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev at the American kitchen of the future exhibit in a Moscow Trade Show.

1965 – Folk Music star Bob Dylan was booed off stage at the Newport Folk Festival for using an electric guitar. Alan Lomax the great Smithsonian Folk Music historian got into a fistfight over it and Pete Seeger threatened to pull the electric plugs.

1968-Pope Paul VI published the encyclical Humane Vitae, which set the Church policy against all forms of birth control other than the Rhythm Method. No to the Pill, Condoms and other contraception. This made the Pope a real drag to the Swinging Sixties.

1969 - 1st performance of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young at the Fillmore East in NYC.

1969 – Senator Edward Kennedy plead guilty to leaving scene of an accident a week after the Chappaquiddick car accident that killed campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne.

1972- The story was broken of the Tuskeegee Experiments- that in the late 1940’s and 50’s the US Government did medical experiments on unwilling humans, injecting with them with syphilis and other diseases. The subjects used were exclusively African American men. One went mad and leapt out of a window. President Clinton officially apologized to the survivors in 1993.

1975 - "A Chorus Line," longest-running Broadway show (6,137), premiered.

1984- Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became 1st woman to walk in space

1985- Movie star Rock Hudson publicly acknowledged that he had AIDS.

1990 - Roseanne Barr sings the National Anthem at a San Diego Padre game, joke- impersonating ball players by spitting , grabbing her crotch and screeching during her rendition. It didn’t go over well with the more patriotically minded in that conservative town.

2000- An Air France Concord supersonic airliner exploded on takeoff, killing everyone on board. The investigation proved a piece of metal debris that fell off the previous Continental Airliner exploded one of the Concords tires and the resultant wreckage was sucked into the planes engine. Both Britain and France suspended SST flights for over a year and in 2003 discontinued them forever as being too expensive.
---------------------------------------------------------------
Yesterday’s Question: Who were the Jews of China?

Answer; There are several dialects spoken in China, Mandarin, Cantonese, Nu. The Hakka speaking people are known for not having their own home province, and despite the rootlessness they have a strong culture, language and cuisine. So they are called the Jews of China.


July 24th, 2008 thurs
July 24th, 2008

Registered at the Comicon yesterday. It's already a mob scene there, and today's supposed to be the slow day. Frank Miller will speak at the Eisner Awards about Will Eisner, and many tributes to the late Dave Stevens (Rocketeer).


-------------------------------------
Question: Who are called the Jews of China?

Yesterday’s Question Answered below: What was Winston Churchill’s Black Dog?
----------------------------------------------------
History for 7/24/2008
Birthdays: Simon Bolivar, Aemilia Earhart, Alexander Dumas fils, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Graves, Pat Oliphant, Bela Abzug, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ruth Buzzi, Lynda Carter, Chief Dan George, Robert Hays, Gus Van Sant, Anna Paquin, Michael “Kramer” Richards, J-Lo Jennifer Lopez is 39

1656- Jewish philosopher Benedict Spinoza was excommunicated by the Rabbis of the Portuguese Synagogue in the Hague. His radical ideas of God made Jews, Catholics, Protestants and even some other humanists attack him, but his ideas formed the basis for modern rationalist philosophy. A German writer called Spinoza “Der Gott bedrunken Mensch” The Man Drunk on God. Albert Einstein, Kant, Goethe and Voltaire were all inspired by the philosophy of Spinoza.

1701- HAPPY BIRTHDAY MOTOWN!- After paddling in birchbark canoes 49 days from Quebec, French explorer Antoine de al Mothe-Cadillac and several families found the City of Detroit.

1794-The End of the "Reign of Terror". After tens of thousands of deaths and fear rampant, a group of French politicians called the Directorate overthrow Maximillien Robespierre and have him and his Jacobin followers guillotined. Robespierre didn't go quietly, a soldier named Charles Merda shot him in the face shouting Vive la Republique!" His brother Augustin Robespierre tried to escape out a window but just succeeded in breaking his hip.
At the guillotine Robespierre’s second in command Saint-Just was defiant to the end:
" I curse the dust I'm made of! I give it to you! Scatter my bones and Republics shall spring from them!" Robespierre wasn't so eloquent on the scaffold. He just bellowed in pain from the jaw wound. A woman shouted at him:" Go to Hell, Villain, and go knowing with you go the curses and maledictions of every wife, every mother !" When his head plopped into the basket Parisians cheered and applauded for 15 minutes. Then they overthrew and smashed the fearsome guillotine. Napoleon was careful to keep few political prisoners and if he executed any he used a firing squad. He shrank from ever using the hated guillotine. He renamed the place where the Guillotine was set up Place de la Concord.

1824- The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian published the results of the first ever US public opinion poll- a clear lead for Andrew Jackson for president.

1847- The Mormons reach the Great Salt Lake. After trekking 1500 miles for17 months since Illinois, leader Brigham Young said :"Enough. This is the place.'

1901- William Porter, also known as O.Henry, was released from jail after doing time for embezzlement. While in jail he found he had a talent for writing.

1934- Cecil B. DeMille’s epic film Cleopatra premiered. It starred Claudette Colbert wearing skimpy metal brassieres that Madonna could envy.

1938 - Instant coffee invented.

1948-HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARVIN THE MARTIAN- Warner's "Haredevil Hare" featuring the first Marvin the Martian.

1965- Bob Dylan released the song “Like a Rolling Stone”.

1966- Actor Montgomery Clift died at age 45.

1969- After successfully landing on the moon and returning, Apollo 11 safely splashes down in the ocean.

1980- In London’s Dorchester Hotel, comedian and actor Peter Sellers died of a heart attack. He was 46.

1984-Walt Disney's "The Black Cauldron" premiered. PigBoy!! Munchins and Crunchins!

2005- American Lance Armstrong won the Tour du France bicycle race for an unprecedented 7th time, even after surviving testicular cancer that had spread to his spine and brain.
-----------------------------------------
Yesterday’s Question: What was Winston Churchill’s Black Dog.

Answer: It was his name for a deep depression that took hold of him from time to time.


Click to enlarge

It's time once more to take the road down to San Diego for the annual orgy of mass- toon consumption THE SAN DIEGO COMICON. Since 1972 cartoonists, fantasy sci-fi fans and just generally weird people gather by the tens of thousands to fill the convention center there and see sneaks of future Comic inspired blockbusters.

Highlights this year will be Eric Goldberg and his daughter J.R. Goldberg both with booths signing their newest books. Eric's great new how-to on animation principles Character Animation Crash Course just came out. Jenny will be signing her work at Dark Horse Comics.

WHO IS ROCKET JOHNSON?- the book done by a dozen Walt Disney animators with too much time on their hands, will be available for signing as well. I'm teasing, it's all in a good cause, because the proceeds from the work will go for Muscular Dystrophy.

My own CLICK & CLACK'S AS THE WRENCH TURNS will have a panel of the creative heads moderated by yours truly, on Thurs Morning at 10:00AM at Room 2. We'll be hosting an invitation-only hospitality suite at the Marriott Gaslamp that evening.

A new episode is playing tonight, so there'll be much to talk about. Maybe I'll bring some copies of Drawing the Line to sign. com'on and drop in on us!

I'll also do some volunteer work at ASIFA/Hollywood's table and will be Friday on the State of the Industry Panel. If you've never been to a Comicon, it's worth going at least once for the social phenomenon.

Hmm...I wonder if the Imperial Stormtrooper-Elvis Impersonator and Buddy Jesus will be there again...?

--------------------------------------------------
Quiz: What was Winston Churchill’s Black Dog?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: In Hollywood, what are the Coogan Laws?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
History for 7/23/2008
Birthdays: Ethiopian Emperor Rastafari Halie Selassie "the Lion of Judah", Raymond Chandler, Raymond Booth, Don Drysdale, Gloria DeHaven, Arthur Treacher, Woody Harrelson, Pee Wee Reese, Bob Fosse, Harry Cohn, Don Imus, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Charisma Carpenter, Slash, Marlon Wayans, Monica Lewinsky, Daniel Radcliffe the Harry Potter star is 19

Today is the Ancient Roman Festival of Neptune, God of the Sea.

1866- The Cincinnatti Reds Baseball club formed. The oldest continual professional baseball team in the U.S.

1886- This was the day Bowery saloonkeeper Steve Brodie claimed he jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge.

1888 - John Boyd Dunlop patents the pneumatic rubber tire.

1904 – The Ice Cream Cone created by Charles E Menches during the LA Purchase Expo.

1908 -Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid IV is deposed by a group of militant army officers demanding modern reforms called the Young Turks.

1919- At the request of his Secretary of War McAdoo President Woodrow Wilson named the recently concluded great war against Germany as the "World War." It wasn’t called World War One until Time magazine labeled the conflict of 1939-45 World War Two. Franklin Roosevelt thought it" too depressing, like we were bound to have more."

1927 – Reacting to a public finally tired of the Tin Lizzy Model T and increased competition, the Ford Motor Co sells 1st the first Model A car.

1932-The Birthday of Fritos. Texas ice cream maker Elmer Doolin buys a recipe for corn chips from a Mexican fry cook for $100 dollars and starts the Frito-Lay Company.

1937-TENNIS DIPLOMACY- The US and Nazis Germany spent much of the late 1930’s testing their competing philosophies on sports playing fields- Democracy vs Aryan Racial Purity. First Jesse Owens at the Olympics, then prizefighters Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, this day even the semi-finals of the Davis Cup Tennis championship became a Yankees vs Nazis test. At Wimbeldon England American Dan Budge and German Baron Gottfried Von Krom played the game of their lives. Hitler had personally telephoned Von Krom the night before and ordered him to win. Ironically Von Krom was anti-Nazi. Dan Budge won after 6 nail biting tied sets. At one point American tennis great Bill Tilden who had been hired to coach the German team signaled that the match was in the bag. This provoked such an angry reaction from the audience that entertainers Jack Benny and Ed Sullivan tried to climb the fence to kick Tilden’s ass. But Budge came from behind to win. Von Krom took defeat like a gentleman but Hitler didn’t. Shortly upon his return to the fatherland the Gestapo arrested him for homosexual activity.

1962- The first simultaneous television broadcast via the new TelStar communications satellite from America to Europe.

1966- The comedy song "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha, Ha!" released. The singer was Napoleon XIV.

1968- Fred Blasie won an unprecedented fifth World Wrestling Championship belt. Blasie later gained more fame for recording the comedy song "Pencil Necked Geeks" and beating up comedian Andy Kaufman in the ring for calling wrestling a hoax.

1982- Actor Vic Morrow and two children are killed by a stunt helicopter while filming "Twilight Zone, the movie". The last scripted line before his death was "I’ll Keep you safe kids, I swear to God!" The children were being worked into the early morning hours without a caretaker supervisor in defiance of the Coogan Laws. Director John Landis was investigated but exonerated. The only filmworker to dare to testify against Landis, the wardrobe supervisor, was blacklisted and never worked in Hollywood again.

1984- Vanessa Williams the first black Miss America resigned after a photo spread of her in a nude lesbian scenario in Penthouse magazine. She denied any impropriety until the facts were obvious and she resigned. At the same time it was pointed out to Sylvester Stallone that he starred in a trashy porno called The Italian Stallion. Sly's reaction:" Eh, I was young, unemployed, and had to eat." Scandal over.

2003-THE DOWNING STREET MEMO- British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his cabinet have a meeting about Iraq. During that meeting Blairs’ people discuss as fact that the Bush Administration cooked the data to bring about a cassus-belli, the excuse for invasion. This story is buried by the media in the USA.

2004- Two armed men enter the Munch Museum in Norway and steal Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream at gunpoint. It was recovered with some water damage in 2007.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Yesterday’s Question: In Hollywood, what are the Coogan Laws?

Answer: Regulations regarding the welfare of child film stars. That they not lose school time, and their monies are kept in trust until they are of legal age. Named for Jackie Coogan, the child who acted with Charlie Chaplin in the silent classic: “The Kid”.


.

I just heard about the death of Charlie Downs. Charlie was one of the young animators promoted by Ward Kimball to build his TV animation crew. Charlie did beautiful work on the Disneyland Show, as well as Beany & Cecil, the Pink Panther, the Banana Splits, the Taarna Seq of Heavy Metal and the Pirate Captain in Raggedy Ann & Andy.

I didn't know him as well as I knew other animators, but I did do some of his inbetweens on Ann. Barney Posner and Mitch Rochon were doing his cleanups. The work was intricate and challenging. I learned a lot from it. Later during the citywide cartoonist strike of 1982, Charlie kept us all laughing doing the picketline in a pith helmet and roller skates, and later playing Dixieland Jazz with John Sperry.

Charlie suffered from debilitating illnesses in late life and spent his final years in a home. He was 81. But I will prefer to remember him in his youth as Charlie Downs,wild free spirit, and Charlie Downs, Disney Animator.

---------------------------------------------------------------
Question: In Hollywood, what are the Coogan Laws?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered below: What was the name of Winston Churchill’s bulldog?
------------------------------------------------------------------
History for 7/22/2007
Birthdays: Emma Lazarus, Eduard Hopper, Gregor Mendel, Alexander Calder, James Whale, Oscar De La Renta, Rose Kennedy, Stephen Vincent Benet, Jason Robards, Bob Dole, David Spade, Terence Stamp, Danny Glover, Alex Trebek, Bobby Sherman, Don Henley, William Dafoe, John Leguizamo, Albert Brooks- real name Albert Einstein, a nice name but already taken

1502- Amerigo Vespucci and a Portuguese expedition return from exploring the coast
of Brazil. It's popular nowadays to claim Columbus was ripped off by a German mapmaker from the credit of discovering America, but there's more to it than that. Columbus went to his grave believing he had discovered the outer coastline of Asia. Vespucci, after exploring from Brazil to South Carolina was the first to press the idea that this new coastline was not Asia, but something quite different. A new continent.

1793- THE MACKENZIE EXPEDITION- No, I’m sorry, but Louis & Clark weren’t the first white men to explore the American Continent to the Pacific. This day a party
of French-Canadian voyageurs and Scottish trappers led by Alexander Mackenzie reached the Georgian Straights in British Columbia ten years earlier. MacKenzie had been trying since 1789 to find the Pacific shore of Canada and stake British claims to
the great Canadian Northwest. In 1790 Mackenzie started out from Lake Athabasca
and followed a river that took him to the Arctic ocean instead of the Pacific -oops!
don’t you hate when that happens !? This time he reached the right salt water. His
1801 book "Travels to the Pacific" was studied and debated intensively by President Thomas Jefferson and his aide Meriwhether Lewis. It is the prime reason the U.S. plans for the Lewis & Clark expedition to the Pacific were given a top priority. For the first time since Christopher Columbus white settlers at last understood just how big the North American continent was-Mackenzie correctly estimated it was about three thousand miles wide.

1862- EMANCIPATION- President Abraham Lincoln called a secret cabinet meeting at
the White House in the dead of night. Abe opened the session by reading jokes from
a newspaper by humorist Artemus Ward. The cabinet officers exchanged confused glances. Secretary of State William Seward found Abe’s folksy-hillbilly humor annoying. He wondered if the Old Tycoon would ever get to the point. Lincoln then shocked them
all when he said that he intended to free the slaves by presidential proclamation
without the consent of Congress. Seward convinced him not do it until there was
a Union battle victory, because to do so at the then bad state of affairs would
look more like a last act of desperation. In a few weeks the Battle of Antietam
was fought, which wasn’t a great victory, but it was at least it wasn’t an embarrassing defeat, so then the Emancipation Proclamation was announced.

1864- THE BATTLE OF ATLANTA- Confederate leader John Bell Hood attempted to break the siege of the Atlanta by William Tecumseh Sherman. At the beginning of the fight Sherman’s gifted corps commander General Dan MacPherson was killed by a sniper. MacPherson was admired by the generals of both sides. Had he lived, many predicted he would have been President of the US. When MacPherson’s successor General John Logan asked for orders, Sherman told him "Just Fight’em. Fight them like Hell!" Hoods attempts at a break out failed and when Sherman threatened his last escape
route Hood abandoned Atlanta Sept. 2nd.

1921- Artist Man Ray arrived in Paris determined to go Dada!

1933- Wiley Post completed the first solo flight around the world. The following
year Post would die in the same plane crash as writer Will Rogers.

1934- Public Enemy #1-John Dillinger was shot down by G-Man Melvin Purvis coming
out of the Biograph Theater on Lincoln Ave. in Chicago. He had just seen Clark
Gable and Myrna Loy in Manhattan Melodrama. Dillinger 's identity was betrayed
by Anna Sage, the Woman in Red, a German-Romanian prostitute who didn't want
to be deported. As they came out of the theater Purvis shouted “STICKEM UP JOHNNIE!” Dillenger went into a crouch and went for his gun. Purvis and his men blew him away. Anna Sage was deported anyway. Melvin Purvis became the most famous lawman in America and in so doing earned the enmity of his publicity-hungry boss J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover slowly hounded Purvis out of the bureau and ruined his career. In 1961 Purvis took his own life with the same gun used to kill Dillinger. The F.B.I. sent no flowers or condolences to his family despite his being their greatest single field agent.

1967- Jimi Hendrix quits as opening act of the Monkees' tour.

1977- Walt Disney’s film "The Rescuers" featuring the last work of Disney
master animator Milt Kahl.

2002- Worldcom files for Chapter 11, the largest bankruptcy in US history. This
while the CEO Bernard Ebbers was building himself a new $94 million mansion. Ebbers got 25 years in the pen, and Worldcom reorganized as MCI. In 2003 the US Government awarded them a no-bid contract to build a cellular telephone system in Iraq.
------------------------------------------------------------
Yesterday’s Quiz: What was the name of Winston Churchill’s bulldog?

Answer: He didn’t own one. He had a tabby cat named Nelson, a budgy named Toby and standard black poodle named Rufus.


RSS