Our friend actress Kellie O'Hara has scored a big hit as the lead in the Broadway revival of South Pacific. Kellie is doing the voice of Beth in our upcoming Car Talk animated series CLick & Clack, as the Wrench Turns. She was also Belle in the Broadway version of Beauty & the Beast. Congrats Kellie!

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2008/04/04/theater/reviews/04paci.html?scp=2&sq=South+Pacific&st=nyt

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Quiz: What is a fait d’accompli?

Quiz: Everything sounds nicer in French. What do these words mean- Pamplemousse, framboise, Chevaux du Frise.?
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History for 4/6/2008
Birthdays: Raphael of Urbino, Sacajawea, Ram Dass, Butch Cassidy, Gustav Moreau, Lowell Thomas, Merle Haggard, Billy Dee Williams, George Reeves, Michelle Phillips, Andre Previn, Barry Levinson is 66, Roy Thinnes, Zach Braff is 33

1327- Italian poet Petrarch first saw the love of his life- Laura de Sade at the Church of Sants Clara in Avignon France. Even though Petrarch was a monk and she was married, he loved her from afar and wrote some of the first Great Italian Love Poetry, preparing the way for the Renaissance. Laura de Sade was the distant ancestor of the famous sadist the Marquis de Sade, who will be born 400 years in the future.

1453-Turkish Sultan Mohammed II," The Scourge of Christendom", planted his standard before the St. Romanus Gate, and began the great siege of Constantinople, capitol of the Byzantine Empire. The siege was as long as that last sentence. The Turkish Army went to battle to the sounds of heavy percussion, drums and cymbals, reintroducing them into European music.

1520- Renaissance artist RAPHAEL of Urbino, died at 37 on his birthday. Vasari wrote of the great artist " He pursued pleasures and love affairs without moderation. On one occasion he went to excess, and returned home with a violent fever whereof he died soon after." Michelangelo, Leonardo and Titian lived to great old age.

1672- THE LAST DITCH EFFORT. French King Louis XIV invaded Holland with a huge army. England and Germany also declared war and piled on the tiny country. When the Duke of Buckingham advised the Dutch:” Don’t you see your country is lost?” The young William III of Orange replied defiantly” The best way to avoid seeing your country lost is to fight until you die in the last ditch” He coined the phrase “the last ditch effort”. The Dutch under William threw back the invaders from the gates of Amsterdam and eventually recovered all their land back.

1808- JOHN JACOB ASTOR founded the American Fur Company. Almost on the tail of Lewis and Clark Astor established a line of fur trading posts to the Pacific and set the basis for the Astor Family fortune.

1896- The first OLYMPIC GAMES of the modern era opened in Athens Greece. The last was closed by the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius in 391 A.D as a pagan festival. The Games were revived as the idea of Baron Pierre Coubertin, who became the first president of the IOC. These games also saw the first modern Marathon race. Appropriately it was won by a Greek- Spyridion Louis.

1906-THE FIRST ANIMATED FILM- Cartoonist James Stuart Blackton created sensation when Edison filmed him doing sequential drawings and they seemed to come alive. The film was The Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. Blackton made a fortune, lost it and was hit by a bus in 1941. But his animated antics paved the way for Mickey, Bugs,and Bart.

Blackton making like an artist

1909- Commander Robert Peary and his African American assistant Matthew Henson claimed to have been the first to reach the North Pole. Their claim was challenged but confirmed by the US Government in 1911. Today scholars say they were slightly off.

1917-THE UNITED STATES ENTERS WORD WAR ONE. Congress approved President Woodrow Wilson’s call for a declaration of war against Germany and her allies Austria, Turkey and Romania. In 19 months the war would cost two hundred thousand U.S. lives, cost $56 billion, and created dozens of millionaires. If you owned any stock in chemical companies like Dupont or gun makers like Remington, your stock went up 400%. Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to sit in Congress, voted against war. Twenty four years later in 1941 she was the only vote against World War Two. At first there was sincere doubt America could go into the Allied camp, after all they had as citizens one and one half million German, Hungarian and Austrian immigrant plus millions more of Jewish Americans who hated the Czar of Russia and 16 million Irish Americans who hated England plus American Isolationists who felt America's should not get involved in overseas arguments. So it was a difficult sell to the public, to say the least.

1929- Mahatma Ghandi and his thousands of followers complete their Salt March and make salt on the shores of the Indian Ocean in violation of the British State monopoly. This was the Indian equivalent of the Boston Tea Party. Ghandi was arrested soon after.

1931- The Little Orphan Annie radio show premiered. Remember kids to drink your Ovaltine and get out your de-coder rings.

1933- the Screen Writer's Guild, later the WGA, formed. It took about seven years for them to unionize screenwriting in Hollywood. Jack Warner called them : "Communists, Radical Bastards and Soap Box Sons of B*tches !" David O. Selznik, who prided himself on running a writer-friendly studio, when told of the Guild's formation told them: "What? You put a picket line in front of my studio and I'll mount a machine gun on the roof and mow you all down !!" Despite these protestations the Guild today represents all Hollywood writers.

1945- OPERATION FLOATING CHRYSANTHEMUM- The Japanese attack the U.S. Navy around Okinawa with 355 Kamikazi suicide planes. The concept seems nutty today but it had effect. More U.S. ships were sunk at this battle than in any time since Pearl Harbor. Casualty rates of sailors were so high that the War Dept. ordered a news blackout. The navy actually meditated a withdrawal from Okinawa at one point. Before the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Japanese High Command had 2,200 kamikaze planes hidden in mountain bunkers to await the US invasion of the Japanese home islands.

1951- Happy Birthday AstroBoy! According to the 1951 comic book by Osamu Tezuka, today Professor Elephant completed the little boy with the suction cup feet and pointed hairdo. Originally called Tetsuwan Atomo, he was named Astro Boy when Mushi Prod released the animated version theatrically in 1961.

1956- Elvis Presley signed his first movie deal with Paramount Pictures.

1968- Two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, police attacked the Black Panther Party at their Oakland HQ. In the furious shootout a member named Billy Hutton was killed, Eldridge Cleaver wounded and Bobby Seale arrested. This incident seemed to prove the black militants claims of police harassment and caused a firestorm of civic protest. The Black Panthers forged an alliance with the Anti-Vietnam War white students, SDS, and later the Hispanic militants the Young Lords and AIM, the American Indian Movement.

1974- ABBA, a new disco phenomenon from Sweden is introduced to the world when they win a Eurovision song contest. Mama Mia!

1994-The Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi are both killed when their plane crashed. It is never proved why the plane went down but violence broke out in the Rwandan capitol. The ethnic Hutus began a systematic killing of the Tutsi people. It was one of the worst genocides since the Holocaust.
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Yesterday’s Question: Everything sounds nicer in French. What do these words mean- Pamplemousse, framboise, Chevaux du Frise.?

Answer: Grapefruit, strawberries, a grisly wall of sharpened stakes in front of cannon for horsemen to impale themselves on.

Quiz: Everything sounds nicer in French. What do these words mean- Pamplemousse, framboise, Chevaux du Frise.?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: What is the Utah Teapot?
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History for 4/5/2008
Birthdays: Plato, Swineburne, Booker T. Washington, Josef Lister, Nadar, Jean Fragonard, Hicks Lokey, Nguyen Van Thieu, historian Robert Bloch, Gale Storm, Washington Atlee-Burpee the mail order seed king, Spencer Tracy, Frank Gorshin, Melvyn Douglas, Walter Huston, Nigel Hawthorne, Peter Greenaway, Gregory Peck, Roger Corman. Agnetha Faltskog of ABBA is 58, Colin Powell is 71, Betty Davis would have been 100 today. Betty quote:" Whenever they want a broad with balls, they call me!"

To the ancient Romans this was the Feast Day of the Goddess Fortuna Virilis, or Good Fortune.

1614- English King James I’s second parliament met. It was famous for enacting no laws, basically doing absolutely nothing. Briton’s rejoiced.

1860- GARABALDI AND “THE THOUSAND RED SHIRTS” LAUNCH THEIR INVASION OF SICILY. Of the several Italian leaders struggling to unify Italy Guisseppi Garabaldi was the least patient. While the King of Sardinia Vittorio Emanuel and his minister Cavour tried quiet gentle diplomacy, Garabaldi and his "red shirts" launched a unprovoked assault on the Bourbon Kingdom of Two Sicilies and told Vittorio-"You come from the North, I from the South." They met at the middle at Magenta and unified the Italian peninsula for the first time since the Roman Empire fell. While in the south Garabaldi's Northern Italian men wrote home of a new dish they tried- pasta with tomato sauce!

1869- Daniel Bakeman, recorded as the last surviving minuteman of George Washington’s Revolutionary army, died at age 109. A man who looked George Washington in the face lived long enough to be photographed by Matthew Brady.

1874- Johann Strauss Jr.’s operetta Die Fledermaus premiered in Vienna.

1887- Lord Acton wrote: “ Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

1892- THE JOHNSON COUNTY WAR- By the 1890's many great Wyoming cattle ranches were owned by Eastern or European companies. When cattle herds were decimated by the great frost of 1888 a labor dispute arose between the distant employers and the laid off cowboys, many of whom resorted to rustling to make a living. By 1892 the friction became so bad the Wyoming Cattlemen's Association hired a private train and filled it with hired Texas gunfighters and enough ammunition to kill everyone in three states and sent it to Johnson county. This day they pulled out of Cheyenne with orders to shoot or string up any and all rustlers, revolutionists and troublemakers. After killing two men on their list the word got out to the citizens of Casper Wyoming. They gathered en masse and surrounded the Texans in a ranch house laying siege to it, throwing lit dynamite sticks from an armored wagon and shooting at any cowpoke who dared show his face in a window.
The hapless hit men were finally rescued by the U.S. Army, who granted all a general amnesty. The incident was the basis for the movie "Heaven's Gate".

1913- Ebbets Field opened in Flatbush. The Brooklyn Dodgers defeat the New York Highlanders (Yankees) 3-2

1923- Lois Armstrong, King Oliver and the Creole Jazz Band took a train from Chicago to Richmond Indiana to record Chimes Blues. Satchmo’s first record.

1930 -James Dewar invented the Twinkie. Dewar ate two every day of his life and called them “The best darn-tootin idea I ever had!” As an experiment in 1996 five top French master chefs were given the assignment of trying to recreate a Twinkie using natural ingredients. They all failed.



1931- Fox Film Company dropped their option on young star John Wayne as a dud not going anywhere. Wayne eked out an existence doing cheap westerns for Republic and Monogram until John Ford made him a star in 1939’s Stagecoach.

1945- The first Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon.

1951- Republican Senator Robert Short read General Douglas MacArthur’s proclamation to the Communist Chinese on the floor of Congress. It read that if they didn’t withdraw from Korea, MacArthur would restart the Chinese Civil War and “Rain Nuclear Fire down upon their cities”. Gen. MacArthur had no permission from the State Department to make such a wild threats and it ruined all the behind the scenes maneuvers to get the Chinese to negotiate an end to the Korean War early. MacArthur had received a direct order from the President not to make any public statements about Korean policy, but the General ignored him. President Harry Trumans reacted-“I’m gonna fire that pompous Sunofabitch!”

1965- Julie Andrews had created the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady on Broadway. But when filming the motion picture the studio decided she was not a big enough star so they used Audrey Hepburn with a dubbed singing voice. But Ms Andrews had her revenge .At the Academy Awards My Fair Lady won Best Picture and Rex Harrison best actor but Julie Andrews won the best actress Oscar for Mary Poppins.

1963- The Lava Lamp invented by Dr Edward Craven Walker.

1969- Pope Paul VI abolished the big wide brimmed red hats (galeros) the cardinals wore.

1976- Eccentric Billionaire Howard Hughes died at age 76. Hughes had inherited his fathers tool company at 17 and built the mighty Hughes aircraft empire and RKO pictures. But after surviving several test plane crashes, he became addicted to pain killers and became increasing withdrawn from the world. He died a strange shut in, long haired and living on a diet of drugs and saving his urine in mason jars.

1985- Singer David Lee Roth quit the rock band Van Halen to pursue a solo career.

1994- Grunge rock star Kurt Kobain shot himself.

2003- Invading American forces began the Battle for Baghdad.

2030- FIRST CONTACT- According to Star Trek this is the day Professor Zephram Cochran adapted an old World War Three ICBM and invented the Warp Drive, enabling the Earth to begin deep space exploration, and during whose maiden flight he made the first contact with an alien race- from the planet Vulcan.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is the Utah Teapot? Also called the Newell Teapot?

Answer: For many years computer graphics were simple wireframe vector graphics with no internal mass. One scientist said they looked like “ glowing erector sets” on a green TV screen.
In 1975 Martin Newell, a researcher at the University of Utah, recreated the digital coordinates of his wife’s Melita teapot with the aid of student Jim Blinn. They made the first complex solid digital image. The Utah teapot became a symbol or mascot of the computer graphics industry for years afterwards.

Quiz: What is the Utah Teapot? Also called the Newell Teapot? ( hint: you CGI folks should know this…)

Answer to yesterday’s question below- Who coined the term- to start from scratch?
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History for 4/4/2008
Birthdays: Roman Emperor Caracalla, Cinema pioneer Edweard Muybridge, Maya Angelou, Frances Langford, Irv Spence- Tom & Jerry animator, Gil Hodges, Arthur Murray, Muddy Waters, Cloris Leachman, Dorothea Dix, Elmer Bernstein, Bijan, Robert Downey Jr is 43, Barry Pepper is 38, Hugo Weaving is 48, Heath Ledger would have been 29

Happy Birthday Agent Smith!

If you were a Roman today is the first day of the Megaleasian Festival in honor of Lunus the Moon god. Party! Par-tee!

In China today is Ching-Ming Tomb Sweeping Day.

636AD- Today is the Feast Day of Saint Isadore of Seville, the Patron Saint of the Internet. Don’t believe me? Check out http://www.catholic.org/saints

896 A.D.-THE SYNOD HORRENDIUS-One of the more bizarre incidents in Vatican history. Bishops Stephen and Formosan hated each other. When Formosan became pope Stephen had to bide his time in hiding. After Formosan's death Stephen became pope but was unsatisfied that he couldn't strike back at his old enemy. So Pope Stephen had Formosan's tomb opened and the corpse dressed in bishop's robes, sat up in a chair and put on trial for heresy. The cross examination was pretty strange, the prosecutor said things like :"His very silence is proof of his guilt!" The corpse was convicted, excommunicated, bounced around by a Roman mob and thrown in the Tiber. Pope Stephen VI later became the first pope to be killed in bed with someone's wife.

1561- A strange show in the sky of red discs and crosses was reported over Nuremberg Germany. An early UFO sighting?

1581- Queen Elizabeth I visited the Golden Hind, the ship which Francis Drake sailed around the world. The 'Great Pirate of the Unknown Seas" had plundered huge treasure ships and drove Spanish Colonial America crazy. The Spanish Ambassador to London demanded the pirate Drake lose his head, but Queen Elizabeth had a different use in mind for her sword- she knighted the Devon innkeeper's son.
The Golden Hind was kept in a prize anchorage for decades until age and dry rot caused her to fall to pieces. Ben Johnson wrote poems about Sir Francis Drake and Shakespeare's island of wizards in the Tempest may have been modeled on Drake's accounts of the strange stormy islands of Tierra Del Fuego in the Straights of Magellan.

1704 -British sea dog Admiral Rourke and Sir Cloudsley Shovel capture Gibraltar from Spain. Britain still owns it today, which really annoys Spain.

1841-PRESIDENT WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON DIED AFTER ONLY 31 DAYS IN OFFICE. “Old Tippicanoe”caught pneumonia giving his inauguration address in icy drizzle. No U.S. President had ever died in office before and no one knew if the Vice President was now only a caretaker until special elections or was he the president for the next for years. Vice President John Tyler set the rule by staying as President for four full years. People couldn't stand him. They called him "Your Accidency". When he got word of the President's death he was playing marbles with some children and was about to get his knuckles rapped for losing.

1850- The City of Los Angeles was incorporated under U.S. law.

1865- LINCOLN IN RICHMOND- Meanwhile against the wishes of his bodyguards that it was still too dangerous Abraham Lincoln toured the newly captured Confederate capitol of Richmond. Most of the white population had fled the smoldering city but crowds of jubilant black slaves pulled his coach and cheered that the Day of Jubilee had arrived. One man kneeled to him and Lincoln raised him up “Father, you no longer have to kneel to any other man, only God. You are Free. Free as air.” Lincoln walked over to the Confederate Executive Mansion and sat in Jefferson Davis’ chair, putting his feet up on his desk. He then visited the family of Rebel General George Pickett of the famous Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. The Pickett’s were friends of Abe and Mary Lincoln before the war and Abe enjoyed bouncing Pickett’s baby boy on his knee.

1924-Tom Milton first ran a Miller hot rod on the dry lake Cal bed at 151 mph.

1932- Louisiana Senator Huey Long tells Congress that 80% of America’s wealth was controlled by 20% of its population. According to Business Week in 1997 80% of America’s wealth was owned by 2% of its population and the top 175 richest people on Earth collectively own 50% of all the total wealth of the planet.

1952-CARTOON COMMIES- Nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell accused the owners of a New York commercial animation studio, Tempo Productions, of Communist sympathies. One of the owners was Disney Layoutman Dave Hilberman, who was a union organizer and was the only artist personally denounced by Walt Disney to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The F.B.I. began investigating Tempo and their Madison Avenue clients quickly pulled their business. Tempo closed, laying off 50 artists. Mr. Clean, Markie Maypo and the Hamm’s Beer Bear were once again safe from Red subversion.

1954- Arturo Toscanini , who had been making music since the 1880’s, conducted his final concert.

1958- Screen goddess Lana Turner and her gangster lover Johnny Stompanato had a violent argument that ended when Turner’s teenage daughter plunged a large kitchen knife into his chest. She was acquitted as justifiable homicide and some rumors maintain the daughter was covering for her mother’s actions. It was whispered Hollywood society ladies had nicknamed Stompanato’s male organ Oscar for it’s size.

1967- Van Nuys premier head shop Captain Ed’s Heads & Highs first opened for business.

1968- THE SETTLERS MOVEMENT- The Israeli government was trying to sort out what to do about the West Bank territories conquered in the Six Day War. This day a small group of ultra-conservative Jews called Gush Eymunim moved into a hotel the Arab city of Hebron and declared themselves a settlement. Minister Moshe Dayan wanted Jewish settlements but he wanted them to be alongside Arab communities, not displacing them. This was the first provocation by conservative settlers that would bedevil Palestinian-Israeli relations for the next forty years.

1968- DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING ASSASSINATED. The great civil rights leader was struck in the head by a dum-dum bullet fired from a high powered rifle while he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. His last words were teasing Jesse Jackson for not being dressed properly for going out to a dinner. Jesse was wearing a turtleneck instead of suit and tie. Dr. Benjamin Hooks ran to the phone to get help but the switchboard was not working. The motel manager's wife who usually ran the switchboard had seen the shooting and the shock had given her a heart attack. She died the next day. The Memphis police had always surrounded King's party with at least seven officers whenever he was in town. For some unknown reason that morning they were ordered to stand back at least seven blocks. It was the one-year anniversary of the speech where he declared his opposition to the Vietnam War. A man named James Earl Ray was later apprehended in England, confessed to the shooting and was given a life sentence. He later recanted his confession and said the FBI coerced him and he was taking orders from a mysterious contact man named Raul. James Earl Ray died in 1998. The King family reopened the investigation and a civil court ruled that Dr. King was probably killed by a conspiracy. When F.B.I. director J.Edgar Hoover heard about the assassination he did what he did the day John Kennedy was shot, he spent the day at the racetrack celebrating.

1968- When news of Martin Luther King's assassination got out 175 US cities suffered urban riots and street fighting . In Indianapolis Sen. Bobby Kennedy was scheduled to go speak to a mostly black ghetto crowd. His police escort refused to follow him out of fear. Kennedy went anyway, told the shocked audience the terrible news, made a reference to his own murdered brother, then proceeded to read them poetry from the Greek writer Aeschylus "We must tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world." Indianapolis was quiet that night.

1984- In George Orwell’s novel 1984 this is the day Winston Smith started a secret diary and first wrote the dangerous thought-crime “Down With Big Brother”.
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yesterday’s question- Who coined the term- to start from scratch?

Answer: Before formal stadiums were built for sports, the starting line of a footrace or horse race was literally a line scratched in the dirt. If you overshot the start too early, you were told by the judges to go back and start from scratch.

Quiz- What is the origin of the phrase- to start from scratch?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Who first coined the term “ The Band of Brothers”?
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History for 4/3/2008
Birthdays: King Henry IV of England (1361), Washington Irving, William Marcy " Boss" Tweed, Sally Rand the Fan Dancer, Ma Rainey, Iron Eyes Cody, Wayne Newton, Doris Day, Robert Sherwood, Virgil Grissom, Marsha Mason, Melissa Etheridge, Marlon Brando, Amanda Byrnes, David Hyde Pierce, Alec Baldwin is 50, Eddie Murphy is 46

In Ancient Greece the beginning of April was the Aphrodisia- the Festival of Aphrodite. Greeks would offer sacrifices to the Goddess of Love and some would visit the holy prostitutes in the great temple of Corinth. Gimme that Ole Time Religion…..

1730 -EMPEROR MOYTOY OF AMERICA- An English conman, Sir Alexander Cummings, had ingratiated himself into the council of the huge Cherokee Nation, then occupying most of Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky and Tennessee. In a scam to make himself look like the spokesperson of all native Americans Cummings convinced one Cherokee chief named Moytoy to travel to England and do ritual submission to King George II under the title Emperor Moytoy of the Americas! The Indians were confused but went along with what they thought was a gag. Cummings disappeared shortly after the truth came out, undoubtedly a wealthier man.

1882- JESSE JAMES SHOT-The famous outlaw had been living quietly with his family under the alias of Mr. Howard when he was murdered by his own gang members, his cousins Bob and William Ford. Jesse was shot in the back of the head while he was standing on a chair straightening a picture frame. His last words were: ”My, it’s awfully hot today...” He was 34. Jesse’s older brother Frank took the hint and went straight. Bob Ford went on tour giving lectures, re-enacting how he had killed Jesse. Finally in a mining camp someone blew him away with a shotgun.

1920- Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald got married.

1922- JOSEF STALIN made General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. In the scramble for power after the death of Lenin this move allowed him to consolidate his his hold on the top job and push out Leon Trotsky and the other top Bolsheviks like Zioniev, Kamieniev and Krupskaya. He made sure Lenin's last will and political testament was never made public. Stalin's real name was Djugashvili, his other code name that close friends were allowed to call him was 'Kobal'. He once told Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta :"The problem with Americans is your people don't know how to follow orders."

1930- Ras Tafari crowned Emperor of Ethiopia as Halie Selassie. The Jamaican movement called Rastafarians were named for him.

1948 -THE MARSHAL PLAN signed into law by President Truman. It called for 5 billion U.S. dollars to be spent to help 16 European countries rebuild their shattered economies after World War Two.

1968- In Memphis Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was supposed to give a sermon at the Temple Baptist Church but excused himself because of his workload and stress. Since he had openly come out against the Vietnam War the death threats had increased and it all weighed heavily on his mind. Rev. Ralph Abernathy telephoned from the church that the crowd was disappointed Dr. King had not showed up. "Martin, they don't want to hear me. They're here to hear you." So Dr King went to the church and delivered off-the-cuff the last great speech of his life: "I have been to the Mountain and have Seen the Promised Land, and though I may not get there with you, it is alright.". At one point he was startled when the wind outside caused a shutter to bang. Then he returned to the Lorraine Motel. He was murdered the next day.

1968- Stanley Kubrick's epic film "2001: A Space Odyssey" premiered. The N.Y. Times review said it was : " Somewhere between hypnotic and boring". Pauline Kael called it "monumentally unimaginative!" In a recent interview screenwriter Arthur C. Clarke said HAL the computer was not a coded reference to IBM . At the Oscars for that year Clarke and Kubrick lost the best screenplay award to Mel Brooks for the Producers. The film won only one Oscar, the only one Kubrick ever won, for visual effects.

1974- Even while the Watergate Scandal continued, this day the IRS reported President Richard Nixon had been paying taxes based on an income of only $15,000 a year when he was making at least $200,000 a year.

1975- Eccentric chess champion Bobby Fischer was stripped of his World Chess Championship for refusing to play any more matches to defend his title.

1984-THE COFFEE SHOP CONVERSION. Future President George W. Bush was a cocaine-snorting alcoholic who had been busted for drunk driving. This day he claimed he became Born-Again after meeting an evangelist in a coffee shop.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Who first coined the term “ The Band of Brothers”?

Answer: Alexander the Great’s bodyguard cavalry were called the Companions, but the credit goes to the Bard. In Shakespeare’s play Henry V, King Henry exhorts his soldiers to fight for him on the field of Agincourt “ We few, we happy few. We Band of Brothers. For any man who stands with me this day, be he ‘ere so base, shall be called my brother.” In 1805 in the British Navy, the fighting captains who clustered around Admiral Nelson were called the Band of Brothers. Major Winter of the 101st Airborne used the term to title his memoirs of WWII, and so we have it today.

Quiz: Who first coined the term “ The Band of Brothers”?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: What is the difference between Lager, Pilsner and Blonde Beer?
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History for 4/2/2008
Birthdays: Frankish Emperor Charlemagne, Giacomo Casanova, Hans Christian Andersen, Marvin Gaye, Emile Zola, Max Ernst, Buddy Ebsen, Sir Alec Guinness, Frederick Bartholdi, Emmy Lou Harris, Linda Hunt, Isiah Washington

430 a.d. Today is the feast day of Saint Mary the Egyptian, a former prostitute who repented by living naked and alone in the desert for 49 years, only appearing briefly at Easter time to take communion, and to get some more sunblock.

1459- Vlad II "Dracula" -Little Dragon, duke of Wallachia, shows why he got the nickname Vlad the Impaler by impaling the city council of Brasov high on stakes then eating lunch under their quivering bodies. Impaling was a torture of Turkish origin, where you had a huge sharpened stake hammered up into your body, then standing it up. A good executioner could keep the stake from piercing too many important organs, prolonging the agony of your death. This was Vlad’s preferred method of getting rid of inconvenient people. No wonder in the 1890’s when British author Bram Stoker was collecting folk tales in the Transylvanian mountains to use as source material for a gothic vampire novel he chose Dracula for it’s title. Another of Dracula’s favorite gags was when Turkish diplomats refused to take their hats off in his presence he had them nailed to the men’s heads, then chuckled as they rolled around on the floor in agony.

1520- Somewhere off the coast of what will one day be Argentina, Magellan's captains, convinced this crazy Portuguese turncoat didn’t know where he was going, try to mutiny and go home to Spain.

1800- Beethoven's First Symphony premiered. Vienna's leading music critic called it - 'a vulgar, impertinent explosion more expected from a military band than an orchestra!’

1801- BATTLE OF COPENHAGEN- The British Navy has a one day war with Denmark. The fleet was sent by London to intimidate the Danes into leaving Napoleon's anti-British blockade, but the Danes were more worried about a Russian-Swedish alliance forcing them to remain. So Admiral Nelson sailed his fleet into Copenhagen harbor and pounds it out with the Danish Navy and shore batteries. Nelson’s ships sailed up and down the drydocks pounding the unmasted Danish battleships in for repairs. Despite fearful manpower losses the British don't lose one ship while sinking or capturing 17 Danish top ships of the line.
The one-eyed, one armed Nelson gloried in battle. When a Danish cannon ball struck his mainmast showering him and his staff with burning splinters, he laughed and said: "Hot work, what ?" At one point the action got so desperate, that Nelson's superior Admiral Hyde Parker raised the ensign flags to break off battle and retreat. Nelson ignored them. He jokingly raised his spyglass to his dead eye and said :"What ensign flags ? I don't see any ensign flags !" Denmark made peace the next day and all the surviving combatants had a lovely dinner together at the Copenhagen Palace, as though nothing had happened.

1836- Charles Dickens married Elizabeth Howarth.

1865- The Confederate capitol Richmond finally fell to U.S. armies. More destruction to the city was done by looting Confederates and released prisoners than the enemy. Several large fires created the type of total urban destruction not to be seen again until the World Wars in the 20th Century.

1877- First man shot out of a cannon.

1877- The first White House egg rolling contest.

1943- Disney short 'Private Pluto' the first Chip & Dale cartoon.



1943-Happy Birthday SAT’s! This day Harvard Dean Henry Chauncey supervised the distribution to 316,000 High School seniors of the Army-Navy College Qualifying Test, later re-titled the Scholastic Aptitude Tests or SAT. This became a standardized test that manages every year to raise the stress level of seniors regardless of race, class or religion. Go On To Next Page.

1974-While actor David Niven was speaking at the Academy Awards telecast a nude streaker ran past him on nationwide television. Mr. Niven, completely unflustered, dryly commented: "The only laugh that man will ever get is by stripping off his clothes and showing off his shortcomings. "

1978-The t.v. show "Dallas" debuts.

1982- THE FALKLANDS WAR-Britain declared war on Argentina over the their takeover of the Falkland Islands. British tabloid papers called for a boycott of Argentine imports. It turns out the chief Argentine imports were bully-beef for SPAM and grass seed which nefarious jelly makers would use as imitation strawberry pips to convince unsuspecting customers that the jam they were buying was real strawberry. That'll bring them to their knees...

1981- John Welsh made CEO of General Electric. After automating factories and firing one third of his employees, he earned the name "Neutron Jack" after the bomb that kills people but leaves buildings intact.

1993- Bullocks Wilshire department store with the famous Tea Room closed.

1994-Disney chief executive Frank Wells is killed in a helicopter crash on a skiing trip. It’s been speculated that blowing snow off some high peaks caused a ice ball to be sucked into the copter’s air intake manifold. Clint Eastwood was supposed to be on that trip but couldn't make it. Billie Joel and Christie Brinkley had a similar scare with their helicopter on the same day. The death of the Disney CEO set in motion the events that would lead to Jeffrey Katzenberg forming Dreamworks and Michael Ovitz’s brief tenure as a mouseketeer and Michael Eisner’s eventual fall. In 1999 the Hollywood Reporter estimated that the little iceball cost the Walt Disney Company one billion dollars.

1996- Former President Lech Walesa, who led the first great people’s movement to overthrow a Communist dictatorship and was president of Poland for two terms and a Nobel Prize winner, gets his old job back repairing electric batteries at the Gydansk shipyard. The shipyard was later closed.

2004- Walt Disney Studio released HOME ON THE RANGE.

2005-Polish Pope John Paul II died after reigning for 26 years and making more Saints than any previous pope.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is the difference between Lager, Pilsner and Blonde Beer?

Answer: They are all the same. Also called Lawn Beer, cold Light Pilsner became the preferred beer in America after the Prohibition, Depression and Dustbowl eliminated all of the other more exotic European type brews. Only recently have these beers returned to America, but because of our archaic Prohibition laws many are still watered down to keep the alcohol content low, which is why foreign beers taste better.

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