Quiz: Who was The Black Dahlia?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: “How do you know she is a witch? Well, she turned me into a newt!” What is a newt?
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History for 1/14/2022
Birthdays: Marc Anthony 82BC, Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Benedict Arnold, Hal Roach, Richard F. Outcault, Cecil Beaton, John Dos Passos, Lawrence Kasdan, Guy Williams, Andy Rooney, Julian Bond, Steven Soderbergh is 59, LL Cool J, Faye Dunaway is 81, Emily Watson is 55

350AD. The feast day of Saint Hilary of Poitiers- Saint Hilary was the father of church music. In exile in Phyrgia, he noticed pagans sang hymns to their gods, so he composed the first Christian music. The Halleluiah Chorus, Ave Maria, Silent Night, and “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Heaven” would follow in due time.

1604- King James I of England thought he could be like Roman Emperor Constantine, and use his royal prestige to resolve the theological disputes dividing Christianity. This day he convened at Hampton Court a grand synod of Anglican Bishops, Presbyterians, Baptists, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and Puritans to try and settle their differences. Nothing was really solved, but the only positive step was a motion was made to create a standardized translation of the Bible into English- The King James Edition.

1639- The Fundamental Orders of Connecticut, the first constitution for a colony, is established. The Connecticut territory was a disputed area between the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam and the English New Englanders until the English conquest of 1661. The personal intervention of the Duke of York prevented Long Island from being made part of Connecticut.

1699- The Pilgrims of Salem hold a day of fasting and prayer to atone for any people they may have unjustly executed as witches.

1797- Battle of Rivoli. Napoleon defeats the Austrians in Italy.

1831- Victor Hugo’s novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame first published.

1858- Italian terrorists throw three bombs at French Emperor Napoleon III’s carriage outside the Paris Opera. 8 killed and 158 wounded, but not the Imperial family.

1900- Giacomo Puccini's opera "Tosca" premiered in Rome.

1914- Henry Ford's assembly line process for building cars accelerates car production, thanks to a new chain system pulling the chassis along as they are worked on. As the system got faster and faster, the older, slower workers were replaced by younger ones. Hair dye sold at a premium in Detroit.

1943- Churchill and Roosevelt hold a summit meeting in Casablanca in North Africa. The Casablanca Declaration bound the allies to never negotiate less than a total surrender out of the Axis powers. It was felt that one of the reason Germany resorted to war only twenty years after The Great War was their denial that they were ever defeated.
At one point Churchill made a number of American diplomats and staff climb a high tower in the Casbah because he thought the setting sun would make a smashing good watercolor.

1952-The NBC "Today" show debuts with Dave Garroway, Jim Fleming and J. Fred Muggs the chimp.

1954- actress Marilyn Monroe married baseball star Joe DiMaggio.

1957- British Prime Minister Anthony Eden resigned, citing ill health, but more likely because he bungled The Suez Crisis.

1957- Humphrey Bogart died of esophageal cancer at age 57. When he was buried at Forrest Lawn, wife Lauren Bacall put in with his ashes a solid gold whistle inscribed with the famous line from "To Have and To Have Not"- 'If you ever need me, just whistle.' The group of friends around Bogie and Bacall were nicknamed ‘The Rat Pack”.
After Bogart’s death Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin made the Rat Pack famous.

1964- Hanna- Barbera's ' The Magilla Gorilla' cartoon show.

1967- HIPPIES! The first “ Human Be-In” in Golden Gate Park. The Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead performed. Allan Ginsburg, Ram Dass and Timothy Leary spoke. LSD was laced into turkey sandwiches, and soon the crowd of 30,000 was high. The national media played up the event, and the rest of America first saw the power of the Hippy youth culture, and heard the word like “psychedelic” and Timothy Leary saying “ Tune in, Turn on, Drop out.” It was the prelude to the Summer of Love.

1969- At the Academy Awards, Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day won best animated short. It is the last award credited to Walt Disney. Although he had died at the end of 1966, he had greenlit it and worked on it. Woolie Reitherman accepted the award.

1972- Norman Lear’s hit TV comedy series Sanford & Son premiered. Starring Red Fox, it was based on the English show Steptoe & Son.

1974- Sylvia Holland, British born story/concept artist at Disney on Fantasia/ Make Mine Music, died at age 74.

2004- Trying to channel JFK, President George W. Bush declared in his State of the Union speech his intention to return America to the Moon by 2020 and make a manned landing on Mars by 2030. To do this he gave NASA only one billion dollars more than their regular budget, while at the same time allocating $1.5 billion to fight gay marriage initiatives. In 2017 President Trump made a similar pledge to go to Mars.

2005- The Cassini-Huygens Probe landed on Saturn’s moon Titan.

2016- Actor Alan Rickman passed away at age 69 of pancreatic cancer.
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Yesterday’s Question: “How do you know she is a witch? Well, she turned me into a newt!” What is a newt?

Answer: A small lizard-like amphibian. In the middle ages some people believed that newts had magical powers, especially where fire was concerned.

Quiz: “How do you know she is a witch? Well, she turned me into a newt!” What is a newt?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: What disease was known in Medieval times as “ The King’s Evil”?
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HISTORY FOR 1/13/2022
Birthdays: Salmon P. Chase, Horatio Alger-1834, Sophie Tucker, Gwen Verdon, Robert Stack, Charles Nelson Reilly, Rip Taylor, Brandon Tartikoff, Julie Louise Dreyfus is 61, T. Bone Burnett, Patrick Dempsey, Orlando Bloom is 45

565A.D. THE NIKA SEDITION- In Constantinople, like Rome before her, the big spectator sport was chariot racing. Fans went crazy, lots of money wagered and charioteers were celebrities. Chariots were raced in teams like modern race cars (Team Unser, Team Ferrari etc.) and were distinguished by their colors. The big teams were the Blues and Greens. The Whites and the Reds were kind of second tier. They even had their own booster clubs, who carried their arguments into the streets and beat each other up.
On this day the hooliganism of the booster clubs got so out of hand that they rioted in the streets and burned down half of Constantinople. Emperor Justinian had to bring in the legions to restore order. The fan clubs were called in Latin FACTIOS, from where we get the words "fan, factions and fanatic".

1687- Father Eusebio Kino began his missionary work in the Spanish Southwest. He founded several missions in Arizona and helped introduce the horse, pairs of whom were brought over from Spain and released around Santa Fe to multiply in the wild. The Italian born Jesuit’s travels also proved that California was not a big island as previously thought.

1733- James Oglethorpe reached Charleston South Carolina with a 114 colonists plucked from prisons back in England. His goal was to sail down to the Savannah River and create a new colony to stand as a buffer state between Spanish Florida and the English holdings. He got there on Feb 1, and called his new colony after King George- Georgia.

1777- Virginia Governor Thomas Jefferson signed a bill in the legislature banning sodomy. The penalty for conviction was castration.

1847- Gen. Andres Pico signed the capitulation of Campo de Cahuenga (the little park across from Universal studios today), surrendering the northern Mexican state of Alta-California to U.S. Gen. John Fremont. Fremont, nicknamed "The Pathfinder", was the first Republican candidate for President in 1856, and when the Civil War began he was a General until the Confederates made a fool of him and he dropped from public view. During the Civil War Andres Pico served in the Yankee force that defeated an attempted Confederate invasion of California. I guess he figured one change of flag in a lifetime was enough.

1849- Battle of Chillianwallah. The British army under Lord Hugh Gough defeated the Sikh army of Sher Singh and conquered the Punjab. Gough was a blunt old style soldier. When his second mentioned the army was almost out of cannonballs, Gough responded:” Good! Then we shall be at them with the bayonet!” This was the first battle where common soldiers’ bravery was “mentioned in dispatches” by the commander. At one point a befuddled major issued the wrong orders to a key troop of cavalry who would have galloped away from the battle, but they were rallied by their chaplain. For his bravery, Lord Gough recommended the chaplain be promoted to Brevet-Bishop.

1854- The modern Accordion is patented by Anthony Faas. Polka fans rejoice!

1864- Stephen Foster, the composer of "My Old Kentucky Home" and "Camptown Races" was found dead, a penniless drunk in New York's Bowery slum. In his hands was a piece of paper with the words "Dear friends and gentle hearts... ". A Pennsylvania Yankee, despite writing a lot of music about the South, he only visited it once, to New Orleans in 1852.

1872- GRANDDUKE ALEXIS BUFFALO HUNT. Grand Duke Alexis the son of the Czar of Russia visited America. A sportsman, He expressed a desire to go out West and hunt real buffalo. The US Government ordered General Custer and Buffalo Bill to afford him every courtesy. Buffalo Bill even talked Sioux Chief Spotted Tail to move his tribe’s winter encampment 100 miles south so Alexis could experience real wild Indians. Starting today the hunting party hunted and feasted for two weeks, leaving behind a trail of champagne bottles and buffalo carcasses. The trip was a great success and Buffalo Bill realized there was big money to be made in giving fancy foreigners a taste of the Wild West…

1895- Oscar Wilde’s play The Ideal Husband, premiered in London.

1898- Under the banner headline "J'Accuse !", a Paris newspaper printed writer Emile Zola's stinging criticism of the French government's handling of the Dreyfus scandal, blowing the whole scandal wide open. It charged Dreyfus was scapegoated to take the wrap for informants higher up in the Army General Staff. The army sued Zola for libel, and he went into exile to avoid imprisonment. He returned one year later after an enquiry cleared Dreyfus.

1906- The first ad for a radio appeared in an American Science Magazine. It boasted an effective range of over one mile !

1910- Dr. Lee Deforest, experimenting with his new radio vacuum tubes broadcast singers from New York's Metropolitan Opera for the first time. The regular Texaco 'Live from the Met' broadcasts wouldn't get going until 1934.

1914- Folksinging union organizer Joe Hill was arrested in Utah on trumped up murder charges.

1925- THE FIRST CALIFORNIA GURU- Indian spiritual teacher Paramahansa Yogananda , then called “The Swami” settled in Los Angeles and gave his first lecture to an audience in LA Philharmonic Hall. He taught westerners about these new things called Yoga and Meditation. He was a cause celeb, with friends like Luther Burbank, Armelita Galli-Curci, and the Barrymores. His Autobiography of a Yogi became a bestseller, read by the folks like Steve Jobs.
He founded the Malibu Self-Realization Center in 1950. It featured one shovel-full of ashes from the funeral pyre of Mahatma Gandhi.

1929- Wyatt Earp died at 82 of prostate cancer in Los Angeles. After careers as a gunfighter, buffalo hunter, Dodge City marshal, prizefight referee, Yukon gold prospector and faroe dealer he finished in L.A. speculating in real estate. He liked to stroll onto Hollywood western movie sets to give advice to Tom Mix and William S. Hart on how they did it in the Old West. On the subject of the Gunfight of the OK Corral in 1881 he told so many different versions of what happened, that his account is considered unreliable. But no one denied that in all his gunfights he was never even scratched. He was buried in San Francisco's Jewish Cemetery because his third wife, ex-saloongirl Sadie Marcus was of that faith.
Wyatt Earp would have died totally forgotten but in his last years he was interviewed by a journalist named Stuart Lake who published a best selling biography in 1931 called Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal. After that the movies and TV took up his name to make him the most famous lawman in western history, which would have been a surprise to him.

1930- The Mickey Mouse comic strip first appeared in US newspapers. Walt Disney himself wrote them, Ub Iwerks penciled and Winn Smith inked.

1939- Col. Jacob Ruppert died, the brewing tycoon and owner of the NY Yankees during their glory years of Ruth, and Gehrig. His will left his millions to a chorus girl. She said “ they were just friends.”

1943- Movie star Frances Farmer was dragged out of a Hollywood hotel in a straightjacket. She screamed Rats! Rats! and listed her occupation on her arrest record as “c**ksucker”. Her career was ruined and she spent years in asylums. But it’s inconclusive whether she had actually suffered mental illness, or it was her mother overreacting to her sullen, temperamental nature.

1945- Sergei Prokoviev’s 5th Symphony (Classical) premiered in Moscow.

1946- In his comic strip, Dick Tracy first uses his two-way wrist radio.

1947- The comic strip “Steve Canyon”, by Milt Caniff first premiered in newspapers.

1953-" The Doctor's Plot"- Aging Soviet dictator Josef Stalin decided to launch a new purge and shoot and imprison thousands of people. He announced he had uncovered a conspiracy of counter revolutionists and spies to bribe doctors to poison top Soviet officials. Luckily Stalin died before he could kick off his new terror campaign. As he lay stricken with a stroke on his deathbed, his doctors were too afraid to treat him.

1957-THE FRISBEE went into production today. Two World War II fighter pilots who met in a German prison camp, Warren Fransconi and Walter Morrison, invented the plastic platter in a San Luis Obisbo home. Originally called Flying Saucers and Pluto’s Platters, they got the name Frisbee when they demonstrated it at Yale University. The students there were used to flipping pie platters at each other from the local Frisbee Pie Company, so when they played with the new disc, they cried “Frisbee, Frisbee!” which seemed to Walter a better name.
When Walt Morrison died in 2002, his family obeyed his last request, to have his body cremated, his ashes mixed with plastic, and molded into a Frisbee.

1958- Actress Jayne Mansfield married weightlifter Mickey Hargitay. Their daughter was Marisa Hargitay.

1962- In the wee hours of a rainy night, TV pioneer Ernie Kovacs died when he plowed his Corvair into a power pole at Beverly Glen and Santa Monica Blvd. He was attending a baby shower Billy Widler threw for Milton Berle and his wife. But it was also known that Ernie had a weakness for vodka and orange juice. At the funeral, the pastor said Ernie wanted his life summed up like this,” "I was born in Trenton, New Jersey in 1919 to a Hungarian couple. I've been smoking cigars ever since."

1979- The Young Men’s Christian Association filed a lawsuit against the rock group the Village People over their hit song “YMCA”.

1979- Russian animator Yuri Norstein’s masterpiece Tale of Tales premiered.

1985- Carol Wayne, an actress who played sexy blonde roles on comedy shows like Johnny Carson, drowned while swimming in Mexico. She was 41.

2002- While alone watching a football game on TV, Pres. George W. Bush almost choked to death on a pretzel.

2011- The huge Italian luxury cruise liner Casta Concordia ran aground on rocks off the coast of Umbria and capsized, killing 200. The captain of the ship was not present when the ship was in crisis because he was in his cabin with a hot Venezuelan woman. After the crash, he left his sinking ship early and was seen in town when everyone else was still trying to rescue survivors. He was jailed.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What disease was known in Medieval times as “The King’s Evil”?

Answer: Scrofula. It was believed the disease could be cured by only the touch of the monarchs hands. The Kings Touch.

QUIZ: What disease was known in Medieval times as, “ The King’s Evil”?

Answer to yesterdays question below: : In British slang, what is a toff? As in “ cads, toffs and bounders.”
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History for 1/12/2022
Birthdays: Pilgrim leader John Winthrop, Charles Perrault (Mother Goose), John Hancock, Edmund Burke, John Singer Sargent, Jack London, James Farmer the founder of CORE, Herman Goering, Eddie Selzer, "Smokin' Joe" Frazier, Tex Ritter, Martin Agronsky, Howard Stern is 67, Rush Limbaugh, Oliver Platt is 62, Wayne Wang, Tiffany, Kirstie Alley is 66, John Lasseter is 65

Festival of Sarasvati –the Hindu Goddess of Wisdom.

1493- All Jews ordered to leave Sicily.

1519- Vasco Nunez de Balboa, Spanish discoverer of the Pacific, was convicted of treason, rebellion and mistreatment of Indians and beheaded. The cause was probably more that the local colonial governor Pedro de Arias hated him.

1641- The Virginia Colony passed a law that if any Indian committed a crime, the first Indian seen, even if he was completely innocent, would be compelled to pay his fine.

1669- Buccaneer Henry Morgan convened a meeting of the Captains of the Coast, a meeting of pirates on board his frigate the Oxford. In their meeting they resolved to attack Cartagena Columbia, a rich Spanish port and staging area for Spanish treasure galleons. During the drunken celebrations someone fired a gun off in the Oxford’s powder magazine and the ensuing explosion killed 200. Arrr..!

1800- The frigate USS Experiment was attacked by ten pirate ships off Hispaniola.

1809- A group of Viennese businessmen convinced Ludwig Van Beethoven not to move to another city by paying him a yearly allowance. Beethoven constantly worried about money and pleaded poverty, yet after his death people found thousands of silver coins hidden in little pots and cupboards throughout his home. He used to charge people three marks to look at him through his window while he composed.

1812- The first Mississippi steamboat brought a cargo of cotton bales from Natchez to New Orleans to be loaded onto a transatlantic ship. This is the beginning of the riverboat trade Mark Twain made famous.

1898- Nationalist riots broke out in the Spanish colony of Cuba. U.S. President McKinley sent the battleship Maine to Havana harbor to protect American interests. Americans have coveted Cuba since James Madison's time. Just before the Civil War broke out, Southern businessmen paid mercenaries to conquer Cuba from Spain and bring her into the union as a new slave state. The U.S. threatened Spain with war over Cuba in 1870 and 1874 as well.

1928- NY police raid Alfred Knopf publishing offices, and seized 852 copies of the novel “The Well of Loneliness” by Radclyffe Hall, because it was thought to turn young girls into lesbians.

1928- Henry Grey and Ruth Snyder are electrocuted in Sing-Sing Prison for the murder of Mrs. Snyder's husband. The love triangle was the inspiration for the films 'Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice' and 'Body Heat". Press photographer Thomas Howard taped a small camera to his ankle and snapped a photo of Mrs Snyder frying in the chair. The New York Daily News published the photo on its front page.

1942- German submarine U-123 torpedoed the American tanker S.S. Norness right outside the entrance to New York Harbor. The incident sent panic up and down the Eastern seaboard. The New York Museum of Natural History even moved its Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton to Pittsburgh, to save it from Nazis attack.

1945- To the overture of thousands of heavy cannons and Katyusha rockets the Red army crossed the Vistula river in Poland and began its final offensive against the Third Reich. This would end with Hitler’s death and the fall of Berlin. The nickname the multiple firing Katyushas was “Stalin’s Pipe Organs”.

1945- Japan signed licensing contracts and received from Nazi Germany their plans for jet fighters. Work was begun on a Japanese version of the Messerschmidt ME 262, the worlds’ first jet fighter, but they were too late to affect the wars end. The first Japanese fighter jet flew over Tokyo on Aug 6th,1945, the same day Hiroshima was A-bombed.

1960-” The Scent of Mystery”- the first film in Smell-O-Vision.

1962- President John F. Kennedy signed Executive order 10988, mandating federal workers had the right to join unions and bargain collectively. In 2001 in the trauma over 9-11, President George W. Bush demanded his newly organized 50,000 member Department of Homeland Security be forbidden to unionize.

1965- NBC TV premiered Hullabaloo, a Rock & Roll dance show with lots of mini-skirted go-go dancers. ABC responded with Shindig.

1966- Holy Cult Classic! The TV show "Batman" with Adam West and Burt Ward, premiered.

1969- Super Bowl III at the Orange Bowl, Broadway Joe Namath and the underdog NY Jets upset the Baltimore Colts led by the legendary Johnny Unitas 16-7.

1970- The Biafran Civil War ended.

1971- “ ALL IN THE FAMILY” Norman Lear's TV sitcom debuted. Based on a popular British show Till Death Do Us Part, it broke new ground for American sitcoms by frankly discussing race working class prejudice, menopause, rape and other taboo subjects. The first show featured the sound of a toilet flushing. The networks were so worried about its explosive content ABC rejected the show twice, and CBS ran the first episodes with a long apologetic disclaimer. Carrol O’Connor, the actor who played Archie Bunker, was so convinced the show would flop, he demanded as part of his contract a round trip plane ticket home. The show ran for 13 years, a bushel of Emmy Awards and made Archie Bunker famous.

1971- Jesuit Father Daniel Berrigan, nun Sister Elizabeth McAllister and several others were indicted in Federal court for conspiracy. The Catholic clerics were trying to bring an end to the Vietnam War through non-violent acts of civil disobedience. After handcuffing themselves to missiles and the gates of army bases, the government alleged their scheme was to kidnap top Nixon diplomat Henry Kissinger and sabotage the State Department heating systems in the dead of winter. That was ever proven. All charges were eventually overturned.

1987- No mystery, Agatha Christie died at 88 of natural causes.

1995- Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen announced the name of their new partnership would be 'Dreamworks SKG'. Someone in Florida immediately bought the domain name “Dreamworks.com” and waited for their buyout offer. I heard it was $5,000.

1997-According to Arthur C. Clarkes 1968 book "2001, a Space Odyssey", the HAL-9000 computer was booted up today.

1998-The LEWINSKY SCANDAL- Former White House staffer Linda Tripp was frustrated her career in the Clinton Administration was going nowhere. This day she appeared in the office of independent special prosecutor Kenneth Starr with tape recordings she secretly made of her friend Monica Lewinsky. They admitted to a sexual affair with the President. Conservative Judge Starr had been investigating Slick-Willie Clinton for years. After spending $54 million tax dollars, he hadn’t found much. So he immediately leaped at this opportunity, and asked the Attorney General for an extension of his mandate.
Ms. Lewinsky had meant to keep her affair a secret, despite telling 11 friends. By autumn, the resultant scandal brought Washington to a standstill and only the second presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history. President Clinton first lied, then admitted to the affair, but was acquitted and served out his term anyway. Then Linda Tripp asked the public for donations for her legal defense fund for her violating federal wiretap laws “I am one of you...a David against a Goliath...Even $1,000 dollars would do..” She took the money and got a facelift.

2002-The Refusenik Movement began in Israel when 53 Israeli Army officers announced they refused to enforce the Likud Government’s policy in the West Bank & Gaza.
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Yesterdays’ Question: In British slang, what is a toff? As in “ cads, toffs and bounders.”

Answer: A toff was a British nickname for a man who effected an elitist, aristocratic accent and bearing. Monty Python would call them an “upper class twit”. Usually the type of character played by Terry Thomas.

Quiz: In British slang, what is a toff? As in “ cads, toffs and bounders.”

Yesterday’s question answered below: What does it mean when you say “Your name is Mudd?”
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History for 1/11/2022
Birthdays: Roman Emperor Theodosius I, Alexander Hamilton, Gliere, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Harry Selfridge the London department store guy, Rod Taylor, David Wolper, Lyle Lovett, Ben Crenshaw, Naomi Judd, Joan Baez, Stanley Tucci, Disney animator Prez Romanillos, Amanda Peet

Roman festival Carmentalia, or the Feast of the Nine Muses. Clio, Euterpe, Thalia, Melpomeni, Terpsichore, Erato, Polymnia, Ourania and Calliope.

1025- Byzantine Emperor John Tzimisces poisoned. He had become Emperor after seducing the previous emperor’s wife and assassinating him. John was succeeded by Basil II "the Bulgar Slayer".

1775- Frances Salvador, a South Carolina plantation owner was elected to the colony’s legislature. This makes him the first person of the Jewish faith to ever hold office in America. He was known as the Paul Revere of the South, because he raised the alarm through the countryside when the redcoats approached Charleston. One year later he was killed fighting British allied Cherokees.

1803 –U.S. diplomats James Monroe and Robert Livingston sailed for France to try and make a deal with Napoleon for the city of New Orleans. Instead, Napoleon sells them the entire U.S. Midwest, from the Bayous to Montana. The Louisiana Purchase.

1813- SAUVE’ QUI PEUT! “Every Man for Himself.” Joachim Murat was a bold cavalryman who rose to high command under Napoleon. He married Napoleon’s sister Caroline and was made the King of Naples. Back then that meant the bottom half of Italy, south of Rome. But after Napoleon’s disastrous retreat from Moscow, Murat began the New Year by changing sides. He abandoned the freezing French army recovering in Poland and announced he was taking Naples into the Grand Alliance against Napoleon. Even Nappy’s own sister Caroline endorsed his decision. But this amazing act of betrayal didn’t save his throne. Murat was still overthrown and shot.

1862- Abraham Lincoln accepted the resignation of Simon Cameron as Secretary of War. Lincoln said:” The only thing that man never stole was a red hot stove.” He replaced him with Edwin Stanton, a lawyer who was the first to get a client off a murder charge with a plea of temporary insanity.

1863- The Confederate Armies in Tennessee and Kentucky were commanded by General Baxton Bragg, a conscientious if sour and unimaginative man. Bragg wasted two near victories at Perryville and Stones River by ordering a retreat just when the Yankees were beaten. Southern newspapers called for his ouster.
This day Bragg demanded a letter of support from all his generals. His top divisional commanders Hardee, Cleburne, Cheatham and Breckenridge not only refused, they sent their own letters to Richmond calling him an incompetent coward. Nathan Bedford Forrest hated Bragg so much, he once pulled his sword on him. But Bragg had a friend in President Jefferson Davis. Baxton Bragg convinced Davis he was the innocent victim of a conspiracy. So Davis reconfirmed Bragg in command. Only after losing most of the state of Tennessee, was Bragg finally replaced. He was promoted, kicked upstairs.

1863- Battle of Arkansas Post. Union forces under John McClernand and David Dixon Porter capture a large Confederate fort guarding the conflux of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers. McClernand at one point was angling with the War Dept. to replace that drunk Ulysses S. Grant.

1879- THE ZULU WAR began. British control over the Boers (white afrikkaners of South Africa ) was always strained. The Governor of Capetown. Lord Chelmsford, decided to distract the Boers by picking a fight with neighboring KwaZulu, the Zulu Empire, the largest centralized black state in Africa. He had only vague instructions from the Foreign Office to do so. Still he was confident a few natives with spears wouldn't give a modern European army too much trouble. On Jan. 22nd the Zulu wiped out his army at Ishandlwana, inflicting the worst defeat on a British army in a generation. The full weight of the British Empire, including units brought from India and Canada, were required to finish a war started over nothing by a regional governor.

1892- French impressionist painter Paul Gaughin, aged 44, married a 13 year old Tahitian girl named Teha’amana who he called Tehura. His previous marriage to a Danish lady who gave him 5 children had broken up.

1908- President Teddy Roosevelt declared the entire Grand Canyon a National Monument. “The Ages have been at work at it and Man can only mar it.”

1913- Horse drawn public transport ended in Paris. As the last horse-omnibus moved through the streets. Parisians held mock funerals.

1922- Insulin first used to treat diabetes.

1942- Japanese forces attacked the Dutch East Indies and Borneo.

1942- In the dead of night, German submarine U-123 slipped into New York harbor, sailed right past the Statue of Liberty, up the Hudson about to where the George Washington Bridge would one day be, before turning back. Captain Reinhard Hardegen was surprised the Americans had not yet instituted black-out rules yet. The lights of Manhattan still twinkled brightly. On his way out of the harbor, he torpedoed a British tanker. Kapitan Hardegen survived the way and died in 2018 at the age of 105.

1943- American Communist writer Carlos Tresca was shot and killed on a New York street. His killer was never found. It’s been speculated he was killed by agents of Mussolini or even agents of Stalin.

1944- Mussolini has his foreign minister Count Ciano and his army chief Marshal De Bono, shot by firing squad. Count Ciano was his own son-in-law.

1948- President Harry Truman called for the creation of free, two-year community colleges for all those who desired a college education.

1949- The first recorded snowfall in Los Angeles.

1949- Cornerstone laid for Washington D.C.’s Islamic Center, the first major mosque in the US.

1963- A record was released in Britain called “Please, Please Me” recorded by a working class rock & roll band from Liverpool called The Beatles. It was their first hit.

1964- U.S. Surgeon General Luther Terry gave the first warnings against smoking. The Nazis had prohibited smoking in government buildings in 1939.

1965- Whisky-A-Go-Go, the first Disco opened on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Discotecque is French for record library. An earlier Whisky had opened in Chicago. The LA Whisky a Go Go opened with a live band led by Johnny Rivers, featuring a mini-skirted female DJ spinning records between sets from a suspended cage at the right of the stage. That July, the DJ danced during Rivers' set. The audience thought it was part of the act and the concept of Go-Go dancers was born. Groovy!

1995- After the Feds de-regulation of media ownership and the seeing the success of the Fox Network, Warner Bros collected six independent television stations around the US and this day started them off as the WB Network, today called the CW.

1999- John Stewart became the anchor of the Daily Show on Comedy Central.

2004- Harvard students Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz, and Chris Hughes, registered the domain name Facebook.com. It originally was a way for their classmates to rate female students they knew to be, “hot or not”.

2018- President Donald Trump earned the anger of the world when in an open meeting with senate leaders he said, “Why are we accepting people from shithole countries like Haiti, El Salvador and Africa, when we could have people from Norway?”
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Yesterday’ Question: What does it mean when you say “Your name is Mudd?”

Answer: Virginia country doctor Samuel Mudd was visited during the night by a desperate man on the run, suffering from a broken ankle. He set the man’s leg and sent him on his way. Turns out the man was John Wilkes Booth, who had just killed President Lincoln. For that act of charity, Mudd’s life was ruined. He was tried, sentenced to Dry Tortugas, America’s version of Devils Island. So saying You’re name is Mudd was a nice way of saying you’re really screwed.

Quiz: Many say Former President Trump’s decisions were made perfunctory. What does that mean?

Yesterdays’ question answer below: In New Orleans, what does it mean to join The Second Line?
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History for 1/9/2022
Birthdays: Richard Nixon, Woody Guthrie, Ray Bolger, William Powell, George Balanchine, Judith Krantz, Bob Denver, Crystal Gayle, Joan Baez, Simone de Beauvoir, Sir Rudolph Bing, Herbert Lom, Gypsy Rose Lee, Joely Richardson, J.K. Simmons is 67.

Festival of Janus, the namesake of January, Roman God of gateways and doors. Not to be confused, of course, with Terminus, God of borders and terminal points, Lemintinus the God of threshholds and stoops. Cardea the Goddess of hinges, or Forculus the God of the door leaves and sectioned doors.

1349- The Jews of Basel Switzerland were locked up in a warehouse and burned to death. Their neighbors accused them of bringing the Black Plague.

1570- Ivan the Terrible, just getting the suspicion that the city of Novgorod may be plotting a revolt, surrounded the city and massacred 20,000 people. Afterwards he told the survivors: " Forget your wrongs."

1768- Former English cavalry sergeant Phillip Astley combined trick riding in a tight circular ring, with a clown act, and some jugglers, and took it all on the road. The first traveling circus.

1769- Gaspar De Portola and St. Junipero Serra set sail from Mexico to colonize California. They sailed because many thought California was an island. The California coastline had been explored by Juan De Cabrillo, Sir Francis Drake and others 250 years earlier. But since there were no more gold-laden, Aztec-type cities to plunder, it was quickly forgotten. Conquistadors don’t surf. By the 1760s, Spain’s King Charles III was finally moved to order the colonization of California to limit the encroachment of Russian fur traders coming down into Mendocino, and the English claims to the Oregon territory.

1793- Aeronaut Jean Pierre Blanchard and his dog flew by hot air balloon from Philadelphia to Woodbury New Jersey. President George Washington was a spectator.

1806- In London, this day was the great funeral of Admiral Horatio Nelson, killed at the moment of victory in the Battle of Trafalgar. He was interred under the center of Saint Pauls Cathedral in a tomb built for Henry VIII's chancellor Cardinal Woolsey. Woolsey fell from royal favor before he ever got a chance to use it. The huge stone coffin stayed around in storage until a suitable hero popped up. An early example of recycling.

1825- Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams had dinner. The presidential election was deadlocked between Adams and Andrew Jackson with Clay a distant third. Andrew Jackson had won the popular votes, but the electoral votes were tied. Over sherry, Henry Clay offered all his electoral votes to Adams in exchange for the job of Secretary of State. So John Quincy Adams won the presidency with the electoral votes of states like Kentucky where hardly a soul had voted for him. People were furious over King Caucus and called it the stolen election. In the next election cycle Andy Jackson won easily and began major reform of the electoral system.

1847- After a small skirmish near San Gabriel Mission, Commodore Richard Stockton and the U.S. cavalry recaptured the pueblo of Los Angeles and ended resistance by the native population 'the Californios', to U.S. rule.

1847- First U.S. governor of New Mexico territory Charles Bent is murdered and scalped by angry Indians after the U. S. conquering army had moved on. His trading post- Bent’s Fort, still stands today.

1857- THE LAST BIG ONE. The Fort Tejon earthquake shook Los Angeles. This was the last major quake in Southern Cal of the great San Andreas Fault, an estimated 8.25! Because the area was so lightly populated, only two people were killed. One woman when her house collapsed on her, and an old man who had a heart attack. For the next big San Andreas quake? Stay tuned….

1860- The Star of the West, a ship sent to re-supply Union held Fort Sumter sitting out in Charleston Harbor, was fired on by South Carolina shore batteries on Morris Island and forced to turn around. These are the first hostile shots fired between North & South. But the incident was not enough to trigger the U.S. Civil War.

1914 -John Randolph Bray took out patents on the principles of film animation: cycles, arcs, keys and in-betweens. He even tried to sue Winsor McCay, who had already been using them for years.

1924- The breakfast cereal Wheaties invented.

1936- Actor John Gilbert died of a heart attack after years of alcohol abuse. The accepted reason was he was a has-been silent film star whose voice was too thin and squeaky for talking pictures. Actually his voice wasn't too bad, some of it may of had to do with his punching Louis B. Mayer in the mouth when Mayer made a crude remark about Gilbert's relationship with Greta Garbo -something like "Why marry her when you're getting it anyway ?.."-BOP! . Mayer got up and screamed: "I'll ruin you if it costs me millions!"
Gilbert's fading popularity and decline into alcohol as his second wife Virginia Bruce’s film career blossomed, was the inspiration for "A Star is Born".

1939- Top Looney Tunes director Frank Tashlin was hired by Walt Disney. He quit after two fruitless years, and he wrote a children’s book called the "Bear that Wasn’t" about his experiences. An early vice president of the Cartoonists Guild, he also joined the Mouse House to help unionize the studio. After a stint at Screen Gems, in 1945 Frank Tashlin went to Paramount’s live action division and became the director of the Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis comedies.

1959- The TV series Rawhide debuted, starring a young actor named Clint Eastwood. President Lyndon Johnson and Ladybird were big Rawhide fans.

1968- THE BATTLE OF QUE SANH- Que Sanh was a U.S. Marine firebase at the western tip of the Vietnamese DeMilitarized Zone. It was so placed to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail. This day Firebase Que Sanh was surrounded and attacked by huge North Vietnamese forces. General William Westmorland growled to his corps commanders "This will NOT be the American Dien Bien Phu !" Dien Bien Phu was the 1954 siege that defeated the French. The Battle of Que Sanh lasted until April with the Marines fighting off huge attacks.
The U.S. media at the time portrayed Que Sanh as an epic showdown in the tradition of Gettysburg or Guadalcanal, but to the Vietnamese General Ngyun Vo Giap, it was a feint to distract from the real offensive when the Tet Lunar holiday began....

1972- In a rare press conference by telephone from the Bahamas, reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes declared the biography done of him by Clifford Irving was a total fabrication.

1976- First day of shooting in Philadelphia of the movie Rocky. It was the first movie to utilize the Steadicam, a system that balanced hand-held camera shots.

1987- THE OCTOBER SURPRISE- Seven years later, The Ronald Reagan White House released a memorandum from 1980 proving the sales of weapons to Iran did bring about the release of the American Embassy hostages. Ronald Reagan had declared there was no ransom paid. His media spinners encouraged the idea that all the Old Gipper had to do was show up in the White House for the mad mullahs to release our people and hightail it outta’ town! Now the truth was out that Reagan lied, but it was too late, and not enough of a sound bite for a dazed & confused public.

2007- Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. “We didn’t realize we would change the world” a senior manager on the project recalled, “We just wanted to make an iPod that you can make a phone call on.”

2008- After his surprise win in the New Hampshire Primary, Barack Obama electrified the country with his speech:” Yes We Can.”

2021- Twitter suspended President Donald Trump’s account.
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Yesterday’s Question: In New Orleans, what does it mean to join The Second Line?

Answer: In New Orleans parades, after the main parade or “first line”, there is a “second line” of folks enjoying the music, marching along, dancing and perhaps dressed in special costumes. I think second line parades have often followed funeral processions and weddings, nowadays, there are second line parades that are held on their own, without a first line. It is like a moving block party.