Quiz: What does the term mean, to be as thin as a rail?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered Below: What do you mean when you say something is problematic?
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History for 5/25/2019
Birthdays: Miles Davis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Josef Broz Tito, Igor Sikorsky, Pontormo, Bennett Cerf, Claude Akins, Leslie Uggams, Bill Bojangles Robinson, Frank Oz (Richard Frank Oznowicz), Beverly Sills, Robert Ludlum, Anne Heche, Irwin Winkler, Mike Myers is 56, Ray Stevenson is 55, Ian McKellen is 80

194BC- The Roman temple of Fortuna Virilis was dedicated on the Quirinal Hill.

1085- King Alfonso VI of Aragon took Toledo from the Moors.

1521- German Emperor Charles V declared Protestant reformer Martin Luther a heretic and an outlaw. The German states that rallied to Luther’s new teachings fought their emperor in the epic Schmalkalden Wars. Even Charles’ own sister became a Lutheran.

1660- RESTORATION DAY- After Oliver Cromwell executed King Charles I, he declared the British Monarchy abolished, and ruled England as a dictator. When Cromwell died of natural causes in 1659 he tried to leave his son Richard Cromwell in his place. But the son is not the father. The rickety system didn’t work, and Richard got the name “Tumbledown-Dick”. The Puritan junta led by General Monck had no other remedy to avoid chaos than recalling King Charles’ son Charles II from exile in Holland to come be king of England. This day King Charles entered London. For many years Restoration Day was a holiday in the UK.

1720- John Copson became the first Insurance Agent in the New World.

1787- First meeting of delegates in Philadelphia to write the U.S. Constitution.
Interestingly enough, nobody really asked them to. They were only summoned by Congress to iron out some bugs in the Articles of Confederation. However James Madison of Virginia and Alexander Hamilton of New York hatched a plan to chuck the whole system and write a whole new document.

1810- When Napoleon had conquered Spain, the colonies of Latin America puzzled about where to send taxes to. The French occupation government in Madrid or the Spanish Royal family in exile in Naples? This day Argentina had a better idea. They declared Independence.

1865- Mary Lincoln and her son Tad move out of the White House where she had been holed up in seclusion since the night of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. She had been too traumatized to attend the funeral or accompany the body back to Illinois.

1878- Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore premiered at the Savoy in London.

1895- Author and playwright Oscar Wilde sentenced to prison for sodomy.
The terrible conditions of his imprisonment in Redding Gaol will break his health and lead to his early death in exile in 1900. In a 1995 ceremony honoring him in Westminster Abbey it was revealed the laws that sentenced Wilde were still on the books in England.
The Victorian hypocrisy was compounded by the fact that so many great men of the British Empire privately acknowledged a preference for their own sex- Gordon of Khartoum, Sir Cecil Rhodes, Lawrence of Arabia, Nicholson the Tiger of the Punjab, and more. Queen Victoria once said after a meeting with Earl Kitchener of Omdurman: ”I was told my lord does not prefer the company of women. Still, I found him to be a pleasant speaker.”

1906- Putting on the Ritz! Swiss hotelier Cesar Ritz opened London’s Ritz Hotel. The first hotel to feature unheard of luxuries like a telephone and an indoor toilet in every suite!

1911-The beginnings of Mexican Revolution forced longtime dictator Gen. Jose Porfirio Diaz into exile. As a young man Diaz had fought the French under Juarez, but he later seized power for himself and ruled for thirty years. Under him Mexico industrialized and gained railroads, electric power, telephones and schools. He once said:" My poor Mexico. Too far from Heaven and too close to the United States."

1911- Thomas Mann visited Venice Italy. On the Lido Beach he was inspired to write A Death in Venice.

1915- Following up on the widespread massacres of Armenians, today the Ottoman Turkish government began mass deportations of their Armenian citizens.

1917-In World War I, Germany bombed London for the first time not with zeppelins but with new Gotha biplane bombers.

1923- Britain and France recognize the Hashemite Kingdom of TransJordan ruled by Abdallah Ibn Hussein.

1927- Ford had put America on wheels with the Model T, the most successful car model in history. Today they stopped making the Model T after 15 million cars, costing on average $300 each, $26 dollars down with monthly payments.

1932- Flamboyant New York Mayor Jimmy Walker testifies before the Seabury Commission. The corruption scandals of his administration will force him to resign.

1932-Mickey’s Revue, the first Disney cartoon that featured the character that would eventually be called Goofy.

1935- Babe Ruth hits his final home runs. The Bambino was in his last year, working out his contract with the Boston Braves. This day in Pittsburgh, the Babe showed his old form when he hit three home runs and a single. His record of 714 home runs held for over sixty years.

1942- First day shooting on the film “Casablanca”.

1944- Yugoslav partisan leader Marshal Tito escaped a massive German Blitzkreig attack designed just to kill him.

1946- Chuck Jones cartoon Hare Raising Hare, where Bugs meets a large shaggy monster named Gossamer “ Monsters are such interesting people…”

1950- Brooklyn Battery Tunnel opened in NYC.

1957- Sid Caesar's Your Show of Show's canceled after nearly a decade. The show used future star writers like Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner, Woody Allen and Neil Simon. They pioneered the executive strategy of producer Sylvester “Pat” Weaver to not let the show be owned by an entire sponsor, but the network would produce the show and would sell the sponsor commercial time in 30 second chunks. Pat Weaver’s daughter is Sigorney Weaver. Your Show of Shows was finally bested in the ratings by The Lawrence Welk Show.

1961- THE SPACE RACE- The United States had been chafing about how far ahead the Soviet Union was in the exploration of space. In an address to Congress this day President John F. Kennedy pledged the wealth and resources of the U.S. to beating the Soviets to the Moon. "Our pledge is within the next ten years to send a man to the moon and return him safely to Earth… We choose to go to the Moon not because it will be easy but because it is hard!" The Moon landing was achieved in 1969. Today it is acknowledged that without the motivation of the Cold War the conquest of the Moon would have happened much more slowly.

1965- The Saint Louis Gateway Arch dedicated.

1968- The Rolling Stones release the song Jumping Jack Flash.

1969- John Schlesinger’s film Midnight Cowboy premiered. The first X-rated film to ever win the Oscar for Best Film. “ Hey! I’m walking here!”

1977- The premiere of George Lucas’ movie Star Wars. The movie opened on the 28th. After Universal passed, Twentieth Century Fox picked up the distribution but let the backend go to Lucas, because they didn't think the film would do any serious business. Even George Lucas didn’t expect the film to break even. Fox's market research department told studio head Alan Ladd Jr: a. don't make this movie; no one will go see a science fiction movie; and b. change the title; no one will go see a movie with "War" in the title. Fox executives had predicted the studios monster hit for that summer would be "Dirty Mary and Crazy Larry" with Peter Fonda and Susan George.
Star Wars was a monster hit. It was like there were no other movies playing that summer. It sold out Grauman’s Chinese in Hollywood 50 weeks in a row. George Lucas became a seriously rich man and developed THX sound, digital animation and Industrial Light and Magic special effects. The film’s popularity ran so ahead of expectations, that at Christmas when you purchased a Star Wars game you got a box with a pink IOU note in it pledging to get you the game when they printed more.

1979- Ridley Scott's sci-fi classic Alien opened. It featured the exotic designs of Swiss artist Giger, and John Hurt with a classic case of chest pains!

1980- Evangelist Oral Roberts claimed he saw a 900-foot Jesus over his bed.

1983- Return of the Jedi opened. It was originally Revenge of the Jedi, but George Lucas changed the name just a month before.

1986- Hands Across America stunt to help hunger has 7 million people at one time holding hands at noon.

1994- First International Conference on the World Wide Web. Tim Berners-Lee and CERN talked on how to unify existing internet systems into the new World Wide Web.

2000- NUKE THE MOON. It was revealed that in 1958 US scientists planned to explode an atomic bomb on the moon. There would be no mushroom cloud because that requires an atmosphere, and the flash would only be visible for a few seconds. What the purpose would be other than to scare the BeeJeezus out of the Russkies no one knew. This dumb-ass idea was soon scrapped.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What do you mean when you say something is problematic?

Answer: Problematic is a concise, euphemistic way of saying a situation is complicated, difficult to discern or navigate, full of possible pitfalls and any results may be, at best, less than satisfactory or, worse, lead to even greater problems. (Thanks, FG)

Quiz: What do you mean when you say something is problematic?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: What was the first movie by The Marx Bros.?
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History for 5/24/2019
Birthdays: Jean Paul Marat, Queen Victoria, Walt Whitman, Emmanuel Leutze, Gary Burghoff, Priscilla Presley, Patti LaBelle, Tommy Chong of Cheech & Chong, Peter Ellenshaw, Kristin Scott Thomas is 59, Alfred Molina is 66, Jim Broadbent is 70, John C. Reilly is 54, Bob Dylan is 78

1429- Near Champagne, Joan of Arc was captured by the Burgundians. The independent Duchy of Burgundy then was the area where Belgium and Lorraine are today. They sold her to the English, who put her on trial as a witch. The French king, Charles VI, whom Joan had re-conquered half of France for, did absolutely nothing to help or ransom her, as was the custom with noble prisoners. She was tortured and burned at the stake. While other kings are nicknamed Lion Heart or The Great, Charles’ nickname was "The Well-Served."

1543- Astronomer Nicolas Copernicus died in Frombork, Poland. He made sure his book ‘Die Revolutionabus Orbium Coelestrum’, ‘On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Bodies’, would be published after his death. Legend says that after thirty years of trying to get it published, on his deathbed his friends laid the first copy on his pillow. The old scientist smiled and then died. In the book, he mathematically proved the Earth went around the Sun instead of visa-versa, and that the Earth rotated on its axis daily. The Pope, Martin Luther and John Calvin all agreed that Copernicus was crazy. In Scripture, hadn’t Joshua commanded the Sun to stand still? One question historians debate is whether Copernicus was really a priest or not. He worked for the Archbishop of Gniezno as a lay-clergyman that didn’t have to take Holy orders. No record exists of his saying a Mass. He never married, but he lived with his housekeeper like man and wife.

1578- Dutch Calvinists stage a march through Amsterdam. They dismiss the pro-Catholic town council and take over the large Catholic Cathedrals in the city for use by the new reformed faith.

1590- In Rome, construction of the great Dome of Saint Peters Basilica completed.

1626- MANHATTAN BOUGHT FROM THE INDIANS- Dutchman Peter Minuit stopped several Indians he found on the island and negotiated a purchase of the land for $24 dollars in trade goods, which at the time was not a bad price. To the Indians the purchase and ownership of land was crazy ("Why not also buy the clouds?"-Chief Seattle), and besides, the Hackensack-Lanapii Indians weren’t even from that area, they were just there hunting. Manhattoes is old Algonguin meaning " island of little hills". The Lenapii were named Canarsie by Frenchman Jacques Cartier “duck people”(canard) because their village on the Jamaica Bay (just west of present day J.F. Kennedy Airport,) was surmounted by a totem topped with the image of a duck.

1647- With the English Civil War almost over, the various factions of the Parliamentary side start to bicker and pull apart. Presbyterians and Puritans squabble over the spiritual direction of the nation and, on this day, Parliament ordered Oliver Cromwell to disband his New Model Army. The Army refused to disarm and instead marched on London- Cromwell declared: "This army is no mere assemblage of mercenaries, but the true embodiment of the will of the English people!” King Charles I, currently a prisoner in Scotland passing the time by learning to play a new game called “Golfe” would be encouraged to restart the civil war. Cromwell's Army, not Parliament, soon became the only real power in English politics.

1667- The War of Devolution- French King Louis XIV sent his armies in to conquer the Spanish Netherlands- aka Belgium, after the Spanish kings heir died and the title “devolved” to Louis’ wife Anne of Austria.

1738- English clergyman John Wesley pursued a stricter way to God, but a German Moravian preacher told him he wouldn’t really know God until God came to him and touched him. According to Wesley’s own diary this day at a sermon he “saw the light” the Magna Dies- the Great Day- the first of many revelations that would lead him to found the Methodists.

1804- On their route up the Missouri River, Lewis and Clark came ashore at Boone’s Settlement Missouri, near what will one day be Kansas City. They bought butter and corn. Did Lewis and Clark meet old Daniel Boone? Meriwether Lewis’ diary pages for that day are lost.

1818- Gen. Andrew Jackson captured Pensacola, capitol of the Spanish colony of Florida. Hotheaded Jackson decided the only way to stop Seminole Indian raids into Georgia territory was to invade Spanish Florida and chuck the Spanish Governor out. From Pensacola Jackson sent a message to the shocked Monroe Administration: " Gimme another regiment and I'll be in Key West in a fortnight. Gimme a frigate and I'll be in Cuba in a month!"
The Spanish were outraged, but their resources were already stretched to the limit fighting the armies of liberation in South America. They couldn’t fight the U.S. as well. What Jackson started violently, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams negotiated peacefully, the U.S. acquisition of Florida.

1830 –The poem "Mary Had A Little Lamb," was written.

1844- Samuel Morse sent the first telegraph message. From Washington to Baltimore it said: "What Hath God Wrought?" The message was from the Bible- Numbers 23:23.
Samuel Morse considered himself an artist first and did a little inventing to pay the bills. He heard a French inventor had speculated about the idea of telegraphy so he decided to build a working model and invented the Morse code system of representing letters with dots and dashes. Members of Congress and octogenarian former First Lady Dolly Madison were present at the ceremony. By the decade’s end, twenty thousand miles of telegraph wire crisscrossed the country.

1850- America’s first nationwide newspaper/magazine Harpers Weekly began.

1853- First cases reported of the Yellow Fever Epidemic in New Orleans. The city had swelled with ethnic immigrant Irish and Germans who had been forced to live and work in the low-rent swamp districts. 2,000 people or 10% of New Orleans population died in just four months, at the rate of 200 a day. The disaster was later evoked by Anne Rice in her book “ Interview with the Vampire.”

1856- The Potawattomie Massacre. In pro-slavery vs. anti-slavery infighting in Kansas, abolitionist John Brown dragged James Doyle and five other slaveholders out of bed at night. Announcing he was the Avenging Arm of the Lord, Brown beheaded them with an antique broadsword. Later in New York, when John Brown was feted by high society like Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Brown would omit this little detail about his life.

1861- The day after Virginia finalized its joining the Confederate States, US troops occupied Arlington and the Potomac riverbank opposite Washington DC. John Ellsworth was a personal friend of Abe and Mary Lincoln. When the Civil War broke out, Ellsworth raised a volunteer regiment of New York City firemen and dressed them in colorful Algerian costume. The roughneck 6th New York Fire Zouaves were shunned by Washington society at first until they proved their worth when they stopped a fire that would have destroyed a popular hotel.
This day, Col. Ellsworth and some men, crossed the Potomac River into Alexandria, Virginia to pull down a Confederate flag flying on top of a building that all Washington could see. As he was descending the stairs with the miscreant banner, the building’s caretaker pulled out a gun and shot Ellsworth dead. The Zouaves riddled him with bullets. All Washington turned out for a massive state funeral for the gallant Ellsworth, filled with Victorian pomp and maudlin sentiment. But the real Civil War had only just started. Few Americans understood that soon they would be mourning not one death, but tens of thousands.

1866 - Berkeley, California founded, named for George Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne.

1866- The Battle of Tuyuti- called the Waterloo of South America. Paraguayan strongman Francisco Solano Lopez fought a war of annihilation against the combined armies of Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil. Lopez fell; Paraguay was defeated and dismembered. So many of its male population were dead by the war’s end it was factored out of the regional balance of power.

1881-Canadian Ferry Princess Victoria sinks near London, Ontario drowning 220.

1883- The Brooklyn Bridge Opened. After 14 years building it and 27 deaths, including the architect John Roebling, and the crippling of his son Washington Roebling, President Chester Allen Arthur and the Mayor of New York Franklin Edison walked out on to the span to be met at the middle by Seth Low the Mayor of Brooklyn. Washington Roebling’s wife Emily Roebling was the first person to cross the bridge. At this time the Brooklyn Bridge was the tallest structure in the world.

1899 - 1st auto repair shop and car garage opens: The Back Bay Cycle and Motor Company of Boston.

1929- The Marx Brothers first movie comedy” The Coconuts” premiered.

1935- The first Baseball night game- Reds vs. Phillies.

1941- Paramount Pictures seized control of the Max Fleischer Studio in Miami. They allowed Max and Dave Fleischer another 26 weeks to complete their projects in house but as Paramount employees. They had to sign “resignations in blank” to be exercised at Paramount’s discretion when the 26 weeks were up. Max and Dave quit by then anyway. The studio was re-organized as Famous Studio, and moved back to New York in Jan 1943.

1941- The German battleship Bismarck sunk the largest warship in the British Navy, HMS Hood, when a lucky shot exploded her internal ammunition stockpile. The news shocked a world accustomed to the invincibility of the British Navy.

1949- The city of Shanghai was captured from the KMT by the communist Peoples Liberation Army of Mao tse Tung.

1950- Married movie star Ingrid Bergman shocked American morality by having an open love affair with neorealist film director Roberto Rosselini. This day they were finally married but the outcry of conservatives about this “Apostle of Degradation” was such that her image needed a makeover. So she played Saint Joan of Arc.

1954 - IBM announces vacuum tube "electronic" brain, a computer that could perform 10
million operations an hour.

1958 – United Press & International News Service merge into United Press International.

1976 - 1st commercial SST Concorde flight to North America -London to Wash DC.

1989- In Los Angeles, a spectacular fire destroyed the Art-Deco-Moderne all-wood landmark, the Pan Pacific Auditorium.

1991- Tri-Star Pictures $75 million-dollar flop "Hudson Hawk" opened.
Star Bruce Willis, whose own salary was $17 million, blamed the film’s costs on union filmworkers’ salaries. He would return to his car after a day’s shooting to find it covered with animal excrement. The film almost sank his career. Willis’ next two films, "Death Becomes Her" and 'Pulp Fiction", he did for scale. In 2000 he gave a $100,000 dollar donation to the SAG/AFTRA strike fund.

1991- Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise opened.

2000- Prime Minister Ehud Barak withdrew Israeli troops from southern Lebanon after a military occupation of eighteen years. The mastermind of the 1982 Lebanon invasion, General Ariel Sharon, later took Barak’s job. Israel invaded Lebanon again in 2006.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What was the first movie by The Marx Bros.?

Answer: The Cocoanuts.

Quiz: What was the first movie by The Marx Bros.?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: King Richard and Saladin were in the Third Crusade. How many Crusades were there?
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History for 5/23/2019
Birthdays: Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Scatman Crowthers, Rosemary Clooney, Artie Shaw, Alicia de Larrocha, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Melissa McBride, Drew Carey is 61, Joan Collins is 86

Today in ancient Rome was the feast of Vulcan.

37BC- Herod the Great captured Jerusalem back from a Greek pretender named Antigonus with the help of a Roman legion sent by his friend Marc Anthony. He reigned 37 years under Roman dominance and rebuilt the great temple of Solomon.

1498- In Rome, mystic monk Savonarola was hanged and his body burned for defying the Borgia Pope Alexander VI. Savonarola dominated Florence for a time like a Christian Ayatollah. Artists Michelangelo Buonarrotti, Sandro Botticelli and Luigi Della Robbia were admirers of his. Among his reforms were to hold a large Bonfire of the Vanities.

1533- King Henry VIII of England has his first wife Catharine of Aragon's marriage to him annulled. Henry's interest in multiple marriages wasn't merely a case of a roving eye, his father had won the throne in a bloody civil war (The War of the Roses) and it could all happen again if he didn't produce a male child fast. Despite his efforts, his Tudor dynasty was remembered for his female offspring, Mary I and Elizabeth I.

1618- THE DEFENESTRATION OF PRAGUE- The Protestant officials of Bohemia let the Catholic German Emperor know what they thought of his ultimatums by throwing his emissaries out of a window. "De-fenestrate" or to toss out a window. It was a low second floor window and a dung pile broke their fall, so only pride was injured. Catholic writers said they were caught by angels.
This event started the THIRTY YEARS WAR, a European Civil War, when Catholic and Protestant nations who's pent up anger had been boiling for decades broke forth. They battled for years, until nobody could remember who started the whole thing to begin with. Germany lost one quarter of her population and would not see this kind of devastation again until World War II.

1633- An edict of the King of France declared that only good Catholics would be allowed to settle in their colony of New France, already being called Canada. French Huguenots settled for the Anglo Dutch territories in Maryland, and New Amsterdam.

1701- Captain Kidd was hanged in London for piracy, robbery and killing a sailor with a bucket. His last letter was written to try to bribe the judge with his buried treasure. His body was coated with tar and left hanging in a cage suspended over Execution Wharf on the Thames for years afterward, as a warning to other would-be pirates.

1706- BATTLE OF RAMILIES- the Duke of Marlborough destroyed the main French army of Louis XIV under Marshal Villeroi. Carried away by the excitement, Marlborough personally led a cavalry charge sword in hand against the Maison Du Roi – the French elite Guards Cavalry. In the melee' he was knocked off his horse, trampled, and had to run for his life. As he was climbing up on another horse, the aide holding the reins had his head struck off by a cannon ball. His enthusiasm for hand-to-hand combat cooled, Marlborough spent the rest of the day in the rear directing the battle like a good general should.

1785- Ben Franklin invented bifocal glasses.

1861- Virginia, the most populous state and home of many presidents announced it was leaving the United States and joining the new Confederate States.

1865- Over a month after Richmond’s fall and Lee’s surrender the last bloodshed of the Civil War occured. In Texas, Confederate General Magruder defeated a small Yankee force near Galveston Bay.

1865- UNION VICTORY DAY-To celebrate the end of the American Civil War today was the Union Victory Parade in Washington D.C.- The massed Grand Armies of the Republic marched down Pennsylvania Ave. to celebrate their victory over the Confederacy. They passed President Andrew Johnson and Generals Grant and Sherman. Sherman refused to shake hands with Secretary of War Edwin Stanton because of Stanton's criticism of Sherman's surrender terms to the Confederate western armies.
27 year old Gen. Custer, showing off for the crowd, with his golden locks flowing, managed to pass the reviewing stand twice. He claimed his horse was skittish.
Despite the fact that 180.000 African American men fought in the war, no black regiments were allowed in the parade. Even the gallant 54th Mass who did the heroic attack on Fort Wagner was refused permission to march. The flags in the nation's capitol were returned to full mast for the first time since Lincoln's assassination. Union veterans later formed the first professional veterans aid association the Grand Army of the Republic (GAR), a forerunner of the VFW and the American Legion.

1873- The first Preakness horse race. The winner's name was Survivor.

1903- MOTHER JONES CHILDRENS CRUSADE- Seventy three year old activist and union organizer Mary "Mother Jones" Harris led a strike of 16,000 Philadelphia mill workers, all children under 12 years old, to demand a 55 hour workweek down from 60 hours a week. That July she led a march of thousands of working children from Philadelphia to President Teddy Roosevelt's home in Oyster Bay New York to demand the end of child labor.

1911- President Taft dedicated the central branch of the New York Public Library.

1931- In Max Fleischer's Silly Scandals, the girl character first seen in Dizzy Dishes is first called Betty Boop.

1934- BONNIE & CLYDE were blown away in a hail of machine gunfire as they drove down a road near Gisland, Louisiana. She was 24, he was 25. The ambush was set up by Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. An estimated 107 shots were fired in less than two minutes. Each body had about 28 bullets in them. Hamer smiled:" It’s a shame I had to bust the cap on a lady." Their bullet ridden car still pops up at auto shows from time to time.
In 1948 Frank Hamer was called out of retirement to help investigate voter fraud involving the first senate race of a young congressman named Lyndon B. Johnson.

1941-Hollywood union boss George Brown and assistant Willard Bioff (also a Frank Nitti bagman) were indicted on federal racketeering charges. Brown had been a Chicago operative and it was said 'he could drink 100 bottles of beer in one day". Their main contact among the Hollywood studio heads was Nicholas Schenck, the chairman of Loews Theaters and a head of MGM. Willie Bioff had tried to help Louis B. Mayer defeat the screen actors guild and hijack the Disney animator's union. After their jail time Bioff blew up in his car after turning government witness and Brown 'disappeared...' Nicholas Schenck meanwhile was pardoned by President Truman himself.

1945- Reinhard Gehlen was the head of Nazi intelligence and kept numerous agents in Washington, London and Moscow. After hiding for a month after the fall of Berlin, on this day he surrendered himself to the Americans. Initially, they wanted to put him on trial for war crimes, until he revealed his agents in Moscow were still on his payroll, which greatly interested General Wild Bill Donovan, who was reforming the O.S.S. for its new cold war responsibilities. So Generalobherst Reinhard Gehlen came to the U.S. and began his second career as a founder of the CIA.

1945- SS leader Heinrich Himmler committed suicide by biting a cyanide capsule shortly after being captured by the British authorities. "The bastards’ beat us!" A British army guard growled, when he heard the news.

1951- China formally annexed Tibet, a nation they invaded the year before.

1960- Nazi Adolph Eichmann was one of the architects of the Final Solution. He had been hiding in Argentina since the war ended. In 1957 a German prosecutor tipped off Israeli intelligence of Eichman’s whereabouts. This day Mossad agents kidnapped him in Buenos Aires and brought him to Israel for a public trial.

1969- The Who released their rock opera Tommy.

2003- In US occupied Iraq, American occupational viceroy L. Paul Bremmer overruled CIA and Pentagon advice and disbanded the Iraqi Army, internal security, Presidential Guards and police forces, about 500,000. With this one decree, thousands of angry, humiliated career officers were unemployed, robbed of their pensions and benefits, but allowed to keep their side arms. The Anti-American guerrilla insurgency exploded soon after. Many of the military leadership of ISIS were former Iraqi commanders. Paul Bremmers’ excuse was he was only following orders, while Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney claim they were surprised by the move.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: King Richard and Saladin were in the Third Crusade. How many Crusades were there?

Answer: Nine. The First one was the one that captured Jerusalem. The Third was Richard Lionhearted’s Crusade.

Quiz: King Richard and Saladin were in the Third Crusade. How many Crusades were there?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Jesus was a Jew, but he did not speak Hebrew. What language did he speak?
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History for 5/22/2019
Birthdays: Sir Lawrence Olivier, Mary Cassatt, Richard Wagner, Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle, T. Bone Pickens, Judith Christ, Irene Pappas, Paul Winfield, Richard Benjamin, Susan Strassberg, George Baker, Paul Winchell, Tommy John, Naomi Cambell, Dr. Robert Moog –inventor of the first music synthesizer, Ginnifer Goodwin is 41

In Kodiak Alaska, today is the Kodiak Crab Festival.

Happy National Bartender's Day

337AD- Emperor Constantine the Great, who raised Christianity from an illegal cult to the official religion of the Roman Empire, died after a ruling for 37 years. For some reason he himself didn't accept baptism until on his deathbed. His coins had Christ on one side and Sol Invictus, the Imperial Sun god on the other. To maintain order in the Empire until his son Constantius could be contacted and safely installed as leader in Constantinople, the embalmed corpse of Constantine continued to receive ambassadors and preside over meetings for the rest of the year.

1276- Today is the feast day of Saint Humility of Faenza, a nun who insisted she be bricked up into her cell with only a hole cut for food, water and to hear Mass and slept on her knees. After twelve years of this she was talked out of her cell to become an abbess.

1455- Battle of St. Albans- First battle of the WAR OF THE ROSES. The conflict wasn't about differing views on horticulture but a dynastic struggle between two powerful branches of the royal family of England. It seems a hundred years earlier King Edward III had a lot of lusty sons. His two eldest and lustiest were Edward the Black Prince and John of Gaunt. Edward lusted after Joan the fair Maid of Kent and John lusted after the throne. The Black Prince should have become The Black King, but he died young. Even then John couldn't be king because the rules said the throne went to the eldest Black Princeling, Richard II. So John of Gaunt had some lusty sons himself and they became the Lancaster branch of the family, after John's title as Earl of Lancaster- represented by the Red Rose. The Black Prince's progeny were the York family represented by the White Rose. They warred and conspired and murdered and had a lusty old time until they wiped each other out and were replaced by a third family, the Tudors.

1761-The first life insurance policy issued in the U.S.

1782- In a letter to one of his officers, George Washington rejected the calls to declare himself King of the United States. " It pains me to hear such ideas are circulating within the army. I regard such ideas with horror and condemn it severely. It seems pregnant with the greatest misfortunes that could ever befall our country."

1800- The US Congress disbanded the US Army as being unnecessary and expensive. We would make do with militia to deal with Indians and a coast guard.

1809- Battle of Aspern-Essling. Napoleons army was crossing the Danube when the rivers flood washed out two bridges cutting his army in two. Austrian general Archduke Charles jumped on the opportunity and attacked, driving back Nappys troops against the river. Marshal Lannes, one of Napoleon’s top combat officers, was killed.

1843- Wagons Ho! The Great Emigration- One of the largest wagon trains ever set out from Independence Missouri. Thousands of settlers driving a thousand head of cattle set off west along the Oregon Trail.

1854- The NEBRASKA COMPROMISE-One of many stop-gap legislative measures to try to stall the Civil War a few more years. In an attempt to keep the balance between slave states and free states entering the Union, Whig Congressmen strike a deal where Kansas and Nebraska could decide for themselves whether they wanted to enter the union as free or slave states. Nobody was pleased with this deal. Guerrilla war broke out in Kansas and the Whig party disintegrated from dissent. The dissident Whig politicians like Freemont and Lincoln soon formed a new political party. At first called the Anti-Nebraska Men, they later became the Black-Republicans or simply Republicans.

1856- San Francisco City supervisor James Casey was hanged by San Francisco City Vigilance Committee for murder. Casey had sought out the editor of the Evening Bulletin James King and shot him down on the street for insulting him in print. The vigilantes of the Barbary Coast then went into action.

1868- The Reno Gang robbed an Indiana express train of $96,000. The train was carrying the payroll of railroad and mine workers.

1915- The San Fernando Valley voted to become part of Los Angeles.

1920- THE DEARBORN INDEPENDENT- Henry Ford was a brilliant inventor with strange opinions. He overpaid assembly line workers, gave equal raises and promotions to black and Latino workers, but he hated Jews. He had purchased the newspaper the Dearborn Independent in 1918 and ran editorials in it with no advertising, totally his own opinions. This day the Independent Anti-Semitic campaign began with the headline -"The International Jew: The World’s Problem." 119 leading prominent Christian leaders including President Woodrow Wilson signed a petition demanding the slanderous publications be stopped, but Ford just ignored them. In 1934 when CBS correspondent William Shirer interviewed Chancellor Adolf Hitler in Berlin, he noticed Hitler had translations of the Dearborn Independent on his desk.

1922-The U.S. Supreme Court rules Baseball is not a monopoly but a sport. This is the Achilles heel issue everyone jumps on when arguments about baseball owners use of salary fixes and other group actions reach crescendo.

1925- First day of shooting on Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis.

1942- In a dark basement room in Pearl Harbor, the U.S. Navy Cryptographic Unit spent weeks at primitive computers breaking the Japanese radio codes. Cmdr Joe Rochefort paced the small room in his red smoking jacket, downing pots of coffee, and coming up with answers to riddles.
This day Joe Rochefort solved the most important riddle of his career. He deduced from intercepted radio messages that on June 4th Japan was going to feint a strike at the Aleutian Islands then launch its main battle fleet at Midway Island. Midway was a little dot of an island halfway between Japan and Hawaii. When Admiral Nimitz received this report he had to decide whether it was a trick or the real thing before committing his own aircraft carriers. If Nimitz was wrong and the fleet outmaneuvered, Hawaii, Australia and even the California coast might come under Japanese attack. Nimitz chose to fight at Midway and Rochefort proved to be right. The Battle of Midway would be the victory to turn the tide of the Pacific War.
In the month following the victory, the Chicago Tribune published the headline "Navy Breaks Jap Code" which cause Tokyo to change all their codes, so the work had to start all over again.

1949- Admiral James Forrestal was a top strategist during World War Two and was serving as President Truman’s Secretary of Defense. But the pressures of command in first the World War, then the Cold War may have been too much for him. Several days after President Truman awarded a medal to Forrestal he was admitted to the Bethesda Naval Hospital for nervous exhaustion. This day he leapt out a window with his bathrobe cord knotted around his neck. It was ruled a suicide.

1954- Bob Dylan’s Bar Mitzvah. Maseltov!

1955-The Golden Age of Radio ended when after 22 years the Jack Benny show was canceled. Once the top broadcast show in the nation, Benny went into television.

1957- A U.S. B-36 bomber accidentally dropped a Hydrogen Bomb on Albuquerque, New Mexico. The bombardier, Lt. Robert Carp lost his balance in the bomb bay area and grabbed for a handle that released the nuke. He ran back to the cockpit yelling: "I didn't touch anything! I didn't touch anything!" The bomb blew up a mesa and killed a cow but miraculously the thermonuclear triggering mechanism didn't kick in. This was kept a classified top secret until the late 1980's.

1964- In a speech at Ann Arbor, President Lyndon Johnson called for the Great Society. Johnson is remembered as the Vietnam War president but many of his Great Society social programs like Medicare and Medicaid are still in effect today.

1966- Bill Cosby became the first African-American to win an Emmy Award for starring in a television series- I-Spy.

1967- T.V. children's show Mr. Roger's Neighborhood debuted.

1969- PEOPLE’S PARK- The escalating tension between anti-war counter-culture and "the Establishment" picked an unusual item to fight over. A group of activists in Berkeley took over a 2 acre plot of land scheduled for development by the college. They planted grass and flowers and called it a "people’s park". Conservative Governor Ronald Reagan wasn’t going to tolerate any more tomfoolery and after officers and a chain link fence failed to keep out the squatters he sent in the National Guard. This day the confrontation between the bayonet wielding troops and hippies broke out into violence. One man was killed and another was blinded by riot gas. The college decided to yield the land for the park and it stays so today.

1972- The land of Ceylon declared itself the Republic of Sri Lanka.

1973- Scientist Bob Metcalfe of Xerox PARC patented the Ethernet.

1981- Peter Sutcliffe was convicted in the Yorkshire Ripper trial of murdering 13 women.

1985- Top Disney animation director Wolfgang "Woolie" Reitherman, who directed the Jungle Book among other films, died in a car crash following lunch at the Smoke House in Burbank.

1992- The film Encino Man premiered, with Brendan Frazier and Pauly Shore.

2001- Ted Turner and Jane Fonda divorced.

2002-The Ayatollahs of Iran outlaw Barbie dolls. They denounce Barbie as "agents of subversive Zionist Western propaganda."

2004- The heir to the Spanish throne Prince Felipe of Asturias married a TV news anchorwoman. The first commoner in the Spanish Royal family.

2004- Manmohar Singh was sworn in as Prime Minister of India. The first Sikh ever to hold this office. His Congress party had been led by Sonya Ghandi, but she declined the job. Let me see, if my husband P.M. Rajiv Ghandi was blown up by a suicide bomber, and my mother-in-law Indira was machined gunned by her own body guards, and my great uncle the Mahatma Ghandi was gutshot, maybe this job isn't a good career move for me?

2012- SpaceX, the world’s first privately owned spacecraft, blasted off to bring supplies to the International Space Station.
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Yesterday’s Question: Jesus was a Jew, but he did not speak Hebrew. What language did he speak?

Answer: Aramaic, a language today spoken by modern Kurds.

Quiz: Jesus was a Jew, but he did not speak Hebrew. What language did he speak?

Yesterday’s Question: The Last Code Talkers of WWII are passing away. What was a Code Talker?
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history for 5/21/2019
Birthdays: Plato, Fats Waller, Albrecht Durer, Andre Sakharov, Armand Hammer, Raymond Burr, John Hubley, Dennis Day, Sen. Al Franken, Harold Robbins, Judge Reinhold, Larry Terro called Mr. T. is 69

1420- After the great victory of Agincourt King Henry V of England and King Charles VI the Mad of France conclude a peace treaty at Troyes. Harry of England would marry the French king's daughter and become heir. But Henry's early death from dysentery at 35 canceled these plans. That would have been an early end to the Hundred Years War, making it the 75 Years War.

1471- King Henry VI of Lancaster had been captured in the battle of Tewkesbury when he was defeated in the War of the Roses. On this day the prisoner-king was slain in the Tower of London while at prayers. Many say he was done in by King Edward IV hunchbacked brother Richard of Gloucester (later Richard III). To this day the spot where the king was murdered is covered with flowers every May 21st.

1506- Christopher Columbus died. Bitter, forgotten, watching other people take credit for his discoveries.

1540- Hernand DeSoto discovered the Mississippi River, the "Father of the Waters."

1542- Hernand DeSoto's yellow fever ridden body is dumped in the Mississippi to keep it from being violated by outraged Indians.

1661- BLIMEY! TEA COMES TO ENGLAND- King Charles II of England the Merry Monarch, married Catherine of Braganza, the Princess of Portugal. Her dowry included Tangiers and Bombay India. Poor Catherine never gave Charles any children, and she had to endure his constant philandering with a steady stream of mistresses. But she did introduce Britain to a new custom. She preferred drinking tea to the more traditional English Ale. Soon everyone had to have some.

1674- COSSACKS AND BAGELS- Hetman of the Ukraine Jan III Sobieski crowned king of Poland. He replaced King Michael Wisnoviecki, of whom it was said ' He could speak nine languages, but had nothing intelligent to say in any of them!'. Jan Sobieski became a warrior king. Some speculate that the Bagel was invented to celebrate his victories over the Turks. It's supposedly shaped like his stirrup. Others say baloney, the hole is in the bagel so you can stack them on a stick and sell them on the street.

1780- Off the coast of Connecticut, General George Washington conferred with his allies Admiral DeGrasse and the Comte Du Rochambeau aboard DeGrasse’s flagship. Washington wanted to attack the British in occupied New York, but Rocheambeau had a better idea: to pretend to assault New York, then their troops and ships would rendezvous down in Virginia and trap British General Cornwallis in Virginia at a little place called Yorktown.
During this time a French officer wrote home about the curious American custom of whittling. “Whenever the American generals need to ponder great strategies, invariably they take out a knife and carve fruitlessly upon a small stick!”

1796- The President’s Slave is Missing- Oney Judge was a slave in the home of President Washington. When Washington would bring his household slaves north to New York and Philadelphia, it created a delicate legal problems because they were in free states. When Washington decided to send his slaves back to Virginia, and 23 year old Oney learned Martha intended to give her as a wedding present to her granddaughter, she chose tonight to run away. Philadelphia friends put her on a boat to New Hampshire. Washington angrily offered a ten dollar reward, and even discussed having her kidnapped and brought back South. But relented when advisors warned him it would cause an abolitionist riot on the docks. Oney stayed free in New Hampshire, married and died peacefully in 1845.

1800- Napoleon crossed the Alps into Italy at the Great Saint Bernard Pass. Napoleon waited for his last troops to complete the crossing, then thanked the monks who aided his men and crossed himself. Artist David portrayed Napoleon as crossing on a fierce white charger. In actuality he did the crossing on a donkey and at one point tucked his big gray overcoat between his legs and slid down a snowy mountain slope on his butt.

1821- Democratic delegates from several states gathered in Baltimore to consider their candidate for president. The first American political convention.

1856- CONGRESSIONAL SLUGFEST- During an angry debate on the slavery issue South Carolina Congressman Preston Brooks attacked and beat unconscious Massachusetts Representative Charles Sumner right on the floor of the House of Representatives. "I wore out my cane on his head!” Brooks boasted. Admirers sent Brooks more canes.
The slavery argument had become so ugly Congressman took to carrying concealed pistols and daggers to Capitol Hill. The news outraged abolitionists. In far away Kansas territory it affected preacher John Brown. "Dad went a little crazy when he got the news."-his son admitted. Brown would break into slave owners homes in the dead of night and announcing he was the Avenging Angel of the Lord, behead them with an antique broadsword.

1863- ARMY CHOW... The standard ration for soldiers in the Civil War was a baked flour biscuit called HardTack. Soldiers loved complaining about how awful it tasted and how hard it was to eat. ( Examples of hardtack 150 years old are still edible ). When Ulysses Grant marched his men around the back of the Confederate stronghold of Vicksburg Mississippi he cut himself off from his supply lines and let him men live off the local farms for food. His men feasted three weeks straight on roast turkey and goose, smoked hams, bacon, buttermilk and sweet potatoes. This relentlessly rich diet sparked an unusual protest on this day. As Grant was riding past his troops digging trenches they started yelling out loud: "Hardtack! Give us Hard Tack! A man can't work with this heavy food !" Soon thousands of men were chanting in unison "HARD-TACK! HARD-TACK!!' General Grant was forced to stop and pledge on the spot to restrict their diet back to the bland old biscuit.

1881- Clara Barton convened the first meeting of the American Red Cross as a branch of the International Red Cross.

1885- The pieces of the Statue of Liberty leave for the U.S. I wonder if the crates said "Some Assembly Required"? .The sculptor, Felix Bartholdi was requested to do something so that “Liberty does not leave France”, so he a made a smaller copy of the lady that is placed on the Seine facing westward. She and the Liberty in New York are facing one other.

1878- Mr. D.A. Buck of Waterbury Conn. received a patent for a low cost, mass produced pocket watch. Within a few years he was selling half a million Waterbury Watches a year at $3.50 each.

1892- Leoncavallo's opera "I Pagliacci" debuted at La Scala in Milan.

1906 - Louis H Perlman patented a de-mountable tire-carrying rim for cars.

1908 - 1st horror movie “Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde” premiered in Chicago.

1914 - Greyhound Bus Company began in Minnesota.

1916 - Britain began "Summer Time" Daylight Savings Time. The US adopted the system in the 1930s.

1921- LEOPOLD & LOEB- Two preppie millionaire's sons who were pumped up on Nietzches theory of the superman decided to commit the perfect murder. They lured Loeb's 15 year old cousin into their car, bludgeoned him to death with a chisel then had lunch. Despite their confidence in their superior intellects they were quickly identified and tried for murder. The rich families hired famed social-progressive lawyer Clarence Darrow for the defense. Darrow made no attempt to prove their innocence but got them off on a life sentence. In 1936 Loeb was cut up with a razor while trying to rape another prisoner, Leopold was paroled in 1958 and died in 1971. The pointless cold bloodedness of the murder today would seem like just another Jerry Springer show, but it horrified 1920's America. F.Scott Fitzgerald said the Jazz Age lost some of it's innocent fun after Leopold & Loeb.

1921- The Soviet Army re-conquered Chechnya. They had been conquered in Czarist times but after the Revolution tried to break free. The Red Army came back, executed their Imam Godzhink and reasserted the rule of Moscow. The Chechens tried to rise again in 1991 and were put down after another bloody war.

1922- On the Road to Moscow, the first political cartoon to win a Pulitzer prize. The cartoonist Rollin Kirby, was passionate about Prohibition. He had a regular character to extol temperance named Mr. Dry. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933 Kirby killed off Mr. Dry in print.

1927- Charles Lindbergh-Lucky Lindy, The Lone Eagle, etc. reaches a field outside Paris called Le Bourget after flying nonstop across the Atlantic. There was no such thing as an auto-pilot yet, so he had to stay awake and alert for 33 hours straight. His fatigue would have let him crash, if the gremlin ghoulies he was hallucinating hadn’t kept him company. As soon as he was sighted over Paris, huge searchlights were beamed on his plane. The light temporarily blinded him so that he almost crashed. As he landed people swarmed around the whirring propeller, narrowly missing another tragedy. But Lindy was safe and history made. He said he had never been to Europe and had wanted to see the sights, but almost immediately he was whisked by battleship back to the U.S. for tumultuous ovations and parades.

1933- Woolie Reitherman’s first day at Walt Disney Studio.

1945- BOGEY LOVES BABY-Humphrey Bogart married Lauren Bacall on a friend’s farm in Ohio. He was 48 and she was 21. Her real name was Betty Persky, but she passed for wasp. So when the publicity photographers came, they were under strict instructions from Jack Warner to frame out of the shots Bacall’s more Jewish-looking relatives.

1945- The remaining barracks of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were destroyed by the U.S. Army with flamethrowers.

1952- Actor John Garfield died. Some say he died in the midst of wild fornications; in truth he died in his sleep of heart failure aggravated by stress and alcoholism. He was 39. The matinee idol of “The Postman Rings Twice” and “Kid Galahad” was too politically left for the conservative postwar age. When a young stage actor he had run guns to the IRA, later he supported progressive union movements, anti-fascism and desegregation. His outspoken politics got him blacklisted in Hollywood, his friends deserted him and he was ruined.

1952- Famed writer Lillian Hellman testified before the House UnAmerican Activities Committee HUAC, but refused to name names. “I cannot cut my conscience to fit the fashions of the day.” She escaped a contempt of Congress wrap but she was blacklisted and at one point was working the makeup counter in a department store.

1966 - Heavyweight Cassius Clay KOs Henry Cooper in London

1968- Future President George W. Bush graduated Yale with a C average.

1972- A Hungarian lunatic shouting I am Jesus Christ, attacked Michelangelo’s statue La Pieta with a hammer. He is the reason why today we can only enjoy this beautiful sculpture from behind 3 inch thick bulletproof glass.

1979 - Elton John becomes 1st western rocker to perform live in USSR.

1980 – Star Wars “The Empire Strikes Back" premiered.

1983 - David Bowie's "Let's Dance," single goes #1. The tracks featured a then little known guitarist named Stevie-Ray Vaughn.

1991- Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Ghandi was blown up by a suicide bomber girl carrying a bomb in a bunch of flowers. She was believed to be one of the Tamil Tiger separatists.

1992- Tonight Show host Johnny Carson did his last show “I bid you a very heartfelt goodnight.” Johnny spent his remaining years in privacy, even refusing an invitation to appear at the NBC 75th anniversary spectacular.

2011- An 89 year old California Pentacostal minister named Harold Camping caused a sensation in the U.S. when he declared today would be the Rapture, the Christian idea of the End of the World. It didn’t happen.

2017- In Nassau County NY was the final performance of Ringling Bros, Barnum & Bailey Circus. The Greatest Show on Earth had been a tradition for 146 years.
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Yesterday’s Question: The Last Code Talkers of WWII are passing away. What was a Code Talker?

Answer: Code Talkers were Navajo members of the U.S. Marine Corps who, during WWII, used their native language to transmit battle strategies, troop movements, enemy fortifications and other secret communications, most especially in the Pacific Theater. Navajo is one of the most complex languages in the world. For instance, they have 36 words for “love”. The Japanese were expert at breaking military codes, but could not figure out the Navajo language.