Quiz- Now that you know what mullet is, what is mutton?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: When you wash down a dish of fried mullet with sac. What is sac?
-------------------------------------------------------------
History for 6/2/2018
Birthdays: John Randolph, The Marquis DeSade, Martha Custis Washington, Thomas Hardy, Hedda Hopper, Sir Edward Elgar, Johnny Weismuller, Charlie Watts, Disney story artist Dick Heumer, Lotte Reinniger, Marvin Hamlisch, Barry Levinson, Jon Peters, Dana Carvey, Garo Yepremian, Jerry Mathers the Beaver of the old TV show Leave it to Beaver is 70, Dayvid Haysbert is 64, Lasse Halstrom is 72

193AD- Shortly after he abdicated, Roman Emperor Didius Julianus was assassinated. As his own bodyguard turned on him and raised his sword, Julianus cried” What evil have I done? Who have I killed?” Unfortunately, Roman emperors were rarely allowed to retire.

303AD- Martyrdom of St. Elmo. This guy has to win the endurance record. The Emperor Diocletian had him starved, beaten with clubs, flogged with lead balled whips, rolled in tar and set on fire, roasted again in an iron chair, and he finally died after having his intestines wound out around a windlass. He is the patron saint of seafarers. When the blue electrical phenomenon appeared on ship's masts during a storm, it is called "St. Elmo's Fire".

1453-At Breslau, Papal Legate John of Capistrano presided over the torture of six Jews. After they confessed to Jewish practices, he had them burned at the stake. After John died the Protestants dug up his bones and threw them to their dogs. John was canonized San Juan Capistrano in 1690. A century later Franciscan monk Fra Junipero Serra named the picturesque little mission in California after him. And the swallows do migrate there, sometimes.

1502- 30 year old Caesar Borgia had conquered most of central Italy in the name of his father Pope Alexander VI. He attacked the town of Faenza that was stoutly defended by Astorre Manfredi and his brother. Caesar Borgia offered them generous terms and after the surrender treated the Manfredi Brothers quite courteously, until they got back to Rome where he clapped them in a dungeon. This day the bodies of the Manfredi Brothers were found floating in the Tibur.

1533- Pope Paul III banned the enslavement of Indians in the New World. Whether anybody listened to him is another matter.

1763- At the British Fort Michilimackinac near Lake Superior some Sauk and Chippewa Indians were playing lacrosse. While the British sentries were engrossed in the ball game Indian women gathered near the forts’ open gates. When one player hurled the ball up over the wall as a signal the women tossed concealed tomahawks to the players who then rushed the fort and defeated the garrison.

1780- THE GORDON RIOTS- Lord Gordon organized a public demonstration against a pending bill granting toleration of Roman Catholic worship in England. The mob marched on Parliament where went goes berserk and looted London for a week. Lord Gordon became the last nobleman executed in the Tower of London and Parliament passed the Riot Act. But his tactics scared Parliament from passing the bill. The Catholic Emancipation Bill would not be passed until 1834. From then on whenever an unruly crowd won't disperse shortly before the Authorities start shooting and clubbing people, they first read them aloud the Riot Act.

1781- Thomas Jefferson was a great American statesman and thinker, but he was not much at military matters. This day, he sighted the rampaging British Army approaching his mountaintop home of Monticello. He galloped away for his life, abandoning his household. The redcoats respected his home, but burned his barns and liberated 200 of his slaves. As Governor of Virginia Jefferson had compromised his states defenses when he refused to accept black volunteers in the Virginia militia, to make up the manpower lost to Washington’s army up north. In the meantime Royalist governor Lord Dunmore was offering freedom for slaves who fought under the King’s colors. Jefferson resigned as governor and nine days later, fellow Virginian Patrick Henry convened a committee to investigate Jefferson’s incompetence while in office.
Years later in 1820 when elderly Thomas Jefferson presided over a commemoration of Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, Jackson joked: “Well I’m glad to see the old gentleman got up enough courage to even remember a Battle!”

1886- President Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom in a White House ceremony. She was the daughter of his former law partner and Cleveland became her legal guardian after his death. Despite her being half his age and his reputation for fathering children out of wedlock, they were much in love and she especially charmed the American public. At age 21 she became the youngest woman to be First Lady. Songs were written for her and their first baby was honored with a candy bar- the Baby Ruth.

1896- Gugielmo Marconi took out a patent on wireless broadcasting - radio.
At the time his device could be heard from almost 12 miles away!

1920- Eugene O’Neill won a Pulitzer Prize for his first play Beyond the Horizon.

1920- TERRORISM- Radical Anarchists set off 11 bombs in the US, including at the home of the U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. Palmer and his wife just missed being killed because the bomber’s device exploded as he was setting it down on their porch. This year they also set off a bomb in a wagonload of scrap metal on Wall Street and a man tried to assassinate banker J.P. Morgan.
This sparked a large government crackdown called The Palmer Raids. Many innocent immigrants, suffragettes and union organizers were jailed or deported as criminals, including Emma Goldman. The progressive reaction to the crackdown was the birth of the American Civil Liberties Union. Palmers point man was young J. Edgar Hoover.

1924- Congress granted U.S. citizenship to all Native American Indians, whether they wanted it or not.

1918 - Velveeta Cheese invented by Swiss immigrant Emil Frey as a way to recycle damaged and partially used cheese wheels.

1928- Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek of the Kuomintang Government, captured the imperial capitol city of Peking (Beijing) from warlord Chang Zhou Lin, called the Old Marshal.

1932- The Screen Publicists Guild formed

1940- Will Eisner's "The Spirit" comic first appears.

1941- Lou Gehrig died of Lou Gehrig's disease at age 38.

1946- Italians vote in a postwar referendum to become a republic. The monarchy of the House of Savoy was in place all during the regime of Mussolini. Because of King Vitorio Emmanuele IV’s support of Fascism, he and the Royal House of Savoy were declared deposed.

1952 - Maurice Olley of General Motors began designing the Corvette.

1952- Queen Elisabeth II of England crowned. The date was set by meteorologists who predicted it would be one of the few days that year that would have bright sunshine. And-you guessed it... it rained all day. It was also the first Royal Coronation to be seen on television.

1956- Elvis Presley introduced his hit song “You Ain’t Nothin But a Hound Dog” on the Milton Berle TV show.

1958- An L.A. referendum allowed the county to buy Chavez Ravine from its inhabitants to build Dodger Baseball Stadium.

1961- Humorist writer George S. Kaufman died. Playwright, humorist and critic who wrote Dinner at Eight, You Can’t Take it With You and Stage Door.
He wanted on his headstone: "Over My Dead Body!"

1973- London animator Richard Williams closed down his Soho studio for a month so his staff could be lectured by Hollywood animation legends Art Babbitt, Chuck Jones and Ken Harris.

1996- Ray Combs, who took over the job as host of the TV game show Family Feud after Richard Dawson, hanged himself with his bed sheets at Glendale Adventist Hospital.

1999- Pope John Paul II blessed the new Vatican Parking garage.

2003- One secret to the American victory in Iraq was many in Saddam’s army heeded an appeal from the invaders not to resist and they would be taken care of. After the victory the occupation authority announced the Iraqi Army would be disbanded and all career soldiers lost their pensions and benefits. Today thousands of unemployed Iraqi soldiers demonstrated in front of American Occupation Headquarters in Baghdad demanding to be paid. It is the first time a defeated army ever demanded back pay from the winner.
=============================================================
Yesterday’s Quiz: When you wash down a dish of fried mullet with sac. What is sac?

Answer: Sac was a reinforced wine developed in Spain during the Elizabethan Era. Its most popular form was Sherry, called Sherry Sack or Sac. Also Malaga. Shakespeare’s Falstaff speaks a soliloquy in praise of Sack.

Quiz: When you wash down a dish of fried mullet with sac. What is sac?

Yesterday’s Quiz: What kind of food is mullet?
----------------------------------------------------------------------
History for 6/1/2018
Welcome to June, from Iunius mensis, the month of Juno, queen of the Roman gods.

Birthdays: Brigham Young, Marilyn Monroe, Pat Boone, Mikhail Glinka, Red Grooms, Karl Von Clausewitz, Andy Griffith, Morgan Freeman is 81, Nelson Riddle, Lisa Hartman, Cleavon Little, Frederica Von Stade, Powers Booth, Rene Aubergjenois, Lisa Hartman, Jonathan Pryce is 71, Brian Cox is 72, Heidi Klum is 45, Josef Pujol *

*Pujol was famous throughout late Victorian Europe as Le Petomane- The Fartiste- who could fart musical melodies and snuff candles at great distances. He performed concerts for crowned heads that he would finish by farting La Marseillaise.

344BC- Romans dedicated the temple of Juno Moneta, the Lady Who Warns. They also stamped it on their money. Moneta is the root of the word Money and Monetary.

193 AD- Roman General Septimius Severus defeated his rival for the empire, Pescennius Niger “Black Pescennius”, massacred his family, and carried his head around on a spear. Septimius used the body of another rival as a doormat to wipe his feet on. This made him undisputed emperor.

1098- Antioch was stormed and captured by warriors of the First Crusade.

1660- Boston Puritans had passed a law that preaching any religion other than that accepted by the Massachusetts Bay Puritan group was heresy and forbidden. When Quaker Mary Dyer refused to cease, leave, or recant her views, this day she was hanged. Her death and that of another Quaker Anne Hutchinson shocked the colonies so, that King Charles II of England issued an order forbidding execution for heretical preaching.

1792- Kentucky Statehood. The lands of Kentucky were claimed at one point to be part of Virginia, claimed by Spain and groups of leathershirts (frontiersmen) even talked of founding an independent state called the Kingdom of Yazoo.

1795- The Glorious First of June. The British Channel fleet under Admiral “Black Dick” Howe attacked a French grain convoy in the Atlantic. They defeated the French escort fleet, but the grain transports got away anyway.

1813- In battle with a British warship, HMS Leopard, dying Captain Lawrence, of the U.S.S. Chesapeake, cried:" Don't Give Up the Ship!" They don't, but he died anyway.

1815 - Marshal Louis Berthier was Napoleon's chief of staff and an organizational genius. This day in Hamburg while watching Russian troops ride towards a new invasion of France, he fell out of a window. Strange way to die for a general who was in constant battle for over twenty years. The fall may have been an accident or maybe a foreign agent decided he should be kept out of the coming war. The Duke of Wellington paid tribute to his abilities by noticing how many mistakes plagued the French due to confused orders and missed communications: "The Battle of Waterloo was decided when Berthier fell out that window."

1847- Utopian evangelist John Humphrey Noyes inaugurated a Free-Love commune at Putney, Vermont. It later moved to Oneida New York.

1862- When Gen. Joe Johnston gets wounded, Jeff Davis gives over command of the Army of Northern Virginia to his military adviser- Robert E. Lee. Lee's career begins. Johnston later magnanimously stated in his memoirs: "My getting shot was the best thing that could have happened for the Confederacy". At first the rebel soldiers weren't impressed by Mr. Lee. They nicknamed him Old Granny and the King of Spades for his making them dig trenches, but by the Civil Wars’ end his genius had achieved fame on both sides.

1876- Eighteen-year old Milton Hershey opened his first candy store. After he saw European machines to make milk chocolate demonstrated at the Chicago Worlds Fair, he decided to focus exclusively on chocolate. Hershey's goes on to become the largest candy maker in the U.S. The Hershey’s chocolate kiss is so named because the machine that creates the candy looks like it is kissing the conveyor belt.

1880 - 1st pay telephone installed; this one in a bank.

1879-After falling from the French throne in 1870 the Emperor Louis Napoleon III and his family lived in England. The only son of Napoleon III and Eugenie, Napoleon IV, went with the British Army to South Africa to fight Zulus. While waving his grand-uncle's sword around on patrol, he fell off his horse during a skirmish and was speared to death by 17 Zulu’s. The direct Bonaparte family line ends with him.

1909- The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, formed. W.E.B. Dubois edited their newsletter The Crisis.

1931- 48 year old Swiss artist Albert Hurter joined the Disney staff, giving the look of cartoons like Snow White a more Germanic storybook look. His hiring created a new type of job at the studio, an Inspirational Sketch Artist, what we call today a Vis-Dev artist.

1933 - Charlie Chaplin wed actress Paulette Goddard.

1933- Eric Larson’s first day at Walt Disney Studio. One of the Nine Old Men, he retired 53 years later in 1986.

1936 - "Lux Radio Theater" moved from NYC to Hollywood.

1938- SUPERMAN- Joe Seigel and Jerry Shuster were two aspiring cartoonists in a Cleveland High School. Jewish kids, they had read about the Nazi concept of the Aryan Superman. They wanted to show a Superman could be on the American side. So they created a new hero named Superman in 1933. The scrambled about as cartoonists in NYC for a few years and in 1938 sold Detective Comics (D.C.) on their Superman idea for $130. The first Superman in Action Comics came out this day. Part of the contract was they gave DC all rights to the Man of Steel.
When the first megabudget Superman movie was being made in the 1975, the National Cartoonist's Society spokesman Neal Adams pointed out that Seigel & Schuster were now destitute. Seigel was blind on disability, and Schuster delivered sandwiches from a local deli. The bad publicity forced Warner Bros and DC Comics to award them and their families pensions for their life.

1942- British actor Leslie Howard, who played Ashley in" Gone with the Wind "was killed. The movie star was doing diplomacy in Spain, but on the flight home his commercial DC-3 airliner was shot down by German JU-88 fighters over the Bay of Biscay. He was such an effective propagandist that when German agents learned his schedule, they sent the interceptors just to get him.

1955- Marilyn Monroe’s movie The Seven Year Itch opened.

1961 - FM multiplex stereo broadcasting 1st heard.

1966 - George Harrison is impressed by Ravi Shankar's concert in London.

1967 –Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the US and it immediately goes gold.

1968 - Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" hits #1.

1979- Gannett News Services began USA Today, called by some critic's- 'MacPaper'.

1980- Ted Turner started CNN news channel.

2001- In Katmandu, Nepal Crown Prince Dipendra quarreled so much with his mother and father, the King Birenda and Queen Aiswarya, about his upcoming marriage that he came to dinner and shot them to death. He also killed four other members of the royal family and then himself. This was the largest massacre of a royal family since Czar Nicholas II’s family was executed in 1918. Next day, a Nepalese government spokesman labeled the incident an “accident”. Dipendra was in a coma for several days before dying and in those few days a government council declared him king anyway. In 2008 the Nepalese Monarchy was officially deposed.
================================================
Yesterday’s Quiz: What kind of food is mullet?

Answer: It is a type of fish in the Mediterranean that is quite tasty.

Quiz: What kind of food is mullet?

Answer to Yesterday’s Quiz Below: What does the term mean, to be as thin as a rail?.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
History for 5/31/2018
Birthdays: King Manuel I of Portugal 1495, Walt Whitman, Fred Allen, Don Ameche, Prince Ranier, Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, Ranier Fassbinder, Brooke Shields, Joe Namath, Richie Valens, John Kemeny-the co-creator of the computer language BASIC, Tom Berenger, Denholm Elliot, Peter Yarrow, Lea Thompson, John Bonzo Bonham of Led Zepplin, Colin Ferrell is 42, Clint Eastwood is 89

1578- A farmer plowing a vineyard near Rome caused the ground to collapse beneath him revealing the long buried Ancient Roman catacombs. Antonio Bosio studied them and in 1632 published his study, "Underground Rome".

1669 -Samuel Pepys was forced to discontinue the diary he had kept from 1660 due to failing eyesight.

1759- Under pressure from religious groups, the Royal Colony of Pennsylvania banned theatrical plays. You could be fined 500 pounds for trotting the boards.

1790- The U.S. Congress passed its first laws protecting the copyright of written works. This law was lobbied for by Noah Webster, who later wrote the first American dictionary.

1793- LA TERREUR- THE REIGN OF TERROR BEGAN- French extremists the Jacobins named for their meeting place, near the monastery of St.Jacob- Danton, Robespierre and Marat take over the French Government. They declare anybody who doesn't agree with them to be counterrevolutionary dead meat. Robsepierre said: “Virtue without Terror is Impotence, Terror without Virtue is Criminal.”
Until 1794 their Committee of Public Safety guillotined 17,000 people, including Madame DuBarry, the great scientist Lavoisier, poet Andre Chenier and finally even fellow revolutionaries Danton and Camille Desmoulins. They also drowned hundreds in barges. One method of execution was the Republican Marriage- that meant tying up a man and woman face to face then throwing them into the sea to drown.
Napoleon, Josephine, Roget Du Lisle -who wrote Le Marseillaise, even American Thomas Paine barely escaped with their heads. Marat said: "If we cut off 10,000 heads today, it saves us having to cut off 100,000 tomorrow!" Robespierre kept a servant playing a little accordion in his office so he wouldn't have to listen to the screams and pleas of the condemned dragged off to execution. To their credit they enacted much needed social reforms, For the first time the public could enjoy the Royal art collections like the Louvre and the royal parks like the Luxembourg Gardens.
The modern concept of the restaurant also arises at this time. The name comes from a place to Restore-Your Health- Restaurant. In previous ages you could get a meal at an inn or public house, but it was never very good. The former chefs of great estates, now unemployed because their employer’s decapitated heads were in baskets, opened shops and cooked their grand cuisine for the average Jacques & Jill.

1837 - Joseph Grimaldi, England’s greatest clown (king of pantomime), died at 57. On stage since the age of 3 at Sadler-Wells, he never appeared in a circus ring. Instead, his
act was stage pantomime. In tribute to him, all English clowns are known as “Joey’.

1859- The famous clock in the Elizabeth Tower of Parliament called after its bell Big Ben began running, and its chimes sounded out across London for the first time.

1866- The FENIAN BROTHERHOOD, 1,500 Irish Union Army veterans decide the way to liberate Ireland from Britain is to invade Canada from New York State. - (?)
They don't get very far.

1870- President Ulysses Grant calls for the U.S. purchase and annexation of Santo Domingo (modern Haiti). Congress defeats the measure as being too costly. Grant was disgusted, hadn't the gov't wasted millions already to purchase the frozen wastes of Alaska in 1868? Other times in American history we've made moves on Cuba and Nicaragua and occupied Haiti in the 1920s and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s.

1873- SCHLEIMANN FOUND TROY. German archaeologist Heinrich Schleimann unearthed the horde of gold known as Priam's Treasure in a mound near Hysarlik Turkey. This proved this site was the Troy of Homer and the Trojan War was not a myth but a real historical event. There were actually 9 Troys on the site- from a Bronze Age village to a Late Roman Empire city. The Troy of the Trojan War was Troy number 4. It showed signs of destruction by fire.

1879- New York’s Madison Square Garden opened. Designed by Stanford White to resemble a Venetian Palazzo. The modern sports complex was opened in the 1960s.

1889-The Johnstown Flood. The South Fork Dam swollen by heavy rains burst and sent a 35-foot wall of water and debris over the town. 2,295 were killed.

1894- Happy Birthday Kellogg’s Corn Flakes! Dr. John Harvey Kellogg of Battle Creek Michigan patents "flaked cereal and the process for making same." He felt whole foods like Corn Flakes could help Victorian people curb their sexual urges.

1902-THE BOER WAR ENDED. After English troops entered Praetoria, Boer survivors signed the Treaty of Vereeniging. Transvaal President Kruger "Oom Paul"-Uncle Paul- fled to Holland. When the Queen of Holland appealed for help for the Boers, who were ethnically Dutch-German. The Kaiser was noncommittal. The leader of the second largest population of Germans, President Teddy Roosevelt of the United States, said, "It is right and natural that the larger nations should dominate the smaller."

On a troopship returning from South Africa volunteer doctor Arthur Conan-Doyle was told by a Welsh doctor of a legend of a big ghostly dog that attacked people on the moors of his home estate. Conan-Doyle thought this would be a swell story for his character Sherlock Holmes to solve. The Hound of the Baskervilles was the result.

1904- On the first day of a new Parliament the right honorable Tory member Mr. Winston Churchill entered the House of Commons, bowed to the Speaker, then took a seat with the Liberal Benches, publicly abandoning his Tory Party. In 1924 he changed his mind again and rejoined the Tories. This was why he was so shunned in the 1930’s. He was seen as a shameless opportunist, and not trusted by many of his peers.

1910- Not even ten years after the Boer independent state was defeated in the Boer War, the British formed it into the self-governing commonwealth known as The Union of South Africa, with former Boer General Jan Christian Smuts as it’s head.

1911- RMS Titanic launched from the Belfast shipyards. In a strange premonition of her eventual fate, she was never christened at launch time.

1913- The 17th Amendment was ratified. It called for senators to be elected by popular vote instead of nominated by the various state legislatures.

1916-The BATTLE OF JUTLAND. German and British battleships boom away
at each other in the only major fleet engagement of World War I. Giant battleships called Dreadnoughts were the nukes of the turn of the century power game. Yet when the first and third largest fleets in the world finally clashed, it was a tie. British Admiral Beatty was annoyed with the performance of his fleet: "Blast! Why are all me bloody battlecruisers sinking?” But the German High Seas fleet went back into Kiel harbor and didn't emerge again for the rest of the war.

1921-The deadliest race riot in US History. After a white woman in Tulsa Oklahoma claimed a black man grabbed her arm, marauding white mobs attacked the black neighborhood of Greenwood. They burned 35 blocks of houses and kill at least 300 innocent people. The Tulsa community finally apologized in the year 2000.

1928- The song “ Old Man River “sung by Pail Robeson came out as a single.

1929- Steamboat Willie was the first Mickey Mouse cartoon, but Mickey didn’t speak much. He just whistled, yelped and laughed. In the cartoon released this day “the Carnival Kid” Mickey spoke his first words “ Hot Dogs!” The voice was musician Carl Stalling. Later Walt Disney decided to voice the mouse himself.

1948- The various guerrilla groups fighting for the new state of Israel, the Palmach, Haganna and Irgun, combine to officially become the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force,

1957- Malaya received its independence from Britain.

1958 - Dick Dale invents "surf music" with "Let's Go Trippin".

1962- Israel hanged Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann. His body was cremated and the ashes scattered in the sea.

1969- John Lennon and Yoko Ono record "Give Peace a Chance." It became the theme song of the Anti-Vietnam War movement. Because of this song and Lennon’s support of the Hippie protesters the Nixon White House kept a file on him. Lennon spent most of 1972-73 under a constant threat of 60-day deportation from the US.

1979- The nation of Rhodesia reformed as the Republic of Zimbabwe under rebel leader Robert Mugabe. But unlike his contemporary Nelson Mandela, Mugabe made himself president for life and crushed all opposition. He was only recently forced to retire in his 90s.

1984- Martial arts movie star Steven Segal married soap opera star Adrienne LaRussa. But what Adrienne didn’t know was he already had a wife named Miyako Fujetani and two kids waiting for him in Japan. A few months after this he fell for another actress named Kelly LeBrock.

1985- John Sculley was a former exec from Pepsi brought in by Apple Computer founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to help run the company. This day his solution to help the company run better was to fire Steve Jobs. Wozniak retired and Sculley eventually moved on. Before his death, Steve Jobs came back to Apple and make it the worlds most profitable company, as well as run Pixar, and be on the board of the Walt Disney Company.

1989- "Skinhead Day at the Magic Kingdom" Disneyland refused to admit a rally of skinheads, Nazis and Klansmen.

1990- Television sitcom Seinfeld premiered based on a TV special about the standup comedian called the Seinfeld Chronicles. No Soup for You!

1995- A young Mexican-American Tejana singer named Selena was gaining a growing crossover appeal in pop music and there seemed no limit. This day her career was cut short when she was shot and killed by the Yolanda Saldivia, the president of the Selena Fan club.

1996- Despite grief over the assassination of Labor Prime Minister Ytshak Rabin, the Israeli public voted for the right wing Likud today, making Benjamin “Bibi” Netnayahu Prime Minister. He was turned out in 1999 over corruption, but re-elected in 2009. Currently his government is under several criminal investigations.

2000- The first Survivor show premiered, shepherding in the era in America of TV Reality shows.

2003- A wild dove got into the Pentagon and flapped around the Air Force Secretary's office on the 4th floor. Can we say- symbolic?
=========================================================
Yesterday’s Question: What does the term mean, to be as thin as a rail?

Answer: A rail is a tiny, thin bird from the Louisiana bayou.

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

Yesterday’s Quiz: Who sang the solo vocal on the original theme song of Star Trek?
--------------------------------------------
History for 5/30/2018
Birthdays: Czar Peter the Great, Benny Goodman, Mel Blanc, Stepin Fetchit, Boris Pasternak, Irving Thalberg, Milt Neil, Howard Hawks, Gale Sayers, Michael J. Pollard, Wynonna, Keir Dullea is 82, Ceelo Green is 43, Idina Mensel is 47

1431- At Place de Vieux-Marche’ in English controlled Rouen, St. Joan of Arc was burned at the stake. She was only 19. Her last request was for a priest to hold up high a crucifix, so she could pray aloud above the flames. When an English knight watched the maid call out to Christ as she died, he exclaimed in grief: "Brothers, we are lost, because I think we have just killed a Saint! " She was made a saint in 1954. A few years ago, scientists opened her tomb for study, and only found the remains of a cat.

1593- English playwright Christopher Marlowe was stabbed to death in an argument over a restaurant check at the Bulls Tavern in Depford. Marlowe, whose plays included “Tamburlane” and “Dr Faustus", was one of Shakespeare's competitors, and found time for some espionage on the side. Writer Sir Anthony Burgess theorized there may have been more spy-stuff to this case than not wanting to pay for ale & kippers. The murderer, Ingram Frizer, was quickly pardoned by Queen Elizabeth I, and Marlowe was buried in an unmarked grave.

1630- King Gustavus Adolphus gave an emotional farewell speech to the Swedish Diet as he prepared to leave with his army for Germany. He had pledged to take up the Protestant cause in the brutal Thirty Years War then raging across Europe. Gustavus won many victories but he never saw Sweden again, because he was killed in battle at Lutzen in 1632.

1787- THE CRUCIAL VOTE creating the U.S. Constitution. The delegates of the thirteen states (actually twelve, Rhode Island refused to participate) had originally come to Philadelphia to iron out some bugs in the system called the Articles of Confederation.
On this day they were convinced to accept “the Virginia Plan” authored by James Madison and strongly backed by NY’s Alexander Hamilton. This was to scrap the entire U.S. government used up till then and create a new central government with a two chamber Congress based on the Roman Senate. Also an elected chief magistrate called, at first, 'The Executive" and later the President. Some politicians not attending the meeting, like Patrick Henry and Sam Adams, were outraged. Thomas Jefferson, then ambassador in Paris, was dubious about the elected-president idea. “So they’ve decided to saddle us with a Polish King” he quipped, meaning an elected figurehead monarch with no real power. Aaron Burr wrote:” Same old pork, different sauce.”

1788- French philosopher Francois Voltaire died of uremic illness at age 84. He breathed his last cradled in the arms of Benjamin Franklin. He had been trying to write a chapter of a new dictionary, trying to keep himself going by drinking 20 cups of coffee a day. A great critic of the Catholic Church, he refused the Sacrament up to the last but was still smuggled away after death to be buried in sacred ground. In 1793 his remains and Rousseau’s were moved to the Pantheon.
In 1814 a Royalist ghoul broke into Voltaire and Rousseau’s tombs, stuffed their bones into a sack and threw them into a garbage dump. The whereabouts of his remains are unknown to this day.

May 30, 1806- ANDREW JACKSON KILLED CHARLES DICKINSON IN A DUEL. -the hotheaded Jackson challenged Dickinson after he welched on horse racing bet. After Jackson accused him, he made insulting remarks about Jackson’s wife Rachel, calling her a scarlet lady. In Long County, Kentucky they faced off with pistols at ten paces.
Dickinson got off a shot first. Eyewitnesses said you could see the puff of dust from Jackson's jacket where the bullet entered his ribs. Amazingly, instead of falling, Jackson just coldly stood there, staring. He then lifted his gun and shot Dickinson dead. 
Jackson would carry the lead ball in his chest for the rest of his life, alongside two others earned in Indian wars.
When asked why he didn’t forgive Dickinson and shoot wide, He replied: "I'd have killed Dickinson, even if he had put a bullet in my brain!"

1821 - James Boyd patents the Rubber Fire Hose.

1848- William Young patents the ice cream freezer.

1883- A rumor among the strollers on the Brooklyn Bridge that the bridge was falling caused a panic and 12 people were trampled. Young street kid Al Smith recalled being under the bridge and seeing a rain of bowler hats and parasols as the crowd pushed and shoved. To prove the bridge was absolutely safe, the mayor had P.T. Barnum parade his circus elephants over to Brooklyn.

1899- Female outlaw Pearl Hart robbed the Globe, Arizona stagecoach.

1913- It’s Albanian Independence Day! The Treaty of London signed, ending the First Balkan War and acknowledging the independence of Albania. The Second Balkan War started thirty days later.

1919- Hollywood entrepreneur Charles Tolman bought a natural declivity north of Hollywood Blvd called Daisy Dell. People had been picnicking in the grass there for years. Now Tolman wanted to build a concert amphitheatre. Conductor Hugo Kirchhofer remarked “ It looks like a big bowl!” So it became the Hollywood Bowl thereafter.

1922- The Lincoln Memorial dedicated. The huge statue of Lincoln seated was carved by an Italian immigrant family in the Bronx. While President Harding talked, a guest of honor was elderly 86 year old Robert Todd Lincoln, Abe Lincolns only surviving child. He was a former Secretary of War. It was his last public appearance.

1927- In one of the more disturbing Memorial Day parades in New York City history, one thousand Ku Klux Klansmen and blackshirted Italian Fascists tried to march down Broadway, and got into fistfights with bystanders.

1930- The Lockheed Terminal rededicated as Burbank Airport.

1935 - Babe Ruth's final game. He goes hitless for the Braves against Phillies.

1942- The British RAF launch the first of their 1000 plane bombing raids on Germany, this one flattened the city of Cologne.

1955- The New York chapter of the Catholic League of Decency pressured Loews Theater on Broadway to take down a giant 30-foot billboard of Marilyn Monroe trying to push her skirt down.

1961- Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo was ambushed in his Chevrolet. Shot five times, he was left dead in the street.

1962- Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem had its first performance.

1972- Director choreographer Bob Fosse filmed a live performance of Liza Minelli’s one-woman show Liza with a Z. It was telecast in Sept. and became a sensation.

1994 - Death of Baron Marcel Bich, Italian-born French engineer and industrialist who created an empire through his disposable BIC pens, lighters and razors.

2003- Pixar’s Finding Nemo opened.
============================================================
Yesterday’s Quiz: Who sang the solo vocal on the original theme song of Star Trek?

Answer: Metropolitan Opera soprano Frederika Von Stade. Despite her Prussian name, she was born in Somerville New Jersey. Her friends called her Flicka. I once saw her as Sophie in Die Rosenkavalier and she rocked!

Quiz: Who sang the solo vocal on the original theme song of Star Trek?

Yesterday’s question answered below: What does it mean to be in “ a fit of pique”..?
----------------------------------------------------------------
History for 5/29/2018
Birthdays: John F. Kennedy, King Charles II (the "Merry Monarch"), Bob Hope, G. K. Chesterton, Patrick Henry, Oswald Spengler, T.H. White, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Josef Von Sternberg, LaToya Jackson, John Hinckley Jr., Al Unser Jr., Beatrice Lilly, Danny Elfman, Annette Bening is 60, Melissa Etheridge is 57, Rupert Everett is 59


526 AD -An earthquake destroyed the city of Antioch. Another major quake two years later caused much rebuilding efforts to be abandoned. Once one of the largest cities in the ancient world on a par with Rome and Athens, today it is a forgotten little Turkish border town.

1415- The Grand Council of churchmen at Constance trying to heal the Great Schism ordered the deposition of Pope John XXIII. John ran the Vatican like a mercenary captain, taxing everything including gambling and prostitution. It was said he had slept with 200 women including maids, matrons and nuns. He fled Constance disguised as a groom and was given sanctuary by Cosimo de Medici of Florence. Today he is counted an AntiPope, an illegal one, so Salvatore Roncalli in 1958 was given his number John XXIII.

1453- CONSTANTINOPLE CONQUERED BY THE TURKS- Sultan Mohammed II the "Scourge of Christendom" stormed the capitol of the old Byzantine Empire. His great cherry wood cannons firing giant stone balls blew great holes in the city walls, proving the end of castles as serious defenses.
When he knew the battle was lost, the last Eastern Emperor of the Romans, Constantine XI Paleologus, sallied out sword in hand and went down fighting. His body was identified out of a pile of corpses only by the bejeweled purple shoes. As Mohammed II rode into the city in triumph he recited a Persian poem:" A spider weaves it's web in the palace of the Caesars, a shadow falls over the House of Amonhasarib.
Except for Spain, Christian Europe hadn’t given much thought to expansionist Islam since the Crusades. Now Turkey became Europe’s number one rival for the next 300 years. The Byzantine Empire’s loss did have one beneficial effect on Western Civilization. All the fleeing Greek scholars, with their arms full of the works of Plato and Aristotle, would settle in European capitols and help spark the Renaissance.

1606- Michel Caravaggio the artist shot a man over a tennis match. Caravaggio was a mad-artist before the term was invented. The police records of Rome show the master painter constantly in trouble, seducing man, woman and child, throwing rocks at soldiers, stabbing waiters, etc.

1692- The Battle of La Hogue- Great naval battle when the French fleet of Admiral de Tourville was ordered by Louis XIV to attack an Anglo-Dutch navy despite being heavily outnumbered. The French admiral did a brilliant job but lost anyway, and the French monarch turned his back on the navy, abandoning supremacy of the seas to England.
Once considered the most important naval engagement until Trafalgar, La Hogue is now mostly remembered on cheap, framed prints of naval battle paintings you see hanging in doctor’s waiting rooms.

1765 - Patrick Henry gave a defiant speech in the Virginia House of Burgesses against the English Stamp Act. Someone in the crowd yelled "Treason!"
Henry smiled: "If this be treason, make the most of it!"

1780- THE WAXSAWS or TARELTON’S QUARTER- In the later part of the American Revolution the British Army tried encouraging Loyal Americans to fight their Rebel brothers. A British officer named Banastre Tarleton raised a hard riding company of American Loyalist dragoons to subdue unruly South Carolina. But Tarleton had a sadistic streak that made him go beyond the gentlemanly war of the era.

At the Waxsaws in North Carolina Tarleton rode down a company of Virginia militia and slaughtered them as they tried to surrender. After the battle ended he ordered his men to comb the battlefield and bayonet the wounded. So he won the tactical victory but Butcher Tarleton’s tactics made more enemies than friends for his side. Many North Carolina hill country folk who had been sitting out the war lost kin at the Waxsaws and so joined the American side in droves. Knowing they may get “Tarleton’s Quarter” made many Minutemen fight harder rather than surrender.

1790- Two years after the U.S. Constitution was ratified, Rhode Island had still not ratified the document. Rhode Island refused to send delegates to the convention drafting it, and only after the other twelve states threatened to completely sever all commercial ties with it did they knuckle under and vote to join the union, but only by a majority of only two votes.

1814- Napoleon’s Empress Josephine died of a cold contracted while entertaining Czar Alexander of Russia. She was 50. A woman’s fashion of the time was to wear a flimsy muslin dress dampened with water to make it see-through, the equivalent of the modern wet T-shirt. Dressed this way she went for an evening stroll through the gardens of Malmaison with the Russian emperor, caught a chill and soon expired. Napoleon learned of her death while he was in exile on Elba. He locked himself in his room for two days grief stricken. He admitted, “ I loved her, but I did not respect her..”

1843- John C. Freemont began his second surveying expedition mapping out vast areas of California and Oregon and studying its geography. For this he was nicknamed the Pathfinder and later became the first presidential candidate of the new Republican Party.

1848- Wisconsin became a state.

1856- THE LOST SPEECH- Former Congressman Abraham Lincoln was called upon to deliver the adjournment speech to the convention inaugurating the new Illinois Republican Party. He had decided to abandon his strategy of mincing words about slavery and “hit it hard.” Lincoln delivered what many regarded as the best speech of his life, a speech better than the Gettysburg Address or “ With Malice Towards None” the Second Inaugural.
And maddeningly for history we have no record of what he said. The newspapermen jotting it down shorthand were so amazed by what they heard that they stopped writing, confident they could share the notes of another later. Even Abe’s close friend Herndon, who was a prodigious note taker, gave up after fifteen minutes, admitting he “threw pen and paper away and was swept up in the inspiration of the hour”. The speech made Lincoln one of the rising stars of the party, yet we don’t know anything he said that night.

1859 –Illinois Congressman Abe Lincoln says in a better documented occasion "You can fool some of the people all of the time and all of the people some of time, but you can't fool all of the people all of time"

1905- Third Day of the Battle of Tsushima Straights. Japanese Admiral Togo catches up to the second half of the Russian Navy and sinks it. In 1985 Japanese salvage crews brought up a huge hoard of gold bullion meant for the payroll for the Tsarist sailors. A Japanese venture capitalist tried to use it to buy back the Kurile Islands- the few small islands in the north that Soviet Russia invaded in the closing days of World War Two and have never given back. Russia said 'No Deal."

1908- Teddy Roosevelt signed the first ban on child labor in the U.S.

1911 -The first Indianapolis 500

1912- 15 young women were fired by the Curtis Publishing Company for dancing "Turkey Trot" during their lunch break.

1914- THE COLONEL REDL AFFAIR- In the years before World War I, the Great Powers of Europe spent vast sums on spies and agents to discover each other's future war plans. The period was known as the “soft war” not unlike the Cold War of a later generation. Coloneloberst Redl was on the Austro-Hungarian General Staff but was passing information on to Russian Intelligence. He was exposed by an Italian double agent who was also his male lover. According to the Austrian military code of honor, Redl was forced by his fellow officers to shoot himself. An eccentric man, his apartment was filled with life-size mannequins in chairs. Hungarian director Istvan Szabo made an award winning film about Redl with Klaus Maria Brandauer in 1986. There were earlier films made of the story in 1931 and 55.

1932- The BONUS MARCHERS reached Washington D.C. Men who joined the army during the Great War were promised an extra bonus to be received in 1945. Similar bonuses were given by the Gov’t to Civil War Veterans in the 1890s. But by 1932 the Great Depression had so ruined people's lives a movement was started by a Portland veteran named Captain William Waters to pass a bill in Congress to get their bonus early. Veterans would lobby congress by mounting a poor people's march on Washington. People's marches of this sort had happened before, like "Coxey's Army" in 1896, the Civil Right's march in 1964, and the Million-Man March in 1995. Veteran's groups came from all over the nation and by the time they got to Capitol Hill they numbered around 80,000. The set up shantytowns on the Mall nicknamed “Hoovervilles”.

Everyday Senators going to work had to slip through a huge line of homeless men shuffling silently around the Capitol Building. The Hoover government panicked and believed Soviet-style revolution was imminent. The opposition to the bonus bill was led by Senator Howard Vidal, father of writer-activist Gore Vidal and uncle to Al Gore.

1941-THE GREAT WALT DISNEY CARTOONISTS STRIKE.. The picket line and campsite went up across the street where St. Joseph's Hospital is today. Chef's from nearby Toluca Lake restaurants would cook for the strikers on their off time and the aircraft mechanics of Lockheed promised muscle if any ruff stuff was threatened.

Picketers included Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace), Walt Kelly and Margaret Selby (later Kelly) (Pogo), Bill Melendez (A Charlie Brown Christmas), Steve Bosustow and John Hubley (Mr. Magoo), Maurice Noble and Chuck Jones (What's Opera Doc?), George Baker (Sad Sack), Dick Swift ("the Parent Trap") Frank Tashlin (Cinderfella) Ade Woolery (Playhouse), and four hundred others. Animators from Warner Bros. MGM and Walter Lantz marched with their Disney brothers and sisters, because they knew this was where the fate of their entire industry would be settled. Celebrities like Dorothy Parker and John Garfield gave speeches. The studio claimed no one of importance was on strike.

The strike was eventually settled by Federal arbitration and a little arm twisting by the Bank of America. Many of the artists who left the studio afterwards set up U.P.A. and pioneered the modern 1950's style.

1942- JOHN BARRYMORE- The great dramatic actor, the first American to dare to play Hamlet in England, died of his many vices at age 60. Whether the infamous prank actually happened where Raoul Walsh, Bertholdt Brecht, Peter Lorre, W.C. Fields and some others (the "Bundy Drive Boys") kidnapped Barrymore's body from Pierce Brothers Funeral Home and propped it up at the poker table to scare the willys out of Errol Flynn is a matter of debate. Flynn and Paul Heinried said it was true, writer Gene Fowler said it was false. . John Barrymore's last words were to screenwriter Gene Fowler: "Say Gene, isn't it true you are an illegitimate son of Buffalo Bill?"

1942- Bing Crosby recorded "White Christmas," debatably the greatest selling record of all time. 1952- Edmund Hillary and Sherpa guide Tenzing Norga became first men to reach the top of Mt. Everest.

1954- New York Police raid the studio of Irving Klaw, the photographer of the Betty Page kinky pin-up photos. Klaw tried to appeal to the Supreme Court but couldn’t get a hearing.

1956- Hollywood director James Whale (Frankenstein, The Invisible Man) drowned himself in his pool. His career was over and his health was deteriorating from a series of strokes. Bruises were found on his head and at first the police suspected foul play. It wasn’t until 1989 his gay lover made his suicide note public. His head had struck the pool’s bottom as he jumped in causing the bruise.

1972- Moe Berg died of old age. He was a master spy who using a front as a catcher for the Washington Senator’s Baseball team, fluent enough in quantum physics to converse with Einstein. He was once ordered by Washington to go to Switzerland and meet with Rudolph Heisenberg, the Nazi Einstein, and kill him if he felt the Germans were getting too close do developing their own atomic bomb. He chose not to shoot him. In his later years he was a regular contestant on TV game shows. Believe it or not!

1973 - Columbia Records fired president Clive Davis for misappropriating
$100, 000 in funds, Davis then founded Arista records.

1977 - Janet Guthrie becomes 1st woman to drive in Indy 500.

1978 - Bob Crane, (Hogan-Hogan's Heroes), died at 49 under mysterious circumstances. He was found in a Tucson hotel room surrounded by pornography, bludgeoned to death by a camera tripod. The murder was never solved.

1987 –pop singer Michael Jackson attempted to buy the XIX century remains of Joseph Meredith a.k.a. the Elephant Man.

1999- Hikers in Malibu California discover the remains of Phillip Taylor, the bass guitar player of the 60’s band Iron Butterfly. The musician had disappeared four years before. Now his skeleton was found sitting in his Ford Aerostar at the bottom of a steep ravine.

2003- The BBC aired a news expose alleging that Prime Minister Tony Blair’s government “sexed up” or exaggerated the proof of Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction to justify the unpopular invasion of Iraq. The documentary named a shy government researcher named Dr. David Kelly as the perpetrator. He committed suicide as a result.
=======================================================
Quiz: What does it mean to be in “ a fit of pique”..?

Answer: It means to make a rash decision out of annoyance. From the Old French Piquer, to prick someone.