Quiz: Was Cyrano de Bergerac a real person?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Why did L. Frank Baum call his fantasy land over the rainbow, the Land of Oz?
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History for 2/17/2008
Birthdays: Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, Montgomery Ward, Red Barber, Michael Jordan, Marian Anderson, C'haim Potok, Jim Brown, Rene Russo, Michael Bay, Cybil Shepard, Denise Richards is 37 and Paris Hilton is 27

3,201BC- According to Sumerian records from today in the month of Hilu to the month of Eshil-March 30th occurred the GREAT FLOOD, that the story of the flood of Noah in the Bible was based on. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1920’s theorized that the Great Flood was the tidal backwash caused by the sinking of the lost continent of Atlantis.

1673- MOLIERE DIED. The great playwright was suffering from tuberculosis and was in failing health, but he insisting on playing the lead in his final play "The Imaginary Illness". Tonight when asked to rest instead he responded" There are fifty workman here who won’t get paid if we don’t play". He played Argan, a hypochondriac who imagined himself dying.
In the final act he uttered the word "Juro I swear," and was seized with a violent coughing fit. He covered with a joke and finished the play, but later was carried home where he died choking on his own blood. The local priest refused to come and give him Last Rights because of his Tartuffe making fun of religious types. Moliere was one of the greatest playwrights and poets of the age and Frenchmen equate him with Shakespeare.

1864-THE FIRST SUCCESSFUL SUBMARINE ATTACK-. The Confederate submarine Hunley ,after testing that drowned 23 men including the inventor, sails, err, chuggs, actually it was driven with a screw turned propeller -screws it's way to Yankee ships blockading Charleston Harbor. It attaches a underwater bomb called a David to the hull of the U.S.S. Housatonic. The david exploded sinking the Housatonic, but it also dragged down the Hunley and it’s 13 man crew to a watery grave. The first modern diesel/electric submarine was developed by John Holland in 1894. Recently archaeologists raised the Hunley from the harbor and even found the lucky gold dollar the captain kept in his pocket. Researchers also found the graves of one of the earlier test crews under the concrete foundation of a Charleston football stadium.

1865- Gen. Sherman burns Columbia, S.C. The POPULARITY OF THE CIGARETTE- By Jan 1865, Everyone knew the Civil War was almost over, yet try and reason with Uncle Billy Sherman. His army, fresh from burning Georgia, now spread a wide path of destruction through the Carolinas. When Sherman's men reached the capitol of South Carolina, they took special revenge in destroying the city where the first vote to secede took place. Yankee's sang "Hail Columbia, Happy Land; If I don't burn you I'll be damned!" Cigarettes were gaining popularity in Spain and Latin American while in the U.S. tobacco was taken chiefly in cigars, pipes and chaw. A South Carolina planter in Durham had just finished developing the perfect mild blend of cigarette tobaccos, Bull Durham, when Sherman's bluecoats arrived to loot and torch the factory. Instead of tragedy things worked out well for the fellow. After the Civil War the Yankees went home to towns from Maine to California and talked of the good smoke they had in Carolina. Soon it was a national passion. Hey man, you got any papers?

1876- The invention of canned sardines.

1877- THE SATSUMA REBELLION-Part of the modernizing of Japanese society after the Mejii Restoration was the phasing out of the Samurai class. Some moved into the officer corps of the new western trained army. Many of the samurai, rather than bear the shame of demotion to peasantry, emigrated to Hawaii under the invitation of King David Kalakaua IV. But some samurai didn’t go quietly. When ordered by the government to give up their swords, a large samurai army led by Takamuri Saigo revolted and has to be put down in several bloody battles. Takamuri committed suicide but later all is forgiven. One of the Satsuma clan retainers will go to the Naval Academy and become Grand Admiral Togo, father of the modern Japanese Navy. The Tom Cruise 2001 film The Last Samurai was about this event.
Modern statue of Takamuri Saigo

1906- In a White House wedding ceremony President Teddy Roosevelt saw his eldest daughter Alice married to Congressman Nicholas Longworth of Ohio. Alice was as free spirited as her father, Once when confronted about her escapades Teddy remarked " I can run the country or control Alice, but I cannot do both."

1911- General Motors installed in their Cadillacs the first automatic starters, replacing the handcrank. It was developed by Charles Kettering, the reason he did it was because a friend of his stopped to assist a young lady's who's engine had stalled. When he tried to get the engine started again using the hand crank, it kicked back and hit him in the jaw, breaking it and eventually causing gangrene, which eventually killed him. Kettering spent many years at GM and started the Delco brand of auto parts. He also was responsible for fast drying paint which allowed a car to be painted in almost instantly on an assembly line instead of days. He sold the idea to an unbelieving client by having his car taken from the parking lot, painted and returned over a long lunch.

1912- THE NEW YORK ARMORY SHOW-Mabel Dodge and Gertrude Stein introduce Post expressionist modern art to the U.S. public. The first U.S. showings of Picasso, Matisse, Duchamp and the Italian futurists. The show was denounced as a "chamber of horrors" and Matisse was burned in effigy in Chicago. Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending a Staircase" was described by an art critic as "an explosion in a shingle factory". Duchamp was highly gratified, I believe.

1925- First issue of Harold Ross’s The New Yorker magazine.

1934- Pennsylvanian Amos Neyhardt started the first drivers education course.

1942- Ernst Lubitsch’s screwball comedy about the Nazis "To Be , Or Not To Be"debuted. Adolf Hitler enters a room and after everyone "Seig Heil" salutes him, he replies "Heil Myself !" But the film flopped because it’s female star Carole Lombard died tragically in a plane crash shortly before the premiere.

1958 – Johnny Hart’s comic strip "BC" 1st appears

1967 – The Beatles release "Penny Lane" & "Strawberry Fields"

1979- A Prairie Home Companion radio show starring Garrison Keilor was first broadcast nationally. It was a feature on Minnesota Public Radio since 1974.

1987- Soviet premiere Mikhail Gorbachev revealed President Ronald Reagan's preoccupation with space aliens: "At our meeting in Geneva, the U.S. President said that if the earth faced an invasion by extraterrestrials, the United States and the Soviet Union would join forces to repel such an invasion. I shall not dispute the hypothesis, though I think it's early yet to worry about such an intrusion..."

1989- "Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure" premiered starring the most excellent Keanu Reeves and Alex Winter. Whoah-Dude!

2008- The province of Kossovo declares it's independence. This is the last part of the old nation of Yugoslavia to break apart, a process that began with the death of Tito in 1991.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Why did L. Frank Baum call his fantasyland over the rainbow, the Land of Oz?

Answer: While he was writing stories, Baum tried many careers like theater manager and door to door china salesman. In 1900 he tried to publish a book he called first called the Wizard of the Emerald City. But the publisher had a superstition about gemstones and asked him to change the title. At the time he was a reporter for the Chicago Evening Post. He looked around for an idea, when he noticed the files inside his desk. He saw files listed A-N, and O-Z, Oz. And so Wonderful Wizard of Oz it became. It became the best selling children’s book two years running and a hit play in 1902.

Eduard Meissonier

About DRAWING THE LINE

Studies in American Humor- “ An unwritten chapter in animation history, until now, has been the place and importance of unionization in the industry, which Tom Sito has happily supplied…..In an area where politics, economics, and aesthetics meet, Sito sorts out and makes sense out of a much misunderstood chapter in the story of Hollywood.”-M. Thomas Inge

Reviews/Comptes Rendus- “ In Drawing the Line, Tom Sito, a 30 year veteran of the animation industry and past president of America’s largest animation union…..crafts an appealing analysis of the heretofore undocumented tensions resulting from the production process of one of America’s most enduring cultural media.”
-Paul Lawrie- University of Toronto

Thank you very much! Check out the press section of this site to read what Leonard Maltin, Jerry Beck, and the London Review of Books had to say! Amazon and Barnes & Noble have recently restocked their supply. So, click on the book cover to order a copy today!

Quiz: Why did L. Frank Baum called his fantasy land over the rainbow, the Land of Oz?

Yesterday’s Question Answered below: KILROY WAS HERE was scrawled everywhere in the 1940s. Was Kilroy a real person?

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History for 2/16/2008
Birthdays: Charles Taze Russell founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, Edgar Bergen, Sonny Bono, John MacEnroe, Frank Welker, John Schlesinger, Faith Hubley, Katherine Cornell, John Corligiano, Kim Jong Il, Levar Burton is 50, Ice-T is 50

In ancient Rome it was the Festival of Quirinalia- when the founder of Rome Romulus was taken up into the clouds and became the god Quirinus

Today is the feast of St. Juliana, who was tortured by both her father AND her boyfriend.I know a lot of you girls out there can relate to that. She also liked to wrestle winged devils in her spare time.

1923- Bessie Smith made her first recording-"Downhearted Blues".

1937- Chemist Wallace Carothers working for the Dupont Company received the patent for the synthetic fiber called Nylon. This fabric could replace expensive silk. By World War Two nylon stockings for women were so popular that limited by shortages resourceful women would draw a seam in pencil down their bare leg to impersonate the effect.

1978- The first computer bulletin board goes on live. Ward Christensen and Randy Seuss's Computerized Bulletin Board System was an S-100 motherboard and CP/M, and a Hayes 300 baud modem. It still runs to this day, but the Internet has taken the place that BBS's used to have

1985-"Family Dog" episode on Steven Spielberg’s Amazing Stories show. The first direction by Brad Bird.

1994- Apple announced the introduction of the digital camera, the first camera that needed no film but could load images directly into a computer.

2003- As part of his lavish birthday celebrations, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il called for this people to "Burn with Everlasting Hatred for the United States."
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Yesterday's Trivia Question: All through World War Two the preferred American graffiti was a drawing of a big nosed man looking over a wall and the words KILROY WAS HERE, written over it. Was Kilroy a real person?


Answer: During World War Two, James Kilroy worked as a checker at the Fore River Shipyard in Quincy Mass. His job was to check on the number of rivets completed. Riveters were on piecework and got paid by the rivet. Kilroy would count a block of rivets and put a check mark in semi-waxed lumber chalk, so the rivets wouldn't be counted twice. He continued to put his checkmark on each job he inspected, but added KILROY WAS HERE in king-sized letters next to the check, and eventually added the sketch of the chap with the long nose peering over the fence and that became part of the Kilroy message. Once he did that, the riveters stopped trying to wipe away his marks, and so get paid twice for the same job.

Ordinarily the rivets and chalk marks would have been covered up with paint. But with war on, however, ships were leaving the Quincy Yard so fast that there wasn't time to paint them. As a result, Kilroy's inspection "trademark" was seen by thousands of servicemen who boarded the troop ships the yard produced. To the servicemen he was a complete mystery; all they knew for sure was that some jerk named Kilroy had "been there first." As a joke, U.S. servicemen began placing the graffiti wherever they landed, claiming it was already there when they arrived. From Berlin to Tokyo.

Kilroy became the U.S. super-GI who had always "already been" wherever GIs went. It became a challenge to place the logo in the most unlikely places imaginable (it is said to be atop Mt. Everest, the Statue of Liberty, the underside of the Arch De Triumphe, and even scrawled in the dust on the moon.)

And as the war went on, the legend grew. Underwater demolition teams routinely sneaked ashore on Japanese-held islands in the Pacific to map the terrain for the coming invasions by U.S. troops (and thus, presumably, were the first GI's there). In 1945, an outhouse was built for the exclusive use of Truman, Stalin, and Churchill at the Potsdam conference. The first person inside was Stalin, who emerged and asked his aide (in Russian), "Who is this Kilroy?" ...

( Special Thanks to KARL COHEN of ASIFA/ SF for sending me this story)

courtesy of seldomnicenowadays.blogspot.com

Question: All through World War Two the preferred American graffiti was a drawing of a big nosed man looking over a wall and the words KILROY WAS HERE, written over it. Was Kilroy a real person?



Answer to yesterdays question below: Name a US president who’s name ends in a vowel.
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History for 2/15/2008

Birthdays: Galileo Galilei, French King Louis XV, Michel Praetorius, Susan B. Anthony, Charles Tiffany, John Barrymore, Matt Groening, Jane Seymour, Cesar Romero, Gale Sondergard the Spider Woman, Melissa Manchester, Claire Bloom, Chris MacDonald, Chris Farley, Marisa Berenson is 61

1720- Young Francois Voltaire had begun a career as a successful playwright with his first play Oedipe. But his second play Artemire was booed as loudly as his first play was cheered. The irate poet ran up on stage and argued with the audience for over an hour about its merits. But the audience still thought the play sucked.

1815- Things on the Island of Elba had gotten so quiet that the British officer in charge of Napoleon's exile, Sir Colin Cambell, informed his prisoner he was going on holiday to see his girlfriend in Italy. “Will you be back by the 28th?” Napoleon asked. “Yes, why ?” Oh, nothing. it's just my sister Princess Pauline is planning a party and we'd hate for you to miss it." In reality Nappy planned to escape and reconquer Europe. Pauline had her party on the 25th. Sir Colin returned to find his prisoner, and his career in the army, had flown the coup.

1898- The U.S.S. Battleship MAINE EXPLODES in Havana Harbor, killing 252 sailors. The cause was never confirmed, it may have been a spontaneous igniting of fumes in the gunpowder magazine, but the American public was urged to blame Spanish sabotage.
The next day a motor launch out to the site of the disaster rescued the ships cat clinging to the mainmast protruding from the water. U.S. public opinion against Spain was pushed by "yellow journalists" like William Randolph Hearst and Josef Pulitzer who told his correspondent artist Frederick Remington: "You supply the pictures, I'll supply the war."American expansionists had been planning a war with Spain since 1896 and had tried to pick a fight over Cuba in 1871 and 1874. President McKinley, who Teddy Roosevelt described as having :"no more backbone than a chocolate eclair" gave in and declared War on Spain to cries of "Remember the Maine!". More Americans were killed on the USS Maine than in the entire Spanish American War, which was fought and over by December of the same year. America emerges as a power player on the world stage.

1933- ATTEMPTED ASSASINATION OF FDR- Unemployed anarchist Guisseppe Zangara shot a pistol at President-elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt at a rally in Chicago. He missed FDR but killed the Mayor of Chicago Anton Czermak. Guisseppe
Zangara was tried and sent to the electric chair the following month.

1947- During the anti-Communist witchhunts the FBI revoked the visa of famed documentary filmmaker and founder of the National Film Board of Canada John Grierson because they thought his politics were subversive.

1954- Future President and b-movie star Ronald Reagan tried doing a stand-up act at the Las Vegas Ramona Room with the "Honey Brothers", a comedy troupe similar to Abbot & Costello.

1969- President Richard Nixon combined the twin holidays of Lincoln’s Birthday Feb. 12th and Washington’s Birthday Feb.22nd into one three day weekend and called it President’s Day. So instead of two days off in February you have one with no emotional meaning to it. Nixon does it to us again!

1984- Touchstone Pictures created so the Walt Disney Company could do more adult movies. Their first film was Splash., starring a tastefully naked Darryl Hannah.

1989- The last Soviet troops leave Afghanistan.

1991- In a speech President George I Bush Ist invited dissident elements in Iraq to rise up against Saddam Hussein in Iraq. He declared: ”The Day of the Dictator is Over!” Iraqi Kurds, Shiites and Marsh Arabs rose in revolt, confident the US would back them. The US instead pulled out and left them to be bombed and nerve-gassed by Saddams’ Republican Guard. Maybe as many as 500,000 died..

1994- After months of insane bidding, Viacom’s Sumner Redstone beat out QVC’s Barry Diller to buy Paramount Pictures. The cost is $20 billion, although the studio’s net worth was estimated at $8 billion. When asked, Diller replied: “What’s done is done. Next.”

2002- Scientists announce the first discovery of fossilized Dinosaur vomit.

2003- Millions of protestors march in cities from Hollywood to Kiev to Capetown to protest US plans to attack Iraq. Nearly a million marched in London alone. Pres. Bush II invaded anyway.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: In 1988 hesitant Democratic Presidential candidate Mario Cuomo joked:” The American people would never elect a president who’s name ended in a vowel”. This year we’ve seen Rudy Giuliani, and now Barak Obama. So, have any U.S. Presidents had a name that ended in a vowel?

Answer : What Super Mario may have been saying, in so many words, is that almost all US presidents have been WASPS ( White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) ( all except Kennedy) but there were four presidents who’s name did end in a vowel. James Monroe, Franklin Pierce, Millard Fillmore and Calvin Coolidge.

Quiz: In 1988 hesitant Democratic Presidential candidate Mario Cuomo joked:” The American people would never elect a president who’s name ended in a vowel”. So far this year we’ve seen Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, and now Barak Obama. So, have any U.S. Presidents had a name that ended in a vowel?

Answer to yesterdays question below: Was Robin Hood a real person?
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History for 2/14/2008
Birthdays: Joshua Norton aka Joshua Ist Emperor of the United States 1819, Jack Benny- real name Benjamin Koubeilsky, Frederick Douglas, Christopher Latham Scholes- inventor of the typewriter, George Washington Ferris inventor of the Ferris Wheel, Pier Francesco Cavalli, Jimmy Hoffa, Vic Morrow- COMBAT star and Jennifer Jason-Leigh’s dad, Skeezix Wallet (character in Gasoline Alley comic strip), Gregory Hines, Ignaz Friedman, Thelma Ritter, Carl Andersen, Hugh Downs, Jim Kelly, Florence Henderson, Meg Tilly, Alan Parker, Margaret Knight the inventor of the flat bottom paper bag in use in supermarkets today.

Happy Valentines Day!
so where's my Whitman's sampler?

This holiday was originally the Roman fertility festival LUPERCALIA, when the young men of Rome wearing olive oil and not much else, would run through the streets waving oak branches over the heads of young girls to inspire fertility. Then they would all go to the orgy.
Keeping with the custom of the early Church to sanctify pagan holidays with saints days-. Pope Gelasius Ist decided to rename the holiday for St.Valentine, who was martyred by Emperor Claudius II Gothicus in 295 A.D.. The olive oil and the orgy was out, but tradition has it that Valentine in prison kept communicating with his flock by writing little notes and tossing them through the bars.. These notes or "Valentines" fused with the romance notion of the old Roman party and became a custom for lovers as early as the 14th century.

Today in the Orthodox calendar is the Feast of Saint’s Cyril and Methodius, the “Apostles to the Slavs”, who created the Russian (Cyrillic) alphabet out of Greek and Hebrew characters.

1848- President James Knox Polk is the first president to sit for a photograph. The daguerrotype was taken by a young Matthew Brady.

1876- THE TELEPHONE- One of the strangest coincidences in technology history was that two men invented the same device at almost the same moment. Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell in Boston and Elijah Gray in Chicago were both working on a device to transmit human voices instantaneously over wires. Each knew of the others work and labored furiously to be the first. When Bell was able to get a weak sound of his voice over the wire his sponsor and future father in law Robert Hubbard wanted to file the patent. But Bell procrastinated until he felt it was perfect. Exasperated, Hubbard took the schematics and went to the office to file the patent himself. What he found out later, was he filed the patent barely two hours ahead of Gray in Chicago! Gray tried to challenge the patent. US courts decided that since Grays attorney had filed a “caveat” to a patent- which meant I’m working on an idea” while Hubbard & Bell filed a patent “I’ve invented the idea”, they awarded the patent to Bell. Elijah Gray still went on to invent more things, founded the Western Electric Company and grew very rich. But Alexander Graham Bell got the credit as inventor of the telephone.

1884- 25 year old Teddy Roosevelt was an up and coming member of the New York State legislature. On this day he received a double shock - both his mother and young wife died on the same day. Shattered, he abandoned his political career and fled to the Badlands of North Dakota to be a rancher and deputy sheriff. He said the landscape was so bleak it "looked like the personification of a poem by Edgar Alan Poe."

1886- Los Angeles began to export its first trainload of oranges back east.

1887- Several leading French intellectuals including Guy DeMauppasant, Balzac and Charles Gounod publish a letter to the President of the Republic begging him not to build the Eiffel Tower.-" A Useless Monstrosity, which even America with it's crazed passion for commerce has the sense to reject! And what if it lasts twenty years ?" There were plans to pull down the tower 1907 but by then it had new use as a wireless radio antenna.

1907- Golden Books incorporated. One of their artists was Gustav Tennegren, who would become the stylist of Walt Disney's Pinnochio.

1927-Alfred Hitchcock’s first suspense film “The Lodger” opened in London.

1929- the ST. VALENTINE'S DAY MASSACRE- Scarface Al Capone's gang dressed as Chicago police round up a bunch of Bugs Moran's hoods at the S.M.C. Cartage Company garage at 2122 North Clark Street and blow them away with tommy guns. Dr Reinhardt Schwimmer, one of the men killed, wasn’t even a mobster but an optometrist who liked to hang out with gangsters to see life on the edge. The seven men had 200 bullets in them. They even shot their dog. When Moran was asked who he thought had done it, he replied: ”Only Capone kills like that.” Big Al himself was in Key Biscayne Florida having lunch with the Dade County District Attorney. One of the triggermen was Machine-gun Jack McGurn, but when questioned by police his girlfriend testified he had been in bed with her all that day. Newspapers called her his 'Blonde-Alibi". McGurn was bumped off later that year. At the massacre site amazingly one gangster- Joe Duesenberg- lived long enough for police to question. But to the end he wouldn't spill the beans. When asked who shot him full of bullets, he replied:" Nobody!" and died.

1931- Tod Browning's film of the play Dracula, starring Hungarian actor's union organizer and recreational morphine addict Bela Lugosi, premiered.

1946-Enniac, the first all electronic circuited computer, started up at the university of Pennsylvania.

1949- The United States charged that the Soviet Union had as many as 14 million people in prison camps in Siberia, called Gulags.

1962- First Lady Jackie Kennedy gave a tour to network television cameras of the private living quarters of the White House. It’s the first time most Americans had ever seen the inside of the Executive Mansion.

1965- The Detroit home of black activist Malcolm X was firebombed.

1967- Former kinky pinup model Betty Page married Harry Lear.

1968- Part of the Vietnamese Tet Offensive was the Communists overrunning the old Imperial Capitol of Hue. This day US Marines finally recaptured the cities Imperial citadel after weeks of bitter house to house fighting. The Communist command center was set up in a throne room called the Place of Perpetual Peace.

1979- Digital music composer Walter Carlos, who scored the film A Clockwork Orange, announced he had undergone a sex change and was now Wendy Carlos.

1989- Iranian religious leader the Ayatollah Khomeni issued a 'fatwah' -death sentence against Pakistani novelist Salman Rushdi because he considered parts of his book "The Satanic Verses" to an insult to the character of the prophet Mohammed. Rushdie’s birth home of India only allowed him a visa in 1999. The fatwah was finally revoked in 2000 by the Supreme Islamic Counci, Iran's equivalent of the Supreme Court.

1991-Meg Ryan married Dennis Quaid.
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Yesterdays Question: Last time I asked if Sherlock Holmes was a real person. Now I’ll ask- was Robin Hood a real person?

Answer : Well,…yes in a way. Many scholars have wondered just who the heck this Robin Hood guy was. He's sort of a composite of several notable rogues. Robin of Loxley was a Saxon bandit, but evil King John liked crooks, so he gave him a job. A few decades later there was Will of the Weald called Windikin, Eustache the Black and Fulk Fitzwarren, a nobleman in disgrace who became an outlaw. He and other woodsmen fought for justice for England's poor in King Henry III 's reign. But Henry was a good king- well, kind of an okay-middle-of-the-road, could-have-done-better king. So it's convenient to combine them with Robin of Loxley and King John the Bad king. People have celebrated Robin Hood since Piers Ploughman (1382) and Shakespeare mentioned him in As You Like It (1603) but his character was cemented by the internationally popular novels of Sir Walter Scott. In Ivanhoe (1819) Scott has King Richard Lionheart call him :” Robin Hood, Prince of Outlaws and his Merry Men!”
Prop of Time/Warner Bros.