¬Quiz: A surefire laugh-getter in ancient Rome was to say “ Go kiss a Sibyl”. Why?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: Why are black crayon grease pencils called China Markers, in UK a Chinagraph?
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History for 8/16/2014
Birthdays: Fess Parker, Karl Stockhausen, George Meany, Charles Bukowski, Menachim Begin, Otto Mesmer the creator of Felix the Cat, Myron Grim Natwick the creator of Betty Boop, Hal Foster the creator of Prince Valiant, Kathie Lee Gifford, Eydie Gorme, Bill Evans, Leslie Ann Warren, Angela Bassett is 56, Julie Numar is 81, Robert Culp, James Cameron is 60, Bruce Beresford, Steve Carrell is 52, Madonna aka Louise Ciccone of Bay City Michigan is 56

Today is the Feast of St. Roch, who had a heavenly inspired dog to lick his sores and cure him of the Black Plague. It was thought dog licks cured plague.

1521- Guatamoc was the last fighting Aztec emperor. After Montezuma died he led Aztec resistance to Cortez and his Spanish conquistadors. After 80 days of brutal house to house fighting, he finally surrendered the capital Tenochtitlan. The Spaniards tortured Guatamoc for three days trying to get him to reveal where the secret treasure of Montezuma was. As they poured boiling oil on his feet he laughed:” Ah, am I standing on a field of rose petals?” Today they hanged him. He never revealed where the Aztec treasure was.

1777-Battle of Bennington- General of Volunteers John Stark defeated a large contingent of Hessians sent by Burgoyne to get help for his redcoats trapped at Saratoga. Stark inspired his men before the battle with words like these: “Men, yonder are the Hessians. They were bought for seven pounds ten pence a man. Are you worth more than that? Tonight the American flag will fly atop that hill or Molly Stark will sleep a widow!” The flag few atop the hill and Stark went home to his wife a hero.

1780- Battle of Camden, South Carolina- Colonial General Horatio Gates excelled at backroom politics almost more than at military accomplishments. He finagled the northern army command away from it's creator General Phillip Schuyler, then later took full credit for the great American victory of Saratoga even though the hard work was done by Benedict Arnold. Yet he was considered a serious rival of George Washington for leadership of the American armies. But on this day his humiliating defeat at the hands of Lord Cornwallis extinguished his ambitions. Gates leapt on his horse and abandoning his retreating army, galloping alone 30 miles to safety. Then citing ill health, he resigned from the service.

1805- In the camp at Boulogne Napoleon held a grand military ceremony for his Grande Armee’. To the thundering beat of 1,300 massed drums he personally awarded medals to worthy common soldiers. The secret to Napoleons leadership was a special bond between him and his men that was unique to his time. In an world of aristocrats who considered the common people scum, Napoleon walked casually among his soldiers like an equal, stopping to share a roast potato or a dirty joke in rough soldiers language. He called them his children. He had an uncanny memory and read the personnel rosters of his 350,000 man army once a month to update himself on his men’s achievements.

1812- Napoleon’s army stormed the burning Russian city of Smolensk. Marshal Murat, almost sensing the disaster this Russian invasion was going to bring, walked casually out in the open in front of the Russian cannons, almost inviting them to kill him. He was finally tackled out of harm’s way.

1812- American General Hull surrendered most of Michigan territory, including the settlement of Detroit, to British General Issac Brock.

1819- THE PETERLOO MASSACRE- At Saint Peters’ Fields in Manchester thousands of factory workers and their families gathered to protest for better working hours and minimum wages. The response of the local magistrate Sir Simon Burley was to send in the Royal Horse Cavalry to ride them down and saber them. The incident was called Peterloo because most of this same cavalry engaged were also at the battle of Waterloo four years earlier. People referred to Sir Simon Burley’s actions with a pun from MacBeth, hurley-burley.

1858- Queen Victoria sent the first transcontinental wire message to President James Buchanan via Cyrus Field's incredible UNDERWATER TRANSCONTINENTAL CABLE, stretching from London to New York. After great fanfare about progress and a new era in communications it broke down, as well as the next several tries to fix it. Just hours after the first message a fisherman pulled it up in his net, thought it was the tail of a sea serpent and cut off a chunk to take home and brag to his friends. Other attempts were ruined when technicians tried to correct the faintness of the signal by boosting the voltage beyond the safety range of the insulation-Zapp!

Direct transcontinental communications didn't really become a reality until wireless broadcasting. But the who-ha over this scientific marvel did inspire author Jules Verne to write "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea."

1877- BIRTHDAY OF THE WORD-"HELLO". In a letter dated today Thomas Edison wrote to the first president of AT&T about how people should initiate conversation on the new telephone machine. A genteel Victorian would think it impolite to speak until spoken to. Edison explained that the results of sonic tests proved the old English fox hunting call "Halloo!" was most audible over great distances. Alexander Graham Bell, an old navy man, always thought the right way to start a phone conversation was to say "AHOY!", but hello won out. In most languages around the world the word hello is the same. It was the only English word Sioux Chief Sitting Bull ever learned. He loved to grab your hand and pump it vigorously while saying:" HELLO, HELLO!" 1896- Four miners find gold in Bonanza Creek in the Klondike. The Yukon Gold Rush.

1938- In Three Forks Misssissippi, Blues legend Robert Johnson was poisoned by a jealous husband.

1942- Happy Birthday Mighty Mouse. Terrytoon's short: "The Mouse of Tomorrow".

1954- First issue of Sports Illustrated.

1965- The AFL, American Football League offered it’s first expansion franchise to a new team called the Miami Dolphins. The AFL merged with the NFL in the 80s.

1969- “ Hey Man, we’re gonna serve breakfast in bed for 500,000” So was hippy Wavy Gravy’s announcement on the second day of the Woodstock Rock Concert. He said this was the day Americans learned to eat Granola. It was ladled out en masse in paper cups and has been a diet staple ever since.

1974- The Ramones play their first gig at the NY club CBGBs. Hey-Ho, Lets Go!

1977- E-DAY in Memphis. Elvis Presley, donuts and Pizza Hut box in hand died sitting on the toilet He was reading the book-the Historic Search for the Face of Jesus. He was 42.

1985- On her birthday, Madonna married Sean Penn. They divorced shortly after.

1987- The Harmonic Convergence- Another one of these celestial events that the mainstream media trumpeted as the end of everything. All nine planets of our solar system were in perfect alignment and the subsequent gravitational forces were supposed to knock the Earth into the Sun or something or other that would send us to Hell in a Handbasket. Lots of New Age types flocked to occult sites like Mt. Shasta and Stonehenge to meditate on the End of All Things. So what happened? Nothing.

1991- The original Shamu the Whale died of respiratory failure at age 16.

2005- Top Pixar storyartist Joe Ranft was killed in an auto accident. He was 42.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Why are black crayon grease pencils called China Markers, in UK a Chinagraph?

Answer: They have nothing to do with the nation of China. In the early Twentieth Century, they were created to mark the prices on expensive porcelain dishes being shipped. The waxy black marks wiped off the porcelain easily without leaving a stain.

Quiz: Why are black crayon grease pencils called China Markers, in UK a Chinagraph?

Yesterday’s question answered below: Who or what was Cantinflas?
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History for 8/15/2014
Birthdays: Napoleon Bonaparte, Leon Theremin- inventor of that weird electronic musical instrument that is in all those 1950s flying saucer movies, Samuel Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, King Frederick Wilhelm Ist of Prussia 1685, T.E. Lawrence of Arabia, Ethel Barrymore, Huntz Hall, Bill Baird, Edna Ferber, Sir Robert Bolt, Rose-Marie is 90, Linda Ellerbee, Gene Upshaw, Oscar Peterson, Shimon Peres, Mike “Mannix” Connors, Nicholas Roeg, Anthony Andrews, Ben Afleck is 41, Debra Messing is 45, Julia Child, Jennifer Lawrence is 23.

778 AD.-Battle of Roncevaux or Roncesvalles. Legendary battle where Frankish Emperor Charlemagne's top knights -the Palladins: Roland waving his sword Durandel, Oliver and Ogier the Dane fought to the end against the Moors. In reality the battle was probably a small rearguard border skirmish with hostile Basques tribesmen in the Pyrenees Mountains.
But a poem about the incident called the Song of Roland inflated it into an epic Christian battle against the evil Moslem Moors, wizards and devils. The Chanson du Roland became the top best seller of the Middle Ages, read and enjoyed throughout Europe. When William the Conquerer's Normans went into battle at Hastings in 1066, William’s minstrel Vailletan sang the Song of Roland at full gallop while tossing his sword into the air and catching it like a parade drum major.

1057-Scottish king Macbeth was defeated and killed by Malcom III Canmore at the Battle of Lumphanan in Aberdeenshire. But did Burnham Wood move to Dunsinane?

1097- DEUS VOLT ! GOD WILLS IT! The First Crusade was announced at Clermont by Pope Urban VII. Christian Europe decided that the Holy places in Jerusalem should not be in Moslem hands. In his sermon the Pope addressed the assembled knights in their native French: "Christian warriors who continually seek pretexts for war and rape Rejoice! If you must have Blood, then bathe in the Blood of the Infidels, and Christ will count you among his Warriors! Soldiers of Hell, become Soldiers of the Living God!”
They sewed small strips of red cloth in a cross on their left shoulders and began with a massacre of any Jews they could find. History is at a loss to find any comparable social phenomenon. It took Islam a generation to understand that this was a Christian Jihad (Holy war) declared on them. The Moslem Emirs were just as feudally divided as the European warlords, until they united under Sultan Salladin.

1100s-1400s- PAX DEI- The Medieval Church tried to limit the carnage of knights fighting and feuding by declaring a Truce of God during Lent and this, the beginning of the harvest season. It sometimes worked, but slaying infidels was still okay year round.

1261 Byzantine Emperor Constantine VIII came from Nicea and recaptured his capitol Constantinople from the Crusader knights who had occupied it since 1209.

1457 – The earliest dated bound book, The "Mainz Psalter," completed.

1519- Panama City, Panama founded.

1535- Ascension Paraguay founded.

1549- First Christian missionaries arrive in Japan. A band of Spanish Jesuits led by Father Francis Xavier landed in Kagoshima on the island of Kysuhu.

1598- Irish Earl Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone defeated an English Army at Yellow Ford.

1620 – The Mayflower sets sail from Southampton with 102 Pilgrims.

1649- THE IRONSIDE CONQUEST- Oliver Cromwell brought his New Model Army over to Ireland to crush Catholic Irish rebellion. His depredations wreaked upon the population of Ireland are still recalled as the Curse of Cromwell. Mass death of this kind would not visit the Emerald Isle again until the Great Potato Famine of 1846.

1794- The first U.S. coin minted in the United States, a silver dollar. Minting of colonial and state currencies had been going on in America for years, Continental Eagles and such. The word Dollar is derived from Thaler from JacobsThaler meaning from the Gift of St. Jacob, a Czech mountain valley where there were rich silver deposits.

1806- For his birthday, Napoleon lays the cornerstone for the Arc de Triomphe.

1812-English General Issac Brock turns back a U.S. invasion of Canada and captured the Yankee settlement of Detroit.

1843- Tivoli Gardens opened in Copenhagen. One of the oldest amusement parks in the world. King Christian said “ When people are amused, they don’t worry about politics. :
Hans Christian Andersen was a frequent visitor. Walt Disney visited to get inspiration for Disneyland.

1848 - M Waldo Hanchett patents the dental chair.

1885- Sir Richard Burton completed his translation from medieval Persian of One Thousand and One Arabian Nights. There had been earlier attempts like a French edition in 1809, but Burton’s edition introduced the west to Aladdin and his magic lamp, Sinbad the sailor and Scheherazade.

1911- Proctor & Gamble introduced Crisco shortening.

1914- After ten years labor the Panama Canal opened for regular service. 1935- Twentieth Century Pictures and Fox Pictures merge to become Twentieth Century Fox.

1935- Humorist writer Will Rogers and his pilot Wiley Post are killed when their small plane crashed in Barrow, Alaska.

1939 - In 1st night game at Comiskey Park, Sox beat Browns 5-2. 1944- Operation Dragoon. To support the Normandy beachheads landings a second landing was made by allied armies on the southern French beaches near Marseilles.

1945- The US officially ended wartime gasoline rationing.

1946- Disney’s Make Mine Music, featuring Blue Bayou, All the Cats Join In, and Willie the Operatic Whale.

1947-"The Stroke of Midnight" India and Pakistan, the Jewel in the Crown, get their freedom from Britain after 300 years. The end of the Raj.

1948- Syngmun Rhee elected first president of the Republic of South Korea. The Russians saw this as a direct challenge to their hold over the North and quickly choose communist Kim Dae Jung as the leader of North Korea. What began as a postwar temporary partition of the Korean peninsula was made complete.

1958 - Buddy Holly weds Maria Santiago.

1960- The Congo ( Brazzaville) declared independence from France. It had been renamed Zaire for awhile but is back to the Republic of the Congo today.

1965- The Beatles play their largest U.S. concert yet, at New York's Shea Stadium.

1968- The pirate radio station Radio Free London began transmitting.

1969-WOODSTOCK-Three Days of Peace and Music- The rock concert of the 20th Century opened. The promoters, one of whom was heir to the Polident Denture Cream fortune, were hoping to host 50,000 people and launch a recording studio in the quiet New York farming town. What they got was 500,000 young fans and the social phenomenon that defined an age. At one point the more conservative elements of the community got a court order to block the land to be used, but farmer Max Yasgur offered his cow farm for the site.

Up till then in the tumultuous 1960’s any gathering of young people that big meant violence and riot, and at one point New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller threatened to send in the National Guard. But the magic prevailed and there was no violence outside of 200 bad acid trips and one heroin overdose.

Richie Havens was the first act to play, he did six sets and kept stalling because the crowd was so immense they had to bring in the other bands by helicopter. When he ran out of songs to sing Havens started riffing any thing he could think of. This way Havens created his most famous tune “Freedom” with added in spirituals like “Sometimes I feel like a Motherless Child”. After his death in 2013, his ashes were scattered at the Woodstock site.

1971- President Nixon announced a sweeping economic package including taking the U.S. dollar off the Gold Standard. The world's most stable currency being so transformed created the wildly free-flowing currency market we have today. When warned of this consequence, President Nixon is supposed to have replied: "I don't give a sh*t about the Lire."

1971- Bahrain declared independence from Britain.

1977- THE WOW SIGNAL- Project SETI- Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence- heard something. It sounds like static to us, but it was a strong electromagnetic signal on a regular narrow band AM radio frequency emanating from deep space. So far, it has never been explained away or repeated. SETI scientist Jerry Ehmen noted in his log for that night “….wow!”

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Yesterday’s Quiz: Who or what was Cantinflas?

Answer: Mario Moreno (1911-1993) known as Cantinflas, was the most famous Mexican comic actor, the Mexican Chaplin. One of his only English speaking roles was as David Niven’s companion in the film Around the World in Eighty Days (1956).

QUIZ: Who or what was Cantinflas?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: The Japanese kamikaze of WWII were named after an earlier event. What was the original kamikaze?
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History for 8/14/2014
Birthdays: Gary Larson, Erwin "Magic" Johnson, Lina Wertmuller, David Crosby, California bandit Triburcio Vasquez, Alice Ghostly, Buddy Greco, Nehemiah Persoff, The 20's Parisian nightclub singer Bricktop, Dick Lundy, Mark "The Bird" Fidrych, C.S. Watson, James Horner, Wim Wenders, Emmanuele Beart, Halle Berry is 48, Mila Kunis, Steve Martin is 69

29BC- Octavian celebrated a triumph in Rome to celebrate his victory at Actium over Anthony & Cleopatra.

1248 - Construction of the DOM Cologne Cathedral begun. It was finished 600 years later in 1848. Hey, what can I say?, these things take time.

1281-A Pacific typhoon, called by the Japanese the Kamikaze, or The "Divine Wind" destroyed the Mongol invasion fleet of Kublai Khan as it approached the shores of Japan. The Mongols showed the Japanese that they meant business. When they captured small outer islands like Ryuku and Iwo Jima, they crucified the civilians to the topmasts of their ships.

1385- Battle of Aljubarrota- Portuguese King John the Great defeated a Spanish army trying to put a relative on his throne. Portugal celebrates this as their independence day. Among Johns army were English archers freelancing after a lull in the Hundred Years War

1457- The first printed Gutenburg Bible finished. One agent of Gutenberg's bringing the first shipment of bibles to Paris was arrested for witchcraft because locals thought it was humanly impossible for one person to make so many identical books without the aid of black magic.

1498 - Columbus explored the mouth of the Orinoco River in Venezuela .

1585 - Queen Elizabeth Ist of England politely turned down the offer of the Dutch to be Queen of Holland. She was trying to avoid angering Spain any further. Spain had a long festering feud with the Dutch. Shopping around for monarchs was not so unusual in those days. In 1700 England would go shopping for a Protestant king until they found the German George Ist. In 1827 the throne of Greece was offered to both a German Hohenzollern and a Russian Romanov.

1744- LOUIS LE BIEN AIMEE- Pleasure loving French King Louis XV had become gravely ill and was near death. His father confessor the Bishop of Soisson refused to give him the sacraments unless he banished his mistresses and reformed his sinful life. He did so and Louis health improved. He was so good the peasants began calling him Louis le Bien Aimee’- the Well Beloved. But boys will be boys. King Louis soon grew bored with being a faithful sober husband. He called back his bimbos and banished the Bishop instead. Louis XV lived happy, if disreputably, to a very old age.

1761-Battle of Liegnitz-Frederick the Great beats the Austrian army trying to surround him. Communications were so faulty 30,000 Russian soldiers stood around doing nothing while they could hear the distant cannon of their Austrian allies being defeated .

1781- At their camp in Wethersfield Conn, George Washington and the Comte du Rochambeau had been debating whether to use their combined forces against occupied New York City or Lord Cornwallis in Virginia. Today Washington received a letter from the Admiral DeGrasse that he was bringing his large French fleet with supplies and troops to meet them at the Chesapeake Bay. Washington knew this could be their last campaign, since his French allies wouldn’t send any more help in 1782, and everyone was starting to listen to a rumor that the Czarina Catherine of Russia was offering to broker an international peace conference in Vienna. Washington was sure that at this peace conference among the crowned heads of Europe, American Independence would probably be negotiated away. He resolved to accept the French plan to attack Cornwallis at Yorktown Virginia.

1784- On Kodiak Island Grigori Shelekov founded Three Saints Bay, the first Russian colony in the Americas. The Russians would continue to expand their trading posts and settlements until Russian America extended from Alaska to just north of San Francisco California.

1820 - 1st US eye hospital, the NY Eye Infirmary, opens in NYC.

1873 - "Field & Stream" magazine began publishing.

1893 - France issues 1st driving license, included a required driving test.

1900 – The 1st electric tram began in the Netherlands -Leidseplein-Brouwersgracht.

1900 -The end of the 55 DAYS IN PEKING. A multinational military force relieved the diplomats besieged by the rebellious Boxers and regular Chinese Army in the Chinese capitol. The Dowager Empress Zhou Zhsi fled into the countryside. British, American, German, Russian, French, Italian and Japanese troops fought side by side and looted and burned the beautiful Summer Palace.

Just in case you thought tasteless cheap journalism is a modern problem- At this time back in Europe no one knew the Peking diplomats fate. The press had picked up on a report from a Shanghai correspondent for the London Daily Mail that reported them all massacred, with lots of lurid "eyewitness "details of their gang rape and torture. Queen Victoria had been fooled to the point of ordering a memorial service at St. Paul's Cathedral before reconsidering until more substantive proof came in.

1908- The first international beauty pageant held in Kent, England.

1920- THE MIRACLE OF THE VISTULA -An obscure action to western historians, but it poses an interesting "what if..." The Poles and Bolshevik Russians were having a war after the Red Revolution. The Reds had thrown the Poles back from Moscow and on this day they were beaten back by Marshal Pilsudski from the gates of Warsaw. The "What if" is the fact that Lenin and Trotsky never intended the Communist Revolution to be confined to Russia alone. The Red Army would missionary it across Europe the way Napoleon's battalions had spread in their wake social reforms of the French Revolution. Russian Marshal Tuckhashevsky told his men: " The Road to a World Conflagration lies over the Corpse of Poland !"

With post-Great War Berlin, Vienna, Rome and Budapest in political chaos, if the Poles hadn't stopped the Bolsheviks when they did, instead of a Nazi Europe the 1920's we could have seen a Europe where the Communist Russia extended to the borders of France and Holland. Analysts at the time said this battle was as important as Marathon or Waterloo, but today it is forgotten.

1922- 38 year old rising politician Franklin Roosevelt discovered the first signs that he had polio.

1928 - Ben Hecht & Charles McArthur's play" The Front Page," premiered in NYC. They later went on to become top comedy writers in Hollywood. McArthur is the one who sent Hecht the famous cable- "Hecht, some quick, fortunes to be made and your competition are idiots!"

1935- President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed into law the National Social Security Act. Considered the most successful US Federal social program ever.

1937 "Bloody Saturday" in Shanghai. With the opening of the Sino-Japanese War, the Chinese hoped for foreign help by making a stand at Shanghai, within full view of the International Settlement. On August 14, some American trained Chinese bombers attacked the Japanese warship Izumo, anchored in the river in the heart of the city. They misjudged--some said their bomb sights hadn't been adjusted-- and they dropped two bombs on Nanking Road, the "5th Avenue" of Shanghai.

One bomb went through the roof of the Palace hotel, the other detonated on the street: 729 people killed, 861 wounded. The same day, another tragic mistake--once again, Chinese bombers miscalculated, with worse results.(the area was crowded with refugees) 1,011 dead and 570 wounded.—the bodies were packed so tightly, blood flowed in the gutters like water.

1939 - 1st night games at Comiskey Park -White Sox 5, Browns 2

1941- Nazi spy & saboteur Josef Jakobs was the last prisoner to be executed in the Tower of London. No he wasn’t beheaded, he was shot. He had suffered a broken ankle during his capture so he faced his firing squad seated on a Windsor chair.

1942 – General George Marshall named Dwight D Eisenhower as US commander for invasion of North Africa. Marshall wanted at first to run the show himself, but President Roosevelt said he was too valuable and had to stay in Washington in overall charge. Eisenhower was a controversial choice. A career staff desk jockey, he had no experience leading men in combat. This was especially galling to British Field Marshall Montgomery, who had been in the field battling Nazis for 3 years now. But Marshal foresaw the job of European Allied commander would be a more administrative and even diplomatic, juggling act between the Yanks, British and Free French, so Eisenhower was his man.

1945-VJ DAY (Aug 15th in Japan) -President Truman announced the surrender sparking wild celebrations in allied cities like New York and London. In Japan citizens were politely asked to stand at attention by their radios as Emperor Hirohito explained to his people about the surrender. It is the first time they had ever heard his voice. At 3 am that morning 1,000 rebel Japanese troops attacked the palace trying to prevent the disgrace of the surrender announcement. They were fought off by the Imperial guard and the guard commander was killed. The speech was pre-recorded and went on anyway.

Defense minister Anami committed Hara-Kiri while his radio played the address. Gangs of angry kamikaze pilots wandered the streets looking for trouble. Their commanders had emptied the gas tanks of their planes to obey the Imperial edict.

1956- The Marilyn Monroe movie "Bus Stop" premiered.

1962 - French & Italian workers break through at Mount Blanc to create a auto
Tunnel through the Alps.

1962 - NASA test pilot Joseph Walker takes X-15 supersonic plane to 60,000 ft.

1962 - US mail truck in Plymouth, Mass robbed of more than $1.5 million.

1964 –California angels pitcher Bo Belinsky is suspended after attacking sportswriter Braven Dyer.

1965 - Sonny & Cher's "I Got You Babe" hits #1.

1965- Jane Fonda married director Roger Vadim, who put the beautiful young blonde in naughty movies like Barbarella. His previous wife Bridgette Bardot was a beautiful young blonde that he put in naughty movies….hmm.

1971 – The British began internment without trial in Northern Ireland.

1979 – A rainbow was seen in Northern Wales that lasted for 3 hours duration.

1980- SOLIDARNOSC!! - At a strike at the Lenin Shipyards in Gdansk, Communist Poland the first mass peoples movement that would eventually topple European Communism was created. An electrician named Lech Walsesa climbed the fence and joined the strike, eventually becoming the leader of the movement Solidarity. He was a political prisoner, a Nobel Prize winner and eventually President of democratic Poland.

1994 – The world’s most wanted terrorist "Carlos the Jackal" was arrested in Khartoum Sudan when he entered a clinic to have a varicose vein removed from his testicle.

1995- Super-agent Michael Ovitz of CAA was named President of the Walt Disney Company under Michael Eisner. After 14 fruitless months he left.

2003- A blackout shut down the power from New York to Toronto to Detroit.

2006- A UN brokered ceasefire stopped the open war between Israel and the Hezbollah living in Lebanon.

2126- Get your catchers mitts out! Comet Swift-Tuttle will pass very close by the Earth.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: The Japanese kamikaze of WWII were named after an earlier event. What was the original kamikaze?

Answer: It was a Pacific Typhoon that prevented the Mongol invasion of Japan. See above, 1281.

Quiz: The Japanese kamikaze of WWII were named after an earlier event. What was the original kamikaze?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: Who first said “ When Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold.”…?
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History for 8/13/2014
B-Dayz: Annie Oakley, Alfred Hitchcock, Don Ho, Buddy Rogers, Bert Lahr, Ben Hogan, Richard Baseheart, Saul Steinberg, Regis Toomey, Johann Christoph Denner (1655)- inventor of the clarinet. Danny Bonaduce, John Logie Baird one of the inventors of television, Hockey great Bobby Clarke, Daniel Schorr, Bombay movie star Viyayanthimala, Fidel Castro is 88

Egyptian Festivals of Isis & Serapis

Festival of the Greek goddess Dianna of Ephesus. She had six breasts. During one of these festivals Saint Paul tried to spoil the party by preaching his sermon to the Ephesians. They ran him out of town. Diana in her Greek form as Artemis from the older Near Eastern goddess Cybele. She had the dual nature of Virgin & Mother. Hmm…Sound familiar?

These three pagan festivals of Isis, Serapis and Artemis were in the Middle Ages converted into the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. In the Italian city-state of Sienna this is the date for the Pallio, the traditional horse race through the streets in medieval splendor.

Today is also the Feast Day of Saint Cassian, the Patron Saint of Stenographers.

29BC- Octavian celebrated a triumph in Rome for his victory over Anthony and Cleopatra.

1521- The Aztecs surrender to Cortez. After Montezuma was killed the Aztecs chose Guatamoc as their new emperor and he drove the conquistadors from their capital Tenochtitlan vowing:" We will eat the Spaniards flesh with salsa ! " remember that next time you order fajitas. But smallpox ravaged the population and Cortez soon returned with heavy reinforcements of allied Indian tribes from Texcoco who hated Aztec dominance. After 80 days of bloody house to house fighting that destroyed most of the capitol. Guatamoc and a few survivors surrendered. Cortez built Mexico City on the ruins.

1642- Astronomer Christian Huygens noticed that Mars had a southern polar ice cap too.

1727- Count Nicholas Von Hutzendroff formed a group of Bohemian Protestant refugees into the movement Unas Fratrum or the Moravian Brethren. The Moravians strict but gentle practices were a great influence on Pastor John Wesley who created Methodism.

1790- The PEOPLE OF NEW SPAIN BECOME MEXICANS. almost 269 years after the Aztec surrendered workmen in Mexico City were clearing a building site for a convent when they unearthed a giant statue of the snake skirted Aztec goddess Tonnantzin Coatlicue. The find galvanized Mexican society. Indians and Mestizos crowded around the statue and recalled their once mighty civilization. Worried Spanish colonial authorities quickly reburied the statue but the damage was done.
Dominican monk Servando De Meir preached that the Aztec god Quetzalcoatal was actually St. Thomas the Wandering Apostle, so that meant Mexico was Christian before Spain was. Twenty years later when Father Hidalgo rang the liberty bells he called for revolution in the name of Our Lady of Guadalupe Tonnantzin. The people of New Spain named their country after the old Aztec name Mexica or Mexico.

1805- LEWIS GETS LAID, or, THE END OF A MYSTERY-historians have always puzzled why Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis & Clark's famous trek to the Pacific, killed himself in a lonely cabin on the Natchez Trace in 1809. Lewis was a personal protege of Thomas Jefferson and James Monroe and was first Governor of Upper Louisiana -everything from Missouri to Wyoming. He was likely to one day become President. Yet despite his coolness under extreme hardship after his death stories evolved about his manic-depression, alcoholism or even that he was murdered.

Recently a Seattle scholar theorized that on this day in 1805 he spent the night with a Shoshone woman to celebrate getting safely across the Continental Divide. The Shoshone regarded sexual contact as hospitality and that particular tribe was known to be rife with syphilis. Lewis subsequent illnesses and his increasing suicidal depression was clinically symptomatic with the final stages of the disease. And this would also explains why Jefferson and Captain William Clark would have been so quick to hush up any further investigation of his death, even resorting to calling Lewis an alcoholic, which in those days had far less social stigma than a venereal disease.

1846- Commodore Stockton and Col Freemont with a contingent of U.S. Marines marched up from their ships in San Pedro Harbor to Ciudad Los Angeles. They interrupted a local fiesta to inform the startled inhabitants that they were now part of the United States, whether they liked it or not.

1889- The first coin operated telephone set up in a Hartford Conn. bank.

1907-The first motorized TAXICABS hit the streets of New York. Taxi comes from Taximeter, a little machine that tallied the fare based on distance traveled. Cab is short for the earlier form of hired horse drawn carriage. Originally called a Cabriolet, then a brand name of Hansom Cabs, then just Cabs.

1910- Florence Nightingale dies after being in sickbed convinced she was dying since age 37. She died at 90. Although claiming to be too sick to walk down a flight of stairs she worked ceaselessly reforming the army medical system, founding nursing colleges and drove several friends into early graves in the cause of medical reform. She created the ideal of the clean cut, disciplined nurse professional.

1914 - Carl Wickman begins Greyhound, the 1st US bus line, in Minnesota.

1920- PONZI SCHEMES- This day U.S. investors attacked the offices of financier Charles Ponzi, demanding their money back. Carlo Ponzi had emigrated from Italy and came up with the idea of talking investors into giving him money without being specific about how he would make them rich. He used the millions to buy suits, cars and mansions. Like all pyramid schemes this one finally blew up. Ponzi spent some jail time and was deported. Mussolini gave him a job in the finance ministry and Ponzi proceeded to embezzle the Italian Treasury. He escaped to Brazil where he died comfortably in 1949. He gave his name to the term Ponzi Schemes.

1932- German President Von Hindenberg had a fifteen minute meeting with Adolf Hitler. He rebuked Hitler for tying up the Reichstag and the violence in the streets. Hitler refused any partial role in the government short of full power. After Hitler left, the old general grumbled:" That man for a Chancellor? I’d rather make him a postmaster so he could lick stamps with my head on it!"

1934- First Little Abner comic strip by Al Capp. Dogpatch, Mammy Yokum, Daisey Mae, Kickapoo Joy Juice, Jubilation T. Cornpone and the Schmoo are born. Al Capp was a hard drinking old curmudgeon of a cartoonist who lost one leg when as a child he fell off a streetcar. In his old age he gloried in being a right wing chauvinist who got into arguments with lefties like John Lennon & Yoko.

1937- The Japanese army reopened its’ campaign to conquer China by mass daylight bombing of Shanghai.

1941- James Stuart Blackton certainly had an interesting career. The English born artist became a top newspaper cartoonist, a vaudevillian drag act as Mademoiselle Stuart, the first American animator, founder of the Vitagraph Company, the movie fanzine Motion Picture World. He even successfully faked a newsreel of the battle of Manila Bay in 1898 using toy boats, sparklers and cigar smoke. He made fortunes and lost them just as quickly. On this day, penniless, he was struck and killed by a bus on Pico Blvd.

1942 Disney's Bambi opened in theaters nationwide. Today the film looks quaint but in its time artists felt it was as realistic as artists could attain. Designer Rico LeBrun had a hunter friend bring in a real deer he shot in the Sierras. LeBrun set up drawing and anatomy sessions to study the dead animal. But LeBrun was so inspired by the opportunity he refused to dispose of the carcass even after several days it began to smell badly and attract flies. Finally the other animators waited until LeBrun had left for lunch and tossed the rancid thing.

1945-After the atomic bombings Japan prepared to surrender. A note delivered to the Swedish Embassy in Tokyo expressed the wish of the Imperial Japanese Government to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. Emperor Hirohito pre-recorded a radio message to prepare his people for something they had never faced since the days of Kublai Khan- foreign occupation .

1946- MGM cartoon Northwest Hounded Police, the short in which Tex Avery perfected the 'Tex Avery Take" - used since in films like Mask, Roger Rabbit and Casper.

1955- Shooting wrapped on Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. He was remaking the film he had done as a silent movie in 1925. One wag said: DeMille has done God one better, because he has now parted the Red Sea twice."

1960- French West Africa declared independence from France and became the nations of Chad and the Central African Republic.

1981- At his California ranch in a dense morning fog, Pres Ronald Reagan signed the Kemp-Roth Economic Recovery Act of 1981, the first of tax cuts for the wealthy that would slowly destroy the American Middle Class and shift the massive income tax burden from the rich to the poor. The wealthy saw their tax rate drop from 70% to 14% and estate taxes eliminated. The tax rate on corporations dropped by half. Tax write-offs were given to companies who moved their factory jobs overseas.

1991- Jack Ryan died. The Toymaker was the inventor of Hot Wheels toy cars, and helped launch the doll Barbie.

2000- In a presidential debate with AL Gore, candidate George W. Bush attacked the Clinton presidency for being too quick to use the military. Bush declared “ The U.S. should not be in the business of nation building.” Once in office, Bush invaded two countries and was only stopped invading a third with great difficulty.
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Yesterday’s Question: Who first said “ When Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold.”…?

Answer: Austrian Foreign Minister Metternich, the architect of post-Napoleonic Europe, made the remark in 1848 when after working class rioting broke out in Paris, demonstrations quickly broke out in Vienna, Berlin, Rome, Milan, Warsaw and Budapest.

Quiz: Who first said “ When Paris sneezes, Europe catches cold.”…?

Yesterday’s question answered below: What female superhero was drawn by a woman cartoonist?
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History for 8/12/2014
Birthdays: King George IV, Cecil B. DeMille, The alien Alf- 1757, Cantinflas, Buck Owens, George Hamilton, Edith Hamilton, Diamond Jim Brady, screenwriter William Goldman, Mtsislav Rostropovitch, Xenia Sharpe (educator who invented the childrens reader Dick and Jane) Kathy Lee Bates-the author of the song America the Beautiful, Klara Schickelgruber- Hitlers mom, Dominique Swain, Pete Samprass, John Casale-I'm not Fredo! Casey Affleck is 39.

The Golden12th. In England this is the beginning of grouse hunting season.

1508- Ponce de Leon landed in Puerto Rico.

1530- The Medici family had ruled the Republic Florence previously as merchant politicians. Now they turned the city-state into the hereditary Duchy of Tuscany. This day the Republic ended when the city was stormed by a Medici-Papal army. The city fell, despite the fortifications being designed by Michelangelo. They didn't stop the enemy, but they must have looked GREAT!

1553- Pope Julius III ordered the confiscation and burning of Jewish Talmuds.

1658-Happy Birthday NYPD! The first city police force in America was set up in New Amsterdam ( I wonder if they said-"Booeck'eym²)

1687- Second Battle of Mohacs- Austria takes Hungary from the Turkish Sultan.

1794-The GREAT WHISKEY REBELLION-In the colonial Northwest frontier -Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan- the chief medium of trade was whiskey. Gold was rare and nobody knew whether English pounds, Spanish doubloons or Yankee eagles were legal tender. Whiskey was also the easiest way to convert excess corn crop to a commodity before it spoiled. And drinking water could kill you with any number of diseases, while nothing can live in alcohol. So buying and trading was in whiskey. Abraham Lincoln's father sold their farm for whiskey.

So when George Washington's government decided to put a tax on hooch, the frontiersmen went wild-not that they weren't that way anyway. Rebellion is an exaggeration; it was never more than a few drunken yahoos shooting up a local post office. Still, mindful of the recent chaos of the French revolution, President Washington freaked and sent 5,000 troops to crush the rebellion. Touchy Joe, or George.

1799- Napoleon spent the night meditating at the Great Pyramid of Egypt.

1805- Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark, climbed a mountain peak in the Bitterroot Range of Rocky Mountains near the present day Montana -Idaho border. He had traveled this far on the theory of Thomas Jefferson’s that the Missouri River and Columbia River were the same river. So one should be able to travel from New Orleans to the Pacific Ocean by river. When Lewis climbed this mountain he expected to see on the other side gentle rolling plains to the Pacific. Instead, he saw even higher snowcapped mountains and still more mountains behind them. It dawned on Lewis that this is one big mother of a continent and that river theory thing was all wrong.

1812 Austrian Dr Joseph Lister is the first surgeon to use disinfectant during surgery. It took a long time for Lister’s hygienic practices to catch on. During the American Civil War surgeons would sharpen their scalpel on the sole of their boot before commencing the incision.

1813- British commander the Duke of Wellington liberated Madrid, Spain, forcing out the French under Napoleons brother, Joseph Bonaparte.

1821- Stephen Austin entered Texas with the first group of Anglo colonists invited by the Mexicans to bolster their sparse population. It brought a land rush of poor families from the U.S. They would write on their doors before they left G.T.T. or Gone To Texas.

1822- Vicount Lord Castelreagh, chief British diplomat and statesman during the Napoleonic wars, goes mad after eating hot buttered toast and kills himself with a butter knife. He had been warned by his doctor Lord Graydon against eating hot buttered toast. Shortly afterwards his doctor Lord Graydon also committed suicide, but he didn't have any hot buttered toast.

1851- Mr Issac Singer received a patent on his new sewing machine. Elias Howe, who had invented the sewing machine first, immediately sued him. But Singers improved design was so much superior to Howes that he quickly recouped al the penalties paid and eventually bought out Howe. The Singer Sewing Machine Company is still around today.

1869- San Francisco lunatic Joshua Norton, who called himself Norton Ist, Emperor of the United States, today published an Imperial Edict outlawing the Democratic and Republican Parties. Hmmm… he may be on to something!

1877-THE BIRTH OF RECORDED SOUND. Thomas Edison announced his sound recording invention and demonstrates it by recording "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a tin cylinder. Edison never quite understood the possibilities of a music industry and was convinced that the recorded sound was going to be a used primarily for people to listen to the voices of deceased family, sort of like a voice from the grave. That idea was so popular that it translated to the Logo of the RCA Company with the familiar image of the dog listening to "His master's voice". The original image of that dog listening to his master's voice, had the dog sitting on a coffin.

A few years later Emile Berliner from Georgia invented the flat record disc. Edison thought the disc was clumsy and too fragile. In the future he declared, everyone would use recording cylinders.

1898- Annexation Day in Hawaii. The U.S. formally takes over the Kingdom of Hawaii. The government of Queen Liliokalani had been overthrown a group of Yankee sugar plantation owners and handed over to the U.S.

1915 - "Of Human Bondage," by William Somerset Maugham, published.

1927- the William Wellman movie WINGS opened with Howard Arliss and Buddy Rogers, the first silent film to win best picture at the Academy Awards before the advent of sound. The second silent film was The Artist, in the year 2012.

1932 Aldous Huxley's Brave New World first published. Before anyone ever heard of stem cells, Huxley had written a scholarly paper on the moral dangers inherent in controlled eugenics. Writer H.L. Mencken urged him to put his ideas in a fiction form to reach a wider audience. The title comes from Shakespeare's the Tempest " Oh Brave New World, that has such people in it!'

1942-MONTY’S HERE!- General Bernard Law Montgomery arrived at El Alamein to take over command of the British Eighth Army facing Rommel and the Afrika Corps.

1944- JOE KENNEDY JR. The Allies were at a loss at how to stop the German V-1 and V-2 rockets being fired at London. They had wreaked more havoc than the great German bombing raids in the Blitz four years earlier. Allied Bomber command came up with the idea of filling a B-26 with high explosive and after getting to the coast the pilots would bail out and the plane would complete it’s trip by remote control to destroy the rocket launching pads in Calais. The first pilot to volunteer for this dangerous mission was Joe Kennedy Jr., eldest son of the famous Kennedy clan.

After ten minutes in flight the plane exploded before Joe could bail out. Ironically the Germans had moved the V-2 base out of range anyway. Just before he left he telephoned a friend in London: I’m going into my act now. If I don’t make it back tell dad I love him. The grief-stricken elder Kennedy transferred his plans for political power to his second son John F. Kennedy.

1951- Bob McKimson’s Warner Bros short Hillbilly Hair. The short includes the long routine animated by Emery Hawkins when Bugs Bunny takes over calling a square dance and uses it to torture the two twin-brother hillbillies who are after him.

1953- The Soviet Union exploded its first Hydrogen Bomb, nicknamed by the CIA "Joe-4" for Joe Stalin. The scientific team led by Andrei Sakharov called it the Layer Cake-alternating layers of hydrogen and uranium fuel wrapped around a conventional atomic bomb. Like Robert Oppenheimer in America, Andre Sakharov later became a leading critic of the nuclear arms race.

1959- Under the gaze of howling and spitting crowds, the first 6 black students registered for class at Little Rock High School. When the governor of Arkansas declared he would use the National Guard to keep the school segregated President Eisenhower sent in the elite 101st Airborne division to enforce the federal court order and escort the children. Scholars today admit that Eisenhower was not exactly a champion of civil rights, but the Supreme Court ordered it, and to the old general, orders were orders.

1961-Soviet and East German troops start building the Berlin Wall, which remained a symbol of Cold War tension until it was pulled down spontaneously by Berliners in 1989.

1981- IBM introduced its first PC- personal computer and PC-DOS I.. Unlike Apple, IBM shared the basic hardware design, so a myriad of cheaper competitor PC’s soon flooded the market.

1988- Martin Scorcese’ film The Last Temptation of Christ opened in theaters to howls of protests from religious groups. There had been more inflammatory interpretations of the Christ story on screens in the past like Pasolini’s Gospel According to Saint Matthew and the Canadian film Hail Mary, but the church groups weren’t that media savvy yet. Like all these protest efforts, all the controversy did was boost it's box office.

1999- In Yorkshire England, Tish, the world’s oldest goldfish, died at age 43.

2000- In the waters off Norway the Russian submarine Kursk suffered an explosion and sank. No one is sure what happened, the theory is an old torpedo exploded in the bow. Out of pride, Russian Naval authorities refused offers of international help to rescue the remaining sailors trapped on the sea bottom. By the time they relented and accepted help, all 116 men were dead.

2008- Entertainer and producer Merv Griffin died at age 81. The creator of games shows like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, his last statement on his website was " I was planning to go on vacation, but this is not the destination I intended."
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Yesterday’s Question: What female superhero was drawn by a woman cartoonist?

Answer: Miss Fury, by Tarpe Mills in 1941. Miss Fury was the original CatWoman.