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Oct. 6, 2019
October 6th, 2019

Quiz: I’ll ake mincemeat out of him! What exactly is mincemeat?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered below: Politicians describe groups of followers as cohorts. What is a Cohort?
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History for 10/6/2019
Birthdays: Alfred Lord Tennyson, Jenny Lind the Swedish Nightingale, George Westinghouse, Janet Gaynor, Carol Lombard, Karol Szymanowski, Thor Heyderthal, wrestler Bruno Sammartino, Britt Eckland, Le Corbusier, Elizabeth Shue is 56, Sean William Scott, Jeremy Sisto is 45, Ioan Guffrudd is 46

In Ireland this is Ivy Day, when Irish folk commemorate the death of the great statesman Charles Stuart Parnell with a sprig of ivy in their buttonholes.

105B.C. Migrating German barbarian tribes called the Cimbri defeated the Roman army at the river Arusia, modern Vaucluse in the Rhone Valley. The defeat gave Gaius Marius the opportunity to reform the training of the Roman legions.

68BC- Roman General Lucullus defeated the Armenians under King Tigranes II at Artaxata.

1502- THE LAST VOYAGE OF COLUMBUS -Rejecting the ideas of Amerigo Vespucci, Juan De La Cosa and the Portuguese that what he had discovered was in fact a new continent, Columbus makes one more attempt to reach China by sailing west.
He explores down the Central American coastline to Venezuela and Columbia. The Nicaraguans tell him that beyond their jungle is another Great Ocean. He surmises that it must be the Indian Ocean so these people must be the Vietnamese (Cochin-China).

1536- Near Brussels Englishman William Tyndale was strangled and burned at the stake for committing a crime against the Church, that of translating the Bible into English. Years later Tyndale’s writing was the basis of the King James Bible.

1600- THE BIRTH OF OPERA. This day as part of the celebrations of the marriage of French King Henry IV to Marie de Medici, composers Rinconcini and Caecini premiered a new kind of musical drama where soloists sang without the heavy polyphony of madrigals but more directly in imitation of ancient dramas. It was “Eurydice” and it was the first true opera. Many composers including Claudio Monteverdi took up the form.

1683-THE PENNSYLVANIA DUTCH- the first recorded German immigrants, Mennonite farmers from the Rhineland, arrived in America invited by Gov. William Penn of Pennsylvania. The reason many German immigrants in Pennsylvania were labeled Dutch was the backwoods Americans inability to distinguish when the German declared “Ich bin Deutsche” from “Dutch”.

1802- The Heiligenstadt Testament- Composer Ludwig van Beethoven left behind a note found among his papers after his death in 1827. Dated this day it was addressed to his brother Karl and another unspecified relative. It was more of a spiritual Last Will than anything else. In the note Beethoven poured out of his heart confessing his faults and his fears of going deaf. It is an amazing insight into the great man’s soul.

1803- Napoleon inspected the restorations to a XVII century French church and veterans hospital called the Hotel des’Invalides, unaware that it would be his tomb 40 years in the future.

1826- A Missouri saddlemaker offered a reward of one penny for a runaway apprentice. The boy had joined a Santa Fe bound wagon train and grew up to become Kit Carson, one of the Old West's most famous scouts.

1847- Charlotte Bronte's novel Jane Eyre first published.

1860 First telegraph linking L.A. and San Francisco.

1860- During the Taiping Rebellion in China the Ever-Victorious Army, a mercenary western force paid by the Manchu Emperor, recaptured Peking (Beijing). Originally organized by an American named Stoneman, the Ever Victorious was now commanded by British Sir Charles Gordon, for which he received the nickname "Chinese Gordon'.

1863- The first Turkish Bath House is opened in Brooklyn.

1863- The BAXTER SPRINGS MASSACRE- Quantrill’s Raiders bushwhacked Union General Blount’s personal entourage on the road in Kansas and killed 86. It’s called a massacre rather than a battle, because most of the slain were noncombatant office staff trying to surrender. The heartless guerrillas even shot the regimental band. One union soldier with five bullets in him recalled before he lost consciousness, a large horseman standing over him gloating:” When you meet God, tell him the last thing you saw on Earth was Old Billy Quantrill!”

1864- SHERIDAN'S VALLEY CAMPAIGN- The Shenandoah Valley had been a pain in the neck to the U.S. Army throughout the Civil War. Its pro Southern population hid guerrillas like John Mosby, the "Grey Ghost". Stonewall Jackson had humiliated three Yankee armies there. Towns like Winchester and Harper's Ferry changed hands 73 times!

So while Lee and Grant’s armies stood stalemated outside Richmond, feisty Irish-born cavalryman Phil Sheridan was given a large army and ordered to finally bring the Shenandoah Valley to heel. After drubbing the Confederates in battle, he turned away from the rebel army and concentrated on the civilian population. His army burned towns and crops, and hanged men from the trees even remotely suspected of being guerrillas. Sheridan sat, feet up, in a slow moving open buggy and waved his cigar like an orchestra conductor's baton. "Go to it my boys! Have Fun!" Like Sherman’s terror campaign through Georgia, the brutality of Sheridan left a bitter memory to Southerners for generations to come.

1866- The Reno Bros. committed the first recorded train robbery, this one in Indiana.

1880- First classes at University of Southern California or USC.

1889- Paris' naughty nightclub the Moulin Rouge opened.

1908- Since a Peace Treaty of Berlin in 1878 the European Peace had hinged upon the little Turkish province of Bosnia-Herzegovenia being administered by Austria while still nominally part of Turkey. This compromise was clunky but it worked. This day in reaction to the Bulgarians declaring their independence the Austro-Hungarian Empire announced it was annexing Bosnia-Herzegovenia outright. This act destabilized the world situation and began the diplomatic spiral into The Great War 6 years later..

1911- The first transpacific telephone conversation, between Tokyo and San Francisco.

1917- The terrible WWI Battle of Passchendale finally ended when Canadian troops took the ridge on the third attempt. 250,000 casualties on both sides.

1918- From the wreckage of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of World War I the Serbs, Croats, Slovenes and Bosnians formed themselves into a new country called the Kingdom of South Slavs or Yugoslavia. It broke up in the 1990s.

1921- In London the society known as PPEN established, for Poets, Playwrights, Editors and Novelists.

1927-"THE JAZZ SINGER" with Al Jolson debuts. Okay, somebody made a sound picture in 1924, and also something called "Footlights of New York" from 1926 but hey, you know what?- who cares! THIS was the movie that made "Talkies" a reality. The success of this film turned Warner Bros from a minor film company into a major Hollywood studio. Within a year of this opening, all but a handful of major movie theaters were showing sound movies. 26 year old Walt Disney was in the audience at that opening day, and it made him realize he needed to put sound in his next cartoon.

1959- “Pillow Talk” premiered, the first romantic comedy pairing Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Stanley Shapiro won a best screenplay Oscar for it. The film typified the wink-wink attitude about sex before the 1960’s Sexual Revolution and defined Doris Day’s reputation as the wholesome, girl-next-door archetype.

1966- California became the first state to officially declare LSD illegal. Hippies in San Francisco celebrate by rallying in Golden Gate Park in the thousands, and all taking a tab together.

1968- In Huntington Cal, Troy Perry and 12 others started the first Gay & Lesbian Church.

1971- William Freidkin’s gritty cop movie the FRENCH CONNECTION premiered. The film won best picture, director and actor Oscars, made a major star out of Gene Hackman. One unforeseen result was the movie stimulated interest in pursuing the investigation of the real French-Corsican Mafia heroin trafficking in the US. That mob was soon broken up. The two real life detectives the film was based on- Eddie Egan and Sonny Corso, booth retired from the NYPD and pursued careers in show biz.

1973- THE OCTOBER WAR or THE YOM KIPPUR WAR. Egypt and Syria surprised attacked Israel on the holiest religious holiday of the Jewish calendar. They also achieved surprise by attacking at 2:00 in the afternoon instead of dawn. The Sinai and Golan Heights saw some of the largest tank battles since World War II. The Arab states received men and material support from the PLO, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Morocco, Libya, Algeria, Bangladesh and even Idi Amin the dictator of Uganda. America and Russia faced off by heavily re-supplying both sides. Both sides charged Russians and Americans were flying covert combat missions as well.

1976- During a televised debate with Jimmy Carter, President Gerald Ford said he was unaware of any Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, a great surprise to Poles, Czechs, Romanians, Lithuanians and others. Later the American public surprised Gerald by voting him out of office.

1981- Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat was assassinated while viewing parade marking Yom Kippur War anniversary. Commandos hopped out of the back of a troop carrier and blew him away with machine guns. Almost killed next to him was Hosni Mubarak. Although some claim that the chief assassin Khaled Al Islambouli asked Hosni to step aside so not to get hurt. One of the conspirators arrested was Alman Al Zawahiri, who today is the little guy with the glasses and grey beard who took over Al Qaeda, after Osama Bin Laden was killed.

1991- Elizabeth Taylor got married for the 8th time, now to construction engineer Larry Fornetsky, at Michael Jackson’s house. They divorced shortly after.

1991- Disney’s Darkwing Duck TV show premiered.

1991- University of Oklahoma Professor Anita Hill testified at the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. She alleged that when she was his aide she was subject to constant sexual harassment. Judge Thomas declared her testimony a "symbolic lynching". Thomas' conservative backers countered with a furious media campaign. Despite her credentials as a PhD scholar from a Christian University, they portrayed Prof Hill as a paranoid slut. Those involved in the smear campaign admitted it was all fabricated. Clarence Thomas was confirmed, but the controversy made Sexual Harassment a national issue.

2002- Pope John Paul II canonized Fra Paulo Escriva, the mystic founder of the order Opus Dei. John Paul broke with the more liberal Jesuits in favor of Opus Dei, a super conservative group that critics say wanted directed power over Catholic doctrine and still practiced self- flagellation.

2002- The Mayor of Paris Bertrand Delaune was stabbed in the stomach at an all night Nuit Blanche rock concert. He recovered and remained mayor until 2014.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Politicians describe groups of followers as cohorts. What is a Cohort?

Answer: It was a unit size in a Roman Legion, the equivalent of a modern platoon.


Oct. 5, 2019
October 5th, 2019

Quiz: Politicians describe groups of followers as cohorts. What is a Cohort?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered below: What was a G-Man?
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History for 10/5/2019
Birthdays: Wendel Wilkie, President Chester Allen Arthur, Ray Kroc the mastermind of MacDonalds restaurants, Louis Lumiere, Vaslav Havel, Larry Fine of the Three Stooges" , Bob Geldorf, Mario Lemieux, Josh Logan, Bill Dana "my name Jose Jimenez", Bill Keane, Clive Barker, Glynnis Johns is 96, Donald Pleasance, Maya Lin, Bernie Mac, Karen Allen is 68, Kate Winslet is 44, Guy Pearce is 52, Jesse Eisenberg is 36

1600- King Henry IV of France married his second wife Marie de Medici by proxy in a grand ceremony in Florence. Flemish master painter Peter Paul Rubens was in attendance, and the Queen asked him to create paintings commemorating the events.

1759- Col. Robert Rogers led his Roger’s Rangers on a forced march to surprise the Abeknackie Indians who had been raiding Maine homesteads. At 4:00 am near present day Saint Francis, the Rangers burned the Abeknackie village and killed so many people that the Abeknackies ceased to be a force in the area. Years later Rogers wrote down his principles of irregular warfare- his maxims like "Move Fast and Hit Hard" became the basis of Special Forces training today.

1761- Prime Minister William Pitt the Elder, called the Architect of the British Empire, resigned from office. He was replaced by Lord Bute, who Frederick the Great called a complete scoundrel. Bute was chosen mostly because young King George III liked to play whist with him. Whist was a card game similar to bridge.

1762- Christoph Gluck premiered his opera Orpheo et Eurydice in Vienna.

1795- THE WHIFF OF GRAPESHOT- The end of the French Revolution. The problem with revolutions is once you start one it’s a real problem how to stop them. The Paris mob had gotten used to overthrowing one government after another since 1789. In 1795 when yet another mob of rioters threatened to overthrow yet another French government the politicians turned to young general Napoleon Bonaparte, who dispersed the crowd by firing cannons at them loaded with buckshot. A self proclaimed "Child of the Revolution" Bonaparte was already considered politically left, so his act of force could not be accused of royalist leanings. This action helped the little general with the funny Italian name becomes a national figure.

1813- BATTLE OF THE THAMES RIVER. Indiana territory- Tecumseh, an Indian visionary who foresaw that only by united action could native peoples hope to drive the white man back to Europe, spent his life convincing tribes to put away their tribal differences and fight as one people. He assembled a huge force of warriors, but was defeated and killed by Gen. William Henry Harrison. Congressman Richard Johnson, who said he personally killed the great chief (nobody saw it happen) later became Vice President and Harrison President. People sang:"Rumpsy-Dumpsey, Rumpsey- Dumpsey, Colonel Johnson Killed Tecumsee."
Tecumseh was one of the few who managed to organize real resistance to the white migration west and as such was one of America's greatest threats. Yet whites were so impressed by his nobility that people like Ohio settler John Sherman named his son and future Civil War hero William Tecumseh Sherman.

1842-THE BIRTHDAY OF BEER! Lager Beer is perfected in the city of Pilzn -Pilsner Beer. Of course, beer was made by the Sumerians, Egyptians, Gauls, and can be traced back to the Ice Age, but our concept of beer requiring an advancement in refrigeration is Pilsner or Lager.

1858- An arsonist burns down NY's Crystal Palace Museum.

1864- A cyclone destroyed the Indian City of Calcutta, killing 60,000.

1877- After a lightning campaign across 1,200 miles Nez Perce Chief Joseph found himself surrounded by U.S. armies just 40 miles from the Canadian border. At Bear’s Paw near Chinook Montana, Chief Joseph surrendered to General Nelson Miles…
"From where the Sun now stands, I will fight no more forever."

1880- Alonzo T. Cross patented the first ball-point pen.

1882- Outlaw Frank James surrendered to authorities six months after his brother Jesse was killed. After doing some prison time Frank went straight and toured in a Wild West Show with fellow outlaw Cole Younger. He died peacefully in 1915.

1892-THE DALTON BOYS RAID COFFEEVILLE, Kansas and try to rob two banks at once. One quick thinking bank clerk told them the bank vault was on a time lock and would open shortly. There was no such timelock, but while the badmen waited, the townspeople broke into the hardware store and armed themselves to the teeth. As the Daltons emerged, they were shot down by the locals, much the same way the Jesse James Gang was wiped out at Northfield Minnesota ten years earlier. 8 were killed. Only Emmett Dalton survived despite 25 gunshot wounds. After getting out of jail in 1907, he also wisely went straight.

1904- According to comedian and playwright Steve Martin, this is the day Pablo Picasso met Albert Einstein at the Cafe Lapin Agile. There was a Cafe in Paris called Lapin Agile that Picasso did like to go, to but he never actually met Einstein.

1905- Happy Birthday T-Rex! Prof. Henry Osborne published a paper on the new bones found in Montana of a sleek hunter-killer dinosaur. He originally called it Dynamosaurus Imperiosis, but changed it to Tyrannosaurus Rex.

1908- Bulgaria declared its independence from Turkey and formed a monarchy under German Prince Ferdinand von Battenburg.

1914- The first airplane was shot down by another airplane. For weeks since the Great War began German, British and French airplanes flew missions of air reconnaissance. When planes encountered each other the pilots would fire pistols and even threw darts and bricks at one another. Finally, someone thought of mounting a machine gun on a plane and aerial combat was born.

1915- Germany issued an official apology to the USA over the loss of life in the sinking of the luxury liner Lusitania, and promised to pay restitution.

1930- THE R-101 The BRITISH HINDENBURG- Lord Thompson of Cardington dreamed of a fleet of passenger zeppelins uniting the British Empire much the way steam did in Queen Victoria's time. Dirigible moorings were built in Karachi, Montreal, Sydney and Ishmalia in Egypt. The R-101 was the largest zeppelin in the world when she was launched and had all the luxury of the Cunard ocean liners. Lord Thompson himself decided to take the inaugural flight from London to India and back in time to make a vital Imperial conference. On Oct. 4th as a crowd sang Sir Edward Elgar's hymn 'Land of Hope and Glory" Thompson launched the R-101 "I see this great ship of the air built with the same perseverance and permanency that has built our British Empire and will give us the mastery of the air lanes of the world!"

300 miles out the R-101 was struck by a violent thunderstorm and crashed at Beauvais France. A sergeant was heard saying : "We’re down lads." when the hydrogen gas exploded. All but 6 of her 54 passengers died in the flaming inferno, including Lord Thompson. (compared to 30 out of the 96 Hindenburg passengers and crew died). Even though her sister ship the R-100 made a perfect flight to Canada and back the British public was so shocked by the disaster that all further attempts at a British dirigible service was scrapped.

1932- Talking pictures now in vogue, MGM Studios fired famed comic Buster Keaton.

1933- Warner Bros musical Footlight Parade with James Cagney premiered.

1945- The BATTLE OF BURBANK.- Three thousand striking union filmworkers (and a few animators) battled the Burbank police in front of Gate 2 of the Warner Bros. Studio lot. chains, bricks, tear gas, firehoses, burning cars. Jack Warner placed sharpshooters behind those large movie billboards on Barham and Pass. One of the strike leaders arrested was a background painter for Tex Avery cartoons. Herb Sorrel, the union leader, was pulled into a car and beaten up by gangsters, then arrested for incitement to riot.

1947- President Harry Truman gives the first speech broadcast nationwide on television. In it he asked Americans to forgo eating meat on Tuesday’s and Thursdays, to build up U.S. grain stocks to feed people still starving in Post War Europe.

1961- The film Breakfast at Tiffany’s opened, with Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, the song Moon River.

50 Years Ago- 1969- Monty Python's Flying Circus debuted on British television BBC-1.

1969- Cuban Lieutenant Eduardo Jimenez, who wanted to defect to the USA, flew his Mig-21 fighter jet to Miami and landed it at Homestead Airforce Base. But what was embarrassing was he flew completely through all the U.S. advanced warning defenses and missiles, and landed his Mig right next to Air Force One carrying President Richard Nixon. Doh!

1969- Former First Lady Jackie Kennedy was seen going into a Manhattan cinema to see the Swedish x-rated film I Am Curious Yellow. Jackie-O beat up the photographer who caught her, but her example spawned a fashion among New York High Society intellectuals going to see porn as a Sexual Revolution statement. They called it Porn-Chic.

1970- The Canadian October Crisis. A Quebec terrorist separatist group calling itself the FLQ kidnapped and murdered a Canadian cabinet minister. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau sent army troops into Montreal and Quebec City to impose order.
Worst civilian disturbances in Canada since 1867.

1986- IRAN-CONTRA- President Ronald Reagan feared Communist expansion growing in a new revolutionary regime in Nicaragua. When the U.S. Congress banned any funds for anti-Communist mercenaries, Reagan's National Security Agency staffer Oliver North created a covert pipeline of arms. On this day Nicaraguan communists shot down an unmarked plane full of smuggled weapons flown by a CIA agent named Eugene Hasenfuss. The revelation of the incident sets in motion the scandal that would tarnish the Reagan Administration.

1989- The Dalai Lama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

2000- The Yugoslavian Revolution. –Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic’ had spent the eleven years since the death of Tito making war on the various ethnic parts of Yugoslavia as they broke off and founded sister republics. War, misery and genocide were meted out on Slovenes, Croats, Bosnians and Kossovar Albanians in turn.
Serbia endured the condemnation of the world and American-Nato bombing raids.
This day after refusing to admit he had lost re-election, 200,000 Serbs marched into Belgrade and in a massive "People Power" revolution threw old Slobodan out. Woycheslav Kostunitse was declared the legal president and old Slovo died in jail.

2003- Timothy Treadwell was an author and advocate for the wild grizzly bears of North America. This day near Khalifa Bay Alaska those bears attacked Treadwell and his girlfriend Anne Huguenard and tore them to pieces. When authorities brought down the bear in question, after being shot 21 times, human remains were found in his stomach. When Treadwell appeared on the David Letterman TV Show the previous year, Letterman joked:" Is it going to happen that one day we read a news article about you being eaten by one of these bears?" Werner Herzog did a film about his life. Grizzly Man.

2011- Steve Jobs died at age 56 of a pancreatic neuroendocrine tumor (pNET) that spread to his liver. As he faded away, he looked straight ahead as if he was seeing something and murmured "oh wow....oh....wow...."

2017- The ME TOO Movement. Harvey Weinstein of Miramax and later the Weinstein Company was one of the most powerful movie producers in Hollywood. This day the NY Times broke the story of his history of sexually inappropriate conduct towards women. He was first fired from his company, then ejected from the Motion Picture Academy. Soon more women and men were encouraged to come forward with their stories of sexual abuse. All across Hollywood, celebrities secrets were exposed and careers collapsed, Kevin Spacey, Louis CK, Garrison Keilor, Les Moonves, Maestro James Levine, opera star Placido Domingo, and more.
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Quiz: What was a G-Man?

Answer: Short for Government agent, most commonly an FBI man.


Oct. 4, 2019
October 4th, 2019

Quiz: What was a G-Man?

Yesterday’s Answer below: Which one of these places is fictional? Kalamazoo, Timbuktu, Kokonino County, Dogpatch, Cuchamonga.
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History for 10/4/2019
Birthdays: French King Louis X The Stubborn 1314, Richard Cromwell “ Tumbledown Dick, “ President Rutherford B. Hayes, Frederick Remington, Jean Millet, Buster Keaton, Englebert Dolfuss, Charlton Heston, Susan Sarandon is 73, Armand Assante, Damon Runyon, Alvin Tofler author of Future Shock, Anne Rice, Alicia Silverstone is 43, Christoph Waltz is 63, Liev Schreiber is 52

1648- Happy Birthday NYFD! Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam Peter Stuyvesant established the first regular municipal fire department in the New World. Most Fire brigades were volunteers until the late 1800s.

1777- BATTLE OF GERMANTOWN George Washington tried a dawn surprise attack on the British army around Philadelphia. The same tactic had worked at Trenton, but here things went wrong from the start. In the morning fog the Yankee right flank got turned around and started shooting at the Yankee center. The Center thought they were being attacked by Loyalists and returned fire. Two thirds of the American army shot itself to pieces and ran away before the British even knew what was happening. Washington realized he was going to need some drill instructors....

1798- Lyrical Ballads, a small book of poems published jointly by English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The book opened with the Rime of the Ancient Mariner and finished with Wordsworth’s Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tinturn Abbey.” The book didn’t sell that well. Wordsworth blamed Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner poem for being too long. Some of the best sales of the book were by sea captains who thought The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was a collection of sea shanties.

1846- The First American mayor of Los Angeles, a Lieutenant Gillespie, was apparently such an asshole to the population of Spanish Californians that they rose in revolt and chased him out of town. The Californios under their old Mexican General Andres Pico waged a guerrilla war against the U.S. army for the next few months.

1869- Henry J. Heinz begins his condiment company, bottling horseradish in a little shop in Pittsburgh. He was later called the Catsup King, -or Ketchup, if you prefer. Catsup comes from a Chinese fermented fish sauce called Koe-chiap he adapted.
One of the Heinz Company's greatest stunts was in the 1920s they placed a 40 foot tall electrified pickle on the corner of 23rd and 5th Ave. in Manhattan.

1909- St. Louis Missouri was site of the first –and probably only- airship race in the US. Four dirigibles, the total number in America, ran a course for a purse of $1000 dollars.

1910-King Manuel II of Portugal abdicated. The Portuguese Republic is declared.

1918- The day after he took the job of German Chancellor, Prince Max of Baden first telegraphed Washington DC to request peace talks to end World War I. But the note said Germany would not give up any of the territory it conquered in Belgium, France or Poland. President Wilson refused this, so the war went on.

1931- Chester Gould's "Dick Tracy" comic strip debuts.

1943- Actor Clark Gable was awarded the Distinguished Flying Medal for flying combat missions over Germany. It was said Gable took these deliberately dangerous missions instead of doing USO shows out of a death-wish in grief for his wife Carole Lombard, who was killed in a plane crash the year before.

1950- The first Peanuts comic strip introducing Charlie Brown’s dog Snoopy.

1955- The Brooklyn Dodgers a.k.a. "Da Bums" win the World Series for the first time, and the only time they ever won it while inhabiting the precincts of Flatbush. The name Dodgers came from the fact that several main trolley car lines intersected in front of Ebbets Field on Atlantic Avenue. To get into the ballpark you had to cross this area dodging the traffic. So they were known as the Brooklyn Trolley-Dodgers, then Dodgers.

1957- SPUTNIK- Russia inaugurates the Space Age and first shoots an object into space orbit. A basketball sized satellite called" Sputnik-1". Sputnik means Satellite and the word spawned pop words like Beatnik, Nudnik and Peacenik. Americans used to thinking of themselves as the leaders in all technology reacted with shock. Why weren’t we first? We were losing the space race! Senate leader Lyndon Johnson complained “I don’t want to sleep under a Commie Moon!”

The gov't reaction caused the creation of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funneled Defense Dept money into research through leading universities. Besides space, DARPA oversaw the development of computer graphics and the Internet.

Wild rock & roll star Little Richard Penniman thought Sputnik was an omen of the end of the world and resolved to give up sex, drugs and rock & roll and become a born again Christian preacher. Good Golly Miss Molly!

1957-"Leave it to Beaver' debuts on CBS.

1965- Pope Paul VI arrived in the US to deliver a plea for world peace at the United Nations. Then his Holiness visited the World’s Fair and took in a Yankee baseball game.

1969- Diane Linkletter, the daughter of television personality Art Linkletter got high on LSD and leapt out of a window to her death. Her boyfriend snatched at the belt loops of her dress in an attempt to save her, but they tore away. Afterwards Art Linkletter became a livelong crusader against drug abuse.

1971- Janis Joplin was found dead of a drug overdose at the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood. She was 27. Her song “Me and Bobby McGee” was as yet unreleased but soon topped the pop charts. Joplin left a considerable sum in her will for a party for her friends. The invitation read “ The Drinks are on Pearl”, her nickname.

1986- On a New York street a man named William Tager walked up to CBS News anchor Dan Rather and mumbling “Kenneth, what’s the Frequency?” started furiously punching Rather. He thought CBS was beaming microwaves at his brain and it was Dan’s fault. Who Kenneth was, remains a mystery.

1993- After a two week power struggle between Russian Parliamentary hard line conservatives and President Boris Yeltsin, Russian troops fire on and attack the barricaded Russian White House (Parliament building). The conservatives, including Yeltsin's own vice-president Victor Chernomyrdin, are arrested and the fragile democracy saved. This Parliament building is where Yeltsin himself was barricaded two years earlier during the failed August Coup.

1998- Rolie Polie Olie premiered on The Disney Channel. The French-Canadian Nelvana production, designed by William Joyce, is today considered one of the earliest animated TV series done completely on computer.

2001- James Hemingway, the youngest son of writer Ernest Hemingway, was found dead in the women’s wing of a Miami jail. He had become a transsexual street vagrant, and had gone by the name of Gloria, and was picked up by Miami cops for drug use and exposing himself in public. He was 69.

2006- Julian Assange founded Wikileaks.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Which one of these places is fictional? Kalamazoo, Timbuktu, Kokonino County, Dogpatch, Cuchamonga.

Answer: Dogpatch was never a real place. A few spots were named that after the comic strip Little Abner made it popular.


Oct. 3, 2019
October 3rd, 2019

Question: Which one of these places is fictional? Kalamazoo, Timbuktu, Kokonino County, Dogpatch, Cuchamonga.

Yesterday’s Question Answered Below: Some things are named William and Mary. Like the college in Virginia called William and Mary. So, who were William and Mary?
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History for 10/3/2019
Birthdays: Gore Vidal, Mikail Lermontov, Harvey Kurtzman, Chubby Checker, James Herriot, Eleanor Duse, Emily Post, Leo McCarey the director of the Marx Brothers classic film Duck Soup, and many Laurel & Hardy shorts, Steven Reich, Tommy Lee, Neve Cambell, Clive Owen is 55

1226- Saint Francis of Assisi died at 44. He seldom bathed and he asked his followers to strip him naked so he could leave the world as he came in. They all sang his Canticle of the Animals, then he exclaimed 'Welcome, Sister Death." His gravesite was kept a secret until 1818.

1574- The "Sea Beggers' the nickname of the Dutch rebel navy, lifted the Spanish siege of the Dutch city of Leyden. Surrounded by a large Spanish army, the Dutch flooded their dykes drowning thousands of enemy soldiers, then floated in their navy to the rescue. Singing their national hymn “Willhemus Van Nassauwen “they entered the city throwing bread from all sides to the starving populace. This victory turned the tide in the struggle with Spain for the independence of Holland. Prince William the Silent wanted to reward Leyden with a big tax cut, but Leydeners said they’d rather have a University. So William founded the University of Leyden.

1779- After the epic battle between the USS Bonhomme Richard and the HMS Serapis Captain John Paul Jones limped his battered ships into the nearest Dutch harbor near Amsterdam. The French and American strategists told him to do this, to drive the British crazy and get Holland into the war. The Dutch not only wouldn’t hand Jones over the British, they even allowed his men to guard his British POW’s under arms in a Dutch fort. Britain declared war on Holland soon after.

1855- American James McNeill Whistler arrived in Paris to study painting. He had tried to apply to West Point for a military career, but failed the entrance exam. Years later he joking told friends "If I hadn't identified phosphorous as a gas, I'd be a major general by now!'

1895-The Red Badge of Courage first published. Despite being one of the best books on the average soldiers experience, author Stephen Crane was never in the Civil War or any army. He died of tuberculosis at age 26.

1903- President Teddy Roosevelt dreamed of a canal across the Isthmus of Panama linking the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. A French company had started the project and now wanted the U.S. to buy them out for $40 million. Panama was a province of Columbia and Teddy offered them $10 million for the land. Columbia said they wanted $40, so Teddy decided it would be cheaper to start a revolution. On this day, he invited the leading Panamanian Nationalists including a Gen. Bonavilla to the White House and gave his support for an uprising. After the Independence of Panama was declared, Roosevelt recognized them within one hour, then bought the Canal Zone, for ten million.

1903- Dr Horatio Nelson Jackson, the first man to drive an automobile across the American continent, was given a ticket in his home town for driving faster than 6 miles an hour.

1910- English comedians Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel first arrive in the U.S. with a touring British vaudeville company, the Fred Karno Troupe.

1918- THE LOST BATALLION During the Meuse Argonne Offernsive the 577th Battalion of the US Rainbow Division moved too far ahead of other attacking units and was cut off and surrounded by superior German forces. Called upon to surrender the doughboys fought off all attacks in a heroic stand for five days. Six hundred men went in, barely two hundred came out. After the war their commander Major Wittelsey was awarded the Medal of Honor. But he never got over the trauma. Three years later he shot himself.

1928- The Nationalist Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) armies completed the unification of China. After the Manchu Emperor was overthrown in 1911, China had fallen to pieces and its provinces were governed by small warlords and foreign armies. Feng Xiao Yang “The Christian Marshal” who baptized his troops with a fire-hose. Or Zhang Zhong Chang the ”Dogmeat General” who it was said “had a penis the size of a stack of silver dollars!” The KMT created a new national assembly, constitution and elected Generalissimo Chiang Kai Shek as their president. Chiang only had to deal now with the Communists led by Mao Tse Tung.

1932- Iraq (formerly Mesopotamia) won its independence from British protectorate status.

1940- The US Army created Airborne troops. These soldiers would parachute behind enemy lines and infiltrate enemy positions. Because of the rigorous choosing and training process these troops turned out to be among the best prepared ground forces. The most well known divisions are the 101st Screaming Eagles and the 82 Airborne.

1941- Warner Bros. THE MALTESE FALCON "premiered. Screenwriter John Huston asked if he could direct an adaptation of this old Dashell Hammett story, which had been already made into movies twice. This version became the most famous. The name was kept despite producer Hal Wallis wanting to change it to THE GENT FROM FRISCO.

1942- In Pennemunde Germany, a group of Nazi scientists led by Dr. Werner Von Braun successfully launched a 12 ton rocket that flies 150 miles and almost broke through the stratosphere into orbit. The good thing is Braun proves his thermos-bottle type liquid-fuel rocket engines arranged in a cluster of three can work. The bad thing is Hitler named them the Vengance-2 (V-2), filled them with explosives, and started shooting them at England. When the war ended, Von Braun and his team had been working on a rocket that could carry explosives 4,000 miles- to America.

1944- Haij-Amin al Husseini the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and spiritual leader of Palestinian Arabs was in Berlin writing Nazi propaganda for the Middle East. This day he proposed to SS Reichfuhrer Heinrich Himmler that he organize an Arab-Islamic Nazi Army with which to conquer Palestine and drive out the Jews. Nothing came of the plan. While Churchill organized all-Jewish desert brigades in the British Army, the Mufti organized an SS Division for Hitler from Bosnian Muslims in Yugoslavia. After the war he was held in France for trial as a war criminal but escaped to Egypt where he lived out his days preaching resistance to Israel.

1951- The Shot Heard Round the World- Bobby Thompson's bottom of the ninth, last out, home run which enabled the N.Y. Giants to defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers for the National League Pennant.

1955- 'Good Morning, Captain.' The Captain Kangaroo kid show debuted on television.

1955- The Mickey Mouse Club TV show premiered. “Who’s the leader of the Band that’s Made for you and me…?”

1957-Walter Lantz's The Woody Woodpecker TV Show debuted.

1957- Jayne Mansfield met Greta Garbo and asked for her autograph.

1961- The Dick Van Dyke Show premiered. It made stars of Van Dyke and Mary Tyler Moore and was written by ex-Sid Caesar writer Carl Reiner and Rocky & Bullwinkle writer Alan Burns.

1967- Folksinger and union activist Woodie Guthrie died of Huntington’s Chorea. His family scattered his ashes in New York Harbor, then went to Nathans on the Coney Island Boardwalk for hot dogs, Woody’s favorite.

1972- After much backroom arm twisting by the Nixon White House, the House Banking Committee denied funds to the Packman Committee investigating the Watergate scandal.
This all but insured that the Watergate scandal would not break out in the open until after the 1972 Presidential election. Nixon won re-election by a landslide and the Watergate scandal forced him to leave office in 1974.

1986- THE K-219 INCIDENT- In the final years of the Cold War duel between the US and Soviet Union large nuclear submarines packed with missiles played a deadly game of hide and seek in the waters off the US and Russian coastlines. These submarine duels were dramatized by Tom Clancy’s novel the Hunt for Red October.
But evidence was declassified in the 1992 about a real incident. Either from mechanical failure or collision with an American sub, the Soviet nuclear submarine K-219 had an explosion and reactor fire 250 miles west of Bermuda. As American ships stood by, the Russian crew fought fire, acid fumes and radiation. The K219 sank, but not before Captain Alexei Britanov was able to evacuate 119 crewmen to a rescue ship. 4 crewman died including a young sailor named Pamynin, who sacrificed his life to shut down the reactors with a hand wrench before they melted down. This young Russian sailor prevented the U.S. East Coast from being bathed in deadly nuclear radiation. A statue was dedicated to Pamynin in 1996. There were similar accidental sinking of Russian nuclear subs in 1964-the K-19, and the Kursk in 2000.

1990- The rift between East Germany and West is declared officially over.

1992- Barack Obama married Michelle LeVaughn Robinson.

1992- Bald Irish pop star Sinead O’Connor caused a fuss by tearing up a picture of the Pope on the show Saturday Night Live. She was later booed off stage during a concert at Madison Square Garden.

1993- THE RAID ON MOGADISHU- US troops were deployed with other UN forces to the civil war wracked nation of Somalia to aid the starving population. Once there they found themselves plunged in a chaos of heavily armed warring clans. This day a Delta Force was sent into the capitol city Mogadishu to apprehend lieutenants of the faction leader Mohammed Farah Idide. Once there two helicopters were shot down by hand held missiles and the Deltas were surrounded in the narrow streets by swarms of hostile militia. The US forces fought their way out with the aid of UN Pakistani mountain troops. But the images of dead American troops being dragged through the dusty streets by gleeful Somalis soured the American public back home and the forces were soon withdrawn. Idide was later assassinated and the chaos continued. The Ridley Scott film BLACK HAWK DOWN dramatized the incident.

1995- After a long sensationalist trial turned into a media spectacle, celebrity O.J. Simpson was acquitted of the double murder of his second wife Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman. He was later convicted in a wrongful death suit brought in Civil Court by Nicole’s family.

2002- Disgruntled Gulf War vet John Allen Mohammed and his 17 year old stepson John Lee Malvo went on a shooting spree in the suburbs of Washington DC as the DC Sniper. They shot thirteen people at random with one bullet each and terrorized Maryland and Virginia before they were caught. Even Son of Sam killer David Berkowitz was employed from prison to appeal to the DC Sniper to stop.

2003- The Siegfried and Roy magic show in Las Vegas came to an end after a large Bengal Tiger attacked Roy Horn and tore his throat open in front of an audience. Most thought it was part of the act. Roy survived, but they wisely decided to retire.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Some things are named William and Mary. Like the college in Virginia called William and Mary. So, who were William and Mary?

Answer: King William III of Orange and his wife Mary, the daughter of King James II, overthrew her daddy in 1688, and ruled as the King and Queen of Great Britain.


Oct. 2, 2019
October 2nd, 2019

Quiz: Some things are named William and Mary. Like the college in Virginia called William and Mary. So, who were William and Mary?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What does it mean to say, “ I’m beating the bushes..” ..?
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October 2, 2019
Birthdays: King Richard III, Nat Turner, Mahatma Ghandi, Claus Von Hindenburg, Ferdinand Foch, Spanky MacFarland, Julius Marx known as Groucho, Bud Abbott, Moses Gunn, Graham Greene, LeRoy Shield (composer of the music in the Hal Roach comedies), Donna Karan, Gordon Sumner known as Sting is 68, Lorraine Bracco is 55, Tiffany, Kelly Ripa

Happy Farm Animals Day

1370- King Charles V makes warrior Bertrand De Guesclin (De-Goo-Clan) Constable of France, and so in charge of the French side of the Hundred Years War. De Guesclin was a very noble and able knight; not many artifacts remain of his time, but if you go
to the monastery of Mont. St. Michel in Brittany where he kept his wife, they have
the complete selection of her chastity belts.

1608- Dutch lens grinder Hans Lipperschei sent to the States General in the Hague
a plan for an invention to see enemies at great distances. It used a tube with concave
lenses on one end and convex lenses on the other. The Telescope. Another Dutch lens
maker asked for a similar patent. But it was Italian scientist Galileo Galilei who
read their doctoral papers. Within a year he had ground his own lenses and created
his own telescope. He was the first to train it on the Universe, and he got all the credit.

1780- The Americans hang British Major John Andre' as a spy at a tavern near
present day Nyack, New York. Andre' was Benedict Arnold's contact. He had
put aside his redcoat uniform to slip through American lines. He was arrested before
he could get back. Washington really wanted to trade Andre for Benedict Arnold if he could, and the British were disgusted that Arnold refused to nobly offer himself in exchange. The hangman chosen was a loyalist prisoner who was promised his freedom. It was felt if the executioner was a Yankee, the man's family might be harmed in revenge.

Up until now the British and their Yankee cousins had been quite civil to each other
and it was not uncommon to see paroled American and British officers dining together
at the height of the Revolution. But the British considered this hanging a barbaric
abuse of a prisoner of war. Everyone knew Andre was not a professional spy or turncoat,
but a gentleman British officer of high standing. John Andre had always been dismissed
as a dandy fop, but it was admitted by all he met his end well. Benedict Arnold
became a redcoat, but he was never accepted by British society.

1807- Napoleon met Goethe at the philosopher's home at Weimar. People expected
sparks to fly as the Great Enslaver of Nations would meet the Champion of the Human
Spirit. Actually they had a pleasant afternoon conversation.

1836- Charles Darwin on the HMS Beagle returned to Falmouth England, ending a five
year voyage to Brazil, the Galapagos and New Zealand. The knowledge he gained on
exotic flora and fauna would lead him to write the Origin of the Species.

1914- Charles Taze Russell, founder of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, predicted this day
would be the beginning of the Apocalypse and the End of the World. When nothing
happened he responded that it was the beginning of a process of events that would
lead to the eventual end of the world. - oh.

1918- As the German lines on the Western Front continued to crumble liberal Prince Max of Baden agreed to become Chancellor of a new government in Berlin. He demanded that
that Kaiser relinquish the power to make war and peace to the Reichstag. He also
brought two leading Social Democrat deputies into the cabinet. They and General
Ludendorf urged an immediate peace with the Allies before red revolution broke out
in Germany.

100 years ago- 1919- President Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke after a speech at Pueblo, Colorado. For two months he lingered paralyzed while the nation was run by first lady Edith Wilson. No one told the public or the Vice President. There are many interpretations of how the government was run in those weeks. Edith claimed to be passing on Wilson's wishes to the government from his sickbed, but many thought Wilson was too incapacitated even for that, and The First Lady was running America herself. When Wilson’s debilitated condition became known in Feb, he still refused to relinquish the presidency, inspiring lawmakers to create the 25th Amendment.

1920 - The only triple-header in baseball history was played on this day, as the
Cincinnati Reds took two out of three games from the Pittsburgh Pirates.

1925-The first bright red Leyland doubledecker omnibuses appear on London streets.

1928 - This was a busy day at Victor Records Studios in Nashville, Tennessee. DeFord
Bailey cut eight masters. Three songs were issued, marking the first studio recording
sessions in the place now known as Music City, USA.

1933- Library of Congress musicologist John Lomax met with an Arkansas chain gang
convict named Hudlan Ledbetter, who everyone called Leadbelly. He recorded a cotton picking work song of his called "the Rock Island Line'. Leadbelly became famous
and recorded his own version 3 years later.

1936- Mussolini attacked Ethiopia.

1937 - Ronald Reagan, just 26 years old, made his acting debut this day
with Warner Brothers release of "Love is in the Air".

1950- Charles Schulz's "Peanuts" comic strip debuts. Good ol'
Charlie Brown was the name of a fellow post office worker all the guy's liked
to play jokes on. Schulz's idea 'Little Folks' was initially rejected
by all the major comic syndicates. Three months before the strip was accepted his
girlfriend broke off their engagement. He had left his job at the post office and
she was convinced he would never amount to anything.
At the time of his death Charles Schulz had mountains on the moon named for his characters, and he was arguably the richest visual artist on earth.

1954- Elvis Presley was fired from Nashville's Grand Ol' Opry Show after
one performance. He was told: "Son, you ain't a' going no where. Go
back to driving a truck!"

1955 - "Good Eeeeeeevening." The master of mystery movies, Alfred
Hitchcock, presented his brand of suspense to millions of viewers on CBS
on this night.

1957- Raintree County, the first film in Panavision.

1958- The Huckleberry Hound show.

1959- The television show the Twilight Zone debuts. Producer/writer Rod Serling
had fought network execs for months that a mystery-suspense show could compete with
all the Doctor and Cowboy shows on TV. He originally wanted Orson Welles to be
the host of the show but when Welles asked for too much money, Serling decided to
do it himself. He wrote 90 episodes. He said he got the name Twilight Zone from a
term airline pilots used for the area when both the clouds and ground are invisible
from view and you lose your bearings.

1967- Thurgood Marshall was sworn in as the first African American to be a Supreme
Court Justice.

1967- San Francisco Police raid the Haight-Ashbury home of the rock band the Grateful
Dead, busting everyone for possession of narcotics.

1968- Just a week before the Olympics were set to begin in Mexico City the Mexican
government shot hundreds of rioting student demonstrators and arrested hundreds
more who were never seen again. Thirty years later the incident is still not acknowledged
by them as ever even happening. In 2001, President Vincente Fox did a South-African style peace commission.

1977 - Following a foiled attempt to steal the body of Elvis Presley from
Forest Hill Cemetery, both Presley's and his grandmother's bodies were moved
to Graceland.

1978- Future TV star Tim Allen was busted in Kalamazoo Michigan for selling cocaine.

1982- Godfrey Reggio’s haunting documentary Koyaanisqatsi premiered at Radio City Music Hall. Music by Phillip Glass.

1985- Actor Rock Hudson died of AIDS, just 3 ½ months since he announced he had contracted it. He was 59. The first major celebrity to die of the disease.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What does it mean to say, “ I’m beating the bushes..” ..?

Answer: In medieval times when a noble or royal went hunting, swarms of lackeys would beat the forest underbrush with sticks to force small game hiding out into the open to shoot. It has become to mean to look frantically for someone.


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