Question: Why is Judas Iscariot the only apostle with a last name?

Yesterday’s Quiz: Who or what, is Ovaltine?
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History for 4/6/2015
Birthdays: Raphael of Urbino, Sacajawea, Ram Dass, Butch Cassidy, Gustav Moreau, Lowell Thomas, Merle Haggard, Billy Dee Williams, George Reeves, Michelle Phillips, Andre Previn, Barry Levinson, Roy Thinnes, John Ratzenberger, Zamfir, Paul Rudd is 46, Zach Braff is 40.

46BC- Battle of Thapsus- Even after Julius Caesar defeated his chief rival Pompey, other enemies kept the Roman Civil War going. This day in Africa, Caesar defeated an army led by a coalition of senatorial foes including Cato the Younger. Caesars troops were angry that they had to fight again the enemies Caesar had pardoned after the Battle of Pharsalia. So after the victory, they went on a killing spree of most of the prisoners.

Cato the Younger declared he would spend the rest of his life eating his meals seated upright instead of lying down, which the Romans considered very bad for the digestion. Then he went on board his flagship at Utica and tried to commit suicide by stabbing himself in the belly. A doctor bandaged up his wounds. As Caesars officers arrived to arrest Cato, he pulled off the bandages, ripped open his wounds and pulled out his own intestines. “All is well with the General” Cato said and died.

1327- Italian poet Petrarch first saw the love of his life- Laura de Sade at the Church of Sants Clara in Avignon France. Even though Petrarch was a monk, and she was married, he loved her from afar and wrote some of the first Great Italian Love Poetry, preparing the way for the Renaissance. Laura de Sade was the distant ancestor of the famous sadist the Marquis de Sade, who will be born 400 years in the future.

1453-Turkish Sultan Mohammed II, planted his standard before the St. Romanus Gate, and began the great siege of Constantinople, capitol of the Byzantine Empire. The Turkish Army went to battle to the sounds of heavy percussion, drums and cymbals, reintroducing them into European music.

1520- Renaissance artist RAPHAEL of Urbino, died on his 37th birthday. Vasari wrote of the great artist: " He pursued pleasures and love affairs without moderation. On one occasion he went to excess, and returned home with a violent fever whereof he died soon after." Michelangelo, Leonardo and Titian lived to great old age.

1717- BACH BUSTED- Composer Johann Sebastian Bach was court organist for the Duke of Saxe-Weimar but he was frustrated that he couldn’t get the job of court composer- Kappelmeister. Even after the incumbent kappelmeister Johann Drese died instead of Bach, the post went to Drese’s son! When the court of the nearby German state of Anhalt-Coethen offered him a better job, he went to tell his boss Duke Wilhelm Augustus that he wanted out of his contract. The Duke responded by clapping Bach in prison! Johann Sebastian Bach cooled his heels in the slammer until December when the duke relented and let him go to his new gig. Your Highness, Fugue You!

1776- USN- When the American Revolution started the rebels had only a few lightly armed sloops and pirate ships to pit against the invincible British Navy. The three heaviest armed American warship carried 34 cannons, Britain had 120 ships of the line that boasted 74 cannon each. This day was the first fleet action of the U.S. Navy. Commodore Iziah Hopkins flotilla engaged the British frigate HMS Glasgow off the coast of Rhode Island.

The six little American ships could do little against the one British ship and after a lot of cannonballs flying the only British casualty was one man shot by a marine with a rifle.
Hopkins was cashiered out of the service and more daring captains like Nicholas Biddle and John Paul Jones took his place.

1808- JOHN JACOB ASTOR founded the American Fur Company. Almost on the tail of Lewis and Clark Astor established a line of fur trading posts to the Pacific and set the basis for the Astor Family fortune. A wily businessman, Astor had established Astoria on the Columbia River, the first Yankee settlement in the Pacific Northwest. When the War of 1812 broke out with England Astor knew nothing could defend this outpost from troops in British Granville- later renamed Vancouver. When a British man-of-war dropped anchor in Astoria bay to burn the town the captain was met with a man waving a bill of sale. Astor had sold the entire town to a Canadian company, thereby saving it.

1817- Princess Charlotte, the only child of the Prince and Princess of Wales, died in childbirth creating a succession crisis. Mad King George III had many children, but they were all amazingly infertile, at least with their legitimate partners. HRH, soon to be George IV, hated his wife and was unlikely to have any more offspring, his younger brother William was childless and their three sisters were spinsters. Lucky for England the Duke and Duchess of Kent just had a new baby girl named Victoria. Later as Queen Victoria she would visit Charlotte’s tomb and meditate on their strange paths of Fate.

1830- A Vermont man named Joseph Smith went to Fayette New York and filed papers to found a new Church he called the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or the Mormon Church.

1830- The Mexican Government tried to stop any further American immigration into Texas territory by an edict this day. It also forbade trade contact with the US and outlawed black slavery. Three issues destined to anger the Texans into demanding independence.

1832- The Black Hawk War began in the Illinois- Kentucky area. A young volunteer who didn't see much action was a tall gawky lawyer named Abe Lincoln.

1853- The town of Portland Oregon founded.

1862 BATTLE OF SHILOH- One of the bloodiest battles on American soil. At dawn the Confederate army surprise attacked the Union army of General Ulysses Grant at a small Tennessee riverboat landing. Orthodox military logic would say Grant should have retreated, however he fought back and won a great, if confused victory. More Americans were wounded or killed in this one battle than all the previous American wars rolled into one. Shiloh is Hebrew for:” Place of Peace”.

Confederate commander Albert Sidney Johnston, who was said to be as brilliant as Robert E. Lee, was trying to stop his hungry soldiers from sitting down to eat the hot breakfast they scared the Yankees away from. Picking up a tin coffee cup, he told looting rebels 'This is all the plunder I want” He spent the day directing the battle waving his tin cup instead of a sword. He was shot down and bled to death while waiting for his personal doctor to finish treating some captured enemy wounded. A Lieutenant General, Johnston remains the highest-ranking American general ever killed in action.

Other combatants were Welshman William Morton Stanley, who would someday go to Africa and find Dr. Livingston, and General Lew Wallace, who as Governor of New Mexico, when not pardoning Billy the Kid would write the novel Ben Hur. The first day of Shiloh went badly for the North. That night Sherman said in frustration:” Grant, today we’ve had hell to pay!” In the firelight Grant quietly whittled on a stick:” Yep......whip ‘em tomorrow.” he muttered. Which he did.

1868- Brigham Young married Anne Elizabeth Webb, his 27th wife.

1896- The first OLYMPIC GAMES of the modern era opened in Athens Greece. The last was closed by the Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius in 391 A.D as a pagan festival. The Games were revived as the idea of Baron Pierre Coubertin, who became the first president of the IOC. These games also saw the first modern Marathon race. Appropriately it was won by a Greek- Spyridion Louis.

1906 - Cartoonist James Stuart Blackton created sensation when Edison filmed him doing sequential drawings and they seemed to come alive. The film was The Humorous Phases of Funny Faces. Blackton made a fortune, lost it and was hit by a bus in 1940. But his animated antics paved the way for Mickey, Bugs, Bart, Gollum and Laura Croft.

1909- Commander Robert Peary and his African American assistant Matthew Henson claimed to have been the first to reach the North Pole. Their claim was challenged but confirmed by the US Government in 1911. Today scholars say they were slightly off.

1917-THE UNITED STATES ENTERS WORLD WAR I. Congress approved President Woodrow Wilson’s call for a declaration of war against Germany and her allies Austria, Turkey and Romania. In 19 months the war would cost 200,000 U.S. lives, cost $56 billion, and created dozens of millionaires. If you owned any stock in chemical companies like Dupont or gun makers like Remington, your stock went up 400%.

Jeannette Rankin, the first woman to sit in Congress, voted against war. At first there was sincere doubt America could go into the Allied camp, after all they had as citizens one and one half million German, Hungarian and Austrian immigrant plus millions more of Jewish Americans who hated the Czar of Russia and 16 million Irish Americans who hated England plus American Isolationists who felt America's should not get involved in overseas arguments. So it was a difficult sell to the public, to say the least.

1929- Mahatma Ghandi and his thousands of followers complete their Salt March and make salt on the shores of the Indian Ocean in violation of the British State monopoly.
This was the Indian equivalent of the Boston Tea Party. Ghandi was arrested soon after.

1929- Louisiana senator Huey Long gained national notoriety when Rockefeller’s Standard Oil Company tried to get the state legislature in Baton Rouge to impeach him. Long made a large part of the Louisiana legislature sign a pledge that hey would never impeach him, in return for sweetheart jobs and kickbacks. The impeachment scheme failed and Long- The Kingfish continued to be a rogue force in Third Party Politics.

1931- The Little Orphan Annie radio show premiered. Remember kids to drink your Ovaltine and get out your de-coder rings.

1933- the Screen Writer's Guild, later the WGA, formed. It took about seven years for them to unionize screenwriting in Hollywood. Jack Warner called them : "Communists, Radical Bastards and Soap Box Sons of B*tches !" David O. Selznick, who prided himself on running a writer-friendly studio, told them: “You put a picket line in front of my studio and I'll mount a machine gun on the roof and mow you all down !!" Despite these protestations, the Guild today represents all Hollywood writers.

1936- A scientist at Dupont invented Teflon.

1941-The Nazis panzers invaded Yugoslavia and Greece.

1941- The British army entered Addis Ababa and drove Mussolini’s Italians from Ethiopia.

1945- OPERATION FLOATING CHRYSANTHEMUM- The Japanese attack the U.S. Navy around Okinawa with 355 Kamikazi suicide planes. The concept seems nutty today but it had effect. More U.S. ships were sunk at this battle than in any time since Pearl Harbor. Casualty rates of sailors were so high that the War Dept. ordered a news blackout. The navy actually meditated a withdrawal from Okinawa at one point. Before the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Japanese High Command had 2,200 kamikaze planes hidden in mountain bunkers to await the US invasion of the Japanese home islands.

1951- Happy Birthday AstroBoy! According to the 1951 comic book by Osamu Tezuka, today Professor Elephant completed the little boy with the suction cup feet and pointed hairdo. Originally called Tetsuwan Atomo, he was named Astro Boy when Mushi Prod released the animated version in the US in 1961.

1956- Elvis Presley signed his first movie deal with Paramount Pictures.

1968- Two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King, police attacked the Black Panther Party at their Oakland HQ. In the furious shootout a member named Billy Hutton was killed, Eldridge Cleaver wounded and Bobby Seale arrested. This incident seemed to prove the black militants claims of police harassment and caused a firestorm of civic protest. The Black Panthers forged an alliance with the Anti-Vietnam War white students, SDS, and later the Hispanic militants the Young Lords and AIM, the American Indian Movement.

1974- ABBA, a new disco phenomenon from Sweden is introduced to the world when they win a Eurovision song contest. Mama Mia!

1991- The first episode of Darkwing Duck premiered.

1994-The Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi are both killed when their plane crashed. It is never proved why the plane went down but violence broke out in the Rwandan capitol. The ethnic Hutu tribe began a systematic killing of the Tutsi people. It was one of the worst genocides since the Holocaust.
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Yesterday’s Question: Who or what, is Ovaltine?

Answer: It is a chocolate and malt flavored powder that is added to milk to make a cocoa-like drink. In the mid twentieth century it was very popular. It was advertised on television shows and, before TV, on radio shows like Little Orphan Annie. You could send away for premiums, like secret decoder rings and such. (There is an episode about that in A Christmas Story.)

Quiz: Who or what, is Ovaltine?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: What does it mean in music when the score asks you to play Andante Cantabile?
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History for 4/5/2015
Birthdays: Plato, Swinburne, Booker T. Washington, Josef Lister, Bette Davis, Nadar, Jean Fragonard, Hicks Lokey, Nguyen Van Thieu, historian Robert Bloch, Gale Storm, Washington Atlee-Burpee the mail order seed king, Spencer Tracy, Frank Gorshin, Melvyn Douglas, Walter Huston, Nigel Hawthorne, Peter Greenaway, Gregory Peck, Roger Corman is 89, Agnetha Faltskog of ABBA is 65, Colin Powell is 78, Pharrell Williams is 42.



HAPPY EASTER, Commemorating the time when Jesus Christ was crucified and after three days rose from the dead. For those of you who always wondered why Easter moves around so much when the other holidays stay put, the Medieval Church wanted the festival of Jesus moved from any connection with the Jewish Passover. So Church doctors decided the Easter feast would be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox-Spring. Makes sense to me..?
Easter is named for Oster, Eostre or Aster, German goddess of the East Wind that brings Spring, who’s sacrifice was painted eggs laid at her alter. In 63AD. Baodicea, The British warrior queen who battled the Roman legions of Nero had on her flags the Great Moon-Hare, who was the servant of Oster. In 1680 a German writer named Georg Franck published a story of a fantastic rabbit who laid magic eggs and hid them for lucky children to find. How this all got mixed up with Jesus, you gotta ask Mel Gibson

We owe a big colorful Easter Eggy thanks to druggist, William Townley who invented Easter egg dye tablets in his Newark, New Jersey drug emporium in 1880. He branded his five-color dye kits, Paas, which comes from the word Passen, the Pennsylvania Dutch name for Easter.

To the ancient Romans this was the Feast Day of the Goddess Fortuna Virilis, or Good Fortune.

622 A.D.- BYZANTINE EMPEROR HERACLIUS began his military campaigns. Heraclius is one of the mysteries of history. He sat lethargic on his throne while the Persian Shah Chosroes II conquered the whole Middle East almost up to his doorstep. Then Heraclius got up, put on his armor and turned into Julius Caesar, Alexander and Rambo all rolled into one. In a lightning campaign he destroyed the Persian army, burned their capitol, sprinkled garbage on the grave of Zoroaster and chased them to the foot of the Himalayas. The Persians assassinated Chosroes just to make Heraclius go away.

Then Heraclius went back to his throne and did nothing for the rest of his reign. Moslem Arabs would soon appear from out of Arabia and wipe out both empires, which is why you probably never heard of him. Some speculate that his wife Empress Heracleonas was the real military genius but the scholars recorded the deeds all in the man’s name.

1242-" THE BATTLE ON THE ICE" Lake Pripous. Alexander Nevsky the Prince of Novgorod defeated the German monastic knights The Order of Sword Brothers. These warrior-monks had been sent by Rome to combat pagans in the Baltic lands but after everyone had become Christian they had switched their attention to "Greek Orthodox-Schizmatics". In 1939 Sergei Eisnestein did the famous film Alexander Nevsky about the battle with a musical score by Sergei Prokoviev.

1531- Richard Roose was boiled in oil for trying to poison the Archbishop of Canterbury.

1613- Princess Pocahontas, now baptized Lady Rebecca, married John Rolfe. She had been sold by her cousins to the Jamestown colonists as a hostage for a copper pot. Today many old families in Virginia claim a dynastic link to Pocahontas. John Rolfe is famous for inventing the American tobacco industry. The local Virginia weed was a bit too rough for Englishmen to puff on so Rolfe had tobacco cuttings smuggled out of Brazil and planted in the James River delta. Since the English had found no gold-rich Aztec Indians this settlement was at first viewed as a failure. But this tobacco crop made the Virginia Colony a success to profit hungry investors back home.

1614- English King James I’s second parliament met. It was famous for enacting no laws, basically doing absolutely nothing. Briton’s rejoiced.

1759- A small Dutch fleet blown off course in a Pacific storm discovered a small island. Because it was Easter they named it Easter Island.

1794- French Revolutionaries Danton and Camille Desmoulins were guillotined. They were arch-leftists but their old buddy Robespierre wanted them out of the way. So they were convicted of being treasonous counterrevolutionaries. When Danton mounted the scaffold he laughed:" When you take my head off, show it to the people. It will be worth it!"

1814- Now that Napoleon had agreed to abdicate he wanted to assure his son would keep the throne of the French Empire But the victorious allied monarchs in occupied Paris told Nappy’s emissary Caulaincourt that they refused negotiate with them any further. At the same time one of Napoleon’s generals and closest friends Marshal Marmont made his own deal and took his army over to the enemy. Marmont was the Duke of Ragusa and for the next few decades a Raguser became a synonym for traitor like Benedict Arnold or Quisling.

1815-the volcano Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia killing 12,000 and effecting weather patters around the world. Many quaint Currier & Ives ice skating prints come from this year without a summer.

1827- Englishman Joseph Lister born. Lister was not only the inventor of Listerine but of hygienic medical practices. Before Lister insisted on sterilization hospitals were known as death traps of infection where surgeons would sharpen their scalpels on the sole of their boots before making their incision. He once stopped an epidemic in a hospital by noticing that the interns would go from dissecting cadavers to delivering babies without washing their hands!

1851- New York Mayor Ambrose Kingland proposed that a large park be built in Manahattan for health and recreation. Work on Central Park was begun in 1856.

1860- GARABALDI AND “THE THOUSAND RED SHIRTS” LAUNCH THEIR INVASION OF SICILY. Of the several Italian leaders struggling to unify Italy Giuseppe Garibaldi was the least patient. While the King of Sardinia Vittorio Emanuel and his minister Cavour tried quiet gentle diplomacy, Garibaldi and his "red shirts" launched a unprovoked assault on the Bourbon Kingdom of Two Sicilies and told Vittorio-"You come from the North, I from the South." They met at the middle at Magenta and unified the Italian peninsula for the first time since the Roman Empire fell. While in the south Garabaldi's Northern Italian men wrote home of a new dish they tried- pasta with tomato sauce!

1862- During the Civil War Union General George MacClellan paused in his march through Virginia to attack the old Revolutionary War town of Yorktown. A small force under a rebel leader named MacGruder fooled MacClellan into believing he was facing a large rebel army when he actually outnumbered them 20 to one. MacGruder marched his little force in circles, making multiple campfires and constantly blowing bugles, trying to look like a larger force than they actually were. When the Yankees finally overran the rebel fortifications they found the heavy cannon pointed at them were harmless logs - Quaker Guns.

In another incident MacClellan held up his main advance several hours while his staff debated how deep a stream was. Finally fearless young cavalry leader George Armstrong Custer walked his horse out into the stream and sat down.”This is how deep it is, General.” Custer said.

1862- Meanwhile in Tennessee Confederate Beauregard and Albert Johnston’s rebel army was sneaking up to surprise attack Ulysses Grants army at Shiloh. But Beauregard was concerned that their undisciplined men were whooping and shooting their guns off and the element of surprise was now lost. Johnston ended speculation by saying:” I intend to fight them tomorrow even if they are a million strong!” Past midnight Yankee General Sherman received reports of rebs skirmishing with his sentries. He told his adjutant to forget it and get some sleep as there would be no battle that day. Shortly afterwards the entire Confederate Army boiled into his camp.

1869- Daniel Bakeman, recorded as the last surviving minuteman of George Washington’s Revolutionary army, died at age 109. A man who looked George Washington in the face lived long enough to be photographed by Matthew Brady. He married at age 12 and he and his wife stayed married for 91 years, a record.

1874- Johann Strauss Jr.’s operetta Die Fledermaus premiered in Vienna.

1887- Lord Acton wrote: “ Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

1892- THE JOHNSON COUNTY WAR- By the 1890's many great Wyoming cattle ranches were owned by Eastern or European companies. When cattle herds were decimated by the great frost of 1888 a labor dispute arose between the distant employers and the laid off cowboys, many of whom resorted to rustling to make a living. By 1892 the friction became so bad the Wyoming Cattlemen's Association hired a private train and filled it with hired Texas gunfighters and enough ammunition to kill everyone in three states and sent it to Johnson county. This day they pulled out of Cheyenne with orders to shoot or string up any and all rustlers, revolutionists and troublemakers. After killing two men on their list the word got out to the citizens of Casper Wyoming. They gathered en masse and surrounded the Texans in a ranch house laying siege to it, throwing lit dynamite sticks from an armored wagon and shooting at any cowpoke who dared show his face in a window.
The hapless hit men were finally rescued by the U.S. Army, who granted all a general amnesty. The incident was the basis for the movie "Heaven's Gate".

1913- Ebbets Field opened in Flatbush. The Brooklyn Dodgers defeat the New York Highlanders (Yankees) 3-2

1915- Jess Willard knocked down Jack Johnson, the first black heavyweight boxing champion in a title fight in Havana Cuba. The older Johnson retired after the fight. He wouldn’t hold the title long though, on July 4th Willard lost to new kid Jack Dempsey.

1923- Lois Armstrong, King Oliver and the Creole Jazz Band took a train from Chicago to Richmond Indiana to record Chimes Blues. Satchmo’s first record.

1930 -James Dewar invented the Twinkie. Dewar ate two every day of his life and called them “The best darn-tootin idea I ever had!” As an experiment in 1996 five top French master chefs were given the assignment of trying to recreate a Twinkie. They all failed.

1931- Fox Film Company dropped their option on young star John Wayne as a dud not going anywhere. Wayne eked out an existence doing cheap westerns for Republic and Monogram until John Ford made him a star in 1939’s Stagecoach.

1939- For German children, membership in the Hitler Youth corps became mandatory.

1945- The first Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoon.

1951- Republican Senator Robert Short read General Douglas MacArthur’s proclamation to the Communist Chinese on the floor of Congress. It read that if they didn’t withdraw from Korea MacArthur would restart the Chinese Civil War and “Rain Nuclear Fire down upon their cities”. Gen. MacArthur had no permission from the State Department to make such a rash statement and it ruined all the behind the scenes maneuvers to get the Chinese to negotiate an end to the Korean War early. Last December MacArthur had received a direct order from the President not to make any public statements about Korean policy, but the General chose to ignore it. President Harry Truman reacted-“I’m gonna fire that pompous Sonofabitch!”

1951- The Atomic Spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were sentenced to death for espionage.

1955- Elderly Prime Minister Winston Churchill finally retired. He was succeeded as PM by Anthony Eden. Churchill, already the author of several books, joked with his cabinet:” Gentlemen, History shall be kind to us, for I intend to write it!”

1963- The Lava Lamp invented by Dr Edward Craven Walker.

1965- Julie Andrews had created the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady on Broadway. But when filming the motion picture the studio decided she was not a big enough star so they used Audrey Hepburn with a dubbed singing voice. But Ms Andrews had her revenge .At the Academy Awards My Fair Lady won Best Picture and Rex Harrison best actor, but Julie Andrews won the best actress Oscar for Mary Poppins.

1969- Pope Paul VI abolished those silly big wide brimmed red hats (galeros) the cardinals wore.

1976- Eccentric Billionaire Howard Hughes died at age 76. Hughes had inherited his fathers oil rig tool company at 17 and built the mighty Hughes aircraft empire and ran RKO pictures. But after surviving several test plane crashes, he became addicted to pain killers and became increasing withdrawn from the world. He died a strange shut in, long haired and living on a diet of drugs and saving his urine in mason jars.

1985- Singer David Lee Roth quit the rock band Van Halen to pursue a solo career.

1994- Grunge rock star Kurt Kobain shot himself. His body wasn’t discovered until two days later.

2003- Invading American forces began the Battle for Baghdad.

2030- FIRST CONTACT- According to Star Trek this is the day Professor Zephram Cochran adapted an old World War Three ICBM and invented the Warp Drive, enabling the Earth to begin deep space exploration, and during whose maiden flight he made the first contact with an alien race- from the planet Vulcan.
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Yesterday’s Question: What does it mean in music when the score asks you to play Andante Cantabile?

Answer: To play in a moderate dancelike rhythm.

Quiz: What does it mean in music when the score asks you to play Andante Cantabile?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: What is Stockholm Syndrome?
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History for 4/4/2015
Birthdays: Roman Emperor Caracalla, Edweard Muybridge, Maya Angelou, Frances Langford, Irv Spence- Tom & Jerry animator, Gil Hodges, Arthur Murray, Muddy Waters, Cloris Leachman, Dorothea Dix, Elmer Bernstein, Bijan, Heath Ledger, Robert Downey Jr is 50, Barry Pepper, Craig T. Nelson is 71, Hugo Weaving is 55

If you were a Roman, today is the first day of the Megaleasian Festival in honor of Lunus the Moon god. Party! Par-tee!

In China today is Ching-Ming Tomb Sweeping Day.

527AD- Byzantine Emperor Justin named his nephew Justinian as his successor.

636AD- Today is the Feast Day of Saint Isadore of Seville, the Patron Saint of the Internet. Don’t believe me? Check out http://www.catholic.org/saints

896 A.D.-THE SYNOD HORRENDIUS-One of the more bizarre incidents in Vatican history. Bishops Stephen and Formosan hated each other. When Formosan became pope Stephen had to bide his time in hiding. After Formosan's death Stephen became pope but was unsatisfied that he couldn't strike back at his old enemy. So Pope Stephen had Formosan's tomb opened and the corpse dressed in bishop's robes, sat up in a chair and put on trial for heresy. The cross examination was pretty strange, the prosecutor said things like: "His very silence is admittance of his guilt!" The corpse was convicted, excommunicated, bounced around by a Roman mob, and thrown in the Tiber. Pope Stephen VI later became the first pope to be killed in bed with someone's wife.

1561- A strange show in the sky of red discs and crosses was reported over Nuremberg Germany. Perhaps an early UFO sighting?

1581- Queen Elizabeth I visited the Golden Hind, the ship which Francis Drake sailed around the world. The 'Great Pirate of the Unknown Seas" had plundered huge treasure ships and drove Spanish Colonial America crazy. The Spanish Ambassador to London demanded the pirate Drake lose his head, but Queen Elizabeth had a different use in mind for her sword- she knighted the Devon innkeeper's son.
The Golden Hind was kept in a prize anchorage for decades until age and dry rot caused her to fall to pieces. Ben Johnson wrote poems about Sir Francis Drake and Shakespeare's island of wizards in the Tempest may have been modeled on Drake's accounts of the strange stormy islands of Tierra Del Fuego in the Straights of Magellan.

1704 -British Admirals Rourke and Sir Cloudsley Shovel capture Gibraltar from Spain. Britain still owns it today, which really annoys Spain.

1841-PRESIDENT WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON DIED AFTER ONLY 31 DAYS IN OFFICE. “Old Tippicanoe” caught pneumonia giving his inauguration address in icy drizzle. No U.S. President had ever died in office before and no one knew if the Vice President was now only a caretaker until special elections or was he the president for the next for years. Vice President John Tyler set the rule by staying as President for four full years. People couldn't stand him. They called him "Your Accidency". When he got word of the President's death he was playing marbles with some children and was about to get his knuckles rapped for losing.

1850- The City of Los Angeles was incorporated under U.S. law.

1865- As the bedraggled Army of Northern Virginia retreated from Richmond, Robert E. Lee had a slim hope that if he could put distance between himself and the pursuing Union armies he might be able to join together the remaining Confederate forces and still pose a challenge. These hopes were dashed this day. When Lee’s army reached Amelia Courthouse, the waiting trainloads of promised food turned out to be only ammunition. There wasn’t enough trains to convey his men South to a link up with the other rebel forces. Lee lost an entire day resting his army while looking for food. This allowed Grants Union forces to catch up and slowly surround him. Lee remarked bitterly that while his men starved, the Confederate Congress could only “debate and shell peanuts!”

1865- LINCOLN IN RICHMOND- Meanwhile against the wishes of his bodyguards that it was still too dangerous Abraham Lincoln toured the newly captured Confederate capitol of Richmond. Most of the white population had fled the smoldering city, but crowds of jubilant black slaves pulled his coach and cheered that the Day of Jubilee had arrived. One man kneeled to him and Lincoln raised him up “Father, you no longer have to kneel to any other man, only God. You are Free. Free as air.” Lincoln walked over to the Confederate Executive Mansion and sat in Jefferson Davis’ chair, putting his feet up on his desk. He then visited the family of Rebel General George Pickett of the famous Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. The Pickett’s were friends of Abe and Mary Lincoln before the war and Abe enjoyed bouncing Pickett’s baby boy on his knee.

1900- In Brussels, a protester shouting 'Vive Les Boers!" fired four shots at the Prince Edward and Princess Augusta of Wales (Future Edward VII). They all miss. He was protesting the British war on the whites Afrikanners of South Africa.
Queen Victoria survived six assassination attempts in her lifetime.

1901- Russian author Leo Tolstoy broke with the Russian Orthodox Church when he sent a letter to the Patriarch this day declaring that prayers offered to Jesus Christ were “the worst type of sacrilege”.

1924-Tom Milton first ran a Miller hot rod on the dry lake Cal bed at 151 mph.

1932- Louisiana Senator Huey Long tells Congress that 80% of America’s wealth was controlled by 20% of its population. According to Business Week in 1997 80% of America’s wealth was owned by 2% of its population and the top 175 richest people on Earth collectively own 50% of all the total wealth of the planet.

1933- The U.S. Government orders all citizens to turn in their remaining gold dollar coins.

1933- The U.S. airship Akron crashed in a storm, killing the crew and an admiral.

1942- 'THE HUMP' -When the Japanese army overran Rangoon and cut the Burma Road, Allied forces helping Chiang Kai Shek 's Chinese armies and the Flying Tigers were suddenly without supplies. Army Air Corps General Olds and his men begin the daily supply flights of transports from India over the Himalayas to China, or 'Over the Hump'.

1944- During World War II a South African reconnaissance plane flies over the Auschwitz Concentration Camp and takes photos. When they are analyzed in London the intelligence boys declare it do be nothing more than a synthetic rubber plant.

1952-CARTOON COMMIES- Nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell accused the owners of a New York commercial animation studio, Tempo Productions, of Communist sympathies. One of the owners was Disney Layoutman Dave Hilberman, who was a union organizer and was the only artist personally named by Walt Disney to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The F.B.I. began investigating Tempo and their Madison Avenue clients quickly pulled their business. Tempo closed, laying off 50 artists. Mr. Clean, Markie Maypo and the Hamm’s Beer Bear were once again safe from Red subversion.

1954- Arturo Toscanini, who had been making music since the 1880’s, conducted his final concert.

1958- Screen goddess Lana Turner and her gangster lover Johnny Stompanato had a violent argument that ended when Turner’s teenage daughter plunged a large kitchen knife into his chest. She was acquitted as justifiable homicide, and rumors maintain the daughter was covering for her mother’s own actions. It was whispered Hollywood society ladies had nicknamed Stompanato’s willy Oscar for it’s size.

1967- Van Nuys premier head shop Captain Ed’s Heads & Highs first opened for business.

1967- In a speech at the Riverside Baptist Church in Manhattan Rev Dr. Martin Luther King announced his opposition to the Vietnam War. This put him in direct conflict with the heretofore friendly Lyndon Johnson administration. Whereas LBJ had Dr King and the Southern Christian leadership up to the White House often, and had done much to fight discrimination, the volatile LBJ now called Dr. King “that backwoods n--- preacher!”

1968- THE SETTLERS MOVEMENT- The Israeli government was trying to sort out what to do about the West Bank territories conquered in the Six Day War. This day a small group of ultra-conservative Jews called Gush Eymunim moved into a hotel the Arab city of Hebron and declared themselves a settlement. Minister Moshe Dayan wanted Jewish settlements but he wanted them to be alongside Arab communities, not displacing them. This was the first provocation by conservative settlers that would bedevil Palestinian-Israeli relations for the next forty years.

1968- DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING ASSASSINATED. The great civil rights leader was struck in the head by a dum-dum bullet fired from a high-powered rifle, while he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. King and his team had been clowning around that morning and throwing pillows at one another. On the balcony Dr Kings last words were teasing Jesse Jackson for not being dressed properly for going out to dinner. Jesse was wearing a turtleneck instead of suit and tie.

Dr. Benjamin Hooks ran to the phone to get help but the switchboard was not working. The motel manager's wife who usually ran the switchboard had seen the shooting, and the shock had given her a heart attack. She died the next day. The Memphis police had always surrounded King's party with at least seven officers whenever he was in town. For some unknown reason that morning they were ordered to stand back at least seven blocks. It was the one-year anniversary of the speech where he declared his opposition to the Vietnam War.

A man named James Earl Ray was later apprehended in England, confessed to the shooting and was given a life sentence. He later recanted his confession and said the FBI coerced him, and he was taking orders from a mysterious contact man named Raul. James Earl Ray died in 1998. The King family reopened the investigation and a civil court ruled that Dr. King was probably killed by a conspiracy. When F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover heard about the assassination he did what he did the day John Kennedy was shot, he spent the day at the racetrack celebrating.

1968- When news of Martin Luther King's assassination got out, 175 US cities suffered urban rioting. In Indianapolis, Sen. Bobby Kennedy was scheduled to go speak to a mostly black crowd. His police escort refused to follow him out of fear. Kennedy went anyway. He told the audience the terrible news, made a reference to his own murdered brother, then proceeded to quote them poetry from the Greek writer Aeschylus "We must tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world." The crowd wept and prayed together. Indianapolis was quiet that night.

1984- In George Orwell’s novel 1984 this is the day Winston Smith started a secret diary and first wrote the dangerous thought-crime “Down With Big Brother”.

1988- Arizona governor Evan Meacham was impeached, the first US governor to get the boot in 60 years. Meecham had made Arizona the only state in the U.S. to refuse the Martin Luther King holiday. Meecham had once referred to African Americans as “pickaninees” and had ordered a list drawn up of all state employees who were gay.

1994- Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark start Netscape. Clark also founded Silicon Graphics, Inc.
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Yesterday’s question: What is Stockholm Syndrome?

Answer: The Stockholm Syndrome happens when kidnapped persons begin to identify and sympathize with their captors. It comes from a bank robbery that happened in Sweden. Over the several days that bank employees were held hostage, they bonded with the bank robbers to the point where some even defended their abductors after the ordeal was over.

Quiz- What is Stockholm Syndrome?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Why is a cup of coffee sometimes called a cup of Joe?
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History for 4/3/2015
Birthdays: King Henry IV of England (1361), Washington Irving, William Marcy " Boss" Tweed, Sally Rand the Fan Dancer, Ma Rainey, Iron Eyes Cody, Wayne Newton, Doris Day, Robert Sherwood, Virgil Grissom, Marsha Mason, Melissa Etheridge, Marlon Brando, Amanda Byrnes, David Hyde Pierce, Alec Baldwin is 57, Eddie Murphy is 53

In Ancient Greece the beginning of April was the Aphrodisia- the Festival of Aphrodite. Greeks would offer sacrifices to the Goddess of Love and some would visit the sacred prostitutes in the great temple in Corinth. Rich old dowagers would put in their wills some money to buy slave girls to donate to the sacred bawdyhouse.
Gimme that Ole Time Religion….

127 AD.- Today is the day Pope Sixtus Ist was martyred under the Emperor Trajan. Sixtus is remembered as the pope during the Mass when the priests chanted Holy, Holy, Holy -Hosanna in the Highest, etc. he insisted it be sung by everyone in the congregation.

628AD- After being defeated by Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, Persian King Chosroes II was murdered by his own son, and his body chucked down a well.

1043- Edward the Confessor crowned King of England.

1312-The Vatican, under the influence of the French King Phillip the Fair, abolished the Holy Order of the Knights Templar. The order was rich in international finance and none of it taxable and because they were monks there were no relatives to sponge it off. They invented the personal check, so a Templar didn’t have to ride from castle to castle with those heavy bags of gold. Just write out a note (or have your scribe do it if you were illiterate) and affix your seal to it. I wonder if they had pretty sunsets printed on them...

1367-The Battle of Navarette- during a lull in the Hundred Year War, Edward the Black Prince of England goes to Spain to help King of Aragon Pedro the Cruel press his claims against Navarre. He defeats a Franco-Navarrese force of knights and captures the great French knight Bertrand DeGuesclin (De-Gue-Klan). But when Edward refused to turn over his prisoners to Pedro so he could behead them ( why else have a nickname like Cruel ?), even refusing to hand over DeGuesclin for his weight in pure silver, Pedro refused to pay the Englishmen's wages and Edward went home broke and annoyed.

1657- Oliver Cromwell formally refused the title King of England and preferred to remain the Lord Protector of the English Republic.

1714-THE FIRST BRITISH PRIME MINISTER-Before this time men who ran the government of England at the kings pleasure held a variety of titles: Lord High Admiral, Chancellor, Mayor of the Palace, etc.. As the complicated checks & balances of democratic government evolved more dependable positions were needed.

When The British Crown was offered to the German George Ist of Hanover, he was bewildered by how complicated English parliamentary democracy was! He also refused to learn English, switching to French or Latin when no one responded to his German.

Couldn't I just work with one man who could get what I wanted done? So Minister of the Exchequer (treasury) Sir Robert Walpole (father of writer Horace Walpole), who's party was in the majority in Parliament became First Minister, later Prime Minister .The reason the job evolved out of the Treasury is that minister could grease the rights palms to get things done.

King George wanted Walpole in close touch so he gave him a house near Whitehall Palace. He had just foreclosed on a modest row house called #10 Downing Street. Walpole said he didn't want it seen as a royal bribe. He would vacate it when he left office for his successor.

1730 -EMPEROR MOYTOY OF AMERICA- An English conman, Sir Alexander Cummings, had ingratiated himself into the council of the Cherokee Nation, then occupying most of Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky and Tennessee. In a scam to make himself look like the spokesperson of all native Americans, Cummings convinced one Cherokee chief named Moytoy to travel to England and do ritual submission to King George II under the title Emperor Moytoy of the Americas! The Indians were confused but went along with what they thought was a gag. Cummings disappeared shortly after the truth came out, undoubtedly a much wealthier man.

1764- Aging Empress Maria Theresa of Austria raised her son Joseph II to be co-emperor. He was the Emperor in the movie Amadeus. This day he was crowned at Frankfurt. He later wrote his mother “ ..a lot of elegant people mouthing idiocies.”

1791- The French Revolution Assembly National decided to convert the Church of Saint Genevieve to a secular temple to contain the remains of the great leaders of the French Nation. It was renamed the Pantheon after the ancient Roman name. The bones of Mirabeau, Voltaire, Rousseau and more were soon moved there.

1814-THE MARSHALS STRIKE. Napoleon’s top generals, the Marshals, gathered around him at Fontainbleau Palace to try to convince him to step down. These men had their fortunes made in his service. They had fought and bled for him on a hundred battlefields. But after twenty years, France was overrun by five foreign armies, Paris had fallen, the French were down to drafting fifteen year olds. The war was obviously lost.

The discussion soon grew ugly. Marshals Ney, Oudinot, Moncey and Lefebvre told him if ordered they would not follow him to try to retake Paris. Napoleon shouted:” You just want to protect your titles and estates! I can replace you all with sergeants!”

Finally he was made to accept the inevitable. He had tried first to resign in favor of his three year old son and save his dynasty. The Allies were amenable to this if it represented what the French people really wanted. However certain French government officials scheming for the return of the Bourbon Kings staged street demonstrations for the old monarchy, and convinced one of Napoleon's closest friends, Marshal Marmont the Duke of Ragusa, to defect to the enemy with his entire army.

This gesture decided the allies that the French people would rather have King Louis return rather than the boy Napoleon II. Napoleon was forced to abdicate completely, and the name "Raguser" became a word for traitor like Benedict Arnold.

1860-The Pony Express system starts. Relay riders from Saint Louis across the prairies and deserts all the way to Sacramento, California. Ten days to get a letter from St. Jo to Denver. For all it's romance, it failed after just 1-1/2 years. Stagecoaches and telegraph wires soon covered the message business.

1861- Seven days before the Civil War would begin, tensions between North and South built to the point of explosion. At Fort Sumter South Carolina a Boston ship, the R. H. Shannon, with a cargo of ice bound for Savannah puts in a stop at Charleston Harbor. She sails right in between the itchy fingered Yankee and Rebel cannons. The captain rarely read newspapers so he was completely unaware of the political situation. When he heard a warning shot, he ran up the Stars and Stripes. Suddenly cannons started to boom out all around him. Mystified, he lowered the flag, the gunfire stopped and the Shannon sailed on...

1869- First performance of Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor.

1882- JESSE JAMES SHOT-The famous outlaw had been living quietly with his family under the alias of Mr. Howard when he was murdered by his own gang members, his cousins Bob and William Ford. Jesse was shot in the back of the head while he was standing on a chair straightening a picture frame. His last words were: ”My, it’s awfully hot today...” He was 34. Jesse’s older brother Frank took the hint and went straight. Bob Ford went on tour giving lectures, re-enacting how he had killed Jesse. Finally in a mining camp someone blew him away with a shotgun.

1897-composer Johannes Brahms died.

1920- Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald got married.

1922- JOSEF STALIN made General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. In the scramble for power after the death of Lenin this move allowed him to consolidate his his hold on the top job and push out Leon Trotsky and the other top Bolsheviks like Zioniev, Kamieniev and Krupskaya. He made sure Lenin's last will and political testament was never made public.

1936-Bruno Richard Hauptmann was electrocuted for the murder of the Lindbergh baby.

1948 -THE MARSHAL PLAN signed into law by President Truman. It called for 5 billion U.S. dollars to be spent to help 16 European countries rebuild their shattered economies after World War II.

1968- In Memphis, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was supposed to give a sermon at the Temple Baptist Church, but excused himself because of his workload. Since he had openly come out against the Vietnam War, the death threats had increased and it all weighed heavily on his mind. Rev. Ralph Abernathy telephoned from the church that the crowd was disappointed Dr. King had not showed up. "Martin, they don't want to hear me. They're all here to hear you."

So Dr King went to the church, and delivered off-the-cuff the last great speech of his life: "I have been to the Mountain and have Seen the Promised Land, and though I may not get there with you, it is alright.". At one point he was startled when the wind outside caused a shutter to bang. Then he returned to the Lorraine Motel.

1968- Stanley Kubrick's epic film "2001: A Space Odyssey" premiered. The N.Y. Times review said it was : " Somewhere between hypnotic and boring". Pauline Kael called it "monumentally unimaginative!" Writer Arthur C. Clarke always said HAL the computer was not a coded reference to IBM . At the Oscars, Clarke and Kubrick lost the best screenplay award to Mel Brooks for the Producers. 2001 won only one Oscar, for visual effects. It was the only Oscar a Stanley Kubrick film ever won.

1973- Standing on the corner of 6th Ave in Manhattan, Motorola scientist Marty Cooper made the first cell phone call. He called his competitor Joel Engel at Bell Labs to tell him he had lost the race to invent the cell phone. He said that first phone, “It was the size of a leg of lamb.”

1974- Even while the Watergate Scandal continued, this day the IRS reported President Richard Nixon had been paying taxes based on an income of only $15,000 a year, when he was making at least $200,000 a year.

1975- Eccentric chess champion Bobby Fischer was stripped of his World Chess Championship for refusing to play any more matches to defend his title.

1984-THE COFFEE SHOP CONVERSION. Future President George W. Bush was a cocaine-snorting alcoholic who had been busted for drunk driving. This day he became Born-Again Christian after a meeting with an evangelist in a coffee shop.

1994-Disney chief executive Frank Wells was killed in a helicopter crash on a skiing trip. It’s been speculated that blowing snow off some high peaks caused an ice ball to be sucked into the copter’s air intake manifold. Clint Eastwood was supposed to be on that trip but couldn't make it. Billie Joel and Christie Brinkley had a similar scare with their helicopter on the same day. The death of the Disney CEO set in motion the events that would lead to Jeffrey Katzenberg leaving Disney and forming Dreamworks, as well as Michael Ovitz’s brief tenure as a mouseketeer and Michael Eisner’s eventual fall in 2006. In 1999 the Hollywood Reporter estimated that the little iceball cost the Walt Disney Company over one billion dollars.

1996- Ron Brown, the first African American to be Chairman of the Democratic Party, was killed in a plane crash near Dubrovnik, Croatia.

1999- Egypt repealed a 1904 law that said a rapist could escape prison for his crime if he married his victim!
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Why is a cup of coffee sometimes called a cup of Joe?

Answer: It was named for Secretary of the Navy Josephus “Joe” Daniels, who banned “ardent spirits” from the officers’ mess in 1914, making coffee the strongest drink offered aboard ship. This inspired the slang reference to coffee as a cup of Joe. It may also be derived from the slang Cup of Jamoke, a corruption of coffee producing states Jamaica and Java.

Question: Why is a cup of coffee sometimes called a cup of Joe?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: What does it mean to have an albatross around your neck?
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History for 4/2/2015
Birthdays: Frankish Emperor Charlemagne, Giacomo Casanova, Hans Christian Andersen, Marvin Gaye, Emile Zola, Max Ernst, Buddy Ebsen, Sir Alec Guinness, Frederick Bartholdi, Emmy Lou Harris, Linda Hunt, Isaiah Washington, Karl Castle.

304B.C.- Alexander IV, the young child of Alexander the Great, began his reign under the regency of the Macedonian General Perdiccas.

430AD. Today is the feast day of Saint Mary the Egyptian, a former prostitute who repented by living naked and alone in the desert for 49 years, only appearing briefly at Easter time to take communion, and to get some more sunblock. 1459- Vlad II "Dracula" -Little Dragon, duke of Wallachia, shows why he got the nickname Vlad the Impaler by impaling the city council of Brasov high on stakes then eating lunch under their quivering bodies. Impaling was a torture of Turkish origin, where you had a huge sharpened stake hammered up into your body, then standing it up. A good executioner could keep the stake from piercing too many important organs, prolonging the agony of your death.

This was Vlad’s preferred method of getting rid of inconvenient people. No wonder in the 1890’s when British author Bram Stoker was collecting folk tales in the Transylvanian mountains to use as source material for a gothic vampire novel he chose Dracula for it’s title.

1502- King Henry VII Tudor’s primary heir Arthur of Britain died at age fifteen. King Henry had just married Arthur to the Catharine daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain a few weeks before. Now Henry didn’t want to lose the Spanish alliance, and he was too cheap to send back Catharine’s huge dowery. So he remarried her to his other son, Henry VIII. Catherine and Henry VIII’s marriage problems would lead to the English Church’s break with Rome.

1520- Somewhere off the coast of what will one day be Argentina, Magellan's captains, convinced this crazy Portuguese turncoat didn’t know where he was going, try to mutiny and go home to Spain.

1800- Beethoven's First Symphony premiered. Vienna's leading music critic called it - 'a vulgar, impertinent explosion, more expected from a military band than an orchestra!’

1801- BATTLE OF COPENHAGEN- The British Navy has a one day war with Denmark. The fleet was sent by London to intimidate the Danes into leaving Napoleon's anti-British blockade, but the Danes were more worried about a Russian-Swedish alliance forcing them to remain. So Admiral Nelson sailed his fleet into Copenhagen harbor and pounds it out with the Danish Navy and shore batteries. Nelson’s ships sailed up and down the drydocks pounding the unmasted Danish battleships in for repairs. Despite fearful manpower losses the British don't lose one ship while sinking or capturing 17 Danish ships of the line.

The one-eyed, one armed Nelson gloried in battle. When a Danish cannon ball struck his mainmast showering him and his staff with burning splinters, he laughed and said: "Hot work, what ?" At one point the action got so desperate, that Nelson's superior Admiral Hyde Parker raised the ensign flags to break off battle and retreat. Nelson ignored them. He jokingly raised his spyglass to his dead eye and said :"What ensign flags ? I don't see any ensign flags !"

Denmark made peace the next day and all the surviving combatants had a lovely dinner together at the Copenhagen Palace, as though nothing had happened.

1814- Now that Paris was occupied by enemy armies, the French Senate led by Talleyrand declared the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte officially deposed.

1836- Charles Dickens married Elizabeth Howarth.

1865- The Confederate capitol Richmond fell to U.S. armies. More destruction to the city was done by looting Confederates and released prisoners than the enemy. Several large fires created the type of total urban destruction not to be seen again until the World Wars in the 20th Century.
Mrs. Robert E. Lee ( a grandniece of George Washington) was at her town home in the city while her husband was still out with his army. General Phil Sheridan stationed a guard to protect her door but she protested bitterly that he was a black soldier and thought it was meant to annoy her, which knowing Phil Sheridan, it probably was.

1865- Lincoln awakes from a strange dream. He tells Mary that he was wandering in an empty White House and heard women weeping. When he asked a guard at the East Room what had happened, the guard said the president had been assassinated.

1877- First man shot out of a cannon.

1877- The first White House egg rolling contest.

1917- Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin arrived by train at St. Petersburg's Finland Station to cheers and salutes. He was smuggled from Geneva to Russia by the German High Command in a sealed railroad car. the German secret service also paid for the printing presses for Pravda. He begins to organize the Communist plot to seize the Russian Government.

1917- President Woodrow Wilson called a special session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. ‘The World Must be made Safe for Democracy!” he said.

1943- Disney short 'Private Pluto' the first Chip & Dale cartoon.

1943-Happy Birthday SAT’s! This day Harvard Dean Henry Chauncey supervised the distribution to 316,000 High School seniors of the Army-Navy College Qualifying Test, later re-titled the Scholastic Aptitude Tests or SAT. This became a standardized test that manages every year to raise the stress level of seniors regardless of race, class or religion. Go On To Next Page.

1974-While actor David Niven was speaking at the Academy Awards telecast a nude streaker ran past him on nationwide television. Mr. Niven, completely unflustered, dryly commented: "The only laugh that man will ever get is by stripping off his clothes and showing off his shortcomings. "

1974- at that same Oscar telecast, Francis Ford Coppola held up presenting the Best Picture Nomination to declare that a Revolution was coming in Digital Technology “that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a small town try-out!” The audience was confused and annoyed at being delayed any longer to get to their parties.

1978-The TV show "Dallas" debuts.

1982- THE FALKLANDS WAR-Britain declared war on Argentina over the their takeover of the Falkland Islands.

1981- John Welsh made CEO of General Electric. After automating factories and firing one third of his employees, he earned the name "Neutron Jack" after the bomb that kills people but leaves buildings intact.

1993- Bullocks Wilshire department store with the famous Tea Room closed.

1996- Lech Walesa, who led the first great people’s movement to overthrow a Communist dictatorship and was president of Poland for two terms and a Nobel Prize winner, got his old job back repairing electric batteries at the Gydansk shipyard. The shipyard was later closed. Capitalism’s a bitch, ain’t it?

2004- Walt Disney Studio released Home on the Range.

2005-Polish Pope John Paul II died after reigning for 26 years.

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Yesterday’s Quiz: What does it mean to have an albatross around your neck?

Answer: In medieval times, one of the penalties for poaching on the King’s lands, was you having to wear the dead animal around your neck as a mark of shame. In Coleridge famous poem The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, the last sailor of a cursed ship wears the albatross he killed around his neck. Since then, it’s meant having to live with the results of an unfortunate decision.