Miriam McDonald sent me this link to a cute song There's No One More Irish, than Barack O'Bama! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EADUQWKoVek



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Quiz: Americans have their Presidential inauguration the third Tuesday of January. When do the British traditionally swear in their Prime Minister?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: What is The Beast with Two Backs..?
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History for 1/19/2009
Birthdays: James Watt, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert E. Lee, Paul Cezanne', Janis Joplin would have been 65, Tipi Hedren is 79, Slobodan Milosovic’, radio star Ish Kabibble, Dolly Parton, Michael Crawford, Desi Arnez Jr., Chic Young, Guy Madison, Richard Lester, John H. Johnson publisher of Ebony and Jet Magazines, Jean Stapleton, Fritz Weaver, Sean Wayans, Robin MacNeill, Paul Rodriquez, Antoine Fuqua, Drea Di Matteo is 37,
and Bart the Bear-1977 Bear who starred in movies like Clan of the Cave Bear, The Bear, White Fang and Legends of the Fall

Happy Feast of St. Wulfstan.

379 A.D. Valentinian Ist was a great Roman emperor with a really bad temper. When Barbarians crossed the Rhine and sacked a few villages Valentinian got his legions together and burned down half of Germany. He only stopped for the winter and was preparing to continue in the spring when on this day a delegation of tribal chiefs came to ask for peace. They explained that it wasn't their idea to make war, just some of the younger hotheads in the tribe. They said that the Emperor was overreacting. Valentinian got so enraged by this that he raised his fists, turned purple and before he uttered a word broke a blood vessel and fell over stone dead. His general Theodosius became emperor.

1405- Tartar conqueror Tamerlane fell ill and died in Samarkand. He roved the world conquering and murdering like Genghis Khan but without Genghis’ skill at empire building. His empire fell apart soon after his death, inspiring Lord Byron to write his poem about transitory glory- Ozimandias.

1547-Grand Duke of Muscovy Ivan IV Vasilievich, called Ivan the Terrible, crowned Tsar or Czar- a Russian form for Caesar. His father Grand Duke Ivan III the Great assumed the title and power but it remained for his son to formalize the office.

1633- Thomas Morton was twice deported by the Pilgrims for holding “licentious Maypole celebrations” at his Indian trading post. This day he returned to England and tried to have the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter revoked. The King refused, because that might make the whole crowd of buckle-shoed killjoys come back home!

1729- British Restoration playwright William Congreve died. He willed all his property to Henrietta, the Duchess of Marlborough. But then the Duchess did something a bit odd. She had a death mask made of Congreve’s face and attached it to a life size mannequin. She ate and conversed with the dummy all day and slept with it at night. She insisted her servants wait upon the dummy and treat it when she felt it was ill. When she died she was buried with the dummy.

1829 Johann Von Goethe published Faust Part 1.

1840- Explorer Lt. Charles Wilkes claimed all of Antarctica for the United States. He was on a scientific expedition to chart the South Seas and Southern polar waters. Captain Wilkes was really good at exploring, but he was such a tyrannical disciplinarian he was court-martialed upon his return. Wilkes’ erratic behavior may have been a model for Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab in his novel Moby Dick.

1853- Giuseppe Verdi's Il Trovatore with the famous Anvil Chorus premiered in Rome.

1919- Famed dancer of the Ballet Russe Vasclav Nijinsky danced his last dance at a hotel in San Moritz Switzerland. He later became an incarcerated mental patient and underwent numerous extreme shock therapies until his death in 1950.

1940- The Three Stooges do their impression of Hitler and the top Nazis in the Columbia Pictures short comedy “You Natzy Spy”. Moe Howard is still the best Hitler impersonator of all time. “Hail-Hail-Hailstone of Moronica! Waahoo!”

1955- President Eisenhower held the first news conference that was filmed and shown on television. It was held in the treaty room of the State Department. Eisenhower was famous for his ability to speak at great length and never say anything of substance. “This day, My Fellow Americans, more than at any other time, ahead of us, lies the Future!”

1961- The first episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show filmed.

1977- In one of his last acts as President, Gerald Ford pardoned Tokyo Rose. Iva Toguri D’Aquino was a Japanese American who did propaganda broadcasts for Radio Tokyo encouraging American GI’s to give up. She explained she was stranded in Tokyo when the war broke out and was coerced into doing the broadcasts.

1979- Wendy O. Williams, mohawk-haired lead singer of the punk band the Plasmatics was arrested in Milwaukee for masturbating herself with a sledgehammer on stage.

1985- Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA peaked the pop charts at #9.

1989- President Ronald Reagan, in one of his last acts as president, pardoned Yankee Baseball club owner George Steinbrenner for making illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon.

1991-Eastern Airlines ceased operations and goes out of business. Chairman and former astronaut Frank Borman was philosophical: “Business without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell.”
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is The Beast with Two Backs..?

Answer: In Shakespeare’s play Othello, the villain Iago made crude jokes about his commander Othello having sex with his wife Desdemona. One of his references was “ Methinks they maketh the Beast with Two Backs.”