June 13th, 2009 Saturday June 13th, 2009 |
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Question: What does it mean when a person describes themselves as a Luddite?
Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: What film had the line “ Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!”
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History for 6/13/2009
Birthdays: Gnaeus Agricola-40AD, Harriet Beecher Stowe, W.B.Yeats, Red Grange, Basil Rathbone, Dorothy Sayers, Ralph Edwards, Paul Lynde, Tim Allen, Darla Hood, Ally Sheedy, Simon Callow, Joe Roth, Christo, Malcom McDowell is 66
The Festival of the Roman Goddess Minerva.
313 A.D. Constantine, the Roman Emperor of the West and Licinius the Emperor of the East publish a joint edict throughout the Roman Empire granting religious toleration : "All men to worship what Gods they will." This edict lifts the 250 year persecution of Christianity.
1381-THE ENGLISH PEASANT REVOLT OCCUPIES LONDON. -Wat the Tyner and his pissed-off peasants chase young King Richard II into the Tower of London,then drag the Archbishop of Canterbury up to Tyburn Hill to chop his head off. The Archbishop was in charge of economic policy and taxation for the young king, so he was the focus of the people's rage.They used a non-union headsman, so it took several whacks to get the job done...
1777- General “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne began his invasion down from Canada into New York State to smash the American Revolution. The Great North River, called the Hudson, was the jugular of America, because it divided militant New England from the moderate Mid-Atlantic and Southern States. Before Burgoyne left London he had wagered politician Charles Fox 20 guineas that he would finish off the Yankees by Christmas.
Burgoyne immediately annoyed senior British officers in America. He refused orders from Canadian Governor General Carleton. He declared that his was an independent command and so could not be ordered about by anyone but London. By October, defeated and surrounded by hordes of rebel soldiers at Saratoga he got a letter out to Carleton “requesting instructions”. Carleton understood a weenie attempt to shift the blame, so he ignored him, Burgoyne surrendered and was exchanged. He did get home by Christmas, just without his army...
1905- The workers of the Russian city of Odessa go on strike and the Tsar's troops shoot them down on the Odessa steps. This causes the Battleship Potemkin's sailors to mutiney. Twenty years later Sergei Eisenstein to make a famous film of the same name.
1920-The US Government rules Americans cannot mail their children through the Parcel Post System.
1927- Wall St. tickertape parade for Lucky Lindy- Charles Lindbergh.
1941-The American Federation of Labor the AF of L called for a nationwide boycott of all Disney products and films. This was to support the Disney Cartoonists strike.
1942- President Roosevelt by executive order created the Office of Strategic Services or the OSS. Under director Wild Bill Donovan its job was to coordinate espionage and intelligence gathering against the Axis powers in cooperation with its British counterpart , the SOE. On the agencies personnel roster were experts from spymasters Bill Gates and William Casey to tourist book author Eugene Fodor and chef Julia Child. Child recalled the outfit was nicknamed “Oh So Secret!” and “Oh, So-Social” for all the society notables in it. After World War Two the OSS transformed into the CIA.
1944- The first Vengence-1( V-1) Buzz Bombs hit London. The first 21 launched missed most targets and one even spun around and landed near Hitler's western headquarters. This is when the auto-destruct button was conceived. Of the ones that hit England the worst damage was to Bethnel Green tube station. Unlike bombers these rockets were almost impossible to shoot down. By wars end 1,800 would hit London along with 5,000 V-2s and drive a lot of the population into the countryside.
1958- rock & roll great Frank Zappa graduated Antelope Valley High School.
1962- Three convicts, Frank Lee Morris, and the brothers Anglin, escape from Alcatraz with a crude rowboat. They are the only prisoners to have successfully escaped from the Rock. Alcatraz was closed by attorney general Robert Kennedy later that year.
1967- President Lyndon Johnson appointed Thurgood Marshal to the Supreme Court. Marshal was the first African American to sit in the nations highest court and as an attorney successfully pled the 1955 case Brown vs. Board of Education that struck down school segregation.
1971 -The day after Tricia Nixon's wedding the Washington Post and the New York Times began printing THE PENTAGON PAPERS. They were leaked by dissenting intelligence specialist Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg was on the staff of Defense Secretary Robert MacNamara when McNamara ordered a fact paper drawn up explaining step by step just how the U.S. managed to get in as big a mess as Vietnam. The papers revealed publicly such damaging secrets as the U.S. had secretly been fighting alongside the South Vietnamese much earlier than the "Tonkin Gulf Incident" of 1965, all the while claiming neutrality. The U.S.S. Maddox, the ship that was fired on in the Tonkin Gulf, was ordered to violate Vietnamese waters and provoke a Communist attack; and that the opinion of the Pentagon Joint Chiefs in 1965 was that we knew the war was unwinnable, yet we kept fighting anyway until 1973.
The publication was very damaging to the Nixon White House even though it was all about events taking place in the previous Democratic administrations. Robert McNamara said he himself never got around to reading the Pentagon Papers but had a copy in his garage.
1978- Henry Ford II fired Lee Iacocca from the Ford Corporation. The creator of the Ford Mustang would later move on to run Chrysler. When asked why Ford said: “Sometimes you just don’t like somebody.”
1991- Boris Yeltsin becomes the first popularly elected leader of Russia.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What film had the line “ Badges? We don’t need no stinking badges!”
Answer: John Houston's "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (1948)
Dobbs (Humphrey Bogart): If you're the police, where are your badges?
Gold Hat (Alfonso Bedoya): Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don't need no badges. I don't have to show you any stinking badges! ( a gun battle ensues)
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