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Nov 29, 2011 tues.
November 29th, 2011

QUESTION: Ben, Hoss, Little Joe and Hop Sing were characters in what famous 60s TV show?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Where did the phrase originate “ He doth protest too much”..?
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History for 11/29/2011
Birthdays: Gaetano Donizetti, Busby Berkeley, C.S. Lewis, Louisa May Alcott, Chuck Mangione, Vin Scully, Gary Shandling, Cathy Moriarity, Don Cheadle, Joel Coen, Jacques Chirac, Kim Delaney, Howie Mandell, Susee “Chapstick” Chafee

1830- The November Uprising. Polish nationalists rise up against the Russian occupiers in one of their many romantic but hopeless efforts. In America literary figures like Hawthorne, Poe, and Longfellow were romantically moved to write lots of epic poems, but not much else was done to help.

Edgar Allen Poe in an opium induced delirium would run out of his Bronx cottage and march up and down the street with a musket in his hand shouting: "To Warsaw! To Warsaw!" Luckily the local constable was well aware of Mr. Poe's eccentricities and sent him home to bed.

1864- Colorado militia killed over 150 Cheyenne Indians in the Sand Creek Massacre. Col. John Chivington was depressed that he was not back east winning glory in the Civil War. So he attacked a peaceful Cheyenne village. He later held a victory parade in Denver displaying the scalps of the Indians, mostly women, old men and children. His actions sparked a needless Indian war that raged for years afterwards.

1887- The US Navy received permission from the Hawaiian King David IV Kalakaou to lease land for a base at Pearl Harbor.

1890- The first Army-Navy football game held at West Point. Midshipmen beat the cadets 24-0.

1915- In the first years of animated films, one artist like Winsor McCay drew everything. This day John Randolph Bray's "Colonel Heeza Liar in Africa" cartoon debuted. Bray adapted Henry Ford's assembly line system to making animation, creating positions of layout, background painters, inkers, cel painters, checkers and camera. After 1919 Bray shifted his studio’s focus from entertainment to technical and training films. Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, Max & Dave Fleischer and Shamus Culhane all got their start at Bray's.

1929- Commander Richard Byrd radioed he'd made the first airplane flight over the South Pole. Commander Byrd had flown over the North Pole in 1926 with his friend Floyd Bennett but Bennett had since died and when Byrd made it over the South Pole he dropped a small American flag weighted with a stone from Bennett’s grave.

1941-In occupied Russia, Nazi troops first raped and then hanged Zoia Kosmodemianskaya. She was a top guerrilla leader at 18 years old. Before she died she cried defiance at the Nazis:” You cannot hang all 190 million of us!”

1942- U.S. declared coffee would be rationed along with sugar, gasoline and rubber. And lots more. People put their cars up on blocks "for the duration". Gas Ration cards were listed as C, B & A. The C card meant essential defense worker, police & fire, so they had unlimited access to gasoline. A cards were the least important.

1944- A Detroit man named Malcolm Little was busted for larceny. He later reformed his life around the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Malcolm X.

1947- THE UN DECIDES. Since 1897 European Jewry had focused on buying land and relocating to Palestine. In 1936 the Egyptian Parliament issued an open letter to all Jews to come live amongst them, but rising Arab nationalism since 1919 tended to resist Jewish immigration. Since World War One the British held Palestine as a mandate but after World War Two they dumped the whole problem in the United Nations hands. The Peel Report, a Foreign Office paper published in 1937 said maybe creating two new states was the solution.

This day The United Nations voted 33-13 to partition the British Mandate of Palestine into Jewish and Arab independent states with Jerusalem under international supervision. On May 14th 1948 British forces completed their withdrawal and Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel.

1959-The Second Grammy Awards, broadcast for the first time on television. Bobby Darins’ rendition of Mack the Knife won top honors.

1961- NASA sent Enos the Chimp into orbit.

1963-THE WARREN COMMISSION announced- President Lyndon Johnson set up the Warren Commission to investigate the murder of John F. Kennedy. He had originally thought the Dallas Homicide Squad was sufficient, but public outrage demanded more.
The Commission was headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren and participants included future president Gerald Ford, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State Alan Foster Dulles and future Senator Arlen Spector, who as a young attorney argued for the validity of the "magic bullet" theory”. That one bullet went through Kennedy, bounced, went through Gov. Connolly, ricocheted, went through Connolly a second time, zinged, and wound up sitting in Gov. Connolly's bedsheets in the hospital with no surface dents or marks on it -or something like that.

After ten months the Warren Commission concluded that President Kennedy was killed by a lone nut and there was no conspiracy. In 1975 the House Committee on Assassinations concluded the contrary view, that Kennedy probably was the victim of a conspiracy but what it was is unknown. To this date there are still two million documents pertaining to the case kept classified,

Theories abound –that Attorney General Robert Kennedy squelched evidence that might have tarnished his brother’s record by proving his links to mobsters, to the CIA, Castro or space aliens pulling the trigger. No matter, in the end the Warren Commission’s unsatisfying conclusions spawned a generation of conspiracy buffs.

1963- After the Kennedy assassination, comic Vaughn Meader announced he was giving up his act impersonating the dead president. Meader’s comedy album The First Family sold 7.5 million copies in 1962, but now it wasn’t funny anymore and Meaders career collapsed. He died of emphysema in 2004. When Lenny Bruce first took the stage after the Kennedy assassination, he opened with a long drag on his cigarette and sighed:” ….Man…. Vaughn Meader is really screwed!”

1967- Robert MacNamara, who was Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, stepped down to become president of the World Bank.

2001- former Beatle guitarist and composer George Harrison died of cancer.
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Question: Where did the phrase originate “ He doth protest too much”..?

Answer: In Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. As the Queen, Hamlet's mother, watches
the ironic play that Hamlet has arranged for the court's entertainment
(and, for his own purposes, to test his mother and uncle), Hamlet
asks her how she likes the play. She says, responding to the character
of the Queen, "The lady doth protest too much...methinks." Meaning the
character's dramatic vows of fidelity do not ring true.


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