March 19, 2016 March 19th, 2016 |
Todays Question: Why is a zero score in Tennis called Love?
Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Who taught the French to like wine?
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History for 3/19/2016
Birthdays: George De La Tour, Wyatt Earp, Dr. David Livingston, William Jennings Bryan, Sir Richard Burton (The African explorer, not Liz Taylor's ex), Charles M. Russell, Jacky Moms Mabley, Adolf Eichmann, Phillip Roth, Adolf Galland, Ursula Andress, Patrick McGoohan, Ornette Coleman, Harvey Weinstein, Bruce Willis is 61, Glenn Close is 69, animator Richard Williams is 83
Roman Festival ANCILIA when the Salii, the Leaping Priests of Mars, take down the Sacred Shields of Mars the Avenger that dropped down from Heaven for Romulus and do the leaping dance of Mars. A ceremony to mark the beginning of campaigning season.
Today is Saint Joseph’s Day, when the swallows come back to Capistrano.
1330- Edmund the Earl of Kent was beheaded by order of his mother.
1611- Moscow Burns- again. During the period called the Time of Troubles a Polish army had captured the Kremlin and tried to get the son of the Polish King Wladyswav IV or Ladislas made Czar. The Orthodox Patriarch of Moscow Hermogenes forbade any good Russian from swearing allegiance to the Roman Catholic Ladislas. So the Poles threw the Patriarch in a dungeon where he soon died. This day a rebel army organized by a Prince Troubetskoy and peasant butcher Kosma Minin attacked the foreign occupiers and in the ensuing conflict, the city caught fire.
1628- A group called Puritans, differing from the Pilgrims of the Plymouth Colony, were granted a Royal Charter to set up their own colony in Massachusetts. Oliver Cromwell once considered immigrating to this colony, but eventually opted to stay in England.
1644- Si Sang, the last emperor of China's Ming Dynasty, committed suicide.
1687- French explorer Sieur de LaSalle was killed by his own men on the shores of the Mississippi in an argument over scarce food rations. He was 43.
1799- Franz Josef Haydn’s oratorio the Creation premiered. Haydn was inspired when he heard Handel’s the Messiah in London.
1812- When Napoleon’s armies occupied Spain in 1808 the Spanish people formed independent bands and fought on in the hills as "guerrillas"- "Little Wars". These militias sent delegates to a free, independent parliament called the Supreme Cortes in the city of Cadiz. This day they declared a constitution for Spain acknowledging exiled King Ferdinand, abolishing torture and the Inquisition but keeping the Catholic Church. These men were first called by the term Liberales or Liberals.
1831- The First U.S. Bank Robbery. English immigrant Edward Smith alias Edward Honeywell made a duplicate set of keys and robbed the City Bank of New York of $245,000 bucks. He did ten years in Sing Sing but only half the money was ever found.
1847- THE MORMON BATALLION reached Los Angeles. Brigham Young, in order to quiet Federal suspicions that his Utah commune didn't want to be part of the U.S., forms a volunteer battalion to help in the War with Mexico. This troop makes one of the longest infantry marches in U.S. history across the arid desert and arrives in El Pueblo de Los Angeles in time to interrupt a fiesta. They tell the startled locals that they were now Americans (see what happens when you let too many gringos into this country..?)
1853- Charles Dickens novel Bleak House first appeared in magazine installments. It is the first novel to mention dinosaurs-" It would be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill…"
1859- Charles Gounod's opera 'Faust" premiered. It was so popular that after a while in New York wags nicknamed the Metropolitan Opera the "Faustspeilhaus" ( it's a pun on Wagner's theater in Bayreuth being called a Festspeilhaus, so Faustspeilhaus..heh-heh,.get it ?....look, don't blame me...its a Gilded Age joke....)
1866- H.M.S. MONARCH OF THE SEAS leaves Liverpool with 2,000 tons,700
immigrants and freight bound for New York. and disappears forever. No wreckage, no survivors, no distress signals. One of the Mysteries of the Deep...
1875- Mark Twain admits in a letter to a friend that he now likes to use a typewriter, a new technology accused of ruining the art of writing.
1895- The Lumiere Brothers shot their first movie, employees leaving their dad’s factory.
1914- A fire in the negative vaults of the Eclair Studios in New Jersey destroyed forever all the American work of pioneer French animator Emile Cohl. He had come to the U.S. to animate the first cartoon series, George McManus’ "The Newlyweds" later to be renamed in comic strip form "Life With Father".
1916- The first mission of the U.S. Airforce. The First U.S. Aero Squadron flew reconnaissance missions this day to aid General Pershing’s pursuit of Pancho Villa.
1918- As a wartime measure the Congress created Daylight Savings Time separate from Standard Time.
1920- U.S. Congress rejects U.S. admission into the League of Nations. The refusal of the worlds largest economy who's President (Wilson) was the architect of the plan as well as the refusal to admit Soviet Russia dooms the League to impotence. Wilson ruined his health crossing the country lobbying for support for the League and was heartbroken at its failure. In 1945 after another horrible war the world would try again with the United Nations.
1928- the Amos & Andy radio show debuted. NBC Blue Network, WMAQ in Chicago.
1931- Nevada legalized gambling.
1935- Harlem riots. When the rumor spread that a young shoplifter had been beaten to death by police in the basement of Kress Department Store, 10,000 Harlem residents riot in the streets and burn shops. Two people are killed. The child makes an appearance and in fact had never been harmed.
1945- THE NERO ORDER- While allied armies pour into Germany, Adolph Hitler in his bunker issued an order to destroy all bridges, water and telephone systems, dams, schools, anything that could be of any use after the war is over." The Allies will have conquered nothing by ashes!" An immolation worthy of Wagner's Gotterdammerung.
Despite some Nazis fanatical wish to fight to the end, most rational Germans including Albert Speer completely ignored this order. And Hitler down in his bunker didn't know one way or another. German generals started to refer to the Fuhrer's strange mood swings with a German word: VookenCuckooshein- that translates as "Cloud-Cuckoo-Land".
1953- First T.V. broadcast of the Oscar ceremony. That utterly memorable circus film
"The Greatest Show on Earth" won top honors. Ironically it was Cecil B. DeMille’s only Oscar of his career. Before TV, the Oscars ceremony included a dinner and an hour of dancing before the awards were presented.
1954- Singer Sammy Davis Jr. lost an eye in an auto accident in the California desert. He was left lying bleeding unattended in a hallway in Riverside County Hospital. This was because he was black and it was a segregated facility. Finally actor Jeff Chandler found him and forced the doctors to treat him. Friend Frank Sinatra urged Davis out of his depression and got him out on stage again. That first night at Ciro’s nightclub the entire Ratpack- Sinatra, Dean Martin and Peter Lawford each preformed on stage wearing a black eye patch similar to Davis’.
1957- Elvis Presley purchased an estate outside Memphis Tennessee called Graceland from Ruth Moore for $100,000.
1957- Skiing aficionado Pete Seibert was wounded in both legs during World War II, and it was feared he would never walk again. He not only walked but he got back on skis and by 1950 made the US Olympic skiing team. This day he hiked with a friend up to an isolated Valley in Colorado named Vail. He exclaimed:" My God Earl, we’ve climbed all the way to Heaven!” Pete Seibert built Vail into a world-class ski resort and town.
1959- North Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh declared a war of unification against the Republic of South Vietnam.
1959- Disney released The Shaggy Dog, their low budget live action comedy hit.
1962- The first Pillsbury Doughboy commercial.
1964- IBM gives the green light to plans for the 360 series. The first compatible computers.
1964- First day shooting on the James Bond film Goldfinger.
1973- During the Watergate Scandal, President Richard Nixon's lawyer John Dean tells him "There is a cancer on the Presidency."
1974- The band Jefferson Airplane changed its name to Jefferson Starship.
1979- C-Span cable channel started broadcasting live from the floor of Congress. The first Congressman to speak on camera was Al Gore.
1982- Randy Rhoads, the lead guitarist for Ozzy Ozbourne died when he playfully flew his plane buzzing the bands travelling bus and smacked into a farmhouse.
1984- I’LL BE BACK- James Cameron began shooting the film the Terminator. He first considered casting O.J. Simpson for the cyborg killer before settling on Austrian weightlifter Arnold Swarzenegger.
1987- Reverend Jim Baker resigned as head of the PTL Ministries. The Televangelist had been accused of hanky-panky with secretary Jessica Hahn and defrauding his parishioners of millions to put air conditioning in his dog’s house, and build a Christian Theme Park named Heritage USA. Evangelist turned comedian Sam Kinison joked:
"I imagine up in Heaven Jesus must be flipping through the New Testament saying "Hey, where did I say anything about a Water Slide?!"
1993- Monkey-cam debuted on the David Letterman Show.
2003- SHOCK AND AWE, THE WAR IN IRAQ BEGAN- The United States, Britain and a loose coalition of small states manipulated public outrage over the 9-11 attacks to invade Saddam Husseins’ Iraq and march on Baghdad.
Although Iraq had never bothered the US directly, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney declared they had solid evidence that Saddam had the ability to attack America with nuclear weapons in 45 minutes. The White House encouraged the belief that Saddam had ties to Osama Ben Laden’s 9-11 attack. By 2008 all these claims proved to be lies. Bush and Cheney blamed it on the bad intelligence, after giving their CIA chief George Tenent the Medal of Freedom. 5,000 American dead, ten thousand Americans mutilated or disabled, 106,000 Iraqi dead. As Vice President Dick Cheney said “ …so?”
2004- Brian Maxwell, the inventor of the Power Bar nutrition snack, died of a heart attack at age 51.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Who taught the French to like wine?
Answer: The Romans. The ancient Gauls preferred beer. Wherever Caesars legions tramped, settlers behind them brought cuttings to start vineyards.