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SEPT 28, 2017
September 28th, 2017

Question: What TV show featured Baba Louie and El Kabong?

Yesterday’s Question Answered below: When you had a great all around day, why do you say you” had a field day.”..?
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History for 9/28/2017
Birthdays: Michel Caravaggio, Georges Clemenceau, Al Kapp, William Paley, Max Schmelling, Bridgette Bardot is 82, Frederic Engels, Marcello Mastroianni, Moon Unit Zappa, Ed Sullivan, Sylvia Kristel, John Sayles, Arnold Stang, J.T. Walsh, Seymour Cray, Janeane Garofalo is 53, Mira Sorvino is 50, Hillary Duff is 30, Naomi Watts is 49

48 B.C.- Pompey the Great, fleeing Julius Caesar after he was defeated by him in battle in Greece, was assassinated by the Egyptians just as he landed on their shore. A hired Roman officer named Septimius did the murder. The Egyptians thought it would please Caesar to present him with his enemies head. When one of Pompey's supporters was approaching the coast by ship and saw a Roman-style funeral pyre, he knew their cause was lost. He sighed:" Even thou, Pompeius Magnus?"

855AD- The Frankish Empire of Charlemagne had covered Europe from Hungary to the Pyrenees. This day Frankish Emperor Lothar died, and according to custom his kingdom is divided among his sons. Lothar had fought against his brothers Charles the Bald and Louis the German unsuccessfully to keep the empire together. By the Treaty of Verdun Louis and Charles acknowledged the fact that Charlemagne’s Empire was jut too big to handle. They broke it up, creating the kingdoms of France, Germany and Austrasia- later Austria and Italy.

1043- Battle of Lyrskog Heath. King Magnus the Good of the Vikings defeated a Baltic tribe called the Wends. Magnus psyched out the enemy by taking off his chain mail armor, and put on a loud red shirt. He then ran ahead of his charging warriors swinging a large double bladed axe over his head in wide circles, until he crashed into the foe.

1216- CORONATION OF KING HENRY III- English King John Ist, aka John the Bad, John Lackland, John SoftSword, John the Total Loser, etc. was killed when an evil monk poured poisonous toad venom in his ear. His son Henry was left a situation that didn't make for a good coronation. The country was racked by civil war and invasion because of the dispute over the Magna Charter, the great document that granted broad ranging civil rights. Henry couldn't have his coronation at Westminster because London was occupied by a French army. He couldn't have the Archbishop of Canterbury preside over the ceremony because he was under house arrest in the Vatican. And to top it all off his father had lost the Iron Crown of Alfred the Great at the beach. Boy, what a downer of a party! Henry III would reign for 56 years and demand extravagance at all subsequent royal functions.

1542- The European Discovery of California- Juan de Cabrillo sailing up from Mexico stepped ashore at Cabrillo Point in San Diego Harbor. He had hoped that San Diego Bay would be the Straights of Anian, a mythical sea route back to the Atlantic that would be safer than Magellan’s Straights. All through the 1500’s conventional thinking was that America was just a big island with sea routes all around it. California was supposed to be the Kingdom of Califa, the Amazons who wield Golden Swords.

1774- Pennsylvanian Joseph Galloway proposed in the first Continental Congress that the solution to America’s problems with England was to petition the mother country for dominion status:” since the colonies hold in abhorrence the idea of being independent communities.” The Dominion Plan was defeated by only one vote.

1781- Washington and Rochambeau’s troops entered the siege trenches around Yorktown. They were amazed at the British army’s lack of activity. Lord Cornwallis knew he was being surrounded by land and sea for two weeks, yet he did nothing to break out of the trap. He decided to wait until his superior General Clinton would arrive with a rescue force. But Clinton was busy in New York entertaining King George’s younger son the Duke of York who was visiting America to buck up the troops morale. Clinton’s relief force showed up to Yorktown two weeks late for Cornwallis’ defeat.

1794- France’s Ecole Polytechnique first opened.

1850- Congress abolished flogging on US Naval vessels. Captains came up with other clever means of discipline like hanging a seaman from his thumbs.

1857- Wall Street collapsed and the ensuing panic created recession and unemployment.

1864- CENTRALIA RAID- Confederate Guerilla "Bloody-Bill" Anderson stops a train of 150 disarmed Union recruits and has them all killed and scalped. Because of the chaos of civil war, nobody noticed that this guy was a complete psychopath. He hung human hair from his saddle and galloped into battle weeping out loud as he fired his pistols. He would put a knot in the sash around his waist for every time he killed a Yankee. By the time Bloody Bill was finally gunned down his sash was full of knots.

1864- THE FIRST INTERNATIONALE opens. European and American trade unions hold a mass meeting in London with the goal of attempting to centralize the world struggle for labor rights. The meeting was soon sidetracked by radical and anarchist politics and soon disbanded. The Second and Third Internationales were more about communist politics. One positive accomplishment was a Frenchman wrote a melody for the meeting that became a famous song of revolution, "The Internationale".

1904- A woman is arrested on New York’s Fifth Ave for openly smoking a cigarette. Look how far we’ve come. Today almost anyone now can be arrested for smoking a cigarette!

1918- At Imperial German headquarters master strategist General Eric Ludendorf monitored the reports of his armies being driven back from their final defensive lines. Ludendorf closed his office door and went into a fit of hysterics- screaming that the Kaiser, the Reichstag and the Liberals had ruined everything. Then, after regaining his composure, he calmly walked downstairs to a meeting with General Von Hindenberg and Kaiser Wilhelm. There he told them that hopes for winning the World War I were now kaput. The German army was defeated, the people demand peace. Negotiations should begin immediately.

1924 -the first airplane flight around the world landed back at it's point of departure. Commander Leslie Arnold took off from Seattle with 5 converted torpedo bomber seaplanes. One crashed, another sank but the remaining three circumnavigated the globe.

1928-For his birthday William Paley, son of a cigar manufacturer, was given control of a little radio company called Columbia broadcasting. He turns CBS into a corporate broadcasting giant, and threw his support behind developing television and long playing records.

1950- In a media rich ceremony, General Douglas MacArthur restored South Korean President Sygmun Rhee to the presidential palace in liberated Seoul. The Marines complained that though they had done the bulk of the house-to-house fighting, they were left out of the ceremony by old regular Army man MacArthur. Colonel Chesty Puller looked at all the crisp Army MP’s standing guard and growled to a correspondent “ Today my First Marines took 25 combat casualties, while these little cookies were still flying out from Tokyo!”

1960- Ted Williams hits a home run at his last at-bat. Number 521.

1961- Richard Chamberlain made a name for himself by playing the handsome Dr. Kildare on TV, Raymond Massey co-starred.

1961-The Hazel TV show with Shirley Booth premiered.

1967- Speed Racer premiered in the U.S.

1970 - After spending three days making peace between King Hussein of Jordan and Yassir Arafat of the PLO, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt died of heart failure.: Five million people in the streets of Cairo attended the funeral and took over the coffin draped in the Egyptian flag and passed it above their heads across the city to the intended mausoleum. Nasser had been the first native leader of Egypt since the last Pharaoh Nectanebo, was driven out by Persian King Cyrus in the fourth century BC.

1976- Stevie Wonder released his famous album Songs in the Key of Life.

1978- Pope John Paul Ist dies after only 34 days in office. The rumor was some sort of pills were found by his bedside. The Vatican refused any autopsy, fueling many conspiracy theories.

1994- Michael Eisner cancelled plans for a theme park called Disney’s America in Northern Virginia.

2015- Scientists discover liquid water on the planet Mars.
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Yesterday’s Question: When you had a great all around day, why do you say you” had a field day.”?

Answer: The phrase originated around 1747. Back then, when a regiment went out for field maneuvers, when not drilling, it would turn into a day-long picnic, with a lot of drinking, carousing, and partying with local girls. Soldiers confined to barracks, looked forward to having “ a field day”.


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