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Sept 5, 2018
September 5th, 2018

Quiz: Has a horror movie ever won the Oscar for Best Picture?

Yesterday’s Question Answered below: Who said, “The fault, Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…”
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History for 9/5/2018
Birthdays: Louis XIV The Sun King, Jesse James, Cardinal Richelieu, Johann Christian Bach, Jacopo Meyerbeer, John Cage, Quentin de la Tour, Darryl F. Zanuck, Jack Valenti, Bob Newhart is 89, George Lazenby, Raquel Welch is 78, Kathy Guisewhite, Dweezil Zappa, Werner Herzog is 78, Michael Keaton is 67, Rose McGowan is 46

1499- Former Columbus captain Alonso De Hojeda arrived in the New World on his own expedition. Along with him as pilot (navigator) was a Florentine named Amerigo Vespucci. Vespucci made four more trips to the alien land, and published books about his adventures, leaving out Hojeda. When Columbus was still insisting he had reached Asia, Vespucci argued this was in fact a New World. His publishers spiced up his accounts with beautiful naked brown native women with lascivious morals throwing themselves on the Europeans. Although mostly fiction, it was quite popular reading.
In 1507 when Columbus was ignored and forgotten, German mapmakers Martin Waldseemuller & Gerhardus Mercator published the first mass printed maps of the known world. They drew on Vespucci's books and called the new hemisphere "America". I guess that's better than the United States of Hojeda.

1536- Protestant Reformer John Calvin was put in charge of the religious life of the city of Geneva. His ideas were so err…Puritan, that within two years he was kicked out.

1654- FIRST JEWS IN AMERICA- The first boatload of Jewish families arrived in America at what would one day be New York City- then New Amsterdam. They were fleeing the Spanish Inquisition that was being set up in Brazil. They had to auction their furniture to pay off their French pirate captain, Jean De La Monthe, but Asher Levy and his family where here to stay.
Puritan Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant immediately complained to The Hague that Jews not be allowed to settle in New Amsterdam. The Dutch East India Company told him to mind his own business and apologize. He was reminded he was running a business, not a religious colony. Anyone who wanted to work and raise a family was welcome.

1698 - Russia's Peter the Great was determined to drag his kingdom into the modern world. Since the fashion in Europe at this time was clean-shaven, he imposed a tax on beards. When Czar Peter spotted a boyar at his court who refused to comply, he personally jumped the old man with a pair of shears.

1725- King Louis XV of France married Marie Leszcynska, daughter of the last King of Poland. Their grandson Louis XVI was the one guillotined in the Revolution.

1774- The first Continental Congress assembled in Philadelphia to come up with a group response to the worsening political climate with mother England. It is the first time all the American colonies had ever gathered together. British held Florida and Nova Scotia were invited but refused to attend. Ben Franklin was in London at the time and frankly doubted New Englanders, Southerners, city folk and frontiersmen could ever be persuaded to act together. Peyton Randolph was elected first president of Congress.

1781- BATTLE OF THE VIRGINIA CAPES sometimes called The Battle of the Chesapeake- arguably the real battle that won the American Revolution.
French Admiral DeGrasse' fleet drives off the English fleet attempting to rescue Lord Cornwallis trapped inside the port of Yorktown by Washington and Rocheambeau.
For command of the vital mission the British admiralty had passed over a more aggressive admiral named Rodney in favor of a semi-retired fossil named Sir Thomas Graves. Admiral Graves caught the French fleet dispersed unloading troops and supplies, but instead of immediately attacking, he waited three hours while the enemy formed in line. He then raised confusing signal flags for “Attack” and “Maintain Position” simultaneously.
The inability of the British navy to rescue Cornwallis sealed his defeat. If the British had won this battle, scholars agree the French were tired of propping up Washington and his raggedy-ass rebels.

1812- The vanguard of Napoleon’s Grand Army came up upon a little hill outside the town of Borodino. They strained to see if they had reached Moscow. But instead they saw something else- the main Russian army preparing to stand and fight. Napoleons plan was to invade a country, destroy their army, occupy their capitol, then sign a peace treaty. But these Russians weren't playing by the rules. For months after retreating across thousands of miles of Russian soil, Napoleon would finally get the big battle he desired.

1836- Sam Houston was elected first, and only, President of the Republic of Texas.

1867- After the Civil War, with so many farms neglected or destroyed, the USA experienced a beef shortage. This was answered by herding Texas longhorn cattle up to where they could be put on trains to Chicago and eastern meat markets. This day the first herd of Longhorns made it up the Chisholm Trail to the train depot of Abilene Kansas. A rancher who bought a thousand head of cattle at $4 a head could sell them here for $40 a head. One cattle drive could net up to $100,000 dollars, well worth risking hostile Indians, rustlers and floods. This created cattlebarons and a new kind of hero in the public's mind, the Cowboy.

1870- Now that Napoleon III had been defeated and deposed and German Chancellor Bismarck had achieved all his political goals. So he proposed immediate peace talks to end the Franco Prussian War with a minimum of fuss. He had knocked off Austria the same way in the Seven Week's War of 1866. But this time Bismarck was overruled by his master King William I and the German generals, who wanted to march to Paris. Bismarck warned that humiliating the French would accomplish nothing, except creating a desire for revenge. He was overruled and the revenge happened in 1914-18 and 1939-45.

1882- The first Labor Day parade occurred when 10,000 union workers marched in Union Square New York.

1885 - 1st gasoline pump is delivered to a gasoline dealer (Ft Wayne, Ind)

1917- The U.S. Government made nationwide police raids to close down the offices of the IWW (The International Workers of the World- or The Wobblies). They were a folk-song-singing radical labor union who came out against U.S. participation in World War I "The Master Class has always declared the wars, the Working Class must fight the battles"- Eugene Debs. Their apologists point out that while the Great War cost 166,000 U.S. casualties it made 200 new millionaires and if you had stock in petrochemicals like Dupont you made 400% profit.

1929- Wall Street stocks soared to unprecedented heights throughout 1929. Starting today they began to taper off and slide. Economist Roger Babson, the Sage of Wellesley , warned of an impending Stock Market crash, but people laughed him off. They called his warnings "Babson-Mindedness". The market would continue to move downwards for the next several weeks climaxing Black Tuesday, the great crash of October 29th and the Great Depression.

1921: FATTY ARBUCKLE. After completing three feature films simultaneously, comedian Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle rented three rooms in San Francisco's St. Francis Hotel for a big party. One attendee, Actress Virginia Rappe, died of peritonitis a few days afterward. Maude Delmont, a professional blackmailer who also attended, spread the story that Arbuckle had raped the actress. She never testified in court.
The Hearst Press took up the story and sensationalized it as an example of Hollywood depravity. Fatty Arbuckle was found innocent after three sensational trials (the last jury actually apologized to him). The Motion Picture Production Code was formed as a direct result. Its first action was to ban Arbuckle from the screen. Fatty Arbuckle directed comedy for ten years under the pseudonym Will B. Good, and appeared in a successful series of short sound films in 1932, but died the same day that Warner Brothers signed him for a feature.

1932- Paul Bern, the studio executive husband of sexy starlet Jean Harlow, was found lying naked on his bathroom floor with a bullet in his head. He had committed suicide and left a note apologizing to Harlow. Harlow called the studio and her agent before calling the police. Bern’s brother revealed that Paul Bern had another wife he was hiding. All jumped to hush up the scandal.

1935- At a giant Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg Adolph Hitler told the world “ We want Peace. Germany has no interest in harming her European neighbors .” uh-huh..

1935- Tumbling Tumbleweeds premiered, the film that made a star out of Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy.

1939- The British Empire had restructured in 1867 as a commonwealth of dominions which some it's larger colonies had self rule. But to the outside world it still looked like everything from Hong Kong to Ottawa to Capetown was run on orders from London. Three days after British Prime Minister Chamberlain declared war on Nazi Germany, U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull telephoned Ottawa to ask if that meant Canada was going to fight too?

1943- Young British cartoonist Ronald Searle is captured by the Japanese in Burma. He spent his time as a P.O.W. working on the infamous Bridge on the River Kwai and making sketches of the nightmarish conditions of his fellow prisoners.

1957- Jacques Kerouac’s ode to the beat life ON THE ROAD, first published. Kerouac wrote it in a white heat using one large roll of white paper stuffed into his typewriter instead of individual sheets. When the editor got the novel it had no paragraph breaks of chapter breaks. Another young writer of the time, Truman Capote, was unimpressed. “That’s not writing, it’s typing.”

1958 The novel DR ZHIVAGO by Boris Pasternak published in US. It was banned in Russia until the collapse of Communism.

1964- Buffalo NY cook Angela Bellissima took some chicken wings, threw them into a deep fryer with spices and invented Buffalo Wings.

1965- CBS television network headquarters are moved into a sleek building on 6th Ave. in Manhattan. Because of it's black granite and smoke tinted window's it's nicknamed "Black Rock". NBC's headquarters in Rockefeller Center are called "30 Rock". ABC's, owing to their status as the third network, called their headquarters "Little Rock".

1972- Palestinian Black September terrorists attack Munich's Olympic Village during the Summer Games. There they murder 11 Israeli athletes of their national team.

1975 –Manson Family cult member Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme attempted to assassinate President Gerald Ford. She was released from jail in 2009.

1977- NASA launched the Voyager 1 probe towards the outer planets of our solar system. Among the things Voyager discovered was that Jupiter had many more moons than previously thought and had a ring like Saturn. In 2012 it became the first man-made object to leave our solar system and enter interstellar space.
Part of NASA's program was an explanatory simulation film done on computer by Jim Blinn in 1980 and 1982. The animation was so smooth and the graphics so breathtaking it expanded the use of the CGI medium and inspired a new generation of digital artists.

1980 - World's longest auto tunnel, St Gotthard in Swiss Alps, opened.

1989- President George H.W. Bush does a major speech highlighting his war on drugs. He brandishes a bag of crack-cocaine. He declares it was purchased across the street from the White House in Lafayette Park. Later the truth came out that no crack cocaine is sold in Lafayette Park, the DEA agents had to talk a crack dealer into coming to the park. They even had to give him directions, because he never visited the White House area before.

1994- Patrick McDonnell started drawing the comic strip MUTTS.
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Yesterday’s Question: Who said, “ The fault , Dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…”

Answer: Brutus’s co-conspirator Cassius said it in Act II of Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar.
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