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Oct. 23, 2019
October 23rd, 2019

Question: Who was the last American President to sport facial hair?

Yesterday’s Question Answered Below: What is a goniff?
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History for 10/23/2019
Birthdays; Johnny Carson, Adlai Stevenson, Pele, Zioniev, Weird Al Yankovic, Dwight Yoakham, Michael Crichton, Chi-Chi Rodriquez, Phillip Kaufman, porn star Jasmine St. Claire, Gummo Marx, Ang Lee is 65, Ryan Reynolds is 43, Sam Raimi is 60

42 BC- Battle of Phillipi- The forces of Marc Anthony and Octavian defeated the legions of Brutus and Cassius in Greece. Both assassins of Julius Caesar, Marcus Brutus and Cassius Longinus, were killed.

524 AD- BOETHIUS- After the Fall of the Roman Empire in 476 for awhile the Roman Senate answered to Theodoric the King of the Goths in Italy, the way they once answered to the emperor. The Christian Senator Boethius had risen to be a counselor to Theodoric. But the old barbarian became increasing suspicious of plots around him.

Boethius was falsely accused of plotting against the king’s life and this day Theodoric had him executed. Goths tied a rope around his temples and twisted it until his eyes popped out, then he was beaten to death with clubs.

As soon as Boethius was dead Theodoric felt sorry and wept for his friend. The reason we remember this story was while Boethius was in prison awaiting death he wrote one of the great works of western philosophy- THE CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOSPHY. It was one of the first great works of Christian thinking since the Gospels and bridged the transition of philosophy from Greco-Pagan themes to Christian meditation.

1642- The Battle of Edgehill- First battle of the English Civil War, King Charles Cavaliers-1, Roundheads-0. Even though the Parliamentary forces were defeated, the King hesitated when his impulsive cavalry general Prince Rupert wanted to pursue the enemy to London. It was the best chance King Charles ever had to crush the rebellion at one grand blow, Oliver Cromwell was as yet an obscure m.p. from Cambridge who led a small troop. But Charles delayed and let the opportunity slip away. The Parliamentary Army was under the command of the Earl of Essex, who traveled around with a coffin and burial shroud among his personal baggage. An ancestor of Walt Disney fought there for the king.

1661- King Charles II, crowned at Westminster Abbey. The current English Crown Jewels date from this time, since Oliver Cromwell’s Puritan Parliament had the ancient crown jewels of Anglo-Norman times destroyed.

1812- THE MALET PLOT-While Napoleon was retreating from Moscow, thousands of miles away all France waited anxiously for news. This day a civil servant named Malet convinced everyone that Napoleon and his whole army was dead and destroyed. In the ensuing panic Malet actually succeeded in taking over the French Government for a few days.
Eventually everything was straightened out and Malet imprisoned. But it was terribly discouraging to Napoleon; he had hoped to build a dynasty to last generations. But it took only one kook to show how shallow the support for his regime was.

1917- In a secret meeting in Petrograd (now Saint Petersburg) all the various left wing Russian political parties: Mensheviks, Anarchists, Utopian Socialists and Narodniks agreed to unite under Lenin’s Bolshevik Party and adopt their plan to violently seize power. After taking control Lenin had them all suppressed. The assassin who shot and wounded him in 1921 was a Socialist.

1923- The German postwar economy collapses. Raging inflation makes it 6 billion DeutschMarks to one U.S. dollar. The few workers who had jobs are paid every other day and it takes a wheelbarrow full of money to buy a loaf of bread. The major industrial region of the Ruhr was under foreign occupation. These conditions made the rise of Adolf Hitler possible. The creeping depression afflicting the war-ruined European economies would help collapse the American banking system in 1929.

1927- Charles Lindbergh finally returned to Roosevelt Field Long Island. It was his starting point of an epic tour around the U.S. to celebrate his successful solo crossing of the Atlantic. Lindbergh toured 80 U.S. cities, much of it flying town to town in his little plane The Spirit of St Louis. In so doing, Lindbergh taught Americans that travel by air was a safe, easy alternative to railroads.

1928- A financial consortium led by Wall St. banker-bootlegger Joseph Kennedy Sr. buys the Keith Albee theater circuit and merged it with the Radio Company and the Orpheum theaters to form Radio-Keith-Orpheum or RKO pictures. After Joe Kennedy met with the other Hollywood moguls he told a friend: ”They’re all a bunch of Austrian Pants Pressers! I can take their businesses away from them!” Kennedy made a quick killing then got out of the picture business in 1930, just before the Depression dropped his studios stock value. RKO made films like King Kong, Fort Apache and Citizen Kane before merging into Desilu in 1957.

1930- The first Miniature Golf tournament held in Chattanooga Tenn.

1931- Chicago gangster Al Capone sentenced to 11 years in Alcatraz for federal income tax evasion.

1935- New York gangster Dutch Schultz was rubbed out. The erratic Schultz (real name Arthur Fleigenheimer) had announced to the other mob bosses that Federal prosecutor Thomas Dewey was getting too close, so he would kill him. To the syndicate killing such a high profile fed was going too far and would bring the wrath of Washington down on them, so Lucky Luciano decided it was easier to take care of the Dutchman instead.

Schultz was having dinner at the Bob Treat Porkchop House in Newark with his crooked accountant "Abadaba" ( a corruption of Abracadabra ) when he excused himself to go to the mens room. Hitmen followed him in and shot him six times while at the urinal. Gee, I hope he zipped up.....

1940- HITLER MET FRANCO- Hitler and Mussolini spent large sums of men and material to help Franco win the Spanish Civil War. Now they wanted payback in form of an alliance. However they could not strike a bargain and Franco declared neutrality in the World War. After the talks Hitler says of his negotiations with Franco:" I'd rather have 3 or 4 teeth extracted than go through that again!"

1940- Shooting on the film Citizen Kane wrapped.

1941- Walt Disney’s Dumbo premiered.

1942-EL ALAMEIN- Montgomery's British 8th Army threw 2500 new American made Sherman and Grant Tanks against Rommel's Afrika Korps threatening Egypt and the Suez Canal. Rommel the Desert Fox was on sick leave in Germany with diphtheria and Rommels' replacement, General Stumme, dropped dead of a heart attack in the middle of the battle. Rommel flew back to try and stop the British attack, but by Nov.4th he had to accept defeat and abandon his Egyptian positions. Hitler had made Rommel a field marshal “ I wish he had given me another Panzer division instead” was his reply.

1955-Vietnamese Emperor Bao Dai abdicated to a South Vietnamese Republic set up outside of and ignoring Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh communists.

1956- The great Hungarian Rising of Inver Nagy. Inspired by the seeming liberalism Nikita Khruschev was bringing to Moscow, thousands march to the statue of the poet Petofi to read his poem "Arise, Hungarians!" and burn newspaper torches. It turned out Khruschev wasn't as liberal as they thought, a month later hundreds of Soviet tanks rolled in to Budapest to crush them.

1968-THE FIRST OCTOBER SURPRISE- Pres. Johnson was pushing secret peace talks to end the Vietnam War before he left office. Secret messages from South Vietnamese ambassador Bo Dhiem to the Saigon government confirmed that the Republican leaders like Richard Nixon were assuring the South Vietnamese that if they didn’t make peace before the American elections, Nixon would support them. On Nov 2nd, President Nguyen Van Thieu withdrew from the peace table and talks collapsed. Richard Nixon won election and the war went on 7 more bloody years.

1971-Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida opened.

1973- President Richard Nixon ordered a worldwide red alert of our strategic nuclear forces to warn the Soviets not to take advantage of U.S. domestic turmoil over Watergate. Soviet ambassador Dobrynin wrote in his memoirs that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger later telephoned and apologized to him for the alert. He said that it was only done to distract U.S. public opinion from the Watergate scandal.

1983- Jessica Savitch was one of the first women journalists to break the barrier for women getting the top anchor jobs in network news broadcasting. This day she died in a car accident.

1983- President Ronald Reagan had sent U.S. Marines into civil war torn Beirut to achieve peace. This day a suicide bomber drove a truck full of dynamite into the Marines barracks, killing 241 men in their sleep. Reagan then withdrew the remaining Marines.

1987- Judge Robert Bork was defeated in his bid for a seat on the Supreme Court. Besides offending Liberals by being a longtime Conservative stalwart, he offended Conservatives by admitting under oath he smoked marijuana. Recently he was an adviser to Mitt Romney.

2001- Apple Computers launched the ipod.

2007- Massive brush fires north of San Diego California displaced one million people, the largest number of U.S. refugees since the Civil War.
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Yesterday’s Question: What is a goniff?

Answer: Yiddish for a thief or a crook.


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