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April 7, 2021
April 7th, 2021

Question: The Walt Disney movie Frozen was based on what original story?

Answer to yesterday’s question below:What do these movies have in common? Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Secret of Nimh, Tron, Poltergeist, Blade Runner and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.
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History for 4/7/2021
Birthdays St. Francis Xavier, William Wordsworth, Mongo Santamaria, Walter Winchell, David Frost, Percy Faith, Daniel Ellsberg, Jerry Brown, Alan Pakula, Billie Holiday, Ravi Shankar, Irene Castle, Wayne Rogers, Stan Winston, James Garner, Olkirk Christenson-the inventor of Lego toys, Francis Ford Coppola is 82, Russell Crowe is 57, Jacky Chan is 67

Today is the Feast of Saint Jean Baptiste de LaSalle.

1732-STAND AND DELIVER! Dick Turpin was hanged. Dick Turpin was a highwayman who was the Jesse James of England. Many legends abound how he rode his trusty mare Black Bess from London to York in one day (impossible), and robbed the rich and helped the poor (he kept it all for himself). Finally, In York he was arrested for robbery, rustling, and shooting his neighbors chickens.

1805- Ludwig Van Beethoven premiered his Symphony # 3 Eroica at Vienna’s Theater-an-der-Wein. It marks his break with the gentle styles of Mozart and Haydn and the evolution of his full mature sound. He originally intended to dedicate it to Napoleon but scratched out the dedication page when he heard Napoleon had renounced republican liberal values and made himself an emperor. Of all his symphonies it remained his favorite, despite the opinions of music critics at the time-“ Strange modulations and violent transitions… undesirable originality.”

1827- The first book of matches is patented.

1850 - The Nevada (California?) gold rush town of Rough n’ Ready declared itself an independent nation, complete with president, flag and constitution. It lasted about three months. When the miners went to buy liquor at a nearby town to celebrate the 4th of July, they were refused because they were now foreigners. So the miners voted to rejoin the USA.

1862-THAT DEVIL FORREST! The Second Day of the Battle of Shiloh. Union General Grant, reinforced overnight, counterattacked and recaptured his ground lost the day before by the rebel surprise attack. When General Lew Wallace met him with reinforcements Wallace said: ”If stupidity and hard fighting are what you want, here we are.” Grant said: “I’ve had plenty of both already.”
The last Confederate under fire was wild cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest. He led a charge at the Union Army to cover the rebel armies retreat. At one point the gray-clad horseman found himself cut off and alone in a sea of blue uniforms. The Yankees yelled: "Kill Him! Kill the G-ddamn Rebel! Knock him off his horse!" While Forrest slashed all around him with his saber, a bluecoat pushed his rifle into Forrest's ribs and pulled the trigger. The force of the blast lifted him momentarily out his saddle, but Forrest ignored the wound and kept fighting. To keep from being shot in the back as he galloped to safety Forrest pulled one hapless Yankee up on his horse and used him as a shield, then dropped him down when out of danger.

Forrest survived the Civil War " I personally killed ten Yankees and had eleven horses shot out from under me. I finished the war down one horse!"

1865- General Ulysses Grant opened a correspondence with Confederate General Robert E. Lee about the surrender of his army. After the capture of Richmond, Grant’s Yankees sensed final victory was close. This night at Farmville Virginia, Grants blue coated troops broke out in a spontaneous torchlight celebration. The sky was illuminated by multitudes of torches and as Grant received their cheers. The nearby rebels could hear as the night sky shook with the sound of “John Brown’s Body” sung by thousands.

1891- Showman P.T. Barnum died of old age. The last words of the man who invented kiddie matinees, the Greatest Show on Earth and coined the word “Jumbo” were "How were the box office receipts today?"

1927- An audience at the Bell Laboratory watched a three inch television screen broadcast a sound image of US Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.

1927- Abel Gance’s classic film Napoleon premiered at the Paris Opera. Gances active camera and wild editing were years ahead of their time, climaxed by a triptych of large images on three movie screens linked by synchronized projectors. One American man in the audience, Walter Wallin, was inspired to develop the Panavision wide screen lens, used in many modern movies.

1933- President Franklin Roosevelt began to dismantle the Prohibition laws by passing a law to allow the drinking of beer. My grandmother remembered jumping on a horse drawn beer wagon as they paraded down Fifth Ave. in New York City to cheering crowds. Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia and Mayor Jimmy Walker were there too.
The full repeal of Prohibition would take an amendment to the Constitution, ratified by December of that year.

1933- Hitler's regime passed the Professional Civil Service Restoration Act, which ordered Jews and other political undesirables fired from all government posts including university professorships, museum curators, and arts funded grants. The exile of Germany's intellectual elite began- Bertholdt Brecht, Billy Wilder, George Gropius, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, George Grosz, Michael Curtiz, Lazslo Moholy-Nagy, Max Reinhardt and Otto Klemperer -Colonel Klink's dad.

1939-"The Ugly Duckling" the last Disney Silly Symphony short cartoon.

1945-The SUICIDE MISSION OF THE BATTLESHIP YAMATO- The Japanese superbattleship had just enough fuel to sail into the midst of the American Navy around Okinawa, then it was to sell itself dearly. It never made it though. Because of Ultra, the cracking of the Japanese code, the Americans knew it was coming. The Yamato was bombed and torpedoed by swarms of U.S. planes and went to the bottom before it ever got within range of other surface ships.

1947- The Russians hanged Rudolph Hoess, Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, in front of the camp. His last words were Seig Heil.

1948- The World Health Organization created
1949- Musical "South Pacific" debuts. Some Enchanted Evening…

1957- The last New York City trolley car shuts down. (Queens to Manhattan)

1966-The U.S. Air Force recovered one of the H-Bombs they lost over Spain.

1970- The film Midnight Cowboy with Dustin Hoffman and John Voight won the Best Picture Oscar. The only x-rated film ever to do so. Walt Disney’s It’s Tough to be a Bird” won best animated short.

1971- In a taped Oval Office phone conversation, President Richard Nixon complained to Henry Kissinger that none of his cabinet had bothered to call and compliment him on a policy speech.” Well, screw ‘em! Screw all the cabinet!”

1972- Gangster "Crazy Joe" Gallo was machine gunned while celebrating his birthday at Umberto's Clam House in the Little Italy section of Manhattan. He had been disturbing the gang peace in New York set up by the council of the Five Families, under the leadership of Godfather Carlo Gambino. Crazy Joe’s headquarters was in the President’s Street section of Brooklyn where supposedly he kept a live African lion as a pet. Finally when Gallo had hit rival don Joe Columbo in broad daylight at a Columbus Day Italian Unity rally, the Five Families decided he had gone too far. Ownership of the restaurant was returned in 1994 by the city prosecutors office to the original owner Manny "the Horse" Ianello.

1990- The Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center opened a show of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe that the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC cancelled. Mapplethorpe’s explicit depictions of gay and s/m lifestyles shocked neoconservative critics of the national endowments for the arts. A media debate on whether government should subsidize or censor art raged, and Dennis Barry the museum director was tried for obscenity. His acquittal was seen as a victory for free expression but the argument cast a pall on future funding of controversial art.

1998- Pop star George Michael was busted after exposing himself to an undercover policeman in a public park men’s room in Beverly Hills.

1998- Lead singer for the punk band The Plasmatics, Wendy O. Williams, committed suicide with a shotgun. The outrageously mohawked punk rocker was known for stunts on stage like destroying her amplifiers with a chainsaw, skydiving in the nude, autoeroticism with a sledgehammer, and crashing a burning school bus into a wall of television sets.

2155- According to the show Babylon 5 today marked the first contact between humans and the Centauri Alliance.
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Yesterday’s question:What do these movies have in common? Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Secret of Nimh, Tron, Poltergeist, Blade Runner and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

Answer: They were all released in the year 1982.


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