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Nov 12, 2021
November 12th, 2021

Question: Truman was an army vet. Kennedy and Nixon were navy men. Has a U.S. President ever come from the Marines?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What does it mean to be tossed in the hoosegow?
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History for 11/12/2021
Birthdays: Auguste Rodin, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, Bahi-ullah 1817 founder of the Bahii faith, Elizabeth Cadie -Stanton, Cecil B. DeMille, Grace Kelly, Edward G. Robinson, Jack Oakie, Kim Hunter, Shamus Culhane, Charles Manson, Neil Young, Edvard Munch, Nadia Comenici, Tanya Harding, Wally Shaw, Megan Mullally is 62, Anne Hathaway is 39, Ryan Gosling is 41, David Brain is 80.

1035- King Canute the Great died. He was the Viking King of Denmark and England simultaneously. It was Canute who once tried to command the ocean tide to go out.

1623- In Vilnius Lithuania, Catholic priest St. Joseph of Polotsk was torn apart by an angry mob. Polish Catholic legislators led by chancellor Jan Zamoyski tried to reconcile the practices of their Ukrainian and Belarus subjects by creating the Church of the Uniate Rite. Clergy could keep their Eastern Orthodox rituals and wives, but acknowledge the Pope. This compromise didn't suit all tempers, and such acts of violence broke out into the Great Cossack Revolt of 1648.

1792- The Revolutionary French Republic issued a declaration that any other European kingdom that wants to overthrow their king and chop his head off, is welcome to come join the fun and France would help.

1859- The first trapeze act was demonstrated at the Cirque Napoleon in Paris. The act caused such a sensation that the daredevil was immortalized by his tights becoming a fashion named in his honor- Jules Leotard.

1861- THE CURRAUGH CAMP AFFAIR- When 20 year old Edward the Prince of Wales went to Oxford he was kept on a short leash by his worried parents Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. They expected his college life to be- well, Victorian. He was to reside off campus, limited his diet to bland foods and soda water, and absolutely no smoking or carousing with women! This draconian regimen only stiffened Bertie’s rebellious nature.

When allowed to attend maneuvers in Ireland and bunk with a company of hard drinking cavalry officers, Bertie was at last free to go wild. By unfortunate coincidence the gossip about the Prince’s all night drinking binges and bedding actresses reached his father just as Albert was showing the first signs of the typhoid fever that would kill him. For years afterwards, Queen Victoria blamed her son for contributing to his father's death. In his adult years, King Edward VII was never without a cigar in his teeth, a girl on his lap and a drink in his hand. Women called the Prince, Dirty Bertie, and Edward the Caresser.

1912- SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC- in the Antarctic this day the frozen bodies of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott and his men were found. He had lost his race to find the South Pole to Norwegian Piers Ammundsen then was stranded by a blizzard only 30 miles from his base camp on the Ross Ice Shelf. His last diary entry (March 29th ) said "We are showing that Englishmen can still have a bold spirit, fighting it out to the end. This diary and our dead bodies will be the proof. I should like to write more but I haven't the strength..."

1917- At the first meeting of the Russian Duma since the Bolshevik Revolution Lenin and Trotsky revealed their radical plan to reform Russian Society into a Communist Worker’s State dominated by the Soviets -workers and peasants councils.

1918- The day after the Armistice ended World War I, dozens of German army regiments against orders, began to march back across their border in perfect order. Then, defying the shouts and threats of their officers, the men threw away their helmets and guns, and walked home. Fighter ace James Norman Hall of the Lafayette Escadrille borrowed a Spad and flew over the Western Front one last time. He was amazed at how quiet and peaceful it now was. He no longer had to look anxiously over his shoulder for enemies diving out of the clouds, or anti-aircraft bursts. He landed, and never flew again. James Norman Hall moved to Tahiti, and with another Lafayette Escadrille veteran , Charles Nordhoff, he wrote the famous book, The Mutiny on the Bounty.

1918- With their Hapsburg emperor fled, Austria declared itself a republic.

1920- In the wake of the "Black Sox" Baseball scandal, the first rigged World Series, Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis was elected first Commissioner of Baseball. He ordered all those involved in the scandal including Shoeless Joe Jackson permanently banned from baseball, even though they had been acquitted in a civil trial.

1923- In Clarksburg West Virginia a man shot his wife for smoking a cigarette. After World War I the psychologist nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edmund Bernayz left the office of war propaganda and went into the advertising business. He later bragged that it was he who created the campaign equating woman’s emancipation and voting rights with smoking cigarettes. He created ad campaign calling cigarettes "Freedom Sticks".

1927- The Holland Tunnel completed. It runs under the Hudson River connecting New York and New Jersey. It’s not named for the Netherlands, but for the engineer Clifford Holland, who died shortly before its completion.

1933- Hugh Gray of the British Aluminum Company takes the first photographs of what he claimed was a monster in Loch Ness. He would be the first of many to have claimed to have seen Nessie.

1937- Alan Turing delivered his famous paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" at Kings College, Cambridge.
In it he postulated on the ability to create a "universal machine" that used numbers to solve problems and could be re-programable for different tasks. In his day they were called Turing Machines, but we know them now as Computers.

1938- The Madagascar Plan. Nazi Herman Goring announced a new plan to create a homeland for European Jews in French Madagascar off the coast of Africa. It sounds goofy but they got it from an idea of 19th century Zionist leader Theodore Herzl and the just concluded international conference at Evian France showed the reluctance of the western democracies to take in large amounts of refugees. The idea went nowhere.

1939- Actor Bela Lugosi spent the day at the Walt Disney Studio posing for their animators as the Devil in Night on Bald Mountain in Fantasia. Despite the good publicity shots, lead animator Bill Tytla was dissatisfied with his performance and used fellow artist Ham Luske as his model instead.

1944- THE BATTLESHIP TIRPITZ is sunk. After the big battle with the Bismarck, Nazi admirals built an even bigger battleship, the Tirpitz. The allies however, found out through intelligence when it would sail and attacked this one as soon as it left harbor. They pounded it with bomber and torpedo planes and midget submarines day and night until it rolled over and sank. Survivors recalled as the ship was sinking they could hear through the hull the sound of the doomed sailors singing "Deutschland Uber Alles".
This caused a British Admiral to remark:" It's tragic that such men follow such a cause."

1946- Disney's "Song of the South" with James Baskett as Uncle Remus.

1946- The Exchange Bank in Chicago opened the first drive in bank.

1948- After World War II, Japanese leaders were sentenced for war crimes by a world court like the top Nazis leaders were at Nuremberg. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, Generals Homma and Yamashita and 900 others were executed or imprisoned for crimes against humanity and genocide.

1970- Florence Oregon found a large dead gray whale on its beach. City fathers decided it would be easier to dispose, if they blew it up. As an audience watched, they stuffed it with half a ton of dynamite. The explosion drew cheers from the audience, then everyone ran for cover as they were showered by falling 50 pound chunks of smelly blubber and guts. The film of it has been called the first viral video.

1981- The Space Shuttle Columbia takes off for the second time. First reusable spacecraft.

1990- Akihito became Emperor of Japan.

2014- The European Space Agency successfully landed the first satellite Philae on a moving comet. Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It had been launched ten years before and had taken this long to reach it.
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Yesterday’s Question: What does it mean to be tossed in the hoosegow?

Answer: It is an old west nickname for being tossed in jail. Corrupted from the Spanish word for judgement-jail, juzgar, or juzgado.


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