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June 1, 2022
June 1st, 2022

Quiz: William the Conqueror was originally Duke of Normandy. What country is Normandy in?

Yesterday’s Quiz: Why is a prostitute called whore? Where did that word come from?
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History for 6/1/2022
Welcome to June, from Iunius mensis, the month of Juno, queen of the Roman gods. Mother of Mars and Vulcan, protector of the Home and Defender of Women. From the Greek Hera.

Birthdays: Brigham Young, Marilyn Monroe, Pat Boone, Mikhail Glinka, Red Grooms, Karl Von Clausewitz, Andy Griffith, Nelson Riddle, Lisa Hartman, Cleavon Little, Frederica Von Stade, Powers Booth, Rene Aubergenois, Lisa Hartman, Morgan Freeman is 85, Jonathan Pryce is 75, Brian Cox is 76, Heidi Klum is 49, Josef Pujol *

*Pujol was famous throughout late Victorian Europe as Le Petomane- The Fartiste- who could fart musical melodies and snuff candles at great distances. He performed concerts for crowned heads that he would finish by farting La Marseillaise.

344BC- Romans dedicated the temple of Juno Moneta, the Lady Who Warns. They also stamped it on their money. Moneta is the root of the word Money and Monetary.

193 AD- Roman General Septimius Severus defeated his rival for the empire, Pescennius Niger “ Pescennius the Black”, massacred his family, and carried his head around on a spear. Septimius used the body of another rival as a doormat to wipe his feet on. This made him undisputed emperor.

1098- Antioch was stormed and captured by warriors of the First Crusade.

1660- Boston Puritans had passed a law that preaching any religion other than that accepted by the Massachusetts Bay Puritan group was heresy and forbidden. When Quaker Mary Dyer refused to cease, leave, or recant her views, this day she was hanged. Her death and that of another Quaker Anne Hutchinson shocked the colonies so, that King Charles II of England issued a royal command forbidding execution for heretical preaching.

1792- Kentucky Statehood. The lands of Kentucky were claimed at one point to be part of Virginia, claimed by Spain and groups of leathershirts (frontiersmen) even talked of founding an independent state called the Kingdom of Yazoo.

1795- The Glorious First of June. The British Channel fleet under Admiral “Black Dick” Howe attacked a French grain convoy in the Atlantic. They defeated the French escort fleet, but the grain transports got away anyway.

1813- In battle with a British warship, HMS Leopard, dying Captain Lawrence, of the U.S.S. Chesapeake, cried:" Don't Give Up the Ship!" They don't, but he died anyway.

1815 - Marshal Louis Berthier was Napoleon's chief of staff and an organizational genius. This day in exile in Bamburg while watching Russian troops ride towards a new invasion of France, he fell out of a window. Strange way to die for a general who was in constant battle for over twenty years. The fall may have been an accident or maybe a foreign agent decided he should be kept out of the coming war. The Duke of Wellington paid tribute to his abilities by noticing how many mistakes plagued the French due to confused orders and missed communications: "The Battle of Waterloo was decided when Berthier fell out that window."

1847- Utopian evangelist John Humphrey Noyes inaugurated a Free-Love commune at Putney, Vermont. It later moved to Oneida New York.

1862- When Gen. Joe Johnston gets wounded, Jeff Davis gives over command of the Army of Northern Virginia to his military adviser- Robert E. Lee. Lee's career begins. Johnston later magnanimously stated in his memoirs: "My getting shot was the best thing that could have happened for the Confederacy". At first the rebel soldiers weren't impressed by Mr. Lee. They nicknamed him Old Granny and the King of Spades for his making them dig trenches, but by the Civil Wars’ end his genius had achieved fame on both sides.

1876- Eighteen-year old Milton Hershey opened his first candy store. After he saw European machines to make milk chocolate demonstrated at the Chicago Worlds Fair, he decided to focus exclusively on chocolate. Hershey's goes on to become the largest candy maker in the U.S. The Hershey’s chocolate kiss is so named because the machine that creates the candy looks like it is kissing the conveyor belt.

1880 - 1st pay telephone installed; this one in a bank.

1879- After falling from the French throne in 1870 the Emperor Louis Napoleon III and his family lived in England. The only son of Napoleon III and Eugenie, Napoleon IV, went with the British Army to South Africa to fight Zulus. While waving his grand-uncle's sword around on patrol, he fell off his horse during a skirmish and was speared to death by 17 Zulu’s. The direct Bonaparte family line ends with him.

1909- The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the NAACP, formed. W.E.B. Dubois edited their newsletter The Crisis.

1921- THE GREAT TULSA RACE MASSACRE-The deadliest race riot in US history. After a white woman in Tulsa Oklahoma claimed a black man grabbed her arm in an elevator, marauding white mobs attacked the black neighborhood of Greenwood. Greenwood was a prosperous community called The Black Wall Street. The white mobs burned 35 blocks of houses and killed at least 300 innocent people. Pushing many corpses into unmarked mass graves. Small private aircraft dropped home made molotov bombs. The Tulsa community did not apologize until the year 2000.

1931- 48 year old Swiss artist Albert Hurter joined the Disney staff, giving the look of cartoons like Snow White a more Germanic storybook look. His hiring created a new type of job at the studio, an Inspirational Sketch Artist, what we call today a Vis-Dev artist.

1933 - Charlie Chaplin wed actress Paulette Goddard.

1933- Eric Larson’s first day at Walt Disney Studio. One of the Nine Old Men, he retired 53 years later in 1986.

1936 - "Lux Radio Theater" moved from NY to Hollywood.

1938- SUPERMAN- Joe Seigel and Jerry Shuster were two aspiring cartoonists in a Cleveland High School. Jewish kids, they had read about the Nazi concept of the Aryan Superman. They wanted to show a Superman could be on the American side. So they created a new hero named Superman in 1933. The scrambled about as cartoonists in NYC for a few years and in 1938 sold Detective Comics (D.C.) on their Superman idea for $130. The first Superman in Action Comics came out this day. Part of the contract was they gave DC all rights to their creation.
When the first megabudget Superman movie was being made in the 1975, the National Cartoonist's Society spokesman Neal Adams pointed out that Seigel & Schuster were now destitute. Seigel was blind on disability, and Schuster delivered sandwiches from a local deli. The bad publicity forced Warner Bros and DC Comics to award them and their family’s pensions for their life.

1943- British actor Leslie Howard, who played Ashley in" Gone with the Wind "was killed. The movie star was doing diplomacy in Spain, but on the flight home his commercial DC-3 airliner was shot down by German JU-88 fighters over the Bay of Biscay. He was such an effective propagandist that when German agents learned his schedule, they sent the interceptors just to get him.

1955- Marilyn Monroe’s movie The Seven Year Itch opened.

1961 - FM multiplex stereo broadcasting 1st heard.

1966 - George Harrison is impressed by Ravi Shankar's concert in London.

1967 –Beatles released Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in the US and it immediately goes gold.

1968 - Simon & Garfunkel's "Mrs. Robinson" hits #1.

1979- Gannett News Services began USA Today, called by some critics- 'MacPaper'.

1980- Ted Turner started CNN 24 hour news channel.

1981- Superman II, directed by Richard Lester. With Christopher Reeve, Margot Kidder and Terence Stamp. Kneel before Zod!

2001- In Katmandu, Nepal Crown Prince Dipendra quarreled so much with his mother and father, the King Birenda and Queen Aiswarya, about his upcoming marriage that he came to dinner and shot them to death. He also killed four other members of the royal family and then himself. This was the largest massacre of a royal family since Czar Nicholas II’s family was executed in 1918. Next day, a Nepalese government spokesman labeled the incident an “accident”. Dipendra was in a coma for several days before dying and in those few days a government council declared him king anyway. In 2008 the Nepalese Monarchy was officially deposed.

2020- President Donald Trump had Black Lives Matter demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd in front of the White House tear-gassed and beaten to clear a path for him to stroll across the street to be photographed with a prop Bible, which he held upside down. Sources say he was so upset by Black Lives Matter protestors, he had to be talked out of ordering in the 82 Airborne Division to clear the streets. Yet all of this law enforcement managed to be strangely absent for three hours the following Jan 6th.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Why is a prostitute called whore? Where did that word come from?

Answer: In the Muslim concept of Heaven, every blessed soul in paradise would be attended to by 99 houris, beautiful servant girls.


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