BACK to Blog Posts

December 16th, 2007 Sunday
December 16th, 2007

QUIZ: Here’s another one about famous meetings. Of these meetings, which one never took place? Walt Disney and H.G. Wells, Walt Disney and Frank Lloyd Wright, Walt Disney and Max Fleischer, Walt Disney and Nikita Khruschev, or Walt Disney and Mussolini?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Napoleon & Wellington, Mozart & Beethoven, Michelangelo & Leonardo Da Vinci, Oscar Wilde & Walt Whitman. Of these encounters, which two people never met?
------------------------------------------------
History for 12/16/2007
Birthdays: TA-TA-TA-TUMMMMMM!!! Ludwig Van Beethoven, Catherine of Aragon (Henry VIII's wife number one), Marshal Gerbhard von Blucher, Lenoid Brezhnev, Jane Austen, Margaret Mead, Noel Coward, George Santayanna, Liv Ullmann is 66, Steve Bochco, Leslie Stahl. Quentin Blake- dean of British illustrators favored by Roald Dahl, William 'Refrigerator' Perry, Arthur C. Clarke is 89

1773- THE BOSTON TEA PARTY- The British Parliament had angered the colonists of New England by disallowing any tea to be imported except by British vessels and then a heavy tax to the Crown was to be paid on it's purchase. As New England women began to develop alternatives from grass and dandelions-what we now call Herbal Teas- the men of Boston threatened violence on any merchant who dared sell English tea.

On Nov 28th the good ship Dartmouth anchored at Griffith's Wharf with 144 tons of tea to be cleared of customs by December 17th. A mob gathered at the Old South Meeting House to discuss what to do. The call was made for 'The Mohawks!" In the crowd were Paul Revere and artist Jonathan Trumbull. At 6:00 p.m. men disguised as Indians boarded the Dartmouth overpowered the crew and tossed crates of loose tea into the harbor. British Admiral Montague watched the proceedings from his warship across the harbor, but didn't take any action "for fear of civilian casualties." He well remembered the political repercussions a few years earlier, when His Majesties troops fired into a snowball throwing crowd and the radical Yankees called it the Boston Massacre.
Next morning all of Boston developed mass amnesia. No one knew who did the deed. One man waited until he was ninety-three years old and the Revolution long over before he named who was there that night.

1900 -EARLY ANIMATED FILM "ENCHANTED DRAWINGS', James Stuart Blackton was a New York World cartoonist who used to do a vaudeville act in drag. He came to do an article on Thomas Edison then Edison put him on the payroll. He created this and several other trickfilms. It doesn’t move much more than his vaudeville lightning drawing act, His 1906 film Humorous Phases of Funny Faces is considered the first animated cartoon.

1905- Variety magazine born.

1907- THE WHITE FLEET- today Teddy Roosevelt sent a large contingent of US Navy battleships all painted white from Hampton Roads for a round the world cruise. It was billed as a goodwill tour but in an age when battleships were the viewed like nukes are today the message to other world powers was obvious. The US is a new power player in world affairs

1913- Young English music hall actor named Charlie Chaplin got a job at Keystone Studios in Hollywood. His first film he would play a villain.

1935- Hollywood movie star Thelma Todd found dead in her car in her garage in Malibu She was 30. She was a sexy comedienne who starred with Laurel & Hardy, Buster Keaton and the Marx Brothers and loved to party so much she was nicknamed"Hot Toddy". She knew New York mobster Lucky Lucciano. Was she done in by the mob, her jealous director boyfriend, was it a suicide or did she just pass out drunk in her car garage with the motor running? The mystery’s never been answered.

1944- Big Band Leader Glen Miller's plane disappeared over the English Channel. In 1988 ,a retired RAF engineer admitted he may have jettisoned some leftover bombs on top of the entertainer's plane while returning home from a bombing run.

1944- THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE- In his last gamble Hitler scraped together his remaining army reserves armed with new King Tiger tanks and launched them in an attack through the center of the allied armies. The Nazis panzers were spearheaded by a group of commandos in G.I. uniforms trained by one eyed Otto Skorzeny in American slang and baseball scores to confuse communications. They calculated to launch their offensive during a heavy snowstorm when the superior Allied air forces would have to be grounded.
After chasing the Germans across France to the Rhine recapturing with ease the World War One battlefields their fathers and uncles had bled for the American armies had come to consider the Krauts a defeated enemy. So they were taken completely by surprise. One US POW noted as he was brought to the rear seeing countless Germans in fresh uniforms and new tanks. General Eisenhower had just gotten his fifth general's star and was attending the wedding of his orderly Rickie in Versailles when he got the news. Rickies bride was Pearlie.

At one point the German offensive was so successful that Franklin Roosevelt wanted to drop the first Atomic Bomb on them. The offensive eventually stalled and was beaten back at the cost of 70,000 U.S. casualties; the most Americans killed and wounded in any single battle in history. Some analysts maintain that Hitler probably shortened the war by wasting his reserves early in such a gamble against the Anglo-American front, while the Russians were a lot closer to Berlin.

1966- New York Police raid the offices of Bernard Spindle, a freelance surveillance expert who bugged the phones of the rich and powerful. They carted off all his tapes and records; including tapes -he claimed- proving Marilyn Monroe’s sexual hijinks with President John Kennedy. He was later informed all his tapes were lost. Spindle’s career was the inspiration for the movies The Conversation and the Enemy of the State.

1966- The Jimi Hendrix Experience released the song ‘Hey Joe’, in the UK.

1971- Don McClean released the long version of the song ‘American Pie’.

1973- O.J. Simpson became the first NFL player to rush for 2000 yards in a season.

1988- Shockjock Howard Stern is fined $100,000 by the FCC for having on his radio show a man who could play the piano with his penis.

1993- Aaron Spelling fired Shannon Dougherty off the TV soap Beverly Hills 90210.

1999- Julie Andrews, star of Mary Poppins and the Sound of Music, sued New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital for destroying her singing voice during a routine throat operation.
-----------------------------------------------------
Yesterday’s Quiz: It’s interesting when famous people meet. Napoleon & Wellington, Mozart & Beethoven, Michelangelo & Leonardo Da Vinci, Oscar Wilde & Walt Whitman. Of these encounters, which two people never met?

Answer: Napoleon and Wellington faced each other across a three mile wide battlefield, but they never met one another face to face.


RSS