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March 18, 2023
March 18th, 2023

Quiz: What does it mean to remain taciturn?

Yesterdays’ question answered below: Who said:” But screw your courage to the sticking point.”?
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History for 3/18/2022
Birthdays: Amerigo Vespucci, John Calhoun, Nicholai Rimsky-Korsakov, Neville Chamberlain, Wilson Picket, Edgar Cayce, John Updike, Grover Cleveland, Edward Everett Horton, Vanessa Williams, F. W. DeKlerk, George Plympton, Peter Graves, Irene Cara, Luc Besson, Queen Latifah (born Dana Elaine Owens) is 52

44BC- This would have been the day Julius Caesar would have left Rome to lead his legions against the Parthians (Iran), had he not been assassinated.

566- The Feast of Saint Frediano (St Fred), who redirected a river near Lucca with his rake.

1286- King Alexander III of Scotland accidentally rode his horse off a cliff.

1554- Princess Elizabeth was sent to the Tower of London on a charge of treason. An uprising of English Protestants under Sir Thomas Wyatt had been crushed. Wyatt under torture confessed his goal was to put Elizabeth on the throne. Elizabeth claimed she never heard of Wyatt, but her stepsister Queen Mary Tudor was suspicious. You could imagine what Elizabeth was thinking when she was rowed into the Tower through the Traitor’s Gate, the same way her mother Anne Boleyn was. “Oh Lord, I never thought to have come here as a prisoner.” For the next several weeks Elizabeth played a dangerous game pretending to be a loyal Catholic. Mary soon died of ovarian cancer and Elizabeth then became Queen.

1584- Czar Ivan the Terrible died while playing chess. Nobody is sure why, except for
"a noticeable swelling of his cods." He had no natural heir, especially after beating his eldest son's brains out with a mace, and his youngest son Dmitri was also dead. Chancellor Boris Gudunov said during an epileptic seizure, the boy whipped out his knife and slashed his own throat. (yeah...right...) Then Boris Gudunov crowned himself Czar. Russia entered a period of dynastic struggle known as "the Time of Troubles".

1662- French philosopher Blaise Pascal, who had invented an early computer device, tried to start a municipal bus system.

1815-VIVE L'EMPEREUR! While marching on Paris to overthrow King Louis XVIII Napoleon is stopped near Grenoble by the Royal French army led by his old friend Marshal Michel Ney. Ney had promised the king he would bring Bonaparte to Paris in an iron cage. The whole Royal Army was Nappy’s old troops anyway, just with a different flag. Soldiers who had served side by side for twenty years suddenly were facing each other. Instead of civil war, Napoleon quietly walked up to their raised guns and smiled: " Soldiers! You all know me. If any of you want to kill your Emperor, here I am." After an agonizing pause, the army cheered and went over to him en masse, including Ney.

1831- The U.S. Supreme Court rule that the Cherokee Nation are a “Domestic Dependent” and not a foreign nation, and therefore cannot sue in federal court over the Trail of Tears.

1834- The Tolpuddle Martyrs. Six Dorchester laborers were arrested and banished to the Australian penal colony for trying to organize a labor union. It is considered the beginning of British trade unionism. Public agitation forced the government to pardon them and invite them home. Only one went back to Dorchester, the rest moved to Canada.

1852- New York City steamboat skipper Henry Wells and mailman William Fargo form the Wells Fargo Company. In 1873 they went into a joint venture with several other freight shipping companies they called American Express.

1871- Citizens of Paris, disgusted with the inept handling of the Franco Prussian war and horrible siege they had to endure, declared a workers revolutionary state, The COMMUNE OF PARIS. Artist Honore' Daumier was named to it's governing board. Karl Marx, living in London, said it was the wrong type of revolution.

The Communards were enthusiastic but inefficient revolutionaries. They tried to burn down Notre Dame but it was so old and damp it wouldn't burn. Then they tried to execute the eighty year old archbishop of Paris by firing squad. They all missed on the first try.

They were eventually crushed by the regular French Army after bitter street fighting that destroyed a lot of Paris including the Tuileries Palace, the Hotel deVille and the Palace of St. Cloud. In Pere' Lachaise cemetery you can still see the 'Wall of the Comunards', where 150 were lined up and shot. They took as their banner the red flag of revolution. Young student Nikolai Lenin, when studying the Commune, adopted their red flag for his and it became the symbol of world communism. When Yuri Gargarin went into orbit in 1959 he had a relic piece of a Commune flag with him.

1902- BIRTHDAY OF THE RECORDING INDUSTRY. The RCA Victrola company sent its engineers to Milan to record ten discs of the young singer Enrico Caruso. He became a world celebrity and the phonograph went from being a scientific curiosity to something every home had to have.

1910- Rosie O’Neill invented the Kewpie Doll.

1913- On the streets of Salonika, the King of Greece was assassinated by anarchist Alexandros Skinos.

1915- THE BATTLE OF The DARDANELLES or POINT HELLAS - As part of World War I’s Gallipoli Campaign, a large British fleet attacked the shore installations guarding the sea approaches to Istanbul. The British Navy hadn't suffered a major defeat since the days of Lord Nelson, but now they were so badly shot up by the Turkish shore batteries that they had to withdraw. The First Sea Lord, Jack Fisher, resigned. King George V grumbled that Fisher should have been hung from a yardarm. The British Navy stayed formidable but its myth of the invincibility was damaged. Ship captains had discouraged target practice, because firing their cannon soiled the nice polished shine on the barrels. Historian Jan Morris said they had tried to beat the Turks by merely 'Looking Superb".

1924-The film “The Thief of Baghdad” starring Douglas Fairbanks released. Directed by Raoul Walsh and designs by William Cameron Menzies. It is considered one of the first great special effects blockbusters.

1925- THE GREAT MIDWEST TORNADO- One of the largest tornadoes ever recorded. A Force 5 monster that traveled 300 miles from Mississippi to Illinois traveling at 73 miles an hour. It wiped out two large towns and killed 689 people.

1928- William T. Hones was planting horseradish in Petersburg Virginia when he dug up a 32 carat diamond. He took it home as a curiosity and only figured out it’s value 15 years later. It was the largest diamond found in North America.

1931- Jacob Schick introduced the electric razor.

1942- Paramount’s “The Lost Dream” Little Audrey cartoon. The short was directed by Bill Tytla for Famous Studios. He designed Little Audrey based on his own daughter Tammy.

1943- The Nazi Gestapo arrested serial killer Bruno Ludke. Ludke admitted to murdering 85 people. He would dress as a laundry delivery man and strangle his victims, mostly women, then commit unnatural acts with their remains. Ludke was sent to a Vienna hospital for medical experiments, then executed in a concentration camp in 1944.

1947- William Durant, the executive who built General Motors into an industrial giant, died the manager of a bowling alley in suburban Chicago. He had been ruined in the 1929 Stock Market Crash.

1962- President DeGaulle of France and Algerian FLN sign an accord giving Independence to Algeria.

1965- Cosmonaut Sergei Leonov became the first human to walk in space.

1965- The Rolling Stones were fined 5 English pence for urinating on a wall in Stratford at ABC recording studio Romford.

1967- The Pirates of the Caribbean ride opened at Disneyland, designed by master animator Marc Davis. giggles.

1980- At the Soviet Union’ secret Plesetsk space center a Vostok rocket exploded on the launch pad, killing fifty top scientists.

1981- Ronald Reagan’s Vice President George H.W. Bush got into a traffic accident in Washington D.C. while driving his secretary/mistress Jennifer Fitzgerald to dinner. Desperate to keep his affair out of the papers, Secretary of State Alexander Haig and Attorney General William French-Smith went to DC police HQ and erased any record of the accident from the daily police blotter. George H.W. Bush ran for president on a platform touting his family values.

1986- The New York Times reported that a 17-year-old student in New Jersey had tracked the launch of the new Soviet space station, Mir, before the Soviet government formally announced it. Phillip Naranjo tracked transmissions between space vessels and control centers on Earth. Just before the Russians announced Mir on February 20, the teen had picked up their Cyrillic code.

2011- The first space probe went into orbit around Mercury.
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Yesterdays’ question: Who said:” But screw your courage to the sticking point.”?

Answer: Lady Macbeth to her husband in The Scottish Play (Macbeth).


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