What do George Washington, Casanova and Mozart all have in common?

Quiz- Yesterday in Hollywood there was a big fire on the Universal back lot. Why is the area where they film movies called Lots?
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History for 6/3/2008
Birthdays: John Paul Jones, Jefferson Davis, Josephine Baker, King George V, Henry Shrapnel, Tony Curtis is 82, Allen Ginsburg, Collen Dewhurst, Alain Renais, Curtis Mayfield, Paulette Goddard, Maurice Evans, Jack Oakey, Jan Peerce, Zoltan Korda, John Dykstra, Tom Arnold, Hale Irwin, Chuck Barris

The First Friday in June is commemorated as DONUT DAY, when we reflect on the origins of the portable cake. It’s birth in 1847 is credited to a Maine sea captain Hanson Crockett Gregory. Out at sea, the old salt had his breakfast interrupted by a New England squall. So he stuck his cake onto the spoke of his ship’s wheel, while he steered out of danger, thereby creating the legendary hole.

1579- Sir Francis Drake, his ship the Golden Hind parked in Drake's Bay or Anchor Bay or wherever, claims California for England. He calls it Nova Albion. Early explorers thought North and South America was one big island. Magellan had found the way around the southern tip. Drake repeated Magellan's route around South America to attack Panama and the Peruvian treasure fleet. After which he sailed north trying to find the northern end of the island so he could sail around the top to get back into the Atlantic. By Mendocino California Drake realized that this was one big mother of an island and it would be wiser to turn around and go home another way. The Northwest Passage isn't discovered until Canadian ice breaker does it in 1958.

1846- General Stephan Kearny with his Army of the West forming in Texas received orders from Washington to invade Mexican Alta-California.

1851- The American clipper ship Flying Cloud began her maiden voyage from Sandy Hook New York. She was so fast she could sail from New York around South America to San Francisco in 89 days, making her the most celebrated Yankee merchant ship and with the British Cutty Sark the subject of numerous model boat kits.

1888-The poem: "Casey at the Bat" by Edward Lawrence Taylor published in the San Francisco Examiner.

1923- Italian Prime Minister Benito Mussolini gave Italian women the right to vote.

1924- THE FIRST D.J.- Moses Baritz, working for the BBC affiliate in Manchester England, started a radio program where he spun classical records and chatted in-between song cuts, inventing the Disc Jockey format.

1924- Writer Franz Kafka died in Keirling Austria. He left instructions to
to burn all his unfinished manuscripts, including the Trial. Fortunately his friends did not.

1929- Movie stars Douglas Fairbanks Jr married Joan Crawford.

1939- Movie director Alexander Korda married movie star Merle Oberon.

1943- First Day of the ZOOT SUIT RIOTS- In Los Angeles, Navy and Marine servicemen awaiting embarkation to the World War Two Pacific battlegrounds clashed with Hispanic gangs. Truckloads of off-duty servicemen return to town to enlarge the fight. The servicemen could only tell who to beat up based on whether or not they were wearing a zoot-suit. They beat up two 13 year olds sitting in a theater watching a movie. Downtown L.A. becomes an urban war zone.… so, this is something new-?

1944- Nazi meteorologists in Norway predict a storm system over Europe to last all week. German High Command was sure an invasion of Europe was imminent but that Eisenhower would need at least 4 days of good weather to launch an attack. The original date for D-Day was supposed to be tomorrow June 4th but this night Eisenhower canceled the go-ahead until June 6th. The tides would never be this favorable again until September.
Field Marshal Rommel, deciding there would be no invasion that week, goes home to Germany for conferences and his wife's birthday, June 6th.

1946- THE BIKINI went on sale. Parisian designer Jacques Castel invented the two piece women’s bathing suit. Named the Bikini for the Atomic test in the Bikini islands Castel said it would "hit the fashion world like an atomic bomb". The first model to wear it was a stripper because the regular fashion models refused to parade around in 'Castel's flimsy straps'.

1946- A consumer study finds there are only 10,000 television sets in America.
A follow up study five years later finds the number at 12 million.

1949 - Dragnet is 1st broadcast on radio ( KFI in Los Angeles ). Creator Jack Webb wanted to capture the dry, non-theatrical delivery he heard real cops use. He ordered his actors to “stop acting, just read the lines”. Webb wrote the scripts from real LAPD cases and starred as well.

1967 - Aretha Franklin's "Respect" reaches #1. Sockittome,sockittome,sockittome.

1968- Artist Andy Warhol was shot in the gut three times by Valerie Solanas, author of the "SCUM Manifesto". Warhol barely lived but recovered. Solanas was institutionalized.

1971- The First artificial gene created.

1976 –Galileo-Galileo Fig-a-ro! Queen's single "Bohemian Rhapsody" goes gold.

1980- President Jimmy Carter announced the United States would boycott the 1980 summer Olympic Games in Moscow because of the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan. The Russians boycotted the LA Olympics in 1984 and left Afghanistan in 1989. One of the casualties of the boycott was the animated film Animalympics by Steve Lissberger.
Animators who worked on it include Roger Allers, Dan Haskett, Brad Bird, Bill Kroyer, Randy Cartwright, Andy Gaskill, and me.

1986- Attorney Roy Cohn was disbarred by a federal appellate court. It was a symbolic act because Cohn would soon be dead of HIV/AIDS. In his career Cohn had prosecuted the Rosenbergs, helped Sen Joe McCarthy in his anti-Communist witchhunts and defended Mafia dons like John Gotti. Despite being gay himself, one of Cohn’s last acts was to lobby New York State legislators from his deathbed to defeat a Gay Rights Bill.
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Yesterday’s Quiz- Yesterday in Hollywood there was a big fire on the Universal back lot. Why is the area where they film movies called Lots?

Answer: Because in the early days of Hollywood, many movie companies began in storefronts and shot their films in the lot in the back.