Brave Combo, who did the music in our Click & Clack As the Wrench Turns Show, have put up free streams of a selection of the music of the show.

http://www.brave.com/bo

Brave Combo is out of Denton Texas, just north of Dallas. They've played before on the Simpsons, and worked with every kind of musician from David Byrne and Talking Heads to Tiny Tim!

I had a lot of fun collaborating with Carl, Danny and Jeff, and we all made some great tunes together. I hope you all like it too.
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Quiz: What is meant by keel-hauling?

Quiz: Which medal is older- The Congressional Medal of Honor, The Purple Heart or the Victoria Cross?
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History for 7/5/2008
Birthdays: P.T. Barnum, Beatrix Potter, The XVIII Century English actress Mrs. Sarah Siddons, Jean Cocteau, Admiral David Farragut, Len Lye, George Pompidou, Shirley Knight, Huey Lewis, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Milburn Stone (Doc on Gunsmoke), Goose Gossage, Warren Oates, Henry Cabot Lodge IV, Edie Falco

1779- TRYON’S NEW HAVEN RAID- During the American Revolution Royalist Governor Tryon of New York thought a way to bring the American rebels back to their allegiance was to launch a punitive raid across Long Island Sound to rebel strongholds in Connecticut the day after their Independence Day celebrations. Forty boat loads of British redcoats landed at New Haven and wantonly looted, burned and brutalized the inhabitants. The elderly Dean of Yale University was beaten to death with rifle butts after urging his students to resist. Civilian homes were ransacked and women raped. The redcoats then burned Norwalk and Scranton before returning back across the water to occupied New York. British policy in general was that the majority of Americans are good subjects but just deluded by bad leaders. Tryon was frustrated with the endless guerilla fighting. So like the Americans at Mi Lai in 1968, he lashed out with a brutality that accomplished more harm than good.

1820- THE TRIAL OF QUEEN CAROLINE- Forget Charles & Di, this was the greatest marital scandal ever to hit the British Monarchy. George the Prince Regent had been estranged from his wife Caroline since 1796 and she had been living a wild life in Italy while George chased skirts at court. When his elderly mad father George III finally died and 'Princee' became King George IV, nobody expected Caroline to suddenly show up in England and still want to be Queen. On this day George forced a bill into the House of Lords to grant him a divorce so he could be free to marry his mistress Lady Cunningham nicknamed 'the Vice-Queen'. The evidence in the trial were juicy anecdotes of the Queen's own sexual shenanigans with a number of Italians. The whole sordid affair was terribly embarrassing and split the nation into factions. Some loyal to the King, others the Queen's defender's of Women's Rights and the Family. The King's public appearances were greeted with cries of 'Nero!" the Duke of Wellington was hissed and had rocks thrown at him and Prime Minister Lord Liverpool was so upset he could not address Parliament without a dose of ether first. Eventually the divorce bill was dropped and the King crowned with the Queen shut out of the cathedral. A popular doggerel in Punch made a joke of Christ's advice to the Adulteress-
" Most Gracious Queen we thee implore, to Go Away and Sin No More...
But if that effort Be too Great, Just Go Away at Any Rate.."

1892- THE HOMESTEAD MASSACRE- Jacob Frick, the attorney of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, decided to solve the problem of uppity unions by surrounding his Homestead plant with barbed wire and guns then announcing to the astonished employees that they were getting a 20% pay cut. 3,000 workers fought with police and non-union replacements, 7 killed, the union leaders arrested for incitement to riot. Some apologists claim that Andrew Carnegie’s disillusionment with business and his desire to dedicate the remainder of his life to philanthropy stemmed from his horror of the violence done in his name at Homestead. Carnegie was on vacation and when told replied: "Ah yes, Florence is beautiful this time of year". Jacob Frick built himself an art museum in New York.

1910- Writer O.Henry died of cirrhosis and tuberculosis at 47. His last words were "Turn up the lights, I don't want to go home in the dark." He became a writer while serving a jail term for embezzlement.

1935- The Wagner Act passed congress, decreeing all American workers have the right to collective bargaining and to form unions.

1943- Betty Grable married bandleader Harry James.

1945- The First British General Election held in ten years. Winston Churchill and his Tories were turned out for Labor candidate Clement Atlee. When his aides accused the British voters of ingratitude, Churchill said they had been through a lot and wanted to move on. But Churchill called Clement Atlee "a Sheep in Sheep’s clothing."

1945- OPERATIONS OVERCAST and PAPERCLIP- The U.S. Army intelligence arranged for top Nazi rocket Scientists to be brought to the U.S. for our space program.
Pres. Truman had passed a law forbidding visas for anyone with a Nazi past. But the War Dept Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency chief Bosquet Wev declared:" We’re not going to beat a dead Nazi Horse!" Experts doctored the dossiers on these scientists and changed descriptions like: "Fanatical Unrepentant Nazi" to "Politically Neutral". Head of the unit Dr. Werner Von Braun was the inventor of the clustered liquid fuel engine rockets which Hitler had named the Vengence-2 and fired at London. At the end of the war Von Braun had been working on a rocket with a range of 4,000 miles that could have reached New York or Boston. Dr. Arthur Rudolphe the designer of the Saturn-5 moon rocket was deported in 1984 when a British documentary exposed his running a slave labor camp in 1943. Dr. Herman Becker-Freysing the man who built John Glenn's space suit got his knowledge about the effects of atmospheric pressure and oxygen loss on humans from experiments he did on the inmates of Dachau.

1951- Dr Shockley announced the invention of the Transistor, making the miniaturizing of complex electronics possible. One documentary noted that if you tried to make a digital telephone with the earlier technology of vacuum tubes, it would have to be the size of an office building.

1952- London Transport scrapped the last of their electric streetcars in favor of diesel polluting double-decker buses.

1954- Elvis Presley recorded "That’s All Right" at Sun Records in Memphis. Some call it the first true Rock & Roll song, but that is disputed by Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, Ike Turners Delta 88 and many other R&B hits. “That’s All Right” was written by black bluesman Arthur Big-Boy Crudup, who never profited from the song’s success, and died in a shack.

1954- Tomoyuki Tanaka announced the beginning of production on the movie Godzilla.
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Quiz: Which medal is older- The Congressional Medal of Honor, The Purple Heart or the Victoria Cross?

Answer: The Purple Heart, established by order of George Washington in 1782.