Quiz: Trekkies! What is Mr Sulu’s first name?

Yesterday’s Answer Below: What do these people have in common? Marge Schott, Branch Rickey, Bill Veeck and Gene Autrey?
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
History for 11/4/2010
Birthdays: Will Rogers, Art Carney, Loretta Swit, Martin Balsam, Gig Young, Darla Hood, Joe Neikro, Robert Mapplethorpe, Ralph Maccio, Andrea McArdle, Matthew McConnaughy, Walter Cronkite, Laura Bush is 64

1640- THE LONG PARLIAMENT- British King Charles Ist didn't like parliaments. He found them pushy, always demanding rights for the common man and such. It had been 11 years since is last parliament and he had dismissed that one after three weeks. It was called "the Short Parliament". But he needed money to put down rebels in Scotland. So Charles I reluctantly convened the Long Parliament. This one stayed in session for the rest of Charles' life and defeated and beheaded him in the English Civil War. The Long Parliament was finally disbanded by Cromwell and his army in 1652 and after Charles II 's restoration, the English parliament stayed more or less in regular sessions.

1646- The Massachusetts Bay Colony started to feel threatened by all the Quakers, Shakers, Anabaptists and other weirdoes coming in by the boatload from Europe. So they announced that the crime of Heresy was punishable by death. And of course heresy was anything the Massachusetts Bay Colony didn't care to believe in. After hanging two Quaker preachers and driving other like Anne Hutchinson outside the walls to death at the hand of hostile Indians, the heresy statutes were revoked by King Charles II.

1804- LEWIS & CLARK MET SACAJEWEA- The American explorers were spending the winter in a friendly Mandan village when a French Canadian trapper named Toussaint Charbonneau offered his services as a guide. He had two wives who were Shoshone (Snake) women. Sacajewea was then 15 and pregnant. Lewis and Clark hired Charbonneau not because he would be useful as much as Sacajewea, because she spoke the languages of the western tribes beyond the Rocky Mountians. Sacajewea would speak to Shoshone and Nez Perce in their language, then translate into Hidatsa to Charbonneau. He would translate it into French to another trapper named Driar who would speak English to Lewis and Clark. Despite the clumsiness, this system worked. Sacajewea braved every hardship the expedition faced to the Pacific and back, and with her baby on her back.

1842- Abe Lincoln, 33, and Mary Todd, 23, marry. Mary Lincoln came from a pro Southern Kentucky family and was always at odds with Washington society. Mary was as volatile as Abe was laid back and they would have marital fights right in front of officers and dignitaries causing everyone to hang their heads in embarrassment.

1854- THE LADY WITH THE LAMP- English nurse Florence Nightingale arrived at Scutari Turkey to care for English wounded from the Crimean War. The English Army medical system then was a disaster of outmoded bureaucracy. Hundreds of sick and dying men were piled up bed to bed in a hospital 4 miles square without basic sanitary conditions- no blankets, fresh clothes or fresh food. Rich English aristocrat Florence Nightingale brought her own finances to clothe, feed and care for the sick. Even just doing laundry saved lives because men had clean linens to sleep on. She told her volunteers "The strongest women must stand with me at the washtub!" She had no official status or commission from the government, but she revolutionized the military hospital system and the nursing profession, often fighting stodgy old generals who saw her as a troublemaker. Chief surgeon Sir John Hall growled:" The woman insists on grotesque excess and luxury- after all, what does a soldier want with a toothbrush?"

1862- Richard J. Gatling patented the machine gun. "It is to the pistol as the sewing machine is to the simple sewing needle." Gatling's idea was to invent machines to make war too terrible to be waged any longer. What he succeeded in doing was to indeed make war more terrible.

1879- James Ritty of Dayton Ohio patented the cash register, invented as a way to keep employees from pocketing receipts.

1913- William Mulholland's great aqueduct starts bringing water 200 miles from Northern California to L.A. by the force of gravity alone. Without the extra water L.A. would never have grown any larger than 140,000 people. ( L.A. Times estimate.)

1918- Wilfred Owen, one of the greatest English poets of the age, was killed in combat in World War One, only six days before the final cease fire.

1927- HOWARD CARTER OPENED THE TOMB OF KING TUT. Other royal tombs had been opened before but they had always been cleaned out centuries ago by grave robbers. King Tut Ankh Amon’s was the first unspoiled Pharoah's tomb to be discovered in modern times. The site was discovered under a house built for workers excavating the tomb of King Ramses IV. There was King Tut's Curse guarding the door, and a few folks like Lord Carnaervon did go to an early grave: allegedly from scratching a zit and getting blood poisoning. Legend has it the same zit was found on King Tut's mummy! But Howard Carter, the man who broke the seal, rifled the tomb and did everything but stick his fingers in Tut's ears, lived to a merry old age and even pocketed a few artifacts he didn't feel like sharing with the British Museum. They were later returned by an embarrassed family descendant.

1928- Arnold Rothstein, top New York gangster who got vaudeville dancer Jimmy Walker elected mayor and rigged the 1919 World Series, is shot in the groin during a poker game. It took him hours to die. When asked by the police who shot him, Rothstein’s last words: "If I live, I'll take care of it..."

1939- Packard introduced the first air-conditioned automobile.

1952- UNIVAC, the first all electronic business computer, accurately predicted Dwight Eisenhower would win in a landslide. The first computer projected results for an election.

1955- In Arizona Willie Bioff, former IATSE union official, who tried to hijack the Hollywood unions (Including the Disney cartoonists) for Frank Nitti's gang, turns the key in his Ford pickup and explodes. He had turned informer and was in the Witness Protection plan.

1958- Angelo Roncalli was elected Pope John XXIII. John 23rd was one of the best loved popes of the twentieth century. He liberalized the Church through his council Vatican II, changed the Latin Mass into common language, encouraged folk masses and other reforms. Pope John Paul II has made more saints than any other Pope but withheld final sainthood for John XXIII because he was too liberal for his taste.

1963- The Beatles are part of the Queens Royal Command performance in London. John Lennon tells the audience: " Will the people in the cheap seats clap their hands?, and if the rest of you would just rattle your jewelry.."

1968- the first issue of Screw Magazine. Former reporter Jim Buckley and former industrial spy for the Bendix Corporation, Al Goldstein named their magazine Screw after trying Hump, Love and being told they couldn't name it F**k.

1979- THE IRAN HOSTAGE CRISIS- Iranian militants with the approval of the Iranian revolutionary government and the Ayatollah Khomeni attack the U.S. embassy in Teheran and take most of the 90 staff hostage for 444 days. The crisis seemed to paralyze the Jimmy Carter administration and probably helped elect Ronald Reagan.

1980- Yomiuri Giants baseball great Saduharu Oh retired after hitting 868 homeruns in his 22 year career.

1993- The Topanga-Malibu fires., Huge brush fries burn expensive homes in Malibu.

1999- Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. This law, drafted by conservative Republicans, repealed many of the government safeguards enacted during the Great Depression against banks speculating in stocks and insurance. It created the free-wheeling Wall Street economy that collapsed in 2008.

2008- Barack Obama was elected first African-American to be President of the United States.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yesterday's Question: What do these people have in common? Marge Schott, Branch Rickey, Bill Veeck and Gene Autrey?

Answer: They were all the owners of baseball teams- Cincinnati Reds, Brooklyn Dodgers, Chicago Cubs and California Angels.