Feb 26, 2013 tues. February 26th, 2013 |
Quiz: What does it mean to have some “hair of the dog”..?
Answer to yesterday’s question below: Has a comedy ever won an Oscar for Best Picture?
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History for 2/ 26/ 2013
Birthday:King Wenceslas of Bohemia-1361, Victor Hugo, Buffalo Bill Cody, Emma Destin, Levi Strauss, Jackie Gleason, Fats Domino, Betty Hutton, Johnny Cash, William Frawley (Fred Murtz), Robert Alda, Tony Randall, Erhyke Bahdu, Tex Avery
747 B.C. In Sumer, it is the beginning of the Age of Nabronassar.
500s BC to 391 AD, ANTHESTERION- the Ancient Greek festival of death and exorcism. The Greeks believed ghosts weren’t as scary as they were annoying. If you didn’t bury the dead properly with spices and a coin in the mouth for the Chaeron the Boatman of the River Styx, they became ghosts. They would haunt you by moping around, turning up at inappropriate moments, predicting your death, bleeding on your lunch, etc. So this festival was a sort of visiting hours for the other world.
You left your door open and cooked a meal for the spirits so they could spend a day visiting their old haunts (forgive the pun). This way they would not bug you the rest of the year. This festival was also considered a festival of flowers to usher in Spring. Most Greeks spent all three days of the festival drunk.
393AD Today is the feast day of Saint Porphyry, who made it rain in Gaza.
1773- Construction began in Philadelphia on the Walnut Street Jail, a Quaker alternative to physical punishment, where Penitents could reflect on their crimes- the first Penitentiary. The other innovation was individual cells instead of the large room common in colonial jails.
1775- Leslie’s Retreat. In Boston, British General Gage sent a Colonel Leslie with a column of soldiers to Salem Mass to confiscate a store of weapons the colonists had. The Redcoats played Yankee Doodle on the march, then a form of insult to Americans. They were stopped at a river crossing by a line of heavily armed Salem colonists. Leslie didn’t want a showdown, so he negotiated, while other neighbors smuggled the illegal weapons into the forest. The American Revolution started a few weeks later at Lexington & Concord.
1815- Napoleon and his followers escaped his exile island of Elba and sailed to France for another try for power. He had less than a thousand followers to try to re-conquer a nation of 14 million.
1854- Composer Robert Schumann went mad and jumped off a bridge into the Rhine River. He was fished out and institutionalized. His schizophrenia grew out of advanced syphilis. He said he was not committing suicide but had thrown his wedding ring into the river to free his wife Clara of him, Then he relented and leaped into the raging ice filled water to get it back.
Ironically this drama was played out during his towns winter carnival celebrations. The tragedy of seeing his friend and teacher collapse moved young Johannes Brahms to write his First Piano Concerto.
1907- British Oil and Royal Shell merge to form British Petroleum- B.P. company.
1919- Congress established Grand Canyon National Park.
1929- Congress declared the Grand Tetons a national park.
1935- Adolf Hitler revealed to the world press that Germany had built the Luftwaffe, the worlds’ largest air force.
1936- The NINI ROKU-JIKEN COUP. Young Japanese officers lead four regiments to try take over the government in Tokyo. They kill several government ministers and try to assassinate Prime Minister Inokai but fail. The coup collapses when Emperor Hirohito himself declared he would personally lead his Imperial Guard against them if they would not stand down. The anti-war Prime Minister was later assassinated by another officer.
Despite the coups failure peace-party politicians were intimidated to try and stop the Japanese army's plans for total Asian conquest. Emperor Hirohito also gave up on any more direct action on his part as a break with tradition.
1951- The 22nd Amendment ratified limiting the President to two four year terms. This was passed by a Republican Conservative dominated Congress. They were determined to never have something like Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four terms again.
1962- First day shooting on the first James Bond film Dr. No. The scene was in M's office and featured Bernard Lee, Peter Burton and the new discovery, Sean Connery.
1965- First day of shooting on the Beatle's second film 'Help!"
1983- Michael Jackson’s album Thriller went to #1 in the pop charts and stayed for weeks. In the weeks after his death in 2009, Thriller again went to #1.
1985- New York Police under District Attorney Rudy Giuliani arrested most of the leaders of the New York Mafia families called The Commission. Despite this highly touted raid, the mob rebuilt, so that another big raid was necessary in 2010.
1990- Cornell Gunther, lead singer for the DooWop group the Coasters, was shot dead at a Las Vegas traffic intersection."Yakkety-Yak, Don't Talk Back!"
1991- At a meeting in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee introduced the first Web Browser.
1991-The Highway of Death- During Gulf War One, The U.S. Air Force caught a long column of Iraqi army vehicles fleeing on an open desert road with no cover. No one is sure how many Iraqis were killed.
1993- THE FIRST WORLD TRADE CENTER ATTACK. Followers of Moslem extremist cleric Omar Abdel Rahman set off a large truck bomb in New York's World Trade Center. The bomb created a five story crater in level B-2 of the underground parking structure. It killed 7 and injured over one thousand. 50,000 had to be evacuated from the twin towers for smoke inhalation.
It has been speculated that one reason there were not even more deaths in the collapse of 9-11, 2001 was because much of the office workers experienced this 1993 attack, so they knew exactly how to evacuate the towers quickly. President Clinton’s Justice Dept had all the perpetrators in jail within a year. When planner Ramsay Youssef was being flown out of New York to his 240 year imprisonment the plane flew over Manhattan by the World Trade Center. A he looked down he was reported to have sighed: Should have used more dynamite.²
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Yesterday’s Question: Has a comedy ever won an Oscar for Best Picture?
Answer: Three true comedies have won. IT HAPPENED ONE NIGHT in 1934, ANNIE HALL in 1986 (?) and SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE in 1998.