Oct. 28, 2018 October 28th, 2018 |
Question: What was the first Marvel comic book character to be made the subject of a major motion picture?
Yesterday’s Question answered below: In Rome today you can see trash bins and manholes with the acronym SPQR on it. The Roman Legions had it on their standards. What does SPQR mean?
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History for 10/28/2018
Birthdays: Elsa Lanchester, Cleo Lane, Charlie Daniels, Evelyn Waugh, Jonas Salk, Bruce Jenner, Joan Plowright, Edith Head, Chef August Escolfiere the great French Chef who created Peche Melba and moved French cuisine to the front rank of world cooking, Charles Grovesnor the founder of National Geographic magazine, Joaquin Phoenix is 44, Dennis Franz, Julia Roberts is 51, Bill Gates is 63, Disney animator Don Lusk is 105!
FEAST OF SAINTS SIMON ZEALOT & ST. JUDE- In the Middle Ages people mixed up St. Simon with St. Simeon the " Hobgoblin Saint", and St. Jude (The patron saint of Lost Causes) with Judas Iscariot- I guess they felt God made him a saint as a consolation prize. So today was considered a good day for conjurers, sorcerers, necromancers and other practitioners of the Black Arts. One 17th century sorcerer, Bruno of Prague, claimed he could summon up St. Jude this day to grant you a wish. But if you showed any sign of fear or hesitation, St. Jude would smack you upside of the head and disappear.
312AD- BATTLE OF THE MULVIAN BRIDGE-The day before his showdown with his enemy emperor Maxentius at the gates of Rome, Roman Caesar Constantine had a vision: a fiery Cross appeared in the sky with the device "IN HOC SIGNO VINCE" -By This Sign shalt thou Conquer". He decided this must be Christianity calling, so when Constantine won the battle, he ended Nero's 300 year ban on the outlaw religion, and later made it the official religion of the Empire.
Yet despite his efforts in the cause of this new religion, and his mother Saint Helena being a devoted Christian, Constantine himself worshipped Sol Invictus, the Invincible Sun most of his life. He made the Church move the Christian Sabbath from the Hebrew Saturday to the Sun's day. Constantine himself wasn't baptized until on his deathbed 37 years later.
1147- Battle of Iconium- Saracens-1, Crusaders-0
1492- Christopher Columbus reached the island of Cuba. Here the Indians showed him how to smoke tobacco, which they called cochiba.
1575- THE PACIFICATION OF GHENT- The 17 provinces of the upper and lower Netherlands agreed to unite under the leadership of William of Orange. They also call for complete religious freedom and cut all ties with the Spanish Hapsburg Empire.
1726- Johnathan Swift published "Gulliver's Travels"-"To Vex the World rather than Divert it."
1872- EVANGELIST SEX SCANDAL! After the Civil War, minister Henry Ward Beecher of Brooklyn's Plymouth Church was the most famous clergyman in America. He was a great abolitionist, friend of Presidents and brother of writer Harriet Beecher Stowe. On this day feminist Victoria Woodhull revealed Beecher's habit of seducing the ladies of his congregation. Woodhull was a radical socialist who believed in Spiritualism and Free Love, and she admitted she herself had slept with the good reverend and even participated in a ménage a' trois with Beecher and wife of his publisher Elizabeth Tilton! Beecher's friends locked up Woodhull for slander and tried every lawsuit possible. His sister Harriet wrote lampoons of Mrs. Woodhull calling her Aurelia Dangereyes. But the famous reverend fell from grace in American eyes. In later years Rev Beecher preached sermons that Hell didn’t exist. Critics said it was because he was afraid that he knew it was his own eventual destination.
1916- Oswald Boelcke, German air ace and tutor of Baron von Richtofen the Red Baron, died during a dogfight when he accidentally collided mid-air with one of his own wing man. Boelcke was a jolly fellow who if he heard one of the Allied pilots he shot down was captured, he would appear at his bedside with chocolate, schnapps and tobacco to party with him.
1918- The first signs begin that the Kaiser's government was crumbling under the strain of the Great War. Germanys closest ally Austria Hungary asked the Allies for a cease fire. On this date at Kiel the entire Imperial German High Seas Fleet mutinied and refused to set sail to attack the British Navy one more time. When soldiers were brought in to shoot the sailors, they joined the mutiny too. Factory worker uprisings broke out in Hamburg and in Munich. The willingness to carry on the war and obey the Kaiser was breaking down all over Germany.
In 1940 Newspaperman William Shirer noticed how pampered and well treated the sailors of the Third Reich’s navy were. Herr Hitler never forgot that revolution in Russia and Germany started in the Navy.
1918- The Czechs, Bohemians, Sudetens, Moravians and Slovaks form themselves into the Republic of Czechoslovakia. In 1991 the Slovakians split off from the Czech Republic.
1919- Congress overrode the veto of President Woodrow Wilson and passed the Volstead Act. The act gave enforcement powers to the Prohibition (XIX) Amendment forbidding the sale and consumption of alcohol. Named for House Judiciary Chair Andrew Volstead (R. Minn), the act was actually drafted by Wayne Wheeler, powerful lobbyist of the Anti-Saloon League. Andrew Volstead went along with the act, and lost re-election. The Volstead Act gave government the power to seize and destroy alcohol and distilleries, and shut down bars. This set the stage for the Roaring Twenties.
1928- Mussolini and his Fascists complete the March on Rome. Mussolini had started his political career as a socialist labor leader but soon decided there were more opportunities on the other side. He was Italy's youngest Prime Minister before forming his right wing extremists into a party and seizing power. He actually already had control of the government, he had just promised his men a dramatic march and didn’t want to let them down. Pope Pius XI said:” Mussolini is a man sent by Divine Providence.”
The word "Fascist" comes from their symbol "fasces" the bundle of sticks with an axe sticking out of them you sometimes see on gov't buildings. It was an allusion to the symbols of Roman power he wished to revive. In the previous generation Guisseppi Garabaldi's men were nicknamed the Red Shirts, so Mussolini dressed his men in Blackshirts, which led Hitler to make his stormtroopers Brownshirts.
1929- Composer Irving Berlin scolded George Gershwin for his lack of patriotism that he unloaded his stocks and bonds. The Great Stock Market Crash the following day bankrupting Irving Berlin but left Gershwin unscathed. Stick to music, Irv...
1948- Swiss chemist Paul Mueller received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry. It was for inventing DDT. After the world war whole populations and jungles were sprayed with DDT to kill bugs and parasites. It wasn’t until 1970 that someone finally noticed it also caused cancer.
1949- Kay Kamen, Walt Disney Studios merchandising mastermind, was killed in a plane crash in the Azores. For almost two decades the Baltimore-born ad man was the mastermind behind the creation of Disney merchandising, including the wildly successful Mickey Mouse watch. By the time of his death, Disney merchandising was earning the studio $100 million a year.
1949- A top secret meeting of the Special Advisory Committee met at the Atomic Energy Commission to discuss whether to respond to the Russian atomic bomb by building a bigger Super “Hydrogen” Bomb. The Special Committee included father of the A-Bomb Robert Oppenheimer, Edward Teller, Enrico Ferme, two Nobel Prize winners and the President of Harvard. The scientists unanimously concluded that the H-Bomb “would not be a weapon of war but a weapon of Mass Genocide, and so a Moral Evil.” They advised against it. The US government ignored them and built one anyway.
1962- THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS ENDED- Soviet Chairman Nikita Khruschev withdrew his nuclear missiles from Cuba in exchange for a promise from Kennedy not to invade Cuba and to withdraw missiles from Turkey -they were obsolete and had been planned for de-activation anyway. Kennedy told the U.S. public there was no deal made. Generals on both sides were furious. Gen. Curtis LeMay called it America's greatest defeat. But the world breathed a sigh of relief. And Fidel Castro? Well, nobody bothered to tell him. He came out of his bunker after he found out the news on the Voice of America broadcast that evening.
1963- First day of demolition of New York’s City Pennsylvania Station, a massive Beaux Artes building. It signaled the triumph of the automobile over the train. It took three years to demolish and today it is considered a great cultural crime. The remade Pennsylvania station was an all underground facility. One writer said:” We used to enter New York like gods, now we come in like rats.” The angry reaction over the destruction of Penn Station fostered the creation of the New York Landmarks Commission.
1965- Pope Paul VI published an encyclical Nostra Aetate, that officially absolved the Jewish people for any guilt in the death of Jesus Christ.
1965- St. Louis Gateway Arch completed.
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Yesterday’s Question: In Rome today you can see trash bins and manholes with the acronym SPQR on it. The Roman Legions had it on their standards. What does SPQR mean?
Answer: Senatus Populusque Romanum, the Senate and the People of Rome.