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Sept. 26, 2022
September 26th, 2022

Quiz: The place names in the board game Monopoly like Park Place, Montrose Ave., St. Charles Place, are all taken from one particular American city. What is it?

Yesterday’s question answered below: When you describe someone describing staging as “proscenium” what does that mean?
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History for 9/26/2022
Birthdays: George Gershwin, T.S. Elliot, John Chapman (also known as Johnny Appleseed)-1774, Winsor McCay-1869, Theodore Gericault -1791, Olivia Newton-John, Cheryl Tiegs is 74, Marty Robbins, Pope Paul VI, Jack Lalanne, Melissa Sue Andersen, Phillip Bosco, James Cavaziel, Surena Williams, Linda Hamilton is 66.

303AD. Feast of Saints Damian & Cosmas. The Syrian twin doctors were nicknamed 'The Moneyless". They were martyred by being crucified, stoned, shot full of arrows, beheaded, and they had to read their own prescriptions.

1370- Battle of Nicopolis- During a pause in the Hundred Years War with the English, Count Egguerand de Coucy led the cream of French knighthood in one last Crusade to help the king of Hungary defeat the Turks. Instead their army was defeated and their leaders captured. By now Sultan Bajazet (nicknamed Ilderim- Lightning) was so fed up with crusaders, knights and chivalry, that he refused to ransom them, but had them all beheaded.

1529- Sultan Sulieman the Magnificent lays siege to the city of Vienna. At one point he told his troops that if they didn't capture the city he would fill the moat with their genitals. (ouch!) The goal of the Ottoman Empire was the "Completion of the Crescent" . Starting in Turkey the southern side swung out through Palestine, Egypt to the Atlantic. Now the Northern arm must go through Hungary and Austria through France to Spain.

1560- A Spanish expedition under Don Pedro de Ursua left Peru for the deep Amazon. Lost in the limitless rainforest almost all his men die or go mad. The expedition at one point was taken over by a deranged conquistador named Aguirre who declared himself 'Emperor of the Kingdom of El Dorado'! The incident is the subject of Werner Herzog's 1972 movie "Aguirre the Wrath of God".

1575-Writer Miguel de Cervantes was captured by Barbary Pirates and held a slave for five years until his family ransomed him. He wrote Don Quixote in 1604.

1579- Sir Francis Drake in his ship the Golden Hind entered Plymouth Harbor England, after sailing around the world for 33 months. He raided Panama, Peru and visited a strange new place they called Nova Albion and we call California. The Golden Hind was kept in dry-dock in a place of honor for years, until it finally fell to pieces from dry rot.

1687- The Ancient GREEK PARTHENON WAS BLOWN UP during a minor Venetian raid on Turkish held Athens. A random shell ignited a gunpowder magazine the Turks had been storing inside of it. For two thousand years the Greek masterpiece had survived mostly intact. Later on in 1801 English Lord Elgin will back up his frigate to the shore and pry off the frieze marble sculptures for his collection.

1739- THE WAR OF JENKINS EAR- A 9 year war between England and Spain started when a Spanish warship stopped an English merchant ship and cut off the ear of the captain named Robert Jenkins. Jenkins marched around Parliament loudly calling for war and waving his ear, pickled in a bottle of spirits. He wore his hair long so some doubted that it was his ear in that bottle.

1820- In Defiance, Missouri, 85 year old frontier scout Daniel Boone died of acute fever and indigestion after eating too many yams. He did all of his exploring without a compass. Someone once asked him - Didn't you ever get lost? He replied, No, but I was once bewildered for three days...

1835- Donizetti’s opera Lucia De Lammermoor premiered.

1863- In a secret meeting, several Confederate generals agree to petition President Jefferson Davis to replace their commander Baxton Bragg. Despite his just winning a victory- Chickamauga. Private soldiers like memoirist Sam Watkins wrote that most of Bragg’s army disliked him. His top cavalry leader, Nathan Bedford Forrest, once got angry enough to draw his sword on him. But Pres. Davis seemed to be the only man who liked Bragg, and kept him in command. Bragg humiliated the mutineers, and the rest of his staff refused to talk to him. Baxton Bragg’s next battle, Missionary Ridge, was a complete disaster and lost most of Tennessee to the Confederacy.

1887- Emile Berliner patented the gramophone, rejecting Thomas Edison's cylinder in favor of a flat disc record on a turntable.

1892- The John Philip Sousa Band makes its first public appearance.

1914- The Federal Trade Commission, or FTC created.

1918- THE MEUSE ARGONNE OFFENSIVE- To the rally cry of Marshal Foch “Everyone to the Battle!” the Allies began the final mass offensive from Denmark to Switzerland to finish the Germans and end World War I.
The Big Breakout was done by the fresh American divisions thrown forward by Pershing into the Argonne forest. Led by colorful officers like Douglas MacArthur, the Boy Colonel, who led his men calmly across No-Man's Land without a helmet or gun, and dressed in his West Point varsity sweater and cane. There was also artillery Captain Harry Truman and a pushy Lieutenant of a tank brigade named Patton. After fierce resistance, the exhausted German lines finally began to cave in. The offensive had started off in a dense fog. A whole Yank battalion got lost and surrounded by Germans. After being rescued they were hailed as the "Lost Battalion".

1920- The NFL, National Football League, created.

1926- Bullock's Wilshire department store opened. The Tea Room quickly became the in place for Hollywood Society to see and be seen in.

1937- "Queen of the Blues" Singer Bessie Smith died after a car accident in Mississippi. She crashed her Packard into a parked car. She was 43. One account said she died because she was refused treatment in a segregated hospital, but the truth was she was treated by a white doctor at the scene and sent to the nearest hospital, which was a black one.

1939- Nazi scientists led by Rudolph Heisenberg met to discuss how the fission of uranium could be used to create a super bomb. Meanwhile in America, Hungarian scientist Dr. Leo Szilard was warning the US government that they better start an atomic program fast.

1941- Max Fleischer's "Superman" cartoon debuts. The first animated action-adventure short. They were much more expensive that the usual short cartoons- $90,000 to the usual $40,000, but Paramount wanted them.

1946- In Vietnam, as pro-French and pro-Communists battled in the streets of Saigon, the American O.S.S. representative Col. Peter Dewey wrote back to Washington: “Vietnam is aflame. The French and British are finished here. America should pull out and let the Vietnamese settle their own affairs.” Two days later, on his way to the airport he was ran into an ambush and was killed. The first very American killed in Vietnam.

1955- Eddie Fisher married Debbie Reynolds.

1957- The musical West Side Story opened. The legend goes composer Leonard Bernstein was in the hospital to be operated on for a deviated septum. While recuperating he ran into lyricist Steven Sondheim, who was also recovering from an operation. To pass the time while convalescing they started talking about the idea of an updated Romeo and Juliet set to music in the slums. One early title was Gang Way!

1960-THE NIXON-KENNEDY TELEVISED DEBATE. The first televised presidential debate that really ushered in the era of the "media-candidate". People who heard the debate on radio thought Vice President Nixon had won because he scored more points on issues. But far more who saw it on Television lauded Kennedy because of his cool, calm Presidential bearing as opposed to Nixon's pale sweaty-lipped nervousness.
As he watched the debate on TV, Nixon’s running mate, Senator Henry Cabot-Lodge III, murmured “ We’re gonna lose…” For years Nixon put down his electoral defeat to the fact that he refused stage makeup before going on camera.
One New York Times analyst referred to Kennedy & Nixon as the Roadrunner & Wile E. Coyote of American politics.

1961- Nineteen year old folk singer Bob Dylan made his debut in a Greenwich Village coffee house Gerde’s Folk City.

1961- Fidel Castro gave a speech to the United Nations that lasted 4 and 1/2 hours.

1962- The Beverly Hillbillies debuts. The story goes that CBS mogul William Paley disliked farm-humor type shows, and this project was greenlit behind his back, while he was on vacation.

1964- The premiere of Gilligan’s Island. The good ship Minnow was named for Newton Minnow, the FCC Chairman who first called television “A Vast Wasteland”. Actress Natalie Schafer, who played the wife of millionaire Thurston Howell III, really was a millionaire. She took the role just for the free trip to Hawaii.

1983- Stanislav Petrov saved the world. At this time, America and Russia had the nuclear capability to destroy all life on Earth 23 times over. During the deadly game of nuclear brinksmanship, there were some close-calls. This day Soviet Air-Defense Ministry officer Stanislav Petrov received an alarm that the US had fired 5 nuclear missiles at Russia. Petrov had only a few moments to decide if the alarm was real, and alert for a full counterstrike. But he reasoned, “ Why only 5?” He guessed it was a false alarm, which it was.

1987- A market research group called Q-5 tried to use a bank of computers number-crunching demographic surveys to design the ultimate safe, wholesome, politically-correct children's show. They came up with "The Little Clowns of Happytown"-. Of the 26 children's series in syndication it remained dead last in ratings, He-Man, Jem and G.I. Joe on top. The people have spoken.

1990- The Motion Picture Association changed the rating for the naughtiest movies from X to NC-17.

2001- While the ruins of the World Trade Center were still warm, Pres. George W. Bush asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to draw up military plans to attack Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with the 9-11 attacks.

2004- Florida gets hit with its fourth hurricane in six weeks. Hurricane Jean killed 6 and caused billions in damage. The last time Florida was hit by that many hurricanes was in 1886.

2020- President Trump tested positive for Covid-19. He kept it a secret and continued to meet people without a mask or other precautions. He probably gave it to the former governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, who wound up in intensive care and almost died.
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Yesterday Quiz: When you describe someone describing staging as “proscenium” what does that mean?

Answer: Proscenium comes from an old Greek word meaning the frame of a theater stage that separates the actors from the audience. The opposite of theater-in-the-round. In modern days when we say proscenium it means to stage programs straight on and flat.


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