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April 4, 2023
April 4th, 2023

Quiz: What was the difference between a Pilgrim and a Puritan?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: Just where exactly is Silicon Valley?
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History for 4/4/2023
Birthdays: Roman Emperor Caracalla, Eadweard Muybridge, Maya Angelou, Frances Langford, Irv Spence-Tom & Jerry animator, Gil Hodges, Arthur Murray, Muddy Waters-born McKinley Morganfield, Cloris Leachman, Dorothea Dix, Elmer Bernstein, Bijan, Bea Benaderet, Heath Ledger, Robert Downey Jr is 58, Barry Pepper, Craig T. Nelson is 79, Hugo Weaving is 63

If you were a Roman, today is the first day of the Megaleasian Festival in honor of Lunus the Moon god. Party! Par-tee!

In China, today is Ching-Ming Tomb Sweeping Day.

527AD- Byzantine Emperor Justin named his nephew Justinian as his successor.

636AD- Today is the Feast Day of Saint Isadore of Seville, the Patron Saint of the Internet. Don’t believe me? Check this out. http://factually.gizmodo.com/the-patron-saint-of-the-internet-is-isidore-of-seville-1595023500

896 A.D.-THE SYNOD HORRENDIUS-One of the more bizarre incidents in Vatican history. Bishops Stephen and Formosan hated each other. When Formosan became pope Stephen had to go into hiding. After Formosan's death Stephen became pope but was unsatisfied that he couldn't strike back at his old enemy. So, Pope Stephen had Formosan's tomb opened, the corpse sat up in a chair, and put on trial for heresy.
The cross examination was pretty strange, the prosecutor said things like: "His very silence is admittance of his guilt!" The dead body was convicted, excommunicated, tossed around by a Roman mob, then thrown in the Tiber. Pope Stephen VI later became the first pope to be killed in bed with someone's wife.

1561- A strange show in the sky of red discs and crosses was reported over Nuremberg Germany. Perhaps an early UFO sighting?

1581- Queen Elizabeth I visited the Golden Hind, the ship which Francis Drake sailed around the world. The 'Great Pirate of the Unknown Seas" had plundered huge treasure ships and drove Spanish Colonial authorities crazy. The Spanish Ambassador to London demanded the pirate Drake lose his head, but Queen Elizabeth had a different use in mind for her sword- she knighted the Devon innkeeper's son.
The Golden Hind was kept in a prize anchorage for decades until age and dry rot caused it to fall to pieces. Ben Johnson wrote poems about Sir Francis Drake. Shakespeare's island of wizards in the Tempest may have been modeled on Drake's accounts of the strange stormy islands of Tierra Del Fuego in the Straights of Magellan.

1704 -British Admiral Sir Cloudsley Shovel captured The Rock of Gibraltar from Spain. Britain still owns it today, which really annoys Spain.

1841- PRESIDENT WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON DIED AFTER ONLY 31 DAYS IN OFFICE. “Old Tippecanoe” caught pneumonia giving his inauguration address in icy drizzle. When Vice President Tyler got word of the President's death, he was playing marbles with some children, and was about to get his knuckles rapped for losing. No U.S. President had ever died in office before, and no one knew if the Vice President was now only a caretaker until special elections, or was he the president for the next for years? John Tyler set the rule by staying President for four full years. Many people couldn't stand him. Instead of “Your Excellency, they called him "Your Accidency".

1850- The City of Los Angeles was incorporated under U.S. law.

1865- As the bedraggled Army of Northern Virginia retreated from Richmond, Robert E. Lee had a slim hope that if he could put distance between himself and the pursuing Union armies he might be able to join together the remaining Confederate forces in the Carolinas and keep fighting. These hopes were dashed this day. When Lee’s army reached Amelia Courthouse, the waiting trainloads of promised food turned out to be only ammunition. There weren’t enough trains to convey his men. Lee lost an entire day resting his army while scavenging for food. This allowed Grants Yankee army to catch up and slowly surround him. Lee remarked bitterly that while his men starved, the Confederate Congress could only “debate and shell peanuts!”

1865- LINCOLN IN RICHMOND- Meanwhile against the wishes of his bodyguards that it was still too dangerous, Abraham Lincoln toured the newly captured Confederate capitol of Richmond. Most of the white population had fled the smoldering city, but crowds of jubilant black slaves pulled his coach and cheered that the Day of Jubilee had arrived. One old black man kneeled to him. Lincoln raised him up “Father, you no longer have to kneel to any other man, only God. You are Free. Free as air.” Lincoln walked over to the Confederate Executive Mansion and sat in Jefferson Davis’ chair, putting his feet up on his desk. He then visited the family of rebel General George Pickett of the famous Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. The Pickett’s were friends of Abe and Mary Lincoln before the war and Abe enjoyed bouncing Pickett’s baby boy on his knee.

1900- In Brussels, a protester shouting 'Vive Les Boers!" fired four shots at the Prince of Wales and Princess Augusta (Future King Edward VII). They all miss. He was protesting the British war on the whites Afrikanners of South Africa. Queen Victoria survived six assassination attempts in her lifetime.

1901- Russian author Leo Tolstoy broke with the Russian Orthodox Church when he sent a letter to the Patriarch this day declaring that prayers offered to Jesus Christ were “the worst type of sacrilege”.

1924- On a dry lakebed in California, Tom Milton ran a Miller race car at 151 mph.

1932- Louisiana Senator Huey Long told Congress that 80% of America’s wealth was controlled by 20% of its population. According to Business Week, today 80% of America’s wealth was owned by 1% of its population, and the top 150 richest people on Earth collectively own 50% of all the total wealth of the planet.

1933- The U.S. Government orders all citizens to turn in their remaining gold dollar coins.

1933- The U.S. airship Akron crashed in a storm, killing the crew and an admiral.

1942- 'THE HUMP' -When the Japanese army overran Rangoon and cut the Burma Road, Allied forces helping Chiang Kai Shek 's Chinese armies and the Flying Tigers were suddenly without supplies. Army Air Corps General Olds and his men begin the daily supply flights of transports from India over the Himalayas to China, or 'Over the Hump'.

1944- During World War II a South African reconnaissance plane flew over the Auschwitz Concentration Camp and took photos. When they are analyzed in London, the intelligence boys declared it to be a synthetic rubber plant.

1952- CARTOON COMMIES- Nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell accused the owners of a New York commercial animation studio, Tempo Productions of Communist sympathies. One of the owners was Disney Layout man Dave Hilberman, who was a union organizer and was the only artist personally named by Walt Disney to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The F.B.I. began investigating Tempo and their Madison Avenue clients quickly pulled their business. Tempo closed, laying off 50 artists. Mr. Clean, Markie Maypo and the Hamm’s Beer Bear were once again safe from Red subversion.

1954- Arturo Toscanini, who had been making music since the 1880’s, conducted his final concert. Toscanini’s studio space at NBC is today the set of the Saturday Night Live TV show.

1958- Screen goddess Lana Turner and her gangster lover Johnny Stompanato had a violent argument that ended when Turner’s teenage daughter plunged a kitchen knife into his chest. She was acquitted as justifiable homicide. Rumors maintain the daughter was covering for her mother’s own actions. It was whispered Hollywood society ladies had nicknamed Stompanato’s willy Oscar for its size.

1967- Van Nuys premiere head shop Captain Ed’s Heads & Highs first opened for business.

1967- In a speech at the Riverside Baptist Church in Manhattan Rev Dr. Martin Luther King announced his opposition to the Vietnam War. This put him in direct conflict with the heretofore friendly Lyndon Johnson administration. Whereas LBJ had Dr. King and the Southern Christian leadership up to the White House often, and had done much to fight discrimination, the volatile LBJ now called Dr. King “that backwoods n--- preacher!”

1967- Snoopy’s little bird friend Woodstock debuted in the Peanuts comic strip.

1968- THE SETTLERS MOVEMENT- The Israeli government was trying to sort out what to do about the West Bank territories conquered in the Six Day War. This day a small group of ultra-conservative Jews called Gush Eymunim moved into a hotel the Arab city of Hebron and declared themselves a settlement. Minister Moshe Dayan wanted Jewish settlements, but he wanted them to be alongside Arab communities, not displacing them. This was the first provocation by conservative settlers that would bedevil Palestinian-Israeli relations for the next fifty years.

1968- DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING ASSASSINATED. The great civil rights leader was struck in the head by a .30 cal bullet fired from a high-powered rifle, while he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. He was 39. Dr. King and his team had been clowning around that morning, throwing pillows at one another. On the balcony Dr King’s last words were teasing Jesse Jackson for not being dressed properly for going out to dinner. Jesse was wearing a fashionable turtleneck instead of suit and tie.
Dr. Benjamin Hooks ran to the phone to get help, but the switchboard was not working. The motel manager's wife who usually ran the switchboard had seen the shooting, and the shock had given her a heart attack. She died the next day. The Memphis police had always surrounded King's party with at least seven officers whenever he was in town. For some unknown reason that morning they were ordered to stand back at least seven blocks. It was the one-year anniversary of the speech where he declared his opposition to the Vietnam War.
A man named James Earl Ray was later apprehended in England, confessed to the shooting and was given a life sentence. He later recanted his confession and said the FBI coerced him, and he was taking orders from a mysterious contact man named Raul. James Earl Ray died in 1998. The King family reopened the investigation and a civil court ruled that Dr. King was probably killed by a conspiracy. When F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover heard about the assassination he did what he did the day John Kennedy was shot, he spent the day at the racetrack celebrating.

1968- When news of Martin Luther King's assassination got out, 175 US cities suffered urban rioting. In Indianapolis, Sen. Bobby Kennedy was scheduled to go speak to a mostly black crowd. His police escort refused to follow him out of fear. Kennedy went anyway. He told the audience the terrible news, made a reference to his own murdered brother, then proceeded to quote them poetry from the Greek writer Aeschylus "We must tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world." The crowd wept and prayed together. Indianapolis was quiet that night.

1973- The World Trade Center Twin Towers first opened to the public.

1984- In George Orwell’s novel 1984, this is the day Winston Smith started a secret diary and first wrote the dangerous thought-crime “Down With Big Brother”.

1987- Ronald Reagan’s hand-picked FCC voted to repeal The Fairness Doctrine, which mandated news services report unbiased news, reflecting all opinions. This set the stage for the highly partisan news reporting of today.

1988- Arizona governor Evan Meacham was impeached, the first US governor to get the boot in 60 years. Meecham had made Arizona the only state in the U.S. to refuse the Martin Luther King holiday. Meecham had once referred to African Americans as “pickaninees” and had ordered a list drawn up of all state employees who were gay.

1994- Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark started Netscape. Clark also founded Silicon Graphics, Inc.

2007- Bob Clark, the director of the holiday classic film A Christmas Story, was killed in a head on car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. He was 67.

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Yesterday’s question- Just where exactly is Silicon Valley?

Answer: In California, between San Francisco and San Jose along the southern bay. Centered around Stanford University, who owned much of the land. In the 1930s the University adopted a policy of discounted leasing land for company startups, provided the new companies focused on high tech. Towns include Palo Alto, San Mateo, Mountainview, Menlo Park, Redwood City.


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