July 27, 2023 July 27th, 2023 |
Quiz: What is the law of eminent domain?
Yesterday’s Question Answered Below: Which movie came out first? Gulliver’s Travels, The Wizard of Oz or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?
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History for 7/27/2023
Birthdays: Confucius, Alexander Dumas fils, Enrique Granados, Hillaire Belloc, Maureen McGovern, Keenan Wynn, Leo Durocher, Peggy Fleming, Bobby Gentry, Jerry Van Dyke, Vincent Canby, Betty Thomas, Ilya Salkind, David Swift –director of the Haley Mills Disney films like The Parent Trap, Maya Rudolph is 51, Jonathan Rhys Meyers is 46, Norman Lear is 101
1214- THE BATTLE OF BOUVINES- Called the most famous battle you never heard of.
Ever since 1066 there was a sticky point of medieval etiquette, because the King of England was also Duke of Normandy, so technically a vassal of the King of France. Yet the King of England also ruled over half of France, the Angevin empire. For years nobody pushed the question. Finally, paranoid English King John I had his boy nephew Arthur of Brittany killed for fear he would try to overthrow him. King Phillip of France convened a Feudal trial over the murder, and as his feudal suzerain formally stripped King John of his French provinces of Aquitaine, Gascony, Poitou, Brittany, Vexin, Anjou and Normandy. King John naturally didn't go along with this, and the issue was decided by battle. Bouvines today is a field where the Lille Airport is.
The French victory at Bouvines doubled the size of France and cut England off from the continent of Europe. King Phillip was hailed as Phillip Augustus. King John's nickname became John Lack-land and John Softsword. Although the English tried several more times to get back Normandy, England went on to develop its own unique society, instead of being a French adjunct. King John even grew to prefer speaking English over French.
1361- Battle of Visby, King Valdemar of Denmark defeated the people of Gotland in Sweden. Its remembered because it left one of the largest mass graves of Medieval soldiers ever discovered.
1586- Sir Walter Raleigh brought the first tobacco pipe home to England from America.
Columbus had of course brought cigars and other duty-free home years earlier, but tobacco was one of the goodies that kept England interested in American colonies after everyone realized there weren’t any more gold-rich Aztec-Inca Empires to plunder. King James I called smoking a filthy and unhealthful habit, but Raleigh persisted. He even paused for a few last puffs before putting his head on the executioner’s block.
1661- England passes the Navigation Act, spurring shipbuilding, especially in the U.S colonies. The masts of the British Navy were harvested from tall New Hampshire oaks.
1667- At Sulzbach near Baden, a cannonball killed Marshal Turenne, general of Louis XIV. Turenne was one of the most brilliant commanders of the age and idolized by military strategists like Napoleon.
1861- One week after losing the Battle of Bull Run, Union Army commander Irwin MacDowell was replaced by General George B. McClellan. “Little Mac” McClellan was a brilliant organizer with a Napoleon complex a mile wide. He once kept President Lincoln and the Secretary of War cooling their heels in his drawing room while he took a nap. Never able to defeat Robert E. Lee, he would persist in writing friends letters like “Once Again God has chosen me to be the savior of My Country.”
1880- BATTLE OF MAIWAND: The Afghan leader Ayub Khan's tribesmen destroyed a British invasion force. Dr. Watson told Sherlock Holmes he was there. Afghans recall a heroic young girl named Malala who grabbed a flag and braved the bullets. While the British remember a little terrier named Bobbie who was a regimental mascot and was wounded several times. He was brought to London and received a medal from Queen Victoria, but he was later run over by a London taxi. Shoulda stayed in Afghanistan where it was safer.
1900- HUNS- In Bremerhaven, Kaiser Wilhelm II addressed a contingent of German marines about to embark for China to help in the international effort to put down the Boxer Rebellion. Caught up in the moment, Wilhelm cried: "Take no prisoners! Kill all those who fall into your hands! As the deeds of the Huns of Attila resound through history for their ruthlessness, so like the Huns, make the name of Germany live in Chinese annals for a thousand years!"
An embarrassed chancellor Von Bulow called it "The worst speech of the year and possibly of the Kaiser's career." He tried to release an edited version to the press. When the Kaiser read the edited speech, he said: My dear Bulow. You left out all the good parts." Germans got the nickname Huns for years afterwards.
1914- Austria declared war on Serbia. The first declaration of World War I.
1921- Two Toronto scientists, Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate the hormone Insulin to treat diabetes.
1921- SHAKESPEARE & CO. opened in Paris. The English language bookshop on the Seine owned by Sylvia Beach was the most famous hangout for the U.S. expatriate intellectuals. Shakespeare & Co. championed writers like James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Carlos Santayanna, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sherwood Anderson and more.
During the liberation in 1944, the shop was liberated personally by Ernest Hemingway who shot snipers off its roof. After paying his respects to Sylvia, Hemingway and his G.I. buddies went on to liberate the Ritz hotel and its famous wine cellar.
1937- The invading Japanese Army entered Beijing, then called Peiping, the former Peking. Most of the art treasures of the old Imperial City had been crated up and moved to Taipei.
1939- Nazi High Command gave secret orders for German supply ships to put to sea, fill up on supplies like fuel oil and ammunition at neutral harbors in the Americas and take their positions in the Atlantic. In effect, this is the first hostile move against Britain, four and a half weeks before the attack on Poland and the declaration of war.
1940- HAPPY BIRTHDAY BUGS BUNNY. Tex Avery’s short-"A Wild Hare”-There were several earlier prototypes of the famous rabbit, white with a different voice, but this is the short that is generally accepted as his birthday.
In the late 30s, a fashion among some animators in LA was to spend the weekend up in the High Sierras hunting. Most of them were terrible at it, and when they came back with nothing, got a lot of teasing from their buddies. At Looney Tunes, a few guys did gag drawings of designer Ben Hardaway fruitlessly hunting a rabbit. His nickname was Bugs, because he originated from Chicago, like gangster Bugs Moran. Being Bugs or Bugsy was also slang then for crazy. The gag drawings were of Hardaway and " Bug's Bunny". Bob Givens created the first official model sheet of the character.
In this short Bugs says “Whats Up Doc?” for the first time, co-opting a line uttered by Clark Gable while chewing a carrot in the 1934 Frank Capra hit “It Happened One Night”.
Interestingly, voice actor Mel Blanc was allergic to carrots, and kept a bucket nearby to spit them out after chewing. He experimented with chewing other vegetables, but he claimed nothing sounded as good as raw carrots.
1946- Writer Gertrude Stein died at age 72. Her last words to Alice B. Toklas were:" What is the Answer?" When Alice said nothing, Gertrude said:" Well then, what is the Question?"
1953- THE KOREAN WAR ENDS- The Treaty of Panmunjom. After 170,000 Americans casualties and millions of Koreans & Chinese killed, the treaty fixed the border basically where they were in 1950. The South Korean Government was outraged and considered it a betrayal, because it accepted the permanent division of Korea in to two parts. South Koreans weren’t even allowed at the negotiations. But America and China were tired of the endless death and stalemate and wanted out.
Before the treaty went into effect, South Korean President Sygmun Ree opened all POW camps and let all the North Korean troops who didn’t want to return home, run free. South Korea never signed the treaty, so it is still technically at war with the North.
1953- The Tonight Show debuted on NBC. Its first host was Steve Allen.
1965- The U.S. Government forces cigarette companies to print warning labels on the their packages about the hazards of smoking.
1977- John Lennon got his green card. Richard Nixon considered him a dangerous radical. Several times he was under 60-day notice to leave the country.
1977- Allegro Non Troppo opened in American theaters. Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto’s homage to Walt Disney’s Fantasia.
1986- Gregg Lemond became the first American to win the Tour de France bicycle race.
1993- IBM announced it would eliminate 35,000 white-collar jobs. Downsizing becomes a popular sport in corporate America. The more workers laid off, the higher your stock rose. The chairman of General Electric Jack Welch, was nicknamed “Neutron Jack” after the neutron bomb that kills off people but leaves buildings intact. He was lionized as a hero in corporate America. He wrote op-eds in the NY Times defending his practice of outsourcing American jobs.
1996- A bomb packed with nails goes off during Olympic celebrations in Atlanta Georgia. One woman was killed, and dozens injured. While hunting the bomber, the media decided to focus on an overweight security guard who lived with his mom named Richard Jewel. Ironically Jewel was the one who first alerted police to the suspicious package, and tried to evacuate the area, otherwise more people would have been killed. After weeks of merciless hounding by the press, the FBI declared Jewel completely innocent. In 2003 the police finally caught the real culprit, abortion clinic bomber and backwoods fruitcake Eric Rudolph.
2007- The Simpson’s Movie debuted.
2016- In an election speech, Donald Trump declared “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 (Hillary Clinton) emails that are missing.” According to the Mueller Probe, soon after this speech the level of Russian hacking into American sites shot up dramatically.
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Yesterday’s Question: Which movie came out first? Gulliver’s Travels, The Wizard of Oz or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?
Answer: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), The Wizard of Oz (August 1939), Gulliver’s Travels (December 1939)