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July 28, 2023
July 28th, 2023

Quiz: “ Shave and a Hair-cut. Two Bits.” How much in real money is two-bits?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: What is the law of eminent domain?
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History for 7/28/2023
Birthdays: Beatrix Potter, Jacqueline Kennedy, Richard Rogers, Ibn al’ Arabi- philosopher 1165, Marcel Duchamp, Rudy Vallee. Sally Struthers, Peter Duchin, Vida Blue, Joe E. Brown, Jim Davis the creator of Garfield, Frankie Yankovic the Polka King, Elizabeth Berkley, Earl Tupper the inventor of Tupperware, Hugo Chavez

450AD- Roman emperor Theodosius II died without a designated heir. Rome had already fallen so nobody was too fussed about it.

754 A.D. Pope Stephen III crowns Pepin the Short King of the Franks or French. Pepin was the son of Charles Martel and the father of Charlemagne. Pepin had asked for the Pope’s help to legitimatize his overthrow of the last king of the Merovingian Dynasty, Childeric IV, whom he had locked up in a monastery. In return he gave his military guarantee to the Vatican’s hold over a buffer state in the center of Italy. The Papal States would remain a political reality for 1,100 years until absorbed into united Italy in 1870.

1428- The Aztecs overthrew the Tepanec kingdom and begin their rise to empire. While the Inca of Peru were a homogeneous empire the Aztec ruled Mexico by conquest and subjugation of other tribes. So, when Cortez and the Spaniards arrived in 1519 they found lots of native tribes happy to help them against the Aztecs.

1540- Henry VIII married his fourth queen Catherine Howard. This was seen as an old man's autumn fancy. Henry was in his 50's and Catherine a teenager who still had the hots for boys her own age, a bad idea if she wished to keep her head.

1586 - Sir Thomas Harriott first introduced potatoes to Europe. At first people thought they were poisonous because their blossom resembled that of toxic nightshade.

1588- The English sea captains Thomas the Earl of Leicester and Sir Francis Drake were playing a game of bowls when they were told the Spanish Armada had been sighted off the coast of Cornwall. The Armada was so big, just the front row of ships reached seven miles across. Leicester coolly said:" Come Drake, there’s time to finish the game." They finished their game, then defeated the Armada the next day.

1609- Sir George Somers was shipwrecked on the uninhabited island of Bermuda.
He stayed to build a settlement, claiming the island for Britain.

1615- French explorer Samuel de Champlain reached Lake Huron.

1655- Poet, playwright and duelist Cyrano de Bergerac died in Paris. The famous play about him and his big nose was written by Edmond Rostand in 1895.

1750- Composer Johann Sebastian Bach died at age 65. He had suffered blindness in his old age but is eyesight returned shortly before his fatal stroke. One of his final compositions was a chorale prelude: "Come, Kindly Death- come for my life is dreary, and of earth I am weary, etc."
He and his wife Anna Magdelena had 17 children, and 7 more by his first wife. Many of whom became composers Johann Christian Bach, Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach, etc. Bach’s music was soon forgotten until rediscovered by Mendelssohn and others in the 1820s.. Albert Einstein’s brother Alfred said Bach’s music" almost makes one want to become Christian."

1788- Master British portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds visited the other master British portrait painter Sir Thomas Gainsborough, who was dying or cancer. They had been enemies for years, but now at the end they made up. When Reynolds left him, Gainsborough said "Goodbye until we meet in the Hereafter, Van Dyck in our company."

1794-The Thermidor Reaction, The end of the "Reign of Terror". After thousands of deaths, a group of French politicians called the Directorate overthrew Maximilien Robespierre and have him and his Jacobin followers guillotined. Robespierre didn't go quietly, a soldier named Charles Merda shot him in the face shouting Vive la Republique!" His brother Augustin Robespierre tried to escape out a window but just succeeded in breaking his hip.
At the guillotine Robespierre’s second in command Saint-Just was defiant to the end:
" I curse the dust I'm made of! I give it to you! Scatter my bones and Republics shall spring from them!" Robespierre wasn't so eloquent on the scaffold. He just bellowed in pain from the jaw wound. A woman shouted at him:" Go to Hell, Villain, and go knowing with you go the curses and maledictions of every wife, every mother!" When his head plopped into the basket Parisians cheered for 15 minutes. Then they smashed the fearsome guillotine. As dictator Napoleon was careful to keep few political prisoners and if he executed any he used a firing squad. He renamed the place where the guillotine was Place de la Concord.
In 1891 a hit play about this event opened in Paris called “Thermidor” for the month in the French Revolutionary calendar. The chef of the Café de Paris created a new seafood dish in its honor, Lobster Thermidor.

1808- The Turkish Janissaries, the royal guard, deposed Sultan Mustapha VI and replaced him with his cousin Mehmed II. The Janissaries were the real power in Istanbul at this time, keeping a supply of royal princes in the harem, to be taken out as needed. Sultans sometimes picked what Harem girl they would favor that night by how many garlic cloves she could hold in her bellybutton.

1809- Battle of Talavera. General Sir Arthur Wellesley defeated the French army in Spain and for that was made Viscount Wellington. Sir Hugh Gough, who would later earn fame conquering the Punjab in India, was young officer at the time. In this battle Gough was so grievously wounded he was left for dead on a pile of corpses. Wellington happened to be riding by and was commenting to his staff upon his bravery, when to prevent being buried alive, Hugh Gough signaled by pushing his arm up out of the corpses and waved his hat at the startled Wellington." You-hoo..M’Lord, I’m not dead yet…"

1812- General Light Horse Harry Lee was a Revolutionary War hero and had eulogized George Washington as "First in War, First in Peace, First in the Hearts of his Countrymen".
But this day the old general got involved with mob violence in Baltimore while trying to protect a publisher friend who was against "Mr. Madison’s War with the British”, what we now call the War of 1812. Despite his fame, Lee was dragged by a mob and beaten senseless, one of his eyes almost gouged out. He went to the West Indies to convalesce –and escape his creditors, but he never fully recovered. His 5-year-old son was future Civil War General Robert E. Lee.

1821- Peru declared independence from Spain.

1839- Italian revolutionary Guisseppe Fleschi wanted to assassinate the king of France, King Louis Phillipe. He rigged up a strange device that could fire 25 gun barrels simultaneously. He pointed this machine at the king during a military parade and pulled the string. All the guns went off but not one hit their intended target. Ironically, the only person killed was the elderly war minister Marshal Mortier, an old general of Napoleon's, who had spent thirty years amid shot and shell and had never even been scratched.

1841- The body of Mary Cecilia Rogers was pulled out of New York Harbor. The sensational murder of the “Beautiful Cigar Girl” inspired Edgar Allen Poe to write “The Mystery of Marie Roget.”

1858- The French photographer Nadar went up in a balloon and took the first aerial photograph.

1866- BUFFALO SOLDIERS- An act of Congress called for the creation of two all black cavalry regiments to serve in the peacetime army's frontier duty. These units, the 9th and 10th U.S. Cavalry became the famous "Buffalo Soldiers". They were so named by the Indians because an African Americans’ hair resembled the tuft of hair between a buffalo's horns to them, a symbol of strength. Buffalo Soldiers defeated the Apaches and charged up San Juan Hill right alongside Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Their captain in Cuba named John Pershing was given the nickname Blackjack Pershing not for a love of cards, but for preferring leading black troops to white.

1867- The Daughters of St. Crispin, the first women's labor organization.

1896- Happy Birthday Miami! The City of Miami incorporated.

1882- Parsifal, the last opera of Richard Wagner was produced at Bayreuth. As a way to ensure its financial solvency Wagner left instructions to never tour Parsifal but it should forever stay at Bayreuth. This lasted a few decades.

1898- Spain asks for peace talks with the United States to end their war. The Spanish American War began in April and ended in December.

1914- THE RUSH INTO WORLD WAR I ACCELERATED. Britain suggested an international conference to settle Austria’s grievances against Serbia. Austrian Foreign minister Berchtold informed the British ambassador that it was too late for mediation because Austria had already declared war. The German Kaiser was having second thoughts but slipped out of Berlin to go yachting to avoid the Russian ambassador who was trying to make him commit to discussing peace. Part of the muddle that aggravated the meltdown of diplomacy, was many of the top European statesmen were on their summer holiday while this crisis deepened.

1932- The movie White Zombie with Bela Lugosi opened.

1932- THE BATTLE OF ANACOSTIA FLATS- Capitol Hill was surrounded by 20,000 Bonus Marchers- unemployed World War I veterans and their families who desperately marched to Washington to demand help from the ravages of the Depression and their promised back pay.
On this day, President Hoover's response was to order the US Army to drive them away by force. Gen. Douglas MacArthur with his aides Patton and Eisenhower send tanks, saber wielding cavalry and bayonet armed troops to break up the homeless peoples dwellings. Facing them on the makeshift barricades eyewitnesses saw a black man waving a large American flag and Charles Frederick Lincoln, a direct descendant of Abraham Lincoln. These poor veterans and their families had come from as far as Honolulu. No record was kept of how many were killed or died on the walk home.
Pres. Hoover was jubilant that order was restored, and the public was jubilant when they voted him out of office later that year.

1933- The first singing telegram. It was delivered to singer Rudy Valee by Western Union operator appropriately named Lucille Lipps.

1945- Congress endorses United Nations Charter. Congress' refusal to join the League of Nations in 1919 help doom that organization.

1945-A B-25 Mitchell bomber flying in thick fog struck the 78th floor of the Empire State Building in New York City. It killed a dozen people, including some when one of its 1,500 lb. engines shot through the building and down onto 33rd street. One woman in an elevator had the cables cut and fell 80 stories at 200 miles an hour to the basement. Miraculously she lived.
Despite the devastation, the building did not collapse but stayed sound. As a result, US and World air traffic control standards were stiffened, air traffic controllers finally got the power to order planes down, and large planes are kept away from flying over large urban areas.

1948- In honor of the death of D.W. Griffith, all Hollywood studios observed three minutes of silence.

1948- The Premiere of " Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" For you hardcore film trivia fans this film is the only other time than the original Tod Browning movie that Bela Lugosi played Count Dracula on film.

1954- The film On The Waterfront opened. Producer Sam Spiegel originally wanted Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly as the leads. But Kelly took Hitchcock’s Rear Window instead, and Marlon Brando and Eva Marie-Saint became available, much to the annoyance of Sinatra.

1958- HAPPY LEGO DAY! Danish toymaker Gotfried Kirk Christiansen patented the interlocking plastic bricks. The LEGO empire began.

1965- VIETNAM- President Lyndon B. Johnson had been wrestling with a problem since June 5th. In Vietnam, the war against the Communist guerrilla Viet Cong was going badly. Strategic bombing of the North has failed to stop incursions in the South and the latest government in Saigon had fallen and been replaced by a group of generals led by Ngyen Kao Key. Johnson had to decide to pull, out or expand US commitment. Retired presidents Truman and Eisenhower advised him against going in.
This day, at a routine Friday 12:30 PM press briefing, calculated to not be well attended, LBJ made the announcement that US forces in Vietnam would be expanded dramatically from 75,000 to 125,000- eventually to 450,000 by the end of 1967. What LBJ wasn’t saying was he had now decided that US ground troops would carry the bulk of the fighting. Not just to prop up the South Vietnamese army, but defeat the North Vietnamese Army, without ever invading North Vietnam. He would still try to do his Great Society Programs while running a trillion-dollar war that all his experts doubted was winnable.
This one decision destroyed Johnson’s Presidency and cracked the thriving post war economy creating recession and domestic political turmoil.

1971- Photographer Diane Arbus probed increasingly darker subject matter, circus freaks, severe birth defects. This day she committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, then slitting her wrists.

1978- National Lampoons Animal House directed by John Landis opened.

1987- Disney's Oilspot and Lipstick premiered at Siggraph Anaheim. Directed by Michael Cedeno. It was an early experimental all CGI film.

1998- In Afghanistan the Taliban ordered mass destruction of television sets. They also forbade the Internet and shaved the heads of their national soccer team for daring to wear shorts.

1999- Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco declared today Marilyn Chambers Day, in honor of the San Francisco native, and star of classic porn like Behind the Green Door.

2061- The next predicted appearance of Halley’s Comet.
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Yesterday’s Question: What is the law of eminent domain?

Answer: The state reserved to itself the right to seize your land for the creation of large public works, like the building of railroads or roadways. They can’t always snake around everyone’s private property. James Madison added it into the Constitution as part of the Fifth Amendment. Eminent Domain superseded any legal deeds, the state gave you monetary compensation. And if you were lucky, it might actually be what the land was really worth.


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