Question: What does it mean when you say something with aplomb?

Yesterday’s Question Answered below: What is meant by noblesse oblige?

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History for 9/28/2023
Birthdays: Michel Caravaggio, Georges Clemenceau, Al Kapp, William Paley, Max Schmelling, Frederic Engels, Marcello Mastroianni, Moon Unit Zappa, Ed Sullivan, Sylvia Kristel, John Sayles, Arnold Stang, J.T. Walsh, Seymour Cray, Janeane Garofalo is 59, Mira Sorvino is 56, Hillary Duff is 36, Naomi Watts is 55, George Scribner, Bridgette Bardot is 89

48 B.C.- Pompey the Great, fleeing Julius Caesar after he was defeated by him, was assassinated by the Egyptians as he landed on their shore. A Roman officer named Septimius was hired to do the murder. The Egyptians thought it would please Caesar to present him with his enemy’s head. When one of Pompey's supporters was approaching the coast by ship and saw a Roman-style funeral pyre on the beach, he knew their cause was lost. He sighed:" Even thou, Pompeius Magnus?"

855AD- The Frankish Empire of Charlemagne had covered Europe from Hungary to the Pyrenees, Denmark to Sicily. This day Frankish Emperor Lothar died, and according to custom his kingdom is divided among his sons. Lothar had fought against his brothers Charles the Bald, and Louis the German to keep the empire together. By the Treaty of Verdun, Louis and Charles acknowledged the fact that Charlemagne’s Empire was just too big to manage. They broke it up, creating the kingdoms of France, Germany, and Austrasia, later Austria and Italy.

1043- Battle of LyrskogHede. Viking King Magnus the Good defeated a Baltic tribe called the Wends. Magnus psyched out the enemy by taking off his armor, and put on a loud red shirt. He then ran ahead of his charging warriors swinging a large double-bladed axe (he named it Hel) over his head in wide circles, until he crashed into the foe.
Back then, kings were kings for a reason!

1216- CORONATION OF KING HENRY III- English King John I died when an evil monk poured poisonous toad venom in his ear. His son Henry was left a situation that didn't make for a good coronation. The country was racked by civil war and invasion because of the dispute over the Magna Charter, the great document that granted broad ranging civil rights. Henry couldn't have his coronation at Westminster because London was occupied by a French army. He couldn't have the Archbishop of Canterbury preside over the ceremony because he was under house arrest in the Vatican. And to top it all off his father had lost the Iron Crown of Alfred the Great at the beach. Boy, what a downer of a party! Henry III would reign for 56 years and he would demand extravagance at all subsequent royal functions.

1542- The European Discovery of California- Juan de Cabrillo sailing up from Mexico stepped ashore at Cabrillo Point in San Diego Harbor. He had hoped that San Diego Bay would be the Straights of Anian, a mythical sea route back to the Atlantic that would be safer than Magellan’s Straights. All through the 1500’s conventional thinking was that America was just one big island with sea routes all around it. California was supposed to be the Kingdom of Califa, the Brown Amazons who wield Golden Swords.

1774- Seven months before Lexington and Concord, Pennsylvanian Joseph Galloway proposed in the first Continental Congress that the solution to America’s problems with England was to petition the mother country for dominion status:” since the colonies hold in abhorrence the idea of being independent communities.” The Dominion idea was defeated by just one vote.

1781- Washington and Rochambeau’s troops entered the siege trenches around Yorktown. They were amazed at the British army’s lack of activity. Lord Cornwallis knew he was being surrounded by land and sea for two weeks, yet he did nothing to break out of the trap. He decided to wait until his superior General Clinton would arrive with a rescue force. But Clinton was busy in New York entertaining King George’s younger son the Duke of York who was visiting America to buck up the troops morale. Clinton’s relief force showed up to Yorktown two weeks late for Cornwallis’ defeat.

1794- France’s Ecole Polytechnique first opened.

1850- Congress abolished flogging on US Naval vessels. Captains came up with other clever means of discipline like hanging a seaman from his thumbs.

1857- Wall Street collapsed and the ensuing panic created recession and unemployment.

1864- CENTRALIA RAID- Confederate Guerilla "Bloody-Bill" Anderson stops a train of 150 disarmed Union recruits and has them all killed and scalped. Because of the chaos of civil war, nobody noticed that this guy was a complete psychopath. He hung human hair from his saddle and galloped into battle weeping aloud as he fired his pistols. He would put a knot in the sash around his waist for every time he killed a Yankee. By the time Bloody Bill was finally gunned down his sash was full of knots.

1864- THE FIRST INTERNATIONALE opens. European and American trade unions came together in a mass meeting in London, with the goal of attempting to centralize the struggle for labor rights. The meeting became sidetracked by radical and anarchist politics, and soon disbanded. The Second and Third Internationales were more about communist politics. One positive accomplishment was Frenchman Pierre de Guyter wrote a melody for the meeting that became the song of revolution, "The Internationale".

1904- A woman was arrested on New York’s Fifth Ave for openly smoking a cigarette. Look how far we’ve come. Today, almost anyone can be arrested for smoking a cigarette!

1918- At Imperial German headquarters, master strategist General Erich Ludendorff monitored the reports of his armies being driven back from their final defensive lines. Ludendorff dismissed his staff, gently closed his office door, and went into a fit of hysterics- screaming that the Kaiser, the Reichstag, and the Liberals had ruined everything. Then, after regaining his composure, he calmly walked downstairs to a meeting with General Von Hindenburg and Kaiser Wilhelm. There he told them that hopes for winning World War I were now kaput. The German army was defeated, the people demand peace. Negotiations need to begin immediately.

1924 -the first airplane flight around the world landed back at its point of departure. Commander Leslie Arnold took off from Seattle with 5 converted torpedo bomber seaplanes. One crashed, another sank but the remaining three circumnavigated the globe. They completed the journey in 175 days, making 74 stops and covering 27,550 miles.

1928- For his birthday, William Paley, son of a cigar manufacturer, was given control of a little radio company called the Columbia Broadcasting System. He turned CBS into a corporate broadcasting giant and threw his support behind developing television and long playing records.

1929- USC first played UCLA in a football game. USC won 76-0. Play was suspended for a few years because of UCLA revamping its program, but resumed regularly in 1935. A sportswriter at the time wrote: "In years to come, this game will probably be one of the football spectacles of the West"

1935- Mickey Mouse short On Ice, premiered.

1950- In a media rich ceremony, General Douglas MacArthur restored South Korean President Sygmun Rhee to the presidential palace in liberated Seoul. The Marines complained that though they had done the bulk of the house-to-house fighting, they were left out of the ceremony by old Army man MacArthur. Colonel Chesty Puller looked at all the crisp Army MP’s standing guard and growled to a correspondent “ Today my First Marines took 25 combat casualties, while these little cookies were still flying out from Tokyo!”

1960- Ted Williams hit a home run at his last at-bat. Number 521.

1961- Richard Chamberlain made a name for himself by playing the handsome Dr. Kildare on TV, Raymond Massey co-starred.

1961-The Hazel TV show with Shirley Booth premiered.

1961- Tennessee Tuxedo and his Friends Show premiered. Don Adams (Get Smart) did the lead voice.

1967- Speed Racer premiered in the U.S.

1970 - After spending three days making peace between King Hussein of Jordan and Yassir Arafat of the PLO, President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt died of heart failure. Five million people in the streets of Cairo attended the funeral and took over the coffin draped in the Egyptian flag and passed it above their heads across the city to the intended mausoleum. Nasser had been the first native leader of Egypt since the last Pharaoh Nectanebo, was driven out by Persian King Cyrus in the fourth century BC.

1976- Stevie Wonder released his album Songs in the Key of Life.

1978- Pope John Paul I dies after only 34 days in office. The rumor was some sort of pills were found by his bedside. The Vatican refused any autopsy, fueling many conspiracy theories.

1987- Star Trek the Next Generation premiered.

1994- Michael Eisner cancelled plans for a theme park called Disney’s America in Northern Virginia. The idea was dropped after much resistance from local homeowners in Northern Virginia. Many of them were retired Washington D.C. power brokers, who didn’t want a huge noisy theme park next to their quiet estates.

1996- The Ambiguously Gay Duo premiered on the Dana Carvey Show. Created by SNL writer Robert Smigel. J.J. Sedelmier created the animation, Steve Carrell and Stephen Colbert did the voices.

2015- Scientists discovered liquid water on the planet Mars.
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Yesterday’s Question: What is meant by noblesse oblige?

Answer: Noblesse oblige is a French expression that means that nobility extends beyond mere entitlement, requiring people who hold such status to fulfill social responsibilities to be kind to those less fortunate.