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Feb 26, 2024
February 26th, 2024

Quiz: Many places are named Shangri La. Where was the original Shangri La?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: Pres. Trump was criticized for never using the Presidential forested retreat Camp David while in office. Why is it called Camp David?
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History for 2/ 26/2024
Birthday: King Wenceslas of Bohemia-1361, Frances Marion, Victor Hugo, Buffalo Bill Cody, Emma Destin, Levi Strauss, Jackie Gleason, Fats Domino, Betty Hutton, Johnny Cash, William Frawley, Robert Alda, Tony Randall- born Arthur Rosenberg, Erhyke Bahdu, Fred “Tex” Avery

747 B.C. In Sumer, it is the beginning of the Age of Nabronassar.

500s BC-391AD, HAPPY ANTHESTERION- the Ancient Greek holiday of Death and Spring. Dedicated jointly to Dionysus and Hermes Kthoninos- (Underworld). The Greeks believed ghosts weren’t as scary as they were annoying. If you didn’t bury the dead properly with spices and a coin in the mouth for the Chaeron the Boatman of the River Styx, they became ghosts. They would haunt you by moping around, turning up at inappropriate moments, predicting your death, bleeding on your lunch, etc. So this festival was a sort of visiting hours for the other world.
You left your door open and cooked a meal for the spirits so they could spend a day visiting their old haunts (forgive the pun). This way they would not annoy you the rest of the year. This festival was also considered a festival of flowers to usher in Spring.
Most Greeks spent all three days of the festival drunk.

393AD- Today is the feast day of Saint Porphyry, who made it rain in Gaza.

1773- Construction began in Philadelphia on the Walnut Street Jail, a Quaker alternative to physical punishment, where Penitents could reflect on their crimes- the first Penitentiary. The other innovation was individual cells instead of the large room common in colonial jails. All nations have jails but only America has penitentiaries.

1775- Leslie’s Retreat. In Boston, British General Gage sent a Colonel Leslie with a column of soldiers to Salem Mass to confiscate a store of weapons the colonists had. The Redcoats played Yankee Doodle on the march, then a form of insult to Americans. They were stopped at a river crossing by a line of heavily armed Massachusetts colonists. Leslie didn’t want a showdown, so he negotiated, while other neighbors smuggled the illegal weapons into the forest. Leslie went back empty handed. The American Revolution started a few weeks later at Lexington & Concord.

1815- Napoleon and his followers escaped his exile island of Elba and sailed to France for another try for power. He had less than a thousand followers to try to re-conquer a nation of 14 million.

1854- Composer Robert Schumann went mad and jumped off a bridge into the Rhine River. He was fished out and institutionalized. His schizophrenia grew out of advanced syphilis. He said he was not committing suicide but had thrown his wedding ring into the river to free his wife Clara of him. He then relented and leaped into the raging ice filled water to get it back.
Ironically this drama was played out during his town’s winter carnival celebrations. The tragedy of seeing his friend and teacher collapse moved young Johannes Brahms to write his First Piano Concerto. It was rumored that Clara Schuman and young Brahms had a fling as well.

1907- British Oil and Royal Shell merge to form British Petroleum- BP Company.

1929- Congress declared the Grand Tetons a national park.

1935- Adolf Hitler revealed to the world press that Germany had built the Luftwaffe, the worlds’ largest air force. This was a direct violation of the restrictions placed on Germany in the Versailles Treaty. Germany awaited the response, which was nothing.

1936- The NINIROKU JIKEN. Or the Coup of 2-26. Young Japanese officers led four regiments to attempt a takeover the government in Tokyo. They killed several government ministers, including two former prime ministers, and tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Prime Minister Okada. The coup collapsed when Emperor Hirohito declared he would personally lead his Imperial Guard against them if they would not stand down. The anti-war Prime Minister was later assassinated by another officer. Despite the coup’s failure, the surviving peace-party politicians were now too intimidated to block the Imperial Army plans for continued conquest in Asia.

1942- Walt Disney received the Irving Thalberg Award at the Academy Awards. Leopold Stokowski got a special Oscar for his work on Fantasia, Frank Churchill and Oliver Wallace won Best Score for Dumbo.

1951- The 22nd Amendment ratified limiting the President to two four-year terms. This was passed by a Republican Conservative dominated Congress. They were determined to never have something like Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four terms again.

1962- First day shooting on the first James Bond film Dr. No. The scene was in M's office and featured Bernard Lee, Peter Burton and their new discovery, Sean Connery.

1965- First day of shooting on the Beatle's second film 'Help!"

1983- Michael Jackson’s album Thriller went to #1 in the pop charts and stayed for weeks. Twenty-six year later, after Jackson’s death in 2009, Thriller again went to #1 around the world.

1985- New York Police under District Attorney Rudy Giuliani arrested most of the leaders of the New York Mafia families called The Commission. Despite this highly touted raid, the mob rebuilt, so that another big raid was necessary in 2010.

1986- Dragon Ball Z premiered in Japan

1990- Cornell Gunther, lead singer for the DooWop group the Coasters, was shot dead at a Las Vegas intersection."Yakkety-Yak, Don't Talk Back!"

1991- At a meeting in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee introduced the first Web Browser.

1991-The Highway of Death- During Gulf War One, The U.S. Air Force fighter bombers caught a long column of Iraqi army vehicles fleeing on an open desert road with no cover. No one is sure how many Iraqis were killed but easily over a thousand.

1993- THE FIRST WORLD TRADE CENTER ATTACK. Followers of Muslim extremist cleric Omar Abdel Rahman set off a large truck bomb in New York's World Trade Center. The bomb created a five-story crater in level B-2 of the underground parking structure. It killed 7 and injured over one thousand. 50,000 had to be evacuated from the twin towers for smoke inhalation. But the Twin Towers remained standing.
It has been speculated that one reason there were not even more deaths in the collapse of 9-11, was because much of the office workers experienced this 1993 attack, so they already knew exactly how to evacuate the towers quickly. President Clinton’s Justice Dept had all the perpetrators in jail within a year. When planner Ramsay Youssef was being flown out of New York to his 240 year imprisonment, the plane flew over Manhattan by the World Trade Center. He was reported to have sighed: “….should have used more dynamite.”

1996- Silicon Graphics Corp (SGI) bought Cray Research.

2002- Terminal 1 of Sacramento Airport was evacuated because of a suspicious package that might be a bomb. Turns out it contained a Mickey Mouse snow globe.

2012- In Florida, 16 year old Trayvon Martin was walking home after buying a bag of Skittles, when he was shot to death by a self-appointed vigilante George Zimmerman. Zimmerman claimed self-defense and was acquitted in a trial with heavily racist overtones.

2014- Vladimir Putin invaded the Crimea, which was then part of Ukraine.

2017- Disney's Zootopia won best animated feature Oscar, and Pixar's Piper won best animated short.
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Yesterday’s Question: Pres. Trump was criticized for never using the Presidential forested retreat Camp David while in office. Why is it called Camp David?

Answer: The Caitochin military base in the mountains of Frederick County Maryland, was converted into a Presidential retreat by Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1935. He called it ShangriLa. In the 1950s President Dwight Eisenhower renamed it after his newly born grandson David. So Camp David it has remained.


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