Yesterday, The National Rifle Association, attacked the Walt Disney Company for its policy of not allowing park employees to bring their guns to work.

The late, great, Ollie Johnston told me once:" There is more humor in the streets than you could ever write. You just have to listen."

Amazing.


Yo Thumper, you got any Glock 9mm hollowpoint... .

final color of engineers booth.


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My early concept for Beth's office

the Premiere of Click & Clacks As the Wrench Turns is tomorrow!
Good News!If we do have to premiere at 10pm in NY and LA, at least the Daily Show and Colbert are still on vacation!!

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Quiz: The California town of Goleta ( north of Santa Barbara) is in the news because of the brush fires. But Goleta has a connection with events in World War Two. What is it?

Yesterday’s question answered below: Which American leaders were given these Indian names? A- Son of the Morning Star. B-Sharp Knife, C-Dark Eagle, D- Burner of Villages.
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History for 7/8/2008
B-Dazes: Jean de LaFontaine the creator of Puss & Boots, John D. Rockefeller Sr, Nelson Rockefeller, Kathe Kollwitz, Count Ferdinand Von Zeppelin, Louis Jordan, Billy Eckstine, Steve Lawrence, Percy Grainger, Cynthia Gregory, Phillip Johnson, Kim Darby, Marty Feldman, Roone Arledge, Kevin Bacon, Billy Crudup, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, Angelica Huston, Raffi

951AD Happy Birthday Paris!. The Roman city of Lutetia-muddy place- was built on the site of a Gaulish village inhabited by a tribe called the Parisi. This date was when the Franks established a castle on the present day site of the Louvre. Despite Viking raids and floods the city slowly began to grow.

1386- The Battle of Sembach- Leopold of Austria discovers why you leave the Swiss alone and let them stay neutral. His army of knights were intent on chastising this land of uppity goat herders and was destroyed instead. They at first held off the raging Schwyzers with a wall of spears. But then legend has it that great hero and really big schwyzer Arnold von Winkelreid shouted "Brothers! Take care of my wife and children!" and gathered up a dozen enemy spear points and shoved them into his own chest. As he pulled them down with him that opened a gap in the Austrian line that the Swiss swarmed through to victory.
Duke Leopold was found in a ditch with a battleaxe stuck in his face and two more rammed up his ass. The Hapsburg family, who entombed him a huge cathedral, made him the martyred saint of the family.

1822- Poet Percy Shelley drowned when a storm sank his yacht the Simon Bolivar off Leghorn, Italy. His body was cremated but his heart was embalmed in lead and presented to his wife Mary Wollenstonecraft Shelley. Lord Byron swam offshore during the cremation so they could observe Shelley's spirit rising to Heaven.

1835- The Liberty Bell cracked. It rang for the Declaration of Independence and was being rung for the death of Chief Justice John Marshall.

1838- THE TRAIL OF TEARS- Cherokee Removal Treaty goes into effect. President Andrew Jackson, Indian name: "Sharp Knife", forced the entire Cherokee Nation to evacuate Georgia, Alabama and Tennessee. 17,000 people were marched to Oklahoma. One third died along the way. The token amounts paid for their land could not help their heartbreak at leaving their ancestral home. Large warriors would touch or kiss trees as they trudged away to the amusement of the soldiers. The Supreme Court ruled the harassment of the Cherokee Nation was unconstitutional but President Jackson ignored them. Jackson said:" Chief Justice Marshal has ruled, now let him try to enforce it." One Georgia man later said:" I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered in the thousands, but the Cherokee Removal was the cruelest work I ever knew."

1889-The Wall Street Journal first published.

1889- The last great bareknuckle championship fight. John L. Sullivan defeated Jack Kilrain in Mississippi for a purse of $20,000. After 60 rounds one of Sullivan’s eyes was shut, he was covered with welts and blood was showing above his shoes. When his manager recommended declaring a draw Sullivan said:" Hell no. I want to kill him!" He won after 75 rounds. Sullivan was one of the first flamboyant prizefighters and the first American fighter to declare himself Champion of the World. He’d travel from town to town building his legend:"I’m John L. Sullivan and I can lick any man in the house!"

1896- William Jennings Bryan"the Son of the Plains", electrifies listeners at the Democratic Convention with a speech denouncing the gold standard: "You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold!" Whether federal currency should be backed by gold or cheaper silver divided Americans along class lines. Modern people only recall Bryan as the attorney Clarence Darrow made look silly in the Scopes "Monkey Trials". But Bryan was a fiery populist orator and strong rogue political force who made several tries at the Presidency. He was a Ralph Nader with Pat Robertson and some Ethel Merman thrown in.

1907-The First Ziegfield Follies, staged on the roof of the New York Theater, now called the New Amsterdam Theater.

1911- Burbank incorporated as a city.

1918- A young American ambulance driver serving in Italy during the First World War gets badly wounded by shrapnel fire. His name was Ernest Hemingway. His long recovery and love affair with his nurse he later worked into his novel "A Farewell To Arms".

1922- Horn player Louis Armstrong left his hometown of New Orleans to go to Chicago and play in King Oliver’s Jazz band.

1932- THE DEPRESSION STOCK MARKET HITS ROCK BOTTOM - free falling since the Great Crash of October 1929, and compounded by the Harley-Smoot trade act of 1931, which started a trade war that killed off overseas exports. From a Dow Jones high in the Roaring Twenties of 262, today’s average hit bottom at 58 (today the Dow is routinely over 10,000 ).Only 720,278 shares exchanged. One local club wallpapered the bar with unsold bond certificates. The Bond market lost around ten million in value, Total output of heavy industries like steel production were working at only 12% of capacity. 20% of the U.S. workforce was unemployed, 50% of New York City, 80% of industrial cities like Detroit and Toledo. Top Wall Street securities firms like Morgan and Salomon Brothers encouraged "Apple Days"- one day a week for brokers to go on the street to sell apples to supplement their income. One songwriter wrote a song about the unpopularity of stock traders: " Please Don't Tell Mother I Work on Wall Street, She Thinks I Play Piano in a WhoreHouse. " The just completed Empire State Building was nicknamed the "Empty State Building." because there were no businesses to move into it. Yet President Herbert Hoover could only spout unrealistic slogans like "the economy is fundamentally sound" and "prosperity is just around the corner." Mt. Rushmore sculptor Judson Borglum said: "If you put a flower in Hoover's hand, it would wilt !"

1932- Tod Brownings disturbing movie "Freaks" about a family of circus sideshow performers, premiered. One of Us, One of Us!

1951- The first meeting of American, United Nations, North Korean and Chinese officials to discuss peace terms to end the Korean War. The talks dragged on for months and eventually signed as the Treaty of Panmunjom. At this first meeting the reds and allies noted little psychological victories. The North Koreans drove up in a captured American jeep. When the chief Communist negotiator General Nom Il wanted a smoke he pulled out a Russian cigarette. But after striking 14 Peoples Democratic Chinese matches he still couldn’t get it to light. So he was finally forced to light his cigarette by borrowing from the Americans a good old capitalist Zippo lighter.

1961-YEAH, BABY YEAH!! Upon arriving at Cliveden, Estate of Lord and Lady Astor, Britains Secretary for War Sir John Profumo was introduced to Christine Keilor, a 19 year old party girl swimming nude in the pool. Profumo and Lord Astor chased Christine around the pool trying to pull her towel away while bejeweled guests arrived for a party. It was bad enough that the married Profumo started a hot affair with Christine but also her manager Stephen Ward was connected to an East German Communist spy ring. The Profumo Scandal brought down the MacMillan Tory Government in 1963.

1969 - Thor Heyerdahl and his raft Ra II landed in Barbados 57 days from Morocco. He was trying to prove ancient mariners could have traveled from Africa to the Americas using a ship made from papyrus reeds. It also may explain the phenomenon that some Egyptian mummies have been found to have traces of tobacco and chocolate in their stomachs.

1978- 100,000 rallied in Washington D.C. in support of the Equal Rights Amendment- the ERA.

1982- Walt Disney's TRON- the first film claiming to be made chiefly with computer graphics premiered. It only was about 20 minutes of actual CGI and the computer images were still printed onto traditional animation cells and painted, but it was still a significant achievement. Remember in 1981 there were no off the shelf graphics software. Everything written was proprietary. Wavefront wouldn't exist for several years and Parallel processing didn't really get going until '84. Warping or morphing was about 4 years away in the future. The big deal at the time was that MAGI had just solved the "hidden Line" problem. Modern artists making KUNG FU PANDA or WALL-E would shake their heads at this, because now this is all so basic that it isn't even thought about anymore. But back then even a slight change in design could take days to compute.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Which American leaders were given these Indian names? A- Son of the Morning Star. B-Sharp Knife, C-Dark Eagle, D- Burner of Villages.

Answer a- George Armstrong Custer, B- Andrew Jackson, C-Benedict Arnold, D- George Washington. Washington got that name because as President in 1794 he sent the army to drive out the Iroquois Five Nations Confederacy out of New York State and burn their villages.

click to enlarge, Early pass on the garage kitchen area.



The news articles keep rolling in on CLICK & CLACK'S AS THE WRENCH TURNS

Here is today's from CNN.com

http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/TV/07/07/apontv.click.clack.ap/index.html

Also check out the Washington Post from yesterday and this week's TIME Magazine.

Hmm..all this hype...dis show better be good!

Quiz: Which American leaders were given these Indian names? A- Son of the Morning Star. B-Sharp Knife, C-Dark Eagle, D- Burner of Villages.

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Italian writer Umberto Eco once said:” English is a confusing language. If a He is a Him, why isn’t a She a Shim? Why is it Her? So, how do we answer Signore Eco?
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History for 7/7/2008
Birthdays: Gustav Mahler, Satchel Page, Ringo Starr is 68, Doc Severinsen, Robert Heinlein, William Kuntsler, Gian Carlo Menotti, Ken Harris, Shelley Duva is 58, Ted Cassidy-Lurch in the Adams Family, Michelle Kwan, David McCullough, Pierre Cardin, and according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle this is the birthday of Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick Dr. John Watson

750 BC -? This was the Roman Feast of Quirinus, then day when Romulus the founder of Rome was taken up to heaven in a cloud and assumed his place beside the Gods as the deified god Quirinus.

1569- Sir Francis Drake boldly sailed into the harbor of Cartagena, the largest port on the Spanish Main, and carried off a treasure galleon.

1607- The English anthem God Save the King first sung in honor of King James Ist.

1666- King Charles II and his court quit London in the wake of the Great Plague.

1814- Sir Walter Scott published his first novel Waverly. He wrote it under a pseudonym because he worried it would damage his reputation as a poet.

1865- Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators were all hanged Lewis Payne, George Atzenrodt and David Herold. Even weeping old Mary Surrat, who's involvement is still debatable. She may have known of some kind of plot but all they could prove was she the landlady of the boardinghouse where the plotters met. Everyone expected that a last minute amnesty would come from President Johnson but the President stayed silent and she was hanged with the others. Mary Surrat was the first woman executed in the U.S. Large Lewis Payne’s neck didn’t break at first and he kicked and danced in the air for five minutes before he choked. General Dan Sickles said afterwards "We do not want to know their names anymore." The large gallows was then broken up and the splinters sold off as souvenirs to tourists.

1895-THE FIRST SUNDAY COMICS - The first modern comic strip Hogan’s Alley featuring "The Yellow Kid" by Richard Felton Outcault, debuts in the Sunday edition of Pulitzer's New York World. The strip was so popular it gave the name "Yellow Journalism" to the sensationalist tabloid press. Comic strips at this time became the mass media of the day. For people who couldn’t afford a theater ticket and couldn’t yet speak English, the little characters in the penny papers were extremely popular and made celebrities out of cartoonists like Outcault, Bud Selig George McManus and Winsor McCay. Richard Outcault later inventing the backend deal when he asked for a percentage of all sales from his new comic strip "Buster Brown and his dog Tige"

1943-BANZAI- Climax of the Battle of Saipan- 4,300 Japanese troops stream out of the jungle in a massed Banzai charge on U.S. Marine positions. Fighting devolved into insane hand to hand combat with Samurai swords and rifle-bayonets, more reminiscent of the Civil War than World War Two. One of the Marines wounded in the attack was future movie star Lee Marvin, nicknamed Captain Marvel by his buddies for his gung-ho attitude. Almost all the Japanese were killed. Later in a cave the Marines found the bodies of General Saito and Admiral Nagumo, the fleet commander at the Pearl Harbor attack. They had committed hari kari when the attack had failed.

1947-THE ROSSWELL INCIDENT- An official news report from the U.S. Airforce 509th bomber command -the same unit that dropped the Hiroshima bomb- stated they had recovered the wreckage of a UFO in the New Mexico desert near Rosswell and were examining it. The next day the commanding general of the 8th Air Force flew to Rosswell and stated to the press that the earlier report was in error and it was only a downed weather balloon. The wreckage was removed under heavy-armed guard and complete secrecy was then imposed and maintained to this day. The communications officer Major Jesse Marcey who posed for an official photo showing him with the balloon wreckage later told his son it was faked. Marcey, who died in 1967 and his adjutant Lt. Haut still stick to the original version of their story. Lt. Haut also claimed the base commander Col. William Blanchard thought it was UFO debris. This report coming only two weeks after the first modern sighting of "flying saucers" over Mt. Reynier in Oregon sparked the Flying Saucer craze that gripped America throughout the 1950’s. In 1994 and 1997 the Pentagon tried to explain away the story by saying at Rosswell and the base Area 51 they were experimenting with high altitude balloons carrying sniffer devices to detect Russian nuclear tests and the rumored alien remains recovered were test dummies. But then the military just added to the mystery when they still refused any access to the mysterious Area 51. When asked now that the Cold War was over what is done there the Army spokesman said : "Uh, Secret Stuff...."

1949-"I’m Friday"- The program Dragnet first debuted on radio. Jack Webb conceived, wrote, directed and starred in the show. His hardest job was urging actors "not to act" but to speak the lines normally like the average person does.

1960- First demonstration of a practical laser beam. In Russia it had been theorized since 1951. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation or LASER.

1967- Vivien Leigh, the actress who played Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, died in a mental institution at age 53.

1967 - Beatles' "All You Need is Love" is released. In 2002 for her Jubilee Queen Elizabeth II requested it because it was one of her favorite songs.

1967 – The Doors' "Light My Fire" hits #1.

1981- Judge Sandra Day O’Connor becomes the first woman nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.

1982- A drunken lunatic named Michael Fagin with a bleeding left hand broke into Buckingham Palace, got past all the security and startled Queen Elizabeth in her bed. Her personal bodyguard was out walking the royal dogs. The Queen kept the man engaged in conversation at the foot of her bed until guards dragged him away.

2005- Four Al Qaeda terrorist bombs exploded in the London subway Tube and a doubledecker bus, killing 50 and injuring one thousand..

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Yesterday’s Quiz: Italian writer Umberto Eco once said:” English is a confusing language. If a He is a Him, why isn’t a She a Shim? Why is it Her? So, how do we answer Signore Eco?

Answer: The discrepancy is because of the conflux of Danish and Saxon in English.
The Old Norse- Dutch ( Frisan) word for female is zij or sio, in Old Saxon hjo or heo. They all got mixed up in the Northumbrian stew and this problem is the result.

Another article about Click & Clack, this one from Dallas Texas-

http://www.dentonrc.com/sharedcontent/dws/drc/localnews/stories/DRC_Brave_Combo_0706.2984932a.html

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Quiz: Italian writer Umberto Ecco once said:” English is a confusing language. If a He is a Him, why isn’t a She a Shim? Why is it Her? So, how do we answer Signore Ecco?

Yesterday’s questions answered below: What is meant by keel-hauling?
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History for 7/6/2008
Birthdays: John Paul Jones, Czar Nicholas Ist the Iron Czar, Frida Kahlo, Della Reese
Nancy Reagan, Ned Beatty is 71, Sylvester Stallone is 61, Merv Griffin, Janet Leigh, Bill Haley, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Sebastian Cabot, James Bordrero, The Dalai Lama, LaVerne Andrews of the Andrews Sisters, Geoffrey Rush is 57, President George W. Bush is 62, 50 Cent is 33

Happy St. Fermin's Day, the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Remember when running the trick to it is keeping ones self directly in front of the bull’s head. This area between his eyes is his blind spot.

83 B.C. Sulla the Dictator stormed Rome and defeated the supporters of Marius. This first civil war amongst powerful Roman factions is known as the" Wars of Marius & Sulla" or “the Social Wars”. No one had ever dared take soldiers into Rome itself and it spelled the death of the democratic Republic. Sulla published lists of hundreds of political enemies called the Proscribed. If you were on that list anybody could kill you without trial or appeal. Even a slave could kill his master and get the reward. Sulla had on his staff a kid who recently changed sides. His name was Gaius Julius Caesar.

1685- THE BATTLE OF SEDGEMOOR AND THE BLOODY ASSIZES.-The Illegitimate son of King Charles II, the Duke of Monmouth, tried to overthrow his Catholic uncle King James II with the help of many Protestant Englishmen, angry that the Catholic monarch was planning to subvert the liberties won by Cromwell in the English Civil War. This day Monmouth hightailed it for the hills while his army was cut to pieces in battle.
After the battle the punishment of the rebels under Judge Jefferies was so brutal it was nicknamed the Bloody Assizes. An assize was another name for circuit court. Hundreds were beheaded, tongues cut out, limbs branded with hot irons then transported as slaves to the Bahamas and Barbados to cut sugar cane. White sugar was a new delicacy sweeping the nation. To this day many white skinned Bahamians can claim descendant from these condemned rebels. In the 1890s Rafael Sabatini wrote a novel about one slave who escaped to become a pirate named Captain Blood, later made into an Errol Flynn movie.

180-? THE IMMORTAL BELOVED LETTERS.- Composer Ludwig van Beethoven never married but not for want of trying. The bad tempered loner loved several women but never had a serious relationship. After his death several love letters were found. The letters written this day were of a supremely passionate nature where he begged some unknown woman to keep an appointment with him at some unstated rendezvous in Hungary. “Though still in bed my thoughts go out to you, My Immortal Beloved…” The letters were never sent and have no addresses or names. Who is this Immortal Beloved Beethoven yearns for?

1853- In Ripon, Wisconsin Free-Soil Whigs and other lefty radicals form the new Republican Party. They were called the Anti-Nebraska Men, then Black-Republicans for awhile because of their strong anti-slavery stance.

1885- Louis Pasteur gave the first inoculation to cure rabies.

1886 - Horlick's of Wisconsin offers the1st malted milk to public. It began as an attempt to create a new type of baby formula.

1895- A businessman named William Sydney Porter returned from Honduras where he had fled after being indicted for embezzlement. He had returned because he had learned of the illness of his wife. Porter was sent to prison and while there began writing little stories which he later published under the name O. Henry.

1906- THE GREAT FUNERAL OF JOHN PAUL JONES- The heroic sea captain of the American Revolution died a bitter old man in Paris in 1792. Ill and forgotten, he had no friends. Writer Thomas Carlyle said Jones “resembled an empty wineskin.” The few mourners at the little Paris cemetery were he was interred were all admiring Frenchmen and children he had given coins to on the street during his walks through the Luxembourg Gardens. The American ambassador skipped his funeral because of a dinner party he didn’t want to miss. A Frenchman named Simonot had embalmed Jones in brandy in a lead sealed coffin because he figured the American government wanted to take him home. He was amazed when they were too cheap to cover the transport fees. Jones’ sword and medals were pawned to pay for the funeral. A century later America had become a great power. Scientists set about to look for John Paul Jones remains. They discovered the lead casket in Paris’ Old Protestant Cemetery. The brandy embalming kept him so well preserved they could do an autopsy on the body. Jones had died of bronchial pneumonia and kidney failure at age 45. President Teddy Roosevelt shared Jone’s dream of a powerful US Navy and used the occasion to stage a grand re-internment in Annapolis Naval Academy.
So on his birthday rows of battleships booming salutes and mile-long processions of marching US Marine and French honor guards gave John Paul Jones the grand funeral he always felt he deserved, just 113 years late.

1917 – As Lowell Thomas’ news reel cameras rolled, Lawrence of Arabia and Bedouin Sheik Ouda Abu-Tai captures the Red Sea Port of Acqaba from Turkish troops. The battle was dramatized in the 1962 David Lean epic Lawrence of Arabia.

1928- The film "The Lights of New York" premiered at the Strand theater on Broadway. 1927's the Jazz Singer popularized sound movies while still being half silent. This film was the first with an all dialogue track.

1944- A fire broke out in the main tent of Ringling Bros Circus during a children’s matinee in Hartford Connecticut . The big top had been waterproofed with a paraffin solution thinned with gasoline and now that mixture engulfed the tent in flames. 168 died and 682 more were injured, mostly children. In 1950 a deranged arsonist named Robert Segee admitted setting the Hartford Circus Fire.

1957-Chuck Jones short "Whats Opera, Doc?" debuts. “Kill da wa-bitt, kill da wa-bitt..."

1957-16 year old John Lennon first met 15 year old Paul McCartney at a church picnic near Woolton, England. Lennon invited McCartney to join his first band called the Quarrymen, but MacCartney missed their first engagement because of a boy scout trip.

1964 - Beatles' film "Hard Day's Night" premieres in London. The bands iconoclastic, antics portrayed by Richard Lesters surreal free style direction set the style for the music videos of the future.

1965- TV sitcom F-Troop premiered. Shortly after the series began production it was learned that lead actress Melody Patterson (Wrangler Jane) was actually underage- barely 16. She kept her part but the writers had to tone down any sexual innuendo in the scripts.

1965 - Rock group "Jefferson Airplane" formed.

1974- The first broadcast of A Prairie Home Companion, Garrison Keilor’s ode to a small town in Minnesota.

1998- French workers at Disney’s Paris theme park went on strike for better pay, and not having to smile like idiots all the time, like the Americans do.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is meant by keel-hauling?

Answer: An extreme form of punishment in navys during the Age of Sail. The accused seaman was tied to a rope, thrown overboard and a team pulled him down and around under the keel (bottom) of the ship and back up to the other side. If he didn’t drown, he got scraped up by all the barnacles and other crud on the ships bottom. Like flogging, keelahauling began in Elizabethan times, but was outlawed by the 1850s.

Brave Combo, who did the music in our Click & Clack As the Wrench Turns Show, have put up free streams of a selection of the music of the show.

http://www.brave.com/bo

Brave Combo is out of Denton Texas, just north of Dallas. They've played before on the Simpsons, and worked with every kind of musician from David Byrne and Talking Heads to Tiny Tim!

I had a lot of fun collaborating with Carl, Danny and Jeff, and we all made some great tunes together. I hope you all like it too.
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Quiz: What is meant by keel-hauling?

Quiz: Which medal is older- The Congressional Medal of Honor, The Purple Heart or the Victoria Cross?
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History for 7/5/2008
Birthdays: P.T. Barnum, Beatrix Potter, The XVIII Century English actress Mrs. Sarah Siddons, Jean Cocteau, Admiral David Farragut, Len Lye, George Pompidou, Shirley Knight, Huey Lewis, Julie Nixon Eisenhower, Milburn Stone (Doc on Gunsmoke), Goose Gossage, Warren Oates, Henry Cabot Lodge IV, Edie Falco

1779- TRYON’S NEW HAVEN RAID- During the American Revolution Royalist Governor Tryon of New York thought a way to bring the American rebels back to their allegiance was to launch a punitive raid across Long Island Sound to rebel strongholds in Connecticut the day after their Independence Day celebrations. Forty boat loads of British redcoats landed at New Haven and wantonly looted, burned and brutalized the inhabitants. The elderly Dean of Yale University was beaten to death with rifle butts after urging his students to resist. Civilian homes were ransacked and women raped. The redcoats then burned Norwalk and Scranton before returning back across the water to occupied New York. British policy in general was that the majority of Americans are good subjects but just deluded by bad leaders. Tryon was frustrated with the endless guerilla fighting. So like the Americans at Mi Lai in 1968, he lashed out with a brutality that accomplished more harm than good.

1820- THE TRIAL OF QUEEN CAROLINE- Forget Charles & Di, this was the greatest marital scandal ever to hit the British Monarchy. George the Prince Regent had been estranged from his wife Caroline since 1796 and she had been living a wild life in Italy while George chased skirts at court. When his elderly mad father George III finally died and 'Princee' became King George IV, nobody expected Caroline to suddenly show up in England and still want to be Queen. On this day George forced a bill into the House of Lords to grant him a divorce so he could be free to marry his mistress Lady Cunningham nicknamed 'the Vice-Queen'. The evidence in the trial were juicy anecdotes of the Queen's own sexual shenanigans with a number of Italians. The whole sordid affair was terribly embarrassing and split the nation into factions. Some loyal to the King, others the Queen's defender's of Women's Rights and the Family. The King's public appearances were greeted with cries of 'Nero!" the Duke of Wellington was hissed and had rocks thrown at him and Prime Minister Lord Liverpool was so upset he could not address Parliament without a dose of ether first. Eventually the divorce bill was dropped and the King crowned with the Queen shut out of the cathedral. A popular doggerel in Punch made a joke of Christ's advice to the Adulteress-
" Most Gracious Queen we thee implore, to Go Away and Sin No More...
But if that effort Be too Great, Just Go Away at Any Rate.."

1892- THE HOMESTEAD MASSACRE- Jacob Frick, the attorney of steel magnate Andrew Carnegie, decided to solve the problem of uppity unions by surrounding his Homestead plant with barbed wire and guns then announcing to the astonished employees that they were getting a 20% pay cut. 3,000 workers fought with police and non-union replacements, 7 killed, the union leaders arrested for incitement to riot. Some apologists claim that Andrew Carnegie’s disillusionment with business and his desire to dedicate the remainder of his life to philanthropy stemmed from his horror of the violence done in his name at Homestead. Carnegie was on vacation and when told replied: "Ah yes, Florence is beautiful this time of year". Jacob Frick built himself an art museum in New York.

1910- Writer O.Henry died of cirrhosis and tuberculosis at 47. His last words were "Turn up the lights, I don't want to go home in the dark." He became a writer while serving a jail term for embezzlement.

1935- The Wagner Act passed congress, decreeing all American workers have the right to collective bargaining and to form unions.

1943- Betty Grable married bandleader Harry James.

1945- The First British General Election held in ten years. Winston Churchill and his Tories were turned out for Labor candidate Clement Atlee. When his aides accused the British voters of ingratitude, Churchill said they had been through a lot and wanted to move on. But Churchill called Clement Atlee "a Sheep in Sheep’s clothing."

1945- OPERATIONS OVERCAST and PAPERCLIP- The U.S. Army intelligence arranged for top Nazi rocket Scientists to be brought to the U.S. for our space program.
Pres. Truman had passed a law forbidding visas for anyone with a Nazi past. But the War Dept Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency chief Bosquet Wev declared:" We’re not going to beat a dead Nazi Horse!" Experts doctored the dossiers on these scientists and changed descriptions like: "Fanatical Unrepentant Nazi" to "Politically Neutral". Head of the unit Dr. Werner Von Braun was the inventor of the clustered liquid fuel engine rockets which Hitler had named the Vengence-2 and fired at London. At the end of the war Von Braun had been working on a rocket with a range of 4,000 miles that could have reached New York or Boston. Dr. Arthur Rudolphe the designer of the Saturn-5 moon rocket was deported in 1984 when a British documentary exposed his running a slave labor camp in 1943. Dr. Herman Becker-Freysing the man who built John Glenn's space suit got his knowledge about the effects of atmospheric pressure and oxygen loss on humans from experiments he did on the inmates of Dachau.

1951- Dr Shockley announced the invention of the Transistor, making the miniaturizing of complex electronics possible. One documentary noted that if you tried to make a digital telephone with the earlier technology of vacuum tubes, it would have to be the size of an office building.

1952- London Transport scrapped the last of their electric streetcars in favor of diesel polluting double-decker buses.

1954- Elvis Presley recorded "That’s All Right" at Sun Records in Memphis. Some call it the first true Rock & Roll song, but that is disputed by Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock, Ike Turners Delta 88 and many other R&B hits. “That’s All Right” was written by black bluesman Arthur Big-Boy Crudup, who never profited from the song’s success, and died in a shack.

1954- Tomoyuki Tanaka announced the beginning of production on the movie Godzilla.
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Quiz: Which medal is older- The Congressional Medal of Honor, The Purple Heart or the Victoria Cross?

Answer: The Purple Heart, established by order of George Washington in 1782.