Question: Who said: “ there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns -- the ones we don't know we don't know."

Yesterday’s question answered below: One person worked on the films Hitchcock’s the Birds (1963), The Time Machine (1960), Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), and the Disney Cartoon 101 Dalmatians (1961). Who is it?
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History for 1/16/2009
Birthdays: Yukon poet Robert Service, Andre Michelin 1853 the pneumatic tire inventor, Ethel Merman, Dizzy Dean,, A.J. Foyt, Marilyn Horne, Sade, Michael Wilding, Eartha Kitt, Debbie Allen, John Carpenter, Diane Fossey, Kate Moss is 35, Tsianina Joelson, Great Spanish animation director Raul Garcia-Sanz is 51

1786- The Virginia Legislature passed the Ordinance of Religious Freedom, which stated that no man can be forced to join or support any church he didn’t want to. The Ordinance became the basis for the First Amendment to the Constitution.

1891- Three weeks after the Wounded Knee massacre the last independent warrior bands of Sioux Indians came in and surrendered to the U.S. Cavalry at the Pine Ridge Reservation.

1917-THE ZIMMERMAN TELEGRAM- The reason other than the Lusitania that the U.S. entered World War One. The German Kaiser's generals fretted that the unrestricted U-Boat sinkings were strangling Britain but they may force America into joining the Allies. So they concocted a scheme to keep the Yankees occupied on their own side of the world. On this day British intelligence handed President Woodrow Wilson an intercepted message from Baron Zimmerman the German charge d' affaire in New York to the German Ambassador in Mexico City. It relayed an offer from Berlin of an alliance if Mexico would please invade Texas! The Kaiser promised President Huerta return of the entire U.S. southwest. The Mexican president wasn't exactly enamoured with the U.S. lately but he still declined the offer. Instead of checking U.S. participation in the European war the incident all but decided it. Wilson had run for re-election as an anti-war candidate but now became convinced Germany had to be stopped.

1935- Ma Barker’s gang has a furious shootout with the FBI at Ocklawaha, Florida. Legend has it they found Ma's body with the smoking tommygun still cradled in her lap. Others say she was only an ignorant hillbilly lady traveling with the gang as a cover. Only one of Ma Barker's sons (Fred) was killed with her. Herman Barker committed suicide at Wichita, Kansas, August 29, 1927, after being blinded by police bullets in a gun battle in which he killed a policeman. Arthur "Doc" Barker was captured by the FBI in Chicago eight days before the shootout that killed Ma and Fred. He was killed attempting to escape from Alcatraz on January 13, 1939. Lloyd "Red" Barker was released from Leavenworth in 1939 after serving seventeen years of a 25-year sentence for mail robbery. He was murdered by his wife at their suburban-Denver home on March 18, 1949.

1936- Albert Fish, the Moon Maniac was executed at Sing Sing Prison. The 66 year old Fish had killed ten children and cannibalized their remains. He even went as far as to send a letter to the mother of his last victim describing how he had turned her daughter into a stew. The letter was traced back to him and he was arrested. He almost shorted out the electric chair because he kept his underpants filled with metal sewing needles.


As he went to his death he told guards he was looking forward to the electric chair. "it is a thrill I never tried."

1938- Benny Goodman brought the new Swing Music to staid old Carnegie Hall. Count Basie and Harry James joined in to get the tuxedoed crowd dancing in the aisles, then afterwards they all went uptown to the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem to watch Count Basies band square off against the legendary Chick Webb. After this triumph Benny Goodmans’ band would never be the same- Lionel Hampton, Harry James and Gene Krupa all split off to form their own orchestras."That band I had the night I played Carnegie Hall was the best I think I ever had." Goodman said later.

1940- Lee Francis, then Hollywood’s top madam, was busted for prostitution.

1942-Actress Carol Lombard and her mother died in a plane crash in the Sierra Mountains while returning from a war bond drive. Her husband movie king Clark Cable was so disconsolate that he joined an airforce combat squadron instead of doing USO work and took dangerous missions trying to get killed.

1945- Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg disappeared. The diplomat had been covertly smuggling hundreds of Jews out of Nazi occupied Austria by giving them neutral Swedish passports. When the Soviets overran Vienna Wallenberg dropped out of sight. In 1991 The Russian government at last admitted that Wallenberg died in Leningrad’s Lubyanka Prison.

1954-THE WAR ON COMICS- Senator Estes Kevfhauer chaired a U.S. Senate subcommittee to study juvenile delinquency. They conclude that one of the contributing factors to adolescent moral decay was four-color comic books. The probe was sparked by the publication of a book called The Seduction of the Innocent.


It charged among other things that Batman & Robin were gay because when not fighting crime, Bruce Wayne & Dick Grayson lounged around all day in silk pajamas! Despite testimony by Walt Kelly, Milt Caniff, Al Capp and Bill Gaines 350 comic book companies including the EC "Tales from the Crypt" label were driven out of business. The strict comics-code was established. The comic book industry, which had been selling one million books a month, never regained that level of prosperity in the US again.

1962- Television pioneer Ernie Kovacs died when he plowed his Corvair into a tree at Beverly Glen and Santa Monica Blvds. Kovacs had a fondness for all night poker and vodka parties. Friend Jack Lemmon said Ernie was so fanatical for a good card game that once when over a friend's house no table large enough could be procured for a game, Kovacs ordered the front door taken off it's hinges and a tablecloth thrown over it so they could all play.

The Nairobi Trio. Sometimes Jack Lemmon and Edie Adams were in the Gorilla outfits with Ernie for a laugh

1962-First day of shooting on the film Dr No with a young actor named Sean Connery.

1970- Col. Mohammar Khaddafyi became premier of Libya.

1974- Peter Benchley’s novel Jaws first published.

1979- The Shah of Iran Reza Pahlevi fled Teheran in the face of the Ayatollah’s fundamentalist revolution.

1980-The silver market collapses, making the Hunt Brothers from two of the richest men in America to two of the poorest.

1991- GULF WAR I -U.S., French, British and Arab airforces begin attacking Iraqi-held Kuwait. Sadam, Wild Weazels, Gen Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, Republican Guards, Scuds, Smart Bombs and CNN's Peter Arnett hanging a mike out the window of his Baghdad office as the bombs rained down.

1995- The UPN Network (Universal-Paramount Network) began telecasting.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: One person worked on the films Hitchcock’s the Birds (1963), The Time Machine (1960), Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), and the Disney Cartoon 101 Dalmatians (1961). Who is it?

Answer: Australian actor Rod Taylor. In 101 Dalmatians he was the voice of Pongo.

Quiz: One person worked on the films Hitchcock’s the Birds (1963), The Time Machine (1960), Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point (1970), and the Disney Cartoon 101 Dalmatians (1961). Who is it?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: In the discussions of Hilary’s Secretary of State hearings, an analyst casually mentioned Clauswitz. He was a long dead German General from Napoleon’s time. What could possibly be relevant?
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History for 1/15/2009
Birthdays: Dr. Martin Luther King would have been 80 today, Moliere, Gamal Abdel Nasser, outlaw Cole Younger, Charro, Matthew Brady, drummer Gene Krupa, Lloyd Bridges, Mario Van Peebles, Josef Broyer the mentor of Sigmund Freud, Margaret O’Brien, Aristotle Onassis, Captain Beefheart, Dr. Edward Teller “father of the H-Bomb”.

1208-THE ALBIGENSIAN CRUSADE- Count Raymond of Tolouse, son in law of King Pedro the Lecher of Aragon, was thought to be sympathetic to a heretical Christian cult called Cathars, from the French region of Albi (so Albigensians).They believed in a Zoroastrian dualism in direct conflict with the Church. When a papal representative named Peter De Castellan was sent from Rome to tell Count Raymond to knuckle under, he was assaulted. So a crusade was declared not against Moslems in the Middle East or the Moors of Spain but against other Christians in the heart of France. The holocaust was terrible, for the first time the answer of how we tell the guilty from the innocent was :”Kill them all and God will recognize his own.” The leader of the crusade Simon de Monfort, had his head flattened by a catapult stone. The Cathar religion disappeared except for cult fans like Alastair Crowley and the author of the DaVinci Code.

1793- The Convention of the French Revolution condemns King Louis XVI (now called simply “citizen Capet”) to death by guillotine. Voters for the death penalty included the artist Jean Jacques David, American Thomas Paine and Louis’ own younger brother the Duc D’Orleans, now ridiculously renamed Phillipe Egalite’. When Phillipe arrived home that night and his family shunned him. He cried aloud:”What else could I do ? ” Phillipe later got guillotined anyway.

1829- The first of two commercial working railroad locomotives arrived in the U.S. from England. Named the Pride of Newscastle back home, it was renamed the America. The Stourbridge Lion followed in May. These two trains began the U.S. Railroad system.
Historian Stephen Ambrose noted that until this time society moved a the speed of a walking horse, that Washington and Jefferson could travel no faster than Socrates or Shakespeare did in their day.

1922- Irish troops led by IRA chief Michael Collins officially take over Dublin Castle and the Irish capitol’s administration from the British. The British commander at first upbraided Collins for being late for the ceremony. Collins said in response:” You’ve been here seven centuries and you can’t wait seven minutes ?” When the Lord Lieutenant Governor shook Collins hand and said “I’m so happy to meet you!” Collins smiled” The hell y’are.”

1929- Most of the nations of the world sign the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which states that War is a Bad thing. Ten years later World War Two breaks out.

1935-The Tsuni Conference- Chinese Communists elect Mao Tse Tung (or MaoZseDong) as their overall leader.

1936-THE DGA- Several top Hollywood directors including Lewis Milestone, Ruben Mamoulian and William Wellman meet at King Vidor’s house and pledge $100 dollars each to form the Screen Director’s Guild, later the Director’s Guild of America. It was a risky thing to do, previous attempts to form a directors union were broken up with threats by the producers of perpetual blacklisting. Final recognition and contracts were signed by President Frank Capra in 1940. One provision insisted on in the contract was that the director’s credit be the final name in the opening titles before the movie began. And so it remains.

1945- As the Nazi war effort was caving in on all sides Adolph Hitler relocated his headquarters from East Prussia to the Reichchancellory building in Berlin. One SS major cracked up der Fuhrer by joking that “now we can take a street car from the Western Front to the Eastern Front.”

1947-”THE BLACK DAHLIA”- One of the most lurid murder cases in Los Angeles history. A little girl playing in a vacant lot discovered the remains of high priced prostitute Elisabeth Short, 22, who used to work the Biltmore Hotel. She was named the Black Dahlia because of the black pullover sweaters and black lingerie she favored. Her body had been sawed in half and completely drained of blood, and the initials 'BD' carved on her thigh. She showed signs of torture before death. The murderer was never found. The incident was the basis for a movie called “True Confessions” with Robert DeNiro and Robert Duval. The last detective on the case died in 2003.

1951- ILSE, THE SHE-WOLF OF THE SS. Ilse Koch was the wife of the commandant of Buchenwald Concentration Camp and every bit as sadistic as her husband. She participated in torture and experiments on inmates to turn them into soap and their skin into lampshades. This day in her second war crimes trial she was sentenced to life imprisonment. Sixteen years later in 1967 she committed suicide in prison. In the 70’s Roger Corman revived interest in her by creating an S&M porn film about her life.



1967- THE FIRST SUPER BOWL- After a decade of professional football conference title games, the AFL and NFL combined to make a single championship game- Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers defeated the Kansas City Chiefs 35-10. Super Bowl Game day in the US has become a holy day of obligation and people who don’t care for the sport suddenly find it less crowded at movie theaters and zoos.

1974- Eeehhhhhh-The first episode of Happy Days premiered with Ron Howard as Richie Cuningham and Henry Winkler as Da Fonz.

1983- Meyer Lansky, the elderly retired Mafia boss denied the right to move to Israel, died of a terminal nosebleed.

1998- Investigators from special counsel Kenneth Starr’s office have their first meeting with President Bill Clinton’s tootsie Monica Lewinsky in the lobby of the Watergate Hotel. They tried to pressure the 25 year old to admit her affair. They verbally denigrated her when she asked that her lawyer or her mother be present. But the Bimbo from Beverly Hills High was smart. She held out for 8 months to get the immunity deal she wanted before speaking out about those snapped thongs and well placed cigars.
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Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: : In the discussions of Hilary’s Secretary of State hearings, an analyst casually mentioned Clauswitz. He was a long dead German General from Napoleon’s time. What could possibly be relevant?



Answer: Klaus Von Clausewitz wrote the definitive book on political theory Vom Kreige, On War. In it he theorized that “ war is an extension of foreign policy” That “war is an unnatural state that should only be used when all diplomatic channels fail….war is basically the failure of foreign policy…..and should never be done for it’s own sake….” Yesterday several top Defense Dept officials including Secty Gates have asked that the State Dept be reinforced and rebuilt. Soft Power…..indeed.

Since 1994, I have been helping organize an annual memorial for ASIFA/Hollywood and the GUILD to honor all those who have passed away that year. One ancillary result of my efforts is it enables me to learn about facets of the Animation industry I had not known of before.

This year, one of the revelations to my parochial American eyes is the depth of emotion caused by the passing of Oliver Postgate.



Oliver Postgate 1925-2008 was the son of a British MP, a conscientious objector and anti-nuclear protestor who in his soft, gentle way made some of the most memorable British children's programming ever.
IVOR THE ENGINE, BAGPUSS and the CLANGERS.

In 1959 he and his partner Peter Fermin turned an old cowshed into an animation studio. Oliver wrote the stories and did the voices and articulated the cuttouts under a 16mm camera, and Fermin did the visuals. They could sometimes finish up to two minutes of footage a day! For this the BBC paid them 3O pounds an episode.

To many a child growing up in the British Isles in the 60s and 70s, these programs are the warmest of childhood memories.

Check out this video retrospective on U-Tube, and read all the tributes from around the world below. Do a GOOGLE search and check out all the articles about him.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/organgrinder/2008/dec/09/television-television

Shelley Page of Dreamworks wrote me: I don't know who or what was the voice of your childhood - but for Brits of my and Jan's (Pinkava) generation it will always be Oliver Postgate's unforgettable voice - warm, witty and reassuring. He stirred the imagination of a generation as no other animator (with the possible exception of Walt Disney) ever has or will do.

In the Hollywood animation business we endlessly stress over money, status, union contracts and job security. But every once and awhile, we need to step back and be reminded what a wonderful thing we've been allowed to do - that we can touch the hearts of children, and create memories for them that will be there long after we too are gone.

Sometimes, just knowing that is compensation enough.

Thank you Oliver Postgate, for reminding this dumb Colonial what really matters. Congratulations for your amazing career.
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{The ASIFA/TAG sponsored AFTERNOON OF REMEMBRANCE will be held Saturday Feb 7th at the HOLLYWOOD STUDIO MUSEUM at 1:30PM. It is a non-religious program where the animation community remembers their friends and colleagues. Among the 40 other honorees will be Ollie Johnston, Bill Melendez and Eartha Kitt. admission is free and all are welcome}

Quiz: In the discussions of Hilary’s Secretary of State hearings, an analyst casually mentioned Clauswitz. He was a long dead German General from Napoleon’s time. What could possibly be relevant?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: With Obama and Gov. Rod Blagoyevich, we are witnessing the spectacle of a new reformist President going to Washington and trying to govern while leaving behind in his home state a petty scandal involving a crooked colleague. Has this ever happened to any earlier presidents?
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History for 1/14 /2009
Birthdays: Dr. Albert Schweitzer, Benedict Arnold, Faye Dunaway is 67, Hal Roach, Raymond Outcault, Cecil Beaton, John Dos Passos, Lawrence Kasdan, Andy Rooney, Julian Bond, Steven Soderbergh is 46, LL Cool J, T. Bone Burnet, Emily Watson

350 a.d.- The feast day of Saint Hilary of Poitiers- Saint Hilary may have been the father of church music. In exile in Phyrgia he noticed pagans sang hymns to their deities, so he composed the first Christian musical hymns. The Halleluiah Chorus, Ave Maria and “Drop Kick Me Jesus Through the Goalposts of Heaven” would follow in due time.

1699- The Puritans of Salem hold a day of fasting and prayer to atone for any people they may have unjustly tortured and executed as witches. Well, at least they said they were sorry.

1900- Puccini's opera "Tosca" debuts in Rome.

1952-The NBC "Today" show debuts with Dave Garroway, Jim Fleming and J. Fred Muggs the chimp.

1954- actress Marilyn Monroe married baseball great Joe DiMaggio.

1957- Humphrey Bogart died of esophageal cancer at age 57. When he was buried at Forrest Lawn, wife Lauren Bacall put in with his ashes a solid gold whistle inscribed with the famous line from "To Have and To Have Not"- 'If you ever need me, just whistle.' The group of friends around Bogie and Bacall were nicknamed ‘The Rat Pack” . After Bogart’s death Frank Sinatra made the Rat Pack famous.

1964- Hanna & Barbera's ' The Magilla Gorilla' cartoon show.

1967- HIPPIES! The first “ Human Be-In” in Golden Gate Park. The Jefferson Airplane and Grateful Dead performed. Allan Ginsburg, Ram Dass and Timothy Leary spoke. LSD was laced into turkey sandwiches, and soon the crowd of 30,000 was stoned. The national media played up the event, and the rest of America first saw the power of the Hippy youth culture, and heard the word like “psychedelic” and Timothy Leary saying “ Tune in, Turn on, Drop out.” It was the prelude to the Summer of Love.

1972- Norman Lear’s hit comedy series Sanford & Son premiered. Starring Red Fox, it was based on the English show Steptoe & Son.

1990-Matt Groenings the Simpsons, which had been run as a series of blackout vignettes on the Tracey Ullman Show, now debuted as its own regular prime time series. Cowabunga!

2004- President George W. Bush declared his resolve to return America to the Moon and make a manned landing on Mars by 2030. To do this he gave NASA only one billion dollars more than their normal budget, while at the same time allocating $1.5 billion to fight Gay marriage initiatives.

2005- The Cassini-Huygens Probe landed on Saturn’s moon Titan.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: With Obama and Gov. Rod Blagoyevich, we are witnessing the spectacle of a new reformist President going to Washington and trying to govern while leaving behind in his home state a petty scandal involving a crooked colleague. Has this ever happened to any earlier presidents?

Answer: BLEEPIN yeah! Franklin Roosevelt was Governor of New York, and just as he was running for the presidency to unseat Hoover, the Mayor of New York City was Jimmy Walker, a loveable rogue that historians agree was” as crooked as a dog’s leg.” Walkers’ corruption finally led to his resignation, and FDR supported the Republican candidate- Fiorello LaGuardia.
The reason why it took awhile for anyone in Congress to take Harry Truman seriously, was he was seen as the protégé of a corrupt Kansas City political boss, Tom Pendergast.
Teddy Roosevelt had the whole corrupt NY Tammany Machine behind him when he became Vice President. When President McKinley was assassinated, Political boss Paul Crocker moaned” Oh no! Now that crazy cowboy is president!”

Quiz: With Obama and Gov. Rod Blagoyevich, we are witnessing the spectacle of a new reformist President going to Washington and trying to govern while leaving behind in his home state a petty scandal involving a crooked colleague. Has this ever happened to any earlier presidents?

Answer to yesterday’s question below; Who is ROY GBIV?
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HISTORY FOR 1/13/2009
Birthdays: Salmon P. Chase, Horatio Alger-1834, Sophie Tucker, Gwen Verdon, Robert Stack, Charles Nelson Reilly, Rip Taylor, Brandon Tartikoff, Armie Archerd, Julie Louise Dreyfus is 48, T.Bone Burnett is 61, Patrick Dempsey, Orlando Bloom is 32

565A.D. THE NIKA SEDITION- In ancient Byzantium like Rome before her, the big spectator sport was chariot racing. Fans went crazy, lots of money wagered and charioteers were celebrities. The choice seats at the Hippodrome and Circus Maximus were not at the finish lines but on the turns because that’s where the most crashes were. Chariots were raced in teams like modern race cars ( Team Unser, Team Ferrari etc.) and were distinguished by their colors. The big teams were the Blues and Greens. The Whites and the Reds were always kind of second rate. They even had their own booster clubs who carried the arguments over races into the streets and beat each other up. On this day the hooliganism of the booster clubs got so out of hand that they rioted in the streets and burned down half of Constantinople. Emperor Justinian had to bring in the legions to restore order. The clubs were called in Latin FACTIOS from where we get the words "fan, factions and fanatic".

1687- Father Eusebio Kino began his missionary work in the Spanish Southwest. He founded several missions in Arizona and helped introduce the horse, pairs of whom were brought over from Spain and released around Santa Fe New Mexico to multiply in the wild. The Italian born Jesuit’s travels also proved that California was not an island as previously thought.

1733- James Oglethorpe reached Charles Town South Carolina with a large contingent of colonists plucked from prisons back in England. His goal was to sail down to the Savannah River and create a new colony to stand as a buffer state between Spanish Florida and the English holdings. He intended to call the new colony after King George,- Georgia.

1847- Gen. Andres Pico signed the capitulation of Campo de Cahuenga (the little park across from Universal studios today), surrendering the Mexican state of Alta-California to U.S. General John Fremont. Fremont, nicknamed "The Pathfinder" was the first Republican candidate for President in 1856 and when the Civil War began he was a General until the confederates made a fool of him and he dropped from public view. During the Civil War Andres Pico served in the Yankee force that defeated an attempted Confederate invasion of California. I guess he figured one change of flag in a lifetime was enough.

1849- Battle of Chillianwalah. The British army under Lord Hugh Gough defeated the Sikh army of Sher Singh and conquered the Punjab. Gough was a blunt old style soldier. When his second mentioned the army was almost out of cannonballs Gough responded:” Good! Then we shall be at them with the bayonet!” This was the first battle where common soldiers’s bravery was “mentioned in dispatches” by the commander. At one point a befuddled major issued the wrong orders to a key troop of cavalry who would have galloped away from the battle but they were rallied by their chaplain. Lord Gough recommended for his initiative the chaplain be raised to Brevet-Bishop.

1854- The Accordion is patented. Polka fans rejoice!

1864-Stephen Foster, the composer of "Old Kentucky Home" and "Camptown Races" was found dead, a penniless drunk in New York's Bowery slum. In his hands was a piece of paper with the words "Dear friends and gentle hearts... ". A Pennsylvania Yankee, despite writing a lot of music about the South, he only visited it once, to New Orleans in 1852.

1872- GRANDDUKE ALEXIS BUFFALO HUNT. Grand Duke Alexis the son of the Czar of Russia visited America. A sportsman, He expressed a desire to go out West and hunt buffalo. The US Government ordered General Custer and Buffalo Bill to afford him every courtesy. Buffalo Bill even talked Sioux Chief Spotted Tail to move his tribes winter encampment 100 miles south so Alexis could visit real wild Indians. Starting today the hunting party hunted and feasted for two weeks leaving behind a trail of champagne bottles and buffalo carcasses. The trip was a great success and Buffalo Bill realized there was big money to be made in showing city slickers and foreigners a taste of the Wild West…

1874- Chang and Eng Bunker were the original Siamese Twins joined at the chest and sharing one liver. Since leaving Thailand they traveled the world with P.T. Barnum showing off their unique physique to paying crowds. They married two women and produced 21 offspring. As they aged they made a deal that they wouldn’t be physically separated until one of them died. This day Chang awoke to discover his brother Eng had died. He frantically called for the doctor to come and separate them. But the doctor was late, and when he arrived Chang had died as well. They were 62.

1895- Oscar Wilde’s play The Ideal Husband, premiered in London.

1898- Under the banner headline "J'Accuse !" a Paris newspaper printed writer Emile Zola's stinging criticism of the French government's handling of the Dreyfus scandal, blowing the whole thing wide open. The army sued Zola for libel, and he went into exile to avoid imprisonment. He returned to France after Dreyfus was pardoned in 1899.

1906- The first ad for a radio appeared in an American Science Magazine. It boasted an effective range of over one mile !

1910- Dr. Lee Deforrest experimenting with his new radio vacuum tubes broadcast singers from New York's Metropolitan Opera for the first time. The regular Texaco 'Live from the Met' broadcasts wouldn't get going until 1934.

1914- Folksinging union organizer Joe Hill was arrested in Utah on trumped up murder charges.

1925- THE FIRST CALIFORNIA GURU- Indian spiritual teacher Abrahamansa Yogananda , then called “The Swami” settled in Los Angeles and gave his first lecture to an audience in LA Philharmonic Hall. He founded the Malibu Self-Realization Center in 1950.

1929- Wyatt Earp died at 81 of prostate cancer in Los Angeles. After careers as a gunfighter, buffalo hunter, Dodge City marshal, prizefight referee, Yukon gold prospector and faroe dealer he finished in L.A. speculating in real estate. He liked to stroll onto Hollywood western movie sets to give advice to Tom Mix and William S. Hart on how they did it in the Old West. He was buried in San Francisco's Jewish Cemetery because his third wife, ex-saloon hooker Sadie Marcus was of that faith. On the subject of the Gunfight of the OK Corral in 1881 he told so many different versions of what happened that his account is considered unreliable.

Wyatt Earp would have died totally forgotten but in his last years he was interviewed by a journalist named Stuart Lake who published a best selling biography in 1931 called Wyatt Earp, Frontier Marshal. After that the movies and TV took up his name to make him the most famous lawman in western history, which would have been a surprise to him.

1930- The Mickey Mouse comic strip first appeared in US newspapers.

1942- In the dead of night the German U-Boat U-123 crept into New York Harbor. The German captain was amazed that although they were at war, the Americans had made no defensive arrangements. The city wasn’t even blacked out, but still illuminated brightly.

1943- Movie starlet Frances Farmer was dragged screaming in a straightjacket out of a Hollywood Hotel and committed. She screamed Rats! Rats! and listed her occupation on her arrest record as “c**ksucker”. Her career was ruined and she spent years in asylums but it’s inconclusive whether she had actually suffered mental illness or it was her mother overreacting to her sullen, temperamental nature.

1945- Sergei Prokoviev’s 5th Symphony ( Classical) premiered in Moscow.

1953-" The Doctor's Plot"- Elderly Soviet dictator Josef Stalin decided life had been dull of late so he decided to launch a new purge and shoot and imprison thousands of people. So today he announced he had uncovered a conspiracy of counter revolutionists and spies to bribe doctors to poison top Soviet officials. Luckily Stalin died before he could kick off his new terror campaign. As he lay stricken with a stroke on his deathbed his doctor was too afraid to treat him.

1957-THE FRISBEE- Two former World War Two pilots, Warren Fransconi and Walter Morrison invented the plastic platter in a San Luis Obisbo home. Originally called Flying Saucers and Pluto’s Platters they got the name Frisbee when they demonstrated it at Yale University. The students there were used to flipping pie platters at each other from the local Frisbee Pie Company, so when they played with the new disc they cried “Frisbee, Frisbee!” which seemed to Warren & Walter a better name. When Morrison died in 2002 his family obeyed his last request- and I’m not making this up- to have his body cremated, his ashes mixed with plastic, and molded into a Frisbee.

1958- Actress Jayne Mansfield married weightlifter Mickey Hargitay. Their daughter was Marisa Hargitay

1985- Carol Wayne, an actress who played bimbo blonde roles on shows like Johnny Carson, drowned while swimming in Mexico. She was 41.

2002- Pres. G.W. Bush almost choked on a pretzel, alone watching football on TV.
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Yesterday’s Question: Who is ROY GBIV?

Answer: He is the way art and science students are taught to remember the colors of the spectrum- Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet.