Question: Do we drink Fluoridated Water?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered: “The Time Has Come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things. Of Shoes, of Ships, of sealing wax. Of Cabbages and Kings..” What is that from -------------------------------------------------------------
History for 1/20/2012
Birthdays: King Charles III of Spain, Richard Henry Lee- signer of the Declaration of Independence, Frederico Fellini, Patricia O’Neal, Mario Lanza, David Lynch, George Burns, DeForest Kelly, Edwin Buzz Aldrin the second astronaut to walk on the moon, Arte Johnson, Lorenzo Lamas, Bill Maher is 56, Rainn Wilson is 46

In the French Revolutionary calendar this is the first day Pluvoise, the Month of Rain.

661 A.D. -Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammed, was assassinated by a partisan of Muyawiah Ibn Abi Suffian- the founder of the Ummayad Dynasty of Caliphs. Ali’s supporters were called Ali's SHIAH or Ali's Partisans – which became the branch of Islam called Shiite, the rest of Islam is known as Sunnite. It became a split as fierce as the one between Catholic and Protestants in Christianity.

1193- Licensed prostitution began in Japan.

1777- George Washington invited a brave young Colonial artillery captain to join his personal staff. Alexander Hamilton’s career began.

1779- The English dramatic actor David Garrick died. Supposedly his last words were when asked “Is it hard to die?” Garrick replied:” Dying is not Hard. Comedy is Hard.”

1783- Britain signed peace treaties with France and Spain, ending their support to the American Revolution. The treaty with America had been finalized three months earlier.

1841-Convention of Chuen Pee-Treaty ended the Opium Wars. China cedes land in Canton to Britain that will become Hong Kong. The Chinese never smoked opium until it was introduced by British traders from India.

1852- Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in book form. It had been released in magazine installments the year before, as was the custom of the time.

1908- The Sullivan Ordinance barred women from smoking in public facilities.

1920- The American Civil Liberties Union founded by Roger Baldwin.

1924- WAR ON THE MAFIA- In 1924 the Mafia was almost completely destroyed. By who? Benito Mussolini. While not yet Il Duce but merely Italy’s Prime Minister Benito had had enough of the crime family clans in Sicily and sent a huge army to crush them. The blackshirted jackbooted regiments marched across the island arresting 11,000 and executing hundreds. Mussolini declared victory and many of the surviving dons fled to America where Prohibition was providing great new opportunities for crooks.

1930-The Matanza Massacre. Authorities in El Salvador kill 30,000 peasants protesting the government refusing to seat peasant ministers who won an election. By the time the army stopped, 4 percent of the population was dead, the Communist Party gone and native Indian dress and languages outlawed. The leader of the peasants Augustin Farabundo Marti later gave his name to the 1980’s guerrilla movement.

1936- King George V of England died. In great pain from incurable cancer, only recently a doctor admitted getting obeying instructions from Edward VIII to euthanize him with a strong shot of cocaine and morphine. The doctor timed his offing of the king so the news would be out with the morning newspapers instead of the trashier afternoon tabloids.
His Majesties last words were reported to be:" How goes the Empire? " He actually winced at the sloppy way the injection was done and said: " Oww! G--Damn You!".

1937- Franklin D. Roosevelt inaugurated for his second term after defeating Gov. Alf Landon of Kansas. He is the first president to be inaugurated in January instead of the customary March 4th. The Depression still raged despite all his efforts, he gives the inaugural speech decrying the rampant poverty in the U.S. "I see one third of the nation, ill-housed, ill-fed, ill-clothed, living in conditions far beneath the minimum standards we regard as decent, etc."

1938-The first true animator, Emile Cohl, died while headed for the Paris premiere of Disney's"Snow White and the Seven Dwarves". Cohl was so poor that the electricity in his flat had been turned off and the candles had ignited his beard. Angry he was never recognized in his time, he once said: "the French prefer their artists with marble and flowers on top.".

1942- The Wanasee Conference-Heydrich, Adolf Eichmann and other top Nazis have a lunch conference in a suburb in Berlin. Over cocktails they invented The Final Solution. Zyclon–B gas chambers instead of electrocution or carbon-monoxide. They set a target goal of ten million Jews to be murdered by 1946.

1945- Franklin D. Roosevelt sworn in as U.S. President for a fourth consecutive term, the only person ever to do so.

1949- FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover gave Shirley Temple a pen that shoots tear gas.

1953- The Birth of Little Ricky on the I Love Lucy show drew a larger viewing audience than the televised inauguration of President Dwight Eisenhower.

1961- John F. Kennedy gave his famous inaugural speech:” Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Outgoing President Eisenhower disliked JFK personally and was angry that his win over Nixon seemed a repudiation of his policies, so almost nothing was said between them in the limousine during the drive to the ceremony. John Kennedy also went through that day mostly hatless, inaugurating the fashion. Before JFK, a man was not fully dressed without a fedora or cap of some sort.

1965- Alan Freed, the disc jockey who coined the term Rock & Roll died at 43 of uremic blood poisoning. He was broken by the Rock payola scandal and died so poor his friends passed the hat to pay for his funeral.

1968- Young U.S. infantryman Ron Kovic was wounded near the Vietnamese demilitarized zone the DMZ. The black soldier who carried him to safety was killed shortly after and Kovic never learned his name. The incident put Kovic in a wheelchair for life and changed his attitude towards the righteousness of the war. He wrote the bestseller " Born on the Fourth of July" and became a passionate antiwar activist.

1969- Richard Nixon sworn in as President capping one of the most amazing comebacks in political history. After losing to Kennedy in 1960 Nixon lost yet again to Pat Brown for the governorship of California and was considered politically finished. Anybody remember Michael Dukakis, Dan Quayle or Fritz Mondale,? Yet Nixon worked on his image over the years and re-emerged in 1968 as “The New Dick”. Nixon ran as peace candidate and at his inaugural announced “The era of confrontation is over, the era of negotiation has begun.” It took him five years to get us out of Vietnam, immolating Cambodia and Laos in the process. When Nixon took office there were 23,000 combat deaths, but when he left there were 58,000 war deaths and 8 US students shot down on their college campuses. So his record remains at best controversial.

1981- As President Reagan was being sworn in, the hostages taken at the United States Embassy in Teheran were released after being held for 444 days. Years later it was revealed a deal was made with the Iranian militants to release the hostages in exchange for a ransom of weapons. But at the time, all the American public knew was that all the Old Gipper had to do was show up, to make the Mad Mullah’s hightail-it outta town.

1982- Rock star Ozzie Osbourne was hospitalized in Des Moines Iowa after biting the head off a dead bat thrown on stage during a concert.

1982- SONY introduced the Camcorder, the personal video camera.

1986- The worlds first computer virus, Brain, was sent out over the internet.

2001- George W. Bush inaugurated as the 43rd President. He is only the second son of a president to be elected, the other being John Quincy Adams, the son of John Adams.

2009- Standing in front of the U.S. Capitol, a building built by African slaves, Barack Obama is inaugurated 44th President of the United States. The first African-American.

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Yesterday’s Quiz: “The Time Has Come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things. Of Shoes, of Ships, of sealing wax. Of Cabbages and Kings..” What is that from?

Answer: From Lewis Carroll’s poem the Walrus and the Carpenter from his sequel to Alice in Wonderland, Though the Looking Glass.

Quiz: “The Time Has Come, the Walrus said, to speak of many things. Of Shoes, of Ships, of sealing wax. Of Cabbages and Kings..” What is that from?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: Which comic character is the oldest? Buster Brown, Felix the Cat or Mickey Mouse?
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History for 1/19/2012
Birthdays: James Watt, Edgar Allen Poe, Robert E. Lee, Paul Cezanne', Janis Joplin would have been 69, Tipi Hedren is 82, Slobodan Milosovic’, radio star Ish Kabibble, Dolly Parton, Michael Crawford, Desi Arnez Jr., Chic Young, Guy Madison, Richard Lester, John H. Johnson publisher of Ebony and Jet Magazines, Jean Stapleton, Fritz Weaver, Sean Wayans, Robin MacNeill, Paul Rodriquez, Antoine Fuqua, Drea Di Matteo is 40, and Bart the Bear-1977 Bear who starred in movies like Clan of the Cave Bear, The Bear, White Fang and Legends of the Fall

Happy Feast of St. Wulfstan.

379 A.D. Valentinian Ist was a great Roman emperor with strange mood swings. He outlawed the original Biblical birth control method, called exposure; in other words leaving unwanted babies in the forest. Another time he had some stableboys crucified for letting the hounds go too early during a hunt. When some Barbarians crossed the Rhine and sacked a few villages Valentinian got his legions together and burned down half of Germany. He only stopped for the winter and was preparing to continue in the spring when on this day a delegation of tribal chiefs came to ask for peace. They explained that it wasn't their idea to make war, just some of the younger hotheads in the tribe. They said that the Emperor was overreacting. Valentinian got so enraged by this that he raised his fists, turned purple and before he uttered a word broke a blood vessel and fell over stone dead. His general Theodosius became emperor.

1405- Tartar conqueror Tamerlane fell ill and died in Samarkand. He roved the world conquering and murdering like Genghis Khan, but without Genghis’ skill at empire building. His empire fell apart soon after his death, inspiring Shelley to write his poem about transitory glory- Ozimandias.

1523- In Switzerland, Ulrich Zwingli publishes his 67 Articles attacking the authority of the Pope. This is the first manifesto of the Zurich Reformation.

1547-Grand Duke of Muscovy Ivan IV Vasilievich, called Ivan the Terrible, crowned Tsar or Czar- a Russian form for Caesar. His father Grand Duke Ivan III the Great assumed the title and power but it remained for his son to formalize the office. The Russian Princes call themselves the new inheritors of the Eastern Orthodox religion and Roman Empire after Constantinople, once called New Rome, fell to the Moslem Turks. Czars were crowned with the "Cap of Monomachus", a small skullcap reputedly worn by one of the Greek Byzantine Emperors, Constantine IV Monomachus“ single-combat”. This cap was covered with ermine trim and gold. The Czars boasted: "Two Romes have fallen. The Third Rome -Moscow shall stand forever!"

1633- Thomas Morton was twice deported by the Pilgrims for holding “licentious Maypole celebrations” at his Indian trading post. This day he returned to England and tried to have the Massachusetts Bay Colony’s charter revoked. The King probably refused because that might make the whole crowd of buckle-shoed killjoys return home!

1729- British Restoration playwright William Congreve died. He willed all his property to Henrietta, the Duchess of Marlborough. But then the Duchess did something a bit odd. She had a death mask made of Congreve’s face and attached it to a life size mannequin. She ate and conversed with the dummy all day and slept with it at night. She insisted her servants wait upon the dummy and treat it when she felt it was ill. When she died she was buried with the dummy.

1829 Johann Von Goethe published Faust Part 1.

1840- Explorer Lt. Charles Wilkes claimed all of Antarctica for the United States. He was on a scientific expedition to chart the South Seas and Southern polar waters. Captain Wilkes was really good at exploring, but he was such a tyrannical disciplinarian he was court-martialed upon his return. Wilkes’ erratic behavior may have been a model for Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab in his novel Moby Dick.

1853- Giuseppe Verdi's Il Trovatore with the famous Anvil Chorus premiered in Rome.

1869- New York City controller of Central Park Andrew Green received a petition from 18 of the city’s wealthiest citizens. It called for the establishment of a Museum of Natural History. The famous building was built in 1874.

1915- Two German zeppelins cross the Channel and drop bombs on Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn causing two deaths. The first time England was bombed from the air.

1919- Famed dancer of the Ballet Russe Vasclav Nijinsky danced his last dance at a hotel in San Moritz Switzerland. He later became an incarcerated mental patient and underwent numerous extreme shock therapies until his death in 1950.

1940- The Three Stooges do their impression of Hitler and the top Nazis in the Columbia Pictures short comedy “You Natzy Spy”. Moe Howard is still the best Hitler impersonator of all time. “Hail-Hail-Hailstone of Moronica! Waahoo!”

1945- In Poland the Nazis ordered the evacuation of the remaining concentration camps in advance of the advancing Red army. Tens of thousands were marched out of Auschwitz and Birkenau west in freezing cold. Any who fell were shot.

1955- President Eisenhower held the first press conference that was shown on television. It was held in the treaty room of the State Department. Eisenhower was famous for his ability to speak at great length and never say anything of substance. “This day, My Fellow Americans, more than at any other time, ahead of us lies the Future!”

1961- The first episode of the Dick Van Dyke Show filmed.

1966- Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Nehru, became prime minister of India.

1977- In one of his last acts as President, Gerald Ford pardoned Tokyo Rose. Iva Toguri D’Aquino was a Japanese American who did propaganda broadcasts for Radio Tokyo encouraging American GI’s to give up. She explained she was stranded in Tokyo when the war broke out and was coerced into doing the broadcasts.

1979- Wendy O. Williams, mohawk-haired lead singer of the punk band the Plasmatics was arrested in Milwaukee for going on stage and masturbating with a sledgehammer.

1983- Klaus Barbie arrested in Bolivia and extradited to France. Barbie was the Nazi Gestapo chief in France and was called the Butcher of Lyon for his torture and execution of hundreds of French resistance and Jews. After the war Barbie avoided arrested and was briefly hired by the CIA as an anti-soviet spy. He went to South America and applied his skills for the dictators there until his extradition. While other former Nazis like Kurt Waldheim were disingenuously vague about their past, Barbie was loudly unrepentant. It was reported he continually embarrassed the Nazis trying to hide in South America by Sieg-Heil saluting them on the street and singing old stormtrooper songs over his steak fajitas.

1985- Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA peaked the pop charts at #9.

1989- President Ronald Reagan, in one of his last acts as president, pardoned Yankee Baseball club owner George Steinbrenner for making illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon.

1991-Eastern Airlines ceased operations and goes out of business. Chairman and former astronaut Frank Borman was philosophical: “Business without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell.”
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Which comic character is the oldest? Buster Brown, Felix the Cat or Mickey Mouse?


Answer: Buster Brown 1902, Felix the Cat- 1919, Mickey Mouse, 1928.

Quiz: Composer Phillip Glass has been writing an opera about the last days of Walt Disney, for the 2011 Season. Has there ever been an opera written before about someone connected to Animation?

Yesterdays Quiz answered below: Why is a weather system called a front?
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History for January 17, 2012
Birthdays: Benjamin Franklin, Max Sennett-1880, Al Capone, Ethan G. Hodell 1883- the inventor of the Tow-Truck, Constantin Stanislavsky, Moira Shearer, Shari Lewis, James Earl Jones is 81, Vidal Sassoon, Betty White, Zooey Deschanel, Denny Doyle, Kevin Reynolds, Muhammad Ali is 70, Jim Carrey is 50, Michelle Obama is 48, Betty White is 90

50 BC- Julius Caesar¹s chief rival for power in Rome was Pompey Magnus. Pompey was as famous a general as Caesar and he controlled the Roman Senate. Pompey bragged that if Caesar started a civil war all he had to do would be to stamp his foot and soldiers would spring up everywhere to defend Rome.

But when Caesar invaded Italy, Pompey stamped his foot and nothing happened. Pompey¹s troops were in Spain and Greece. The only legions locally were loyal to Caesar. This day Pompey and the Senate abandoned Rome and fled south to the heel of the Italian boot, then to Greece.

395AD- Death of Theodosius Ist, the last Roman Emperor to rule over the all the Empire from Scotland to Arabia. After his death the Roman Empire divided permanently between East and West.

1775-Sheridan's Restoration comedy The Rivals premiered at Covent Garden Theater, London.

1781- BATTLE OF HANNAH¹S COWPENS- Dan Morgan "the old wagoneer" and his mountainmen shot up a pro-British American army in the Carolinas. The American Loyalists in the South were led by Col. Banastre Tarleton, a dragoon officer unusual for his ruthlessness. After one battle he made his men go over the field and bayonet any rebels who might still be alive. Many in Morgan¹s army were the mountain kinfolk of the slain. This night the cry in the Yankee camp was:" Heads up boys! Bennie's Coming!"

1794- SCANDAL!! ANDY JACKSON MARRIES RACHEL DONELSON FOR THE SECOND TIME. Mrs. Rachel D. Robards was married to a brutal older man, when she fell in love with the dashing young officer in the Tennessee wilderness. Separated from Mr. Robards she and Jackson were in Natchez, Mississippi at her sister¹s, when they heard word that Robards had filed for a divorce back in Nashville.

Jackson and Rachael then married and lived together for a year but then discovered that the divorce report was false and worse, Mississippi where they were married was still Spanish territory that didn't recognize Protestant marriages as legal. Rachel finally got her divorce from Robards, and they married again. Still, the social stigma of 'living in sin' stuck.

Rachel became morose in later years when Jackson's political enemies used the charge of adultery to attack him. Jackson fought duels and killed men over his wife's honor. By the time Jackson was elected President, Rachel Jackson was too ill to go to Washington. She died just before the Inauguration. The widower President lived long, but never got over his love for his Rachel.

1800- Thomas Jefferson welcomed French businessman Etienne Irenee¹ Du Pont de Nemours to America. Monsieur Dupont had decided to move his business from revolution ravaged France and become an American. He founded the Dupont Chemical Corporation that today makes plastics and housepaints, but back then what was most important was he made gunpowder. During the American Revolution gunpowder was a precious commodity. Colonial women saved pigeon droppings and their own urine to concoct saltpeter. Almost all the high quality gunpowder had to be imported from France. The Dupont family continued to control America¹s petrochemical destiny way into the mid-twentieth century. And ladies could dispose of their urine in more sanitary ways.

1836- Texas General Sam Houston orders Jim Bowie to go to the Alamo and blow it up. Then bring the soldiers and the valuable cannon back to the main army to fight Santa Anna. But once there, Bowie was convinced by William Travis to disobey orders and defend the Alamo to the bitter end.

1884- The Battle of Abu Kleer. British forces attempting to save Gordon of Khartoum are furiously attacked by the Dervish army of El Mahdi. At one point the Dervishes broke up a British infantry square, something Napoleon had trouble doing at Waterloo. Kipling wrote a poem in praise of the bravery of the long haired black Sudannese tribemen called ³Fuzzy-Wuzzy² ­³Though we sloshed them with Martini;s an it wasn¹t hardly fair, with the odds against you Fuzzy-Wuzzy, you broke the British square.² A Martini-Henry was a rapid reloading rifle used at the time.

1904- Chekov's The Cherry Orchard opened in St. Petersburg.

1908- Thousands of women march on Downing Street in London demanding women be given the vote. The broke windows and shouted ³It will be bombs next time!² Among the suffragettes arrested and imprisoned was 23 year old Alice Paul from New Jersey. She was honored in 1996 by a US postage stamp.

1926- FATS WALLER KIDNAPPED-Harlem Jazz great Fats Waller was in Chicago for a gig. On the street several gunmen grabbed him and dragged him into their limo and sped off to the lair of mob boss Scarface Al Capone. When he arrived there the terrified Waller was reassured by Capone that as it was Big Al¹s birthday all he wanted was for Waller to perform at his party. The bash lasted three days and the joint was really jumpin! Waller left unharmed, and with a very fat paycheck as well, but resolved to stay in Harlem where it was safe.(-?).

1926- George Burns married Gracie Allen.

1929- First appearance of Popeye the Sailor in E.C. Seegar's comic strip the Thimble Theatre.

1935- In an address to Congress, Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed national unemployment insurance. It had been a issue demanded by workers since Coxey's Army in 1895.

1942- Right after the Pearl Harbor attack British Prime Minister Winston Churchill slipped across U-boat infested Atlantic waters and arrived in Washington for strategy planning meetings with President Roosevelt. Today he flew back to London without incident, although over London itself his plane was almost mistaken for the Luftwaffe and shot down.

1949- The first Volkswagen beetles arrive in North America.

1949- The Goldbergs, a radio comedy show about a Jewish family in the Bronx, moved to television and became the first true sitcom. The show ended when Mrs. Goldberg was accused by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee of being a Communist.

1950- THE BRINKS JOB- Several small time hoods wearing Halloween masks entered a Brinks Armored Car office in Boston and stole $1,2 million in cash and 1.5 in securities. By 1953 one crook broke down and confessed just eleven days before the statute of limitations would run out.

1957- The first non-stop jet flight around the world. Three U.S. B-52 bombers took off from Edwards Air force base in California and by flying at supersonic speed and refueling in mid air circumnavigated the globe in a little over 48 hours. The mission was not intended to set a record or for any scientific value as to demonstrate that the U.S. could now go anywhere on the earth and drop a nuke on you. They cemented this idea by dropping a dummy bomb after passing over Malaya.

1961- Frank Sinatra¹s Ratpack had campaigned hard for their friend John F. Kennedy for president. Black entertainer Sammy Davis Jr. had worked particularly hard to help Kennedy win the African American vote. But Sammy had a preference for blond white actresses and had married one, May Britt in 1960. To fend off negative publicity this day JFK had his secretary Mrs. Lincoln telephone Sammy Davis and un-invite him to the President¹s Inaugural Ball. We¹re Liberal, but not that liberal. And uhh..thanks for the help. Dean Martin was so angry at this insult to his friend that he cancelled his appearance at the inaugural.
In 1968 Sammy Davis angered the black community when he embraced republican Richard Nixon.

1961- President Dwight Eisenhower¹s farewell speech to the nation. He warned against the growing influence of the ³Military Industrial Complex².

1964- The first Porsche Carrera sportscar arrived in L.A..

1977- Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad in Utah for murdering an elderly couple. They pinned a paper on his chest with a heart drawn on it so marksmen could aim straight. Norman Mailor wrote the book ³Executioners¹ Song² about the event.

1994-The Great Northridge Earthquake rocked Los Angeles. 72 deaths and 20 billion dollars in damage. It was officially listed as 6.8 on the Richter Scale, although many persist that in some areas it was as high as 7.2 . The epicenter was in the San Fernando Valley, so the valleys two major industries, animated cartoons and pornography, were temporarily disrupted.

1995- In a strange coincidence, one year to the day after the Los Angeles earthquake a massive earthquake struck Kobe Japan. The Japanese place great resources and time in earthquake preparedness, yet this 7.2 quake toppled whole freeways, killed 5,000 and left 1 1/2 million people homeless. It was the worse natural disaster in Japan since the 1923 Tokyo quake.

2000-A Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton was offered for sale on E-Bay.
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Yesterday¹s Question: Why is a weather system called a front?

Answer: It became a habit because of World War I. The first scientific meteorological reports were ordered by the army to coordinate massive assaults all along the Western Front. So the name stuck.

Question: Why is a weather system called a front?

Yesterday’s question answered below: When you hear political pundits describe the end of Keynesian Economics, what does that mean?
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History for 1/16/2012
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 is 62, John Carpenter, Diane Fossey, Kate Moss is 38, Tsianina Joelson

Happy Martin Luther King Day, observed.

1761- The British capture Pondicherry, the last French outpost in India.

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.

1865- After resting his army in Savannah Georgia for Christmas, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman began to move his blue columns towards the Carolinas.

1883- Moved to act by the assassination of President James Garfield by a demented civil servant, Congress passed the Pendleton Act creating rigid merit standards for government jobs and creating the Civil Service Commission. Before this things ran as the "Spoils System"- after every election hundreds of government jobs were given by the President and his party to party hacks and amateurs as payment for favors, much uhh..as they run things today.

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.

1919- In Argentina it was the end of the Sanglante- the Bloody Week . The government crushed a general nationwide strike – 700 killed.

1920- THE VOLSTEAD ACT passed to give teeth to the new Prohibition Amendment outlawing all alcohol in the U.S.. The Roaring 20's really begin. Bootlegging and smuggling reach epidemic proportions.

1920- The League of Nations held it’s first meeting in Paris.

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- the first racetrack photo-finish camera installed.

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.

1938- Nylon invented by the Dupont Company.

1939- Albert Einstein and Neils Bohr announce the successful fission of uranium and asked that it be used for peaceful purposes only. One of their colleagues Dr. Leo Szilard immediately warned the U.S. that they better start a nuclear bomb program because another friend of Bohr's, Dr. Rudolph Heisenberg, was building one for Hitler.

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.

1942- Japanese armies attacked Burma.

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.

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

1970- Col. Mohammar Khaddafyi became premier of Libya, a job he held until last year.

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: When you hear political pundits describe the end of Keynesian Economics, what does that mean?

Answer: An economic system first presented by John Maynard Keynes in the 1930's
in response to the Great Depression, whereby the private sector and government both play a part in determining a country's economic policies. In the U.S.,Keynesian policies were instituted most especially in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The end of Keynesian economics is generally thought of as the rise of deregulation and business laissez-faire attitudes that began, at least in the U.S., with the so called "Reganomincs" of the 1980's and advocated by Milton Friedman.

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Quiz: When you hear political pundits describe the end of Keynesian Economics, what does that mean?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Was Prokoviev’s famous suite Peter and the Wolf written in the XIX of XX Century?
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History for 1/15/2012
Birthdays: Dr. Martin Luther King, 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”.

Happy Druid New Year

Feast of St. Paul the Hermit

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. The Pope had previously sent St. Dominic to re-convert the Cathars but after ten years of preaching and fasting St. Dominic’s final conclusion was :”Someone should take a stick to those people!”

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 to tell the guilty from the innocent was :”Kill them all and God will recognize his own.”

The Holy Office of the Inquisition was invented to finish things off. The Cathar religion disappeared except for cult fans like Alastair Crowley and the author of the DaVinci Code.

1520- Pope Leo X tells little monk Martin Luther he has sixty days to knock off all this Reformation stuff and stop complaining, or he's going to excommunicate his butt !

1559- Queen Elizabeth Ist was crowned at Westminster Abbey. The daughter of Anne Boylen was twenty five and reigned 42 years. Only Victoria and the current Queen Elizabeth II reigned longer.

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.

1811- In a secret session, the US Congress approves a plan to get Florida away from Spain.

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.

1861- The Lincoln-hating Mayor of New York City Fernando Wood passed a non-binding resolution of secession from the United States. The pro-Southern sentiment went underground in the public outrage over the rebels firing on Fort Sumter.

1895- The Electric Strike- Brooklyn's 5,000 trolley car workers go out and hit the bricks. New York's 7th Regiment has to run the system.

1919- After World War One toppled the Kaiser, anarchy reigned in Berlin streets. Today as the Spartacist revolt was put down in Berlin, German Socialist leaders Red Rosa Luxembrug and Karl Leibknecht were dragged out of the Eden Hotel, beaten with rifle butts, then shot. Their bodies were then dumped in a canal.

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.”

1927- The Dumbarton Bridge carried the first auto traffic across San Francisco Bay.

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 confirm 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.

1943- The Pentagon completed. First conceived as a medical research facility, it grew to become the headquarters of the massive US military Industrial Complex, the largest office building in the world. The supervisor of construction was General Leslie Grove, who was also head of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos.

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.

1949- Chinese Communist armies captured the city of Tientsin after an all day battle with Nationalist forces.

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 a sexploitation film about her life.

1960- Walt Disney Presents Leslie Neilsen as revolutionary guerrilla Francis Marion in the adventure series Swamp Fox.

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.

1968- Jeanette Rankin, the 87 year old Congresswoman who voted against US participation in World War One and World War Two, today led a protest against the Vietnam War.

1974- 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 well placed cigars.
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Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Was Prokoviev’s famous suite Peter and the Wolf written in the XIX of XX Century?

Answer: Written in the XX Century, 1936 to be exact.