Question: Who was Caliban?

Yesterdays Question answered below: What does it mean when something is ad hoc?
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History for 3/9/2018
Birthdays: Amerigo Vespucci, Eddie Foy Sr., Yuri Gargarin, Samuel Barber, chess master Bobby Fischer, Mickey Spillane, Vita Sackville-West, Raul Julia, Vacheslav Molotov, Juliet Binoche is 54, Linda Fiorentino is 60, Lil' Bow-Wow is 31

1522- Protestant reformer Martin Luther had inspired the people of Germany to throw off the authority of the Roman Catholic Church. But he soon became alarmed by the excesses he heard of. People were burning churches and stoning priests who refused to change their ways. One bishop fed Holy Communion wafers to his pet parrot.
This day Martin Luther came out of protective hiding and donned his monks robes to give a series of 8 sermons from the pulpit in Wittenberg. He called people back to order and to show mercy to those who still preferred the old religion. Stop the violence he said" had I not freed millions of men from ecclesiastical oppression without lifting more than one pen?"

1566- The Scottish Presbyterian nobles around Mary Queen of Scots disliked her Italian secretary Antonio Riccio. So today despite the Queens protests, they dragged him off and stabbed him to death.

1796- NAPOLEON & JOSEPHINE'S WEDDING ANNIVERSARY- Legend has it Napoleon was working late at the office planning to attack Italy so arrived two hours late. The minister had dozed off and Napoleon shouted:" Wake up Citizen and Marry Us!" Josephine (34) was about 8 years older than Nappy (26) so to smooth over the difference on the marriage certificate he made himself 18 months older and she took four years off.

1805- YORK -Several times the little Lewis and Clark expedition was saved from attack because Indians were amazed to see York, Captain Clark's slave. It was the first black man they had ever seen. This day York was introduced to Mandan Chief One-Eyed Le Bourgne. Le Bourgne first tried to rub the color off with water but when he saw York's dark hair he whooped for joy! The whites were hairy, pale and ugly, but this man was beautiful like a buffalo! A very powerful symbol in Mandan culture. Chief LeBourgne immediately invited York to make love to two Mandan maidens so a physical record of this great event would remain with the tribe. York found himself on several more occasions a sexual diplomat on behalf of the United States.

1822- First patent in the U.S. issued for ceramic false teeth. Before that they were made of a strong oak; George Washington once tried a set made of deer's teeth set in lead that was too heavy for him to close his mouth. He settled for a set carved from a hippopotamus jaw. In Gilbert Stuarts' painting the bulge seen in his tightly compressed upper lip is his dentures.

1841- After hearing the arguments of former president John Quincy Adams, the US Supreme Court ruled that the African men who overpowered the crew of the Spanish slave ship La Amistad could go home to Africa.

1842- Francisco Lopez discovered gold in Placerita Canyon in Southern California.

1846- With the lavish ceremony before the gates of Lahore, Britain concluded the First Sikh War. One of the tributes handed over was the Koh-in-Noor Diamond, The Mountain of Light, at 800 karats the largest diamond in the world. It is now part of the crown jewels of Britain.

1847- General Winfield Scott began landing the U.S. troops off ships in the harbor of Vera Cruz in landing boats he designed. He hoped to emulate Cortez's march of conquest to Mexico City. It was the first large scale amphibious landings in U.S. Army history.

1858- THE MAILBOX is patented. One legend has it first invented by English writer Anthony Trollope.

1862- THE MONITOR VS. THE MERRIMAC. The first battle between iron warships. The Confederate Merrimac also called the Virginia spent yesterday shooting up the wooden Yankee fleet, it's armor plating laughing off their cannonballs.

She was preparing to finish the job today when the weirdly designed little U.S.S. Monitor chugged into view. The two ironclads fought to a draw, but it saved the remainder of the Union fleet. When you see paintings of the event, they neglect the fact that both ships were covered with pork fat to keep them slippery, and it must have caught fire during the cannon fire. So imagine two flaming pork chops bobbing in the water shooting at each other. They kept bouncing cannonballs off their iron sides all day. At one point the confederate captain asked his gunnery officer why he had stopped firing. He replied:" Because I'm doing her as much damage as if I snapped my fingers at her every two and a half minutes!" The Merrimac's crew even tried to board the Monitor with pistols and cutlasses, but she was too un-maneuverable to catch her. Finally exhausted, they both drew off for the night.

The CSS Merrimac was later blown up when it's home base at Norfolk was captured by land forces and the USS Monitor sank in a storm. But both sides began to build more iron warships. The London Times correspondent John Russell had watched the battle and wired home:" As of today every wooden fleet in the world is now obsolete."

1888- While strolling through his garden, writer Jules Verne was shot by an emotional deranged nephew. He recovered, but walked with a limp for the rest of his life.

1907-Former Edison animator J. Stuart Blackton starts "Moving Picture World" an early movie fanzine.

1913- Virginia Woolf completed her first novel The Voyage Out.

1916- Pancho Villa and his Mexican Revolutionaries- Los Dorados, crossed into Texas and New Mexico and at the town of Columbus killed 17 Americans and burned the town. Villa was angry that the Yankees had intervened in the Mexican revolution several times and allowed American railroads to transport the troops of his enemy General Carranza. Pancho Villa was pursued by U.S. troops under Blackjack Pershing, leading men who would one day command Americas armies, like Lieutenant George Patton and Captain Douglas MacArthur.

1917- During the air battles over the Western Front this day a red German Fokker Albatross biplane was forced down over his own lines. Friendly troops carried the pilot to safety, stunned but okay. When they asked him how many planes had he shot down, he murmured "24". The men thought he was a liar until they undid the scarf around his neck and saw his Blue Max medal. The pilot was Von Richtofen, the Red Baron. Baron von Richtofen would recover and go back into combat, scoring 80 kills until he was finally killed in April 1918.

1932-New York born Eamon DeValera elected first President of the Republic of Ireland.

1932- China's last Manchu emperor Henry Pu Yi was declared by the Japanese Army emperor of their conquered territory in Manchuria called Manchukuo.

1935- The Looney Tune Cartoon "I haven't Got a Hat" premiered. This cartoon gave birth to the first permanent Warner Bros. Cartoon star- Porky Pig.

1945- U.S. B-29s drop massive amounts of incendiary bombs on Tokyo, killing 120,000 people, more than Hiroshima (90,000). USAF General Curtis LeMay told his assistant Robert MacNamara that "If the Japanese had won the war, we would've been prosecuted as war criminals."

1954- Edgar R. Murrow does his "See It Now" television broadcast detailing the life of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, the commie-chaser. The obvious contradictions and gross opportunism in McCarthy's record when laid out before a nationwide audience, destroyed his career and took the steam out of the "Red Scare" of the 50's. It is probably television journalism's finest moment. For the lowest? Well, what's on tonight?

1955- Actor James Dean's film, East of Eden, premiered today,.

1959-The first "Clutch Cargo" show.

1974- Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda came out of the Philippine jungle and surrendered, at last made to understand that World War II had been over for thirty years. Even after he captured a transistor radio, he thought the broadcast news of American troops in Vietnam and Korea was just propaganda. Onoda was finally convinced when Japanese researchers produced his elderly retired Major, who was driven through the jungle while reading over a bullhorn the surrender orders he first gave in 1945. Lt. Onoda returned to Japan a popular, if confused, hero. Onoda died in 2012 at age 94.

1984- Roy E. Disney Jr., Walt's nephew, resigned from the central board of the Walt Disney Company, setting in motion a series of takeover bids and maneuvering that by August would wrest control of the company from Ron Miller, Walt's son-in-law.

1984- Touchstone pictures Splash premiered, featuring Tom Hanks, John Candy and a tastefully topless Daryl Hannah.

1989- Artist-photographer Robert Maplethorpe died of AIDS.

1997- Gangsta-rap singer Christopher Wallace, who was known as the Notorious B.I.G. and also called Biggie Smalls, was shot and killed by a gangsta-style drive by. His last album was entitled Life After Death. Notorious BIG could never shake the accusation that he was involved in the similar murder of singer Tupac Shakur.
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Yesterdays Question: What does it mean when something is ad hoc?

Answer: Ad hoc is a Latin phrase meaning "for this". In English, it generally signifies a solution designed for a specific problem or task, non-generalizable, and not intended to be able to be adapted to other purposes.

Question: What does it mean when something is ad hoc?

Yesterday's Question answered below: How many British Kings were there between Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II?
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History for 3/8/2018
Birthdays: Sophocles, Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach, Hannah Hoes Van Beuren- the First Lady for Martin Van Beuren, Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., Alan Hovhannes, Kenneth Grahame the author of the Wind in the Willows, Cyd Charisse, Charlie Pride, Mickey Dolenz, Alan Hale Jr., Jim Rice, Aiden Quinn is 59, Freddy Prinze Jr is 42, Jim Bouton- baseball player, author, and inventor of Big League Chew bubble gum

1265-THE GREAT PARLIAMENT- For the first time in the modern era, a legislative body comprised of English Nobility, Clergy and Common men met to discuss the affairs of the kingdom. All modern representative government begins here. This inclusion of a "House of Commons" was the genius of Earl Simon de Monfort, a rebel baron who saw the need to curb King Henry III's power, and perhaps from the depths of the Middle Ages, he saw the future. First he had to defeat and capture the King in battle and forced the clergy to declare excommunicate anyone who messed with the system, just to make the whole thing stick. So even after Simon De Monfort was chopped up in battle and the king restored to full power, the Parliamentary system endured.

1702- After the death of King William III of Orange, Queen Anne takes over England.
She was an obese lady almost in constant pain from gout and pleurisy and had to be moved around in a chair, raised and lowered with ropes and pulleys. Like William and Mary she had no direct heir - she had 17 children but none of them made it past the age of 11. After her death the British throne went to a nephew, the German Elector of Hanover, George I because he was Protestant.
Pirate Edward Teech, called Blackbeard, named his ship "Queen Anne's Revenge", for reasons known only to him.

1778- France's entry into the war for American Independence made London rethink it's strategy. This day Colonial Secretary Lord Germain sent orders to Generals Howe and Clinton to stop chasing rebels in Philadelphia and fall back to New York City, where they could be more adequately supported by the navy. The American Revolution would now be a secondary consideration to the wider global war with France, Spain and Holland.

1782- Gnaderhutten massacre- Connecticut militia ambush 90 Pequot Christian Indians as revenge for Indian raids. The raiders were from another tribe, but these guys were more conveniently in the neighborhood.

1846- After the U.S. annexation of Texas, Mexico disputed exactly where the border ended. The U.S. claimed it was the Rio Grande, the Mexican Government claimed it was a few hundred miles further north at the River Nueces. This day President James K. Polk ordered General Zachary Taylor "Old Rough & Ready" to move his army into the disputed area and hope he gets attacked so they could declare war on Mexico with a clear provocation.

1862- The Confederate navy had dredged up the hull of a sunken warship named the Merrimac and outfitted her with iron boilerplate to create the C.S.S. Virginia, the first ironclad warship. Her skipper was Captain Robert Buchanan, before the war he was first commandant of the Annapolis Naval Academy.
On this day the Merrimac-Virginia steamed over to a large fleet of wooden warships blockading Hampton Roads inlet and sank them. While the big warship's cannonballs bounced harmlessly off her iron plate she rammed and sank the U.S.S. Cumberland, burned the U.S.S. Congress and ran two more ships aground. Eventually she drew off for the night resolved to finish them in the morning. Washington D.C. panicked: the entire wooden U.S. Navy was now obsolete.
What was to prevent the Merrimac-Virginia from sailing up the Potomac and shelling the White House? The USS Monitor, that's who, sailing down slowly from New York. It arrived this night and moored alongside the stricken Congress. Sailors said it looked like a "Cheese Box on a Raft."

1862- THE LAST PIRATE - Ned Gordon was the last man hanged in the United States for high sea piracy. By then most of his companions had taken commissions in the Confederate Navy as privateers. The buccaneer life continued in the South Seas through the Twentieth Century by the Lascar people of Madagascar, and today pirates can still be found in Somalia. In 1999 China executed 13 men for sea piracy and in 2001, the Australian captain of the America's Cup winner was killed by pirates off the coast of Brazil. In 2012 America sentenced a Somali pirate to 33 years in prison.

1886- A small time Scots doctor in Portsmouth England named Arthur Conan-Doyle had been trying his hand at writing fiction. He had sold a few stories to magazines and tried to publish a historical novel "Firm of Girdlestone" with lackluster results.
This day he began a new novel " A Tangled Skein" which had a new character named at first Sheridan Hope, then Sheringford Holmes. By the time he finished his story month later, he had changed the title to "A Study in Scarlet" and the main protagonist name had become SHERLOCK HOLMES.
Conan Doyle was an admirer of the American writer Oliver Wendel Holmes who was touring Britain that year. Like him, Holmes was a doctor who turned writer. No one is sure where he got the name Sherlock. It may have been a neighbor. Conan Doyle's professor in Edinburgh college Dr Joseph Bell excelled at deductive reasoning and had an assistant named Dr Watson.

1894- The first dog licenses issued in New York.

1908- The British House of Commons voted down a bill giving women the vote.

1917- In St. Petersburg it is International Women Workers Day. Demonstrating women throw rocks at factory windows to get the men to come out and join them. Soon the Czar's capitol is in a general strike. Czar Nicholas was at the front and the Czarina is enclosed with her icons praying over the recently murdered monk Rasputin. The anti-government demonstrations would go on day and night, joined by policemen and soldiers until the Czar himself abdicated on March 15th.

1921- Spanish premier Eduardo Dato was assassinated while leaving the Cortes or Parliament in Madrid.

1930- An angry mob of unemployed battle the police in New York's Tompkin's Square.

1933- As a result of President Roosevelt's Nationwide Bank shutdown, Hollywood Studios go into a cash panic. MGM, RKO and the others ask for 30-50% salary cuts from their stars and artists. At one point they announced the salary cuts at the Oscar banquet ( betchya that made for a real fun party!)
Louis B. Mayer, tearful and unshaven pleaded his case to his contract-stars, who reluctantly accepted the cuts. Lionel Barrymore called out "We're with ya. L.B. !" Afterwards Mayer winked to his secretary and giggled:" So how'd I do?" A week later Mayer hired his new son-in-law David Selznick as a producer at $4000 a week. Production chief Darryl Zanuck quit Warner Bros. over the cuts and went on to build Twentieth Century Fox.

1933- Nazi interior minister Wilhelm Frick announced the creation of a system of Concentration Camps to incarcerate political undesirables.

1941- Writer and playwright Sherwood Anderson dies from pterioteritus- internal bleeding- after swallowing a toothpick at a cocktail party.

1941- The National Television System Committee set up by the FCC to standardize television technology recommended an industry standard of 525 scan lines at 30 frames a second- what we now call after their name- NTSC. England later adopted the PAL (Phase Alernation Line) of 625 lines, 25 frames per second and France the SECAM System (Systeme Electronique Couleur Avec Memoire).which is also a 625 line, 25fps system. This is why British TV shows like The Prisoner always looked so grainy on American sets and American shows look so garish on British sets. By garish I mean the color, not the content.
It also speeds up the film during video from 24 frames to 25fps (i.e. 4%)...which is why in England and the rest of Europe, all Hollywood movies are 4% shorter and the voices of the actors all sound a little squeaky. The way to remember NTSC is "Never-The-Same-Color'. DVD and BluRay went to a thousand- scan lines. The invention of digital screens is making most of this irrelevant.

1942- Dutch forces surrender Java to Japanese invaders. They roll on to Sumatra.

1950- the Volkswagen bus introduced.

1961-The Frito Company merges with potato chip makers H.L. Lay to form Frito-Lay. The recipe for Fritos corn chips was bought by milkshake salesman Elmer Doolin from a Mexican fry cook in Texas.

1966- London gangster Ronnie Kray entered the Blind Beggar Pub on Whitechapel Road and shot gangster George Cornell in the head. Ronnie and his identical twin brother Reggie ran rackets in London as well as a West End nightclub that booked performers like Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland. The Krays were finally imprisoned in 1968.

1968- The Soviet nuclear submarine K-19 sank in the Pacific off the US coastline. In 1974 the CIA tried to secretly dredge it up with a research ship the Glomar Explorer designed by Howard Hughes Company. In 2002 Harrison Ford made a movie about the K-19, but that sank without a trace also.

1969 The Pontiac Trans-Am introduced. Muscle car enthusiasts rejoice!

1970- The Nixon White House announced that the Americans operations in Vietnam and Cambodia had also been expanded into the neutral nation of Laos and already 27 Americans had been killed in fighting there.

1973- Paul McCartney was fined 100 pounds for growing marijuana on his farm Mull of Kintyre.

1977- Ralph Bakshi's film Wizards premiered.

1994- Don Ku invented the ubiquitous little rolling wheeled black suitcase with collapsible handle that bumps into your legs at airports today.

1998- In Ladson South Carolina, Daniel Rudolph, the brother of Abortion Clinic bomber Eric Rudolph, videotaped himself cutting off his own hand with a power saw. He said he intended this to be a message to the FBI and the Media!

2014- Malaysian airliner MH 370 en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing with 227 passengers and crew disappeared mid-ocean. Evidence showed that it's satellite tracking had been turned off from inside the cabin shortly before it disappeared. A small piece of wreckage was found on the African coast, but by January 2017 the search was called off. To this day no trace has yet been found.
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Yesterday's Question: How many British Kings were there between Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II?

Answer: Four. Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, and George VI.
Prince William's baby son will someday be George VII, but we'll probably all be dead by then.

Question: How many British Kings were there between Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II?

Yesterdays Question answered below: Who first said " Water, Water Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink"?
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History for 3/7/2018
Birthdays: Maurice Ravel, Piet Mondrian, Roman Emperor Geta, Luther Burbank, Tammy Fae Baker, Willard Scott, Lynn Swann, Franco Harris, Daniel D. Travanti, Rachel Weisz is 47, Michael Eisner is 76, Wanda Sykes is 54, Peter Saarsgard is 47, Bryan Cranston is 62

322 BC- the Greek philosopher Aristotle died of indigestion.

161AD- The death of the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius. Marcus Aurelius became Emperor. Marcus named his brother Lucius Verus as co-emperor, but Verus died after a few years. Marcus Aurelius became famous as the philosopher-emperor, ruling justly and leaving behind his Meditations, one of the great works of western philosophy.

1274- Saint Thomas Aquinas died in Italy. Everybody knew the great teacher was so holy he undoubtedly would be made a saint (the medieval equivalent of being called to the Hall of Fame). So rather and wait for opportunity to sell his bones as relics, the people sped up the process of decomposition by cutting up his body and boiling the pieces in lye.

1765- PARLIAMENT PASSES THE STAMP ACT. Ever since winning Canada and India from France, England had to come up with ways to pay for her massive war debt as well as garrisoning and administering of all the new possessions. The Stamp Act ordered that all purchases and exports to and from America have a royal stamp (i.e. tax) on them, sort of like the stamp you see on liquor bottle caps. These taxes were already in place in England, so Whitehall felt nobody would mind. Americans went ballistic and overnight became a nation of smugglers. They most strongly objected to the idea that the tax was levied without their consent. No one consulted their elected representatives and there were no American seats in Parliament.

Even though the unpopular act was repealed a year later after Benjamin Franklin successfully argued in Parliament, the resentment against the mother country lingered. The British in turn were surprised and annoyed by the all the fuss. They felt the Yankees were an ungrateful people they had defeated French for.

1774- To combat rampant smuggling and teach a lesson to the increasingly uppity New Englanders, the Royal Governor of Massachusetts General Thomas Gage ordered the Port of Boston closed. This act all but ensured that the first outbreak of violence in the American Revolution would happen there.

1809- French Balloonist Jean Pierre Blanchard died from injuries sustained from crashing his balloon in the Netherlands. Blanchard with a man named Jeffries had crossed the English Channel by air and for years he had demonstrated the wonders of air flight for audiences like Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon.

1850- THE 7 OF MARCH SPEECH- The only address given to Congress that is known only by its date. Senator Daniel Webster stood up and electrified the nation with a three hour address backing the Clay Compromise: "Mr. Speaker ! I rise not as a Massachusetts man, or a Northern man, but as an American !!" This Northern abolitionist backed the fugitive slave law and other concessions to the South in exchange for California entering the union as a non-slave state.

New England supporters were furious. His controversial stand probably cost him his last chance of ever becoming president, and he died bitter two years later. John F. Kennedy said in "Profiles in Courage" that by doing this act Daniel Webster helped delay the Civil War for ten more years, which allowed the north to grow more industrially powerful. He supposedly said, " I'd rather be right than be president."

1862- THE BATTLE OF PEA RIDGE- Yankees under General Curtis defeated a Confederate army under Gen. Stirling Price, keeping Missouri in the Union. It was a confused battle with militias, frontier scouts like Wild Bill Hickock and Creek Indians under Confederate Colonel Stand Watie. Curtis directed the battle in an old brown corduroy jacket and nuzzled a shotgun in his lap. The Creeks captured a Union battery but stopped their attack to dance with the scalps of the Yankees.

1862- BULLETHOLE ELLIS- Rebel Guerrilla leader William Quantrill and his raiders shot up the Kansas town of Aubrey. During the raid Quantrill fired his Colt revolver at a man in a second story window named Abraham Ellis. The bullet was slowed by smashing through the windowsill and embedded in the man's skull, but just missed touching his brain. Quantrill apologized to Ellis. Ellis had helped him get a teaching job before the war. The raiders left him for dead, but Abe Ellis recovered. Old Bullethole Ellis lived to a ripe old age, just with a large round dark hole in the center of his forehead.

1877- Bill Reed, a Union Pacific Railroad worker discovered a vast field of dinosaur fossils at Como Bluff Wyoming. "The bones extend for seven miles and are by the ton!"

1906- Finland becomes the first nation to give women the right to vote.

1916- BMW- The manufacturing firms of Karl Rapp and Gustav Otto merged to form the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke AG -Bavarian Aircraft Works. The company would later become the Bayerische Motor-Werke -Bavarian Motor Works or BMW. The Logo circle represents a white propeller turning against a blue sky- the colors of the old Kingdom of Bavaria, the heraldic shield of the ruling Wittelsbach Dynasty. After the world wars, BMW was prohibited from manufacturing aircraft engines, as their engines had powered the fiercest fighters like the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Focke-Wulf 190. So BMW focused on making high quality cars.

1932-BATTLE OF THE RIVER ROUGE- At the depth of the Great Depression unemployment in Detroit was up to 50% of the population. 10,000 desperately unemployed auto workers stage a protest march on Henry Ford's Rouge River plant, the largest factory in the world. They are met by police and thugs who fired guns into the crowd, killing 3 and wounding 25. Henry Ford, (who personally made $10 million that year) had machine guns mounted on his home's roof and advised his chief executives to carry side-arms. Fords private in-house police were called by the Orwellian misnomer the Service Department.

1936- HITLER RE-OCCUPIED THE RHINELAND- Since the Versailles treaty the German industrial heartland of the Ruhr valley was under neutral and sometimes Anglo-French occupation. Imagine trying to restart your stagnant economy with Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh under foreign control. Today Hitler took the biggest gamble of his career and ordered the still infant Wehrmacht army to reoccupy the Ruhr, in defiance of all previous treaties. He dared the Allies to do something about it, and they stayed quiet. German generals were amazed that France and England could have easily invaded at any time and squashed them, but they did nothing.

1942- The Japanese army captured Rangoon and cut the Burma Road, severing Anglo- Chinese supply lines. After this, supplies would have to be brought in 'Over the Hump" meaning flown by unescorted transport planes from India over the Himalayas.

1945- THE BRIDGE AT REMAGEN- A hostile army had not crossed the Rhine into Germany since Napoleon in 1806. The Germans called their defense of the border the Siegfried Line. The Nazis had ordered all Rhine bridges destroyed, but the bridge at Remagen was detonated with inferior charges. So it stayed intact as the U.S. Third Army approached. Sgt. Alex Drabik of Ohio ran across the bridge, weaving back and forth like a football fullback, with the enemy firing at him from all sides. Just as he reached the other side a Nazi jumped out, pointed a Lugar pistol in his face and pulled the trigger. The gun was empty. The Siegfried Line was breached, and Sgt. Drabik died of very old age in 1993.

1947- Winston Churchill, while giving a speech in America about the Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe uses the term "Iron Curtain". " From Zagreb on the Adriatic to Stettin in the Baltic, an Iron Curtain has descended across Europe." The phrase had been invented earlier by German Admiral Doenitz, but Churchill popularized the phrase. The Iron Curtain ended in 1989.

1951- The Prime Minister of Iran- General Ali Rasmara was assassinated by Islamic extremists.

1965- BLOODY SUNDAY- THE EDMUND PETTUS BRIDGE-As Dr. Martin Luther King's Civil Rights marchers reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Gov George Wallace had Alabama police ambush them with firehoses, teargas, bullwhips and attack dogs. Dozens of peaceful marchers were beaten and hospitalized. Three were killed. The brutal images on television shocked the nation had probably did more to ensure passage of the National Civil Rights Bill than anything the police could do to stop it.

1969- Golda Meir became Prime Minister of Israel.

1988- 300 pound female impersonator Harry Milstead, better known as Divine in the John Waters films, died of sleep apnea.

1999- Film director Stanley Kubrick died in his sleep of a heart attack just six days after completing his final film Eyes Wide Shut. He was 70.
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Yesterdays Question: Quiz: Who first said " Water, Water Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink"?

Answer: Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his 1798 poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. " Water, water everywhere, and all the boards did shrink. Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink.."

Quiz: Who first said " Water, Water Everywhere, and Not a Drop to Drink"?

Yesterday's Question answered below: In Canada there is a University of Guelph. Michaelangelo was a Guelph. What is a Guelph?
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History for 3/6/2018
Birthdays: Michelangelo Buonnarotti, Cyrano De Bergerac, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Phil Sheridan, Lou Costello, Ivan Boesky, Ring Lardner, Gabriele Garcia-Marquez, Valentina Tereschkova the first woman in space, Tom Arnold, Kiri Te Kanawa, Rob Reiner is 71, Alan Greenspan, DC Mayor Marion Barry, Stephen Schwartz is 70, Ed McMahon, Shaquille O'Neal is 46

Today is the Feast Day of Saint Fridolin the Wanderer.

1521- Fernan de Magellan discovered the Pacific island of Guam.

1554- The future King of Spain Phillip II married the Catholic Queen of England Mary Tudor long distance, by proxy. When Phillip came to England, and realized Mary had waited to long to have children and was now too old and ill, he sent emissaries to see if her half-sister Elizabeth was interested.

1834- The Ontario settlement of Fort York is incorporated as the new City of Toronto.

1836- THE ALAMO- The Mexican army of General Santa Anna overwhelmed a small garrison of rebellious Texans in an old mission.
The tragic stand of 189 men led by colorful frontiersmen like Davey Crockett and Jim Bowie against 5,000 troops has become part of American mythology. That they ignored Sam Houston's direct orders to blow up the mission and join his main army with their valuable cannon is forgotten. Apologists contend that if they didn't stall, Santa Anna's army he would have swooped down on Washington-on-the-Brazos and squashed the Texas Rebellion while Texan leaders were still quibbling over their constitution.

The attack began at 4:30 a.m. in the predawn darkness and was all over in 90 minutes, a little after 6 a.m. Jim Bowie was bayoneted in his hospital bed. The notes of a Texas officer named Dolson who interviewed a Mexican officer named Sanchez after the battle were discovered in 1961. It revealed that maybe Davey Crockett didn't go down heroically using his rifle "Old Betsy" as a club- like in the movies, but tried to surrender. His wife was Mexican, and he was a politician after all. Santa Anna had him and any surviving white men shot. Sanchez wasn't sure if it was Crockett. We'll never know for sure.
There were 16 Alamo survivors, the women and children, and Colonel Travis' black servant Joe. Santa Anna made sure they were each given two pesos and a blanket and set free. The battle cry of Texans became Remember the Alamo!

1837- Col Travis black slave Joe fought on the barricades of the Alamo alongside his master. After the battle Joe was thanked for his services by being returned to Travis' family in Alabama to remain a slave. On the one-year anniversary of the battle, Joe escaped to freedom. He remained in hiding for 30 years, long after the Civil War and Emancipation, emerging for a newspaper interview in 1877.

1850- Gustav Flaubert was the French writer who was once tried for pornography for creating Madame Bovary. This day while in Egypt he kept an appointment with the countries most famous belly dancing prostitute, Kuchuck Hanem.

1853- Giusseppi Verdi's classic opera La Traviata premiered at Teatro alla Fenice in Venice. It was based on Dumas novel Le Dame Aux Camelias. Verdi wrote in his diary about the premiere:" The evening was a disaster! Was it my fault or the fault of the singers? Only time will tell..."

1856- LONG BEFORE AMAZON- Mr. Simon met Mr. Schuster while buying a piano in New York City and discovered they had a common love of books. They formed Simon & Schuster, one of the most famous publishers in the U.S.

1857- THE DREDD SCOTT DECISION. One of the incidents leading to the Civil War and one of the most infamous Supreme Court rulings in US History. A slave, Dredd Scott, sued in court for his freedom on the grounds that he no longer lived in a slave state, because his master had moved his home to a free state.
The Supreme Court of Chief Justice Taney, whom the N.Y. Tribune had described as "5 slaveholders and two doughfaces", handed down the decision that not only was Scott still a slave, but he and his descendants could never have rights of U.S. Citizenship, no matter where they lived. In effect, all African-Americans even if born free in the North were still not people but property.
This idea exploded the already enraged public opinion in the North. Four years later the same justice Taney swore in Abraham Lincoln as president.

1860- Presidential candidate Abe Lincoln in a speech said:" Thank God we have a system where workers have the Right to Strike."

1864- THE NAVAJO LONG WALK- After being defeated when their Navajo-Fortress in Canyon de Chelly was stormed by US Cavalry under Kit Carson, the Navajo and their families were forced into a death march in the winter cold several hundred miles to a reservation. Years later Washington decided it didn't want their ancestral lands after all and let them return.

1884-Susan B. Anthony led 100 women's rights advocates to a meeting with President Chester Allen Arthur. They demanded he give his support for giving women the vote. President Arthur said he would think about it, then he did nothing.

1899- The wonder drug of the age and the first patent medicine- Aspirin, is patented. Felix Hoffman isolated the compound salicin from ground willow bark, an old Indian pain remedy. Ancient Romans drank willow water for pain.

1911-THE YELLOW PERIL- In the bizarre game of diplomatic chess the great powers played before World War I, the issue of race was a favorite topic. The" Battle between the White Forces of Christian Civilization against the limitless Yellow Hordes of Asia" was an idea the German Kaiser Wilhelm liked to talk at length on.
On this day the Kaiser's agents convinced the U.S. public via the US tabloid press that Japan had concluded an alliance with Mexico and was preparing to seize the Panama Canal, and that a Japanese Army was even now marching up Baja to invade California! To quiet public fears President Taft was actually forced to mobilize 2/3 of the U.S. Army and Navy and sent it to the Mexican border "for maneuvers".
When the Great War did come Japan was on the American side, and the Kaiser tried fruitlessly to make an alliance with an unsympathetic Mexico.

1917- Woman's rights advocate Margaret Sanger is released from prison where she was jailed for trying to open the first Planned Parenthood clinic. She married the inventor of the Three-In-One Oil Company and used to smuggle abortion medicines in cans of oil. During prohibition she smuggled diaphragms in cases of innocent-looking bootleg whiskey. She lived into the 1960s, long enough to see the Birth Control Pill and the Women's Movement.

1918- The Navy destroyer USN Cyclops disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle, and has never been found.

1921- The film Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse premiered. The first Hollywood film to earn over one million dollars, and it made a major star out of Rudolf Valentino..

1933- Two days after inauguration Eleanor Roosevelt became the first First Lady to hold her own separate press conference. She insisted only female journalists could attend.

1936- Mr. Clarence Birdseye introduced frozen vegetables.

1944- The first big daylight bombing raid on Berlin. In one of the largest air battles of World War II, 800 B-17 and P-51s battled hundreds of Luftwaffe fighters. Over 80 US planes were shot down, losing 690 airmen, and 45 German planes. But the message was clear, Germany would now get the kind of wholesale destruction that Rotterdam, Warsaw and London got.

1978- Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt was shot and crippled by a lunatic.

1979- The film The China Syndrome premiered. It was about an accident at an American nuclear power plant. Three weeks later the real Three Mile Island accident occurred, boosting the box office. " It's spooky, it's enough to make you religious" said star Michael Douglas.

1981- CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite retired. Dan Rather succeeded him after CBS learned ABC was offering Rather big bux to jump networks. Roger Mudd, who was thought to be the real successor to Cronkite, left the network to anchor the History Channel. Dan Rather was the CBS anchor until 2004.

1989- Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications to become Time Warner, the largest media conglomerate in the world. They were bought by AOL in 2000 but AOL proved to be dead weight and they resumed control as TimeWarner in 2003.

1992- The film The Lawnmower Man premiered. It featured early motion-capture CGI imagery, and claimed to have the first virtual reality sex scene.

1998- The Big Lebowski opened in theaters. The Dude Abides…
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Yesterday's Question: In Canada there is a University of Guelph. Michaelangelo was a Guelph. What is a Guelph?

Answer: It was a political party in Italy that arose over dynastic contenders to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. Guelphs vs. Ghibbelines.

Question: In Canada there is a University of Guelph. Michaelangelo was a Guelph. What is a Guelph?

Quiz: Who were the Toy Story characters Woody and Buzz Lightyear named after?
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History for 3/5/2018
Birthdays: Henry III of England, Giovanni Batista Tiepolo, Explorer Le Sieur de Cadillac the founder of Detroit, Hector Villa-Lobos, Howard Pyle, William Oughtred 1574- inventor of the Slide Rule, Red Rosa Luxemburg, Rex Harrison, Dean Stockwell, Paolo Pasolini, Andy Gibb, Samantha Eggar, Andrej Wajda, Fred Williamson, Penn Gillette is 62, Eva Mendes is 43, Kevin Connolly is 43

Today is the feast day of Saint Eusebius of Cremona.

493AD- BARBARIAN PEACE SUMMIT- Theodoric the Visigoth invited Odoacer, King of the Germans in Italy to a peace conference. On a pre-arranged signal two Goths held Odoacer's hands pretending to shake them, then Theodoric whipped out his sword and sliced Odoacer in half. He said of his sword stroke: "Surely the mother of this knave hath made him with gristle, for I find no bones in his body." Peace was achieved.

1496- English King Henry VII hired Italian John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto) to go explore this New World that the Spanish were going on about.

1534- Renaissance painter Correggio died when after an argument in the cathedral of Parma with his patrons paid him with sacks of pennies. He grew overheated carrying them all home and died of a fever at age 45.

1562- The Teutonic Knights disbanded- Warrior monks were a creation of the Crusades but by the Renaissance they were outmoded. This German order of military monks formed in Jerusalem went to Prussia after the Crusades to convert the pagan Baltic peoples by chopping them up for Christ. But by now they had two big problems: Number one- everyone they used to chop were already Christians. Number two- the Reformation had started and all the knights were converting to Lutheranism, even the Order's own bishop! So Grand Master Kettler went to Wittenburg to talk to the great reformer Martin Luther. Luther told Kettler to chuck the whole monk-thing, get married and become Duke of Prussia. Brandenburg-Prussia was the state that Germany unified under in 1870.

1616- The Holy Office of the Inquisition published its verdict on the new scientific ideas of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. It read:" The idea that the Earth goes around the Sun is Foolish, Philosophically Erroneous and Heretical since it contradicts Holy Scripture. The idea that the Earth revolves on its axis is also Ridiculous and Heretical." Galileo's writings were not removed from the Index of Banned Books until 1835. In 1986, Pope John Paul II admitted Galileo might have been right.

1717- Giovanni Tiepolo joined the Guild of Saint Lawrence, the artists union in Rome.

1759- Francois Voltaire's most famous satire on religion and hypocrisy- Candide- was published. It was immediately ordered publicly burned by the regional parliaments of Geneva and Paris. This only increased its popularity. To stay out of trouble Voltaire first refused to admit he was the author:" People must have lost their senses to attribute to me that pack of nonsense! I have, Thanks God, better occupations."

1770- THE BOSTON MASSACRE- A snowball fight near some British sentries turned into an ugly anti-British riot that made the redcoats open fire on the crowd. African American Crispus Attucks among several others were killed. Radical publisher Sam Adams inflated the incident into the Boston Massacre. The British authorities were accommodating enough to allow the soldiers put on trial in a colonial civilian court. The soldiers were defended by a young Boston lawyer named John Adams. They were all acquitted.

1836- At the Alamo, as the Mexican army of Santa Anna prepared for their final attack, legend has it Colonel Travis gathered the remaining defenders. He drew a line in the sand with his sword and asked all who wished to stay and fight to the bitter end to cross it. All crossed but one. He was an elderly Frenchman named Louis Rose, who slipped out through the lines to safety. Rose was a veteran of Napoleon's army and had fought at Waterloo. I guess he felt he had been through enough history for one lifetime. At dusk, 16 year old rider James Allen slipped out of the Alamo to bring the doomed men's last message to the outside world.

1853- Harry Steinway & Sons began their piano making company.

1863- The U.S. Army finally admits having the men do their own cooking was bad for morale, as well as their digestion. The first field kitchens with real cooks set up.

1868- Englishman C.H. Gould patented the first stapler.

1877- Rutherford Hayes inaugurated. His wife banned hard liquor from the White House. For this she was known as Lemonade Lucy.

1891- The town council of Phoenix Arizona offered a bounty of $200 for every dead Indian brought in, and they didn't care how they came to be dead.

1912- Italy became the first to use dirigibles for military purposes. Using them to get aerial reconnaissance of Turkish positions west of Tripoli, Libya.

1913- The day after his inauguration, President Woodrow Wilson began filling his cabinet. Secretary of the Navy Dearing proposed as Assistant Secretary of the Navy a young New York assemblyman named Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wilson said:" Most Roosevelts I know try to run everything, but this fellow is a capitol idea!"

1915- NYPD broke up a plot by anarchists to set off bombs in St. Patrick's Cathedral.

1918- Lenin moved the capitol of Russia from Petrograd- Saint Petersburg, back to Moscow.

1922- F.W. Murnau's eerie film Nosferatu premiered in Berlin.

1933- The day after his inauguration, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered a nationwide "Bank Holiday", a nice way of saying shut the whole system down to stop the panic. One third of all U.S. banks had already collapsed. Roosevelt moved so fast, throwing program after program to combat the Great Depression, that his first 100 days in office became legendary, and now the media use it as a litmus to measure other presidents against.

1937-Allegheny airlines born, later to become U.S. Air. Allegheny had such a bad safety record that by the 1970's the joke on their motto was "Allegheny will get you there-maybe."

1937- SPITFIRE. The first flight of Britain's most famous fighter plane, the Supermarine Spitfire Mark II. Designer B. J. Mitchell fought red tape and outdated thinking on the army's requisition board. He died of exhaustion and heart failure at 42, never knowing that his Spitfire would become the decisive tool in winning the air war over Britain, and saving his country from Nazi invasion.

1963- Country star Patsy Cline died in plane crash near Camden Tenn. Also killed were singers Cowboy Copas and Hacksaw Hawkins.

1966- As America was still getting used to the idea of fighting in Vietnam and anti-war sentiment was beginning, a staff Sgt. Barry Sadler wrote a pro-war song titled Ballad of the Green Berets, that today hit #1. "Put silver wings, on my sons chest…."

1973, New York Yankee pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson make a stunning declaration. The left-handers announce that they have traded each others wives, children, houses, even their family dogs.

1982 - John Belushi died of drug overdose at Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Strip. He had done 20 heroin-cocaine speedballs in just 24 hours. A woman named Cathy Smith was charged with administering to him the fatal dose. Robin Williams was with him that night partying also but left early. Belushi was 31. Someone scrawled on Belushi's tombstone:" You could have given us more laughs.....But NNNOOOO!

1995- Vivian Stanstall, lead singer for the Bonzo Dog Band, died in a fire in his London flat. He had been smoking in bed.

2004- Communist China changed its constitution to say that private property is now OK.
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Yesterday's Question: Who were the Toy Story characters Woody and Buzz Lightyear named after?

Answer: Buzz was named for Apollo astronaut Buzz Aldrin, and Woody was named for African American cowboy actor Woody Strode (Sgt. Rutledge, Once Upon a Time in the West).