TomSito.com - TOM'S BLOG

Question: The Walt Disney movie Frozen was based on what original story?

Answer to yesterday’s question below:What do these movies have in common? Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Secret of Nimh, Tron, Poltergeist, Blade Runner and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
History for 4/7/2021
Birthdays St. Francis Xavier, William Wordsworth, Mongo Santamaria, Walter Winchell, David Frost, Percy Faith, Daniel Ellsberg, Jerry Brown, Alan Pakula, Billie Holiday, Ravi Shankar, Irene Castle, Wayne Rogers, Stan Winston, James Garner, Olkirk Christenson-the inventor of Lego toys, Francis Ford Coppola is 82, Russell Crowe is 57, Jacky Chan is 67

Today is the Feast of Saint Jean Baptiste de LaSalle.

1732-STAND AND DELIVER! Dick Turpin was hanged. Dick Turpin was a highwayman who was the Jesse James of England. Many legends abound how he rode his trusty mare Black Bess from London to York in one day (impossible), and robbed the rich and helped the poor (he kept it all for himself). Finally, In York he was arrested for robbery, rustling, and shooting his neighbors chickens.

1805- Ludwig Van Beethoven premiered his Symphony # 3 Eroica at Vienna’s Theater-an-der-Wein. It marks his break with the gentle styles of Mozart and Haydn and the evolution of his full mature sound. He originally intended to dedicate it to Napoleon but scratched out the dedication page when he heard Napoleon had renounced republican liberal values and made himself an emperor. Of all his symphonies it remained his favorite, despite the opinions of music critics at the time-“ Strange modulations and violent transitions… undesirable originality.”

1827- The first book of matches is patented.

1850 - The Nevada (California?) gold rush town of Rough n’ Ready declared itself an independent nation, complete with president, flag and constitution. It lasted about three months. When the miners went to buy liquor at a nearby town to celebrate the 4th of July, they were refused because they were now foreigners. So the miners voted to rejoin the USA.

1862-THAT DEVIL FORREST! The Second Day of the Battle of Shiloh. Union General Grant, reinforced overnight, counterattacked and recaptured his ground lost the day before by the rebel surprise attack. When General Lew Wallace met him with reinforcements Wallace said: ”If stupidity and hard fighting are what you want, here we are.” Grant said: “I’ve had plenty of both already.”
The last Confederate under fire was wild cavalryman Nathan Bedford Forrest. He led a charge at the Union Army to cover the rebel armies retreat. At one point the gray-clad horseman found himself cut off and alone in a sea of blue uniforms. The Yankees yelled: "Kill Him! Kill the G-ddamn Rebel! Knock him off his horse!" While Forrest slashed all around him with his saber, a bluecoat pushed his rifle into Forrest's ribs and pulled the trigger. The force of the blast lifted him momentarily out his saddle, but Forrest ignored the wound and kept fighting. To keep from being shot in the back as he galloped to safety Forrest pulled one hapless Yankee up on his horse and used him as a shield, then dropped him down when out of danger.

Forrest survived the Civil War " I personally killed ten Yankees and had eleven horses shot out from under me. I finished the war down one horse!"

1865- General Ulysses Grant opened a correspondence with Confederate General Robert E. Lee about the surrender of his army. After the capture of Richmond, Grant’s Yankees sensed final victory was close. This night at Farmville Virginia, Grants blue coated troops broke out in a spontaneous torchlight celebration. The sky was illuminated by multitudes of torches and as Grant received their cheers. The nearby rebels could hear as the night sky shook with the sound of “John Brown’s Body” sung by thousands.

1891- Showman P.T. Barnum died of old age. The last words of the man who invented kiddie matinees, the Greatest Show on Earth and coined the word “Jumbo” were "How were the box office receipts today?"

1927- An audience at the Bell Laboratory watched a three inch television screen broadcast a sound image of US Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover.

1927- Abel Gance’s classic film Napoleon premiered at the Paris Opera. Gances active camera and wild editing were years ahead of their time, climaxed by a triptych of large images on three movie screens linked by synchronized projectors. One American man in the audience, Walter Wallin, was inspired to develop the Panavision wide screen lens, used in many modern movies.

1933- President Franklin Roosevelt began to dismantle the Prohibition laws by passing a law to allow the drinking of beer. My grandmother remembered jumping on a horse drawn beer wagon as they paraded down Fifth Ave. in New York City to cheering crowds. Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia and Mayor Jimmy Walker were there too.
The full repeal of Prohibition would take an amendment to the Constitution, ratified by December of that year.

1933- Hitler's regime passed the Professional Civil Service Restoration Act, which ordered Jews and other political undesirables fired from all government posts including university professorships, museum curators, and arts funded grants. The exile of Germany's intellectual elite began- Bertholdt Brecht, Billy Wilder, George Gropius, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, George Grosz, Michael Curtiz, Lazslo Moholy-Nagy, Max Reinhardt and Otto Klemperer -Colonel Klink's dad.

1939-"The Ugly Duckling" the last Disney Silly Symphony short cartoon.

1945-The SUICIDE MISSION OF THE BATTLESHIP YAMATO- The Japanese superbattleship had just enough fuel to sail into the midst of the American Navy around Okinawa, then it was to sell itself dearly. It never made it though. Because of Ultra, the cracking of the Japanese code, the Americans knew it was coming. The Yamato was bombed and torpedoed by swarms of U.S. planes and went to the bottom before it ever got within range of other surface ships.

1947- The Russians hanged Rudolph Hoess, Nazi commandant of Auschwitz, in front of the camp. His last words were Seig Heil.

1948- The World Health Organization created
1949- Musical "South Pacific" debuts. Some Enchanted Evening…

1957- The last New York City trolley car shuts down. (Queens to Manhattan)

1966-The U.S. Air Force recovered one of the H-Bombs they lost over Spain.

1970- The film Midnight Cowboy with Dustin Hoffman and John Voight won the Best Picture Oscar. The only x-rated film ever to do so. Walt Disney’s It’s Tough to be a Bird” won best animated short.

1971- In a taped Oval Office phone conversation, President Richard Nixon complained to Henry Kissinger that none of his cabinet had bothered to call and compliment him on a policy speech.” Well, screw ‘em! Screw all the cabinet!”

1972- Gangster "Crazy Joe" Gallo was machine gunned while celebrating his birthday at Umberto's Clam House in the Little Italy section of Manhattan. He had been disturbing the gang peace in New York set up by the council of the Five Families, under the leadership of Godfather Carlo Gambino. Crazy Joe’s headquarters was in the President’s Street section of Brooklyn where supposedly he kept a live African lion as a pet. Finally when Gallo had hit rival don Joe Columbo in broad daylight at a Columbus Day Italian Unity rally, the Five Families decided he had gone too far. Ownership of the restaurant was returned in 1994 by the city prosecutors office to the original owner Manny "the Horse" Ianello.

1990- The Cincinnati Contemporary Art Center opened a show of the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe that the Corcoran Gallery in Washington DC cancelled. Mapplethorpe’s explicit depictions of gay and s/m lifestyles shocked neoconservative critics of the national endowments for the arts. A media debate on whether government should subsidize or censor art raged, and Dennis Barry the museum director was tried for obscenity. His acquittal was seen as a victory for free expression but the argument cast a pall on future funding of controversial art.

1998- Pop star George Michael was busted after exposing himself to an undercover policeman in a public park men’s room in Beverly Hills.

1998- Lead singer for the punk band The Plasmatics, Wendy O. Williams, committed suicide with a shotgun. The outrageously mohawked punk rocker was known for stunts on stage like destroying her amplifiers with a chainsaw, skydiving in the nude, autoeroticism with a sledgehammer, and crashing a burning school bus into a wall of television sets.

2155- According to the show Babylon 5 today marked the first contact between humans and the Centauri Alliance.
==========================================================
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yesterday’s question:What do these movies have in common? Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Secret of Nimh, Tron, Poltergeist, Blade Runner and E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

Answer: They were all released in the year 1982.

Quiz: Why are capitol letters called Upper Case, and small letters, Lower Case?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: Who coined the term- to start from scratch?

---------------------------------------------------------------------

History for 4/4/2021

Birthdays: Roman Emperor Caracalla, Eadweard Muybridge, Maya Angelou, Frances Langford, Irv Spence-Tom & Jerry animator, Gil Hodges, Arthur Murray, Muddy Waters, Cloris Leachman, Dorothea Dix, Elmer Bernstein, Bijan, Heath Ledger, Robert Downey Jr is 56, Barry Pepper, Craig T. Nelson is 77, Hugo Weaving is 61

HAPPY EASTER, Commemorating the time when Jesus Christ was crucified and after three days rose from the dead. For those of you who always wondered why Easter moves around so much when the other holidays stay put, the Medieval Church wanted the festival of Jesus moved from any connection with the Jewish Passover. The Last Supper after all, was a Passover Seder. So after a lot of bickering, the Church decided the Easter feast would be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox-Spring. Makes sense to me..?

Easter is named for Oster, Eostre or Aster, German goddess of the East Wind that brings Spring, who’s sacrifice was painted eggs laid at her alter. In 63AD. Baodicea, The British warrior queen who battled the legions of Nero, had on her flags the Great Moon-Hare, who was the servant of Oster. In 1680 a German writer named Georg Franck published a story of a fantastic rabbit who laid magic eggs and hid them for lucky children to find.

We owe a big colorful Easter Eggy thanks to druggist, William Townley who invented Easter egg dye tablets in his Newark, New Jersey drug emporium in 1880. He branded his five-color dye kits, Paas, which comes from the word Passen, the Pennsylvania Dutch name for Easter.

If you were a Roman, today is the first day of the Megaleasian Festival in honor of Lunus the Moon god. Party! Par-tee!

In China, today is Ching-Ming Tomb Sweeping Day.

527AD- Byzantine Emperor Justin named his nephew Justinian as his successor.

636AD- Today is the Feast Day of Saint Isadore of Seville, the Patron Saint of the Internet. Don’t believe me? Check this out. http://factually.gizmodo.com/the-patron-saint-of-the-internet-is-isidore-of-seville-1595023500

896 A.D.-THE SYNOD HORRENDIUS-One of the more bizarre incidents in Vatican history. Bishops Stephen and Formosan hated each other. When Formosan became pope Stephen had to go into hiding. After Formosan's death Stephen became pope, but was unsatisfied that he couldn't strike back at his old enemy. So Pope Stephen had Formosan's tomb opened, the corpse sat up in a chair, and put on trial for heresy.

The cross examination was pretty strange, the prosecutor said things like: "His very silence is admittance of his guilt!" The dead body was convicted, excommunicated, tossed around by a Roman mob, then thrown in the Tiber. Pope Stephen VI later became the first pope to be killed in bed with someone's wife.

1561- A strange show in the sky of red discs and crosses was reported over Nuremberg Germany. Perhaps an early UFO sighting?

1581- Queen Elizabeth I visited the Golden Hind, the ship which Francis Drake sailed around the world. The 'Great Pirate of the Unknown Seas" had plundered huge treasure ships and drove Spanish Colonial America crazy. The Spanish Ambassador to London demanded the pirate Drake lose his head, but Queen Elizabeth had a different use in mind for her sword- she knighted the Devon innkeeper's son.

The Golden Hind was kept in a prize anchorage for decades until age and dry rot caused her to fall to pieces. Ben Johnson wrote poems about Sir Francis Drake and Shakespeare's island of wizards in the Tempest may have been modeled on Drake's accounts of the strange stormy islands of Tierra Del Fuego in the Straights of Magellan.

1704 -British Admiral Sir Cloudsley Shovel captured The Rock of Gibraltar from Spain. Britain still owns it today, which really annoys Spain. It’s ownership recently came up in the Brexit discussion.

1841- PRESIDENT WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON DIED AFTER ONLY 31 DAYS IN OFFICE. “Old Tippicanoe” caught pneumonia giving his inauguration address in icy drizzle. When Vice President Tyler got word of the President's death, he was playing marbles with some children, and was about to get his knuckles rapped for losing. No U.S. President had ever died in office before, and no one knew if the Vice President was now only a caretaker until special elections, or was he the president for the next for years? John Tyler set the rule by staying President for four full years. Many people couldn't stand him. Instead of “Your Excellency, they called him "Your Accidency".

1850- The City of Los Angeles was incorporated under U.S. law.

1865- As the bedraggled Army of Northern Virginia retreated from Richmond, Robert E. Lee had a slim hope that if he could put distance between himself and the pursuing Union armies he might be able to join together the remaining Confederate forces in the Carolinas and keep fighting. These hopes were dashed this day. When Lee’s army reached Amelia Courthouse, the waiting trainloads of promised food turned out to be only ammunition. There weren’t enough trains to convey his men. Lee lost an entire day resting his army while scavenging for food. This allowed Grants Yankee army to catch up and slowly surround him. Lee remarked bitterly that while his men starved, the Confederate Congress could only “debate and shell peanuts!”

1865- LINCOLN IN RICHMOND- Meanwhile against the wishes of his bodyguards that it was still too dangerous, Abraham Lincoln toured the newly captured Confederate capitol of Richmond. Most of the white population had fled the smoldering city, but crowds of jubilant black slaves pulled his coach and cheered that the Day of Jubilee had arrived. One old black man kneeled to him. Lincoln raised him up “Father, you no longer have to kneel to any other man, only God. You are Free. Free as air.” Lincoln walked over to the Confederate Executive Mansion and sat in Jefferson Davis’ chair, putting his feet up on his desk. He then visited the family of rebel General George Pickett of the famous Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. The Pickett’s were friends of Abe and Mary Lincoln before the war and Abe enjoyed bouncing Pickett’s baby boy on his knee.

1900- In Brussels, a protester shouting 'Vive Les Boers!" fired four shots at the Prince of Wales and Princess Augusta (Future King Edward VII). They all miss. He was protesting the British war on the whites Afrikanners of South Africa.

Queen Victoria survived six assassination attempts in her lifetime.

1901- Russian author Leo Tolstoy broke with the Russian Orthodox Church when he sent a letter to the Patriarch this day declaring that prayers offered to Jesus Christ were “the worst type of sacrilege”.

1924- Tom Milton first ran a Miller hot rod on the dry lake Cal bed at 151 mph.

1932- Louisiana Senator Huey Long tells Congress that 80% of America’s wealth was controlled by 20% of its population. According to Business Week, today 80% of America’s wealth was owned by 1% of its population, and the top 150 richest people on Earth collectively own 50% of all the total wealth of the planet.

1933- The U.S. Government orders all citizens to turn in their remaining gold dollar coins.

1933- The U.S. airship Akron crashed in a storm, killing the crew and an admiral.

1942- 'THE HUMP' -When the Japanese army overran Rangoon and cut the Burma Road, Allied forces helping Chiang Kai Shek 's Chinese armies and the Flying Tigers were suddenly without supplies. Army Air Corps General Olds and his men begin the daily supply flights of transports from India over the Himalayas to China, or 'Over the Hump'.

1944- During World War II a South African reconnaissance plane flew over the Auschwitz Concentration Camp and took photos. When they are analyzed in London, the intelligence boys declared it to be a synthetic rubber plant.

1952- CARTOON COMMIES- Nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell accused the owners of a New York commercial animation studio, Tempo Productions of Communist sympathies. One of the owners was Disney Layout man Dave Hilberman, who was a union organizer and was the only artist personally named by Walt Disney to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The F.B.I. began investigating Tempo and their Madison Avenue clients quickly pulled their business. Tempo closed, laying off 50 artists. Mr. Clean, Markie Maypo and the Hamm’s Beer Bear were once again safe from Red subversion.

1954- Arturo Toscanini, who had been making music since the 1880’s, conducted his final concert. Toscanini’s studio space at NBC is today the set of the Saturday Night Live TV show.

1958- Screen goddess Lana Turner and her gangster lover Johnny Stompanato had a violent argument that ended when Turner’s teenage daughter plunged a kitchen knife into his chest. She was acquitted as justifiable homicide, and rumors maintain the daughter was covering for her mother’s own actions. It was whispered Hollywood society ladies had nicknamed Stompanato’s willy Oscar for it’s size.

1967- Van Nuys premier head shop Captain Ed’s Heads & Highs first opened for business.

1967- In a speech at the Riverside Baptist Church in Manhattan Rev Dr. Martin Luther King announced his opposition to the Vietnam War. This put him in direct conflict with the heretofore friendly Lyndon Johnson administration. Whereas LBJ had Dr. King and the Southern Christian leadership up to the White House often, and had done much to fight discrimination, the volatile LBJ now called Dr. King “that backwoods n--- preacher!”

1968- THE SETTLERS MOVEMENT- The Israeli government was trying to sort out what to do about the West Bank territories conquered in the Six Day War. This day a small group of ultra-conservative Jews called Gush Eymunim moved into a hotel the Arab city of Hebron and declared themselves a settlement. Minister Moshe Dayan wanted Jewish settlements but he wanted them to be alongside Arab communities, not displacing them. This was the first provocation by conservative settlers that would bedevil Palestinian-Israeli relations for the next fifty years.

1968- DR. MARTIN LUTHER KING ASSASSINATED. The great civil rights leader was struck in the head by a .30 cal bullet fired from a high-powered rifle, while he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. He was 39. Dr. King and his team had been clowning around that morning, throwing pillows at one another. On the balcony Dr King’s last words were teasing Jesse Jackson for not being dressed properly for going out to dinner. Jesse was wearing a fashionable turtleneck instead of suit and tie.

Dr. Benjamin Hooks ran to the phone to get help, but the switchboard was not working. The motel manager's wife who usually ran the switchboard had seen the shooting, and the shock had given her a heart attack. She died the next day. The Memphis police had always surrounded King's party with at least seven officers whenever he was in town. For some unknown reason that morning they were ordered to stand back at least seven blocks. It was the one-year anniversary of the speech where he declared his opposition to the Vietnam War.
A man named James Earl Ray was later apprehended in England, confessed to the shooting and was given a life sentence. He later recanted his confession and said the FBI coerced him, and he was taking orders from a mysterious contact man named Raul. James Earl Ray died in 1998. The King family reopened the investigation and a civil court ruled that Dr. King was probably killed by a conspiracy. When F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover heard about the assassination he did what he did the day John Kennedy was shot, he spent the day at the racetrack celebrating.

1968- When news of Martin Luther King's assassination got out, 175 US cities suffered urban rioting. In Indianapolis, Sen. Bobby Kennedy was scheduled to go speak to a mostly black crowd. His police escort refused to follow him out of fear. Kennedy went anyway. He told the audience the terrible news, made a reference to his own murdered brother, then proceeded to quote them poetry from the Greek writer Aeschylus "We must tame the savageness of man, and make gentle the life of this world." The crowd wept and prayed together. Indianapolis was quiet that night.

1973- The World Trade Center Twin Towers first opened to the public.

1984- In George Orwell’s novel 1984, this is the day Winston Smith started a secret diary and first wrote the dangerous thought-crime “Down With Big Brother”.

1987- Ronald Reagan’s hand picked FCC voted to repeal The Fairness Doctrine, which mandated news services report unbiased news, reflecting all opinions. This set the stage for the highly partisan news reporting of today.

1988- Arizona governor Evan Meacham was impeached, the first US governor to get the boot in 60 years. Meecham had made Arizona the only state in the U.S. to refuse the Martin Luther King holiday. Meecham had once referred to African Americans as “pickaninees, and had ordered a list drawn up of all state employees who were gay.

1994- Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark started Netscape. Clark also founded Silicon Graphics, Inc.

2007- Bob Clark, the director of the holiday classic A Christmas Story, was killed in a head on car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. He was 67.

==========================================================

Yesterday’s question- Who coined the term- to start from scratch?

Answer: Before formal stadiums were built for sports, the starting line of a footrace or horse race was literally a line scratched in the dirt. If you overshot the start too early, you were told by the judges to go back and start from the scratch.

Quiz: Who coined the term- to start from scratch?

Yesterday’s Question answered below:What does it mean to have an albatross around your neck?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
History for 4/3/2021
Birthdays: King Henry IV of England (1361), Washington Irving, William Marcy "Boss" Tweed, Sally Rand the Fan Dancer, Ma Rainey, Iron Eyes Cody, Wayne Newton, Doris Day, Robert Sherwood, Virgil Grissom, Marsha Mason, Melissa Etheridge, Marlon Brando, Amanda Byrnes, David Hyde Pierce is 63, Alec Baldwin is 63, Eddie Murphy is 60

In Ancient Greece the beginning of April was the Aphrodisia- the Festival of Aphrodite. Greeks would offer sacrifices to the Goddess of Love, and some would visit the sacred prostitutes in the great temple in Corinth. Rich old matrons would put aside in their wills some money to purchase slaves to work in the sacred brothels.

127AD- Today is the day Pope Sixtus I was martyred under the Emperor Trajan. Sixtus is remembered as the pope during the Mass when the priests chanted Holy, Holy, Holy -Hosanna in the Highest, etc. he insisted it be sung by everyone in the congregation.

628AD-After being defeated by Byzantine Emperor Heraclius, Persian King Chosroes II was murdered by his own son’s followers, and his body chucked down a well.

1043- Edward the Confessor crowned King of England.

1312-The Vatican, under the influence of the French King Phillip the Fair, abolished the Holy Order of the Knights Templar. The order was rich in international finance and none of it taxable and because they were monks there were no relatives to sponge off. They invented the personal check, so a Templar didn’t have to ride from castle to castle with those heavy bags of gold. Just write out a note (or have your scribe do it if you were illiterate) and affix your seal to it. I wonder if they had pretty sunsets printed on them...

1367-The Battle of Navarette- during a lull in the Hundred Year War, Edward the Black Prince of England goes to Spain to help King of Aragon Pedro the Cruel press his claims against Navarre. He defeats a Franco-Navarrese force of knights and captures the great French knight Bertrand DeGuesclin (De-Gue-Klan). But when Edward refused to turn over his prisoners to Pedro so he could behead them ( why else have a nickname like Cruel ?), even refusing to hand over DeGuesclin for his weight in pure silver, Pedro refused to pay the Englishmen's wages and Edward went home broke and annoyed.

1657- Oliver Cromwell formally refused the title King of England, and preferred to remain the Lord Protector of the English Republic.

1714-THE FIRST BRITISH PRIME MINISTER-Before this time men who ran the government of England at the kings pleasure held a variety of titles: Lord High Admiral, Chancellor, Mayor of the Palace, etc.. As the complicated checks & balances of democratic government evolved more dependable positions were needed.
When The British Crown was offered to the German George I of Hanover, he was bewildered by how complicated English parliamentary democracy was! He also refused to learn English, switching to French or Latin when no one responded to him in German.
Couldn't I just work with one man who could get what I wanted done? So Minister of the Exchequer (treasury) Sir Robert Walpole (father of writer Horace Walpole), who's party was in the majority in Parliament became First Minister, later Prime Minister. The reason the job evolved out of the Treasury is that minister could grease the rights palms to get things done.
King George wanted Walpole in close touch so he gave him a house near Whitehall Palace. He had just foreclosed on a modest row house called #10 Downing Street. Walpole said he didn't want it seen as a royal bribe. He would vacate it when he left office for his successor.

1730 -EMPEROR MOYTOY OF AMERICA- An English conman, Sir Alexander Cummings, had ingratiated himself into the council of the Cherokee Nation, then occupying most of Georgia, the Carolinas, Kentucky and Tennessee. In a scam to make himself look like the representative of all native Americans, Cummings convinced one Cherokee chief named Amatoya Moytoy to travel to England and do ritual submission to King George II. He dubbed him Emperor Moytoy of America! The Indians were confused but went along with the silliness if it meant good trading relations with the redcoat white men. Cummings disappeared shortly after the truth came out, undoubtedly a much wealthier man.

1764- Aging Empress Maria Theresa of Austria raised her son Joseph II to be co-emperor. He was the Emperor in the movie Amadeus. His sister was Marie Antoinette. This day he was crowned at Frankfurt. He later wrote his mother about his coronation“...a lot of elegant people mouthing idiocies.”

1791- The French Revolution Assembly National decided to convert the Church of Saint Genevieve to a secular temple to contain the remains of the great leaders of the French Nation. It was renamed the Pantheon after the ancient Roman name. The bones of Mirabeau, Voltaire, Rousseau and more were soon moved there.

1814- THE MARSHALS STRIKE. Napoleon’s top generals, the Marshals, gathered around him at Fontainbleau Palace to try to convince him to step down. These men had their fortunes made in his service. They had fought and bled for him on a hundred battlefields. But after twenty years, France was overrun by five foreign armies, Paris had fallen, the French were down to drafting fifteen-year olds. The war was obviously lost.
The discussion soon grew ugly. Marshals Ney, Oudinot, Moncey and Lefebvre told him if ordered they would not follow him to try to retake Paris. Napoleon shouted:” You just want to protect your titles and estates! I can replace you all with sergeants!”

Finally he was made to accept the inevitable. He had tried first to resign in favor of his three year old son and save his dynasty. The Allies were amenable to this if it represented what the French people really wanted. However certain French government officials scheming for the return of the Bourbon Kings staged street demonstrations for the old monarchy, and convinced one of Napoleon's closest friends, Marshal Marmont the Duke of Ragusa, to defect to the enemy with his entire army.

This gesture decided the allies that the French people would rather have King Louis return rather than the boy Napoleon II. Napoleon was forced to abdicate completely, and the name "Raguser" became a word for traitor like Benedict Arnold.

1860-The Pony Express system starts. Relay riders from Saint Louis across the prairies and deserts all the way to Sacramento, California. Ten days to get a letter from St. Jo to Denver. For all it's romance, it failed after just 1-1/2 years. Stagecoaches and telegraph wires soon covered the same message business much more easily.

1861- Seven days before the Civil War would begin, tensions between North and South built to the point of explosion. At Fort Sumter South Carolina a Boston ship, the R. H. Shannon, with a cargo of ice bound for Savannah put in a stop at Charleston Harbor. She sailed right in between the itchy fingered Yankee and Rebel cannons. The captain rarely read newspapers so he was completely unaware of the political situation. When he heard a warning shot, he ran up the Stars and Stripes. Suddenly cannons started to boom out all around him. Mystified, he lowered the flag, the gunfire stopped and the Shannon sailed on...

1869- First performance of Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto in A minor.

1882- JESSE JAMES SHOT-The famous outlaw had been living quietly with his family under the alias of Mr. Howard when he was murdered by his own gang members, his cousins Bob and William Ford. Jesse was shot in the back of the head while he was standing on a chair straightening a picture frame. His last words were: ”My, it’s awfully hot today...” He was 34. Jesse’s older brother Frank took the hint and went straight. Bob Ford went on tour giving lectures, re-enacting how he had killed Jesse. Finally in a mining camp someone blew him away with a shotgun. The last thing he heard was,” …oh, Bob….”

1897-composer Johannes Brahms died.

1920- Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald got married.

1922- JOSEF STALIN made General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party. In the scramble for power after the death of Lenin this move allowed him to consolidate his his hold on the top job and push out Leon Trotsky and the other top Bolsheviks like Zioniev, Kamieniev and Krupskaya. He made sure Lenin's last will and political testament was never made public.

1936-Bruno Richard Hauptmann was electrocuted for the murder of the Lindbergh baby.

1948 -THE MARSHAL PLAN signed into law by President Truman. It called for 5 billion U.S. dollars to be spent to help 16 European countries rebuild their shattered economies after World War II.

1968- In Memphis, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was supposed to give a sermon at the Temple Baptist Church, but excused himself because of his workload. Since he had openly come out against the Vietnam War, the death threats had increased and it all weighed heavily on his mind. Rev. Ralph Abernathy telephoned from the church that the crowd was disappointed Dr. King had not showed up. "Martin, they don't want to hear me. They're all here to hear you."
So Dr. King went to the church, and delivered off-the-cuff the last great speech of his life: "I have been to the Mountaintop and have Seen the Promised Land. And though I may not get there with you, it is alright…..". At one point he was startled when the wind outside caused a shutter to bang. Then he returned to the Lorraine Motel.

1968- Stanley Kubrick's epic film "2001: A Space Odyssey" premiered. The N.Y. Times review said it was: " Somewhere between hypnotic and boring". Pauline Kael called it "monumentally unimaginative!" Writer Arthur C. Clarke always said HAL the computer was not a coded reference to IBM. At the Oscars, Clarke and Kubrick lost the best screenplay award to Mel Brooks for The Producers. 2001 won only one Oscar, for visual effects. It was the only Oscar a Stanley Kubrick film ever won.

1973- Standing on the corner of 6th Ave in Manhattan, Motorola scientist Marty Cooper made the first cell phone call. He called his competitor Joel Engel at Bell Labs to tell him he had lost the race to invent the cell phone. He said that first phone, “It was the size of a leg of lamb.”

1974- Even while the Watergate Scandal continued, this day the IRS reported President Richard Nixon had been paying taxes based on an income of only $15,000 a year, when he was making at least $200,000 a year.

1975- Eccentric chess champion Bobby Fischer was stripped of his World Chess Championship for refusing to play any more matches to defend his title.

1984-THE COFFEE SHOP CONVERSION. Future President George W. Bush was a cocaine-snorting alcoholic who had been busted for drunk driving. This day he became Born-Again Christian after a meeting with an evangelist in a coffee shop.

1994-Disney chief executive Frank Wells was killed in a helicopter crash on a skiing trip. It’s been speculated that blowing snow off some high peaks caused an ice ball to be sucked into the copter’s air intake manifold. Clint Eastwood was supposed to be on that trip but couldn't make it. Billie Joel and Christie Brinkley had a similar scare with their helicopter on the same day. The death of the Disney CEO set in motion the events that would lead to Jeffrey Katzenberg leaving Disney and forming Dreamworks, as well as Michael Ovitz’s brief tenure as a mouseketeer and Michael Eisner’s eventual fall in 2006. In 1999 the Hollywood Reporter estimated that the little iceball cost the Walt Disney Company over one billion dollars.

1996- Ron Brown, the first African American to be Chairman of the Democratic Party, was killed in a plane crash near Dubrovnik, Croatia.

1999- Egypt repealed a 1904 law that said a rapist could escape prison for his crime if he married his victim!
==========================================================
Yesterday’s Quiz:What does it mean to have an albatross around your neck?

Answer: In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s epic poem, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, the main character, aboard a ship that has wandered far off course, shoots and kills an albatross. At first supportive, the crew soon becomes angry at the mariner’s act, which they believe has doomed their voyage. They force the mariner to wear the dead bird around his neck as a talisman, but the curse comes true and the mariner becomes the witness to the tragic demise of the ship and crew. Now, as pennance, the mariner must wander the earth telling the tale to any and all who will listen.

One of the most popular and influential poems in the English language, the phrase, having an "albatros around one's neck” has come to mean living with some terrible emotional or physical burden, guilt or heavy responsibility. (Thanks FG)

Question: What does it mean to have an albatross around your neck?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: “ Not my bailiwick”. What is a bailiwick?
---------------------------------------------------------
History for 4/2/2021
Birthdays: Frankish Emperor Charlemagne, Giacomo Casanova, Hans Christian Andersen, Marvin Gaye, Emile Zola, Max Ernst, Buddy Ebsen, Sir Alec Guinness, Frederick Bartholdi, Emmy Lou Harris, Linda Hunt, Isaiah Washington, Karl Castle.

304B.C. Alexander IV, the young child of Alexander the Great, began his reign under the regency of the Macedonian General Perdiccas.

430AD. Today is the feast day of Saint Mary the Egyptian, a former prostitute who repented by living naked and alone in the desert for 49 years, only appearing briefly at Easter time to take communion, and to get some more sunblock.

1459- Vlad III "Dracula" -Little Dragon, Duke of Wallachia, shows why he got the nickname Vlad the Impaler, by impaling the city council of Brasov high on stakes then eating lunch, laughing under their quivering bodies. Impaling was a torture where you had a huge sharpened stake hammered up into your body, then standing it up. A good executioner could keep the stake from piercing too many important organs, prolonging the agony of your death. Another time when Turkish ambassadors refused to remove their hats to him, as were their custom, Vlad had the men seized and had their hats nailed to their heads. Then laughed as they writhed on the floor in agony.
No wonder in the 1890’s when British author Bram Stoker was researching folk tales of the Carpathian mountains to use as source material for a vampire novel, he chose Dracula for its title.

1502- King Henry VII Tudor’s primary heir Arthur of Britain died at age fifteen. King Henry had just married Arthur to the Catharine daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain a few weeks before. Now Henry didn’t want to lose the Spanish alliance, and he was too cheap to send back Catharine’s huge dowery. So he remarried her to his other son, Henry VIII. Catherine and Henry VIII’s marriage problems would lead to the English Church’s break with Rome.

1520- Somewhere off the coast of what will one day be Argentina, Magellan's captains, convinced this crazy Portuguese didn’t know where he was going, try to mutiny and go home to Spain.

1800- Beethoven's First Symphony premiered. Vienna's leading music critic called it - 'a vulgar, impertinent explosion, more expected from a military band than an orchestra!’

1801- BATTLE OF COPENHAGEN- Britain had a one day war with Denmark. The English fleet was sent by London to intimidate the Danes into leaving Napoleon's anti-British blockade, but the Danes were more worried about a Russian-Swedish alliance forcing them to remain. So Admiral Nelson sailed his fleet into Copenhagen harbor and shot it out with the Danish Navy and shore batteries. Nelson’s ships sailed up and down the drydocks blasting the parked Danish battleships in for repairs. Despite fearful manpower losses the British don't lose one ship while sinking or capturing 17 Danish ships of the line.
The one-eyed, one armed Nelson gloried in battle. When a Danish cannon ball struck his mainmast showering him and his staff with hot burning splinters, he laughed and said: "Hot work, what?" At one point the action got so desperate, that Nelson's superior Admiral Hyde Parker raised the ensign flags to break off battle and retreat. Nelson ignored them. He jokingly raised his spyglass to his blind eye and said, "What ensign flags? I don't see any ensign flags!"
Denmark made peace the next day and all the surviving combatants had a lovely dinner together at the Copenhagen Palace, as though nothing had happened.

1814- Now that Paris was occupied by enemy armies, the French Senate led by Talleyrand declared the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte officially deposed.

1836- Charles Dickens married Elizabeth Howarth.

1865- The Confederate capitol Richmond fell to U.S. armies. More destruction to the city was done by looting Confederates and released prisoners than the enemy. Several large fires created the type of total urban destruction not to be seen again until the World Wars in the 20th Century.
Mrs. Robert E. Lee (a grandniece of George Washington) was at her town home in the city while her husband was still out with his army. General Phil Sheridan stationed a guard to protect her door, but she protested bitterly that he was a black soldier and thought it was meant to offend her. Which knowing Phil Sheridan, it probably was.

1865- Abe Lincoln awakened from a strange dream. He told Mary that he was wandering the halls in an empty White House, when heard women weeping. When he asked a soldier at the East Room what had happened, he said the president had been assassinated.

1877- First man shot out of a cannon.

1877- The first White House egg-rolling contest.

1916- Edinburgh Scotland was bombed by German zeppelins. They tried to bomb Edinburgh castle, but missed. The one o'clock signal gun was turned on them as a defense. The only damage they managed to cause was to destroy an Innes & Grieve warehouse packed with whiskey, which burned very brightly. This made the Scots very angry.

1917- Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin arrived by train at St. Petersburg's Finland Station to cheers and salutes. He was smuggled from Geneva to Russia by the German High Command in a sealed railroad car. the German secret service also paid for the printing presses for Pravda. He began to organize the Communist plot to seize the Russian Government.

1917- President Woodrow Wilson called a special session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. ‘The World Must be made Safe for Democracy!” he said.

1934- Ward Kimball’s first day at Walt Disney as an inbetweener.

1943- Disney short 'Private Pluto' the first Chip & Dale cartoon.

1943- Warner short “Super Rabbit”.

1943- This day Harvard Dean Henry Chauncey supervised the distribution to 316,000 High School seniors of the Army-Navy College Qualifying Test, later re-titled the Scholastic Aptitude Tests or SAT. The SAT became a standardized test that manages every year to raise the stress level of seniors regardless of race, class or religion.
Go On To Next Page.

1951- Author Jack Kerouac began writing his masterpiece On the Road, on one long roll of teletype paper. He tried to write in a marathon, reinforced by cigarettes, coffee and Benzedrine. The book was one long paragraph, with no page or chapter breaks.“ The only people for me are the mad ones…”

1974-While actor David Niven was speaking at the Academy Awards telecast a nude streaker named Bob Opel ran past him on nationwide television. Mr. Niven, completely unflustered, dryly commented: "The only laugh that man will ever get is by stripping off his clothes and showing off his shortcomings. "

1974- Later at that same Oscar telecast, Francis Ford Coppola presented the last award of the evening, the Best Picture to Cabaret. But he held up the show to launch into a speech that a Revolution was coming in Digital Technology “that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a small town try-out!”
The audience was confused and annoyed at being delayed any longer to get to their parties. No one knew what he was talking about.

1978-The TV show "Dallas" debuts.

1982- THE FALKLANDS WAR-Britain declared war on Argentina over their military takeover of the Falkland Islands.

1981- John Welsh made CEO of General Electric. After automating factories and firing one third of his employees, he earned the name "Neutron Jack" after the bomb that kills people but leaves buildings intact.

1993- Bullocks Wilshire department store with the famous Tea Room closed.

1996- Lech Walesa, who led the first great people’s movement to overthrow a Communist dictatorship and was president of Poland for two terms and a Nobel Prize winner, got his old job back repairing electric batteries at the Gydansk shipyard. The shipyard was later closed. Capitalism’s a bitch, ain’t it?

2004- Walt Disney Studio released Home on the Range.

2005-Polish Pope John Paul II died after reigning for 26 years.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Yesterday’s Quiz:“ Not my bailiwick”. What is a bailiwick?

Answer: In Medieval England, a bailiff was the lieutenant of a sheriff who was charged with maintaining day-to-day order and maintenance in a castle. So non-military issues were his responsibility, or in his bailiwick. Its come to mean your particular responsibility.