Quiz: What was the Doomsday Book?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Does Belgium have a president, or a king?
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History for 7/28/2022
Birthdays: Beatrix Potter, Jacqueline Kennedy, Richard Rogers, Ibn al’ Arabi- philosopher 1165, Marcel Duchamp, Rudy Vallee. Sally Struthers, Peter Duchin, Vida Blue, Joe E. Brown, Jim Davis the creator of Garfield, Frankie Yankovic the Polka King, Elizabeth Berkley, Earl Tupper the inventor of Tupperware, Hugo Chavez

450AD- Roman emperor Theodosius II died without a designated heir. Rome had already fallen so nobody was too fussed about it.

754 A.D. Pope Stephen III crowns Pepin the Short King of the Franks or French. Pepin was the son of Charles Martel and the father of Charlemagne. Pepin had asked for the Pope’s help to legitimatize his overthrow of the last king of the Merovingian Dynasty, Childeric IV, whom he had locked up in a monastery. In return he gave his military guarantee to the Vatican’s hold over a buffer state in the center of Italy. The Papal States would remain a political reality for 1,100 years until absorbed into united Italy in 1870.

1428- The Aztecs overthrew the Tepanec kingdom and begin their rise to empire. While the Inca in Peru were a homogeneous empire the Aztec ruled Mexico by conquest and subjugation of other tribes. So, when Cortez and the Spaniards arrived in 1519 they found lots of Indian tribes happy to help them against the Aztecs.

1540- Henry VIII married his fourth queen Catherine Howard. This was seen as an old man's autumn fancy. Henry was in his 50's and Catherine a teenager who still had the hots for boys her own age, a bad idea if she wished to keep her head.

1586 - Sir Thomas Harriott first introduced potatoes to Europe. At first people thought they were poisonous because their blossom resembled that of toxic nightshade.

1588- The English sea captains Thomas the Earl of Leicester and Sir Francis Drake were playing a game of bowls when they were told the Spanish Armada had been sighted off the coast of Cornwall. The Armada was so big, just the front row of ships reached seven miles across. Leicester coolly said:" Come Drake, there’s time to finish the game." They finished their game, then defeated the Armada the next day.

1609- Sir George Somers was shipwrecked on the uninhabited island of Bermuda.
He stayed to build a settlement, claiming the island for Britain.

1615- French explorer Samuel de Champlain reached Lake Huron.

1655- Poet, playwright and duelist Cyrano de Bergerac died in Paris. The famous play about him and his big nose was written by Edmond Rostand in 1895.

1750- Composer Johann Sebastian Bach died at age 65. He had suffered blindness in his old age but is eyesight returned shortly before his fatal stroke. One of his final compositions was a chorale prelude: "Come, Kindly Death- come for my life is dreary, and of earth I am weary, etc."
He and his wife Anna Magdelena had 17 children, and 7 more by his first wife. Many of whom became composers Johann Christian Bach, Carl Phillip Emmanuel Bach, etc. Bach’s music was soon forgotten until rediscovered by Mendelssohn and others in the 1820s.. Albert Einstein’s brother Alfred said Bach’s music" almost makes one want to become Christian."

1788- Master British portrait painter Sir Joshua Reynolds visited the other master British portrait painter Sir Thomas Gainsborough, who was dying or cancer. They had been enemies for years, but now at the end they made up. When Reynolds left him, Gainsborough said "Goodbye until we meet in the Hereafter, Van Dyck in our company."

1794-The Thermidor Reaction, The end of the "Reign of Terror". After thousands of deaths, a group of French politicians called the Directorate overthrew Maximilien Robespierre and have him and his Jacobin followers guillotined. Robespierre didn't go quietly, a soldier named Charles Merda shot him in the face shouting Vive la Republique!" His brother Augustin Robespierre tried to escape out a window but just succeeded in breaking his hip.
At the guillotine Robespierre’s second in command Saint-Just was defiant to the end:
" I curse the dust I'm made of! I give it to you! Scatter my bones and Republics shall spring from them!" Robespierre wasn't so eloquent on the scaffold. He just bellowed in pain from the jaw wound. A woman shouted at him:" Go to Hell, Villain, and go knowing with you go the curses and maledictions of every wife, every mother!" When his head plopped into the basket Parisians cheered for 15 minutes. Then they smashed the fearsome guillotine. Napoleon was careful to keep few political prisoners and if he executed any he used a firing squad. He renamed the place where the guillotine was Place de la Concord.
In 1891 a hit play about this event opened in Paris called “Thermidor” for the month in the French Revolutionary calendar. The chef of the Café de Paris created a new seafood dish in its honor, Lobster Thermidor.

1808- The Turkish Janissaries, the royal guard, deposed Sultan Mustapha VI and replaced him with his cousin Mehmed II. The Janissaries were the real power in Istanbul at this time, keeping a supply of royal princes in the harem, to be taken out as needed. Sultans sometimes picked what Harem girl they would favor that night by how many garlic cloves she could hold in her bellybutton.

1809- Battle of Talavera. General Sir Arthur Wellesley defeated the French army in Spain and for that was made Viscount Wellington. Sir Hugh Gough, who would later earn fame conquering the Punjab in India, was young officer at the time. In this battle Gough was so grievously wounded he was left on a pile of corpses for dead. Wellington happened to be riding by and was commenting to his staff upon his bravery, when to prevent being buried alive, Hugh Gough signaled by pushing his arm up out of the corpses, and waved his hat at the startled Wellington." You-hoo..M’Lord, I’m not dead yet…"

1812- General Light Horse Harry Lee was a Revolutionary War hero and had eulogized George Washington as "First in War, First in Peace, First in the Hearts of his Countrymen".
But this day the old general got involved with mob violence in Baltimore while trying to protect a publisher friend who was against "Mr. Madison’s War with the British”, what we now call the War of 1812. Despite his fame, Lee was dragged by a mob and beaten senseless, one of his eyes almost gouged out. He went to the West Indies to convalesce –and escape his creditors, but he never fully recovered. His 5 year old son was future Civil War General Robert E. Lee.

1821- Peru declared independence from Spain.

1839- Italian revolutionary Guisseppe Fleschi wanted to assassinate the king of France, King Louis Phillipe. He rigged up a strange device that could fire 25 gun barrels simultaneously. He pointed this machine at the king during a military parade and pulled the string. All the guns went off but not one hit their intended target. Ironically, the only person killed was the elderly war minister Marshal Mortier, an old general of Napoleon's, who had spent thirty years amid shot and shell and had never even been scratched.

1841- The body of Mary Cecilia Rogers was pulled out of New York Harbor. The sensational murder of the “Beautiful Cigar Girl” inspired Edgar Allen Poe to write “ The Mystery of Marie Roget.”

1858- The French photographer Nadar went up in a balloon and took the first aerial photograph.

1866- BUFFALO SOLDIERS- An act of Congress called for the creation of two all black cavalry regiments to serve in the peacetime army's frontier duty. These units, the 9th and 10th U.S. Cavalry became the famous "Buffalo Soldiers". They were so named by the Indians because an African-Americans hair resembled the tuft of hair between a buffalo's horns to them, a symbol of magical strength. Buffalo Soldiers defeated the Apaches and charged up San Juan Hill right alongside Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders. Their captain in Cuba named John Pershing was given the nickname Blackjack Pershing not for a love of cards, but for preferring leading black troops to white.

1867- The Daughters of St. Crispin, the first women's labor organization.

1896- Happy Birthday Miami! The City of Miami incorporated.

1882- Parsifal, the last opera of Richard Wagner was produced at Bayreuth. As a way to ensure its financial solvency Wagner left instructions to never tour Parsifal but it should forever stay at Bayreuth. This lasted a few decades.

1898- Spain asks for peace talks with the United States to end their war. The Spanish American War began in April and ended in December.

1914- THE RUSH INTO WORLD WAR I ACCELERATED. Britain suggested an international conference to settle Austria’s grievances against Serbia. Austrian Foreign minister Berchtold informed the British ambassador that it was too late for mediation because Austria had already declared war. The German Kaiser was having second thoughts but slipped out of Berlin to go yachting to avoid the Russian ambassador who was trying to make him commit to discussing peace terms. Part of the muddle that aggravated the meltdown of diplomacy, was many of the top European statesmen were on their Summer vacations while this crisis deepened.

1932- The movie White Zombie with Bela Lugosi opened.

1932- THE BATTLE OF ANACOSTIA FLATS- Capitol Hill was surrounded by 20,000 Bonus Marchers- unemployed World War I veterans and their families who desperately marched to Washington to demand help from the ravages of the Depression and their promised back pay.
On this day, President Hoover's response was to order the US Army to drive them away by force. Gen. Douglas MacArthur with his aides Patton and Eisenhower send tanks, saber wielding cavalry and bayonet armed troops to break up the homeless peoples dwellings. Facing them on the makeshift barricades eyewitnesses saw a black man waving a large American flag and Charles Frederick Lincoln, a direct descendant of Abraham Lincoln. These poor veterans and their families had come from as far as Honolulu. No record was kept of how many were killed or died on the walk home.
Pres. Hoover was jubilant that order was restored, and the public was jubilant when they voted him out of office later that year.

1933- The first singing telegram. It was delivered to singer Rudy Valee by Western Union operator appropriately named Lucille Lipps.

1945- Congress endorses United Nations Charter. Congress' refusal to join the League of Nations in 1919 help doom that organization.

1945-A B-25 Mitchell bomber flying in thick fog struck the 78th floor of the Empire State Building in New York City. It killed a dozen people, including some when one of its 1,500 lb. engines shot through the building and down onto 33rd street. One woman in an elevator had the cables cut and fell 80 stories at 200 miles an hour to the basement. Miraculously she lived.
Despite the devastation, the building did not collapse but stayed sound. As a result, US and World air traffic control standards were stiffened, air traffic controllers finally got the power to order planes down, and large planes are kept away from flying over large urban areas.

1948- In honor of the death of D.W. Griffith, all Hollywood studios observed three minutes of silence.

1948- The Premiere of " Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" For you hardcore film trivia fans this film is the only other time than the original Tod Browning movie that Bela Lugosi played Count Dracula on film.

1954- The film On The Waterfront opened. Producer Sam Spiegel originally wanted Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly as the leads. But Kelly took Hitchcock’s Rear Window instead, and Marlon Brando and Eva Marie-Saint became available, much to the annoyance of Sinatra.

1958- HAPPY LEGO DAY! Danish toymaker Gotfried Kirk Christiansen patented the interlocking plastic brick. The LEGO empire began.

1965- VIETNAM- President Lyndon B. Johnson had been wrestling with a problem since June 5th. In Vietnam, the war against the Communist guerrilla Viet Cong was going badly. Strategic bombing of the North has failed to stop incursions in the South and the latest government in Saigon had fallen and been replaced by a group of generals led by Ngyen Kao Key. Johnson had to decide to pull, out or expand US commitment. Retired presidents Truman and Eisenhower advised him against going in.
This day, at a routine Friday 12:30 PM press briefing, calculated to not be well attended, LBJ made the announcement that US forces in Vietnam would be expanded dramatically from 75,000 to 125,000- eventually to 450,000 by the end of 1967. What LBJ wasn’t saying was he had now decided that US ground troops would carry the bulk of the fighting. Not just to prop up the South Vietnamese army, but defeat the North Vietnamese Army, without ever invading North Vietnam. He would still try to do his Great Society Programs while running a trillion-dollar war that all his experts doubted was winnable.
This one decision destroyed Johnson’s Presidency and cracked the thriving post war economy creating recession and domestic political turmoil.

1971- Photographer Diane Arbus probed increasingly darker subject matter, circus freaks, severe birth defects. This day she committed suicide by swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, then slitting her wrists.

1978- National Lampoons Animal House directed by John Landis opened.

1987- Disney's Oilspot and Lipstick premiered at Siggraph Anaheim. It was an early experimental all CGI film.

1998- In Afghanistan the Taliban ordered mass destruction of television sets. They also forbade the Internet and shaved the heads of their national soccer team for daring to wear shorts.

1999- Mayor Willie Brown of San Francisco declared today Marilyn Chambers Day, in honor of the San Francisco native, and star of classic porn like Behind the Green Door.

2061- The next predicted appearance of Halley’s Comet.
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Yesterday’s Question: Does Holland have a president or a king?

Answer: King Willem-Alexander since 2013, with a prime minister and parliament.

Quiz: Does Belgium have a president, or a king?

Yesterday’s Question Answered Below: Which movie came out first? Lady and the Tramp, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, or Cinderella?
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History for 7/27/2022
Birthdays: Confucius, Alexander Dumas fils, Enrique Granados, Hillaire Belloc, Norman Lear, Maureen McGovern, Keenan Wynn, Leo Durocher, Peggy Fleming, Bobby Gentry, Jerry Van Dyke, Vincent Canby, Betty Thomas, Ilya Salkind, David Swift –director of the Haley Mills Disney films like The Parent Trap, Maya Rudolph is 50, Jonathan Rhys Meyers is 45.

1214- THE BATTLE OF BOUVINES- Called the most famous battle you never heard of.
Ever since 1066 there was a sticky point of medieval etiquette, because the King of England was also Duke of Normandy, so technically a vassal of the King of France. Yet the King of England also ruled over half of France, the Angevin empire. For years nobody pushed the question. Finally, paranoid English King John I had his boy nephew Arthur of Brittany killed for fear he would try to overthrow him. King Phillip of France convened a Feudal trial over the murder, and as his feudal suzerain formally stripped King John of his French provinces of Aquitaine, Gascony, Poitou, Brittany, Vexin, Anjou and Normandy. King John naturally didn't go along with this, and the issue was decided by battle. The French victory at Bouvines doubled the size of France and cut England off from the continent of Europe. King Phillip was hailed as Phillip Augustus. King John's nickname became John Lack-land and John Softsword. Although the English tried several more times to get back Normandy, England went on to develop its own unique society, instead of being a French adjunct. King John even grew to prefer speaking English over French.

1361- Battle of Visby, King Valdemar of Denmark defeated the people of Gotland in Sweden. Its remembered because it left one of the largest mass graves of Medieval soldiers ever discovered.

1586- Sir Walter Raleigh brought the first tobacco pipe home to England from America.
Columbus had of course brought cigars and other duty-free home years earlier, but tobacco was one of the goodies that kept England interested in American colonies after everyone realized there weren’t any more gold-rich Aztec-Inca Empires to plunder. King James I called smoking a filthy and unhealthful habit, but Raleigh persisted. He even paused for a few last puffs before putting his head on the executioner’s block.

1661- England passes the Navigation Act, spurring shipbuilding, especially in the U.S colonies. The masts of the British Navy were harvested from tall New Hampshire oaks.

1667- At Sulzbach near Baden, a cannonball hit Marshal Turenne, general of Louis XIV. Turenne was one of the most brilliant commanders of the age and idolized by military strategists like Napoleon.

1861- One week after losing the Battle of Bull Run, Union Army commander Irwin MacDowell was replaced by General George B. McClellan. “Little Mac” McClellan was a brilliant organizer with a Napoleon complex a mile wide. He once kept President Lincoln and the Secretary of War cooling their heels in his drawing room while he took a nap. Never able to defeat Robert E. Lee, he would persist in writing friends letters like “Once Again God has chosen me to be the savior of My Country.”

1880- BATTLE OF MAIWAND: The Afghan leader Ayub Khan's tribesmen destroyed a British invasion force. Dr. Watson told Sherlock Holmes he was there. Afghans recall a heroic young girl named Malala who grabbed a flag and braved the bullets. While the British remember a little terrier named Bobbie who was a regimental mascot and was wounded several times. He was brought to London and received a medal from Queen Victoria, but he was later run over by a London taxi. Shoulda stayed in Afghanistan where it was safer.

1900- HUNS- In Bremerhaven, Kaiser Wilhelm II addressed a contingent of German marines about to embark for China to help in the international effort to put down the Boxer Rebellion. Caught up in the moment, Wilhelm cried: "Take no prisoners! Kill all those who fall into your hands! As the deeds of the Huns of Attila resound through history for their ruthlessness, so like the Huns, make the name of Germany live in Chinese annals for a thousand years!"

An embarrassed chancellor Von Bulow called it "The worst speech of the year and possibly of the Kaiser's career." He tried to release an edited version to the press. When the Kaiser read the edited speech, he said: My dear Bulow. You left out all the good parts." Germans got the nickname Huns for years afterwards.

1914- Austria declared war on Serbia. The first declaration of World War I.

1921- Two Toronto scientists, Frederick Banting and Charles Best isolate the hormone Insulin to treat diabetes.

1921- SHAKESPEARE & CO. opened in Paris. The English language bookshop on the Seine owned by Sylvia Beach was the most famous hangout for the U.S. expatriate intellectuals. Shakespeare & Co. championed writers like James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, Carlos Santayanna, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Sherwood Anderson and more.
During the liberation in 1944, the shop was liberated personally by Ernest Hemingway who shot snipers off its roof. After paying his respects to Sylvia, Hemingway and his G.I. buddies went on to liberate the Ritz hotel and its famous wine cellar.

1937- The invading Japanese Army entered Beijing, then called Peiping, the former Peking. Most of the art treasures of the old Imperial City had been crated up and moved to Taipei.

1939- Nazi High Command gave secret orders for German supply ships to put to sea, fill up on supplies like fuel oil at neutral harbors in the Americas and take their positions in the Atlantic. In effect, this is the first hostile move against Britain, four and a half weeks before the attack on Poland and the declaration of war.

1940- HAPPY BIRTHDAY BUGS BUNNY. Tex Avery’s short-"A Wild Hare”-There were several earlier prototypes of the famous rabbit, white with a different voice, but this is the short that is generally accepted as his birthday.
In the late 30s, a fashion among some animators in LA was to spend the weekend up in the High Sierras hunting. Most of them were terrible at it, and when they came back with nothing, got a lot of teasing from their buddies. At Looney Tunes, a few guys did gag drawings of designer Ben Hardaway fruitlessly hunting a rabbit. His nickname was Bugs, because he originated from Chicago, like gangster Bugs Moran. Being Bugs or Bugsy was also slang then for crazy. The gag drawings were of Hardaway and " Bug's Bunny". Bob Givens created the first official model sheet of the character.
In this short Bugs says “Whats Up Doc?” for the first time, co-opting a line uttered by Clark Gable while chewing a carrot in the 1934 Frank Capra hit “It Happened One Night”. 
Interestingly, voice actor Mel Blanc was allergic to carrots, and kept a bucket nearby to spit them out after chewing. He experimented with chewing other vegetables, but he claimed nothing sounded as good as raw carrots.

1946- Writer Gertrude Stein died at age 72. Her last words to Alice B. Toklas were:" What is the Answer?" When Alice said nothing, Gertrude said:" Well then, what is the Question?"

1953- THE KOREAN WAR ENDS- The Treaty of Panmunjom. After 170,000 Americans casualties and millions of Koreans & Chinese killed, the treaty fixed the border basically where they were in 1950. The South Korean Government was outraged and considered it a betrayal, because it accepted the permanent division of Korea in to two parts. South Koreans weren’t even allowed at the negotiations. But America and China were tired of the endless death and stalemate and wanted out.
Before the treaty went into effect, South Korean President Sygmun Ree opened all POW camps and let all the North Korean troops who didn’t want to return home, run free. South Korea never signed the treaty, so it is still technically at war with the North.

1953- The Tonight Show debuted on NBC. Its first host was Steve Allen.

1965- The U.S. Government forces cigarette companies to print warning labels on the their packages about the hazards of smoking.

1977- John Lennon got his green card. Richard Nixon considered him a dangerous radical. Several times he was under 60-day notice to leave the country.

1986- Gregg Lemond became the first American to win the Tour de France bicycle race.

1993- IBM announced it would eliminate 35,000 white-collar jobs. Downsizing becomes a popular sport in corporate America. The more workers laid off, the higher your stock rose. The chairman of General Electric Jack Welch, was nicknamed “Neutron Jack” after the neutron bomb that kills off people but leaves buildings intact. He was lionized as a hero in corporate America. He wrote op-eds in the NY Times defending his practice of outsourcing American jobs.

1996- A bomb packed with nails goes off during Olympic celebrations in Atlanta Georgia. One woman was killed, and dozens injured. While hunting the bomber, the media decided to focus on an overweight security guard who lived with his mom named Richard Jewel. Ironically Jewel was the one who first alerted police to the suspicious package, and tried to evacuate the area, otherwise more people would have been killed. After weeks of merciless hounding by the press, the FBI declared Jewel completely innocent. In 2003 the police finally caught the real culprit, abortion clinic bomber and backwoods fruitcake Eric Rudolph.

2007- The Simpson’s Movie debuted.

2016- In an election speech, Donald Trump declared “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 (Hillary Clinton) emails that are missing.” According to the Mueller Probe, soon after this speech the level of Russian hacking into American sites shot up dramatically.

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Yesterday’s Question: Which movie came out first? Lady and the Tramp, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, or Cinderella?

Answer: Cinderella (1950) was first, then Alice In Wonderland (51), Peter Pan (53), Lady and the Tramp (55).

Question: Which movie came out first? Lady and the Tramp, Peter Pan, Alice in Wonderland, or Cinderella?

Yesterday’s Question: Keanu Reeves has a new movie called Bererker. What is the historic origin of that name?
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History for 7/26/2022
Birthdays: Salvador Allende, Serge Koussevitzky, George Bernard Shaw, Gracie Allen,
Carl Jung, Stanley Kubrick, Blake Edwards, George Grosz, Pearl Buck, Jason Robards Jr, Aldous Huxley, Jean Shepard, Ken Muse, Vivian Vance, Emil Jannings, Sandra Bullock is 58, Kevin Spacey, Kate Beckinsdale, Helen Mirren is 77, Jason Statham, Mick Jagger is 79

1533- Atahualpa, Emperor of the Incas, was executed by Francisco Pizarro. The Great Inca was captured by ambush at Cajamarca and forced to fill a large room with gold and two more rooms with silver to get his release. This was accomplished, but Pizarro decided to kill him anyway. Atahualpa accepted baptism out of fear of being burned alive, the Inca mummified their kings and carried their remains around like saints’ relics, being burned denied you access into the next world. So, he was garroted-strangled with a twisting stick behind the rope. The Spaniards then burned his body anyway.
The Inca people didn't completely submit but withdrew deeper into the Andes and fought on for 70 more years. Pizarro became first governor of Peru and lived in Lima where he was run through with a sword during a feud with another Spanish noble family.

1656– Rembrandt van Rijn declared bankruptcy.

1694- The Bank of England opened on London's Threadneedle Street. It issued the first bank checks.

1757- Battle of Hastenbeck- The Duke of Cumberland, the bastard son of King George II who had defeated Bonnie Prince Charlie at Culloden, took over a Hanoverian army in the Netherlands. The British general was so badly beaten that he signed a treaty of his own at Klosterzeven with the French pledging not to militarily intervene anymore in Central Europe and even giving up Hanover, King George’s family homeland. In London, Prime Minister Pitt called Cumberland “a Coward and Traitor!”

1758- Admiral Boscowen’s fleet with the aid of New England militia captured the French fortress of Louisbourg on the mouth of the Saint Lawrence. This was the first step in the British conquest of Canada.

1775- U.S. Postal System began. Ben Franklin was first postmaster general. The year before Franklin had been fired by the Kings Privy Council in London from his post as postmaster of the Colonies. Interesting enough the only time a US postal system ever operated at a profit was the Confederate Postal System ran by a man named John Regan.

1781- During the Revolution, James Armistead was a runaway black slave who served British Lord Cornwallis as a cook. He was also a spy planted by Lafayette. Today he brought news to George Washington in his camp in Connecticut that Lord Cornwallis was fortifying his encampment at Yorktown Virginia, and intended to stay put. His information proved vital in the ultimate victory that won the American Revolution.

1790- The Funding Bill passed in Congress that was the first step in the master plan of Alexander Hamilton to start the US economy. He struck a deal with states rights politicians like Thomas Jefferson that allowed the US government to assume all the outstanding debts the individual states accrued during the Revolution. This act bound all the loose knit states more firmly under the Federal Government’s leadership. In return Hamilton proposed moving the site of the American Capitol from Philadelphia to a more southern site, like some area in Maryland near George Washington’s Virginia home.
This site for the Federal City would eventually be Washington DC. Of course all of this create a huge federal budget deficit, but in Hamilton’s thinking big deficits were good for a country, they implied solidity.

1815- THE WHITE TERROR- It was said after the French Revolution that the Royal Bourbon family had learned nothing, but remembered everything. After the Battle of Waterloo smashed Napoleon's power forever, restored King Louis XVIII issued his Royal Ordinances, lists of Bonaparte supporters to be arrested. Some like Marshal Ney and General Labedouyere were shot, some jailed, Marshal Brune was lynched, many fled to America where Napoleon’s brother Joseph had resettled the Bonaparte family in Philadelphia.
Others fled to New Orleans, where for years they defiantly waved the Tricolor flag at arriving French merchant ships. When Andrew Jackson fought British troops at New Orleans, over the roar of the guns French volunteers sang Le Marseillaise at the bagpiping Highlanders, A group of Napoleon’s veterans tried to found a colony on an island off Galveston Texas, but were driven away by a hurricane. One of the exiles, a 17 year old veteran named Michel Bouvier, was set up in the cabinet making business by Joseph Bonaparte. Michel Bouvier was the ancestor of Jackie Bouvier Kennedy.

1822- The Liberators meet. Simon Bolivar met Jose San Martin at Guayaqui, Equador.

1826- In Valencia, school teacher Cayetano Ripoll became the last person executed for heresy by the Spanish Inquisition, which had been raging since 1492. Napoleon had suspended their activities when he occupied the country in 1808, but they restarted after he left. Cayetano Ripoll had fought Napoleon’s troops during the war, but as a school teacher he was arrested by the Inquisition for teaching “deist principles and hanged. The Inquisition was official ended in 1834. The Alhambra Decree that expelled the Jews was not rescinded until 1968!

1835 - 1st sugar cane plantation started in Hawaii.

1847- The Republic of Liberia was declared, the first democratic republic in Africa. Joseph Jenkins-Roberts elected first president. When the US government finally outlawed the African slave trade in 1825 one problem was what to do with all the boatloads of slaves still at sea completing the Middle Passage and all the unsold slaves in harbor depots? It was decided to send all these people to a specific beach on the West African Coast. The freed slaves called themselves Liberia and named their capitol Monrovia in honor of James Monroe, who was US president at the time of their liberation.

1861- Mark Twain left St. Jo Missouri to go west and sit out the Civil War. He went with his brother Oren Clemens who had been appointed to administer the Nevada territory.

1887 - 1st Esperanto book published.

1903 –FIRST TRANSCONTINENTAL AUTO TRIP- Dr. Horatio Nelson Jackson, mechanic Sewell J. Crocker, and Bud the Wonderdog, in their Winton Touring Car rode into New York City at 4:30AM, having left San Francisco sixty-three days before. They are the first to cross the United States by automobile. They did it to win a $50 bet that you could cross the country by auto in 90 days. Jackson won the bet but spent $8,000 of his own money to do it. And he never collected his winnings. He was hailed as the Great Automobilist and his car was put on display. At the time, there were only 250 miles of paved roads in the United States, all in major cities.

1917- The last two-horse street car made it’s final run, down Broadway. There were now more automobiles than horses on the streets of American cities.

1918- During WWI, at a testimonial dinner in London, U.S. Under-Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt first met First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. The friendship made there would mean a lot when they fought WWII together twenty years later.

1925- Exhausted by his verbal battle with Clarence Darrow in the just concluded Scopes Monkey Trial, famed statesman William Jennings Bryan died in his sleep.

1926 - National Bar Association incorporates.

1941- Angered by Japan's refusal to stop its invasion of China and now Indochina, President Roosevelt ordered Japan's overseas assets frozen and embargoes oil and steel.
Since the U.S. was then the world's leading producer of oil and steel this meant Japan's imports were cut by 90%, and her industry would soon dry up. Japan had a strategic oil reserve that could last only three years. FDR also closed the Panama Canal to all Japanese shipping. The generals in Japan now felt war with America was inevitable.

1943- The Birth of L.A. Smog! A newspaper headline from this date mentions a 'gas-attack' of exhaust and haze that reduced visibility to three short blocks.

1945-The Potsdam Declaration-Truman and Churchill called upon Japan one more time to surrender unconditionally. By now all the leaders now knew the Americans had the Atomic Bomb. With a tentative schedule of dropping it the first week of August, they wanted to give Japan one more chance. The Japanese cabinet chose to ignore the Potsdam Declaration, and hoped to use a diplomatic route to Stalin to force negotiations. They were unaware that Stalin was planning to attack Japan also.

1945- While the Big Three Potsdam conferences were going on, at home a British general election turned Winston Churchill out of office. He had to embarrassingly leave the conference and was superseded by Labor candidate Clement Atlee, who assumed a junior role in the talks. Churchill used to refer to Atlee as “a sheep in sheep’s clothing”

1947- HAPPY BIRTHDAY CIA! Pres. Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the CIA, the NSC, The Joint Chiefs and all those other groups that draw un-scrutinized federal budgets.

1948- President Truman issued Exec Order # 9981 to the U.S. military to ban all segregation. At the time the US Army was more segregated than it had been in 1865 or 1776.

1951- Charlie Chaplin driven into exile by red-baiters. He was on a holiday to Britain when he learned his visa had been revoked by the U.S. government. He didn't return until 1972. Despite his immense achievements in Hollywood History, when the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated later that year, Chaplin’s name was deliberately excluded.

1951- Walt Disney’s Alice in Wonderland had its world premiere in London’s Leicester Square Theatre. It opened in the U.S. two days later.

1952- Evita Peron the beautiful First Lady of Argentina died at age 33.

1953- Fulgensio Batista had suppressed the evolution of democracy in Cuba and ruled as a dictator. This day a 25 year old lawyer and part time left handed baseball pitcher named Fidel Castro with a few followers tried to start a revolt by raiding the impregnable Morcado Barracks. The pathetic assault was immediately crushed and the survivors including Castro jailed. But the event was seen by the people and the world that Cubans would not submit quietly. When Castro was released in 1956 and started his more organized guerrilla campaign he called his group the July 26th Movement.

1956- The Suez Crisis. Egypt's Gamal Nasser, on the anniversary of the exit of King Farouk I (1952) and the declaration of the Republic, nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been run by an Anglo-French cooperative. Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt, but the war was stopped by the intervention of the US and USSR.

1958- Top US test pilot Ivan Kinchilo was killed in a plane crash. His F-104 malfunctioned only 800 feet off the ground and he ejected, but couldn’t prevent his parachute from delivering him into the fireball of wreckage. Kinchilo has been called the First Spaceman, since in 1956 piloted a Bell-X test plane to the edge of the stratosphere. A friend of Neil Armstrong and the Gemini astronauts. Many say had Kinchilo lived, he would have been an important figure in the NASA Space Program.

1959- KPFK, Los Angeles progressive radio of The Pacifica Network, starts up.

1970- Oh, Calcutta! Play opened in London. Oh, Calcutta had nothing at all to do with India, the show was a series of unrelated, but sex-dominated sketches featuring a totally nude cast, both male and female. The title came from a pun on the French “O quel cul t’as” meaning “what a nice bum you have”.

1979- Alvin Texas recorded 43 inches of rain in one day.

1984- Edward Gein died peacefully in a prison for the criminally insane. Gein was arrested in 1957 and sentenced to life for mass murder. Police found his farm in Wisconsin decorated with human body parts and heads in the freezer and in the stove, and the dried cadaver of his mother Augustina. His story inspired "Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Silence of the Lambs".

1990- Pres. George H.W. Bush signed the Citizens with Disabilities Act into law.

1991 – Children’s comic Paul Reubens aka Pee Wee Herman was arrested in Florida for masturbating in an adult movie theater. The film was Naughty Nurse Nancy.

1995- After a year of investigation, the General Accounting Office noted that all documents pertaining to the Roswell UFO Incident of 1947 had disappeared or been destroyed. …Hmmm.
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Yesterday’s Question answered below: Keanu Reeves has a new movie called Bererker. What is the historic origin of that name?

Answer: In Viking times a particular kind of warrior was called a berserker. They got so worked up by fighting, they blacked out and later did not remember killing all those people. The Berserks Way was considered a holy state of Odin, and some warriors brought on the condition by taking hallucinogenic mushrooms.

Quiz: Keanu Reeves has a new movie called Bererker. What is the historic origin of that name?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What is provenance? As in a distinguished provenance.
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History for 7/25/2022
Birthdays: Bishop Theitmar of Merseberg- 975AD, Arthur Balfour, Thomas Eakins, Maxfield Parrish, Stuart K. Hine 1899 missionary who wrote the hymn "How Great Thou Art", Woody Strode, Walter Payton, Walter Brennan, David Belasco, Adnan Khashoggi, Imam, Jack Gilford, Illena Douglas, Estelle Getty, Matt LeBlanc, Louise Brown the first "test-tube" baby-conceived by invitro-fertilization is 44

Today is the Feast of Saint James, called San Diego or Santiago de Compostela in Spanish.

325 A.D. The Council of Nicea- The Roman Emperor Constantine called all the bishops of Christianity to answer the questions posed by the Arian (Gnostic) Christian sect. The Arrians asked: "If Jesus was God on Earth, then who was minding the store upstairs? And how can you kill God? Maybe he was just pretending to be dead..." They came up with the Nicene Creed (The Apostles Creed) and the Mystery of the Trinity, "One In Being with the Father" If you can't figure this out, a nun would be happy to rap your knuckles for asking.

1554- Queen Mary I of England "Bloody Mary" married King Philip II of Spain in Winchester Cathedral. Phillip didn’t linger long in England and Mary was much older than him, and beyond child bearing years.

1570- Czar Ivan IV demonstrated why his got the name Ivan the Terrible by ordering mass executions of his supposed enemies in Moscow. This day he had Boyar Prince Viskavati hanged from a gallows and slowly sliced up with knives, allowing him to live just long enough to watch Ivan rape his wife and daughter.

1593- After a bloody religious-civil war, Henry IV made himself King of all of France. But his capitol Paris was still holding out. When he asked why they were so stubborn in their resistance, they said it was because he was a Protestant. "Well then," the King said, ”Paris is well worth a Mass!”. So, he converted back to Catholicism. Henry’s family, the Bourbons, became the royal dynasty of France, and today is still on the throne of Spain. Recently the remains of Henry IV were found, a pierced ear for a pearl earring.

1788- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart completed his Symphony #40 in G minor.

1792- THE BRUNSWICK MANIFESTO- The Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia sent armies invading France to help their brother-king Louis XVI put down the unruly French Revolution. This day the military commander of the invasion, Charles William, the Duke of Brunswick, issued a proclamation to the French people that if they didn’t knuckle under to their King like all good little peasants do he was going to kick their butts! He especially threatened Paris with “a memorable-vengeance". This arrogant threat enraged the French people and all but decided King Louis and Marie-Antoinette should be executed. Danton and Marat called for a rising of the French nation, a levee en masse. So many men signed up to fight, recruiters ran out of ink. One future general Augureau, poked the pen into his vein and signed up in his own blood. The Duke of Brunswick was defeated by rampaging Frenchmen shouting Aux Armes-Citoyens!

1814- Battle of Lundy’s Lane. American forces defeated a British invasion force coming from Canada near Niagara Falls.

1822- General Augustin Iturbide has himself crowned Emperor of Mexico.

1846 -The Spanish-Californios residents of Los Angeles chase the U.S. occupying force out of town a second time.

1871- Samuel Colt patented his first revolver in 1836. Today he patented the "peacemaker", his most iconic Western sixgun. Gunfighters filed off the barrel sight so it wouldn't catch on your clothes during a quickdraw, and carried it “5 beans in the wheel" meaning while walking they kept it set at the one empty chamber, so it doesn't accidentally go off in the holster and shoot you in the foot, which was embarrassing. Most gunfighters carried it in their belts or a waist high holster. Wild Bill Hickock carried his 1860 Navy Colts backwards in a red sash. The familiar low-on-the-hip two gun holsters didn't become common until cowboys saw them in the Buffalo Bill Wild West Show in the 1880’s.
Colonel Colt got very rich from his invention and had an annoying habit of shooting his guns off in courtrooms and restaurants like Yosemite Sam. Yee-Hah!

1871 An electric carousel was patented by Wilhelm Schneider, Davenport, Iowa

1894-the Sino Japanese War. The Japanese surprise attack the Korean peninsula amphibiously at the Bay of Inchon, giving Douglas MacArthur the same idea 57 years later.

1897- Young writer Jack London went to the Klondike to look for gold. He didn’t find much gold, but did get material for a lot of good stories.

1898- The US Army invaded Puerto Rico. Spain had granted the island home rule but America took possession of it in the treaty ending the Spanish American War. It’s been a US commonwealth ever since. Puerto Ricans were given full US citizenship in 1917 and self government in 1942.

1909-THE WRISTWATCH- Frenchman Louis Bleriot flew the English Channel. Bleriot had no fuel gauge in his plane. He knew the rate that his plane burned fuel so he kept a clock in his cockpit to mark the time. But a problem was the engine vibrations would rattle the clock to uselessness. So he asked his friend, Charles Cartier the jeweler, to make him a reliable timepiece free from vibrations. Cartier created a small watch that you could strap to your wrist with the clock face showing- the Wristwatch. By World War I wristwatches supplanted pocket watches as the standard male accessory.

1918- In Russia the anti-Communist White Guards entered Ykaterinburg one week too late to prevent the murder of Czar Nicholas II and his family. They discovered the bullet ridden blood soaked room and after capturing one of the Bolshevik agents involved in the murder spread the news of the crime to the world. Soviet apologists for years maintained that the murder of the Imperial Family was done upon the initiative of the local Soviet council under Commissar Yakovlev. But documents discovered in 1989 revealed the murders were a direct order from Lenin.

1920- The French Army occupied Damascus after Lawrence of Arabia and Faisal's All-Arab Congress government failed. Faisal's son was given the Kingdom of Mesopotamia (Iraq) after his claims to the Hejaz region were trumped by Saudi King Ibn Saud. The French would hold Syria as a colony after World War II, which is why the Syrians have never been very pro-western since.

1927- The Tanaka Memorial- Japanese statesman Baron Tanaka spelled out for the Japanese government a strategy of conquest for the next twenty years, calling for Japan to achieve economic dominance by creating a Greater East Asian Economic Sphere from Korea to Australia. This document was considered by Anglo-American strategists the "Mein Kampf " of the Japanese militarists.

1934- Nazi agents assassinated the Austrian Chancellor Englebert Dolfuss for resisting Fascist encroachment, and having a very silly name.

1936- Orchard Beach opened in the North Bronx.

1940- In Nazi occupied Paris, a Gestapo agent walked into the French offices of MGM studios and confiscated the six prints of "Gone With The Wind" sent from America. They were taken to Berlin for a screening for top Nazi officials. Gone with the Wind was one of Adolf Hitler’s favorite movies. For the entire period of the Occupation, Henri Langlois, founder of the Cinémathèque Française, hid a surviving print of Gone With The Wind under his bed. The day Paris was liberated, the Cinémathèque was reopened with the first public screening.

1943 - Benito Mussolini was overthrown as leader of Italy and imprisoned, while the Italian government tried to open negotiations with the allies. Hitler responded by sending commandos to rescue Mussolini, and militarily occupying Italy.

1944- Operation Cobra- The Allies break out of the Normandy beachheads and hedgerows and unleash Patton's fresh Third army into the French interior countryside. Between now and the Battle of the Bulge, the German Army can do little more than fall back to the Rhine.

1951- CBS conducts the first broadcast of color television. NBC made color TV popular in the mid 1960's.

1953- Chuck Jone's "Duck Dodgers in the 24 and 1/2 Century".

1953- New York City subway fares rise from 10 cents to 15 cents. Subway tokens were issued for the first time.

1959-"The Kitchen Debates" Vice President Richard Nixon traded catty comments with Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev at the American kitchen of the future exhibit in a Moscow Trade Show.

1965- Folk Music star Bob Dylan was booed off stage at the Newport Folk Festival for using an electric guitar. Alan Lomax, the great Smithsonian Folk Music historian got into a fistfight over it, and Pete Seeger threatened to pull the electric plugs.

1968- Pope Paul VI published the encyclical Humane Vitae, which set the Church policy against all forms of birth control other than The Rhythm Method. No to the Pill, condoms, and other contraception. This made the Pope a real drag to the Swinging Sixties.

1969 – Senator Edward Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident a week after the Chappaquiddick car accident that killed his campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne.

1972- The story was broken of the Tuskegee Experiments- that in the late 1940’s and 50’s the US Government did medical experiments on unwilling humans, mostly African American men, injecting with them with syphilis and other diseases to study their effects. One went mad and jumped out of a window. President Clinton officially apologized to the survivors in 1993.

1975 - "A Chorus Line," longest-running Broadway show (6,137), premiered.

1984- Cosmonaut Svetlana Savitskaya became 1st woman to walk in space.

1984- The groundbreaking CGI film The Adventures of Andre and Wally-B premiered at the Siggraph convention in Minneapolis. Directed by Alvy Ray Amith and the computer designers who would eventually form Pixar. They were aided by new hire John Lasseter, who brought his Disney animation expertise to forming credible character animation on computer.

1985- Movie star Rock Hudson publicly acknowledged that he had AIDS. He had collapsed in France and he made the announcement while being treated at a French clinic. He was the first major public figure to acknowledge he had the mysterious new disease.

1990 - Roseanne Barr sang the National Anthem at a San Diego Padre game. As a joke she impersonated ball players by spitting, grabbing her crotch and screeching during her rendition. It didn’t go over well with the more patriotically minded in that very conservative town.

2000- An Air France Concord supersonic jetliner exploded on takeoff, killing everyone on board. The investigation proved a piece of metal debris that fell off the previous Continental jetliner exploded one of the Concords tires and the resultant wreckage was sucked into the plane’s engine. Both Britain and France suspended SST flights for over a year and in 2003 discontinued them forever as being too expensive.

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Yesterday’s Question: What is provenance? As in a distinguished provenance.

Answer: A source, back ground or a birthplace.

Quiz: What is a Bailey? As in The Old Bailey?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What is a dichotomy?
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History for 7/23/2022
Birthdays: Ethiopian Emperor Rastafari Halie Selassie "the Lion of Judah", Raymond Chandler, Jackson Beck the voice of Bluto, Raymond Booth, Don Drysdale, Gloria DeHaven, Arthur Treacher, Pee Wee Reese, Bob Fosse, Harry Cohn, Don Imus, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Slash, Marlon Wayans, Woody Harrelson is 62, Edie McClurg, Daniel Radcliffe is 34

Today is the Ancient Roman Festival of Neptune, God of the Sea.

1599- Michel Caravaggio received his first commission for a painting.

1645- Russian Czar Michael Romanov died, founder of the Romanov dynasty.

1846- Because he did not agree with the U.S. War with Mexico, writer Henry David Thoreau refused to pay his taxes. A local constable fined him. The event caused him to write his famous piece "On Civil Disobedience" which inspired Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Ang Sung su Chi.

1866- The Cincinnati Reds Baseball club formed. The oldest continuous professional sports team in the U.S.

1868- The 14th Amendment ratified, giving all African Americans the right to vote. It just wasn’t enforced until 1965.

1880 - 1st commercial hydroelectric power planet begins, Grand Rapids, Mich

1885- Ulysses Grant died at age 63 of throat cancer. Despite being a great general, he was a bad politician and a worse businessman. Bankrupt after trusting speculators who swindled him, Grant saw writing his memoirs as the only way to save his family from his bad debts. Writing up to 50 pages a day in constant pain, he refused any painkillers to not cloud his mind. But he coated his throat daily with a mixture of salt water and cocaine. He completed the book only four days before he died. They were published by the ex-confederate Mark Twain, and immediately became a best seller.

1886- This was the day Bowery saloonkeeper Steve Brodie claimed he jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and lived to talk about it.

1888 - John Boyd Dunlop patents the pneumatic rubber tire.

1892- The business partner of millionaire steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie was attorney Henry Clay Frick. Frick was charged by Carnegie to resolve the union issues at his steel works while he vacationed in Europe. Frick set off the Homestead Massacre, hiring thugs to shoot workers and their families who protested a 20% pay cut. Frick claimed he was merely the front man for Carnegie. Carnegie goes down in history as a great philanthropist. This day a Russian anarchist named Sasha Berksman entered Frick’s office and shot him twice. Frick recovered.

1894- Japanese troops occupied the Korean Imperial Palace. After years of conflict, they annexed Korea in 1905. Japan held Korea until 1945.

1904 – The Ice Cream Cone created by Charles E. Menches during the LA Purchase Expo. Also introduced there was Dr. Pepper.

1908 -Turkish Sultan Abdul Hamid IV is deposed by a group of young army officers demanding modern reforms, called the Young Turks.

1914-The Austro-Hungarian Empire sent Serbia its final ultimatum. After their Archduke's assassination in Sarajevo by Bosnian- Serb terrorists, the Austrian government deliberately made their demands so humiliating that Serbia would have to reject it and Austria could cleanly declare war. Austria wanted to beat up the little nation it saw as encouraging revolution among the Slavic parts of its empire. But Serbia had an alliance that would bring Russia into the conflict. Austria had an agreement that would bring Germany into war with Russia.
Once the Austrians got proof that the assassins were in the pay of the Serbian Secret Service, if they had simply declared war then no country would have minded. The Austrian Emperor Franz Josef said: "Russia will not step in to protect regicides." But Austria wasting weeks publicly posturing and intriguing, so Russia, Germany and France would have to get involved or lose face. The Russian ambassador said to the Austrians-" You are trying to set fire to Europe!" When German Kaiser Wilhelm read the ultimatum he said-" Spirited note, what?"

1919- At the request of his Secretary of War McAdoo, President Woodrow Wilson named the recently concluded great war against Germany as the "World War." It wasn’t called World War I until in Nov 1942, when Time magazine labeled the new conflict of 1939-45 World War II. Franklin Roosevelt thought it" too depressing, like we were bound to have more."

1920- Kenya declared a crown colony of the British Empire.

1927 – Reacting to a public finally tired of the Tin Lizzy Model T and increased competition, the Ford Motor Co sold the first Model A car.

1932-The Birthday of Fritos. Texas ice cream maker Elmer Doolin buys a recipe for corn chips from a Mexican fry cook for $100 dollars and started the Frito-Lay Company.

1936- Aviator Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh arrived in Berlin to begin a state visit of Germany as the personal guests of Adolph Hitler. Lindbergh praised the German Luftwaffe as the "greatest air force in the world". Only three Americans ever got the Third Reich’s highest civilian medal- Lindbergh, Henry Ford and the Chairman of the US Chamber of Commerce.

1937 – Scientists at Yale University announced the isolation of the pituitary hormone.

1937-TENNIS DIPLOMACY- The US and Nazi Germany spent much of the late 1930’s testing their competing philosophies on sports playing fields- Democracy vs Aryan Racial Purity. First Jesse Owens at the Olympics, then prizefighters Joe Louis and Max Schmeling, this day even the semi-finals of the Davis Cup Tennis championship became another Yankees vs Nazis test.
At Wimbledon England, American Don Budge and German Baron Gottfried von Cramm played the game of their lives. Hitler had personally telephoned Von Cramm the night before and ordered him to win. Ironically, von Cramm was anti-Nazi. Don Budge won after 6 nail-biting tied sets. Queen Mary was present, and Hitler was glued to his radio. At one-point American tennis great Bill Tilden who had been hired to coach the German team signaled that the match was in the bag. This provoked such an angry reaction from the audience that entertainers Jack Benny and Ed Sullivan tried to climb the fence to kick Tilden’s ass. But Budge came from behind to win. Von Cramm took defeat like a gentleman but Hitler didn’t. Shortly upon his return to the fatherland, the Gestapo arrested him for homosexual activity. He was released only after a campaign of protest letters from the worlds top athletes, organized by his old opponent, Dan Budge.

1942- Fuehrer directive #45. Adolf Hitler ordered General Von Paulus in Russia to turn his Sixth Army from his drive on the oil fields of Baku and take the city of Stalingrad.

1944- To counter charges that concentration camps are bad places, the Nazis invited the International Red Cross and neutral journalists to tour a model camp called Theresinstadt. The camp was a dummy with little white picket fences and flower pots in the barracks windows. The ICRC found conditions "moderately comfortable". After the Red Cross left, the inmates were all shipped off to Auschwitz.

1951-Thelonius Monk recorded the seminal jazz album Straight, No Chaser.

1952- Egyptian King Farouk abdicated to a group of army officers led by General Mohammed Naikeeb and Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser. Another officer in the coup was Col. Anwar El Sadat. Britain had ruled Egypt since 1880 and after withdrawing in 1936 they continued to control Egyptian politics through the Albanian-born ruler King Farouk. It was the first time Egypt was ruled by Egyptians in 2,250 years. Gamal Nasser would make Egypt a leader in the Third World non-aligned movement, fought wars against Israel and nationalized the Suez Canal. Nassar later said: "Whenever I asked someone 'What should I do first to build the new Egypt?" they would only advise me who I should kill."

1966- The comedy song "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha, Ha!" released. The singer was Napoleon XIV.

1967- The city of Detroit exploded into race riots after white police raided a house party at 12th & Claremont for returned black Vietnam veterans. Forty-three died and it took 20,000 soldiers to restore order. It was the worst rioting in the city's history in a summer of race riots in other major American cities like Newark and Washington D.C.

1968- Fred Blasie won an unprecedented fifth World Wrestling Championship belt. Blasie later gained more fame for recording the comedy song "Pencil Necked Geeks" and beating up comedian Andy Kaufman in the ring for calling wrestling a hoax.

1974- The junta of military officers ruling Greece since the time of George Papadopoulos collapsed. Greece held free elections.

1982- Actor Vic Morrow and two children are killed by a stunt helicopter while filming "Twilight Zone, the movie". The last scripted line before his death was "I’ll Keep you safe kids, I swear to God!" The children were being worked into the early morning hours without a caretaker supervisor in defiance of the Coogan Laws. Director John Landis was investigated but exonerated.

1984- Vanessa Williams the first black Miss America, resigned after a photo spread of her in a nude lesbian scenario in Penthouse magazine. She denied any impropriety until the photos were published widely.

1986 - Britain's Prince Andrew married Sarah Ferguson called Fergie. They divorced later and she moved to the US and became the spokesperson for Weight Watchers.

1995- The Discovery of Comet Hale-Bop. It’s called that because it was discovered almost simultaneously by two separate astronomers-Alan Hale in New Mexico and Thomas Bop in Arizona. The comet’s passing close by the Earth was the signal for a messianic cult in San Diego called the Heaven's Gate to commit mass suicide by eating poison laced chocolate pudding. They felt that suicide would enable them to join aliens flying in UFOs in the comet’s tail. CNN mogul Ted Turner said of the cult: "Oh well, one hundred fewer nuts in the world…"

1999- The Inspector Gadget Movie starring Matthew Broderick opened.

2003-THE DOWNING STREET MEMO- British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his cabinet had a meeting about the war in Iraq. During that meeting Blairs’ people openly discussed as fact that the George W. Bush administration had cooked the data as an excuse for their invasion. “Their case is thin.” This while the White House was loudly declaring that war was its last resort. When the Downing St memo was revealed in 2005, the story was quickly buried by the complacent U.S. media.

2004- Two armed men enter the Munch Museum in Norway and steal Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream at gunpoint. It was recovered with some water damage three years later.
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Yesterday’s Question: What is a dichotomy?

Answer: a contrast between two things that are opposed or entirely different.
"a dichotomy between science and mysticism"