Question: What is the origin of the phrase” To be Turned Down Flat?”

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Who put up the first Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree?
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history for 12/2/2007
Birthdays: George Seurat, Charles Ringling, Julie Harris, Gianni Verasce, Ray Walston, Alexander Haig, Monica Seles, Cathy Lee Crosby, Lucy Liu is 39, Britney Spears is 25

1494- Now that the Medici Dukes were driven out of Florence mystical monk Savonarola proposed to the people that they create a Republic ruled by God’s Law. Savonarola ruled Florence like a Christian Ayatollah. He led big public spectacles where in large bonfires Florentines burned “vanities” like makeup, wigs, art and books and tried to live a religious life. Eventually it all got so boring they burned Savonarola instead, and recalled the Medicis.

1697- Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London reopened. It was restored by Sir Christopher Wren after being destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666.

1723- Phillipe D’Orleans died of an apoplectic fit at 49. He ruled France as regent for the boy King Louis XV and even when Louis attained his manhood he didn’t mind if his Uncle Phillipe continued to run the country for him. Phillipe D’Orleans was an able minister but extremely corrupt and sexually promiscuous. The City of New Orleans was named for him.

1804- NAPOLEON CROWNED EMPEROR OF FRANCE .The 35 year old little corporal from Corsica who spoke French with an Italian accent, had piercing gray eyes and if he liked you showed his affection by giving your ear a tug, crowned himself Emperor of the French. He had the Pope brought up from Rome to Notre Dame for legitimacy but in a moment of planned theater Napoleon took the crown from his hands and crowned himself. European liberals like Goethe and Beethoven who had thought Napoleon would be a strong force of reform in Europe were now disillusioned that he turned out to be just another usurper. Beethoven scratched off his dedication of his Third Symphony (Eroica) to him. Napoleon's mother, an old guerrilla named Madame Letizia, thought her son was making a fool out of himself and boycotted the ceremony. When David was doing the official painting of the event Napoleon ordered him to paint his mother in anyway.

Another curiosity of the coronation was the problem finding virgins. In order to copy the ceremony of the ancient coronation of Charlemagne they needed 12 virgin maids with candles. And after 15 years of social and sexual revolution in France, well, it was hard finding any virgins in Paris. Napoleon made a joke about looking in the quiet suburb of St. Germain en Laye.

1805- THE SUNRISE OF AUSTERLITZ- At a small village in what is now the Czech republic Napoleon defeats the Tsar of Russia and Emperor of Austria in one spectacular battle. Tolstoy called it the Battle of the Three Emperors. As much as he was a strategist and tactician Napoleon was a great analyst of human character. Based on his opinion of his opponent’s personalities he predicted exactly how the battle would go two weeks before he lured them into it. The defeat of the Allies was total and climaxed by the French artillery blowing holes in a frozen lake the Russians were trying to escape over, drowning hundreds. Within days they sued for peace and the war ended. Napoleon's take on events: "Ah, que Belle Journee'."What a nice day it's been."

1834-Battle of Ndondakasuka- Csetshwayo and his Zulu Impis (regiments) defeat his rival Mbulazi to become King of the Zulu Empire. Csetshwayo's descendants are now the leaders of the Inkatha Freedom Party in modern South Africa.

1854-Napoleon III was Napoleon's nephew and since 1848 legally elected President of the Second French Republic. But he decided that he wanted to be an Emperor like his uncle so he seized dictatorial power on the anniversary of Austerlitz and locked up all dissenters like Victor Hugo, Alex DeTocqueville and cartoonist Honore' Daumier (gotta watch them cartoonists...)

1859- John Brown Hanged- He said nothing on the scaffold but left a prediction on a slip of paper :".. I now believe that the sins of this nation have become so great that the cannot be excised but by a great spilling of blood.." Witnessing the event were Col. Robert E. Lee and part time reservist John Wilkes Booth.

1863- The dome of the U.S. Capitol completed as the Goddess of Freedom is hoisted up into place.

1877- Camille Saint Saens opera “Samson & Dalila” premiered in Weimar.

1896- We remember Wyatt Earp as the marshall of Dodge City and gunfighter of the 1881 OK Corral gunfight. He was better known to his people of his own generation as the referee of the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey Heavyweight Championship prizefight. After leaving Tombstone Arizona, Wyatt Earp drifted to San Francisco where his skills as a fight referee were called upon for this last of the big bare-knuckle bouts. He enraged the public when he declared the fight for Sharkey in the 3rd round after Big-Bob Fitzsimmons couldn't stop bleeding. More people were out to kill him over this decision than were ever out to get him when marshal of Dodge City. He quickly pulled up stakes and went to the Yukon for the gold rush. He was all but forgotten until a cheap book called Wyatt Earp Frontier Marshal published in 1920 made him famous. He died in Los Angeles in 1929 selling real estate and advising movie companies on how to shoot their westerns.

1901- Mr. King Gillette invented the safety razor.

1942- THE FIRST CONTROLLED NUCLEAR CHAIN REACTION.-The concept of a fission reaction had been theorized by Einstein and Bohr in 1939. Under a squash court at the University of Chicago a team of physicists led by Enrico Ferme began a chain reaction in a uranium pile and stopped it again, producing a few watts of energy. To celebrate they produced a bottle of chianti and some paper cups. No toasts were made to man's entrance into the Atomic Age. Tennis courts are still there and the Regenstein Library was built on the site where to this day the lowest basement registers off the scale on geiger counters.

1956- Fidel Castro with 88 followers trained in guerrilla fighting landed on the beach in Cuba and melted into the mountains. This group would be the core of a revolution that by 1959 would topple the US backed regime of dictator Fulgensio Batista and upset the world balance of power. The ramshackle boat Fidel, Che and his buddies made the crossing over from Mexico in was called the Granma.

1993- NASA astronauts do a series of space walks from their shuttle to adjust the Hubble space telescope. The Hubble cost billions of dollars but was sent into orbit with a flaw in it’s lenses. It was nearsighted. The spacewalk in effect gave the Hubble a set of glasses to see better the furthest details of deep space.

1994- LA jury found Heidi Fleiss ‘The Hollywood Madam”guilty of running a prostitution ring.
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Yesterday’s Question: Who put up the first Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree?

Answer: When work began on Rockefeller Center, the company refused to use union laborers. They used mostly Italian and Slavic immigrants. When the company also ordered the crew to work through the Christmas holiday, the workers protested by putting up a little Christmas tree in front of the work site. They hung some paper ornaments, cranberries and tin cans. This to show the world what they were spending their holiday working. The Rockefeller Foundation obviously didn’t care for the bad publicity, so they adopted the Christmas tree and turned it into an event. By 1933 the tree lighting became a annual spectacle.

There was some news of a break in the WGA Strike today when the all the media talked about managements new offer.

But take it from an old negotiator, shipmates; when management immediately goes public with their offer, it means they know it won't be accepted so they want to loudly declare that they are trying to settle the strike and be reasonable and it's those stubborn union people who won't bend. It's part of the public relations war.

When the real bargain is struck, it will be behind closed doors and we won't hear anything about it until the deal is done. I wish everyone good luck and hope for the sake of all that the day does come soon.
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Quiz: How did the tradition of the Rockefeller Christmas Tree first get started?

Answer to yesterday’s quiz below: Why was Sam Clemens called Mark Twain?
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History for 12/1/2007
Welcome to Decembrius, month number 10 to the Romans who only had ten months in their original calendar. It’s the same Latin root as Decimate, Dime, Decimal and Dixie.

Birthdays: Woody Allen is 72, Richard Pryor, Mary Martin, Cyril Ritchard, Dick Shawn, Bette Midler is 62, Lee Trevino, Charlene Tilton, Lou Rawls, Marshal Gyorgi Zhukov, Rex Stout the creator of Nero Wolfe Mysteries, Colombian Drug Lord Pablo Escobar, Treat Williams, Carol Alt, Sarah Silverman.

Today is WORLD AIDS DAY- established by the UN in 1987. The lights on Broadway and in Washington D.C.will be dimmed tonight to mark the occasion.

1521- Pope Leo X died after getting overheated attending celebrations of the Papal defeat of French forces in Milan. He was 45. Some thought he was poisoned, but he probably caught the malarial fever prevalent in Rome at the time. Leo was one of the great art patrons of the Renaissance and spent lavishly. As soon as the Pontiff stopped breathing, Cardinals and bankers looted the Vatican treasury for all the money he borrowed from them, sending the Church into one of the worst financial crises in its’ history.

1641- THE GREAT REMONSTRANCE- Parliament sent English King Charles 1st a long list of everything that annoyed them about being his subjects. They demanded Parliament to be the supreme authority in the realm, to sit in permanent session, the right to select and dismiss royal ministers and to reform the Protestant Church of England to a more Calvinist purity. 'God's Blood ! You ask of me things one would never ask of a king !"-sayeth King Charles. This little spat would become the English Civil War by next June.

1805-THE MIDNIGHT CAMP AT AUSTERLITZ- The night before the big battle between French, Austrian and Russian armies on a cold little field in what would be the Czech Republic. Napoleon went on a midnight inspection of his troops. His tour turned into something akin to a football homecoming rally. His soldiers cheered, lit torches, sang and partied around bonfires all night. Across the hills, the enemy generals mistakenly thought all the activity meant Napoleon was breaking his camp to run away.
The secret to Napoleons’ leadership was a special bond between him and his soldiers that was unique to his time. In an world of kings and aristocrats who considered the common people scum, Napoleon walked casually among his soldiers campfire’s like an equal, stopping to share a roast potato and a dirty joke in rough soldiers language. His men considered the Little Corporal one of them, like the title Emperor was just some other military rank. He called them “My Children”. Even George Washington refused that kind of familiarity with his Minutemen. After the victory of Austerlitz the next day Napoleon personally adopted all the children of the soldiers killed in the battle and had them raised in private schools. The boys learned a trade, and the girls were provided with doweries for good marriages.

1835- Hans Christian Andersen published his first book of fairy tales.

1869- A Sir William MacDougal was sent by Ottawa to take over the administration of Prince Rupertland, now called the new Canadian province of Manitoba. His problem was the whole population of French trappers, Indians and half-breeds had already declared themselves the independent Metiz Republic under their leader Louis Riel. MacDougal had to sneak across the border from the U.S. at midnight. Avoiding Metiz patrols his party stopped at an abandoned Hudson's Bay trading post where they raised the Union Jack in the darkness and MacDougal read his Royal Proclamation to an audience of seven aides and two hunting dogs. Then they crept back over the border to the U.S. to a healthy dose of razzing from Yankee cowboys. The British Army arrived next spring and established order but by then MacDougal had been recalled.

1879-Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic opera HMS Pinafore opened. Sullivan conducted the orchestra while Gilbert was a chorister. “So Stick to your desk and never go to sea, and you will be the leader of the Queen’s Navy..”

1887- The first Sherlock Holmes mystery by Arthur Conan-Doyle "A Study in Scarlet" first published in Beatty’s Christmas Gazette.

1909- The Pennsylvania Trust Company invented the Christmas Club account.

1917- Father Flanaghan opened Boys Town west of Omaha Nebraska. A retreat for wayward boys and in 1979 girls as well.

1934- Josef Stalin's close confidant Sergei Kirov is assassinated in a Kremlin hallway by Lenoid Nikolayev. Stalin orders the GREAT PURGES of the thirties to begin. Later it came out that Stalin had ordered Kirov assassinated as an excuse. Exact figures are debatable but it is estimated millions were arrested and died. Stalin even had the wandering poor blind storytellers of the Ukraine rounded up and shot for fomenting anti-revolutionary ethnicity. Recently declassified private papers of Stalin revealed he admired Czar Ivan the Terrible and tried to learn from his example.

1938- Legendary filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein released in Moscow his film of Russian patriotism ALEXANDER NEVSKY, with soundtrack provided by Sergei Prokoviev. The ultra-nationalist film was a thinly veiled warning to Hitler's Germany not to think about invading Mother Russia.



1953- Ex- Esquire Magazine art director and frustrated cartoonist Hugh Hefner published the first issue of Playboy Magazine. It featured a nude centerfold of actress Marilyn Monroe. She joked to the press “ I had nothing on but the radio!” Hefner assembled the layout of the magazine on his kitchen table and borrowed money from his mother-in-law to pay for the printing. The first Playboy had no number or date, because Hef was certain he couldn’t afford to make an issue number two.



1955- ROSA PARKS, a black seamstress in Montgomery Alabama, refuses to give up her seat on a crowded bus and is arrested for violating the segregation laws. She was fined $10. At the time she said she was unaware that she was breaking the law, she was actually seated in the first row reserved for Colored passengers, but since the bus was crowded the driver insisted she give up her seat for a white man. This incident and the subsequent boycott is the spark of the great Black Civil Rights Movement of the 50's and 60's.

1963- The NASA space facility at Cape Canaveral Florida was changed to Cape Kennedy in honor of slain president John F. Kennedy. The same day the Kennedy Family moved out of the White House so Lyndon Johnson could move in. Jackie Kennedy only returned to the White House once more in her life in 1971 and on the condition that it be in secret and no press be present. She even would tell D.C. taxicabs to avoid streets where she might accidentally get a glimpse of it.

1982- Dr. Barney Clark receives the first Artificial Heart. Part of the research development was credited to Paul Winchell, puppeteer and cartoon voice who created Jerry Mahoney, Knucklehead Smith, Dick Dastardly and a plastic heart valve. At first it was hoped these plastic valves could take the place of real hearts, but today they are mostly used for temporary relief until a human donor heart can be found and will now be replaced by the newer technologies.

1990- The tunnelers digging below the English Channel from France and England break through to meet in the middle and shake hands. A tunnel under the English Channel had been a dream since Napoleon in 1802.
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Yesterday’s Question: Why was Sam Clemens called Mark Twain?

ANSWER: It was the norm in the XIX Century for writers to use pseudonyms like Artemus Ward and George Elliot. Sam Clemens took the name from his years as on the Mississippi. It was the call used to let riverboat pilots know how much water was drafting under their boats while steering through dangerous shallows. "By the mark, twain" meant there was enough water under the hull (about two fathoms) for safe passage.
There are a lot of Twain fans in our audience because I got a lot of responses. Chuck (Jones) would have been proud.

Question: Sam Clemens called himself Mark Twain. Why?

Answer to yesterday’s quiz below: Why is the South Eastern US known as Dixie?
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History for 11/30/2007
Birthdays: Samuel Clemens aka Mark Twain, Winston Churchill,Jonathan Swift,Gordon Parks, G. Gordon Liddy, Alan Sherman, Abbie Hoffman, Virginia Mayo, Ephram Zimbalist Jr, Richard Crenna, Robert Guiliame, Rex Reason, Mandy Patinkin, Luther Ingram, Ridley Scott is 70, David Mamet, Ben Stiller is 42, Shuggie Otis, Billy Idol, Joan Ganz Cooney the creator of Sesame Street, Dick Clark is 79

1750- Marshal Saxe died. The one-eyed old general was given the beautiful French chateau of Chambord by Louis XV as his retirement home. An illegitimate son of Polish King Augustus the Strong, Saxe spent the summer nights camping out Cossack style and letting wild steppe ponies gallop the castle grounds. An old ladies man, he died after an all night "interview" with eight actresses. The king's physician wrote as the cause of death on the Death Certificate; "Une surfeit des femmes."- an overdose of women.

1776- As George Washington’s minuteman army retreated across New Jersey to escape the pursuing British Army a third of his troop’s enlistment’s were up. In a cold rain two thousand New Jersey and Maryland militiamen quit and walked home. Writer Thomas Paine was serving General Nathaniel Greene as a secretary and was moved by this pitiful sight to write the pamphlet: “The Crisis.”:”These are times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will shrink in this crisis from the service of his country. But he that stands now deserves the love and thanks of both man and woman. “ Washington called his downcast soldiers together and had the pamphlet read aloud to them.

1782- On a dark snowy day in an upstairs room on the Rue Bonaparte on Paris’ Left Bank, The United States and Britain signed the first of several protocols leading up to the full peace treaty ending the American Revolution in 1783. John Adams, John Jay, Benjamin Franklin and Richard Lawrence signed for America, a parliamentary delegation led by Lord Oswald signed for the Crown. On British diplomat said:” The Americans are the greatest quibblers I have ever dealt with, and I pray never to again in the future!”

1886- Paris’ famed naughty nightclub the Follies Bergere opened. The home of the Can-Can, Toulouse Lautrec, Josephine Baker, Brickttop, Maurice Chevalier.

1900- Oscar Wilde died of meningitis in a hotel in Paris. His last words; "This wallpaper is appalling! Either it goes or I do."

1922- The great actress Sarah Bernhardt made her last performance in Turin Italy. She was still considered sexy despite advanced age and a wooden leg.

1924- The first fax message sent. A photo of the Prince of Wales was wired across the Atlantic by radio transmission.

1939- Soviet Russia attacks Finland. The gallant Finns fought back fiercely with skiing hit and run attacks, and gasoline bottle bombs nicknamed for Stalin's Foreign Minister, Vachyescav Molotov, the "Molotov Cocktail".

1940-actress Lucille Ball married Cuban band leader Desi Arnaz. Together they pioneered the new art of Television. They divorced in 1960.

1968- “Love Child” by Diana Ross and the Supremes hit #1 in the pop charts.

1970- First day shooting on William Freidkin’s film The French Connection.

1974- In a dry gully in Ethiopia Dr Dennis Johannsen discovered the perfect skeletal remains of one of the earliest human ancestors, a homonid ape that walked upright named- Australiopithicus Afranencis. Johannsen liked the Beatles song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds so he named the ape Lucy.

1979- ESPN, the 24 hour sports channel began broadcasting.

1982- Nova Pictures is founded, but due to conflict with a PBS t.v. show of the same name they change theirs to TriStar Pictures. In 1994 TriStar was merged into SONY Pictures.

1985-Punk band The Dead Kennedys released their album Frankenchrist.

1991- Battered wife Mrs Omeima Nelson killed her abusive husband, dismembered his body and ate him. “I did his ribs just like in a restaurant.” she said.

1993- President Clinton signed the Brady Handgun bill into law. The bill was named for Reagan press secretary James Brady, who received a debilitating head wound in the assassination attempt on Reagan in 1981.President Bush allowed the law to expire.

1999- Seattle protestors trying to disrupt the World Trade Organization battle riot police and turn the downtown area into a retro-sixties battle zone. For the next several years wherever the WTO met they were surrounded by hundreds of thousands of protestors, although the mainstream media tends to pooh-pooh their message.

2003- Roy Disney Jr, the last member of the Disney family, was forced to resign from the Walt Disney Company. It was claimed to be the mandatory retirement policy but more likely he was forced out by the exec he hired to run the company in 1984- Michael Eisner. In 2005 after compelling Eisner to leave, Roy Disney was restored to an emeritus consultant position.
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Yesterday’s Question: Why is the South Eastern US known as Dixie?

Answer: In the early days of the United States, states minted their own currency until the Dollar became standard. Because some much of the new nations good came through the Port of New Orleans, merchant got used to the Louisiana currency with the French words printed on it. The most common was the ten dollar bill, with the French for ten- DIX on each bill. So it was Dixie money, or money from Dixie.

click on an image to enlarge.

I had a wonderful time last tuesday in New York City giving the Distinguished Alumni Lecture at the School of Visual Arts. For those who don't know about it, SVA was formed as the Cartoonists and Illustrator's School in 1949 by Burne Hogarth, Tom Gill, Bill Gallo and Silas Rhodes. It changed it's name to Visual Arts in the 60s and got their accreditation in 1973. In the early 70s after Cal Arts and Sheridan, SVA was once of the few places to offer regular classes in cartooning and animation. Graduates include such names as Keith Haring, Paul Davis, Bill PLympton, John Dilworth, Barry Caldwell, Russell Calabrase, Yvette Kaplan,Kevin Petrilak, Drew Freidman, Harvey Pekar, Bat Lash, Art Speigelman, Alex Kuperschmidt and yours truly. Our teachers included Will Eisner, Harvey Kurtzman, Gil Miret and Howard Beckerman- see below. Even Ralph Bakshi and R.O. Blechman once taught there.

The amphitheater was packed with eager young minds ready to be corrupted by my subversive rants. I showed things new and old,even some sneaks of things to come. I think a good time was had by all. Mark Hamill once told me that any time the audience doesn't rush up on stage and try to kill you, it was a good crowd. Afterwards I went with a few mates to toss a pint and damn all kings at the Molly Malone Pub on Third Ave. Glocca Morra is gone, Amy's PIta Burgers is gone, Connolly's Bar and Once Upon a Stove are but a memory, but Mollys is still there unchanged as she was thirty years ago.

Thanks to Candy Kugel, David Setlow, Paul Lepelletiere and all my other old and new friends who wasted a perfectly good evening to hear me talk. Thanks to Elaine Chow, Reeves Lehman and the SVA Alumni Society for putting this together.
My flyer up on the SVA 23rd St, Elevator. Yes, that crummy little elevator is still the only way to get up and down that building. Remember when it was one of the last manually operated elevators left requiring a fulltime operator? One was an elderly security guard who was a veteran of the U.S. incursion into Soviet Russia in 1919!

everyone's favorite pedagogue, Howard Beckerman, still sexy at 75


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Quiz: Why is the South Eastern US known as Dixie?

Yesterday’s Question below: Why are checks, theater and color in Britain spelled checques, theatre and colour?
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history for 11/29/2007
Birthdays: Gaetano Donizetti, Busby Berkeley, C.S. Lewis, Louisa May Alcott, Chuck Mangione, Vin Scully, Gary Shandling, Cathy Moriarity, Don Cheadle, Joel Coen, French President Jacques Chirac, Kim Delaney, Howie Mandell, Susee “Chapstick” Chafee

1864- Colorado militia kill over 300 Cheyenne in the "Sand Creek Massacre." Col. John Chivington was depressed that he was not back east winning glory in the Civil War so he attacked a peaceful Cheyenne village, killing 150. He later held a victory parade in Denver displaying the scalps of the Indians, most of whom were non-combatants -women, old men and children. Chivington eventually resigned from the military and his actions sparked a needless Indian war that raged for years afterwards.

1887- The US Navy received permission from the Hawaiian king to lease land for a base at Pearl Harbor. They had been landing there since 1864.

1890- The first Army-Navy football game held at West Point. Midshipmen beat the cadets 24-0.

1913- John Randolph Bray's "Colonel Heeza Liar in Africa" cartoon. Bray adapted Henry Ford's assembly line system to making animated cartoons, creating positions of layout, background painters, inkers, cel painters, checkers and camera. Before this one artist like Winsor McCay and an assistant did everything. Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, Max & Dave Fleischer and Shamus Culhane all got their start at Bray's.

1929- Commander Richard Byrd radioed he'd made the first airplane flight over the South Pole. Commander Byrd had flown over the North Pole in 1926 with his friend Floyd Bennett but Bennett had since died and when Byrd made it over the South Pole he dropped a small American flag weighted with a stone from Bennett’s grave.

1942- U.S. declared coffee would be rationed along with sugar, gasoline and rubber. And lots more. People put their cars up on blocks "for the duration". Gas Ration cards were listed as C, B & A. The C card meant essential war worker, police & fire so they had unlimited access to gasoline. A cards were the least important.

1944- A Detroit man named Malcolm Little was busted for larceny. He later reformed his life around the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Malcolm X.

1959-The Second Grammy Awards broadcast for the first time on television. Bobby Darins’ rendition of Mack the Knife won top honors.

1963- After the Kennedy assassination comic Vaughn Meader announced he was giving up his act impersonating the slain president. Meader’s comedy album The First Family sold 7.5 million copies in 1962, but now it wasn’t funny anymore and Meaders career collapsed. He died of emphysema in 2004. When Lenny Bruce first took the stage after the Kennedy assassination he opened with a long sigh and a puff on his cigarette:” ….Man. Vaughn Meader is really screwed!”

1967- Robert MacNamara, who was Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson , resigned to become president of the World Bank.

2001- former Beatle guitarist and composer George Harrison died of cancer.

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Yesterday’s Question: Why are checks, theater and color in Britain spelled checques, theatre and colour?

Answer: Noah Webster (1758-1843) wrote the The American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828, at a time when the United States was undergoing a conscious effort to create it’s own culture distinct from Mother England. Federal architectural styles tried to move away from British taste, the Church of England in American renamed itself the Episcopal Church of America. So Webster decided to create distinctions in American English from the Queens English.
So words that had been influenced in Britain by Norman French, Webster changed to the Spanish spellings, color and favor instead of colour and favour, check instead of cheque., theater and center instead of theatre and centre. His dictionary made spelling words so popular, they started a new kind of contest in schools called Spelling Bees.

Question: Why are checks, theater and color in Britain spelled checques, theatre and colour?

Answer to yesterdays question below: Why is a bunch of tubs of food along a wall where you serve yourself, called a buffet meal?
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History for 11/28/2007
Birthdays: Jean Baptiste Lully, William Blake, Frederich Engels, Stefan Zweig, Ernst Roehm, Brooks Atkinson, Berry Gordy the founder of Motown Records, Randy Newman, Anton Rubinstein, Gary Hart, Vern Den Herder, Paul Warfield, Hope Lange, Ed Harris, Paul Schaefer, Laura Antonelli, Joe Dante, Michael Ritchie, Anna Nicole-Smith, John Stewart is 44

885 A.D. est. date that the VIKINGS ATTACKED PARIS-Viking warchief Ragnar Lothbrocks, or Ragnar Hairy-Legs decided the Parisians would get a big surprise if he rowed his dragonships down the Meuse, pulled them out on rollers and lowered them back into the Seine to attack Paris. The Parisians under Duke Bernard put up a stout resistance from the city walls until French King Charles the Fat sent help.
The Vikings seldom bothered with besieging big walled cities, preferring quick raids in the countryside. Paris at the time had shrunk from it's Roman splendor to just the Isle de la Cite' the island in the middle of the Seine River.

1815- After Waterloo and a prisoner on the island of St. Helena, Napoleon Bonaparte for the first time put away his uniform and appeared in civilian clothes. It was his tacit admission that after more than twenty-five years at war his career was now indeed over.

1870- Painter Jean Bazille was shot and killed while serving in the French Army fighting the Prussians. He was only 29. He had been one of the leaders of the new Impressionists painters. Had he lived he might have produced many masterpieces and would’ve been as famous as Degas, Monet or Cezanne.

1895- The GREAT CHICAGO RACE- first American auto race. Two electric and four gas powered cars raced from Chicago to Evanston and back 54 miles despite several inches of snow on the ground. The winner Number 5 driven by inventor Charles Duryea reached a top speed of 7 miles an hour! Only one other car finished, the rest broke down. Duryea won $2000 and a good cold.

1911- The Chevrolet Automobile Company founded by the brothers Chevrolet.

1919- Lady Astor became the first woman elected to the British Parliament. She was the political as well as verbal nemesis of Winston Churchill who said "Mr. Churchill, if I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee!" To which Churchill replied:" Madame if I were your husband I would drink it !"

1925- First radio broadcast from the Grand Ol' Opry in Nashville.

1926- California oil tycoon Edward Doheny went on trial for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal. That he and Harry Sinclair bribed the Secretary of the Interior to lease them U.S. strategic oil reserves. And like most millionaires he was acquitted.

1942- THE COCOANUT GROVE FIRE-The U.S. public was distracted for awhile from war news by reports of a terrible disaster in Boston. A fire broke out at a popular nightclub called the Cocoanut Grove and killed 492 people in only twelve minutes. The clubs decorations caught fire and created carbon monoxide gas and there were only two exits. Among the dead was western movie star Buck Jones. The tragedy created the first mandatory laws requiring public buildings to have fire exits opening outwards and safety testing of decorative materials.

1947- Disney's cartoon "Chip and Dale".

1948- Hopalong Cassidy premiered on television.

1953- Frank Olson, a US government employee, jumped out a window of the New York Statler Hotel. In 1975 it was revealed Olson was given LSD by Dr Sidney Gottleib given as part of a government “mind-control” experiment.

1981 - Moviestar Natalie Wood drunkenly toppled off her yacht near Catalina Island and
drowned. Her husband Robert Wagner friend Christopher Walken, were onboard having an argument and unaware of her predicament. Wood had once confessed to a friend that she had a horror of drowning.

1994 –At the Columbia Penitentiary in Portage Wisconsin mass murderer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer was beaten to death with a broomstick by inmate Christopher Scarver while cleaning the prison bathroom. Scarver also killed a third man on their work detail and told prosecutors God told him kill them both. Dahmer’s brain was preserved in formaldehyde but his mother ordered it’s destruction in 1995.
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Question: Why is a bunch of tubs of food along a wall where you serve yourself, called a buffet meal?

Answer: One version is that the French definition of a sideboard is a Buffet, but the origin of the word is not clear.
The version I like is when the notorious Pope Alexander VI Borgia was Pope, he staged orgies at the Vatican with his children Cesare and Lucretzia Borgia. So the guests wouldn’t be slowed down in their sexual escapades by having to break for a sit-down dinner, the Pope had all the food lined up along the wall. This way the participants could take a quick time out for a snack, then jump back into the pile.

The cook of the French ambassador to the Vatican thought this was a neat idea.
His name was Pierre Buffet.