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June 26th, 2008 thurs
June 26th, 2008

Quiz: What is a coup d’ etat?

Yesterday’s question answered below: what is a Deus ex Machina?
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History for 6/26/2008
Birthdays: Peter Lorre -real name Laszlo Lowenstein, Pearl Buck, Abner Doubleday, Babe Deidrickson-Zacharias, Willy Messerschmidt, Claudio Abbado, Woolie Reitherman, Gregg LeMond, Vittorio Storaro, Colonel Tom Parker, Pat Morita, Chris Isaak, Derek Jeter, Chris O’Donnell, Sean Hayes

363 AD- Julian the Apostate slain in battle with the Persians. Julian was the Roman Emperor who decided his stepdad Constantine had made a mistake making the world Christian and we should go back to Zeus, Venus, Hercules and the lot. This is why he is called "Apostate". He was only emperor for two years, if he had reigned thirty like his predecessor who knows how different the world may have looked.
Despite his religious stance no one doubted his ability as a leader. During his invasion of Persia his camp was surprise attacked by the army of the Grand Surenna, the Persian Prime Minister. Julian jumped on a horse without his heavy breastplate and rode into the melee. As he was struck in the chest by the enemy spear he supposedly looked heavenward and said:" You have won, Galilean." The legions elected a Christian General Jovian emperor and Europe never looked back.

1496-Michelangelo Buonnarotti arrived in Rome to look for work. Coming from the city of Florence he was treated as the citizen of a foreign country.

1830- Ascension of King William IV of Great Britain after the death of his brother George IV. While still Duke of Clarence, William kept a certain Mrs. Jordan as a mistress, by whom he sired ten illegitimate children. One day he told his mentally tottering father, George III, that he paid her 1000 pounds annually for this service. Reportedly, the feisty king was much agitated by this revelation and replied: "A thousand, a thousand--too much! Too much! Five hundred quite enough! Quite enough!" Some time later, following the collapse of his relationship with Mrs.Jordan, and after perhaps reflecting on his father's words, William demanded repayment of a portion of her "allowance." She responded by sending him the announcement for a play that read, "Positively no money refunded after the curtain has risen."

1870- Atlantic City inaugurated its ocean side boardwalk; the first of it's kind in the US.

1888- Scots writer Robert Louis Stevenson embarked from San Francisco to wander the South Pacific and finally settle in Samoa.

1906- The first Grand Prix automobile race was held at Le Mans, France. The winner was Hungarian Ferenic Szisz with a top speed of 63 miles an hour! Szisz also was sporting those newfangled rubber tires on rims, which change faster than regular wood wheels.

1924 - The Ziegfeld Follies opens on Broadway.

1925- Charlie Chaplin has a lavish Hollywood premiere for his new film the Gold Rush.
He had edited the film in secret in an upstairs hotel room in Salt Lake City to keep away from the public and his wife∂s bill collectors.

1926- From his London flat John Logie Baird invented television. The Boob Tube has no one single Tom Edison-like inventor but many claimants. The Englishman joined the ranks of others who claimed to have invented TV first, including Philo Farnsworth, Vladimir Zworkin, Dr. Lee DeForrest and Deutsches Kino.

1927- The Cyclone Rollercoaster ride debuted at Coney Island Amusement Park. It was built on the site of the Switchback Railway, the first modern rollercoaster. The Cyclone is still thrilling and scaring people today.

1950- Two days after their invasion began Communist North Korean troops reach the outskirts of Seoul, the capitol of South Korea.

1961- John F. Kennedy makes his "Ich Bin Ein Berliner" speech at the Berlin Wall. He electrifies and inspires all Europe despite " ein berliner" also meaning a local brand of little jelly donut. The proper way to say I am a Berliner is "Ich bin Berliner”.
I guess "The Proudest boast a free man today can say is, I am a little jelly donut!" has a certain cachet for some folks. The crowd smiled but was polite. Today in Berlin tourist shops, you can buy a plastic donut with JFK’s speech coming from a hidden computer chip.

1964 - Beatles release "A Hard Day's Night" album.

1965-"Hey, Mr. Tambourine Man " by the Byrds hits number one on the US pop charts. Bob Dylan wrote the lyrics. William Shatner's version became the most well known.

1968- Pope Paul VI announced excavations in the ancient Roman cemetery located in the sub-sub basement of Saint Peter∂s Basilica had discovered the bones of Saint Peter himself. There were a few red faces when it was also found out that a Vatican librarian had removed the crucial piece of stone with the inscription "Here is Peter" and had kept it on his library shelf.

1977 - Elvis Presley does his last performance in Indianapolis.

1984- Campy singer Tiny Tim married Miss Vicky on the Johnny Carson show during a live broadcast.

2000- THE GENOME- Scientists announce they had cracked the human gene code and now had a rough sketch of how our DNA is assembled. Custom drugs could now e developed matching the DNA of an individual patient. It is called the biological equivalent of the landing on the moon.

2003 - Lenin said the Workers Must Control the Means of Production. Today a group of strippers bought the San Francisco bar the Lusty Lady.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: what is a Deus ex Machina?

Answer: An act of God or other supernatural device that fixes everything. Literally- god out of a machine. From ancient Greek plays, that would conclude when the god Apollo or some other would be lowered to the stage from a pulley and solve all the problems of the protagonists. Today its considered an improbable contrivance to a plot problem.


June 25th 2008 Weds
June 25th, 2008

Yo Nikolai, you got any freelance..?


Cartoon Brew blog is repeating the story that animators in Japan are forming unions and demanding better conditions. Could they be reading my book? Wow!

Workers of the World.... you know...

Seriously, it only makes sense that animation artists stick together in collective benevolent organizations. We are and always were an industrialized artform. Now that we use pixels instead of pencils, does not make it any different. We animators will always be treated as a tribe, no matter how special we may flatter ourselves to be. Our corporate employers goal will always be, in the main, dedicated to getting our talents for as little is possible. It's not personal, it's the way of the business world. It's part of the Push-Me, Pull You system of negotiation. To say you are above all such squalid dealings, just encourages the other side to push harder.

If writers, ballet dancers, symphony orchestras and movie directors, pretty creative jobs, can stick together and support their unions, what makes animators so damn unique that they can't?


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Quiz: what is a Deus ex Machina?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered Below: What does the term laissez-faire mean?
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History for 6/25/2008
Birthday: George Orwell (real name Eric Arthur Blair ), Marc Charpentier, Lord Louis Mountbatten, General Hap Arnold, Cajun musician Clifton Chenier, Sidney Lumet, Walter Brennan, Willis Reed, George Abbott, Carly Simon, June Lockhart is 82, Alex Toth, Jimmy Dyne-o-Mite Walker, George Michaels, Mike Myers

1630 – The Fork introduced to American dining by Plymouth Gov Winthrop.

1835- Antoine Baron Gros was a celebrated painter under Napoleon and a friend of David and Ingres. But politics and tastes change. In a royalist postwar France dominated by Delacroix and Gericault, Baron Gros lived on forgotten and melancholy. This day the 64 year old artist drowned himself in the Seine.

1857- Writer Gustav Flaubert goes on trial for pornography in his first novel Madame Bovary. He escaped conviction and went on to his next book Salambo the Carthaginian princess who strangled herself with her own hair. Don’t try this at home girls!



1876- CUSTER'S LAST STAND called by the Sioux the Battle of the Greasy Grass- George Armstrong Custer and 300 of his 7th Cavalry are wiped out by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the combined Sioux, Cheyenne nations (approximately 1,700 warriors).
There had been defeats of the Whites like this before: Fetterman's Massacre, The Little Rosebud Battle, but nothing captures the imagination like the Little Big Horn. And for Native-Americans it marks the last coming together of the tribes and the last great victory .The Ogalala Sioux, Hunkpapa, Miniconjou, Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne all united to resist the violation of their sacred Black Hills. No U.S. Army commander ever expected so many different tribes could unite and field thousands of warriors at once. Custer trusted in his audacity. "Custer's Luck". The boy general –just 23 years old in the Civil War, he was always at the head of his men in costly, reckless attacks yet personally suffered nothing more severe than the flu. Now at age 36 his luck ran out.

Accounts by natives were sketchy and no one is sure just how Custer died. The last white soldier who saw him alive was a courier sent away with a message " Benteen, come up quick. Big Village. Bring packs". The trooper was an Italian immigrant named Giusepppi Martini who couldn’t speak English. The famous image of Custer standing to the last with Old Glory in hand was made up by an artist named Paxton for an Anheuser-Busch beer advertisement in 1877. One Crow Indian scout who escaped said Custer was the first casualty and that his being shot down panicked the troopers. Others say the last they saw of Custer he was crawling on all fours with blood trickling down his mouth. He was found in a pile of bodies with a bullet wound in the left side and one in the temple. The Indians didn’t even know they had killed Yellow Hair until told way later. The tribes afterwards dispersed and headed for Canada. The only 7th Cavalry survivor was Commanche, Capt. Mile’s Keough's horse. He was treated with honor by the army and fed a bucket of beer every payday for the rest of his life. Custer was hallowed with martyrdom. Ulysses Grant was quiet about the affair but privately thought it a badly botched operation. Sitting Bull was more blunt- "The soldiers were fools, they rode to their deaths." Mrs. Libby Custer lived until 1937 and met FDR. The last living eyewitness of the battle, Mrs. Kate Bighead of the Cheyenne who was taken on the battlefield by her mother at 4 years old, died in 1959.

1970- Toi Yo ta Hoooo! Richard Wagner's opera Die Walkure premiered in Munich.

1908- Famed New York architect Stanford White was having dinner at Madison Square Garden (back when it was still a garden, on Madison Ave. and still square) when he was shot to death by millionaire Harry Thaw, the husband of his mistress Evelyn Nesbitt. The eccentric Thaw was obsessed by White, hiring detectives to follow the artist and report his amorous pursuits. He would only date women who had dated White first. Thaw’s defense attorney’s got him acquitted of murder by reason of temporary insanity.
So instead of the electric chair Harry Thaw spent a few years in a mental home living on squab flambe' and champagne. He was cheered by the crowd when he was freed. The key defense witness was 22 year old Mrs. Evelyn Nesbitt-Thaw, one of the beautiful "Gibson Girls’. She gave juicy details of her kinky relationship with White, like the red velvet swing she would ride in the nude over the admiring architect’s head. After Thaw was released they divorced. Before Evelyn died of old age in 1967 she admitted that Stanford White was the only man she ever really loved. The incident was the basis for I.L.Doctorow's novel "Ragtime".

1910- First performance of Stravinsky's ballet "Firebird" by Diagheilev and his Ballet Russe. Stravinsky called the dancers as "A bunch of knock-kneed Lolitas".

1940- Young actor Ronald Reagan married actress Jane Wyman. This was back when he was a Liberal Democrat.

1944- Three weeks after the D-Day landings with 650,000 troops now in France, German Western Front army commander Von Runsdtedt still believed the main allied invasion hadn’t arrived yet.

1951- After losing a power struggle between himself and Dory Schary, Louis B. Mayer announced he was stepping down as head of MGM. Mayer in his time was the most powerful man in Hollywood. He kept an all white office modeled after Mussolini’s in Rome. His penchant for putting relatives in charge of the company’s departments caused the joke that MGM stood for Mayer-Ganz-Mishpochen, Yiddish for Mayer-And-His-Whole-Family.

1951 - 1st color TV broadcast-CBS' Arthur Godfrey from NYC to 4 cities.

1967- The "Our World" Beatles concert, the first television event to try a worldwide satellite linkup. They sing and record "All You Need is Love" live in front of an audience of 400.

1973- White House counsel John Dean testifies to the Congressional Watergate Committee "There is a Cancer on the Presidency." For the first time one of President Nixon's closest advisers hinted that the President himself was personally involved in the Watergate scandal.

1997- Disney's animated film Hercules released.

2008- While receiving the President of the Philippines at the White House, President Bush, considered how to praise the achievements of the Philippine people. He did so by commenting how good his chef was.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What does the term laissez-faire mean?

Answer: It means “let do”, to leave things alone. This was the traditional policy of Conservative Republicans and other free market capitalists in the US. to let Big Business police itself and work things out. When it fails, like Hoover’s policy after the Stock Market Crash, you get things like the Great Depression.




On Sunday I was in New York City to attend the 35th Alumni Reunion of my old Class of 1973 of the High School of Art & Design. About 120 of us partied at the 260 Club on 5th Ave. A rooftop club that was done in a 70's style disco chic'.

" alt="" />Reunion organizer Joe Notovitz addresses all us kids.

The High School of Art & Design was one of New York's reknown FAME Schools, public high schools that stressed vocational training in the arts. Others included Music & Art and Performing Arts (yeah, the one with the TV show). I had to submit a portfolio to get in. It was a chance to take classes in illustration and sculpture and photography, as well as cartooning and animation.

A&D alumni include Ralph Bakshi(when it was called Industrial Arts), Dan Haskett, Lou Scarborough, Ella Fitzgerald, Bobby Darin, Calvin Klein, Tony Bennett among others.

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A07EED7163CF936A35751C1A9679C8B63

It was fun hooking up with old schoolmates and some teachers, most of whom I haven't seen in 35 years. As one commentator on This American Life once said:" At my reunion, we all looked the same, except we all had swelled a bit."

My class of 1973 was kind of unique in that we never got a High School Yearbook. There was a printers strike or something that year. I forgot what it was. We're only now starting to get it together as alumni so we could finally print one.

I know to some of you it seems hokey, seeing lots of old folks pretend they were still kids. But don't knock it until you've tried it. I didn't think I'd have as much fun as I did. It's like reclaiming a long gone part of your past memory, finding a forgotten center of yourself. It is also amusing to recall some crisis you experienced as teens that seemed earth-shattering at the time, now reduced to the rosy-hue of warm nostalgia.

We all don't want to age, really. Shamus Culhane in his 80s told me in his mind he still felt 20, he didn't know what happened. Likewise, I never knew I'd be an Elder Statesman in my field one day. You just keep working and living your life and suddenly you realize 35 years have gone by! All the elders you looked up to had moved on. So perhaps these rituals, are a way of acknowledging a milestone in life, and taking stock of how far one has come.

And an observation to my current students at USC and UCLA: no matter how old you get, you still never really feel comfortable calling your old teachers by their first names! At this party I still referred to Mr Ginsburg and Mrs. Arnold.

" alt="" />Animator Juan Sanchez and I. We are both also veterans of Jack Zander's Animation Parlour

So thank you Joe and all the volunteers who made this event happen. I salute all my fellow A&D alumns and wish you all well. For those who couldn't make it this time, I hope to see you one day.


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Quiz: What does the term laissez-faire mean?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered Below: Why is New York City called the Big Apple?
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History for 6/24/2008
Birthdays: Earl Kitchener, the Sirdar of Omdurman, E.I.Dupont, Ambrose Bierce, Jack Dempsey, John Ciardi, Mick Fleetwood, Phil Harris- singer and voice of Baloo in Disney’s Jungle Book, Billy Casper, Michelle Lee, Claude Chabrol, Chief Dan George, Pete Hamill, Peter Weller, Sherry Springfield

1219- Pope Innocent III set today as the deadline for deadbeat knights who volunteered to go on Crusade to get off their ironclad butts and get going. Knights had an economic incentive to taking the Crusading vow: no one could collect a bad debt from you and you couldn't be imprisoned. So some knights would take the vow for the perks but then stall on making the dangerous trip to the Middle East where two out of three never returned.

1324- THE BATTLE OF BANNOCKBURN- Scottish King Robert the Bruce defeated the invading army of King Edward II of England and secured the crown of Scotland for the next 300 years. The Bruce fought in the midst of his troops, hacking down Sir Hugh de Bohun in single combat with his battle-axe. Edward’s father, Edwards Longshanks, had developed winning tactics of using Welsh archers to shoot up an enemy before the mounted knights charged. But Edward II’s bad generalship bungled the system and knights and footmen scrabbled to get out at the Scots not allowing the Welsh bowmen a target.

1374- In the French town of Aix la Chapelle was the first recorded outbreak of Ergot Madness or St. John’s Dance. Groups of people frothing at the mouth danced around uncontrollably until they fell over dead from exhaustion.

1497-English explorer John Cabot discovered Canada -Eh!

1812- NAPOLEON INVADES RUSSIA with the largest army yet assembled.
Around 600,000. By December, barely 30,000 came out alive. This day while inspecting the troops Napoleon’s horse stepped in a rabbit hole and threw him on his butt. This was taken as an ill omen.

1876- CUSTER APPROACHES THE LITTLE BIG HORN- General Custer's scouts reported a large Indian camp at the Little Big Horn River. Custer decides to attack tomorrow without waiting for the other armies to catch up. Through his interpreter Mitch Boyer he tells his Indian scouts that after he has destroyed the Sioux he will go back east and become the Great White Father. The Republican presidential nominating convention was next month. The Crow and Mandan scouts were troubled by the signs and began their death-songs. Embedded N.Y. Herald reporter Mark Kellogg made a final entry in his diary: "I go to ride with Custer and will be there at the death...” In the dawn's light a survivor from Renos command overheard Custer's chief Mandan scout Bloody Knife tell Custer: " You and I are going Home today -but by a different path."

1901- The first exhibit in a Paris salon on the Rue Lafitte of a dark-eyed ,young, Spanish artist named Pablo Picasso.

1939- Pan-Am airlines began regular transatlantic passenger flights from New York to London.

1945- Meet the Press debuted on radio. Two years later it moved to television and it remains t.v.’s longest running program.

1947- THE FIRST MODERN UFO SIGHTING. A commercial airline pilot flying out of Seattle notices 6 silver disc shaped objects hovering over Mt. Reynier near Seattle. They then shot off at terrific speed. They are never identified nor explained. The pilot, Kenneth Arnold had impeccable credentials as an ex-combat Marine pilot and chamber of commerce member. The government response was to hit him with an IRS audit. The "flying-saucer" craze, with allegorical overtones to postwar atomic paranoia, sweeps the American imagination throughout the 1950’s.

1949 - "Hopalong Cassidy" becomes the1st network western on television-NBC.

1950- THE KOREAN WAR BEGAN- June 25th in some records because of the International Date Line- 30 North Korea divisions armed with heavy Soviet tanks and artillery crossed the 38th parallel and invaded South Korea. The attack was a complete surprise and most South Korean officers were at a party dedicating a new Officer’s Club. The US had deliberately kept the Korean Army lightly armed to diffuse Cold War tension. Mao and Stalin were equally surprised by North Korean Kim Il Sung’s attack. The previous January Secretary of State Dulles had said during a conference that the US "was not interested in the Korean Peninsula." But when President Harry Truman was informed of the invasion he responded in typical Truman fashion:" We gotta stop those Sons of Bitches!" At this time there were only 500 US troops in Korea called KMAG, for Korean Military Advisory Group, which one Yank this day changed to Kiss My Ass Goodbye! This is considered the first war fought by the United Nations, since Truman pushed through a resolution sending troops under the UN banner. The Russians were boycotting the Security Council over its refusal to seat Red China so they were unable to veto the move.

1963 - 1st demonstration of a home video recorder, at BBC Studios, London

1970 – The movie "Catch 22" opens in movie theaters.

1997 - Brian Keith, actor (Family Affair, Dirty Dingus McGee), shot himself at 75. He was suffering from incurable cancer and tired of fighting the disease.

2004- On the Senate floor, the Vice President of the United States, Richard Cheney, told the Democratic Senate leader, Patrick Leahy, to “Go F**k Himself!” Republican Majority Leader, Senator Tom Delay, said the Vice President “was having a hard day”. The Vice President never apologized for this vulgar breach of Senatorial etiquette. While this was happening the Bush Administration was urging the FCC to stiffen penalties on DJ’s like Howard Stern for his use of naughty language.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Why is New York City called the Big Apple?

Answer: Jazz musicians in the 1920s used to say: “When it comes to places to play gigs at, there are a lot of apples on the tree; but when you play New York, you got the Big Apple.”


June 23rd, 2008 mon
June 23rd, 2008

Quiz: Why is New York City called the Big Apple?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: In the US, what is Title Nine?
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History for 6/23/2008
Birthdays: Roman Emperor Augustus, Josephine DeBeauharnais-Bonaparte, Bob Fosse, Justice Clarence Thomas, James Levine, Dan Ogilvy of Ogilvy & Mayers, Joss Whedon, Dr Alfred Kinsey, The Duke of Windsor formerly King Edward VIII, Wilma Rudolph, Selma Blair, Frances MacDormand

1611- In Hudson’s Bay, Canada, explorer Henry Hudson's crew mutinied and set him adrift in a rowboat with his son. They were never seen again. When back in Holland the mutineers were never charged because they claimed to have discovered the Northwest Passage to the Indies, which luckily they never were called upon to prove.

1793- During the French Revolution, Josephine De Beauharnais is condemned to be guillotined. In a prison filled with nobles and intellectuals she found her husband Alexandre the Vicomte du Beauharnais. They had been estranged for years and she had become quite a scandalous woman. When the jailer read out the names to go to the blade that day he read: "DeBeauharnais!" without specifying which DeBeaharnais was to go. The husband stepped forward and said: "Madame, just this once allow me to go first." When the Reign of Terror was overthrown she was released and she became the wife of Napoleon.

1868- Christopher Latham Scholes patents the typewriter. In 1873 he sold his patent to the Remington Company. In 1874 Mark Twain secretly admitted to a friend that he enjoyed writing on the newfangled technology.

1940- HITLER THE TOURIST. After the defeat of France, Adolph Hitler takes his one vacation out of Germany. A plane flies him to Paris in the early morning and he is driven around to see the sites. While his Mercedes is waiting at a traffic light a newsboy, not realizing who he was, stuck a morning newspaper under his nose yelling "le Matin! Le Matin!” Hitler was back in Berlin that evening.

1944- Franklin Roosevelt's last fireside chat on the radio.

1972- Title IX passed by the US Government. It called for women’s collegiate sports to be funded equally as the men’s sports.

1976- Toronto’s CN Tower opened. Called the world’s tallest free-standing structure.

1979- The Knack released the single My Sharona.

1989- Tim Burton’s film " Batman" opened.

1992- Head of the New York Mafia John Gotti was sentenced to life in prison for murder and racketeering. It had been so hard to pin anything on Gotti that he was nicknamed the Teflon Don. Finally, crusading prosecutor Rudolph Giuliani secured the testimony of the Dons top henchman Sammy ‘the Bull’ Gravano. For turning informant, Sammy dodged any penalties despite admitting killing 32 people, including killing and cutting up his own brother in law, whose pieces he buried in his backyard. Gravano wrote a best selling memoir. John Gotti died in prison in 2002.

1993- Lorena Bobbit had tired of her abusive husband John. So this night while he was drunk she severed his penis and drove off, casually tossing it into a nearby field. Doctors recovered the free willy and reattached it starting a media sensation. Bobbitt eventually became a porn star.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: In the US, what is Title Nine?

Answer: Title IX stated that no person shall, on the basis of sex, be denied participation in any activity funded by the Federal Government. It’s biggest impact was to mean that women’s sports programs had to be funded equally as the mens’.


June 22, 2008
June 22nd, 2008

Quiz: In the US, what is Title Nine?

Yesterday’s question answered below: Americans have been called Yankees since colonial times. What does Yankee mean?
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History for 6/22/2008
Birthdays: Captain George Vancouver, Eric Maria Remarque, John Dillinger, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Mike Todd, Billy Wilder, Joe Papp, Bill Blass, Oscar Fischinger, Pistol Pete Maravich, Klaus Maria Brandauer, Ed Bradley, Emmanuelle Seigner, Prunella Scales, Meryl Streep, Kris Kristofferson, Matt Doherty

168 BC -Battle of Pydna- Roman general Lucius Aemelius Paulus defeated the Macedonian army of King Perseus. This victory, besides giving Rome control over Greece, destroyed the reputation of the army of Alexander the Great, and announced to the world Roman supremacy. The old tactics of the Greek Phalanx was eclipsed by the more versatile Roman Legion.

After the battle was the Romans destroyed the Greek city of Corinth, whose agora or town square was dominated by a huge gold sundial -the Gnomon. Paulus figured that sundial would look neat in the Roman Forum so he had is men pry it loose and drag it to Rome. But once in the Forum they noticed a problem. Rome is on a different latitude line than Corinth and the stylus of a sundial has to be adjusted or it won’t tell the proper time. The Greeks were still too angry with the Romans to tell them how to do it. So the great gold sundial sat giving the wrong time for 150 years before someone fixed it.

1342 – According to JRR Tolkeins’ book the Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins returned to his home at the Shire with the Ring.

1876- Gen. Custer and the Seventh Cavalry ride out of Fort Lincoln. Custer was to scout for a larger army under General Terry and not to engage the Indians when he found them but wait. Custer turned down an offer of two companies of Colorado militia, artillery and Gatling guns for fear it would slow him down. Many men upon leaving the fort immediately emptied their canteens and refilled them with rotgut whiskey bought from peddlers outside the walls. Gen. Gibbon called out to Custer as he rode out: "Remember George, save some Indians for us!" Custer replied: "No I won't!"

1898- US Troops including Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders landed on the Cuban coast near the town of Daiquiri. This is when the mixed drink named Daiquiri was introduced to American drinkers as well as the Cuba-Libre, which we now call a Rum & Coke.

1941- THE CURSE OF TAMERLANE- In the 15th century Timur Khan or Tamerlane conquered an empire almost as large as Genghis Khan’s. Today Russian archaeologists in Samarkand excavated his tomb. The grave had an inscription:” Do not disturb my Tomb, ere a Fate Worse than Mine awaits You.” This same day the Nazi invasion of Russia began. 27 million Russians died.

1941-BARBAROSSA- The code word “Dortmund” issued to leading Wehrmacht units. Operation Barbarrossa, the Nazi invasion of Russia begins. Three million steel helmeted troops and three thousand tanks in three huge pincers pierce the Russian heartland.
Hitler boasts:"We have only to kick the door in, and the whole rotten structure will collapse!" It seemed like that at first, if only because Stalin had already shot most of his best generals in his paranoid purges. Despite the data pouring in from Soviet spies and even a warning from Winston Churchill that an attack was imminent Stalin refused to believe his buddy Adolf would go back on their treaty of Peace and Friendship. He figured the western democracies were counting on the Nazis and Bolsheviks destroying one another so it was in their mutual interest to avoid war. But he miscalculated depth Hitler’s hatred of Communists and lust for world domination. Hitler called it: “The Final War of Extermination with the World Conspiracy of Jewish-Bolshevism.” Jews find this sadly ironic because Stalin himself was anti-Semitic. Many peoples forcibly subjugated by Moscow like the Baltic Lithuanians, Latvians and Ukrainians welcomed the Nazis as liberators, until the Gestapo & SS set up a worse tyranny than they had yet known.
While 695,000 Americans died in World War II almost all of which were military personnel, 27 million Russians died, 20 million were civilians. More than half the 7 million German casualties in the war, 3 out of every 5, were caused by the Red Army.

1943- British tanks and Indian troops broke the Japanese siege of Imphal. Since March the Japanese 15th Army had attacked from Burma into India in what Japanese troops hoped was “ The Drive to Delhi”. They fought for months with tanks, planes, samurai swords and Gurkhas wielding their Kukhris- the famous boomerang shaped knife.

1944- Congress passed the Rankin-Barden Servicemen’s Adjustment Act, better known as the "GI Bill" giving college and home loans and college tuitions to returning veterans.

1948- Answering the need for manpower in a war-depleted economy the first ship load of immigrants from the Caribbean arrived in England. They had no place to stay so for awhile the government reopened the Clapham Junction WWII bombshelter. This day marked the beginning of the pluralization of British society.

1966 – The film "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" opened. Based on the play by Edward Albee and starring Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor it was the first to use four letter words. Just a year before comedian Lenny Bruce had gone to jail for saying the same words, although everyone including President Johnson swore in everyday parlance.

1969- Singer actress Judy Garland OD’s on sleeping pills. She was 46. Whether it was an accident or a suicide we will never know. A pillhead from early age, she had gotten hooked when MGM chief Louis B. Mayer ordered studio nurses to put her on amphetamines so she would have the energy to finish the Wizard of Oz. Fellow contract actress June Allyson explained- “You didn’t argue when the nurses brought them to you. They told us they were vitamins!”

1970- President Nixon signed the law lowering the voting age from 21 to 18.

1978 - James Christy's discovery of Pluto's moon Charon announced.

1990- "Checkpoint Charlie" in Berlin dismantled. John Le Carre' and other spy novel writers mourn. There is a replica and a Cold War Museum at the site today.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Americans have been called Yankees since colonial times. What does Yankee mean?

Answer: There’s much debate as to the origin of the word. One is when Dutch and English tradesmen bartered in colonial New York and Connecticut, one would accuse the other of being like a local pirate they nicknamed Old Jack Cheese. In Dutch it the name is Jan Quess, so the name evolved. In 1761 the song Yankee Doodle was first heard.


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