Quiz: Where exactly is The Devil’s Triangle?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Who were Leopold and Loeb?
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History for 7/20/2017
Birthdays: Petrarch, Sir Edmund Hilary, Lord Elgin, Quaker Anne Hutchinson, Natalie Wood, Theda Bara the Vamp, Carlos Santana, Lord Reith- the first Director General of the BBC. Giselle Bunchen is 37, Sandra Oh is 46, Harrison Ellenshaw, Diana Rigg is 79

1402- Near Ankara (Angora), the armies of the Ottoman Sultan of Turkey were destroyed by a Tartar invasion led by Tamerlane.

1420- Czech leader John Ziska led the Hussite rebels to defeat the German Emperor Sigmund at Witkowo Hill, freeing his besieged capitol Prague. Ziska led armies in battle despite losing both eyes in fighting. When he finally died, he left instructions to have his body skinned, and the hide dried, and stretched onto a war drum.

1773-The Vatican outlaws the Society of Jesus, aka the Jesuits. The pope had gotten tired of all their intrigues and foreign entanglements. They went into hiding until they re-emerged reformed in 1820.

1804- Sir Richard Owen born. He was the British scientist who coined the term Dinosaur for all the ancient lizard fossils being dug up. Yet he came to oppose Darwin’s theories of evolution. He believed dinosaurs were the creatures from Noah’s Flood who missed the boat.

1858 – Admission first charged to see a baseball game, 50 cents.
NY beat Brooklyn 22-18.

1868 - 1st use of tax stamps on cigarettes.

1869- Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad and in the Holy Land first published. If you ever wondered what was the most popular book in America during the 19th Century, it was not Moby Dick, War & Peace, Jane Eyre or David Copperfield. The all time best selling book in America during the Victorian Era was a sappy travel diary" Tent Life in the Holy Land "by a now forgotten author William Prime. Twain had taken the Grand Tour abroad that was fashionable with the new American wealthy classes and thought he’d have some fun recounting his own trip” To cross the Sea of Galilee by boat, a big local Arab demanded eight dollars for use of his miserable conveyance. No wonder Christ preferred to walk.”

1877-Russians besiege Turkish held Plevna in Bosnia.

1879- Joel Chandler Harris published in the Atlanta Constitution "The Story of Mr. Rabbit and Mr. Fox as Told by Uncle Remus". The first Uncle Remus stories. Harris collected most of the stories from African American storytellers.

1881- Sitting Bull returned to U.S. territory and surrendered. He and his people had been residing in Canada since the Little Big Horn. When Canadian officials first challenged them being in Canada, Bull produced out of his medicine bag old treaty medals stamped with King George III on them. He said "We also are the children of the Great Redcoat Mother."

1919- Pancho Villa assassinated while driving in his new Dodge. Even with 16 bullets in him he still managed to kill one of his attackers. Three years later someone broke into his grave and stole his head.

1920- On the last day of testimony at the Scopes Monkey Trial defense attorney Clarence Darrow surprised everyone by calling prosecuting attorney William Jennings Bryan to the witness stand. In a dramatic all day debate Darrow and Bryan grappled over the validity of the Bible vs, Charles Darwin’s theory of Evolution. Darrow ultimately lost the case, but this debate made Bryan look foolish. The confrontation was dramatized in Stanley Kramer’s 1965 film “Inherit the Wind”.

1944- THE GENERALS PLOT- German generals plot to kill Adolf Hitler, take over the Third Reich and declare a ceasefire with the Allies. During a conference at Hitlers strategic HQ at Rastenberg Prussia one-eyed Count von Stauffenburg planted a suitcase-bomb next to Hitler's feet and excused himself. But someone bumped against it and moved it out of the way. After watching the massive explosion Stauffenburg then relayed the code word "Valkyrie". This meant the plotters could begin to arrest key Nazis, disarm the SS and form a provisional government with Field Marshal Erwin Rommel as President.
In the explosion many were killed but amazingly Hitler only suffered a punctured eardrum and a stiff left arm. That night he went on nationwide radio to announce he was all right, and even read the weather in that day's newspaper to prove he was not pre-recorded. The coup plotters were rounded up and executed, some hung slowly with piano wire. Their deaths were filmed for Hitler's amusement at home. Rommel the Desert Fox was forced to commit suicide. After 5000 arrests the purge was halted only when an allied bombing hit the courtroom, and blew up the judge.

1946-Bob Clampett's cartoon"the Great Piggy Bank Robbery" with Daffy Duck as Duck Tracy. "I'm gonna rrrrrrrrrrrubbb ya out, see !"

1951- King Abdallah of Jordan was shot and killed at the Al Acqsa Mosque in Jerusalem by a Palestinian. He was attending a memorial service for the Prime Minister of Lebanon who had also been assassinated. He was an enemy of the Palestinian leader the Grand Mufti and resisted the Mufti’s attempts to declare a Palestinian state after Israel’s War of Independence. King Abdallah claimed all Palestinian lands not part of Israel should be part of Jordan. Abdallah then angered the Palestinians further by wanting to make peace with Israel and declaring that the Jews had every right to worship at their holy places like the Wailing Wall, then under Jordanian control. Watching his grandfather killed was young future King Hussein, who was never that fond of Palestinians afterwards. He drove them out of his country in 1972 spawning the Black September Movement.

1954- As part of the settlement brokered by the United Nations for the French to leave colonial Indochina, the country was divided in half at the 17th parallel, with the Communists in North Vietnam and the non-Communists in the South. This set the stage for the next twenty years of wars that would last until unification in 1975.

1963- Lt. Colonel John Paul Vann, acknowledged one of the finest combat field commanders in the service, scheduled a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington. He planned to tell them that further American military involvement in Vietnam was pointless. The generals already knew his purpose and refused to meet with him. Afterwards he was slowly pushed him out of the army for having an attitude problem. He died in combat as a civilian advisor near Da Nang in 1967.

1964 –The first surfin' record to go #1-Jan & Dean's "Surf City"

1968 - Iron Butterfly's "In-a-Gadda-da-Vida", considered the first heavy metal song to
hit the pop charts. The song was written as “ In the Garden of Eden” but singer Doug Ingle was so drunk and stoned, In a Gadda Da Vida was all that he could slur out.

1969- Tranquility Base- The Eagle has Landed. Apollo11’s Lunar Module the LEM first landed humans on the Moon. The astronauts spent a night’s sleep and preparing and stepped out on the Lunar surface the next day.

1973- Bruce Lee died of cerebral edema one month before his last film Enter the Dragon premiered. The handsome kung fu movie star single-handedly made Chinese martial arts a world wide craze, and the Chop-Socky genre film a standard genre in world movie theaters. He was buried in his Enter The Dragon costume. Bruce Lee was only 33.

1974- Turkey invaded the island of Cyprus, after a Greek coup toppled the coalition gov’t of Archbishop Makarios.

1976-Warner\Lambert, makers of Trident sugarless gum, comes out with their famous slogan "Sugarless gum is recommended by four out of five dentists who chew gum". When people asked what gum did the fifth dentist recommend, they were brushed.

1976- The Viking I probe successfully landed on Mars.

1984 - Jim Fixx, creator of the Jogging craze through his hit book Running, died at 52 of a heart attack. Apologists for a health advocate dying so young, say Fixx would have died even younger without his physical routine. The creator of PowerBars also died in his fifties. Pass me another donut.

1994 - OJ Simpson offers $500,000 reward for evidence of ex-wife Nicole’s killer. No clues or suspects other than himself ever appeared. As David Letterman later said" OJ began to vigorously search for the real killer on all the major golf courses of the nation."
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Who were Leopold and Loeb?

Answer: Nathan) Leopold and (Richard) Loeb were two wealthy Chicago university students, Both were highly intelligent and inspired by Nietzsche’s ideas of the superman, were convinced they could pull off the "perfect crime”. In order to prove their idea, in 1924 they murdered a teenaged boy. The crime was quickly solved and Leopold & Loeb were sent away for 99 years. Loeb was murdered in prison. Leopold was released in 1958.

Quiz: Who were Leopold and Loeb?



Yesterday’s Question Answered below: In 1996 Britain turned over Hong Kong to China. There was one other part of China that was own by a different European country that had to be turned over as well. What was it?

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History for 7/19/2017

Birthdays: Edgar Degas, Col. Samuel Colt, Charles Mayo of the Mayo Clinic, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vicki Carr, Max Fleischer, Lizzie Borden, Ille Nastase, George McGovern, Brian Harold May of Queen, Atom Egoyan, Anthony Edwards, Campbell Scott, Benedict Cumberbatch is 41



64 A.D. THE BURNING OF ROME- As the city burned, mad emperor Nero was inspired to run up to an observation platform and sing an elegy on the destruction of Troy while accompanying himself on the lyre. Romans later became suspicious when the areas most affected by the fire on the Palatine Hill were expropriated by the Emperor to build his new palace, the Golden House.

The fire had started to die out after six days, but flared up again on the grounds of the estate of Tigellinus, a top aide to Nero. The fire burned for nine days and destroyed two thirds of the city, including a temple built by Romulus, and the shrine of the Vestal Virgins. The Romans were the first civilization to form a fire brigade.



711 A.D. Battle of Medina-Sidonia- The Moors conquered most of Spain. When he first landed, the Moorish commander Tarik Bin Ziyad ordered his landing ships burned. He addressed his warriors: " ...The enemy is in front of you and the sea behind you... You have no choice but victory!” They pushed the Christian Spaniards north up against the Pyrenees Mountains. The Moors weren’t driven back until 1492. Until then the Emirs of Granada and Cordoba set up lavish courts where great sums were spent on poets, artists, mathematicians and scientists.



1500-In the Vatican, Lucretzia Borgia’s second husband Duke Alfonso of Naples was stabbed to death by assassins sent by her brother Caesar Borgia. Enemies of the Borgias said Caesar was jealous and had an unnatural passion for his sister, but his real reasons were political. Alfonso was against Caesar’s alliance with France, the enemy of Naples. Caesar had previously sent men to assault Alfonso as he was leaving Saint Peters Basilica in Rome, but he fought them off and recovered. While convalescing he spotted Caesar from his sickbed window, grabbed a bow and arrow and tried to shoot him. Then Caesar had him whacked. Cardinal Sforza, who arranged the marriage, was soon poisoned.



1553-Lady Jane Grey deposed after being Queen of England for nine days. When Henry VIII's sickly son died at 15 the Protestant grandees panicked that the next in line to the throne was his Catholic daughter Mary Tudor. So they attempted a bit of dynastic sleight of hand with this distant protestant cousin. (remember Elizabeth then was still considered illegitimate). It didn't wash and Mary soon earned the sobriquet "Bloody Mary" by having all their heads.



1629- Communications between Europe and America in the colonial period were always spotty and confused. The fastest news could travel across the Atlantic was two months. On this day an English expedition attacked the French settlement of Quebec and captured Governor Samuel Champlain. Shortly afterwards a message came from London saying the war had been over for two months and they should let him go and apologize.



1717- George Frederich Handel premiered his suite the Water Music for a procession of King George II on pleasure boats from Whitehall to Lambeth Palace.



1799- THE ROSETTA STONE DISCOVERED. During Napoleons campaign in Egypt several soldiers digging a latrine uncover a black basalt slab with several forms of writing all over it.

In 1821 Francois Champolion figured it out. The stone was the key to translating Egyptian hieroglyphics, sort of an ancient Babelfish. The document in honor of Cleopatra and her brother Ptolemy is written three times. Once in Hieroglyphs (sacred letters of Ancient Egypt), then in Hieratic (governmental cursive type, a simpler form of Hieroglyphs used for texts unrelated to the Temple and Religion) and in Coptic, the same Egyptian language written in Greek letters. Since Champolion knew Greek, and had contacts with Egyptian Christian priests who spoke Coptic. The rest was easy.



Before the Rosetta Stone people thought Egyptian hieroglyphics were just magical symbols, but after the stones discovery the long mute voice of Ancient Egyptian civilization was heard again. Prayers, Literature and Poetry could now be understood.

It was like the discovery of a long dead world.



1848- THE SENECA FALLS DECLARATION- The Birth of the American Woman's Rights Movement. In a Wesleyan Chapel 200 delegates heard Lucretzia Mott and Elizabeth Cady-Stanton make the case for women to be treated as equal citizens under the law. Frederick Douglas attended, and admitted that at first he was a skeptic, but he left convinced.



1878- In New Mexico Territory the climax of the Lincoln County Wars, a feud between cattle barons and smaller independent ranchers. John Tunstall's attorney Big Jim McSween and his men including outlaw Billy the Kid were surrounded by a large force of rancher Murphy’s men backed up by militia with a Gatling gun and a small cannon. The Murphy men set the house on fire and shot the defenders as they rushed out. Billy the Kid blasted his way out to freedom. Big Jim McSween tried to surrender but was shot down.



1879- Doc Holiday had opened a saloon with a partner in Las Vegas, New Mexico. An army scout named Mike Gordon got mad at one of his dance hall girls, went out into the street and started drunkenly bellowing threats and firing wildly at the windows of the saloon. Doc Holiday came out, shot Gordon dead with one bullet, then went back in and calmly resumed his poker game.



1900- The first line of the Paris Metro underground dedicated. Ligne 1 Porte Vincennes.



1913 - Billboard Magazine publishes earliest known "Last Week's 10 Best Sellers among

Popular Songs" Malinda's Wedding Day is #1



1932- writer Daphne du Maurier married General Frederick Browning.



1934- In an affidavit dated this day an old blacksmith from Pittsburgh named Louis Davarich claimed in 1899 he flew in a flying machine before the Wright Brothers. The inventor was a German immigrant named Gustav Whitehead and he designed a monoplane powered by a small steam engine. If true this would predate the Wright Brothers by 5 years, but Whitehead never documented nor published his discoveries, did not apply for a patent. He died poor and forgotten in 1927. Is it true? Believe it or not!



1939 – Dr. Roy P Scholz is 1st surgeon to use fiberglass sutures, replacing cat’s intestines and wool thread.



1941 - British PM Winston Churchill launched his "V for Victory" campaign. By coincidence the letter "V" in morse code corresponded with the opening notes of Beethoven ‘s 5th symphony "Dit-Dit-Dit Daaah." making it the musical theme of the BBC overseas radio service war news. If you ever lived in England you would know that reversing the two fingers sign is an insult akin to flashing someone the middle finger.



1942-Operation Drumroll cancelled. Germans withdraw U-Boats stationed off the US coastline because of effective US counter-submarine measures.



1952- Several UFOs appeared on the radar of Washington DC’s National Airport (Today its Reagan Airport). So many alarming reports and phone calls came in, that the Air Force was obliged to hold a news conference to calm public fears. They explained the lights were temperature inversions. Uh, huh…



1957 - 1st rocket with nuclear warhead fired, Yucca Flat, Nevada



1957- The film “ I Was a Teenage Werewolf” starring Michael Landon premiered.



1966- 50 year old Frank Sinatra married 21 year old Mia Farrow. Frankie’s ex Ava Gardner commented:” Hah! I always knew Frank would one day wind up in bed with a little boy. “ Two years later when Mia Farrow was offered the lead role in Roman Polanski’s film “Rosemary’s Baby” Frank gave her an ultimatum "Baby, it's either me or your career”. She took the part and he served her with a divorce papers on the set. Mia got an Oscar nomination and Frank recorded “Strangers in the Night”.



1990- The Richard Nixon Library dedicated in Yorba Linda California. Nixon's Western White House of San Clemente first refused the honor of being the site as well as his real birthplace town of Whittier. The little wood frame house where Nixon was born was moved to the Yorba Linda site. At the dedication the five living Presidents were present.

Senator Bob Dole pointed at former Presidents Ford, Reagan and Nixon and joked to a friend: "Look, there’s Hear no Evil, See No Evil, and Evil.”



1991- Heavyweight boxing champ Mike Tyson raped a contestant for the Miss Black America Pageant named Desiree Washington. He got 3 years in jail.



1993- President Clinton launched his gays in the military initiative called "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell." It caused a storm of controversy, and probably uprooted more gay men and women out of their military careers than if nothing was done. The initiative was outlawed in 2010, after thousands of careers were ruined.

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Yesterday’s quiz- In 1996 Britain turned over Hong Kong to China. There was one other part of China that was own by a different European country that had to be turned over as well. What was it?



Answer: Macau was a Portuguese colony from 1557-1999.

Quiz: What is a conifer?


Yesterday’s Question answered below: We all know Nickelodeon is a TV channel, but what was a nickelodeon originally?

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History for 7/17/2017

Birthdays: James Cagney, John Jacob Astor I, Hyacinth Rigaud, Bernice Abbott, Chill Wills, Brian Trottier, Phoebe Snow, Daryl Lamonica, Prof. Peter Schickele a.k.a. PDQ Bach, Earl Stanley Gardner the creator of Perry Mason, Art Linkletter, Diane Carroll, David Hasslehoff is 65, Donald Sutherland is 82, Phyllis Diller


In ancient Rome, today was the feast of the god of Honor, Honorous.


924 – The death of Edward "the Elder", King of the West Saxons. During his reign, he annexed Wessex and the Danelaw up to the Humber River. Danelaw was the name for English territory governed by Danish Vikings.


1429- Charles the Dauphin is crowned King Charles VII at Rheims, thanks to the victories of Joan of Arc.


1453 Battle of Chatillon. The last battle of the Hundred Years War. English knight Sir John Talbot was blown away by the French with their newfangled cannons. Other names for the cannon were bombardons, culverins, and a variation on the catapult name for rock thrower- Mangonnel, shortened to Gonne or Gun.



1647- A Neopolitan fishmonger named Maisaniello led 100,000 Italians in a revolt against high taxes and tariffs. Maisaniello held power in Naples for ten days until his was assassinated this day by agents of the Spanish Viceroy the Count de Orsuna. One of Maisaniellos ideas was he reduced the price of bread by half, and if a baker didn’t comply, he was roasted in his own oven.



1789- Three days after the Bastille was stormed, King Louis XVI appeared on a balcony at Paris city hall the Hotel Du Ville and wore a red, white and blue cockade in a red Phyrgian liberty cap to the cheers of the multitude.



1793- Charlotte Corday, the assassin of French Revolutionary leader Jean Paul Marat, went to the guillotine. When her decapitated head was lifted out of the basket the executioner gave it a smack on her cheek for being a naughty little girl, to the laughter of the crowd.



1803- James T. Callender, editor of the Aurora newspaper, was among the worst scandal mongering journalists in early America. He broke the story of Alexander Hamilton’s extramarital affairs and Thomas Jefferson’s sleeping with his slaves like Sally Hemmings. He called John Adams a "pernicious Hermaphrodite" and labeled George Washington’s Farewell Address the "Last ravings of a diseased mind". Everyone hated him. This night his body was found floating the James River. Without an investigation, a court decided he fell in while drunk.



1841 - British humor magazine "Punch" 1st published.



1867 - 1st US dental school, Harvard School of Dental Medicine, established



1873- The U.S. Secretary of War William Belknap approved the revised set of cavalry regulations called "Upton's Rules". It became the standard for the U.S. Cavalry throughout the Indian Wars. Belknap was forced to resign for pocketing defense funds in 1874.



1876- Battle of Warbonnet Gorge. Skirmish between the US 5th Cavalry pursuing hostile Indians soon after Custers Last Stand. The battle is remembered chiefly because Gen Phil Sheridan asked his old friend Buffalo Bill Cody to return from his play acting back east and scout for the army one more time. He looked rather incredible riding the prairie in his theatrical black velvet silver studded Mexican Vaquero britches and coat.



Bill Cody was challenged to single combat by a Cheyenne Chief named Yellow Tail. Bill killed the chief and scalped him, waving the hair in the air to the cheering troopers and announcing "The first scalp for Custer!" Buffalo Bill then returned to the East where his new stage production "The First Scalp for Custer" ran for weeks to sold out audiences.



1879 - 1st railroad opens in Hawaii.



1893- Representatives of fourteen stage unions meet to form IATSE, the International Alliance of Theatrical & Screen Engineers of the U.S. & Canada.



1917-President Woodrow Wilson approved U.S. troops to join an Anglo-French mission to Russia. Originally intended to help the Russians from the German Army, the mission became an attempt to help anti-Bolshevik forces overthrow Lenin and reopen the second front against the Kaiser. In effect the U.S., France and Britain invaded Soviet Russia.



The American general was named Graves; the British were led by General Ironside, a 6 foot 4, killing machine his friends nicknamed "Tiny". The Michigan wolverines sent to Archangel and Vladivostok were told they were going to capture German U-boat bases. This excuse wore thin when the Great War ended and they were still fighting Bolsheviks, without ever seeing a German.



They were never given any real instructions about what to do except support Anti-Bolshevik forces, who were pathetically few in number. The Allied forces were withdrawn from Russia in 1922.



1928- President of Mexico Alvaro Obregon was at a large banquet for former veterans of the Mexican Revolution. Part of the party was having an artist stroll about making caricatures of the guests. Obregon said to cartoonist Leon Toral: "Make sure you make me look good." Toral responded "Oh, I will.." and pulled a gun and shot the President to death. An assassin but still a professional artist, he actually completed the drawing before reaching for his pistol. Gotta watch them cartoonists….



1935 - Variety's famous headline "Sticks Nix Hick Pix" meaning audiences in rural areas were not attending movies with a rustic theme.



1936-. The Spanish Civil War began. A Spanish Fascist army led by Francisco Franco invaded Spain from North Africa. The first moves were to occupy the Canary Islands. The Fascists figured the takeover would only take a few days, but all over Spain the common workers, farmers, artists, even women and children took up guns to fight.



1937- the Nazis open an art exhibit of banned artworks and artists called Entartete Kunst- Degenerate Art. Works of Dali and Duchamp, Grosz, Lippschitz, Kandinsky and Miro, with appropriate insults underneath. The next day Hitler dedicated the Great German Art Collection, having cleansed the German art world for National Socialist art, mostly bad deco-greco nudes and dumb Nordic medieval fantasy scenes.



1944- Top German Field Marshall Erwin Rommel was strafed by an Allied fighter plane as his open car sped down a French country road. Germans nicknamed these roaming planes JABOS, for jaeger-bomber or hunter bombers. By now Rommel was in the Generals Plot to overthrow Hitler. His last conversation was with an SS Panzer Division General named Sepp Deitrich. Rommel asked him cryptically": Would you obey an order from me, even if it ran counter to the wishes of the Fuehrer?" Deitrich said he would.



But the plane attack cut short his career as a conspirator. When the General's Plot to kill Hitler went off in three days Rommel, who the conspirators planned to make President of the new Reich, was in a coma in the hospital.



Even though the bomb failed to kill Hitler, if a healthy Rommel, who's fame was second only to Hitler, went on nationwide radio and announced an army coup against the Nazis and an immediate unilateral ceasefire, it's intriguing to think what might have happened.



1944- The Port Chicago explosion. In Oakland Harbor, African American sailors were given the dreary but dangerous duty of loading ammunition onto ships. This day an accident with high explosives blew up 321 men. The blast broke windows in San Francisco across the bay and was heard as far away as Boulder City Nevada.

When the base commander ordered the men to immediately resume loading with no change in pattern or promise of investigation- the black sailors refused. They were court-martialed for mutiny and treason.



1945-THE FIRST POTSDAM MEETING-New President Harry Truman met Stalin and Churchill in a suburb of war ravaged Berlin. Halfway through the talks Churchill learned that he was defeated in parliamentary elections and would be replaced by Clement Atlee. Truman told Stalin about the atomic bomb and was surprised that Stalin wasn’t surprised. Stalin already knew because of spies he had at Los Alamos. Stalin told Truman the Japanese government was requesting peace talks asking that Russia act as intermediary, which they had no intention of doing.



Stalin called the Anglo-Americans his "soyuznicki" Little Allies. Truman called him "Uncle Joe". Paranoid Stalin disliked the name because he thought it was meant to be an insult.



1955- DISNEYLAND OPENED- Walt Disney's dream of a perfect family amusement park, called 'The Happiest Place on Earth" was declared open with movie celebrities like Ronald Reagan, Art Linkletter and the Mouseketeers in attendance. Walt hoped to get 10,000 visitors that first day. He got 100,000. Facilities broke down from the huge crowds and the haste with which the park was built. Concrete pavement which was poured the night before was still soft under people's feet, there were no working water fountains and the car parking was a nightmare. To the Disneyland workers opening day was nicknamed 'Black Sunday". But despite all, Disneyland became a huge success.



1955 - Arco, Idaho becomes 1st US city lit by nuclear power.



1967– The Monkees performed at Forest Hills NY, Jimi Hendrix was their opening act.



1968- In Iraq, the Bath party seized power under President Ahmad Hussain Al-Bakr. The following year his chief of police Saddam Hussein would overthrow him.



1968- The Beatles musical cartoon feature The Yellow Submarine premiered in London’s Piccadilly Circus. Look Out! It’s the Blue Meanies!!



1975-The first Apollo-Soyuz space linkup. A second linkup would not happen until 1995.



1979- Nicaraguan rebels called Sandinistas overthrow dictator Anastasio Somosa. He escaped to Miami with CIA help. The Reagan White House spent most of the 1980’s obsessed with these Communist rebels as a new escalation of the Cold War.



1988- A home video tape was released of actor Rob Lowe making whoopee with two underage girls in his hotel room.



1996- TWA Flt.#800- a jumbo jet flying from New York to Paris exploded over Long Island Sound shortly after take-off. Disturbing rumors of a missile bringing down the plane was squashed by authorities, despite the Air France pilot immediately behind and eyewitnesses describing a streak of light in the sky before the explosion. In Paris, elderly Kennedy press secty Pierre Salinger reported it as a missile, and was derided as senile. The official reason the FAA gave was "fumes ignited in a wing tank", but that explanation failed to satisfy the grieving relatives. Why a plane with a 30 year safety record should just blow up, and none have blown up that way since, remains a mystery.



2004- Katsuhiro Otomo’s film Steamboy premiered. Japanese interest in the idea of SteamPunk began to spread worldwide.

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Yesterday’s Quiz: We all know Nickelodeon is a TV channel, but what was a nickelodeon originally?


Answer: A nickelodeon was a little viewing machine, that the new motion picture film was played on for the price of a nickel. Thomas Edison thought this was the correct way movies should be shown, instead of the Lumiere’s idea of projected in a theater. The machines were collected in an arcade that was first called a nickelodeon, then a penny arcade, and in the 1980s a video arcade.

Question: We all know Nickelodeon is a TV channel, but what was a nickelodeon originally?


Yesterday’s Question answered below: What is a Victrola?


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History for 7/16/2017

Birthdays: Andrea Del Sarto, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Ginger Rogers, Pinchas Zukerman,

Orville Redenbacher, Roald Amundsen, Sunny Tufts, Barbera Stanwyck, Reuben Blades, Mary Baker-Eddy the founder of Christian Science, Phoebe Cates, Will Farrell is 50


1054 –The GREAT SCHISM- Eastern Greek Orthodox and Latin Roman Catholic Churches split. The Patriarch Of Constantinople Michael I Cerularius and Pope Leo IX mutually excommunicate one another. When Catholic Crusaders sacked Constantinople in 1209 they put a prostitute on the Orthodox Patriarch's throne just for laughs. The Greek Patriarch referred to the Vatican in Rome as a "Synagogue of Satan!"

Historian Ernle Bradford stated that his event marked the moment when Christianity ceased to be a supra-national force for unity in Europe the way Islam was in the Arab world. Europeans would now turn to nationalism as their identifying creed and Christianity took a backseat.



1099- JERUSALEM FALLS TO THE CRUSADERS- The knights of the First Crusade broke into the city and committed horrible massacres of the population. The rampaging knights even cut down Armenian & Syrian Christians, because they looked dark and were dressed like Arabs. In an ironic twist of history, the Jewish population fought shoulder to shoulder alongside their Arab cousins. When the massacre started they withdrew to a central synagogue where the Christians barred he doors and burned them to death.

The Crusaders then declared the Holy City free, and warlord Geoffrey de Boullion declared himself "Protector of the Holy Sepulcher" instead of king, since in his opinion "There is no King here but Christ". After he died his younger brother Baldwin made himself King of Jerusalem. The Crusaders held Jerusalem for about a hundred years.



1212-BATTLE OF LAS NAVAS DE TOLOSA- Christian Kings of Spain defeat the Moors and begin the "Reconquista", the gradual winning back of the Iberian peninsula lasting until 1492. King Pedro of Aragon was nicknamed Pedro the Lecher, because of his sexual appetite. Legend has him having to be helped into the saddle after taking on 100 women in one night!



1439 - Kissing is banned in England to stop diseases from spreading.



1690-After the collapse of his cause in the Battle of the Boyne, King James II Stuart fled Ireland for exile.



1721- Guilliame DuBois, archbishop of Cambrai was ordained a Cardinal. The Bishop was one of the most sexually promiscuous men in France, outdone only by his master Phillipe D’Orleans, Regent for the boy King Louis XV. The memoirist Madame De Sainte Simon wrote His Eminence the Cardinal “had a face like a ferret and was a Cloaca Maxima of depravity” named for Rome’s largest sewer. Yet despite his sexual appetite he ran Frances’ foreign policy almost as well as Cardinal Richelieu did a century earlier. France was at peace for 27 years. His only fear as Cardinal was that his wife would renege on the blackmail money he paid her, and go public.



1769- Fra Junipero Serra founded his first Mission settlement in California- San Diego de Alcala, now present day San Diego. The master plan was to create a string of missions from San Diego to San Francisco one days ride apart- San Clemente, San Juan Capistrano, Santa Anna, San Gabriel, Santa Maria Reina de Los Angeles, etc.



1777- I WILL FIND YOU! -In frontier Kentucky outside of Boonesborugh Jemima Boone and her girlfriend are set upon by a Shawnee Indian warparty and kidnapped. Her daddy Daniel Boone with seven men tracked the warparty. This day after a sharp fight they freed the women. Despite killing the son of the Shawnee chief, Boone was later adopted into the tribe in his place. This incident was widely reported in the colonies and was the basis for James Fennimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans.



1779- American colonial General "Mad" Anthony Wayne attacks the British garrison at Stony Point, New York.



1862- In Paris the French Emperor Napoleon III received John Slidell, the ambassador of the Confederate States. But France declined to intervene in the American Civil War.



1877- THE GREAT UPHEAVAL- The B&O Railroad cuts their workers wages 10% for the second time that year. (there had been a recession raging in the U.S. economy since 1873 ). Workers and engineers at Martinsburg Virginia went out on strike and started sabotaging trains. The strike soon spread coast to coast and became America's first nationwide strike. The laws protecting workers union rights were still far in the future so strikes were put down by troops randomly shooting into crowds, mass firings and vigilante murder of union leaders.

The violence shocked the rest of the world. Karl Marx wrote Engels "did you hear what is happening in America?” He always thought industrialized countries like America and England would go communist long before Russia and China.



1918- CZAR NICHOLAS ROMANOV AND FAMILY MURDERED. After abdicating the Czar's family was imprisoned in a house in Siberia. The anti-Communist While armies were about to capture the area. So from Moscow Vladimir Lenin sent orders that they all be killed. In the middle of the night commissar Yakov Sverdlov told the Czar they were to be moved and were ordered to wait in a basement room of their house. Outside Red guards revved a truck motor to mask the sound of the guns. Then a group of soldiers came in the room pulled out their pistols. Nicholas’ last word before the guns went off was "Schto? " What the-? They even shot the family doctor, the boys sailor bodyguard and the family dog.



The anti-Communist forces captured the area two weeks later and told the world about the crime. Seeing what happened to the Russian Czar may be part of the reason the Kaiser and Austrian Emperor slipped away quietly into exile after losing the Great War. Remains weren't discovered until 1988 and in 1993 DNA testing proved them to be the true remains of the Czar and his family. DNA Testing on the remains of a woman who died in 1984 named Anna Andersen, who claimed to be the child Duchess Anastasia was negative.



The reason the children's remains weren't in with the others was because the Bolsheviks first tried destroying their remains with sulfuric acid but found it took too long, so they cremated the rest. Czar Nicholas II and his family were made saints of the Russian Orthodox Church in 1994.



1932- Cecil B. DeMille shot the scene in his film Sign of the Cross where Claudette Colbert took a bath in asses milk. Legend has it that DeMille insisted on real milk in the bath and that by the second day the hot studio lights had curdled it to a smelly cheese. But production notes show the scene was all shot in one day. DeMille always got away with sexy semi-nude scenes by putting them in biblical settings. After all, who would criticize a morality tale from the Good Book?



1935- The first parking meter set up in Oklahoma City.



1936 - 1st x-ray photo of arterial circulation, Rochester, NY



1945-THE FIRST ATOMIC BOMB EXPLODED at Alamagordo New Mexico (site code name was "Trinity'). Called at first the Super Cosmic Bomb, nicknamed "The Gadget". The Manhattan Project scientists weren't sure that once you started the chain reaction detonating particles of light when it would stop, if ever. Physicists Richard Fenyman and Enrico Fermi wagered a case of beer that they would incinerate the state of New Mexico. (funny guys). They were led by General Leslie Groves, a by-the-book army engineer who supervised the construction of the Pentagon, and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, a brilliant physicist and Berkeley radical who read Sanskrit to relax. When he saw the force of the blast, Oppenheimer recalled the Hindu verse: "Now have I become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds..."



1951- J.D. Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye" published.



1954- Groundbreaking for the construction of Disneyland.



1956 –The Last time Ringling Bros, Barnum & Bailey Circus performed under a canvas circus tent.



1963- Cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman in space aboard

Vostok 6.



1964- Conservative Republican Senator Barry Goldwater was nominated to run against Lyndon Johnson for president. Goldwater set the tone by his speech:" Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." LBJ’s campaign portrayed him as a dangerous warmonger and he lost in a landslide. In later years Goldwater’s conservative views were eclipsed by the even more conservative Reagan and Bush.



1966- Mao Tse Tung takes a swim in the Yangtzse River and gives permission for his young Red Guards to start the Cultural Revolution.



1969- Congress passed Title 14, Section 1211 of the Code of Federal Regulations. It makes it illegal for U.S. citizens to have any contact with extraterrestrials or their spacecraft.



1973- WHO HAS THE TAPES ! Presidential attorney Alexander Butterfield admitted to the Senate Watergate Committee that President Richard Nixon had bugged the Oval Office and had recorded tapes of all of his conversations. The tape system was actually installed by Lyndon Johnson. When Nixon took office he was going to have it all removed. But his aides convinced him to keep the system to document his place in history. Why Nixon never destroyed these tapes that brought him down remains one of the mysteries of history.



1994- Comet Schoendacher-Levy 6 impacted with the Planet Jupiter, giving scientists a spectacular ringside seat to the processes of the creation of the Universe.



1999- JOHN-JOHN -Thirty years after the death of his father and uncle, 38 year old John Kennedy Jr. fell victim to the Kennedy curse when his small plane crashed on the way to a wedding in Martha’s Vineyard. His wife had delayed to have a pedicure, so he had to take off at dusk. He was too inexperienced to fly on instruments at dusk in fog and he lost his bearings, hitting the water at 150 miles per hour. The Kennedy’s have a history of bad luck with planes- Kathleen Kennedy, Ethel Kennedy’s parents and JFK’s older brother Joe Kennedy all died in small plane crashes. Senator Ted Kennedy barely survived a crash. Teddy refused to ever fly with John Jr., and died of old age in 2009.

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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is a Victrola?



Answer: The first successfully marketed record player. Emile Berliner invented the flat record disc in 1871, and in 1901 He and his partners started the Victor Talking Machine Company. They went to Italy and recorded a new young singer named Enrico Caruso, and suddenly every home had to have one.

Quiz: What is a Victrola?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: What is meant by plein-air painting?
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History for 7/15/2017
Birthdays: Rembrandt van Rijn, Inigo Jones, Sir Thomas Bullfinch, Mother Cabrini, Clemont Moore, Julian Bream, Linda Rondstadt, Alex Karras, Jan Michael Vincent, Lola Davidovich, Forrest Whitaker is 56, Brigette Neilsen, Jesse Ventura, Terry O’ Quinn is 65

Feast of St. Nicodemus of the Holy Mountain.

765 A.D.- Mayan Scientists hold a conference at Copan to discuss astronomy and adjust their calendar. By 1492 the Mayan civilization was already 2,000 years old. Their calendar was so perfect, the difference between it and our modern atomic clocks calculation of a lunar month is just 24 seconds! They used hieroglyphic writing but also a system of numbers including zero, which the Greeks and Romans never figured out. Among their surviving documents are calculations on the orbit of Venus.

Tikal, one of their cities, covered 23 square miles ( Rome of the Caesars covered 8 ) and had a temple that was the tallest structure in America until the completion of the U.S. Capitol dome in 1863.

1205- Pope Innocent III declared that because they have rejected Christ, the Jewish people must be subjected to perpetual servitude and subjugation. It took several more centuries of oppression and a holocaust for the Vatican to officially "forgive" Judaism in 1947. Pope John Paul II apologized in 2000.

1410- Battle of Grunwald, King Jagiello of Poland, Witold Wytautas of Lithuania and their Tartar allies defeated the Prussian Teutonic Knights and the Livonian Sword Brothers under Grand Master Ulrich Von Junnigen.

1685- James the Duke of Monmouth was executed. Monmouth was the bastard son of King Charles II and tried to overthrow his step-uncle James II in Monmouth’s Rebellion.
Monmouth New Jersey had been named for him.

1780- American Colonial General Benedict Arnold snuck a coded message to British Commander Sir Henry Clinton. In it, he offered to betray the fortress of West Point to the British for 20,000 English pounds. Arnold wasn’t even West Point’s commander yet, but he expected Gen. George Washington to confirm him in the job any day. The only person who warned that Gen. Arnold might be up to something, was a female spy planted in British Headquarters in occupied New York. Her cover was kept so complete, that her name is lost to history. We only know her as agent “355”.

1789- Astronomer Jean Sylvain Bailly is proclaimed first mayor of Paris. Since Medieval days when the Hero Mayor Etienne Marcel had defied the King, Paris had no mayor but was under direct royal control through an appointed prefect. Today the mayor of Paris is such an important position it is considered the stepping stone to the Presidency of the Republic.

1795 - "Le Marseillaise" became officially the French national anthem.

1806- American captain Zebulon Pike set off on his trek of discovery through the new Kansas, Nebraska and Colorado territory. Near Santa Fe New Mexico he was apprehended by Spanish Authorities for trespassing and put on a boat back home. In Colorado, Pike discovered the mountain named for him- Pike’s Peak.

1815- Napoleon boards HMS Bellerophon for the trip to St. Helena. On the trip he teaches himself English and makes friends with the British sailors to such an extent that their officers reprimand them. He said to his Irish doctor O'Meara:" So you are a doctor and I am a general. How many men have you killed? I'll wager more than me!"

1861- During the Civil War a beautiful Washington D.C. socialite named Rose Greenhow moved in the highest circles of government and was personal friends with top Congressmen and Generals. But Rose was also a Southern spy. This day she got out a message to Confederate General Beauregard that the main Union army would commence their march on Richmond that week. This bit of espionage would contribute to the great Union disaster at Bull Run. Rose Greenhow was later arrested and her home turned into a women’s prison.

1862- THE WILD RIDE OF THE C.S.S. ARKANSAS- Union Admiral David Farragut (the 'Damn the Torpedoes!' guy) had moved his big battle fleet up the Mississippi above the Confederate fortress town of Vicksburg and was preparing to bombard the town. Southern Captain Issac Brown was told he would take command of an ironclad called the Arkansas, and sailed it right into the middle of the Union navy, firing on all sides. One ship attacked 34 warships!
Farragut was taking a nap and was so surprised he fought the battle in his nightshirt. Although pounded by dozens of heavy cannonballs Brown's homemade ironclad not only held up but she inflicted so much damage on Farragut's wooden ships he was forced to leave Vicksburg and retreat to the Gulf. At one point Capt. Brown was knocked senseless by some shrapnel and when he woke up he had been laid out on a pile of dead corpses. But he had done his job. No further attempts to attack Vicksburg occurred until the end of that year. One ship had defeated a navy.

1863- Yankee leaders were so frustrated by the actions of Confederate guerrillas in Missouri and Kansas that they resorted to a controversial solution. They began arresting the wives, sisters and girlfriends of the guerrillas and lodged them in Kansas City. They hoped to ship them to rebel held Arkansas, thinking this would draw off their menfolk. But on this day an unforeseen tragedy struck. The old Grand St Hotel they were in collapsed, killing many of the innocent women. The country was shocked and the rebels vowed revenge. Cole Younger lost his mother and two sisters. He never believed the collapse was an accident. Bloody Bill Anderson rode into battle tearfully shouting his baby sisters name.

1870 -The Hudson's Bay Company sold Prince Rupertland to Canada, which was the entire Canadian west from the Ontario border to the Pacific and from the Montana border up to the Arctic Circle. Up to then it had been a corporate businessman's dream, the largest land mass ever managed by a board of directors, almost as large as the United States. The Hudson's Bay CEO, Sir Roger Simpson had been called the 'Emperor Simpson' by his detractors. Canada suddenly became bi-coastal. But the French-Indian fur trappers called the Metiz understood the threat Anglo town settlers would bring to their way of life and rose in revolt under their leader Louis Riel.

1882- In Springfield Illinois, “The Crazy Old Lady” who lived alone in the big house with the curtains always drawn finally died. Mary Todd Lincoln, the widow of Abraham Lincoln, had always been high strung and a little paranoid. Now, her spirit was broken by her husbands murder and all of her children dying except her eldest son Robert. And he kept trying to get her committed to a lunatic asylum before she spent all of their family fortune. Mary wore nothing but black, constantly wept, packed and unpacked trunks all day, and lived on chloral hydrate, opium and other narcotics. This day she finally got her fondest wish, to join her husband in death.

1915- A Secret Service agent was presented with a suitcase left by a German diplomat on a New York City subway seat. In the satchel was a complete list of known German spies and saboteurs working in the U.S., a nation still officially neutral in the war between Britain, France and Germany.

1916- The Boeing Aircraft Corporation (originally Pacific Aero) formed in Seattle by William Boeing.

1928- The first Enigma Machine for decryption invented.

1938- Max Fleischer Popeye cartoon "With the Jeep" introduced Eugene the Jeep. The character was created in the Thimble Theater comic strip two years earlier. The funny little character later gave its name to the army’s new General Purpose Vehicle, the G.P. or Jeep.

1941- President Franklin Roosevelt sent federal mediator Stanley White to try and solve the labor strike between Walt Disney and his cartoonists.

1945- President Truman was shown intercepted communiqués from Japanese military command saying that all that was left of the Japanese army was massing on the Southern beaches of Kyushu preparing to meet the expected American invasion.

1951-A Syrian nationalist shot and killed the Lebanese Prime Minister Riyadh Bey-Ehrsault in Beirut.

1953- English serial killer Jack Christie was executed. In his home at Number 10 Rillington Place police found the bodies of several women buried in the garden. Two bodies weren’t even Christies, they were credited to an abortionist who was a previous tenant who had botched two and they died of internal bleeding.

1953- The film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes premiered starring Marylyn Monroe and Jane Russell.

1971- President Nixon announced he had accepted an invitation to visit Red China.

1971- Producer Steve Krantz announced the production of the first X-rated cartoon, Fritz the Cat, to be directed by newcomer Ralph Bakshi.

1979- THE OIL CRISIS. July 15, 1979- In a nationwide address, President Jimmy Carter laid out the oil/gas crisis. He stated flatly that the U.S. and the world was trapped in an increasing dependence on diminishing stocks of foreign oil. We need to move to develop solar and other alternative fuels immediately. “ When we import oil, we import rising prices and unemployment."
He said we should establish a Solar Bank to eventually take on 20% of the nations energy needs. But the media focused on his negative tone, his speaking of a “ crisis of confidence” They called it the “national malaise” speech, even though he never said that.
The next President, Ronald Reagan, ignored Carter’s initiatives and tore off the solar panels from the roof of the White House. The cost of gas then was .86 cents a gallon.

1982-Coca-Cola introduced Diet Coke. Coke officials are proud of the fact that within a year it's sales top that of Tab, but Tab was owned by Coke as well. ( duh..?)

1997- Famed clothing designer Gianni Versace was murdered outside his Miami mansion by a deranged serial killer on a spree since leaving Minnesota. The killer, Andrew Cunanan, was later found in a houseboat with a self-inflicted bullet in his head.

2011- Disney’s Winnie the Pooh and short the Ballad of Nessie opened in theaters.

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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is meant by plein-air painting?

Answer: Plein-air roughly translates to “in the air," so plein-air painting means painting in the open, as opposed to in a studio. It is painting what one sees in nature, capturing the actual setting rather than painting something fabricated or from one’s imagination. This was especially evident with the Impressionists and landscape inspired groups like the Hudson River School.