Quiz: What is the law of eminent domain?

Yesterday’s Question Answered Below: Which movie came out first? Gulliver’s Travels, The Wizard of Oz or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?
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History for 7/27/2023
Birthdays: Confucius, Alexander Dumas fils, Enrique Granados, Hillaire Belloc, Maureen McGovern, Keenan Wynn, Leo Durocher, Peggy Fleming, Bobby Gentry, Jerry Van Dyke, Vincent Canby, Betty Thomas, Ilya Salkind, David Swift –director of the Haley Mills Disney films like The Parent Trap, Maya Rudolph is 51, Jonathan Rhys Meyers is 46, Norman Lear is 101

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1900- HUNS- In Bremerhaven, Kaiser Wilhelm II addressed a contingent of German marines about to embark for China to help in the international effort to put down the Boxer Rebellion. Caught up in the moment, Wilhelm cried: "Take no prisoners! Kill all those who fall into your hands! As the deeds of the Huns of Attila resound through history for their ruthlessness, so like the Huns, make the name of Germany live in Chinese annals for a thousand years!"
An embarrassed chancellor Von Bulow called it "The worst speech of the year and possibly of the Kaiser's career." He tried to release an edited version to the press. When the Kaiser read the edited speech, he said: My dear Bulow. You left out all the good parts." Germans got the nickname Huns for years afterwards.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1977- Allegro Non Troppo opened in American theaters. Italian animator Bruno Bozzetto’s homage to Walt Disney’s Fantasia.

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

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

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

2007- The Simpson’s Movie debuted.

2016- In an election speech, Donald Trump declared “I will tell you this, Russia: If you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 (Hillary Clinton) emails that are missing.” According to the Mueller Probe, soon after this speech the level of Russian hacking into American sites shot up dramatically.
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Yesterday’s Question: Which movie came out first? Gulliver’s Travels, The Wizard of Oz or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?

Answer: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), The Wizard of Oz (August 1939), Gulliver’s Travels (December 1939)

Question: Which movie came out first? Gulliver’s Travels, The Wizard of Oz or Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?

Yesterday’s Question: Was George Washington the first president to sit in the Oval Office?
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History for 7/26/2023
Birthdays: Salvador Allende, Serge Koussevitzky, George Bernard Shaw, Gracie Allen,
Carl Jung, Stanley Kubrick, Blake Edwards, George Grosz, Pearl Buck, Jason Robards Jr, Aldous Huxley, Jean Shepard, Ken Muse, Vivian Vance, Emil Jannings, Ken Muse, Sandra Bullock is 59, Kevin Spacey, Kate Beckinsdale, Helen Mirren is 78, Jason Statham, Mick Jagger is 80

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

1656– Rembrandt van Rijn declared bankruptcy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1835 - 1st sugar cane plantation started in Hawaii.

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

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

1887 - 1st Esperanto book published.

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

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

1918- During WWI, at a testimonial dinner in London, U.S. Under-Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt first met First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill. The friendship made there would mean a lot when they fought WW2 together twenty years later.

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

1926 - National Bar Association incorporates.

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

1943- The Birth of L.A. Smog! A newspaper headline from this date mentions a 'gas-attack' of exhaust and haze that reduced visibility to three short blocks. Besides leaded gasoline, many suburban homes had little backyard ovens to burn their garbage.

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

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

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

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

1951- Charlie Chaplin driven into exile by red-baiters. Chaplin never was a communist or any other radical movement. He was just outspoken in his views, and in Commie-Paranoid America that was enough. He was on a holiday to Britain when he learned his visa had been revoked by the U.S. government. He didn't return until 1972. Despite his immense achievements in Hollywood History, when the Hollywood Walk of Fame was dedicated later that year, Chaplin’s name was deliberately excluded.

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

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

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

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

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

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

1970- Oh, Calcutta! Play opened in London. Oh, Calcutta had nothing at all to do with a city in India, the show was a series of unrelated, but sex-dominated sketches featuring a totally nude cast, both male and female. Sketches were written by John Lennon, Sam Shephard and Jules Feiffer. The title came from a 1946 Dadaist painting by Clovis Trouille. It was a pun on the French “O quel cul t’as” meaning “what a nice ass you have”. The fun turned dark in 1988 when the show’s producer Norman Kean went mad, stabbed his wife then committed suicide.

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

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

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

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

1995- After a year of investigation, the General Accounting Office noted that all documents pertaining to the Roswell UFO Incident of 1947 had disappeared or been destroyed. …Hmmm.
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Yesterday’s Question answered below: Was George Washington the first president to sit in the Oval Office?

Answer: No. The Oval Office was not built until the Twentieth Century. Washington served as president in New York City and Philadelphia.

Quiz: Was George Washington the first president to sit in the Oval Office?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What does it mean to say, my name is mud?.
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History for 7/25/2023
Birthdays: Bishop Theitmar of Merseberg- 975AD, Arthur Balfour, Thomas Eakins, Maxfield Parrish, Stuart K. Hine 1899 missionary who wrote the hymn "How Great Thou Art", Woody Strode, Walter Payton, Walter Brennan, David Belasco, Adnan Khashoggi, Imam, Jack Gilford, Illena Douglas, Estelle Getty, Matt LeBlanc, Louise Brown the first "test-tube" baby-conceived by invitro-fertilization is 45

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1871- The electric carousel was patented by Wilhelm Schneider, Davenport, Iowa

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1936- Orchard Beach opened in the North Bronx.

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

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

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

1946- MARTIN & LEWIS- Singer Dean Martin had met young comedian Jerry Lewis the year before at a club in New York City. This day in Atlantic City’s 500 Club they debuted as a team when Lewis suggested to the club owner that Martin would be a good replacement for a singer who called in sick. They became a major sensation, with movies, records and TV shows. They hired young writer Norman Lear and Ed Simmons to write for them.

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

1953- Chuck Jones’ "Duck Dodgers in the 24 and 1/2 Century".

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

1956- Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis performed for the last time as a duo at NY’s Copacabana. Exactly ten years from their first appearance.

1958- Jack Warner cheated his two surviving brothers Harry and Al out of their share of Warner Bros Studios. The three had agreed to all retire together and sell to an investor group led by a man named Sememenko. But by a pre-arranged deal with Sememenko, Jack then bought him out and named himself President of Warner Bros. When brother Harry read the news in Variety the next day, it gave him a heart attack. He lingered for a week then died this day. The family never spoke to their brother Jack again. His wife Rhea said “He didn’t die. Jack killed him.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1985- Movie star Rock Hudson publicly acknowledged that he had AIDS. He had collapsed in France and he made the announcement while being treated at a French clinic. He was the first major public figure to acknowledge he had the mysterious new disease. People then were so afraid of this mysterious disease and how it was transferred, everyone’s initial response was to shun the sufferer. The French-American hospital insisted Hudson leave, so he called his friends Pres. Ronald and Nancy Reagan for an airlift to a U.S. military hospital. They ignored him. Rock Hudson had to pay out of his own pocket to hire a 747 airliner to fly him directly home to LA.

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

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

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Yesterday’s Question: What does it mean to say, my name is mud?

Answer: Dr. Samuel Mudd was local Virginia doctor that treated John Wilkes Booth’s broken ankle after he assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Mudd claimed to know nothing about the assassination and said he simply set the leg of a man who came to his house early one morning. There were enough inconsistencies in his story to connect him to the murder and, conversely, enough to surmise that he was innocent of the assassination plot. He was found guilty in the military court that tried all of the people accused of the murder plot and was sentenced to life in prison. He was spared, by one vote of being hanged. After four years in prison in Dry Tortugas, the American version of Devils Island, Dr. Mudd was pardoned by President Andrew Johnson.
Since then, to say “My name is Mudd” is a way of saying I am really screwed now.

Question: What does it mean to say, my name is mud?

Yesterday’s Question Answered below: What Asia-Minor? Where is Asia-Minor?
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History for 7/24/2023
Birthdays: Simon Bolivar, Amelia Earhart, Alexander Dumas fils, Ambrose Bierce, Robert Graves, Pat Oliphant, Bela Abzug, Zelda Fitzgerald, Ruth Buzzi, Lynda Carter is 72, Chief Dan George, Robert Hays, Gus Van Sant, Anna Paquin, Patty Jenkins, Elizabeth Moss, J-Lo Jennifer Lopez is 53

634 A.D. Accession of Omar as the third Caliph. This event caused the great split in the Moslem world. After the death of the Prophet, his first successor was his best friend and companion during the Hegira, Abu Bakir. But after his death the unrelated general and second-best friend Omar Ibn Al-Khattab, nicknamed "the Just" was nominated successor.
Mohammed's daughter Fatima and son-in-law and cousin Ali Ibn-Abu Taleb split off with their followers. After the death of Ali and his two sons Hassan and Hussein, their group under the third Fatimid Caliph, Osman Ibn-'Affan became the Shiite sect of Islam, while the main branch under Omar became the Sunnite. The rivalry was similar to the Protestant-Catholic split in Western Christendom.

1567- Mary, Queen of Scots, was imprisoned by the Scots and forced to abdicate her throne to her 1-year-old son James VI. Mary was raised in exile at the French court and her autocratic French ways and Catholic religion didn’t sit well with the Presbyterian Scots lords and their chaplain John Knox. So as soon as the succession was secure with a baby Mary was bundled off to prison and later turned over to Elizabeth of England for execution.

1568- Don Carlos was the eldest son of King Phillip II of Spain, the most powerful monarch in the world at the time. But Carlos and his dad didn’t get along, it all started when the King Phillip decided to marry the 16 year old bride Margaret of France, originally intended for Carlos. When Carlos showed signs of mental instability, he decided to take the side of Dutch rebels and made noises like he wanted to overthrow his father. Phillip had him imprisoned. He died of dysentery after fasting three days then gorging on meat and ice water, but many in Europe accused his father of poisoning him.

1656- Jewish philosopher Benedict Spinoza was excommunicated by the Rabbis of the Portuguese Synagogue in the Hague. His radical ideas of God made Jews, Catholics, Protestants and even some other humanists attack him, but his ideas formed the basis for modern rationalist philosophy. A German writer called Spinoza “Der Gott bedrunken Mensch” The Man Drunk on God”. Albert Einstein, Kant, Goethe and Voltaire were all inspired by the philosophy of Spinoza.

1701- After paddling in birchbark canoes 49 days from Quebec, French explorer Antoine de al Mothe-Cadillac and several families founded the City of Detroit.

1758 – Mr. George Washington Esq., admitted to the Virginia House of Burgess.

1784- On his way home from France after the American Revolution, Dr Benjamin Franklin stopped at the British Isle of Wight. While there he met his only son William Franklin, the former Royal Governor of New Jersey. While Franklin was a leading patriot, William stayed loyal to Britain and suffered imprisonment and exile. The two men hated one another, they only agreed to meet to humor grandson Temple Franklin.
After an all-night argument nothing was settled. Ben Franklin never spoke or wrote to his son ever again. When old Ben died, he left William out of his will. “It is only what he would have done to me.” Temple Franklin never recovered any salaries Congress owed Ben Franklin, but he did inherit land in New Jersey from his Tory father William.

1824- The Harrisburg Pennsylvanian published the results of the first ever US public opinion poll- a clear lead for Andrew Jackson for president.

1832- French immigrant Benjamin Booneville led the first wagon train across the Rocky Mountains in Southern Wyoming. Booneville was a US Army captain who answered personally to President Jackson. Many believed he used the wagon train as an opportunity to observe British power in the Northwest.

1847- The Mormons reach the Great Salt Lake. After trekking 1,500 miles for 17 months since Illinois, leader Brigham Young said, "Enough. This is the place.”

1847 -Rotary-type printing press patented by Richard March Hoe, of New York.

1901- William Porter, also known as O. Henry, was released from jail after doing time for embezzlement. While in jail, he discovered he had a talent for writing.

1923- Treaty of Lausanne- The western powers ended the Greek-Turkish War and confirmed the Turkish Republic's borders from the old Ottoman Empire. The Turks kept Anatolia and their Aegean coastline, The French got Syria, The Greeks the Ionian islands, the British got Palestine, the Bolshevik Russians got Yerevan, and the Armenians and Kurds got nothing. Lawrence of Arabia was present but realized after a while no one was seriously listening to him, so he left in disgust.

1934- Cecil B. DeMille’s epic film Cleopatra premiered.

1938 - Instant coffee invented.

1948- Warner's "Haredevil Hare" featuring the first Marvin the Martian. Now where did I put my Pew Illudium Q 36 Explosive Space Modulator?

1965- Bob Dylan released the song “Like a Rolling Stone”.

1966- Actor Montgomery Clift died of a heart attack at age 45. When his private nurse Lorenzo James said goodnight to him at 1:00AM, he asked him if he wanted to watch his old movie The Misfits on TV. Clift’s last words were, “Absolutely Not!”

1967- Old French President Charles DeGaulle was on a state visit to Canada. While giving an address to a huge crowd in Quebec City he used the same words he used in 1940 to call for French freedom from Nazi occupation to voice his tacit support of French-Canadian independence: “Vive Le France, Vive Quebec, Vive Quebeque Libre!” The Ottawa government cut short the remainder of his trip and sent him back to Paris. But his words set the province aflame. All the separatist sentiment dividing Canada for next two decades-national referendums, the Meech Lake accords, the FLQ conspiracy and the Quebec Separatist movement, can trace their beginnings to those three words said on that day.

1969- After successfully landing on the moon and returning to Earth, Apollo 11 safely splashed down in the ocean.

1980- In London’s Dorchester Hotel, comedian and actor Peter Sellers died of a heart attack. He was 54.

1983- George Brett of the Kansas City Royals had a second homerun he hit nullified after Yankee manager Billy Martin complains he had too much pine tar on his bat.

1985- Walt Disney's "The Black Cauldron" premiered. Billed as Walt Disney’s greatest animation feature in decades, its first week it came in third to PeeWee’s Big Adventure, and The Care Bears Movie. It’s failure almost ended Disney animation.

1998- Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan opened.

1998- Russell Weston was a schizophrenic who believed Navy Seals were hiding in his cornfield. He had killed all his mother’s 25 cats because they had fleas. This day he went to Washington and tried to shoot his way into the US Congress, At the metal detector he killed two security guards before he was brought down in a hail of bullets.

2002- Only once since the Civil War had a U.S. Congressman been officially expelled. Today the House of Representatives voted 420 to 1 to expel Congressman James Trafficante for his conviction on bribery and extortion charges and having the worst haircut on Capitol Hill.

2005- American Lance Armstrong won the Tour du France bicycle race for an unprecedented 7th time, even after surviving testicular cancer that had spread to his spine and brain. Steroids or not, it was still one hell of an achievement. After he confessed to juicing (using performance enhancing drugs like steroids), all his medals were taken away.
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Yesterday’s Question: What Asia-Minor? Where is Asia-Minor?

Answer: To the Greek and Roman mapmakers, the continent of Asia began on the west coast of Turkey. So the entire Turkish peninsula, called the province of Anatolia, was called Asia Minor. Or the Beginning of Asia.

Quiz: What Asia-Minor? Where is Asia-Minor?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: The US soldier who defected to North Korea brings up the 1950s concept of brain-washing. What was brain washing?
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History for 7/23/2023
Birthdays: Ethiopian Emperor Rastafari Halie Selassie "the Lion of Judah", Raymond Chandler, Jackson Beck the voice of Bluto, Raymond Booth, Don Drysdale, Gloria DeHaven, Arthur Treacher, Pee Wee Reese, Bob Fosse, Harry Cohn, Don Imus, Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Slash, Marlon Wayans, Woody Harrelson is 63, Edie McClurg, Daniel Radcliffe is 35

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1885- Ulysses Grant died at age 63 of throat cancer. He smoked up to 22 cigars a day. Despite being a great general, he was a bad politician and a worse businessman. Bankrupt after trusting speculators who swindled him, Grant saw writing his memoirs as the only way to save his family from his bad debts. Writing up to 50 pages a day in constant pain, he refused any painkillers to not cloud his mind. But he coated his throat daily with a mixture of salt water and cocaine. He completed his book only four days before he died. It was published by ex-confederate Mark Twain, and immediately became a best seller.

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

1888 - John Boyd Dunlop patents the pneumatic rubber tire.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1999- The Inspector Gadget Movie starring Matthew Broderick opened.

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

2004- Two armed men entered the Munch Museum in Norway and stole Edvard Munch’s masterpiece The Scream at gunpoint. It was recovered with some water damage three years later.
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Yesterday’s Question: The US soldier who defected to North Korea brings up the 1950s concept of brain-washing. What was brain washing?

Answer: Brain washing means changing a person’s point of behavior by severe psychological pressure, torture, drugs, or other nefarious means. Whether brain washing actually works like it does in movies like The Manchurian Candidate has never been proven.