Quiz: Who was the first European to see a Hurricane?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: ipso-facto.
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History for 6/29/2016
Birthdays: Bernard Hermann, Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle, Slim Pickens, Nelson Eddy, Gary Busey, John Hench, Little Eva, Harmon Killabrew, Antoine de Saint Exupery, Anna Sophie-Mutter, Leroy Anderson, Maria Conchita Alonso, Robert Evans, Matthew Weiner, Brett McKenzie, Roger Allers, Ray Harryhausen

65 AD- Feasts of Saints Peter and Paul. Supposed to be the date they were executed by order of Nero. Paul was beheaded in the Mamertine prison. He had the right to die quickly because he had honorary Roman citizenship. Peter was taken to Vatican Hill to be crucified. When he expressed joy that he would die as Jesus had, the Roman guard thought of a variation, and crucified him upside down.
When later Roman Emperor Commodus learned the Christian sect liked Vatican hill because of that, he had his favorite racing horse buried there. When told “ the Christians venerate that ground.” Commodus replied “ Well, I really liked that horse….”

1540- When Henry VIII needed some dirty work done, his unscrupulous chancellor Sir Thomas Cromwell was there to do it for him. Behead a wife, behead a Saint, no problem sire. This day Cromwell’s turn came and he went to the block. The official charge was for Heresy. Cromwell could probably appreciate the silliness of the charge. The king was merely tired of him, embarrassed by the botched marriage to Anne of Cleves and wanted him out of the way. His great nephew Oliver Cromwell disliked being reminded he was distantly related to that royal kissass Sir Thomas Cromwell.

1762- Catherine the Great overthrew her husband Czar Peter III in a palace coup. When Catherine received word that Peter intended to depose her to marry his mistress she decided to strike first. Peter was mentally ill, so few believe he managed to make a child Her husband the Czar –Autocrat preferred playing with his toy soldiers in bed. But in those days if a marriage didn’t produced children it was assumed the woman was at fault. Catherine had a son the Czarevich Paul.
So the remainder of the Romanoff dynasty may well be the spawn of Count Orloff in the Guards, Polish Prince Poniatowski or any one of a number of other lovers. The Russian troops worshipped their “little mother” because her first order after the coup was to cancel Peter’s planned war with Denmark, which the men thought foolish. Czar Peter was beaten and strangled, and Czarina Catharine became one of Russia’s great rulers.

1776- SO YOU WANT INDEPENDENCE EH?- This day outside New York Harbor near Sandy Hook New Jersey, an immense British fleet was sighted. 500 ships bringing 32,000 redcoat troops and supplies 3,000 miles. It was led by the Howe brothers- General Lord William Howe and Admiral Richard Howe, “Black Dick”. One American soldier wrote:” There must be no one left in London, they are all here.”

Simultaneous task forces were headed for the Carolinas, and the mouth of the Chesapeake to menace Philadelphia. The British regulars were augmented by regiments of Hessian German mercenaries, toughened in the schools of Frederick the Great, reputedly the finest in the world. General George Washington with his little army of amateur farmers were going to face the largest amphibious invasion until D-Day.

1776- THE BATTLE OF SULLIVAN’S ISLE. At the same time, Colonial Minutemen repulsed another English seaborne attack, this one at Charleston, South Carolina. A rebel song of the time poked fun at the British commander, Sir Peter Parker's Lament :

" With Much Labor and Toil
Unto Sullivan's Isle
Came I like Falstaff or Pistol.
But the Yankees ('Od rot'em)
I could not get at 'em
And they terribly mauled my poor Bristol! (-HMS Bristol)

But My Lords do not fear
For before the next year,
('Though a small island could fret us)
The continent whole
We shall take by my soul,
If the cowardly Yankees will let us!"

1776- Happy Birthday San Francisco! Don Juan Bautista De Anza brought 247 colonists to the tip of a rocky promontory in a huge foggy natural harbor and built a Presidio, or fort. When a monk came six months later to built a mission he called it San Francisco de Asiacutes. The nearby village was called Yerba Buena for all the good herbs growing in the area. Juan de Anza explored and mapped most of the route from Old Mexico through Northern California but is not as well known to Americans as Fra Junipero Serra, or the Anglo explorers John Freemont, and Kit Carson.

1799- The little Kingdom of Naples had trouble deciding who's side it was on during the Napoleonic Wars. It was very pro-British until a French army showed up, when they drove out the king and became pro-French. The British came back with a fleet and put the king back on his throne. The Neopolitan King Ferdinand “Big Nose" VII had told his British friends:" treat my Naples like it was a rebellious Irish village ".

On this day the commander of the Neopolitan Navy, Admiral Carracciolo, who had changed sides several times, was captured and brought before Admiral Horatio Nelson. Nelson convened a drumhead courts-martial, sentenced and hanged the old Italian from his flagship's yardarm all on the same day. His lack of mercy, even of enough time to allow the condemned time to say his prayers, remains one of the only black marks on Nelson's otherwise brilliant naval career. After a yardarm hanging the body was cut loose and allowed to drop into the sea.

In a grim postscript, several days later, King Ferdinand was looking out across the harbor when he dropped his spyglass in horror. Carracciolo's body, bloated, fish knawed and pop-eyed from the hanging, had resurfaced and was looking right at him.

1801- Composer Ludwig van Beethoven confessed to a friend that he was going deaf.

1815- After Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte spent a week sitting at Malmaison Palace trying to decide what to do, and reminiscing about Josephine to her daughter Hortense. as Allied armies closed in on Paris. Prussian Marshal Blucher declared his goal was to arrest Napoleon and hopefully shoot him as a criminal. At 5:00PM today Napoleon finally left Paris for the Atlantic coast with a promise that a ship was waiting to take him to exile in America. Shortly afterwards a troop of Prussian cavalry arrived too late.

1863- Robert E. Lee with his army invading Pennsylvania, learned from an actor turned spy named Harris that the Yankee army he thought he left back in Virginia was now following him close by. There was a danger his army could be attacked while in it was strung out in several columns foraging for supplies. Angry that Jeb Stuart’s cavalry was off somewhere instead of scouting, Lee orders his grey columns to turn away from Harrisburg and Philadelphia and concentrate where five main roads intersected.
A town named Gettysburg.

1927- The first commercial airplane reached Hawaii from the US mainland. It was a seaplane and at one point it ran out of fuel, landed in the water and the crew rowed the final few miles.

1935- Disney short Who Killed Cock Robin? Directed by Dave Hand.

1936- Pope Pius XI published an encyclical warning of the evils of Motion Pictures. “They glorify Lust and Lascivious behavior.”

1940 – ROBIN THE BOY WONDER- According to Batman Comics, this day mobsters rubbed out a circus highwire team known as the Flying Graysons, leaving their son Dick an orphan. He was taken in by millionaire Bruce Wayne so Batman could have his Robin.

1940- First day shooting on the film Citizen Kane.

1941- One week after the German invasion began at a secret meeting in Moscow leader Josef Stalin was finally made to understand by his defense committee just how badly the Red Army was being beaten by the Nazis Blitzkrieg. He left the room saying “ Lenin had left us a powerful state and we have screwed it up!”

1950- The Hollywood Ten are given jail sentences for contempt of Congress.

1956- President Eisenhower signed the Interstate Highways Act, allocating millions of dollars to build a system of interstate freeways connecting all the major U.S. cities. Ike was an engineer in the 1920s and saw the deplorable condition of American roads. During World War II he saw the Germans use autobahns to move heavy mechanized forces quickly.
The Interstate System had at first a definite Cold War logic to it. The Interstates would be commandeered in time of war and every few miles there had to be a five mile straitaway so military planes could use them for an emergency landing.

1956- Marilyn Monroe married author Arthur Miller.

1966- Operation Rolling Thunder. US B-52s bomb Hanoi for the first time.

1967-Actress Jane Mansfield and her dog were killed in a car crash when their car slammed into a parked tractor-trailer. Her children including Marisa Hargitay were in the back seat.

1968 - "Tip-Toe Thru' The Tulips With Me" by Tiny Tim peaks at #17.

1974- Isabella Peron, the second wife of Juan Peron after Evita, became President of Argentina.

1978- Actor Bob Crane, best known as the star in the television series Hogan’s Heroes, was found beaten to death with an electric cord wrapped around his neck in a Scottsdale Arizona hotel room. Around his body were pornographic literature and a large library of home made porn tapes.

1992- President of Algeria Mohammed Boudief was assassinated during a speech.

2002- President George W. Bush formally turned over presidential power for two hours to Vice President Dick Cheney while he underwent a colonoscopy- i.e. a fiber optic camera is shoved up his butt.

2007- Pixar’s Ratatouille premiered, directed by Brad Bird.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: ipso-facto.

Answer: Ipso-facto is Latin for “by the very fact”, which is used to mean that something is a fact by its very nature. For example, Saturn is a planet that revolves around the same sun as Earth, so, ipso-facto, Saturn is a planet in our solar system.

Quiz: ipso-facto.

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered below: What is circular reasoning?
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History for 6/28/2016
Birthdays: King Henry VIII, Luigi Pirandello, Jean Jacques Rousseau, John Dillinger, Richard Rogers, Gilda Radner, Cartoonist George Booth is 90, Leon Panetta, Mary Stuart Masterson, Kathy Bates is 68, John Cusack is 50, Mel Brooks is 90

Today is the Feast Day of Saint Plutarch and Saint Theodichidia.

622 A.D. The prophet Mohammed arrived in Medina, completing the Haj.

1098- THE HOLY LANCE- Outside the city of Antioch Kerbogha the Saracen Emir of Aleppo was defeated by the warriors of the First Crusade inspired by the "Holy Lance". The Crusaders were surrounded and starving, when a monk from Marseilles named Peter Bartholomew began to have visions of St. Andrew. The Saint told him to instruct the Crusader warlords where to dig to find the Holy Lance that pierced the side of Christ. At first the monk was too frightened to go up to the barons, but plucked up his courage after Saint Andrew appeared to him a second time and boxed his ears for not following his orders. Boy, that’s one touchy saint!
They dug in a church as instructed and found nothing, then dug up every other church in town until they found a rusty spike that looked close enough. The army was so jazzed over this obvious sign of divine favor that they stormed from the gates of the city to give battle. The Crusader Bishop Alhdemar Du Puy bolstered their religious zeal by dressing up three mounted knights in pure white, having appear on a distant hillside and declared they were the Saints Jude, Andrew and Maurice come down to fight the unbelievers. Thus inspired, the Crusaders joyfully slaughtered all before them.

After the victory, Peter Bartholomew started to order the crusader barons around and get real uppity. The warlords told him that they were going to build a huge bonfire and that if he could walk through the inferno unharmed, then God must surely be acting through him. By the morning of the test, the little monk had run away.

1119- Ager Saguinus "the field of Blood" Another crusader army doesn't do as well.

1519- THE MAN WHO MARRIED EUROPE- Charles V von Hapsburg was the grandson of Ferdinand & Isabella and so became King of Spain. At this time to be King of Spain meant he also ruled Portugal, the Netherlands and Belgium, Southern Italy, the Philippines and all of the Americas. This day he was elected Holy Roman Emperor of Germany, which meant he was now also ruler of all of Central Europe- Germany, Austria and Italy down to Sicily. Charles V became the most powerful man in Europe and France suddenly found itself surrounded. Both she and England faced a Hapsburg super-state, fueled by the limitless gold of the plundered Aztec and Inca empires. Charles was the first of his family to have the unique facial characteristic called the “Hapsburg Lip” – a large lower lip and protruding jaw.

1709- Battle of Poltava- Peter the Great of Russia defeats Charles XII of Sweden, the "Madman of the North". This battle wins Russia enough Baltic coastline needed for serious trade with Western Europe.

1751- The first volume of the ENCYCLOPAEDIA appeared in print. French philosophers Diderot, D’Alambert and Voltaire inspired by the ideas of English scholars Newton and Francis Bacon, decided to put a summary of all human knowledge into one work. Encyclopedie is from the Greek “Knowledge all in the Round”. It took thirty years to write all the volumes, the last volume the index was published in 1780. But in those days the Encyclopedists were as much a political and anti-clerical movement as a fount of trivia. That these humanist scholars should attempt to define concepts like “God” The Soul” “Heaven and Hell,” without the Church, was considered a declaration of philosophical war. The liberal thinking in the Encyclopaedia did a lot to advance the thinking of the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions.

1778- BATTLE OF MONMOUTH- The largest land battle of the American Revolution. George Washington had gotten word that the main British army had quit the rebel capitol of Philadelphia and was falling back to New York. He resolved to strike the British army while strung out on the march. It was the first battle where the Americans, their discipline stiffened by Baron Von Stueben’s drills, could slug it out face to face with the redcoats.
The temperature was a stifling 90-100 % F and many men collapsed from heat exhaustion in their wool uniforms. This was where Molly Harris, called Molly Pitcher, took her husbands place manning a cannon. She laughed when an enemy cannonball flew between her legs taking away parts of her lower petticoats. The battle was a draw, but Washington had shown his army wasn’t a mob of raggedy-ass farmers, but a true modern army. Washington also silenced his last critics among the other generals.

His second, General Charles Lee, was retreating from the field when Washington rode up and rallied his men. Lee was dismissed from the service, but not before Washington gave him a piece of his mind. An eyewitness said: “As a connoisseur of swearing I can attest that General Washington excelled at calling Lee every swear word one could think of. It was wonderful. He swore until the leaves shook from the trees!”

1868- Artist Claude Monet was so broke and depressed he jumped in the Seine River. After splashing around for a while, he decided its silly to drown himself so he swam to the riverbank and went for a drink. He outlived all the Impressionist painters of his generation, dying in 1926.

1914-WORLD WAR I began- commenting on 40 years of European peace, Otto Von Bismarck had said:" The next European war can only happen if some damn fool thing happens in the Balkans." The Austro-Hungarian Empire was muscling the little kingdom of Serbia. Austria had already annexed Bosnia in 1909 and Serbia claimed it as theirs. The heir of the Austrian throne, Archduke Franz-Ferdinand went on a provocative tour of the Bosnian town of Sarajevo in an open limousine. One terrorist Nedjelko Cabrinovic, hurled a bomb at the car but the driver avoided it and took another route. The Archduke stopped at city hall where he and the mayor got into an argument. The mayor claimed:” This city is absolutely safe!”

The motorcade proceeded until it was stopped by traffic at an intersection. Then 18 year old Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princeps stepped out of the crowd and fired his pistol. The first bullet hit the Archduchess Sophie Chotek who slumped lifeless over her husbands lap. Franz Ferdinand cried out: "Mama don't die! For the children!" when the next bullet killed him. Austria and Germany and Turkey declared war on Serbia and Russia and France and England. Later the whole world joined in the lunacy, about 58 nations and 22 million deaths, the last declaration was Honduras declaring war on Germany two months before the armistice. Gavrilo Princeps died in 1918 of tuberculosis in an asylum for the criminally insane, unaware that he had set the world aflame.

1918- The German Kaiser told Lenin that Germany and Finland would not violate the terms of their Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and so would not intervene in the Russian Civil War with a move against Petrograd. This enabled the Bolsheviks to move vital forces East to deal with Anglo-American supported White armies.

1919- The VERSAILLES TREATY is signed, finally ending the First World War. President Wilson had wanted a peace based on mutual respect and self-determination, but the winning powers led by Clemenceau and Lloyd George brushed aside his naive suggestions and wanted revenge. The German delegate was Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, a stiff monocled Prussian who’s autocratic demeanor annoyed Wilson and lost probably the only sympathetic ear there.“ Isn’t it always the same with those people?” Wilson complained. Economist John Maynard Keynes warned the penalties heaped upon postwar Germany by article #232- The War Guilt Clause- would create a grave economic crisis for her and the world, all but predicting the Great Depression to come. The terms imposed on the defeated Germany were so crushing and humiliating that they were a major factor in the German public turning to Adolf Hitler. World War II has sometimes been called the "War to settle the Treaty of Versailles"

1928- Louis Armstrong & Earl Hines recorded West End Blues.

1944- German commanders in the West, Feldmarshalls Rommel and Von Rundstedt have a showdown with Hitler at Berschesgarten. They tell their Fuehrer bluntly that since the Allied breakout at Normandy the war in the West was already lost. Germany must make peace at any price before she is totally destroyed. Hitler said the Allies would never make peace with him so he knows they mean he must resign. Hitler rants about the new miracle weapons that would turn the tide, but Rommel asks him about what to do now.
Hitler angrily throws them out. Von Rundstedt was forcibly retired and another officer promoted over Rommel’s head. Erwin Rommel decided to join in a generals plot to overthrow Hitler.

1950- General Douglas MacArthur flew out from Tokyo to see for himself the beginnings of the Korean War. He stood on a hilltop watching the terrible spectacle of the city of Seoul in flames. As bullets zipped around him and smoke and screams filled the air he calmly lectured the newspapermen about the similarities to Napoleon’s assault on the Austrian city of Ratisbon in 1809.

1955- Walt Disney sends a memo to his studio employees to please come to the grand opening day of Disneyland Park on July 17. He was concerned not enough people would show up the first day and it would look bad on the TV cameras. He shouldn’t have worried.

1969- THE STONEWALL UPRISING- New York City Police got a false tip about a stabbing in a mob-owned Stonewall gaybar in Greenwich Village. Others claim the cops were there to get their money kickbacks, and when it wasn’t paid, they started arresting patrons. But for once the patrons didn’t go quietly but began to fight back. In the 60’s era of social revolution, the incident caused three days of urban rioting and the Gay Pride Movement was born.

1970 -On the one-year anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising, today marked the first Gay Pride Marches in New York, SF, Chicago and Los Angeles.

1971- Mobster Joe Columbo tells an Italian/American Unity Day rally in Columbus Circle, NY that the "Mafia" was a myth invented to demean people of Italian ancestry. A minute later hitmen sent by "Crazy Joe" Gallo, assassinated him.

1971- The Supreme Court overturned the conviction of prizefighter Mohammed Ali for draft evasion.

1975- Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling died during open heart surgery. He was 50. His last movie script was called The Man, about resistance of the Washington powerful to the first black president of the United States.

1997- Heavyweight prizefighter Mike Tyson was banned from boxing and fined $3 million for biting off a chunk of Evander Holyfield’s ear during a match.

2000- Little Cuban boy Elian Gonzales was taken by his father back home to Cuba after being in the US for 7 months. The 6 year olds estranged mother took the child and fled to Florida on a raft. But she and her boyfriend drowned, so the child was cared for by distant cousins in Miami.

Elian Gonzales case became sensationalized by the US media and the vocally militant anti-Castro Cuban community of Miami. Fidel’s regime also had fun making publicity out of the traumatized boy’s plight. Finally Attorney General Janet Reno ordered the family home raided by US Marshals to unite the boy with his father. Back in Havana Juan Miguel Gonzales said: ”I never want anyone to stick a camera in my sons face again!”
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is circular reasoning?

Answer: Circular reasoning happens when an argument begins with a premise that is presented as true in order to prove the premise is true. Circular reasoning was the popular way to conduct science in the Middle Ages until replaced by empirical reasoning ( i.e. doing experiments to provided real proof.).

Quiz: What is circular reasoning?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: We understand the metaphor of when someone is undermined. But where did the phrase originate?
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History for 6/27/2016
Birthdays: Swedish King Charles XII "the Madman of the North", Helen Keller, Norma Kamali, Charles Stuart Parnell, Bob" Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan, Emma Goldman, Marine General Chesty Puller, Walter Johnson, Ross Perot, Isabella Adjani is 61, Lauren Hill, Alice McDermott, J.J. Abrams is 50, Tony Leung ChuWai is 54, Toby McGuire is 41. Katherine Beaumont the voice of Alice in Alice in Wonderland and Wendy in Peter Pan is 78.

1542- Juan Cabrillo set sail from Mexico to explore the unknown California Coast. He was told he might find the magic kingdom of Queen Califa, an island east of Asia, next to the Earthly Paradise, populated with brown amazons with golden swords. He got the idea from a popular novel of the time.

1652 - New Amsterdam passed the 1st speed limit law in the New World.

1693 – The first woman's magazine "Ladies' Mercury" published in London.

1743- The English under George II defeat the French at Dettingen, and composer Georg Frederich Handel wrote in celebration the Dettingen TeDeum.

1787- English historian Edward Gibbon completed his most famous work-"The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". The massive history ran thousands of pages and took twenty years to write. When he presented the first volume, bound in gold, to mad King George III, the King said: -" What's this? Another damn big, black book, eh Mr. Gibbon? Scribble, Scribble!! "

1788- The Battle of the Liman. Catherine the Great's fleet defeated the Turkish navy in the Black Sea near the Moldavan coast. What is memorable about this was one of the Russian admirals was Pavel Ivanovich Jones, or John Paul Jones from the US Navy. During the night Jones got in a little boat manned by one Cossack named Ivak and had himself rowed out into the middle of the Turkish Navy to inspect it. The Cossack spoke good Turkish and learned the fleet's passwords but it was still incredibly dangerous.. Jones suffered no discovery and even paused to write graffiti on the stern end of a Turkish battleship to prove he was there. He wrote in chalk the French: "This ship to be burned- Paul Jones". Next day it was.

1804-The Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr challenged former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton to a duel. Hamilton (the guy on the ten-dollar bill) had slandered Burr in the press and on previous occasions he had also challenged James Monroe and General Charles Lee (a critic of George Washington’s). Between this challenge and the duel on July 11th, Aaron Burr fought another one with his cousin. The two men still had to sit side by side at an Independence Day banquet on July 4th.

1829- James Smithson died. The English scientist had amassed a huge fortune from patents yet was snubbed by polite London society because of his illegitimate birth. So he turned his back on his mother country and willed all his money to the United States, specifically asking a museum be set up in his name. The Smithsonian Institute was the result.

1844- Mormon leader Joseph Smith and his brother Hyram were killed by a mob in Illinois. After being shot down Smith’s body was propped up and used for target practice. A man drew his Bowie knife to decapitate the body but Mormon folklore says his hand was stopped by a thunderbolt.

1847- New York and Boston linked by regular telegraph service.

1862. Battle of Gaines Mill. For the first time, the army launched two large observation balloons to observe enemy troop movements. The Washington and the Intrepid. The rebels launched their own balloon, called the Gazelle. Young George Armstrong Custer went for a ride in one.

1863- George Gordon Meade named commander of the Union Army of the Potomac. The quiet Pennsylvanian was awoken out of his sleep at three a.m. by a courier sent by special train from Washington. At first he thought he was under arrest. General Meade would have command for just one week before he would have to fight the greatest battle in U.S. history- Gettysburg.

1864- Battle of Kennesaw Mountain. General Sherman's Yankees are thrown back by Joe Johnston's Confederates near Atlanta.

1876- Major Gibbon's column discovered the remains of Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn. It was near one hundred degrees Fahrenheit in the dry sun. At first from a distance they thought the naked bloated bodies were skinned buffaloes. Custer’s men had all been paid their monthly wages before riding out of Fort Lincoln. The Indians were uninterested in paper greenbacks, so among the carcasses little piles of money were blowing through the greasy grass. Because hostile Indians were still in the vicinity.
Gibbon's men hastily buried the soldiers where they fell. A few years later when a proper burial detail arrived to re-inter the bodies and remove Custer's remains to West Point they had trouble telling just who was who. So they shoveled a few bones and some yellow hair into a box and called it Custer. As late as 1991 Gen. George A. Custer III has refused to have the West Point tomb opened for DNA testing.

1905- Big Bill Haywood banged a board on the table to call to order the First Meeting of the I.W.W.-the International Workers of the World. Mother Jones, Dorothea Parsons, Eugene Debs, Emma Goldman and Fighting Bob LaFollette were also present. The I.W.W. nicknamed the Wobblies, was a labor movement that sought to unite all working people into one big international organization. Their romantic message of labor brotherhood, carried by poor folksingers like Joe Hill, was popular among miners and farmworkers. But their radical politics terrified big business. When they came out against U.S. participation in World War I the government violently suppressed them.

1922 - Newberry Medal 1st presented for kids literature, the first winner was Hendrik Van Loon.

1949 - "Captain Video & His Video Rangers," debut on DUMONT-TV.

1950- Seoul fell to North Korean troops. President Truman ordered U.S. troops to Korea without asking Congress for a declaration of war. He calls it a "police action." The Marines wrote on their tanks" Truman’s Police". Truman later told his aide Dean Acheson "Dean, I’ve spent the last five years trying to avoid a decision like the one I just had to make." The U.N. Security Council voted for a force to be sent to Korea without the Soviet Union's ambassador being present. Nations like Turkey, Holland, Britain, France, and Australia pledge to send troops for the force.

1954- Rebels organized by the CIA overthrow the elected government of Guatemala.

1962- Daryl F. Zanuck showed up at the quarterly meeting of the exec board of 20th Century Fox, and in a celebrated corporate showdown, he wrested back control of the company he founded in 1935, but had lost control of.

1966- TV soap opera Dark Shadows premiered. Barnabas Collins was the first vampire to have issues with his job, and so became the ancestor of the modern romantic vampires of True Blood and Twilight.

1973- Senior White House Counsel John Dean testified to the Watergate committee that President Richard Nixon maintained an Enemies List. The list ran from Senator Ted Kennedy and journalist Daniel Shore, to June Foray and Bill Scott, who did the cartoon voices of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Bullwinkle the Moose.

1984- Hollywood introduced the PG-13 rating to indicate graphic violence, invented for the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

1995- Boyishly proper British actor Hugh Grant is busted for soliciting sex from a Sunset Blvd. street hooker named Divine Brown. Grant had just released a film called “ The Englishman Who went up a Hill and Came down a Mountain". Pundits had fun changing the title to "The Englishman who went to L.A. a Hugh, and Came Back a John."

2007- British Prime Minister Tony Blair stepped down after ten years. His security police nickname in office was Bambi.

2008- Pixar’s WALL-E opened in theaters.

2011- The Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team franchise filed for bankruptcy. The team owners, Mr & Mrs Frank McCourt wrecked the teams finances fighting over their personal divorce proceedings.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: We understand the metaphor of when someone is undermined. But where did the phrase originate?

Answer: In the Middle Ages, one of the methods to attack a castle was to dig a tunnel under a section of wall, causing the wall to collapse. Today it’s a metaphor for subverting the basis or proof of an argument.

Quiz: We understand the metaphor of when someone is undermined. But where did the phrase originate?

Yesterday’s question answered below: Some people describe the UK Brexit vote as Jingoism. What is Jingoism?
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History for 6/26/2016
Birthdays: Peter Lorre- born Laszlo Lowenstein, Pearl Buck, Abner Doubleday, Babe Deidrickson-Zacharias, Willy Messerschmidt, Claudio Abbado, Woolie Reitherman, Gregg LeMond, Vittorio Storaro, Colonel Tom Parker, Pat Morita, Chris Isaak, Derek Jeter, Chris O’Donnell, Sean Hayes is 46

4AD- The Roman Emperor Augustus officially adopted his stepson Tiberius, as his official heir and successor.

363 AD- Julian the Apostate slain in battle. Julian was the Roman Emperor who decided his stepdad Constantine had made a mistake making the world Christian and we should go back to Zeus, Venus, Hercules and the lot. This is why he is called "Apostate". During his invasion of Persia his camp was surprised by the Grand Surenna, the Persian Prime Minister. Once the battle he was struck in the chest by the enemy spear. Dying, he supposedly looked heavenward and said:" You have won, Galilean." The Roman legions elected Christian General Jovian as emperor, and The Western World never looked back.

1483- Duke Richard of Gloucester, having locked up his two nephew princes in the Tower of London "for protection", has them declared illegitimate, so he could become King Richard III. Even after Richard was killed in battle and the Tudor Dynasty in place the two little princes seemed to have disappeared.
In 1903 their two little skeletons were discovered buried under a staircase in the Tower. Some historians maintain Richard III didn’t kill the princes but Henry VII Tudor did after he took the crown from Richard. Then his granddaughter’s favorite playwright Will Shakespeare wrote a play pinning the dirty deed squarely on Richard.

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

1522-The armies of the Grand Turk attack the island of Rhodes. The Knights of St. John had fallen back to Rhodes after losing the Crusades. They will lose this base too, but make their final stand on Malta.

1541- Francisco Pizzarro, the conqueror of Peru, was eating dinner in Lima when his enemies rushed in and stabbed him to death.

1797 - Charles Newbold patents 1st cast-iron plow. He can't sell it to farmers, though; they fear the effects of iron on their soil.

1815- After Waterloo, Napoleon requested as a condition of his abdication be that he be allowed to go to the United States. He started to study books on America and the provisional French government prepared two frigates at Rochefort to take him across the Atlantic. Napoleon said his goal was now to be a scientist and study flora and fauna but he also said to another "Come, let us go to Texas and found a new Empire in the Desert!" But the allies would not allow this dream to manifest. The British took him instead to a lonely prison island off the coast of Africa, Saint Helena.

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

1858- The U.S. Army marched into Salt Lake City Utah. This was considered the end of the Mormon Rebellion. The city was deserted as Mormon leader Brigham Young had ordered the population to flee into the mountains. The US commander Col. Albert Sidney Johnston would later die at Shiloh leading Confederate forces. In the soldiers’ gambling tents, nicknamed FrogTown, was a teamster and card-shark named William Clark Quantrill, who would one day lead his rebel guerrillas in Missouri-Quantrills Raiders. When Abe Lincoln was inaugurated, he was asked” What do you propose to do about the Mormons?” He replied” I propose to leave them alone.”

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

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

1900 - Dr Walter Reed began the research that conquered Yellow Fever.

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

1916- The Cleveland Indians baseball team started the custom of wearing numbers on their uniforms.

1922- Montgomery’s Country House opened in the Los Feliz Area of LA. In the 1930s it was the nearest bar to Walt Disney’s Hyperion Studio, so artists nicknamed it “ the commissary”. Today it is called the Tam O’ Shanter, and is still in business.

1924- At the Democratic Party nominating convention young politician Franklin D. Roosevelt stood up on crutches and painfully walked the 30 feet to the podium to nominate candidate Al Smith for president. Al Smith lost, but the big news was FDR was not washed up due to his polio, but was back in the national political scene. He received a standing ovation.

1924 - The Ziegfeld Follies opened on Broadway.

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

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

1927- The Cyclone Rollercoaster ride debuted at Coney Island Amusement Park. It was built on the site of the Switchback Railway, the oldest rollercoaster.

1940- Turkey announced that unlike World War I it would sit this one out thank you. It declared itself neutral in World War II.

1945- The United Nations is born when 50 nations sign the U.N. Charter in War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. John F. Kennedy was there, trying his hand as a journalist.

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

1959- Queen Elizabeth and President Dwight Eisenhower dedicated the Saint Lawrence Seaway- a system of locks and canals connecting the Atlantic Ocean and Saint Lawrence River to the Great Lakes in the interior of the North American Continent.

1959- Disney short Donald in Mathmagic Land premiered with the film Darbie O’Gill and the Little People.

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

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

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

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

1977 - Elvis Presley does his last public performance, in Indianapolis.

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

1990- The IRA detonated a bomb in the elite conservative hangout in London called the Carleton Club that almost killed Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. The exclusive club's rules are so strict that Thatcher had to be named an "Honorary Man" before she could enter.

1992- Secretary of the Navy William Garnett resigned over the Tailhook Scandal, when Navy pilots went wild partying at a convention and sexually assaulted 26 female officers. Female officers testified of having to run a gauntlet of drunken pilots pawing and tearing at their clothes.
The initial inquiry was led by Rear Admiral Duvall M. Williams. He was replaced after he told people he thought female Navy Pilots were all “hookers and go-go dancers.” The chief whistleblower that testified against the high command, Lt. Paula Coughlin, was made a pariah, and hounded out of the service.

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

2003 - Lenin said the Workers Must Control the Means of Production. Today a group of strippers bought their San Francisco bar The Lusty Lady.

2015- In the case Obergefell vs. Hodges, the Supreme Court ruled LGBT Americans had the right to marry. Legalizing same-sex marriage.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Some people describe the UK Brexit vote as Jingoism. What is Jingoism?

Answer: Jingoism is a form of fervent patriotism that favors a narrow, nativist world view. It comes from a British Empire music hall song “ We don’t want a war, but by Jingo if they do, we got the ships, we got the men, we got the money too…”

Quiz: Some people describe the UK Brexit vote as Jingoism. What is Jingoism?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered Below: The Ghostbuster movies created the idea of “being slimed”. It comes from an arcane Victorian belief in ectoplasm. What was ectoplasm?
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History for 6/25/2016
Birthday: George Orwell, Marc Charpentier, Lord Louis Mountbatten, General Hap Arnold, Cajun musician Clifton Chenier, Sidney Lumet, Walter Brennan, Willis Reed, George Abbott, Carly Simon, June Lockhart, Alex Toth, Peyo (the creator of the Smurfs), Jimmy Dyne-o-Mite Walker, George Michaels, Mike Myers is 53, Ricky Gervais is 55.

841- Charlemagne had made all Europe from Spain to Hungary the Frankish Empire. But the grandchildren of Charlemagne divided the empire according to their custom. Instead of the eldest son inheriting everything (primogeniture), all the sons got an equal share. This ensured civil wars to reunite and consolidate power. After knocking off their brother Lothar, Charles the Bald & Louis the German fixed the borders for a final division of the nations, that would become France and Germany.

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

1673- The Dutch open their dykes and flood the land around Amsterdam to stop an invading French army.

1744- The first Methodist conference convened, in London.

1789- This day representatives from the Revolutionary National Assembly went to Paris city hall and told King Louis’ Royal administrators to get lost. They would now run Paris.

1815- After Napoleons defeat at Waterloo, now it that it was safe, King Louis XVIII returned to France. He was the younger brother of the Louis XVI guillotined in the Revolution. The slow, rotund Louis XVIII, called Dix-Huit -Deez-Hweet in French, was nicknamed "Louis Biscuit" by the British because he came to Paris with the supply wagons of Wellington’s Army. The French called him Louis Dix-Huitres meaning Louis Ten Oysters. One British officer called him "A French Falstaff, a Fat Disgrace."

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

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

1863- During the Civil War siege of Vicksburg, Yankee engineers dug a tunnel under the rebel lines and fill it with gunpowder. The huge explosion accomplished little, but blew a black cook named Abraham up through the air and over into Union lines. The man was badly frightened by his strange flight to freedom, but miraculously unhurt . Soldiers of an Iowa regiment immediately put him in a tent and charged people five cents to come look at him.

1867 - 1st barbed wire patented by Lucien B Smith of Ohio. It was considered the perfect tool to protect crops from free-range cattle and other marauders. During the Boer War in 1898 South Africa the White Afrikaner Boers got the novel idea of stringing the stuff in front of the attacking Gordon Highlander regiments. It’s been used as a tool to herd people ever since,

1876- CUSTER'S LAST STAND called by the Sioux the Battle of the Greasy Grass- George Armstrong Custer and 300 of his 7th Cavalry are wiped out by Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and the combined Sioux, Cheyenne nations (approximately 1,700 warriors).

There had been defeats of the whites like this before: Fetterman's Massacre, The Little Rosebud Battle, but nothing captures the imagination like the Little Big Horn. And for Native-Americans it marks the last coming together of the tribes and the last great victory .The Ogalala Sioux, Hunkpapa, Miniconjou, Lakota Sioux and Cheyenne all united to resist the violation of their sacred Black Hills. No U.S. Army commander ever expected so many different tribes could unite and field thousands of warriors at once.

Custer trusted in his audacity. "Custer's Luck". The boy general –just 23 years old in the Civil War, he was always at the head of his men in costly, reckless attacks yet personally suffered nothing more severe than the flu. Now at age 36 his luck ran out.

Accounts by natives were sketchy and no one is sure just how Custer died. The last white soldier who saw him alive was a courier sent away with a message " Benteen, come up quick. Big Village. Bring packs". The courier was an Italian immigrant named Giusepppi Martini who couldn’t speak English. The famous image of Custer standing to the last with Old Glory in hand was made up by an artist named Paxton for an Anheuser-Busch beer advertisement in 1877. One Crow Indian scout who escaped said Custer was the first casualty and that his being shot down panicked the troopers. Others say the last they saw of Custer he was crawling on all fours with blood trickling down his mouth. He was found in a pile of bodies with a bullet wound in the left side and one in the temple. The Indians didn’t even know they had killed Yellow Hair until told days later.

The tribes afterwards dispersed and headed for Canada. The only 7th Cavalry survivor was Commanche, Capt. Mile’s Keough's horse. He was treated with honor by the army and fed a bucket of beer every payday for the rest of his life. Custer was hallowed with martyrdom. Ulysses Grant was quiet about the affair but privately thought it a badly botched operation. Sitting Bull was more blunt- "The soldiers were fools, they rode to their deaths."

Mrs. Libby Custer lived until 1933 and met FDR. The last living eyewitness of the battle, Mrs. Kate Bighead of the Cheyenne who was taken on the battlefield by her mother as a young girl, died in 1959.

1870- Toi Yo ta Hoooo! Richard Wagner's opera Die Walkure premiered in Munich.

1906- Famed New York architect Stanford White was having dinner at Madison Square Garden (back when it was still a garden, on Madison Ave. and still square) when he was shot to death by millionaire Harry Thaw, the husband of his mistress Evelyn Nesbitt. The eccentric Thaw was obsessed by White, hiring detectives to follow the artist, and report his amorous pursuits. He would only date women who had dated White first. Thaw’s defense attorney’s got him acquitted of murder by reason of temporary insanity.

So instead of the electric chair Harry Thaw spent a few years in a mental home living on squab and champagne. The crowd cheered him when he was freed. The key defense witness was 22 year old Mrs. Evelyn Nesbitt-Thaw, one of the beautiful "Gibson Girls’. She gave juicy details of her kinky relationship with White, like the red velvet swing she would ride in the nude over the admiring architect’s head. After Thaw was released they divorced. Before Evelyn Nesbitt died of old age in 1967, she admitted Stanford White was the only man she ever really loved. The incident was the basis for I.L. Doctorow's novel and movie "Ragtime".

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

1910- Congress passed the Mann Act sometimes called the White Slave Trafficking Act. It stated you couldn’t coerce a woman across state borders for immoral purposes. Penalties are doubled for legal minors but the law says nothing about boys.

1934- Young artist Milt Kahl's first day at Walt Disney Studios. It was said he was the first artist to ever show Walt a real portfolio of drawings to get hired.

1940- Young actor, and liberal labor activist Ronald Reagan married his first wife, actress Jane Wyman.

1942- A staff officer named Dwight Eisenhower was named by General George Marshall to overall command of all US forces in Europe. Picked over 400 other officers Eisenhower was chosen for his organizational skills, although up until then he had never actually led troops in combat.

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

1945- President Truman wrote in his diary about how to end the war with Japan” Should I invade or bomb and blockade? This is the hardest decision I ever had to make..” Truman knew about the atomic bomb, but didn’t know if it would work until July 16th.

1951- After losing a power struggle to Dory Schary, Louis B. Mayer announced he was stepping down as head of MGM. Mayer in his time was the most powerful man in Hollywood. He kept an all white office modeled after Mussolini’s in Rome.

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

1956- The last Packard automobile was produced.

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

1968- Pierre Elliot Trudeau elected Prime Minister of Canada. For the next twenty five years he and his flower-child wife Margaret will be one of Canada’s most colorful leaders.

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

1981- Bill Gates and Paul Allen file papers to incorporate their company Microsoft.

1982- Ridley Scott’s sci-fi film Blade Runner opened.

1991-The Fifth Balkan War- also called the Yugoslav Civil Wars began. After the death of aged Communist dictator Josef Tito, the union of South Slavs called Yugoslavia started to come apart. This day Slovenia & Croatia declared their independence. Serbia had allocated to itself the bulk of the armaments of the former Yugoslav army and attacked them with it.
During these wars it was almost impossible to tell Serbs, Bosnian-Moslems or Croats apart. At times they killed each other based on what their automobile license plate read.

1980- Disney’s film Herbie Goes Bananas, premiered.

1997- Disney's animated film Hercules released.

2009- Michael Jackson, called the King of Pop, died after his personal physician Dr. Conrad Murray administered a powerful sedative named Propofol to help him sleep and stopped his heart instead. He was 50 and been performing on stage since the age of 5.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: The Ghostbuster movies created the idea of “being slimed”. It comes from an arcane Victorian belief in ectoplasm. What was ectoplasm?

Answer: Edwardian society had a fascination with spiritualism, that we could communicate with the dead. They believed psychic ectoplasm was a strange sticky substance that ghosts were made of. That a good psychic medium could excrete this stuff from their minds during a trance.