Question: What does it mean to defenestrate someone?

Yesterdays Question answered below: What is a John Roscoe? (Hint: Damon Runyon)
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History for 3/7/2023
Birthdays: Maurice Ravel, Piet Mondrian, Roman Emperor Geta, Luther Burbank, Tammy Fae Baker, Willard Scott, Lynn Swann, Franco Harris, Daniel D. Travanti, Rachel Weisz is 53, Michael Eisner is 81, Wanda Sykes is 59, Peter Saarsgard is 52, Bryan Cranston is 67.

322 BC- the Greek philosopher Aristotle died of indigestion.

161AD- The death of the Roman Emperor Antoninus Pius. Marcus Aurelius became Emperor. Marcus named his brother Lucius Verus as co-emperor, but Verus died after a few years. Marcus Aurelius became famous as the philosopher-emperor, ruling justly and leaving behind his Meditations, one of the great works of western philosophy.

1274- Saint Thomas Aquinas died in Italy. Everybody knew the great teacher was so holy he undoubtedly would be made a saint (the medieval equivalent of being called to the Hall of Fame). So rather and wait for opportunity to sell his bones as relics, the people sped up the process by boiling his remains in lye.

1765- PARLIAMENT PASSES THE STAMP ACT. Ever since winning Canada and India from France, England had to come up with ways to pay for her massive war debt as well as garrisoning and administering all the new possessions. Up until now Americans had gotten off easy on taxes, because the Crown knew their economy was building. The Stamp Act ordered that all purchases and exports to and from America have a royal stamp (i.e. tax) on them, sort of like the stamp you see on liquor bottle caps. These taxes were already in place in England, so Whitehall felt nobody would mind. Americans went ballistic and overnight became a nation of smugglers. They most strongly objected to the idea that the tax was levied without their consent. No one consulted their elected representatives, and there were no American seats in Parliament.
Even though the unpopular act was repealed a year later after Benjamin Franklin successfully argued in Parliament, the resentment against the mother country lingered. The British in turn were surprised and annoyed by the all the fuss. They felt the Yankees were an ungrateful bunch, they had defeated French for.

1774- To combat rampant smuggling and teach a lesson to the increasingly uppity New Englanders, the Royal Governor of Massachusetts General Thomas Gage ordered the Port of Boston closed. This act all but ensured that the first outbreak of violence in the American Revolution would happen there.

1809- French Balloonist Jean Pierre Blanchard died from injuries sustained from crashing his balloon in the Netherlands. Blanchard with a man named Jeffries had crossed the English Channel by air, and for years he had demonstrated the wonders of air flight for audiences like Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon.

1850- THE 7TH OF MARCH SPEECH- The only address given to Congress that is known only by it's date. Senator Daniel Webster stood up and electrified the nation with a three hour address backing the Clay Compromise: "Mr. Speaker ! I rise not as a Massachusetts man, or a Northern man, but as an American !!" This Northern abolitionist backed the fugitive slave law and other concessions to the South in exchange for California entering the union as a non-slave state.
New England supporters were furious. His controversial stand probably cost him his last chance of ever becoming president, and he died bitter two years later. But John F. Kennedy said in "Profiles in Courage" that by doing this act Daniel Webster helped delay the Civil War for ten more years, which allowed the north to grow more industrially powerful. So he saved the United States in a way.

1862- THE BATTLE OF PEA RIDGE- Yankees under General Curtis defeated a Confederate army under Gen. Stirling Price, keeping Missouri in the Union. It was a confused battle with militias, frontier scouts like Wild Bill Hickock and Creek Indians under Confederate Colonel Stand Watie. Curtis directed the battle in an old brown corduroy jacket and nuzzled a shotgun in his lap. The Creeks captured a Union battery but stopped their advance to dance with the scalps of the Yankees.

1862- BULLETHOLE ELLIS- Rebel Guerrilla leader William Quantrill and his raiders shot up the town of Aubrey, Kansas. During the raid, Quantrill fired his Colt revolver at a man looking out of a second story window named Abraham Ellis. The bullet was slowed by smashing through the windowsill and embedded in the man’s skull, but just missed touching his brain. Quantrill apologized to Ellis. Ellis had helped him get a teaching job before the war. The raiders left him for dead, but Abe Ellis recovered. Old Bullethole Ellis lived to a ripe old age, just with a large round dark hole in the center of his forehead.

1877- Bill Reed, a Union Pacific Railroad worker discovered a vast field of dinosaur fossils at Como Bluff Wyoming. "The bones extend for seven miles and are by the ton!"

1906- Finland becomes the first nation to give women the right to vote.

1916- BMW- The manufacturing firms of Karl Rapp and Gustav Otto merged to form the Bayerische Flugzeugwerke AG -Bavarian Aircraft Works. The company would later become the Bayerische Motor-Werke -Bavarian Motor Works or BMW. The Logo circle represents a white propeller turning against a blue sky- the colors of the old Kingdom of Bavaria, the heraldic shield of the ruling Wittelsbach Dynasty. After the world wars, BMW was prohibited from manufacturing aircraft engines, as their engines had powered the fierce fighters like the Messerschmitt Bf 109 and the Focke-Wulf 190. So, BMW focused on making high quality cars.

1932-BATTLE OF THE RIVER ROUGE- At the depth of the Great Depression unemployment in Detroit was up to 50% of the population. 10,000 desperately unemployed auto workers staged a protest march on Henry Ford's Rouge River plant, the largest factory in the world. They are met by police and hired thugs who fired into the crowd, killing 3 and wounding 25. Henry Ford, (who personally made $10 million that year) had machine guns mounted on his home's roof and advised his chief executives to carry sidearms. Fords private in-house police were called by the Orwellian misnomer the Service Department.

1936- HITLER RE-OCCUPIED THE RHINELAND- Since the Versailles treaty the German industrial heartland of the Ruhr valley was under neutral and sometimes Anglo-French occupation. Imagine trying to restart your stagnant economy with Chicago, Detroit and Pittsburgh under foreign control. Today Hitler took the biggest gamble of his career and ordered the still infant Wehrmacht army to reoccupy the Ruhr, in defiance of all previous treaties. He dared the Allies to do something about it, but they remained quiet. German generals were amazed that France and England could have easily invaded at any time and squashed them, but they did nothing.

1942- The Japanese army captured Rangoon and cut the Burma Road, severing Anglo- Chinese supply lines. After this supplies would have to be brought in 'Over the Hump" meaning flown by unescorted transport planes from India over the Himalayas.

1945- THE BRIDGE AT REMAGEN- A hostile army had not crossed the Rhine into Germany since Napoleon in 1806. The Germans called their defense of the border The Siegfried Line. The Nazis had ordered all Rhine bridges destroyed, but the bridge at Remagen was detonated with inferior charges. So it was intact as the U.S. Third Army approached. Sgt. Alex Drabik of Ohio ran across the bridge, weaving back and forth like a football player, with the enemy firing at him from all sides. Just as he reached the other side a Nazi popped out, pointed a Lugar pistol in his face and pulled the trigger. The gun was empty. The Siegfried Line was breached, and Sgt. Drabik died of very old age in 1993.

1945- Tom & Jerry short Quiet Please won the Oscar for Best Animated Short.

1947- Winston Churchill, while giving a speech in America about the Soviet dominance of Eastern Europe uses the term "Iron Curtain". " From Zagreb on the Adriatic to Stettin in the Baltic, an Iron Curtain has descended across Europe." The phrase had been coined earlier by German Admiral Doenitz, but Churchill popularized the phrase. The Iron Curtain ended in 1989.

1951- The Prime Minister of Iran- General Ali Rasmara was assassinated by Islamic extremists.

1955- The 7th Emmy Awards, the first to be nationally televised. Steve Allen hosted. Held at the Moulin Rouge nightclub.

1965- BLOODY SUNDAY- THE EDMUND PETTUS BRIDGE-As Dr. Martin Luther King’s Civil Rights marchers reached the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Gov George Wallace had Alabama police attack them with firehoses, teargas, bullwhips and attack dogs. Dozens of peaceful marchers were beaten and hospitalized. Three were killed. The brutal images on television shocked the nation, had probably did more to ensure passage of the National Civil Rights Bill than anything the police could do to stop it.

1969- Golda Meir became Prime Minister of Israel.

1985- Lionel Ritchie and Michael Jackson released “ We Are The World” a song recorded by many of the top names in pop music at the time, all proceeds going to help starving children in Africa. Bruce, Springsteen, Madonna, Paul McCartney, Mick Jagger, and more. It became the 8th most popular single of all time.

1988- 300 pound female impersonator Harris Milstead, better known as Divine in the John Waters films, died of sleep apnea. He was 42.

1999- Film director Stanley Kubrick died of a heart attack in his sleep, just five days after screening his final film Eyes Wide Shut. He was 71.

2010- The Pixar film UP won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
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Yesterday’s question: What is a John Roscoe? (Hint: Damon Runyon)

Answer: A nickname for a gun. A gat, A heater, Etc.

Quiz: What is a John Roscoe? (Hint: Damon Runyon)

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Who was El Kabong? (Hint: 1960s TV)
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History for 3/6/2023
Birthdays: Michelangelo Buonarotti, Cyrano De Bergerac, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Phil Sheridan, Lou Costello, Ivan Boesky, Ring Lardner, Gabriele Garcia-Marquez, Valentina Tereschkova the first woman in space, Tom Arnold, Kiri Te Kanawa, Rob Reiner is 75, Alan Greenspan, DC Mayor Marion Barry, Stephen Schwartz is 75, Ed McMahon, Shaquille O’Neal is 51

Today is the Feast Day of Saint Fridolin the Wanderer.

1521- Fernan de Magellan discovered the Pacific island of Guam.

1554- The future King of Spain Phillip II married the Catholic Queen of England Mary Tudor long distance, by proxy. When Phillip came to England, and realized Mary had waited to long to have children and was now too old and ill, he sent emissaries to see if her half-sister Elizabeth was interested.

1834- The Ontario settlement of Fort York is incorporated as the new City of Toronto.

1836- THE ALAMO- The Mexican army of General Santa Anna overwhelmed a small garrison of rebellious Texans in an old mission. The tragic stand of 189 men led by colorful frontiersmen like Davey Crockett and Jim Bowie against 7,000 troops has become part of American mythology. That they ignored Sam Houston's direct orders to blow up the mission and join his main army with their valuable cannon is forgotten. Apologists contend that if they didn’t stall, Santa Anna's army he would have swooped down on Washington-on-the-Brazos and squashed the Texas Rebellion while Texan leaders were still quibbling over their constitution.
The attack began at 4:30 a.m. in the predawn darkness and was all over in 90 minutes, a little after 6 a.m. Jim Bowie was bayoneted in his hospital bed. The notes of a Texas officer named Dolson who interviewed a Mexican officer named Sanchez after the battle were discovered in 1961. It revealed that maybe Davey Crockett didn't go down heroically using his rifle "Old Betsy" as a club- like in the movies, but tried to surrender. He was a politician after all. Santa Anna had him and any surviving white men shot. Capt. Sanchez wasn’t sure if it was Crockett. We'll never know for sure.
There were 16 Alamo survivors, the women and children, and Colonel Travis' black servant Joe. Santa Anna made sure they were each given two pesos and a blanket and set free. The battle cry of Texans became Remember the Alamo!

1837- Col Travis black slave Joe fought on the barricades of the Alamo alongside his master. After the battle Joe was thanked for his services by being returned to Travis’ family in Alabama to remain a slave. On the one-year anniversary of the battle, Joe escaped to freedom. He stole a horse and escaped to Mexico. He remained in hiding for 40 years, long after the Civil War and Emancipation, emerging for a newspaper interview finally in 1877.

1841-American John Goff Rand working for the Winsor & Newton Company of London patented artists oil paints premixed in collapsible metal tubes. Before this, artists (or their apprentices) had to mix their own pigment from ground stones and egg, then stored the mix in pig bladders.

1850- Gustav Flaubert was the French writer who was once tried for pornography for writing Madame Bovary. This day while in Egypt he kept an appointment with the countries most famous belly dancing prostitute, Kuchuk Hanem.

1853- Giusseppi Verdi’s classic opera La Traviata premiered at Teatro alla Fenice in Venice. It was based on Dumas novel Le Dame Aux Camelias. Verdi wrote in his diary about the premiere:" The evening was a disaster! Was it my fault or the fault of the singers? Only time will tell..."

1856- Mr. Simon met Mr. Schuster while buying a piano in New York City and discovered they had a common love of books. They formed Simon & Schuster, one of the most famous publishers in the U.S.A.

1857- THE DREDD SCOTT DECISION. One of the incidents leading to the Civil War and one of the most infamous Supreme Court rulings in US History. A slave, Dredd Scott, sued in court for his freedom on the grounds that he no longer lived in a slave state, because his master had moved his home to a free state.
The Supreme Court of Chief Justice Taney, whom the N.Y. Tribune had described as "5 slaveholders and two doughfaces", handed down the decision that not only was Scott still a slave, but he and his descendants could never have rights of U.S. Citizenship, no matter where they lived. In effect, all African-Americans even if born free in the North were still not people but property.
This idea exploded the already enraged public opinion in the North. Four years later the same justice Taney swore in Abraham Lincoln as president.

1860- Presidential candidate Abe Lincoln in a speech said:" Thank God we have a system where workers have the Right to Strike."

1864- THE NAVAJO LONG WALK- After being defeated when their Navajo-Fortress in Canyon de Chelly was stormed by US Cavalry under Kit Carson, the Navajo and their families were forced into a death march in the winter cold several hundred miles to a reservation. Years later Washington decided it didn't want their ancestral lands after all and let them go home.

1884- Susan B. Anthony led 100 women’s rights advocates to a meeting with President Chester Allen Arthur. They demanded he give his support for giving women the vote. President Arthur said he would think about it, then he did nothing.

1899- The wonder drug of the age and the first patent medicine- Aspirin, was patented. Felix Hoffman isolated the compound salicin from ground willow bark, an old Indian pain remedy. Then he went on to invent Heroin.

1911-THE YELLOW PERIL- In the bizarre game of diplomatic chess the great powers played before World War I, race was a favorite topic. The" Battle between the White Forces of Christian Civilization against the limitless Yellow Hordes of Asia" was an idea the German Kaiser Wilhelm liked to talk at length on.
On this day the Kaiser's agents convinced the U.S. public via the US tabloid press that Japan had concluded an alliance with Mexico and was preparing to seize the Panama Canal, and that a Japanese Army was even now marching up Baja to invade California! To quiet public fears President Taft was actually forced to mobilize 2/3 of the U.S. Army and Navy and sent it to the Mexican border "for maneuvers".
When the Great War did come Japan was on the American side, and the Kaiser tried fruitlessly to make an alliance with an unsympathetic Mexico.

1912- Happy National Oreo Cookie Day! The Oreo cookie debuted on store shelves.

1917- Woman’s rights advocate Margaret Sanger is released from prison where she was jailed for trying to open the first Planned Parenthood clinic. She married the inventor of the Three-In-One Oil Company and would smuggle abortion medicines in cans of oil. During prohibition she smuggled diaphragms in cases of innocent-looking bootleg whiskey. She lived into the 1960s, long enough to see the Birth Control Pill and the Women’s Movement.

1918- The Navy destroyer USN Cyclops with a crew of 306 disappeared in the Bermuda Triangle, and has never been found.

1921- The film Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse premiered. The first Hollywood film to earn over one million dollars, and it made a major star out of Rudolf Valentino.

1933- Two days after inauguration Eleanor Roosevelt became the first First Lady to hold her own separate press conference. She insisted only female journalists could attend.

1936- Mr. Clarence Birdseye introduced frozen vegetables.

1944- The first big daylight bombing raid on Berlin. In one of the largest air battles of World War II, 800 B-17 and P-51s battled hundreds of Luftwaffe fighters. Over 80 US planes were shot down, losing 690 airmen, and 45 German planes. But the message was clear, Germany would now get the kind of wholesale destruction that Rotterdam, Warsaw and London got.

1978- Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt was shot and crippled by a lunatic.

1979- The film The China Syndrome premiered. It was about an accident at an American nuclear power plant. Three weeks later the real Three Mile Island accident occurred, boosting the box office. " It's spooky, it's enough to make you religious" said star Michael Douglas.

1981- CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite retired. Dan Rather succeeded him after CBS learned ABC was offering Rather big bux to jump networks. Roger Mudd, who was thought to be the real successor to Cronkite, left the network to anchor the History Channel. Dan Rather was the CBS anchor until 2004.

1989- Time Inc. merged with Warner Communications to become Time Warner, the largest media conglomerate in the world. They were bought by AOL in 2000 but AOL proved to be dead weight and they resumed control as TimeWarner in 2003.

1992- The film The Lawnmower Man premiered. It featured early motion-capture CGI imagery, and claimed to have the first virtual reality sex scene.

1998- The Big Lebowski opened in theaters. The Dude Abides…
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Yesterdays Question: Who was El Kabong? (Hint: 1960s TV)

Answer: It was a Zorro-type personality adopted by the Hanna Barbera character Quick Draw McGraw. Instead of a trademark Z drawn by his sword, he would whack you on the head with his guitar, while yelling “KA-BONG!”

Question: Who was El Kabong? (Hint: 1960s TV)

Quiz: What is marzipan?
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History for 3/5/2023
Birthdays: Henry III of England, Giovanni Batista Tiepolo, Explorer Le Sieur de Cadillac the founder of Detroit, Hector Villa-Lobos, Howard Pyle, William Oughtred 1574- inventor of the Slide Rule, Red Rosa Luxemburg, Rex Harrison, Dean Stockwell, Paolo Pasolini, Andy Gibb, Samantha Eggar, Andrej Wajda, Fred Williamson, Penn Gillette is 67, Eva Mendes is 48

Today is the feast day of Saint Eusebius of Cremona.

493AD- BARBARIAN PEACE SUMMIT- 17 years after the last Roman emperor fell, Theodoric the Visigoth invited to peace talks Odoacer, King of the Germans in Italy. On a pre-arranged signal two Goths held Odoacer's hands pretending to shake them, then Theodoric whipped out his sword and with one stroke sliced Odoacer in half lengthwise. He said of his sword stroke: "Surely the mother of this knave hath made him with gristle, for I find no bones in his body." Peace was achieved.

1496- English King Henry VII hired Italian Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot) to go explore this New World that the Spanish were going on about.

1534- Renaissance painter Correggio died when after an argument in the cathedral of Parma with his patrons paid him with sacks of pennies. He grew overheated carrying them all home and died of a fever at age 45.

1562- The Teutonic Knights disbanded- Warrior monks were a creation of the Crusades, but by the Renaissance they were outmoded. This German order of military monks formed in Jerusalem went to Prussia after the Crusades to convert the pagan Baltic peoples by chopping them up for Christ. But by now they had two big problems: Number one- everyone they used to chop were already Christians. Number two- the Reformation had started and all the knights were converting to Lutheranism, even the Order’s own bishop! So Grand Master Kettler went to Wittenberg to talk to the great reformer Martin Luther. Luther told Kettler to chuck the whole monk-thing, get married and become Duke of Prussia. Brandenburg-Prussia was the state that Germany unified under in 1870.

1616- The Holy Office of the Inquisition published its verdict on the new scientific ideas of Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo. It read:" The idea that the Earth goes around the Sun is Foolish, Philosophically Erroneous and Heretical since it contradicts Holy Scripture. The idea that the Earth revolves on its axis is also Ridiculous and Heretical." Galileo’s writings were not removed from the Index of Banned Books until 1835. In 1986, Pope John Paul II admitted Galileo might have been right.

1717- On his birthday Giovanni Tiepolo joined the Guild of Saint Lawrence, the artists union in Rome.

1759- Francois Voltaire’s most famous satire on religion and hypocrisy- Candide- was published. It was immediately ordered publicly burned by the regional parliaments of Geneva and Paris. This only increased its popularity. To stay out of trouble Voltaire first refused to admit he was the author:" People must have lost their senses to attribute to me that pack of nonsense! I have, Thanks God, better occupations."

1770- THE BOSTON MASSACRE- A snowball fight near some British sentries turned into an ugly anti-British riot that made the redcoats open fire on the crowd. African American Crispus Attucks among several others were killed. Radical publisher Sam Adams inflated the incident into the Boston Massacre. The British authorities were accommodating enough to allow the soldiers put on trial in a colonial civilian court. The soldiers were defended by a young Boston lawyer named John Adams. They were all acquitted.

1836- At the Alamo, as the Mexican army of Santa Anna prepared for their final attack, legend has it Colonel Travis gathered the remaining defenders. He drew a line in the sand with his sword and asked all who wished to stay and fight to the bitter end to cross it. All crossed but one. He was an elderly Frenchman named Louis Rose, who slipped out through the lines to safety. Rose was a veteran of Napoleon's army and had fought at Waterloo. I guess he felt he had been through enough history for one lifetime. At dusk, 16 year old rider James Allen slipped out of the Alamo to bring the doomed men’s last message to the outside world.

1853- Harry Steinway & Sons began their piano making company.

1863- The U.S. Army finally admits having the men do their own cooking was bad for morale, as well as their digestion. The first field kitchens with real cooks set up.

1868- Englishman C.H. Gould patented the first stapler.

1877- Rutherford Hayes inaugurated. His wife banned hard liquor from the White House. For this she was nicknamed Lemonade Lucy.

1891- The town council of Phoenix Arizona offered a bounty of $200 for every dead Indian brought in, and they didn’t care how they came to be dead.

1912- Italy became the first to use dirigibles for military purposes. Using them to get aerial reconnaissance of Turkish positions west of Tripoli, Libya.

1913- The day after his inauguration, President Woodrow Wilson began filling his cabinet. Secretary of the Navy Dearing proposed as Assistant Secretary of the Navy a young New York assemblyman named Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wilson said:" Most Roosevelts I know try to run everything, but this fellow is a capitol idea!"

1915- NYPD broke up a plot by anarchists to set off bombs in St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

1918- Lenin moved the capitol of Russia from Petrograd- Saint Petersburg, back to Moscow.

1933- The day after his inauguration, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered a nationwide "Bank Holiday", a nice way of saying shut the whole system down to stop the panic. One third of all U.S. banks had already collapsed. Roosevelt moved so fast, throwing program after program to combat the Great Depression, that his first 100 days in office became legendary, and now the media use it as a litmus to measure other presidents against.

1936- Disney’s Three Orphaned Kittens won the best short Oscar at the 8th Academy Awards.

1937-Allegheny Airlines born, later to become U.S. Air. Allegheny had such a bad safety record that by the 1970’s the joke on their motto was "Allegheny will get you there-maybe." In 1979 Allegheny rebranded themselves as USAir.

1937- SPITFIRE. The first flight of Britain’s most famous fighter plane, the Supermarine Spitfire Mark II. Designer R. J. Mitchell fought red tape and outdated thinking on the army requisition board. He died of exhaustion and heart failure at 42, never knowing that his Spitfire would become the decisive weapon in winning the air war over Britain, and saving his country from invasion. During the Battle of Britain, when Reichsmarshall Hermann Goring asked Luftwaffe ace Adolf Galland what could he use to defeat the English? Galland responded “ How about a squadron of Spitfires.”

1954- The Creature From the Black Lagoon opened. Directed by Jack Arnold. The Gill-Man designed by Disney animator Millicent Patrick.

1963- Country star Patsy Cline died in plane crash near Camden Tenn. Also killed were singers Cowboy Copas and Hawkshaw Hawkins.

1966- As America was still getting used to the idea of fighting in Vietnam, and anti-war sentiment was beginning, a Sgt. Barry Sadler wrote a pro-war song titled Ballad of the Green Berets, that today hit #1. “Put silver wings, on my sons chest….”

1973, New York Yankee pitchers Mike Kekich and Fritz Peterson make a stunning declaration. The left-handers announce that they have traded each others wives, children, houses, even their family dogs.

1982 – comedian John Belushi died of a drug overdose at The Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Strip. He had done 20 heroin-cocaine speedballs in just 24 hours. A woman named Cathy Smith was charged with administering to him the fatal dose. Robin Williams was with him that night partying but left early. Belushi was 31. Someone scrawled on Belushi’s tombstone:" You could have given us more laughs.....But NNNOOOO!

1995- Vivian Stanstall, lead singer for the Bonzo Dog Band, died in a fire in his London flat. He had been smoking in bed.

2004- Communist China changed its constitution to say that private property is now OK.
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Yesterday’s Question: What is marzipan?

Answer: A German confection made from almond paste and sugar pressed into molds to make decorative shapes or decorate cakes.

Quiz: What is marzipan?

Yesterday’s Question: What is a billy-club?
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History for 3/4/2023
Birthdays: King Henry II Plantagenet, Antonio Vivaldi, Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal, Count Pulaski, Miriam Makeba, Nancy Wilson, Bernard Haittink, John Garfield, Knute Rockne, Chastity Bono, Ray “Boom-Boom” Mancini, Patsy Kensit, Katherine O’Hara is 70, James Ellroy, Mykleti Williamson. Ward Kimball, Vicky Jenson, Ken Duncan

1152- Frederick Barbarossa made Emperor of Germany. Barbarossa means 'redbeard'. Barbarossa was the Richard Lionheart of Germany.

1517- HERNANDO CORTEZ LANDED IN MEXICO. With a hostile Viceroy of Cuba between him and Spain, and only 508 men, he resolved to conquer the Aztec Empire of many millions. He even burned his ships, to force his men to conquer or die.

1554- Queen Mary Tudor published a Royal edict repudiating her father Henry VIII’s religious reforms and restoring the Roman Catholic faith to dominance in England. Protestantism and other “heresies” were forbidden. To those who didn’t agree, she became Bloody Mary.

1647- As he realized he was losing the English Civil War, King Charles I sent his son Charles II and the rest of his family to Holland for safety. Today he saw them off. They would never see him alive again.

1681- King Charles II granted a charter to William Penn and his Quakers to build a colony in the New World. Penn wanted to name the new country "New Wales" because of its hills, but Charles disagreed. As a Quaker, Penn was too modest to have a whole colony named after him. Since the Merry Monarch was essentially paying off an old debt owed to Penn's father, Admiral Penn, who stayed loyal to him during Cromwell’s time, the king suggested the new colony be named for his father. What else was there besides hills? Lots of forest-- the King knew that woods in Latin is Sylvania. Hey, how about Penn's Woods- thus Pennsylvania.
When His Majesty noticed the Quakers not removing their hats in his presence, King Charles removed his. William Penn asked: ”Sire, why dost thou remove thy hat?” The Merry Monarch replied:” Well, ONE of us is supposed to!”

1759- Madame de Pompadour secured the appointment of Etienne de Silhouette as Finance Minister and controller general. Silhouette tried to fix the chaotic French economy by raising taxes of aristocrats and cutting back their privileges. Noblemen said they had been reduced to mere shadows of their former selves. By November the king fired him, and people joking called him a shadow. Now the word silhouette means outline figure.

1791- Green Mountains, or in French, Vermont, territory became the 14th state. The first new state added to the original 13 colonies. Before then, Vermonters had tried to be an independent country and once during the Revolution, Ethan Allen floated secret negotiations to sell Vermont back to the British.

1793-1933, Traditional Presidential Inauguration Day. "March Forth with a New President" (get it ?)
Transportation being what it was in early America, and the time it took to count votes, and the Electoral College to ratify the election results, this seemed a convenient time.
Inauguration ceremonies have been as elaborate as the Trump’s $107 million inaugural, to as simple as when Tom Jefferson addressed a few invited guests indoors, then returned to have dinner alone at Conrad's Tavern.
At Lincoln's second inaugural in 1865, Incoming Vice President Andrew Johnson was so nervous, he kept accepting sips of corn whisky. So before Lincoln delivered his famous speech " With Malice Towards None. With Charity for All..." Johnson was up there burbling incoherently in a drunken stupor. Lincoln had to order him pulled off the podium. In 1937 Franklin Roosevelt moved the inauguration date to the third week in January and that’s where its been ever since.

1836- Today General Santa Anna held a council of war to decide what to do about the Alamo. Many of his generals were against an attack. The Texans were cut off with little food, and there was no help coming. The Alamo had no strategic importance. So why waste men? But Santa Anna wanted to make an example of these “Yankee Land Pirates”. He ordered a grand assault on the Alamo as soon as the preparations were completed.

1861- THE STARS & BARS. During the Civil War the Confederate army was having a problem with their flag. Their first design so closely resembled the United States flag that soldiers had trouble distinguishing one from the other in heavy battle smoke. Creole General Pierre Beauregard put the ladies sewing circles of New Orleans on the problem and they came up with the Stars & Bars design based on the Cross of St. Andrew.

1887- William Randolph Hearst bought the little San Francisco Examiner and began to build the Hearst newspaper empire. Hearst’s father was part owner of the famed Comstock Mine, and thought his son crazy for wasting his time with the penny-paper business. Hearst died in 1951 at age 88, leaving an estate of $160 million. Today Hearst publications are still 15 magazines and broadcast networks.

1887- The first Daimler motorcar introduced in Essenlingen Germany- the Daimler Benzin Motorcarriage. Daimler’s chief competition was Dr Carl Benz. In 1899, Austrian Emile Jellinek invested heavily in Daimler’s motorcars, provided he name them for his daughter Mercedes. Mercedes and Benz merged in 1926 but the two founders- Gottfried Daimler and Carl Benz never met face to face.

1902- AAA the Auto Club founded.

1917- Jeanette Rankin became the first female member of Congress.

1922- F.W. Murnau’s classic film Nosferatu, the Vampire, opened in Berlin.

1924- The song “Happy Birthday to You” copyrighted by Claydon Sunny.

1933- Franklin Roosevelt gave his famous speech“ The only thing we have to fear is, Fear itself.” at his first inauguration.

1936- Screenwriter Dudley Nichols publicly refused the Best Screenplay Oscar for John Ford’s “The Informer” as a protest in support of the struggling Writer’s Guild.

1936- First flight of the German dirigible Graf Hindenburg.

1944- Louis Lepke Buchalter went to the electric chair at Sing Sing prison. Buchalter with Albert Anastasia headed the heavy enforcement arm of Lucky Lucciano’s New York Mafia Syndicate. Nicknamed “Murder Incorporated,” the Brooklyn gang committed at least 100 murders, including Dutch Schultz, and Lucciano’s mentor Joey the Boss Masseria.

1946- Alex Raymond's comic strip 'Rip Kirby" premiered.

1952- Ronald Reagan married Nancy Davis at the Little Red Church on Coldwater Canyon Blvd. in L.A. William Holden was their best man.

1952- Ernest Hemingway wrote a letter to his publisher:" I've completed a new novel. I think it's my best one to date." The Old Man and the Sea.

1956- Burger King introduced their signature hamburger the Whopper.

1958- U.S.S. Nautilus, first nuclear sub, reaches the North Pole under the ice cap.

1960- American opera baritone Leonard Warren dropped dead on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera in the 2nd act of Verdi's La Forza Del Destino.

1961- In the early stages of filming Cleopatra in London, actress Elizabeth Taylor developed pneumonia and slipped into a coma. She would have died, had not doctors at a convention at London’s Dorchester Hotel performed and emergency tracheotomy. When you seen the film today you can still see the tracheotomy scar at the base of her throat.

1976- Due to the intervention of San Francisco mayor George Moscone, the Giants baseball team would stay in city by the bay. In a last minute deal, the Stoneham family sells the team to Bob Lurie and Bud Herseth instead of the Labbatt's Brewery, which had planned to move the Giants to Canada.

1982- The Abrahams/Zucker Bros TV comedy Police Squad! premiered.
1994- Basketball legend Michael Jordan went to bat for the first time in a Chicago White Sox Baseball uniform. Jordan gave up baseball after one season and returned to the NBA.

1991- During the Gulf War, US troops destroyed an Iraqi bunker concealing tons of deadly sarin nerve gas. Estimates are up to 24,000 troops were exposed to the toxic release.

1994- 375 pound comedian John Candy died of sleep apnea. He was 43.

1997- The senate of Brazil finally allowed women to wear slacks to work.

2000- The Japanese launch of Sony Playstation 2. It was designed to compete with Segas Dreamcast and Nintendo’s Cube. The Playstation 2 was the most anticipated videogame launch in history. 600,000 units were sold. One store in Tokyo’s Ginza had 4,000 people lined up at their door. It remained hot for 13 years.

2004- A New York court convicted interior decorating guru Martha Stewart of four counts of stock fraud. This was for dumping her stock in a pharmaceutical firm called InClone after getting an inside tip that their cancer cure didn’t actually work.

2008- The first Simon’s Cat short cartoon appeared on YouTube. English commercial animator Simon Tofield wanted to teach himself Adobe Flash, a 2D computer animation program. He decided to make a cartoon of his cat, and his quirky behavior. He took the results and posted it on YouTube for a laugh. It got thousands of views and made him famous. Now he has a staff, sells merchandise and is working on longer films.

2016- Disney’s Zootopia, directed by Byron Howard, Rich Moore and Jared Bush.
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Yesterday’s Question: What is a billy-club?

Answer: A billy-club was the nickname for a policeman’s baton or truncheon. The name may have originated in London, were one of the nicknames for the London Police was The Old Bill.

Quiz: What is a billy-club?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: What is the difference between a cupid and a cherub?
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History for 3/3/2023
B-Dayz: George Pullman of Pullman Railroad cars, General Matthew Ridgeway, Jean Harlow, Diana Barrymore, Akira Ifukube the composer of the music scores to movies like Godzilla, Tone Loc, Jacky Joyner-Kersee, James Doohan, Ronald Searle, animator Bruno Bozzetto, Bobby Driscoll, Herschel Walker, George Miller, Miranda Richardson

1517- Protestant reformer Martin Luther wrote the Pope in Rome a letter of submission and tried to make nice. But privately he told a friend” I am not sure whether the Pope is the AntiChrist or merely his Apostle.”

1764- Elderly French King Louis XV appeared before the regional Parliament of Paris to tell them who was boss:” In My Person alone resides the Sovereign Power…to me alone belongs the legislative power, unconditional and undivided. My people and I are one, all public order emanates from me.” None of that representative government stuff like England was going to happen while HE was around. King Louis XV all but ensured that France would change only from a violent revolution.

1783- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart first performed his Symphony #35 the Hafner in Vienna with the Austrian Emperor Joseph II in attendance.

1800- President John Adams signed a bill calling for the second census of the people of the United States.

1801- THE MIDNIGHT JUDGES-Outgoing President John Adams was the first presidential sore loser. He was outraged that he was not re-elected to a second term like George Washington was. He vented his frustrations by spending his last night as President signing dozens of Federal Judgeships and army officer commissions to members of his own Federalist party. He then boycotted the inauguration and took his sweet time moving out of the White House, forcing Thomas Jefferson to spend his first night as President sleeping in Conrad’s Tavern.

1820- The Missouri Compromise. Most of US politics of the early nineteenth century was seeing how long they could keep the Civil War from breaking out. Congress was evenly divided between slave states and free states, so every new state created caused a crisis. This day it was decided Missouri would be a slave state while Maine would be a free state and there would be no slave states north of Missouri in the remaining Louisiana Purchase territories.

1836- A messenger slipped past the Mexican army into the Alamo. He told Col. Travis and his Texans that they could expect no help from the outside world to save them.

1842- Massachusetts created a law trying to limit the workday for children under twelve to only twelve hours a day, but opponents considered it too lefty-liberal to be enforced.

1845- On his last day in office, President John Tyler signed Florida Statehood.

1849- The US Department of the Interior established

1863- President Lincoln signed into law the National Conscription Act (the Draft).
The Confederate States had already started drafting the previous year. Rich men could get out of the army by paying $300 for a substitute. J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller and Theodore Roosevelt's father took this way out. Harvard-Yale games and varsity boat races went on throughout the Civil War with no loss of players. This angered the poor that the war was a rich man's game. Riots broke out in several cities. A popular song of the day "We are coming Father Abraham, Three Hundred Thousand Strong" was changed to "We are Coming, Father Abraham, Three Hundred Dollars More

1873- Under the Comstock Act, information on birth control is considered pornography and not permitted to be sent through the U.S. mail.

1873- The US Congress voted to double their own salaries, and make the pay raise retroactive for the previous two years. This was at the time of a severe economic recession. The public was furious over the “Salary Grab Act”.

1875- Claude Bizet's opera CARMEN debuts. Parisians usually go to see comedies at the Opera Comique and most thought this would be about the adventures of a coquettish Spanish gypsy. Instead they saw one of the great dark dramas of opera, a story of sexual power and obsession. The shocking sight of a slutty smuggler getting knifed by a burnout soldier driven mad with sex was so upsetting, it was booed off the stage and savaged by critics. Bizet never got over the fiasco. He died three months later. Today Carmen is arguably the world's most famous operas.

1875- HOCKEY- The first modern Hockey Game was played at the Victoria skating rink in Montreal Canada. McGill University claim they invented it in 1877. The NHL was created in 1917.
No one is sure just how old hockey is. In the 1700’s Micmac Indians played a game on bone skates using sticks and passed it on to the British garrison of Halifax Nova Scotia. The people of Windsor Nova Scotia claim hockey was invented there at Long Pond in 1844 from the Irish game of Stick & Ball. The first pucks were frozen horse droppings. No one is sure where the word Hockey came from, the nickname of some British officer or local schoolteacher perhaps.

1902-The U.S. Supreme Court ruled it's all right for the U.S. Government to ignore Indian treaties, if they do it in a nice way.

1913- The Womens Suffrage Parade in Washington D.C. The national votes for women movement sent 5,000 marchers down Pennsylvania Ave. It was met with crowds of men who jeered and threw stones, causing 100 to go to the hospital. President-Elect Woodrow Wilson wondered why no one was there to greet him at the train station. They were all at the suffragette march.

1925- The Warner Bros started up their radio station, KFWB. It was Sam Warner’s idea, and their father Ben had coined the letters to mean Keep Fighting, Warner Bros, because of their constant bickering. It went through several hands, and was a newsradio station for a long time. In 2016, it was bought by a Bollywood music company who changed its letters.

1931- President Hoover signed an act of Congress that made the "Star Spangled Banner" officially the U.S. national anthem. The 1814 Francis Scott Key poem set to the English beer hall song "To Anacreon in Heaven" was sung since the 1850's, but this day it became official.

1934- Public Enemy #1 John Dillinger escaped from a Witchita jail by carving a gun out of soap (it was actually wood) and painting it black with shoe polish. He said: "The jail hasn't been made that can hold me!"

1938- The desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia discovered it had a lot of oil.

1938- The skies over Los Angeles finally clear after two huge Pacific storms ravaged the region, causing massive flooding from Long Beach to Glendale. The destruction and flooding caused Los Angeles to cover the Los Angeles River and Burbank Creek in concrete, creating the distinctive flood basin the Terminator raced motorcycles and trucks through.

1945- General MacArthur announced the Philippine capitol Manila had at last been retaken from the Japanese. The month-long fighting had been house-to-house and General Yamashita’s troops had committed wholesale executions of civilians as they retreated. After the war, General Yamashita was executed as a war criminal.

1950- Paramount's "Quack-a-Doodle-Doo" The first Baby Huey cartoon.

1950- Don Herbert began teaching millions of kids about science as TV’s Mr. Wizard.

1952- The Supreme Court ruled that school teachers could be fired if they were Communists.

1959- Lou Costello, the loveable pudgy comedian of the team Abbott & Costello, died of a heart attack three days before his 53 birthday. A recurrence of childhood rheumatic fever and the death of his infant son darkened his last years. The team of Abbott and Costello broke up in 1957. His last words were to a hospital nurse,” That was the best strawberry soda I ever had…”

1966- William Frawley, the bald, gravel-voiced neighbor Fred Murtz on I Love Lucy, had just seen the movie Inside Daisy Clover on Hollywood Blvd. He was outside the Knickerbocker Hotel when he lit a cigar, then dropped dead of a heart attack. He was 79. When his TV partner Vivian Vance heard the news, she said “Champagne for everyone!” They never liked each other much. Frawley once referred to her as a “miserable c*nt...”
Vivian died in 1979.

1973- THE BAR CODE. An ad-hoc committee of scientists from Proctor & Gamble and Nabisco and such announced the invention of the Universal Product’s Code- The Bar Code, that annoying little set of bars and numbers on everything you own or buy. No longer would stores have to close their doors periodically for inventory counting.

1975- First meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in a garage in Menlo Park Ca., Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were members.

1980- Aetna Insurance reported in a newsletter having to pay damages for a man at a delicatessen who had a carp he was ordering jump off the counter and bit him in the leg.

1985- The TV show “Moonlighting” premiered. Cybil Shepherd and Bruce Willis.

1991- L.A.P.D officers beat up drunk and disorderly driver Rodney King. King had previous convictions and was tazed several times but still fought back at police. They seemed to go berserk on him with their clubs just as a witness caught the incident on videotape. The incident and trials caused a scandal in Los Angeles and later the largest civilian riots in U.S. history.

2001- Despite worldwide outrage, the fundamentalist Taliban of Afghanistan began destroying their nations ancient giant stone Buddhas with dynamite, as graven images.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is the difference between a cupid and a cherub?

Answer: Cupid was a Roman god. The son of Venus and Eros. Cherubim was a classification of angel, smaller and more childlike than the Seraphim, the taller adult angels. Cherub’s job seemed to be mostly flitting around the edges of baroque paintings.