Quiz: Why is Queen Victoria’s husband Prince Albert important to the way we celebrate Christmas?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What nation was St. Nicholas originally from?
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History for 12/22/2010
Birthdays: Josef Stalin- real name Jozef Djugashvili, James Oglethorpe the founder of the State of Georgia, Jean Racine, Giacomo Puccini, Connie Mack, J. Arthur Rank, Ladybird Johnson, Deems Taylor, Jean Michel Basquiat, Barbara Billingsley, Peggy Ashcroft, Emil Sitka, Gene Rayburn, Hector Elizondo, Diane Sawyer, Steve Carlton, Steve Garvey, Robin Gibb & Maurice Gibb of the Bee Gees, Ralph Fiennes is 47.

1737- Preacher John Wesley, the founder of the Methodists, was chased out of Savannah Georgia. The townspeople thought Pastor Wesley applied the Law of God a bit too harshly. He finally refused to grant an old girlfriend the rights of marriage because she had not been to confession enough in the past three months. This day he took ship back to England before he was arrested.

1807- President Thomas Jefferson was desperately trying to steer a neutral course in the struggle between Britain and Napoleon’s France, each wanted the US to choose their side. This day Congress passed his Embargo Act, cutting off trade with both European powers.

1808-DA-DA-DA- DUMMMM- Beethoven premiered his 5th Symphony.

1849-Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky had been a political radical. On this day the Czar's secret police the Ohkrana broke his spirit by a cruel ruse. They arrested him for treason. He was tried, convicted and sentenced to death. He was given a last meal, received Last Rites from a priest, blindfolded and stood before a firing squad. But before the guns would go off the squad stopped and his sentence was commuted. He was sent instead to Siberia for four years. This naturally had an adverse effect on his sensitive nature and he spent his later years a raving conservative.

1882- Thomas Edison introduced the string of electric Christmas Tree lights replacing candles.

1864- General Sherman marching through Georgia, today telegraphed Lincoln :”I present you as a Christmas gift the City of Savannah”. Sherman spared Savannah the depredations his men committed in the rest of the state, many say because he had friends there before the war, but also because he needed a deep water port for a winter base that the US Navy could supply him from.

1898-THE DREYFUS CASE- Early in 1898 the French Army High Command discovered they had a spy on their staff leaking secrets to Germany. The man was a Colonel Count Esterhazy an aristocrat pretty high up in the chain of command. The Generals worried that news of the scandal would humiliate and weaken the army's prestige. So they looked for a lower ranked scapegoat to pin Esterhazy's crimes on. They chose a Captain Alfred Dreyfus, who was working class and Jewish.

They had Dreyfus courtmartialed for espionage and treason and exiled to Devil's Island. As his sword and medals were being publicly stripped from him he shouted out loud "Citizens of France ! I am Innocent !!"

But Dreyfus's family refused to give up hope and brought in the famous author activist Emile Zola, who uncovered the plot in the news article "J'Accuse !"I Accuse. The scandal tore the French military and public opinion apart. Esterhazy fled to Germany and one top general shot himself. In 1906 Dreyfus was cleared of all charges and when the Great War came General Dreyfus was entrusted with the defense of Paris.

The Dreyfus case to French scholars is as contentious as the “Did Thomas Jefferson boink his Slaves?” controversy is to Americans. In 1998 on the hundredth anniversary of the Dreyfus Case everyone was still arguing over the interpretation of events.

1921- LENIN'S TESTAMENT- Soviet Russian leader Vladimir Lenin was in failing
health after an assassination attempt and a stroke . He knew of the internal
struggle within the Communist Party between Trotsky and Stalin to succeed
him. This day he dictated a series of notes spelling out his analysis of the
situation and where he thought the future of the revolution should go. He
felt Stalin was able but too dangerous to be in charge" Comrade Stalin is devoid of
the most elementary human honesty". So Trotsky should come after him as
leader of the Soviet Union. Lenin called it "Letter to the Party Congress"
because he intended it to be published. Upon Lenin's death Stalin seized
power and made sure this document was never made public. It didn't come out
for thirty three years, until after Stalins death in 1953.

1940- Nathaniel West, novelist author of Day of the Locust and Miss Lonelyhearts, was killed in a car crash in L.A..

1941-Now that America was officially at war with the Axis, Prime Minister Winston Churchill slips across U-Boat infested waters to spend a month at the White House planning strategy with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. A White House butler described;" Mr. Churchill awoke to a tumbler of sherry. At noon scotch and sodas, champagne at dinner finished off with 90 year old brandy then light a cigar and begin the day's work- from 9:00 PM- 2:00 AM. Churchill liked to dictate memos from his bath. When Roosevelt was told he could enter the room he was embarrassed and excused himself to leave. Churchill stood up from the tub wearing nothing but soapsuds and the cigar in his teeth and declared: "THE PRIME MINISTER OF GREAT BRITAIN HAS NOTHING TO HIDE FROM THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES !" When a friend later asked FDR what was Churchill like, the President mused: "He's pink...all over."

1944- During the Battle of the Bulge a German officer was sent under a white flag to Gen.McAulliffe's American troops in Bastogne. His message was “You are surrounded with no hope of relief. Surrender or be annihilated!” General McAuliffe sent him a simple reply:" NUTS!' McAulliffe's force was eventually rescued by Patton. In later years McAullife grew tired of the fame of being the general who said "nuts". At a party a Manhattan socialite once said to him: "How do you do, General Nuts".

1951- Yves Montand married Simone Signoret.

1964- In Chicago Comedian Lenny Bruce was sentenced to four months in prison on obscenity charges. When the arresting officer read aloud his jokes, the jury laughed out loud. Lenny complained about the policeman’s delivery. After Lenny Bruce no one has ever been convicted in the U.S. for telling jokes. One fan arrested that night with Bruce, was future comic George Carlin.

1973- The 55 miles per hour speed limit was set for all US interstate highways.

1984- Nerdy shopkeeper Bernard Goetz shot four black men on a NYC subway train. They had asked him for money and one man had a sharpened screwdriver. Goetz had been robbed before of a liquor store payroll and pushed through a plate glass store window. Two of the men died and one was left paralyzed. Like OJ Simpson ten years later, the Subway Vigilante divided people along racial lines. Was Bernard Goetz a homicidal racist or a mild man pushed over the brink?

1988- In Brazil ecologist and rubber workers union activist Chico Mendes was shot and killed by plantation owners.

1993- The Hubble Space telescope cost $1.5 billion but it had a flaw. It’s lens was ground incorrectly so it was nearsighted. This day Space Shuttle Endeavour flew into space to fit the Hubble with an optical corrective system called CoStar, in effect, giving it a set of glasses. The Hubble now sees correctly into deep space and records phenomena billions of light years away.

2001- THE SHOE BOMBER. Would-be terrorist Richard Reid tried to blow up an American Airlines flight from Rome to Orlando by trying to ignite a substance concealed in his sneakers. He was stopped and beaten silly by his fellow travelers, including a 6’8 pro basketball player returning home from the Italian leagues. He’s why we all have to take our shoes off in airports now.
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Yesterday’s Question: What nation was St. Nicholas originally from?

ANSWER: Haogious Nikolaos of Bari, was a Christian Bishop of Lydia, now modern Turkey. Scholars can’t even agree if he ever lived, but people celebrated the goodness of St. Nicholas since the late 300s. He’s the one who climbed in a poor man’s house and left gold coins in the stockings drying by the hearth fire.

Quiz: What nation was St. Nicholas originally from?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below; Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the Longfellow poem The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. Dr.Prescott and William Dawes are not mentioned in the poem. Who were they?
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history for 12/21/2010
Birthdays: Benjamin Disraeli, Josh Gibson- the Home Run King of the Negro Baseball Leagues, Pat Weaver-TV exec who created the Today Show and father of Sigourney Weaver, Frank Zappa, Dr. Kurt Waldheim, Florence Griffith Joyner, Chris Evert, Joe Paterno, Phil Roman, Jane Fonda is 72, Paul Winchell, Keifer Sutherland is 44, Samuel L. Jackson is 63, Ray Romano is 53, Jane Kaszmarek, Judy Delphy is 41, Jeffrey Katzenberg is 62

Happy Winter Solstice! The shortest day of the year. Ancient Egyptians made offering to the god Horus to return from the Land of the Dead. Zoroastrians lit fires on their roofs to Ahura Mazda. Norse Vikings brewed an extra strong beer and decorate their mead halls with evergreen garlands

1375- The writer Boccaccio died, not of the plague, and not during a party like in his book the Decameron.

1376- END OF THE BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY- After a lot of lobbying from St. Catherine of Siena and Saint Brigid of Sweden, Pope Gregory XI moved the Vatican back to Rome from Avignon. Gregory mysteriously died shortly after he arrived. Roman mobs, angry at the poverty caused by the absence of the Holy See, attacked the mostly French cardinals selecting the next pope. They crowded around their building shouting: "Death or an Italian Pope!' and threw javelins at the ceiling knowing the points would pop out of the floor and prick their feet. The terrified cardinals dragged any old bishop out of the Vatican library, made him an Archbishop, then Cardinal, then Pope, then ran for the hills. The librarian became Pope Urban VIII, the "Beast of Naples".

Gee, They never told me this stuff in Catholic School...

1776-American diplomats Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane arrive in Paris to negotiate an alliance and money for the rebellious colonies with France, Holland and Spain. Their secretary, William Bancroft, was a British spy.

1863- Congress created the Medal of Honor, at first only for Navy personnel for gallantry, but later extended to all branches of the military.

1866- THE FETTERMAN MASSACRE- Foreshadowing by ten years what Custer would get, the Sioux led by Crazy Horse surrounds an army detachment and wipes them out. The commander of Fort Phil Kearny, Colonel Carrington sent out the troop to drive away some hostiles molesting a woodcutting detail. It turned out to be an elaborate trap planned by Crazy Horse and Red Cloud. It was said Carrington was such an aristocrat "the way he would prefer to deal with the Sioux would be to socially ostracize them". Now as his men went down under a hail of arrows Carrington could hear the firing in the distance but didn't think they needed any help. Captain Fetterman and his second in command Brown were among the last survivors. Fetterman had said the threat of the hostiles was overrated and "With 80 men I could ride through the entire Sioux Nation !" Brown had gone against orders on the mission because he promised his family back east a real Indian scalp for Christmas. Now surrounded and not wishing to be tortured by the Indians, they held their revolvers to each other's temples and on the count of three...

1909- The first Junior High School or Middle School set up in the US in Berkeley Cal.

1913-THE BIRTHDAY OF THE CROSSWORD PUZZLE-The first Crossword Puzzle appeared in the New York World.

1914- The premiere of the first feature length film comedy- Tilly’s Punctured Romance, starring Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand and a young Charlie Chaplin.

1919-THE PALMER RAIDS- THE RED SCARE- American businessmen watched the growing Communist regime in Russia with fear. Soviet groups were also moving to take over Germany, Hungary and Austria." Bolshevism is worse than war.”-Herbert Hoover
Under emergency wartime sedition legislation (even though World War One had been over for a year) U.S. marshals raid newspaper and union offices and deported 249 immigrants, including women's rights advocate Emma Goldman. The raids were organized by a young executive in the treasury dept. named J. Edgar Hoover.

1925- Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic masterpiece Battleship Potemkin premiered in Moscow. The films pioneering use of montage and allegorical imagery intercut inspired a generation of filmmakers.

1933- Twentieth Century Fox signed 5 year old Shirley Temple to a seven year contract.

1937-Walt Disney's " Snow White and the Seven Dwarves" had it’s grand premiere. The first feature length American cartoon, it becomes the box office champ of 1938-earning 4 times more than any other film that year.

1937- Ted Healy, former vaudeville partner and founder of the Three Stooges, was killed in a bar fight. One legend has it that actor Wallace Beery and some gangsters did the fatal pounding. Another rumor is one of the gangsters was young Albert Cubby Broccoli, who forty years later would produce the Bond movies and win an Irving Thalberg Award at the 1982 Oscars. The Three Stooges do much better without Healy.

1939- In the year that saw them signing a non aggression pact, Adolf Hitler in Berlin sent Holiday Greetings to his buddy Marshal Josef Stalin in Moscow. Merry Christmas you Zionist-Bolshevik UnterMenschen! Thank you and same to you, you Fascist Maggot Tool of International Capitalism!

1940- Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (44) died of a heart attack at Hollywood columnist Sheila Graham's house. She had just left the house to buy him some candy.
His last words were 'Hershey bars will be fine..."

1945- General George “Blood & Guts” Patton died from injuries suffered in an auto accident in Manheim Germany on Dec. 9th.

1953- Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the Atomic Bomb, is accused of being a Communist. When he was asked in 1940 to head the Manhattan Project the government knew he was a Berkeley eccentric who had joined every leftist group in town but he was brilliant. This act is now viewed more as the government revenge for his flat refusal to help Edmund Teller in developing the Hydrogen Bomb.

1958- Charles DeGaulle elected President of the 5tth French Republic.

1964-The British Parliament voted to ban the death penalty.

1969- Famed football coach Vince Lombardi coached his last game- Dallas beat Washington 20-10.

1971- Richard William's animated TV special "A Christmas Carol" with Alastair Sim reprising his scrooge.

1972- 14 members of an Uruguayan rugby team were found alive on an Andes mountain peak after their plane crashed. They survived the harsh conditions by turning cannibal and eating the dead. Umm..Goalie Empanadas!

1975- International terrorist Carlos the Jackal attacked an OPEC oil meeting in Vienna and took 11 ministers hostage. He escaped to Algeria and wasn’t finally caught until 1994 while trying to get an operation on his testicle.

1978- Chicago police investigating the disappearance of a 15 year old boy searched the home of contractor John Wayne Gacy. They found the remains of 33 boys in the crawl space. Gacy in his spare time did volunteer work as a clown entertaining sick children.

1989- PanAm 747 jumbo jet Flight 103 from London to New York explodes over Lockerbie Scotland killing most of the passengers. The bomb was planted in Munich by Libyan agents.

1989- The Romanian army joined the people protesting in the streets and overthrew the hated Communist dictator Nicholai Cercescu. While most of the nation starved in a stagnant economy, Cercescu lived in luxury. His son drove sports cars and lost fortunes at roulette tables in Monte Carlo. Little Cercescu kept a “raping room” for women who caught his fancy. As the Communist regimes of Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany collapsed, Romanians realized their time had come, and they poured out into the streets.

1989- Vice President Dan Quayle sent out 30,000 official Christmas cards with the word beacon misspelled- beakon. In 2007 President George W. Bush sent out Hanukah cards featuring the White House Christmas Tree.

2003- Just in time to spoil the spirit of Christmas, Homeland Security Secty Tom Ridge gave a national news conference to announce the color-coded threat level was raised to the highest state of alert since the 9-11 Attack. The Al Qaeda terrorists were going to attack the United States at any minute! After terrifying us all, nothing happened. in 2009 it was revealed the data was based a conman named Dennis Montgomery, who fooled the CIA into believing he had special software that he could use to intercept Al Qaeda secret messages broadcast on the Arab news network Al Jazeera.

2012- The World will come to an End, according to the ancient Maya Calendar. Translating Mayan can be open to interpretation, so end of an era may also mean beginning of a new age of enlightenment. We can’t be sure, because the Spanish Conquistadors killed everyone who could read it.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Yesterday was the 150th anniversary of the Longfellow poem The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. Dr.Prescott and William Dawes are not mentioned in the poem. Who were they?

Answer: They were the two other riders with Revere who were told to spread the alarm. Dawes actually made it to Concord to warn the Sons of Liberty leaders. Paul Revere was arrested by the British early and sent home without his horse. But Paul Revere gets all the credit.

Quiz: Today is the 150th anniversary of the Longfellow poem The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. Dr.Prescott and William Dawes are not mentioned in the poem. Who were they?

Answer to yesterdays question below: Boogie Woogie, Boogie Down, Get up and Boogie. Just where did the word Boogie come from?
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History for 12/20/2010
Birthdays: Bonnie Prince Charlie, Branch Rickey, George Roy Hill, Dr. Samuel Mudd, Jenny Aguitter, Uri Geller, Irene Dunne, Cecil Cooper, Albert Dekker, Harvey Firestone, John Spencer, Elsie De Wolfe- the first interior decorator,

69AD- Roman General Vespasian occupied Rome with his legions, declared himself emperor and dispatched his predecessor. Aulus Vitellius. Vespasian was the winner in a long year of civil war that started with Nero committing suicide, then Sevius Galba, Otho, and Vitellius all in one year took the throne and were knocked off. The Romans called A.D. 69, the "Long Year". Vespasian was not an aristocrat like Casear, but a humble man who rose up through the ranks. He was once caught sleeping during one of Nero’s harp recitals.

1192- Richard the Lionhearted was returning from the Crusades when he was imprisoned by Duke Leopold of Austria. Leopold blamed Richard for the death of his relative Conrad of Monferrat in Palestine. The King of France Phillip II and Richard’s own brother John send large bribes to the German Emperor Henry to keep Richard locked up.

1790- The first successful U.S. cotton mill opens in Pawtucket RI, it’s inventor Samuel Slater had memorized British technology for use in America. He also thought child labor would be most useful in his factories.

1803- The Louisiana Purchase completed as the French flag came down and the Stars and Stripes went up over the Cabildo in New Orleans. New Orleans continued to be a magnet for French people dispossessed by the politics in Europe. Ten years after Waterloo the French royalist charge de affaires would complain to the U.S. state department that the New Orleanaise would still wave the banned revolutionary tricolor flag at arriving French ships.

1811- Napoleon made another attempt to go hunting in the Forest of Boulogne. Even though they were both great generals, Napoleon and Wellington were terrible hunters and bad shots. While hunting Napoleon shot out the eye of one of his generals by mistake and Wellington constantly shot barn doors and stable boys by accident. Napoleon kept the Royal shooting park at St. Cloud as a game preserve and a Captain Coignet once saw him feeding snuff to the deer.

1860- ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY YEARS AGO- SECESSION! to the sound of cannon and church bells the first Southern State, South Carolina, voted to secede from the Union. Until the Confederacy formed South Carolina calls itself "the Palmetto Republic". Judge Pettigru, who was against this drastic move, said:" South Carolina is too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum."
In Washington D.C. Northerners at first reacted with apathy. One Washington department store advertised: THE UNION IS DISSOLVING BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN YOU CAN’T STILL FIND SAVINGS WHEN YOU SHOP FOR CHRISTMAS AT LEHMANS!

1860- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow published his most famous poem- The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere. Oh listen my children and you shall here, of the Midnight ride of Paul Revere. Although he got most of the facts wrong, it was a great success. Longfellow intended it to rouse Americans of his day to the threat of Southern Secession and Slavery.

1891-BASKETBALL INVENTED. Minister and former Canadian rugby player James Naismith worried how his students could do team sports in the harsh New England winters. So he nailed up two peach baskets on opposite ends of a gymnasium at a YMCA in Springfield Mass. and invented the game of basketball. He originally asked for square boxes but the man he sent out mistook his instructions and brought round peach baskets instead. The NBA regulation height of the baskets of ten feet was determined by the gym in Springfield having a second floor running track and two nails were conveniently waiting at this height. Naismith played himself frequently, and married one of the first female players, named Aemelia.

1892- Alexander Brown and George Stillman of Syracuse New York invented inflatable pneumatic automobile tires, replacing wagon wheel and bicycle rims.

1892- According to Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days this was the day Phileas Fogg completed his trip.

1920- English song & dance man Leslie Downes became an American citizen and changed his name to Bob Hope.

1937- Nazis Josef Goebbels noted in his diary that this day he sent his boss Adolf Hitler a Christmas present of a dozen Mickey Mouse Cartoons from America. Officially der Fuehrer called Mickey ‘vermin’ but privately enjoyed his animated antics.

1943- Stalin changed the national anthem of Russia from the revolutionary Internationale to the Hymn of the Soviet Union. ( The song Sean Connery and his crew sang in the film “The Hunt for Red October.”)

1950- Harvey premiered starring James Stewart and a 6 foot invisible rabbit.

1952- Bridgette Bardot married director Roger Vadim.

1955- Sir Lawrence Olivier’s film version of Richard III premiered.

1962- The Osmond Brothers premiered on the Andy Williams Show.

1957- Elvis Presley received his draft notice. G.I. Blues!

1970- ELVIS MEETS NIXON or "The President Meets the King." Citizen Presley volunteers his services in the war on drugs and gave Nixon a gold plated 44 cal. pistol. The President thanked him with a White House security officer's badge for his collection of police badges....... you see why fiction pales next to this stuff.... A recent biography of Presley described the dozen or so patent medicines he was on while he met Nixon.

1971- Twentieth Century Fox chief Darryl F. Zanuck blames his own son CEO Richard Zanuck for Fox's monetary problems and fires him. This sets off a power struggle among the board of directors. When Zanuck's estranged wife Libby throws her support against the mogul, Darryl F. Zanuck is overthrown and fired from his own company. He was the last of the original Hollywood moguls.

1977- Mayor Richard Daley Sr, the Boss of Chicago for twenty years, died of a heart attack.

1989- Operation Just Cause, the U.S. invades Panama to oust General Manuel Noriega, for being a dictator, drug pusher and not returning the C.I.A.'s washroom keys. When the general, known to Panamanian citizens as “Pineapple-face” took sanctuary in the Vatican Embassy, the U.S. army surrounded the building and drove him out by playing Jimi Hendrix and Motown through loudspeakers 24 hours a day. Tony Orlando & Dawn or the Bay City Rollers would drive me out.
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Yesterday’s question: Boogie Woogie, Boogie Down, Get up and Boogie. Just where did the word Boogie come from?

ANSWER: It was an old African word meaning “ to Dance”.

Quiz: Boogie Woogie, Boogie Down, Get up and Boogie. Just where did the word Boogie come from?

Yesterday’s QUIZ answered below: What is the Stone of Scone? And who gets to sit on it?
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History for 12/19/2010
Birthdays: King Phillip V of Spain (1683), Edith Piaf, Edwin Stanton, Thomas 'Tip' O'Neil, Cicely Tyson is 77, Sir Ralph Richardson, Robert Urich, Jennifer Beals is 47, David Susskind, Fritz Reiner, Alyssa Milano is 38, Jake Gyllenhaal is 40

1154- Coronation of King Henry II of England. He was the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou and Empress Matilda, the daughter of William the Conqueror. His coronation settled a period of dynastic civil wars in England between the Conqueror’s children known as the 'Wars of Stephen and Matilda". Henry and his siblings Richard Lionheart and John Lackland are also called the Angevin dynasty, because of the part of France (Anjou) their family came from, and also because medieval scholars like to overcomplicate things.

1686- According to Daniel Defoe, this was the day Robinson Crusoe was rescued from his deserted island.

1732- The Pennsylvania Gazette announced the publication of a new enterprise by Dr. Benjamin Franklin writing under the penname Richard Saunders. The work was Poor Richard’s Almanac, an international best seller that made Franklin famous.

1783- William Pitt the Younger became Prime Minister of Great Britain at only 24 years old." A sight to make the Nations stare, A Kingdom trusted to a Schoolboy's care."

1793- The Anglo-Spanish fleet evacuates Toulon after the cities strong points are stormed by the French army led by a pushy 23-year-old artillery major with a funny Italian name- Napoleon Bonaparte.

1903- NY City’s Williamsburg Bridge opened. Because it linked the communities of Manhattan’s Lower East Side with the Hasidim enclave in Williamsburg Brooklyn.

1914- Earl Hurd patented animation 'cels' (celluloids) and backgrounds. Before this cartoonists tried drawing the background settings over and over again hundreds of times or slashed the paper around the character and tried not to have it walk in front of anything. By the late 1990’s, most cels & cel paint had been replaced by digital imaging.

1915- Earl Douglas Haig replaces Sir John French as commander of British troops on the Western Front. His nickname was Whiskey Doug because his family owned a well-known distillery. Haig had won the Boer War by bloody frontal assaults, and he had learned nothing from the experience. He had no use for new gismos like machine guns and airplanes, even after he watched large numbers of his troops mowed down by them. In the attack called Passchendale in 1917 he lost hundreds of thousands of men in stand up frontal assaults. "Good Lord, have we lost that many?" In later years before giving his papers to the Imperial War Archives, Haig bought an out of date 1917 diary similar to his own, then replaced pages with rewritten ones. This so he would appear to be prescient at guessing the enemies intentions.

1918- Robert Ripley began his "Believe It Or Not" column in the New York Globe.

1926- The U.S. government passed a law that women authors can only legally copyright their works under their husband's names.

1932- BBC Overseas Service Radio broadcasts begin.

1941- THE FLYING TIGERS debut in the skies over China, surprising and shooting down 9 out of 10 in a Japanese bomber squadron flying from Hanoi. General Claire Chennault had come to China as an adviser to organize the Chinese Air Force, and stayed on to coordinate U.S. efforts in China after Pearl Harbor. His men were all volunteer adventurers who flew their P-40's with the tiger teeth insignia against overwhelming odds. They were awarded a bounty of $500 for every Japanese plane downed. In July they were incorporated into the regular U.S. Air Force.
Claire Chennault argued frequently with Washington, MacArthur and his army partner in China, General 'Vinegar Joe' Stillwell. Just before the final victory in 1945 Chennault was forcibly retired and resumed his post as adviser to Chiang Kai Shek. He was the U.S. general most times under hostile fire. He flew combat missions and personally had 60 kills, which made him an Ace. Yet Chennault was deliberately not invited to the Grand Surrender Ceremony on the Missouri in Sept ‘45.

1941- After two weeks of bombardment and air strikes the Japanese occupy British Hong Kong. The Japanese assault teams had been told to take no prisoners and committed horrible atrocities on British, Canadian and Australian defenders. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler told his dinner guests " The Japanese are all over those islands and will soon be in Australia. The White Race will disappear from those regions."

1957- The musical ‘The Music Man’ starring Robert Preston first debuted. "Seventy Six Trom-bones in the Big Parade.."

1959- Confederate General Walter Williams, who claimed to be the last living veteran of the Civil War, died at age 117. The claim was later proved false, but it was a good story.

1971- Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ premiered. Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess. In America the film received an X Rating, more for sexual situations than violence. The sensation over the film caused so many incidents of urban violence, that with Kubrick’s permission, it was banned in England for three decades.

1974- The first personal computer went on sale. The Altair 8800, named for the planet in the 1955 sci-fi movie classic Forbidden Planet. The computer came in a kit that you had to build and it cost $397. The next year, two kids at Harvard named Bill Gates and Paul Allen created a programming language for it called BASIC.

1997- MTV dropped airing the rap song Smack My Bitch Up, by Prodigy.

1998-IMPEACHMENT- The Republican dominated House of Representatives voted two articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewsinsky. The vote was along strict party lines and most of the Democrats stormed out in protest. Despite the impeachment, President "Slick Willy" Clinton was acquitted by trial in the Senate in February and completed his second term. To complete the circus-like atmosphere, pornography publisher Larry Flynt announced he had proof that incoming Republican Speaker of the House Bob Livingston, a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, had had at least six affairs while a congressman including one of his staff and a lobbyist. Livingston resigned before his hand could touch the gavel. Two other of the loudest callers for impeachment, Senator John Ensign and South Carolina Gov Pete Sanford, have since been caught in equally tawdry affairs.

2001- Peter Jackson’s film ‘The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring’ first opened.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is the Stone of Scone? And who gets to sit on it?

Answer: The Stone of Scone was a rock that the Kings of Scotland had to sit on to be crowned. King Edward Ist of England carried it off to London where it was placed into the British Throne. 700 years later, in 1996, England returned it.

Quiz: What is the Stone of Scone? And who gets to sit on it?

Yesterday’s Quiz Answered Below: What legendary rock band began in the 1960s playing in Palo Alto bars and Pizza Parlors as The Warlocks?
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History for 12/18/2010
Birthdays: Antonio Stradivari, Karl Maria Von Weber,Ty Cobb, George Stevens, Ozzie Davis, Diane Disney-Miller, Anita O’Day, Paul Klee, Betty Grable, Willy Brandt, Keith Richards, Leonard Maltin, Alyssia Sanchez-Vaccario, Ray Liotta is 56, Katie Holmes is 32, Brad Pitt is 47, Steven Spielberg is 64

1679- THE ROSE ALLEY AMBUSCADE- Writer and critic John Dryden was walking in the Rose Alley in Covent Garden when a group of thugs jumped him and beat him up. They had been hired by The Earl of Rochester, because of a Dryden published a satirical essay making fun of him. Other writers like Voltaire suffered similar attacks from powerful aristocrats who couldn’t take a joke.

1757- Frederick the Great’s army besieged the Fortress city of Breslau in Silesia. The Austrian garrison’s commander General Sprecher posted placards throughout the town threatening with death anyone who breathed a word of surrender- then he surrendered.

1783- The American Revolution now over, George Washington appeared before Congress in Philadelphia to resign his army commission, and go home to Mount Vernon. This moment was when George Washington parts company with most conquerors like Cromwell, Napoleon and Castro. He had power, and then walked away.
Kings George III and Louis XVI were amazed when they heard the news: That Washington, the great generalissimo, the most powerful man in the Americas, would give up his power so lightly, to return to his farm like the legendary Roman -Cincinnatus. George Washington was called out of retirement five years later to be the first U.S. president.

1787- New Jersey named the third state.

1812-NAPOLEON'S RETREAT FROM MOSCOW ENDS -Napoleon reached Paris by sled after racing ahead of his shattered army to prop up the tottering government.
Of Napoleon's 600,000 troops that invaded Russia less than 60,000 frozen wretches came out. Insanely brave Marshal Ney was the last invader to recross the border. Alone with bullets whistling past his ears, he calmly crossed the burning Neiman River bridge stopping to pick up abandoned muskets to fire them at the Russians. After he fired a last shot he threw the empty rifle at them.
When Napoleon got to his palace at Saint Cloud he was so dirty from the trip the guards didn't recognize him, and wouldn't let him in. His first official acts after the public announcement of the Russian Campaign’s disaster was ordering the Paris ballet dancers to dance barelegged instead of in the customary tights. While that topic dominated gossip, his second act was to give the French people a big tax cut. Watching Louis XVI lose his head in the Revolution gave Nappy a healthy, if cynical, respect for the anger of the average citizen.

1890-The first electric powered subway train opened in London. This allowed the subways to be built in closed tunnels (or tubes) under buildings. The older steam engine tube trains operating since 1863 needed an open trench for the coal smoke to be let out.

1912- THE PILTDOWN MAN- An announcement was made, of a find, in a peat pit, in England, of the remains of a human ancestor between ape and man, the so-called "Missing Link". The skull had canine teeth like an animal but it had an enlarged cranium like a man and was buried with primitive tools. This find was made at the time Darwin’s Evolutionary theories were being hotly debated. The authenticity of the Piltdown Man was thrown into question in 1949. When modern dating techniques were perfected, by 1953, the Piltdown Man was officially declared a hoax. The remains were too modern to be ancient and the canine teeth had filed down by tiny files. It is generally believed that a practical joker named Martin Hinton at the British Museum of Natural History may have been the perpetrator.

1916- The terrible Battle of Verdun ended. It had been raging since February. German General Von Falkenhayn wanted to draw France into a meatgrinder battle and 'bleed her white'. After hundreds of thousands of casualties, he had done the same damage to his own side. He lost his job. The Verdun cemetery contains 100,000 bones of Unknown soldiers. Even today in Verdun there are areas you cannot walk for fear of unexploded shells.

1919- in France Composer Cole Porter married divorcee Linda Thomas. They stayed together all their long lives even though she knew from the outset that he was gay .

1931- Gangster Jacky "Legs" Diamond had a penchant for recovering after being shot repeatedly by pistols and shotguns. It was said he had so much lead in him he could attract a magnet. Today someone finally shot him down and he didn't get up.

1937- Mae West does a comedy routine on national broadcast radio with Don Ameche about Adam and Eve that was considered so racy CBS banned her from their network.
At the same time she got fined by the networks for joking about ventriloquist puppet Charlie McCarthy:" Hmmm…he’s all wood and a yard long!"

1939-Max Fleischer's animated classic “Gulliver's Travels”.

1940- Adolf Hitler and his generals promulgate the plans for Directive 21, the invasion of Soviet Russia. They name it Barbarossa after a legendary German Emperor, a contemporary of Richard Lionhart, who fought the Eastern Slavs.

1941- The Japanese overwhelm the island post of Guam. 641 marines against 5,000 Japanese.

1944- MOE BERG AND THE NAZI EINSTEIN. Head of the German atomic program, Prof. Werner Heisenberg gives a lecture on S-matrix physics in Zurich, Switzerland. In the audience was Moe Berg, allied spy, amateur physicist and catcher for the Washington Senators (sounds ridiculous but true). Before the war Berg and Heisenberg were both friends with Danish physicist Neils Bohr, hence his invitation. The U.S. intelligence officers gave Berg a pistol and instructed him to stand up and shoot Heisenberg dead on the spot, if he felt from the talk that the Nazis were close to finishing their Atomic Bomb. Moe Berg coolly schmoozed Heisenberg at the reception afterwards, and even walked him home, but did nothing. In the 1950's Berg was a frequent contestant on quiz shows.

1956- Japan is admitted into the UN

1956- TV Game show To Tell the Truth made its debut. Bud Collier hosting, and panelists like Kitty Carlisle, Bennett Cerf, Orson Bean and Dorothy Killgallen as panelists.

1960- A young eccentric man named Jerry Garcia was dishonorably discharged from the army. He had done things like drive a tank into a field then walk away and had been AWOL 8 times in one year. After leaving the army Jerry Garcia became a hippie musician in San Francisco and in 1966 formed the rock band the Grateful Dead.

1961-" In the Jungle, the mighty jungle, the lion sleeps to-night…a winoweh, etc. " this song by the Tokens goes to #1 in pop charts.

1964- DePatie-Freleng’s The Pink Phink, the first Pink Panther cartoon short.

1966- Chuck Jone's 'How the Grinch Stole Christmas' premiered.

1970- An atomic leak at a Nevada weapons stockpile caused hundreds to flee.

1972- President Nixon announced that despite all the war protestors and outcry he would continue to carpet-bomb North Vietnam and Laos until he got a negotiated settlement.

1975- Rod Stewart announced he was leaving the band Faces for a solo singing career.

1978- SAG strikes Hollywood again for residuals. (again...)

1984- Christopher Guest married Jamie Lee Curtis at Rob Reiner’s house .

1997- Saturday Night Live Comedian Chris Farley was found dead in his Chicago apartment in the John Hancock Tower, surrounded by empty food containers and porn magazines. The chubby 31-year-old had been partying for 17 straight hours doing cocaine, heroin, vodka and crystal-meth. His last words were to an exhausted prostitute:" Please don’t leave me.". Farley idolized the late John Belushi, who had also died of drugs and hard living at age 31. One writer recalled Farley drunk turned to him and asked innocently:" Do you think Belushi is in heaven?"

1998- Dreamworks feature cartoon the “Prince of Egypt”, or, as it was known in Hollywood,"The Zion King".

2003-Gary Ridgeway, "The Green River Murderer" was sentenced to life in prison. In the 1980’s Ridgeway murdered 48 women in the Seattle area. "I murdered mostly prostitutes because I figured nobody would miss them."

2009- A massive blizzard buried the U.S. east coast. Washington D.C. got 24 inches, the most December snow since the 1920s.
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Yesterday’s Question: What legendary rock band began in the 1960s playing in Palo Alto bars and Pizza Parlors as The Warlocks?

Answer: The Grateful Dead.