BACK to Blog Posts

July 07, 2009 tuesday
July 7th, 2009

Quiz: In what film were three lovable rogues named Comrades Iranoff, Buljanoff and Kopalski?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: In music composition, what is meant by con fuoco?
----------------------------------------------------------
History for 7/7/2009
Birthdays: Gustav Mahler, Satchel Page, Ringo Starr is 69, Doc Sevrinsen, Robert Heinlein, William Kuntsler, Gian Carlo Menotti, Ken Harris, Shelley Duval is 59, Ted Cassidy-Lurch in the Adams Family, Michelle Kwan, David McCullough, Pierre Cardin, and according to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle this is the birthday of Sherlock Holmes’ sidekick Dr. John Watson
Happy Birth-dayyyyy...

750 BC- 391AD This was the Roman Feast of Quirinus, then day when Romulus the founder of Rome was taken up to heaven and assumed his place beside the Gods as the deified Quirinus.

1569- Sir Francis Drake boldly sailed into the harbor of Cartagena ( in modern Columbia), the largest port on the Spanish Main, and looted a treasure galleon.

1607- The English anthem God Save the King first sung in honor of King James Ist.

1666- King Charles II and his court quit London in the wake of the Great Plague.

1754- The Kings Royal College of New York founded. After the American Revolution, the name was changed to Columbia University.

1821- The Latin American liberation army of Jose San Martin captured Lima Peru.

1839-The First European Railroad link opens between Vienna and Prague, thanks to the entrepreneurial investment of Meyer Rothschild, the Austrian branch of the House of Rothschild. Even though the English invented the locomotive years earlier European development moved much slower than in America where vast distances needed to be linked up fast. There was medical concern about people being moved at such high speeds as 35 miles an hour! A Viennese doctor wrote that at if the human body moved faster than 15 mph, blood would squirt out of your eyes and ears. Men would go mad and women sex-crazed.

1865- Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth's co-conspirators were all hanged Lewis Payne, George Atzenrodt and David Herold. Even weeping old Mary Surrat, who's involvement is still debatable. She may have known of some kind of plot but all they could prove was she the landlady of the boardinghouse where the plotters met. Everyone expected that a last minute amnesty would come from President Johnson but the President stayed silent and she was hanged with the others. Mary Surrat was the first woman executed in the U.S. Large Lewis Payne’s neck didn’t break at first and he kicked and danced in the air for five minutes before he choked. General Dan Sickles said afterwards "We do not want to know their names anymore." The large gallows was then broken up and the splinters sold off as souvenirs to tourists.

1894-The Pullman Strike-U.S. troops battle 5,000 Chicago area railroad workers and their families in the streets. Dozens are killed. Troops were called for after marshals and detectives refused to shoot at unarmed working people. Other unions go out in sympathy with the Pullman workers and make the strike nationwide. Union president Eugene Debs is arrested for sedition and treason but acquitted by three grand juries. He later runs for president on the socialist ticket in 1912. President Cleveland before crushing the strike with regular army troops had just set the date for the first Labor Day.

1895-THE FIRST SUNDAY COMICS - The first modern comic strip Hogan’s Alley featuring "The Yellow Kid" by Richard Felton Outcault, debuts in the Sunday edition of Pulitzer's New York World. The strip was so popular it gave the name "Yellow Journalism" to the sensationalist tabloid press. Comic strips at this time became the mass media of the day. For people who couldn’t afford a theater ticket and couldn’t yet speak English, the little characters in the penny papers were extremely popular and made celebrities out of cartoonists like Outcault, Bud Selig George McManus and Winsor McCay. Richard Outcault later inventing the backend deal when he asked for a percentage of all sales from his new comic strip "Buster Brown and his dog Tige".

courtesy of humboldt.edu

1898-Congress votes to annex the Kingdom of Hawaii.

1900- Warren Earp, the youngest brother of Wyatt Earp, was killed in a gunfight. He had gotten into an argument in a saloon in Wilcox Arizona. Warren Earp was not at the OK Corral in 1881, but he did help his brothers hunt down the killers of Morgan Earp.

1911- THE AGADIR INCIDENT or "The Panther's Leap' In the tense international climate just before the Great War Germany sparked a major international incident by making moves to take southern Morocco from France. They sent the battle cruiser Panther to Agadir Harbor to "protect endangered German citizens", There were no Europeans in that part of Morocco so the German ministry cabled a Herr Weiland to rush overland by train to meet the warship. He was nicknamed "The Endangered German". After a lot of diplomatic bluffs and threats between Paris, Berlin, London and St. Petersburg, Germany eventually backed down. One Berlin newspaper said:" To think we almost went to war with Britain & France over a country that can only provide sand for our canary cages!" An angry German minister said:" The incident had the same effect as viewing a dead squid. First shock, then amusement, then revulsion."

1943-BANZAI- Climax of the Battle of Saipan- 4,300 Japanese troops stream out of the jungle in a massed Banzai charge on U.S. Marine positions. Fighting devolved into insane hand to hand combat with Samurai swords and rifle-bayonets, more reminiscent of the Civil War than World War Two. One of the Marines wounded in the attack was future movie star Lee Marvin, nicknamed Captain Marvel by his buddies for his gung-ho attitude.

Almost all the Japanese were killed. Later in a cave the Marines found the bodies of General Saito and Admiral Nagumo, the fleet commander at the Pearl Harbor attack. They had committed hari kari when the attack had failed. This event also caused Prime Minister Hideki Tojo's government to fall, since Tojo had pledged the U.S. could not take Saipan, an island which placed Japan within range of US long range bombers.

1947- THE ROSSWELL INCIDENT- An official news report from the U.S. Airforce 509th bomber command -the same unit that dropped the Hiroshima bomb- stated they had recovered the wreckage of a UFO in the New Mexico desert near Rosswell and were examining it. The next day the commanding general of the 8th Air Force flew to Rosswell and stated to the press that the earlier report was in error and it was only a downed weather balloon. The wreckage was removed under heavy-armed guard. Complete secrecy was then imposed, and maintained to this day.

The communications officer Major Jesse Marcey, who posed for an official photo showing him with the balloon wreckage later told his son it was faked. Marcey, who died in 1967 and his adjutant Lt. Haut still stick to the original version of their story. Lt. Haut also claimed the base commander Col. William Blanchard thought it was UFO debris. This report coming only two weeks after the first modern sighting of "flying saucers" over Mt. Reynier in Oregon sparked the Flying Saucer craze that gripped America throughout the 1950’s.

After the Cold War ended, the Pentagon tried to explain the incident by saying at Rosswell and the base Area 51 they were experimenting with high altitude balloons carrying sniffer devices to detect Russian nuclear tests. The rumored alien bodies recovered were in reality test dummies.

But then the military added to the mystery when they still refused any access to the mysterious Area 51. When asked what is done there, the Army spokesman said: "Uh, Secret Stuff...."

1949-"I’m Friday"- The program Dragnet first debuted on radio. Jack Webb conceived, wrote, directed and starred in the show. His hardest job was urging actors "not to act" but to speak the lines normally like the average person does.

1960- First demonstration of a practical laser beam. In Russia it had been theorized since 1951. Light Amplification by Stimulated Emission of Radiation or LASER.

1967- Vivien Leigh, the actress who played Scarlet O’Hara in Gone with the Wind and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, died in a mental institution at age 53.

1967 - Beatles' "All You Need is Love" is released. In 2002 for her Jubilee Queen Elizabeth II requested it because it was one of her favorite songs.

1967 – The Doors' "Light My Fire" hits #1.

1981- Judge Sandra Day O’Connor becomes the first woman nominated to the U.S. Supreme Court.

1982- A drunken lunatic named Michael Fagin with a bleeding left hand broke into Buckingham Palace, got past all the security and startled Queen Elizabeth in her bed. Her personal bodyguard was out walking the royal dogs. The Queen kept the man engaged in conversation at the foot of her bed until guards dragged him away.

2005-THE 7-7 ATTACK- Four Al Qaeda terrorist bombs exploded in the London subway Tube and a doubledecker bus, killing 50 and injuring one thousand..
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Yesterday’s Quiz: : In music composition, what is meant by con fuoco?

Answer: It means you should play the music “with fire or fury” .


RSS