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November 28th,2009
November 28th, 2009



Sadness in the Sito household. Our oldest cat Chagadai, passed away Friday morning. She was very old, and suffering multiple strokes.

Named for one of Genghis Khan's mightiest Mongol warriors, she was a great hunter. Our floor was routinely festooned with mice heads and small bird parts. we tried to put a bell on her, and she just laughed it off, and let a wild finch loose in our most inaccessible bathroom.

She eventually grew into graceful old retirement. Arthritic and missing a fang or two, she would sit peacefully near the bird feeder, reminiscing when she was their terror. Friday morning as she lay on her favorite blanket on the floor, bathed in warm morning sunshine, she gently let her spirit free.

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Question: Who said” We didn’t land at Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us!”

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What character was the first Macy Day balloon?
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History for 11/28/2009
Birthdays: Jean Baptiste Lully, William Blake, Frederich Engels, Stefan Zweig, Ernst Roehm, Brooks Atkinson, Berry Gordy the founder of Motown Records, Randy Newman, Anton Rubinstein, Gary Hart, Vern Den Herder, Paul Warfield, Hope Lange, Ed Harris is 59, Paul Schaefer, Laura Antonelli, Joe Dante, Michael Ritchie, Anna Nicole-Smith, Judd Nelson, John Stewart is 47

1493- Christopher Columbus returned to San Salvador, to discover his first colony La Natividad wiped out by angry Indians.

1520- Having recovered and refitted from navigating the Straights of Magellan around the tip of South America, Fernan Magellan began his trip across the Pacific.

1895- The GREAT CHICAGO RACE- first American auto race. Two electric and four gas powered cars raced from Chicago to Evanston and back 54 miles despite several inches of snow on the ground. The winner Number 5 driven by inventor Charles Duryea reached a top speed of 7 miles an hour! Only one other car finished, the rest broke down. Duryea won $2000 and a good cold.

1911- The Chevrolet Automobile Company founded by the brothers Chevrolet.

1919- Lady Astor became the first woman elected to the British Parliament. She was the political as well as verbal nemesis of Winston Churchill who said "Mr. Churchill, if I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee!" To which Churchill replied:" Madame if I were your husband I would drink it !"
Lady Astor by John Singer Sargent and Chuchill

1922- The first Skywriting display. Former RAF pilot Cyril Turner wrote HELLO USA , CALL VANDERBILT 7-200 in the skies above New York City. 47,000 immediately telephoned the number.

1925- First radio broadcast from the Grand Ol' Opry in Nashville.

1942- THE COCOANUT GROVE FIRE-The U.S. public was distracted for awhile from war news by reports of a terrible disaster in Boston. A fire broke out at a popular nightclub called the Cocoanut Grove and killed 492 people in only twelve minutes. The clubs decorations caught fire and created carbon monoxide gas and there were only two exits. Among the dead was western movie star Buck Jones. The tragedy created the first mandatory laws requiring public buildings to have fire exits opening outwards and safety testing of decorative materials.

1947- Disney's cartoon "Chip and Dale".

1948- Hopalong Cassidy premiered on television.

1951-Truman held a crisis cabinet meeting over the War in Korea.
U.S and United Nations forces had been attacked by 180,000 Communist Chinese, lost the capitol Seoul and were being driven back down the Korean peninsula. Gen. Douglas MacArthur recommended a limited dropping of at least ten atomic bombs on Chinese cities, spreading a belt of nuclear waste across the Sino-Korean border and inviting Chaing Kai Shek's Nationalist Chinese forces to attack China and restart the Chinese Civil War. This would mean Russia would step in with it's nuclear weapons and World War III would result.
Truman made the decision to keep the Korean War a "limited war" and not let it expand, no matter how dire allied losses became.
Gen. MacArthur was horrified. He was told we are not at war with Communist China, even though thousands of Chinese soldiers were even now locked in deadly battle with his troops. At first his calls for nuclear weapons sounds crazy, but his argument was it was crazy to fight wars to preserve a status-quo. If you go to the extreme of risking men's lives, do it to win or don’t go to war at all. In 1964 from his deathbed MacArthur sent a note to Pres. Johnson warning him not to go into Vietnam.

1953- Frank Olson, a US government employee, jumped out a window of the New York Statler Hotel. In 1975 it was revealed Olson was given LSD by Dr Sidney Gottleib given as part of a government “mind-control” experiment.

1953- Cartoonist writer Milt Gross died.

1981 - Moviestar Natalie Wood drunkenly toppled off her yacht near Catalina Island and drowned. Her husband Robert Wagner friend Christopher Walken, were onboard having an argument and unaware of her predicament. Wood had once confessed to a friend that she had a horror of drowning.
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Yesterday’s Question answered below: What character was the first Macy Day balloon?

Answer- Felix the Cat in 1927. Many of these first balloons were designed by animator Tony Sarg.



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