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.