Question: Who was it who didn’t die, but floated away on a boat to the mystical island of Avalon?

Yesterday’s Question: What does the term mean, to be as thin as a rail?
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History for 5/27/2011
Birthdays: James 'Wild Bill' Hickock, Julia Ward Howe, Aemelia Jenks-Bloomer, Dashiell Hammett, Vincent Price, Dr. Henry Kissinger is 86, Leopold Goldowsky (the inventor of Kodachrome film), Hubert H. Humphrey, Herman Wouk, Christopher Lee is 89, Harlan Ellison, Joseph Feinnes, Richard Schiff is 56, Peri Gilpin, Paul Bettany is 40

595 a.d. Today is the Feast day of Saint Augustine of Canterbury, who saw children in the slave docket and when told 'Those are Angles"-The barbarian tribe that England is named for. Augustine replied: Non Sunt Anglicai, Sunt Angelis” -Those are not Angles, those are Angels" -please forgive my bad Latin grammar. Augustine of Canterbury should not be confused with the Saint Augustine of Hippo, who wrote the Confessions and said:" Lord, help me to be Chaste.... But not just yet."

1647-The first witch execution in Salem Massachusetts. Contrary to popular perception, more witches were hanged or crushed with stones, than burned at the stake.

1647- Peter Stuyversant inaugurated as Dutch Governor of New Amsterdam. The one legged old soldier was a staunch Calvinist who was sent by the Hague to “clean up the town”.

1703- Czar Peter the Great laid the cornerstones for his new capitol Saint Petersburg. The Baltic Port was called at one time Petrograd and Leningrad but was changed back to the original name in 1989. It was the capitol until Lenin moved it back to Moscow in 1917.

1831- Mountain man explorer Jedediah Smith was killed fighting Commanches.

1874- Prostitution was outlawed in Los Angeles central business district.
1895 - British inventor Burt Acres patented a film camera/projector

1905- BATTLE OF THE TSUSHIMA STRAIGHTS- Grand Admiral Togo and the Japanese Navy destroy the Imperial Russian fleet in a battle that announced to the world Japan's had become an international power. It had been only 55 years since Admiral Perry forced the opening of its feudal society. Mahatma Ghandi said also the victory was a beacon to all colonialized peoples that the Europeans could be defeated at their own games. Of course the Japanese weren't fighting for altruistic motives but to see who would take over Manchuria and Korea.

1930- HAPPY BIRTHDAY SCOTCH TAPE -Chemist Richard Drew of Saint Paul Minnesota invented cellophane tape, marketed by the 3M Company under the brand Scotch. It was called Scotch after the stereotype perception that Scots people are frugal with money, so it’s a good value. Three years later Drew invented Masking Tape as a way for car manufacturers to pain cars two tone.

1933- Disney’s cartoon“The Three Little Pigs” premieres, whose song “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf” becomes a national anthem of recovery from the Depression. It was also a favorite song of Adolph Hitler.

1935- The U.S. Supreme Court strikes down Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Act (The NRA) program. Roosevelt responds by trying to stack the court with judges more to his liking. He referred to them as 'The Nine Old Men', a sobriquet Walt Disney would borrow in 1949 for his animators.

1937- San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge opens.

1941- The German battleship Bismarck finally sunk by massed Royal Navy ships and torpedo planes. In 1981 I heard CBC radio interview with the last surviving flag-deck officer of the Bismarck , a Baron von Mullenheim-Rechburg, who had just published a memoir. The radio interviewer asked him:" When did you get the idea to write this book? He replied:" When I was floating around in the burning water..." The interviewer then asked incredulously" Then why did you wait forty years? He replied casually:" Well...you know, things come up..."

1942- Top Nazis in occupied Czechoslovakia Reynhard Heydrich was assassinated by the resistance ,who threw a bomb into his car. Hitler angrily responded by ordering the SS to select a Czech village at random and destroy it. They picked Lidice; they leveled it and murdered all its innocent inhabitants.

1943- In a secret meeting in German occupied Paris, young French resistance leader Jean Moulin got all the various separate underground movements to unite under Charles DeGaulle's Free French. Moulin was eventually captured by the Gestapo and tortured to death, but le Maquis- i.e. resistance, continued the fight united until the liberation.

1949- Actress Rita Hayworth married Arab playboy Prince Aly Khan.

1961 – The first black light is sold

1969 – Construction on Walt Disney World Orlando began.

1977-The Sex Pistols release their Punk hit God Save the Queen, the Fascist Regime, in time for the Queen’s Jubilee year. Her Majesty preferred the Beatles All You Need is Love.

1968- At this time 350 Americans a week were being killed in Vietnam, and in 12 days George W. Bush’s student deferment would be up! But never fear, his family was pulling strings. So even though the normal wait was a year, this day George W. Bush was accepted into the Texas Air National Guard on the first day he applied.

1991- The Milwaukee police question serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer after finding a distraught, bleeding young Laotian immigrant in the street. The boy was struggling to shake off the effect of date-rape drugs given him by Dahmer. After deducing that it was merely a quarrel between gays, the police returned the boy to Dahmer who killed and ate him later.

1994 – Nobel Prize winner and dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia after a 20 year exile.

1995- Actor Christopher Reeves was left paralyzed from the neck down after falling from his horse in an equestrian event in Charlottesville, Va. He became a spokesman for stem-cel research but his national effort was stymied by powerful religious lobbies. Christopher Reeves died in 2004.

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Yesterday’s question: What does the term mean, to be as thin as a rail?

Answer: A rake is a small thin bird of the Louisiana bayous, that is threatened by the Deep Water Horizon Oil Spill Disaster.