Quiz: Christmas is also called Yuletide. So what’s a Yule?

Yesterday’s QUIZ answered below: In the ancient world, Dec 24th was also the birthday of the god Mithras, of the religion espoused by Zoroaster. What nation did this god come from?
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History for 12/19/2012
Birthdays: King Phillip V of Spain (1683), Edith Piaf, Edwin Stanton, Thomas 'Tip' O'Neil, Cicely Tyson, Sir Ralph Richardson, Robert Urich, Jennifer Beals is 49, David Susskind, Fritz Reiner, Mel Shaw, Alyssa Milano is 40, Jake Gyllenhaal is 32

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, the second major span across the East River. It linked Manhattan’s Lower East Side with 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 By the late 1990’s, most cels & cel paint had been replaced by digital imaging.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?"

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- 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.."

1958- First airing of the Disneyland TV holiday special “ From All of Us, to All of You.”

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 Lewinsky. 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. Three other of the loudest callers for impeachment, Senators David Vitter, 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 question: In the ancient world, Dec 24th was also the birthday of the god Mithras, of the religion espoused by Zoroaster. What nation did this god come from?
is New Zealand named after?

Answer: Ancient Persia (Iran).