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Sept 22, 2020
September 22nd, 2020

Question: What or where is Elysium?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: What is the difference between a raincoat and a Macintosh?
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History for 9/22/2020
Birthdays: Anne of Cleves 1515- Henry VIII’s fourth wife. Bilbo Baggins and Frodo Baggins, Mafioso Joe Valachi, Michael Farraday, Meryl Streep is 70, John Houseman, Joanie Jett, Erich Von Stronheim, Tom Lasorda is 93, Paul Muni, Debbie Boone

3001-Bilbo Baggins left the Shire, having entrusted the one true ring to the custody of his nephew Frodo.

480 BC. Themistocles and the Athenian fleet of 300 faced the 1,200 warships of Xerxes the Great King of Persia in the Bay of Salamis. This night at a war council the Greek admirals voted not to try to fight such mighty host, but run away. Finding himself outvoted, Themistocles was so confident in their ability to win, that he took a risk that could have cost his life. He sent a spy to Xerxes to tell him the Greeks were planning to flee. So he should maneuver his fleet around them and cut off any hope of retreat. Xerxes fell for it and forced the engagement. The victory of Salamis assured the Golden Age of Athens.

287AD- THE THEBAN LEGION-One of the celebrated myths of the Middle Ages. A Roman general Maximian Herculius recruited an entire army unit from Christians in upper Egypt. In Gaul with the imperial army, the Emperor Maximian ordered sacrifices to the Mars for victory. The Theban Legion refused to participate in the pagan ritual. The emperor had every tenth man executed (to "decimate") and still they refused. Soon all 1,500 were executed. So much time and money was invested by the state in the training of veteran soldiers, that it seems unlikely that the practical Romans would execute an entire legion. Still, it's a good story.

1692- Seven more witches were hanged in Salem, Mass. When the daughter of the Royal Governor of the Massachusetts Colony was accused, the Governor finally stepped in and stopped the madness. He overturned the decisions of the Salem court and ordered its disbandment. These were the last witch executions in America.

1761- King George III’s coronation in London. Unlike his two George forebears who clung to their German Hanoverian roots, George III spoke English without an accent. He considered himself English and never visited his German ancestral lands. All the great men of the day were there like Pitt the Elder, Edmund Burke and Dr. Samuel Johnson. In the crowd in front of Westminster Abbey, dazzled by all the pomp and circumstance, was a young colonist from America named John Hancock. Presented at court, he received from his sovereign’s hands a silver snuffbox. Ironically this was the very same Hancock whose bold signature would one day adorn the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

1776- Nathan Hale was hanged as a spy by the British in occupied New York City. The Connecticut schoolteacher had only been a spy for nine days until he was ratted out by Colonel Robert Rogers, the French & Indian War hero, who was now a Tory Loyalist. One account later by a English officer named Montrose was that Hale’s last words were a quote from Addison’s play Cato: ”I regret that I have but one life to give for my country….”

1762- After deposing and assassinating her husband Czar Peter III, Catherine the Great has a coronation to crown herself Czarina of all the Russias, at the cathedral of the Assumption in Moscow.

1777- General John Burgoyne was considering falling back with his British army to Canada after being stopped at Saratoga New York. But this day he changed his mind after getting a message from General Henry Clinton who said he was marching north from New York City to rescue. Clinton didn’t get much further than White Plains, and the delay proved fatal to “Gentleman Johnny” Burgoyne and his army.

1792- The French Revolutionaries declare the Kingdom of France a Republic.

1828- SHAKA ZULU, The "Black Napoleon" was assassinated. Shaka took the Zulu tribe from obscurity and created the largest centralized empire in Africa. He created military units, tactics and societal structures that enabled the Zulu to take on the Boers and later the British Empire. In his old age Shaka's rule became increasingly harsh and arbitrary, so his brother Mbulazi killed him. Shaka's descendants run the Inkatha Freedom Party in South Africa today.

1910- 15 year old button sewer Bessie Abramowitz led the Great Chicago Garment Workers Strike.

1925- Lon Chaney’s horror classic film The Phantom of the Opera premiered.

1927- The Dempsey-Tunney championship fight. Tunney wins in the famous 'long count', meaning the referee delayed the count because Dempsey wouldn’t return to his neutral corner. The extra time allowed Tunney to recover his wits and continue the fight to victory. Jack Dempsey had been world heavyweight champion for ten years but retired a year later.

1947- A C-54 Skymaster flies over the Atlantic using the first automatic pilot control.

1964- The T.V. series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. premiered. “Open Channel D, Please..”

1964- Jerome Robbins’ “The Fiddler on the Roof “ opened on Broadway. Based on the story “Tevye and His Daughters” by Scholom Alecheim in 1894. In 1953 Jerome Robbins had named names to the HUAC committee to save his career. Now in Fiddler he had to use blacklisted actors like Zero Mostel and Beatrice Arthur, who all despised him.

1967- Farewell voyage of the Queen Mary, in service since 1936.

1975- A emotionally unstable FBI worker named Sarah Jane Moore tried to assassinate President Gerald Ford in front of the Saint Francis Hotel in San Francisco. Her gun arm was deflected at the last second by a man named Oliver Sipple. The bullet missed by just 5 feet. In the subsequent media attention, Sipple was outed as a gay man and his career was ruined and his Baptist mother disowned him. “I can’t see what my sexual orientation had to do with saving the President’s life!”

1976- TV show Charlie’s Angels premiered. It made a star out of Farrah Fawcett.

1979- Hanna Barbera's Super Globetrotter's Show, featuring Multi-Man, Sphere Man, Gizmo-Man, Spaghetti-Man and Fluid-Man.

1980- Proctor & Gamble announced a recall of millions of tampons following several deaths from a rare infection called Toxic Shock Syndrome.

1984- Michael Eisner named CEO of the Walt Disney Corporation.

1994- Friends TV show premiered.

1996- Seymour Cray, genius engineer who designed the most powerful supercomputers for the Control Data Corporation and Cray Computers, was in a bad car accident in Colorado Springs. He died two weeks later. He was 71.

2011- Scientists at the CERN accelerator claimed to make a particle go faster than the speed of light, something Einstein said could not be done.

2017- 2017- In a speech to his supporters, Pres. Donald Trump referred in vulgar terms to football star Colin Kaepernik, who protested during the playing of the national anthem. “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, ‘Get that son of a bitch off the field right now! Out! He’s fired!’”
Many presidents would swear in private like Truman, Johnson and Nixon, but never in public. It was a matter of the dignity of the Presidency. This was the first time a sitting president used vulgarities openly, in an official speech. And it wouldn't be the last.

2017- Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico. Three thousand deaths. The Trump administration bungled the rescue and recovery attempt and claimed the death toll was only 46 when it is actually more than 3,000. It took 11 months for electricity to be completely restored to the entire island. One year later President Trump was still declaring the federal response “ a complete success.”
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Yesterday’s question: What is the difference between a raincoat and a Macintosh?

Answer: Not much. A Macintosh is another name for a rubberized raincoat, invented by Charles Macintosh in 1823, and used mostly in Britain. While a raincoat is any waterproof coat that can be worn in the rain.


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