BACK to Blog Posts

Nov. 18, 2020
November 18th, 2020

Question: The royal family of Britain are the Windsors. The Royal Family of France were the Bourbons. The royal family of Russia were the Romanovs. Who are the current royal family of Spain?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Pittsburgh, Plattsburg, Gettysburg. What is a burg?
=======================================================
History for 11/18/2020
Birthdays: Armelita Galli-Curci, Karl Maria Von Weber, W.S. Gilbert, Johnny Mercer,
Astronaut Alan Shepard, Louis Daguerre, Brenda Vaccarro, Eugene Ormandy, George Gallup, Warren Moon, Pam Dawber, Rocket Ishmail, Delroy Lindo, Kevin Nealon, Owen Wilson is 53, Chloe Servigny is 47

500 A.D.- Today is the Feast day of the Irish Saint Mawes, who was born in a barrel floating in the sea.

It’s hand drawn animation day! See below- 1928.

1421- In Holland a dyke holding back the Zuyder Zee River gave way and the ensuing flood killed 10,000.

1602- In Transylvania, 22 year old English soldier of fortune John Smith killed three Turkish warriors in single combat. Such single bouts were normal before large armies clashed. The Duke of Transylvania, Sigmund Bathory, granted the commoner Smith his own coat of arms, three Turkish heads. This is the same John Smith who will go to Virginia and meet Pocahontas in 1607.

1718- Francois Voltaire’s first play Oedipe, premiered in Paris.

1812- Battle of Krasnoe-Napoleon's frozen army retreating from Moscow, fights it's way out of three encircling Russian armies trying to trap it. One of the armies was commanded by an admiral Tchitchagoff who's 20th century descendant would be the artist Erte'. Another general was the grandfather of writer Leo Tolstoy. General Tolstoy was an eccentric, who rode into battle in a chauffeured carriage with a trained bear sitting next to him he'd taught to drink champagne.

1863- Abraham Lincoln boarded a train to Gettysburg to deliver “a few appropriate remarks” to dedicate the new national cemetery there.

1865 Mark Twain's first story "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' published.

1883- THE DAY WITH TWO NOONS. Congress adopted William Allen’s plan to divide the United States into standardized time zones, corresponding to timetables set by the transcontinental railroads. At noon in New York City, the bells of Saint Paul’s Church tolled. Ten minutes later, several blocks away, the bells of Trinity Church on Wall St. tolled noon Eastern Standard Time, 11:00AM Central Time, 10:00AM Mountain Time and 9:00AM Pacific Time. And so it has been ever since.

1889- Richard Strauss completed his tone poem Death and Transfiguration.

1902- THE TEDDY BEAR BORN-The Washington Evening Star published a story of how President Teddy Roosevelt while hunting couldn't bring himself to shoot a grizzly bear cub. Cartoonist Cliff Berryman illustrated the incident with one of his signature “dingbat” bear cubs in a gesture of “oh no!” Brooklyn toymaker Morris Mitchcom sewed a doll from the illustration in the newspaper and sent the first one to the White House.

1903- The Hay-Buneau-Varilla Treaty signed, giving the U.S. permission to dig a canal in Panama. When Nicaragua wanted too much money for the canal zone, President Roosevelt backed a revolution that created the nation of Panama. Such a deal!

1914- SABOTAGE - A secret message was sent out by Imperial German Naval Command to all diplomatic embassies to begin sabotage operations of war material being readied in America and Canada for shipment to England.
Bombs exploding in cargo ships and warehouses in New York, Boston and Baltimore became common. One incident called the “Black Tom” pier explosion detonated two million pounds of explosive on a Jersey City wharf. The blast cracked windows on Wall St. and damaged the arm of the Statue of Liberty.
The success of German spies in the U.S. before America's entry into World War I sparked the buildup of a little known government office called the F.B.I. and the strict domestic counterintelligence work done in World War II.

1928- HAPPY BIRTHDAY MICKEY MOUSE- At Universal’s Colony Theater in New York, Walt Disney’s cartoon "Steamboat Willie" debuted before a movie called Gang War. The first major sound cartoon success and the official birth of Mickey Mouse. Two earlier silent Mickey's were being completed, but when Walt saw Al Jolson speak in the Jazz Singer, he held those two shorts back so the sound experiment could go ahead. At this time Walt Disney had just 11 employees.

1942-The KEYES RAID- The British army in North Africa had had enough of their German adversary Rommel the Desert Fox, so they sent a suicide commando mission to the Afrika Korps HQ just to kill him. Desert warfare was so porous the front lines were virtually non-existent. Unfortunately, Rommel was far away in Rome the night 50 British and Australian commandos shot up his office.

1953- Singer Frank Sinatra had been having trouble with his sputtering career and his crumbling marriage to screen sex goddess Ava Gardner. This day songwriter Jimmy Van Heusen claimed he found Old Blue Eyes on his bathroom floor with his wrists slashed. Heusen bound his wounds then called his agent rather than the police. Sinatra recovered and soon his career revived and he had a new marriage.

1963-The first push button telephones go into service. By 1980 they pretty much replaced the rotary dial phones.

1964- In a public statement to the press, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover called Dr. Martin Luther King “The most notorious liar in the country!” This in response to the criticism Dr. King made that the FBI wasn’t trying hard enough to track down the murderers of civil rights workers. Hoover always believed Dr. King and the whole NAACP were dangerous communists.

1970- At the Lakeside School in Seattle, a young kid named Bill Gates was first shown computer programming.

1978- JONESTOWN- After visiting U.S. congressman Leo Ryan and his party were murdered, 912 American members of the Rev. Jim Jones cult in Jonestown Guiana commit suicide, many drinking from tubs of Kool Aid, spiked with cyanide.

1985- Bill Watterson’s comic strip Calvin & Hobbs debuted.

1988- Disney’s Oliver & Company released.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------______________________________________________
Question: Pittsburgh, Plattsburg, Gettysburg. What is a burg?

Answer: An old German term originally for a mountain, later or a stronghold or fortress, usually on top of a hill where villagers could take refuge in when under attack. It the US it became a term for a town.


RSS