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Nov. 29, 2020
November 29th, 2020

QUESTION: What is a dilettante?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Which planet is larger? Mars or Earth?
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History for 11/29/2020
Birthdays: Gaetano Donizetti, Busby Berkeley, C.S. Lewis (Carl Staples Lewis), Louisa May Alcott, Chuck Mangione, Yakima Canutt, Gary Shandling, Cathy Moriarity, Don Cheadle, Joel Coen is 64, Jacques Chirac, Howie Mandell, Susee “Chapstick” Chafee, Chadwick Boseman, Anna Faris is 44, Vin Scully is 93

1830- The November Uprising. Polish nationalists rise up against the Russian occupiers in one of their many valiant but ultimately hopeless efforts. In America, literary figures like Hawthorne, Poe, and Longfellow were romantically moved to write lots of epic poems, but not much else could be done to help.
Edgar Allen Poe in his alcohol and drug induced delirium, would run out of his Bronx cottage and march up and down the street with a musket in his hand shouting: "To Warsaw! To Warsaw!" Luckily, the local constable was well aware of Mr. Poe's eccentricities and sent him home to bed.

1864- Colorado militia killed over 150 Cheyenne Indians in the Sand Creek Massacre. Local garrison commander Col. John Chivington was depressed that he was not back east winning glory in the Civil War. So he attacked a peaceful Cheyenne village. He later held a victory parade in Denver displaying the scalps of the Indians, mostly women, old men and children. His actions sparked a needless war with the Cheyenne that raged for years afterwards.

1887- The US Navy received permission from the Hawaiian King David IV Kalakaou to lease land for a base at Pearl Harbor.

1890- The first Army-Navy football game held at West Point. Midshipmen beat the cadets 24-0.

1913- In the first years of animated films, one artist like Winsor McCay drew everything alone, and may have hired a cameraman or assistant. This day, John Randolph Bray's cartoon "Colonel Heeza Liar in Africa" debuted. Bray adapted Henry Ford's assembly line system to making animation, today known as the Production Pipeline. He created the job positions of layout, animator, inbetweener, background painter, inker, blackeners (cel painters), and camera. In the 1920s the job of gag man (storyboarder), cleanup and checkers. After 1919, Bray shifted his studio focus from entertainment to technical and training films. J.R. Bray started the careers of Paul Terry, Walter Lantz, Max & Dave Fleischer, Dick Heumer, and Shamus Culhane.

1929- Commander Richard Byrd radioed he'd made the first airplane flight over the South Pole. Commander Byrd had flown over the North Pole in 1926 with his friend Floyd Bennett, but Bennett had since died. When Byrd made it over the South Pole he dropped a small American flag weighted with a stone from Bennett’s grave.

1941- In occupied Russia, Nazi troops first raped and then hanged Zoia Kosmodemianskaya. She led a team of partisans at 18 years old. Before she died, she cried defiance at the Nazis:” You cannot hang all 190 million of us!”

1942- During WWII, the U.S. declared coffee would be rationed along with sugar, gasoline and rubber. And lots more. People put their cars up on blocks "for the duration". Gas Ration cards were listed as C, B & A. The C card meant essential defense worker so they had unlimited access to gasoline. B cards police & fire. An A card was the least important, i.e. us.

1944- A Detroit man named Malcolm Little was busted for larceny. He later reformed his life around the Nation of Islam and changed his name to Malcolm X.

1947- THE UN DECIDES. Since 1897 European Jewry had focused on buying land and relocating to Palestine. In 1936 the Egyptian Parliament issued an open letter to all Jews to come live amongst them, but rising Arab nationalism since 1919 tended to resist Jewish immigration. Since World War I, the British held Palestine as a mandate but after World War II they dumped the whole problem in the United Nations hands. The Peel Report, a Foreign Office paper published in 1937 said maybe creating two new states was the solution.
This day The United Nations voted 33-13 to partition the British Mandate of Palestine into Jewish and Arab independent states with Jerusalem under international supervision. On May 14th 1948 British forces completed their withdrawal and Jewish Agency Chairman David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the State of Israel.

1959- The Second Grammy Awards, broadcast for the first time on television. Bobby Darin’s rendition of Mack the Knife won top honors.

1961- NASA sent Enos the Chimp into orbit.

1963- THE WARREN COMMISSION announced- President Lyndon Johnson set up the Warren Commission to investigate the murder of John F. Kennedy. He had originally thought the Dallas Homicide Squad was sufficient, but public outrage demanded more.
The Commission was headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren and participants included future president Gerald Ford, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State Alan Foster Dulles and future Senator Arlen Spector, then a young attorney who argued the validity of the "magic bullet" theory”. That one bullet went through Kennedy, bounced, went through Kennedy, ricocheted, went through Connolly, zinged, and wound up sitting in Gov. Connolly's bedsheets in the hospital with no surface dents or marks on it -or something like that. Why the first bullet went through Kennedy intact while the second bullet exploded inside his skull was never explained.
After ten months the Warren Commission concluded that President Kennedy was killed by a lone nut, so there was no conspiracy. In 1975, the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded the contrary view, that Kennedy probably was the victim of a conspiracy but what it was is unknown. To this date there are still two million documents pertaining to the case kept classified. In the end the Warren Commission’s unsatisfying conclusions spawned a generation of conspiracy buffs.

1963- A week after the Kennedy assassination, comedian Vaughn Meader announced he was giving up his act impersonating the dead president. Meader’s comedy album The First Family sold 7.5 million copies and won a Grammy in 1962, but now it wasn’t funny anymore. Meaders career faded, and he ended up managing a pub in Maine. He died of emphysema in 2004. When Lenny Bruce first took the stage after the Kennedy assassination, he opened with a long drag on his cigarette and sighed:” ….Man…. Vaughn Meader is really screwed!”

1967- Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and Johnson, stepped down to become president of the World Bank.

1972- Atari announced Pong, the first popular mass-marketed interactive game.

1981- Actress Natalie Wood drunkenly toppled off her yacht near Catalina Island and
drowned. Her husband Robert Wagner, and friend Christopher Walken were onboard having an argument and unaware of her predicament. Wood had once confessed to a friend that she had a horror of drowning.

2001- Beatle guitarist and composer George Harrison died of cancer. He was 58.

2018- The premiere of Walt Disney’s Mary Poppins Returns.
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Question: Which planet is larger? Mars or Earth?

Answer: Earth is almost twice as large as Mars.


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