Question: What is the origin of the phrase” To be Turned Down Flat?”

Yesterday’s Question answered below: Who put up the first Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree?
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history for 12/2/2007
Birthdays: George Seurat, Charles Ringling, Julie Harris, Gianni Verasce, Ray Walston, Alexander Haig, Monica Seles, Cathy Lee Crosby, Lucy Liu is 39, Britney Spears is 25

1494- Now that the Medici Dukes were driven out of Florence mystical monk Savonarola proposed to the people that they create a Republic ruled by God’s Law. Savonarola ruled Florence like a Christian Ayatollah. He led big public spectacles where in large bonfires Florentines burned “vanities” like makeup, wigs, art and books and tried to live a religious life. Eventually it all got so boring they burned Savonarola instead, and recalled the Medicis.

1697- Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London reopened. It was restored by Sir Christopher Wren after being destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666.

1723- Phillipe D’Orleans died of an apoplectic fit at 49. He ruled France as regent for the boy King Louis XV and even when Louis attained his manhood he didn’t mind if his Uncle Phillipe continued to run the country for him. Phillipe D’Orleans was an able minister but extremely corrupt and sexually promiscuous. The City of New Orleans was named for him.

1804- NAPOLEON CROWNED EMPEROR OF FRANCE .The 35 year old little corporal from Corsica who spoke French with an Italian accent, had piercing gray eyes and if he liked you showed his affection by giving your ear a tug, crowned himself Emperor of the French. He had the Pope brought up from Rome to Notre Dame for legitimacy but in a moment of planned theater Napoleon took the crown from his hands and crowned himself. European liberals like Goethe and Beethoven who had thought Napoleon would be a strong force of reform in Europe were now disillusioned that he turned out to be just another usurper. Beethoven scratched off his dedication of his Third Symphony (Eroica) to him. Napoleon's mother, an old guerrilla named Madame Letizia, thought her son was making a fool out of himself and boycotted the ceremony. When David was doing the official painting of the event Napoleon ordered him to paint his mother in anyway.

Another curiosity of the coronation was the problem finding virgins. In order to copy the ceremony of the ancient coronation of Charlemagne they needed 12 virgin maids with candles. And after 15 years of social and sexual revolution in France, well, it was hard finding any virgins in Paris. Napoleon made a joke about looking in the quiet suburb of St. Germain en Laye.

1805- THE SUNRISE OF AUSTERLITZ- At a small village in what is now the Czech republic Napoleon defeats the Tsar of Russia and Emperor of Austria in one spectacular battle. Tolstoy called it the Battle of the Three Emperors. As much as he was a strategist and tactician Napoleon was a great analyst of human character. Based on his opinion of his opponent’s personalities he predicted exactly how the battle would go two weeks before he lured them into it. The defeat of the Allies was total and climaxed by the French artillery blowing holes in a frozen lake the Russians were trying to escape over, drowning hundreds. Within days they sued for peace and the war ended. Napoleon's take on events: "Ah, que Belle Journee'."What a nice day it's been."

1834-Battle of Ndondakasuka- Csetshwayo and his Zulu Impis (regiments) defeat his rival Mbulazi to become King of the Zulu Empire. Csetshwayo's descendants are now the leaders of the Inkatha Freedom Party in modern South Africa.

1854-Napoleon III was Napoleon's nephew and since 1848 legally elected President of the Second French Republic. But he decided that he wanted to be an Emperor like his uncle so he seized dictatorial power on the anniversary of Austerlitz and locked up all dissenters like Victor Hugo, Alex DeTocqueville and cartoonist Honore' Daumier (gotta watch them cartoonists...)

1859- John Brown Hanged- He said nothing on the scaffold but left a prediction on a slip of paper :".. I now believe that the sins of this nation have become so great that the cannot be excised but by a great spilling of blood.." Witnessing the event were Col. Robert E. Lee and part time reservist John Wilkes Booth.

1863- The dome of the U.S. Capitol completed as the Goddess of Freedom is hoisted up into place.

1877- Camille Saint Saens opera “Samson & Dalila” premiered in Weimar.

1896- We remember Wyatt Earp as the marshall of Dodge City and gunfighter of the 1881 OK Corral gunfight. He was better known to his people of his own generation as the referee of the Fitzsimmons-Sharkey Heavyweight Championship prizefight. After leaving Tombstone Arizona, Wyatt Earp drifted to San Francisco where his skills as a fight referee were called upon for this last of the big bare-knuckle bouts. He enraged the public when he declared the fight for Sharkey in the 3rd round after Big-Bob Fitzsimmons couldn't stop bleeding. More people were out to kill him over this decision than were ever out to get him when marshal of Dodge City. He quickly pulled up stakes and went to the Yukon for the gold rush. He was all but forgotten until a cheap book called Wyatt Earp Frontier Marshal published in 1920 made him famous. He died in Los Angeles in 1929 selling real estate and advising movie companies on how to shoot their westerns.

1901- Mr. King Gillette invented the safety razor.

1942- THE FIRST CONTROLLED NUCLEAR CHAIN REACTION.-The concept of a fission reaction had been theorized by Einstein and Bohr in 1939. Under a squash court at the University of Chicago a team of physicists led by Enrico Ferme began a chain reaction in a uranium pile and stopped it again, producing a few watts of energy. To celebrate they produced a bottle of chianti and some paper cups. No toasts were made to man's entrance into the Atomic Age. Tennis courts are still there and the Regenstein Library was built on the site where to this day the lowest basement registers off the scale on geiger counters.

1956- Fidel Castro with 88 followers trained in guerrilla fighting landed on the beach in Cuba and melted into the mountains. This group would be the core of a revolution that by 1959 would topple the US backed regime of dictator Fulgensio Batista and upset the world balance of power. The ramshackle boat Fidel, Che and his buddies made the crossing over from Mexico in was called the Granma.

1993- NASA astronauts do a series of space walks from their shuttle to adjust the Hubble space telescope. The Hubble cost billions of dollars but was sent into orbit with a flaw in it’s lenses. It was nearsighted. The spacewalk in effect gave the Hubble a set of glasses to see better the furthest details of deep space.

1994- LA jury found Heidi Fleiss ‘The Hollywood Madam”guilty of running a prostitution ring.
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Yesterday’s Question: Who put up the first Rockefeller Center Christmas Tree?

Answer: When work began on Rockefeller Center, the company refused to use union laborers. They used mostly Italian and Slavic immigrants. When the company also ordered the crew to work through the Christmas holiday, the workers protested by putting up a little Christmas tree in front of the work site. They hung some paper ornaments, cranberries and tin cans. This to show the world what they were spending their holiday working. The Rockefeller Foundation obviously didn’t care for the bad publicity, so they adopted the Christmas tree and turned it into an event. By 1933 the tree lighting became a annual spectacle.