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June 23, 2022
June 23rd, 2022

Quiz: In the 1960s a man named Bill Dana was popular on TV for a character he did. What was it?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: When exercising, what does it mean to be working out your glutes?
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History for 6/23/2022
Birthdays: Roman Emperor Augustus, Josephine Bonaparte, Alan Turing, Bob Fosse, James Levine, Dan Ogilvy of Ogilvy & Mather, Joss Whedon, Dr. Alfred Kinsey the sex researcher, Edward VIII, aka the Duke of Windsor, Selma Blair, Justice Clarence Thomas, Josh Whedon is 58, Frances MacDormand is 65

1565- Siege of Malta -the fortress of St. Elmo fell to Turkish assaults. Sultan Sulieman the Magnificent was shocked at how many good troops he lost to take the smaller of two forts defending Valetta, the capital of Malta. He could imagine the cost to take the larger fort, St. George. So Sulieman gave up the siege. The victorious Knights of St. John Hospitaller, looking for a home since the Crusades, would now be the Knights of Malta. Their emblem, the Maltese Cross, is four barbed arrowheads forming a cross.

1611- In Hudson’s Bay, Canada, Henry Hudson's crew mutinied and set him and his son adrift in a rowboat. They were never seen again. When back in Holland the mutineers were never charged because they claimed to have discovered the Northwest Passage to the Indies, which luckily for them they never had to actually prove.

1683- William Penn signed a treaty with the Lenni-Lenapi Indians at Shackamaxon under the Treaty Elm to start his new Quaker colony called Pennsylvania. Penn wrote of the Indians: "Their language is narrow, yet lofty like the Hebrew…one word suffices in place of three."

1757- Battle of Plassey- Sir Robert Clive with 900 English and 1300 Indians defeated an army of 50,000 under Siraj-ud-Daula, the Nawab of Bengal who perpetrated the infamous Black Hole of Calcutta. Daula was killed, and the victory assured the British domination of India for the next two hundred years.

1789- Since June 20th, when the French Estates General had adjourned to a Tennis Court and declared itself the National Assembly, everyone wondered what King Louis XVI would do. This day the King held a Royal Levee with the legislators and court to announce his decision.
From his golden throne Louis said that while he agreed to most of their political reforms, but the idea that a regularly sitting Parliament of common people could overrule royal authority he declared was "illegal and void". He would stay an absolute monarch, answerable only to God, thank you.
After the King ended the meeting, his Royal Herald called upon the legislators in his tennis court to go home. The orator Mirabeau cried" We shall not leave this hall except by the power of the bayonet!" When told this, the King sighed "Oh... to the Devil with them. Let them stay." The standoff persisted until July 14th when the attack on the Bastille began the French Revolution.

1793- During the French Revolution, Josephine De Beauharnais is condemned to be guillotined. In a prison filled with nobles and intellectuals she found her first husband Alexandre the Vicomte du Beauharnais. They had been estranged for years and she had become quite a scandalous woman. When the jailer read out the names to go to the blade that day he read: "DeBeauharnais!" without specifying which of them was to go. The husband stepped forward and said: "Madame, just this once allow me to go first." When the Reign of Terror was overthrown she was released and she became the great love of Napoleon.

1810- The Pacific Fur Company was set up by John Jacob Astor, a German immigrant merchant. His ambition was to set up a string of fur trading posts along the route traveled by Lewis & Clark. It is the beginning of the great Astor fortune.

1815 –A week after his defeat at Waterloo. Napoleon abdicated for good. He abdicated to his son 4-year-old Napoleon II then being held in Austria, but everyone ignored that wish.

1859- Battle of Solferino- Garabaldi and Napoleon III defeated the Austrian army. This victory and the next battle of Magenta freed Milan and the Po Valley. All Italy is united for the first time since the Roman Empire. The completion of the unification process Italians called The Irredenta. In return, Italy gave France the city of Nice.
After the carnage of the battle the suffering of the wounded was so pitiable that a Swiss volunteer doctor named Dr. Henry Dunant was inspired to found the International Society of the Red Cross. He was soon bankrupt and forgotten but his organization was taken up at the first Geneva Convention in 1864 and made international law.

1865- Partially as a result of the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. Secret Service was set up.

1865- Two months after Lee surrendered to Grant, at Fort Towson in Indian Territory, General Stand Watiee, aka De-Ga-Ta-Ga, surrendered his Cherokees. This is the last Confederate force in the Civil War. Confederate Jo Shelby rather than give up, rode his Iron Legion of rebel cavalry across the Rio Grande into Mexico. After two years exile he returned and accepted the Yankee amnesty.

1868- Christopher Latham Scholes patented the typewriter. In 1873, he sold his patent to the Remington Company, who had made rifles.

1940- HITLER THE TOURIST. After the defeat of France, Adolph Hitler made his one vacation trip out of Germany. A plane flew him to Paris in the early morning and he was driven around to see the sites. While his Mercedes was waiting at a traffic light, a newsboy, not realizing who he was, thrust a morning newspaper under his nose yelling "le Matin! Le Matin!” Hitler was back in Berlin that evening.

1944- Franklin Roosevelt's last fireside chat on the radio.

1953- Prime Minister Winston Churchill suffered a stroke during a dinner for the Italian Prime Minister. By agreement with the Fleet St press barons, it was all kept secret from the nation and the world. The 81-year-old Churchill recovered quickly, and was back wheeling and dealing by the end of the summer.

1963- In Disneyland the Enchanted Tiki Room opened with the first animatronics (the birds).

1971- Three Soyuz 11 cosmonauts were found dead in their space capsule upon landing. The capsule must have had a pressure leak upon re-entry. Soviet accidents in space were kept secret until after the fall of communism in 1990.

1972- Title IX passed by the US Government. It called for women’s collegiate sports to be funded equally as the men’s sports.

1976- Work completed on Toronto’s CN Tower. Called then the world’s tallest free-standing structure.

1979- The Knack released the single My Sharona.

1989- Tim Burton’s film " Batman" opened.

1989- Disney’s Honey I Shrank the Kids opened with the Roger Rabbit short Tummy Trouble.

1992- Head of the New York Mafia John Gotti was sentenced to life in prison for murder and racketeering. It had been so hard to pin anything on Gotti that he was nicknamed the Teflon Don. Finally, city prosecutor Rudy Giuliani secured the testimony of the Dons top henchman Sammy ‘the Bull’ Gravano. For turning informant, Sammy dodged any penalties himself, despite admitting killing 32 people, including his own brother in law, whose body parts he buried in his backyard. John Gotti died in prison in 2002. Gotti’s personal attorney was Roy Cohn, who was Donald Trump’s mentor.

1993- Lorena Bobbit had tired of her abusive husband John Wayne Bobbit. So this night while he was drunk, she severed his penis and drove off, casually tossing it into a nearby field. Doctors recovered the free willy and reattached it, starting a media sensation. They divorced and John Bobbitt for a while became a porn star.

1995- Walt Disney’s Pocahontas goes into general release.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: When exercising, what does it mean to be working out your glutes?

Answer: Your butt muscles, Gluteus Maximus and gluteus minimus.


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