Quiz: What is gossamer? As in to fly on gossamer wings.

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Who is the higher rank- A caliph or a sultan?
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History for 7/2/2022
Birthdays: Roman Emperor Valentinian III (419AD), Bishop Thomas Cranmer (1429) , Christoph Witobald Gluck, Herman Hesse, Medgar Evers, Patrice Lamumba, Thurgood Marshall, Andrez Kertesz, Richard Petty, Abe Levitow, Ahmad Jamal, Cheryl Ladd, Jose Canseco, Jerry Hall, Imelda Marcos, Ron Silver, Lindsay Lohan, Brock Peters, Margot Robbie is 32, Larry David is 75

6BC- Feast of the Visitation- When the Virgin Mary visited Saint Elizabeth and confided in her that she was pregnant with baby Jesus. The Magnificat is Mary's reply to the Angel of the Annunciation--"Magnicifcat anima mea Dominum..." "My spirit doth magnify the Lord" Many great composers like Vivaldi and Bach wrote grand choral masses called Magnificats for this occasion.

64 AD.- Today is the feast day of Saints Processus and Martinian who supposedly were Saint Peter's jailors in the Mamertine Prison in Rome. They were converted by their victim and Peter struck stones of the floor with his staff and water squirted out so he could baptize them.

1296- Scottish King John Balliol indicated to English King Edward I Longshanks (Long-legs) that he is ready to give up. He was stripped of his titles and the Scots referred to him derisively as "Toom-Tabard" or "the bugger without any sleeves". Scottish resistance to English rule soon flared up under William Wallace. John Balliol founded a school at Oxford.

1644- Battle of Marston Moor (English Civil War) The army of Parliament inflicts a crushing defeat on King Charles’ army outside of York. The defeat meant most of Northern England was now lost to the Royalist cause. The battle is also remembered as the first time a self-taught colonel distinguished himself in the public eye- Oliver Cromwell. The Royalists called him Old Ironsides.

1650- The first daily newspaper is published in the city of Leipzig.

1723- Johann Sebastian Bach’s chorale Magnificat first performed in Leipzig.

1776- AMERICAN CONTINENTAL CONGRESS VOTES FOR INDEPENDENCE- Deep into a hot rainy Philadelphia night the delegates finally voted the ultimate break with the mother country. At this time most Americans still referred to England as 'home'. No colony had ever broken away from their mother country and become an independent nation.
And as far as the document Thomas Jefferson had written, called the Declaration of Independence, there were 46 separate revisions. The Southern states would not vote until the anti-slavery clauses were dropped. A clause stating New England Protestants objected to tolerance of Roman Catholics was dropped. One cancer-wracked delegate Cesar Rodney, rode 80 miles just to be there to effect the vote. The final vote was 12 colonies yay, 0-nay and New York abstaining.

"The Business is Done." John Adams said. After the Declaration was voted on, a day was given to cleanup the document, and it would be announced on July 4th. The famous printed page with John Hancock's big signature was not done until August 2nd.
John Adams always thought the great national celebration should be July 2nd, not the 4th, because to him, that was the day the important part actually happened.

1787- Commanding General of the U.S. Army James Wilkinson arrived in New Orleans for an inspection tour. In reality he was there to offer his services to the Viceroy of Spain as a paid double agent. In 1805 he conspired with Aaron Burr, and in 1812 he commanded America’s two bungled invasions of Canada. He is the highest-ranking traitor in U.S. history, so far, and he was never caught. It was said of Wilkinson “He never won a battle, nor lost a court martial.”

1789- Two weeks before the French Revolutionaries stormed the Bastille, the Marquis DeSade was transferred to another jail. This after he grabbed one old inmates ear trumpet and recited out the window some sex jokes about the warden to the laughing crowd below.

1863-2nd Day Battle of Gettysburg. Yankees and Confederates fight each other all day with no result. Places like Little Round Top, Devils Den and The Peach Orchard become battlefields. This was the day Maine schoolteacher Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain successfully defended the Little Round Top, climaxing with a bayonet charge after his men had all but run out of ammunition. Gen. Dan Sickles had his leg blown off. He was carried from the field, coolly puffing a cigar. A wily Tamany Hall politician, Dan Sickles knew this wound meant votes back home. He was elected to Congress after the war. He donated his shattered leg to the Army Medical School and used to visit it in his old age.

1881-PRESIDENTIAL ASSASSINATION. President James Garfield was shot by Charles Guiteau. Guiteau was a demented gov't worker who expected a job when Garfield was elected. He said he believed in "Bible-Communism" and that he worked for "Jesus & Company". When nobody took notice of him, Guiteau decided to kill the President, then ask the Vice President Chester Alan Arthur for a job. On a platform at Washington's Union Station, Charles Guiteau shot the President in the back, dropped his gun and announced:" I am the last Stalwart. Arthur is now President!"

Garfield lingered for three months in great pain before he died. Chester Allen Arthur was a political hack, whose only previous job before being president was collector of tolls for the Port of New York. Woodrow Wilson called him" a nothing with whiskers". In fairness to Arthur he did help create civil-service qualifications and eliminate the corruptible spoils system. Standing next to Garfield when he was shot was Secretary of War Robert Lincoln, the son of Abraham Lincoln. Convinced he was bad luck, Robert Lincoln never went near the White House again.

1890- The Sherman Anti-Trust Act passed. This law forbids business monopolies. J.P. Morgan said: "Trying to break up trusts is like trying to unscramble eggs!" It was invoked to break up Standard Oil (Exxon), the Hollywood Studios in 1948, the ATT/Bell Telephone System in 1980, and in 2000 against Microsoft.

1900- THE FIRST MAN POWERED FLIGHT- No, not the Airplane, the Zeppelin. Count Von Zeppelin’s creation the LZ-1 made it’s first flight. The LZ-1 carried several passengers and mechanics gently into the air 30 miles from Frederichshaven on Lake Constance to Immenstadt, making perfect time. By the 1930s there was a regular zeppelin service between Europe and Buenos Aires. For years and it was considered much safer than airplanes. But after the Hindenburg disaster and the United States embargo of strategic helium, in 1939 Herman Goring scraped what was left of the zeppelin fleet for spare parts.

1901- The last train holdup in America by Butch Cassidy, the Sundance Kid and their Hole in the Wall Gang.

1912- The Democratic Presidential Convention in Baltimore had been deadlocked for over a week. Finally after 46 separate ballots New Jersey Governor Woodrow Wilson was nominated to run against Republican President Howard Taft and Progressive 3rd party candidate Teddy Roosevelt.

1912- The First Automat restaurant.

1914- Under interrogation, the 3 other Bosnian-Serb conspirators to the Archduke Franz Ferdinand assassination in Sarajevo confessed that they were members of the Black Hand, a terrorist group organized and paid covertly by the chief of Serbian intelligence.
Scholars agree that if Austria had declared war on Serbia immediately, no other nation would have intervened and World War I may not have had to happen. But because Austria prevaricated for weeks and insisted Germany help which provoked Russia (see below), they began the tumbling of the great house of cards that caused the global disaster killing 37 million people and contributing to the Spanish flu epidemic that killed a further 21 million.

1914- THE GERMAN KAISER HAS LUNCH with the Austrian ambassador. Kaiser Wilhelm pledged to fully support Austria's move to strike Serbia over the assassination at Sarajevo, knowing it would probably annoy his cousins Nikky the Tsar of Russia and Georgie the King of England. Casually, he pledged the lives and fortunes of his 30 million German subjects and the destruction of his dynasty over poached eggs and champagne. He then went on a vacation cruise for the next three weeks and was unavailable during the frantic diplomatic negotiations trying to avoid world catastrophe.

1921- To prove what a neat new invention radio was, RCA chief David Sarnoff broadcast for free a live feed of the Jack Dempsey vs. George Carpentier championship prizefight. He had loud speakers set up in Times Square that attracted ten thousand listeners. As it happened, the live reports were a sham. An eyewitness to the fight relayed details via tickertape to a Manhattan studio. Then an announcer read them aloud over the radio as though he were there. No matter, the effect was electric. Suddenly everyone wanted a radio in their home.

1927- The film Flesh and the Devil established a new star named Greta Garbo.

1928- The day after the Democratic convention nominated New Yorker Al Smith for president, the Attorney General ordered major raids a dozen illegal speakeasies throughout New York City. Smith was a leading opponent of Prohibition, and the attorney general wanted to embarrass him.

1934- Twentieth Century Fox signed a movie contract with child star Shirley Temple.

1937-AMELIA EARHART DISAPPEARED. Over the Pacific near Howland Island the Coast Guard cutter Ithaca received the last radio signals from aviatrix Amelia Earhart and her co-pilot Fred Noonan. …."One half-hour fuel and no landfall in sight. We are in position….." Then nothing. They disappeared never to be found. Recently investigators made a case that she was rescued by the Japanese and executed on Saipan. Nothing conclusive has ever been proven.

1940- Hitler held a victory celebration in Berlin. Thousands of steel helmeted troops goose-stepped though the Brandenburg Gate to celebrate their defeat of France, Belgium and the British Army.

1941- JAPAN OCCUPIED VIETNAM- When Germany conquered France, the French colony of Tonkin-Indochine (Vietnam) stood alone in confusion. Should they take orders from Vichy or the Free-French government in exile? Ignoring the protests of Britain and the United States, the Japanese Army moved in and occupied Indochina. Japanese Admiral Yamamoto was a leader of the peace party with Prince Konoye trying to prevent the coming conflict. When he was told what the army had done without consulting the opposition parties, he just shrugged. He knew this would provoke America past the point of no return. Now he must start planning a war with America.

1942- The beginning of the Battle of El Alamein. Rommel the Desert Fox and his Afrika Corps had pushed he British 8th Army across the North African desert into Egypt. Their goal was the cut the Suez Canal, occupy the Holy Land and link up with other Nazi units moving down from the Russian Caucasus into French Vichy controlled Syria. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Haij Amin al Husseini promised a Palestinian uprising to coincide with the Nazi arrival. But the British 8th Army dug in at this obscure Egyptian railroad station outside of Cairo called El Alamein, and finally stopped Rommel’s advance.


1945- In the July issue of The Atlantic Magazine, MIT Scientist Vanaevar Bush predicted some day in the future we would all be writing to each other on little electronic boxes on our desks. He didn’t have the name computer yet. He called it a “memex”. We would read stories, watch movies, have access to all the libraries of the world. We would send each other letters and pictures on it. In a Manila hospital, a young serviceman named Douglas Engelbart was recovering from war wounds. He read this article there and was inspired to study this new field. He eventually invented the computer mouse, hot keys, and coined the term "on-line."

1946-The Peace Treaty of Beverly Hills- SAG president Ronald Reagan brokered a labor settlement between the two rival Hollywood Unions, IATSE vs. CSU, temporarily ending a violent Hollywood strike. At this time Reagan went to work every day with a 32 cal. Smith & Wesson under his coat.

1955- The Lawrence Welk T.V. Show debuts. Wannaful, wannaful!

1961- On the porch of his home in Ketchum Idaho, Nobel Prize winning writer Ernest Hemingway held a shotgun into his mouth, and with his big toe pushed the trigger. He blew most of his head off, just leaving his lower jaw and some cheek. Papa Hemingway was always haunted by the suicide of his father and he was receiving electro-shock treatments at the Mayo Clinic for depression and alcoholism. He thought about suicide for years, and when drinking with friends would take out his shotgun and rehearsed for them how he would do it. He lived for awhile in Cuba and his office in Cuba is still kept the way he left it, even protecting the hordes of cats sired by Hemingway's original pair. In 1996 his granddaughter Margaux Hemingway, called the First Supermodel, committed suicide almost to the day.

1962- The U.S. Congress passed a resolution to declare today General Włodzimierz Krzyżanowski Day, in honor of my great-grand uncle (by marriage), General Włodzimierz Krzyżanowski, who commanded the Polish Legion of the Yankee Army in the Civil War.

1964- THE CIVIL RIGHTS ACT. African Americans finally get the basic rights promised them by Abe Lincoln 100 years earlier. In the South, blacks were routinely disqualified from voting and forced to take humiliating tests, like guessing how many bubbles were on a bar of wet soap. Several Civil Rights bills had been proposed since but they were all blocked by the Southern Caucus in Congress.
Those who remember Lyndon Johnson only as the warmonger of Vietnam should also recall that his arm twisting was the main reason this act made it through Congress. Chief Justice William Reinquist, Senator Strom Thurmond, Rev Billy Graham and Claire Booth Luce of Time Magazine all urged LBJ not to sign it. When Johnson did sign the act, he looked at his aide, sighed and said, “Well, we just lost the South.” The Civil Rights Act started the shift of Southern white conservatives from the Democratic Party to the Republicans.

1980- the Abrahams-Zucker Bros comedy Airplane! Premiered.

1982- Don Bluth’s The Secret of Nimh premiered.

1986- Walt Disney’s The Great Mouse Detective released in theaters.

1986- John Carpenter’s Big Trouble in Little China debuted.

1992- THE GREAT FLYING LAWNCHAIR- San Pedro California resident Larry Walters strapped 45 helium weather balloons to his lawnchair and took along a sixpack of beer, a sandwich and a pellet gun. In his lawnchair he reached 16,000 feet. He shot up so fast a commercial airplane reported him as a UFO. Trying to shoot some of the balloons, he lost consciousness and dropped his pellet gun. After two hours the balloons lost altitude and he got entangled in some power lines. He was fined by the FAA for violating LAX commercial airport airspace.

1994- During the World Cup Columbian soccer star Andres Escobar accidentally scored a goal for the opposing team causing Columbia’s elimination. They take their soccer pretty seriously in Columbia. This day Escobar was shot 12 times by an enraged fan.

1997- "KILL THIS STORY! DRIVE A STEAK THROUGH IT’S HEART AND BURY IT !" was the reaction of a top CNN news executive to the uproar caused by two journalists who broadcast a story that during the Vietnam War the U.S. military experimented with bombing enemy villages with chemical weapons. Among the villages targeted with Nerve Gas was one they knew harbored American deserters. The operation was code-named Tailwind.
CNN was immediately attacked by Veteran’s groups, Henry Kissinger and Gen. Colin Powell. So this day CNN retracted the story as being bad journalism and fired the reporters and producer of the show. Top CNN Gulf War correspondent Peter Arnett came out in support of the story and quit CNN. The journalists refused to recant their story and said the then commander of the joint chiefs of staff Admiral Sumner vouched for it’s validity. Others said Sumner was senile.

1998- In Paris, Mexican World Cup soccer fan Rodrigo Rafael Ortega was arrested for drunkenly urinating on the eternal flame at the Arch de Triomphe in honor of France’s Great War dead. The eternal flame had burned continuously since 1921, even the Nazis left it alone during the occupation. Ortega was the only one to ever put it out. Once again international football proves its ability to bring peoples together.
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Yesterdays’ Quiz: Who is the higher rank- A caliph or a sultan?

Answer: A Caliph. The office of Caliph was created as the one direct successor to the Prophet Mohamed. A Caliph could create sultans, like he raised up Saladin to be Sultan of Egypt.