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Aug. 10, 2022
August 10th, 2022

Quiz: My very first trivia question from 2007: What was the name of Abe Lincoln’s dog?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bartok. Which composer worked in the Twentieth Century?
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History for 8/10/2022
Birthdays: Alexander Glauzunov, Billie Holiday, Eddie Fisher, Leo Fender, Herbert Hoover, Polish King Jan III Sobieski, Norma Shearer, Rhonda Fleming, Jimmy Dean, Justin Theroux, Rosanna Arquette is 63, Antonio Banderas is 62

70 AD - JERUSALEM WAS DESTROYED BY THE ROMANS- After a prolonged siege, the Roman legions of Vespasian and Titus broke into the city and crushed the Zealot revolt with great slaughter. The cedar panels and muslin curtains of the Great Temple of Herod caught fire and the entire temple was destroyed but for an outer building retaining wall, known thereafter as the Wailing Wall.

70AD - One mystery about the destruction of Jerusalem is the disappearance of the ARK OF THE COVENANT, which was taken from the Great Temple of Herod by the Romans and kept as a treasure in Rome. Some say it was carried off by the Goths when Rome fell four hundred years later and buried with their king Alaric. Another legend said a Christian Roman Emperor named Valerian returned the Ark to Jerusalem but the Moslems sacked the monastery it was hidden in. Still another said it is supposedly in Ethiopia guarded for life by a family of Orthodox monks who keep it in a temple hewn out of rock, with one door and one key.

256 AD- St. Lawrence's day. He was the Saint whose emblem is the grill he was roasted on. Supposedly he showed his contempt for his torturers efforts by saying:" I think I'm done on this side." The Perseid Meteor Shower occurs around this time. It has been called the Burning Tears of Saint Lawrence.

1415- King Henry V of England and his army embarked from Dover to cross the Channel and press his claim to be king of France as well.

1492- Cardinal Roderigo Borgia elected Pope, despite openly keeping his children Caesar and Lucretia Borgia. He promised so many bribes to the other cardinals that humorists make jokes comparing him to Christ giving his worldly riches to the poor. When asked what his Papal name would be he replied “by the name of the Invincible Alexander”, who was not even a Christian. So Pope Alexander VI it was.

1536- CANADA GETS ITS NAME-French explorer Cartier discovered a great river on St. Lawrence's Day, which he calls the St. Lawrence River. Cartier asks the Huron people "what people lived upstream?". They replied people who work with red copper, in their language" Caignetdaze". Cartier recorded in his log, the land "Chemin de Canada".

1557- Battle of San Quentin. King Henry II of France thought to see if the new young king of Spain Phillip II was as tough as his predecessor Charles V was. Phillip’s armies beat the French in this battle and threatened Paris before all sued for peace.

1628- Swedish King Gustavus built a huge battleship called the Vasa. This day in front of the whole court he launched it into a fjord and it immediately sank to the bottom. Doh! 333 years later it was brought up, and today is a nice attraction in a Stockholm museum.

1629- Painter Diego Velasquez traveled to Italy to study the Renaissance masters on the advice of his buddy, painter Peter Paul Rubens.

1675 - King Charles II lays foundation stone of Royal Observatory, Greenwich.

1680- THE GREAT PUEBLO INDIAN REVOLT. In Spanish New Mexico the Pueblo, Zuni, Hopi, Acoma and eastern Apache had had enough of Spanish colonists and their Christianity. A Pueblo leader named Pope' coordinated a simultaneous attack timed by giving each chief a rope with the days marked off with knots. Today the last knot was untied and the Indians attacked the Spaniards from all sides. 500 out of 2,000 Europeans were killed and the churches and town of Santa Fe burned. The Madonna brought from Valencia Spain called La Conquistadora was riddled with arrows, the marks of which you can still see today. The Spaniards retreated back to Old Mexico, but returned in force 13 years later.

1787- Mozart completes his Eine Kleine Nachtmusik -A Little Night Music.

1788- Mozart’s on a roll! This day he completed his Jupiter Symphony #41. It was his last symphony. He never heard it performed in his lifetime.

1792- The FRENCH REVOLUTION HEATS UP. Since the fall of the Bastille two years earlier France and King Louis XVI had tried to work as a constitutional monarchy guided by the Marquis de Lafayette. But Louis only played for time while negotiating with his royal relatives in Germany and Austria to send armies to help him put his peasants in their place.
By now the French nation had enough. Mobs stirred to anger by radicals like Danton and Marat marched on the Tuileries Palace demanding justice. The King Louis XVI's Swiss bodyguard opened fire on them. The enraged peasants tore the guards to pieces and looted the palace, sticking soldier's ears on the king’s desk. The king and queen tried to escape out the back door but were grabbed by the mob. A flag was made from a Swiss red uniform coat- the very first Red Flag of Revolution. Lafayette later fled into exile and was imprisoned.
Standing in the street watching all this was a young unemployed lieutenant named Napoleon Bonaparte. He later wrote that if King Louis had the nerve to appear on a horse at the head of his supporters he could have triumphed. Napoleons conclusion: " Quel connard!”- “What an asshole!"

1793- In one of the more positive results of the Reign of Terror, the French Revolutionary Government opened the royal art collection of the Louvre to the public as a museum.

1867- Rather than put up with his pushy Secretary of War any longer, President Andrew Johnson asks for Edwin Stanton's resignation. Stanton (who formed the first American Secret Service and as a lawyer invented the "temporary insanity" plea) not only refused, he barricaded himself in his office and his partisans in the former Lincoln cabinet began impeachment proceedings against President Johnson.

1889 - Dan Rylands patented the screw -on cap.

1897 -German chemists working for the Bayer Company invent Aspirin, the first mass market over the counter drug. A powdered willow tree root that was known to the Native Americans for years. The Romans ground willow root and dissolved it in water for pain.

1913-The Treaty of Bucharest signed ending the Second Balkan War. Bulgaria was beat up by Greece, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania over the territory they all took from Turkey.

1921- After a long day of physical exercise, young politician Franklin D. Roosevelt told his family “I feel funny. I’m going to bed.” He went to sleep and, in the morning, discovered he could no longer walk. It was polio. He never walked on his own ever again.

1928- Calvin Coolidge dedicated the cornerstone of the monument at Mount Rushmore, South Dakota. The last time a President of the United States rode a horse to attend an official event.

1942- HALELIEUYAH NIGHT- The Marines in the jungles of Guadalcanal were tensely awaiting a night attack by the Japanese. They convinced each other that because Japanese attempting to speak English have difficulty pronouncing the letter “L”, all passwords should contain them. So when a few Korean slave laborers straggled into the camp perimeter, the alarmed Marines, thinking the attack had started, yelled to each other: “LOLLYPOP! LAPLAND! LOLLAPALOOZA!”

1945- After Hiroshima & Nagasaki bombings a third atomic pile was delivered to Tinian Island air base to be assembled into one more A-bomb. But it's dropping was canceled by President Truman. He told his aide Dean Acheson: "Another 100,000 people...I can't see killing any more kids." The military had plans for three more atomic bombings in September and three more in October before the land invasion of Kyushu on Nov. 2nd.

1945- Even after the two atomic bomb attacks the Japanese cabinet is still deadlocked 3 - 3 on whether to surrender. Prime minister Suzuki still thought he could get Russia to negotiate separately -Stalin had just declared war and sent troops to invade Manchuria and the Kurile islands. War minister Korechika Anami said the national honor demanded a final battle on the home soil:" Wouldn't it be wonderful to see all of Japan destroyed… like a beautiful flower!"
The impasse was broken by Emperor Hirohito, who broke with tradition and personally intervened "The time has come to bear the unbearable". Next morning a note requesting negotiations based on Japan's acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration was sent to the Swiss and Swedish consulates. Anami committed suicide in front of his radio as the Emperor announced the surrender.

1948 – Allen Funt's "Candid Camera" TV debut on ABC.

1964- Near Ely, Nevada the U.S. Forrest Service cut down a Bristlecone Pine that scientists thought to be the oldest living thing- 4,900 years old.

1966 - Daylight meteor seen from Utah to Canada. Only known case of a meteor seen
entering Earth's atmosphere & leaving it again.

1966- Murderer James French was sent to the electric chair by the state of Oklahoma. He joked; How about this for a headline for tomorrow's paper? FRENCH FRIES!

1969- The night after Charles Manson’s cultists murdered actress Sharon Tate, they attacked another Los Angeles home at random. They murdered attorney Leo and Rosemary LaBianca on Waverly Drive in the neighborhood of Los Feliz.

1970 - Jim Morrison is charged in Miami on "lewd & lascivious behavior"

1972 - Paul & Linda McCartney are arrested in Sweden on drug possession.

1973 –San Francisco’s first BART train travels through the transbay tube to Montgomery St Station.

1978- Ford announces a recall of its Pinto series car after tests prove when bumped from behind the auto’s gas tank explodes into flames.

1979- Britain's first official nudist beach opened at Brighton.

1983- Discovery of the Vega Galaxy. This was the first physical proof of a planetary system outside our Milky Way. With modern orbiting telescopes we’ve since found millions of them.

1984- Famed New Yorker cartoonist and former Disney artist Virgil “Vip” Partch died in a car crash with his wife, outside of Valencia, California.

1987- Clara Peller, the elderly actress who gained last minute advertising fame by saying Where's the Beef? died at 86. The director and writer of the spots was the father of J.J. Sedelmier, who created the Ambiguously Gay Duo and other TV Funhouse animations for SNL.

2001- Warner Bros film Osmosis Jones opened in theaters.

2019- Jeffrey Epstein was a Wall St. financier who on the side ran an upscale prostitution ring. He even had his own pleasure island in the Caribbean where Princes, Presidents and CEOs could molest underage girls as young as 14. He was finally arrested and kept at the downtown Manhattan men’s detention center. Before he could reveal any of his clients names, this night he committed suicide. Although on a suicide-watch, the two guards assigned to watch him just happened to be missing, and the 24 hr camera on him just happened to be turned off.
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Quiz: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Bartok. Which composer worked in the Twentieth Century?

Answer: Bela Bartok.


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