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Aug. 22, 2022
August 22nd, 2022

Question: When Winston Churchill said “ It is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma”, what was he talking about?

Yesterday’s Quiz: What is a kepi? (Hint: U.S. Civil War)
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History for 8/22/2022
Birthdays: George Herriman the creator of Krazy Kat, Dorothy Parker, Claude DeBussy, Johnny Lee Hooker, Denis Papin 1647 inventor of the Pressure Cooker, Leni Reifenstahl, General Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf, Paul Molitor, Bill Parcells, Max Vilander, Carl “Big Yaz”Yazstremski, Dyanna Nyad, Deng Xiao Ping, Henry Cartier Bresson, Valerie Harper, Ray Bradbury, Cindy Williams, Kristen Wiig is 49

In Britain it is National Slacker Day: Stand Up for your Right to Sit Back Down!

565AD – St. Columba reported seeing a sea monster in Loch Ness.

1485-"A Horse! A Horse! My Kingdom for a Horse!!" Battle of Bosworth Field. Welsh prince Henry Tudor defeated and killed King Richard III and becomes King Henry VII, first of the Tudor Dynasty. Henry Tudor was married to Elizabeth Rivers, the daughter of Richards dead brother King Edward IV, further strengthening his claim to the throne. Shakespeare made Richard out to be a usurper and child murderer, but couldn’t hide the fact that he died well. Whatever the truth, he went down sword in hand, fighting like a true descendant of Richard Lionheart. Recently Richard’s skeleton was found under a parking lot, and he did indeed have a misshapen spine and club foot.

1558- When Antonio Carafa became Pope Paul IV. Former head of the Inquisition, he blamed the loss of half of Europe to Protestantism to the corruption in the Catholic Church. He attacked the dry rot with zeal. He started with a warning to all monks away from their monasteries without permission to return at once. This day he ordered the gates of Rome closed. All deadbeat monks still AWOL to be rounded up and sentenced to be galley slaves. He’s the Pope who created the Index of Forbidden Books, and ordered little shmatas painted on Michelangelo’s nude Christ in the Last Judgment.

1572-Admiral Gaspar Coligny, was leader of the French Huguenots –Protestants, and was one of the most powerful men in France. This night he was recovering from an earlier assassination attempt, when agents of the Duke du Guise rushed into his room and stabbed him to death. They hurled his body out a window to smash on the pavement stones at the Dukes feet. When it was pointed out to the king that the French Protestants may not like this, the emotionally unstable King Charles IX shouted:" Then slay them all, so none shall remain to accuse me!" The Great Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre was the result.

1611- Galileo made a group of Venetian senators climb to the top of Saint Marks Basilica in Venice with him to demonstrate to them his new invention, the telescope.

1715 – Handel’s "Watermusic" premiered on the Thames River to mark celebrations of the Peace ending the 15 year long War of Spanish Succession.

1776- The Long Island Campaign began. British General Lord Howe and his brother Admiral Richard, called “Black Dick”, commanded the largest invasion force ever sent by England. Today they began ferrying their army from tory-loyalist Staten Island across the Straights of Verrazano for the march towards the village of Breuklyn. -Brooklyn. Their Hessian mercenaries, to show off their discipline, stood at rigid attention as the flatboats bobbed in the choppy water. Now that the British fleet were anchored inside New York Harbor, George Washington agreed that New York City was as already lost. He contemplated burning the town to keep it from being used by the enemy as a base. But Congress couldn't let him give up America’s largest city without a fight.

1791-THE NIGHT OF FIRE- Haitian slaves, after decades of oppression were organized by a voodoo priest named Boumann. This night they set fire to plantations, crops and massacred 300 white settlers. This began the great Haitian Revolution which will rage until 1811 and make Haiti the second republic in the New World.

1806- elderly French painter Jean Fragonard died of a cerebral seizure after eating a large fruit ice on a hot day.

1848- Ulysses Grant married Julia Dent. One of the only things Grant did well other than win the Civil War was his long and happy marriage to his Julia.

1849- The first aerial bomb attack. Austrian General Von Wintzingerode was at a loss at how to get at the besieged Italian city of Venice. The Venetian lagoon was too deep to wade across but was too shallow for battleships. Finally, a Swiss mercenary suggested filling hot air balloons with troops and flying them over the city to drop explosives. A dozen pilotless balloons filled with grenadiers were launched aloft, and one or two did drop some grenades, but soon a stiff breeze blew them all to Croatia. Doh!

1851- The schooner America defeated the British yacht Aurora to win the trophy called the Hundred Guinea Cup that would in time be called the America's Cup. It was the first win for the US in an international sports competition. American yachts continued to win it for the next 150 years until Australia II took it in 1984.

1860- Italian nationalist leader Giuseppe Garibaldi with his 'redshirts' crossed the Straights of Messina from Sicily and invaded the boot of Italy.

1882- American showman P.T. Barnum bought the largest elephant in the London Zoo. He created a new name for the beast- he called it JUMBO. It was the highlight of his circus for years. After Jumbo was hit by a freight train and killed, PT Barnum had its bones bleached and charged people admission to come look at its skeleton.

1901-The Cadillac Automobile Company formed. Named for the French explorer who founded Detroit, William De La Mothe-Cadillac.

1902- Teddy Roosevelt became the first president to ride in an automobile.

1906 - 1st Victor Victrola manufactured, using Emile Berliners flat record turntable system. The Victrola was so cheap and easy to use it became standard in many homes and finished off any competition from Thomas Edison’s rival talking cylinder system.

1910- Despite a pledge after the Russo-Japanese War that they would bestow “complete freedom” on the Korean people, this day Japan’s military occupied Korea and annexed it to the Japanese Empire.

1914- The Angel of Mons. British forces stalled the German advance towards Paris with a fighting retreat, and in so doing helped the main French army to win at the Marne. In a proclamation to his generals Kaiser Wilhelm stated “Roll over this contemptible little British Army!” The term appealed to the Tommies, and they nicknamed themselves “The Old Contemptibles”. At this time newspapers reported that soldiers claimed they saw ghosts in shining armor aiding the British army. "those who could see said they saw 'a row of shining beings' between the two armies.”
The German field general was General Von Kluck, whose name rhymed with the Britons favorite expletive. As the marched through Belgian streets, the soldiers sang “We don’t give a F*CK about old Von KLUCK, an iz whole F*CKING ARMY!”

1922- After World War I, Lawrence of Arabia wrote home from Baghdad about the Postwar British occupation of Iraq:” The Public had been led into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques have been belated, insincere and incomplete. Things have been far worse here than we have been told.”

1927- Walt Disney’s last Alice in Cartoonland short, Alice in The Big Leagues is released.

1927- 200,000 people protest in Hyde Park London and around the world for clemency for convicted Italian immigrants Nicolo Sacco and Bartolomeo Vancetti. They were socialists who were convicted of murdering a store clerk in Massachusetts and became a radical cause-celebre. Letters demanding mercy came in from George Bernard Shaw, Helen Keller, Picasso, the Pope and more. Woody Guthrie wrote folk songs in praise of Sacco & Vancetti. The next day the State of Massachusetts electrocuted them anyway.

1929- Walt Disney’s Silly Symphony The Skeleton Dance premiered. The tight dancing synch inspired a generation of animators. The idea of skeletons was suggested by composer Carl Stalling, a Kansas City movie theater organist that Walt befriended.

1935- Father Charles Coughlin, “the Radio Priest” addressed ten thousand in Madison Square Gardens. At the height of his popularity almost one third the American public tuned into his weekly radio address. But as his influence waned after the 1936 presidential elections. He turned increasingly to racist Anti-Semitic hate mongering. He even tried to make excuses for Kristallnacht. In 1942 with America in the war, his archbishop with permission from the Vatican ordered him to shut up, on pain of being defrocked. He retired from public life.

1939- The first aerosol spray can.

1942- Brazil declared war on the Axis powers. She was the only Latin American country to send troops to Europe to fight in World War II.

1942- Tex Avery’s first cartoon for MGM, The Blitz Wolf.

1945- This was the date Stalin scheduled for the Soviet invasion of Hokaido, in North Japan. The American attack, in the event the atomic bombs didn't work, was not scheduled until November 1st. With all of the remaining Japanese army concentrated on the southern beaches awaiting the American landings, if the Russian invasion in the north had come off as scheduled, they would have been able to overrun Northern Japan quite easily. The world might have had to settle for a divided Japan resembling Korea. History however, turned out differently.

1953-The French government closed the Devil's Island prison colony.

1962- Rogue French army officers, angry at France’s yielding independence to Algeria, try to assassinate Pres. Charles DeGaulle. Near Orly Airport, they opened up with machine guns on the presidential motorcade. They killed two police motorcyclists, but DeGaulle’s peppy Citroen DS sped away and escaped the gunfire. For that, DeGaulle made sure Citroen would never go bankrupt. The incident was the basis for the novel and film The Day of the Jackal.

1976- The protest at the Seabrook Nuclear Plant in New Hampshire. The birth of the U.S. anti-nuclear movement.

1984 – The last Volkswagen Rabbit produced.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is a kepi? (Hint: U.S. Civil War)

Answer: The little round wool cap all soldiers in the Civil War wore on their heads. Based on a fashion set by Napoleon III’s French army.


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