Quiz: What is a billy-club?

Answer to yesterday’s question below: What is the difference between a cupid and a cherub?
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History for 3/3/2023
B-Dayz: George Pullman of Pullman Railroad cars, General Matthew Ridgeway, Jean Harlow, Diana Barrymore, Akira Ifukube the composer of the music scores to movies like Godzilla, Tone Loc, Jacky Joyner-Kersee, James Doohan, Ronald Searle, animator Bruno Bozzetto, Bobby Driscoll, Herschel Walker, George Miller, Miranda Richardson

1517- Protestant reformer Martin Luther wrote the Pope in Rome a letter of submission and tried to make nice. But privately he told a friend” I am not sure whether the Pope is the AntiChrist or merely his Apostle.”

1764- Elderly French King Louis XV appeared before the regional Parliament of Paris to tell them who was boss:” In My Person alone resides the Sovereign Power…to me alone belongs the legislative power, unconditional and undivided. My people and I are one, all public order emanates from me.” None of that representative government stuff like England was going to happen while HE was around. King Louis XV all but ensured that France would change only from a violent revolution.

1783- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart first performed his Symphony #35 the Hafner in Vienna with the Austrian Emperor Joseph II in attendance.

1800- President John Adams signed a bill calling for the second census of the people of the United States.

1801- THE MIDNIGHT JUDGES-Outgoing President John Adams was the first presidential sore loser. He was outraged that he was not re-elected to a second term like George Washington was. He vented his frustrations by spending his last night as President signing dozens of Federal Judgeships and army officer commissions to members of his own Federalist party. He then boycotted the inauguration and took his sweet time moving out of the White House, forcing Thomas Jefferson to spend his first night as President sleeping in Conrad’s Tavern.

1820- The Missouri Compromise. Most of US politics of the early nineteenth century was seeing how long they could keep the Civil War from breaking out. Congress was evenly divided between slave states and free states, so every new state created caused a crisis. This day it was decided Missouri would be a slave state while Maine would be a free state and there would be no slave states north of Missouri in the remaining Louisiana Purchase territories.

1836- A messenger slipped past the Mexican army into the Alamo. He told Col. Travis and his Texans that they could expect no help from the outside world to save them.

1842- Massachusetts created a law trying to limit the workday for children under twelve to only twelve hours a day, but opponents considered it too lefty-liberal to be enforced.

1845- On his last day in office, President John Tyler signed Florida Statehood.

1849- The US Department of the Interior established

1863- President Lincoln signed into law the National Conscription Act (the Draft).
The Confederate States had already started drafting the previous year. Rich men could get out of the army by paying $300 for a substitute. J.P. Morgan, Cornelius Vanderbilt, John D. Rockefeller and Theodore Roosevelt's father took this way out. Harvard-Yale games and varsity boat races went on throughout the Civil War with no loss of players. This angered the poor that the war was a rich man's game. Riots broke out in several cities. A popular song of the day "We are coming Father Abraham, Three Hundred Thousand Strong" was changed to "We are Coming, Father Abraham, Three Hundred Dollars More

1873- Under the Comstock Act, information on birth control is considered pornography and not permitted to be sent through the U.S. mail.

1873- The US Congress voted to double their own salaries, and make the pay raise retroactive for the previous two years. This was at the time of a severe economic recession. The public was furious over the “Salary Grab Act”.

1875- Claude Bizet's opera CARMEN debuts. Parisians usually go to see comedies at the Opera Comique and most thought this would be about the adventures of a coquettish Spanish gypsy. Instead they saw one of the great dark dramas of opera, a story of sexual power and obsession. The shocking sight of a slutty smuggler getting knifed by a burnout soldier driven mad with sex was so upsetting, it was booed off the stage and savaged by critics. Bizet never got over the fiasco. He died three months later. Today Carmen is arguably the world's most famous operas.

1875- HOCKEY- The first modern Hockey Game was played at the Victoria skating rink in Montreal Canada. McGill University claim they invented it in 1877. The NHL was created in 1917.
No one is sure just how old hockey is. In the 1700’s Micmac Indians played a game on bone skates using sticks and passed it on to the British garrison of Halifax Nova Scotia. The people of Windsor Nova Scotia claim hockey was invented there at Long Pond in 1844 from the Irish game of Stick & Ball. The first pucks were frozen horse droppings. No one is sure where the word Hockey came from, the nickname of some British officer or local schoolteacher perhaps.

1902-The U.S. Supreme Court ruled it's all right for the U.S. Government to ignore Indian treaties, if they do it in a nice way.

1913- The Womens Suffrage Parade in Washington D.C. The national votes for women movement sent 5,000 marchers down Pennsylvania Ave. It was met with crowds of men who jeered and threw stones, causing 100 to go to the hospital. President-Elect Woodrow Wilson wondered why no one was there to greet him at the train station. They were all at the suffragette march.

1925- The Warner Bros started up their radio station, KFWB. It was Sam Warner’s idea, and their father Ben had coined the letters to mean Keep Fighting, Warner Bros, because of their constant bickering. It went through several hands, and was a newsradio station for a long time. In 2016, it was bought by a Bollywood music company who changed its letters.

1931- President Hoover signed an act of Congress that made the "Star Spangled Banner" officially the U.S. national anthem. The 1814 Francis Scott Key poem set to the English beer hall song "To Anacreon in Heaven" was sung since the 1850's, but this day it became official.

1934- Public Enemy #1 John Dillinger escaped from a Witchita jail by carving a gun out of soap (it was actually wood) and painting it black with shoe polish. He said: "The jail hasn't been made that can hold me!"

1938- The desert kingdom of Saudi Arabia discovered it had a lot of oil.

1938- The skies over Los Angeles finally clear after two huge Pacific storms ravaged the region, causing massive flooding from Long Beach to Glendale. The destruction and flooding caused Los Angeles to cover the Los Angeles River and Burbank Creek in concrete, creating the distinctive flood basin the Terminator raced motorcycles and trucks through.

1945- General MacArthur announced the Philippine capitol Manila had at last been retaken from the Japanese. The month-long fighting had been house-to-house and General Yamashita’s troops had committed wholesale executions of civilians as they retreated. After the war, General Yamashita was executed as a war criminal.

1950- Paramount's "Quack-a-Doodle-Doo" The first Baby Huey cartoon.

1950- Don Herbert began teaching millions of kids about science as TV’s Mr. Wizard.

1952- The Supreme Court ruled that school teachers could be fired if they were Communists.

1959- Lou Costello, the loveable pudgy comedian of the team Abbott & Costello, died of a heart attack three days before his 53 birthday. A recurrence of childhood rheumatic fever and the death of his infant son darkened his last years. The team of Abbott and Costello broke up in 1957. His last words were to a hospital nurse,” That was the best strawberry soda I ever had…”

1966- William Frawley, the bald, gravel-voiced neighbor Fred Murtz on I Love Lucy, had just seen the movie Inside Daisy Clover on Hollywood Blvd. He was outside the Knickerbocker Hotel when he lit a cigar, then dropped dead of a heart attack. He was 79. When his TV partner Vivian Vance heard the news, she said “Champagne for everyone!” They never liked each other much. Frawley once referred to her as a “miserable c*nt...”
Vivian died in 1979.

1973- THE BAR CODE. An ad-hoc committee of scientists from Proctor & Gamble and Nabisco and such announced the invention of the Universal Product’s Code- The Bar Code, that annoying little set of bars and numbers on everything you own or buy. No longer would stores have to close their doors periodically for inventory counting.

1975- First meeting of the Homebrew Computer Club in a garage in Menlo Park Ca., Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were members.

1980- Aetna Insurance reported in a newsletter having to pay damages for a man at a delicatessen who had a carp he was ordering jump off the counter and bit him in the leg.

1985- The TV show “Moonlighting” premiered. Cybil Shepherd and Bruce Willis.

1991- L.A.P.D officers beat up drunk and disorderly driver Rodney King. King had previous convictions and was tazed several times but still fought back at police. They seemed to go berserk on him with their clubs just as a witness caught the incident on videotape. The incident and trials caused a scandal in Los Angeles and later the largest civilian riots in U.S. history.

2001- Despite worldwide outrage, the fundamentalist Taliban of Afghanistan began destroying their nations ancient giant stone Buddhas with dynamite, as graven images.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: What is the difference between a cupid and a cherub?

Answer: Cupid was a Roman god. The son of Venus and Eros. Cherubim was a classification of angel, smaller and more childlike than the Seraphim, the taller adult angels. Cherub’s job seemed to be mostly flitting around the edges of baroque paintings.