April 2, 2023 April 2nd, 2023 |
Question: Why is the person who carries your golf clubs called a caddie?
Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: Where are the Canary Islands?
History for 4/2/2023
Birthdays: Frankish Emperor Charlemagne, Giacomo Casanova, Hans Christian Andersen, Marvin Gaye, Emile Zola, Max Ernst, Buddy Ebsen, Sir Alec Guinness, Frederick Bartholdi, Emmy Lou Harris, Linda Hunt, Isaiah Washington, Karl Castle.
304B.C. Alexander IV, the young child of Alexander the Great, began his reign under the regency of the Macedonian General Perdiccas.
430AD. This day was the feast day of Saint Mary the Egyptian, a former prostitute who repented her sins by living naked and alone in the desert for 49 years, only appearing briefly at Easter time to take communion, and to get some more sunblock.
1459- Vlad III "Dracula" -Little Dragon, Duke of Wallachia, shows why he got the nickname Vlad the Impaler, by impaling the city council of Brasov high on stakes then eating lunch, laughing under their quivering bodies. Impaling was a torture where you had a huge sharpened stake hammered into your rectum, up into your body, then standing it up. A good executioner could keep the stake from piercing too many important organs, prolonging the agony of your death. Another time when Turkish ambassadors refused to remove their hats to him, as were their custom, Vlad had the men seized and had their hats nailed to their heads. The legend says he laughed as they writhed on the floor in agony.
No wonder in the 1890’s when British author Bram Stoker was researching folk tales of the Carpathian Mountains to use as source material for a vampire novel, he chose Dracula for its title.
1502- King Henry VII Tudor’s primary heir Arthur of Britain died at age fifteen. King Henry had just married Arthur to the Catharine daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain a few weeks before. Now Henry didn’t want to lose the Spanish alliance, and he was too cheap to send back Catharine’s huge dowery. So he remarried her to his other son, Henry VIII. Catherine and Henry VIII’s marriage problems would lead to the English Church’s break with Rome.
1520- Somewhere off the coast of what will one day be Argentina, Magellan's captains, convinced this crazy Portuguese didn’t know where he was going, try to mutiny and go home to Spain.
1800- Beethoven's First Symphony premiered. Vienna's leading music critic called it - 'a vulgar, impertinent explosion, more expected from a military band than an orchestra!’
1801- BATTLE OF COPENHAGEN- Britain had a one-day war with Denmark. The English fleet was sent by London to intimidate the Danes into leaving Napoleon's anti-British blockade, but the Danes were more worried about a Russian-Swedish alliance forcing them to remain. So Admiral Nelson sailed his fleet into Copenhagen harbor and shot it out with the Danish Navy and shore batteries. Nelson’s ships sailed up and down the drydocks blasting the parked Danish battleships in for repairs. Despite fearful manpower losses the British don't lose one ship while sinking or capturing 17 Danish ships of the line.
The one-eyed, one armed Nelson gloried in battle. When a Danish cannon ball struck his mainmast showering him and his staff with hot burning splinters, he laughed and said: "Hot work, what?" At one point the action got so desperate, that Nelson's superior Admiral Hyde Parker raised the ensign flags to break off battle and retreat. Nelson ignored them. He jokingly raised his spyglass to his dead eye and said, "What ensign flags? I don't see any ensign flags!"
Denmark made peace the next day and all the surviving combatants had a lovely dinner together at the Copenhagen Palace, as though nothing had happened.
1814- Now that Paris was occupied by enemy armies, the French Senate led by Talleyrand declared the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte officially deposed.
1836- Charles Dickens married Elizabeth Howarth.
1865- The Confederate capitol Richmond fell to U.S. armies. More destruction to the city was done by looting Confederates and released prisoners than the enemy. Several large fires created the type of total urban destruction not to be seen again until the World Wars in the 20th Century.
Mrs. Robert E. Lee (a grandniece of George Washington) was at her town home in the city while her husband was still out with his army. General Phil Sheridan stationed a guard to protect her door, but she protested bitterly that he was a black soldier and thought it was meant to offend her. Which knowing Phil Sheridan, it probably was.
1865- Abe Lincoln awakened from a strange dream. He told Mary that he was wandering the halls in an empty White House, when heard women weeping. When he asked a soldier at the East Room what had happened, he said the president had been assassinated. This story was confirmed a generation later by Robert Hay, who had been Lincolns’ personal assistant and in 1898 was Secretary of State under Teddy Roosevelt.
1877- First man shot out of a cannon.
1877- The first White House egg-rolling contest.
1902- The first movie theater opened in Los Angeles.
1916- Edinburgh Scotland was bombed by German zeppelin L14. They tried to bomb Edinburgh castle, but missed. The one o'clock signal gun was turned on them as a defense. The only damage they managed to cause was to destroy an Innes & Grieve warehouse packed with whiskey, which burned very brightly. This made the Scots very angry.
1917- Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin arrived by train at St. Petersburg's Finland Station to cheers and salutes. He was smuggled from Geneva to Russia by the German High Command in a sealed railroad car. the German secret service also paid for the printing presses for Pravda. He began to organize the Communist plot to seize the Russian Government.
1917- President Woodrow Wilson called a special session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Germany. ‘The World Must be made Safe for Democracy!” he said.
1934- Ward Kimball’s first day at Walt Disney as an inbetweener.
1943- Disney short 'Private Pluto' the first Chip & Dale cartoon.
1943- Warner short “Super Rabbit”.
1943- This day Harvard Dean Henry Chauncey supervised the distribution of 316,000 High School seniors of the Army-Navy College Qualifying Test, later re-titled the Scholastic Aptitude Tests or SAT. The SAT became a standardized test that manages every year to raise the stress level of seniors regardless of race, class or religion. Go On To Next Page.
1951- Author Jack Kerouac began writing his masterpiece On the Road, on one long roll of teletype paper. He tried to write in a marathon, reinforced by cigarettes, coffee and Benzedrine. The book was one long paragraph, with no page or chapter breaks.“ The only people for me are the mad ones…”
1974-While actor David Niven was speaking at the Academy Awards telecast a nude streaker named Bob Opel ran past him on nationwide television. Mr. Niven, completely unflustered, dryly commented: "The only laugh that man will ever get is by stripping off his clothes and showing off his shortcomings. "
1974- Later at that same Oscar telecast, Francis Ford Coppola presented the last award of the evening, the Best Picture to Cabaret. But he held up the show to launch into a speech that a Revolution was coming in Digital Technology “that will make the Industrial Revolution seem like a small town try-out!” The audience was confused and annoyed at being delayed any longer to get to their parties. No one knew what he was talking about.
1978- The TV show "Dallas" debuts.
1982- THE FALKLANDS WAR-Britain declared war on Argentina over their military takeover of the Falkland Islands.
1981- John Welsh made CEO of General Electric. After automating factories and firing one third of his employees, he earned the name "Neutron Jack" after the bomb that kills people but leaves buildings intact.
1993- Bullocks Wilshire department store with the famous Tea Room closed.
1996- Lech Walesa, who led the first great people’s movement to overthrow a Communist dictatorship and was president of Poland for two terms and a Nobel Prize winner, got his old job back repairing electric batteries at the Gydansk shipyard. The shipyard was later closed.
2004- Walt Disney Studio released Home on the Range.
2005- Polish Pope John Paul II died after reigning for 26 years.
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Yesterday’s Quiz: Where are the Canary Islands?
Answer: The Canary Islands are an archipelago off the coast of Morocco, SW from Spain. Administered by the Spanish Government.