Question: In a famous Shakespeare play one character says” This royal seat of kings, this sceptered isle...This blessed plot. This earth, this realm, this England.” Who says it?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What is an escutcheon?
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History for 11/12/2023
Birthdays: Auguste Rodin, Dr. Sun Yat Sen, Bahi-ullah 1817 founder of the Bahii faith, Elizabeth Cadie -Stanton, Cecil B. DeMille, Grace Kelly, Edward G. Robinson, Jack Oakie, Kim Hunter, Shamus Culhane, Charles Manson, Neil Young, Edvard Munch, Nadia Comenici, Tanya Harding, Wally Shawn is 80, Megan Mullally is 64, Anne Hathaway is 41, Ryan Gosling is 43, David Brain is 82.

1035- King Canute the Great died. He was the Viking King of Denmark and England simultaneously. It was Canute who once tried to command the ocean tide to go out.

1623- In Vilnius Lithuania, Catholic priest St. Joseph of Polotsk was torn apart by an angry mob. Polish Catholic legislators led by chancellor Jan Zamoyski tried to reconcile their Catholic practices with their Ukrainian and Belarus subjects by creating the Church of the Uniate Rite. Clergy could keep their Eastern Orthodox rituals and wives, but acknowledge the Pope. This compromise didn't suit all tempers, and such acts of violence broke out into the Great Cossack Revolt of 1648.

1792- The Revolutionary French Republic issued a declaration that any other European kingdom that wants to overthrow their king and chop his head off, is welcome to come join the fun and France would help.

1859- The first trapeze act was demonstrated at the Cirque Napoleon in Paris. The act caused such a sensation that the daredevil was immortalized by his tights becoming a fashion named in his honor- Jules Leotard.

1861- THE CURRAUGH CAMP AFFAIR- When 20 year old Edward the Prince of Wales went to Oxford he was kept on a short leash by his worried parents Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. They expected his college life to be- well, Victorian. He was to reside off campus, limited his diet to bland foods and soda water, and absolutely no smoking or carousing with women! This draconian regimen only stiffened Bertie’s rebellious nature.
When allowed to attend maneuvers in Ireland and bunk with a company of hard drinking cavalry officers, Bertie was at last able to go wild. By unfortunate coincidence the gossip about the Prince’s drinking binges and bedding actresses reached his father just as Albert was showing the first signs of the typhoid fever that would kill him. For years afterwards, Queen Victoria blamed her son for contributing to his father's death. In his adult years, King Edward VII was never without a cigar in his teeth, a girl on his lap and a drink in his hand. Women called him Dirty Bertie, and Edward the Caresser.

1912- While King Edward VII was womanizing, his queen Alexandra was an enthusiastic amateur photographer. She used her Kodak Brownie camera to photograph the Royal Family at leisure. This day she published Queen Alexandra’s Christmas Album, with the proceeds to go to charity. The informality of her photos was revolutionary and did much to humanize the British Royal family to the public.

1912- Mayor of New Orleans Martin Behrman shut down the brothels and shady establishments of the red-light district Storyville. The place where American Jazz originated.

1912- SCOTT OF THE ANTARCTIC- in the Antarctic this day the frozen bodies of Capt. Robert Falcon Scott and his men were found. He had lost his race to find the South Pole to Norwegian Piers Amundsen, then was stranded by a blizzard only 30 miles from his base camp on the Ross Ice Shelf. His last diary entry (March 29th) said "We are showing that Englishmen can still have a bold spirit, fighting it out to the end. This diary and our dead bodies will be the proof. I should like to write more but I haven't the strength..."

1917- At the first meeting of the Russian Duma since the Bolshevik Revolution Lenin and Trotsky revealed their radical plan to reshape Russian society into a communist worker’s state dominated by the Soviets -workers and peasants councils.

1918- The day after the Armistice ended World War I, Fighter ace James Norman Hall of the Lafayette Escadrille borrowed a Spad and flew over the Western Front one last time. He was amazed at how quiet and peaceful it now was. He no longer had to look anxiously over his shoulder for Fokkers diving out of the clouds, or anti-aircraft bursts. He landed, and never flew again. James Norman Hall moved to Tahiti, and with another Lafayette Escadrille veteran, Charles Nordhoff, wrote the famous book, The Mutiny on the Bounty.

1918- With their Hapsburg emperor fled, Austria declared itself a republic.

1920- In the wake of the "Black Sox" Baseball scandal, the first rigged World Series, Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis was elected first Commissioner of Baseball. He ordered all those involved in the scandal including Shoeless Joe Jackson permanently banned from baseball, even though they had been acquitted in a civil trial.

1923- In Clarksburg West Virginia a man shot his wife for smoking a cigarette.

1927- The Holland Tunnel completed. It runs under the Hudson River connecting New York and New Jersey. It’s not named for the Netherlands, but for the engineer Clifford Holland, who died shortly before its completion.

1933- Hugh Gray of the British Aluminum Company takes the first photographs of what he claimed was a monster in Loch Ness. He would be the first of many to have claimed to have seen Nessie.

1936- The Oakland-San Francisco Bay Bridge dedicated. Engineer Charles Purcell went on to design LA Freeways.

1937- Alan Turing delivered his famous paper "On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem" at Kings College, Cambridge.
In it he postulated on the ability to create a "universal machine" that used numbers to solve problems and could be re-programable for different tasks. In his day they were called Turing Machines, but we know them now as Computers.

1938- The Madagascar Plan. Nazi Herman Goring announced a new plan to create a homeland for European Jews in French Madagascar off the coast of Africa. It sounds goofy but they got it from an idea of 19th century Zionist leader Theodore Herzl and the just concluded international conference at Evian France showed the reluctance of the western democracies to take in large amounts of refugees. The idea went nowhere.

1939- Actor Bela Lugosi spent the day at the Walt Disney Studio posing for their animators as the Devil in Night on Bald Mountain in Fantasia. Despite the good publicity shots, lead animator Bill Tytla was dissatisfied with his performance and used fellow artist Ham Luske as his model instead.

1940- The first LA Freeway, the Arroyo-Seco opened for car traffic for the first time. “ Called the finest highway of its kind in America”. In 1954 it was renamed The Pasadena Freeway, and today is simply called The 110 Freeway.

1941- On the night before mobster Abe Reles, alias Kid Twist, was due to testify what he knew of the Mafia, he was thrown out of a hotel window to his death. He was under Federal protection. In 1962, Joe Valachi testified mobster Frank Costello had raised $100,000 to bribe NYPD cops to do the deed themselves. A popular toast in Brooklyn those days was: “ Here’s to Abe Reles, a canary who could sing, but not fly.”

1944- THE BATTLESHIP TIRPITZ is sunk. After the big battle with the Bismarck, Nazi admirals built an even bigger battleship, the Tirpitz. The allies however, found out through intelligence when it would sail and attacked this one as soon as it left harbor. They pounded it with bomber and torpedo planes and midget submarines day and night until it rolled over and sank. Survivors recalled as the ship was sinking they could hear through the hull the sound of the doomed sailors singing "Deutschland Uber Alles".
This caused a British Admiral to remark:" It's tragic that such men follow such a cause."

1946- Disney's "Song of the South" with James Baskett as Uncle Remus.

1946- The Exchange Bank in Chicago opened the first drive in bank.

1948- After World War II, Japanese leaders were sentenced for war crimes by a world court like the top Nazis leaders were at Nuremberg. Prime Minister Hideki Tojo, Generals Homma and Yamashita and 900 others were executed or imprisoned for crimes against humanity and genocide.

1970- The town of Florence Oregon found a large dead gray whale on its beach. City fathers decided it would be easier to dispose, if they blew it up. As an audience watched, they stuffed it with half a ton of dynamite. The explosion drew cheers from the audience, then everyone ran for cover as they were showered by falling 50 pound chunks of smelly blubber and guts. The film of it has been called the first viral video.

1981- The Space Shuttle Columbia takes off for the second time. First reusable spacecraft.

1990- Akihito became Emperor of Japan.

2014- The European Space Agency successfully landed the first satellite Philae on a moving comet. Comet 67P Churyumov-Gerasimenko. It had been launched ten years before and had taken this long to reach it.
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Yesterday’s Question: What is an escutcheon?”

Answer: An escutcheon is the shield on a coat-of-arms.