Quiz: What does it mean when you say someone is “ gung-ho”?

Yesterday’s quiz answered below: In illustrations of Dickens A Christmas Carol, the ghost of Jacob Marley is always wearing a bandage around his head lengthwise. Why?
-------------------------------------------------------------
History for 12/19/23
Birthdays: King Phillip V of Spain (1683), Edith Piaf, Edwin Stanton, Tip O'Neil, Cicely Tyson, Sir Ralph Richardson, Robert Urich, Robert Sherman, Jennifer Beals is 60, David Susskind, Fritz Reiner, Mel Shaw, Alyssa Milano is 51, Jake Gyllenhaal is 43

1154- Coronation of King Henry II of England. He was the son of Geoffrey Plantagenet of Anjou and Empress Matilda, the daughter of William the Conqueror. His coronation settled a period of dynastic civil wars in England between the Conqueror’s children known as “The Wars of Stephen and Matilda". Henry and his sons Richard Lionheart and John Lackland are also called the Angevin dynasty, because of the part of France (Anjou) their family originated.

1686- According to Daniel Defoe, this was the day Robinson Crusoe was rescued from his deserted island.

1732- The Pennsylvania Gazette announced the publication of a new book by Dr. Benjamin Franklin writing under the penname Richard Saunders. The work was Poor Richard’s Almanac, an international best seller that made Franklin famous.

1783- William Pitt the Younger became Prime Minister of Great Britain at only 24 years old." A sight to make the Nations stare, A Kingdom trusted to a Schoolboy's care."

1793- The Anglo-Spanish fleet evacuated Toulon after the cities strong points were captured by the French army, led by a pushy 23-year-old major with a funny name- Napoleon Bonaparte.

1903- NY City’s Williamsburg Bridge opened, only the second major span across the East River since the Brooklyn Bridge. Because it linked Manhattan’s Lower East Side with Williamsburg Brooklyn, anti-Semites called it The Jew Bridge.

1914- Earl Hurd patented animation 'cels' (celluloids) and backgrounds. Before this cartoonists tried drawing the background settings over and over again hundreds of times or slashed the paper around the character and tried not to have it walk in front of anything. By the late 1990’s, most cels & cel paint were replaced by digital imaging, except in Japan, where some traditional paint continued.

1915- Earl Douglas Haig replaces Sir John French as commander of British troops on the Western Front. His nickname was Whiskey Doug because his family owned a well-known distillery. Haig had succeeded in the Boer War by bloody frontal assaults, and he proved he had learned nothing from the experience. He had no use for new gismos like machine guns and airplanes, even after he watched large numbers of his troops mowed down by them. In the attack called Passchendaele in 1917 he lost thousands of men in stand up frontal assaults. He reacted "Good Lord, have we really lost that many?"

1918- Robert Ripley began his "Believe It Or Not" column in the New York Globe.

1919-The premiere of E.C. Segar’s comic strip “The Thimble Theatre”. The original characters were Olive Oyl, her brother Castor Oyl, and her original boyfriend Ham Gravy. Ten years later Popeye the Sailor appeared, as well as J. Wellington Wimpy, Alice the Goon and the Jeep.

1926- The U.S. government passed a law that women authors can only legally copyright their works under their husband's names.

1929- Thomas Benton-Slate was an entrepreneur who invented dry-ice. This day in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, he attempted to fly the first all metal dirigible, the City of Glendale. He brought it out two days ago and it immediately began to pop rivets in the heat and fall apart. So he brought it in for repairs. This day he tried one more time, but the sun’s heat expanded the shell, causing rivets to pop again, followed by a metallic explosion and escaping gas. He had it dragged back into the hanger and forgot about it.

1932- BBC Overseas Service Radio broadcasts began. Originally called Empire Broadcasts. The sound of the chimes of Big Ben heard around the world. Despite gloomy predictions from the BBC's director-general John Reith - "The programs will neither be very interesting nor very good", the broadcasts received praise, and were further boosted by the support of a Christmas message from King George V (the first ever) to the Empire a few days later.

1941- The Japanese began their grand assault on British Hong Kong. The city surrendered on Christmas Day. Japanese assault teams had been told to take no prisoners and committed atrocities on British, Canadian and Australian defenders. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler told his dinner guests " The Japanese are all over those islands and will soon be in Australia. The White Race will disappear from those regions."

1944, in a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court upheld President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Executive Order 9066, ruling that the incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps was constitutional as a “public necessity.”

1957- The musical ‘The Music Man’ starring Robert Preston first debuted. "Seventy Six Trom-bones in the Big Parade…"

1958- First airing of the Disneyland TV holiday special “ From All of Us, to All of You.”

1959- Confederate General Walter Williams, who claimed to be the last living veteran of the Civil War, died at age 117. His claim to be a general was later proved false, but he was that age and in the Civil War, so it was a good story.

1971- Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ premiered. Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess. In America the film received an X Rating, more for the violence than the sexual situations. The sensation over the film caused so many incidents of urban violence, that with Kubrick’s permission, it was banned in England for three decades.

1974- The first personal computer went on sale. The Altair 8800, named for the planet in the 1955 sci-fi movie classic Forbidden Planet. The computer came in a kit that you had to build and it cost $397. The next year, two kids at Harvard named Bill Gates and Paul Allen created a programming language for it called BASIC.

1986- Frank Oz’s movie version of the Ashman-Mencken musical Little Shop of Horrors.” This film convinced Disney to hire them to write the music for Little Mermaid.

1997- MTV dropped airing the rap song Smack My Bitch Up, by Prodigy.

1998- IMPEACHMENT- Before going on their holiday break, the Republican dominated House of Representatives voted two articles of impeachment against President Bill Clinton, over his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The vote was along strict party lines and most of the Democrats stormed out in protest. Despite the impeachment, President "Slick Willy" Clinton was acquitted by trial in the Senate in February and completed his second term. To complete the circus-like atmosphere, pornography publisher Larry Flynt announced he had proof that incoming Republican Speaker of the House Bob Livingston, a descendant of a signer of the Declaration of Independence, had had at least six affairs while a congressman including one of his staff and a lobbyist. Livingston resigned before his hand could touch the gavel. He was replaced by Rep Dennis Hastert, who did time in jail for molesting young boys when a gym coach. Three other of the loudest callers for impeachment, Senators David Vitter, John Ensign and South Carolina Gov. Pete Sanford, were all soon after caught in their own equally tawdry affairs. President Donald Trump has been impeached twice.

2001- Peter Jackson’s film ‘The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship of the Ring’ first opened. It was the first film to use the software Massive, which created hundreds of digital figures to recreate whole armies attacking and retreating.

2020- That evening at The White House Holiday Party, attorney Jenna Ellis was told that even though President Donald Trump had been told repeatedly he lost the election, he had no intention of leaving power. Something no president had dared do in 243 years of elections. “He intends to stay.” That night, Trump tweeted a message to his worked-up fans, “Come to the Capitol on Jan. 6th. It’s going to be wild.”
===============================================
Yesterday’s question: In illustrations of Dickens A Christmas Carol, the ghost of Jacob Marley is always wearing a bandage around his head lengthwise. Why?

ANSWER: When a person dies, the muscles and ligaments that hold the jaw to the rest of the skull relax and begin to break down, causing the mouth to gape open grotesquely. Back in the day, morticians would keep the cadaver from this unpleasant manifestation by the use of a chin strap or sometimes a simple cloth tied around the head to hold the jaw in place. That is what Marley’s ghost is wearing.