Quiz: Icarus was the young man who flew too close to then sun when his wings melted and he fell. Who was Icarus’Daddy?

Yesterday’s Quiz answered below: we’ve heard of musical pieces like Piano Concerto #1 or #5. But who wrote Piano Concerto #0 ?
--------------------------------------------------
History for 12/21/2023
Birthdays: Benjamin Disraeli, Josh Gibson- the Home Run King of the Negro Baseball Leagues, Pat Weaver-TV exec who created the Today Show and father of Sigourney Weaver, Frank Zappa, Dr. Kurt Waldheim, Florence Griffith Joyner, Chris Evert, Phil Roman, Jane Fonda is 84, Paul Winchell born Pinkus Wilchinski, Keifer Sutherland is 57, Samuel L. Jackson is 75, Jane Kaszmarek, Judy Delphy is 54, Jeffrey Katzenberg is 73

Happy Winter Solstice. The shortest day of the year.

1375- The writer Boccaccio died, not of the plague, and not during a wild party like in his book the Decameron.

1376- END OF THE BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY- After a lot of lobbying from St. Catherine of Siena and Saint Brigid of Sweden, Pope Gregory XI moved the Vatican back to Rome from Avignon. Gregory mysteriously died shortly after he arrived. Roman mobs, angry at the poverty caused by the absence of the Holy See, attacked the mostly French cardinals selecting the next pope. They crowded around their building shouting: "Death or an Italian Pope!' and threw javelins at the ceiling knowing the points would pop out of the floor and prick their feet.
The terrified cardinals dragged any old bishop out of the Vatican library, made him an Archbishop, then Cardinal, then Pope, then ran for the hills. The librarian became Pope Urban VIII, “The Beast of Naples".

1776- American diplomats Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane arrive in Paris to negotiate a French alliance and money for the rebellious colonies. It took them a year. Their personal secretary, William Bancroft, was a British spy.

1788- Emperor Quang Tung of Vietnam was crowned.

1863- Congress created the Medal of Honor, at first only for Navy personnel for gallantry, but later extended to all branches of the military.

1866- THE FETTERMAN MASSACRE- Foreshadowing by ten years what Custer would get, the Sioux led by Crazy Horse surrounded an army detachment and wiped them out. The commander of Fort Phil Kearny Wyoming, a Colonel Carrington sent out the troop to drive away some hostiles molesting a woodcutting detail. It turned out to be an elaborate trap planned by Crazy Horse and Red Cloud. It was said Carrington was such a high-class snob,"the way he would prefer to deal with the Sioux would be to socially ostracize them".

Now as his men went down under a hail of arrows Carrington could hear the firing in the distance but didn't think they needed any help. Captain Fetterman and his second in command Brown were among the last survivors. Fetterman had said the threat of the hostiles was overrated and "With 80 men I could ride through the entire Sioux Nation !" Brown had gone against orders on the mission because he promised his family back east a real Indian scalp for Christmas. Now surrounded and not wishing to be tortured by the Indians, they held their revolvers to each other's temples and on the count of three...

1909- The first Junior High School or Middle School set up in the US in Berkeley Cal.

1913- THE BIRTHDAY OF THE CROSSWORD PUZZLE- Journalist Arthur Wynne created the word game, which included 32 clues and ran in the New York World.

1914- The premiere of the first feature length film comedy- Tilly’s Punctured Romance, starring Marie Dressler, Mabel Normand and a young Charlie Chaplin.

1919-THE PALMER RAIDS- THE RED SCARE- Class-conscious American businessmen watched the growing Communist regime in Russia with fear. Soviet groups were also moving to take over Germany, Hungary and Austria. People feared foreign anarchists at home with bombs." Bolshevism is worse than war.”-Herbert Hoover. This day Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer received permission to go after what he deemed “seditious elements”.
Under emergency wartime sedition legislation (even though World War I had been over for a year) At the stroke of midnight on New Years, U.S. marshals raided newspaper and union offices and deported 249 immigrants, including women's rights advocate Emma Goldman. The raids were organized by a young executive in the treasury dept, named J. Edgar Hoover.

1925- Sergei Eisenstein’s cinematic masterpiece Battleship Potemkin premiered in Moscow. The films pioneering use of montage and allegorical imagery intercut inspired a generation of filmmakers.

1933- Twentieth Century Fox signed 5 year old Shirley Temple to a seven year contract.

1937- Walt Disney's " Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs" had its grand premiere at the Carthay Circle Theater. The first feature length American cartoon, it became the box office champ of 1938, earning 4 times more than any other film that year. Russian director Sergei Eisenstein called it “The greatest movie ever made.”

1937- Ted Healy, former vaudeville partner of the Three Stooges, was killed in a bar fight, while celebrating the birth of his son. No one is really sure what happened. One legend has it that actor Wallace Beery and some gangsters did the fatal pounding. Another rumor is one of the gangsters was young Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, who forty years later would produce the James Bond movies and win an Irving Thalberg Award at the 1982 Oscars. Healy originated the violent comedy schtick of the Stooges. But by this time The Three Stooges had parted ways with Ted Healy and were doing much better.

1939- In the year of their nonaggression pact, Adolf Hitler sent Holiday Greetings to his new best-buddy Josef Stalin. "Merry Christmas, you Jewish-Bolshevik untermensch schweinehund! "Thank you and the same to you, you corrupt Fascist tool of International Capitalism, ифыефкв! "

1940- Writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (44) died of a heart attack at Hollywood columnist Sheila Graham's house. She had just left the house to buy him some candy. She left him thumbing through his Princeton alumni newsletter. His last words to her were 'Hershey bars will be fine..."

1944- Walt Disney’s The Three Caballeros premiered in Mexico City. It opened in the US in February.

1945- General George “Blood & Guts” Patton died from injuries suffered in an auto accident in Manheim Germany on Dec. 9th.

1953- Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the Atomic Bomb, was accused of being a Communist. When he was asked in 1940 to head the Manhattan Project the government knew he was a Berkeley eccentric who had joined every leftist group in town, but he was brilliant. This act is now viewed more as the government revenge for his flat refusal to help Edmund Teller develop the Hydrogen Bomb.

1958- Charles DeGaulle elected President of the 5th French Republic.

1959- Joe Oriolo’s TV remake of Felix the Cat debuted on TV.

1964-The British Parliament voted to ban the death penalty.

1968- The Apollo 8 spacecraft was launched to the Moon. Besides winning the Space Race, and doing the famous Christmas Night reading of Genesis from lunar orbit, Apollo 8 had on board one of the very first mini-computers. The Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) was one cubic foot in size, had stored memory of 5 bytes, a language (DSKY) and a digital display. It’s the forerunner of the personal computer.

1969- Famed football coach Vince Lombardi coached his last game- Dallas beat Washington 20-10.

1971- Richard William's animated TV special "A Christmas Carol" with Alastair Sim reprising his Scrooge.

1972- 14 members of a Uruguayan rugby team were found alive on an Andes mountain peak after their plane crashed. They survived the harsh conditions by turning cannibal and eating their dead.

1973- Ray Harryhausen’s The Golden Voyage of Sinbad premiered.

1975- International terrorist Carlos the Jackal attacked an OPEC oil meeting in Vienna and took 11 ministers hostage. He escaped to Algeria and wasn’t finally caught until 1994 while trying to get an operation on his testicle.

1978- Chicago police investigating the disappearance of a 15 year old boy searched the home of contractor John Wayne Gacy. They found the remains of 33 children in the crawl space. Gacy in his spare time did volunteer work as a clown entertaining sick children.

1979- Disney’s Sci-Fi film The Black Hole opened in theaters.

1982- Thom Riley, one of the stars of the TV cop show ChiPS was busted for driving stoned on Quaaludes.

1988- PanAm 747 jumbo jet Flight 103 from London to New York exploded over Lockerbie Scotland killing all the passengers. The bomb was planted in Munich by Libyan agents. It was in retaliation for either Reagan's bombing of Tripoli in 1986, or the shooting down of Iran Air Flight 655 in July of 1988 by the US Navy Cruiser Vincennes.

1989- The Romanian army joined the people protesting in the streets and overthrew the hated Communist dictator Nicholai Cercescu. While most of the nation starved in a stagnant economy, Cercescu lived in luxury. His son drove sports cars and lost fortunes at roulette tables in Monte Carlo. Young Cercescu kept a “raping room” for women who caught his fancy. As the Communist regimes of Poland, Czechoslovakia and East Germany collapsed, Romanians realized their time had finally come, and they poured out into the streets.

1989- Vice President Dan Quayle sent out 30,000 official Christmas cards with the word beacon misspelled- beakon. In 2007 President George W. Bush sent out Hanukkah cards featuring the White House Christmas tree.

2003- Just in time to spoil Christmas, Pres. Bush’s Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced the color-coded threat level was raised to the highest state of alert since the 9-11 Attack. That Al Qaeda terrorists were about to attack the United States and kill us all at any minute! After terrifying everybody, absolutely nothing happened. In 2009 it was revealed the data came from a conman named Dennis Montgomery, who fooled the CIA into believing he had special software that he could use to intercept Al Qaeda secret messages broadcast on the Arab news network Al Jazeera. It was a complete fraud.

2012- The Era will come to an End, according to the ancient Maya Calendar. The Maya believed that the world as they knew it occasionally was turned upside down. The word for earthquake also meant revolution. Translating Mayan can be open to interpretation, so end of an era may also mean beginning of a new age of enlightenment.

2012- The Walt Disney Company spent $4.06 billion to buy Lucasfilm, ILM and the Star Wars rights. George Lucas retired to do philanthropic pursuits.

2089- According to Ridley Scott, today the good ship Prometheus landed on the Original Planet.
========================================================
Yesterday’s Question: we’ve heard of musical pieces like Piano Concerto #1 or #5. But who wrote Piano Concerto #0 ?

ANSWER: Beethoven didn’t bother to number his works. He left that for later musicologists. They listed his mature piano concertos he wrote from 1 to 5. But after his death, looking through his files they found an immature concerto he wrote at age 14. So they called it Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #0.