Birthdays: Roman Emperor Caracalla, Eadweard Muybridge, Maya Angelou, Frances Langford, Irv Spence-Tom & Jerry animator, Gil Hodges, Arthur Murray, Muddy Waters, Cloris Leachman, Dorothea Dix, Elmer Bernstein, Bijan, Heath Ledger, Robert Downey Jr is 56, Barry Pepper, Craig T. Nelson is 77, Hugo Weaving is 61
HAPPY EASTER, Commemorating the time when Jesus Christ was crucified and after three days rose from the dead. For those of you who always wondered why Easter moves around so much when the other holidays stay put, the Medieval Church wanted the festival of Jesus moved from any connection with the Jewish Passover. The Last Supper after all, was a Passover Seder. So after a lot of bickering, the Church decided the Easter feast would be the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox-Spring.
636AD- Today is the Feast Day of Saint Isadore of Seville, the Patron Saint of the Internet. Don’t believe me? Check this out. http://factually.gizmodo.com/the-patron-saint-of-the-internet-is-isidore-of-seville-1595023500
896 A.D.-THE SYNOD HORRENDIUS-One of the more bizarre incidents in Vatican history. Bishops Stephen and Formosan hated each other. When Formosan became pope Stephen had to go into hiding. After Formosan's death Stephen became pope, but was unsatisfied that he couldn't strike back at his old enemy. So Pope Stephen had Formosan's tomb opened, the corpse sat up in a chair, and put on trial for heresy.
The cross examination was pretty strange, the prosecutor said things like: "His very silence is admittance of his guilt!" The dead body was convicted, excommunicated, tossed around by a Roman mob, then thrown in the Tiber. Pope Stephen VI later became the first pope to be killed in bed with someone's wife.
1561- A strange show in the sky of red discs and crosses was reported over Nuremberg Germany. Perhaps an early UFO sighting?
1581- Queen Elizabeth I visited the Golden Hind, the ship which Francis Drake sailed around the world. The 'Great Pirate of the Unknown Seas" had plundered huge treasure ships and drove Spanish Colonial America crazy. The Spanish Ambassador to London demanded the pirate Drake lose his head, but Queen Elizabeth had a different use in mind for her sword- she knighted the Devon innkeeper's son.
The Golden Hind was kept in a prize anchorage for decades until age and dry rot caused her to fall to pieces. Ben Johnson wrote poems about Sir Francis Drake and Shakespeare's island of wizards in the Tempest may have been modeled on Drake's accounts of the strange stormy islands of Tierra Del Fuego in the Straights of Magellan.
1704 -British Admiral Sir Cloudsley Shovel captured The Rock of Gibraltar from Spain. Britain still owns it today, which really annoys Spain. It’s ownership recently came up in the Brexit discussion.
1841- PRESIDENT WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON DIED AFTER ONLY 31 DAYS IN OFFICE. “Old Tippicanoe” caught pneumonia giving his inauguration address in icy drizzle. When Vice President Tyler got word of the President's death, he was playing marbles with some children, and was about to get his knuckles rapped for losing. No U.S. President had ever died in office before, and no one knew if the Vice President was now only a caretaker until special elections, or was he the president for the next for years? John Tyler set the rule by staying President for four full years. Many people couldn't stand him. Instead of “Your Excellency, they called him "Your Accidency".
1850- The City of Los Angeles was incorporated under U.S. law.
1901- Russian author Leo Tolstoy broke with the Russian Orthodox Church when he sent a letter to the Patriarch this day declaring that prayers offered to Jesus Christ were “the worst type of sacrilege”.
1952- CARTOON COMMIES- Nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell accused the owners of a New York commercial animation studio, Tempo Productions of Communist sympathies. One of the owners was Disney Layout man Dave Hilberman, who was a union organizer and was the only artist personally named by Walt Disney to the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. The F.B.I. began investigating Tempo and their Madison Avenue clients quickly pulled their business. Tempo closed, laying off 50 artists. Mr. Clean, Markie Maypo and the Hamm’s Beer Bear were once again safe from Red subversion.
1954- Arturo Toscanini, who had been making music since the 1880’s, conducted his final concert. Toscanini’s studio space at NBC is today the set of the Saturday Night Live TV show.
1958- Screen goddess Lana Turner and her gangster lover Johnny Stompanato had a violent argument that ended when Turner’s teenage daughter plunged a kitchen knife into his chest. She was acquitted as justifiable homicide, and rumors maintain the daughter was covering for her mother’s own actions. It was whispered Hollywood society ladies had nicknamed Stompanato’s willy Oscar for it’s size.
1967- Van Nuys premier head shop Captain Ed’s Heads & Highs first opened for business.
1973- The World Trade Center Twin Towers first opened to the public.
1984- In George Orwell’s novel 1984, this is the day Winston Smith started a secret diary and first wrote the dangerous thought-crime “Down With Big Brother”.
1987- Ronald Reagan’s hand picked FCC voted to repeal The Fairness Doctrine, which mandated news services report unbiased news, reflecting all opinions. This set the stage for the highly partisan news reporting of today.
1994- Marc Andreesen and Jim Clark started Netscape. Clark also founded Silicon Graphics, Inc.
2007- Bob Clark, the director of the holiday classic A Christmas Story, was killed in a head on car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu. He was 67.
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