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November 28th, 2010 sun.
November 28th, 2010

Question: Tolkien’s series of books about Middle Earth are called The Lord of the Rings. What other great work of fiction that encompasses several shows, is also known simply as The Ring?

Yesterday’s Question answered below: What character was the first Macy Day balloon?
History for 11/28/2010
Birthdays: Jean Baptiste Lully, William Blake, Frederich Engels, Stefan Zweig, Ernst Roehm, Brooks Atkinson, Berry Gordy the founder of Motown Records, Randy Newman, Anton Rubinstein, Gary Hart, Vern Den Herder, Paul Warfield, Hope Lange, Ed Harris is 60, Paul Schaefer, Laura Antonelli, Joe Dante, Michael Ritchie, Anna Nicole-Smith, John Stewart is 48

885 A.D. est. date that the VIKINGS ATTACKED PARIS-Viking warchief Ragnar Lothbrocks, or Ragnar Hairy-Legs, decided the Parisians would get a big surprise if he rowed his dragonships down the Meuse, pulled them out on rollers and lowered them back into the Seine to attack Paris. The Parisians under Duke Bernard put up a stout resistance from the city walls until French King Charles the Fat sent help.

1493- Christopher Columbus returned to San Salvador, to discover his first colony La Natividad wiped out by angry natives.

1520- Having recovered and refitted from navigating the Straights of Magellan around the tip of South America, Fernan Magellan began his trip across the Pacific.

1815- After Waterloo and a prisoner on the island of St. Helena, Napoleon Bonaparte for the first time put away his uniform and appeared in civilian clothes. It was his tacit admission that after more than twenty-five years at war, his career was indeed over.

1895- The GREAT CHICAGO RACE- first American auto race. Two electric and four gas powered cars raced from Chicago to Evanston and back 54 miles despite several inches of snow on the ground. The winner Number 5 driven by inventor Charles Duryea reached a top speed of 7 miles an hour! Only one other car finished, the rest broke down. Duryea won $2000 and a good cold.

1911- The Chevrolet Automobile Company founded by the brothers Chevrolet.

1919- Lady Astor became the first woman elected to the British Parliament. She was the political as well as verbal nemesis of Winston Churchill. She once said to him "Mr. Churchill, if I were your wife I'd put poison in your coffee!" To which Churchill replied:" Madame if I were your husband I would drink it !"

1922- The first Skywriting display. Former RAF pilot Cyril Turner wrote HELLO USA , CALL VANDERBILT 7-200 in the skies above New York City. 47,000 immediately telephoned the number.

1925- First radio broadcast from the Grand Ol' Opry in Nashville.

1926- California oil tycoon Edward Doheny went on trial for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal. That he and Harry Sinclair bribed the Secretary of the Interior to lease them U.S. strategic oil reserves. And like most millionaires, he was acquitted.

1942- THE COCOANUT GROVE FIRE-The U.S. public was distracted for awhile from war news by reports of a terrible disaster in Boston. A fire broke out at a popular nightclub called the Cocoanut Grove and killed 492 people in only twelve minutes. The clubs decorations caught fire and created carbon monoxide gas and there were only two exits. Among the dead was western movie star Buck Jones. The tragedy created the first mandatory laws requiring public buildings to have fire exits opening outwards and safety testing of decorative materials.

1947- Disney's cartoon "Chip and Dale".

1948- Hopalong Cassidy premiered on television.

1951-Truman held a crisis cabinet meeting over the War in Korea.
U.S and United Nations forces had been attacked by 180,000 Communist Chinese, lost the capitol Seoul and were being driven back down the Korean peninsula. Gen. Douglas MacArthur recommended a limited dropping of at least ten atomic bombs on Chinese cities, spreading a belt of nuclear waste across the Sino-Korean border and inviting Chaing Kai Shek's Nationalist Chinese forces to attack China and restart the Chinese Civil War. This would mean Russia would step in with it's nuclear weapons and World War III would result.
Truman made the decision to keep the Korean War a "limited war" and not let it expand, no matter how dire allied losses became.
Gen. MacArthur was horrified. He was told we are not at war with Communist China, even though thousands of Chinese soldiers were even now locked in deadly battle with his troops. At first his calls for nuclear weapons sounds crazy, but his argument was it was crazy to fight wars to preserve a status-quo. If you go to the extreme of risking men's lives, do it to win or don’t go to war at all. In 1964 from his deathbed MacArthur sent a note to Pres. Johnson warning him not to go into Vietnam.

1953- Frank Olson, a US government employee, jumped out a window of the New York Statler Hotel. In 1975 it was revealed Olson was given LSD by Dr Sidney Gottleib, as part of a government “mind-control” experiment.

1953- Cartoonist & writer Milt Gross died.

1981 - Moviestar Natalie Wood drunkenly toppled off her yacht near Catalina Island and
drowned. Her husband Robert Wagner friend Christopher Walken, were onboard having an argument and unaware of her predicament. Wood had once confessed to a friend that she had a horror of drowning.

1994 –At the Columbia Penitentiary in Portage Wisconsin, serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer while cleaning the prison bathroom ,was attacked and beaten to death with a broomstick by inmate Christopher Scarver. He told prosecutors God told him kill him. Dahmer’s brain was preserved in formaldehyde, but his mother ordered it’s destruction a year later.

Answer- Felix the Cat in 1927. Many of these first balloons were designed by animator Tony Sarg.