Motley Moose – Archive

Since 2008 – Progress Through Politics

The Daily F Bomb, Friday 1/17/13

Interrogatories

Ever purchase vanity plates? What did they say? Did you get your money’s worth of vanity?

Ever sing in a choir? Ensemble? Along with the radio, to the annoyance of your neighbors?

Describe perfect weather.

The Twitter Emitter

On This Day

In 1806, Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, Martha, gave birth to James Madison Randolph, the first child born in the White House.

In 1917, the United States paid Denmark $25 million for the Virgin Islands. I wonder if they would have cost less if they were not virgins?

In 1945, Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg, credited with saving tens of thousands of Jews during the Holocaust, was taken into Soviet custody in Budapest, Hungary. (His fate has never been determined.)

In 1946, the United Nations Security Council held its first meeting.

In 1977, convicted murderer Gary Gilmore was shot by a firing squad at Utah State Prison in the first U.S. execution in a decade.

In 1994, a magnitude 6.7 earthquake struck Southern California, killing at least 61 people and causing $20 billion worth of damage. 20 years already! Feels like only yesterday.

In 1995, a magnitude 7.2 earthquake devastated the city of Kobe, Japan; more than 6,000 people were killed.

In 1997, an Irish court granted the first divorce in the Roman Catholic country’s history.

In 1998, President Bill Clinton became the first U.S. president to testify as a defendant in a criminal or civil suit when he answered questions from lawyers for Paula Jones, who had accused Clinton of sexual harassment.

In 2001, faced with an Enron-created electricity crisis, California used rolling blackouts to cut off power to hundreds of thousands of people. I was lucky that the Socialist DWP in L.A. did not have to do that.

Born on This Day

1581 – Bernardo Strozzi, Italian Baroque painter (d. 1644)

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1657 (baptism) – Pieter van Bloemen Flemish painter and draftsman (d. 1720)

1706 – Benjamin Franklin, American statesman and inventor (d. 1790)

1820 – Anne Brontë, British author (d. 1849)

1829 – Raphaël Ritz, Swiss painter (d. 1894)

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1840 – Lorenzo Delleani, Italian landscape painter (d. 1908)

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1863 – David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister (d. 1945)

1863 – Constantin Stanislavski, Russian actor and theatre director (d. 1938)

1880 – Mack Sennett, Canadian film director (d. 1960)

1899 – Al Capone, American gangster (d. 1947)

1904 – Patsy Ruth Miller, silent film actress (d. 1995)

1905 – Peggy Gilbert, American jazz saxophonist and bandleader, advocate for women musicians (d. 2007)

1922 – Betty White, American actress

1923 – Carol Raye, Australian actress

1925 – Patricia Owens, Canadian actress (d. 2000)

1926 – Moira Shearer, Scottish actress (d. 2006)

1927 – Tom Dooley, American humanitarian (d. 1961)

1927 – Eartha Kitt, American actress and singer (d. 2008)

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1928 – Vidal Sassoon, English hair stylist and cosmetologist (d. 2012)

1931 – James Earl Jones, American actor

1939 – Maury Povich, American talk show host and Tabloid TV pioneer

1942 – Muhammad Ali, American boxer

1944 – Françoise Hardy, French singer

1949 – Andy Kaufman, American comedian (d. 1984)

1949 – Mick Taylor, British musician (John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers and The Rolling Stones)

1955 – Steve Earle, American musician

1959 – Susanna Hoffs, American musician (The Bangles)

1960 – John Crawford, American musician (Berlin)

1964 – Michelle Obama, First Lady of the United States

1964 – Andy Rourke, English bass guitarist (The Smiths and Freebass)

1966 – Stephin Merritt, American singer and songwriter (The Magnetic Fields, The 6ths, and The Gothic Archies)

1966 – Shabba Ranks, Jamaican singer1967 – Richard Hawley, English singer, guitarist, and songwriter (Pulp and The Longpigs)

1969 – Naveen Andrews, British actor

1978 – Ricky Wilson, British singer (Kaiser Chiefs)

Died on This Day

1654 – Paulus Potter, Dutch painter (b. 1625)

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1686 – Carlo Dolci, Italian Baroque painter (b. 1616)

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1706 – Phillip Peter Roos, aka “Rosa da Tivoli,” German painter (b. 1657)

1737 – Jacob Laurensz van der Vinne, Dutch Mennonite painter and engraver (b. 1688)

1826 – Joseph Boze, French portrait and miniature painter (b. 1745)

1861 – Lola Montez, Irish-born adventurer (b. 1821)

1863 – Horace Vernet, French painter (b. 1789)

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1884 – Henry Brittan Willis, British painter (b. 1810)

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1886 – Paul Baudry, French portrait painter (b.1828)

1893 – Rutherford B. Hayes, 19th President of the United States (b. 1822)

1927 – Juliette Gordon Low, American founder of the Girl Scouts of the USA (b. 1860)

1933 – Louis Comfort Tiffany, American artist and designer (b. 1848)

1961 – Patrice Lumumba, Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (b. 1925)

1967 – Evelyn Nesbit, American model, actress, and star witness in one of the many murder trials that were dubbed Crime of the Century by the journalists of the day. This one (Stanford White killing Harry Thaw) is now so forgotten that you probably never heard of it. (b. 1884)

1972 – Betty Smith, American writer (b. 1896)

1996 – Barbara Jordan, American politician (b. 1936)

2005 – Virginia Mayo, American actress (b. 1920)

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2007 – Art Buchwald, American humorist (b. 1925)

Today is

Hot Buttered Rum Day

Ditch Your New Year’s Resolutions Day

Kid Inventors’ Day

Customer Service Day


16 comments

  1. Floja Roja

    Wind advisory and fire warning today. Humidity at 13%.

    No car, no vanity plates. I haven’t really thought, therefore, about what I might put on one.

    I can’t really sing, so I’ve never been part of any choir or anything. My neighbors hopefully haven’t heard me sing along with my iPod, I usually turn it up so it’s louder than me (attached to my speakers, silly).

    Perfect weather is in the high 70s most of the day, cooling to 40s or 50s overnight, with occasional rain that is just heavy enough to hear it on the skylight. With a very gentle breeze that feels like a caress.

  2. Scanning your “This Day in History”, they could draw parallels to earthquakes, buying islands, Irish divorces and Bill Clinton’s weenie.

    psst! Pundits!! It is a day … there are no ominous parallels to Eisenhower’s warnings about the military industrial complex. Yes, we see that you have a history book and we are impressed. Now, report on the speech.

  3.    Is it okay to hang out in front of Sunday schools and tell the kids that religion is bullshit? I’m asking for the Supreme Court.

       – TBogg (@tbogg) January 16, 2014

       If you can’t directly yell in a woman’s face as she seeks medical help, how will she know that you’re a Christian?

       – LOLGOP (@LOLGOP) January 16, 2014

    Exactly. Free speech is only protected when it is protecting Republicans and their screaming talking points.

    I did clinic defense in the 90s and those people are unhinged. And they have a history of blowing people up and shooting doctors and clinic workers. Safety zones are for safety.  

  4. Gee

    Hello!

    Ever purchase vanity plates? What did they say? Did you get your money’s worth of vanity?

    Ever sing in a choir? Ensemble? Along with the radio, to the annoyance of your neighbors?

    Describe perfect weather.

    No vanity plates, but I have James Webb Space Telescope plates now.  I feel pretty spiffy.

    Sang in the junior choir at church.  Didn’t care to graduate to the adult choir.  I do sing along with the radio, but just in the car.

    Whatever they were serving up in Yosemite in 1975.  Blue skies.  Low humidity.  Ninety degrees (on the rare occasions it went that high) felt like 75 to me.  Here in DC, you don’t want to go above 75 degrees because of the humidity.  We have beautiful spring days here, but they are rare.  Fall weather is more reliably good, with a slight nip in the air.

    Boy, can I ramble!

  5. Gee

    In 1997, an Irish court granted the first divorce in the Roman Catholic country’s history.

    Now, that was a crappy marriage!

  6. I need to finish some stuff before the president’s speech.

    Duck Die-nasty? Your hover is prescient:

    Many speculated that “Duck Dynasty,” A&E’s hit reality series about a family of swamp millionaires who made their fortune off duck calls, would draw even more viewers after one of the show’s stars, Phil Robertson, made headlines last month for railing against “homosexual offenders,” “Shintos” and “Islamists” in a wild interview with GQ.

    But rather than a ratings spike, viewership for the show’s season five premiere actually dipped considerably. Wednesday’s premiere drew 8.5 million viewers, down 28 percent from the season four premiere last August.

    May Dynasty Die Very Nasty.

    Are those cows waiting for Chris Christie to stop being angry with them? I herd he was quite a vindictive man:

    TPM has found one of the first times the brash political brawler faced such claims was in the mid-1980s when he was an undergrad at the University of Delaware.

    There, student newspaper archives show, Christie was accused of establishing a college political machine that rewarded his friends and drove his classmates out of student government. One fellow student even wrote to the paper to decry Christie’s “cronyism” and question the legitimacy of the future governor’s reign.

    No bull!!

    Have a great weekend, Floja Roja!!

Comments are closed.