Gnovember is a busy month, Marie Curie's birthday, Robert Goddard's experiments with rockets. For the Romans, it was the ninth month. . We'll have Election Day, Veteran's Day (see bonus gnus), and Thanksgiving. Also, National Children's Book Week, Cat Week, Indian Heritage Day (the 25th), Favorite Author's Day, and National Stamp Collecting Week. It  is also a very busy day for presidential births featuring; Zachary Taylor, James K. Polk, Franklin Pierce, James Garfield and Warren Harding.  

This month's full moon is called the "Beaver Moon"

“Since golden October declined into sombre November / And the apples were gathered and stored, and the land became brown sharp points of death in a waste of water and mud.”…..T.S Eliot

“No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,/ No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds, - November!”……Thomas Hood

Science Gnus is an almanacish compendium of News of Science, History, Mathematics and Items of Interest as well as Professor Sy Yentz, Dr. Matt Matician, the Activity of the Month, Factorinos, Trivia Question, Bonus Trivia Question, Extinct, Trivia Answers, Jokes, Obscure Question, Scientist of the Month, and the Flower Rock and Word of the Month

1 1500 – Happy Birthday, Benvenuto Cellini, Italian renaissance  sculptor/goldsmith/writer most famous for his sculpture of Perseus holding the Head of Medusa and his autobiography. Cellini would be the perfect subject for a movie or television series. In addition to his artistic accomplishments he was a soldier and occasionally broke the law.  He was banished from his native Florence for his alleged role in a brawl.  In his autobiography he claimed to play a role in the unsuccessful defense of Rome in 1527 against the forces of Charles VII, slaying the Constable of Bourbon in one attack and later killing Philibert, Prince of Orange, as well. In 1529 he killed a man who had early killed Cellini's brother and, in another incident, wounded a notary of the city. He was imprisoned in 1537 on a charge of stealing gems from a tiara of the Pope. Where the Pope was when the gem went missing from his tiara is unclear. Intervention by Cardinal d'Este of Ferrara (for whom he had created a silver cup) and others brought his release, and Cellini left Rome and spent a few years at the court of Francis I of France before returning to Florence and concentrating on his art rather than his hooliganism.

            1512- Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel at the Vatican in Rome was opened to the public for the first time. (The lines were around the block and kept getting longer as tour groups were inserted into the line by their guides.)Michelangelo's ceiling frescoes (a fresco is a painting technique in which pigments suspended in water are applied to a damp lime-plaster surface), which took several years to complete, and now are among his most famous. The ceiling is a complex system of decoration featuring figures in nine panels devoted to biblical world history. The most famous of these is The Creation of Adam, a painting in which the arms of God and Adam are stretching toward each other with the fingers almost touching. And, while Charlton Heston starred in the movie, The Agony and the Ecstasy, no, Michelangelo didn’t do the painting lying on his back. There was an elaborate scaffold system.  In fact, if one looks carefully, one can see the paint-by-numbers outline used by the great artist.  Not once did he paint “over the line”.  The chapel was originally constructed from 1473 – 81 by Giovanni dei Dolci for Pope Sixtus IV (for whom it is named, yes it was the ”joy of Sixtus” or “Sixtus in the City”). The ceiling frescoes were commissioned by Pope Julius II and painted from 1508 – 12. Michelangelo’ other famous painting(s) in the chapel was  the Last Judgment fresco on the western wall which was painted from 1536 – 41 for Pope Paul III. Take a close look at the fresco and find the  figure of St. Bartholomew, the martyr who was flayed alive.  Hanging from the saint’s hand is Michelangelo’s self portrait, his own face in the empty envelope of skin, a metaphor for the artist's tortured soul. The Gnus highly recommends, Michelangelo and the Pope’s Ceiling by Ross King for a great description of the process.

      1520 – “Do you think we should make a left turn up here?”  “No Magellan, go strait. The Strait of Magellan, the passage immediately south of mainland South America, connecting the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans, was first navigated by Ferdinand Magellan during his global circumnavigation voyage. It was another serendipitous moment in history as Magellan found the strait that is now named after him by chance. When two of his ships were driven towards land in a storm, the men feared they would be dashed against the shore. Then, just in time, they spotted a small opening in the coastline. The passage through the strait took over a month.

             1604 - William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello was first performed, at Whitehall Palace in London before King James I and his court.  The famous Renaissance actor Richard Burbage was the first Othello, contrary to popular thought, Joan Rivers was not the first Desdemona.

            1755- Lisbon, Portugal. A powerful earthquake, felt across Europe, rocked the city three times causing destruction of property, fires and three tsunamis. Over 60,000 died, most drowning in the enormous tidal waves. The earthquake struck in mid-morning during a high religious holiday, All Souls Day. Shortly afterward, the three large tsunamis swept over the city's harbor and killed many thousands of refugees. A week later, after uncontrollable fires and unremitting aftershocks, essentially the whole city of Lisbon was in ashes

         1765 - Despite widespread opposition in the American colonies, the British Parliament enacted the Stamp Act, a taxation measure designed to raise revenue for British military operations in America. People were required to pay a tax on every piece of printed paper they used. Ship's papers, legal documents, licenses, newspapers, other publications, and even playing cards were taxed……..seems very similar to many of the taxes we have today……. This should not be confused with the "Stamp Your Foot Act" - a tantrum thrown by young children and adults when they are angry or frustrated.
        1798- Happy Birthday, Sir Benjamin Lee Guinness, Irish brewer and first lord mayor of Dublin under the reformed corporation in1851. Guinness’ brewery became one of the largest in the world. He had taken control of his grandfather’s business in 1855.  Until his time Dublin stout was chiefly used in home consumption; he developed an immense export trade particularly to the United States, although Professor Sy Yentz loves the stout in Ireland, he thinks the imported stuff tastes like swill.

        1800- President John Adams, in year four of his only term as president, moved into the newly constructed President’s House, the original name for what is known today as the White House. It was designed by Irish-born architect James Hoban, who won a gold medal for his design. John and Abigail Adams had been looking for a three bedroom, two-bathroom split level ranch in a good neighborhood with a small but manageable lawn for a small garden, good schools and perhaps a pool. They settled for 132 rooms, 32 bathrooms, and 6 levels to accommodate all the people who live in, work in, and visit the White House. There are also 412 doors, 147 windows, 28 fireplaces, 7 staircases, and 3 elevators.

            1815- Happy Birthday, Crawford W. Long, American physician who pioneered use of anesthetics.  He performed his first surgical procedure using sulfuric ether gas on March 20, 1842, when he removed a tumor from the neck of a young man. Though he performed more surgeries using anesthesia over the next several years and began using it in his obstetrical practice, Long did not publish his findings. Note: Anesthetics were named after Anna Sthesia, a Greek philosopher noted for her C-SPAN like monologues that put people to sleep.  There is a Crawford Long Museum in Jefferson, Georgia http://www.crawfordlong.org/index.html We don’t think visitors are administered anesthesia when entering the museum.

                 1848 - The Boston Female Medical School, first medical school in the world exclusively for women opened for its first 12 students. It was founded by Samuel Gregory, who disapproved of male doctors attending childbirth and so its early curriculum focused on midwifery (which is not a study of the middle wife of a man who has been married three times but the art and science of assisting a woman before during and after labor and birth). These first twelve students graduated in 1850.  In the same year it was expanded to include a full medical curriculum, and began to grant medical degrees to women.  The school operated for 26 years before it merged with Boston University School of Medicine, which thus became one of the first coed medical colleges worldwide.

            1863- Happy Birthday, George Safford Parker, American inventor who perfected the fountain pen - after failing to find a pen that wrote well and didn’t leak - and founded the Parker Pen Company to manufacture it. The key element in the Parker Pen was the “Lucky Curve” feed system, a system that allowed ink to flow back into the reservoir….instead of all over the paper, your fingers, your pocket or your purse.

         1870- First weather observations made by U.S Weather Bureau- in twenty four locations.  Evidently, someone looked out the window and said, "It's raining by golly. Let’s tell someone.” That made a pretty good observation.  On November 8, the first "cautionary storm signal" was issued for Great Lakes shipping by Increase A. Lapham Also, thank you Jacob Bjerknes, see Nov. 2 below.  

        1871 - Happy Birthday, Stephen Crane, American journalist, poet and  author of  The Red Badge of Courage published in  1895.  The action in the book takes place at the Battle of Antietam, Sept. 1962.  Crane describes war from the point of view of an ordinary soldier. It has been called the first modern war novel.

    1879-  The world's first all-steel railroad bridge was placed in service over the Missouri River at Glasgow, Missouri. It was built for the Chicago & Alton. We know that the 2,700-ft five-span did not get a hernia since it had a truss.  It  took only a year to build but the Glasgow bridge was replaced, for heavier traffic, by a new bridge in 1900 reusing some of the substructure, but with Parker truss (truss, in addition to having faith in someone, is also a structural framework of wood or metal based on a triangular system).

            1880- Happy Birthday, Alfred Wegener, German meteorologist and geophysicist who first gave a well-developed hypothesis of continental drift - plate tectonics in 1912.  It was one of the most important and far-ranging geological theories of all time. Naturally, when first proposed, it was ridiculed, but steadily accumulating evidence finally prompted its acceptance, with immense consequences for geology, geophysics, oceanography, and paleontology. Wegener found that large-scale geological features on separated continents often matched very closely when the continents were brought together. For example, the Appalachian mountains of eastern North America matched with the Scottish Highlands, and the distinctive rock strata of the Karroo system of South Africa were identical to those of the Santa Catarina system in Brazil. Wegener also found that the fossils found in a certain place often indicated a climate utterly different from the climate of today: for example, fossils of tropical plants, such as ferns and cycads, are found today on the Arctic island of Spitsbergen. He suggested that about 250 million years ago all the present-day continents came from a single primitive land mass, the super continent which he named Pangaea, eventually broke up and gradually drifted apart.  Early in November 1930, in attempting to cross Greenland from an ice-cap camp to the Kamarujuk base on the west coast, he lost his life.  His suspected cause of death was heart failure through overexertion.

            1896 – Opening the way for years academic photos that would also titillate thousands of boys, picture showing the unclad (bare) breasts of a woman appeared in National Geographic magazine for the first time. It was a photograph of a Zulu bride and groom in Witwatersrand, South Africa. The decision to run it set a precedent to publish photos of indigenous peoples

            1901- Dr. J.E. Gillman announced an X-ray treatment for breast cancer.  Wilhelm Roentgen, Professor of Physics in Worzburg, Bavaria, had discovered x-rays in 1895.

            1918 – The Malbone Street wreck, the worst accident on a mass transit system occurred  in Brooklyn,  New York City as as BRT (Brooklyn Rapid Transit) Brighton Beach line subway drain driven by an overtired dispatcher driving for the first time – the motormen were on strike- derailed killing 93 people. The Malbone Street wreck also indirectly contributed to the death of the BRT, which fell into receivership a month later. The accident even managed to kill Malbone Street itself. The street became so synonymous with the grisly subway disaster that its name was later changed to Empire Boulevard.

1938 - Seabiscuit defeated War Admiral in an upset victory during a match race deemed "the match of the century" in horse racing. War Admiral had won the “Triple Crown”, the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness Stakes, and the Belmont Stakes earlier in the year. The five year old Sea Biscuit had won many stakes races and this match at Pimlico Racetrack (site of the Preakness) 1 and 3/16 miles was eagerly anticipated. Seabiscuit won by four lengths.

             1939 -A rabbit conceived by artificial impregnation, was the first such animal in the U.S. to be displayed.  Dr. Gregory Pincus, an American biologist, had removed an egg from the ovary of a female rabbit and fertilized it with a salt solution. The egg was then transferred to the uterus of a second rabbit, which functioned as an “incubator.” The rabbit, exclaiming "What's up Doc?" gave a mighty "ahooo, ahooo" and bounced down the road being pursued by a pudgy, odd looking, hunter who kept exclaiming "cwazy Wabbit".

1946 - The New York Knicks (Knickerbockers) played against the Toronto Huskies at the Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto, in the first Basketball Association of America game. The Knicks would win 68-66. Ed Sadowski, with 18 points, and New York's Leo Gottlieb, with 14, led their respective teams. Note; this game had no tattooed, chest pounding, trash talking,  posing exhibitionist “players” on either team.

1950 – Extremist Puerto Rican nationalists Griselio Torresola and Oscar Collazo attempted to assassinate President Harry S. Truman at the Blair House in Washington, D.C. Truman escaped unharmed. The two men had simply walked up to the door of Blair House (the Vice Presidential residence where Truman was staying while the White House underwent renovations) and opened fire.  Later attempts on the president featured blasting Jennifer Lopez recordings through a loud speaker and invitations to join Menudo.

1952- First test explosion of the H- Bomb – “Operation Ivy” (yes, this was the worst case of “poison ivy” that one can imagine) was held at Eniwetok in the Marshall Islands. The bomb, named, "Mike," was set off at 3,000 miles west of Hawaii. The "mushroom" cloud rose to top out in 5 minutes at 135,000 ft (the top of the stratosphere) and eventually spread to 1000 miles wide.   The USSR, thanks to its extensive espionage system, the country was like the kid next to you that spends peeks over your shoulder at your test, came up with its own H-bomb about a year later. So, Professor Sy Yentz, what is the difference between an atom bomb and a hydrogen bomb, we’re just as dead in either case, right?  Yes but there are more dead with an H-bomb which is the nuclear fusion of hydrogen isotopes. An atomic bomb, works by fission, not fusion,  uranium or plutonium is split into lighter elements that together weigh less than the original atoms, the remainder of the mass appearing as energy.     

1952 – And on the same day as the explosion of the first hydrogen bomb came the  premier of the great movie, Son of Geronimo, Apache Avenger – actually it was a serial. The cinematic classic, Ingmar Bergman would have been green with envy, starred television’s Clayton Moore (The Lone Ranger), Rod Redwing as Porico, son of Geronimo, and Rance Rankin.   

        1959 – Goalie Jacques Plante of the Montreal Canadiens hockey team became the first goalie to wear a mask in games on a regular basis. Note, Clint Benedict of the Montreal Maroons had 29 years earlier, but it was short-lived experiment….probably because it had no openings for the eyes, nose, or mouth….. ha, ha, ha, Professor Sy Yentz has his disguised sense of humor) Many goalies of the era wore masks in practice, including Plante, but after his nose was broken by a hard shot in a game on November 1 in New York against the New York Rangers, he refused to come back in without his fiberglass face mask. Since there was no backup goalie with the team so Montreal coach Toe Blake gave in. Plante wore a mask from that game on.

            1969 - Suspicious Minds, by Elvis Presley, hit No. 1 on the Billboard charts. The song was Presley's first chart-topper in seven years and would be his last. The following week it would yield the number 1 spot to Wedding Bell Blues by the Fifth Dimension. Presley, who made huge contributions to the mainstreaming of Rock and Roll in the mid 1950s, was reduced (under the guidance of Col. Tom Parker) to a bloated, drug addled caricature who posed nightly in Las Vegas during the remaining years of his life.  His musical contributions were reduced to classics such as He's Your Uncle, Not Your Dad ("Speedway") Poison Ivy League ("Roustabout") Dominic the Impotent Bull ("Stay Away, Joe") Queenie Wahine's Papaya ("Paradise Hawaiian Style")    

             1977- Chiron, the farthest known asteroid (and original birthplace of Rosie O’Donnell) was discovered by Charles Kowal on a photographic plate taken on October 18. Chiron, located between Saturn and Uranus (reminder the correct pronunciation is "YOOR a nus" – so that Chiron is not located between Saturn and Your Anus) is a small asteroid about 200 Km in diameter.  It is volcanically active suggesting that it may not have been in its present orbit for more than a few million years and my have originated in the Kuiper Belt, a hypothetical disk-shaped reservoir of objects of sizes ranging from tiny particles to (the former planet, currently dwarf planet) Pluto or larger sized bodies at the outer edges of the Solar System.

             1978- The Environmental Education Act was passed.  The Act established and supports educational programs to improve awareness of environmental problems and encourages students to pursue careers related to the environment.

            2007 - 3 new extrasolar (outstide our Solar System) planets about the size of Jupiter were discovered. They're named WASP-3 , WASP-4, WASP-5, - Professor Sy Yentz prefers the waspy names of Buffy, Biff, and Lance – (multicultural diversityists were outraged that ethnic names such as Shaniqua, Guillermo, Weng Ho, and Sal were not used)  and were discovered by a European team of astronomers using observatories in South Africa and the Canary Islands. The new planets were discovered using the Super WASP instruments (we thought polo mallets were WASP instruments).  These are high speed cameras affixed to two telescopes: SuperWASP-North at Roque de los Muchachos Observatory on the island of La Palma in the Canaries and SuperWASP-South at the South African Astronomical Observatory, South Africa

2.      1470 – Happy Birthday, King Edward V of England ,1483). Son of  King Edward the IV and more famously known as one of the “princes in the tower”.  After Edward IV’s death, his brother, Richard of Gloucester assumed “protection of young Edward V and his younger brother, Richard. They were imprisoned in the Tower of London and declared illegitimate. Gloucester named himself rightful heir to the crown as Richard III.  The two young boys never emerged from the Tower, apparently murdered by, or at least on the orders of, their Uncle Richard. During renovations to the Tower in 1674, the skeletons of two children were found, possibly the murdered boys.

             1734 - Happy Birthday Daniel Boone (brother of singer Pat Boone) frontiersman and explorer, born in Berks County, near present day Reading Pa. “I have never been lost, but I will admit to being confused for several weeks”.  If you saw the story of Boone’s life on TV (not counting the Fess Parker shows – which were basically Davy Crockett playing Daniel Boone) it would be hard to believe…..in 1775 Boone and 30 other woodsmen were hired to improve the trails between the Carolinas and the west. The resulting route reached into the heart of Kentucky and became known as the "Wilderness Road." That same year Boone built a fort and village called Boonesborough in Kentucky, and moved his family over the Wilderness Road to their new home. In 1776, Shawnee warriors kidnapped his daughter and two other girls. Two days later Boone caught up with the Indians and through surprise attack rescued the girls. In 1778, he was captured by another band of Shawnee. Boone learned that the tribe was planning an attack on Boonesborough. He negotiated a settlement with Chief Blackfish of the Shawnee, preventing the attack. The Indians admired their captive for his skill as a hunter and woodsman and adopted him into their tribe as a son of Blackfish. They named him Guppy

          1755 – Happy Birthday, Marie- “let them eat cake” Antoinette, French queen consort to Louis VXI guillotined in 1793

             1795-Happy Birthday, James K. Polk 11th President of the U.S. 1844-1848. He was the only Speaker of the House of Representatives to be elected President. When the Democratic party's leading Presidential contenders Martin Van Buren and Lewis Cass failed to attract sufficient support to win the nomination, the deadlocked convention needed a compromise candidate. The Democrats' "dark horse" nominee was James K. Polk. A believer in “manifest destiny”, he lead the nation to victory in the war (provoked) with Mexico and a confrontation with Great Britain over Oregon, Polk left office  having added California, New Mexico and Oregon to the nation.  During Polk's term of office, the United States acquired over 800,000 square miles of western territory and extended its boundary to the Pacific Ocean. The Polk Administration also achieved economic objectives by lowering tariffs and establishing an independent Federal Treasury. Polk was the last strong president before the Civil War and clearly accomplished the goals set at the beginning of his presidency.

          1815 – Happy Birthday, George Boole, English mathematician. He came up with a type of linguistic algebra- Boolian Algebra-  the three most basic operations of which were (and still are) AND, OR and NOT. It was these three functions that formed the basis of his premise, and were the only operations necessary to perform comparisons or basic mathematical functions. Think of him when selecting the appropriate options for connecting search terms to find information in search engines such as Google or Yahoo.

             1865 – Born on the same day as James K. Polk (see above) – but seventy years later, Warren G.  Harding, 29th President of the United States 1921-1923. Like Polk, Harding, from Ohio, was nominated to run for president by  the Republican Party as a dark horse candidate – on the 10th ballot-. His running mate was Calvin Coolidge.  Harding is consistently ranked as one of the worst presidents of all time.. He was inaugurated in 1921 and took over the White House from two-term Democrat Woodrow Wilson. Harding's administration is chiefly remembered for the Teapot Dome scandal, a messy tale of bribery, fraud, and federal oil reserves. He suffered a heart attack  -presumably after meeting the loony residents - and died while visiting San Francisco in 1923. He was the sixth president to die in office.

            1880 – So, in November we have the birthdays of “dark horses” James Polk and Warren Harding.  This day saw the election of another “dark horse” – James Garfield  who won a margin of only 10,000 popular votes, Garfield defeated the Democratic nominee, Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock. Harding would be assassinated in 1881.

 1889 - North and South Dakota were admitted to the Union; the first time that two states simultaneously became a part of the United States.  Earlier that year, after controversy over the location of a capital, the Dakota Territory was split in two and divided into North and South. Presumably, the North didn’t want a capitol named Pierre (perhaps they preferred Yves?) so they chose Bismarck (naming it after the German Chancellor).   President Benjamin Harrison (the president who came between Grover Cleveland's two terms) had a concern about admitting the two states on the same day. Which one would be first? He decided it was easier to mix up the admissions papers so no one would know and just list the states alphabetically. That’s why North Dakota is the 39th and South Dakota is the 40th of the United States of America.

         1897- Happy Birthday Jacob Bjerknes, born in Stockholm, Sweden, his  the father, meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes was the “father” of modern weather forecasting.  He discovered  that cyclones (low-pressure centers) originate as waves associated with sloping weather fronts that separate different air masses proved to be a major contribution to modern weather forecasting.

       1913 – Happy Birthday, actor Burt Lancaster, Burt Lancaster i born in East Harlem, New York City. Among his films were; The Crimson Pirate (1952), From Here to Eternity (1953), Elmer Gantry (1960), for which he won the academy award as best actor and Atlantic City (1980).

            1917 – The Balfour Declaration - British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour expressed support for a national home for the Jews of Palestine in what would become known as the Balfour Declaration. Over ninety years later this declaration affects the Middle East.

             1932 – Happy Birthday, Melvin Schwartz, American physicist who, along with Leon M. Lederman and Jack Steinberger, received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1988 for their research concerning neutrinos. Neutrinos are not a vitamin supplemented breakfast cereal, they are subatomic particles that have no electric charge and virtually no mass. Using a beam of neutrinos, the team discovered a new kind of neutrino called a muon, and new information about the structure of particles called leptons. Turning on the TV they watched the news and learned about morons. Neutrinos are produced when unstable atomic nuclei or subatomic particles disintegrate.

             1931, The DuPont company, of Wilmington, Delaware, announced the first synthetic rubber. It was known as DuPrene, and is now known as neoprene. You’ll find neoprene in automobile tires, wetsuits, soft coatings on exercise weights and the lips of most women in Hollywood……no, no, no not really – Professor Sy Yentz has his Angelina Joliesque sense of humor. The technical name for this synthetic rubber is polychloroprene. Polychloroprene is an organic compound, which means it is mostly composed of carbon (the “duct tape” of organic things – it holds everything together) and hydrogen atoms. And it is a polymer, or long-chained molecule, formed by linking together, end-on-end, many smaller molecules known as monomers.

   1947- Howard Hughes' Spruce Goose, at the time the world's largest plane – a huge seaplane in fact- , flew for the first and last time with Howard Hughes himself at the controls off Long Beach Ca..  It flew for just under a mile at a height of 70 t. and a speed of 80 mph. The plane was 218 ft. long, had a wingspan of 319ft. and was 79ft. high. It  was built from wood due to WW II  raw material restrictions to the use of aluminum, and it’s name was actually H-4 Hercules.  After passing through several ownerships since Hughes’ death, the aircraft was acquired by the Evergreen Aviation Museum in 1995, who moved it by barge to its current home in McMinnville, Oregon  where it has been on display since.

   1948 - Election Day. When Harry S Truman went to bed thinking he was losing the election for president of the United States (to New York Governor, Thomas E. Dewey, southern Democrat – “dixiecrat” Strom Thurmond, and “Progressive” Henry Wallace). The Chicago Daily Tribune printed the famous headline, “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN”. President Truman managed to carry 24,105,812 popular votes to Dewey's 21,970,065. Carrying 28 states and 303 electoral votes, Truman easily defeated Dewey, who had only 189 electoral votes from 16 states  

        1959 – The “Fifties Quiz Show Scandals”…. Charles Van Doren, whose success on the show Twenty One had made him a national hero (sort of like Ken on Jeopardy)  admitted to a House subcommittee that he had the questions and answers in advance of his appearances on the TV game show.

            1964- The fastest single engine, wheel driven car, the Autolite 999 driven by Bob Herda received a ticket for doing 357 mph in a 30 mph zone.  Costing over $50,000 – less than a well equipped Hummer nowadays- the car actually broke four land speed records.

          1976 - Former Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter was the first president elected from the Deep South since 1844.  Carter beat the hopelessly confused Gerald Ford who had assumed the Presidency replacing the odiously criminal Spiro Agnew and then Richard Nixon. The general election campaign began with Ford trailing by over 30 points in the polls In the second candidate’s debate Ford made a major mistake in the second debate by saying that Eastern Europe was free from Soviet domination.  This came as news to the Eastern Europeans currently under Communist domination. Not to be outdone, Carter gave an interview in Playboy Magazine (his advisors had told him to keep in the news, which Carter confused with nudes) in which he talked candidly about lust in his heart. Carter campaigned as an outsider intent on cleaning up Washington. Carter won a very narrow victory over Ford, due to his support from the south, labor, blacks and white ethnics

        1982 – A truck exploded in the Salang Tunnel in Afghanistan, killing an estimated 3,000 people, mostly Soviet soldiers traveling to Kabul. It is believed, the lead truck of a Soviet military convoy collided with an oncoming fuel truck. The resulting blast and burning gasoline ignited other vehicles, and most of the deaths are believed to have been caused by asphyxiation from the smoke and fumes that filled the tunnel. The Salang Tunnel is is 1.7 miles long, 25 feet high and approximately 17 feet wide

        1988- “Oops!”A  Cornell University graduate student named Robert T. Morris, created a computer "worm"  and it began replicating wildly, clogging thousands of computers around the country. When Morris realized what was happening he sent an anonymous message, instructing programmers how to kill the worm and prevent re-infection. However, because the network route was clogged BY HIS WORM!!!!, this message did not get through until it was too late. Morris, was later arrested, tried, found guilty (of technological stupidity?), fined and given probation.

        2000 -An American astronaut and two Russian cosmonauts became the first permanent residents of the international space station, at the start of their four-month mission. After their Soyuz spacecraft linked up, William Shepherd, Sergei Krikalev and Yuri Gidzenko entered the station, turned on the lights and life support systems, and proceeded to set up a live television link with the Russian mission control to confirm that the move-in was going well, although the movers had broken some china, damaged a couch and left scratches on an antique mahogany table.  The station is in a low Earth orbit and can even be seen from Earth with the naked eye: its altitude varies from 319.6 km to 346.9 km above the surface of the Earth (198.6 to 215.6 mi).  They were confined to two of the space station’s three rooms until space shuttle Endeavor arrived in early December with giant solar panels that would provide all the necessary power. But not before an arachnid looking alien popped out of Gidzenko's stomach and left Sigourney Weaver in her underwear...no, no, no....that's not true! Professor Sy Yentz gets a little carried away now and then

3.      1633 - Happy Birthday, Bernardino Ramazzini, Italian physician, born in Capri, Italy, who first recorded  relationships between occupational environment and workers' illnesses and is considered a founder of occupational medicine.  In 1700 he wrote the first important book on occupational diseases and industrial hygiene, De morbis artificum diatriba(Diseases of Workers), it focused on such diseases as “Co- worker halitosis”, Co-worker lack of bathing”, “Boss Tantrums”, and “Copy Machine is Brokenitis”.

         1718- Happy Birthday, John Montagu, the 4^th Earl of Sandwich, who invented the Montaguwich, no, no no Professor Sy Yentz has his culinary sense of humor, actually it was the sandwich. It is said he invented the sandwich in 1762, because he often spent excessive amounts of time gambling and he didn't want to get up from the gambling table, so he told his servants to bring him meat sandwiched in between two slices of bread. Another version has him working long hours and not wanting to leave his desk so his servants brought him what would be called sandwiches.  The explorer, Capain James Cook named the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) for him.

         1749 – Happy Birthday, Daniel Rutherford, English chemist who found – but did not name – nitrogen.  Rutherford kept a mouse in a confined quantity of air till it died. He then burned a candle in what was left until the candle went out. He then burned phosphorus in what was left after that, until the phosphorus would no longer burn. Next, the air was passed through a solution that had the ability to absorb carbon dioxide. The air remaining now would not support combustion; a mouse would not live in it and a candle would not burn.  He called what was left “phlogiston”. Antoine Lavoisier, the French chemist named nitrogen azote meaning without life. The name nitrogen was introduced by J. A. C. Chaptal in 1790.

 1854- Jokichi Takaminea Japanese-born biochemist whocame to live and work in the United States. He was one of the prime movers in the effort to send Japanese Cherry Trees to Washington D.C as a symbol of good will from the Mayor of Tokyo.
In 1901, Takaminea isolated the hormone adrenalin – now supposedly called epinephrine but everyone still calls it adrenalin -produced in the adrenal gland that causes the body to respond to emergencies. This was the first pure hormone to be isolated from natural sources. This means he would be “gland” to meet you.

1863 – Yeast is Yeast and west is west….. J.T Alden  of Cincinnati, was issued a yeast preparation patent for "an improvement in the preparation of yeast" which reduced concentrated yeast from a plastic or semi-fluid state to a dry granular form, a convenient way of preservation for future use. Why yeast?  Yeast is a living, microscopic, single-cell organism that, as it grows, converts its food – through the  process known as fermentation- into alcohol and carbon dioxide. We love yeast because fermentation is what endears it to winemakers, brewmasters and breadbakers.

1868 – Union Civil War hero, Ulysses Simpson Grant – running as a Republican with Schyler Colfax as his running mate defeated Democrat Horatio Seymour, of New York, (with running mate Francis P. Blair)  for the Presidency. Grant had not campaigned and made no promises. He won 214 Electoral votes to Seymour’s 80

1879- Happy Birthday, Vilhjalmur Steffanson, Canadian explorer, born in Ames, Manitoba. He went on three expeditions into the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic, each of which lasted between sixteen months and five years. He was 41 years old before he learned to pronounce his first name and by that time he had changed it to Bob.  

    1892-  The first automatic telephone exchange, using the switching device invented by Almon B. Strowger, was opened. While an undertaker in Kansas City. Strowger had developed a system of automatic switching using an electromechanical switch based on electromagnets. The Strowger exchange opened the public in LaPorte, Indiana,  Strowger’s hometown with about seventy-five subscribers, who were now able to bypass operators.

            1941 -  The order was issued to attack the U.S Naval Base at  Pearl Harbor .The Combine Japanese Fleet received Top-Secret Order No. 1: In 34 days, Pearl Harbor was to be bombed, along with Malaya, the Dutch East Indies, and the Philippines. The Japanese had earlier practiced the art of the sneak attack on the Russians in beginning the Russo-Japanese War of 1905.

             1954- Linus Pauling (part of the famous singing group of Peter, Pauling and Mary), won the first of his two Nobel Prizes- in Chemistry for his research into the nature of the chemical bond and its application to the elucidation of the structure of complex substances". Later, he was awarded a second Nobel Prize, this one for Peace for his efforts in creating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

             1957- Laika, the dog (a Siberian husky), became the first living creature to orbit the Earth aboard Sputnik II.- Sputnik I having been launched a month earlier on October 4.  Since the supply of food and air was limited and the Russians had no intention of bringing her back, Laika also became the first animal to die in space. She died after a few days in orbit when the batteries of her life-support system eventually wore down.

           1964 - Lyndon B. Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater for the presidency. Johnson had become the 36th president of the United States on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in November 1963.  He won 44 states and the District of Columbia with 486 votes. Senator Goldwater took just six states with 52 electoral votes.

            1971- Mariner 10 was launched for the first flight to Mercury.  Mariner 10 was the seventh successful launch in the Mariner series, the first spacecraft to use the gravitational pull of one planet (Venus) to reach another (Mercury), and the first spacecraft mission to visit two planets.  The primary scientific objectives of the mission were to measure Mercury's environment, atmosphere, surface, and body characteristics and to make similar investigations of Venus. Also on it’s arrival at Mercury, it was attacked by a mysterious object later identified as a Martha Stewart Flying Apron which attempted to redecorate its interior an almost bored it to death.    

            2007 – Aboard and outside the Space Shuttle Discovery (launched Oct. 23), A physician astronaut, Scott Parazynsky, a medical doctor by profession, successfully stitched a torn solar panel Saturday, in a risky and unprecedented space walk to ensure an adequate power supply at the International Space Station. Parazynsky  spent more than four hours attaching the end of a robotic boom knitting together the damaged solar panels of the space station with makeshift wire "cufflinks" to fix the problems caused by a snagged wire when the panels unfurled. "It appears you have some kind of surgery to do Dr. Parazinsky," shuttle commander Pamela Melroy told the experienced spacewalker as she watched his every move through binoculars from inside the Discovery probe, currently docked at the station (ISS). The mission carried significant danger as touching the panels risked a shock from the 300-volt current they carried. Afterwards, Parazynsky told the ISS crew that they should “give it two aspirin and call me in the morning”.  Before work began everyone made sure that the solar panels were covered under the space station HMO and that Parazynsky had a referral letter from the primary physician.

4.         

 1677-Thursday-  A social note - The future Mary II, daughter of King James II of England married William, Prince of Orange (aka King Billy, Mr. Caliban, William of Holland) of the Netherlands. The bride, wore a miniskirt by Mary Quant of Carnaby Street.  The groom wore  a big crown. The reception was held a Geert’s Windmills R’ Us with wooden shoe clog music by Douwe and the Dykes.  The monarchs would later be known as William and Mary. James II, (nicknames, the beshitten and Fiery Face…in Ireland he was Séamus á Chaca) a Catholic had been forced to leave England in 1688.  Protestants William and Mary were invited by Parliament to become the new rulers of the realm.

            1841-Thursday-  'Cause it's a good night
To be out there soakin' up the moonlight
Stake out a little piece of shoreline
I've got the perfect place in mind
It's in the middle of nowhere only way to get there
You got to get a little mud on the tires…..Brad Paisley………Happy Birthday, Benjamin Franklin Goodrich the industrialist who founded the B.F. Goodrich Rubber Co. –the first tire company west of the Allegany Mountains -  in Akron, Ohio in 1870. Yes, he never got tired of making tires until, of course, he retired.

               1842 –Friday-  A Friday social note: Mary Todd married Abraham Lincoln after a 3-year courtship. The bride, resplendent in a gown by Vera Wang and jewelry from Harry Winston, marched down the aisle with the then beardless Abe who was wearing a velvet burgundy rented Calvin Klein tuxedo.  About 30 relatives and friends attended the ceremony which was conducted by Reverend Charles Dresser. A reception was held at Anthony’s of  Springfield Illinois.  Music was provided by  “Muskrat Mel and His Magical Wash Board”. http://home.att.net/~rjnorton/Lincoln49.html

            1846-Wednesday-  She's got legs, she knows how to use them
She never begs, she knows how to choose them
She only lets you wonder how to feel them
Would you get behind them if you could only find them….Z.Z Top……And they said he “didn’t have a leg to stand on”….the first U.S. patent for an artificial leg was granted to Benjamin F. Palmer of Meredith of New Hampshire. The leg had a pliable joint that worked noiselessly and preserved its contour in all positions. Artificial limbs were nothing new.  Stories of them date back to the age of Herodotus, 487 B.C.  In fact, the oldest artificial leg in existence is now in the Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London. It was exhumed with a skeleton form a tomb at Capus, Italy. It is described as  “Roman artificial leg; the artificial limb accurately represents the form of the leg; it is made with pieces of thin bronze, fastened by bronze nails to a wooden core.

            1873 –Tuesday-   A banner day in the  history of the liverwurst hero sandwich as Anthony Iske of Lancaster, Pa. was issued a patent for a meat slicing machine. It worked much like a mandolin, a musical instrument resembling a fat guitar, with a frame to hold the meat while sliding it against the blade.  He called it "Machines for Slicing Dried Beef". No word on how many fingers got sliced in the process but that would take us back to 1846 and the patenting of artificial limbs – see above.

            1879-Tuesday-  Put money in thy purse; follow thou the
wars; defeat thy favor with an usurp'd beard. I say put money in
thy purse. It cannot be long that Desdemona should continue her
love to the Moor—put money in thy purse—nor he his to her……Iago………Othello Act 1, scene 3, 336–344 ……………..The first patent for a cash register was issued. (Registered?) James Jacob Ritty with help from his brother John invented that first cash register. It was intended to combat theft by bartenders in the Pony House Restaurant, his Dayton, Ohio saloon. The cash register operated by pressing a key that represented a specific amount of money. There was a bell to ring up sales. It also had a total adder that summed all the cash values of the key presses during a day. There was as yet no cash drawer. Ritty patented the design in 1879 as "Ritty's Incorruptible Cashier."

          1884 –Tuesday-  Democrat Grover Cleveland, Governor of New York, was elected president, (Vice President was Thomas Hendricks of Indiana)  defeating Republican James G. Blaine of Maine. Blaine’s only possible competition for the Republican nomination was  General William Tecumseh Sherman who ended speculation that he would run by making what has become known as a Sherman statement: "If nominated, I will not accept, and if elected I will not serve." The major issue in the election was the integrity of the candidates themselves. Blaine was attacked for his close relations with the railroad interests, from which it was claimed that he received financial benefits. Cleveland, on the other hand, was attacked for being immoral for his affair before his marriage with Maria Halpin, which produced a son. The Republicans would chant "Ma Ma Where's my Papa". Cleveland was able to defuse the story by telling the truth. Cleveland received the support of many reformers including several leading Republicans. Cleveland won the election in a close vote- 219 Electoral votes to 192 for Blaine. Cleveland lost the 1888 presidential election to Benjamin Harrison but returned to office in 1892 when he defeated Republican Harrison.

            1899-Saturday-  Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy.….Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung)was published. The book is the classic text on dream analysis and interpretation. Freud believed that dreams are highly symbolic, containing both overt meanings (manifest content) as well as underlying, unconscious thoughts (latent content).  Freud even influenced music, almost sixty years later the Everly  Brothers, sang All I Have to Do Is Dream.

             1916-Saturday-  Every little girl needed a doll through which to project herself into her dream of her future,………..Happy Birthday,  Ruth Mosko Handler, American inventor who created the Barbie Doll in1959 , a teenage doll with a tiny waist, slender hips, and a healthy bosom……as Handler said in 2002…… If she (a little girl)  was going to do role playing of what she would be like when she was 16 or 17, it was a little stupid to play with a doll that had a flat chest………Ken, a boy doll followed in 1961.She had named the dolls after her children. Handler co-founded the Mattel company in 1942. Most expensive of the dolls is “Divorced Barbie”.  With it you get Ken’s house, boat, and bank accounts.

            1916 –Saturday-  Same day as the inventor of  the Barbie Doll, ….And that's the way it is……..Happy Birthday, Walter Cronkite, American broadcast journalist, best known as anchorman for The CBS Evening News. Also note, that born on the same day, different year – 1969 was relentless self promoter and  societal parasite, Sean (Puff Daddy, P Diddy, Diddy) Combs.

            1922-Saturday-  “Tut Tut….Mummy Dearest”. King Tut (King Tut)
Now when he was a young man
He never thought he'd see (King Tut)
People stand in line
To see the boy king (King Tut) ……Steve Martin…………On a Saturday, the entrance to King Tutankhamen's tomb was discovered in Egypt in the Valley of the Kings where the English archaeologist Howard Carter had been making extended excavations. Later in the month, Carter opened the virtually intact tomb of the, then, largely unknown child-king Tutankhamen, who became pharaoh at age 9 and died at 19.  During his reign, powerful advisers restored the traditional Egyptian religion and art, both of which had been set aside by his predecessor Akhenaton. His tomb remained hidden from the time of his death in 1323 B.C until Carter’s discovery.         

             1924 –Tuesday-  After the death of her husband, William Bradford Ross, the governor of Wyoming, in 1924, his widow, Nellie T.  Ross was elected to replace him, becoming the first woman to serve as a governor in the United States upon her inauguration on January 5, 1925. Unfortunately, Ross was a Democrat in a heavily Republican state (we believe that  19 people of the entire state population of Wyoming -32…at the time…..were Republicans) and so didn’t really accomplish much other than tidying up the governor’s mansion  and making cookies for the legislature.  She became active in the national Democratic Party after her term was completed. She was a strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt during his presidential campaign of 1932; when he was elected to office, he named Ross to the federal post of director of the United States Mint, making her the first woman to hold that post.

            1928- Arnold Rothstein kaput. Arnold Rothstein,  New York's most notorious gambler, was shot and killed during a poker game at the Park Central Hotel in Manhattan. After finding Rothstein bleeding profusely at the service entrance of the hotel, police followed his trail of blood back to a suite where a group of men were playing cards. Reportedly, Rothstein had nothing good in his final hand.  It is generally believed that Rothstein was the guiding force behind the fixing of the 1919 World Series, the infamous “Black Sox” scandal. Although the identity of his shooter or shooters is unknown, quite possibly, he got involved in a feud between gangsters Legs Diamond and Dutch Schultz. Schultz may have been responsible for Rothstein’s kapution in retaliation for Diamond’s bumping off of a Schultz colleague. Or……….in a previous polker game, Rothstein started by winning $60,000, then dropped $340,000 to his pals. "I'll probably have to sell an apartment house to meet these losses," he said, "but I have this and that will help wipe out some of it.""This" was $37,000 he laid on the table for the winners to split. "That's all I have," he explained, "You'll have to wait for the rest of it." He gave them IOUs for the rest, which they willingly accepted, and mentioned several million dollars' worth of collateral. "I'm Rothstein, that name ought to be good for the money." He welshed….and ironically, It was election day and, had he lived, he would have won $500,000 he had laid on Herbert Hoover, but his death voided his winnings and his losses. ….. http://www.oldandsold.com/articles01/article932.shtml...........Of note: Rothstein had never been convicted of breaking any law during his lifetime.

         1939-Saturday-  The first air-conditioned automobile was exhibited by its manufacturer, Packard Motor Co. of Detroit Michigan. The main air-conditioning unit was located behind the rear seat of the car - it had no thermostat -where a special air duct accommodated two compartments, one for the refrigerating coils and one for the heating coils. This must have made riding in the back seat a delight. Packard offered it as an option for $274.

          1952 –Tuesday-  Republican  World War II hero, Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president, defeating Illinois Governor Democrat Adlai Stevenson 442 electoral votes to 89. Eisenhower would be re-elected in 1956. With unpopular Democratic President Harry Truman declining to run, General  Eisenhower was actively courted by both parties. Eisenhower however, was a Republican at heart, and agreed to run for the "good of the nation." At the Republican convention in Chicago General Eisenhower was nominated on the first ballot with the odious Richard Nixon as his Vice President . President Truman supported Governor Stevenson (His grandfather Adlai E. Stevenson  had been Vice President of the United States under President Grover Cleveland from 1893-1897.) for the Democratic nomination. At the Democratic convention in Chicago Stevenson was elected on the third ballot with Senator John Sparkman of Alabama as the Vice Presidential candidate.

            1960-Friday-  Filming wrapped up for the movie – The Misfits, in  which a sexy divorcée falls for an over-the-hill cowboy who is struggling to maintain his romantically independent lifestyle in early-sixties Nevada. Released in 1961, would be the last movie for both stars, Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. Gable suffered a heart attack and went kaput three days after filming ended. Monroe bit the dust in Augus of 1962. Co-star, Montgomery Clift would die six years later. It wasn’t a very good movie either.

            1961 –Saturday-  So one mornin’ when the sun was warm
I rambled out of New York town
Pulled my cap down over my eyes
And headed out for the western skies
So long, New York
Howdy, East Orange….Bob Dylan……...Talkin’ New York………. …Encouraged by recent positive press, a young Bob Dylan appeared at Carnegie Hall in New York City for the first time. Unfortunately, only about 50 people attend, most of them friends of the singer. The set list included: Pretty Peggy-O, Backwater Blues, Fixin’ To Die,Talkin’ Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre, This Land Is Your Land, Freight Train Blues, Song To Woody, and Talkin’ New York

            1965 –Thursday- Go on and write me up for 125
Post my face, wanted dead or alive
Take my license n' all that jive
'cause I can't drive 55! ………Sammy Hagar……..Lee Ann Roberts Breedlove, wife of land speed record-holder Craig Breedlove, became the first female driver to exceed 300 mph when she accelerated up to 308.50 mph in the Spirit of America - Sonic 1 vehicle over the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah when she heard about the special “3 hour Le Creuset cookware sale at Macy’s.  The Sonic 1 was a four-wheel “car” powered by a J79 jet engine. Two policemen hiding behind a billboard speed trap caught her and she was immediately cited for exceeding the 30 mph speed limit and ordered to appear in traffic court.  A few hours after Lee Ann jet-powered across the one-mile course, Craig Breedlove shattered his own record from the previous year when he reached 555.49mph in the Spirit of America. He too was cited for speeding and he and Lee Ann had to take a ten hour defensive driving course.

           1971-Thursday-   Four men, and a kitten completed a raft ride across the Pacific from Ecuador to Australia. Spaniard, Vital Alsar and three compatriots sailed from Ecuador on La Balsa, a 7-log balsa raft with mangrove masts. They passed l000 miles north of Thor Heyerdahl's (Kon Tiki raft trip) final destination and made their way to Mooloolaba on the east coast of Australia. At the end of the trip, they complained about the service, the food and the entertainment (Sylvester Stallone as Hamlet, Paris Hilton as Ophelia), and vowed to use a cruise line in the future. Quote was "cruise lines have better food and I missed the rock climbing wall but the kitten was delicious".

          1977 –Friday- Go out yonder, peace in the valley
Come downtown, there's a rumble in the alley
Oh, you don't know the shape I'm in………………….. The Last Waltz, A film account, directed by Martin Scorsese, of the final concert of The Band - Rick Danko, Robbie Robertson, Richard Manuel,  Levon Helm, and Garth Hudson  ...  ,  premiered in New York City. Also appearing in the concert were: Eric Clapton,  Neil Diamond,  Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell,  Neil Young,  Emmylou Harris   Ringo Starr, Paul Butterfield, and   Dr. John. The Band had been Dylan’s back up group for several years.  They were on stage with him as he was booed in the 60’s for turning electric.

             1979 –Sunday- Student schmudent… Axis of Evil. Iranian “students”, as part of final performance evaluation assessment, stormed the U.S embassy and held 90  (they released women and minority Americans shortly after) Americans for over a year until Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency.

           1980-Tuesday-  Ronald Reagan defeated incumbent Jimmy Carter in a landslide for the presidency. Reagan, the Governor of California (Vice President would be George H.W Bush) ended the hopelessly bumbling four year term of Carter (Populus me sibilat …..everybody hisses at me)by receiving 489 electoral votes to Carter’s 49.

            1998 –Wednesday- Having my baby,
What a lovely way of saying how much you love me,
Having my baby,
What a lovely way of saying what you're thinking of me
I can see it, your face is glowing,
I can see it, in your eyes I'm happy you know it
That your ,
Having my baby,
Your the woman I love, & I love what it's doing to you,
Having my baby,
You're a woman in love and I love what's going through you,……Paul Anka…….. Bizarre accused pedophile, Michael Jackson announced that his “wife”, the lovely, svelt,  Debbie Rowe was pregnant with his first child. Jackson denied tabloid reports that Rowe was paid to be artificially impregnated and carry the child to term.  Why would anyone think that?

            2001 –Sunday-  Hurricane Michelle, a Category Four with sustained winds estimated at 135 mph. hit Cuba destroying crops and thousands of homes and causing approximately $49.53 worth of damage in the Communist Workers Paradise. The United States made the gesture of sending humanitarian aid. On December 16, 2001, Cuba received the first commercial food shipment from the U.S. in nearly 40 years

             2008 –Tuesday- I'm non ut bonus ut interventus quod EGO reputo EGO sum…… Barack Obama, Senator from Illinois became the first African-American to be elected President of the United States, defeating the rather inept John McCain of Arizona

5.         1605 - The Gunpowder Plot.  English Catholics attempted to blow up Parliament and King James 1 as retribution for persecution under Queen Elizabeth 1. This day is known as Guy Fawkes Day in England after the conspirator who was caught with the explosives.  Along with the rest of the conspirators, Fawkes was sentenced to be hanged, drawn & quartered. He foiled the sentence by jumping off the ladder leading to the scaffold and breaking his neck and thus avoided unpleasantness of being drawn and quartered…..while still alive.

          1895- George B. Seldon was awarded the first U.S. patent for an automobile. Ever the eternal optimist, it was said of him, "For Seldon is heard a discouraging word............."

           1895- X-rays were discovered by Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen. He didn't know what to call these offshoots of cathode rays (protestant rays?) so he called them x-rays.

          1906 - Happy Birthday, Fred L. Whipple, American astronomer who proposed the "dirty snowball" model for comet nuclei. This model was confirmed in 1986 when spacecraft flew past Halley's Comet.   

         1906 - Marie Curie gave her inaugural lecture as the first woman lecturer at the Sorbonne. She explained the theory of ions in gases and her treatise on radioactivity to120 students, public and press

         1912 - Woodrow Wilson elected president over Republican William Howard Taft and Bull Moose Party candidate, Theodore Roosevelt

         1940 - FDR  was elected to his third term as president defeating Wendell Wilkie

          1968- Richard Nixon was elected president defeating Hubert H. Humphrey in a surprisingly close election

          1992- The discovery of chemical evidence of 5000-year-old beer found at Godin Tepe in the Zagros mountains of Iran was reported  in the journal Nature. Beer was the preferred fermented beverage of the ancient Sumerians. Professor Sy Yentz had what tasted like this 5,000 year old beer the other night but it was just Bud Lite.

6.        1528 - Spanish Conquistador, Albeza de Vaca discovered Texas.  Actually, he was shipwrecked on Galveston.  He stayed at South Padre Island for Spring Break, partied with the college students and then went back to conquistadoring.

           1572 - A supernova was observed in the constellation known as Cassiopeia. People have asked Professor Sy Yentz about the difference between a nova and a supernova.  The difference is that in between there is the "pretty good nova".

           1860 - Abraham Lincoln was elected president after defeating Stephen Douglas, John Breckinridge, and John Bell

            1865 -Happy Birthday ,William Leishman. He developed the vaccine for typhoid fever.          

           1814- Happy birthday Adolphe Sax, inventor of the saxophone. Yes, the invention was the "joy of Sax".  Some of his compositions involved violin accompaniment yes, it was "sax and violins". And, yes he lived in a large metropolis so it was "sax in the city".   Oh......we have no shame!

          1861- Happy Birthday, James Naismith, inventor of the game of basketball.  

          1861 - Jefferson Davis was elected president of the Confederacy.

          1917- The beginning of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia - resulting in decades of misery and slaughter for millions of people

           1923 - A patent was issued to Colonel Jacob Schick  for the first electric shaver.  He later established his own company, The Schick Dry Shaver Co, Inc. in Stamford, Conn. Yes, Schick happens.

          1977- 39 people were drowned as the Toccoa Dam burst above Toccoa, Georgia, after heavy rains.  

           1981- A black-footed ferret was found in Wyoming, previously thought extinct. Native to North America’s arid, short grass prairies, it lived primarily with, and on, prairie dogs. Wide-scale poisoning programs to eradicate prairie dogs and the destruction of grassland habitat also killed off the ferret. It now survives in a few places in the western United States where ranchers are compensated for not molesting prairie dog towns and where management programs for the prairie dog and the ferret are being developed. It takes about 100 acres of prairie dog colony to support one ferret family (a female and her young). Predators such as owls, eagles, hawks, coyotes, badgers, foxes, and bobcats are now the main cause of death for wild ferrets.

7.       1867- Happy Birthday Marie Curie, Polish-born French chemist and physicist. In 1898, her celebrated experiments on uranium minerals led to discovery of two new elements. First she separated polonium, and then radium a few months later. The quantity of radon in radioactive equilibrium with a gram of radium was named a curie in her honor. With Henri Becquerel and her husband, Pierre Curie, she was awarded the 1903 Nobel Prize for Physics. She was then sole winner of a second Nobel Prize in 1911, this time in Chemistry. Her family won five Nobel awards in two generations. She died of radiation poisoning from her work before the need for protection was known.  In fact, a strand of her hair, when examined in the 1980's was found to be still dangerously radioactive.

         1878- Happy Birthday Lise Meitner, the scientist who first defined fission as the separation of the nucleus of the atom into protons and neutrons. She refused to work on the atomic bomb project as she would not participate in the development of weapons of war. We guess she would rather they have gone "fission".

           1908 - Prof. Ernest Rutherford announced in London that he had isolated a single atom of matter. Rutherford has been described as being to the atom what Darwin is to evolution, Newton to mechanic, Faraday to electricity and Einstein to relativity.  He should certainly be a lot for famous than he is to the general public.

          1918- Robert Goddard demonstrated tube-launched solid fuel rockets. "Tube be or not tube be" can be a fuelish question

          1940 - At approximately 11:00 am, the first Tacoma Narrows suspension bridge collapsed due to wind-induced vibrations. Situated on the Tacoma Narrows in Puget Sound, near the city of Tacoma, Washington, the bridge had only been open for traffic a few months.  The collapse was filmed and is shown quite often on TV.

8.       1656- Happy Birthday, Edmund Halley (rhymes with valley – or sometimes hally but never hailey as in old time rock group Bill Hailey and His Comets) , who in addition to discovering YOU KNOW WHAT COMET, was also the first to chart the stars of the southern hemisphere. Incidentally, the comet named after him has been sighted at intervals of 76 years since 240 B.C.  Unfortunately, Halley went kaput in 1742 and never saw his prediction come true.  He  also pioneered our understanding of trade winds, tides, cartography, naval navigation, mortality tables, and stellar proper motions.

          1793- The Louvre, the great museum in Paris, was officially opened. Construction originally began in 1204. Five Hundred and  eighty nine years is also approximately how long Boston’s “Big Dig” will take. Philippe August began construction of a fortress on the right bank of the Seine. However this original edifice comprised less than a quarter of the present Cour Carrée on the eastern end of the Louvre (the Sully wing of the Museum). It first became the official royal residence under Charles V who also constructed a new perimeter with a moat …..after all, “the moat the merrier”…. In 1546 the architect Pierre Lescot was appointed by King Francis I to erect the west wing of the complex. The Louvre grew larger as the royal collections increased. The Grande Galerie was completed under the reign of Henry IV and in 1624 Louis XIII had Jacques Lemercier plan more extensions to the Louvre. Beginning in 1667, the east façade was designed by Claude Perrault.

          1805- Explorers Lewis and Clark (Jerry Lewis and Dick Clark?) first saw the Pacific at the mouth of the Columbia river. However, they could not see the ocean from back at the tonsils of the Columbia river. We highly recommend, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West-- by Stephen Ambrose

           1847 – Happy Birthday, Bram Stoker, Irish author of  Dracula

                 1864- Abraham Lincoln defeated Union General and Democrat George MacClellan and was re-elected president.

           1881 - Happy Birthday, Robert Esnault-Pelterie, French engineer and aviation pioneer who invented the aileron (a movable airfoil at the edge of the wing of a plane). The aileron Causes the airplane to roll left or right ……..this sort of helps with the steering.

            1884-  Happy Birthday, Herman Rorschach,  Swiss psychiatrist who devised the inkblot test that bears his name and that is widely used clinically for diagnosing psychopathology. In 1918 Rorschach began experiments with 15 accidental inkblots, showing the blots to patients and asking them, "What might this be?" Their subjective responses enabled him to distinguish among his subjects on the basis of their perceptive abilities, intelligence, and emotional characteristics. The Rorschach test is based on the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli, in this case, inkblots. From these cues trained observers are supposed to be able to pinpoint deeper personality traits and impulses in the person taking the test.  His published results in 1921 drew little interest (mostly because people complained about the unsightly inkblots all over the paper)  until after his death about a year later. and then his findings were splattered all over the place.

            1887 – Doc Holliday kaput.  Gunfighter/Dentist, Dr. John Holliday, of Gunfight at the O.K Corral (1882) fame, died of tuberculosis.  He was 36.

            1889 –Montana was admitted to the Union as the 41^ststate. Created out of the Idaho Territory in 1864, the name Montana is a derivation of the Latin word "montaanus" which means mountainous. Even today, Montana is one of the least populous states.....as we know from Tourism slogans such as "Come to Montana and Visit Both of Us". or "Ed's Visiting His Cousin In  Idaho But I'll Be Home All Day", and "Montana - If the Buffalo Find Out There Are More of Them Than Us, We're in Trouble".

            1892 – Grover Cleveland, having lost the 1888 U.S. election, it was to William Henry Harrison’s son, Benjamin, was elected president, defeating William Henry Harrison’s grandson, Benjamin. Grover became the only president  to win non-consecutive terms in the White House. So Grover Cleveland was the 22nd and 24th Presidents of the United States.

            1904 -  Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President of the United States, who had succeeded the assassinated and kaput William McKinley, was elected to a term in his own right this day. He defeated Democrat Alton B. Parker of New York with 336 Electoral College votes to 140.

            1895 – Wilhem Roentgen discovered x-rays a short-wave ray for which he received the first Nobel Prize in Physics in1901. Roentgen was conducting experiments with vacuum tubes. He noticed that electrical discharges passing through vacuum tubes  produced another ray, one that that passed through every day materials such as wood, paper and aluminum.  As the wavelengths of light decrease, they increase in energy. X-rays have smaller wavelengths and therefore higher energy than ultraviolet waves.

            1900 - “Frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn”…..Happy Birthay, Margaret Mitchell, born in Atlanta Georgia, the author of "Gone With The Wind

             1910-  Insect zapping for fun and profit. The first U.S. patent for an "electric insect destroyer" was issued to William H. Frost of Spokane, Washington. The invention used a number of electrically energized parallel wires such that a flying insect passing between them would complete the circuit by bridging the wires with its body and electrocute the insect. In the 21^st century a California judge ruled it to be “cruel and unusual punishment” for insects.  He decreed that insects could only be killed by forcing them to read rulings by the California supreme court for twelve hours at a time, while stinging or biting members  of the American Civil Liberties Union.

            1922 - Happy Birthday, Christian Barnard, the South African  surgeon who performed the first human heart transplant operation. In a five-hour operation on  December 3,  1967, Barnard successfully replaced the diseased heart of  fifty three year old Louis Washkansky  with a healthy heart from Denise Darvall, a woman in her mid-20s with the same blood type, who had died in the hospital after an automobile accident. Washansky survived for eighteen days before he developed pneumonia as the treatment drugs lowered his resistance to disease.  In 1974, Barnard carried out the first double heart transplant. He ended his career in surgery because of the impact of arthritis. Barnard died in 2001……………….of heart disease.

            1923- Happy Birthday, Jack Kilby was an American electrical engineer working for Texas Instruments who invented the first integrated circuit (IC) - is a small electronic device made out of a semiconductor material., another name for a chip , for which he shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physics

            1954 – After a horrible 51-103 last place finish during the season The American League approved the transfer of the Philadelphia Athletics baseball team to Kansas City, MO. The team had been sold to Arnold Johnson who intended to move them to Kansas City….where they were just as miserable and unsuccessful as in their final years in Philly.

            1956 – With great fanfare, the Ford Motor Company decided on the name "Edsel" for a new car model in development for the 1958 market year. Edsel Ford was also the oldest son of founder Henry Ford. The hideous machine was officially introduced to the public a year later. It was a disaster. By 1960, the Edsel was abandoned, and its name would forever be synonymous with business failure

                . 1960 - John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Richard Nixon for the presidency.  Note, if you were concerned about the role of Florida the 2000 presidential election, take note of the fraud in Illinois, particularly in Chicago, that resulted in Kennedy's victory in the state and consequently the election.

              1980 -Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California announced the discovery of a 15th moon orbiting the planet Saturn, courtesy of Voyager I.  There are currently at least sixty known moons, some “pending” moons – they may be moons- and more to be discovered.  It’s a long way from the nine moons that everyone knew of before Voyager and that Professor Sy Yentz learned in school.

            1997- Damn, dam….. the main channel of the Yangtze River in China began to be blocked in preparation for the world’s largest hydroelectric power project.  The dam project – called the Three Gorges (the design was described as gorgeous) Dam, begun in 1994 is scheduled to be completed in 2009.  When completed, the Three Gorges Dam will be the world's largest at 7.575 feet long and 594 feet high. The reservoir behind the dam will reach 410 miles ……………..dammit.

            2007 – The Shuttle Discovery returned to Earth. This 15-day mission was longer than most — and more stressful, too, with the astronauts' impromptu repair to the torn solar wing at the space station.

9.         1731- Happy Birthday, Benjamin Banneker, a black scientist, compiler of almanacs and writer who taught himself mathematics and astronomy by reading borrowed textbooks. His grandfather was a slave from Africa and his grandmother, an indentured servant from England.  Banneker was also a surveyor, who worked closely with Pierre L'Enfant, the architect in charge of planning Washington D.C. L'Enfant was suddenly dismissed from the project, due to his temper. When he left, he took the plans with him. Banneker recreated the plans from memory, saving the U.S. government the effort and expense of having someone else design the capital.

          1801- A condensed Happy Birthday to Gail Borden, American manufacturer who invented a commercial method of condensing milk by heating it in a vacuum to preserve it, patented in 1856.  This was very important for people in big cities which were distant from the farm sources, as well as supplying the military, travelers and seamen. Borden  also patented processes for concentrating fruit juices and other beverages

            1825 - Limelight was first used in a practical way. Although Thomas Drummond, a British engineer, invented the limelight in 1816, it did not come into general use until some 30 years later. Limelight is produced by directing a sharp point of oxygen-hydrogen flame against a cylindrical block of lime. The tiny area of lime becomes incandescent and emits a brilliant white light that is soft and mellow. Still fourteen years away from popular use in theaters,  Thomas Drummond heated a small ball of lime to incandescent in front of a reflector. Set up at Scotland's Slieve Snaght, the light was seen from Divis Mountain, over 66 miles away. This provided a new form of bright light used not only in theaters, but also in lighthouses.

         1841 – Happy Birthday, 1841 Edward VII king of England 1901-10. Edward was sixty by the time his mother, Queen Victoria went kaput. He has the distinction of having been heir apparent to the throne longer than anyone in English or British history, although he did have an era (the Edwardian Era) named after him. 

            1864- Happy Birthday, Dmitry Iosifovich Ivanovsky, Russian microbiologist who, from his study of mosaic disease in tobacco, (mosaic disease also occurs in tomatoes) first reported the characteristics of the organisms that were later called viruses in 1892.  Ivanovsky ruled out the possibility of a bacterial agent. In an experiment, he demonstrated that the disease was either caused by a toxin or, as he thought more likely, by a life form far smaller than any organism previously described. Although Invanovsky is generally credited as the discoverer of viruses, they were also independently discovered and named by the Dutch botanist M.W. Beijerinck only a few years later.

            1871- Happy Birthday, Florence Sabin, American anatomist (an expert in anatomy) who was one of the first women physicians to pursue a research career. She reversed prevailing thought about the lymphatic system (bone marrow, spleen, thymus, and lymph nodes and a network of thin tubes that carry lymph and white blood cells) when  her investigation proved that lymphatic system developed from the veins in the embryo and grew out into tissues…..and then handkerchiefs….no,no,no Professor Sy Yentz has his expectoral sense of humor.  In 1926, she was the first woman elected to the National Academy of Sciences

            1874- As the mushroom said to the toadstool “ why not go out with me, I’m a fungi”. Happy Birthday, Albert Blakeslee, American botanist and geneticist whose international recognition began with his thesis on his discovery of sexuality in the lower fungi, Sexual Reproduction in the Mucorineae, published in 1904. It was significant to the understanding of sexual reproduction of the lower plants.

            1888 - Mary Jane Kelly kaput.  She was the last victim of the serial killer, “Jack the Ripper”. Like the four earlier victims, Kelly was a prostitute. She was reportedly born in city of Limerick, Ireland  in 1863.  Over a period of six weeks in the late summer and early fall of 1888, the “Jack” went on his rampage, killing and mutilating the five prostitutes.  Despite the largest manhunt in London history, he managed to elude arrest even though he killed two of his victims within a stone’s throw of some policemen. Unlike almost all other serial killers, he vanished into thin air, disappearing as abruptly as he had arrived.  Kelly’s mutilated corpse was found lying on her bed, her body was so viscously mangled that her “boyfriend”, Joe Barnett would only be able to identify her by her hair and eyes. 

            1921 - Albert Einstein  was awarded Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with the photoelectric effect.  In the photoelectric effect a light shines on a metal plate. This causes electrons to be knocked loose (ejected) from the metal plate. We measure the kinetic energy of the fastest electrons ejected by the light. Einstein's photoelectric effect paper helped to initiate the fundamental revolution in science that we now call Quantum Physics.

            .1934- Happy Birthday, Carl Sagan, astronomer, biologist, and author. He was perhaps the world's greatest popularizer of science, reaching millions of people through newspapers, magazines and television broadcasts, particularly his work on the PBS series Cosmos, which became the most watched series in public-television history. It was seen by more than 500 million people in 60 countries. The accompanying book, Cosmos (1980), was on The New York Times bestseller list for 70 weeks and was the best-selling science book ever published in English.

            1936- A giant panda was discovered in China. We guess this could be construed as "panda-ing" to the tourist business.  The baby panda, named Su-Lin, was exhibited in America until it died in a Chicago on  Apr 1, 1938……still waiting for the Cubs to win the World Series.

         1938 - "Kristallnacht," or "the Night of Broken Glass," because of the cost of broken glass in looted Jewish shops--$5 million marks ($1,250,000). The Nazi terror campaign against Jews. Began after the shooting of a German official by a 17 year old seeking revenge for the deportation of his father.  Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda, and Reinhard Heydrich, second in command of the SS after Heinrich Himmler, ordered "spontaneous demonstrations" of protest against the Jewish citizens of Munich. As many as 7,500 Jewish shops were looted, 20,000 Jews were arrested  and there were several incidents of rape.

            1957 – Yet another example of patent delays, patent failures and patented mistakes which have rewarded some and denied credit to others –Gordon Gould wrote  the principles of what he called a laser on a  Saturday night. By Wednesday morning he had a notary witness and date his notebook. In the notebook, he had described what he called "light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation," or,  "laser." Unfortunately, he misunderstood the patent process, and did not file promptly. But, other scientists, Charles Townes and Arthur Schawlow, did file for a patent on their similar but independent discovery of how to make a laser. 

             1961 - U.S Air Force  Major Robert M. White took the X-15 rocket plane at a world record speed of 4,093 MPH – six times the speed of sound- and to 30,970 m in height.  The X-15, bridged the gap between air and space flight. Half plane, half rocket, the North American X-15 took test pilots to the edge of space for the first time. Of course at that speed  there was no time for a “food an beverage service” before it got to its destination.

            1961 – On the same day as a record flight (see above), a different kind flight began – this one involving fame and riches. Record store manager Brian Epstein went to a Liverpool nightclub called the Cavern to hear a group called  the Beatles. Two months later, he became their manager and helped them land their first record deal, in 1962. The "Fab Four"-Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison--recorded "Love Me Do," the group's first Top 20 hit less than a year later in September 1962

           1965- The great "Northeast Black out". Most of the Northeastern U.S lost power when a transformer burned in upstate N.Y.  It was the biggest electricity grid failure in U.S. history and caused the 13-hour blackout in northeast America and parts of Canada.  In the subways of New York, 800,000 people were trapped. Overall, some 80,000 square miles, and 25 million people were affected.  There was virtually no looting and no violence.  It was a different time.

           1976- Smokey the Bear kaput.  The original "Smokey the Bear" died of old age. Smokey became the mascot to raise public awareness to protect America's forests.  Earlier mascot attempts such as; "Smokey the Walrus" "Smokey the Yak," "Smokey the Wombat", and "Smokey the Amoeba" had been rejected.

            1989- East Germany, one of the most doctrinaire and repressive of the Communist Soviet puppet states, opened the Berlin Wall, allowing travel from East to West Berlin. The following day, celebrating Germans began to tear the wall down. One of the ugliest and most infamous symbols of the Cold War was soon reduced to rubble that was quickly snatched up by souvenir hunters. The Wall was erected in 1961 because more than 2.6 million East Germans escaped to West Berlin or West Germany from 1949 to 1961

                  1994- Here today – gone in a nanosecond. The first atom of element 110 was detected at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (GSI) in Darmstadt, Germany A thin lead foil target was bombarded with accelerated nickel atoms (guess it wasn’t worth “a plugged nickel”) . A lead nucleus fused with a nickel nucleus to form a new nucleus of element 110, an isotope with atomic mass number of 269. After a small fraction of a thousandth of a second, it was kaput, decaying into lighter elements by emitting alpha-particles which are the nuclei of helium atoms. It was initially known as ununnilium, symbol Uun but officially  named in 2003 as darmstadtium, symbol Ds.

10.   

 1341 –Friday- Happy Birthday, Henry Percy, the 1st Earl of Northumberland and the first of the “Percy’s of Northumberland”.  He was a leading figure during the reigns of England's Richard II (dethroned and kaputed) and successor, Henry IV. He and his son Sir Henry Percy, famous as “Hotspur,” are commemorated in William Shakespeare's play  Henry IV. Part 1.

            1444 - Battle of Varna (that’s in eastern Bulgaria for the geographically disabled) as the army of King Vladislaus III of Varna (also known as Ulaszlo I of Hungary and Wladyslaw III of Poland…obviously, he had an identity crisis) were crushed by the Turks under Sultan Murad II. Vladislaus was killed and his army varnished after Varna.

             1483 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Martin Luther, Catholic priest and later German Protestant reformer who dealt the symbolic blow that began the Reformation when he nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of the Wittenberg Church in 1519. That document contained an attack on papal abuses and the sale of indulgences by church officials.

            1730 –Friday- Happy Birthday, Oliver Goldsmith, Anglo-Irish poet and playwright  who wrote, The Vicar of Wakefield and the play, She Stoops to Conquer.

            1775-Friday-  Semper Fi. The Continental Congress passed a resolution creating two battalions of Continental Marines, later renamed the United States Marine Corps to serve as landing troops for the recently created Continental Navy.  The 1783 Treaty of Paris ended the Revolutionary War and as the last of the Navy’s ships were sold, the Continental Navy and Marines disbanded. Following the formal re-establishment of the Marine Corps on July 11, 1798, Marines fought in conflicts with France, landed in Santo Domingo and conducted operations against the Barbary pirates along the "Shores of Tripoli."

            1810-Saturday- Flushed with success, Happy Birthday, George Jennings English sanitary engineer and plumber who invented the first public toilets.  They were first used for visitors at the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, Hyde Park London, in 1851. Jennings, then a plumber from Brighton installed the toilets. He felt strongly that there should be decent public facilities. To offset the cost, visitors were charged 1 pence for using the toilet.   827,280 of them handled the matter so obviously Jennings’ investment did not go down the drain.

            1851 –Monday Happy Birthday, Francis Maitland Balfour, British zoologist, younger brother of the statesman and Prime Minister Arthur J. Balfour, and a founder of modern embryology- the study of the development of the embryo.  Balfour, showed the evolutionary connection between vertebrates and some invertebrates (a politician and an amoeba, for example) through comparative embryology.

           1861-Sunday Happy Birthday, Robert Innes, Scottish astronomer who discovered Proxima Centauri in 1915. Proxima Centauri is  the closest star to earth after the Sun. It is  about 4.2 light years away and is faint red dwarf star. It is also much cooler than the Sun , with a surface temperature of about 3100 C. just about the same as Tucson Arizona on a July afternoon.  It is only visible with a good telescope, and only then from southern latitudes.  Jeez! It’s hardly worth mentioning! Needless to say, Innes had gone to Australia at an early age and lived most of his adult life in South Africa. So if you’re like Professor Sy Yentz and you were taught and even read that the closest star to the Sun is Alpha Centauri what gives with this Proxima stuff?  The closest star system to the Sun is the Alpha Centauri system. Of the three stars in the system, the dimmest -- called Proxima Centauri -- is actually the nearest star. The bright stars Alpha Centauri A and B form a close binary as they are separated by only 23 times the Earth- Sun distance - slightly greater than the distance between Uranus and the Sun.

             1865-Friday-  The first woman professor of Astronomy in America, Maria Mitchell, began teaching at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, NY. In fact, Maria Mitchell was the first person, male or female, appointed to the Vassar faculty. This made her, briefly, THE Vasser faculty.  Meetings were short and frequently broke due to arguments amongst the participants.  She had the use of a twelve-inch telescope, the third largest in the United States. In 1848 she became the first woman to be permitted to join the American Academy of Arts and Scientists, allowing her access to other serious scientists. She would be the only woman allowed to join for over a hundred years.

            1871-Friday-Baby, now that I've found you
I can't let you go
I'll build my world around you
I need you so
Baby, even though you don't need me
You don't need me. …..The Foundations.  Journalist  Henry M Stanley, working for the New York Herald,  finally found Scottish explorer David Livingstone. In 1855, Livingstone had discovered a spectacular waterfall which he named 'Victoria Falls'. He reached the mouth of the Zambezi River on the Indian Ocean in May 1856, becoming the first European to cross the width of southern Africa. In 1866 he began his search for the source of the Nile River and was not heard from.  Sort of like Shelley Long leaving Cheers to be a movie star.  He was presumed to be kaput. It was Stanley who found Livingstone near Lake Tanganyika and uttered the famous introduction of "Dr. Livingstone, I presume." With new supplies from Stanley, Livingstone continued his efforts to find the source of the Nile. He could have asked Professor Sy Yentz.  He has been in “denial” for years.

          1885-Tuesday- Get your motor runnin'
Head out on the highway
Lookin' for adventure
And whatever comes our way……….Steppenwolf.  Paul Daimler tested his father's invention, the motorcycle.  Earlier in 1885, the world's first motorcycle was designed by Gottlieb Daimler. The frame and wheels were made of wood. A leather belt transferred power from the engine to large brass gears mounted to the rear wheel. The leather saddle wasn't very comfortable since there was no suspension (front or rear). Presumably, Daimler had a much higher pitched voice after the tests. The motorcycle did not have training wheels.

         1924 –Monday-  Dion O'Banion kaput. O’Bannion, leader of Chicago’s  North Side Gang was assassinated in his flower shop by members of Johnny Torrio's (and Al Capone’s) gang, sparking the bloody gang war of the 1920s in Chicago culminating in the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929. O'Banion was happily clipping chrysanthemums (there were no witnesses so “mum” was the word) in a back room. Mobster Frankie Yale entered the shop with notorious Torrio/Capone gunmen John Scalise and Albert Anselmi. When O'Banion attempted to greet Yale with a handshake, Yale clasped O'Banion's hand in a “death” grip so he could not go for his gun. At the same time, Scalise and Anselmi fired two bullets into O'Banion's chest, two in his cheeks, and two in his throat. Dean O'Banion died instantly. O’Banion was later reincarnated in New York City as lead singer of the 50’s doo wop group Dion and the Belmonts

            1925 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Richard Burton, British stage and film actor who wasted his career drinking and marrying Elizabeth Taylor.

                1928 –Saturday- Go go go migo
Go go go migo
Go go migo
Go go go

Aaaaa
Go go go go go...
Aaaaa
Go migo
Aaaaa
Go migo
Aaaaa

Aaaaa

Aaaaa
Migo go go……..Chorus from The Good, The Bad and the Ugly. Happy Birthday, Ennio Morricone, Italian composer. Morricone’s soundtracks added suspense and atmosphere  to the mid-1960s “spaghetti westerns”, notably the Clint Eastwood trilogy of Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and the best…. The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.

            1928 –Saturday-   While Ennio Morricone was being born in Italy, in the Bronx in the game against Army at Yankee Stadium, Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne gave his famous half time lockeroom speech,  "Win one for the Gipper". Underdog Notre Dame would go on to win the game 12-6. George Gipp had been a Notre Dame football star who went kaput in 1920 from a staph infection.

            1938 – Thursday- Singer Kate Smith, on her weekly radio show, sang, Russian immigrant Isadore Baline, later renamed -   Irving Berlin’s God Bless America for the first time. It would become her signature song and one that many believe should be the national anthem.              

            1951-Saturday- The first direct dial long distance telephone service........Later that minute, occurred the first direct dial long distance busy signal.  Mayor M. Leslie Downing of Englewood, N.J., picked up a telephone and dialed 10 digits. Eighteen seconds later, he reached Mayor Frank Osborne in Alameda, Calif (across the Bay from San Francisco)…….who announced that he was rushing to a cabinet meeting and could he call back……no,no,no Professor Sy Yentz has his long distance sense of humor, actually the mayors chatted for a while.

            1958 –Monday-  It's Only Make Believe by Conway Twitty,  topped the Billboard charts and stayed there for 2 weeks. It would be replaced by the Kingston Trio’s Tom Dooley.

            1969 –Monday-  Sesame Street, the brainchild of Jim Henson and created for the Children’s Television Workshop made its debut on PBS. Since then the accutely politically correct muppet/puppet and people show delighted children and their parents all over the world.

            1969 – Mercifully, Elvis Presley’s movie career came to an end with the opening of his last feature film, Change of Habit.  Although nothing could sink to the level of Clambake or Harem Scarem, Change of Habit was pretty bad.  Directed by William Graham and co-starring Mary Tyler Moore as a just about to officially become a nun, one could also find Edward Asner (later to star on Mary’s sitcom) in the cast. The advertisement for  the film should have served as a warning, “When the King of Rock Meets the Queen of Comedy, Romance Rules. “

            1974 –Sunday- einstein was not a handsome fellow
nobody ever called him al
he had a long moustache to pull on
it was yellow
i don't believe he ever had a girl
one thing he missed out in his theory
of time and space and relativity
is something that makes it very clear he
was never gonna score like you and me
he didn't know about

quark strangeness and charm
quark strangeness and charm
quark strangeness and charm
quark ssenegnarts and charm …….Hawkwind. The discovery of the "charmed quark" subatomic particle was announced simultaneously by the two American experimental groups responsible. One was an MIT group at Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the other a SLAC-Berkeley group on the west coast at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Prior to this quarks were generally boorish and ill-mannered and could never be charming. The new particle, of mass 3095 MeV (as we all know, MeV is Mega electron volts), had a lifetime about 1000 times more than that of other particles of comparable mass…..obviously due to its charm.  In 1976, the scientists leading those groups Samuel Ting and Burton Richter, were awarded the Nobel prize in physics.  Quarks, named by physicist Murray Gell-Mann, from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake – “Three quarks for Muster Mark!......     are one of the two basic building blocks of matter – the other is gluon. Scientists have discovered six different kinds of quarks: Top, Bottom, Up, Down, Strange and Charm.  The charmed quark is more massive than the up, down, and strange quarks.

            1975 –Monday-  Edmund Fitzgerald kaput.  The Edmund Fitzgerald, at 729 ft. long, the biggest and fastest freighter on the Great Lakes, sank in Lake Superior during a storm featuring 60 mph winds and 15 ft. waves.  All 29 crew members were lost. The ship is remembered in singer Gordon Lightfoot's ballad The Wreck Of The Edmund Fitzgerald,

            1980-Monday-  During this week, Voyager 1 flew past Saturn. Saturn was the last planetary flyby for Voyager 1.  Voyager 2 would arrive in 1981. Both Voyagers measured the rotation of Saturn (the length of a day) at 10 hours, 39 minutes, 24 seconds. Both discovered answers and questions (sort of like the Jeopardy TV Show) about the rings such as should the engagement ring be returned if the bride breaks off the engagement? and will she really notice it it’s cubic zirconia

            1983 –Tuesday-  First computer virus - U.S. student Fred Cohen (brother of Ice Cream Cohen) presented to a security seminar the results of his test - the first documented virus, created as an experiment in computer security. Cohen created this first virus when studying for a PhD at the University of Southern California.  Now there are almost 60,000 viruses in existence and they have gone from being a nuisance to a permanent menace. Among the worst have been, The Morris Worm, The Concept Virus, CIH, the Anna Kournakova  (created by an obsessed admirer of the  dim bulb tennis celebrity),  The Melissa, ILOVEYOU, and the Blaster Worm with more to come.   Thanks Fred.

            1988 –Thursday-  Good news, the Secretary Herrington of the Department of Energy (quick now, explain what the Department of Energy does)  announced that Ellis County, Texas would be the home of a $4.4 billion atom- smashing super collider. The superconducting super collider would become the world's largest particle accelerator, the basic research tool in high energy physics for studying the nature of matter and energy. Bad news in 1993 after investing over $2 billion dollars into the project, Presidential stud muffin, Bill Clinton and Congress cancelled it entirely. Highly sophisticated machinery and laboratories were simply sold to the highest bidder, and thousands of acres of empty land were parceled off and sold as well. All that now remains are 200,000 square feet of still-vacant factories and labs, and over 30 km of carved-rock tunnels slowly filling with water.  Some guy wants to make it the world’s largest mushroom farm.  Obviously he’s a fungi.

11.     308 – Although Constantine would emerge victorious, The Congress of Carnuntum, in  attempting to keep peace within the Roman Empire, declared that Maxentius and Licinius to be Augusti (co-emperors),  while rival contender Constantine I was declared Caesar of Britain and Gaul.

            1493 – Happy Birthday, Paracelsus, born, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus Von Hohenheim   German-Swiss physician and alchemist who established the role of chemistry in medicine.  He is also credited with introducing opium and mercury into the arsenal of medicine

           1620 - In what is now Provincetown Harbor near Cape Cod, the Mayflower Compact is signed on the Mayflower, establishing the basic laws for the Plymouth Colony. The compact, a round, hinged beauty aide with a mirror on one side and powder on the other was only 5 inches in diameter and Professor Sy Yentz can’t figure out how they wrote all those laws on such a small surface.

            1647- The first American compulsory school law was passed in Massachusetts. It provided for a teacher for every community of over 50 families. It is known as the Old Deluder Satan Law (after the law's first sentence). Remember, the Puritans specifically framed ignorance as a Satanic ill and The General School Law of 1647.  Several secondary and some elementary schools were opened as a result of the edict.

         1790- “Mums the word” -  chrysanthemums were introduced into England from China.  Where as a flowering herb it was described in writings as early as the 15th Century B.C. In 1753 Swedish botantist, Carolus Linnaeus had combined the Greek words chrysos, meaning gold with anthemon, meaning flower. These hardy plants have since been found native in Japan, northern Africa, and southern Europe. Their flowers come in every color except blue.

            1821 – Happy Birthday, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russian novelist, author of Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Brothers Karamazov.

            1831 – Nat Turner kaput.  Nat Turner, the leader of a bloody slave revolt. Turner and 75 followers had rampaged through Southampton County, attempting to instigate a general slave rebellion while, killing about 60 whites in Southampton County, Virginia.  Turner was hanged in Jerusalem, the county seat.

            1834 – and  1858 -  A presidential social note as on this day, the future President Franklin Pierce (1852- 1856) married Jane Appleton.  And on this day in 1858, future President James Garfield (1800-1881)married, Lucretia Rudolph. Surprisingly, both brides wore Vera Wang and the grooms, Tommy Hilfiger tuxedos (Pierce’s was rented).  Both weddings were catered by Izzy Lipschitz “Weddings and Bar Mitzvas for Democrats and Whigs”.

             1885 – Happy Birthday, George Patton, American General.  Having fought in both World War I (see 1918 below) and World War II, he was famous for his fierce determination and ability to lead soldiers, Patton is now considered one of the greatest military figures in history

             1889 - Washington was admitted as the 42nd U.S. state. The state is named after George Washington, and is the only U.S. state named after a president.

            1918- The armistice ending World War 1was signed in France at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. The day was originally called Armistice Day and is now called Veteran's Day in the U.S. The First World War left nine million soldiers dead and 21 million wounded, with Germany, Russia, Austria-Hungary, France, and Great Britain each losing nearly a million or more lives. In addition, at least five million civilians died from disease, starvation, or exposure……..and the armistice sewed the seeds for the second world war, twenty one years later.

            1921 - Exactly three years after the end of World War I, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, now called the Tomb of the Unknowns, - now entombed are unknown soldiers from WW II, the Korean War and the Vietnam War -   was  dedicated at Arlington Cemetery in Virginia during an Armistice Day ceremony presided over by President Warren G. Harding.  The inscription reads;

 "Here Rests
In Honored Glory
An American Soldier
Known But To God

           1925 -Robert A. Millikan coined the name of "cosmic rays" as he announced his discovery of same.  He had received the  Nobel Prize for Physics in 1923 for his study of the elementary electronic charge and the photoelectric effect. Millikan insisted that cosmic rays consisted in whole or in large part of electromagnetic radiation – not charged particles. He was wrong and physicist, Arthur Compton, right by the observation that cosmic rays are deflected by the Earth's magnetic field (and so must be charged particles).

            1926 – The famous cross country U.S.A road, Route 66 was established. Running from Chicago to Los Angeles, route 66 did not follow a traditionally linear course. Its diagonal course linked hundreds of predominantly rural communities in Illinois, Missouri, and Kansas to Chicago; thus enabling farmers to transport grain and produce for redistribution.  It was also, of course, a good place to “get your kicks on route 66”. If you ever plan to motor west. Travel my way, the highway that's the best.
Get your kicks on Route 66!

        1935- A then record 72,395 feet was reached by Lt. Col. Albert William Stevens and Capt. Orvil Anderson, by helium balloon in a sealed gondola, Explorer II. They were high enough to see the curvature of the Earth. This set a sub-stratosphere record that stood for 21 years until Malcolm D. Ross and Victor E. Prather went 113,740 feet over the Gulf of Mexico in 1961.  They also almost set a record for distance traveled as the Ross, ever the practical joker, stuck a pin in the balloon and they whooshed and zig zagged all over the Caribbean, southern U.S.A, Central America, Venezuela, and Bermuda.

Of course in October 2003, A 46-year-old man from England made it into the record books by setting a new world record for a flight powered by party balloons.  Ian Ashpole, reached a height of 11,000ft, while strapped to 600 balloons in a harness.

 1966- On the final Gemini mission, astronauts James Lovell – who would become famous for commanding the aborted Apollo 13 Moon mission in 1970,  and Buzz Aldrin, who would become the second man on the Moon in July 1969,  completed the last of the two-man  Gemini flights. The principal goal of the Gemini missions was to work on docking procedures with another space craft that would be necessary for return to Earth after Moon landings. The Gemini-Titan  achieved  low earth orbit and docked with its Agena target vehicle, placed aloft only an hour and a half earlier. Aldrin then spent over five hours working outside the spacecraft….before Lovell would let him back in only if he promised to “do the dishes”.

        1982, The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by twenty one year old Chinese-American architect, Maya Lin,  was opened to its first visitors in Washington, D.C. There are 58,191 names are inscribed in chronological order of the date of the casualty, showing the war as a series of individual human sacrifices and giving each name a special place in history.  The Memorial was officially dedicated on November 13^th.

              1988 - The oldest known insect fossils (390 million yrs) were reported in Science.  They appeared to be actresses Joan Collins and Faye Dunaway. No, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his entomological sense of humor.  The well-preserved specimens were  discovered in a chunk of mudstone on the north shore of Quebec's Gaspe Bay. They were described as a bristletail, a member of the most primitive order of insects and a distant relative of the silverfish that infest modern households.  It is also the oldest record of terrestrial animal life from North America, surpassing Larry King.

            2004 - Palestinian leader and terrorist,  Yasser Arafat died in Paris at age 75. Presumably he went straight to hell.

12.    1799 – The first record of a meteor shower in North America, so no more meteor baths – it was meteor showers from now on as Andrew Ellicott Douglass, an early American astronomer born in Vermont, witnessed the Leonids meteor shower from a ship off the Florida Keys. Douglass, described the sight as the "whole heaven appeared as if illuminated with sky rockets, flying in an infinity of directions, and I was in constant expectation of some of them falling on the vessel. They continued until put out by the light of the sun after day break."  The Leonids meteor shower – which appears out of the constellation Leo,  is an annual event that is greatly enhanced every 33 years or so by the appearance of the comet Tempel-Tuttle. When the comet returns, the Leonids can produce rates of up to several thousand meteors per hour that can light up the sky on a clear night.

            1842- Happy Birthday, John Strutt, 3rd Baron of Rayleigh, English physical scientist who’s discoveries in the fields of acoustics and optics that are essential to the theory of wave propagation in fluids- the ways in which waves travel through a medium, in this case, fluitds - He received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904 for his investigations into the densities of the most important gases and his discovery of argon, an inert atmospheric gas. After winning the Nobel he could certainly “Strutt his stuff”.

             1847 - In Great Britain, Sir James Young Simpson, Scottish obstetrician and the father of modern anesthetics, (note: ancient anesthetics usually consisted of getting the patient very drunk) used chloroform ("perchloride of formyle") for the first time as an anesthetic in an operation. He had already been using ether – in January of 1847-, but soon began searching for an anesthetic that was less irritant He was not the first to use chloroform but it was his advocacy which led to its acceptance. In fact, In 1853 and 1857 John Snow, the royal anesthetist, delivered Queen Victoria's children with the aid of chloroform Perhaps people started taking it so they wouldn’t have to listen to his “advocacy” anymore. Note: Anna Sthetic was a Greek Philosopher who put everyone to sleep with her boring soliloquies

            1894 – Australian, Lawrence Hargrave was lifted from the ground by a train of four of his "cellular kites". He had linked four huge box kites (a kite shaped like a box open at both ends )together, added a sling seat, and flew - attached to the ground by piano wire. He had invented the box-kite, a lightweight yet very strong configuration of lifting surfaces which defined most aeronautical design prior to WWI.  In fact, Hargrave invented many devices, but never once applied for a patent on any of them

            1906- The 106 degrees F recorded in Craftonville California represented the hottest November temperature ever in the U.S.   It also put a damper on  the plans for the Fun in the Snow Festival scheduled for that day.

           1912 – The body of  explorer Robert Scott was discovered in a tent by a mission sent to find them.  Scott and two companions were in the tent, two others had died in a few days earlier. Scott  had died eight months earlier after reaching  the South Pole, and finding that Roald Amundsen and a team of Norwegian had beaten them to the pole by four weeks.

            1926 -  Happy Birthday, Jack Ryan, American inventor. He redesigned the Barbie doll – which had been invented by Ruth Handler in 1959-, Hot Wheels, Chatty Cathy,  and military missiles. Dr. Ryan invented the joints that allowed Barbie to bend at the waist and the knee. He actually sued Mattel Toy Company seeking recognition as inventor of the Barbie Doll but lost.  Before he designed that very first Barbie, Ryan worked at the Pentagon as an engineer designing Sparrow and Hawk missiles. He was also the sixth husband of serial bride, actress Zsa Zsa Gabor.

          1927 – The Holland Tunnel, connecting New Jersey and New York – under the Hudson River – officially opened on November 13 at midnight.  However on this day, after an opening ceremony, 20,000 people walked the 9,250 feet length of the tunnel from shore to shore, of which 5,480-ft runs under the river.  

            1936 - The Oakland Bay Bridge opened.  President Franklin Roosevelt in Washington pressed a telegraph key to open the bridge at the East Bay Toll Plaza. The bridge is part of Interstate 80 and connects San Francisco and Alameda Counties. It is 4.5 miles in length and the total project: structural and roadway including approaches, toll plaza, etc. is 8.4 miles. During rush hour and most of the other hours of the day there is so much  traffic that it is almost an 8.4 mile parking lot. The Oakland Bay Bridge was opened six months before San Francisco's other famous bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge.

          1944 – Tirpitz kaput.  The German battleship, Tirpitz – sister ship of the Bismarck sunk in 1941 by the British Navy – was sunk during an air attack by British Lancaster bombers.  The Tirpitz, which had been more of a threat than an actual weapon, had been  trapped in Norwegian fjords since early in the war. The 42,000-ton battleship armed with 15-inch guns was done in by “tallboy” dam buster bombs.  Launched in 1939 she never fired a single shot against an enemy ship.

            1946 – First “drive-in bank” – nowadays called a drive through bank- opened in Chicago as the Exchange National Bank – controlled by banking innovator George Sax, located downtown – in “the Loop”, opened ten drive up windows. Remember, this wasn’t such a big deal in those days….but it was the “joy of Sax”.

            1956 -The largest iceberg on record, 208 miles long and 60 miles wide, was sighted in the South Pacific by the (appropriately named U.S.S. Glacier.   This, of course, required a martini glass 250 miles long and 80 miles wide.  One does have to leave room in the glass for the gin and the olive.  Note that in 2000, Iceberg B-15 was the world's largest recorded iceberg. With an area of over 11,000 km², it was larger than the island of Jamaica. Icebergs are not born they are “calved” and so B-15 was calved from the Ross Ice Shelf in March 2000, it broke up into several pieces in 2002 and 2003, the largest of which, B-15A, was the world's largest free-floating object—it was 122 km (76 miles) long, 27 km (17 miles) wide, and covered an area of 3,100 km² -1,200 square miles, or approximately the size of Luxembourg.

          1980- Voyager 1 made its closest approach to Saturn – 77,000 miles.  Although launched sixteen days after Voyager 2, Voyager 1's trajectory was a faster path, arriving at Jupiter in March of 1979. Voyager 2 arrived about four months later in July 1979. Both spacecraft were then directed on to Saturn with arrival times in November 1980 for Voyager 1 and August 1981 for Voyager 2. Voyager 1 took  roughly 16,000 images of Saturn, its rings and satellites.        

            1984 -  Astronauts executed the first salvage operation in space when a Palapa B-2 satellite and Western VI satellites were retrieved. They were  transported back to Earth in the cargo bay of the space shuttle Discovery.  The commercial satellite Palapa B2 was launched for the Indonesian government on STS-41B (Challenger) in February 1984.  However, it failed to reach geosynchronous orbit due to an onboard rocket malfunction. The re-launch in April 1990 was successful, and ownership was transferred back to Indonesia. There is a great picture of astronaut Dale Gardner hold a “For Sale” sign during the space walk in which he retrieved the satellites. This was the second flight of the Orbiter Discovery. During the mission the crew deployed two satellites, Telesat Canada's Anik D-2 and Hughes' LEASAT-1 (Syncom IV-1). So, basically, they brought two back and left two up there.       

13.    354 – Happy Birthday, Aurelius Augustinus, Augustine of Hippo, or Saint Augustine –  born in North Africa, about 45 miles south of the Mediterranean, in the town of Tagaste  in Numidia (now Souk-Ahras in Algeria), near ancient Carthage (modern Tunis).Augustine’s philosophy was shaped by the Roman orator, Cicero – particularly his now lost book , the Hortensius.  He was converted to Christianity in 386 and was baptized by St. Ambrose at Easter of 387. About 12 years later he wrote an account of his life up to a time shortly after his conversion, a book called the Confessions. A philosopher and theologian, Augustine was later the bishop of the North African city of Hippo Regius for the last third of his life. Augustine is one of the most important figures in the development of Western Christianity, and is considered to be one of the church fathers.

            1312 – Happy Birthday, King Edward III of England – the third of the three consecutive Edwards.  Edward himself became king in 1327 after his father, Edward II naturally, was deposed by his mother and her lover, Roger Mortimer. Edward assumed the title of King of France and thus started the “Hundred years War”.

            1715 – Happy Birthday, Dorothea Erxleben, German, first female medical doctor. Her father, Dr. Christian Leporin had  taught her about the healing arts but women were not admitted to medical schools in those day. It was actually the intercession of Prussian King Frederick the Great in 1741 that allowed her to study medicine at the University of Halle.

            1789 - Benjamin Franklin wrote in a letter to a friend, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes." Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe had written “Not the Man in the Moon, not the Inspiration of Mother Shipton, or the Miracles of Dr. Faustus, Things as certain as Death and Taxes, can be more firmly believ'd.” in 1726 but Franklin’s quote resonates with us today.

            1850 – Happy Birthday, Robert Louis Stevenson, Scottish novelist and poet; author of Treasure Island, Kidnapped  and Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

            1927- The Holland Tunnel, costing $54 million,  under the Hudson River opened at midnight for traffic as the first twin tube subaqueous (now there's a word to drop in casual conversation!) vehicular tunnel in the U.S. It joined Jersey City, N.J. and New York City, N.Y. The day before, after an opening ceremony, in the next hour 20,000 people walked the 9,250 feet length of the tunnel from shore to shore, of which 5,480-ft runs under the river. Named after its engineer, Clifford Holland, the tunnel can carry 1,900 vehicles per hour. Of course nowadays, 1900 is the number of cars backed up at the tollbooths.  Later that day the first traffic jam occurred as "squeegee guys" jockeyed for position.      

           1946- As if we didn’t have enough real snow…..Professor Sy Yentz, living in the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania – and who’s street is the snowiest street in the Western Hemisphere found it totally bizarre that artificial snow from a natural cloud was produced over Mount Greylock - the highest point in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, for the first time in the U.S. An airplane spread small pellets of dry-ice (frozen carbon dioxide) for three miles at a height of 14,000 ft. Although the snow fell an estimated 3,000 feet, it evaporated as it fell through dry air, and never reached the ground. It only took a few years for ski resorts to begin looking for ways to create the fake stuff for use during bad snow years. Of course technology had advanced beyond the seeding of clouds by then.

            1970 – East Pakistan – now Bangladesh –was devastated by tidal waves and storm surges on the shores of the Ganges Delta.  The 100-mph Bhola cyclone spurred the deadly flood of ocean water that washed over scores of coastal islands and flooded the densely populated delta region. An estimated 500,000 people were killed in the 20th century's worst disaster by cyclone.

             1971- Timing is everything…….an enormous dust storm covered the visible surface of Mars.  Mariner-9, the first man-made object to orbit another planet, entered Martian orbit. The eagerly anticipated view of the “Red Planet” was obscured by the dust storm. The mission of the unmanned craft was to return photographs mapping 70% of the surface, and to study the planet's thin atmosphere, clouds, and hazes, together with its surface chemistry and seasonal changes and look for signs of Elvis.

            1982- The dedication of The Vietnam Veterans Memorial, designed by twenty one year old Chinese-American architect, Maya Lin.  The Memorial had been opened to its first visitors in Washington, D.C. on Veterans Day. There are 58,191 names are inscribed in chronological order of the date of the casualty, showing the war as a series of individual human sacrifices and giving each name a special place in history.

            1982 – WBA Lightweight Champion,  Ray  “Boom Boom” Mancini defeated Korean Duk Koo Kim in a brutal – televised- boxing match held in Las Vegas, Nevada. Kim went into a coma after the fight and died on November 17.

            1985 - The volcano Nevado del Ruiz erupted and melted a glacier, causing a lahar (volcanic mudslide) that buried Armero, Colombia, killing approximately 23,000 people. The Nevado del Ruiz is the northernmost and highest Colombian volcano with historical activity. The summit has an elevation of 5,389 m, the volcano is covered with 25 km2 of snow and ice even though it's located only 500 km from Earth's equator.

14.     1765- Happy Birthday, Robert Fulton, who planned the 1st steamboat to be commercially successful in the U.S.  He brought steam boating from the experimental stage to commercial success. But he did not invent the steamboat, which had been built in the early 1700's. He applied his engineering skills to their design. He changed the proportions, arrangements, and velocities of already proposed ideas. In 1807, work was completed on the Clermont, the first steamboat that was truly successful, and the culmination of many years of work. Her maiden voyage was on Aug 17 from New York City to Albany, a distance of 150 miles completed in 32 hoursor about the same time it takes nowadays to drive about 10 miles into Manhattan.       

        1832 – The first street car – not named Desire…it was named John Mason…in the U.S began operations in New York City. The carriage was horse-drawn and rode on iron wheels along iron rails laid in the middle of the road. The track ran along Fourth Avenue from Prince Street to 14th Street. It had three non-connecting compartments, each able to carry ten passengers. It was immediately cut off by a yellow taxi in search of a fare. In 1834 Thomas Davenport, a blacksmith from Brandon, Vt., U.S., built a small battery-powered electric motor that would be used in street cars.

            1840 –French impressionist painter, Claude Monet was born on this day in Paris and it made  quite an impression of Professor Sy Yentz.  Monet focused on the effect of changing light on everyday objects. Often he painted multiple studies of the same subjects, from train stations and haystacks to the London skyline, the Rouen Cathedral and, most famously, water lilies.

            1851 – “Call me Ishmael”. Herman Melville’s Moby Dick was published in New York City.  Originally titled, Harry Potter and the Great White Whale…..no, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his Quidditch sense of humor..The book was inspired by real events, notably the sinking of the whaling ship Essex, which foundered in 1820 after it was attacked and repeatedly rammed by an 80-ton sperm whale.  

            1881 - Charles J. Guiteau went on trial for assassinating President James A. Garfield. (He was convicted and hanged.) Guiteau had shot Garfield on July 2 and incredibly inept medical care resulted in Garfield’s death

            1889- Nelly Bly, reporter for the New York World, set off to outdo Phineas Phogg, Jules Verne‘s hero of Around the World in 80 Days by circling the globe in less time. She did it in 72.She began her world-wide journey on the Hamburg-American Company liner Augusta Victoria from the Hoboken (New Jersey) Pier at exactly 9:40 a.m. She traveled via train to boat to rickshaw in order to make the necessary connections. Bly's travel experiences were published daily in her newspaper, World. Seventy-two days, six hours, eleven minutes and fourteen seconds after her Hoboken departure, Nellie arrived home. Her theme song was, obviously, "As Time Goes Bly".

      1891- Happy Birthday, Sir Frederick Banting, Canadian physician who, in 1921, was the first to extract the hormone insulin from the pancreas. Insulin might be extracted from the intact Islands of Langerhans. The Islands of Langerhans are not located in the Caribbean, they are irregular clusters of endocrine cells scattered throughout the tissue of the pancreas that secrete insulin and glucagon. Injections of insulin proved to be the first effective treatment for diabetes, a disease in which glucose accumulates in abnormally high quantities in the blood. Banting was awarded a share of the 1923 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.

     1908- Swiss inventor, Dr. Jacques.E. Brandenberger invented cellophane. After experimenting with different ways of applying liquid viscose rayon (in case you were wondering, that’s is a group of fabrics and yarns produced by extruding cellulose solution through holes in a spinneret) to cloth, Brandenberger discovered that a thin transparent film could be peeled off the top of the cloth and voila! Now you can wrap your sandwiches. What a great month! November  3 saw the birthday of John Montagu, inventor of the sandwich and now we have something to wrap it in.  Just another “slice of life” from the Gnus.

      1910- The first airplane take off and flight from a ship made by Eugene Ely from the bow of the cruiser U.S.S Birmingham, anchored at the Hampton Roads, Virginia. Flying a Curtiss Model D pusher biplane, His makeshift runway was 83 feet long, with a five degree slope, but because the plane itself was 57 feet long, the available runway for takeoff was only 26 feet. To make things even more enjoyable, the flight occurred during a heavy rain storm.  No, Bly did not land on the ship.  He landed on a ship a year later (no, he wasn’t flying around all that time looking for a place to land). He became the first to land on a ship as he landed on he battleship USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco Bay.

             1930 - Happy Birthday, Edward H. White, first U.S astronaut to walk in space. White was one of the three-man crew of Apollo 1 who in 1967 were the first casualties of the U.S. space program. They were  killed when a fire broke out during a flight simulation (the others were Virgil I. Grissom and Roger B. Chaffee).  In 1965, with James A. McDivitt, White manned the four-day orbital flight of Gemini 4, launched on  June, 3 1965. During the third orbit White emerged from the spacecraft, floated in space for about 20 minutes, and became the first person to propel himself in space with a maneuvering unit…..the first “space walk”.

        1933- Happy Birthday, Fred Haise (brother of Purple Haise), American astronaut. Haise was backup lunar module pilot for Apollo 8 and  held the same position on Apollo 11, as backup to lunar module pilot Buzz Aldrin. Lucky Fred, following Apollo 11 Haise began training as a prime crewman on the aborted Apollo 13 mission. 

            1963- A volcanic eruption near Iceland created a new island called Surtsey. Now people could go to the Jersey Shore or the Surtsey Shore.

        1969- Launch of Apollo 12, the second Lunar landing mission. The crew, Charles Conrad, Richard Gordon, and Alan Bean, stayed on the sunny side until the heat baked Bean. The launch took place in a thunder storm and the spacecraft was struck by lightning 36 seconds after launch and again 52 seconds after launch, which momentarily shut off electrical power and cut out telemetry contact. Power was automatically switched to battery backup while the crew restored the primary power system…..frantically flicking switches and pulling out and putting in plugs and finally putting the hamster back on the wheel…..no, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his charged sense of humor.  They arrived at the Moon on November 19 and 34.4 kg of samples of the lunar terrain (moon rocks) was/were collected, various photographs were exposed by the astronauts during lunar surface activities, and parts were taken from the Surveyor 3 spacecraft – which had landed on the Moon on April, 20, 1967- for examination.

            1971 – Mariner 9 became the first space craft from Earth to land on another planet – Mars (where it was promptly attacked by a Martian Tom Cruise and crew of Martian action movie stars). Mariner 8 and 9 were the third and final pair of Mars missions in NASA's Mariner series of the 1960s and early 1970s. Both were designed to be the first Mars orbiters, marking a transition in the exploration of the red planet from flying by the planet to spending time in orbit around it. Unfortunately, Mariner 8 failed during launch on May 8, 1971. Mariner 9 was launched successfully on May 30, 1971, and became the first artificial satellite of Mars when it arrived and went into orbit, where it functioned in Martian orbit for nearly a year. Mariner 9 completed its final transmission October 27, 1972.

            1973 – On a social note, - In England, horse faced Princess Anne – daughter of Elizabeth II - married Captain Mark Phillips, in Westminster Abbey. She was later divorced and married Kentucky Derby winner, Secretariat.

            1985-The first discovery of a fullerene (C₆₀) was published in the journal Nature.  Fullerenes are a class of molecules in which large numbers of carbon molecules are locked together into a roughly spherical shape. Their construction roughly resembles the interlocked trusses of Buckminster Fuller's famous geodesic domes which is why they are sometimes called “buckyballs”. While everyone was excited about their discovery, no commercial applications of round fullerene cage molecules have appeared yet

   15.        655 – Thursday – Sounds like the title of a fantasy novel, maybe part II of a trilogy but no, in the Battle of Winwaed.  Penda of Mercia (where he met Gerry and the Pacemakers on the Ferry Cross the Mersey)  was defeated by Oswiu of Northumbria  in this clash battle between Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia in England. Not only did this ensure Northumbria as the ruling kingdom in Northern England, it marked the defeat of the last pagan force in Anglo-Saxon England. It also lead to Anglo-Saxon acceptance of the Catholic Church over the Celtic Church. It also paved the way for the “Mersey Beat” of the late 1950s – early 1960s of the Beatles, Billy Jay Kramer and the Dakotas,  and the Searchers.

            1492-Tuesday-   Christopher Columbus noted in his journal the use of tobacco among Indians - the first recorded reference to tobacco. "We found a man in a canoe going from Santa Maria to Fernandia. He had with him some dried leaves which are in high value among them, for a quantity of it was brought to me at San Salvador"  Of course as an Italian, Columbus would have actually written, "Abbiamo trovato un uomo in una canoa che va da Santa Maria a Fernandia. Aveva con sé alcune foglie secche che si trovano in alto valore tra loro, per un quantitativo di essa mi fu portato a San Salvador".  Note:We also saw this date as October 15. In 1493, Ramon Pane, a monk who accompanied Columbus on his second voyage, gave lengthy descriptions about the custom of taking snuff. He also described how the Indians inhaled smoke through a Y-shaped tube. Pane is usually credited with being the first man to introduce tobacco to Europe. http://www.tobacco.org/History/Tobacco_History.html

             1738-Saturday- Happy Birthday, English astronomer (born in Hanover, Germany) William Herschel, discoverer of the planet Uranus – pronounced yur an us…NOT your anus!!!. He was a successful music teacher and bandleader, playing the violin, the oboe and, later, the organ…..sometimes all at the same time.  He composed numerous musical works, including 24 symphonies and many concertos, as well as some church music….all of which are largely forgotten.  In 1773, Herschel built and began using his first telescope. With it he began a project that would continue for the rest of his life: that of systematically studying the sky – sidereal astronomy (through Earth’s rotation).  Through this study he discovered the planet Uranus in 1781, many new nebulae, clusters of stars and binary stars. He discovered  the Saturnian satellites Mimas and Enceladus  in 1789 and the Uranian satellites Titania and Oberon  in1787. He was probably the most famous astronomer of the 18th century.  He later opened a string of taverns called Herschel’s Chocolate Bars.

            1777- On a Saturday, the Continental Congress, sitting in its temporary capital of York, Pennsylvania, adopted the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union.  It took four years until the last of what would become the 13 states, Maryland, ratified the agreement.  The articles didn’t work very well and were replaced in 1789 by the Constitution.

         1806 –'Cause baby,
There ain't no mountain high enough
Ain't no valley low enough
Ain't no river wide enough
To keep me from getting to you……….Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.  Pike took a peek on a Saturday.  In the Colorado foothills of the Rocky Mountains during his second exploratory expedition, Lieutenant Zebulon Pike spotted a distant mountain peak that he described as looking "like a small blue cloud." The mountain was later named Pike's Peak in his honor. Pike’s Peak was included as a bonus with the Louisiana Purchase as Thomas  Jefferson was one of the first five hundred callers and qualified for a geographical bonus.  Geologically, the granite rock of which the mountain is made was once hot molten rock located as deep as 20 miles beneath the earth's surface. The molten rock hardened and cooled below the earth's surface as much as one billion years ago. Forces within the earth's crust pushed the rocks upward through a process called uplifting which created a dome-shaped mountain covered with a thick layer of soil and softer rock. Erosion and weathering loosened the softer layers and carried them away. Pike was ready to climb the mountain on November 24 but was forced back by a blizzard.

            1859 –Tuesday-  “ It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The final chapter of Charles Dickens, serialized novel – Charles Darnay and the Deathly Hallows……..no, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his Hogwarts sense of humor – A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens’ 12^th novel) and a meticulously researched history of the French Revolution, was published on a Tuesday in Dickens’ journal All the Year Round. Chapters were published monthly beginning in April. Of course  “"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it ws the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way." …was the opening of the novel.

            1864 – Tuesday – “Let’s go to the beach” General William T. Sherman began his expedition across Georgia by torching the industrial section of Atlanta and pulling away from his supply lines. For the next six weeks, Sherman's army, following a scorched earth policy destroyed most of Georgia before capturing the Confederate seaport of Savannah, Georgia which he presented to Abraham Lincoln as a “Christmas Present”. Lincoln was  somewhat disappointed as he was hoping for a box of Godiva chocolates. 

             1874-Sunday-  Jump for my love
Jump in and feel my touch
Jump you want to taste my kisses
In the night then
Jump, jump for my love
Jump, I know my heart can make you happy
Jump in, you know these arms
Can feel you up
Jump, you want to taste my kisses
In the night then
Jump, jump for my love…..The Pointer Sisters. Happy Birthday, August Krogh, Danish physiologist who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1920 for his discovery of the motor-regulating mechanism of capillaries -small blood vessels. Krogh performed his experiments on frogs. Just before they “croaked”, he “jumped” at the chance to inject them with with Indian ink. He demonstrated that in sample areas of resting muscle the number of visible, stained, capillaries was about 5 per square millimeter; in stimulated muscle, however, the number was increased to 190 per square millimeter.

            1876 –Wednesday- The stock ticker was unveiled at the New York Stock Exchange on this day. It livened up an otherwise ordinary Wednesday. This invention fed traders a steady stream of information.  Edward A. Calahan of the American Telegraph Company had invented the first stock telegraph printing instrument in 1863.  The distinct “click click” sound of the telegraph printing instrument eventually earned it the name of the stock ticker. Stock ticker tape became very popular also for ticker tape parades as millions of pieces of ticker tape streamed from windows to welcome heroes.  As ticker tape was replaced in the latter 20th century, computers, printers and unproductive workers were thrown from windows to welcome heroes.

         1887 – This day (a Tuesday) is certainly battery charged – see 1960 for alkaline battery. German scientist, Dr. Carl Gassner, was issued a U.S patent for the first "dry" cell. He encased the cell chemicals in a sealed zinc container. The sealed zinc shell which contained all the chemicals was also the negative electrode This included the kitchen zinc.  Gassner also patented his invention in Austria, Belgium, England, France and  Hungary in the same year. The Nation Carbide Company, later Union Carbide and Eveready, produced the first consumer dry cell battery. Later, he improved the shelf life of the battery by adding zinc chloride to the electrolyte to reduce corrosion of the zinc shell….which was very similar to those used today.

            1887 –Tuesday-  Same day as the patent for the dry cell….Happy Birthday, Georgia O'Keeffe, American painter born in Wisconsin. She is recognized as one of the great 20^th century artists for her paintings of flowers, cattle skulls, and her “inner self”. Less memorable are remarkably ugly nude photos of her taken by husband Alfred Steiglitz.

            1889 –Friday.  Alas Pedro, we hardly knew ye.  After a mere 49-year reign, Pedro II, the second and last emperor of Brazil, was deposed in a military coup. The Brazilian monarchy had been established in 1822, when Portugal's crown prince, Dom Pedro, defied his Parliament and proclaimed an independent Brazil under his rule. Pedro II had been crowned emperor in 1841. His abolition of slavery had weakened his position with the powerful planters andafter the Paraguayan War, the victorious army, now full of itself, developed an arrogant disregard for civilian leadership. A serious illness in 1887 greatly impaired Pedro's physical and mental ability. On November 16 the republic was proclaimed, and on the next day the royal family was exiled. Pedro went kaput in Paris on Dec. 5, 1891.  

            1891 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Erwin Rommel, the “Desert Fox”, perhaps Nazi Germany’s greatest general. A brilliant military strategist, Rommel was betrayed by the ego of Hitler and his sychophants in the army command both in North Africa, where he lost the pivotal battle of El Alamein to the British and Marshal Montgomery, and at Normandy where he failed to stop the Allied invasion on D Day. After a serious car accident, he was implicated in plot to kill Hitler.  He was approached to join the plotters, said no, but didn’t report the threat.  Hitler, however, did not want Germans to know that he was betrayed by the beloved "people's marshal". He was asked commit suicide and avoid the German gallows. In turn, Hitler promised to bury Rommel with full military honors as though nothing had ever happened. With no other choice, Rommel took the poison and died in 1944.

            1896-Sunday-  On a Sunday,the Niagara Falls power plant began generating electricity flowing from Niagara Falls to Buffalo, some 26 miles away A shocking, yet illuminating experience.  In October 1893, Westinghouse was awarded the contract to build the 5,000 horsepower generators for the Niagara Falls Power Company's Power House No. 1 as well as all auxiliary electrical apparatus, including exciters, measuring instruments and switching devices. Transmission of alternating current electricity (Tesla’s AC was better than Edison’s DC although the Gnus prefers ACDC’s Back in Black)  from Niagara Falls to Buffalo began on this day.

            1904-Tuesday- Now it cuts like a knife
But it feels so right
Yeah! It cuts like a knife
Oh, but it feels so right  ….Bryan Adams.   King Camp Gillette was issued a U.S. patent for his invention of a safety razor using disposable blades. The safety razor was in fact invented in 1880's by the Kampfe Brothers. Gillette was a genius of industry and marketing and while he did improve the design of the safety razor, his true invention was an inexpensive, high profit-margin stamped steel blade and a unique business model for production and sale.  

            1925 – Sunday - The premier of the original, silent movie version of, The Phantom of the Opera, Directed by- Edward Sedgwick and starring Lon Chaney.
Lon Chaney. Another version came out in 1942 starring Nelson Eddy (!!!!!!!!.....of Jeanette MacDonald and  Knickerbocker Holiday fame, and Claude Rains. In 2004 another popped up but this was based on the stage musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber.  

            1926 - Network radio was born on a Monday. 24 stations carried the first broadcast.  After four years of increasing success in broadcasting, AT&T cleverly decided that it no longer wanted to run a radio network. In May, 1926, it transferred WEAF and the network operations into a new company, the National Broadcasting Company, which took over the Broadcasting Company of America assets, and merged them with the radio group's fledgling network operations. In September, 1926 NBC's formation was publicized in full-page ads that appeared in numerous publications: Announcing the National Broadcasting Company, Inc. The new network's debut broadcast followed on this day. The program was a 4½-hour broadcast from the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City. Two remote pickups were also on the program. Opera star Mary Garden sang from Chicago and Will Rogers presented a humorous monologue from Independence, Kansas. Charles Lindbergh, pre Spirit of St. Louis, was among the celebrities who attended the broadcast.

             1941 –Saturday-  SS chief Heinrich Himmler ordered the arrest and deportation to concentration camps of all homosexuals in Germany……. with the exception of certain top homosexual Nazi officials.

            1942 – Sunday – Eleven months after the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war, the four day naval Battle of Guadalcanal ended in a decisive Allied victory. In a series of night engagements, the Japanese had lost two battleships, one heavy cruiser, three destroyers and eleven combat transports, not to mention 5,000 infantrymen drowned, and several thousand naval casualties. From this point on, the Japanese would never stop retreating in the Pacific.

            1943 –Monday Same day – see 1941 - German SS leader Heinrich Himmler ordered that Gypsies were to be put "on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps."

            1956 - Thursday - Love Me Tender, the first Elvis Presley film, premiered. Actually one of Elvis’ better movies, as opposed to Clambake, Elvis played Clint Reno, one of the Reno brothers who stayed home while his brother went to fight in the Civil War for the Confederate army. Of course Elvis married his brother’s (played by Richard Egan) fiancé (played by Deborah Paget) and the fun began. And yes, Elvis took time out from marrying and shooting and fighting to sing a few songs, notably the title song which became # 1 on the Billboard Charts this week.  Also in the movie were Neville Brand who became a favorite TV villain, notably Al Capone in the Untouchables, and Richard Drury, who starred in TV’s The Virginian.  

             1959 – Sunday Attention Truman Capote:  On this day four members of the Herbert Clutter Family Herbert, his wife Bonnie and their two youngest children, Nancy 16 and Kenyon, 15 were murdered at their farm outside Holcomb, Kansas. Writer Capote turned the tragedy of the family massacre into his masterwork, In Cold Blood and actually tried to make the brutal murderers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith into sympathetic figures.

            1960 –Tuesday-  Tired of batteries running down?  Marsal Kordesch and Lewis Urry of patented the alkaline dry-cell. They assigned the patent to the Union Carbide Corporation, the manufacturer of Eveready batteries. The alkaline dry cell lasts much longer as the zinc anode corrodes less rapidly under basic conditions than under acidic conditions. Also note that Al Kaline (Alkaline) was a Hall of Fame right fielder for Baseball’s Detroit Tigers during the 1950’s and 60’s.

            1965 –Monday-   On a sunny Monday, Craig Breedlove, driving his jet-powered Spirit of America--Sonic 1 vehicle, sped up to 600.601 mph over the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, and set a new land-speed record, in addition to leaving the state troopers hiding behind a billboard speed trap far behind.  Breedlove was also the first driver to break the 400 mph and 500 mph land-speed barriers.  The current land speed record is held by Andy Green at 760 mph.

            1966 –Tuesday-  Gemini 12, crewed by James Lovell of later Apollo 13 fame and Buzz Aldrin, second man on the Moon – Apollo 11, splashed down safely in the Atlantic Ocean. It was the final Gemini-mission. The major objectives of this mission were nearly the same as for Gemini 11, but they were more successful as it docked with an Agena booster.  In preparation for this mission, new, improved restraints were added to the outside of the capsule, and a new technique-underwater training-was introduced, which would become a staple of all future space-walk simulation. Aldrin took three space walks, the last of which resulted in a mutoid fungus attaching to his space suit. The mutoid fungus returned to Earth and evolved into Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.  It was the 10th manned Gemini flight, the 18th manned American flight and, including X-15 flights over 100 km, the 26th spaceflight of all time.

            1966 – Tuesday- When the truth is found to be lies
and all the joy within you dies
don't you want somebody to love
don't you need somebody to love
wouldn't you love somebody to love
you better find somebody to love…Grace Slick. Same day as the Gemini 12 splashdown, the Jefferson Airplane recorded the seminal, Somebody to Love. Grace Slick had left the group Great Society and joined the Airplane.  Slick also brought two songs from her former band, the Great Society: Somebody to Love and her self-composed White Rabbit. Both songs, as well as the new lineup, were featured on the Airplane’s second album, Surrealistic Pillow (1967).

            1969 –Saturday-  Food history and another few tons of fat for the obese as Dave Thomas opened the first Wendy's fast food restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. Thomas named the business after his daughter Melinda "Wendy" Thomas (a nickname coined by her brothers and sisters).

            1971 – Monday - Intel released world's first commercial single-chip microprocessor, the 4004 invented by Intel engineers Federico Faggin, Ted Hoff, and Stan Mazor The idea of a computer on a single chip had been described in the literature as far back as 1952. The Intel 4004 chip took the integrated circuit down one step further by placing all the parts that made a computer think (i.e. central processing unit, memory, input and output controls) on one small chip. Almost all modern products use chip technology, they are a chip off the old block.

            1988 Tuesday- - The Soviet Union launched its first space shuttle, Buran ("Snowstorm"), unmanned, on its first and only orbital flight. Russia authorized its shuttle program in 1976 in response to the U.S. Space Shuttle program. (Coincidently, it looked exactly like the U.S shuttles.....but hey, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery......not to mention espionage) Buran's only orbital flight was unmanned, as the life support system had not been checked out and the CRT displays had no software installed. The Buran was launched on the l Energiya booster into a 250 km orbit. The flight lasted 2 orbits in 206 minutes before a reentry and a safe automatic touchdown at Tyuratum. Afterwards, the project's funding was cut, and eventually cancelled in1993. Two other partially completed Buran shuttles were dismantled in November 1995.

            1990 –Thursday-  Meanwhile, with real shuttles (not cheap, poorly performing Soviet copies) the Space Shuttle Atlantis was launched with flight STS-38. The launch had been postponed since July due to a liquid hydrogen leak found on the orbiter Columbia.  It was a Department of Defense mission which meant it was a super duper secret mission and astronauts, Richard Covey and Frank Culbertson had to wear fake moustaches and glasses along with fuzzy blue wigs so no one would recognize them.

            1990 –Thursday-  And tragically, on the same day as the shuttle launch, 1990 - Producers acknowledged that singers Milli Vanilli, ( the lip moving, hip hopping, Fab Morvan and Rob Pilatus.) who won the 1990 "Best New Artist" Grammy Award, did not, how shall we put it….sing on their album.  Perhaps they waved their arms and lip synched? The Grammy was withdrawn, and Arista Records dropped the act from its roster and deleted their album and its masters from their catalog, taking hit album Girl You Know It's True (but of course it wasn’t true) out of print.

            2007 – Thursday – Bangladeshians were again reminded that it’s not good to live below sea level as Cyclone Sidr, equivalent in intensity to a high-end Category 4 hurricane,  hit Bangladesh, killing an estimated 5000 people and destroyed the world's largest mangrove forest.  The tropical storm code-named sidr smashed Bangladesh's south and southwestern regions and  hit the eastern part of the Sunderbans mangrove  forest with a speed of up to 220 kmph and seven feet high tidal surge.

16.     42 B.C – Happy Birthday, Tiberius, the second emperor of ancient Rome, succeeding the powerful Caesar Augustus. Tiberius's mother Livia divorced her own husband to marry Augustus, and the emperor adopted Tiberius (then aged 46) in 4 A.D.        1384 – In a bit of medieval confusion,  Jadwiga was crowned King of Poland Jadwiga was a woman. She was ten years old at the time.

            1620 – “Amaizing!” The first corn (maize) found in the U.S. by British settlers was discovered in Provincetown, Mass., by sixteen desperately hungry Pilgrims led by Myles Standish, William Bradford, Stephen Hopkins, and Edward Tilley, while searching for a Domino’s Pizza at a place they named Corn Hill. The food came from a previously harvested batch belonging to a local Indian tribe. This corn provided a much needed supply of food which saw the Pilgrims through their first winter in the New World.

           1632 – King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden kaput.  He was killed at the The Battle of Lützen, as Catholics and Protestants fought one of the most crucial battles of the Thirty Years War.  Gustavus  had landed on German soil in 1630, and at once went into battle with the Catholic Austrian army. On this day he thought he had a chance to make a surprise attack on the Austrian forces  at Lutzen. He led a charge against a superior force (not smart) and was wounded by gun fire in arm and back, and then immediately run through with a dozen swords.

            1776 - Hessian Lieutenant General Wilhelm von Knyphausen and a force of 3,000 Hessian mercenaries and 5,000 Redcoats captured Fort Washington (and 3,000 Colonial soldiers) at the northern end and highest point of Manhattan Island – now known as Washington Heights. The site is north of the George Washington Bridge (178th St.) at at the corner of Fort Washington Avenue and 183rd Street. George Washington would have sent reinforcements but there was a transport workers strike that day and the 1 and 9 subway/elevated lines were not running.

            1821 - Missouri trader William Becknell arrived in Santa Fe, New Mexico over a route that became known as the Santa Fe Trail. Of course he ate fruits, berries and nuts on the way and that was Santa Fe Trail Mix.  From 1821 to 1846, it was actually an international trail, passing through  Mexico.  With the conclusion of the Mexican War and the Treaty of Guadeloupe-Hidalgo, New Mexico became part of the U.S.  In 1821, the eastern terminus was Franklin Missouri and textiles and hardware went west and silver and mules were traded east.

             1841 – A patent for a. life preserver of cork - Cork, which comes from the bark of the cork oak - was issued to Napoleon E. Guerin of New York City for his "Improvement in Buoyant Dresses or Life-Preservers." It was of the form of a jacket. Hence, "life jacket", although cork could be inserted into any type of clothing……the possibilities are intriguing….cork undies, cork hats, cork pants…..  Two years later, Guerin received a patent for an egg incubator. No, he never got around to patenting an egg incubator that floats.

          1901- The first American racer to exceed the speed of a mile a minute, that’s 60 mph - was  A.C. Bostwick on the Ocean Parkway racetrack in Brooklyn, New York. During a race sponsored by the Long Island Automobile Club, Bostwick reached an average speed of 63.83 mph along a one-mile straightaway on the course, thus completing the mile in 56.4 seconds. So Bostwick’s speed just about equaled what people currently reach racing from traffic light to traffic light nowadays

            1904 – Englishman, John Ambrose Fleming, working as a consultant for the Marconi Company,  invented the vacuum tube. A vacuum tube is a sealed glass or metal-ceramic enclosure used in electronic circuitry to control the flow of electrons between the metal electrodes sealed inside the tubes. The air inside the tubes is removed by a vacuum

            1907 - Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory collectively entered the United States as Oklahoma, the 46th state. Oklahoma, with a name derived from the Choctaw Indian words okla, meaning "people," and humma, meaning "red." On the other hand,  “hummina hummina hummina is what Ralph Cramden (Jackie Gleason) said in the TV show The Honeymooners when he didn’t know what to say.

         1942- Work began on an experimental atomic pile to investigate the world's first artificial nuclear chain reaction.  For those out there who suffer from piles, this is a frightening thought.

             1943 - Happy Birthday, James W. Mitchell, African-American chemist, born in North Carolina,  who is best known for advancing the accuracy of trace element analyses. Trace element analyses, for your next cocktail party conversation, is the study of  elemental abundances at trace levels in a wide variety of geological, biological, environmental and industrial samples.

            1946- The discovery of the elements Americium and Curium was announcedium.  These were elements Numbers 95 and 96.  Curium is intensely radioactive; it is about 3,000 times as radioactive as radium . It is also very toxic when absorbed into the body because it accumulates in the bones and disrupts the formation of red blood cells. Curium-242 and curium-244 are used in the space program as a heat source .Curium has not been found to occur naturally; it was the third transuranium element to be synthesized. it was named for Pierre and Marie Curie , the noted pioneers in the study of radioactivity. Americium is also an artificially produced radioactive chemical element; it is a silver-white metal thought to have either a loose-packed cubic or a close-packed double hexagonal crystalline structure. it is used in industrial measuring devices, radiology, and household smoke detectors.  Americium is he fourth transuranium element to be synthesized.  Got itium?

            1849- A Russian court sentenced author Fyodor Dostoevsky to death – not for writing unremittingly gloomy novels such as Crime and Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov, but for his allegedly antigovernment activities linked to a radical intellectual group. His execution was stayed at the last minute. It was literally the last minute. He was actually in front of the firing squad when he got the reprieve,  and he was sent to a Siberian labor camp.

          1864 – One of several dates this week given for the start of Union Gen. William T. Sherman and his troops "March to the Sea" during the Civil War. Sherman left his supply lines behind and the army lived off the land (that they didn’t destroy) as they marched across Georgia.  Sherman would present the city of Savannah to President Abraham Lincoln as a “Christmas present”

            1957 – Cannibal/serial murderer Ed Gein, killed his final victim.  Gein, who may have  been the inspiration for the characters of Norman Bates in Psycho and serial killer Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs, shot and killed Bernice Worden of Plainfield Wisconsin.  Her son, a Deputy Sheriff suspicious of Gein, led police to his home where they discovered organs in the refrigerator, a heart sat on the stove, and heads had been made into soup bowls. Apparently, Gein had kept various organs from his grave digging and murders as keepsakes and for decoration. He had also used human skin to upholster chairs. Although suspected of many murders, he was only charged with two.  Unfortunately, he was found insane and escaped the electric chair.

            1965 - The Soviet Union launched the Venera 3 space probe toward Venus, the first spacecraft to reach the surface of another planet.  The mission of this spacecraft was to land on the Venusian surface and possibly bring back to Earth Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was thought to be the Queen of the Amazons living on Venus according to the 1958 move, Queen of Outer Space.  The station impacted Venus on March 1, 1966, making Venera 3 the first spacecraft to impact on the surface of another planet. However, the communications systems had failed before planetary data could be returned.  Probably sabotaged by Zsa Zsa and her subjects.

            1973 - The final Skylab mission was launchedium.   Skylab 4, carrying a crew of three astronauts, was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla., on an 84-day mission that remained the longest American space flight for over two decades (until Norm Thagard broke it aboard Mir in 1995 and Shannon Lucid again in Feb 2002-Sep 2003). The Skylab III crew, Gerald P. Carr, William R. Pogue and Edward C. Gibson, maintained their physical condition by walking treadmills and riding an on-board stationary bicycle. Note: to athletes, it is a bad idea to take water and spit it out while on a treadmill in a space craft.  Among the thousands of experiments conducted during this flight, the astronauts took four space walks, including one on Christmas Day to observe the comet Kohoutek. After 1214 orbits, the crew returned to Earth, splashing down on Feb. 8 1974.

17.      No more puniums about elements and eventiums.

          1790 - Happy Birthday, August F. Möbius  German astronomer, mathematician and author. He is best known for his work in analytic geometry and in topology, especially remembered as one of the discoverers of the Möbius strip, which he had discovered in 1858. A Möbius strip is a two-dimensional surface with only one side. 

          1906 - Happy Birthday,  Soichiro Honda the Japanese engineer, race car driver and industrialist who founded the Honda Motor Company, motor cycle and car manufacturer.

           1869- The Suez Canal officially opened connecting the Mediterranean and Red Seas.

           1966- Over 60,000 meteoroids fell over Arizona.

           1967 - Surveyor 6 made a six-second flight from its landing site on the moon. It was the first lift-off from the lunar surface.

           1970 - a U.S. patent was issued for the computer mouse - an "X-Y Position Indicator for a Display System" The inventor was Doug Engelbart. In the lab, he and his colleagues had called it a "mouse," after its tail-like cable.

            1978 - Mass suicide in Jonestown.  People's Temple leader Jim Jones led hundreds of his followers in a mass murder-suicide drinking poison cool-aid at their agricultural commune in Guyana

18.     326 – The original St. Peter's Basilica in Rome was consecrated.  It was built on the site of  a circus built by the Emperor, Caligula, The Emperor Nero was especially fond of this circus and arranged many spectacles in it, among which the martyrdoms of the Christians. The current St. Peters, designed by Bramante and Michelangelo is on the site of the original.

            1307 - According to legend, William Tell, who may or many not have existed, may or may not have shot an apple (or water melon, or kumquat, or cantaloupe) shoots an apple off of his son's (who may or may not have existed)  head (which may or may not have existed depending on whether there was a son depending on whether there was a William Tell).

            1421 – Demonstrating the risks of living in a country below sea level, a seawall at the Zuiderzee, an inlet of the North Sea dike broke, flooding 72 villages and killing about 10,000 people in the Netherlands

             1477- English printer William Caxton, produced the first book printed in England, Dictes or Sayengis of the Philosophres (Sayings of the Philosophers). A few years earlier, in Europe, he had learned the art of printing in Cologne, Germany. In Bruges, Belgiumin partnership with a copyist and bookseller, Colard Mansion, he produced the first book in the English language, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, translated (as were most of his books) from French by Caxton himself. Caxton is known to have printed about 100 books, many dealing with themes of chivalry. He was the translator, from French, Latin, and Dutch, of about one third of the books that he printed, and for some he wrote original prologues, epilogues, and additions.

            1626 -  The current St. Peter's Basilica in Rome – see 326 same day for original –was consecrated

             1789- Happy Birthday, Louis Daguerre (brother of Double Daguerre), French painter and stage designer who invented the daguerreotype- named after himself-, the first practical and commercially successful photographic process. On January 7, 1839, Daguerre show his images – on highly polished silver-plated sheets of copper to the members of the French Académie des Sciences.

           1820- Antarctica was discovered by U.S. Navy Captain Nathaniel Palmer, who was looking for seals and whales, not a continent.  On the sailing ship, Hero, and only 19 years old, he was dispatched from the sealing grounds in the South Shetlands by his commanding officer to search for land to the south.  In January, 1772, Captain James Cook and his crew  had  become the first men to cross the Antarctic Circle.

          1832- Remember how Henry Hudson and so many other explorers were looking for the “Northwest Passage” that would link Europe with the Orient?  It was a bit further north than everyone thought. So,  Happy Birthday, Adolf Erik Nordenskiöld, Swedish geologist, mineralogist, geographer, whose explorations included the first ship voyage from Scandinavia in 1878 across the Asiatic Arctic through the Northeast Passage. Cruise highlights included; looking a snow, being very cold, and  getting stuck in ice floes.  On board entertainment featured Joan Rivers as Scarlet O’Hara in Gone With the Wind.

            1839- Happy Birthday, August Kundt, German physicist who in 1866 developed a method to determine the velocity of sound in gases and solids.  Possibly the initial determination of velocity of sound and gases was made after a healthy dinner of baked beans.

            1883 - It's about time! Standard Time in the U.S. went into effect at noon for the first time due a decision of, of all entities,  the American Railway Association. The need for a system of standardized time was evident because the actual local time,or "sun time" constantly changes as one moves either east or west. By the 1880’s there was large scale train travel and the situation raised problems for railway lines and passengers trying to synchronize schedules in different cities…….sort of like with airplanes nowadays…. The system adopted was first proposed by Charles F. Dowd, a school principal (figures) in New York state. As a result of “Standard Time”, North America was divided into four time zones, fifteen degrees of longitude, and one hour of "standard time" apart. Sir Stanford Fleming proposed the extension of the Dowd system to the whole world with 24 time zones. 

        1897 – Happy Birthday, Patrick Blackett, British physicist and Nobel Prize winner in 1948 for his discoveries in the field of cosmic radiation, which he accomplished primarily with cloud-chamber photographs that revealed the way in which a stable atomic nucleus can be disintegrated by bombarding it with alpha particles – usually helium nuclei.  This resulted in the stable atomic nucleus getting a “headache” for which it had to be bombarded with alpha particles of aspirin.

            1906 – Eye’ll be seeing you…..Happy Birthday, George Wald, American chemist and Nobel Prize winner for Medicine and Physiology in 1967 for his work involving the retina, vitamin A as a component of the retina, and absorption of light by pigments in the retina. As far as Wald was concerned, “the eyes have it”. 

             1916 – The Battle of the Somme during WW I, a prime example of senseless slaughter caused by stubborn, short sighted and sometimes just stupid generals, had begun in July, 1916. At the end of the first day, 20,000 British soldiers were dead and 40,000 wounded. It was the single heaviest day of casualties in British military history. On this day, five months Douglas Haig, commander of the British Expeditionary Force in World War I, calls off the Battle of the Somme in France after nearly five months of mass slaughter. Except for its effect of diverting German troops from the Battle of Verdun, the offensive was a miserable disaster. It amounted to a total gain of just 125 square miles for the Allies, with more than 600,000 British and French soldiers killed, wounded, or missing in action.

             1923- Happy birthday, Alan Sheperd, first American in space. Named as one of the nation's original seven Mercury astronauts in 1959, Sheperd became the first American into space in  May  of 1961, just three weeks after the launch of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who on April 12, 1961, became the first human space traveler on a one-orbit flight lasting 108 minutes. Sheperd’s considerably shorter flight on top of a  Redstone rocket for the 15-minute suborbital flight that took him and his Freedom 7 Mercury capsule 115 miles in altitude and 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral, Fla.. Shepard made his second space flight as spacecraft commander on Apollo 14 from January 31 - February 9, 1971  where, among scientific experiments, he became the first to hit a golf ball on the Moon. He made a one-handed swing with a six iron.  He was one of only 12 humans who walked on the Moon.

                 1926 - George Bernard Shaw refuses to accept the money for his Nobel Prize in Literature – for among others Arms and the Man, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Man and Superman , saying, "I can forgive Alfred Nobel for inventing dynamite, but only a fiend in human form could have invented the Nobel Prize."

             1928- Mickey Mouse debuted Cartoon star Mickey Mouse appeared in Steamboat Willie, an animated short produced by Walt Disney, at the Colony Theatre in New York City.  Steamboat Willie was the first fully synchronized sound cartoon ever produced, and Walt Disney himself provided Mickey's squeaky voice. The rodent  went on to star in over 120 different cartoons. Although Professor Sy Yentz occasionally embellishes the entries (hence “factual and factual”) - Mickey was born out of necessity when Walt discovered he had lost the rights to his previous character, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. Really! Were we thisclose to the “Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Club”?

            1963 – Telephones had used rotary dials since 1891 when Almon Strowger patented the twin inventions of the automatic telephone exchange and the pulse-driven telephone in the home but on this day, the first telephone in the U.S. with push buttons instead of a rotary dial was placed in commercial service in Carnegie and Greensburg, Pa. This was a Touch-Tone telephone with 10 push buttons, manufactured by the Western Electric Manufacturing and supply Unit of the Bell System. The push button service was optional and offered for an extra charge.

            1886 – Chester Arthur kaput. Former President Chester A. Arthur, who had become President following the assassination of James Garfield in 1881,  died of complications from a debilitating and fatal kidney ailment known as Bright’s Disease (nephritis). 

            1970- Nobel Prize winner, Linus Pauling (of Peter, Pauling, and Mary), American quantum chemist and biochemist, declared that large doses of Vitamin C could ward off the common cold. He proposed that regular intake of vitamin C in amounts far higher than the officially sanctioned RDA (Recommended Daily Allowance) could help prevent and shorten the duration of the common cold. Vitamin C, also known as ascorbic acid, is a water-soluble vitamin. Unlike most mammals, humans do not have the ability to make their own vitamin C. Therefore, we must obtain vitamin C through our diet.He concluded that the optimal daily intake of vitamin C for most people is 2.3 grams to 10 grams daily…..and after ten years, they turn into an orange.

            1978 – “Whatever you do, don’t drink the Kool-Ade”. Addled People's Temple leader Jim Jones led hundreds of his pathetic, misguided followers in a mass murder-suicide at their agricultural commune in remote northwestern Guyana. Jones was being investigated by Congressman Leo Ryan of California.  Several members of the cult asked Ryan to rescue them.  Jones had Ryan and his party murdered and the mass suicide/murders followed shortly after. The final death toll was 913, including 276 children.

            1987 – A subway nightmare as inn London, 31 people died in a fire at the city's busiest underground (subway) station at King's Cross St Pancras.  The flash fire engulfed an old wooden escalator. A discarded match apparently ignited grease and rubbish in a machine room beneath escalator serving the Picadilly Line, even though smoking was banned on the London Underground after a fire at the Oxford Circus station a few years earlier.

            1999 –At College Station Texas, 12 students were killed and 27 injured at Texas A&M University when a massive pile of logs intended to be a bonfire for the pep rally for the “big game” against the University of Texas, collapsed.

            2004 - Bill Clinton's presidential library opened in Little Rock, Ark. Among the volumes were: Bill’s Little Black Book of Interns, The True Meaning of “Is”, The More I Travel, the Less I See Hilary, and A Scandal a Day….It’s Tough to Keep Track of Them.

            2004 – And on the same day as the Clinton Library opening, Britain outlawed fox hunting in England and Wales. Fox hunting has been described by Oscar Wilde as “the unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable”.

 19.      1493- On his second voyage, Columbus discovered the island of Puerto Rico. He named the island San Juan Bautista, and the principal town Puerto Rico (rich port) because of its potential.

           1600 – Happy Birthday, Charles I, English king.  Son of James I and the second of the Stuart kings, Charles succeeded in antagonizing both nobility and Parliament.  His disagreements with Parliament led to the English Civil War in which Charles “Caveliers” were defeated by Parliament’s Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads (sounds like a good name for a rock band).  Charles was beheaded in 1849.

                 1620- The Mayflower arrived off Cape Cod, Mass. Pilgrims began lining up for the ferry to Martha’s Vineyard.  Actually, they would land  two day’s later.

         1711- Happy Birthday,  Mikhail Lomonosov, Russian poet and metallurgist (in fact the only poet-metallurgist that we know of).

            1739- John Winthrop, the great great grandson of Massachusetts Bay Colony’s first governor, looked at the Sun through a telescope and saw spots before his eyes. He looked again and saw that they were sunspots.

           1831- Happy Birthday, James A. Garfield, 20th President of the U.S. By a margin of only 10,000 popular votes, Republican Garfield, after being nominated on the 36th ballot, defeated the Democratic nominee, Gen. Winfield Scott Hancock. Garfield was assassinated by a combination of the bullet fired by Charles Guiteau and conspicuously inept medical care in 1881.

          1863 –In just 272 words, President Lincoln gave one of the most famous speeches in American history at the dedication of the military cemetery at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. The crowd had just listened to a two hour speech by actor Edwin Booth – older brother of soon to be presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth- before Lincoln approached the podium. Abraham Lincoln’s address lasted just two minutes. Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address -  “And my address in Washington is 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. but I don’t know my address in Gettysburg……aside to aide – “Bob, where are we staying in Gettysburg”.  Fortunately, Abraham Lincoln cast aside those opening remarks in favor of “Four score and seven years ago….”

            1872- Sometimes ideas are ahead of their times and sometimes they are not made into something practical.  The first adding machine was  patented today.  It was called a "calculating machine," by inventor E.D Barbour but, alas, it was not practical- tha