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The Dangers of Chewing Bubble Gum in Class.

Another busy month.  Birthdays for Martin Luther King, George Washington Carver, Jack London, Richard Nixon and our favorite president, the glamorous Millard Fillmore . January comes from Latin Januarius, after Janus the two-faced Roman god who was able to look back into the past and at the same time, into the future.  Janus also took care of the beginnings of all undertakings.  The January Full Moon is called the Wolf Moon Did you know that there is scarcely any difference between the Chinese and Aztec Zodiacs?

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A guid New Year to ane an' a' and mony may ye see" Which translates to English from Scots as A good New Year to one and all, and many may you see.

New Year’s Day - The world’s most widely celebrated holiday.  The celebration of the new year is the oldest of all holidays. It was first observed in ancient Babylon about 4000 years ago, during the premiere of  Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin Eve. Dick was twenty two at the time.  In the years around 2000 BC, the Babylonian New Year began with the first New Moon after the first day of spring, the Vernal Equinox . The Babylonian new year celebration lasted for eleven days! That’s a long time to stand in Times Square!  The Romans continued to observe the new year in late March, but their calendar was continually tampered with by various emperors so that the calendar soon became out of synchronization with the path of the sun. A calendar correction by  the Roman senate, in 153 BC, declared January 1 to be the beginning of the new year. But egotistical Roman leaders couldn’t leave well enough alone so tampering continued until Julius Caesar, in 46 BC, established what has come to be known as the Julian Calendar. It again established January 1 as the new year. But in order to synchronize the calendar with the sun, Caesar had to let the previous year last for 445 days. A few hundred years later, as Christianity became more widespread, the early church began having its own religious observances concurrently with many of the pagan celebrations, and New Year’s Day “joined the party” so to speak. So who celebrates first? Since the Earth is divided into twenty four time zones, the new year moves progressively around the globe which is why we always found it amusing to see people in Hollywood celebrating New Year’s on “live” television shows when the ball descended in New York City.  The first time zone to usher in the New Year is just west of the International Date Line. (the international date line is “Hi hot stuff, what’s your sign”)  At that time the time zone to the east of the Date Line is 23 hours behind, still in the previous day. The central Pacific Ocean island nation of Kiribati – the same Kiribati that switched time zones and lost a  day in 1994 – see December 31- claims that its easternmost landmass, uninhabited Caroline Island, is the first to bring in the New Year.

            1431 –Saturday-  Borgia, Borgia,
The whole day through
Just an old sweet song
Keeps Borgia on my mind……..with apologies to Ray Charles…….Happy Birthday, Pope Alexander VI, the “Borgia Pope” – 1492 – 1503.  Alexander (Rodrigo Borgia of Spain) was the father of Cesare Borgia and Lucretia Borgia (he had four children in all) and is remembered more for his sordid personal life than his support of Renaissance art and attempts to restore order to the anarchic city of Rome.

            1449 –Monday-  And speaking of the Reniassance, Happy Birthday, Lorenzo di Medici, Italian banker, statesman and politician. Called “Il Magnifico”, Lorenzo was de facto ruler of Florence and he made Florence the most powerful state in Italy. Many Renaissance artists worked at his court, including Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Andy Warhol.  Niccolò Machiavelli, also from Florence called Lorenzo 'the greatest patron of literature and art that any prince has ever been'. He went kaput  at age forty three in 1492, the same year that RodrigoBorgia became Pope Alexander VI, the same year Ferdinand and Isabella drove the Muslims from Spain, and the same year Columbus discovered America.  

            1660 –Thursday “This morning (we living lately in the garret,) I rose, put on my suit with great skirts, having not lately worn any other, clothes but them. Went to Mr. Gunning's chapel…………..” - Samuel Pepys started his famous diary. Pepys (rhymes with “peeps”) was twenty seven when he started the diary which ran through 1669. The diary has proven to be an unparalleled insight into the lives, trends and thoughts of seventeenth century London including the great fire of London in 1666, the plague, and the restoration of King Charles II.

            1735 –Saturday- Revere ware (yes he was a silversmith too). Happy Birthday, Paul Revere member of Sons of Liberty and participant in Boston Tea Party and famous for his”1 if by land, 2 if by sea” ride - at 10 pm on the night of April 18, 1775, Revere received instructions from Dr. Joseph Warren to ride to Lexington to warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams of the British approach to arrest them - . What did Revere wear?  Revere was immortalized by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.

“Listen my children and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere…”  Also riding that night was William Dawes but somehow Longfellow failed to write The Riding Clause of William Dawes.

            1797 –Sunday-  Albany, situated on the west bank of the Hudson River, about 225 km/140 mi north of New York City, became the capital of New York state, replacing New York City.  The State legislature had first met in Albany in 1780.  Surprisingly, considering the miserable weather, Albany is the fourth oldest city (behind Santa Fe, St. Augustine, and Hampton, Virginia), and the second oldest state capital (behind Santa Fe) in the United States.

            1801-Thursday-  The first asteroid, Ceres, was discovered by Italian astronomer and Theatine monk, Guiseppe Piazzi of Palermo. He found Ceres, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Piazzi named it Ceres Ferdinandea, in honor of Sicily’s patron Roman goddess (of agriculture), and his patron, the king. Ceres revolves around the Sun in 4.6 years and has a diameter of about 960 km (600 miles). The discovery of Ceres followed that of the planet Uranus, made in 1781 by the British astronomer William Herschel. Piazzi's discovery confirmed the so-called "Titius-Bode's law", which assumed the existence of a "fifth planet" between the orbit of Mars and Jupiter. Of course the “fifth planet” is in thousands of pieces called asteroids but that would be quibbling. Now with the demotion of Pluto to dwarf planet, Ceres has been promoted from asteroid to dwarf planet. So now it’s Pluto’s equal.   Stay tuned….when we hit seven dwarf planets, we will have a Snow White comet.  

            1803 – An oxymoron – Haitian Independence. Two months after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte's colonial forces, Jean-Jacques Dessalines proclaimed the independence of Saint-Domingue, and renamed it Haiti after its original Arawak name. Setting a precedent for the ultimate abuse of power by all Haitian governments to follow, later that year, Dessalines merrily proclaimed himself Emperor Jacques I. He was killed putting down a revolt two years later.

            1808 –Friday-  The importation of slaves into the United States was banned. As part of a compromise during the creation of the U.S Constitution. Congress had to postpone  banning the trade until 1808. Although the Constitution prohibited Congress from abolishing the slave trade individual states were free to take that initiative whenever they pleased. New Jersey and Rhode Island led the way in 1787, with Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York soon following. By 1806, South Carolina was the only state that had not restricted the slave trade

            1810-Monday-  Happy Birthday, Charles Ellet Jr. , American engineer who built the first wire-cable suspension bridge in America, across the Schuylkill River at Fairmont, Penn., near Philadelphia. Ellet was shot and died of his wounds at the Battle of Memphis during the Civil War in 1862.

            1818 –Thursday- Twenty year old,  Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus was published. Frankenstein was begun in the summer of 1816, and finished over the course of 1817, when Mary and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, were living near Windsor, England. The novel appeared in three volumes and was published by the London publishing house of Harding, Mavor & Jones. It was issued anonymously, with a preface written for Mary by husband Percy. It was published in an edition of just 500 copies. The novel had been previously rejected by Percy Bysshe Shelley's publisher, Charles Ollier and by Byron's publisher John Murray.

            1859-Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Michael J. Owens, American glass manufacturer who invented the automatic glass bottle making machine. In Toledo, Ohio, his mechanization of the glass-blowing process eliminated child labor from glass-bottle factories. In 1904 he had a machine capable of producing four bottles per second. Owens’ machines could be built with from six to twenty arms, each blowing a bottle. We, of course know many famous bottles;  The Bottle of Waterloo, the Bottle of Gettysburg, the Bottle of the Bulge………

            1863 –Thursday- Fifty five years after the importation of slaves was banned,  President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation freeing all slaves in the Confederacy.

            1864 –Friday-  Happy Birthday,  Alfred Stieglitz, American photographer who was instrumental over his fifty-year career in making photography an acceptable art form alongside painting and sculpture. He was married to artist Georgia O’Keefe. Stieglitz’ photographs of the flatiron building in New York City are among Professor Sy Yentz favorite photos.

            1876-Saturday- Happy Birthday, Harriet Brooks, Canadian nuclear physicist. She worked with Ernest Rutherford a man who was ahead of his time in his support for women working in science. In 1903 in England, she became the first woman to study at the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. She spent 1906 and 1907 in Paris working with the Marie Curie, before returning to Canada and working with Rutherford once again. Radiation of course would eventually result in giant mutant animals including lizards, caterpillars, and a scary looking Madonnalike creature, who would attack the city of Tokyo.  Brooks studied the 'emanations' from the radioactive element radium. She concluded that the emanation was a gas, and decided that its atoms were a little smaller than those of its radium 'parent'. The gas eventually came to be called radon. She was also first person to realize that one element can change into another. Like her contemporary, Marie Curie, she died of leukemia caused by working with radioactive materials.

            1892 -Friday Ellis Island opened to begin processing immigrants into the United States. Ellis Island, a small three acre island just off southern Manhattan in New York City, had been known in the 1600s as Gull Island by the Mohegan tribe. After being discovered for its rich oyster beds in 1628, Dutch settlers renamed it Oyster Island. Following the hanging of one “Anderson the Pirate” in 1765, the island was again renamed, this time known as Gibbet Island after the instrument used to hang him. Finally on January 20, 1785, Samuel Ellis purchased the property and gave it his name, which remains the name of the island till today. The island was purchased by the federal government in 1808.  The island was increased to 14 acres using landfill in preparation for its use as an immigration center.  Oh yes, the first immigrant to be processed was fifteen year old Annie Moore of County Cork in Ireland.

             1896-Wednesday German scientist, Wilhelm Röntgen  continued publicizing his discovery of x-rays by  sending copies of his manuscript and some of his x-ray photographs to several famous physicists and friends, including Lord Kelvin in Glasgow and Henre Poincare in Paris. Rontgen had originally announced the discovery locally on December 28. Rontgen had found invisible rays that could go through black paper, and later, other materials, since he didn’t know what they were, he called them X-rays.

            1898 –Saturday- Ah New York New York big city of dreams
And everything in New York ain't always what it seems
You might get fooled if you come from out of town
But I'm down by law and I know my way around, too much
Ah too many people, too much -- a ha hah
Too much, too many people, too much, rrrrrrrah!.....Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five…….Happy birthday New York City. The five boroughs of New York became the city of New York this day. It was called ‘the consolidation’ and the five boroughs were fused into The Big Apple.  To this day residents of Manhattan consider themselves superior to those of the “outer boroughs”.  Everyone else looks down on the Bronx and as for Staten Island?  Well they still milk cows and take in the harvest don’t they? Whenever natives from the other boroughs go to Manhattan, they announce they are “going to the City”.  (Richmond). Queens, of  course is impossible to navigate – they have 67 Road next to 67 Street next to 67 Place, next to 67 Avenue and none of the road/place/avenue/streets are straight and no one plows the snow for them in the winter anyway.  Most of the residents of Queens are people who got lost trying to travel through it.  Brooklyn (Kings County) was a separate city before the consolidation, was dragged kicking and screaming (barely 50% of Brooklynites voted for consolidation) into the new city, and has never recovered from the loss of the Dodgers. The Bronx was originally part of Manhattan (that’s why Manhattan College is in the Bronx ) but became a separate county in 1914.  In 1975 the borough of Richmond, which everyone had been calling Staten Island anyway, was officially named Staten Island…. Professor Sy Yentz, born in the Bronx, knows that New York City has put the fun in dysfunctional.

            1902 –Wednesday-  The first Rose Bowl game was played in Pasadena, California, with the University of Michigan just edging out Stanford University by a score of 49-0.

            1903-Thursday-  The first transpacific cable from the U.S. was landed at Honolulu, Hawaii and the first message was telegraphed to President Theodore Roosevelt in Washington. The message was “Wow, it’s warm and sunny here.  Not many tourists.  Beach-front condos available. We should make this a state”. The cable ship Silvertown had laid 2,620 miles of cable since leaving San Francisco, California, on December 14, 1902.

             1909 –Friday- London astronomers, based on the work of American Percival Lowell(the same Percival Lowell who believed the lines on Mars were “canals”)  hinted at sightings of a planet beyond Neptune. Of course now we know they are wrong.  There used to be a planet beyond Neptune, it was called Pluto, but now it is not a planet. It was voted out of the Planet Club by just 424 astronomers who remained for the last day of a meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Prague in 2006. It is now a dwarf planet Kuiper Belt Object.

            1915 –Friday Aspirin (acetylsalicylic acid), invented by Felix Hoffman in 1897 while searching for something to relieve the pain of his father's arthritis, was sold for the first time without the need of a prescription. It had been available since 1900 in tablet form. The pills were manufactured by Bayer pharmaceuticals in Germany. The medicine had previously been used in powder.

            1919 –Wednesday-  Happy Birthday,  J. D. Salinger, hermitish American novelist. Author of Catcher in the Rye. 

            1928-Sunday-  The Milam Building in San Antonio, Texas. All 21 stories of it became the first high-rise office building, in the world with air-conditioning installed during construction. The air conditioning system, built by Carrier, had a central refrigeration plant in the basement that supplied cold water to small air-handling units on every other floor.  Professor Sy Yentz believes that like many offices he has worked in during his career, the air conditioning only worked during the winter. The Milam building was named for Texas patriot Ben Milam who was involved in actions  in 1835 that would set the stage for the Battle of the Alamo. Ben Milam is gone but the building is still there.

            1934 –Monday- In what should be recognized as a sacred holy day for the movie industry, Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay was closed as a prison. Alcatraz went kaput due to rising operational costs and the U.S Military decided to close so it that now ownership shifted to the Department of Justice and Alcatraz became a United States federal prison. This made it the source for many motion pictures.  Some include: Alcatraz: The Whole Shocking Story (1980), Birdman of Alcatraz (1962), Escape From Alcatraz (1979), The Rock (1996), Terror at Alcatraz (1982) and lots of Al Capone movies.   The island received its name in 1775 when Spanish explorer Juan Manuel de Ayala charted the San Francisco Bay, and named the rocky piece of land La Isla de los Alcatraces, which translated to "Island of the Pelicans." The small uninhabited island had little to offer, with its swift currents, minimal vegetation, and barren ground and ubiquitous film crews. In 1934 the cellhouse contained a total of nearly 600 cells, with no one cell adjoining any perimeter wall. If an inmate managed to tunnel their way through the cell wall, they would still need to find a way to escape from the cell house itself just like Clint Eastwood. The inmates would only be assigned to B, C, and D blocks, since the primary prison population would not exceed 300 inmates and as many tourists as the tourist boats could carry in one day.

            1935 –Tuesday-  Bucknell University (the Bisons) , of Lewisburg, Pa. – in its only Orange Bowl appearance  won the first Orange Bowl 26–0 over the University of Miami (Hurricanes aka The U). Note, the Orange Bowl had been called the Palm Festival for the previous two years.  Bucknell brought 280 gallons of their own water supply from Pennsylvania to combat the heat.  Another famous sidelight from the game was the transmission of the first wire photo across the United States by Associated Press. http://www.orangebowl.org/ViewArticle.dbml?DB_OEM_ID=11800&ATCLID=1565981

            1937-Friday-  Safety glass, first invented by French chemist Edouard Benedictus in 1909, became mandatory for the windshields of cars. Also note that windshield wipers also became mandatory this year. Safety glass shatters into tiny pieces rather than breaking into large slabs that might cut off one’s head in an accident. Safety glass is a glass sandwich in which a layer of clear, flexible plastic is bonded between two layers of glass. Benedictus had discovered safety glass in another of those serendipitous science accidents.  He dropped a beaker.  It didn’t break. He discussed this with his assistant (note; Professor Sy Yentz has dropped thousands of glasses and they always break).  His assistant recalled that the flask had contained a small amount of liquid plastic (celluloid), which had evaporated leaving a transparent layer of plastic on the inside of the flask. When the flask hit the floor, the layer of plastic held the shards together, preventing it from shattering et voila!

            1937 –Friday-  On the same day that shatterproof glass windshields became mandatory, The first Cotton Bowl game was  played in Dallas, Texas. The Horned Frogs of Texas Christian University (TCU), led by all time great, “Slingin’ Sammy Baugh,  defeated  the Golden Avalanche of  Marquette University, Milwaukee 16–6. Actually, The first Cotton Bowl was actually a post-season game between two high school teams on New Years Day of 1936. The following year, college teams replaced the high school teams. Marquette, a university with an identity crisis, had multiple nicknames for its athletic teams.  The football beam was the Golden Avalanche, the others were the Warriors Blue and Gold, or Hilltoppers. They dropped Warriors in fit of political correctness during the 1980s and are now the Golden Eagles.  They no longer have a football team.

            1942 –Thursday-  As the tide of World  War II began to turn in favor of the Allies, (there was still a long way to go)  President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill issued a declaration, signed by representatives of 26 countries, calling themselves  the “United Nations.” The signatories of the declaration promised to create an international postwar peacekeeping organization.  Well, that’s sure worked out well.

            1951 –Monday The first pay-per-view television was instituted by the Zenith Radio Corporation in Chicago. Just like today when we can view cultural highlights like Saw - Pick the Highest Number or any Lindsay Lohan movie, the company sent movies over the airway via scrambled signals. 300 families participated in the test and they would send telephone signals to decode the movies for $1 each. Three movies offered were April Showers – 1948 a comedy starring Jack Carson and Ann Southern,  Welcome Stranger 1947, a comedy starring Bing Crosby, Barry Fitzgerald and Joan Caulfield and Homecoming  a romantic war drama starring Clark Gable,  Lana Turner, and Anne Baxter.  Two comedies and a drama and during the four-week test, families ordered more than 2,600 movies.

            1953 –Thursday-  Hank Williams kaput. Country singer  Hank Williams Sr., 29, Your Cheatin Heart, Jambalaya,  died of a drug and alcohol overdose while en route to a concert in Canton, Ohio. Williams got into the backseat of his Cadillac for the trip fortified with vitamin B shots and a bottle of whiskey among other pharmaceuticals. When the chauffeur was stopped for speeding, the policeman noticed what looked like a dead man in the back seat.  Williams was taken to a West Virginian hospital and he was officially declared dead at 7:00 a.m. on January 1, 1953. He had died in the back of the Cadillac, on his way to a concert.  Ironically, the last single released in his lifetime was I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive.

            1962 –Monday- In the midnight moonlight
I'll be walking a long and lonely mile,
And every time I do,
I keep seeing this picture of you
Here comes my baby, here she comes now,
And-a it becomes as no surprise to me
with another guy,
Well, here comes my baby, here she comes now,
Walking with a love,
With a love that's oh so fine ……..The Tremeloes
, Decca Records in England signed the Tremeloes (Here Comes My Baby, Silence is Golden) after turning down another group that had just auditioned on this day….The Beatles

            1966-Saturday- All US cigarette packages began carrying the health warning: Caution: Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health. The packages were not large enough to add the words “you self destructive, selfish idiot”.

            1972 –Saturday- Jeremiah was a bullfrog
Was a good friend of mine
I never understood a single word he said
But I helped him a-drink his wine
And he always had some mighty fine wine
Singin'...
Joy to the world
All the boys and girls now
Joy to the fishes in the deep blue sea
Joy to you and me ……Three Dog Night…………..From the “wish we were there” column, Three Dog Night (Joy to the World, Celebrate) become the first rock band to appear on a Tournament of Roses Parade float. Lawrence Welk (Calcutta, Champagne Song) was the grand marshal.

            1985 – Tuesday-Yes, like MTV,  they actually used to play music videos, VH-1 premiered as an adult contemporary music video channel with Marvin Gaye's Star Spangled Banner video

            1995- Sunday- The Draupner wave was the the name given to of the first freak wave (not caused by a  hurricane, earthquake, or giant porcine person doing a cannonball)  to be detected by a measuring instrument.  It occurred at the Draupner oil platform in the North Sea off the coast of Norway.  Prior to this measurement, such freak waves were known to exist only through anecdotal evidence provided by those who had encountered them at sea. The wave had a height of approximately 30ft.  Note; freak waves are also distinguishable by their nose rings, lip rings, “goth” appearance and love for the music of Metallica.

             1996-Monday- Tree snail kaput and hence extinct!  Alas wee tree snail, we hardly knew ye. The last Polynesian Tree Snail died at the London Zoo. A protozoan disease of the digestive gland is thought to have been responsible for the kapution of this last individual of the species. As often happens when non-native species are imported to solve a problem, the cure is worse than the disease so when residents of Raiatea, near Hawaii  began importing predatory snails from Florida (these snails would do anything to get beach front land or to the front of the line entering the latest hot nightclub)  in 1986 to eat another kind of pest snail, the predators attacked the native snails (sort of like colonization). By 1991 they had driven the species to the brink of extinction. Scientists captured the last known P. turgida individuals to try to save them through captive breeding which, of course, didn’t work.  The snail’s final words were “it all happened so fast….”

            2000- Saturday- Greenwich Electronic Time - known as GeT - was initiated to act as an international standard for all electronic commerce. All e-mail messages and e-commerce transactions already carry a “time stamp” based on Co-ordinated Universal Time - the modern equivalent of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). The clocks in computers have software which converts e-mail and message dates into local time. GeT provides a single time standard for worldwide Internet traders and users around the world.

            2000-Saturday-  A notable event that didn’t happen.  There was no Y2K millennium bug wreaking havoc on computers and other electronics.  The non-event was preceded by months of hand wringing, dire predictions, millions of printed words, television specials, the sale of Y2K prevention software, and Y2K experts.

            2008 –Tuesday- The first outdoor National Hockey League game held in the United states occurred as The Buffalo Sabres hosted the NHL Winter Classic against the Pittsburgh Penguins, Pittsburgh won 2-1 in a shootout. Pittsburgh won on a goal by “wunderkind” Sidney Crosby.  The game, attended by 76,000 maniacs, was played in a snow storm. Buffalo? January? Lake effect snow?  What were they thinking?!.  Surprisingly, this was better than an exhibition hockey game played in Las Vegas (what were they thinking? !!) in September 1991 in 85˚ temperatures. During the game, the crowd and players were attacked by swarms of flying insects.  Really! We don’t make these things up.

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1492 –Saturday-  The Moors surrendered the city of Grenada to the forces of Christian King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.  The Muslims had conquered parts of Spain, during some of their continuous attacks on Europe, over the previous 400 years.

             1788 –Wednesday- Georgia, became the 4^th state to enter the United States of America. Georgia, named after King George II (one of the “German Georges”, the first George – there were four in all- didn’t speak English and was imported from Hanover) was established under a charter to James Oglethorpe under the condition that it be named after George. Georgia was to be inhabited by the "worthy poor" of London. The "worthy poor" included debtors and other homeless people. As it happened, however, this plan was never fully realized.  When the ship, Anne,  sailed for the new colony on November 16, 1732, not one of the 114 colonists aboard had been released from debtors' prison to make the voyage.  Georgia would become the only state completely controlled by the English during the American Revolution. State stuff; flower Cherokee rose (1916)

tree live oak (1937), bird brown thrasher (1935 – that’s why the NHL team has been named the Atlanta Thrashers), song “Georgia on My Mind” (1922)

Nicknames: Peach State, Empire State of the South

             1791 – I like big butts and I can not lie
You other brothers can't deny…..Sir Mixalot…….. The The Big Bottom Massacre was an infamous encounter between Northwest Territory settlers and local American Indian tribes. Members of the Delaware and Wyandot tribes, decided to attack settlers at Big Bottom, an isolated settlement. The settlers were inside of the blockhouse, preparing their supper. The Indians were able to walk right up to the blockhouse undetected since the clever settlers, who knew they were living in hostile Indian territory, had failed to post any sentries. Many of the natives fired through the gaps in the logs, while other Indians crashed through the door of the structure. They killed eight of the residents inside the blockhouse. They captured another five whites. This attack became known as the Big Bottom Massacre.

            1813-Saturday-  In York, England 66 people went on trial for offenses connected with Luddism. Within days, seventeen of them had been executed. Luddites, who took their name from Ned Ludd (who may or may not have existed) had launched a campaign to destroy the factory machinery (usually sewing) they blamed for their unemployment. Nowadays “luddite” has evolved to mean someone opposing new technologies or technological progress and many of us who are thisclose to destroying a  recalcitrant computer or annoying TV, or  lemon flavored car, may be potential luddites. Luddites of the world unite!

            1822 –Wednesday Happy Birthday – Rudolf Clausius was a German mathematical physicist who was one of the founders of thermodynamics. Clausius reconciled the results of James Prescott Joule with the theories of Sadi Nicolas Léonard Carnot by abandoning the idea that heat was conserved. He stated formally the equivalence of heat and work (that’s the First Law of Thermodynamics) and developed and named  the concept of entropy to explain the directionality of physical processes. Entropy, the measure of the disorder in a closed system, and its direction -- toward increasing disorder -- cannot be reversed. Congress seems to be a good example of entropy.Clausius work  led to  the Second Law of Thermodynamics.        

            1839-Wednesday- French pioneering photographer Louis Daguerre took the first photograph of the moon. Yes……and you knew this was coming…… a city worker objecting to Daguerre’s taking his picture, pulled down his pants and there it was, the first picture of a moon. Oh, Daguerre also took the first picture of Earth’s natural satellite, the Moon.  Exposure time for the photographs was about twenty minutes. In 1837 Daguerre fixed photographs permanently with sodium chloride, and after 1839, using J. F. W. Herschel's discovery, sodium thiosulfate . The process produced a shiny, inverted, but very clear image.

            1842 –Sunday- Charles Ellet’s (see his birthday, January 1, 1810 above) first wire suspension bridge - A bridge having the roadway suspended from cables that are anchored at either end and usually supported at intervals by towers- was opened to pedestrian traffic over the raging waters of the mighty Schuylkill River in  Fairmount, Pennsylvania.

            1859 –Sunday-  Erastus Beadle’s (he was a member of the Beadles before George joined Paul and John in the Beadles) Dime Book of Practical Etiquette was published It  was 72 pages and was Beadle's contribution to the then current enthusiasm for instruction on best behavior. He also wrote the celebrated Ham, Eggs, and Corncake, a Nebraska Territory Diary in 1857.

            1860 –Monday-  French astronomer Urban Le Verrier discovered the planet of Neptune based principle of perturbations in the orbit of Uranus. He then predicted a planet between Mercury and the Sun. This planet was supposed to have a low mass and be closer to the Sun than Mercury, so close in fact  that the telescopes of the day could not resolve it due to the overwhelming brightness of the Sun itself. They then mistook sunspots for the planet and announced on this day that they had found the planet Vulcan  In 1915, it became clear that there never was a Planet Vulcan. Einstein's theory of relativity precisely explained the anomaly as a byproduct of the Sun's gravitational field. However, we know that there really is a planet Vulcan because it is the home of Mr. Spock….so there.
 1890-Thursday-  President Benjamin Harrison (the one sandwiched between Grover Cleveland’s two  terms) appointed Alice Sanger as the first female White House staffer. Sanger was hired as a stenographer. Previously, the only women employed in the White House were maids.

                1905 –Monday-  The turning point in the Russo -Japanese War, came as Port Arthur, the Russian naval base in China, surrendered to Japanese naval forces under Admiral Heihachiro Togo, Japan’s greatest naval hero. Ah the lessons of history……thank you George Santayana……. in February 1904 Japan, practicing their art of surprise attacks had launched a surprise naval attack on Port Arthur, decimating the Russian fleet. Thirty seven years later the same thing happened to the U.S Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor.

            1920-Friday-  Happy Birthday, (No accurate records exist of his date of birth. He celebrated  January 2, 1920, which was the latest possible date, but it might have been as early as 4 October 1919.) Isaac Asimov, scientist, educator, and incredibly prolific writer approximately 500 books including works on Shakespeare, the Foundation Trilogy, I Robot and Caves of Steel who was born in Petrovichi,  Russia.  It was Asimov who coined the word “robotics”.

            1941-Thursday- The Andrews Sisters (Patty, Maxine and LaVerne) recorded the song, Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy on Decca Records. The song, which became a classic World War II hit, gained popularity and recognition in Buck Privates, one of Abbott and Costello’s better movies……before they met Frankenstein of course.

            1941 –Thursday-  And on the same day, Happy Birthday, Donald P. Keck,
American research  physicist, who with his colleagues at Corning Glass, Dr. Robert Maurer and Dr. Peter Schultz, invented fused silica optical waveguide.  We know it as optical fiber. Optical fiber (fiber optics) refers to the medium and the technology associated with the transmission of information as light pulses along a really really really  thin glass or plastic wire or fiber. Optical fiber carries much more information than conventional copper wire and is in general not subject to electromagnetic interference and the need to retransmit signals. Most telephone company long-distance lines are now of optical fiber. In the 1840s, physicists Daniel Collodon and Jacques Babinet showed that light could be directed along jets of water for fountain displays. In 1854, John Tyndall, a British physicist, demonstrated that light could travel through a curved stream of water thereby proving that a light signal could be bent.

                1953 –Friday- The Life of Riley debuted on NBC-TV.  William Bendix portrayed Chester A. Riley. This second version and the series was much more successful, among the top twenty-five most watched programs from 1953-55. Jackie Gleason starred in the original version which ran from October 4, 1949 to March 28, 1950.

            1959 –Friday- Luna 1, the first spacecraft to reach the vicinity of the Moon and to orbit the Sun, was launched by the U.S.S.R. Actually, it was an “oops” as a malfunction in the ground-based control system caused an error in the rocket's burntime, and the spacecraft ended up flying by the Moon. Approaching it at 5,900 km at the closest point, Luna 1 became the first object launched by mankind to reach heliocentric orbit (orbit around the Sun). It was then dubbed a "new planet" and renamed Mechta. Later, following the Pluto demotion, it too was demoted to dwarf satellite.  Its orbit lies between those of Earth and Mars.

             1960-Saturday-  British astronomer,  John Reynolds set the age of solar system at 4,950,000,000 years.............and we thought it didn’t look a day over 4,9490,000,000 year old! No, he didn’t count the candles on a birthday cake…. he detected the xenon isotope (note- isotopes are different forms of atoms of the same element. They have the same number of protons in their nuclei but a different number of neutrons ) of mass 129 trapped in meteorites, and from that discovery inferred that the extinct radioactive isotope iodine-129 (half-life 16 million years and probably generated in a pre-solar supernova) was present when the meteorites formed. This indicated that the meteorites appeared in the early history of the solar system. However, there is good news for those who wish to quibble as in 2009, according to research published online in the Dec. 31 issue of Science Express and in the Jan. 22 issue of Science magazine by Greg Brennecka, a graduate student in the School of Earth and Space Exploration (SESE) at Arizona State University (ASU), the 238U/235U ratio can no longer be considered a constant in meteoritic material. Ah ha! Any deviation from this assumed value causes miscalculation in the determined Pb-Pb age of a sample, meaning that the age of the Solar System could be miscalculated by as much as several million years. Whew! Although this is a small fraction of the 4.57 billion year age of the Solar System, it is significant since some of the most important events that shaped the Solar System occurred within the first 10 million years of its formation. So nyah nyah nyah……take that John Reynolds. http://asunews.asu.edu/20091231_brennecka

            1974 –Wednesday-  Tex Ritter kaput. The singing cowboy (he sang the title song in the great western High Noon) died of a heart attack at the age of 67. Sadly, his son, John, who became a significant television star in Three’s Company, also died of a heart attack in 2003.

             1974-Wednesday-  With the energy crisis in crisis mode, soon to be ex-President Richard Nixon, signed legislation requiring states to limit highway speeds to 55 mph….of course everyone really paid attention to that one.

            1975-Thursday- Don't be concerned, it will not harm you
It's only me pursuing somethin' I'm not sure of
Across my dreams with nets of wonder
I chase the bright elusive butterfly of love……..Bob Lind……………. Kenneth C. Brugger discovered the long-unknown winter destination of the monarch butterfly in the mountains of Mexico. They were driven to the mountains by high prices and pestiferous tourists in Acapulco and Cancun. Each fall, monarch butterflies, driven by a circadian (internal) clock, make sure their passports are in order head point south and flutter up to 2,000 miles to Mexico.

            1981 – Friday- Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, was finally captured by the police. Sutcliffe had murdered at least thirteen women since October 1975.  Like his namesake, Jack the Ripper, he murdered prostitutes but later graduated tocollege students.  On this day, Police surveillance of prostitutes and their clients paid off. Sergeant Robert Ring and PC Robert Hydes recognized 24-year-old Olive Reivers, a pro,  while on patrol. She and Sutcliffe were in a parked car. The police checked the plates on the car which proved to be stolen.  Lesson one – never let the suspect urinate.  Sutcliffe asked if he could get out to urinate and was given permission. He was then taken back to the police station for questioning, Sutcliffe again asked to go to the lavatory and was again given permission. When the police searched him they found a length of clothesline on him. The following day, a sergeant learned about Sutcliffe’s brief absence from the car to relieve himself, and went to look near the oil storage tank. In the leaves, he found a ball-headed hammer and a knife. Then he recalled Sutcliffe’s trip to the lavatory at the police station. In the cistern he found a second knife. When Sutcliffe was told that he was in serious trouble, he suddenly admitted that he was the Ripper, and confessed to the murders. No death penalty in Britain so this creature is serving a life sentence.

            1994 -Sunday The Chrysler Corporation, possibly under the influence of hallucinogens, introduced the conspicuously unaesthetic Neon, a compact car. You can add this mutant machine to the long list of reasons that American auto manufacturing is falling behind in  the world market.  In fact, five years later Chrysler, now Daimler-Chrysler, discontinued the entire Plymouth line (Professor Sy Yentz’ first car was a 1958 Plymouth convertible with push button transmission) and Neon became the Dodge Neon. The Dodge Neon, no more successful than the Plymouth Neon, went to that big junkyard in the sky in 2005.

            1995 -Monday The most distant galaxy yet discovered was found by scientists using the Keck telescope in Hawaii. It is estimated to be 15 billion light years away and was cleverly named 8C 1435+63. That’s so we don’t mix it up with 8C 1435+62. We, on Earth have been visited by residents of that galaxy.  They supply the seemingly bottomless pool of bizarre humanlike beings used to populate reality TV shows.

            2004 –Friday-  Stardust successfully flew past Comet Wild 2 (pronounced "Vilt-2"), collecting samples that it would return to Earth two years later.  Paul Wild (Astronomical Institute of Berne, Switzerland) had discovered the comet on January 6 and 8, 1978. The Stardust flew within 240 kilometers (149 miles) of the comet and caught sample of comet particles while taking detailed pictures of Wild 2's pockmarked surface and comet resident Barbara Walters.

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3.        

106 B.C –Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Cicero, Roman statesman, orator, philosopher and author.  Marcus Tullius Cicero entered public life as a lawyer, became a politician. He was elected as Consul in 63 B.C and  turned back the Cataline Conspiracy, but then lost out in the power struggle following the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 B.C.  He was killed in 43 B.C when the triumvirate of Marc Antony, Octavian, and Lepidus assumed power. Cicero had earned Antony’s lasting hatred with a series quick witted, scathing public attacks on him. Plutarch wrote that not only was he beheaded but the soldiers also cut off his hands as further punishment for having written things against  Marc Antony. “A mind without instruction can no more bear fruit than can a field, however fertile, without cultivation.” – Cicero.

            1496-Friday-  An entry in Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebook mentioned that he had  unsuccessfully tested his flying machine.  From around 1482 to 1499 Leonardo worked for Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan and maintained his own workshop with apprentices in Milan.  The Duke kept Leonardo occupied painting, sculpting and designing elaborate court festivals, but he also put Leonardo to work designing weapons, buildings and machinery including the afore mentioned flying machines, geometry, mechanics, municipal construction, canals and architecture (designing everything from churches to fortresses). His studies from this period contain designs for advanced weapons, including a tank and other war vehicles, various combat devices, and submarines.

            1521-Monday- Hit the road Jack and don't you come back no more, no more, no more, no more.
Hit the road Jack and don't you come back no more.
What you say?
Hit the road Jack and don't you come back no more, no more, no more, no more.
Hit the road Jack and don't you come back no more.….Ray Charles……Pope Leo X (Giovanni Di Medici, son of Lorenzo -Il Magnifico- Di Medici of Florence), issued the papal bull Decet Romanum Pontificem, which excommunicated Martin Luther from the Catholic Church and contributed mightily to the start of Protestantism. Note; papal bulls received more attention than previously attempted papal chickens, papal marmosets and papal amoebas.    Luther reacted in a calm, rational manner. He had burned a previous Papal Bull (Exurge Domine- issued in June 1520) along with the book of church law, and many other books by his enemies on December 10, 1520. This “official final” papal bull of January 3, caused a conclusive and irrevocable break with Rome.

                1777-Friday-  The Battle of Princeton, the mother of Chauncy Poofcakes bopped the chief admissions officer in the head with her teacup in a rage over the level of acceptable SAT  scores and disagreement over her assertion that being drum major of the George III Marching Band was in fact community service.  The chief admissions officer then bashed Mrs. Poofcakes with a rolled up copy of Chauncy’s admissions essay entitled Grammatical Errors in the Declaration of Independence.   No no no no, Professor Sy Yentz has his academic sense of humor. Actually the battle  was really a stroke of strategic genius by General George Washington (who had a lengthening record of losing battles) as he managed to evade a general engagement with General Charles Cornwallis while winning several encounters with the British rear guard, as it departed Princeton for Trenton, New Jersey.

         1823 –Friday-  Happy Birthday, Robert Whitehead, British engineer who invented the modern torpedo. He happened to be working for the Austrian Navy at the time (1864).  Whitehead designed a projectile that was driven by compressed air and was designed to strike a ship's unprotected hull below the waterline. By1870 he had managed to increase its speed to 7 knots and could now hit a target 700 yards away. The following year the British Navy purchased Whitehead's invention. Although a star torpedo, a charge attached to a long pole and carried by a small boat, had been used during the American Civil War, Whitehead was the first to produce a self-propelling torpedo.

            1861 –Thursday-  Oh what did Del-a-ware boy, what did Delaware
What did Del-a-ware boy, what did Delaware
She wore a brand New Jersey,
She wore a brand New Jersey,
She wore a brand New Jersey,
That's what she did wear ………….Perry Como…………..Delaware rejected a proposal to secede from the U.S.  This was just two weeks after South Carolina became the first state to secede from the Union. Among the reasons for not seceding: it was such a  small state that no one would notice it was gone plus the Union couldn’t bear to lose attractions like  Trap Pond State Park, and Rehoboth Beach.  Actually, the legislature was controlled by Unionists.

            1868 – The Meiji Restoration in Japan. The revolution in Japan toppled the Tokugawa shogunate and "restored" imperial rule after a break of seven hundred years. It would transformthe country from a feudal into a modern state and result in the building of really small transistor radios. The impetus for the coup was a fear by many Japanese that the nation's feudal leaders were ill equipped to resist the threat of foreign domination. Soon after seizing power, the Emperor Meiji and his ministers moved the royal court from Kyoto to Tokyo, dismantled feudalism, and enacted widespread reforms along Western models.

            1870-Monday- Work began clearing the site for the Brooklyn Bridge, another wire suspension bridge, connecting Manhattan and Brooklyn – which at that time were two separate cities. Ground was broken for work on the Manhattan and Brooklyn foundations. Following a healthy chili lunch, wind was broken too. The 3,000-ton pneumatic caissons – note; caissons are large, airtight cylinders in which workers cleared away layers of silt in an atmosphere of compressed air underneath the riverbed - were placed  78 feet below the river on the Manhattan side, and 44 feet below the river on the Brooklyn side. To expedite the descent of the caissons, dynamite was used for the first time in bridge construction. The foundations took three years to construct. The five boroughs of New York would not be incorporated until January 1, 1898- that’s above, In June 1869, the New York City Council and the Army Corps of Engineers had approved engineer John  Roebling's design for the bridge. Later that month, while examining locations for a Brooklyn tower site, Roebling's foot was crushed on a pier by an incoming ferry. Roebling later died of tetanus as a result of the injuries. Immediately following Roebling's death, his son, Washington, took over as chief engineer of the Brooklyn Bridge. The job was completed on May 24, 1883.        

            1871 –Tuesday-  Henry Bradley received the American patent for oleomargarine (margarine). Margarine was created in 1870 by Frenchman, Hippolyte Mège-Mouriez .  Mège-Mouriez (who received his own U.S patent in 1873).  He used margaric acid, a fatty acid component isolated in 1813 by Michael Chevreul and named because of the  pearly drops that reminded him of the Greek word for pearl -- margarites…..how appetizing!  There were many patents granted for various formulas and manufacturing techniques for margarine in the U.S. beginning in 1871. Feeling threatened by this food product, the dairy industry was able to have laws passed that prevented manufacturers from coloring the margarine. (The natural color of margarine is white).

             1888-Tuesday-  Grasping at straws.  Marvin Chester Stone made his contribution to western civilization by inventing the artificial drinking straw. Pre Marvin– drinkers used natural rye grass straws.  Post Marvin, the artificial drinking straw made of manila paper and covered  with paraffin.  Stone was already a manufacturer of paper cigarette holders so he liked figuring out new things to do with paper.  Stone made his prototype straw by winding strips of paper around a pencil and gluing it together. He then experimented with paraffin-coated manila paper, so the straws would not become soggy while someone was drinking. He decided the ideal straw was 8 1/2-inches long with a diameter just wide enough to prevent things like lemon seeds from being lodged in the tube.

           1892 –Sunday-  Attention Bilbo, Frodo, Gandalf,  and Gollum.  Happy Birthday, J.R.R Tolkien, English author, born in Bloemfontein, South Africa, of The Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

            1897 –Sunday-  The first recorded use of the word automobile.  "The new mechanical wagon with the awful name automobile has come to stay..." New York Times (1897- we’ve also seen this as 1899- article). However, the credit for the name automobile goes to a 14th Century Italian painter and engineer, Francesco di Giorgio Martini.  Martini never built an automobile, nor did he build a martini,  but he did draw up plans for a man-powered carriage with four wheels. Martini devised the word automobile from the Greek word, "auto," (meaning self) and the Latin word, "mobils," (meaning moving

            1906-Sunday Happy Birthday, William W. Morgan, American astronomer who who discovered the spiral pattern of the Milky Way. He also discovered the peanuts in Snickers. He investigated and catalogued star brightness, discovered "flash" variable stars (stars with rapidly changing luminosity), established the UBV (ultraviolet-blue-visual) magnitudes system for photometry, and made leading contributions to the development of morphological classification techniques for modern astronomy and the Yerkes system of galaxy. What, you may ask, is the Yerkes system?  It is designed to classify galaxies purely according to morphology, and in turn to isolate the physical differences between different classes of galaxies. It classifies galaxies with three parameters: 1. Concentration class -- how centrally concentrated is the galaxian light? 2. Form-family -- what is the fundamental type of galaxy?and 3. Shape -- does the galaxy appear circular or elliptical on the plane of the sky? There is a fourth but it concerns the origins of William Shatner and is too confusing.

             1919-Friday-  New Zealand born physicist, Ernest Rutherford succeeded in splitting the atom. Well, he didn’t actually split the atom.  In 1911, Rutherford had developed the theory of atomic nuclei, that all the positive charge and most of the mass of an atom must be contained in a tiny nucleus at the atom's center. In 1919 he discovered that the nuclei of certain light elements, such as nitrogen, could be "disintegrated" by the impact of energetic alpha particles coming from some radioactive source, and that during this process fast protons were emitted. So, while not actually splitting  the atom (that would have produced fission and he hated to put squirming worms on a hook and go fission) he did scatter the parts of an atom, forcing protons out of the nucleus. In his own words, Rutherford was "playing marbles by bombarding light atoms with alpha rays". There is also argument as to when he did this, as it was not published until 1919 (the end of WWI), some reports and evidence show he did this work around 1917. Patrick Blackett later proved, with the cloud chamber, that the nitrogen in this process was actually transformed into an oxygen isotope, so that Rutherford was the first to deliberately transmute one element into another. Another major step towards atomic energy and another outcome of Einstein’s E=MC² equation of 1905. One unexpected effect of the atom split involved an epidemic of effeminate men on television.

            1920-Saturday-  The Boston Red Sox officially announced the sale of pitcher/outfielder Babe Ruth to the New York Yankees……the deal had been secretly agreed to on December 26…….  Boston owner, Broadway show producer, Harry Frazee was trying to raise money for his production of  the show, No, No Nanette.  While he did produce the show he also produced the key piece to the greatest sports franchise of all time….the New York Yankees. Frazee rejected Yankee owners Til Houston and Jacob Ruppert’s offer to be “his best friend”, and insisted on money.  Frazee would be paid $25,000 up front for Ruth, along with three promissory notes of $25,000 each. Harry would also receive a loan of $300,000 against the mortgage at Fenway Park, making the final deal worth $400,000 -- nearly the full amount Ruppert and Huston had paid for the entire Yankees franchise just four years before. The $100,000 in cash was easily the most ever paid for a ballplayer, doubling the $50,000 the Indians had given the Red Sox for centerfielder Tris Speaker in 1916.

            1924 –Thursday-  King Tut (King Tut)
Now when he was a young man,
He never thought he'd see
People stand in line to see the boy king.
(King Tut) How'd you get so funky?
(funky Tut) Did you do the monkey?
Born in Arizona,
Moved to Babylonia (king Tut)……….Steve Martin……….Two years after British archaeologist Howard Carter and his workmen discovered the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen near Luxor, Egypt, they found the greatest treasure of the tomb—a stone sarcophagus containing a solid gold coffin that held the mummy (but not the daddy) of the boy-king Tutankhamen. (Tut to his friends.)

            1929-Thursday-  The New York Yankees announced that they would put numbers on the back of the team uniforms (to help with player identification from the stands).  Babe Ruth - #3, Lou Gehrig, # 4, …………The initial numbers indicated batting order.  Gehrig batted third, Ruth, fourth.  Earl Coombs was the lead of batter and had #1, Bob Meusel followed Ruth in the batting order and wore # 5. The Yankees have retired quite a few numbers.  All number between 1 and 10, except 2 and 6 are gone.  Derek Jeter, number 2 will have  the number retired.  Possibly, former manager Joe Torre, # 6 will have his retired.

            1938 –Monday- The March of Dimes was established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The organization fights poliomyelitis, a highly infectious viral disease, which mainly affects young children. The virus is transmitted through contaminated food and water, and multiplies in the intestine, from where it can invade the nervous system. Roosevelt himself had become a victim of polio in 1921.  The original name of the organization was the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis.

             1953 –Saturday-  Frances Bolton and her son, Oliver, both from Ohio, became the first mother-son combination to serve at the same time in the United States Congress. Frances, elected as a Republican by special election, in 1940, to fill the vacancy caused by the death of her husband, Chester C. Bolton, was reelected to the fourteen succeeding Congresses and served from February 27, 1940, to January 3, 1969. Oliver served the 11 Congressional District in Ohio from 1953 – 1957 at which time he incurred the wrath of his mother for “staying out past 11 p.m” and was sent home.

            1955 – Monday- The world premiere of  Panther Girl from the Kongo starring  Phyllis Coates, as a female Tarzan in a a 12-Chapter Republic movieserial. “MAN-MADE MONSTERS TERRIFY THE JUNGLE as a mad scientist prepares to unleash a new fury on the world!” Phyllis Coates went on to appear in more television series that you can count. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0167659/

But she would also starr in the 1957, I Was a Teenage Frankenstein with the immortal Whit Bissel.

            1957 –Thursday-After ten years of research, the world’s first electric watch was introduced in Lancaster, PA by the Hamilton Watch Company.  The watch, which came with a really long cord…no, no no it didn’t…..it was battery powered.  The idea of a watch which never needed winding was very exciting to consumers. The Hamilton Electric was an instant hit. It was also obsolete by 1969, having been replaced by quartz watches.

            1957 – Thursday- I'm walkin', yes indeed and I'm talkin'
About you and me, I'm hopin'
That you'll come back to me, yeah-yeah
I'm lonely as I can be, I'm waitin'
For your company, I'm hopin'
That you'll come back to me……….Fats Domino……..While Hamilton was introducing the first electric watch, Antoine, Fats, Domino was recording I’m Walkin’. It would reach the Billboard Top Ten in April. A cover version of this song became Ricky Nelson's first hit after he performed it on The Adventures of Ozzie And Harriet. He covered it because it contained the only 2 chords he knew how to play. http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1833

            1959 –Saturday-  Alaska (49^th state) entered the United States of America.  The territory had been purchased on March 30, 1867 by William Seward from Russia for $7.2 million dollars, about two cents an acre. A check for $7,200,000.00 was issued on August 1, 1868 and made payable to Edouard de Stoeckl, the Russian Minister to the United States. Suggested state nickname, “The 372 people, including Sarah Palin, lots of moose, many bears and salmon, with entire state covered with snow all year round State”.  The state symbol(s)…and it may have more symbols than people, are flower forget-me-not ,tree sitka spruce,  bird willow ptarmigan,  fish king salmon, song Alaska's Flag, gem jade, marine mammal bowhead whale, fossil (formerly Sen. Ted Stevens) woolly mammoth, mineral gold , sport  dog mushing – yes, apparently dog mushing is a sport.

            1960 –Sunday- We note that  Bobby Darin and Connie Francis performed together on the Ed Sullivan Show. Also appearing were lip moving ventriloquists, Edgar Bergen, drummer Gene Krupa and actor Sal Mineo who just happened to drop by to plug the new movie The Gene Krupa Story.   While Bobby sang Beyond the Sea and Connie sang Mamma, together they performed You Make Me Feel So Young and You’re the Top.  We wish they could have combined to sing Splish Splash , I was taking a bath Where the Boys Are but that would have been anticipating the Village People.

            1961 –Tuesday-  Three technicians died at a U.S. plant in Idaho Falls in an accident at an experimental nuclear reactor. According to John McCone, Director of the Atomic Energy Commission and later Director of the C.I.A, radioactivity was  "largely confined"  to the reactor building. Mr. McCone thus set the pattern for intial description of all future nuclear accidents  “slight leak”, “quickly contained”, “itty bitty….we hardly knew it was there”, “leak? What leak?”, “a mere puff”, and “inconsequential exhaust teeny tiny crack”.

            1967-Tuesday-  Jack Ruby, usually described as the Dallas nightclub owner (but actually a pimp and small-time crook with mob connections) who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, the alleged assassin of President John F. Kennedy, died of cancer in a Dallas hospital. The Texas Court of Appeals had recently overturned his death sentence for the murder of Oswald and was scheduled to grant him a new trial.

            1970-Saturday- A cataclysmic day for the music industry and world culture as  Davy Jones announced he was leaving the Monkees. Peter Tork and Michael Nesmith had already left the group so there really wasn’t much for Mr. Jones to leave. Basically, Micky Dolenz of Circus Boy fame was now the Monkees.  Of course everyone would rejoin the Monkees (Nesmith less than the others)  throughout the years whenever they needed money.  

            1980-Thursday-  Conservationist Joy Adamson, author of Born Free, featuring “Elsa the Lioness” was slewn in Kenya by a servant  who had been fired by Adamson.  He claimed she owed him money.  Initially, superb forensics of the Kenyan police blamed her death on mauling by a lion. However, Adamson's body had been found on a road near her camp by her assistant, Pieter Mawson, and her injuries were caused by stabs from a sword like weapon and head injuries, not by a lion's fangs and claws. The “lion” had also opened her tent and stolen the contents of a trunk.

            1998-Saturday Ever the funloving satirists, China announced that it would spend $27.7 billion, earned from sales of General Tso’s Chicken  to fight erosion and pollution in the Yangtze and Yellow river valleys.

            1999-Sunday-  The U.S. Mars Polar Lander was launched for its trip to Mars. On December 3, 1999, the Mars Polar Lander was in the final minutes of slowing itself down, ready to make a self-controlled touch down. Then….Phhtt!  It was never heard from again. Nobody knows for sure exactly what happened. Attached to the Mars Polar Lander was a pair of small hitchhiking devices, the Deep Space 2 Mars Microprobes—named Scott and Amundsen—which were to be ejected at high altitude to fall and penetrate beneath the Martian surface. They too failed and went kaput. Lately suspicion for the disappearance has fallen on Martian immigrant, Paula Abdul.

            2000 –Monday- The last daily Peanuts comic strip was published. Creator, Charles Schultz retired and died shortly afterwards on Feb. 12, the day before his last Sunday comic strip would be  published. http://comics.com/peanuts/?DateAfter=2000-01-03&DateBefore=2010-01-03&Order=&PerPage=1&Search=&x=22&y=10 .It was basically a letter to his readers, with a picture of Snoopy, thanking everyone for their support.

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4.        -Look for the Quadrantid meteor shower tonight.  For those of you who wish to be outside on a freezing cold, windy, possibly snowy, Januay night, the source of the Quadrantid meteor shower was unknown until Dec. 2003 when Peter Jenniskens of the NASA Ames Research Center found evidence that Quadrantid meteoroids come from the beloved 2003 EH1, an "asteroid" that is probably a piece of a comet that broke apart some 500 years ago.

          46 BC –Thursday-  In one of the vary rare defeats of his military career, Julius Caesar was bested by Titus Labienus  in the Battle of Ruspina.  Following his victory over Pompey at Pharsalus (during the Civil War) Caesar moved his army to Africa to secure Rome’s “breadbasket”. However, he lost most of his supplies during a storm at sea and the army was forced to forage for replacements.  While they were busy foraging, Labienus, a former general for Caesar, attacked. Caesar's own account of the battle describes Ruspina as a fighting retreat conducted in good order. Other accounts are less generous and estimate that the Romans may have lost as much as one third of their army in the action.

            1066 –Thursday-  Edward the Confessor kaput. In November, 1065, King Edward fell sick of what was described at the time as "a malady of the brain", which was possibly a stroke or a brain hemorrhage. The kapution of The Confessor, set off the chain of events that culminated in the Battle of Hastings (October 14, 1066) after which Duke William the “Bastard” of Normandy became King William the “Conqueror” of England.  During the battle, King Harold Gowsinson (Edward’s successor) was killed and William, who claimed that the Confessor had named him Successor, became King, altering the course of history. 

            1643 –Sunday- Happy Birthday Isaac Newton, English physicist and greatest brain of the last millennium.  Wait! Wasn’t Newton born on Christmas Day?  Yes he was, but it was the Julian Calendar (Old Style, OS) developed by Julius Caesar.  In 1782, a newer, more accurate calendar, the Gregorian (Pope Gregory XII) Calendar (New Style, NS) was adopted – 10 days were added and Newton’s birthday moved up.  We note this because sources will list Newton’s birthday and Christmas Day and other sources as January 4.  Of course this opens a can of worms for all pre 1582 days so we’ll note Isaac’s discrepancy because of his greatness and just go with consensus sources for everyone else.  He invented calculus but didn’t tell anyone about it for 27 years. He also laid the foundation for the science of spectroscopy but kept that a secret for 30 years. Yes, in addition to being a genius he was a bit odd.  His master work, the Principia, explained mathematically, the orbits of heavenly objects and identified gravity as the moving force of the universe.  His three laws of motion were in the book.  It is a great book from the greatest of minds and it is so obtuse as to be virtually unreadable.  We’re waiting for the graphic novel version

             1777-Saturday- Moon river, wider than a mile
I’m crossing you in style some day
Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker
Wherever youre goin’, I’m goin’ your way…….Johnny Mercer….. Happy Birthday, German  banker and amateur astronomer, Wilhelm Beer (brother of…..no, it’s too easy…). Beer built a private observatory with a 9.5 cm refractor telescope. Working with Johann Heinrick Madler he made the first exact map of the moon in 1836. The four volume map, called the  Mappa Selenographical was the  first lunar map to be divided into quadrants. Beer and Johann Madler also made the first globe of Mars. They later went on to make a map of Mars and also calculated its rotation to be 24 hours 37 minutes 22.7 seconds long. This was within .01 second of what is known today.

            1785 –Tuesday-  Jakob Grimm librarian; fairy tale author, along with brother, Wilhelm.he wrote such popular fairy tales as  Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin and Star  Trek Meets Avatar. . They are most famous for Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812 – 15), known in English as Grimm's Fairy Tales, a collection of 200 tales taken mostly from oral sources.

            1809 –Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Louis Braille, French educator who developed a tactile form of printing and writing, known as eponymously as  Braille. It has been widely adopted by the blind. Braille himself was blinded at age 4 when an injury to one eye resulted in an infection that spread to the other eye.  When Braille was fifteen, he developed his ingenious system of reading and writing by means of raised dots. Braille is a series of raised dots that can be read with the fingers by people who are blind or whose eyesight is not sufficient for reading printed material. Teachers, parents, and others who are not visually impaired ordinarily read braille with their eyes. Braille is not a language. Rather, it is a code by which languages such as English or Italian may be written and read. The writing system he invented evolved from the tactile Ecriture Nocturne (night writing) code invented by Charles Barbier for sending military messages that could be read on the battlefield at night, without light. Braille published the first-ever braille book in 1829.  In 1837, he added symbols for math and music. However, even at the Royal Institution, where Louis taught after he graduated, braille wasn't taught until after his death. Braille began to spread worldwide in 1868, when a group of British men, now known as the Royal National Institute for the Blind, took up the cause.

           1813-Monday-  And speaking of systems of writing (see Louis Braille 1809 above), Happy Birthday, Sir Issac Pitman, English inventor of the Phonetic Shorthand System that we all know and love….even though voice recorders have now moved to the office “fore”.  Pitman’s system, published in 1837, is phonetic: it records the sounds of speech rather than the spelling. For example, the sound [f] in the words famous, elephant and rough is written in the same way for each word.  Vowel sounds are optional and are written with small dots, dashes or other shapes next to the main strokes.  This saves time in writing when the consonants alone make clear what the word is.  This is known as a vowel movement.

            1846-Sunday Happy Birthday, Edward Hibberd Johnson American electrical engineer ,inventor, and associate of  Thomas Edison. Johnson was also a partner with Edison in what would become the General Electric Company.   Johnson created the first electric lights on a Christmas tree on Dec, 22, 1882…. hand-wired with 80 red, white, and blue electric light bulbs. He spent lots of time trying figure out which bulb was “out” thereby causing the entire string to malfunction …..wait…that wasn’t Johnson, that was Professor Sy Yentz on many a December night during the 1950’s and 60’s. Anyway, from that point on, electrically illuminated Christmas trees, indoors and outdoors, grew with mounting enthusiasm in the United States and elsewhere. In 1895, U.S. President Grover Cleveland Grover Cleveland proudly sponsored the first electrically lit Christmas tree in the White HouseWhite

            1847-Monday-  Hit me with your best shot. Fire away…….Pat Benatar…..Samuel Colt, who had invented and patented the repeating revolver pistol in 1836  won a contract to provide the U.S. government with 1,000 of his .44 caliber revolvers. Colt had to ask for production help from Eli Whitney, Jr., son of the famous inventor of the cotton gin. Whitney Jr. who had a factory in Connecticut where the order was completed and shipped by mid-1847. Colt began mass-producing his popular revolvers and handguns hence forth would play a significant role in the history of both the American West and the nation as a whole.  Unfortunately, they still do.  Caliber relates  to the bore of a gun (or its ammunition) that measures forty-four hundredths of an inch in diameter; "a .44 caliber pistol"…the bigger the number, the bigger the bullet. 

            1863-Sunday-  As the Civil War raged, four-wheeled roller skates were patented by James Plimpton of New York. Plimpton’s improvement was a major breakthough in skating.  Without this technological leap, the 1980 skating movie Xanadu starring Olivia  Newton-John and an ancient Gene Kelly, who was possibly looking for puddles to dance in or hide in if he ever saw this turkey,  would never have been possible.  Plimpton’s skates had two parallel sets of wheels, one pair under the ball of the foot and the other pair under the heel. The four wheels were made of boxwood and worked on rubber springs. Ball bearing wheels came along in 1884. However we go back few years for the best innovative skating debut. It came  came early in the evolution of skates in 1760 as inventor, Joseph Merlin, attended a masquerade party in London wearing one of his new inventions, metal-wheeled boots. Joseph wished to make a grand and memorable entrance so he added the unique feature of rolling in while playing the violin. Lining the huge ballroom was a very expensive wall-length mirror. The fiddling skating Merlin was unable to brake (hadn’t thought of that part) and the mirror was doomed as Merlin crashed solidly into it.

            1884 –Friday- The Fabian Society was founded in London.  The members felt that Fabian’s songs, Turn Me Loose and Like a Tiger represented an evolutionary musical step forward from the mundane works of Mozart and Beethoven. Or….. Edith Nesbit and Hubert Bland decided to form a socialist debating group with their Quaker friend Edward Pease (brother of Warren Pease). They were also joined by Havelock Ellis and Frank Podmore and on this day in 1884 they decided to call themselves the Fabian Society. Podmore suggested that the group should be named after the Roman General, Quintus Fabius Maximus, who advocated the weakening of the opposition by harassing operations rather than becoming involved in pitched battles.

            1885 –Sunday-  Dr. William Grant of Davenport, Iowa performed the first successful appendectomy on this day. The operation was performed on Mary Gartside.  Yes, Ms. Gartside lost her appendix but she still had her table of contents.  An appendectomy is the removal by surgery of the appendix, the small worm-like appendage of the colon (the large bowel). An appendectomy is performed because of probable appendicitis, inflammation of the wall of the appendix generally associated with infection.

            1896 –Saturday-  Utah, the “Beehive State” entered the Union.  The state gets its name from the Native American tribe, the Utes, (note, “utes” are also children and teenagers in Brooklyn, NY) and the territory was called the land of the Utes, hence Utah.  Originally settled by Indians, explored by the Spanish and used by “mountain men” hunters, the territory boomed in 1847, with the Mormons, seeking a religious sanctuary in the remote West. They immigrated in large numbers and laid out communities, built homes and churches, established farms supported by an irrigation system and had lots of wives. Utah achieved territorial status in 1850, and by the time of statehood in 1896, the total population included a quarter of a million people, assorted buffalo, rattlesnakes, mountain goats, and lots of sand. The state song is the catchy, Utah, We Love Thee. The Utah state bird is the California sea gull (you figure that one out) , the flower is the sego lily, the tree is the blue spruce, and the state rock is coal (yes, coal).

            1904-Monday-  Thomas Edison’s movie crew filmed the electrocution of an elephant. The ill-fated Topsy, was had to be euthanized by its owners after she killed three men in as many years. The third man was a cretin who fed her a lit cigarette. The event took place in front of an audience of 1500 people at Coney Island, NYC. They had first attempted to execute the elephant with cyanide filled carrots.  When that didn’t work, Edison was the consultant chosen to arrange the electrocution death. After brief prayers with an elephant priest and a last meal of grasses, small plants, bushes, fruit, twigs, tree bark, and roots. The elephant’s final words were either “Mother of mercy, is this the end of Rico?” or “I made it Ma. Top of the World!”.

            1935 –Friday-  Billboard magazine published its first pop-music chart based on national sales figures. The song, Stop! Look! Listen! by jazz violinist Joe Venuti was #1 on the first chart. Joe Venuti was one of the first jazz violinists, and would continue playing up until his death in 1978……which, after all, would be a hindrance on playing……. He was also a major influence on guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinist Stéphane Grappelli in France. The first number one song of what is now known as the  Hot 100 was Poor Little Fool by Ricky Nelson on August 4, 1958.

             1940 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Brian Josephson, and a great day for eponymous science laws as Josephson was the British physicist who discovered the Josephson effect in1962. The Josephson effect is  a flow of electric current as electron pairs, called Cooper Pairs, (see?  Eponymous again, Leon Cooper) - between two superconducting materials that are separated by an extremely thin insulator. This arrangement is called a Josephson Junction      In the immortal words of Shorty Long, there was a Function at the Junction.

            1941 –Saturday-   “Waskily Wabbit”….The animated short Elmer's (Elmer being Elmer Fudd) Pet Rabbit was released. This was the second appearance of Bugs Bunny but the first to have his name on the title. Bugs's debut as a star was the short A Wild Hare, where he first uttered his trademark line, "What's up, Doc?" The voice of Bugs, as well as Elmer (after 1959) was provided by the great Mel Blanc.  Other Mel Blanc voices included:Daffy Duck, Woody Woodpecker, Tweety Bird, Yosemite Sam, Pepe LePew, Sylvester the cat, Foghorn Leghorn, Henery Hawk, Wile E. Coyote Marvin the Martian, Road Runner The Tasmanian Devil, and Speedy Gonzalez.

            1950 –Wednesday-  Record company RCA Victor, the one with the dog listening to “his master’s voice” on the gramophone, announced it would start manufacturing long-playing (LP) records.A bit of history…. In 1948, the 12" (30 cm) Long Play (LP) 33⅓ rpm microgroove record had been introduced by the Columbia Record at a dramatic New York press conference. One side of a 12-inch LP played for 23 minutes, compared with four minutes for one side of a standard 78 rpm record. In 1930, RCA Victor launched the first commercially-available vinyl long-playing record, marketed as "Program Transcription" discs. The commercial rivalry between RCA Victor and Columbia Records led to RCA Victor's introduction of what it had intended to be a competing vinyl format, the 7" (17.5 cm) / 45 rpm Extended Play (EP). For a two-year period from 1948 to 1950, record companies and consumers faced uncertainty over which of these formats would ultimately prevail in what was known as the "War of the Speeds"- a forerunner of the Beta vs. VHS brouhaha. “Vinylly”, the 12" (30 cm) / 33⅓ rpm LP prevailed as the predominant format for musical albums, and the 7" (17.5 cm) / 45 rpm EP or "single" established a significant niche for shorter duration discs typically containing one song on each side and on this day RCA decided to go with the flow. http://www.thevintagerecord.com/articles-on-records/history-of-vinyl.html

            1958-Saturday- Sputnik 1, launched on October 4, 1957 , was burned up on re-entry to the atmosphere.  Also see Explorer, Jan. 31, 1958 .The orbit was observed to decay 92 days after launch  after having completed about 1400 orbits of the Earth. The orbital apogee (highest point) had declined from 947 km after launch to 600 km by December 9. The circle kept getting smaller. Gravity wins again. Sputnik did, however bring back some microbes that spread among the human population and resulted in the devolution of humans who leave their shopping carts in the middle of store parking lots.

            1960 –Monday- French existentialist author Albert Camus went kaput in an automobile accident at age 46 near Sens, France. The driver, his friend and publisher, Michel Gallimard was also killed.  In ironic existentialism, Camus had an unused train ticket in his pocket.  Evidently, he accepted the car ride instead.  Among his best-known novels are The Stranger, 1942 and The Plague ,1947, and The Myth of  Sisyphus, a book of essays.   He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1957.  "Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don't know. I had a telegram from the home: 'Mother passed away. Funeral tomorrow. Yours sincerely.' That doesn't mean anything. It may have happened yesterday." (from The Stranger)

            1962-Thursday- In an age where automated trains are quite common, the first automated subway train in NYC ended as a failure.  This was the 42^nd Street Shuttle running from Grand Central Station to Pennsylvania Station on 34^th street via the IRT line.  The experiment came to an end in 1964 when a small but intense fire engulfed a manually operated train and melted it, yes melted it, away. The automated train was sitting on track 4 and was significantly damaged. It never went back into operation. The next attempt was to create automated passengers who would not toss litter on the tracks or in the trains and would be courteous to fellow while riding the trains.  That too, ended in failure.

            1964 –Saturday- The final victim of the Boston Strangler, Mary Sullivan, was raped and strangled to death in her Boston apartment. The killer left a card reading "Happy New Year" leaning against her foot. The ‘Strangler”,  Albert DeSalvo, had terrorized the city between 1962 and 1964, raping and killing 13 women. DeSalvo confessed to the killings but was in fact, never charged with being the Boston Strangler. He was however, sentenced to life imprisonment in 1967 for sex offenses and robberies committed before the stranglings. DeSalvo was found kaput in his cell at Walpole State Prison in 1973. He had been stabbed through the heart.

            1970 –Sunday- Whoops! Keith Moon of the Who accidently ran over and killed his chauffeur. In 1978 Moon died of a drug overdose. A year later, a Who concert tragedy in Cincinnati, Ohio, ranked as the most horrific rock concert incident in the United States. Eleven rock fans were crushed to death and scores injured.

            1974 –Friday-  Ten years after the last Boston Strangler murder, serial killer Ted Bundy murdered his first known victim when he entered the basement bedroom of 18-year-old Joni Lenz, raped and suffocated her.

            1981 –Sunday  I'm so excited,
And I just can't hide it,
I'm about to lose control
And I think I like it.
I'm so excited,
And I just can't hide it,
And I know, I know, I know, I know
I know I want you, want you. …….The Pointer Sisters….Oh boy!  I just got two tickets to the Broadway show, Frankenstein starring John Carridine and Diane Weist, for January 5. What’s that? But it just opened on this day, January 4.  It closed on the same day?  Yeesh.

Anyone want two tickets to Frankenstein?  Considered at the time the most expensive flop ever produced, Frankenstein lost over $2 million dollars. The disastrous fate of the show was particularly astounding because of its big-budget nature: the show utilized huge sets and special effects that were meant to enhance the production and make it a hit. Frank Rich wrote in his New York Times review that: “This show’s magic tricks were actually pointless from both an artistic and commercial standpoint.”

             1999 –Monday-  Goodbye, au revoir, auf wiedersehen , arrivederci  to the Austrian schilling, Belgian franc, Finnish markka, French franc, German mark, Italian lira, Irish punt, Luxembourg franc, Netherlands guilder, Portugal escudo and Spanish peseta. Europe was united with a common currency when the "euro" made its debut as a financial unit in corporate and investment markets.  Euro cash, decorated with architectural images, symbols of European unity, pictures of Euro Trash, and member-state motifs, would go into circulation on January 1, 2002.

            1999-Monday- In yet another chapter of the multi volume  book of Never Underestimate the Stupidity of Voters, former professional wrestler Jesse Ventura was sworn in as governor of Minnesota. As the Chief Justice of the Minnesota Supreme Court approached, bible in hand, Jesse drop kicked him, climbed the top of the ropes and dove on him, applied Killer Kowalski’s infamous “claw hold”, and then tagged partner Hulk Hogan to complete the tag team match. Minnesotans would later top themselves by electing a comedian to the United States Senate.

            2004 –Saturday-  The first of the two Mars Rover landers, Spirit, landed on Mars.  Opportunity  would follow on January 24.  They had been launched in June and July 2003 and landed on opposite sides of the Red Planet.  They returned to Earth in 2005 and attacked Tom Cruise’s house in Staten Island launching the War of the Worlds.   After years of productive discoveries, the Martian weather, particularly dust storms, took its toll.

            2010 –Monday- The Burj Dubai, the latest, “tallest building in the world”, officially opened. Immediately succumbing to skyscraper identity crisis, the building was renamed the the Burj Khalifa - or Khalifa Tower.  The  height was officially given as 828 meters or 2717 feet.  It is 1,046 feet higher than the world's previous highest occupied building, the Taipei 101 in Taiwan, and 654 feet higher than the tallest man-made structure, the KVLY-TV tower in North Dakota, America, a broadcasting mast. It contains more than 1,000 apartments, an Armani-branded hotel, and offices up to the 160th floor.  There are another forty floors presumably for the storage of camels, sand, and oil wells. Rounding out the top ten are: 3.the World Financial Center, Shanghai, China  4. Petronas Tower 1, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, 5/ Petronas Tower 2, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia 6. Greenland Financial Center, Nanjing, China 7. Sears Tower, Chicago 8. Guangzhou West Tower, Guangzhou, China  9. Jin Mao Building, Shanghai, China and 10. Two International Finance Centre, Hong Kong 2003 88 415 1,362. The Empire State Building in New York City is listed at number 14. http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001338.html

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5.        1477 –Friday-  The Battle of Nancy, the final and decisive battle of the Burgundian Wars.  Burgundy would now be part of France. The  Duke of Burgundy, Charles the Bold, was conducting a siege of  Nancy, the capitol of Lorraine (Nancy? Lorraine?).  Rene, the Duke of Lorraine, with 10,000 of his own troops and 10,000 Swiss mercenaries, attacked the outnumbered Burgundians.  Charles was slewn, his mutilated body was found three days later, and Burgundy (and its delicious wine) would become the eastern part of France.  

            1643 –Monday- Days of Our Pilgrims…… On a social note, we have the first record of a legal divorce in the colonies. Anne Clarke of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was granted a divorce from her adulterous husband, Denis Clarke, by the Quarter Court of Boston, Massachusetts. Denis Clarke, a “himbo” admitted to abandoning his wife, with whom he had two children, for another woman, with whom he had another two children…..he was a 21^st century kind of guy…. He also refused to return to his original wife, thus giving the Puritan court no option but grant a divorce to his wife, Anne. Didn’t we see this on? No word about a pre-nuptial agreement           

            1759 –Friday-  Still another social note (see 1643 above) George Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis, the twenty eight year old widow of wealthy Daniel  Parke Custis. The bride was resplendent in Vera Wang, the groom’s tuxedo was by Calvin Klein.  The reception was held at Guido’s Catered Affairs of Mount Vernon with music by Sven and Kazoo Ensemble. After George Washington died in 1799, Martha assured a final privacy by burning their letters. She died of "severe fever" on May 22, 1802. George and Martha are buried at Mount Vernon, where Washington had planned an unpretentious tomb for them.

            1779 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday,  Zebulon Pike, American explorer born in Trenton, New Jersey who discovered, tried to climb, but failed to climb, what is now known as Pike’s Peak in Colorado. Pike’s Peak is now the most visited mountain in North America and the second most visited mountain in the world behind Japan's Mount Fuji. As for Zebulon Pike?  He was killed in 1813 leading American troops on a successful attack on York (now Toronto) Canada during the War of 1812.

            1779 –Tuesday-  Sharing a birthday with Zebulon Pike is Stephen Decatur, United States Naval hero of the war with Barbary Pirates and the War of 1812. Like Pike, Decatur went kaput at a comparatively young age when he was mortally wounded in a duel with Commodore James Barron. Decatur is remembered for his famous toast, "Our country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but our country, right or wrong."

             1781 –Friday- You cheated, you lied,
You said that you love me
You cheated, you lied
You said that you want me
Oh, what can I do
but just keep on loving you? ……The Shields………..The man who’s name has become synonymous with treason, former American and now British Brigadier General Benedict Arnold captured the virtually undefended capital city of Richmond. Virginia Governor, Thomas Jefferson did not act quickly to  General George Washington’s warning that the British would attack Virginia.  He called out the militia but was too late and Arnold’s British troops captured Richmond without a shot being fired.

            1794-Sunday- Happy Birthday, Edward Ruffin, American farmer and a famous agricultural reformer. Experiments on his farm convinced him that fertilizers, crop rotation, drainage, and good plowing could revitalize the declining soil of his native state of Virginia.  He has been dubbed the father of soil chemistry in the U.S.  Later in life he became a rabid secessionist.  As the Confederacy's fortunes ebbed during the war, however, Ruffin grew distraught. Plagued by ill health, family misfortunes, and the rapid collapse of Confederate forces in 1865, Ruffin proclaimed "unmitigated hatred to Yankee rule," and on June 1 7, 1865, committed suicide. His act has been sometimes considered the "last shot" of the Civil War. http://www.tulane.edu/~latner/Ruffin.html  Ironically, many of his soil preservation techniques would assist George Washington Carver in his experiments with crop rotation (see 1943 below)

             1855-Friday-  Happy Birthday, King C. Gillette, American inventor born in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, and manufacturer of the safety razor. Gillette originally had the idea to put a sharp edge on a small square of sheet steel. He could then sell a safety razor blade that could be thrown away when it grew dull, and readily replaced. Great idea! However, it took six years from 1895 to 1901 for Gillette to find an engineer. It turned out that William Emery Nickerson (an MIT-trained inventor), who could produce the blade Gillette envisioned. In 1901, Gillette and Nickerson got their patent and formed the American Safety Razor Company (soon thereafter renamed for Gillette himself). For the first time, razor blades would be sold in multiple packages, with the razor handle a one-time purchase. The profits were in the blades, not the razors, sort of like when Polaroid sold cheap cameras and made profits through the film. 

            1882-Thursday-  Lizzie Sturgeon played the piano with her toes for a NY audience. Billed as the  “pedal pianist”, Sturgeon had been born with withered and useless arms.  Obviously this feet feat made her the “toes of the town”.  Contemporary singer, Madonna, paid tribute to Lizzie with her hit song, “Like a Sturgeon”.

            1885-Monday-  Happy Birthday, Jeannette Piccard, the only woman to reach the stratosphere in a hot air balloon…..presumably she was traveling with several cable television talk show hosts who supplied the hot air. The historic flight, which also included husband Jean Felix and their pet turtle took place on October 22, 1934.

            1889-Saturday-  Let’s not mince words but take note MacDonalds, Wendy’s, Burger King and backyard grillers everywhere. The word “hamburger” first appeared in print in a Walla Walla, Washington, newspaper……yup! Walla Walla…. The Walla Walla Union in fact. This is according to the date given in the Oxford English Dictionary. The hamburger was named after a German food called hamburg steak, not because it contains ham, but meaning of “from Hamburg” which is, of course, in Germany. In the 19^th century, German immigrants migrated to North America bringing along the recipe for the hamburg steak, a form of ground beef. Ground beef may in turn, go back to the Mongols and later the Tartars . American people adopted the hamburg steak but used the adjective form “hamburger” without “steak” at the end. By 1902, the first description of a hamburg steak appeared in the newspaper– we believe it was presented on either the Food Channel Iron Chef competition or Rachel Ray’s 30 Minute Meals, - came close to the American conception of the hamburger. It gave a recipe calling for ground beef mixed with onion and pepper. There are several claimants to the title of Inventor of the Hamburger. They can be chopped up into Louis Lassen, "Hamburger Charlie" Nagreen, or the Menches Brothers. The burger on a bun is claimed to be the concoction of Charles and Frank Menches. It seems these two vendors ran out of sandwich pork at the Erie County Fair in 1885 and switched to beef.

            1895 –Saturday-  French officer Alfred Dreyfus, condemned for passing military secrets to the Germans, was stripped of his rank in a humiliating public ceremony, with the crowd yelling anti-semitic epithets, at Paris’ Ecole Militaire. The Jewish artillery captain, convicted on flimsy evidence in a highly irregular trial, began his life sentence in the infamous Devil’s Island Prison in French Guyana four months later. There was a tremendous public outcry at the anti-Semitic injustice of the shabby procedure culminating in journalist/author Emile Zola’s J’Accuse letter on the front page of the newspaper, L 'Aurore The public pressure resulted in Dreyfus’ eventual freedom but not before another trial followed by another conviction, then a 1906 the court of appeal pronounced his complete innocence. Dreyfus was reinstated as a major, re-enlisted in World War I, and was promoted to Lieutenant Colonel.

            1925 – Monday- After Wyoming governor, William B. Ross went kaput following complications from an appendectomy in 1924, his wife Nellie T. Ross was elected to replace him, becoming the first woman to serve as a governor in the United States. She was defeated when she ran for re-election in 1926.  Ross was a strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt during his presidential campaign of 1932; when he was elected to office, he named her to the federal post of director of the United States Mint, (she later went on to be director of the U.S Ju Ju Be, the U.S M&M, and the Mint  sub structure, the U.S Junior Mint) making her the first woman to hold that post.

            1914-Monday-  Happy Birthday, Aaron (Bunny) Lapin, American inventor of whipped cream in a spray can in 1948.   He called it Reddi-Wip and it extended the shelf life of whipped cream.  It was first sold in St. Louis by milkmen, but its popularity and distribution expanded quickly across the country and Lapin was soon dubbed the “Whipped Cream King”. Not wishing to rest on his laurels, and foaming at the prospect of further lactosian breakthroughs, Lapin experimented with other aerosol products such as cinnamon margarine & pancake batter, but, strangely …..doesn’t the thought of spray on cinnamon margarine make your mouth water? None of them caught on. In 1998 Time Magazine listed Reddi-wip as one of the century's 100 great consumer items…..but then they also included Spam on the list too.

            1914 –Monday-  And on the same day that “Bunny Lapin” was born so he could invent whipped cream in a can, (see above)Henry Ford, head of the Ford Motor Company, gave birth to a minimum wage scale of $5 per day.

            .1933 –Thursday- Construction began on the Golden Gate Bridge. It would take just over four years to complete as the bridge was open to vehicular traffic on May 28, 1937.  It is named the Golden Gate for spanning the Golden Gate Strait, which is the entrance to the San Francisco Bay from the Pacific Ocean.  It is generally accepted that the strait was named "Chrysopylae", or Golden Gate, by John C. Fremont, explorer and Captain of the topographical Engineers of the U.S. Army circa 1846.  It reminded him of a harbor in Istanbul named Chrysoceras or Golden Horn. The bridge would stretch across the San Francisco Bay from San Francisco to Marin County.

            1934 –Friday-  A uniform size for the baseball was decided by the American and National Leagues, which up till now had been using different sized baseballs.  The baseball is a ball which is nine inches in circumference and is 5 ounces in weight. The core of the ball may vary from cork or rubber or both. Surrounding the core would be either yam or twine or even wool. Covering these materials would be leather in two separate pieces put together by 108 stitches of cotton thread, red in color and coated with wax. On the other hand, early baseballs were made from the materials at hand and varied widely. As you can imagine, wrapping a walnut with string resulted in a ball very different in size and weight than one made by wrapping a stone with cloth, or even socks.

            1940-Friday-  First public use of an FM radio. (See Jan. 28.) NBC began regular FM transmission from Empire State Building on W2XDG, 42.6 and on this day also began experimental FM relay broadcasts: W2XCR Yonkers to W2XMN Alpine, NJ to W1XPW Meriden CT to Worcester to W1XOJ Paxton MA to W1XOY at Mt. Washington to Boston AM station. The first show was Casey Casem’s America’s Top Forty Songs of Artists Who’s Dogs/Grandmothers/Beloved Uncles/Best Friends Died in their  Arms or Suffered Tragic Kaputions and then They Wrote Songs About It.  FM is the encoding of a carrier wave by variation of its frequency in accordance with an input signal –frequency modulation.  And, in case you were wondering……… AM is  amplitude modulation.

                1943-Tuesday-  George Washington Carver Day honors the African-American scientist on the anniversary of his death in 1943.  One of the 20th century's greatest scientists, George Washington Carver's influence is still being felt today. Born in 1864 during the era of slavery he became one of the world's most respected and honored men. He devoted his life to understanding nature and the many uses for the simplest of plant life and is best known for developing crop-rotation methods for conserving nutrients in soil and discovering hundreds of new uses for crops such as the peanut, Arachis hypogaea. The different uses for the peanut became important when  a necessity when farmers included it in crop rotationwith cotton and tobacco. However, they grew (pun intended)  miffed  because the amount of the  annual herbaceous plant (Peanut Facts; which grows t 30 to 50 cm (1 to 1½ ft) tall and has leaves that are opposite, pinnate with four leaflets, two opposite pairs; no terminal leaflet), they harvested was too plentiful and they were drowning in seas of goobers which began to rot in overflowing warehouses. Within a week, Carver had experimented with and devised dozens of uses for the peanut, including milk and cheese. In later years he would produce more than 300 products that could be developed from the legumes, including ink, facial cream, shampoo, soap and peanut butter (a life long diet staple of Professor Sy Yentz). Carver didn’t patent peanut butter – it had probably been developed by the Inca when they started using peanuts in 950 BC.

            1945 –Friday-  “O.k, so here’s your ticket”…the pilot looks at the ticket and says “But this is one way!  …. So On this day Japanese pilots received the first order to become kamikaze, meaning "divine wind" in Japanese. There job was to crash their planes into allied ships. At Okinawa, they sank 30 ships and killed almost 5,000 Americans.

            1959-Monday-  There you go and baby here am I
Well you left me here so I could sit and cry
Well -Golly gee what have you done to me
Well I guess It Doesn't Matter Any More
Do you remember baby last September
How you held me tight each and every night
Well whoops a daisy how you drove me crazy
Well I guess It Doesn't Matter Any More ……..Buddy Holly………..Coral Records released  It Doesn't Matter Anymore written for Holly by Paul Anka (the B side was Raining in My Heart) by Buddy Holly. While Coral Records released Holly’s solo efforts, his work with the Crickets was on Brunswick Records. The record was Holly's last before his tragic death in a plane crash that also killed singers Ritchie Valens and J.P. "The Big Bopper" Richardson on February 3, just under a month later.  Interestingly, the tour, having lost Holly, Valens and Richardson, continued with Bobby Vee (a Holly imitator), Jimmy Clanton (Just a Dream) and Frankie Avalon (couldn’t sing at all) filling in.

            1960 – Attempting to cash in on the popularity of the Untouchables and gangster genre, - “When machine gun mania rocked the nation!”  “They Matched Capone Kill For Kill, in a tidal wave of terror!”, (Thanks IMBd), The Purple Gang, a movie about Detroit’s contribution to the roaring 20’s was released. Directed by Frank MacDonald, it starred Barry Sullivan as the brave police detective and an out of character Robert Blake as the crazed, over the top, overacting, killer.

 1961 –Thursday-  A horse is a horse, of course, of course,
And no one can talk to a horse of course
That is, of course, unless the horse is the famous Mister Ed.

Go right to the source and ask the horse
He'll give you the answer that you'll endorse.
He's always on a steady course.
Talk to Mister Ed. ………………….. Did the horse ever get hoarse? Another watershed in cultural history as Mr. Ed, (the talking horse) one of the more the unforgettable (or forgettable?) of the of the numerous 1960's nonsensical sitcoms made its debut on CBS, home of the nonsensical sit com. Starring Alan Young (Androcles and the Lion), Leon Ames, and Connie Hines, and an horse named Bamboo Harvester as Ed, a palomino, this ode to anthropomorphic teleology  lasted until September 1966. Ed went kaput in 1970.

             1972-Wednesday-  NASA announced the start of the space shuttle program. President Richard M. Nixon announced that NASA would proceed with the development of a reusable low cost space shuttle system.  Columbia made the first shuttle flight on April 12, 1981. The idea for the shuttle was born in 1968 at the height of the Apollo program. The Space Shuttle was designed to fulfill two basic roles in NASA post-Apollo manned flight objectives. The first goal of the Space Shuttle program was to provide NASA with an efficient, re-usable method of carrying astronauts to and from a permanently manned space station. In addition, NASA believed that Space Shuttles could serve as multi-purpose satellite delivery vehicles with the potential to completely replace Atlas-Centaur, Delta and Titan rockets and also deliver alien pod like organisms that would take over human minds and cause them to believe that lining up outside all night so that they could get into a store early in the morning on the day after Thanksgiving was a good idea.

            1980 –Saturday- "London is drowning and I live by the river" ……….London Calling, the great album by The Clash, was released in the United States.  Released in the U.K on December 14, 1979, London Calling was according to Rolling Stone, “an emergency broadcast from rock’s Last Angry Band, serving notice that Armageddon was nigh, Western society was rotten at the core, and Rock & Roll needed a good boot in the rear,”.  But the thing Professor Sy Yentz liked about it, beyond the title song, Spanish Bombs, and Lost in the Supermarket was the “stealth track” Train in Vain which was listed on neither the album cover or the label. You say you stand by your man
Tell me something I don't understand
You said you loved me and that's a fact
and then you left me, said you felt trapped
Well some things you can't explain away
But the heartache's in me till this day
CHORUS
You didn't you stand by me
No, not at all
You didn't stand by me
No way…………………Joe Strummer and Mick Jones.

            2005 –Wednesday-  Eris, the largest known dwarf planet (oxymoron alert – largest dwarf) in the solar system, was discovered by the team of Michael E. Brown, Chad Trujillo, and David L. Rabinowitz using photos taken almost two years earlier, on October 21, 2003, at the Palomar Observatory. Pity poor Pluto, demoted from planetary status, is now not even the largest dwarf planet.  Like Pluto, Eris (named after the Greek goddess of strife and discord – according to mythology, Eris is the one who started the quarrel among the gods that resulted in the Trojan War) is in the Kuiper Belt, the large group of objects orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune.  Eris was originally given the temporary name of Xena (after the TV “warrior princess”) – Xena became quite popular and many folks were disappointed when it was renamed Eris….. Eris even has a moon! But then so does Pluto. Eris’ moon has been named Dysomnia (who was the goddess’ daughter). Eris measures about 70 miles wider than Pluto and is the farthest known object in the solar system at 9 billion miles away from sun.

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6.       

1066 –Saturday- Following  the death of Edward the Confessor (who continued confessing up until his death…he even confessed to being a Britney Spears fan and watching Dr. Phil), Harold Godwinson, was crowned King Harold II.  He would be the last Anglo-Saxon king of England.  On his deathbed, Edward supposedly designated Harold the royal heir. This claim was disputed by William (the Bastard), duke of Normandy and cousin of the late king who claimed that he had become the designated heir in 1051.   On October 14, 1066, Harold met William at the Battle of Hastings.  William won and went from William the Bastard to William the Conqueror in a single afternoon. and the course of history was changed.

            1367-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Richard II of England .  Richard was the son of Edward the Black Prince (and Joan, the Fair Maid of Kent – note: English and Scottish history is replete with “Fair Maids”)  and grandson of Edward III. Richard's father went kaput in 1376 and his grandfather kaputed following year, leaving Richard king at the age of 10. The country was ruled largely by his uncle, John of Gaunt. Note, we’re getting into Shakespeare, Henry IV part one territory here. Richard's unwise generosity to his favorites - Michael de la Pole, Robert de Vere and others – (Richard was homosexual) led Thomas, Duke of Gloucester and four other magnates to form the Lords Appellant. The five Lords Appellant tried and convicted five of Richard's closest advisors for treason.  In September 1398 a dispute between two former appellants, Gaunt's son Henry Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray, Duke of Norfolk, gave the king another opportunity for revenge and he banished them both. When Gaunt died in February 1399, Richard confiscated the vast Lancastrian estates, which would have passed to Bolingbroke. In May Richard left to attack Ireland.  Bolingbroke invaded England and garnered both noble and popular support. Returning to England in August, Richard surrendered without a fight. In September he abdicated and Bolingbroke ascended the throne as King Henry IV. In October Richard was imprisoned in Pontefract Castle, where he died four months later.

            1412-Monday-  (approximately) -  Happy Birthday, Joan of Arc, Roman Catholic Saint and national heroine of France.  From the age of 12 she began to have mystical visions. In these visions she said she felt the voice of God commanding her to renew the French nation. France was engaged in the Hundred Years War (which was really 116 years) with England at the time. At her later trial Joan of Arc said she felt these visions were as real seeing another person. The visions were often accompanied by light and the presence of saints such as the Archangel Michael,St Catherine of Alexandria, and St. Margaret of Antioch. Joan became involved in the Dauphin’s (son of the King Charles VI) military efforts.  To further aid French resistance, Joan took the dauphin with an army of 12,000 through English-held territory to be crowned Charles VII in Rheims cathedral on July 17, 1429. She set out on her own to relieve Compiègne from the Burgundians, was captured in a skirmish and sold to the English by John of Luxembourg for 10,000 crowns. She was put on trial (February 21-May 17, 1431) on charges of heresy and sorcery by an ecclesiastical court of the Inquisition, presided over by Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais. Most of what we know about Joan's brief life are those preserved in the records of her trial. She was found guilty, taken to the marketplace of Rouen on May 30, and burned at the stake. 

            1540-Saturday-  A social note, Henry VIII married wife number four, Anne of Cleves. Anne, who was ugly enough to be a 20^th century Windsor, was selected after a continent-wide search for the increasingly corpulent monarch.  Henry’s 3^rd wife, Jane Seymour, had gone kaput shortly after giving birth to the King’s first male heir, Edward.  The artist Hans Holbein the Younger was dispatched to paint portraits of Anne and a selection of other women Henry was considering for the role of his fourth wife. Unfortunately, Holbein’s portrait was misleading and when Henry saw her in person, things got ugly.  Evidently, she was quite smelly too. Anne was commanded to leave the court on June 24 and on July 6 she was informed of the King’s decision to reconsider the marriage. In a short time, Anne was asked for her consent to an annulment, to which she agreed. The marriage was annulled on July 9, 1540, on the grounds that it had never been consummated -- Henry claimed that he had found his bride so ghastly that he could not bear to sleep with her. Henry then moved on to the rather morally challenged Catherine Howard for wife number five.

            1655 –Wednesday-  Happy Birthday Jacob Bernoulli, the first what seems like an endless line of Bernoullis. Jacob was a Swiss mathematician who was one of the first to fully utilize the differential calculus of and differential calculus of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz and introduced the term integral in integral calculus. By 1689 he had published important work on infinite series and published his law of large numbers in probability theory. Jacob was intrigued by the logarithmic spiral and requested it be carved on his tombstone. The logarithmic spiral is a spiral whose polar equation is given by  (1)  where  is the distance from the origin,  is the angle from the x-axis, and are arbitrary constants.

            1681 –Monday- It is a popular belief that the Duke of Albemarle held a boxing competition between his butcher and butler. This was the first recorded boxing match.  There is no data on the combatants names nor weather they had to go back to their normal duties after the match. The common reason for such matches is believed to be amusement and fun.  Boxing was prevalent in North Africa in 4000 BC. It was also popularly played in Greek and Rome. The rules were crude then and boxers often indulged into lethal boxing rounds with leather taped on to their bare hands. It is believed that in Rome, the boxing fighters were quite possibly offenders and slaves. They played fought to win and gain independence. However, facts also point to free men fighting for competition and the spirit of sport. Eventually, Augustus is known to have banned fighting. http://www.historyofboxing.info/

            1714-Saturday-  During the reign of Queen Anne, the typewriter was patented by English inventor Henry Mill. He never succeeded in perfecting his invention, in fact no record of it survives, so credit, fame and money would go to others. Over three hundred years later, in 1866, Americans Christopher Latham Sholes and his colleagues, Carlos Glidden and Samuel Soulé, invented the first practical typewriting machine.  It took five years, dozens of experiments, and two patents later, Sholes and his associates produced an improved model similar to today's typewriters.  The first "Sholes & Glidden Type Writer" was offered for sale in 1874

            1745 –Wednesday-  Happy Birthday Jacques Montgolfier , younger of the Mongolfier brothers who In 1782, with brother Joseph,  discovered that heated air from a fire directed into a paper or fabric bag made the bag rise. They demonstrated this discovery  later that year when a balloon they made rose into the air about 3,000 feet (1,000 meters), remained aloft some 10 minutes, and then settled to the ground more than a mile and a half from where it rose. On September 19, in a demonstration before Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, they put a sheep, duck, and rooster aboard a balloon to determine the effect of altitude on living creatures. The balloon floated for about 8 minutes and landed safely about 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) from the launch site.

             1822- Sunday- Happy Birthday Heinrich Schliemann, German archaeologist who excavated sites at Troy, Mycenae, and Tiryns that he had connected to Homer’s Iliad and Vergil’s Aeneid. He was supposed to share the treasures he found with the Turkish government.  He spent a lot of time an effort trying to share as little as possible….some archeological treasures ended up in his garden……He excavated Hissarlik on the Asia Minor coast of Turkey, and found ruins of nine consecutive cities buried on top of each other. He incorrectly identified second oldest Troy II, as Homer’s city. The city Homer called Troy has never been found. Some have even claimed it was in England……really.

      1838-Saturday- Dit dot ditty dit dot a ditty ditty 

Dit dot ditty dit dot a ditty ditty

Dit dot ditty dit dot a ditty ditty

Dit dot ditty, Baby come home to me

I sent my baby a telegram asking to be her man

Begging her to come back home to me (Baby come home to me)

Oh I dotted the I's and I crossed the T's

And I'm begging pretty please Honey honey, come back home to me (Baby come home to me…

.......Morse Code of Love.......The Capris………… Samuel Morse gave the first public demonstration of his telegraph.  Luckily, he didn’t have Marconi’s CQD (see 1904)  to try it out.  It was not until five years later that Congress funded $30,000 to construct an experimental telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore, a distance of 40 miles. The famous first message "What hath God wrought?" sent by "Morse Code" from the old Supreme Court chamber in the United States Capitol to his partner in Baltimore, officially opened the completed line of May 24, 1844.

            1853 – Thursday- President elect, Franklin Pierce of New Hampshire and his wife, Jane were involved in a train accident on their way to Washington.  Both escaped with minor injuries as the de-railed train tumbled down an embankment but their eleven year old son, Bennie was killed.  Jane Pierce would not be seen in public for  two years and refused to attend her husband’s inauguration.

            1857 –Tuesday-  Throwing in everything, including the kitchen zinc, a patent, which was the country’s first patent related to zinc ore was issued to Samuel Wetherill, Bethlehem, Pa.

            1898-Thursday-  First telephone message from a submerged submarine was  sent by the inventor Simon Lake (really his name). How ironic that Mr. Lake sent his message (which has been transcribed as “ GET ME OUT THE HELL OF HERE!!!!!!!” no, no,no Professor Sy Yentz has submarinic sense of humor) from the bottom of a river, the Patapsco (outside Baltimore) to be exact. Lake competed with  John Holland to produce the first submarine for the U.S Navy.  Lake, a Quaker from Pleasantville, New Jersey, was unable at first to get funding for his submarines and sold one to Russia in 1904 and then spent seven years working for the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Navy.

         1904- Wednesday Proving that even great scientists don’t always get it right, Marconi established “CQD” as first international radio distress signal. It didn’t last long. Two years later, the much quicker and easier to send by radio, “SOS” became the radio distress signal.

         1907 –Sunday-  Maria Montessori founded the first Montessori school, Casa di Bambini,  in the San Lorenzo district of Rome. Its overall purpose was to give four to seven year old children from low-income families a full-day educational program.  Maria Montessori, born in 1870, was the first woman in Italy to receive a medical degree. She worked in the fields of psychiatry, education and anthropology. She believed that each child is born with a unique potential to be revealed, rather than as a "blank slate" waiting to be written upon, or the horrible little monsters that make life miserable for teachers in June

            1912-Saturday-  New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment, was admitted into the United States as the 47^th state, just beating out Arizona which came in on February 14. New Mexico has an ancient history dating back to what is called "Folsom Man," a 20,000 year-old human inhabitant found near Clovis. Non New Mexicans call him Larry King.  More recently, around 1100, the Anasazi lived in New Mexico throughout the northern part of the state.  Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, a Spanish explorer searching for gold, explored the region that became New Mexico in 1540–1542. In 1598 the first Spanish settlement was established on the Rio Grande River by Juan de Onate; in 1610 Santa Fe was founded and made the capital of New Mexico. The U.S. acquired most of New Mexico in 1848, as a result of the Mexican War, and the remainder in the 1853 Gadsden Purchase-see December 30.  Some state symbols; flower- yucca,  tree-pinon, animal - black bear, bird- roadrunner, fish-cutthroat trout, vegetables - chili and frijol, gem- turquoise,  and the song is the unforgettable,  O Fair New Mexico New Mexico even has a state cookie-bizcochito, and a state question – Red or Green?

         1919-Monday- The great Theodore Roosevelt, 20^th President of the United States, author, conservationist and explorer, died at age 60.  He had never really recovered from the illnesses he suffered during his exploration of the River of Doubt, an Amazon tributary in 1914.  The Gnus highly recommends, in fact, The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard, a superb history that incorporates great science and reads like a novel.

            1929 –Sunday- The ever lactating, Sheffield Farms of New York began using wax paper cartons instead of glass bottles for milk delivery.  Wax was applied to the paper, to make it waterproof. In 1940, polyethylene was introduced as the waterproofing material.

            1936 – Porky Pig made his cartoon debut in a Warner Brothers cartoon, Gold Diggers of ‘49. Note, Mel Blanc, who supplied the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Sylvester, Tweety, Dan Rather,  Jay Leno, Gwenyth Paltrow, Rosie O’Donnell, the entire cast of  The View, Britney Spears ex-husband and Porky, did not join the company till the following year.

            1944 – Thursday- Happy Birthday –Rolf M. Zinkernagel , Swiss immunologist and pathologist who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1996  for his work with colleague Peter Doherty defining the system by which the immune system identifies friend and foe.  Friends know the secret password “swordfish”, foes usually try “it’s me, the Jehovah’s Witness”. Actually it is the thymus gland that selects only white blood cells that react properly to virus-infected cells

            1949-Thursday-  The first photograph of genes was taken at the University of Southern California by Dr. Daniel Chapin Pease and Dr. Richard Freligh Baker. The photo, a 5 x 7” color portrait of a pair of Levis 30” waist with 30” inseam, was framed and hung in their office.

            1957 –Sunday-  Elvis Presley made his third and final appearance on Ed Sullivan’s Toast of the Town. Protecting the American public from God knows what, the CBS censors ordered Elvis to filmed from the waist up. Presley sang Hound Dog, Heartbreak Hotel, Love Me Tender, Don't Be Cruel, Too Much, When My Blue Moon Turns to Gold Again, and "Peace in the Valley." Also appearing on the show was comedienne, Carol Burnett.

            1971-Wednesday- University of California at  Berkeley chemists announced the first synthetic production of growth hormones. They tested the hormones on a cauliflower and it resulted in the creation of Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe.

1994 –Sunday-  I’m so hurt… Timi Yuro………… Olympic figure skating hopeful, Nancy Kerrigan was attacked after a practice session two days before the Olympic Trials.  A man hit Kerrigan with a club on the back of her knee. Evidently, fellow competitor, Tonya Harding, a trailer park denizen, her (first of several) ex-husband, and several other Rhodes Scholars and hatched a plan to keep Kerrigan out of the Trials. 

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7.    

            1355 –Tuesday-  By the time we got to Woodstock,
We were half a million strong
And everywhere was a song and a celebration.
And I dreamed I saw the bomber death planes
Riding shotgun in the sky,
Turning into butterflies
Above our nation…….Joni Mitchell……… Happy Birthday, Thomas of Woodstock, 1st Duke of Gloucester, yet another son (the youngest) of Edward III of England . Thomas bit the dust in 1397 on orders of his nephew, Richard II (who in turn would be slewn in 1399).

            1558 –Tuesday-  The French, led by  Francois, the Duke de Guise (a duke in diguise) seized  Calais, the last continental possession of England. Calais is a city in northern France, located at 50°57N 1°52E. It is in the département of Pas-de-Calais, of which it is a sous-préfecture. It has a population of about 80,000 people plus a zillion tourists.  It overlooks the Strait of Dover, the narrowest point in the English Channel, which is only 34 km (21 miles) wide and is the closest French town to England. The white cliffs of Dover can easily be seen on a clear day. The Duke advised King Henry II that someday, it would be the principal ferry crossing point between England and France, with the vast majority of cross-Channel being made between Dover and Calais. In addition, French end of the Channel Tunnel would  also be situated in the vicinity of Calais, in Sangatte some 4 miles (6 km) to the west of the town. And why?  Due to the large difference in taxation between Britain and France on such items as alcoholic beverages and tobacco, massive shopping complexes targeted at British day-trippers have sprung up on and around Calais. Such day trippers are colloquially known as "booze cruisers". King Edward  I had taken Calais after his victory at Crecy in 1347 and King Henry V had marched to Calais after his victory at Agincourt in 1415. In the intervening years, English possessions ebbed and flowed until Henry VIII’s daughter, Mary I, (Bloody Mary) a very unpopular Queen lost Calais during an ill conceived, badly fought war with France

            1598-Wednesday- Boris Godunov became Czar of Russia. Boris was the brother-in-law of Fyodor, the son of Ivan “The Terrible” who had become Tsar when Ivan went  kaputsky in 1584. Unfortunately, Fyodor was, to be kind, dumb and weak. Ivan, knew this and appointed a council to assist (smirk smirk) Fyodor in his rule.  Within a few years Boris Gudunov was the sole remaining member of the council.  He ruled as Regent and defacto Czar until Fyodor gave up the ghost in 1598. Gudunov only ruled until 1605. Russia suffered a horrible famine and Gudunov was blamed as rumors spread that he was a usurper and Russia was suffering Divine punishment for his sins. He was also faced with pretenders to the throne claiming to be Ivan’s other son Dimitri.  All in all a nice soap opera but for a better opera, see Massorgsky’s Boris Gudunov based on the drama by Alexander Pushkin.

            1608-Monday- Shortly after the arrival of supply ships,  Jamestown, the first colony, just eight months old, had a fire destroy many buildings within the Jamestown fort, among them the colony's first church. Most of the colony's provisions were also destroyed. Powhatan, the father of Pocahontas, provided food for the colony sending allowing Pocahontas to go along almost on a weekly basis.

             1610-Thursday- Galileo Galilei discovered the first four of Jupiter‘s moons.  Can you name them?  That’s right!  The four Galilean Moons are; Ganymede, (a Trojan prince of great beauty whom Zeus made cupbearer to the gods), Callisto, (a nymph, beloved of Zeus. Hera –Mrs. Zeus- changed the woman into a bear and Zeus then placed her in the sky as the constellation Ursa Major). Europa, (a Phoenician princess who was abducted to Crete by Zeus), and Io (a princess whom Zeus transformed into a white heifer to hide her from his ever jealous spouse). We also call Io the “Internal Revenue Moon” as in I owe).  Actually, he saw three of the moons on this day.  He thought they were stars until he looked (through his crude 33-power telescope) the next evening and saw they had appeared to move the wrong way. On January 13^th, he found a fourth “star” that moved in the same direction as the previous three. He realized they were orbiting Jupiter. Tada!  And the next moon after the original four?  The next moon discovered orbiting Jupiter was Amalthea, which was observed by E.E. Barnard in 1892. So far to date, there have been – pick a number-  moons found orbiting Jupiter. Also remember that Galileo was born in 1564, the same year as Shakespeare and also the same year that Michelangelo died.

            1745-Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Johann Fabricius, Danish entomologist who was one of the great entomologists of the 18th century (a century aflutter with entomology). Fabricius studied with Swedish naturalist Carolus Linnaeus, named and classified some 10,000 species of insects. Among the classifications were: Insects Flew in my Ear, Insects that Got in My Underwear, Insects that Gave Me a Rash, Insects That Made My Wife Scream, Insects That Splatter When You Step on Them, and Insects That Taste Good in Covered With Chocolate

             1782-Monday-  The Bank of Philadelphia, the first commercial bank in the U.S, opened for business. This was one week after the Continental Congress had granted a perpetual charter to the Bank of North America. This bank was intended to be a foundation of American credit that would play a significant role in the financial management of the republic.  This was also still fairly optimistic since the British had surrendered at Yorktown in 1781 but the treaty ending the war would not be signed until 1783. All members of the Continental Congress received low interest credit Cards from VISA with bonus points towards a Caribbean Cruise on Disney Lines.

            1785 –Friday- Frenchman Jean-Pierre Blanchard and American John Jeffries flew from Dover, England, to Calais, France, in a gas balloon, becoming the first to cross the English Channel by air (and avoiding the long wait at passport control at Calais). Cleverly preparing for any difficulties, their balloon was weighed down by extraneous supplies such as anchors, a nonfunctional hand-operated propeller, and silk-covered oars with which they hoped they could row their way through the air. Just before reaching the French coast, the two intrepid flyers threw nearly everything out of the balloon, including Blanchard’s trousers and other undeclared items over the side as they attempted to lighten the ship.

            1789-Wednesday- The first U.S. presidential election was held. Americans voted for electors who, a month later (it also took that long to count the “hanging chads” in Florida in 2000, the Ohio re-count in 2004, and the Minnesota Senate election of 2008 in which the number of ballots outnumbered the number of absentee voters), chose George Washington to be the nation’s first President with John Adams as the Vice-President. Others receiving votes were John Jay, John Rutledge, John Hancock, and, bookending nicely with the George at the beginning and four Johns in the middle, George Clinton (yes, the same George Clinton who would go on to be the lead singer of Parliament/Funkadelic 200 years later) last.  

            1800-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Millard Fillmore, the 13^th president of the United States. He was  born in the Finger Lakes country of New York.  Fillmore was Zachery Taylor’s Vice President but when “Old Rough and Ready” bit the dust in 1850, Millard succeeded to the Presidency.  Serving for just about three years, Fillmore was denied the Whig Party nomination in 1852 largely because he had signed the “Fugitive Slave Act”

            1827-Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Sir Sandford Fleming, Scottish surveyor and leading railway engineer who developed the idea of dividing the world into time zones. He was instrumental in convening the 1884 International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington, at which the system of international standard time - still in use today - was adopted. Obviously, this man is responsible for contemporatry “jet lag”. Once he had figured out which time zone he was in Fleming also designed the first Canadian postage stamp.  The three penny stamp issued in 1851 had a beaver on it (the national animal of Canada, since replaced by Alex Trebek).      

            1834-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Johann P. Reis, German physicist whose invention of an early telephone – one of several early “telephones” preceded the work of Alexander Graham Bell. Reis actually coined the word “telephone” for his invention. He was plagued by busy signals and telemarketers for the rest of his life.

            1896 –Tuesday- Fannie Farmer published her first and now famous, Boston Cooking School Cookbook. She included very specific and accurate measurements. Before that cookbook, ingredient lists were estimates….just like some of the contemporary chefs on television ….just use a “pinch of salt” and then they grab a handful and heave it all over the food and “a bit of butter” at which point they dump in a slab the size of a brick.  Fanny Farmer also discussed food composition, caloric calculations and the body's need for nutrients. She formed a systematic view of cooking that influenced cooking instruction for decades to come.

            1900-Sunday-  First boat went through the Panama Canal.  It was a test run and the boat was the Alexandre La Valley. The first official trip through was the S.S. Ancon, carrying a cargo of ……..spice? no…….precious stones? No…..furs? No…..money? No….how about cement? Yes, on August 15, 1914.

            1901-Monday- Fittingly, on the same day that Fannie Farmer published her cook book, convicted cannibal, Alfred Packer was paroled.  Packer, who made several confessions, evidently killed and ate his fellow travelers as they made their way through Colorado during severe winter weather. He claimed one of the others was responsible and he killed him (and ate him) in self-defense.  Packer came under suspicion when he arrived in California looking remarkably healthy and carrying the valuables of his “lunches”.

            1924 -Monday Twenty-six-year-old New York composer George Gershwin completed his  jazz symphony Rhapsody in Blue. In late 1923, bandleader Paul Whiteman began to put together a concert program featuring all American music to be performed on February 12. at Aeolian Hall in New York City. It was to include a new work by George Gershwin.  Whoops! Somehow Gershwin did not realize the word "new" was on the handbill until six weeks before the concert was scheduled - he thought Whiteman would use an existing composition. Whiteman expected a fully symphonic work of jazz material that would fuse jazz and sympony.  Gershwin went a composing frenzy. The work was an instant success marked by the  brilliant and complex opening for clarinet which Gershwin worked out with Whiteman's clarinetist Ross Gorman. http://www.spiritus-temporis.com/rhapsody-in-blue/

            1925-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Gerald Durell, British conservation biologist and prolific author, born in Jamshedpur, India, whose life work was the preservation of endangered animal species. Take a look at Birds, Beasts and Relatives and Zoo in My Luggage.

            1926 –Thursday-  “Say goodnight Gracie”.  “Goodnight George”. A social note as George Burns and Gracie Allen were married in Cleveland, Ohio. A man comes out, puts his arms around Gracie, and kisses her, and she kisses him. They wave to each other as he backs offstage. Gracie returns to George center stage Gracie: Who was that?
George: You don't know?
Gracie: No, my mother told me never to talk to strangers.
George: That makes sense.
Gracie: This always happens to me. On my way in, a man stopped me at the stage door and said, "Hiya, cutie, how about a bite tonight after the show?"
George: And you said?
Gracie: I said, "I'll be busy after the show but I'm not doing anything now," so I bit him.
George: Gracie, let me ask you something. Did the nurse ever happen to drop you on your head when you were a baby?
Gracie: Oh, no, we couldn't afford a nurse, my mother had to do it.
George: You had a smart mother.
Gracie: Smartness runs in my family. When I went to school I was so smart my teacher was in my class for five years.
George: Gracie, what school did you go to?
Gracie: I'm not allowed to tell.
George: Why not?
Gracie: The school pays me $25 a month not to tell.
George: Is there anybody in the family as smart as you?
Gracie: My sister Hazel is even smarter. If it wasn't for her, our canary would never have hatched that ostrich egg.
George: A canary hatched an ostrich egg?
Gracie: Yeah...but the canary was too small to cover that big egg.
George: So?
Gracie: So...Hazel sat on the egg and held the canary in her lap.

            1927-Friday-  On the same day that Johann P. Reis (of telephone fame see 1834 above)  was born, long distance telephone service was opened between New York and London. The first caller had to wait until a “customer assistance technician” was available.  He waited because “your call is very important to us”.  He listened to twenty minutes of Al Jolson singing Mammy.

            1927 –Friday-  The Harlem Globetrotters played their first game, although they were not the Harlem Globetrotters.  A basketball team called the Savoy Five played their first game at Hinckley, Illinois before a crowd of 300. The total payout for the game was $75. The team wore jerseys with the words "'NEW YORK" printed on them, to give the impression that they were from the city. Eventually their name evolved from "Savoy Big Five" to "Saperstein's New York Globetrotters" to the "Harlem New York Globetrotters" and finally just the "Harlem Globetrotters," all in an effort to make it clear that they were an all-black team that traveled the world. In fact, they didn't actually play a game in Harlem until 1968.

         1931 –Wednesday- Aviator Guy Menzies, fleeing a herd of rabid kangaroos in Sydney, made the first solo trans Tasman flight across the Tasman Sea from Australia to New Zealand which culminated twelve hours later with crash-landing in a swamp in Harihari, a sparsely populated part of the West Coast of the South Island of New Zealand..

         1946-Monday-   Happy Birthday, R. Margaret Kearney, Irish/American pioneer in computer shorthand, office management, Pocono resort retail sails, and low-fat cooking.

            1953 –Wednesday-  President Harry Truman announced that the United States had developed a hydrogen bomb. In case you were wondering, the atomic bomb uses nuclear fission, in which big atoms (uranium or plutonium) were split into smaller ones during a chain reaction, that released vast amounts of energy. The hydrogen bomb is not fission but fusion in which atoms (various forms of hydrogen) fuse together to make larger atoms (helium), essentially the same process that occurs in the sun. Fusion bombs are a thousand times more powerful than fission bombs, which are a million times more powerful than chemical ones.  Meanwhile, Communist Russia, world leader in espionagewas busy espionaging America’s Manhattan Project which helped speed up the development of atomic weapons and the Russians would have their own hydrogen bomb within a few months.

            1954 –Thursday-  The Duoscopic TV receiver was unleashed on an unsuspecting world by Du Mont. Two people could enjoy different TV programs at the same time with a new set. Note: One person could not watch two shows at the same time. The experimental Du Mont Duoscopic was actually two receivers in one cabinet, with two chassis, two sets of controls and two viewing tubes mounted at right angles.  A semitransparent mirror superimposed the two pictures, but each viewer saw only one show by watching through polarizing glasses. Note: it only worked if you wore the glasses and sat at two different angles while watching so we guess may one person could watch two shows if he jumped back and forth between two chairs and kept changing the spectacles.  Earphones provided the sound.  

         1958 – Br-oooo-ken hearted me-eee-lo-dy
Ooooonce you were our song of love
Nooooow you just keep taunting me
Wiiiiith the memory of (ba-da-da)
His tender love
Ooooh, broken hearted melody
Must you keep reminding me
Of the lips I long to kiss
And the love I miss
Since he went away
Night and day they play
That broken hearted melody
That he used to sing to me
When our love was young and bright………Sarah Vaughn recorded the great Broken Hearted Melody. Songfacts reminds us that Hal David co-wrote this song with composer Sherman Edwards. It was one of the many that he had written before forming his legendary partnership with songwriter Burt Bacharach.

         1963 – Don't you know that I danced, I danced till a quarter to three
With the help, last night, of Daddy G.
He was swingin on the sax like a nobody could
And I was dancin' all over the room.
Oh, don't you know the people were dancin' like they were mad,
it was the swingin'est band they had, ever had.
It was the swingin'est song that could ever be,
It was a night with Daddy G. Gary (U.S) Bonds sued Chubby Checker for $100,000.  At issue was plagerism. Checker’s Dancin’ Party bore an eerie resemblance to Bond’s Quarter to Three. Quarter to Three was released in 1961, Dancin’ Party in 1962.  The case was settled out of court.

         1968 – Surveyor 7, the last of the series to explore potential Moon landing sites, was launched.  It would land on the Moon on January 10. The investigations in the Apollo landing zone having been satisfactorily accomplished, Surveyor 7 could be sent to an area of primarily scientific interest. The site selected was a rugged, rock-strewn ejecta blanket near Tycho Crater. The spacecraft landed less than 1.5 miles from the center of the target circle, about 18 miles north of the rim of crater Tycho.  The Surveyor probes were the first U.S. spacecraft to land safely on the Moon. The Surveyor 7 probe resulted in the displacement of mutant Lunar microbes that were carried to Earth causing the disease of Nounus Into Verbus in which some humans would continuously use the word transtition as a verb as in “they transitioned from urban to rural or “or they transitioned from military to civilian life”.

         1990- Sunday- The Leaning Tower of Pisa was closed to tourists. The toower continued to tilt naturally at the rate of a little over five arc seconds per year. And what, you legitimately ask, is an arc second?  No, it is not number two of the pair of animals going onto Noah’s Ark, it is equal to exactly 1/3600 of an angular degree or 1/1,296,000 of a circle. Sixty arc seconds comprise an arc minute; 60 arc minutes comprise an angular degree. One arc second of latitude at the earth's surface corresponds to a north-south distance of only about 31 m. and we hope that clears it up for you.  The  Italian government closed the attraction, sparking screams of outrage by Pisan officials, who feared the loss of tourist revenue and the resulting impact on the local economy. The closure was caused by the collapse of  another tower, the civic tower of Pavia in 1989, which raised fears for the safety of the Pisa tower.  The Leaning Tower was reopened in 2001 after combinations of counterweights, excavated soil and slings finally stabilized it. Beginning in 1173 as a bell tower for Pisa's cathedral, it wasn't until five years later that began to tilt downward, just after the third floor was completed. As it turned out, the tower was built upon a dense clay mixture that was not nearly strong enough to hold the bell tower, and construction was halted for nearly 100 years.

         1994 –Friday-  Attack of the Fatuous Trailer Trash.  Nancy Kerrigan withdrew from the U.S. Figure Skating Championships in Detroit. The previous day (see January 6) her right leg was severely bruised in an attack following a practice session.  Turned out it was instigated by slutty fellow skater Tonya Harding, whose slutty ex-husband Jeff Gillooly conspired with  intellectuals Shawn Eckhardt and Shane Stant on the attack.

         1999-Thursday-  The  impeachment trial of Presidential stud muffin,  Bill Clinton began in the Senate.  The Arkansas horn dog was charged with lying under oath and obstructing justice. As instructed in Article 1 of the U.S. Constitution, Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist was sworn in to preside, and the senators were sworn in as jurors.

2003 –Tuesday-  British police announced they had found traces of the deadly poison ricin in a north London apartment and arrested six Muslim terrorists.

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8.    

 1642 –Wednesday-  Galileo Galileo kaput. Born in 1564, the same year as Shakespeare was born and the same year that Michelangelo died…..1642 was also the year that Isaac Newton was born (OS).  Galileo pioneered the "experimental scientific method", built the first high-powered astronomical telescope; invented a horse-powered pump to raise water; demonstrated that the velocities of falling bodies are not proportional to their weights; described the true parabolic paths of cannonballs and other projectiles; developed the ideas behind Newton's laws of motion; and confirmed the Copernican theory of the solar system. Oh yes, he discovered the first four moons of Jupiter too.

            1746 –Saturday-  Bonnie Prince Charlie occupied Stirling in Scotland. Charlie, actually, Charles Stuart, was the Jacobite pretender to the British Throne.  He was the son of the Catholic James III, who was the son of James II (supporters of James were called Jacobites) who was driven into exile by Parliament and the Protestant William and Mary in 1688.  Charlie, like Mary, Queen of Scots, is more glamorous in legend than in real life. Although brave and honorable, he was ineffectual and continually suffered from bad decisions and worse luck, in fact another of his nicknames was “Old Mr. Misfortune”. Charlie’s base of support was Scotland, but only part of Scotland.  Some areas of the Highlands and Lowlands (the weathy) supported the Hanovers of England (via Germany).   Taking Edinburgh and Stirling (site of William Wallace’s great victory) was the high water mark of his attempt to take the throne. He should have stopped there but foolishly moved towards London, lost his nerve, lost most of his troops –they were content with re-taking Scotland and went home- retreated and was cornered and defeated at the disastrous Battle of Culloden.

             1815-Sunday In 1814 we took a little trip
Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip.
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans.
[Chorus:]
We fired our guns and the British kept a'comin.
There wasn't nigh as many as there was a while ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin' on
Down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
We looked down the river and we see'd the British come.
And there must have been a hundred of'em beatin' on the drum.
They stepped so high and they made the bugles ring.
We stood by our cotton bales and didn't say a thing.
[Chorus]
Old Hickory said we could take 'em by surprise
If we didn't fire our muskets 'til we looked 'em in the eye
We held our fire 'til we see'd their faces well.
Then we opened up with squirrel guns and really gave 'em ... well………Johnny Horton………………

The Battle of New Orleans, the most decisive battle of the War of 1812 occurred. Unfortunately, the War of 1812 had ended almost 2 weeks before with the Treaty of Ghent (Belgium). Word had not reached the U.S and the British attacked New Orleans which was defended by General Andrew Jackson. Pirate Jean Lafitte had assisted by warning him of the impending attack yes, it was the thrill of victory and the agony of Lafitte).  The actual battle lasted about 30 minutes as Jackson’s sharpshooters killed or wounded over 2,000 British troops including the commanding general, Sir Edward Peckenham. For an accurate description of the battle listen to Johnny Horton’s recording of  Battle of New Orleans

            1821-Monday-  Happy Birthday, Confederate General James Longstreet. Robert E. Lee called him his “Old War Horse”.  The soldiers called him “Old Pete”.  He came under severe criticism from Southern loyalists after the war when he questioned Lee’s strategy at Gettysburg. It should be noted that his own delays in preparation and ultimately hours late  attack on the Union  flank played a major role in the Union’s successful defense of that area which included the “Devil’s Den”, and the failure to take Little Round Top. Like Stonewall Jackson,(Chancellorsville)  he was shot by his troops during the Battle of the Wilderness in 1864.  Unlike Jackson who became kaput, Longstreet recovered and resumed command in October during the Petersburg operations and commanded on the north side of the James. He remained with Lee through the surrender at Appomattox. After the war he befriended Grant and became (gasp!) a Republican. He served as Grant's minister to Turkey.

                 1838 –Monday Dit dot ditty dit dot a ditty ditty
Dit dot ditty dit dot a ditty ditty
Dit dot ditty dit dot a ditty ditty
Dit dot ditty, Baby come home to me
I sent my baby a telegram asking to be her man
Begging her to come back home to me (Baby come home to me)
Oh I dotted the I's and I crossed the T's
And I'm begging pretty please
Honey honey, come back home to me (Baby come home to me)
Dit dotÉ..
Baby I want your love
Woo-oo
Baby I need your love
Ooo
Honey honey come back home to me (Come back home to me)
Dit dotÉ.
Got to have your love
Woo-oo
Can't live without your love
Woo-oo
Honey honey come back home to me (Come back home to me) ……..Morse Code of Love…..The Capris

“A patient waiter is no loser” – that’s the first telegraph message in the U.S. in which letters were represented by dots and dashes was transmitted. The communications system had been invented by Alfred Vail of Morristown, N.J., in Sep 1837. It then took weeks to figure out what they were talking about…..evidently they had never listened to some restaurant patrons who would try the patience of a saint let alone a waiter.....and wade through the vale of dots and dashes. Vail’s general plan was to employ the simplest and shorte

69 –Tuesday During the “Year of the Four Emperors”, emperor number two Otho, seized power from number one, Galba proclaiming himself Emperor of Rome. Alas poor Otho we hardly knew ye. Otho only lasted three months before committing suicide rather than be slewn by emperor number three,Vitellius who would then be slewn by emperor number four, Vespasian. There certainly was a lot of slewing going on in those days. Vespasian put an end to the game of musical emperors by being the founder of the founder of the Flavian dynasty. Vespasian would succeeded by sons Titus and Domitian.

            1559-Thursday Two months after the death of her half-sister, Queen Mary I (known to history as “Bloody Mary”) of England, Elizabeth Tudor, the 25-year-old daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, was crowned Queen Elizabeth I at Westminster Abbey in London. “Good Queen Bess”, “the Virgin Queen” would become one of England’s greatest monarchs.  Elizabeth's reign was one of the most constructive periods in English history: literature bloomed through the works of Spenser, Marlowe and Shakespeare; Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh were instrumental in expanding English influence in the New World; Elizabeth's religious compromise, rejecting radical Protestantism, laid many fears to rest and de-fused a potential religious powder keg. However, she was also a short-tempered, sometimes indecisive ruler, who enjoyed more than her share of luck. Towards the end of her reign, a series of economic and military problems weakened her popularity to the point where many of her subjects were relieved at her death. While she never married, she probably wasn’t a virgin.  Historians have found receipts from her trysts at the Hi Ho Motel as well as Club Med for Single Monarchs.

            1622 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Jean Moliere, French playwright; author of the Misanthrope, Tartuffe, and others.  One of the most famous moments in Molière’s life was his last and it is the stuff of which legends are made. He collapsed on stage, while performing Le Malade Imaginaire. He died a few hours later at his house.  It is said that he was wearing green, and because of that, there is a superstition that green brings bad luck to actors
            1759 – Monday- The British Museum opened to the public. It was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the physician, scientist and collector, Sir Hans Sloane. The original building was erected in 1677; and was called Montague-house, since it was the town-residence of the dukes of Montague. In the year 1753, the British parliament, passed an act for purchasing the museum of the late Sir Hans Sloane, and the collection of manuscripts of the late Lord Oxford, called the Harleian library, for the use of the public. Twenty six trustees were appointed and incorporated, to provide a repository for those and some other collections. The repository was to be called the British museum and yes the repository contains some suppositories.            

            1777-Wednesday-  Then known as New Connecticut, the area that would become the state of Vermont, declared its independence not only from Great Britain but also New York, not that anyone cared.

            1797-Sunday- I'm puttin' on my top hat
Tyin' up my white tie
Brushin' off my tails
I'm dudein' up my shirt front
Puttin' in the shirt studs
Polishin' my nails ……Irving Berlin………….Great moments in haberdasher history….The top hat was first worn in England by John Heatherington, a London haberdasher.  The first time John Hetherington wore the hat in public, women screamed and fainted, and crowds gathered. It caused an absolute uproar which led to his arrest and subsequent fine of £50, an absolute fortune in those days. A law was also passed forbidding anybody to wear the top hat in public on the grounds it scared timid people. http://ezinearticles.com/?Top-Hat---The-History-and-Origin&id=86976

            1816 – Monday- Happy Birthday Marie LaFarge, French woman accused and convicted of slewing her husband with arsenic in 1840. The  case became notable because it was one of the first trials to be followed by the public through daily newspaper reports. She was also the first person convicted largely on direct forensic toxicological evidence supplied the chronically annoying cast of CSI Miami.  She had bought a relatively large amount during the months preceding the death, allegedly to exterminate the rats, and her husband had become violently ill before he died in the manner consistent with arsenic poisoning.  Servants claimed Marie had stirred white powder into his food.  A local pharmacist tested the food and found arsenic.  Things didn’t look good for Marie.  She was convicted and sentenced to kapution.  The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment.

            1822 –Tuesday-  Great moments in town naming.  Demetrius Ypsilanti was elected president of the legislative assembly of Greece. He was  However, failure to obtain a commanding position in the national convention of Astros, (he wanted to play shortstop but they would only let him pinch hit)  led to his retirement early in 1823. During the lengthy struggle with Turkey, Ypsilanti, with three hundred men held the Citadel of Argos for three days against an army of thirty thousand.  Having exhausted his provisions, he escaped one night beyond the enemy lines with his entire command, having lost not a single man.  The good news was Ypsilanti Michigan was named after him. When three prominent settlers, Judge Augustus Woodward, John Stewart and William Harwood, combined portions of their own land to form the original plat for a new settlement at the crossing in 1825,  this new settlement was named Ypsilanti. http://www.cityofypsilanti.com/about/historyinfo

            1861 –Tuesday- The safety elevator was patented as a “Hoisting Apparatus” by American inventor, Elisha G. Otis, of Yonkers, New York. His invention was designed to stop the fall of an elevator  in case of the lifting rope breaking. The process, however, did have its ups and downs. No, Otis did not invent the elevator, he invented the brake used in modern elevators. His brakes made skyscrapers a practical reality.  The concept of the elevator has been around for centuries.  Early “elevator” designs were in use during the Middle Ages and can be traced back to the third century BC and ancient Greek engineers such as Archimedes. They were operated by animal and human power or by water-driven mechanisms.  The first elevator designed for a passenger was built in 1743 for King Louis XV at his palace in France. The one-person mechanism went up only one floor, (“second floor, ladies underwear, mistresses, guillotines, and silly wigs”), from the first to the second. Known as the "Flying Chair," it was on the outside of the building, and was entered by the king via his balcony. The mechanism consisted of a carefully balanced arrangement of weights and pulleys hanging inside a chimney. Men stationed inside the chimney then raised or lowered the Flying Chair at the king's command. 

            1863-Thursday-  Wood pulp paper was first used in the U.S. for a printed newspaper by the Boston Morning Herald of Boston, Mass. Pulp non-fiction,  wood pulp paper is wood that has been ground to a fine pulp for use in making newsprint and other cheap forms of paper, and in the production of hardboard.  It was a four-page eight column newspaper that sold for 3 cents per copy. The first front page featured Ted Williams spitting at fans.

            1889 –Tuesday-  Things go better with incorporation as The Coca-Cola Company, then known as the Pemberton Medicine Company, was originally incorporated in Atlanta, Georgia. On May 1, 1889, Asa Candler published a full-page advertisement in The Atlanta Journal, proclaiming his wholesale and retail drug business as "sole proprietors of Coca-Cola ... Delicious, Refreshing, Exhilarating, Invigorating." This was a bit premature as Mr. Candler did not actually achieve sole ownership until 1891. Coca Cola was invented by John Pemberton on May 8, 1886. A pharmacist, he produced the syrup for Coca-Cola®, and carried a jug of the new product down the street to Jacobs' Pharmacy, where it was sampled, pronounced "excellent" and placed on sale for five cents a glass as a soda fountain drink.

            1891 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Ray Chapman.  Chapman would be the only professional baseball player to be killed by a pitched ball. An outstanding shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, Chapman was the leadoff batter in the top of the fifth inning in a game against the New York Yankees at the Polo Grounds (this was pre Yankee Stadium and the Yankees share the Polo Grounds with the Giants) in New York City on  August  16, 1920. New York Yankees pitcher Carl Mays (1891-1971), famous for his underhand style, tossed a fast spitball that hit Chapman in the head breaking his cranium with a audible pop that could be heard in the stands.  He died at St. Lawrence Hospital the following morning.

 1908 Wednesday-Happy Birthday, Edward Teller ,Hungarian-born American nuclear physicist who participated in the production of the first atomic bomb (1945) and who led the development of the world’s first thermonuclear weapon, the hydrogen bomb. Another important contribution was the elucidation of the Jahn-Teller Effect (1939), which describes the geometrical distortion that electron clouds undergo in certain situations; this plays prominently in the description of chemical reactions of metals, and in particular the coloration of certain metallic dyes.

            1919-Wednesday-  You can shake an apple off an apple tree
Shake-a, shake- sugar,
But you'll never shake me
Uh-uh-uh
No-sir-ee, uh, uh
I'm gonna stick like glue,
Stick because I'm
Stuck on you ……Elvis……..The Boston Molasses Disaster occurred as giant tank of molasses at the Boston Alcohol Company, ruptured, emptying its entire contents into Commercial Street in Boston’s North End, in the space of a few seconds. The result was a flash flood of millions of gallons of sweet, sticky, gluey, gummy and ultimately deadly goo. Most of the damage was caused by a "wall of molasses" at least eight feet high — 15, according to some bystanders — which rushed through the streets at a speed of 35 miles per hour. It demolished entire buildings, literally ripping them off their foundations. It upended vehicles and buried horses. People tried to outrun the torrent, but were overtaken and either hurled against solid objects or gooed to death where they fell. More than 150 people were injured. 21 were killed. http://edp.org/molyank.htm  Attempts to revive the wounded by licking them proved unsuccessful.

            1929-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

            1936- Wednesday-  The first, all glass, windowless building in the U.S. was completed in Toledo, Ohio as the home of the Owens-Illinois Glass Company Laboratory. Workers were reminded not to throw stones. On August 2, 1904, Michael  Owens of Toledo patented a machine that could automatically manufacture glass bottles. This machine could produce four bottles per second. Owens's invention revolutionized the glass industry and eventually Owens formed the Owens Bottle Machine Company in Toledo. It became the Owens-Illinois Glass Company in 1929.

            1947 –Wednesday-  The mutilated remains of 22-year-old aspiring actress Elizabeth Short, known as the “Black Dahlia” for her dark outfits, were found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles. She had been cut in half and was laying face-up in the dirt. Her arms were raised over her head at 45-degree angles. Her lower of half was positioned a foot over from her torso, the straight legs spread wide open. The body appeared to have been washed clean of blood, and the intestines were tucked neatly under the buttocks. By the time detectives arrived, the crime scene had been trampled by reporters and onlookers. The case on this horrific death  has never been solved. It has, however, provided fodder for numerous books both fiction and non-fiction. We recommend James Ellroy’s Black Dahlia.

            1955- Saturday- Whenever I'm with him
Something inside
Starts to burnin'
And I'm filled with desire
Could it be the devil in me
Or is this the way love's supposed to be
Just like a heatwave
Burning in my heart
Can't keep from cryin'
It's tearing me apart……….Martha and the Vandellas …..On the day the first all glass building (see 1936 above) opened, the first solar-heated and radiation-cooled house in the U.S. started its system. It had been built by Raymond W. Bliss in Tucson, Arizona. Cost was about $4,000. The house used a large slanted slab of steel and glass that captured heat from the sun, which was ducted into the house. Summer cooling used the same ducts enhanced by associated fans and controls. The system worked well to heat the home, but wasn’t an adequate air conditioner.  Solar water heating was used in Florida, California, and the Southwest as early as the 1920s but never took off as a viable commercial industry.

            1961 –Sunday-  On January 1, Motown records signed a girl group called the Primettes.  A couple of weeks later they changed their name. On this day, they signed with Motown as the Supremes. In June 1965, they set a record for the most consecutive Number One hits by an American group when Back in My Arms Again rose to the top of the Billboard singles chart. The other hits in that streak were Where Did Our Love Go, Baby Love, Come See About Me and Stop! In the Name of Love. Professor Yentz’ favorite remains When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes, released in 1964.

            1967 – Sunday- The first Super Bowl as the Green Bay Packers, coached by the great Vince Lombardi defeated Hank Stram’s Kansas City Chiefs. Note: This championship game between the National Football League’s Packers and the American Football League’s Chiefs (originally the Dallas Texans) was not called the Super Bowl.  That name would come after the two leagues merged.  The third championship game (1969 Jets vs. Colts) would be the first to be called Super Bowl.  The Roman numeral numbering system became retroactive to this 1967 game. In the game, actually close at the half, the Packers beat the Chiefs 35-10.  Principal Chief big mouth, one Fred “the Hammer” Williamson who had bragged he would injure Packer players, was carried off the field on a stretcher with an injury of his own. Much to the dismay of television historians, all known broadcast tapes which recorded the game in its entirety were subsequently destroyed in a process of wiping, the reusing videotape by taping over previous content, by both networks. This has prevented contrast and compare studies of how each network handled their respective coverage. CBS did one half, NBC the other.

            1967 –Sunday-  Later that night on the Ed Sullivan Show, the Rolling Stones sold out, changing the lyrics of Let’s Spend the Night Together to Let’s Spend Some Time Together so the CBS Censor could protect …well we’re not sure who they were protecting. They also sang Ruby Tuesday but did not change it to Ruby Anyday.  Also on the show were round cheeked Petula Clark, singing Bob Lind’s Elusive Butterfly & Color My World, comedian Allan Sherman,  The Muppets (Kermit played the piano & sang), and, Sisters of St. Benedict (Nuns from Erie, Pennsylvania; a.k.a. Sisters '67)  who performed a show tune medley: It's A Lovely Day, Consider Yourself & (gasp) Kumbaya

            1969-Wednesday-  The launch of Soyuz 5, provided a highly memorable experience for cosmonaut Boris Valentinovich Volynov.   Actually, the return to Earth was the memorable part as the service module failed to separate resulting in nose-first re-entry. The bolts connecting the service module to the re-entry capsule finally burned through and the capsule turned around, heat shield forward, just before the forward hatch melted. All capsule propellant was exhausted and the cosmonaut made a 9-G totally uncontrolled re-entry, landing hundreds of kilometers short of the planned landing area. After this harrowing experience, at the celebration of his return, Volynov was shot at during an attempt to assassinate the Soviet premier.

              1970-Thursday-  The first evidence was uncovered of the destructive by fire of Jerusalem set by Roman troops led by General Titus in 70 A.D. upon orders from his father, the Emperor, Vespasian (see Flavian dynasty 69 above) . There is a very good record of the fire in the writings of Josephus.  In the year 66 AD the Jews of Judea rebelled against their Roman masters. In response, psycho Emperor Nero dispatched an army under the generalship of Vespasian to restore order. By the year 68, resistance in the northern part of the province had been eradicated and the Romans turned their full attention to the subjugation of Jerusalem. By 70, Nero was kaput and Vespasian was emperor. Titus went on to become emperor briefly enough to begin work on the Coliseum.  He was succeeded by his brother Domitian.

            1974 –Tuesday- The premier of Happy Days, the television homogenized imitation of George Lucas’ 1973 film American Graffiti. Happy Days became one of the most successful series of the 1970s. Set in the late 1950s, early 1960s in Milwaukee,  Happy Days, with rock and roll sound track,  tells the story of the Cunninghams, played by Tom Bosley (Howard), Erin Moran (Joanie), Marion Ross (Marion), and Ron Howard (Richie), and their friends, most nobably Henry Winkler as Arthur Fonzarelli, the Fonz (a role based on his role in Lords of Flatbush, 1974-  with Sylvester Stallone). The series eventually deteriorated to the point where it was so bad that the phrase “Jump the Shark” was developed.  Jump the Shark originated when the series had the Fonz jump over a shark while on water skis. Jump the Shark is an indication either of an irreversible decline in the show's quality or of a desperate bid to stem the show's declining ratings, usually both. Fonz jumped the shark in September 1977. The show continued to whither until mercifully cancelled in 1984. Sadly, the Jump the Shark website has jumped the shark.  If you go there you now get the TV Guide Channel and your brain turns to mush. As will most successful sitcoms, Happy Days had spinoffs.  Spawn of Happy Days included Joanie Loves Chachi Laverne and Shirley  and Mork and Mindy

            1989-Monday-  Three days of rioting, acquiring free appliances, free clothing, free expensive footwear, and any kind of liquor began in Miami when a police officer fatally shot a black motorcyclist, who was fleeing another officer. The policeman said was headed toward him,  causing a crash that also claimed the life of a passenger.

            2004 –Thursday-  Having landed two  weeks earlier, the NASA Spirit Rover rolled onto the surface of Mars for the first time. It quickly discovered that in the previous two weeks, while it waited to go into motion, two MacDonalds, a Walmart, and a Sabrett Hot Dog stand with umbrella had been built.

            2005 –Saturday-   ESA's SMART-1 lunar orbiter, launched Sept. 2003, discovered elements such as calcium, aluminum, silicon, iron, several lost gloves and socks, a few earrings, Nixon’s lost eighteen minutes of tape,  and other surface elements on the moon.  One of its most important discoveries during the mission was a "Peak of Eternal Light," a mountaintop near the Moon's north pole in constant, year-round sunlight. Microbes loostened by the landing, traveled to Earth and became imbedded in the brains of suseptible humans. Symptoms include talking on the cell phone while paying at a store cash register.

st combinations to represent the most frequently recurring letters of the English alphabet, and the remainder for the more infrequent ones. He found upon investigation that the letter e occurs much more frequently than any other letter, and accordingly he assigned to it the shortest symbol, a single dot(.). On the other hand, j, which occurs infrequently, is expressed by dash-dot-dash-dot (-.-.) Eventually, Vail visited the office of the Morristown local newspaper, where be found the whole problem worked out for him in the type cases of the compositor.  See The Century: Illustrated Monthly Magazine, April, 1888, by Franklin Pope, titled "The American Inventors of the Telegraph, with special references to the services of Alfred Vail". http://www.telegraph-office.com/pages/vail.html

            1856 –Tuesday- Borax (hydrated sodium borate) was discovered by Dr. John Veatch near Red Bluff, California. It was found next to the dirty laundry of Johnny Jim Custerpoof, itinerant prospector and Cartesian philosopher.  Four years later, he found borax in Little Borax Lake, four miles to the west.  For hundreds of  years, Tibet was almost the only source known until the discovery in 1776 and subsequent development in  1820 of Italian springs of boric acid (hydrogen tetraborate), which could be converted by the addition of soda (sodium carbonate) into borax. Italy became the principal source of borax until the 1860s, when desert areas in Chile and then the U.S began to supply borax.

            1872 –Monday-  Definitely a gentleman with a unique mind as a  patent was issued to Black American inventor Thomas Elkins for furniture he called a "Chamber Commode". It provided a combination of "a bureau, mirror, book-rack, washstand, table, easy-chair, and earth-closet or chamber-stool," – so while relieving one’s self one might fold one’s clothes, in the bureau, comb one’s hair in the mirror, select a book, wash, eat dinner at the table, but just look at the easy chair – one wouldn’t want to use it until one was finished with the commode…… Previously Elkins had patented a "Dining, Ironing Table and Quilting Frame Combined". Elkins was clearly into multitasking. Still another patent was  issued for a "Refrigerating Apparatus" for "food or corpses," which provides a convenient container and method of chilling using the evaporation of water.       

            1889- Tuesday- The tabulating machine was patented by Herman Hollerith. The U.S. Census Bureau recognized that its traditional counting methods would be inadequate for measuring the expanding population. Note; they still are. As a result, the Bureau sponsored a contest to find a more efficient means of tabulating census data. The winner was Herman Hollerith.  Hollerith, now regarded as “the father of modern automatic computation” (we add him to the long list of “fathers of……..” explored in the Gnus)  believed “it all adds up”, proposed to store information in the form of holes punched through a strip of paper. Hollerith switched to punched cards in 1886 and obtained a second patent in 1887. Wish we’d said it but the Columbia University history site describes  Hollerith's contributions to modern computing as... "incalculable" 

            1905-Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Carl Gustav Hempel,  German-born U.S. philosopher who emigrated to the U.S in 1937 to escape the Nazis, and was one of the leaders of the philosophy  of Logical Positivism which is the assertion of the primacy of observation in assessing the truth of statements of fact and holding that metaphysical and subjective arguments not based on observable data are meaningless. It’s also called logical empiricism, Hempel was logically positive about that!  The group viewed the task of science as that of showing phenomena to be the consequence of unbroken laws.

            1905-Sunday-  And on the same day! Happy Birthday, Walter Diemer (who also died on his birthday in 1995), American businessman who invented bubble gum in 1928.  Since the first batch, the pink color is still standard.  Diemer worked as an accountant for the Fleer Chewing Gum Company in Philadelphia, now famous for their collectible baseball cards. He was chewing over the idea of a less sticky gum of the very first bubble gum invented by Frank Henry Fleer in 1906. Fleer fetchingly called it Blibber-Blubber. Fleer's recipe was later perfected by Diemer, who called his product Double Bubble  and he  bubbled over with enthusiasm at his discovery.  So there you have it. Logical Positivism and bubble gum on the same day. A Science Gnus exclusive. Professor Sy Yentz makes these connections.  He really needs to get out more.

            1918- Tuesday- The disastrous military initiative and battle that almost resulted in the end of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill’s career – Gallipoli- ended as the Allies withdrew their last troops from the Turkish peninsula. Over 250,000 casualties resulted from the ill-advised, disastrous attempt to relieve pressure on the Russians fighting the Turks on the eastern front by attacking the Gallipoli peninsula  The Gallipoli Campaign cost the Allies 141,113 killed and wounded and the Turks 195,000 casualties. Gallipoli proved to be the Turks' greatest victory of World War I. In London, the campaign's failure led to the demotion of Churchill to fry cook  at the Downing Street Burger King and contributed to the collapse of Prime Minister H. H. Asquith's government. The fighting at Gallipoli proved a galvanizing national experience for Australia and New Zealand, which had not previously fought in a major conflict with the resulting horrific casualties. As a result, the anniversary of the landings, April 25, is celebrated as ANZAC Day and is both nations' most significant day of military remembrance.

         1926 –Friday-  Hey, do the mouse, yeah,
Hey, you can do it in your house yeah,
On the rug, or on the wall
If your folks get bugged do it in the hall
Do the Mouse yeah let's do the mouse
Come-on do the mouse with me
Hey, do the mouse, yeah,
Hey, do it all around your house, yeah, ……Soupy Sales……..Happy Birthday, Soupy Sales, (Milton Supman), born in Franklinton, North Carolina. Soupy, one of Professor Sy Yentz favorite comedians and a Logical Positivist, starred, along with White Fang ,Black Tooth, Pookie and Hippy in Lunch with Soupy Sales and The Soupy Sales Show.

         1935- Tuesday- Arthur Hardy (brother of Laurelen Hardy) received a patent for his spectrophotometer.  In addition to being a great word for a spelling bee or Scrabble, 28 points but 56 or 84 if you do a double or triple square,  the instrument measures light in the visible spectrum.  It could detect two million different shades of color (or about as many as a really large box of crayola crayons) and make a permanent record chart of the results.

         1935 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Elvis Presley, cultural icon and originally a pretty good  Rock n Roll singer …….at least the pre army Elvis.  The post army Elvis was spotty.  For every Stuck on You or Devil in Disguise, he came out with Bossa Nova Baby, or Do The Clam.  During his amazing career, Presley helped popularize rock and roll music in America. He even won three Grammy Awards for his gospel recordings. Presley had eighteen number one singles, including Don’t Be Cruel, Hound Dog (a double sided hit – Hound Dog was the B side) and Suspicious Minds as well as countless gold and platinum albums. He was one of the first performers inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. More recently, Presley has been inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1998 and the Gospel Music Association’s Gospel Music Hall of Fame in 2001.  Elvis also made his contribution to cinema greatness with Ingmar Bergmanesque movies such as Clambake, Harem Scarem, and Change of Habit.  A bloated charicature of himself, he gave his last concert in June 1977 in Indianapolis, Indiana. After the concert, Presley returned home to his Memphis mansion, Graceland.  Sometime on the morning of August 16, he died of heart failure. He was only 42 years old.  Event though  Elvis went kaput in 1977 he  is continuously seen in super markets, convenience stores, rocks on Mars, clouds, blood stains and every single casino in Las Vegas.

         1942-Thursday Can you believe it? Soupy Sales, Elvis Presley and Stephen Hawking share a birthday. Also born on this day, Little Anthony (of Little Anthony and the Imperials), David Bowie (formerly David Jones) and Shirley Bassey (Goldfiger)………..  Happy Birthday, Stephen Hawking, English theoretical physicist. His principal areas of research were theoretical cosmology and quantum gravity. Hawking was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, the chair formerly held by Sir Isaac Newton. The author of the best seller A Brief History of Time. he had Lou Gehrig’s disease (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis; ALS), and spent his career  confined to a wheelchair and  unable to speak without the aid of a computer voice synthesizer. However, despite his challenges, he made remarkable contributions to the field of cosmology, which as all cosmologists (and even cosmetologists) know is not the art of applying make-up but the study of the universe as a whole). 

         1953-Thursday-  A severe ice storm left over 4 inches of  the slippery stuff on eastern Pennsylvania and 3” of ice on southeastern N.Y. Over 70,000 homes were left without power. Now that Professor Sy Yentz lives in the Pocono Mountains of Eastern Pennsylvania he knows that this is normal.  Poconoids don’t even give it a second thought.  Professor Yentz hates it!  In fact, the Professor’s street is the focal point, and meteorological Mecca for any snow or ice weather system that develops in the Western Hemisphere.  No matter what direction the system is moving, it will make left turns, right turn, U-Turns, hitch rides, and even sit in the middle seat on Southwest Airlines to it can get to the Poconos, usually on a day that Professor Sy Yentz has an appointment.

         1953 –Thursday - The premiere of The Redhead from Wyoming, which IMBd tells us is about “the queen of an outlaw’s lair”. Directed by Lee Sholem and starring redheaded Maureen O’Hara, the western featured Robert Strauss (Stalag 17  and 96 appearances on television shows), Alexander Scourby who would seemingly narrate every documentary made in the 60s and 70s, Jack Kelly, who would play Brett Maverick’s brother, Bart on Maverick, and Dennis Weaver who would go on to fame as Chester on Gunsmoke, and Sam McCloud on McLoud the television series based on Clint Eastwood’s Coogan’s Bluff. Coogan’s bluff is the hill in upper Manhattan where the Polo Grounds was located and the New York Giants played before moving to San Francisco but that’s a long way from Wyoming where we started

         1966-Saturday On a sad note, this was the last episode of Shindig, one of the more prodigious cultural highlights of the 60’s. Shindig was a rock and roll variety show that debuted on September 16, 1964. Hosted by Jimmy Neil, the house band included Glen Campbell, Leon Russell, and Billy Preston. The house back up “girl group”, the Blossoms, featured the great Darlene Love. Guests ran the gamut from the Everly Brothers and Righteous Brothers on the first show to The Who and the The Kinks on the final show. Of course in between came shows with Donna Loren, Bobby Sherman, and a singing Patty Duke.

         1973 -Monday Soviet space mission Luna 21 was launched. The spacecraft landed on the Moon and deployed the second Soviet lunar rover (Lunokhod 2). The primary objectives of the mission were to collect images of the lunar surface, and find the real birthplace of Regis Philbin.

         1992-Wednesday-  President George H.W Bush, suffering from “stomach flu”, tossed his cookies all over the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister, Kiichi Miyazawa. Bush then said, “that’s for Pearl Harbor and Iron Chef”.  Ooowee! That sushi will get you every time.

            1993 –Friday-  Elvis Presley became the first rock musician featured on a postage stamp. The stamp, which featured a young, slim Elvis when purchased, but the stamp grew duller, repetitive, fatter and paunchier with age and ultimately could only be used in Las Vegas. It was issued on what would have been his 58th birthday.

            1994 -Saturday Russian cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov on Soyuz TM-18 (“I Soyuz Standing There”) left for the space station Mir (the Mir the Merrier). He would stay on the space station until March 22, 1995, for a record 437 days in space. He refused to come back to Earth until someone would explain Lost to him.  

            1998-Thursday-  Scientists identified a chemical compound which explained how nicotine becomes addictive.  Like many drugs, the addictive elements of nicotine are connected with the release of the neurotransmitter, dopamine, in the brain. People get addicted because of the rapid activation that leads to the dopamine release. They enjoy it. They want more.  They miss it when they don’t have it.  So dopamine is why smokers are dopes. The discovery was made when scientists found the first of 11 sub-units, or molecules, of the nicotine receptor in the brain of mice. The mice had been enjoying a relaxing post-coital cigarette when suddenly their brains were ripped out and…………..

            2002 –Tuesday-  President George W. Bush, possibly still feeling guilt over his father’s  regurgitative assault of the Japanese prime minister, Kiichi Miyazawa in 1992 (see 1992 above)   signed into law the No Child Left Behind Act. No Child Left Behind (NCLB or “Nickleby” as it is known to the educational congescenti) covers all states, school districts, and schools that accept Title 1 federal grants. Title 1 grants provide funding for remedial education programs for poor and disadvantaged children in public schools, and in some private programs. NCLB applies differently to Title 1 schools than to schools that do not receive Title 1 grants. However, one way or another, this law covers all public schools in all states. NCLB emphasizes accountability and teaching methods that work. Naturally, it is controversial.  Accountability in education? …..Can you imagine?

             2004 –Thursday-  RMS Queen Mary 2, the largest passenger ship ever built, was christened by Queen Elizabeth II, the granddaughter of Queen Mary, wife of King George V. The Queen Mary 2 is still the largest ocean liner.  A cruise ship, the Freedom of the Seas surpassed her in size in 2006.  

            2005 –Old joke - One foggy night, a United States Aircraft Carrier was cruising off the coast of Newfoundland and the junior radar operator spotted a light in the gloom.  Here is a transcript of what happened next. The radar operator worked out that a collision was likely unless the other vessel changed its course.  So he sent a radio message. U.S. Aircraft Carrier Radar Officer:
'Please divert your course at least 7 degrees to the south to avoid a collision'. Back came the reply: 'You must be joking, I recommend you divert your course instead'. The U.S. Radar Officer referred the matter to his superior officer.  And reported the incident as subordination.As a result the Captain of the Air Craft Carrier sent a second message.  'I believe that I out rank you, and am giving you a direct order to divert your course now!!!' Radio Operator: 'This is a lighthouse.  I suggest you take evasive action.'……………….. The nuclear submarine  USS San Francisco collided at full speed with an uncharted undersea mountain 350 south of Guam while travelling at high speed about 500 ft below surface. The submarine was able to surface and head back to Guam. One sailor was killed. An investigation revealed that other charts onboard the sub clearly displayed a navigation hazard in the vicinity of the grounding. San Francisco’s navigation team failed to review those charts adequately and transfer pertinent data to the chart being used for navigation, as relevant directives and the ship’s own procedures required…..Whew!  That’s telling them off.

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1007-Friday Approximate birthday of Snorro (possibly named after the sound his father made while sleeping), another of the seemingly endless list of children who are identified at one time or another  as “the first Caucasian child in North America”. Snorro Thorfinnson was the son of Thorfinn and Gudrid Karlsefni and born in Vinland colony.  This according to The Encyclopedia of American Facts & Dates - Gorton Carruth.  “Out of the night when the full moon is bright comes a Viking name of Snorro”.

            1493-Monday-  Christopher Columbus reported seeing “ 3 mermaids” near what is now the Dominican Republic. As described, “he saw three mermaids, which rose well out of the sea; but they are not so beautiful as they are painted, though to some extent they have the form of a human face.” Now, there were and are some extraordinarily ugly women visiting the Caribbean during the winter/cruise season but these “mermaids” were probably manatees. Obviously, Admiral Columbus had been at sea way too long.

            1768 –Saturday-  Oh, goodbye cruel world, I'm off to join the circus
Gonna be a broken-hearted clown
Paint my face with a good-for-nothin' smile
'cause a mean, fickle woman turned my whole world upside down
(Goodbye cruel world)
Farewell to love, I'm off to join the circus
Gotta find a way to hide my tears
Bet I'll have them rolling in the aisle
And I'll forget that woman if it takes a hundred years……..James Darren……..Probably the first performance of the modern circus was presented by Philip Astley in London. Astley is also known for contributing trick horse riding to the circus scene.  The circus became so popular in England that large cities constructed buildings for the purpose of accommodating shows. An example was the establishment of the London Hippodrome, which showcased a combination arena with circus, menagerie, and a variety theater. In ancient Europe, the typical circus was held within an oval or circular showground with tiered seating often flanking the edges. Other circuses performed under a large tent, but in Rome, an open-air stadium served as the arena where an array of public exhibitions took place. There were horse races, staged battles, equestrian shows, and chariot competitions. The circus in Rome also served as a significant watermark in history because it was the only public scene that allowed men and women to enjoy an event with one another.  Following the fall of Rome, the Barbarians proved to be rather humorless. Their idea of entertainment centered on sacking, pillaging and raping.  After all, can you name any Ostrogoth clowns?  The spread of circus history and tradition may have been kept alive for the modern world  by gypsies, who traveled through Europe during the 14th century and 15th century, bringing circus tricks and trained animals along. Nowadays the circus has added new entertainment acts. Just watch the antics of governmental acrobats, high wire walkers, animal trainers and clowns on the news every day.

            1776 –Tuesday- Thomas Paine published his pamphlet Common Sense, which presented his arguments in favor of American independence.  Published anonymously, Common Sense was an instant best-seller, both in the colonies and in Europe. It went through several editions in Philadelphia, and was republished in all parts of United America. Because of it, Paine became internationally famous. The work is credited  with uniting average citizens and political leaders behind the idea of independence, helping to transform the colonial squabble into the American Revolution. Pamphlets were an important medium for the spread of ideas in the 16th through 19th centuries. Eventually, Paine went on to write The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, and the sequel to Common Sense, Fifty Cents.

            1788-Wednesday- Connecticut became the 5^th state as it ratified the U.S Constitution.  Dutch explorer Adriaen Block discovered the Connecticut River in 1614. However, the first permanent settlements were made by English Puritans from Massachusetts, starting in 1633.  Geographically, it is the third smallest state, even though its original charter, granted in 1662, extended the land grant west to the Pacific Ocean. So, “visit Connecticut, see the Rockies and surf at Malibu”? Connecticut was an established name early in the 1600's in particular reference to the Connecticut River. The word itself was translated from the Mohegan name "Quinnehtukqut" and means "beside the long tidal river." Some state symbols:  Flower -Mountain Laurel (Kalmia latifolia) Tree -Charter Oak, Song -Yankee Doodle, Ship -USS Nautilus, Hero Nathan Hale, and  Folk Dance - Square Dance

http://www.statesymbolsusa.org/

            1793 –Wednesday-  An all star audience featuring George Washington, John Adams, Paul Revere, Thomas Paine and others observed  Jean-Pierre Blanchard as he made the first successful balloon flight in the United States. Blanchard’s balloon, filled with hydrogen, took off from Philadelphia, PA, soared to 5,800 feet and eventually landed 15 miles away, in Woodbury, New Jersey. While in the air he provided  traffic reports on the conditions on the New Jersey Turnpike and Garden State Parkway. It was Blanchard’s 45^th flight in all.  Technically, Blanchard carried the first piece of airmail with him, a "passport" presented by President Washington that directed "all citizens of the United States, and others, that…they oppose no hindrance…to the said Mr. Blanchard" and help in his efforts to "establish and advance an art, in order to make it useful to mankind in general."

            1823 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday- Johannes Friedrich von Esmarch, German surgeon who was the first to introduce a first-aid kit, the rubber tourniquet, a method of amputation that minimized loss of blood, and triage on the battlefield. He also introduced first aid training for both military and civilian personnel.  Esmarch wrote an authoritative text entitled The Handbook of Military Surgical Technique and several textbooks on first aid that were widely distributed and considered the best references on the subjects.

            1861-Wednesday – So two Italian men were sitting behind a woman on a bus.
“Emma come first,” one of the men said to the other. “Denna I come. Two asses, they come together. I come again. Denna two asses, they come together again. I come again and pee twice. Denna I come oncea more.” “You pigs,” the lady yelled. “In this country, we don’t talk about our sex lives in public!”
“Hey, coola down, lady,” the one man said. “Imma justs tellun him howa to spella Mississippi.”…………. Mississippi – on the seventy third anniversary of Connecticut joining the Union……became the second state, after South Carolina, to secede from the Union. Mississippi had become a state on December 10, 1817

            1868-Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Soren Sorenson, Danish biochemist, scientist and inventor of the pH scale in 1909.  He was reportedly was involved in work testing the acidity of beer and the pH symbol is rooted in the French (not Danish -magt hydrodgen or  it would be the mH scale)  "pouvoir hydrogene" (power of hydrogen).The scale is a  measure of the degree of the acidity or the alkalinity of a solution as measured on a scale (pH scale) of 0 to 14. The midpoint of 7.0 on the pH scale represents neutrality, i.e., a "neutral" solution is neither acid nor alkaline. Numbers below 7.0 indicate acidity; numbers greater than 7.0 indicate alkalinity. He also developed buffer solutions to maintain constant pH of solutions (Sørensen buffers). The 0 end of the scale is where the concentration is increasingly acidic – battery acid or NY Times theater critics. Moving up around 2 is lemon juice and stomach juices – only juice, not Protestants. Then around 3 are vinegar, beer and cola. Next at 4 is tomato juice. Then at 5 is black coffee and rainwater. Then comes urine at 6. Pure water and human blood are at 7. After 7 the concentration starts to become more basic as it heads up the scale. Most biological fluids are between pH 6 and pH8, there are a few exceptions to this like stomach acid. Then between 8 and 9 is seawater. Then at 10 is milk of magnesia. Followed by household ammonia at 11, household bleach at 12. Then between 13 and 14 is oven cleaner.

            1878-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, John B. Watson, American psychologist whose ideas initiated behaviorism as a branch of psychology. He was inspired by the work of Ivan Pavlov, (he of the dog drooling stimulus experiments) and he studied the biology, physiology, and behavior of animals. Watson continued with studies of the behavior of children, his conclusion was that humans, while more complicated than animals, operated on the same principles (just watch a large group of children in a school lunchroom) . Watson strongly rejected any belief in instincts and indicated that it was a misnomer for early experiences. He believed that differences in ability and talent originate in early experience in contrast to being innately determined. Watson’s behaviorism dominated psychology in the U.S. in the 1920s and ‘30s but that was many swings of the “psychology belief” pendulum ago and if you try to follow them all you’ll end up meshugena. 

            1894-Tuesday-  William Kennedy Laurie Dickson copyrighted the first motion picture. The movie, filmed in February 1893 at the Edison studio in West Orange, New Jersey, featured 47 images of a man sneezing….”God Bless You”.  Who nose what came next? In competition with the Lumière brothers in France, Dickson then constructed the first motion-picture stage inside an enclosed studio called the "Black Maria." Starring in many of the first films himself, he recorded short acts, about one minute long, including early attempts at sound movies. The final system was displayed in 1895 as the Vitascope, a bulky but effective camera and projector system that sparked the motion picture revolution. From this we got: Die Hard Dracula, The Tony Blair Witch Project, Leonard Part 6, Fire Maidens from Outer Space, Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000, Phat Girlz, Daddy Day Camp, Plan Nine from Outer Space, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Gigli, Heaven’s Gate, Howard the Duck, The Conqueror (John Wayne as Genghis Khan), Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Catwoman (the Halle Berry version), and The Adventures of Pluto Nash.

            1902 –Thursday-  New York passed a law banning flirting in public.  The Gnus set our crack research staff to validating this entry.  It is a typical xeroxian internet  entry in which the same description is used over and over on a plethora of sites.  We did find, however, a description of the law, a fine of $25 can be levied for flirting. This old law specifically prohibits men from turning around on any city street  and looking "at a woman in that way." A second conviction for a crime of this magnitude calls for the violating male to be  forced to wear a "pair of horse-blinders" wherever and whenever he goes outside for a stroll. So, strictly speaking, the law banned……”hey pretty mama whatcho doin’? ogling. http://www.brandeslaw.com/Lighter/lawsob.htm

1913-Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Richard Nixon, 37^th president of the U.S. Nixon’s Vice President, Spiro T. Agnew resigned in 1973. Note, Nixon insisted “I am not a crook” but he never said anything about his vice president.  Nixon had first come to national prominence as a California congressman.  His warm mixture of surliness, lack of humor, shady politics, and total lack of personality soon won the hearts of the American people.  For some reason, Dwight Eisenhower who could have been elected with even Senator Charles Schumer as a running mate, selected Nixon.  Nixon quickly proved that all beliefs about him were correct. He climbed out of a political scandal on the sleeves of long suffering wife Patricia’s “Republican cloth coat” and a stupid dog named Checkers. In spite of all this, Nixon would have been elected president in 1960 but for the Illinois based shenanigans of the Democrats in Cook County who stole the election (Democrats do that very well) for John F. Kennedy.  Nixon then ran for governor of California in 1962, lost and with typical good humor announced to the press “now you won’t have Nixon to kick around any more”. Unfortunately, he was wrong. We would have Nixon to kick around for a while. The Republicans, suicidal as ever and with an election there for the taking, nominated Nixon for President in 1968. He almost snatched defeat from the jaws of victory but managed to edge out “Happy Warrior” Hubert Humphrey (later famously introduced by the regrettable Jimmy Carter during a convention as Hubert H. Hornblower) for the victory.  Nixon then defeated the Liberace sound alike, George McGovern in 1972 and everything began to unravel when with victory assured –the Democrats and McGovern were engaged in an incompetence contest- he authorized the Watergate burglary of the offices of the Democratic National Committee. Now we really could kick him around.  After Agnew resigned in 73, Nixon nominated, and Congress approved, House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford as Vice President. After the Watergate scandal surfaced in 1972 and festered for two years and faced with what seemed almost certain impeachment, Nixon announced on August 8, 1974, that he would resign the next day to begin "that process of healing which is so desperately needed in America." Ford, our first slapstick President provided many moments of laughter over the next two years before managing to lose the election to peanut farmer, Jimmy Carter.

                        1925 –Friday-  Happy Birthday, Lee Van Cleef, one of the great movie v