Calendar Highlights

The Dangers of Chewing bubble Gum in Class

1.       

 193 –Saturday-  Alas poor Marcus Didius Julianus we hardly knew ye. Roman Emperor Didius Julianus was diddled. The Didster (called M Diddy by his fans) became emperor during an epidemic of assassinations.  Commodus had been kaputed in late 192.  Successor Pertinax  followed to that big rostra in the sky in early 193 bringing us to Didius Julianus who basically bought the emperorship……sort of like Michael Bloomberg’s purchase of multiple terms as Mayor of New York City……Anyway, Dio Cassius’ account describes the populace as openly hostile. Whether the Senate and the citizens were angry over the murder of Pertinax, the preceding assassination of Commodus or the unseemly sale of the empire to Julianus – probably a combination of the three, the praetorian guard effectively switched sides. Dio Cassius describes the end of Julianus’ reign thusly: “We (the Senate) thereupon sentenced Julianus to death, named Severus emperor, and bestowed divine honors on Pertinax. And so it came about that Julianus was slain as he was reclining in the palace itself; his only words were, "But what evil have I done? Whom have I killed?" He had lived sixty years, four months, and the same number of days, out of which he had reigned sixty-six days.” http://www.unrv.com/decline-of-empire/didius-julianus.php

            987 –Friday- Hugh Capet was elected King of France. Capet was the son of a Frankish duke, he inherited vast estates in the regions of Paris and Orléans, which made him one of the most powerful vassals in France and a serious threat to the Carolingian king, Lothar. By 985 Hugh was the ruler of France in all but name. After Lothar and his son conveniently went kaput, the archbishop of Reims convinced an assembly of nobles to elect Hugh Capet king. He immediately crowned his own son to ensure the line of succession, - the Capetian Dynasty- a practice continued until the time of Louis VII.

            1215 –Monday-  Xuanzong, Xuanzong, he’s our mon. If he can’t do it, Genghis Khan. …..Beijing, then under the control of the Jurchen ruler Emperor Xuanzong of Jin, was captured by the Mongols led by  Genghis Khan, ending the Battle of Beijing. Yes, it was Xuanzong’s swan song. In 1211 the Mongols had began a full assault on China by invading the entire region north of the Great Wall…..which, of course, had been built to keep out invaders…. In the summer of 1215 Peking, China, was captured. Leaving one of his generals in charge of further operations in North China, Genghis Khan returned to Mongolia to devote his attention to events in central Asia.

            1495 –Saturday  To Friar John Cor, by order of the King, to make aqua vitae VIII bolls of malt. — Exchequer Rolls 1494–95, vol x, p. In Fife, Scotland 1494, on the banks of the Tay, a Tironension monk, Friar John Cor, paid duty on "eight Bols of malt wherewith to make Aqua Vitae for King James IV"; enough to make him about 1,500 bottles of whisky.  Scotland's great Renaissance king, James IV (1488-1513) was fond of 'ardent spirits' as is the editorial staff of the Gnus. When the king visited Dundee in 1506, the treasury accounts recorded a payment to the local barber for a supply of aqua vitae for the king's pleasure. In 1505, the Guild of Surgeon Barbers in Edinburgh was granted a monopoly over the manufacture of aqua vitae - a fact that reflects the spirits perceived medicinal properties as well as the medicinal talents of the barbers. The primitive equipment used at the time and the lack of scientific expertise meant that the spirit produced in those days was probably potent, and occasionally even harmful. The Gaelic "usquebaugh", meaning "Water of Life", phonetically became "usky" and then "whisky" in English. However it is known, Scotch Whisky, Scotch or Whisky (as opposed to whiskey), we love it. Scotland has internationally protected the term "Scotch". For a whisky to be labeled Scotch it has to be produced in Scotland. http://whiskyman.com/history.html  For single malts, the Gnus prefers Glen Morangie or Balvenie,  although there is a certain sympathy for Bladnoch because it is distilled in Wigtown, near the ancestral home of Castle Douglas.

            1533 –Thursday-   Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. …..Henry IV. Part II……. '[A] woman who is the scandal of Christendom.'…..Katharine of Aragon describing  her rival, 1531…….. Anne Boleyn was crowned Queen of England.  Anne and Henry were secretly married in January 1533 before he got his divorce from Catherine of Aragon.  They were a 21^st Century kind of couple as Anne was “prenatal loaded” at the time.  On  May 2 1536, Anne was arrested. She was accused of adultery with her own brother and four commoners - they were all tried and convicted of treason by Anne's uncle, the duke of Norfolk. On  May 19 , Anne was beheaded at the Tower of London

            1633 –Wednesday – Happy Birthday, Geminiano Montanari, Italian astronomer.  He improved the telescope by adding a devise that enabled the user to measure distances with better precision. Montanari is credited with discovering the variable star, Algol in the constellation of Perseus. Variable stars are stars that change in brightness, sometimes seeming to disappear completely and then getting brighter until they reach a maximum brightness before dimming again.

            1637 –Monday- Happy Birthday- Jacques-Marquette, French Jesuit missionary and explorer. We grew up thinking Marquette was his first name since we always heard it in school as Marquette Andjoliet.  Marquette got a university named after him and Joliet got at prison named after him.  In 1673 Marquette, Louis Joliet and five other men began their expedition by following Lake Michigan to Green Bay, where they visited Lambeau Field and took in a Packers game. Then they canoed up the Fox River, crossed over to the Wisconsin and followed that river downstream to the Mississippi. The first Native Americans they encountered were the Illini, (they had not yet joined the Big Ten)  who were  friendly to the expedition and presented them with a peace pipe to use for the remainder of the journey. The further the expedition went, the more convinced Marquette and Joliet became that the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf of Mexico and not the Pacific as they had hoped. By the time they got to the Arkansas River they were told by friendly local tribes that the sea was only ten days away but they would encounter hostile tribes. They also noticed the presence of Spanish trade goods among the friendly Native Americans and discretion being the better part of valor, the expedition decided to return north. The Illini tribe showed them an easier route to Lake Michigan which was to travel up the Illinois River and cross over to the Chicago River where they enjoyed the Architecture Tour .

             1796 –Wednesday- Rocky Top you'll always be
Home sweet home to me
Good ole Rocky Top, Rocky Top, Tennessee
Rocky Top, Tennessee…….Tennessee was admitted as the 16th state of the United States.  Ever the fickle state, they seceded from the Union on June 8, 1861, became the scene of several Confederate defeats under the hopeless Braxton Bragg, and were re-admitted to the Union on July 24, 1866. Agricultural Insect (yes they have an Architectural Insect!)             Honeybee, Amphibian: Tennessee Cave Salamander, Beverage: Milk ,  Bird: Mockingbird, Butterfly: Zebra Swallowtail; Commercial Fish (yes, a commercial fish….we believe it sells used cars…): Channel Catfsh, Folk Dance: Square Dance, Fruit: Tomato, Game Bird: Bobwhite Quail,  Gem: Tennessee Pearl, Horse: Tennessee Walking Horse, Insects (regular insects as opposed to Architectural insects): Firefly, Mineral: Agate, Poem Oh Tennesssee, My Tennessee by Vice-Admiral William Porter Lawrence, Reptile: Eastern Box Turtle, Rock: Limestone , Slogan : "Tennessee - America at its Best"            Song (there are quite a few but we selected the two we like, Tennessee Waltz  by Redd Stewart and Pee Wee King  and  Song  Rocky Top by Boudleaux and Felice Bryant , Affirmative Action for Bass with, Sport Fish: Large-mouth Bass and Small-mouth Bass, Tree: Tulip Poplar, Wild Animal: Raccoon, and Wildflower: Passion Flower  

            1801 –Monday- I come to wive it wealthily in Padua;
If wealthily, then happily in Padua….. Petruchio….. The Taming of the Shrew (I, ii, 75-76) Happy Birthday - Brigham Young, American colonizer, religious leader and serial groom.  Young was was the second prophet and president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Mormons. After the assassination of founder, Joseph Smith, Young played a crucial role in keeping the church together by organizing the journey that would take the faithful to Winter Quarters, Nebraska, in 1846, then to Utah's Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847, a date now recognized as a holiday in Utah known as Pioneer Day.  Young married approximately 27 women and had 56 known children.

            1812 –Monday-  James Madison sent a declaration of war message to congress, This document cited numerous American grievances against Great Britain including; impressment, the practice of searching American vessels in American waters, trade embargoes detrimental to the American economy, making people watch British sitcoms, Simon Cowell, Freddy and the Dreamers, Joan Collins, silly wigs in court, and finally, the alleged incitement to violence of the First Nations by the British Army.  He also cited the adding of the letter u to many words words such as armor, color, and favorite making them armour, colour, and favourite, the German English horse faced monarchs,  Elton John,  Victoria Beckham,  Jude Law, Masterpiece Theater shows about butlers, sticking out their pinkies when drinking tea, wrapping French fries in newspaper and calling them chips,  and the television show Love Thy Neighbour (which also added the extra “U”).

            1813 –Tuesday-  James Lawrence, the mortally-wounded commander of the frigate  USS Chesapeake, gave his final order: Don't give up the ship! during a sea battle outside Boston with H.M.S Shannon. Captain Lawrence was mortally wounded by small arms fire.  While they didn’t give up the ship, they lost it anyway as Chesapeake was boarded by the crew of the Shannon and the battle was over within fifteen minutes.

            1825 –Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, John Hunt Morgan, American Confederate cavalry general. Although he was from Kentucky.  Kentucky did not secede so Morgan soon formed the 2nd Kentucky Cavalry with himself as colonel. Serving in the Army of Tennessee. He developed a reputation as an aggressive commander and Morgan led several successful raids against Union forces. Morgan’s aggressive tactics constantly clashed with the muddled (alienate your subordinates) tactics of Braxton Bragg.  Morgan was defeated and captured on July 26 after the Battle of Salinesville. After several weeks of imprisonment, Morgan, along with six of his officers managed to tunnel out of the prison and escaped.  Later accused of bank robbery (it may have been some of his men, while working to clear his name, Morgan and his men were camped Greeneville, TN. When Union troops attacked the town. Morgan was shot and killed while attempting to escape from the attackers.

             1849 –Friday- Happy Birthday, Edgar F. and Freelan O. Stanley, American inventors, twin brothers, the most famous manufacturers of steam-driven automobiles. They had invented the “Stanley Steamer” in 1896, the first steam motorcar – named the Flying Teapot-  in New England, and formed the Stanley Motor Company to manufacture them. Francis served as president of the firm. They actively competed in auto races, pitting their steam power against gasoline-fueled engines and often winning. One of their “steamers” no, this wasn’t the Flying Teapot, this was named The Rocket set a world record in 1906 for fastest mile, 28.2 seconds or 127 mph 205 kph. The brothers sold the business in 1918, having manufactured more than 10,000 “Steamers.” In 1918, Francis was killed while driving one of his automobiles. He swerved to avoid an obstruction in a mountain road and plunged down an embankment near Ipswich, Massachusetts. And why aren’t we driving steam powered cars today?  Steam cars  had a significant drop-off in popularity following the adoption of the electric starter, which eliminated the need for risky hand cranking to start gasoline-powered cars. Then the introduction of assembly-line mass production by Henry Ford, hugely reduced the cost of owning a conventional automobile

.           1855 –Friday- Ita erat quando hic adveni. It was that way when I got here……... American adventurer William Walker, who had previously invaded Mexico, arrived in Nicaragua. Internal strife and a power struggle among several leaders had torn the country apart….gee, those things never happen in 3^rd world countries, do they?......... Late in 1854 he obtained a contract from the currently prevailing government of Nicaragua, allowing him to bring to that country approximately three hundred colonists to settle a land grant of fifty thousand acres. In return, Walker and his American colonists would be liable for military service for Nicaragua, for which they would receive monthly compensation from the Nicaraguan government……Big mistake. Calling his group of sixty or so followers the American Phalanx, Walker captured an American steamer plying the waters of Lake Nicaragua and then took the town of Granada. Walker’s victories earned him popular acclaim and, incredibly enough, election as president of Nicaragua in July 1856.

            1864 –Wednesday-  …Not war, but murder………The Battle of Cold Harbor began. Coming less than a month after the battles of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania in which for Robert E. Lee were pyrrhic victories - strategically successful but the lost soldiers could not (unlike Grant who suffered even larger losses) be replaced, Cold Harbor was one of the biggest disasters of the war for the Union as on June 3….see June 3 below, Grant sent wave upon wave of troops to be slaughtered as they attacked well entrenched Confederate troops.

             1869-Tuesday-  Voting doesn't work. why?
When they don't like what we say, then
they stop it in the courts
Voting doesn't work. why?
When they don't like what we say, then
they stop it in the courts ……Placebo……….Thomas Edison of Boston, Mass., received his first patent. It was for an "electrographic vote recorder." The device was the first of its kind, and would enable a legislator……after receiving a allurement, bait, blackmail, buyoff, compensation, contract, corrupt money, corrupting gift, enticement, envelope*, feedbag, fringe benefit, gift, goody, graft, gratuity, gravy, grease, hush money, ice*, incentive, inducement, influence peddling, kickback, lagniappe, lure, payola, perk*, perquisite, present, price, protection*, remuneration, reward, sop, sweetener, sweetening, take……  to register a vote either for or against an issue by turning a switch to the right or left. The original may have still been used in general elections, first in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004.

            1871-Thursday- Abilene, Abilene
Prettiest town I ever seen.
Folks down there don't treat you mean
In Abilene, my Abilene.
I sit alone most every night
Watch them trains roll out of sight
Wish that they were carryin' me
To Abilene, my Abilene. ….. Bob Gibson and John D. Loudermilk……John Wesley Hardin, one of the deadliest gunfighters in the history of the Old West, arrived in Abilene, Kansas, where he allegedly briefly became friends with Marshal Wild Bill Hickok. The other version is that he made Hickok back down in a gunfight.  By 1869, Hardin had killed four soldiers who had come to arrest him so he became a cowboy. In 1871, he signed on with a cattle outfit heading up the Chisolm Trail toward Abilene, Kansas. Forgetting he was supposed to be driving cattle, Hardin killed seven people along the trail and three people in Abilene.

        1875 –Tuesday- Oh, I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts.

There they are all standing in a row.

Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head.

Give 'em a twist, a flick of the wrist."

That's what the showman said…….Fred Heatherton…………… Alexander P.Ashbourne, who also invented the biscuit cutter,  received a patent for a "Process Preparing Cocoanut for Domestic Use ".  Obviously there was some demand for eating coconuts in 1875.  The patent described the process oftaking any quantity of coconuts and paring  them. The coconut  meat was then grated or otherwise smushed , and then passed through fine sieves, but you need to add boiling water at the same time. Got that Rachel Ray? The meat was then cooked with hot steam for 3 to 4 hours, then pressed dry. Sounds delicious, thank you…..Today in Science History….

            1879 –Sunday-  Napoleon Eugene, the last dynastic Bonaparte, was slewn in the Anglo-Zulu War. Euge was the only child of Emperor Napoleon III of France and his wife the Empress Eugénie. He served as an officer in the British Army (Napoleon must have been turning over in his grave!) and volunteered to join the British expedition to Zululand. While out on a reconnaissance mission he was surprised by Zulus and speared to death at Ulundi. His death sent shock waves throughout Europe as he was the last dynastic hope for the restoration of the Bonapartes to the throne of France.

             1880-Tuesday- The first pay telephone service in the United States, for public use went into service. The toll was given to an attendant. It was installed by the Connecticut Telephone Co. in their office at Yale Bank Building at State and Chapel Streets in New Haven, CT. Later that day the first coin was lost in the phone. According to the AT&T website, after making the connections for customers, attendants would lock them in booths so they couldn't leave without paying. We’ve also seen that in 1889 - the first public coin telephone was installed by inventor William Gray at a bank in Hartford, Conn. It was a "postpay" machine (coins were deposited after the call was placed). Gray's other claim to fame was inventing the inflatable chest protector for baseball.

            1886 –Tuesday-  The railroads of the Southern United States converted 11,000 miles of track from a five foot rail gauge to standard gauge. They began on May 31.  Rail gauge is the distance between two rails of a railroad. Sixty percent of the world's railways use a 4 feet 8½ inch (1435 mm) gauge, which is known as standard gauge or international gauge. This brings us to a Professor Sy Yentz pet peeve.  He began his model train collection during the 1950’s.  The two major brands were American Flyer & Lionel.  American Flyer had two rails, Lionel…three.  Lionel was big and clunky.  American Flyer was finely honed and realistic.  He got American Flyer.  American Flyer trains are now worth like $1.85.  Lionels cost in the hundreds.  Go figure

            1907 –Saturday-  Frank Whittle, English inventor  (along with Dr. Hans von Ohain) of the jet engine. Frank Whittle was the first to register a patent for the turbojet engine in 1930. Hans von Ohain was granted a patent for his turbojet engine in 1936. In 1929, Whittle's proposed engine drew in air through a series of compressors. The air entered a combustion chamber, where it was mixed with fuel and ignited. As the resulting hot gas blasted out the back of the chamber, it pushed the engine forward. The exiting hot gas turned a shaft that spun a turbine - which drew in more air, creating an ingenious loop of intake and combustion.

            1909-Tuesday- Thomas A. Edison received a patent for "Shaft-Coupling". It must have been important as many people continue to get shafted to this day…..or it could have something to do with a porno movie. A shaft coupler is a  removable device for fastening together the ends of two coaxial shafts, either permanently or temporarily.  We looked for songs about shaft coupling but…no joy.

            1917 –Friday-  Happy Birthday- William S. Knowles, American chemist. Knowles won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2001 (along with Ryoji Noyori, and K. Barry Sharpless) build molecules without creating a mirror-image opposite, a principle used today in making drugs from L-DOPA, a treatment for Parkinson's, to beta blockers for heart function and the protease inhibitors for AIDS.  In 1968 Knowles discovered that it was possible to use transition metals to make chiral catalysts for an important type of reaction called hydrogenation. His research led quickly to an industrial process for the production of L-DOPA.   Overdoses of L-DOPA can render people stupid, we cite, Gerald R. Ford, Dan Quayle, the New York State Legislature, Charlie Rangel, any Kardashian, any celebrity that carries a dog as an accessory, the people who thought Steven Tyler should be a judge on American Idol

            1918 –Saturday – It’s the bottom of the 9^th inning.  The Chicago White Sox are losing 5-4  to  the NY Yankees.  The Sox  load the bases with no outs. Chick Gandil hit a line drive  to 3^rd baseman Frank (Home Run) Baker who turns a 5-4-3 triple play.  Gandil then went on to fame as a member of the Black Sox throwing the 1919 World Series.

            1925 –Monday…Yankees again….yeesh, you’d think Professor Sy Yentz was a fan……….  Lou Gehrig pinch-hit for shortstop Paul Wanninger in 1925 in a 5-3 loss to the Washington Senators. The next day Lou started at first base in place of tr Wally Pipp, making what was to become his record consecutive-games streak ( it would go to  2,130 games)  two games old.

            1926 –Tuesday – Who said nights were for sleep?...................  Happy Birthday, Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jean Baker, American actress, sex symbol and Presidential innamorata.   Her breakthrough in movies was a bit part (Angela Phinlay ) in The Asphalt Jungle.  Her appearance generated a huge amount of fan mail.  She went on to make, among others; Niagara (1953).Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), How To Marry A Millionaire(1953) River Of No Return, There's No Business Like Show Business, The Seven Year Itch(1955) featuring  Monroe and a subway grating, Bus Stop (1956)  Some Like It Hot(1959), the absolutely awful,Let's Make Love (1960) The Misfits

(1961 – both stars, Monroe and Gable would die within a year, and the unfinished,

Something's Got To Give (production suspended in 1962 went Monroe went kaput) with Dean Martin.  A few minutes of footage from this unfinished film appears in Marilyn, a compilation (and exploitation) film released by Twentieth Century-Fox in 1963.

            1934- Friday  Don't forbid me to hold you tight
a-darlin', don't-a forbid me to hold you tight
Let me hold you in my lovin' arms
'cause it's cold and I can keep you warm

a-don't-a forbid me to kiss your lips
a-darlin' don't-a forbid me to kiss your lips
Let me kiss you please, baby, please
'cause it's cold and your lips might freeze…….Happy Birthday to the man who almost destroyed Rock n’ Roll,  Pat Boone.  Boone was clean cut (even white bucks) and much safer than those nasty Black singers so his cringe worthy watered down cover versions of  Fats Domino’s Ain’t That a Shame, Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally, even Elvis’ Good Rockin Tonight were played all over A.M radio.  He did settle down as a crooner with the insipid April Love, Friendly Persuasion, and Moody River.  We personally liked Speedy Gonzalez.

            1940 –Saturday- Nite shlof inem unterban libling (Don’t sleep in the subway darling….Yiddish Petula Clark)   The Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit Corporation (the BMT) went  out of business,giving the City of New York full control of the subway system in the city. The city had taken over the bankrupt IRT (Interborough Rapid Transit) earlier in the year. The Independent Subway (IND) was formed by the City in the 1920s as an "independent" system that was not connected to the IRT or BMT lines.  

            1947-Sunday- The first photosensitive glass, invented by D.S Stookey ten years earlier, was made in Corning, NY. Photo sensitive glass is not glass that doesn’t want to have its picture taken.  It is, are you ready? Glass containing submicroscopic metallic particles; when ultraviolet light passes through a negative on the glass, it precipitates the particles, with shadowed areas of the negative permitting deeper penetration into the glass than highlight areas, giving the picture three dimensions and color; photograph is developed by heating the glass to 1000°F (538°C).

             1961 –Thursday- And now we can listen to Beyonce singing the best of Pat Boone as FM stereo broadcasting was authorized to begin in the U.S. when on this date the Federal Communications Commission received its first notifications of such regular operation, from WEFM Chicago and WGFM Schenectady. Both stations had previously experimented with stereo broadcasting, as had others. 

           1962 –Friday Near midnight between May 31 and June 1, 1962, Nazi war criminal, Adolf Eichmann was executed by hanging. His body was then cremated and his ashes scattered at sea. Eichmann was responsible for the persecution and murder of millions of Jews in the death camps in Europe during World War II. On May 13, 1960, Adolf Eichmann was seized by Israeli agents in Argentina      

            1964 –Monday The Horror of Party Beach, The Rolling Stones Arrive for Their First American Tour. Seemed like such a natural combination since they both occurred today.  The Horror of Party Beach premiered.  It got one star from IMDb.  We looked for anyone in the cast that we knew but alas….John Scott, Alice Lyon and Alan Laurel just weren’t familiar.  We thought we knew Marilyn Clarke but her only other credit was an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker (starring Darren McGavin), although she did appear in Smokey and the Good Time Outlaws  but this time as Madilyn Clark….. so this story of sea creatures created from radioactive sludge terrorize a beach community is a must see.

            1964 –Monday Obviously people were torn between greeting the The Rolling Stones arrive in New York for their first American tour or seeing Horror of Party Beach. Not quite receiving the tumultuous welcome of the Beatles,  Stones then appeared on the  Les Crane Show and Hollywood Palace, hosted by Dean Martin that week.  They would share the stage with;  comedian Joey Forman, The King Sisters & daughters, Larry Grizwold (comedy trampoline act) and Bertha the elephant and her daughter Tina

            1974 –Saturday- ……..I love you so much, I need the Hiemlich manuver
Your love sticks like a turkey bone in my throat
She's in my thoughts and it'll need a jolt to remove her
Before my expiration, I need resuscitation
Mouth to mouth  ……Arrogant Worms……….The Heimlich maneuver for rescuing choking victims was  published in the journal Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA).  The American Red Cross later adopted it as standard protocol for rescuing choking victims. Saving choking victims was not new, in the 15th century  common practice was to lay a drowning victim face down across a barrel and roll the barrel back and forth. This movement pushed the diaphragm up and into the lungs which pushed the water out.

            1977 –Wednesday-  The proletarian workers paradise known as The Soviet Union’s government charged Anatoly Shcharansky, (after 1986, Natan Sharansky)a leader among Jewish dissidents and human rights activists in Russia, with the crime of treason. The action was viewed by many in the West as a direct challenge to President Jimmy Carter's new foreign policy emphasis on human rights and his criticism of Soviet repression. Carter became so upset that he gave back the Panama Canal.

            1979 –Friday - The first black-led government of Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) in 90 years assumed  power.  Well that’s certainly worked out well.

            1980 –Monday-  Cable News Network (CNN) began broadcasting.  CNN was founded by Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld (although Schonfeld had become a non-person at the station). CNN introduced the concept of 24-hour television news coverage During the ensuing years, the network frequently forgot the definition of news. Viewers (but not many) got to enjoy Parker Spitzer, Larry King’s suspenders (Larry was put out ot pasture and replaced by Piers Morgan), Fareed Zakania, Candy Crowley, the ever earnest Anderson Cooper, Jesse Jackson, Connie Chung, Aaron Brown, Paula Zahn, and the almost daily surgically enhanced Robin Meade. News readers read the news as if they were reading to an early childhood class complete with angry looks, concerned looks and voices, happy looks and voices, querulous looks and voices…..so that we all know how we should react to the news.

            2000 –Thursday-  The Patent Law Treaty was  signed. So we looked this item up and the explanations were more technical than explanations of Field Medal winning  titles in Mathematics.  The best we found was at WIPO – The World Intellectual Property Organization - The aim of the Patent Law Treaty (PLT) is to harmonize and streamline formal procedures in respect of national and regional patent applications and patents, and thus to make such procedures more user-friendly. With the significant exception of the filing date requirements, the PLT provides maximum sets of requirements, which the Office of a Contracting Party may apply. This means that a Contracting Party is free to provide for requirements that are more generous from the viewpoint of applicants and owners, but are mandatory as to the maximum that an Office can require from applicants or owners……Got it?

             2002-Saturday-  Turn out the lights the party's over they say that all good things must end.  Let's call it a night the party's over and tomorrow starts the same old thing again…..Willie Nelson……The first national law prohibiting "light pollution" went into effect. The Czech Republic became the first nation to outlaw excess outdoor light. All outdoor light fixtures in the country had to be shielded to ensure light went only in the direction intended, and not above the horizontal. Czech astronomers had lobbied for the legislation.  Known as the "Protection of the Atmosphere Act," the bill passed both houses of parliament (Chamber of Deputies and Senate) and was signed into law by President Vaclav Havel on February 27, 2002, it went into effect today, although in the absence of light, no one could read it..  The law defined "light pollution" as "every form of illumination by artificial light which is dispersed outside the areas it is dedicated to, particularly if directed above the level of the horizon."   

            2008 –Sunday-  The Phoenix Mars Lander became the first NASA spacecraft to scoop Martian soil. This was a test scoop.  The regularly scheduled scoop would take place later. The 8-foot-long robotic arm uncovered bits of bright specks in the soil believed to be ice or salt containing the DNA of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.  

            2009 –Monday Refusing to blame the Cadillac Escalade, the Chevy Aveo, the Chevrolet Colorado, The Chevy Cavelier, the destruction of the Pontiac brand, the deletion of the Oldsmobile (88, Super 88 and 98), the Hummer H2 , terrible advertising, overblown union contracts, and inept leadership, General Motors filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy. It was the fourth largest United States bankruptcy in history after Lehman Brothers, Washington Mutual and WorldcomInc.

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2.       

455 –Wednesday-  The pump don’t work cause the Vandals took the handle…..Bob Dylan……..The Vandals entered Rome, and plunder the city for two weeks. Yes, entire Idaho St. student body attacked the Eternal City in a desperate search for potatoes.  Vandals were originally Germanic tribes inhabiting [living in] East Germany in the 3rd century B.C. In AD 270 they invaded Romania and Hungary near the Danube River, part of the Roman Empire. Emperor Constantine was forced to make a treaty and give them land there. Around this time, Attila and the Huns (a famous Budapest doo wop singing group) were also threatening Rome. In in 451, one of his generals Aëtius won a major victory over Attila in Gaul. In 454, Valentinian had Aëtius killed out of jealousy and fear he would try to take over. However, two of Aëtius generals and supporters assassinated Valentinian in 455. Rome was without a leader.  Enter the Vandals, stage right.  Valentinian’s widow,  Eudocia, had invited them.  She had been forced to marry his successor, Maximus, and was out for revenge. Pope Leo met with Vandal leader Gaiseric outside the city gates, and persuaded him to have mercy on the people of Rome. The Vandals then proceeded to sack Rome for 14 days, taking all the art and treasure they could find. The good news was that as per Leo's request, there was no murder, arson, or torture.  Gaiseric was a formidable ruler, as shown by the conquests of the Vandals. After his death in 477 AD, the forces weakened, and they were conquered in a single campaign by the Romans.

            1098 –Thursday-  During the First Crusade, the eight month Siege of Antioch ended as Christian forces took the city. As so often happens with sieges, sneaky betrayal, not military force won the day.  One of the Christian leaders, ohemund of Taranto, secretly contacted an Armenian named Firouz who commanded one of the city's gates. After receiving a bribe, Firouz opened gate on the night of June 2/3, allowing the crusaders to storm the city.
    

            1686-Sunday- The publication of Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), known to posterity as the Principia. was arranged in London at the Royal Society. The minutes of the meeting record that the astronomer Edmund Halley would "undertake the business of looking afte rit and printing it at his own charge." The New York  Times Book Review felt that Newton had gotten over his inertia and understood the gravity of the situation but that many of his arguments were elliptical. And it was all the result of a bet.  The great architect and mathematician, Christopher Wren made a wager as to why the shape of a planet’s orbit is an ellipse. He offered a prize of 40 shillings (about 2 weeks pay). He wagered with…Robert Hooke and Edmund Halley.  Hooke, notorious for taking credit for the work of others,  said he knew already but wouldn’t tell them on the grounds that it would rob others of the satisfaction of making the discovery for themselves.Halley went to see his friend, Isaac Newton.  Newton agreed it was an ellipse because, as he said, “I have calculated it”.  However, he couldn’t find any of the work Now we know where students get it from. He agreed to re do the calculations and provide a paper.He did as he promised. He worked on it for two years and added a bit more….He ended up writing Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, The Principia.   It not only explained mathematically the orbits of heavenly bodies, but also identified gravity.  At it’s heart were Newton’s three laws of motion. It has also been called on of the most inaccessible books ever written (obviously they never tried  Thomas Hutton).  But Hooke reappeared on the scene and He got in an argument with Newton over the priority of the inverse square law.  Don’t we all?  Newton refused to release the vital 3rd volume. Halley’s shuttle diplomacy resolved the issue. But wait! There’s more!
The Royal Society had promised to publish the work. Unfortunately, they had used too much money publishing previous year’s (scintillating no doubt) book The History of Fishes. Halley paid for the Principia with his own funds.He accepted a job as Clerk for the Royal Society.  Because they were still short of funds……..He was paid instead in copies of……..The History of Fishes.

            1692 –Monday-  Because it’s witchcraft, wicked witchcraft
And although, I know, it’s strictly taboo ………Frank Sinatra…………Bridget Bishop became the first person to go to trial in the Salem witch trials in, yes,  Salem, Massachusetts. She was found guilty, and hanged on June 10. Bridget,  born sometime between 1632 and 1637 was quite the social butterfly.  She  married three times.  Her third and final marriage, after the kaputions of her first two husbands, was to Edward Bishop, who was employed as a "sawyer" (lumber worker).  In 1680 she had been charged (but cleared) of witchcraft, and on other occasions she had ended up in the courthouse for violent public quarreling with her husband.  In addition to her somewhat outrageous (by Puritan standards…..but then everything was outrageous by Puritan standards..) lifestyle, the fact that Bishop "was in the habit of dressing more artistically than women of the village" also contributed in large part to her conviction and execution. She was described as wearing, "a black cap, and a black hat, and a red paragon bodice bordered and looped with different colors." This was a showy costume for the times. Aside from encouraging rumors and social disdain, this "showy costume" was used as evidence against her at her trial for witchcraft. In his deposition, Shattuck, the town dyer mentions, as corroborative proof of Bishop being a witch, that she used to bring to his dye house "sundry pieces of lace" of shapes and dimensions entirely outside his conceptions of what would be needed in the wardrobe of a plain and honest woman. Fashionable apparel was regarded by some as a "snare and sign of the devil." http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/salem/SAL_BBIS.HTM

            1731 –Saturday-   Happy Birthday - Martha Dandridge Custis Washington Martha Washington, First American first lady. At the age of seventeen, she married Colonel. Daniel Parke Custis, age thirty seven. She had four children with Col. Custis. Her eldest was a daughter, Frances, who died in infancy, next was a son named Daniel,  whose early death is supposed to have hastened his father’s death. The third was Martha, who died in 1770 as a young woman, and last was John, who was killed during the siege of Yorktown at age twenty seven. She married George in 1759. 

            1740 –Thursday-  Nine years younger and born on the same day as Martha Washington, Happy Birthday, Donatien Alphonse François, Comte de Sade, better known as the Marquis de Sade, depraved, debauched, French author of Les 120 Journées De Sodome, Justine (1791) and the sequel, Juliette (1797),

            1763 –Thursday-   During Pontiac's Rebellion, Pontiac, upset that G M had created the Sunbird, attacked what is now Mackinaw City, Michigan. The Chippewas captured Fort Michilimackinac by diverting the garrison's attention with a game of using the subterfuge of a bagataway (lacrosse) game to take the British unexpectedly. They kicked the ball into the fort and before you could say, Trojan Horse, many of the British were killed via terminal stupidity with some taken prisoner. The French population (which far out numbered the British) was unharmed.

            1780 –Friday-  The Derby horse race is held for the first time. It could have been named The Bunbury but  was eponymously named for r Edward Stanley, 12th Earl of Derby, who founded the race.  He proposed a race for both colts and fillies over the same distance of one mile. The story goes that his friend Lord Bunbury tossed him for the honor of naming the new race. The toss was won by the Earl of Derby and thus, it was called after himself.  There was some solace for Bunbury since his , Diomed that won the first event.

            1787 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Nils Gabriel Sefström, Swedish chemist who discovered the element vanadium. He examined iron ore after the Tanburg mine manager had pointed out an interesting test.  They tested the ore by dissolving it in hydrochloric acid and if a black powder resulted the steel was likely to be brittle. Sefström investigated and found that what was important in the test was the presence or absence in the ore of a new element. In 1830 he isolated the new element, which he named vanadium - atomic number 23 -after the Norse goddess Vanadis.  Approximately 80% of the vanadium produced is used as ferrovanadium or as a steel additive. Of course in the “and I listened to you?” category, vanadium was originally discovered by Andres Manuel del Rio (a Spanish mineralogist) at Mexico City in 1801, who called it erythronium, since most of the salts turned red when heated. A French chemist incorrectly declared that del Rio's new element was only impure chromium. Del Rio thought himself to be mistaken and accepted the statement of the French chemist.

            1793 –Sunday-  Jean-Paul Marat recited the names of 29 people to the French National Convention. Almost all of these people would be  guillotined, followed by 17,000 more over the course of the next year during the Reign of Terror  which began in September. Gnus recommendation – A Place of Greater Safety by Hilary Mantel. On July 13, just six weeks after his words condemned people to decapitation, 1 a young Royalist from Caen, Charlotte Corday, managed, by a clever subterfuge, to gain entry into his apartment. When Marat agreed to receive her, she stabbed him in his bathtub

            1840 –Tuesday- “Try to learn something about everything and everything about something.” Happy Birthday- Thomas Hardy, English novelist, poet and dramatist. Hardy set his "Novels of Character and Environment," as he did most of his other novels, poems and short stories, around the market town of Dorchester ('Casterbridge'), near his boyhood home at Bockhampton. The Gnus favorite is Jude the Obscure but Hardy’s works included, Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and the favorite of English classes everywhere, The Return of the Native.

            1850-  Happy Birthday, Jesse Boot, obscure in most of the world but, the English chemist who founded Boots Company, Ltd. At 13 he inherited his father's herbalist shop, andin  his spare-time he studied pharmacy and in 1877 opened his first chemist shop (aka drug store, apothecary, dispensary) . Boot realized that the established chemists in Nottingham had a price-fixing policy. He decided to sell his goods cheaper than the other chemists. Boot advertised in the Nottingham Daily Express that the 128 items in his shop at Goose Gate were being sold at reduced prices and the rest is drug store history.

            1855 –Saturday-  So bring me two pina coladas
One for each hand
Let's set sail with Captin Morgan
And never leave dry land …..Garth Brooks……The Portland Rum Riot occured in Portland, Maine. A 19^th century “Nanny Stater”- Neil Dow guided his Maine Law through the legislature and Maine became the first "dry" state. Strangely, in spite of endless adjustments, however, the Maine Law never succeeded in destroying the liquor traffic or public thirst. In 1855, Dow ordered the militia to fire on civilians (mostly Irish Immigrants) as they descended upon Portland's City Hall, looking for a stash of liquor they had heard was kept there. One man was killed by Dow's forces.

            1857-Tuesday-   Elias Howe and Isaac Singer are the names usually associated with the history of the early sewing machine and few have ever heard of James Edward Allen Gibbs. “After studying the position and relations of the needle and shaft with each other, I conceived the idea of a revolving hook on the end of the shaft, which might take hold of the thread and manipulated it into a chain stitch. My ideas were, of course, very crude and indefinite, but it will be seen that I then had the correct conception of the invention afterwards embodied in my machine." The first practical U.S. chain-stitch sewing machine was patented by a farmer, James E. A. Gibbs of Mill Point, Va. It was a single-thread, twist-loop, rotary hook design. This method thus produced a chain-stitched seam. http://www.ismacs.net/willcoxandgibbs/james-edward-allen-gibbs.html

            1858-Wednesday-  The Donati Comet was first seen and named after its discoverer, Giovanni Battista Donati, of  Florence. It was the second-brightest comet of the nineteenth century  and came closest to Earth (on October 9, and was last seen on March 4, 1859. Around the time of closest approach the Earth, the comet developed a prominent dust tail, up to 60° long and curved like a scimitar, for which it is best remembered.
 

              1875-Wednesday-   Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Watson first transmitted sound over wires. This successful experiment was completed in a fifth floor room  at what was then 109 Court Street in Boston.  While using his “harmonic telegraph" discovered he could hear sound over a wire. The sound was that of a twanging clock spring. Mr. Watson had twanged (or, it could have been Duane Eddy and his “twangy guitar”) a clock spring in their experimental telegraphic device, which Mr. Bell physically heard on a 2nd device. Just over nine months later….on  March 10th, 1876, at the same workshop on Court Street, Alexander Graham Bell shouted the famous words, "Mr. Watson, Come Here, I Want to See You." Thomas Watson, his assistant, surprisingly heard Bell's voice over their telegraphic contraption, and this event marks the first use of a telephone in history. It was followed by, “ Hi, we’re not in right now, but leave a message when you hear the beep and we'll get right back to you.”

            1881-Thursday-  Happy Birthday Henry J. Round, English electronics engineer whose numerous invention contributed to the development of radio communications. Round worked with Marconi's Wireless Telegraph Company, Ltd., from 1902 to 1914, first in the United States, where he improved the tuning components of radio receivers and built early radio direction finders and radio telephones. See Marconi below – 1896.

            1883-Saturday-  The first electric elevated railroad made a trial run in Chicago.  For some reason they put it indoors.  For some reason, the idea did not catch on.  New York City began elevated railway service in the early 1870s, running in Manhattan on Ninth Avenue and Greenwich Street. It was America's first elevated railroad, but it was steam-powered. At the Berlin Exhibition of 1879 some 600 yards of track were laid, on which a little three-horse-power electric engine, designed by Werner von Siemens, hauled a load of some thirty passengers at a speed of four miles an hour. Current was supplied by a third rail laid between the track rails. The 1883 version, developed by, surprise, Thomas Edison and Stephen D. Field aimed to impress the crowds at the Chicago Railway Exposition, and they did. They built a narrow-gauge 3-foot-wide track in the gallery around the edge of the main exhibition building, with tight curves at each end of the 1,552-foot track -- less than one-third of a mile long. The locomotive weighed 3 tons and was 12 feet long by 5 feet wide. It drew current by rubbing a wire brush on each side of an electrified, central third rail. The 15-horsepower locomotive pulled a passenger car at and chugged along at  9 mph. http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2008/06/dayintech_0602

           1886 –Wednesday-  On a social note U.S. President Grover Cleveland married Frances Folsom in the White House, becoming the only president to wed in the executive mansion. - Cleveland was also the first president to have a child born in the White House; his daughter Esther in 1895. John Tyler and Woodrow Wilson also married (not to each other) while in office but managed to splurge on catering halls.  Cleveland, was dazzling in a tux by Halson.  The bride was resplendent in a Martha Stewart gown from K Mart.  Music in the Blue Room was provided by Guido and His Harmonica Orchestra playing the Chicken Dance, the Hokey Pokey and YMCA.  The wedding reception came to an abrupt halt when the crowd ran screaming from the room as Guido launched his polka version of We’ve Only Just Begun.

            1896- TuesdayOtis Pond, an engineer then working for Nikola Tesla, said, "Looks as if Marconi got the jump on you." Tesla replied, "Marconi is a good fellow. Let him continue. He is using seventeen of my patents..  The first radio patent was filed by Guglielmo Marconi in England for his wireless telegraphy apparatus  for "Improvements in Transmitting Electrical Impulses and Signals, and in Apparatus Therefore." 

           1904 –Thursday Johnny Weissmuller, American swimmer and actor. Weismuller was born in Timisoara, Romania,  though he would later claim to have been born in Windber, Pennsylvania, probably to ensure his eligibility to compete as part of the US Olympic team. He was winner of five Olympic gold medals, 67 world and 52 national titles, holder of every freestyle record from 100 yards to the half-mile. Weismuller became more famous for his scholarly, erudite, clad in loincloth, Tarzan starting in 1932 with Tarzan, The Ape Man, and on to;  1934 Tarzan And His Mate, 1936 Tarzan Escapes, 1939 Tarzan Finds A Son, 1941 Tarzan's Secret Treasure, 1942 Tarzan's New York Adventure, 1943 Tarzan Triumphs, 1943 Tarzan's Desert Mystery, 1945 Tarzan And The Amazons, 1946 Tarzan And The Leopard Woman, 1947 Tarzan And The Huntress, 1948 Tarzan And The Mermaids (where he fought an octopus).  Weismuller, having grown attached to Hollywood jungle sets,  then made sixteen Jungle Jim movies.

       1907-Sunday- Old rockin' chair's got me, my cane by my side
Fetch me that gin, son, 'fore I tan your hide
Can't get from this cabin, goin' nowhere
Just set me here grabbin' at the flies round this rockin' chair…Hoagy Carmichael…… Happy Birthday Edwin Shoemaker, American inventor and engineer who with his cousin, Edward Knabusch, created the recliner chair and started the La-Z-Boy
furniture company to manufacture it.  That first recliner chair was a wood slat outdoor folding chair
from orange crates.  A comfortable
concept, the chair followed the contour of a person’s body, both sitting up and
leaning back.

            1922-Friday- Happy Birthday, American geologist, Clair Patterson. Using lead and uranium isotopic data from a meteorite, he calculated an age for the Earth of 4.55 billion years; a figure far more accurate than those that existed at the time and one that has remained unchanged for over 50 years. He determined through ice-core samples from Greenland that atmospheric lead levels had begun to increase steadily and dangerously soon after tetra-ethyl lead began to see widespread use in fuel. He devoted the rest of his life to removing as much introduced lead from the environment as possible.

Following his criticism of the lead industry he was refused contracts with many research organizations, including the United States Public Health Service, and was excluded from a 1971 National Research Council panel on atmospheric lead contamination.Eventually, Patterson's efforts led to the Clean Air Act of 1970, and ultimately the removal of lead from all gasoline in the United States by 1986. Lead levels within the blood of Americans are reported to have dropped by up to 80% Most Earth Science texts do not mention him….and the reviewer of one text that did….Thought he was a woman.

            1925 –Tuesday-  “ Not tonight.  I have a headache.”  First baseman, Wally Pipp, asked out of the line up and manager, Miller Huggins replaced him with Lou Gehrig for the New York Yankees, beginning a streak of 2,130 consecutive games played, topped only by Cal Ripken, Jr. in 1995. Exactly 16 years later to the day, in 1941 Gehrig passed away at age 37,  from Amyotropic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Gehrig, who’s baseball totals would have been even greater also hold one of baseball’s more dubious achievements – the lowest stolen base percentage of all time among players with 200 or more attempts.  50.2%. Wally Pipp, to be fair, was probably benched by Huggins due to a batting slump. The headache occurred  a few weeks later when his skull was fractured by a practice pitch from Charlie Caldwell, an event that may have been mistakenly linked to his initial benching. Pipp was later traded to the Cincinnati Reds before the 1926 season. He played 372 games for them over the next three seasons before retiring.

             1928-Saturday- Kraft's Velveeta Cheese was invented. It was packaged using the 1921 invention of a tinfoil lining that could house the cheese inside a wooden box.  The invention of a food product, how tacky. The United States Food and Drug Administration categorized it as pasteurized process cheese spread. It was developed by a cheese maker,  Emil Frey. He was trying to help the company he worked for find a way to dispose of the excess whey. Whey was a waste product that was made as a result of the cheese making process. Frey was working on another idea when he serendipitously  stumbled on a combination of the whey and another cheese that when mixed together created a smooth, almost velvety cheese material. That is of course why it was given the name Velveeta Cheese, because of the consistency. It was also good for mortar when making brick walls. http://www.cheeselovers.org/velveeta-cheese.html

            1930-Monday-  Happy Birthday,  Charles Peter (Pete) Conrad, American astronaut. Conrad had quite a space resume.  He was the third man to walk on the moon during the Apollo 12 mission. He had other experience in space on Gemini 5 (launched August 21,  1965, logging a new space endurance record of 8 days), on Gemini 11 (launched 18 Sept. 18,  1966, first orbit rendezvous and docking), and the Skylab 2 mission (1973). Returning to Earth, on 14 February 14, 1996, Conrad was a crew member for a record-breaking flight around the world in a Lear jet.

            1946 –Sunday-  Spawning of Peter Sutcliffe, English serial killer known as The Yorkshire Ripper. Sutcliffe, a textbook example for death penalty advocates is serving life for the murders of 13 women in west Yorkshire between 1975 and 1981.

            1946–Sunday-  Birth of the Italian Republic:Eighty five years after the unification of Italy and installation of Victor Emmanuel as king,  in a referendum, Italians voted to have a monarchectomy and  turn Italy from a monarchy into a Republic. After the referendum the king of Italy Umberto II di Savoia was exiled to Portugal.

             1947 –Sunday The premiere of  The Corpse Came C.O.D. Directed by Henry Levin, it starring George Brent and Joan Blondell, in a Tracy/Hepburnish comedy
        

            1964 –Tuesday-  The Rolling Stones made  their American TV debut on the Les Crane Show, another of ABC’s attempts to challenge Johnny Carson. They didn’t perform.  They took questions from the audience.  

            1966 –Surveyor 1 landed in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon, becoming the first U.S. spacecraft to soft land on another world.  The main objectives of the Surveyors were to obtain close-up images of the lunar surface and to determine if the terrain was safe for manned landings. Each Surveyor was equipped with a television camera. This was how Paul Abdul was discovered. In addition, Surveyors 3 and 7 each carried a soil mechanics surface sampler scoop which dug trenches and was used for soil mechanics tests which led to the discover of Senator Charles Schumer, and Surveyors 5, 6, and 7 had magnets attached to the footpads and an alpha scattering instrument for chemical analysis of the lunar material which caused the break up of the marriage of Britney Spears and Jason Allen Alexander.

            1967 –Friday- What would you think if I sang out of tune,
Would you stand up and walk out on me.
Lend me your ears and I'll sing you a song,
And I'll try not to sing out of key.
Oh I get by with a little help from my friends,
Mmm,I get high with a little help from my friends,
Mmm, I'm gonna try with a little help from my friends.   In the U.S., Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band was released by the Beatles. It was released on June 1 in Britain. This was the first album to have song lyrics printed on the back cover.  Produced by George Martin, there were thirteen songs on the album with Within You and Without You being Harrison’s only contribution. The concept behind the album cover collage was the burial of the old I-Want-to-Hold-Your-Hand Beatles. The celebrities looking over the flower bouquet Beatles logo are mourners.  The album was heavily produced and took 129 days and about 700 hours to complete. The Beatles first album, Please Please Me, was recorded in less than 10 hours.

1969 –Friday- Australian aircraft carrier Melbourne sliced the destroyer USS Frank E. Evans in half during a Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) exercise (possibly Operation Bumper Boats) off the coast of Vietnam. HMAS Melbourne was called a jinx ship, not only did it sink the Evans, it had sunk in HMAS Voyager 1964. Both were caused by human error and incompetence on the bridge.  

1992 –Tuesday- In a national referendum Denmark rejected the Maastricht Treaty by a thin margin. and only accepted it in a second vote in May 1993 after receiving an optout on monetary union like the UK and a promise that Danish pastry would not be called Euro Bagels. In France it squeaked home by just 50.4 to 49.7. The Maastricht Treaty served two purposes. It amended the provisions of the Treaty of Rome while hugely advancing the agenda set out under the Single European Act (1986) for deepening European Political Union (EPU). It created a new model for the Community based around three 'pillars' which, broadly speaking, covered economic relations, foreign affairs and home affairs and the fact that a cup of coffee in Italy cost 4 billion lire.  It ... officially created the European Union (EU), which became the title to cover all the functions of the much-expanded European governmental structure and enabled Belgium to conquer the continent. It set in train the process of Economic and Monetary Union (EMU), which would lead to the creation of the Euro.

1997 –Monday-  In Denver, Colorado, home grown terrorist Timothy McVeigh was convicted on fifteen counts of murder (out of 168 who died) and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. McVeigh would be executed in June, 2001.

1999 –Wednesday  Well this was certainly exciting, The Bhutan Broadcasting Service brought television transmissions to the Kingdom of Bhutan for the first time. It was  currently the only service to offer both radio and television to the Kingdom, and is the only television service to broadcast from inside the Bhutanese border. Bhutan is landlocked country in South Asia, located at the eastern end of the Himalaya Mountains and bordered to the north, south, east and west by the Republic of India and to the northwest by Tibet.  Viewers could now enjoy cultural highlights such as My Favorite Yak, Life on the Mo Chhu River (sort of like a Bhutanese Glee), Another Day, Another Ngultrum, Tibet Sucks,  and Thimphu Tonight.

2003 –Monday-  Europe launched its first voyage to another planet, Mars. The European Space Agency's Mars Express probe launched from the Baikonur space center in Kazakhstan. In March 2010, European Mars Express (Mex) probe has made its closest flyby of the Martian moon Phobos, passing just 67km (42 miles) from its surface. Mars Express consists of two parts, the Mars Express Orbiter and the Beagle 2, a lander designed to perform exobiology and geochemistry research. Beagle 2  bit the dust and  failed to land safely on the Martian surface but  the Orbiter has been successfully performing scientific measurements. Residual microbes returned to Earth resulted in a mutation causing Americans to be possibly the most obnoxious tourist on the Earth, except for roving bands of Chinese and Japanese looking for photo ops.  

2004 –Wednesday- Fed Ex ….. Ken Jennings began his 74-game winning streak on the syndicated game show Jeopardy! Just in case someone gives you an answer of "Most of this firm's 70,000 seasonal white-collar employees work only four months a year."…don’t say Fed Ex.
 Jennings’s streak would end on November 30.

2004-Wednesday-  Like a sturgeon
Touched for the very first time
Like a sturgeon
When your heart beats
Next to mine ….apologies  to Madonna……While Ken was beginning his winning streak on Jeopardy, a 2.75-meter sturgeon weighing 120 kg was caught in Swansea Bay off the coast of Wales by Robert Davies. Sturgeons are extremely rare in British waters, so this catch was interesting, but by a statute dating back to the testeronically challenged,  King Edward II the 14th century the fish had to be offered to the Crown if caught in Britain. When Buckingham Palace told him he could "dispose of it as he saw fit,", despite protests from Sarah Ferguson that she was hungry and from Princess Anne who thought it resembled one of her cousins, Davies auctioned it off at Plymouth fish market for £700, but then the  local police confiscated it as a protected species under British law.  If the prouerbe be true,‥that a fishe beginneth first to smell at the head, the faultes of our seruantes will be layed vppon vs.
[1581 G. Pettie tr. S. Guazzo's Civil Conversation iii. 51]

3.3     

1098 –Friday –The city of Antioch finally fell to the First Crusade after an eight-month siege. The Crusade, led by ,Godfrey of Bouillon, Bohemund of Taranto, Raymond IV of Toulouse, and Crusader Rabbit,  had disagreed over what course of action to take the city when they arrived in October 1097 . Bohemund and Godfrey wanted to lay siege. However there was a slight problem since they lacked sufficient men to completely surround Antioch. Thus the southern and eastern gates were left unblockaded allowing the governor, Yaghi-Siyan, to bring food into the city…..it was a Swiss Cheese Seige.  Finally, in November, the crusaders were reinforced by troops under Bohemund's nephew, Tancred. The following month they defeated an army sent to relieve the city by Duqaq of Damascus.  Another Muslim army was on the way, so after eight months of siege and battle, they simply bribed an Armenian named Farouz who was in charge of one of the gates. Requisat Antioch.

            1140 –Monday- When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.

    Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband………French scholar Pierre (Peter) Abelard was found guilty of heresy at the Council of Sens, for writing Ethica, in which he analyzed the notion of sin (not Sens) and also for insisting that he only read Playboy for the articles, he withdrew to the monastery at Cluny. Abelard was also rather famous for his affaire d’coeur with Heloise – he was 40, she was 18, and his subsequent castration men hired by her enraged uncle.

1326 –Thursday-  Borderline … feels like I'm goin' to lose my mind
You just keep on pushin' my love over the borderline
Borderline … feels like I'm goin' to lose my mind
You just keep on pushin' my love over the borderline (borderline)…..Madonna……..The Treaty of Novgorod delineated borders between Russia and Norway in the region called Finnmark. Aha! You say.  The Treaty of Novograd was really in 1557! But, aha! We say.  That was the Second Treaty of Novograde and it ended the Russo-Swedish War (1554–1557)

 1539 –Saturday-  Mass murdering conquistador Hernando DeSoto claimed Florida for Spain.  Following the initial voyage of Juan Ponce de León in 1519,  Hernando de Soto  was chosen to return to Florida and solidify Spain's claim and expand the territory. De Soto had accompanied Francisco Pizarro on earlier voyages to South America and had grown rich from exploitation of the Inca. Figuring there was “gold in them thar swamps” de Soto embarked on an ambitious sea and land venture. He claimed the beaches, Disney World, golf courses, beach front condos, and scantily clad young women for Spain, he disclaimed the insects the size of an SUV, the tourists, Miami, the filling in of the Everglades, and hurricanes saying that the English could have them.

1608 –Tuesday-  Two men, one from Ontario and one from Quebec, were in a cave when they came across a magic lamp.
While they were fighting over who the lamp belonged to, a genie popped out.
The genie said, "I shall grant each of you one wish and only one, so make it good."
The Quebequois spoke first, "I want you to build a hundred foot wall around the border of Quebec, this will ensure that the english culture does not corrode our superior heritage."
The genie nodded, "done," he then turned to the Ontarian. "And your wish?"
"Fill it with water." …………Speaking of explorers, Samuel de Champlain completed his third voyage (he made five in all) to New France at Tadoussac, Quebec.  He had Champlain founded a settlement and trading post along the St. Lawrence River that eventually became the city of Quebec. It was the first permanent white settlement in Canada and gave them plenty of time to change French just enough so that if you speak French you can’t understand Quebecois’ French.

1659 –Tuesday- David Gregory (Gregorie), Scottish astronomer and mathematician. Gregory was the first to openly to teach the doctrines of  Newton’s  Principia, in a public seminary. After  the Union between England and Scotland in 1707, he was given the responsibility of reorganizing the Scottish Mint  which he divided into peppermints, spearmints, chocolate mints, orange mints, ginger mint and Junior Mints.

1665 –Wednesday-  Duke Duke Duke Duke of York

Duke Duke Duke of York……apologies to Gene Chandler…….James Stuart, Duke of York (later to become King James II of England) defeated the Dutch fleet off the coast of Lowestoft.  This was the first major battle of the Second Anglo-Dutch War.  This was the worst defeat in Dutch naval history, with York capturing or sinking seventeen ships while losing only one of his own.  This was the same York, who as James II proved remarkably inept in his battles with William of Orange as he lost his throne in 1689.

1726-Monday-  Oh my mama loves me, she loves me
She get down on her knees and hug me (ahh a-a-ah)
(oh)She loves me like a rock
She rocks me like the rock of ages
And loves me
She love me, love me, love me, love me …..Paul Simon…………Happy birthday, James Hutton, Scottish scientist who founded the science of geology.  Rumor is he got off to a rocky start.  As Bill Bryson notes in his wonderful, A Short History of Nearly Everything, Hutton was described as a man of keen insights and lively conversation. Unfortunately, it was beyond him to set down his ideas in a form that anyone could begin to understand. A biographer described him as “almost entirely innocent of rhetorical accomplishments.” Here is a sample from his masterwork, A Theory of the Earth with Proofs and Illustrations.“ The world which we inhabit is composed of the materials, not of the earth which was the immediate predecessor of the present, but of the earth which, in ascending  from the present, we consider as the third, and which had preceded the land that was above the surface of the sea, while our present land was yet beneath the water of the ocean. “ He was equally bad as a public speaker. Fortunately…he died ..and after he died, a friend named John Playfair – Professor of Mathematics at the University of Edinburgh not only actually understood what Hutton was trying to say, but after Hutton’s death, Playfair produced a simplified exposition of the Huttonian principles, Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth.

            1761-Wednesday  Happy Birthday, Henry Shrapnel, the English army lieutenant (promoted to general later in his career)  who invented the eponymous shrapnel shell in 1784.  The shell, consists of a steel case filled with bullets and an explosive charge. It is fired in midair by a time fuse and scatters shot and shell fragments with great and deadly force over a wide area. Shrapnel's invention was the first air-bursting case shot which, in technical words, "imparted directional velocity" to the bullets it contained. Henry Shrapnel's new shell was first used by the British against the French in 1808, however, it was not named after Shrapnel until 1852.

          1777-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Charles Bernard Desormes, French physicist and chemist. All internet sources have the same citations including….Desormes  determined the ratio of the specific heats of gases in 1819. We figured you’d want to know more about the ratio of specific heats of gases so…….as molar specific heats. For a monoatomic ideal gas the internal energy is all in the form of kinetic energy, and kinetic theory provides the expression for that energy, related to the kinetic temperature. The expression for the internal energy is     ….we hope that clears it up for you.  Anyway, most of Desorme’ work was in collaboration with his son-in-law Nicolas Clément.  Desormes correctly determined the composition of carbon disulphide (CS₂) - a toxic colorless flammable liquid now used in the manufacture of rayon and cellophane and carbon tetrachloride,  as a solvent for rubber and Joan Rivers’ facials, and carbon monoxide (CO) - is a colorless, odorless, and tasteless gas-  in 1801-02. In 1813 he was asked by Bernard Courtois, to make a study of his discovery, iodine,  and its compounds.

            1800- Tuesday-  Since the White House wasn’t finished,  President John Adams moved into a tavern (wouldn’t you?) Tunnicliffe's City Hotel - in Washington, D.C. Abigail was still at home in Massachusetts so she wasn’t able to join him, and cabinet members Timothy Pickering, Oliver Wolcott Jr. Benjamin Stoddard, and Charles Lee in nightly games of Beer Pong…keg Cups  are partially filled with beer and set up in a diamond shape on each ends of the beer pong table. When a ping pong ball lands in an opposing players cup, that cup must be drank by the opposing player. The winner is the player with the most cups left…….. but when the White House was ready, she and John moved in on Nov. 1…just in time for him to lose the election to Thomas Jefferson and they had to move out again.  

            1808 –Friday- Happy Birthday,  Jefferson Davis, American politician and President of the Confederate States of America. Davis, the youngest of ten children was born in Christian County, Kentucky. Following military service during the Mexican War, he served as Secretary of War during the epic administration of the renowned Franklin Pierce.  Though an opponent of secession in practice, Davis upheld it in principle. On January 21, 1861, he announced the secession of Mississippi, delivered a farewell address, and resigned from the Senate. Four days after his resignation, Davis was commissioned a Major General of Mississippi troops. On February 9, 1861 a constitutional convention at Montgomery, Alabama named him provisional president of the Confederate States of America, and he was inaugurated on the 18th.  

            1844 –Monday-   Happy Birthday- Garret Hobart,…….quick now….who was he?.... 24th Vice President of the United States (President, William McKinley) and the sixth Vice President to go kaput while in office. He was replaced on the 1900 ballot by Theodore Roosevelt who would then become President when McKinley went kaput.

            1851 –Tuesday- A white sport coat and a pink carnation
I'm all dressed up for the dance.
A white sport coat and a pink carnation,
I'm all alone in romance. …..Marty Robbins…….The  first  baseball uniforms were worn (see 1953 below), as the New York Knickerbockers dazzled in straw hats, white shirts and  blue long trousers. In 1868 the Cincinnati Red Stockings began wearing knee length knickerbockers- baggy pants that end just after the knees. The word Knickerbocker, as any well educated (and they are all well educated) NBA player will tell you is derived from Diedrich Knickerbocker, the fictitious author of Washington Irving's 1809 novel Knickerbocker's History of New York. He's also mentioned in the original title of Irving's most famous work, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Found Among the Papers of the Late Diedrich Knickerbocker.

            1864 –Friday-  June 3 1864. Cold Harbor. I was killed. The last diary entry, found in the pocket of a dead Union soldier. He had made the entry himself, while all around him, other soldiers were writing names and home addresses on slips of paper and pinning them to the back of their coats.  Not War but Murder….(a superb book by Ernest B. Furguson) This was the fourth phase of U.S. Grant’s overland campaign against Robert E. Lee. Grant had spent all of May attempting to get past Lee’s right flank, suffering defeats but inflicting heavy casualties on the way at the Battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania and North Anna River. On this day, Grant ordered continued assaults against well entrenched Confederate defenders.  In one hour of fighting the Union army suffered 7,000 casualties. Confederate losses were at most 1,500.  Confederate Gen. Evander Law said, I had seen the carnage in front of Marye's hill at Fredricksburg, and on the 'old railroad cut' which Jackson's men held at the Second Manassas; but I had seen nothing to exceed this. It was not war; it was murder. Although the two armies stayed in the trenches around Cold Harbor for some days after 3 June, the failed assault effectively ended the battle.  Grant commented in his memoirs that this, and his 2^nd attack on Vicksburgh were the only ones he wished he had never ordered.

            1864 – Happy Birthday, Ransom E. Olds, American automobile inventor and creator of the Oldsmobile, now defunct but one of the more successful cars of the twentieth century. Olds also created the assembly line in 1901. The new approach to putting together automobiles enabled him to more than quadruple his factory’s output, from 425 cars in 1901 to 2,500 in 1902. Ah, we miss the Delta 88, the Super 88 and the 98.  Professor Sy Yentz had a Cutlass.

            1875 – Thursday- A year before his invention of the telephone, Alexander Bell used his "harmonic telegraph" to transmit a twanging sound from a reed vibrated by Bell’s voice along wires to his assistant Thomas A. Watson.  Bell thought he could send several telegraph messages at once by varying their musical pitch. Although the instrument transmitted voicelike sounds, the words were not recognizable. Twanging did not go away, much ater, Duane Eddy and his twangy guitar had a major hit record with Rebel Rouser in 1958.

             1879-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Raymond Pearl, American scientist who made significant contributions in the areas of biology, genetics, eugenics, and statistics. One of the founders of biometry, the application of statistics to biology and medicine, Pearl (also a virulent ant-Semite) was ahead of his time, warning of the dangers of smoking as early as 1936 and the benefits of alcohol in moderation – as opposed to overuse or abstinence (although, “abstinence makes the heart grow fonder”) - in 1926. Pearl was also a founder of  biogerontology (the biology-based study of aging)

            1884-Tuesday-   I believe I can do anything if I just try……. American of African descent, inventor/scientist Granville T. Woods received his first patent. It was for the first steam boiler furnace.  A steam boiler furnace is an enclosed vessel in which water is heated and circulated, either as hot water or as steam, for heating or power. Called “The Black Edison” over the course of his life Woods would receive 60 patents, mostly relating to electrical subjects. His inventions revolutionized railway and telegraph communication.  This was good news and bad news.  The good news was that it  helped in the growth of his competitors' companies--General Electric, Westinghouse Electric and Manufacturing, and American Bell Telephone. The bad news was that Woods was virtually penniless.

            1888 –Sunday-  The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play,
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A pall-like silence fell upon the patrons of the game.
A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, "If only Casey could but get a whack at that —
We'd put up even money now, with Casey at the bat." ………………The poem Casey at the Bat, by Ernest Lawrence Thayer, was published in the San Francisco Examiner under the title Casey at the Bat: A Ballad of the Republic, Sung in the Year 1888.

            1889 –Monday-  The first long-distance electric power transmission line in the United States was completed.  It ran 14 miles between a generator at Willamette Falls and downtown Portland, Oregon.  Before the Portland line, it was not clear how or even if electrical power could be sent long distances. After the Civil War, stationary steam engines began to flood into American cities, but the power they produced was local.  A German team built a 100-mile alternating-current, high-voltage, three-phase transmission line from a hydroelectric generator to Frankfurt in the summer of 1891. It went many times farther than the Portland line, while maintaining the same efficiency of about 75 percent. http://www.wired.com/thisdayintech/2010/06/0603long-distance-power-line/

            1899 –Saturday  - Three old guys are out walking. First one says, "Windy, isn't it?" Second one says, "No, its Thursday!" Third one says, "So am I. Let's go get a beer." Happy Birthday, Georg von Békésy,  winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1961. He demonstrated  the physical means by which sound is received and analyzed in the cochlea -the spiraling cavity of the ear. Békésy was able to observe the traveling waves along the basilar membrane that were produced by sound. He observed the shape of these waves by stroboscopic examination of the motion of particles of silver which he sprinkled on the nearly transparent basilar membrane. Depending upon the frequency of the sound, the traveling waves achieved maximum amplitude in different locations. His paper was titled Things Go Better With Cochlea.

           1904-Friday Give blood
But you may find that blood is enough
Give blood
And there are some who'll say it's not enough
Give blood
But don't expect too ever see reward
Give blood
You can give it all but still asked for more …..Pete Townshend………..Happy Birthday, Charles Drew, American of African descent, physician and surgeon who was an authority on the preservation of human blood for transfusion. Drew was instrumental in developing blood plasma processing, storage and transfusion therapy. His groundbreaking work in the large-scale production of human plasma was eventually used by the U.S. Army and the American Red Cross as the basis for blood banks.  Segregation rules at the time forbade Dr.Drew, a black man, to donate his own blood. Drew resigned his official posts in 1942 after the armed forces ruled that the blood of African Americans would be accepted but would have to be stored separately from that of whites. He then became a surgeon and professor of medicine at Freedmen's Hospital, Washington, D.C., and Howard University (1942–50).

            1906 –Sunday-  I wasn't really naked. I simply didn't have any clothes on…….Josephine Baker, American dancer born Freda Josephine McDonald. The French loved her (they also loved Jerry Lewis so no one is perfect) and she achieved her greatest successes in France beginning with the Folies Bergère in 1926. She appeared wearing a skirt made of bananas

            1917 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Leo Gorcey, distinguished Shakespearean, classical American actor. Gorcey’s first role was as “Spit”, the slimy stool pigeon in the movie Dead End starring Sylvia Sidney, Joel McCrea and Humphrey Bogardt.  He was a member of the “Dead End Kids” with Billy Halop, Bobby Jordan, Gabriel Dell and Huntz Hall in several movies.  The Dead End Kids morphed into “The East Side Kids”, a series of early 1940’s films with Gorcey as “Muggs McGuiness”.  The East Side Kids then transformed into “The Bowery Boys”. Gorcey was now (Terence Aloysius) “Slip” Mahoney and Huntz Hall was still on board. Of note, Louie Dumbrowski, the candy store owner in most of the films was played by Gorcey’s father Bernard.

            1920 –Thursday-  Twelve years before James Chadwick discovered the neutron, physicist Ernest Rutherford predicted its existence and properties in his Bakerian Lecture, London, on "The Nuclear Constitution of Atoms." Rutherford said  “A neutron walks into a bar, orders a drink. When it offered to pay, the bartender refused to take the money saying ‘for you, it’s no charge”…….. He hypothesized on “conditions where it  would be possible for an electron to combine much more closely with the H nucleus, forming a kind of neutral doublet. Such an atom would have very novel properties. Its external field would be practically zero, except very close to the nucleus..."

            1929 –Monday- Q. What does DNA stand for? A. National Dyslexics Association ... Happy Birthday, Werner Arber,  winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1978.  Arber theorized that when a virus entered bacterium, most of the viral deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) was destroyed. He posited that the bacterium produced an enzyme that severed the viral DNA into smaller pieces. Arber was correct -- certain enzymes, called 'restriction enzyme' or 'restriction endonuclease', cleave long strands of DNA into tiny fragments. These fragments, which retain their genetic information, led to the development of gene splicing -- techniques for separating, manipulating, and eventually altering this basic genetic material.

            1932 –Friday-  New York Yankee Lou Gehrig became the first player in “modern” baseball history to hit four home runs in a game.  Teammate Tony Lazzeri hit hit for the natural cycle, single-double-triple-home run included in his five hits against the Philadelphia Athletics at Shibe Park, Philadelphia.   This was notable because these two feats are both less common than a perfect game, which has occurred twenty one times in one hundred and twenty years.  

            1937 –Thursday-  On a social note the conspicuously fatuous Duke of Windsor married the connubially experienced upwardly mobile (except when she was prone), American divorcé Wallis Simpson. Edward was almost late to the wedding as he had difficulty counting the buttons on his jacket, a Tommy Hilfiger tuxedo.  The blushing bride, wore Vera Wang.  Not a dress.  Vera Wang was draped on her shoulders pinning sleeves on throughout the ceremony.  The reception was held at Anthony’s of Windsor Castle with music by Freddy and the Dreamers.

            1940 –Monday During World War II,  The Battle of Dunkirk ended with a German victory and with Allied forces in full retreat.  On the night of May 9/10, 1940, German forces attacked the Low Countries. Moving to their aid, French troops and the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) were unable to prevent their fall.  The BEF withdrew to a perimeter around the port of Dunkirk.  They had to be evacuated or the 350,000 man army would be captured or destroyed. Between June 3 and 4, an additional 52,921 Allied troops were rescued from the beaches. With the Germans only three miles from the harbor, the final Allied ship, the destroyer HMS Shikari, departed at 3:40 AM on June 4.  All told, 332,226 men were rescued from Dunkirk.

            1948-  Thursday- Q: What is an astronomical unit?
A: One helluva big apartment. The 200-inch (5.08 m) reflecting Hale telescope at the Palomar Mountain Observatory in California was dedicated……by the Shirelles…..To the one I love………. This was the first telescope in the world with a 200-inch lens.  The telescope was officially named after Dr. George Ellery Hale who conceived, designed and promoted this telescope to be placed at an elevation of 5,600 feet on Palomar Mountain, 100 miles southeast of Pasadena, California. Hale bought one hundred sixty acres of land from local ranchers and the U.S. Forest Service. On average the weather allows for at least some data collection about 290 nights a year.

            1953 –Wednesday.  Doublday Shmubleday…. Alexander Cartwright was officially credited by the geniuses in U.S. Congress as founder of baseball.  For years people believed  that  West Point Cadet Abner Doubleday invented baseball one day in 1839 while in Cooperstown, New York. The Doubleday Myth was first created by a panel of “baseball experts” appointed to determine the origins of the game.

The Commission based its conclusions on the testimony of one Abner Graves. History proved that Graves may not have been the most credible witness, however. Just a year later, Mr. Graves shot his wife, was declared criminally insane, and spent the rest of his life in a mental institution….he probably should have been in Congress. On the other hand, Alexander Cartwright was a member of the New York Knickerbockers, a club of young businessmen who regularly played something called Town Ball. In 1845, Cartwright and a committee from his club drew up clear rules designed to convert Town Ball into a more elaborate sport. He called it Base Ball. Cartwright actually wrote down his rules for Base Ball, and many of them are still fundamental parts of the game, including the concepts of: (1) fair and foul territory; (2) three strikes per out; (3) three outs per inning; (4) nine players per side; and (5) ninety feet between bases. The first baseball game played under these new rules took place on June 19, 1846.  Ever quick to pick up on these things, in 2002 Congress declared that Antonio Meucci was the inventor of the telephone.

            1959 –and 1964…. One of the great days in tonsillitis history as firs in 1959, Elvis was tricken with tonsillitis while in the Army. Elvis went to the base hospital in Germany and remained there for six days. They couldn’t find a doctor willing to operate on that million dollar gullet. Instead, the inflammation is instead allowed to run its course and Elvis remained tonsil intacto. Then in 1964 tonsil tragedy struck again as an exhausted Ringo Starr collapsed and was rushed to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with the dread tonsillitis.  Unlike Elvis, who kept his, Ringo had a tonsillectomy.  This resulted in the Beatles recording one of their worst songs ever, the execrable Mr. Moonlight.

            1965 –Saturday-  The first American astronaut to make a “spacewalk”…a bit difficult to “walk when there is no surface to walk on, but why quibble…….. was Major Edward White II,  when he spent 20 minutes outside the Gemini 4 capsule during Earth orbit at an altitude of 120 miles. White later said that later said the spacewalk was the most comfortable part of the mission, and said the order to end it was the "saddest moment" of his life. A tether and 25 foot airline were wrapped in gold tape to form a single, thick cord kept him from floating away.  He used a hand-held 7.5 pound oxygen jet propulsion gun to maneuver around.  White was a member of the Apollo 1 crew killed in a fire while testing their flight capsule in January 1967.

            1967-Saturday-  You know that it would be untrue
You know that I would be a liar
If I was to say to you
Girl, we couldn't get much higher
Come on baby, light my fire
Come on baby, light my fire
Try to set the night on fire ……The Doors recorded , Light My Fire  Silly us, we thought Doors, the group name was based on doors, swinging or sliding barrier that will close the entrance to a room or building or vehicle, and that they could have just as easily named themselves the Walls or the Crown Moldings, or The Window Treatments.  Oh, we were so wrong. Actually, it was double doors, both William Blake If the doors of perception were cleansed man could see things as they truly are, infinite…." from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell written between 1790-93, and  Aldous Huxley and his 1954 book The Doors of Perception.  Anyway, on this day, the Doors recorded Light My Fire. The Doors' record company, Electra,  thought this was too long to get radio play, so the guitar solos were edited down for the single to make it considerably shorter. Many stations played the 6:50 album version anyway. The song reached number 1 on the Billboard Charts on July 28, 1967.  Also, famously, on the Doors one and only appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, Sullivan didn't want the word "higher" sung on the show. The demand was passed down through one of the show's producers, who met the group in the dressing room.The band agreed. The producer  looked at Morrison and said, 'You're the poet. Think of something else -- 'wire,' 'flyer.' "Then the Doors went out and did the song exactly as they always did. Sullivan was so furious he didn't even shake their hands. When the Doors got backstage, they learned they wouldn't be back -- ever.     

            1968 –Monday.  Warholian hanger-on loon, Valerie Solanas, author of SCUM Manifesto,  (an anti male diatribe) attempted to assassinate bizarre artist Andy Warhol by shooting him three times. Curator Mario Amaya  was also shot.  Solanas was arrested the day after the assault. She said that "He had too much control over my life," She was sentenced to  three years in prison and to watch Warhol movies 24/7 for the first two. The shooting was mostly overshadowed in the media due to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy two days later.

            1969 –Tuesday - Ships that pass in the night, and speak each other in passing, only a signal shown, and a distant voice in the darkness; So on the ocean of life, we pass and speak one another, only a look and a voice, then darkness again and a silence.   Henry Wadsworth  Longfellow, ..............well, not quite in this case….as  off the coast of South Vietnam, the Australian aircraft carrier HMAS Melbourne cuts the U.S. Navy destroyer USS Frank E. Evans in half.  At about 3 a.m the two ships were travelling close together at night, performing tight maneuvers, the Frank E. Evans acting as guard ship to pick up any accidentally ditched crew or aircraft. The destroyer turned across the bow of Melbourne, and was cut in two. The bow section sank, and the stern section was later sunk in target practice. 74 people lost their lives, all from the destroyer.

            1973 –Sunday  She’s as sweet as Tupolev honey……apologies to Van Morrison…….. A Soviet supersonic Tupolev Tu-144 crashed near Goussainville, France, killing 14, the first crash of a supersonic passenger aircraft.  The Tupalev, which looked suspiciously like the Concorde (but the Soviets never stole technology from capitalists, did they?) was to  be a shining example of Soviet technology and put through its paces at the Paris Air Show.  Concorde flew first and performed well.  The Tu-144 took off and climbed to 4 000 feet - suddenly there was a violent change in the pitch of the aircraft and it fell out of the sky, the aircraft broke up at 1 500 feet and feel onto the nearby village. All six crew and several civilians died from the accident.

            1980 –Tuesday- I have little compassion for people in trailer parks who refuse to
move after getting tornado warnings. How hard is it for them to
relocate? Their house have wheels.,,,,,,,,,,Carlos Mencia……………. Ruby slippers, house falling on witch …..that’s for Kansas tornadoes.  In this, the Grand Island tornado outbreak. Seven tornadoes hit Grand Island, Nebraska. Five people were killed, 357 single-family homes gone , 33 mobile homes violently relocated and $300 million in damages.  

            1989 –Saturday- The proletarians of the world have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workers of all countries: Unite! ……The government the proletarian workers paradise oof China sent troops to force protesters out of Tiananmen Square after seven weeks of occupation.  The soldiers started firing on the unarmed civilians with AK-47s loaded with battlefield ammunition. The people in the streets don't expect this to happen.. An untold number of people were killed.

            1991 –Monday-  Mount Unzen in southern Japan erupted killing 43 people. Mount Unzen is actually a group of composite volcanoes, the highest of which is Mount Fugen, at 4,462 feet (1,360 m). Mount Unzen had previously erupted in 1792 and

as many as 15,000 people were killed. Composite volcanoes are also called stratovolcanoes.  They are typically deep-sided, symmetrical cones of large dimension built of alternating layers of lava flows, volcanic ash, cinders, blocks, and bombs and may rise as much as 8,000 ft above their bases. Some of the most beautiful mountains in the world are composite volcanoes, including Mount Fuji in Japan, Mount Cotopaxi in Ecuador, Mount Shasta in California, Mount Hood in Oregon, and Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainier in Washington. The essential feature of a composite volcano is a conduit system through which magma from a reservoir deep in Earth's crust rises to the surface. The volcano is built up by the accumulation of material erupted through the conduit and increases in size as lava, cinders, and ash are added to its slopes. The volcanic eruption also caused the  release giant prehistoric scorpions on an Mexican unsuspecting town.

1998 –Wednesday – In the  Eschede train disaster,  an ICE (Inter City Express) high speed train derailed near the village of Eschede in Lower Saxony, Germany, causing 101 deaths. The train, traveling 125 mph, and slammed into a concrete bridge

            2008-Tuesday- Remember the brand new Japanese science laboratory was attached to the International Space Station?   Space Shuttle Discovery's STS-124 mission launched had been launched on  May 31st . It  got down to business, unloading the huge 11.2 meter-long lab using the station's robotic arm and a Toyota Matrix . This was the second component of Kibo (Japanese for "Hope") to be attached to the station, the first was a logistics module sent to the station by Endeavour in March. The third and final part of the lab, a facility that will allow outdoor experiments be exposed to space, would be delivered in the future  The lab will be used to create bizarre looking men who will wear their hair in pony tails well into middle age.

            2010 –Thursday –Sort of like the Japanese soldiers that they found hiding in the jungle long after the end of WW II, A Soviet robot lost on the dusty plains of the Moon for the past 40 years was found again, and it is returning surprisingly strong laser pulses to Earth. Scientists believe that it was reactivated by misdirected radio impulse sent by Vladimir Putin intended to render a dissident journalist kaput.  Researchers plan to use the aged robot to help them measure the Moon's orbit and test theories of gravity.

Back to Calendar

4.       

780 B.C –Wednesday- The first total solar eclipse reliably recorded by the Chinese was noted. Note that while the item is all over the Xeroxian World of the Internet, NASA – a reliable source, we think, does not list it on http://eclipse99.nasa.gov/pages/traditions_morechina.htm

- their Eclipses Through Traditions and Cultures site. Whenever…..The stakes were fairly high for Chinese astrologers.  Failure to get the prediction right, in at least one recorded instance in 2300 BC resulted in the beheading of two astrologers. Since the pattern of total solar eclipses is a very erratic one in time at a specific geographic location, many astrologers were decapitated. By about 20 BC, surviving documents show that the Chinese astrologers had figured it out and understood what caused eclipses. By 8 BC some predictions of total solar eclipse were made using the 135-month reoccurrence period. By 206 AD they could predict solar eclipses by analyzing the motion of the moon itself or asking Bonnie Tyler who observed a Total Eclipse of the Heart in 1983.

            1584 – Monday- Sailing under instructions from Sir Walter Raleigh, Arthur Barlowe identified the site for the  first English colony on Roanoke Island, in what was Virginia  but is now North Carolina. Earlier in 1584, Sir Walter Raleigh had been granted a patent by Queen Elizabeth I to colonize America. Based on Barlowe's report and backed by Queen Elizabeth, Raleigh sent an all-male colony of more than a hundred settlers (the Village People) to Roanoke Island in July 1585.  Of course as we know the colony got wiped out.  A supply ship returned and poof! They were gone.  But Roanoke has gone on to much bigger and better things.  It is now the home of Miniature Graceland in the front yard of one, Don Epperly. Also known as Elvis City, one visitor described Miniature Graceland as slightly shabby but fun to see. Another reported that "the statue of Elvis has spider webs on it, and the mini-marquee is missing a letter or two"….hmmm, could be connected to the missing colonists.  

             1704 –Wednesday-  In the steel of the night
I held you
Held you tight
'Cause I love
Love you so
Promise I'll never
Let you go
In the steel of the night …..apologies to the Five Satins……Happy Birthday,  Benjamin Huntsman, English inventor and manufacturer who invented the crucible process for casting steel.  This was first tried by bass fisherman but the casting frequently resulted in them being hurled from the boat so…it was soon realized that this process could be used to make superior tools and cutlery.

            1738 –Wednesday ………..A traitor is everyone who does not agree with me ………..Happy Birthday, King George (Hanover) III of Great Britain. George would make anyone’s top ten of loony monarchs (actually, listing the top 100 would be fairly easy too). His bizarre behavior and wild outbursts were treated as insanity. He was bound in a straitjacket and chained to a chair to control his ravings. While losing the colonies was his fault, his madness probably wasn’t.  Arsenic was the culprit.  Arsenic was found in massive amounts of George’s hair samples.  It seems that the most common medication he was given was James' powders, a routine medicine administered given several times a day - made of a substance called antimony. Antimony, even when purified, contains significant traces of arsenic. The arsenic from the very medication he was being given to control his "madness" was triggering more attacks.

 1783 –Wednesday- The Montgolfier brothers publicly demonstrated their hot air balloon called the  montgolfière.  Joseph and Jacques Montgolfier were paper mill owners. In their spare time they  were trying to float bags made of paper and fabric. When the brothers held a flame near the opening at the bottom, the bag (called a balon) expanded with hot air and floated upward. The Montgolfier brothers then built a much  larger paper-lined silk balloon and demonstrated it on June 4, 1783, in the marketplace at Annonay. Their balloon lifted 6,562 feet into the air….but there were no passengers.  That would occur on September 19, when a sheep, a rooster, and a duck flew (sounds like a joke…..a sheep, a rooster and a duck go into a bar…..What do you get when you cross a rooster and a duck?  A bird that wakes up at the quack of dawn, he said sheepishly) for eight minutes in front of, still with their heads, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, and the French court. First human flight was on October 15 Pilatre de Rozier and Marquis d'Arlandes were the brave souls.

            1792 –Monday-  Captain George Vancouver claimed  Puget Sound for the Kingdom of Great Britain. Vancouver was a veteran explorer and familiar with the Northwest, having served as a lieutenant on Capt. James Cook’s third voyage to the Pacific. On that voyage, Cook and his crew became the first Europeans to visit the Hawaiian Islands (when Cook was rendered kaput)  they also landed on present-day Vancouver Island — without realizing it was an island.  Vancouver had arrived in April but he made the claim on this day because it was the birthday of King George III (see 1738 above). While in Puget Sound Vancouver named 75 prominent features, from bays to mountains. Many of these remain to this day, including Admiralty Inlet, Mount Baker, Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, Port Townsend, Hood’s Canal (today Hood Canal), Whidbey Island, Deception Pass and Vashon Island.  With George on his mind, he named der gor dover (whole thing) New Georgia.

            1844-Monday-  Few problems are less recognized, but more important than, the accelerating disappearance of the earth's biological resources. In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it is perched. — Paul Ehrlich

 ……An "aukward"  moment in wildlife history. The great auk became extinct when the last one died on Eldey Island.  A pair was beaten to death and its egg was broken according to Peter Mass on the Extinction Website http://www.petermaas.nl/extinct/speciesinfo/greatauk.htm

 There are no penguins at the North Pole (only the South) but the great auk was known as the 'penguin of the north'. Although not a penguin, it resembled these flightless birds of the Southern Hemisphere not only with its small wings, but also with its black back, white abdomen, and upright posture.          

            1859 –Saturday  In the Battle of Magenta, the French army, under Louis-Napoleon, defeated the Austrian army as they went back to the fuchsia.   All of the uniforms were reddish, roseate, rose-colored.  The battle occurred during the Franco-Piedmontese war against the Austrians (this was the second War of Italian Independence if you’re keeping score) in Lombardy, northern Italy. The French victory over the Austrians was an important step toward Italian independence,

            1876 –Sunday-  Driving that train, high on cocaine,
Casey Jones YOU BETTER, watch your speed.
Trouble ahead, trouble behind,
And you know that notion just crossed my mind.
This old engine makes it on time,
Leaves Central Station 'bout a quarter to nine,
Hits River Junction at seventeen TO,
At a quarter to ten you know it's DRIVIN' again…….Grateful Dead………The Transcontinental Express arrived in San Francisco, California, via the First Transcontinental Railroad only 83 hours and 39 minutes after leaving New York City.  The trip would have been considerably faster had they not stopped at the Liberace Museum. Las Vegas, Nevada, Da Tourist Trap & Museum in Yooperland. Upper Peninsula, Michigan, World's Only Corn Palace. Mitchell, South Dakota, Carhenge. Alliance, Nebraska, Seattle's Gum Wall, Barbed Wire Museum in Texas, and the National Museum of Funeral History, also in Texas (is it a great state or what?)

             1872 –Tuesday- I know a girl who thinks of ghosts
She'll make ya breakfast
She'll make ya toast
She don't use butter
She don't use cheese
She don't use jelly
Or any of these
She uses vaseline(
She uses vaseline,
She uses vaseline………….the Flaming Lips……….A process for making Vaseline was patented by Robert Chesebrough of New York City. Chesebrough had worked in the oil-fields of Pennsylvania. He noticed that oil workers would smear their skin with the residue from their drills, called rod wax,  and it appeared to aid the healing of cuts and burns. After months of testing, he managed to successfully extract usable petroleum jelly. The vaseline is a product from petroleum, made from the residue of petroleum distillation left in the still after all oil has been vaporized.  And thanks to the Ask A Scientist website we know that mostly, it is a mixture of different length chains of carbon molecules containing between 20 and 25 carbon atoms. These are considered long chained hydrocarbons. Small chained carbons are like methane and propane. The longer chains have a higher boiling point, and have a semi-solid state at standard temperature and pressure.

            1877 – Monday- My liver swells with bile difficult to repress……Horace……

Happy Birthday, Heinrich Wieland, German biochemist, Nobel winner in Chemistry, 1927, who studied bile acids. Yes, it was a bile experience for Heinrich.  Wieland he showed that three principle ingredients in liver secretions (cholic acid, deoxycholic acid, and lithocholic acid) are chemically similar, and all three are steroids but he is best remembered for his theory that oxidation in living tissues is more a matter of hydrogen atoms being removed than of the addition of oxygen.

            1896 –Thursday-  Henry Ford completed the Ford Quadricycle, his first gasoline-powered automobile, and had a successful test run…..that is after a bit of remodeling.  He built it in the shed behind his home and  half the side of it had to be removed, since the shed door was too small.

             1906-Monday-  Pathologist Howard T. Ricketts discovered that Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever is caused by an unusual microbe spread by ticks.  Interesting that someone with Rickets discovered the cause of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.  The Encyclopedia of Public Health notes that by using laboratory animals, Ricketts was able to demonstrate that ticks transmitted the disease and this finding led to a public health campaign that targeted the elimination of ticks. Although Ricketts observed a very small bacillus, he was unable to isolate and culture the causal agent using contemporary laboratory techniques. Nonetheless, his work suggested that bacterial diseases could be biologically transmitted from pests to people. He published his findings in the Journal of the American Medical Association under the gripping title A Micro-Organism Which Apparently Has a Specific Relationship to Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever: A Preliminary Report in 1909.

            1910 –Saturday…singing cockerells and muscles alive alivo  ….Happy Birthday, Christopher Sydney Cockerell, British engineer and inventor who invented the hovercraft in 1956.  The theory behind one of the most successful inventions of the 20th century  was originally tested in 1955 using an empty cat food can inside a coffee can, an industrial air blower and a pair of kitchen scales. Cockerell was initially testing out the idea that it was possible to produce a cushion of air between the bottom of the tins and the surface of the scales.

            1912 –Tuesday-  It is not the employer who pays the wages. Employers only handle the money. It is the customer who pays the wages…..Henry Ford…. Massachusetts became the first state of the United States to set a minimum wage to encourage employers to pay “standard” wages to women and children.  It was ruled unconstitutional by Supreme Court in 1923.  In 1938 President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA). The act applied to industries whose combined employment represented only about one-fifth of the labor force. In these industries, it banned oppressive child labor and set the minimum hourly wage at 25 cents, and the maximum workweek at 44 hours.

             1913 –Wednesday,  Emily Davison, a suffragette, cleverly ran out in front of King George V's horse, Anmer, at the Epsom Derby. Unfortunately, the horse was running full speed at the time and Davison was trampled and never regained consciousness before going kaput a few days later. The jockey’s injuries included a fractured rib, a bruised face and slight concussion. Anmer, the  horse having gone over, got to his feet and completed the race minus his jockey and with some bruised shins.

            1916 –Sunday – Happy Birthday, Robert F. Furchgott American chemist, awarded the  Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1998.  Furchgott’s focus was investigating the interaction between drugs and the receptors in blood vessels. His research showed that an unknown signaling molecule is produced in blood vessels. Furchgott called this the endothelium-derived relaxing factor (EDRF). It was later discovered that the unknown factor was nitric oxide (NO). Nitric oxide h acts to increase the diameter of blood vessels, providing a new means to relax, widen, and increase the capacity of blood vessels. This led to  life-saving effect by nitroglycerin and other related medicines for the heart. Yes, and Viagra too.

            1917 –Monday-  Between the Pulitzer Prizes, the American Academy of Arts and Letters and its training-school, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, amateur boards of censorship, and the inquisition of earnest literary ladies, every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile. In protest, I declined election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters some years ago, and now I must decline the Pulitzer Prize. 
            —Sinclair Lewis, Letter to the Pulitzer Prize Committee……. The first Pulitzer Prizes are awarded: Laura E. Richards, Maude H. Elliott, and Florence Hall received the first Pulitzer for biography (for Julia Ward Howe). Jean Jules Jusserand received the first Pulitzer for history for his work With Americans of Past and Present Days and Herbert B. Swope received the first Pulitzer for journalism for his work for the New York World (later to merge with the New York Telegram, then the New York Sun to form the World Telegram and Sun…..killed in 1962 by greedy union workers.).  Publisher Joseph Pulitzer had made provisions in his will for Pulitzer Prizes as an incentive to excellence, Pulitzer specified solely four awards in journalism, four in letters and drama, one for education, and four traveling scholarships. In letters, prizes were to go to an American novel, an original American play performed in New York, a book on the history of the United States, an American biography, and a history of public service by the press.

1919-Wednesday- Congress passed  the 19th Amendment to the Constitution which ensures women the right to vote.  It was ratified 441 days later when Tennessee became the 36^th state to vote for ratification.  his amendment was specifically rejected by Georgia on Jul 24, 1919; by Alabama on Sep 22, 1919; by South Carolina on Jan 28, 1920; by Virginia on Feb 12, 1920; by Maryland on Feb 24, 1920; by Mississippi on Mar 29, 1920; by Delaware on Jun 2, 1920; and by Louisiana on Jul 1, 1920….although all would eventually see the error of their ways with Mississippi being the last in 1984
 

            1920 –Friday-  Hungary lost 71% of its territory, 63% of its population and 49% of its goulash when the Treaty of Trianon was signed in Paris.  Other than that, everything was fine.  The treaty concluded  World War I and was signed by representatives of Hungary on one side and the Allied Powers on the other at the Trianon Palace at Versailles, France.  Czechoslovakia was given Slovakia, sub-Carpathian Ruthenia, the region of Pressburg (Bratislava), and other minor sites. Austria received western Hungary (most of Burgenland). The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (Yugoslavia) took Croatia-Slavonia and part of the Banat. Romania received most of Banat and all of Transylvania. Italy received Fiume and the Gabor sisters were sent to the United States.

            1928 –Monday -  The warlord of Manchuria, and former ally of Japan,   Zhang Zuolin was assassinated by Japanese agents as they blew up his train.

             1937-Friday-The customers had a tendency to stop shopping when the baskets became too full or too heavy …..Sylvan Goldman…….The first shopping carts were introduced at the Humpty Dumpty supermarket in Oklahoma City. They were invented by the store owner, Sylvan Goldman who devised a  metal frame that held two wire baskets.  They were not, alas and instant success, as  the site, Idea Finder tells us,  the customers didn’t want to use the carts. Young men thought they would appear weak; young women felt the carts were unfashionable; and older people didn’t want to appear helpless. So, Goldman hired models of all ages and both sexes to push the things around the store, pretending they were shopping. That, and an attractive store greeter encouraging use of the carts, did the trick. By 1940 shopping carts had found so firm a place in American life as to grace the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. Supermarkets were redesigned to accommodate them. Checkout counter design and the layout of aisles changed.

            1939 –Sunday-  And thus I clothe my naked villany
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil…….King Richard III (I, iii, 336-338)……Ah bureaucracy…..The German transatlantic liner,  St. Louis, a ship carrying 963 Jewish refugees, was denied permission to land in Florida, after already being turned away from Cuba. Legally the refugees could not enter on tourist visas, as they had no return addresses, and the U.S. had enacted immigration quotas in 1924.  It was forced to return to Europe where the the ship was able to dock in Antwerp, Belgium; and the governments of Belgium, Holland, France, and the United Kingdom agreed to accept the refugees. Unfortunately, by 1940, all of the passengers, except those who escaped to England, found themselves once again under Nazi rule and more than 200 of its passengers would later die in Nazi concentration camps.

            1942 –Thursday- The beginning of the Battle of Midway as  Japanese Admiral Yamamoto ordered a strike on Midway Island  (an atoll) by much of the Imperial Japanese navy in an effort to draw out and destroy the U.S. Pacific Fleet's aircraft carrier striking forces, which had embarrassed the Japanese Navy in the mid-April Doolittle Raid on Japan's home islands and at the Battle of Coral Sea in early May. He planned to quickly knock down Midway's defenses, follow up with an invasion of the atoll's two small islands and establish a Japanese air base there.  Yamamoto's intended surprise (since the Russo Japanese War, Japan loved surprise attacks) was thwarted by American communications intelligence, which deduced his scheme well before battle was joined. This allowed Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, the U.S. Pacific Fleet commander, to establish an ambush by having his carriers ready and waiting for the Japanese. On  June 4 1942, the trap was sprung.   Although it was a close run thing with a great deal of good luck….the U.S planes were in the air on the way to attack the Japanese, when the Japanese planes attacked the U.S airfield….then later, the U.S planes got to the Japanese carriers when the Japanese planes had landed for refueling…..on the American side.  The battle cost Japan four irreplaceable fleet carriers, while only one of the three U.S. carriers present was lost.

            1942- Thursday  Out on the plains down near Santa Fe
I met a cowboy ridin' the range one day
And as he jogged along I heard him singin'
The most peculiar cowboy song
It was a ditty, he learned in the city
Comma ti yi yi yeah
Comma ti yippity yi yeah
Now get along, get hip little doggies
Get along, better be on your way
Get along, get hip little doggies
He trucked 'em on down that old fairway
Singin' his Cow Cow Boogie in the strangest way
Comma ti yi yi yeah
Comma ti yippity yi yeah . The record label started the year before by songwriter Johnny Mercer, Liberty Records, was renamed Capitol. Capitol  became  the  first major West Coast label (RCA-Victor, Columbia and Decca were all based in New York) CEO Glenn Wallichs came up with the idea of sending free copies of Capitol 78s to radio stations, thus becoming the first record promoter.  The earliest recording artists included Paul Whiteman, Martha Tilton, and Ella Mae Morse. Capitol's first gold single was Morse's Cow Cow Boogie in 1942

            1953 –Thursday- A watershed day in cinematic history as both Julius Caesar and The Lost Planet had their premieres.  People who could not get to The Lost Planet  premiere had to settle for Julius Caesar, directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, starred Marlon Brando as Marc Antony, James Mason as Brutus and Louis Calhern as Caesar.  Love interest was supplied by Greer Garson as Calpurnia and Deborah Kerr as Portia. (Michael Ansara who went on to play Cochise in television’s Broken Arrow, had a minor role as did John Lupton, Ansara’s co-star in Broken Arrow……really….if it wasn’t for the Gnus, you wouldn’t know these things). Meanwhile, at The Lost Planet, directed by Spenser G. Bennett (who went on to direct Adventures of Captain Africa, Mighty Jungle Avenger!) as two newspaper reporters – Judd Holdren and Vivian Mason battled a plot by the evil Dr. Grood (played by Michael Fox but not Michael J. Fox) to conquer the world.

1961 –Sunday-  John F. Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev agreed on neutrality for Laos, - well that certainly worked out well

            1963-Tuesday- Truckin' got my chips cashed in. Keep truckin', like the do-dah man. Together, more or less in line, just keep truckin' on…….Grateful Dead……Six-year-old Robert (Bobby) Patch received a U.S. patent for a "Toy Truck".  Young Robert created a truck that could be taken apart and rebuilt by a kid…..or even a mechanically challenged adult like Professor Sy Yentz.   It could also be transformed into several different kinds of truck  The truck separated into a chassis, driver's cab, truck body, wheels and four axles so it could be reassembled in either a closed van body or dump truck form.

            1973 –Monday-  A patent for the ATM was granted to Donald Wetzel, Tom Barnes and George Chastain.  This was by no means the first ATM.  In 1939, Luther Simjian patented an early and not terribly successful prototype of an ATM. James Goodfellow of Scotland holds a patent date of 1966 for a modern ATM, and John D White  in the US is often credited with inventing the first free-standing ATM design. In 1967, John Shepherd-Barron invented and installed an ATM in a Barclays Bank in London. Don Wetzel invented an American made ATM in 1968 and got his patent….but wait, patents are issued on Tuesdays n’est pas?  Clearly this was a Monday ….another source claims May 18, but that was a Friday….We’re confused…… Wetzel said he got the idea while waiting on line at, yes, a bank. The ATM seems to have had as many inventors as the game of Monopoly.

            1974 –Tuesday- “ I’ve got a great promotional idea.  Let’s charge only 10 cents per beer at the baseball game with the Texas Rangers.  Really….both teams stink and no one would come to the game but this will bring them out to the old ball game.”  Brilliant moments in promotional advertising as during Ten Cent Beer Night - Stroh's beer at 10 cents per 10-ounce cup-  well oiled Cleveland Indians fans started a riot, causing the game to be forfeited to the Texas Rangers. 25,000 fans showed up to imbibe and watch the game at Municipal Stadium, which was a referred to as The Mistake on the Lake. During the pregame fans were setting off fireworks from their seats. During the 2^nd inning, a very  large woman jumped down from the fans into the Indians' on-deck circle, lifted her shirt, and tried to kiss the umpire, Nestor Chylak. Then on to the 4^th inning when in response to a Tome Grieve Ranger home run, a naked man from the stands ran onto the field and slid into second base.  By the 6^th inning fireworks were shooting toward the Texas dugout. Unfortunately, Cleveland, losing 5-3 in the 9^th inning somehow managed to tie the game. More fans ran onto the field in celebration. Then someone tried to steal Texas right fielder Jeff Burroughs' glove for a souvenir. Since the glove was still on Burrough’s hand, he objected. The fan punched Burroughs; Burroughs punched back. In reply, nearby drunk and angry fans jumped onto the field, swarming around Burroughs. Some still in the stands wrenched their chairs out of their bearings and threw them onto the field, aiming for Burroughs. Texas Rangers manager Billy Martin, always known for his calm, serene demeanor,  grabbed a bat and said to his team, "Let's get 'em, boys," on his way out of the clubhouse. When Martin and his team rushed the field, thousands of fans streamed out of the stands.  Things went downhill from there.  It was like Custer at the Little Big Horn, the Rangers were hopeless outnumbered by the Indians (fans). Teams fought with the fans on the field and tried to duck flying chairs and other projectiles. The fans fought with each other, with the Rangers, with the Indians, with the police. They threw a chair at an Indians pitcher, and they hit the umpire with a folding chair. Martin's bat was later recovered, broken. Cleveland forfeited the game.

            1975-Wednesday-  Paleontologists in North Carolina discovered the oldest animal fossil in the U.S., a 620 million year old marine worm.  The marine worm fossil, still singing “ Halls of Montezuma ", promptly invaded Iraq.

            1984- Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was slightly grey,
It didn't have a father, just some borrowed DNA.
It sort of had a mother, though the ovum was on loan,
It was not so much a lambkin, as a little lamby clone.
And soon it had a fellow clone, and soon it had some more,
They followed her to school one day, all cramming through the door.
It made the children laugh and sing, the teachers found it droll,
There were too many lamby clones, for Mary to control.
No other could control the sheep, since their programs didn't vary,
So the scientists resolved it all, by simply cloning Mary.
But now they feel quite sheepish, those scientists unwary,
One problem solved, but what to do, with Mary, Mary, Mary! ……..Anonymous…..DNA from an extinct mammal, the Quagga , a brown, horse-like beast with zebra stripes on the front of its body, which inhabited South Africa was successfully cloned by scientists at the University of California.  The quagga was seen as an unwanted grazing competitor to the farmers' livestock, as were all the other grass-eating wild animals and was hunted to extinction during the 19^th century. The UCal scientists used samples from an over 140-yr-old quagga skin, and Larry King saliva,  in a German museum, and managed to extract enough DNA from the animal's flesh to determine some of its sequences of "base pairs," the molecular rungs that link the two spiral halves of a DNA molecule (looks like a ladder). The quagga DNA came from mitochondria, a structure in cells, rather than from the genome.The scientists showed the quagga DNA was more closely related to the zebra than the horse.

            1989 – Sunday- A white-washed crow won't stay white for long…..Unknown….Tiananmen Square massacre. Chinese troops attacked Tiananmen Square in the center of Beijing, killing and arresting thousands of pro-democracy protesters. Then the Communist government made believe it never happened.

            1996 –Tuesday-  The first flight of Ariane 5, launched by the European Space Agency didn’t go so well as it exploded roughly 20 seconds after launch at Kourou, French Guiana  Ariane explosion The rocket was on its first voyage, after a decade of development costing $7 billion. The destroyed rocket and its cargo were valued at $500 million…..well that sure gave everyone a warm, fuzzy feeling. It turned out that the cause of the failure was a software error in the inertial reference system. A 64 bit floating point number relating to the horizontal velocity of the rocket with respect to the platform was converted to a 16 bit signed integer. The number was larger than 32,767, the largest integer storeable in a 16 bit signed integer, and thus the conversion failed sort of like when you cut and paste text from a website and it pastes at size 82 font on your page.  Other fallout from the failure included a rain of mutated microbes that quickly spread to China making Chinese tourists even more annoying than Japanese tourists.

            2001 –Monday  Nepal's King Dipendra went kaput.  Three  days earlier, the then Crown Prince Dipendra, 30, combining regicide, matricide, and siblingcide, opened fire and shot all the members of the royal family including King Birendra, Queen Aiswarya and Prince Nirajan, before turning the gun on himself. It was believed that Prince Dipendra was angry over a marriage dispute. His mother objected to his choice of bride…can you imagine if he wanted to wed Wallace Simpson?
            2003 –Wednesday-  Kitchy, relentlessly self promoting television doyenne, Martha Stewart was indicted on federal charges of using illegal privileged information and then obrstructing an investigation. She resigned as chairman and chief executive officer of her company the same day.  She was ultimately found guilty of on all four counts of obstructing justice and lying to investigators about a well-timed stock sale –Imclone (did the cloning have anything to do with the Quagga?  See 1984 above), being a thoroughly nasty human being, having no talent, and consorting with K-Mart

            2005 – Saturday- Despite NASA recommendations that astronauts sleep 8 hours a day, they usually don't. Strange sights and sounds, the stress of riding a powerful rocket, the lack of a normal day-night cycle, threats of aliens jumping out of the co-pilot’s stomach, pumped in Cher songs from Earth, worrying about your next bowl movement, concern over which crew mate is really The Thing--all these things tend to keep space travelers awake. A report issued showed that astronauts typically sleep 0.5 to 2.5 hours less than they do on Earth.

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5.        

World Environment Day  -Oh Beautiful for smoggy skies, insecticided grain,
For strip-mined mountain's majesty above the asphalt plain.
America, America, man sheds his waste on thee,
And hides the pines with billboard signs, from sea to oily sea…..George Carlin………By resolution 2994 (XXVII) of December 15, 1972, the General Assembly designated June 5 as World Environment Day, to deepen public awareness of the need to preserve and enhance the environment. The date was chosen because it was the opening day of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm, 1972), which led to the establishment of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)…..Well that’s certainly worked out well.  It’s also Hot Air Balloon Day, see 1783 June 4.        

            469 BC –Wednesday-  By all means marry; if you get a good wife, you'll be happy. If you get a bad one, you'll become a philosopher………Happy Birthday (approximately), Socrates, Greek philosopher.  He is considered one of the founders of Western philosophy. Socrates strongly influenced Plato, who was his student, and Aristotle, whom Plato taught, making Socrates Aristotle’s Grand Teacher.  A handy dandy mnemonic for the correct order of the three is SPA.  His work continues to form an important part of the study of philosophy. Socrates himself left no writings, and most of our knowledge of him and his teachings comes from the dialogues of his most famous pupil, Plato, and from the memoirs of Xenophon(Greek historian, essayist, soldier and xylophone expert). Using a method now known as the Socratic dialogue, or dialectic, he drew forth knowledge from his students by pursuing a series of questions and examining the implications of their answers. Socrates looked upon the soul as the seat of both waking consciousness and moral character, and held the universe to be purposively mind-ordered. In 399 B.C. Socrates was tried for corrupting the morals of Athenian youth, for religious heresies, and watching Jersey Shore. It is now believed that his arrest stemmed in particular from his influence on Alcibiades and Critias, who had betrayed Athens to Sparta during the Peloponnesian war War. He was convicted and drank the cup of poison hemlock claimed it tasted like chicken and went kaput.

            1553 –Friday-  Happy Birthday, Bernardino Baldi, Polyglot, polygraph, and poet Italian mathematician and physicist…..which ended the alliterative description.  He was, perhaps, the most universal genius of his age, and is said to have written upwards of a hundred different works, the chief part of which have remained unpublished. Baldi’s  principal contribution to physics was a commentary on has been called the  pseudo-Aristotelian Questions of Mechanics, thirty-five problems become the pretext for long digressions,  on the topic which was written in the 1580's, but was published in 1621 after Baldi's death. In this he developed the idea of  Archimedes’ center of gravity.

             1656-Monday-  Tiptoe through the window
By the window, that is where I'll be
Come tiptoe through the tulips with me
Oh, tiptoe from the garden
By the garden of the willow tree
And tiptoe through the tulips with me
Knee deep in flowers we'll stray
We'll keep the showers away
And if I kiss you in the garden, in the moonlight
Will you pardon me?
And tiptoe through the tulips with me …..Joe Burke and Al Dubin…… Happy Birthday, Joseph Pitton de Tournefort , French botanist and physician, a pioneer in systematic botany. His system of plant classification represented a major advance in his day.  Hewas responsible for defining a genus as a cluster of species and distinguished between the description of a plant and its nomenclature. Among his notable classifications were Genus – Gave Me a Rashium, Genus – Smells Like a Sweat Sockium, and Genus – Ate My Dogium.  

            1760 –Thursday- Happy Birthday, Johan Gadolin, Finnish chemist, an expert in the chemistry of the elements known as the lanthanide series of elements- the 15 elements with atomic numbers 57 through 71, from lanthanum to lutetium (aka rare earths) . They are stuck down at the bottom of the periodic table because they can barely be distinguished from one another.  Gadolin's best known achievement was in 1794 the discovery of yttria which was a new earth (element in oxide form), present in a black mineral found seven years earlier in Ytterby quarry near Stockholm. This was the first rare earth (lanthanide) element discovered; later the mineral was named in his honor gadolinite and element 64 gadolinium.  Ytterium -Atomic Number: 39, Atomic Weight:  88.90585 is pronounced as IT-ri-em. Gadolinium, Atomic Number: 64 has an Atomic Weight of  157.25  In all, seven elements trace their “roots” to Ytterby.

            1819 –Saturday- Bacchus hath drowned more men than Neptune…..Thomas Fuller…….. Happy Birthday, John C. Adams, British mathematician and astronomer, one of two people who independently discovered the planet Neptune, although Urbain Leverrier of the Berlin Observatory usually gets the credit.  Neptune was discovered by means of mathematics before it was actually seen through a telescope.  In 1843,Adams  had begun working to find the location of the unknown planet. He predicted the planet would be about 1 billion miles (1.6 billion kilometers) farther from the sun than Uranus. He completed this remarkably accurate work in September 1845 and sent it to Sir George B. Airy, the Astronomer Royal of England. However, Airy, joining the long list of dolts who did not listen to genius when it appeared before them, did not look for the planet with a telescope. Apparently, he lacked confidence in  young Adams. Meanwhile, Urbain J. J. Leverrier, a young French mathematician, independent of Adams’ work,  began working on the project. By mid-1846, Leverrier also had predicted Neptune's position. He sent his predictions, which were similar to those of Adams, to the Urania Observatory in Berlin, Germany. Johann G. Galle. Unlike, Airy, Galle listened to the mathematician and on Sept. 23, 1846, Galle and his assistant, Heinrich L. d'Arrest, found Neptune near the position predicted by Leverrier. Today, both Adams and Leverrier are credited with the discovery.  Adams made many other contributions to astronomy, notably his studies of the Leonid meteor shower  in 1866 where he showed that the orbit of the meteor shower was very similar to that of a comet. He was able to correctly conclude that the meteor shower,  was associated with the comet. We now know that most meteor showers are associated with comets. 

            1850 –Wednesday-  Quien es?....Happy Birthday, Pat Garrett, American Western lawman famous for killing Billy the Kid in 1881.  Garrett, a former friend of Henry McCarty, William Bonney, Henry Antrim…..Billy the Kid, had been appointed Sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, took his job seriously and began the relentless pursuit of the outlaw. Garrett set-up many traps and ambushes in an attempt to apprehend Billy, but the Kid kept eluding him.  Finally on July 14, 1881, Sheriff Garrett shot “The Kid”  dead at Fort Sumner, N.M in one Pete Maxwell's darkened bedroom. Garrett was squatting alongside the mattress talking with Maxwell as the Kid entered the room. Mr. The  Kid cocked his revolver and whispered "Quien es?" ("Who is it?"). Mr. Garrett answered by firing twice with one bullet striking the Mr. The Kid squarely in the heart. Garrett lived the rest of his life off the fame of being Billy the Kid’s killer. Most people in the area saw him as a villain for having killed a favorite son. Although he had put his life on the line for his community, he lost the next election for sheriff of Lincoln County.

            1851 –Thursday- Yes Eliza, it's all misery, misery, misery! My life is bitter as wormwood; the very life is burning out of me. I'm a poor, miserable, forlorn drudge; I shall only drag you down with me, that's all. What's the use of our trying to do anything, trying to know anything, trying to be anything? What's the use of living? I wish I was dead!"…..Uncle Tom's Cabin, Ch. 2 ……..Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery serial, Uncle Tom's Cabin or, Life Among the Lowly, her a polemical novel illustrating the moral responsibility of the entire nation for the cruel system, started a ten-month run in the National Era, an abolitionist newspaper.  She was paid $300 and the novel ran in forty installments. It would be published as a book in March 1852.

            1862 – Thursday- Are the stars out tonight?
I don't know if it's cloudy or bright
I Only Have Eyes For You, Dear.
The moon maybe high
but I can't see a thing in the sky,
'Cause I Only Have Eyes For You……The Flamingoes…..(Harry Warren and lyricist Al Dubin….who also co-wrote Tiptoe Through the Tulips) Happy Birthday, Allvar Gullstrand, Swedish ophthalmologist and recipient of the 1911 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his research on refraction of light in the eye.  Gullstrand investigated  the way the eye refracts light, and invented the slit lamp for eye exams -- a device still used by ophthalmologists. He detailed the structure of the cornea (he studied cornea-on-the-cob) and improved corrective lenses for people who had undergone cataract surgery.

            1878 –Wednesday- Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something….Pancho Villa’s last words………… Happy Birthday, Pancho Villa, Mexican revolutionary. Though he was a killer, a bandit, and a revolutionary leader, many remember him as a folk hero (just like Che Guevera but not a communist). Villa was also responsible for a raid on Columbus, New Mexico in 1916, which was the first attack on U.S. soil since 1812. The U.S. sent several thousand soldiers across the border to hunt for Pancho. Though they spent over a year searching, they never caught him.  On May 20, 1920, Adolfo De la Huerta became the interim president of Mexico. De la Huerta wanted peace in Mexico so he negotiated with Villa for his retirement. Part of the peace agreement was that Villa would receive a hacienda in Chihuahua with an infinity pool, tiled floors, crown molding, ceiling fans, and upgraded appliances.  Villa retired from his merry revolutionary life in 1920 but had only a short retirement for he was kaputed down in his car on July 20, 1923.  The assassins were never arrested.

            1877-Tuesday- The eyes of taxes are upon you… New York, as ever,  a state willing to tax anything (including the patience of the residents), in an effort to protect the dairy industry, passed a law to tax oleomargarine. When a court voided the ban on margarine in New York, the dairy industry “udderly” infuriated,  turned its attention to Washington, home to even more obtuse office bearers than NY, resulting in Congressional passage of the Margarine Act of 1886. Margarine had first been created in France in 1870  by Hippolyte Mège-Mouriez for  the Emperor Louis Napoleon III.

            1882 –Monday- The scientific theory I like best is that the rings of Saturn are composed entirely of lost airline luggage.  …..Mike Russell………..John Mitchell Lyons, railway clerk in Moncton, New Brunswick, Canada, received a patent for "Improvements in Baggage Checks and Coupon Tickets".  This was a way to track and identify luggage, separable baggage check tags.  The  baggage check separated into halves along a perforation with  both pieces printed with same route information and identifying number; one half attached to bag, other given to passenger to claim luggage at destination.  Well that has certainly worked out well

            1884-Thursday-  At the Republican Convention (June 3-6), Civil War hero General  William T. Sherman refused the Republican presidential nomination, saying, "I will not accept if nominated and will not serve if elected." This resulted in the nomination of James G. Blaine of Maine, for President and John A. Logan of Illinois, for Vice-President.  The ticket then  lost in the election of 1884 to Democrats Grover Cleveland and Thomas A. Hendricks

            1895 –Wednesday Happy Birthday, William Boyd, American actor better known as Professor Sy Yentz favorite childhood western cowboy hero, Hopalong Cassidy. He started the Hopalong series in 1935 and after he had made 54 "Hoppies" for his original producer, Harry Sherman, Sherman dropped the series. Boyd then produced and starred in 12 more on his own. In 1948 Boyd, in a wise and precedent-setting move, bought the rights to all his pictures just as television, and young Professor Sy Yentz,  were  looking for Saturday-morning western fare. He starred in the television series until 1954 with his horse Topper, and his sidekick played by George ‘Gabby’ Hayes, and later, by Andy Clyde.  It was the first significant Western to appear on network television and began in 1949.  The last episode, Tricky Fingers aired on  April 2, 1954. The reruns went on and on. Professor Sy Yentz parents took a very young (age 4) Professor Sy Yentz to see Hopalong Cassidy live at Madison Square Garden.  They secured first row seats.  When Hoppy made his grand entrance and road Topper along the first row greeting and waiving to fans, Professor Sy Yentz, ever the shy one, hid behind the railing.  

            1900-Tuesday Happy Birthday, Dennis Gabor ( we wish he was the brother of either Zsa Zsa or Eva - we get them confused- Gabor….but he wasn’t), Hungarian-born electrical engineer who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1971 for his invention of holography (holograms).  His first holograms using mercury-vapor lamps demonstrated the principle, but were dim and difficult to view. Holograms require a coherent set of waves, not easily available until the advent of the laser in 1960. Look for those holograms on your driver’s license, in Europe telephone credit cards use holograms to record the amount of remaining credit. Fighter pilots use holographic displays of their instruments so they can keep looking straight up. Museums keep archival records in holograms. One of the best uses for holography is candy. The candy’s surface is etched into tiny prism-like ridges that display 3-D images in brilliant iridescent colors. Gabor’s other work included research on high-speed oscilloscopes, communication theory, physical optics, and television. And no, he was not related to either Zsa Zsa or Eva Gabor, otherwise he would have been a Himbo.

         1941 –Thursday-  Four thousand Chongqing residents were asphyxiated in a bomb shelter during a four hour episode of the Bombing of Chongqing which had commenced on  February, 18 1938 and would continue through  August, 23, 1943.  This was part of an Imperial Japanese Army Air Service and Imperial Japanese Navy Air Service terror bombing operation on the Chinese provisional capital of Chongqing

            1942 – Friday- Having forgotten that they existed, what with Pearl Harbor and Hitler…. United States finally got around to declaring war on Bulgaria, Hungary, and Romania.  Actually, they had declared war on the U.S on June 2 but the Bulgarian’s sent a really heavy manish woman walking along dirt roads to the U.S embassy in Sophia.  The Hungarians sent the declaration in a take-out portion of goulash delivered to the embassy in Budapest, and the Romanians sent it via Gypsy crystal ball….actually and 8-ball, with instructions to ask Has Romania declared war?  The 8-ball then showed “signs point to yes”.

            1943 –Saturday-  In the  75^th running of the  Belmont Stakes, jockey Johnny Longden aboard Count Fleet won the third “jewel” in the Triple Crown having previously won the Kentucky Derby and Preakness Stakes. Having thoroughly beaten all comers, only two horses were entered against “The Count” – Fairy Manhurst and Deseronto. Good thing they didn’t have a trifecta in those days.  Count Fleet won by 25 lengths, a record which stood until Secretariat’s 31-length victory thirty years later. That evening, it was discovered that Count Fleet had bowed a tendon. He never raced again

            1947 –Thursday- It is logical that the United States should do whatever it is able to do to assist in the return of normal economic health in the world, without which there can be no political stability and no assured peace. Our policy is directed not against any country or doctrine but against hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos. Its purpose should be the revival of a working economy in the world so as to permit the emergence of political and social conditions in which free institutions can exist………….In a commencement speech at Harvard University, United States Secretary of State (former five star general) George Marshall called for economic aid to a still recovering war-torn Europe. Officially known as the European Recovery Program, the Marshall Plan began in 1948.

             1956 –Thursday-  Elvis Presley introduced his new single, Hound Dog, on The Milton Berle Show.  Elvis scandalized the audience with his suggestive hip gyrations. In the media feeding frenzy that followed, other show hosts, including Ed Sullivan, denounced his performance. Ed swore he would never invite Presley on his own show, but that autumn, when it became clear that Elvis was a major star,  he booked Elvis for three shows. Actress Deborah Padgett also appeared on th Berle show and  Elvis performed a duet with Uncle Miltie, who was billed as Elvis’ brother Melvin Presley.

            1956-Thursday- Well, be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love
My baby love, my baby love……..  Meanwhile, Gene Vincent (and the Blue Caps) went into the echo machine and recorded  Be-Bop-A-Lula. Vincent would later be injured in the car crash that killed his good friend and fellow rocker Eddie Cochran in 1960.

            1964-Friday- David Jones and his band, The King Bees, released his first single, Liza Jane.  David Jones, wasn’t he the one who starred on Broadway in Oliver and then they stuck him in the Monkees?.... No, this David Jones had to change his name eventually to David Bowie because of the confusion with the Daydream Believer.

            1967 – Monday- The beginning of the Six-Day War as Israel, responding to a threatening build-up of Arab forces – the Muslims had been trying to destroy Israel since the country’s modern rebirth in 1948 - along its borders, launched simultaneous attacks against Egypt and Syria. Jordan then entered the war, but the Arab coalition was no match for Israel's proficient armed forces. In six days of fighting, Israel occupied the Gaza Strip and the Sinai Peninsula of Egypt, the Golan Heights of Syria, and the West Bank and Arab sector of East Jerusalem, both previously under Jordanian rule. By the time the United Nations cease-fire took effect on June 11, Israel had more than doubled its size

          1968- Wednesday-  It’s on to Chicago.  Let’s win there……..At 12:50 a.m. PDT, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, a presidential candidate and brother of assassinated president John F. Kennedy , was shot three times by a an Islamic/Palestinian  assassin, Sirhan B. Sirhan in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Five others were wounded. The senator had just completed a speech celebrating his victory in the California presidential primary. Sirhan was to have been executed, but the U.S. Supreme Court voided the constitutionality of the death sentence before the sentence could be carried out. Kennedy was one of only two U.S senators to be assassinated, the other was Huey Long of Louisiana.

            1976-Saturday- Damn Dam Done. The Teton Dam, a 305-foot high earth-fill dam across the Teton River in Madison County, southeast Idaho, collapsed and released the contents of its reservoir at 11:57 AM.  The failure was initiated by a large leak near northwest abutment of the dam, about 130 feet below the crest. The dam, designed by, ironically,  the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, failed just as it was being completed and filled for the first time.  The collapse of the dam resulted in the deaths of 11 people and 13,000 cattle. The dam was never rebuilt.

            1977-Sunday-  If at first you don't succeed; call it version 1.0 ………The first personal computer, the Apple II, went on sale. It was the invention of Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. You had to supply your own keyboard and monitor. The Apple II was one of three prominent personal computers that came out in 1977. Despite its higher price, it quickly pulled ahead of the TRS-80 and the Commodore Pet (possibly because the "Pet" wasn't housebroken.)

             1981-Friday- From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8, 000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone…..Barbara Ehrenreich ……….An epidemic disease, later to be named AIDS that killed five homosexual men in Los Angeles,  was briefly described by Dr. Michael Gottlieb in the newsletter of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control. This was the first notice to be published on AIDS, though it had not yet been given that name.  Gottlieb reported that within days of the June 5 report, doctors began telephoning from all over the nation to tell him about their own patients with pneumocystis - a form of pneumonia caused by the yeast-like fungus. Over time, intensive care units at UCLA and across the country began to fill with young homosexual men requiring ventilators, their lungs choked with the same strange organism. The AIDS epidemic was underway.

            2004 –Saturday-  Ronald W. Reagan, the 40th president of the United States, died, after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.

            2008 –Thursday-  Flushed with success, It was a very good day for the crew on board the International Space Station.  The shuttle Discovery brought parts to fix the faulty toilet. The Russian flight engineer Oleg Kononenko was able to replace the broken urine collection pump in a two hour repair job and specialists in Moscow checked his work to verify it was working fine….. hopefully, they didn’t look up at the sky….Fortunately, the solid waste disposal was working o.k.I f  the repair was unsuccessful, it may have seriously hindered the manned presence on the station and many experiments would have gone down the toilet.

Back to Calendar

6.        

 1436-Monday-  You, who wish to study great and wonderful things, who wonder about the movement of the stars, must read these theorems about triangles. Knowing these ideas will open the door to all of astronomy and to certain geometric problems. ….Happy Birthday, Regiomontanus, aka, Johannes Müller von Königsberg arguably,  foremost mathematician and astronomer of 15th-century Europe. A letter from this period, sent to the astronomer Giovanni Bianchini  contained Regiomontanus' analysis of all the ways in which current (13^th century) astronomical theory disagreed with the observed phenomena, he felt they were a few French fries short of a Happy Meal, and  expressed the hope of a collaborative effort to restore the discipline.  He wrote his book De Triangulis Omnimodis detailing methods for solving triangles, developed an astrolabe, a medieval instrument, now replaced by the sextant, that was once used to determine the altitude of the sun or other celestial bodies, set up a printing press in his own house and published various scientific and astrological works, and his  book Ephemerides was used by Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci to measure longitudes in their explorations of the New World

            1513-Friday - At the Battle of Novara in northern Italy during the War of the League of Cambrai Swiss troops defeated the French under Louis de la Tremoille, forcing the French to abandon Milan. Duke Massimiliano Sforza was restored to his dukedom, as Gene Chandler would call it, and had a cappuccino at the Just Cavalli Café, shopped at Quadrilatero d'Oro, and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele.

            1523 –Wednesday-  A watershed day in Swedish history as Gustav Vasa was elected King of Sweden. This meant the denouement of  the Kalmar Union which was Scandinavian union (everyone had to be named Sven)  formed at Kalmar, Sweden, in June 1397 that brought the kingdoms of Norway, Sweden, and Denmark together under a single monarch   Then, same day 1654 –Saturday- Charles X succeeded his abdicated cousin Queen Christina to the Swedish throne. We note that Christina (Kristina) was a remarkable monarch require in more than just this item, which we’ve done for her December 18, 1626 birthday.  Suffice to say, the hunch backed long nosed queen was portrayed by Greta Garbo and Liv Ullman on the big screen.  1809 –Saturday Sweden promulgated a new Constitution, which restored political power to the Riksdag of the Estates  as well as a new Freedom of Press Act and Act of Succession, under which the King still played a central role in government, however no longer independent of the Privy Council. The King (Gustav IV was deposed in March 1809 and the new king was calling himself, Charles XIII) was free to choose Councillors. 1857 –Wednesday-  Sophia of Nassau, she lived in a split level ranch near the Roosevelt Mall, her wedding reception was at Leonard’s,  married the future King Oscar II of Sweden-Norway. And lastly, so far,  1974 –Monday- A new Instrument of Government is promulgated making Sweden a parliamentary monarchy. They still have a king or queen but the Riksdagen, is  a unicameral system. It has 349 members who are elected in proportional elections for a period of four years at a time. The term of office is four years.

            1580 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Godefroy Wendelin, Flemish astronomer. Like many scientists in the 16^th century, also took a Latin name, Vendelinus.  Vendinus  measured the distance between the Earth and the Sun using the method of Aristarchus. The value he calculated was 60% of the true value - 43 times the distance to the Moon; the true value is about 384 times; Aristarchus calculated about 20 times- but hey, nobody’s perfect. In 1643 he recognized that Kepler's third law applied to the satellites of Jupiter. Vendelinus crater on the Moon is named after him. Wendelin appears to have been the first to propose the law of the variation of the obliquity of the ecliptic. We put that in so that you can mention it in casual conversation some day.

            1644 –Friday- It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that Quing to Ming ……The Qing Dynasty began as Manchu forces led by the Shunzhi Emperor captured Beijing during the collapse of the Ming Dynasty. The Manchus (gezundheit!) would then  rule China until 1912 when the Republic of China was established.  The Ming dynasty began in 1368, and lasted until 1644 A.D. Its founder was a peasant, the third of only three peasants ever to become an emperor in China,  known as Hongwu Emperor, and he led the revolt against the Mongols and the Yuan Dynasty.

            1683 –Thursday- One time I went to a museum where all the work in the museum had been done by children. They had all the paintings up on refrigerators…..Steven Wright………The Ashmolean, the world's first university museum, opened in Oxford, England. In 1677, English archaeologist Elias Ashmole cleaned out his attic thought of having a yard sale but decided to donate  his collection of artifacts and curiosities to Oxford University. The Oxfordian directors then planned the construction of a building to display the items permanently. Architect Sir Christopher Wren was commissioned for the job, and on June 6, 1683, (we’ve also seen it as May 24, 1683 ….it depends on whom it was opened to)  the Ashmolean opened.  Even the use of the term 'Museum' was a novelty in English: a few years later the 'New World of Words' (1706) defined it as 'a Study, or Library; also a College, or Publick Place for the Resort of Learned Men', with a specific entry for 'Ashmole's Museum', described as 'a neat Building in the City of Oxford'.

            1755—Tuesday- I only regret,that I have but one life to lose for my country.

 Happy Birthday, Nathan Hale, American Revolutionary patriot. He was hanged, by order of General William Howe, as a spy, in the city of New York, at what is now the intersection of East Broadway and Market Streets, on September 22, 1776.  Hale was a teacher when he joined George Washington’s arm He volunteered to go behind British lines to gather intelligence but was  captured by the British on  September 21,  1776 and immediately admitted that he was spying for Washington. Hale's famous quote comes by way of a memoir by his friend, William Hull, who reported the famous last words as told to him by a British engineer who spoke with Hale

            1833-Monday-
Stop this train
I want to get off and go home again
I can't take the speed it's moving in
I know I can't but honestly won't someone stop this train ……John Mayer……Andrew Jackson became the first President to ride on a railroad train.”Old Hickory” rode on a Baltimore and Ohio (B&O…buy it for $200)  train from Ellicott's Mill, MD to Baltimore. Jackson’s arch enemy, John Quincy had also taken that train, but not while he was President.  The steam locomotive was first developed in England at the beginning of the 19th century by Richard Trevithick and George Stephenson. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had begun operation in 1828 with horse-drawn cars, but steam power was added and by 1831, the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad had completed a line from Baltimore to Frederick, Maryland. Two years later, Jackson gave railroad travel its presidential christening. Jackson accumulated a few other “firsts”. He the first president to be born in a log cabin and the first president to be nominated by a political party. He also survived the first attempt to assassinate a president.

             1847- Sunday……Between the optimist and the pessimist, the difference is droll. The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist the hole! …….Oscar Wilde……15 year old Hensen Crockett Gregory used a fork to poke out the centers of uncooked doughnuts his mother was making. This let the dough cook more thoroughly.  In 1937, the Salvation Army made this National Donut Day.  Doughnuts have been around for centuries. Archaeologists turned up several petrified fried cakes with holes in the center in prehistoric ruins in the Southwestern United States.  Professor Sy Yentz had one of these originals at the local convenience store yesterday. Most discussions about doughnut history begin with the mid-19th century and the first recorded doughnut recipes. At this time doughnuts were known as olykoeks, or oily cakes, and it's primarily the Dutch who are credited with taking sweet dough balls and frying them in pork fat. The Hensen Crockett story as a teenager is nice but another has him as a sea captain (note: he did become a sea captain)  with the steering of  boat poking a hole in the center during a storm. A doughnut origin debate was actually held in 1941. The Crockett story (both young and old) is the most popular but another theory came from one Chief High Eagle, a Wampanoag tribesman,  who said his people created the doughnut when several of their arrows missed settlers, striking Pilgrim's cakes instead. In 1872 John Blondel of Thomaston, Maine, took out a patent on a spring loaded doughnut hole machine and by the World War I doughnuts were so popular that the Salvation Army sent them to American troops. Mass production began with a machine introduced by a Bulgarian immigrant; Arnold Levitt in 1921. After World War II , Levitt dropped a “u”, a “g”, and an “h” and  founded the Donut Corporation of America.

            1853 –Friday- Continuing our presidents on trains theme for the day (see Andrew Jackson 1833 above) President-elect of the United States Franklin Pierce and his family were involved in a train wreck near Andover, Massachusetts. Their train-car derailed, toppled off the embankment, and rolled into a field below.  Franklin and Jane Pierce's son Benny died.  The family had already lost two children to typhus.  Jane Pierce blamed Franklin's political ambitions for their son's death. Grief stricken and an emotional wreck, Pierce assumed the Presidency. His presidency was a failure. His distraught wife withdrew from society.

            1868 –Wednesday- Happy Birthday,  Robert Falcon Scott, English explorer.  Talk about having a bad day, Scott lost the race to the South Pole. His first expedition on the Discovery (1901-04, an attempt that included Ernest Shackleton) took him within 450 miles of the South Pole before he had to turn back. Scott later led the Terra Nova expedition, which reached the pole in January, 1912  but whoops….. Norwegian Roald Amundsen had been there a month earlier. On the return trip Scott and his party of four all died of hunger and extreme cold. Their bodies were found 11 miles from a food and fuel depot.

            1865 –Saturday- Minstrel:  Brave Sir Robin ran away...
Sir Robin: No!
Minstrel: bravely ran away away...
Sir Robin: I didn't!
Minstrel: When danger reared its ugly head, he bravely turned his tail and fled.
Sir Robin: I never did!
Minstrel: Yes, brave Sir Robin turned about, and valiantly, he chickened out.
Sir Robin: Oh, you liars
Minstrel: Bravely taking to his feet, he beat a very brave retreat. A brave retreat by brave Sir Robin…….Monty Python & the Holy Grail……….. Quantrill kaput.  Confederate Civil War raider (would be called a terrorist today), William Quantrill, who gave Jesse and Frank James their start, died from gunshot wounds suffered in a May skirmish with Union soldiers in Taylorville, Kentucky on May 10, 1865, where he was literally caught napping by Terrell's men, and shot in the back and shoulder as he tried to flee. Paralyzed, he lingered in great pain and died a month later, 27 years of age, in a Louisville hospital.

             1882-Saturday A guy walks into work, and both of his ears are all bandaged up. The boss says, "What happened to your ears?"
He says, "Yesterday I was ironing a shirt when the phone rang and shhh! I accidentally answered the iron."
The boss says, "Well, that explains one ear, but what happened to your other ear?"
He says, "Well, geez, I had to call the doctor!"………… H.W. Seely  in New York City applied for a patent for the electric flat iron.  Early electric irons used a carbon arc to create heat, however, this was not a safe method……..as they tended to burn and possibly electrocute one as one ironed the collar of a shirt.  We note again that again in the Xeroxian world of the internet, this date is given for Seely obtaining a patent. Patents were issued on Tuesdays.  It would be Patented Oct. 30 1883 In 1892, hand irons using electrical resistance were introduced by Crompton and Co. and the General Electric Company.  It wasn’t until the early 1950s electric steam irons were introduced.  Smoothers made of glass have been found in the graves of Viking women, who used them to smooth the wrinkles from linen garments after a few days of conquering and pillaging.Thousand-year-old drawings from China and Korea show women pressing cloth using a metal pan filled with hot coals, so the art of "ironing" was already well established in some parts of the world even before the first "flatiron" was forged by some unknown blacksmith in Europe in the Middle Ages.

            1882 -Saturday  -More than 100,000 inhabitants of Bombay (now Mumbai) India were killed as a cyclone in the Arabian Sea pushed huge waves into the city’s harbor.  

          1882 – Still Saturday, 1882 –see electric flat iron and Bombay flood, the Shewan forces of Menelik defeat the Gojjame army in the Battle of Embabo. The Shewans capture Negus Tekle Haymanot of Gojjam, and heir victory leads to a Shewan hegemony over the territories south of the Abay River. We note the item because we had never heard of Shewan, Menelik, Gojjame, Negus Tekle Haymanot and the Abay River.   But if you must know, the battle took place in Ethiopia.

             1889 –Thursday- Behold, how great a matter a little fire kindleth!
- New Testament: James 3:5 ……….The Great Seattle Fire destroyed  the entire downtown Seattle, Washington. The University of Washington illuminates us further - On the afternoon of June 6, 1889, John Back, an assistant in Victor Clairmont's woodworking shop at Front Street (now First Avenue) and Madison Avenue, was heating glue over a gasoline fire. Sometime after 2:15, the glue boiled over, caught fire, and spread to the floors, which were covered by wood chips and turpentine. He tried to put the fire out with water, but that only served to thin the turpentine and spread the fire further. Everyone got out of the building safely, and the fire department got to the fire by 2:45. By that time, there was so much smoke that it was hard to find the source of the fire, and by the time it was found, the fire was out of control. The fire quickly spread to the Dietz & Mayer Liquor Store, which exploded, the Crystal Palace Saloon, and the Opera House Saloon. Fueled by alcohol, the entire block from Madison to Marion was on fire. http://content.lib.washington.edu/extras/seattle-fire.html

             1907-Thursday- Laundry Day
(You gotta keep 'em separated)
You like the latest fashions
You'd like to keep 'em clean
You take a trip every week to the laundromat
Throw a load in the washing machine
But if you don't wanna ruin your clothes
You gotta sort 'em out first as everyone knows
Remember bright colors and the others don't mix
Before you wash'em up, wash'em up, wash'em up, wash'em up……Weird Al Yankovic……..An end to thousands of years of dirty clothes as  Persil, the first household detergent, was marketed by Henkel & Cie, of Düsseldorf, Germany as the first "self-acting" washing powder in the world. In 1880 soap started to compete with washing powder, which was originally simply pulverized soap. Henkel added perborate as a bleaching agent to the washing agent. During the washing process, the oxygen formed small bubbles, taking over the hard work at the washboard, saving time and taking the “sun” out of sun-bleaching. The name “Persil” is derived from the two most important chemical raw materials in the product, perborate and silicate. Unlike the chlorine that had be used up to then, it bleached the laundry in an especially gentle and odorless way., On June 6, 1907 advertisement announcing the product appeared in the newspaper Düsselforfer Zeitung. Persil was then launched on the market in hand-made and hand-filled packs made of strawboard with a printed outer wrapper. But it is not good to stick in the mouths of children who have used bad language.

1912 –Thursday- The eruption of Novarupta in Alaska began . It would be, according to Geology.com,  the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century.  a tremendous blast sent a large cloud of ash skyward and the eruption of the century was underway. People in Juneau, Alaska, about 750 miles from the volcano, heard the sound of the blast – over one hour after it occurred. Sarah Palin could see it.  For the next 60 hours the eruption sent tall dark columns of tephra (clastic volcanic materials, as dust, ashes, or pumice, ejected during an eruption and carried through the air before deposition) and gas high into the atmosphere. By the time the eruption ended the surrounding land was devastated and about 30 cubic kilometers of ejecta blanketed the entire region. This is more ejecta than all of the other historic Alaska eruptions combined. It was also thirty times more than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens and three times more than the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo, the second largest in the 20th Century.           

             1918 –Thursday-  The first large-scale battle fought by American soldiers in World War I began in Belleau Wood, northwest of the Paris-to-Metz road.  It saw the re-capture by U.S. forces, under the command of Major General Omar Bundy, of the wood on the Metz-Paris road taken at the end of May by German thus ending what would be the last German offensive of the war.  The battle was also demoralizing for the Germans as getting weary after almost four years of war and casualties, very large American re-enforcement of the allied armies meant a fresh, well supplied foe to deal with. An armistice would be signed five months later on November 11.

              1925 –Saturday Maxwell Motors Corporation, of which Walter. P. Chrysler was board chairman, voluntarily transferred its business and physical properties to a new company organized as Chrysler Corporation. It would be incorporated on June 26. …and yes, Jack Benny drove a Maxwell.

            1932 –Monday-Happy Birthday, David Scott, American astronaut who was the first to drive a wheeled vehicle on the moon during the Apollo 15 mission on  July 31,  1971. He was in command of its Lunar Module which made the fourth lunar landing, and became the seventh person to walk on the moon and the first to use the Lunar Rover vehicle on the moon's surface for which he received multiple traffic citations.  Among them, failure to use a seat belt, driving on the wrong side of the road, speeding, and using an expired driver’s license.  A space veteran, Scott and command pilot Neil Armstrong were launched into space on the Gemini 8 mission-- on March 16, 1966--a flight originally scheduled to last three days but terminated early due to a malfunctioning thruster. Scott served as command module pilot for Apollo 9, March 3-13, 1969. This was the third manned flight in the Apollo series, the second to be launched by a Saturn V, and the first to complete a comprehensive earth-orbital qualification and verification test of a "fully configured Apollo spacecraft."   

            1932 – Let me tell you how it will be,
There’s one for you, nineteen for me,
‘Cause I’m the Taxman,
Yeah, I’m the Taxman.
Should five per cent appear too small,
Be thankful I don’t take it all.
‘Cos I’m the Taxman,
Yeah, I’m the Taxman.
(If you drive a car ), I’ll tax the street,
(If you try to sit ), I’ll tax your seat,
(If you get too cold ), I’ll tax the heat,
(If you take a walk ), I’ll tax your feet.
Taxman. ……..The Beatles…………..In a taxing situation, the U.S Congress, warming up to its late 20^th    century frenzy of tax increases, levied  the first gasoline tax as a part of the Revenue Act of 1932. The Act mandated a series of excise taxes on a wide variety of consumer goods. Congress placed a tax of 1¢ per gallon on gasoline and other motor fuel sold.

             1933-Tuesday-  The first drive-in movie theater was opened in Camden, New Jersey. Invented by Richard Hollingshead, a sales manager at his Whiz Auto Products, the patent for the Drive-In Theater had been issued on May 16, 1933. With an investment of $30,000, Hollingshead opened the first drive-in on Tuesday June 6, 1933 at a location on Crescent Boulevard, Camden, New Jersey. The price of admission was 25 cents for the car and 25 cents per person.  The first movie was Shrek, The Embryo starring Halle Berry and Alex Trebek.

            1939 –Tuesday Judge Joseph Force Crater was declared legally dead. On on the morning of August 6,  1930, purchased one seat for a comedy that was playing that night called Dancing Partners at the Belasco Theater. He then went to Billy Haas’ chophouse on West 45th Street for dinner. After dinner Crater waved goodbye to his friends and then entered a cruising taxi that he hailed down. His next, and most likely, final destination, remains a mystery and the stuff of legend.

            1939….. Tuesday- and, reincarnation fans…on the day Judge Crater was declared officially kaput……..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.Happy Birthday, Gary U.S. Bonds. Early 1960’s singer who started with  New Orleans, continued to Quarter to Three, was happy that School is Out, was depressed that School is In, ordered a pretzel requesting Dear Lady Twist, had a Mexican pretzel Twist, Twist Senora, and ate it over a  Seven Day Weekend. In the early 1980’s he collaborated with Bruce Springsteen on Dedication and Jolie Blon so he was never Out of Work.

            1942- Saturday- The first parachute jump in the U.S. using a nylon parachute was made by Adeline Gray. Leonardo da Vinci between 1483 and 1485, sketched an idea for a device (a "tent roof") that would let someone down safely from high buildings, but it stayed a concept, never getting off the drawing board. Parachutes were once made from silk but now they are almost always constructed from more durable woven nylon fabric, sometimes coated with silicone to improve performance and consistency over time. Nylon was a newly invented synthetic substitute produced by the DuPont Co. It had been exhibited at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Gray, a parachute rigger at the Pioneer Parachute Company jumped from an aircraft flying from Brainard Field, Hartford, Conn. Gray capitalized on her fame with a Camel’s cigarette advertisement “ Taste and Throat, that’s my test of a cigarette.  And the brand for me is camel.  They’re grand.”

            1943 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday Richard E. Smalley, American chemist and physicist. Smalley won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his discovery (with Robert F. Curl, Jr., and Sir Harold W. Kroto) of fullerenes, the third known form of pure carbon (diamond and graphite are the other two known forms). The atoms of fullerenes are arranged in a closed shell. Carbon60, the smallest stable fullerene molecule, consists of 60 carbon atoms that fit together to form a cage, with the bonds resembling the pattern of seams on a soccer ball. The molecule was given the name buckminsterfullerene because its shape is similar to the geodesic domes designed by the American architect and theorist R. Buckminster Fuller.

            1944-Tuesday-  We want to get the hell over there. The quicker we clean up this Goddamned mess, the quicker we can take a little jaunt against the purple pissing Japs and clean out their nest, too. Before the Goddamned Marines get all of the credit……. General George S. Patton, Jr ….June 5, 1944.  D-day, “Operation Overlord” as the allied armies invaded Normandy on the coast of France in a major offensive against the Nazis.  160,000 Allied Troops landed long a 50-mile stretch of heavily-fortified French coastline designated Sword Beach, Juno Beach, Gold Beach, Omaha Beach and Utah Beach,  to fight the Germans on the shores of Normandy. General Dwight D. Eisenhower had overall command of the more than 5,000 ships and 13,000 aircraft  which supported the D-Day invasion, and by day’s end on June 6, the Allies  had gained a foot- hold in Normandy. The cost was high -more than 9,000 Allied Soldiers were killed or wounded -- but more than 100,000 soldiers began the march across Belgium and France and into Germany to defeat the Nazis.  Why was it called D-Day?  Probably because D-Day is a term often used in military parlance to denote the day on which a combat attack or operation is to be initiated.

            1946 –Thursday-  They're playing basketball(JD:Uh, all around the world)
We love that basketball(Uh, to the beat y'all)
They're playin basketball(lets go)
(All around the world)
we love that basketball
they're playin basketball
We love that basketball(y'all know this is So-So Def)
They're playing basketball(To the beat y'all)
We love that basketball(Yeah)
They're playing basketball
We love that basketball(Bow Wow:Yeah) ….Lil’ Bow Wow………(who then matured to Bow Wow)…..The Basketball Association of America is formed in New York City.  Initially there were sixteen teams.  Boston Celtics (1946-49; joined NBA)

 Chicago Stags (1946-49; joined NBA), Cleveland Rebels (1946-47-kaput), Detroit Falcons (1946-47-kaput),New York Knickerbockers (1946-49; joined NBA), Philadelphia Warriors (1946-49; joined NBA , moved to San Francisco in 1962), Pittsburgh Ironmen (1946-47 -kaput), Providence Steamrollers (1946-49 kaput), St. Louis Bombers (1946-49; joined NBA but went kaput in 1950)

Toronto Huskies (1946-47-kaput), Washington Capitols (1946-49; joined NBA – kaput 1951), Baltimore Bullets (1947-49; joined NBA – kaput during 1954/55 season), Fort Wayne Pistons (1948-49; joined NBA –moved to Detroit in 1957), Indianapolis Jets (1948-49; joined NBA), Minneapolis Lakers (1948-49; joined NBA moved to Los Angeles 1960), Rochester Royals (1948-49; joined NBA….hoo boy, follow this now – moved to Cincinnati in 1957, Kansas City 1972 where they would become the Kings, and Sacramento in 1985, still the Kings) Most would merge with the National Basketball Association in 1949. The BAA was the first league to attempt to play primarily in large arenas in major cities, although, during its early years, the quality of play in the BAA was inferior to other leagues and leading independent clubs such as the Harlem Globetrotters, who played more basketball with less clowning in those days.

            1960-Monday- Singer Tony Williams left the Platters to embark upon a solo career. Well that certainly worked out well. Tony was not alone. For many groups, the whole was greater than the sum of it’s parts. Several, can you say Mick Jagger?, realized that a higher level of success meant staying with the group. Other’s like Frankie Valli, had some initial success as singles but retreated too the safey of the group (Four Seasons). For others though,  David Byrne, Talking Heads? Deborah Harry , Blondie? Billie Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins?, Any of the Eagles?, Joe Strummer, Mick Jones, The Clash?, Robbie Robertson, The Band? David Ruffin, Eddie Kendricks The Temptations? Rick Ocasek, The Cars? Roger Waters, Pink Floyd?, Any member of Kiss? Frankie Lymon, The Teenagers?, Sam or Dave?

            1964-Saturday  Goin' to the chapel and we're
Gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel and we're
Gonna get married
Gee, I really love you and we're
Gonna get married
Goin' to the chapel of love The Dixie Cups' Chapel Of Love hits #1 on the Billboard Charts. It was written by Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, and versions were also recorded by The Ronettes and Darlene Love, produced by Phil Spector…..sort of like throw them all against the wall and see which one sticks for a hit. It was also covered by The Beach Boys, Bette Midler, and, gasp, Elton John.  

            1971- Sunday-  Soyuz (based on a 1964 Beatles song, " I Soyuz Standing There") 11 was launched into orbit.  It carried the first men to a space station, Salyut 1. Yes, it was an opportunity to salyut the flag. In a rush to beat the Americans to a space station, the Soviets launched this ill-fated mission two years before the American Skylab.  The main telescope was inoperative due to failure of cover to jettison. There was a fire in the space station nearly resulting in emergency evacuation and finally, a fail-safe valve opening during re-entry resulted in decompression and death of entire crew.  Other than that that, things went fine.    The return to Earth carried mutant space fullerene based microbes that ultimately caused the disease, Amazingius Awesomnium Dullius which caused acute overuse of the adjectives amazing and awesome in the everyday speech of susceptible humans.    

            1971 – Me on the Ed Sullivan show?
Ed Sullivan
Me, Henry McAfee appearing with
Ed Sullivan
Ed-Ed Sullivan
Ed-Ed-Sullivan
Ah Ah Ed Sullivan
Ed Sullivan
Ed Sullivan
Ed-Ed-Sul-Sul
Ed Sullivan, Ed Sullivan
We're gonna be on Ed Sullivan…………Charles Strouse and Lee Adams…….. Ed Sullivan Show kaput. On Sunday June 6, 1971 The Ed Sullivan Show   was cancelled on CBS-TV after 24 seasons. Ed, a New York newspaper columnist had begun the show – then called Toast of the Town on June 20, 1948. Among the first guests were the comedy team of Dean Martin & Jerry Lewis and the writing team of  Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II. The last show, on this day, was a rerun of the March 28, 1971 show starring ….a bit of a come down from Martin and Lewis and Rogers and Hammerstein…..singer, Melanie, David Frye (impressionist),  Danny Davis & the Nashville Brass, and comedian, Lennie Schultz.

            1975-Friday-   An anticyclonic, or clockwise    tornado was seen west of Alva Oklahoma. Most tornadoes spin in a cyclonic, or counterclockwise fashion.  This tornado actually picked up a farm house, carried it for miles and dropped it on a witch.

            1980-Friday-  The premiere of Urban Cowboy, a movie starring John Travolta, looking silly in a cowboy hat, and still taking advantage of his dance moves from Saturday Night Fever and Grease, although Scott Glenn stole the picture. Debra Winger was in there too but Bonnie Raitt, we love Bonnie Raitt, played herself.

            1985 –Thursday- And thus I clothe my naked villany
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil……Richard……King Richard III (I, iii, 336-338) Authorities in Brazil exhumed a body later identified as that of “Angel of
Death”, Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who conducted medical experiments on inmates at Auschwitz during World War II.  He had drowned in 1979 at a Brazilian beach resort and was buried under an assumed name- Wolfgang Gerhard.

            1993 –Sunday-  Mongolia held its first direct presidential elections.  The voting was completed on June 13 when all the voting yurts had been accounted for and yak votes were disqualified.  Punsalmaagiyn Ochirbat won 57% of the vote. Lodonggiyn Tudev wond 36%.  In Mongolia that adds up to %100.

            2002 –Thursday-  A near-Earth asteroid estimated at 10 meters in diameter exploded over the Mediterranean Sea between Greece and Libya. The resulting explosion was estimated to have a force of 26 kilotons, slightly more powerful than the Nagasaki atomic bomb.  The object disintegrated and no part was recovered. Since it did not reach the surface and it exploded over the sea, no crater was formed. However, fallout did distribute fine particulates of C type carbon and silicates, that when inhaled by susceptible humans cause the syndrome scholasticus ad nauseum moronia, participants who prolong class or a meeting by  asking the most inane questions

Back to Calendar

7.        

1420–Wednesday-   Sad news ...just as we were developing an affection for the Patriarcate of Aquileia,  troops of the Republic of Venice captured Udine, ending the independence of the Patriarchate of Aquileia.  In 1348 Aquileia was destroyed by an earthquake, and its patriarchs all moved to Udine a town in northeastern Italy, in the middle of Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, between the Adriatic sea and the Alps. The Venetians were not happy about this, perceiving it as a threat.. When the patriarch Louis of Teck (1412-39) picked the wrong side in a  war between Hungary and Venice, the latter seized on all the lands donated to the patriarchate by the German Empire.

            1494 –Thursday- “So we’ll trade you Rio De Janero for the rest of Brazil and Paraguay……”Spain and Portugal signed  the Treaty of Tordesillas which divided the New World between the two countries. After Columbus returned to Spain breathless with news of his exciting discoveries, Pope Alexander VI – the Borgia Pope, who just happened to be from Spain- gave Spain a head-start in the quest for domination over newly discovered regions of the world. The Pope decreed that all lands discovered west of a meridian 100 leagues (one league is 3 miles or 4.8 km, two leagues are the National and the Americn) west of the Cape Verde Islands should belong to Spain while new lands discovered east of that line would belong to Portugal. This papal bull also specified that all lands already under the control of a "Christian prince" would remain under that same control. Understandably, this did not thrill the Portuguese. King John II (the nephew of Prince Henry the Navigator), making him John the Route Finder,  negotiated with King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain to move the line to the west.  On this day, they signed the treaty moving the line 270 leagues (that included the minors and even World Team Tennis)  west, to 370 leagues west of Cape Verde. This new line (located at approximately 46° 37') gave Portugal more claim to South America yet also provided Portugal with automatic control over most of the Indian Ocean.

            1654 – Sunday- Je préférerais concilier toute l'Europe de deux femmes ….I could sooner reconcile all Europe than two women ……Louis XIV was crowned king of France. Born in 1638, he was named king in 1643 and would go on kinging until he went kaput in 1715.  Louis ruled ruled his country, principally from his palace at Versailles.  It was one of the  most brilliant periods in French history and he remains the symbol of absolute monarchy of the classical age. Or, as Louis said,  Il est légal parce que je le veux  “It is legal because I wish it “. Internationally, in a series of wars between 1667 and 1697, he extended France's eastern borders taking land from the  Habsburgs and then, in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), he engaged a European coalition in order to secure the Spanish throne for his grandson.

            1761 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday, John Rennie, Scottish civil (he was very polite) engineer.  He designed the Waterloo bridge across the Thames at London. Not content with going over water, he also designed water ways, notabley canals.  Among them were the Aberdeen, the Great Western, the Kennet and Avon, the Portsmouth, the Birmingham, and the Worcester

            1776 –Friday- That these united colonies are, and of right ought to be, free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown; and that all political connexion between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.  Richard Henry Lee  (connection to Robert E ?) offered  the "Lee Resolution" – on independence to the committee of the whole  of  the Continental Congress.  The motion was seconded by John Adams but even in 1776, congress was congress being congress and they debated the resolution until June 10 and then it led  to the United States Declaration of Independence. Richard Henry Lee was the great uncle of of Robert E. Lee.

            1778 –Sunday-  Laugh, laugh, I thought I'd die
It seemed so funny to me
Laugh, laugh you met a guy who taught you how it feels to be
Lonely, oh so lonely…….The Beau Brummells…..Happy Birthday……….Beau Brummel, born George Bryan, English fashion leader.  Sarah S.G. Frantz in her review of Ian Kelly’s book, Beau Brummell: The Ultimate Man of Style, says that he was one of the iconic figures of the Regency period, perhaps more culturally significant than the man for whom the era is named, the Prince Regent, the Prince of Wales - that would be between  1811 — when King George III was deemed unfit to rule and his son, the Prince of Wales, ruled as his proxy as Prince Regent — and 1820, when the Prince Regent became George IV on the kapution of his father. Beau Brummell, almost single-handedly changing the entire look of the male wardrobe in a revolution called The Great Masculine Renunciation—a revolution that still has a direct effect on modern culture every time a man wears a power suit.  He led the trend for men to wear understated, but beautifully cut clothes, adorned with elaborately tied neckwear. He claimed to take five hours to dress, and recommended that boots be polished with champagne. His style of dress came to be known as dandyism. A falling out with the Prince of Wales led to Brummell's downfall; his famous remark "Alvanley, who's your fat friend?" (referring to the Prince - who had just cut him) was not the most diplomatic of comments.

            1800 –Saturday-  David Thompson reached the mouth and then the tonsils of the Saskatchewan River in Manitoba. Thompson mapped most of the country west of Hudson Bay and Lake Superior, across the Rocky Mountains to the source of the Columbia River, and the length of the Columbia to the Pacific Ocean. He would be reincarnated as an American Basketball player at North Carolina St.in 1974.

            1811-Friday- Happy Birthday,  Sir James Simpson, Scottish inventor and obstertrician who was the the father of modern anesthetics. See our Gnus Who’s Your Daddy page for a list of Fathers (and Mothers) of………. http://sciencegnus.com/Who%27s%20Your%20Daddy.html

He introduced the terms ovariotomy - a surgical incision into an ovary - and occydynia.  Obviously they had never met before. He employed ether for the first time in Britain, and chloroform ("perchloride of formyle") for the first time as an anesthetic in an operation On on November 15, 1847, he gave the first public demonstration of his new anaesthetic, chloroform. He announced that chloroform was more effective than making people watch C-Span for hours at a time and within a matter of weeks, chloroform also replaced ether as the most commonly used anesthetic.  Anna Sthesia was a Greek philosopher renowned for putting people to sleep with her discourses.

 1848 – Wednesday-  The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public. ……Happy Birthday, Paul Gauguin, French painter.  Gaugin (Eugène Henri)was a postimpressionist (a late 19th-century reaction to Impressionism, emphasizing on one hand the emotional aspect of painting and on the other a return to formal structure)painter whose lush color, flat two-dimensional forms, and subject matter helped form the basis of modern art.  In 1891 Gauguin sailed for the South Seas to escape, as he claimed. European civilization and “everything that is artificial and conventional.”……he also escaped a few debts too.  The essential characteristics of his style changed little in the South Seas; he retained the qualities of expressive color, such as almond toast, burnt sienna, atomic tangerine, crème brulee, fossil butte, fossil butte, banana mania, fuzzy wuzzy, mango tango, and cerulean frost, denial of perspective, and thick, flat forms. His subjects ranged from scenes of ordinary life, such as Tahitian Women, or On the Beach, to brooding scenes of superstitious dread, such as Spirit of the Deadwatching. His masterpiece was the hilarious farcical rompish allegory Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?.

            1862- Saturday- Happy Birthday, Philipp Edduard Anton Lenard, German physicist and recipient of the 1905 Nobel Prize for Physics for his research on cathode rays. He also did some research on protestant and jewish rays. Interest in muslim rays was quickly squelched when a Fatwa was declared and thousands of unemployed young men with beards took to the streets in protest. Lenard investigated the photoelectric effect and why the effect could only be produced by ultraviolet or shortwaves.  He then became a virulent anti semite, later attacking Albert Einstein as a socialist, a pacifist, and, yes as a Jew. He then developed a non-Jewish physics and wrote a  four-volume work, Deutsche Physik

           1863 –Sunday- Not to be outdone by Winfield Scott’s capture of the city in 1847, Mexico City was entered by French troops. This was part of the Franco-Mexican War which was started  in January 1862, the conflict initially was the result of Mexican President Benito Juárez's suspension of interest payments on foreign debts. The French wanted to see  the cliff divers but were informed that occurred in Acapulco.  Then they wanted beach front condos.  Whoops, that was Cancun.  After overthrowing Juarez and installing one, Maximillian as Emperor, the French left Mexico and illegally emigrated to the U.S where  they got jobs as gardeners, cooks, and professional illegal aliens.  Poor Maximillan, with no support from France, was counter overthrown by Juarez in 1867.

            1877 –Thursday- ……Why did Carbon marry Hydrogen? They bonded well from the minute they met………Happy Birthday, Charles Glover Barkla,  British physicist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1917 for his work on X-ray scattering.  In 1903 he proved that molecular weight determines how a gas scatters radiation and in 1904 he proved that x-rays are a form of electromagnetic radiation.  He then used x-ray scattering to ascertain the number of electrons in a carbon atom….in a neutral atom of carbon there are 6 electrons, but the electrons are distributed over 2 shells. In the first shell, there are 2 electrons, and in the second there are 4 electrons.

            1879 –Saturday – Happy Birthday,  Joan Voûte, Dutch astronomer (and one of the few men named Joan in history…yes, we include artist Joan Miro) who studied variable stars (like Cher, who started as a singer, won an academy award as an actress, retired like eight times and became a joke) double stars and parallax. His preliminary account of the parallax of Proxima Centauri (Proxima CentauriProxima Centauri is a red dwarf star about 4.2 light-years distant in the constellation of Centaurus and not really visible to the naked eye)  was published in 1917 as he demonstrated that Proxima was the same distance from the Sun as the Alpha Centaur system.

            1892 –Tuesday- We Americans have no commission from God to police the world ……Benjamin Harrison became the first President of the United States to attend a baseball game. We’ve also seen this as June 6….maybe it was a really long game….like today’s with instant replays, umpire conferences, batters stepping in and out of the batters box adjusting their wrist bands,  and “creeping LaRusss ism” of constantly changing pitchers for almost every batter…..  Harrison had twelve beers by the 3^rd inning and was hurling presidential invective and presidential objects like pens and cabinet secretaries onto the field.  He watched the Washington Senators lose to the Cincinnati Reds 7-4 at Boundry Field, Washington. Harrison attended another game on June 25.  The Senators lost that one too.

            1892 –Tuesday, continuing our baseball theme of the day,  John J  (Dirty Jack) Doyle of the Cleveland  Spiders became the  1st batter to to pinch hit in a baseball game.  Didn’t help though as Cleveland lost to the Brooklyn  Grooms 2-1.

            1892 –Tuesday- While Benjamin Harrison was attending a baseball game and John J. Doyle was pinch hitting, see above,  George Sampson patented the clothes dryer.  Sampson's dryer used the heat from a hot stove to dry clothes and was a ventilator type machine. The first one known to be built was made by French inventor, Michele Pochon. The ventilator was a barrel-shaped metal drum with holes in it. It was turned by hand over a fire.The modern “tumble dryer” consists of a rotating drum called a tumbler through which heated air is circulated to evaporate the moisture from the load. The tumbler is rotated relatively slowly in order to maintain space between the articles in the load. In most cases, the tumbler is belt-driven by an induction motor.

            1892- Tuesday, Still on the same day as the presidential baseball game and the clothes dryer, J. F. Palmer of Chicago, Ill., was granted the first bicycle tire patent for a self-healing cord tire design.  Because the tread of the tire was under compression, punctures would close rather than open. Palmer's tires were more durable, so riders didn't have to replace their tires as often. The  B.F. Goodrich Company of Akron, Ohio began its manufacture the same year

            1896 –Sunday- Happy Birthday,  Robert S. Mulliken, American chemist.  He was called Mr. Molecule by his friends (Mr. Particle by casual acquaintences, and Mr. Smidgen by rivals) for his research on chemical bonds and unraveling the electronic structure of molecules for which he won the 1966 Nobel in Chemistry.

            1896 –Sunday –……A Soviet has saved up his money to buy a car. He goes down to the dealership and says to the salesman "I want that one!"
"The car will arrive in seven years." the salesman replies.
"Will it come