Home

Michelangelo's David

David After 2 Years in the U.S - Courtesy of our Fast Food Nation

March was named for the Roman god of war, Mars. Sadly Marsoids,  there are no U.S or federal holidays in March. We'll have to settle for  Red Cross Month, Women's History Month National Nutrition Month, International Hamburger & Pickle Month  (we thought that’s interesting considering it is Nutrition Month too), National Peanut Month- See George Washington Carver, March 5,  National Noodle Month, Irish Heritage Month, and St. Patrick's Day….not to mention Professor Sy Yentz’ Birthday. The March full moon has been give the rather romantic name of  "Worm Moon".  The alternative is the equally poetic, “Sap Moon”.  Contrary to popular thinking the equinox is not equal day and night on the first day of Spring. In the northern hemisphere, at latitude 40 degrees equal night and day actually  occur about March 17 . On the actual dates we call the equinox, the day is about 7 minutes longer than the night. Science Gnus is a compendium News of Science, History, Mathematics and Items of Interest, with comment, elucidation and occasional exaggeration, for each day of the year.  It also contains Professor Sy Yentz, answering questions, Dr. Matt Matician connecting science and mathematics, the Activity of the Month, Factorinos, Trivia Questions, Bonus Trivia Questions, Extinct Kaput animals and plants, Jokes, Obscure Questions, Scientists of the Month, and the Flower, Rock and Words of the Month

 "March is a month of considerable frustration - it is so near spring and yet across a great deal of the country the weather is still so violent and changeable that outdoor activity in our yards seems light years away."
-   Thalassa Cruso

Beware the ides of March.
- William Shakespeare

 March is the month of expectation,
-   Emily Dickinson, XLVIII

March comes in with an adder's head, and goes out with a peacock's tail.
Richard Lawson Gales

1.         

      –752 B.C – Saturday-  The first in the tradition of Roman Triumphs – marching through Rome displaying booty and captives from successful campaigns and battles – was celebrated by Romulus, the first King of Rome.  http://www.attalus.org/translate/fasti.html.  The triumph celebrated the Roman victory at Caeninenses a Sabine town in Latium.  The battle was occasioned by the  The Rape of the Sabine Women, an episode in the legendary history of Rome  
 in which the first generation of Roman men acquired wives for themselves from the neighboring Sabine SabineThe Sabines were an Italic tribe that lived in the central Appennines of ancient Italy, inhabiting also Latium north of the Anio before the founding of Rome...
 families. (In this context, rape means abduction rather than sexual violation).  As told by
Recounted by Livy and Plutarch, Parallel Lives, Romulus petitioned the surrounding tribes for rights to intermarry. All  Roman requests were rejected. Romulus decided that if the neighboring towns would not share their women, Rome would take them.The Romans sent out word that they would hold the grandest festival and greatest games in a celebration, to honor 'Equestrian Neptune'. The Sabine came in the greatest number, bringing their wives and children. When the games began and all were distracted; the signal was given and the Roman men rushed after the young maidens, most the women of the Sabine, swept them up and carried them off in all directions to their homes. Startled, most of the visitors fled, leaving their women at the mercy of the Romans. After this B.C version of the Dating Game, the Battle of Caeninenses occurred. The Romans celebrated with the Triumph and got to keep the girls.  LivyTitus Livius , known as Livy in English, was a Roman historian who wrote a monumental history of Rome and the Roman people, Ab Urbe Condita Libri, "Chapters from the Foundation of the City," covering the period from the earliest legends of Rome well before the traditional foundation in 753 BC...Plutarch

            286 –Monday-  Roman Emperor Diocletian (infamous for his persecution of Christians….sort of like NPR)  raised Maximian to the rank of Caesar. Follow this now because in……see below

            293 –Wednesday- Roman Emperors Diocletian and Maximian appointed Constantius Chlorus and Galerius as Caesares, thus beginning the Tetrarchy. This was a four-part division of the Roman Empire. Diocletian continued to rule in the East. He made Maximian co-emperor in the West. They were each called "Augustus" which signified that they were emperors. Subordinate to them were the two "Caesars": Galerius, in the east, and Constantius in the west. An Augustus was always emperor. Sometimes the Caesars were also referred to as emperors.  The key name here is Constantius Chlorus who was the father of the emperor  Contantine the Great…….who converted Rome to Christianity.

            1420 – Wednesday- Pope Martinus I, aka Martin the V called for crusade against the hussieten . Everyone said “yeah, great idea, those hussieten have been getting to uppity…wait….. who are? Or what is hussieten? Everyone waited for the explanation. Turns out they were followers of John Hus in what is now the Czech Republic who were fighting for religious reforms.

            1445 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Sandro Botticelli, (Original name Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi)  Italian Renaissance painter, famous for his Birth of Venus (c. 1485) and Primavera (1477-78) – which can be seen at the Uffizi Galleries in Florence. Considering his contemporary fame, it is notable that Botticelli remained little known for centuries after his death. Then his work was rediscovered late in the 19th century by a group of artists in England known as the Pre-Raphaelites who included John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

1565 –Monday- When my baby smiles at me I go to Rio
De Janeiro, my-oh-me-oh
I go wild and then I have to do the Samba
And La Bamba
Now I'm not the kind of person
With a passionate persuasion for dancin'
Or roma-ancin'
But I give in to the rhythm
And my feet follow the beatin' of my hear-eart
Woh-ho-oh-oh, when my baby
When my baby smiles at me I go to Rio…….Peter Allen………The city of Rio de Janeiro was founded. The first Portuguese expedition to explore the Brazilian coast, between 1501 and 1502, visited places like the Guanabara Bay and Angra dos Reis. Gaspar de Lemos who was a captain of a ship in Pedro Alvares Cabral’s fleet made the explorations. It is legend that they thought that the bay that they eventually named Guanabara Bay was a river hence the name Rio which means river in Portuguese. The were unable to get satisfactory samba lessons so the area remained in dispute with France until 1565, when the French were expelled, and Tomé de Souza (military and governor general)  founded the city of São Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro.  

            1611 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, John Pell, English mathematician who introduced the division sign (obelus, ÷) into England. The obelus was first used by Johann Rahnin 1659 in his fun-filled romp through the world of mathematics, Teutsche Algebra.  Pell worked on algebra and number theory. He gave a table of factors of all integers up to 100000 in 1668. Interestingly, “Pell's equation” y2 = ax2 + 1, where a is a non-square integer, was worked out by Joseph Louis Lagrange, not Pell.  Pell also published a number of works, for example Idea of Mathematics in1638 and the riveting two page A Refutation of Longomontanus's Pretended Quadrature of the Circle in 1644.

           1642 –Saturday  New York? Boston? Philadelphia? Charleston? No……the metropolis of Georgeana, Massachusetts (now known as York, Maine) became the first incorporated city in the United States on this day.  A city is incorporated as an administrative district established by state charter. When a city incorporates it is the same as when you incorporate your business. It becomes a fiction of law or a corporation.

             1692-Saturday- Wooo hooo witchy woman, see how
High she flies
Woo hoo witchy woman she got
The moon in her eye
She held me spellbound in the night
Dancing shadows and firelight
Crazy laughter in another
Room and she drove herself to madness
With a silver spoon
Woo hoo witchy woman see how high she flies
Woo hoo witchy woman she got the moon in her eye ……..The Eagles………The Salem Witch Hunt began.  Before it was over, 19 innocent women were hanged.  Sarah Goode, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, an Indian slave from Barbados, were charged with the illegal practice of witchcraft. Later that day, Tituba, probably under coercion, confessed to the crime and encouraged  the Puritan authorities to seek out more Salem witches. The illnesses and bizarre behavior of some young girls was blamed on witchcraft. There were “fitts”—convulsions, contortions, and outbursts of gibberish.  This is fairly typical teenage girl behavior seen in malls everywhere.   Nowadays we would say they didn’t take their meds.  The trials that followed involved sensational testimony with witness trying to outdo each other with tales of witchery gone wild.  A thriving industry of books, movies and TV shows about the Salem trials would follow a few hundred years later.  Ironically, the name Salem was taken from the Hebrew word shalom, meaning peace

          1753 –Thursday-  Ending up with a February 30, and very confusing appointment books, for fifty years, Sweden introduced its own Swedish calendar, in an attempt to gradually merge into the Gregorian calendar. It then reverted to the Julian calendar (eleven days off the Gregorian) on this date in 1712, and finally went back to the Gregorian Calendar on this date in 1753.

            1781-Thursday-  The Continental Congress ratified the Articles of Confederation. The Articles, the first governing document for the United States had been passed by the 2^nd Continental Congress on November 15, 1780. The Articles would later be replaced by the United States Constitution. They were written mostly by John Dickenson (who had refused to sign the Declaration of Independence) but were  weakened by the Congress (sound familiar?).  Among the weaknesses were:  Under the Articles there was only a unicameral legislature so that there was no separation of powers; the central government under the Articles was too weak since the majority of the power rested with the states; Congress, under the Articles, did not have the power to tax which meant that they could never put the country’s  finances in order (of course they now abuse the power to tax and they still can’t get the country’s finances in order);  in order to change or amend the Articles, unanimous approval of the states was required which essentially meant that changes to the Articles would be virtually impossible;  for any major laws to pass they had to be approved by 9 or the 13 states; under the Articles, Congress did not have the power to regulate commerce or  trade.

            1790-Monday- Congress authorized the first U.S. census under the responsibility of Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. Nowadays the census is conducted by the Department  of Commerce.  The six questions asked by the census called for the name of the head of the family and the number of persons in each household of the following descriptions: Free White males of 16 years and upward (to assess the country’s industrial and military potential), free White males under 16 years, free White females, all other free persons (by sex and color), and slaves. The census, taken by U.S. marshals on horseback, counted 3.9 million inhabitants……or about as many people who are in front of you waiting to get into the public bathroom, or at a toll booth, or in the “express line” at a supermarket or claim to have seen the Loch Ness Monster just before tourist season.

            1803 –Tuesday-  Ohio entered the United States of America as the 17th state. It’s called the “buckeye state” because it has buckeyes.  A buckeye is a tree that is used today mostly as pulp. In the past it was used for furniture, crates, pallets, caskets, artificial human limbs. Ohio is also the birthplace of seven Presidents.  Can you name them? – William Henry Harrison, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, and Warren G. Harding.  Ohio was first explored for France by Sieur de la Salle in 1669,. The Ohio region then became British property after the French and Indian Wars. Ohio was acquired by the U.S. after the Revolutionary War in 1783. In 1788, the first permanent settlement was established at Marietta, capital of the Northwest Territory.  Ohio’s official things:  Animal White-tailed Deer, Beverage -Tomato Juice,

Bird –Cardinal, Flower Scarlet –Carnation,  Fruit – not surprisingly, considering the beverage, Tomato, Gem Stone -Ohio Flint, Invertebrate Fossil -Isotelus (Trilobite), although there was a movement to change the invertebrate to Dennis Kucinich,  Tree Ohio- Buckeye, and Ohio is  blessed with two songs; Rock Song -Hang on Sloopy and Song -Beautiful Ohio.

            1810 –Thursday--  Happy Birthday, we think, to Polish composer and pianist Frederic Chopin. Chopin always gave his date of birth as March 1 but according to his baptismal certificate, which was written several weeks after his birth, the date was February 22. In 1831 he arrived in Paris for a concert; he fell in love with the city, decided to make it his new home and never to returned to Warsaw.  Gee! Why would anyone rather stay in Paris than Warsaw? Interesting to note that on this same day that streptomycin, a cure for tuberculosis was announced in 1946, that Chopin died at age 39 of……..tuberculosis. Chopin is currently decomposing. His most famous works, on which his reputation is built, were his Nocturnes and Preludes, although perhaps his most famous individual work is known as the Minute Waltz, which of course lasted longer than a minute.

            1845 –Saturday- The eyes of texas are upon you
All the live long day
The eyes of Texas are upon you
And you can get away
Do not think you can escape them
From night till early in the morn
The eyes of Texas are upon you
Till Gabriel blows his horn …..John Sinclair……With James K. Polk scheduled to be inaugurated on March 4, outgoing President, John Tyler signed a resolution annexing the Republic of Texas. Texas, having won its freedom from Mexico was at the time an independent country.  Great Britain was maneuvering to recognize the country.  Congress sent a message to the Texas government, with a copy of the joint resolutions of Congress in favor of annexation. These were considered by a convention in Texas, called for the purpose of forming a State constitution. That body approved the measure (July 4, 1845), and on that day Texas became one of the States of the Union. The Gnus highly recommends, A Country of Vast Designs: James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent by Robert Merry

            1848-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, US sculptor and coin designer Augustus Saint-Gaudens (of the Gaudens of Eden), born in Dublin Ireland.  His first public commission was the  statue of Civil War hero David Farragut (“Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead”) in New York’s Madison Square Park. For Boston he produced his great relief monument to Col. Robert G. Shaw and his African American Civil War regiment (1884–97).

            1864-Tuesday-  Rebecca Lee Crumpler became the first American black woman to be awarded a medical degree. Born in Delaware in 1831, and after starting as a nurse in 1852, in 1860, she was admitted to the New England Female Medical College and graduated on this day in 1864. Her A Book of Medicinal Discourses in Two Parts was published in 1883. In the book, based on her personal journals, she focused on instructions for women on how to provide medical care for themselves and their children. No photos or other images survive of Dr. Crumpler. The little we know about her comes from the introduction to her book, a remarkable mark of her achievements as a physician and medical writer in a time when very few African Americans were able to gain admittance to medical college, let alone publish. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/changingthefaceofmedicine/physicians/biography_73.html

            1867 -Nebraska, The Cornhusker State, entered the United States of America as the 37^th state. Nebraska had been part of the Louisiana Purchase in 1803.  The state is actually named after the Platte River from the French meaning "broad river." The Omaha Indians called the river "ibôápka" also meaning "ibôápka" but it could be interpreted as "ibôápka".   In 1842, explorer John C. Frémont used the word Nebraska in referencing the Platte River and this was the name that was given to the territory when it was created in 1854 as part of the Kansas-Nebraska Act which created the territories of Kansas and Nebraska and opened the area to settlement.  The Homestead Act of 1862 provided free land in the West to settlers if they would agree to stay for five years.  Upon statehood, Lancaster, Nebraska was renamed Lincoln and became the state capital. State symbols include: American Folk Dance (yes they have an official folk dance)  Square Dance, Beverage - Milk,Two songs -Ballad A Place Like Nebraska and  Beautiful Nebraska, Bird -Western Meadowlark ,Fish- Channel Catfish,  Flower- Goldenrod, Fossil- Mammoth, Gem stone -Blue Agate, Mammal -White-tailed Deer (just like Ohio),River -Platte River, Rock -Prairie Agate, and yes, a Soft Drink -Kool-Aid

            1872-Friday-  Yellowstone National Park, the world's first national park was established by an act of congress.  President Ulysses Grant signed it into existence. The 2.2 million acres of wilderness was "set apart as a public park or pleasuring ground (the phrase certainly takes on a whole new meaning nowadays)  for the benefit and enjoyment of the people." Nathaniel Langford, one of the most outspoken proponents of the national park idea, was appointed the first superintendent of the Park. Now it is overrun with cars and tourists, and the whine of snowmobiles. Cheer up, most of the park is the caldera of a volcano – that’s why they have “Old Faithful” and hot springs-and  last major eruption at Yellowstone, some 640,000 years ago, ejected 8,000 times the ash and lava of Mount St. Helens.  It’s due for another eruption……maybe during a snowmobile convention.

            1872 – Friday- Same day as Yellowstone Park was established…one of the great scientific feuds achieved another milestone of pettiness as bitter rival paleontologists Edward D.Cope and O.C. Marsh raced for recognition of their work on the fossilized remains of an animal with large wings from the dinosaur era.  On this day Cope read his paper to the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia in which he named the creature as Ornithochirus. However, in those days the printed word carried more weight and more distance than the spoken word and Marsh had beat him into print in the American Journal of Science a few days earlier, and the name he used, Pterodactylis, was  established. Bill Bryson in his brilliant A Short History of Nearly Everything has a great description of the feud.

            1873 –Saturday- The company of  E. Remington and Sons in Ilion, New York started production of the first practical typewriter. The concept of a typewriter dates back at least to 1714, when Englishman Henry Mill filed a patent for "an artificial machine or method for the impressing or transcribing of letters singly or progressively one after another." The first typewriter proven to have worked was built by the Italian Pellegrino Turri in 1808. The Remington typewriter was the successor to the first “real typewriter” the Sholes & Glidden typewriter which had introduced the QWERTY keyboard still in use today….even on the keyboard we’re using to write this.

            1880 –Monday-  Happy Birthday, Sir Isaac Shoenberg, Russian/British electronic engineer born in Pinsk, Belarus (note, Minsk is also in Belarus).  Shoenberg is known as the principal inventor of the first high-definition television system, (HDTV) which was used by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) for the world's first public high-definition telecast from London in 1936.  The show, Survivor Contestants Beat Up American Idol Judges, was an immediate hit. During the 1970s and 1980s, the modern prototype for HDTV was being developed in Japan as a way to improve television quality and therefore sell more TVs. Contemporary high definition television is HDTV is a digital TV broadcasting format where the broadcast transmits widescreen pictures with more detail and quality than found in a standard analog television.  In 1932 Shoenberg’s team succeeded in making an electronic television picture-generating tube. The pictures were crude but Shoenberg continued with his research. The persistence paid off. In 1936 the BBC launched a public television service using the system Shoenberg had pioneered.

            1896 –Sunday-  Italy, which gave us Rome and some of the great generals in history, continued (and would continue –see WW II) it’s abysmal military record by actually losing a battle to Ethiopia (Ethiopia!).  At the Battle of Adowa, a decisive defeat of the Italians by the Ethiopian Emperor Menelik II, an  Italian force of 10,000 was routed, losing 4500 dead and 300 prisoners. This would be par for the course in the 20^th century Italy. In the resulting Treaty of Addis Ababa the Italians recognized the independence of Ethiopia and restricted themselves to the colony of Eritrea. The battle ensured Ethiopian survival as an independent kingdom in Africa.

            1896- Sunday- French physicist Henri Becquerel discovered radioactivity when he developed the photographic plate he left in that desk drawer a few days earlier and found it had fogged with the image of the uranium compound crystals resting on it..........So that's why the pictures Prof. Sy Yentz took at the World's Largest Ball of Ear Wax somewhere in Iowa, were so blurry!.......  Recall that on February 26, Becquerel had stored a phosphorescent uranium compound in a closed desk drawer on top of a photographic plate awaiting a sunnier day to test his idea that sunlight would make the phosphorescent uranium emit rays. By accident, he created a new experiment. When he developed the photographic plate, he found a fogged image in the shape of the rocks.He had chosen to work with potassium uranyl sulfate, K₂UO₂(SO₄)₂, which he exposed to sunlight and placed on photographic plates wrapped in black paper. When developed, the plates revealed an image of the uranium crystals.         
These he stored waiting for a sunny day…..which turned out to be March 1.

           1912-Friday- Might as well jump. Jump !
Might as well jump.
Go ahead, jump. Jump !
Go ahead, jump. ……..Van Halen……..Capt Albert Berry performed the first parachute jump from an airplane. The Gnus finds this impressive if the plane was in flight at the time but not so impressive if the plane was on the ground. Previously, Andre Garnerin, of France had leapt from a balloon in 1797.  However, it is believed that the first recorded parachute jump took place in 852 A.D. when Arman Firman, a Muslim holy man, tried to fly in Cordoba, Spain. He jumped off of a tower wearing a huge cloak. He thought the cloak would billow out and allow him to float gently to the earth. Wrong! The cloak did nothing to slow him down and he crashed to the ground. Fortunately, there was enough air in the folds of the cloak to soften the landing slightly and he survived. Thus, this became the first recorded parachute attempt. While we are sure that Berry’s jump occurred over St. Louis, we have also found it listed as occurring on March 13.  We’ll go with the American Institute of Aeronautic which lists it as the 1^st. The first known written account of a parachute concept is found in da Vinci's notebooks (cl495). The sketch he drew consisted of a cloth material pulled tightly over a rigid pyramidal structure. Although da Vinci never made the device, he is given credit for the concept of lowering man to the earth safely using a maximum drag decelerator.

               1921-Tuesday-. Magician, Harry Houdini patented a diver's suit. While diver’s suits had been around for a long time, - probably the first was Klingert's diving suit in1797 which  consisted of a jacket and trousers made of waterproof leather, a helmet with a porthole, and a metal front and was linked to a turret with an air reservoir. Houdini’s diver's suit" allowed divers, in case of danger, to quickly divest themselves of the suit while submerged and to safely escape and reach the surface of the water. It also allowed a diver to don his suit without assistance.  It accomplished this by being formed in two halves, with a locking joint in the middle.  The  diver could reach this joint and release it, and then escape from the suit.

            1922-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday William M. Gaines, American publisher of Mad magazine. “Humor in a jugular vein”. Mad, as it did with many young folks, entertained, and contributed immeasurably to Professor Sy Yentz sense (or attempts at) humor. From http://www.dccomics.com/mad/?action=about1    - Bill Gaines knew that the man who would edit MAD had to have a brilliant sense of humor as well as a groundbreaking visual sense. He had to be a man who could see through the phoniness of popular culture. And he had to be a man who could take a little 10-cent comic book and transform it into the premiere satirical force of the 20th century. Unfortunately, that man was busy, so Gaines hired Harvey Kurtzman.  Also, in 1952... The second issue of MAD went on sale on December 9, 1952. On December 11, the first-ever letter complaining that MAD "just isn't as funny and original like it used to be" arrived.  Along with editor Al Feldstein and "the usual gang of idiots", publisher Gaines made MAD a touchstone of satire and humor for young people throughout the 60s, 70s and 80s

             1924 –Saturday- Happy Birthday, Donald “Deke” Slayton, American astronaut. Slayton was the only one of the seven original Mercury astronauts not to fly in space during the Mercury program.  He was originally scheduled to pilot the Mercury-Atlas 7 mission but was relieved of this assignment due to a heart condition discovered in August 1959. He did make his first space flight, however, as Apollo docking module pilot of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) mission, July 15-24, 1975—a joint space flight culminating in the first historical meeting in space between American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts.

             1932- Tuesday- Charles Lindbergh III, the 20 month old baby of aviators Charles and Anne Lindbergh was kidnapped from their home in New Jersey. The baby’s body was found on the grounds of the estate about a month later.  Bruno Hauptman, a German immigrant was later convicted of the crime and executed.

            1936 –Sunday- Hoover Dam (originally Boulder Dam, changed to Hoover Dam in 1930 and changed back to Boulder Dam during the FDR administration and then changed back to Hoover Dam during the Truman Administration……as far as we know the damn dam is still Hoover Dam….that is,  if you give a damn) was completed. In November, 1932, the Colorado River was diverted around the dam site. In June 1933, the first concrete was poured at the site. Hoover Dam required over 3,250,000 cubic yards of concrete plus another million for the power plant, intake towers and other support structures.

            1937 –Monday-  Permanent license plates made of aluollar. The plates boreminum were first issued in Connecticut.  Leon Serpollet of Paris, France had obtained the first license plate in 1889. In the United States, automobiles were first required to display license plates in the state of New York in 1901. Owners had to provide their names and addresses as well as a description of their vehicles. The fee was one d the owner's initials and were required to be over 3 inches (7.5 centimeters) high.

            1941 –Saturday-  The first commercially licensed FM radio station began operations as Nashville radio station W47NV started transmitting. The station was the first in the country to receive a license for FM radio transmission. All previous commercial stations transmitted via AM, which was more prone to static and interference. On the electronic spectrum, AM radio ranges from 535 to 1705 kHz (kilohertz, or thousands of cycles per-second of electromagnetic energy). The FM radio band goes from 88 to 108 MHz (megahertz, or millions of cycles per second). FM stations must be 200 kHz apart at these frequencies, which means that there's room for 200 FM stations on the FM band……and, seemingly,  most of them play either lite music or hip hop….But, unlike AM radio stations, FM stations don't end up being assigned frequencies with nice round numbers like 1010 WINS or 660 WFAN.  Thus, an FM station may be at 88.7 on the dial. W47NV started its FM broadcast with a commercial for Nashville's Standard Candy Company followed by Garth Brooks whistling and yodeling a salsa salute to Tito Puente.

            1954-Monday -Four members of an extremist terrorist  Puerto Rican nationalist group fired more than 30 shots at the floor of the House of Representatives from a visitors' gallery, injuring five U.S. representatives. Representatives were then debating an immigration bill. The party  breakdown of victims, as reported by the Washington Post, was three Democrats and two Republicans. The wounded lawmakers were Alvin M. Bentley (he took a bullet to the chest), Clifford Davis (shot in the leg), Ben F. Jensen (shot in the back), George H. Fallon and Kenneth A. Roberts. In 1979, fertummelt President Jimmy Carter freed the terrorists, after they had spent 25 years in prison. Their release coincided with Fidel Castro's release of several Americans CIA agents being held in Cuba on espionage charges. Carter's administration denied that there were any connections, saying it was making a humanitarian gesture. Yeah, sure, right.

            1957 –Friday- Bye bye, love.
Bye bye, happiness.
Hello, loneliness.
I think I'm a-gonna cry-y.
Bye bye, love.
Bye bye, sweet caress.
Hello, emptiness.
I feel like I could di-ie.
Bye bye, my love, goodby-ye…………Boudleaux and Felice Bryant …….The Everly Brothers signed with Cadence Records (silver and maroon label). They had their first recording session on the same day.  Overseen by old family friend Chet Atkins, the first song that they recorded was Bye Bye Love. Bye Bye Love, had already been rejected by thirty other acts. The Everlys kept their high harmonies, but backed them with robust acoustic guitars and a rock 'n' roll beat that owed a lot  to the great  Bo Diddley.  Don and Phil Everly would become one of the biggest recording acts of the late 50’s early 60s  rock era.

            1961-Wednesday-  President John F. Kennedy issued an Executive Order, establishing the Peace Corps as a new agency within the Department of State.  The Peace Corp became THE  most popular government service agency of the 1960s. By the time of Kennedy’s death in November 1963, 7,000 volunteers were in the field, serving in 44 Third World countries. In 1966, Peace Corps enrollment peaked, with more than 15,000 volunteers in 52 countries.

           1966-Tuesday-  The Soviet unmanned spacecraft Venera 3, launched in November 1965, touched down on Venus.  This was how they discovered surface temperatures of 900 F as the spacecraft melted and became liquid Venera 3. The understated report was that the communications systems had failed before planetary data could be returned. Many, however suspect that the spacecraft was destroyed by a Venusian society of Amazons led by Queen Zsa Zsa Gabor as incontroverably proven in the documentary movie, Queen of Outer Space.

            1971 –Monday American terrorists exploded a bomb in the a men’s room of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., causing an estimated $300,000 in damage and forcing many Congressmen to “hold it” until they got home.  No one was injured. A collection of left wing loons calling itself the "Weather Underground", an offshoot of the collection of left wing loons and communist sympathizers calling themselves the Weathermen, who were an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society (SDC), claimed credit for the bombing, which was done in protest of the ongoing U.S.-supported Laos invasion.

            1979 –Thursday- The opening of Sweeney Todd on Broadway at the Uris Theater.  Stephen Sondheim’s musical starred Len Cariou as the “Demon Barber of Fleet Street” and Angela Lansbury. Directed by Harold Prince, the play won the Tony Award for Best Musical and Cariou and Lansbury won the Tonys for Best Actor and Actress. Sweeney Todd would run for 557 performances.

            1980-Saturday- Voyager 1 probe, launched in September 1977, confirmed the existence of  the Saturnian moon, Janus. The reason for the confusion was that Janus occupies essentially the same orbit as the moon Epimetheus, sort of like a sub-letting an apartment.  Astronomers, assumed that there was only one body in that orbit, and for a long time struggled to figure out what was going on. As these two satellites approach each other they exchange a little momentum, do a “dosey doe” and trade orbits; the inner satellite becomes the outer and the outer moves to the inner position. This exchange happens about once every four years. Now that they knew there was a Janus, credit for the discovery went to Audouin Dollfus  who found it in 1966 and named it after the two faced –looking forwards and backwards-god of gates and doorways.

            1985 –Friday-  The premiere of Lust in the Dust starring Tab Hunter (yes, that Tab Hunter), Divine, favorite bad guy, Henry Silva, and a fading (quickly) Caesar Romero. With the tagline (IMBd)  “He Rode The West... The Girls Rode The Rest! Together They Ravaged The Land!”, a group of unscrupulous characters sought buried treasure in the old west. The movie scored a 38% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer. Critic Roger Ebert felt that Lust in the Dust would have worked better with Divine in the Tab Hunter role.

            1993 –Monday New York Yankee owner George M. Steinbrenner was reinstated after being banned for life on July 30, 1990 after collaborating with a gambler to dig up dirt on HIS OWN PLAYER, Dave Winfield  Commissioner Fay Vincent banned the fershtinkiner Steinbrenner from baseball forever. Word got out at that night’s game via radio-carrying fans at the Stadium that George was out. Fans gave the news a standing ovation and chanted “No more George.”. Three years later after the bombastic bully said he was sorry, Vincent gave him another chance.            

            2002 –Friday-  The Envisat environmental satellite, launched by the European Space Agency, reached an orbit 800 kilometers (500 miles) above the Earth  carrying the heaviest payload to date at 8500 kilograms (9.5 tons). Envisat, short for environmental satellite, had a unique combination of 10 different instruments which collected data about the Earth’s atmosphere, land, sea and ice – providing scientists with the most detailed picture yet of the state of the planet. Microbes falling to Earth from the satellite are believed to be the cause of the species Briefus Famous Stupiditus, in which the media creates fame (FifteenMinutus Warholus) for some wretched publicity seeking human being.

Back to Calendar

2.        Read Across America Day. It’s always observed the week of Dr. Seuss's birthday.

           986  -Thursday-  Ah, the shrinking gene pool. The Carolingian dynasty that began with Charles Martel and his son Pepin III (the Short) and then his son Charlemagne (the Great), (aka Carolus Magnus—the source of the dynasty's name), sputtered to an end with  Louis V, also called Louis the Indolent or Louis the Sluggard. Louis was crowned the King of France on this date.  This exemplar of royal denseness ruled less than a year as he went kaput in May 987. There were nasty rumors that his mother Emma poisoned him.. His heir by blood was Charles, duke of Lower Lorraine, son of Louis IV, but Lorrain could not secure the support of the bishops and was undermined by  Adalberon (Ascelinus), bishop of Laon. This  assured the success of Hugh Capet. The Sluggard, also designated him by the words "qui nihil fecit", i.e. "le Fainéant" or "do-nothing  by medieval chroniclers was the last Carolingian monarch.  The next dynasty was the Capetians who ruled from 987 to 1328, named after the dynasty’s founder, Hugh Capet.

                        1127 –Wednesday- They showed you a statue, told you to prayThey built you a temple and locked you awa
Aw, but they never told you the price that you pay For things that you might have done.....Only the good die youngthats what i saidonly the good die young only the good die young …..Billy Joel………… This was bad, the assassination of Charles the Good, Count of Flanders. You may wish to look at The Murder of Charles the Good by Galbert of Bruges. Galbert tells us Charles  was slewn in the church of Saint Donatian in Bruges in a plot devised by an embittered noble family. Don’t you just hate when those embittered nobles get carried away? Known for creating laws to protect and help the poor, Charles the Good's assassination sent ripples throughout Europe, affecting the balance of power between England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire. It also threw Flemish society into chaos as this prosperous region became engulfed in a brutal struggle for power.

                        1316 –Monday- Happy Birthday, Robert II, King of Scots, called "the Steward", a title that gave the name to the House of Stewart (later spelled "Stuart"). He was the son of Robert the Bruce’s daughter Marjorie (The Bruce’s son, David II had died childless) and her husband Walter Stewart, 6th High Steward of Scotland.  When King James V  was on his deathbed  in 1542 after yet another Scottish battle defeat to England – Solway Moss-when his only living heir, a girl, was born in December of the same year. Before he died, he is reported to have said "it began with a lass and it will end with a lass". This was a reference to the Stuart dynasty, and how it had started through Marjorie, the daughter of Robert the Bruce. James was succeeded by his infant daughter, Mary, Queen of Scots. The Stuarts would go on to become kings of England (James I) after the death of Elizabeth I.  They continued until the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the conspicuously incompetent James II was ousted and William and Mary of the Netherlands imported by Parliament. Stuart “pretenders” continued to try for the throne until the defeat of Bonnie Prince Charlie at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.

            1459 –Wednesday-  A good day for Popes, three born on this day, Happy Birthday, Pope Adrian VI, (Adriaan Florenszoon Boeyens) born in Utrecht in the Netherlands, the last non-Italian Pope until John Paul II.  Adrian VI, always addressed as “Yo, Adrian”,  lasted only a year, 1522-1523 and most of Adrian VI's official papers disappeared soon after his death. Pope number two for March 2 was: 

            1810 –Friday- Pope Leo XIII (Count Vincenzo Gioacchino Raffaele Luigi Pecci) who became the oldest Pope but then went kaput at age 93. He was elected to the Papacy in 1878.  Then Pope number three for March 2 was:

            1876-Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli). Pius poped from 1939 – 1958 and came under and continued to come under serious criticism for his failure to speak out strongly and effectively against the Holocaust and the Nazis.

            1730 –Thursday-  On the “march” to more &  more discoveries about electricity, Stephen Gray (according to Erik Larson in Thunderstruck) clothed a boy in heavy garments until his body was thoroughly insulated.  He left the boy’s hands, feet, and head unclothed. Using non-conductive silk strings he hung the boy in the air, and then touched an electrified glass tube to his naked foot, “thus causing a spark to rocket from his nose”. We thought you’d get a charge out of this item.

                        1769-Thursday- I've got a mule, her name is Sal,
15 miles on the Erie Canal
She's a good old worker and a good old pal,
15 miles on the Erie Canal
We've hauled some barges in our day
filled with lumber, coal and hay
And we know every inch of the way from
Albany to Buffalo.
Chorus:
Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for we're coming to a town
And you'll always know your neighbor, you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal. ……Thomas Allen……Happy Birthday, DeWitt Clinton, Mayor of New York City 1803-1815  and then Governor of New York, 1817-1823 and again 1825-1828. Clinton was  the moving force behind the building of the Erie Canal, through upstate New York to connect the east with the Midwest.  He advocated removal of the political disabilities of Roman Catholics, abolition of slavery, and amelioration of severe punishment for debt and misdemeanors. Federalists and Republicans supported him as he narrowly lost the presidential election of 1812 to James Madison. 

                        1784 –Tuesday-  Jean Pierre François Blanchard was a pioneering French aeronaut who worked on designing heavier-than-air flying machines, including one based on a theory of rowing in the air currents with oars and a tiller…..really!  He was best known for his many pioneering balloon flights. He took up ballooning following the Montgolfier brothers' 1783 demonstrations of hot-air-balloon flying in Annonay, France. Blanchard made his first successful ascent in a balloon he built himself on this day in 1784.

             1793-Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Sam Houston, born in Virginia.  He was the only man to serve as congressman, senator, and governor of two states, Texas and Tennessee, and is credited with winning Texas's independence from Mexico.  After the Mexican victory at The Alamo in 1836, Houston led his troops to a decisive victory over the serial bungler, General Santa Ana at the Battle of San Jacinto. Houston became an instant hero and became president of the Republic of Texas. When Texas joined the United States in 1845, (see March 1 1845 above) Houston became a senator and served three terms, the last ending in 1859. The same year he was elected Texas governor. In 1861, as Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as president of the United States and the Civil War began, Texas seceded from the Union. Houston refused to pledge allegiance to the Confederate States of America and was de-governored.

            1807-Monday- Congress abolished the African slave trade. Signed into law by Thomas Jefferson on this day, the Bill "prohibits the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States...from any foreign kingdom, place, or country." Unfortunately, the Bill was not as good or effective as it sounds. The final vote in the House was 63 for, 49 against. In the bill itself, one can note that pragmatic concerns about implementation won out over the moralistic point of view. First, the bill contained provisions for the forfeiture of confiscated property, but such property would be under the jurisdiction of the district court, not the government if a slaving ship was seized. Provisions made for the "disposal" of confiscated slaves was not to "contravene" the laws of that specific state. This meant that if seized in Southern territory (which was the likely outcome), blacks would remain enslaved and be auctioned off nonetheless, completely contradicting the spirit of the act. http://www.american.edu/TED/slave.htm

            1836 –Wednesday-  On Sam Houston’s birthday and just four days before the fall of the Alamo on March 6, Texas proclaimed its independence from Mexico.  Independence was secured with Sam Houston’s victory over Santa Anna ….and capture of the hapless general at the Battle of San Jacinto in April.  This is now Texas Independence Day, a state holiday.

            1855 –Friday-  Alexander II became Czar of Russia. Alexander was the eldest son of Czar Nicholas I. In politically, culturally and technologically backwards Russia, he implemented important reforms, notably the abolition of serfdom, as well as changes in national, military and municipal organization. He also rethought foreign policy: Russia now refrained from overseas expansion and concentrated on strengthening its borders. In 1867, he sold Alaska and the Aleutian Islands to the United States. On March 1, 1881, in St. Petersburg, he was assassinated by a bomb thrown by a lunatic student, a member of the meshuggenah revolutionary organization "The National Will.''

            1861 – Saturday. Two years before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in America…… “Serfs Up”. Czar Alexander II (see 1855 above) signed the emancipation reform into law, abolishing Russian serfdom. A serf was a peasant who did not enjoy the rights of a free person, but was not a slave. While the slave was an object of the law, theserf was still a subject of the law – a person…..but barely. It was a miserable life.

            1863-Monday- As the Civil War raged, Congress authorized a track width of 4-ft 8-1/2 in. as the standard for the Union Pacific Railroad. This width became the accepted gauge for most of the world.  U.S. track gauge based is on UK track gauge. While most U.S. railroads were designed by U.S. engineers, not British expatriates, a number of early lines were built to fit standard-gauge locomotives manufactured by English railroad pioneer George Stephenson. People kept getting “engauged” because it took a while to gage the effects of having different gauges for different railroads.

            1867 -Saturday-Jesse James was a lad that killed many a man,
He robbed the Danville train.
But that dirty little coward that shot Mr. Howard
Has laid poor Jesse in his grave……….Bascom Lamar Lunsford………Nineteen year old Jesse James and four others of the James gang  - but no Youngers- attempted to rob the Judge John McClain Banking House of Savannah, Missouri. They got no money but did manage to escape with a free toaster for opening an account. In case you’ve been counting, forty five Jesse James movies have been made. http://www.stjosports.com/jessejamesinthemovies.aspx Among our favorites have been Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (television’s John Lupton – Broken Arrow- as Jesse) 1966 and Bulgarian Jesse James movie, Jesse James Meets Lokum Shekarov, also 1966.  Actors who have played Jesse James include: Jesse James Jr., Tyrone Power, Roy Rogers, Rod Cameron, George Reeves (television’s Superman), Clayton Moore, yes, the Lone Ranger himself, Dale Robertson, Audie Murphy, John Ireland, MacDonald Carey, Robert Wagner, Wendell Corey, Robert Duval, Christopher Lloyd, yes, that Christopher Lloyd of Back to the Future and Taxi, Rob Lowe, Colin Farrell and Brad Pitt.

1874 –Monday The “batter’s box” was instituted for baseball.  Unfortunately, when the batter was in a box, he couldn’t see the pitcher and the pitcher couldn’t see the batter, so they decided to throw away the wood and just draw a line instead. It was six feet long and centered to the middle of home plate. It was one foot from home plate and three feet wide over all and required to be marked with chalk. The batter was required to be within the lines of his position during the act of swinging the bat and if contact was made and the batsman was outside the lines of the box, a foul strike and out was called and the ball was considered dead. Three foul strikes during a batter’s time at bat put him out….unlike the 10-12 pitch “at bats” featuring a plethora of foul balls that we can see today.

1877-Friday-  Ending yet another sleazy chapter in the story of Electoral politics, Congress accepted an electoral commission's decision that Republican Rutherford B. Hayes had won the disputed presidential election of the previous November over New York Governor, Samuel Tilden.  Tilden had won the popular vote but presidential elections are based on the electoral college (number of votes per state based on members of congress which is based on population). 185 votes were required to win, Tilden was ahead 184 electoral votes to 165 for Hayes.  Four states were in dispute; Florida (see Florida, 2000), Louisiana, South Carolina, and Oregon.  The votes and hence the electoral votes for these states were decided by this Electoral Commission.  Congress had appointed the  15-member commission, evenly divided between the two parties, except for one justice, Joseph P. Bradley, a Republican considered (wink wink nudge nudge) nonpartisan.  Bradley voted with the Democrats. Surprise! Hayes got all 20 votes.  Do the math. Three days later, Hayes was inaugurated as the 19th U.S. president.

            1887-Wednesday-   Happy Birthday, Harry E. Soref, locksmith, inventor of the laminated steel padlock, and founder of Master Lock Company  in 1921. Plenty of locks but no bagels, not even a schmear… tsk, tsk. And what, you may  ask, is a laminated padlock – patented in 1924?  The plates punched  from sheet metal were stacked and assembled. Holes that were formed in the middle of the plates made room to accommodate the locking mechanism….the u-shaped top.  The entire stack of plates, loaded with the lock parts in it, was then riveted together. Take a look at your Master Lock and you’ll see the layers.

            1900- Happy Birthday, Kurt Weill, German-American composer born in Dessau. His most famous collaborations were with Bertold Brecht, with whom he worked on The Threepenny Opera – featuring the great song, Die Moritat von Mackie Messer, also known as Mack the Knife in 1928, The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny  in 1929 and Happy End, 1929.

            1902 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Edward U. Condon, American physicist born in New Mexico. The eponymous, Franck–Condon principle (James Franck was a German-American Nobel winner in physics) was named for him.  We looked it up and there is no way to explain it unless you’re really really smart and know what is a rule in spectroscopy and quantum chemistry that explains the intensity of vibronic transitions is.  Condon also applied quantum mechanics to an understanding of the atom and its nucleus.

            1904 –Wednesday- Horton Hears a Who. 

                      And that’s what is new. 
                       There nothing that’s loose.
                        But  Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss.
                        Now you’re in the Gnus.
                        Happy Birthday, Theodore Geisel, author of The Cat in the Hat, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, Green Eggs and Ham among other books in rhyme……except for Bartholomew and the Oobleck which doesn’t rhyme.  Maybe it was an off day.

            1917 –Friday- The grandson of Tsar Alexander II – crowned on this day 1855 (see 1855 above),  Nicholas II of Russia, who was a  few french fries short of a happy meal,  abdicated the throne in favor of his brother Michael II of Russia who refused to accept. In history’s long list of monarchs who made one stupid decision after another to end up losing their throne (and frequently their lives), Nicholas makes the Honor Roll. For example, he married the German princess, Alexandra of Hesse-Darmstadt. Alexandra, the grand-daughter of Queen Victoria, was a strong believer in the autocratic power of Tsardom and urged him to resist demands for political reform.   He lost the Russo Japanese War of 1905.  When a procession procession of workers, seeking to reduce the work day from eleven hours to eight,  reached the Winter Palace it was attacked by the police and the Cossacks. Over 100 workers were killed and some 300 wounded. The incident, known as Bloody Sunday precipitated the Revolution of 1905. In September 1915, Nicholas II assumed supreme command of the Russian Army fighting on the Eastern Front. This linked him to the country's military failures and during 1917 there was a strong decline support for the Tsar in Russia.

            1917 –Friday-  “Lucy! I’m home….” Happy Birthday, Desiderio Alberto Arnaz ye de Acha the Third, you know him as Desi Arnaz, Cuban bandleader, singer and actor. He married actress Lucille Ball and created the classic TV comedy, I Love Lucy in 1952. In addition to being the perfect straight man for a comic genius (also see George Burns and Gracie Allen), Arnaz was one of Hollywood's most perceptive producers in television's early years. His shrewd business skills and his realization of particular combinations of the television's technological and cultural connections enabled him to develop aspects of the medium that remain central to its economic and cultural force. After all these years, I Love Lucy holds up very well.  

            1925 –Monday- I was thinkin' 'bout a shortcut I could take
But it seems like I made a mistake
I was wrong, mmm, I took too long
I got caught in the rush hour
A fellow started to shower
You with love and affection
Now you won't look in my direction
On the expressway to your heart ………Soul Survivor………With  more and more cars being manufactured and sold, more and more drivers were getting lost on their way to ……wherever they were going.  The federal highway numbering system was implemented by a commission of state highway administrators.  They even added the shield shape (ignored by many urban drivers) to the signs. Today as we all know (don’t we?) signs have different colors and east/west highways have even numbers and north/souths have odd numbers……………….and we still get lost…..try figuring out the signs in New Jersey after you cross the George Washington Bridge.

            1933-Thursday- ”It was beauty that killed the beast” – King Kong had its world premiere in New York. “A Monster of Creation's Dawn Breaks Loose in Our World Today!” Starring mistress of the scream, Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot and King Kong, “Eighth Wonder of the World”, Co-producers and directors Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack created a template for larger than life monsters. AMC Filmsite tells us that Fay Wray mistakenly believed that her RKO film co-star, 'the tallest, darkest leading man in Hollywood,' would be Cary Grant rather than the beast. Later in her life, she titled her autobiography On the Other Hand in memory of her squirming in Kong's grip. Since then we have had, Son of Kong, King Kong Meets Godzilla, Konga, affirmative action, Queen Kong, King of Kong Island, King Kong Escapes, King Kong Lives, another King Kong, and yet another, this one a big budget, King Kong and we await, Jason Meets King Kong, Saw Kong, and King Kong Goes to Rehab. .

            1939 –Thursday For those who think Massachusetts is a weird state (not that there’s anything wrong with that…..being weird or thinking it’s weird), the Massachusetts legislature voted to ratify the Bill of Rights, 147 years after the first 10 amendments to the U.S. Constitution had gone into effect.  Although the Massachusetts legislature had adopted most of the amendments in 1790, it failed to send official notice of its action to the national government.  The old “check is in the mail” or “the dog ate my official notice” excuse.

            1944-Thursday-  Over 500 people were suffocated when a train stopped in a tunnel near Salerno, Italy. The train sat idling in the tunnel for more than 30 minutes. The train’s locomotives were burning low-grade coal substitutes because high-grade coal was hard to obtain during WWII and the coal substitutes produced an excess of odorless and toxic carbon monoxide.  The colorless, odorless, tasteless gas killed everyone.         

            1944 –Thursday-  Same day as the train disaster in Italy, a disaster of another kind. Yes, the Academy Awards were televised for the first time.  No one really cared so they were broadcast on two local Los Angeles stations.  If the current ratings drop continues, they may end up the same way. At this gala affair, held at Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Los Angeles, Jack Benny served as master of ceremonies and winners included Best Film Going My Way, whose male lead, Bing Crosby, won Best Actor. Ingrid Bergman won Best Actress for her performance in Gaslight. Who knew that decades later the awards ceremony would turn into tasteless buffet of “red carpet” opportunities for talentless actresses and actors, has been actors and actresses, wanna be celebrities and foo foo designers who have mastered the art of  making silly people look foolish.

            1944 –Thursday- Perhaps attendance was down at the Academy Awards because everyone was attending the premiere of Curse of the Cat People, the sequel to 1942’s much better, Cat People. In Cat People, Simone Simon played a woman who could change into a cat and tear people to shreds.  This time around, her husband has re-married (due to her kaputing in the original) but, shades of soap opera! She’s back as her own ghost to protect the daughter of her former husband.   It was directed by Robert Wise who went on to much better things  like West Side Story, The Sound of Music, The Sand Pebbles and Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

            1947 –Sunday- Happy Birthday, Professor Sy Yentz, American, born in New York City, teacher, student, traveler, teacher of teachers, almanackist, historian, music aficionado, inveterate reader, pseudo dry red wine oenophile, dry wit who’s miraculous wife, Margaret puts up with it all.

            1949 –Wednesday- Turn on the light, let it shine on me,
turn on your love light, let it shine on me
Let it shine, shine, shine, let it shine
I got a little lonely in the middle of the night,
I need you darlin' to make things all right
A Little bit higher, just a little bit higher …..Bobby Bland……The first automatic streetlight system in which the streetlights turned themselves on at dark was installed in New Milford, Connecticut, by the Connecticut Light and Power Company.  Each streetlight contained an electronic device that contained a photoelectric cell capable of measuring outside light. Up to that point a man (with really long arms) would have to go to each streetlight every night at dusk and physically turn them on and at sunrise turn them off. We note that in the chronological History of New Milford, this event is not mentioned. Possibly they were in the dark about the situation. http://www.nmhistorical.org/learningzone/chronological.htm

            1949 –Wednesday-  Same day as the automatic streetlight system, the B-50 Superfortress, the Lucky Lady II  landed at Fort Worth, Texas, after completing the first  round-the-world nonstop flight the covering 23,452-mis in 94 hrs. The plane was refueled several times in mid-flight. They had tried to land several times but were re-routed by air traffic controllers who were having difficulty with a new computer system forty eight times and ended up flying around the world. In flight entertainment included C-SPAN Congressional Minutes in Esperanto and Desperate Housewives Go to Avatar.

                1958-Sunday-  First surface crossing of the Antarctic continent was completed. The journey of approximately 2,500miles lasted 99 sun filled, fun-filled days. The British and New Zealand teams were members of a joint (British) Commonwealth Trans-Antarctic expedition but set off from opposite ends of the continent.  Vivian Fuchs and his team, accompanied by Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mt. Everest, (both teams used motorized vehicles) completed the first surface crossing. Highlights included the British Commonwealth Snowball Fight Championships, The All Blacks vs. Penquins Rugby Game, and finding out at the end of the trip that they forgot to turn the lights off back at the starting base and they had to go back.

            1959-Monday- An experimental push-button phone was tested by the Southern New England Telephone Company of New Haven, Conn., to see if customers would dial fewer wrong numbers using the new design. Guess it worked since push button took over although we still “dial” wrong numbers.  Old habits are hard to break.

           1962 –Friday-  7’ 2” center Wilt (“The Stilt’”, “Goliath”, or “The Big Dipper”) Chamberlain scored 100 points and set an NBA record that remains to this day as the Philadelphia Warriors (now Golden State Warriors)  beat the hapless New York Knickerbockers 169-147 in Hershey Pa. (of all places!)  Chamberlain broke NBA records for the most field goal attempts (63), most field goals made (36), most free throws made (28), most points in a half (59), most field goal attempts in a half (37), most field goals made in a half (22), and most field goal attempts in one quarter (21).  He also mopped the floors during time-outs, washed the towels at half-time, and sold 4,332 hot dogs at the concession stand.  Oh yes, he drove the team bus, flew the plane and inflated the basketballs. Iona College graduate, Richie Guerin led the Knicks with 39 points.

            1964 – A pale (no pun intended), soulless version of  Twist and Shout by the Beatles was released in the U.S. Attention Beatles, nothing could be better than the Eisley Brothers  in 1962.  You should have left it alone. The song was written by Bert Berns (under the pseudonym Bert Russell) along with Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers.

            1972-Thursday-  U.S. spacecraft Pioneer 10 was launched. It passed close by Jupiter and Neptune before leaving the solar system. It is now more than six billion miles from Earth.  For those of you keeping track, in the year 34,000, it will pass within three light years of the star Ross 246 heading generally for the red star Aldebaran, which forms the eye of the constellation Taurus (The Bull). Aldebaran is about 68 light-years away. It will take Pioneer 10 more than two million years to reach it. Just in case anyone finds it, the spacecraft has a diagram of a man and a woman and a map showing the location of the Sun and Earth in the Solar System…….make a left a Jupiter and it’s the second planet on you’re right…the blue and white one. Pioneer's last, very weak signal was received on Jan. 22, 2003.

            1978 –Thursday- Czech this out…. Vladimír Remek became the first non-Russian or non-American to go into space, when he was launched aboard Soyuz 28…..subject of the Beatles song, I Soyuz Standing There.  Soyuz docked with the Salyut 6 space station. Microbes brought back to Earth by Soyuz 28 eventually caused an outbreak of the Cable Television disease , Beatingus Subjectus to Deathicus Ad Nauseum.

            1998 –Monday- Data sent from the Galileo spacecraft indicated that Jupiter's moon Europa has a liquid ocean under a thick crust of ice (sounds like a great dessert). Europa was a Phoenician princess abducted to Crete by Zeus, who had assumed the form of a white bull, and became, by him , the mother of Minos, King of Crete. Europa is one of the four (and second largest) Galilean Moons of Jupiter. The others are,  Io, Callisto,  and Ganymede. Europa’s surface is among the brightest in the solar system, a consequence of sunlight reflecting off a relatively young icy crust. Its face is also among the smoothest, lacking the heavily cratered appearance (obviously Botox at work here) characteristic of Callisto and Ganymede. Europa may be internally active, and its crust may have, or had in the past, liquid water which can harbor life. Famous immigrants from Europa include Vice President Joseph Biden, actor Joachim Phoenix, and singer, Prince.

            2004 –Tuesday-  NASA announced that the Mars Rover Opportunity had discovered evidence that water had existed on Mars in the past. Found in the Meridiana Planum region scientists concluded the rocks were once soaked in liquid water. Not only were the soaked, they were altered by liquid water.  Drinking the water can cause symptoms of the disease Shopping Carticus Parking Loticus in which victims leave their shopping carts anywhere in the parking lot that they feel like it.

            Back to Calendar

3.      1500- Saturday- Happy Birthday, Reginald Pole, English prelate who broke with King Henry VIII over Henry’s antipapal policies and serial marriages. Pole later became a cardinal and a powerful figure in the government of the Roman Catholic queen, Henry’s daughter,  Mary Tudor. His most famous works include his condemnation of Henry VIII and defense of the church, De unitate, 1536, his collaboration on the document concerning reform of the papacy, Consilium de emendanda ecclesiae, 1537 and his anti-Machiavellian treatise, Apologia ad Carolum Quintum,1539).  In 1549 he came up one vote short in the vote for Pope.

            1634 –Friday-  The Town of Boston issued the first license to operate a tavern to Samuel Cole. Cole then opened the first tavern in the North American colonies.  Many of the religious New England authorities disapproved of them, but, surprise!,  taverns begin to flourish during the 1630s as gathering places for socializing and, later, for political discussions and meetings.

             1709 –Sunday- A real "sweet guy", Happy Birthday to Andreas Marggraf, German chemist. In 1747 he published an account of his experiments attempting to obtain true sugar from indigenous plants.  He found that the most sugar was in the beetroot and secondly, the carrot.  In those plants sugar, just like that in sugarcane exists ready formed, and that it could be extracted by boiling the dried roots in alcohol. He used a microscope for these discoveries, one of  the device’s  first recorded usages in a chemical inquiry. Marggraf also isolated zinc from its minerals. He published his findings in the riveting page turner,  On The Method of Extracting Zinc From Its True Mineral, Calamine  in 1746. The metal was thought to be a complex blend of metals nearly until  Antoine Lavoisier's listing of zinc as an element.

            1751-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Pierre Provost, Swiss philosopher and physicist who first showed that all bodies radiate heat, no matter how hot or cold they are. This is a comforting thought to Professor Sy Yentz when he leaves his house on a -7˚ morning in January.

            1791 –Thursday- The best things in life are free
But you can keep 'em for the birds and bees;
Now give me money, (that's what I want) that's what I want,
(That's what I want) That's what I want (That's what I want) yeah,
That's what I want.
Your lovin' give me such a thrill,
But your lovin' don't pay my bills;
[refrain]
Money don't get everything it's true,
What it don't get I can't use……..Barrett Strong……….. The United States Mint was created by the U.S. Congress. The mint, a delicious dark chocolate was……no, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his confectionary sense of humor. President George Washington did not act upon these recommendations until April of 1792.  The first gold coins authorized by the government were as follows:Gold Eagle Value $10.00 Gold Half Value $  5.00, Gold Quarter Eagle Value $  2.50     President Washington appointed scientist, David Rittenhouse, as the first director of the U.S. Mint. A mint building was built in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, located at Seventh and Sugar Alley (now Filbert Street).  It was a three story building and bore the now familiar sign painted on the building between the second and third floors, “Ye Old Mint”.

            1820 –Friday-   Continuing the slippery slide towards Civil War, The U.S. Congress passed the Missouri Compromise. Maine was to be admitted as a free state and Missouri as a slave state……sort of. Maine was made a state and Missouri was authorized to adopt a constitution having no restrictions on slavery. Not until the Missouri legislature pledged that nothing in its constitution would be interpreted to abridge the rights of citizens of the United States was the charter approved and Missouri admitted to the Union in Aug., 1821. Whig Party leader, Henry Clay, as speaker of the House, did much to secure passage of the compromise—so much, in fact, that he is generally regarded as its author, even though Senator Jesse B. Thomas of Illinois was far more responsible for the original  bill. The 36°30' proviso preventing slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of   36°30'  lasted until 1854, when the Kansas-Nebraska Act repealed the Missouri Compromise.

            1821-Saturday-  The first U.S. patent issued to a Black-American was granted to Thomas Jennings for a "dry-scouring" cleaning process . While operating a tailor and cleaning shop in New York, Jennings experimented with different solutions and cleaning agents, testing them on various fabrics until he found the right combination to effectively treat and clean them. He called his method "dry-scouring" and it is the process that we now refer to as dry-cleaning. Jennings used his royalties to buy his family out of slavery. He became a free tradesman and continued his dry cleaning business in New York City. His income went mostly to his abolitionist activities. In 1831, Jennings became assistant secretary for the First Annual Convention of the People of Color in Philadelphia, PA

           1831-Thursday- Drivin' that train
High on cocaine
Casey Jones you better
watch your speed ….Grateful Dead……..Happy Birthday, George Pullman, American industrialist and inventor of the Pullman sleeping car for use on railroads. Prior to Pullman’s invention of the sleeping car, the cars had to stay awake all night.  Railroad journeys tended to be overnight affairs and sleeping cars had been used on American railroads since the 1830s, however, they were not very comfortable.   Pullman created train cars with elegant restaurants, accordioned connectors between cars to keep out wind and noise, (every time it went around a long, wide turn, the accordion would play Lady of Spain I Adore You) and comfortable sleeper compartments with clean sheets and pillows. He was also a master public relations man and promoter.  Pullman made sure that when President Abraham Lincoln died, a Pullman car returned his body to Illinois

            1841-Wednesday- Happy Birthday, John Murray, Scottish naturalist who coined the word oceanography. As a marine scientist, he took part in the Challenger Expedition, captained by George Nares, the first major oceanographic expedition of the world. He was the first to observe the Mid-Atlantic Ridge and the existence of marine trenches. He died in 1914, killed by, of all things, a car.

            1845 –Monday- Florida became the 27th state of the United States of America. It had been discovered by Spaniard Juan Ponce de León in 1513 while he was looking for a beachfront condo in a gated community. He claimed the region for Spain but was unable to establish a colony due to Indian attacks.  In 1539, Hernando de Soto landed in the Tampa Bay.  He didn’t stay long as he explored central and northern Florida while massacring Indians on his way to the Mississippi River. Spain lost Florida to England, then got it back again but then lost it again as it made the mistake of allowing the British to use it as a Naval base (Pensacola) during the War of 1812.  It was attacked and captured by the Americans (who then forced out the indigenous Seminole during ensuing Seminole Wars). Florida became a territory in 1822 and was admitted as a slave state in 1827. Since then gonif businessmen and momzer politicians have tried to fill in the Okefenokee Swamp and other wetlands, destroyed the landscape, built hideous environmentally destructive developments and screwed up elections.  Seems like a great place to live. Florida actually has an official pie among its symbols: Pie - Key lime pie,  Animal - Florida Panther, Anthem Florida, the hauntingly beautiful, yet catchy and finger snapping,  Where the Sawgrass Meets the Road ,  Beverage - Orange Juice, Bird- Mockingbird,  Butterfly - Zebra Longwing,  Flower - Orange Blossom, Freshwater fish- Largemouth Bass, Gem –Moonstone, Marine -Mammal Manatee, and Reptile - American Alligator

            1845 –Monday-  On the same day that Florida was admitted to the union, the U.S. Congress passed legislation overriding a President’s veto. It was the first time Congress had done so. This was a “lovely parting gift” – as they say on TV quiz shows for President John Tyler, who would leave office the next day…succeeded by James K. Polk.  Tyler had vetoed a Congressional bill that would have denied him the power to appropriate federal funds to build revenue-cutter ships without Congress’ approval. With the two thirds required for override, Congress mandated that the executive branch get the legislature’s approval before commissioning any new military craft. In all, Tyler had used the presidential veto 10 times on a variety of legislation during his administration; the frequency of his use of the veto was second only to that of Andrew Jackson, who employed it 12 times during his tenure of eight years. Tyler was around for barely four thanks to the kapution of William Henry Harrison just after his inauguration in 1840.  Tyler, however then tried another veto, he called his cousin Vito who met with congressmen accompanied by his “associates” Guido and Anselmo and said” maybe yooz should reconsida ya cawse of akshun.”

            1845 –Monday-  On the same day as Florida was admitted to the Union, and John Tyler was vetoed,  Happy Birthday, Georg  Cantor, Russian-German mathematician who created modern set theory and extended it to give the concept of transfinite numbers, with cardinal and ordinal number classes, which is something that many of us lose sleep over. His early work was on Fourier series, but he is best known for his study of transfinite set theory. He began with the definition of infinite sets proposed by Dedekind in 1872: a set is infinite when it is similar to a proper part of itself. Sets with this property, such as the set of natural numbers are said to be 'denumerable' or 'countable'.  As with almost all of our mathematical items with elucidation, Professor Sy Yentz has absolutely no idea what any of that means but thanks, as with many citations, to  the Today in Science History website.

            1847-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Alexander Graham Bell American inventor born in Edinburgh,  Scotland.  In 1876, at the age of 29, Alexander Graham Bell invented his telephone, just barely beating out Elisha Gray for the patent, the credit, and ultimately millions of dollars.  In 1877, he formed the Bell Telephone Company.  His mother, who was deaf, was a musician and a painter of portraits. Bell remained interested in working with the deaf throughout his life.  He also continued his experiments in communication. He invented the photophone-transmission of sound on a beam of light, which was a precursor of fiber-optics. In all, Bell was granted 18 patents in his name, and 12 he shared with collaborators. He also participated in the founding of  the National Geographic Society in 1888

          1849 –Saturday-  Congress passed the Organic Act on March 3, 1849, to provide for the territorial government of Minnesota. The boundaries of the territory of Minnesota were Canada on the north, Wisconsin on the east, Iowa on the south, and the Missouri and White Earth rivers on the west. At least we think so.  It was so cold up there that no one wanted to go and find out for sure. When Wisconsin became a state in 1848, the lands between the St. Croix and Mississippi Rivers were without an organized government….just like now.  The organic act provided for a governor, secretary, judicial system, legislative assembly, and a delegate to Congress. Legislators and the delegate to Congress were elected; all other officers were appointed. http://www.sos.state.mn.us/index.aspx?page=645 And what, you may ask, is an organic act?  It’s any Act of the United States Congress that establishes a territory of the United States or an agency to manage certain federal lands.

            1851 –Monday-  In case you think a dime is small, on this day the smallest of United States coins (diameter 14 mm) a three cent was authorized by Congress. It was created in part to pay for the cost of a……now don’t fall off your chair laughing….. stamp. Wait, it gets better, the Federal government was in the process of reducing the cost for mailing a letter from five cents to three cents. The coin was popular with the public….for a while.  But the silver-copper alloy had an unpleasant  predisposition to discolor and turn dark. The tiny  coin soon became known as "fish scales." The three-cent coin gradually fell out of favor and it was minted for the last time in 1873. Issues from 1854 through 1873 have an olive sprig over the III and a bundle of three arrows beneath. Nearly the entire production of non-proof coins from 1863 to 1872 was melted in 1873.

          1863-Tuesday-  President Abraham Lincoln approved a charter for the National Academy of Sciences.  Over the years, the National Academy of Sciences broadened its services to the government. During World War I it became apparent that the limited membership -- then numbering only about 150 -- could not keep up with the volume of requests for advice regarding military preparedness. Under Lincoln’s charter, the National Research Council was established in 1916, the National Academy of Engineering in 1964, and the Institute of Medicine in 1970.  The Academy was created to be an adviser on scientific and technological matters for the federal government. Florence Rena Sabin, elected in 1925, was the first woman member of the NAS., Dr. Sabin was noted for her discovery of the origin and processes of the lympatic system and for her work on tuberculosis. David Blackwell was the first African-American elected member of the NAS in 1965.

            1875 –Wednesday- Perhaps because the U.S Mint was authorized on this day in 1791, Congress just kept getting excited about coins .  Following the microscopic three cent coin of 1851, on this day President Ulysses Grant signed into law the twenty cent coin . It was the brainchild of Nevada Senator John Percival Jones  He claimed  the reason for this coinage was to provide merchants with a denomination of coin which would allow them to lower their prices and/or prevent  them from shortchanging their customers.  Of course being  a Senator from Nevada, where silver had been discovered and was a major product had nothing to do with his promotion of this silver coin.  Right? The coin proved to be confusing and very unpopular. It was kaput by 1878.

            1875 –Wednesday- The premiere of Georges Bizet’s Carmen, at the Opera Comique in Paris.  Carmen is an older tale, one that was first published in the form of a novella written by Prosper Mérimée in 1845.  The opera was not an immediate hit. Critics described it as “immoral” and “low.” While Bizet was awarded for the opera several times, he declared himself that it was a flop. Today, however, it has been played in almost every opera house in the world. You can even get a March of the Toreadors ringtone for your cell phone.

             1879 –Monday- I'm gonna take my vitamins!
(Vitamins! Vitamins!)
You better take your vitamins!
(They're good for you! They're good for you!)
I'm gonna take my vitamins!
(Vitamins! Vitamins!)
You better take your vitamins!
(They're good for you! They're good for you!) ….Supernova……….Happy Birthday, Elmer McCollum, American biochemist who originated the letter system of naming vitamins. He discovered vitamins A (fat soluble) and worked with others on vitamin D. McCollum gave the 'factors' letter names, because their structures had not yet been determined to give them proper chemical names. The letter system proved more effective than the discarded vitamin naming system of  “The one that gave me hives”,“ The one that made me constipated”, “the one that made my toenails grow really fast”, and “the one that caused my wife to grow a beard”.

            1885-Tuesday-   On Alexander Graham Bell’s birthday (see 1847 above) American Telephone and Telegraph (AT&T) was incorporated.  The company began in 1875, in an arrangement among  Alexander Graham Bell and the two men, Gardiner Hubbard and Thomas Sanders, who agreed to finance his work the year before he invented the telephone. In 1877, the three men formed the Bell Telephone Company. The first telephone exchange, operating under license from Bell Telephone, opened in New Haven, CT in 1878. In 1882, American Bell acquired a controlling interest in the Western Electric Company, (founded by Bell’s competitor and loser in the 1876 race to the patent office, Elisha Gray). The whole magilla was incorporated as AT&T on this date. Note as of this date their were no answering machines with annoying instructions nor contacts with ever helpful “technicians” named Ralph from New Delhi.

            1887- Thursday- That deaf, dumb and blind kid
Sure plays a mean pinball ………..The Who……..Anne Sullivan arrived at the Alabama home of Capt. and Mrs. Arthur H. Keller to become the teacher of Helen Keller, their blind and deaf 6-year-old daughter.  Sullivan had to begin her teaching with lessons in obedience, followed by teachings of the manual and Braille alphabets. Sullivan attended classes with Keller and tutored her through the Perkins Institute, The Cambridge School for Young Ladies and Radcliffe College.

            1906 – Saturday- The Voisin brothers, Gabriel and Charles, French airplane inventors and designers built a pusher biplane, powered by an Antoinette V-8 engine, that took off on wheels. Charles died in an automobile accident in 1912. Gabriel continued to manufacture aircraft until, following World War I, he turned to the production of luxury automobiles, citing as a reason his distress at the way aircraft had been used for violence during the war. He continued to make automobiles under the brand name,  Avions Voisin into the 1950s.

             1918 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Arthur Kornberg, American biochemist who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 1959 (shared with Severo Ochoa) for his discovery of "the mechanisms in the biological synthesis of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)" ---enzymes producing DNA. Kornberg produced a chemically exact (though genetically inert – sort of like television’s Katie Couric) replica of deoxyribonucleic acid in 1957 marked a significant step forward in understanding the material from which genes are made, (even though WE know they are made of denim) and which is the vehicle for the chemical transmission of all hereditary characteristics.

                1931-Tuesday-  The “Star Spangled Banner “ became the official national anthem of the United States as  President Herbert Hoover signed an act of Congress. Francis Scott Key had composed the lyrics to "The Star-Spangled Banner" after witnessing the overnight British bombardment of Fort McHenry, just outside Baltimore in Maryland during the War of 1812. Key, an American lawyer, watched the siege while under detainment on a British ship. Key's words were later set to the tune of To Anacreon in Heaven, a popular English song. Some rejected  finalists for national anthem were: Why Don’t We Do It In The Road, Purple People Eater, I Kissed a Girl, and Don’t Worry, Be Happy.

            1939 – Friday- The Tulsa, Oklahoma premiere (the official world premiere would be March 11) of ……The Oklahoma Kid. “Greater Than "Cimarron" - Packed with Thrills - Loaded with Action . . . As an Exciting page from American history is unfolded upon the screen !” Better than all that, it had James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in a western.  The 39 year old Cagney was the Oklahoma Kid. Bogart was Whip McCord. A notorious gunman returns to his hometown, Tulsa, and discovers that his father was lynched after being accused of a murder he didn't commit. Natually, Bogart was the bad guy.

            1959 –Tuesday-  The premiere of Behemoth, the Sea Monster.  The movie is notable for the nuclear waste/fallout created monster attacking London instead of usual 1950s suspect, Tokyo.

            1966-Thursday-  There’s something happening here.  What is ain’t exactly clear….  Neil Young, Stephen Stills and Richie Furay formed the seminal, highly influential group, Buffalo Springfield. And you can take that For What It’s Worth.

            1969- Monday- Apollo 9 was launched from Cape Kennedy on a mission to test the lunar module. Apollo 9 was the first manned flight of all Apollo lunar hardware in Earth orbit  including the  first manned flight of the lunar module in space. Lunar module pilot Russell L. Schweickart performed a 37 minute EVA. Human reactions to space and weightlessness were tested during the 152 orbits.  In July, 1969, Apollo 11 would land on the Moon. Space microbes returned to Earth with the space craft resulted in the creation of creatures known as Motoristicus Moronicus, people who try to read, shave, brush their teeth, or text while driving a car at 60 mph.  

           1978 –Friday-  Invasion of the body snatchers as the body of Charlie Chaplin, including coffin was stolen from Corsier-Sur-Vevey Cemetery, Corsier-Sur-Vevey, Switzerland. Elevne weeks later Swiss police  arrested two motor mechanics - a Pole aged 24 and a Bulgarian aged 38  who confessed to stealing the coffin and reburying it. They were traced after police kept a watch on 200 phone kiosks and tapped the Chaplins' phone after the family received ransom demands of £400,000 for return of the body after it went missing in March. Sir Charles' 51-year-old widow, Lady Oona Chaplin, refused to pay up saying: "Charlie would have thought it ridiculous."

            1980 –Monday-  The USS Nautilus, the first atomic powered submarine was decommissioned. In 1982, in recognition of the submarine's unique place in history, it was designated a National Historic Landmark. With this status in place, Nautilus, named for Captain Nemo’s submarine in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea,  was converted to a museum ship and returned to Groton, Ct.. It is now part of the US Sub Force Museum. The Nautilus had been commissioned on September 30, 1954. 

            1985 –Sunday-  Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum in London unveiled their wax Michael Jackson. Wax was the perfect medium for the effigy as the nose could be shaved thinner, wigs added, and skin bleached through the years.

             2005-Thursday-  The first solo non-stop and fastest flight around the world without refueling ended as Steve Fossett landed at the Salina Municipal Airport, Kansas. He had left 67 hours earlier on Feb.28 2005, in The Global Flyer, a single-engine, single-use experimental jet plane.  At 8 a.m. on Sept. 3, 2007, Fossett took off alone from the Flying-M Ranch, near Yerington, Nev., in a Citabria Super Decathlon, a single-engine two-seater. He was scheduled to be back by noon but never returned.  His body was discovered in the mountains near Mammoth Lake, California, on October 2, 2008. A hiker had discovered Fossett's FAA ID, $1000 in weatherbeaten $100 bills, and a jacket believed to belong to Fossett the previous weekend.

            2009 –Tuesday-  The collapse of the Historical Archive of Cologne buried more than a millenium's worth of documents under tons of rubble.  Cologne's archives were one of the only collections in Germany to have survived World War II completely intact.  Officials believed the building's collapse may have been  related to the construction of a subway line beneath the same street where the archive is located along with shortcuts (i.e intentionally used fewer steel reinforcements at the site of the accident)  taken with the construction work

Back to Calendar

4.        

304 or 304 – Wednesday or Friday- The lives of the saints are replete with a series of gruesome deaths. Sometimes it seemed like a prerequisite in the middle ages. On this date in either 303 or 304, St. Adrian of Nicomedia met a particularly horrendous dénouement  The story is that while presiding over the torture of a band of Christians he was so amazed at their courage that he publicly confessed his faith. He was imprisoned, and the next day his arms and legs were struck off on an anvil, and he was then beheaded, dying in his wife's, Saint Natalia of Nicomedia's, arms. He is patron of soldiers, arms dealers, butchers and communications phenomena, and is much revered in Flanders, Germany and the north of France. http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Adrian_of_Nicomedia.html

            1275 –Monday-  Chinese astronomers observed a total eclipse of the sun.  Chinese astrologers could predict solar eclipses by analyzing the Moon's motion since 206 A.D.  The principle source of solar eclipse observations from the Sung, Kin, and Yuan dynasties (960-1368 AD) are the astrological treatises. Total eclipses are listed for the years 977, 1221, and 1275 AD. Annular, partial and unspecified eclipses are noted for 1022, 1054, 1135, 1214, 1292 and 1367 AD. http://history.cultural-china.com/en/183History5571.html In 1983 Bonnie Tyler would have a total eclipse of the heart:

Once upon a time I was falling in love
But now I'm only falling apart
There's nothing I can do
A total eclipse of the heart
Once upon a time there was light in my life
But now there's only love in the dark
Nothing I can say
A total eclipse of the heart………..Bonnie Tyler channeling Jim Steadman.

            1394-Tuesday- Ride, captain ride upon your mystery ship
Be amazed at the friends you have here on your trip
Ride captain ride upon your mystery ship
On your way to a world that others might have missed ….Blue Image…..Happy Birthday, Prince Henry the Navigator, the son of King João of Portugal. Henry was the driving force behind major exploration voyages. He didn’t do much actual navigating since he didn’t do much sailing but Henry sent sailing expeditions down Africa's west coast and they did the navigating. His goal was to find a route to the rich spice trade of the Indies and to explore the west coast of Africa. The ships that sailed the Mediterranean were too slow and too heavy to make these voyages. Under his direction, a new and lighter ship was developed, the caravel, which would allow sea captains to sail further and faster. Under his  patronage, Portuguese ships sailed to the Madeira Islands (Joao Goncalves Zarco, 1420), rounded Cape Bojador – just south of the Canary Islands- (Gil Eannes, 1434), sailed to Cape Blanc (Nuno Tristao, 1441), sailed around Cap Vert (1455), and went as far as the Gambia River (Cadamosto, 1456) and Cape Palmas (Gomes, 1459-1460).

            1461 –Monday- During  the Wars of the Roses in England, the muddled King Henry VI (Lancaster) who was half a bubble off  plumb– son of the great Henry V- was deposed by his Yorkist cousin, Edward, who then became King Edward IV. Henry had reigned since 1422 when he became King at the tender age of nine months old.  He would make a brief comeback to kingship  from October 31, 1470  until April 14, 1471. Never having more than a tenuous hold on reality (he was dominated by his wife, Margaret), Henry went over the edge in 1453. Richard, the Duke of York was made protector. Disputes between Queen Margaret and her supporters and those of York started the Wars of the Roses.  When Richard of York was killed, his son Edward became head of the house of Lancaster and eventually King Edward IV.

            1493 – Saturday-  “But you had three when you left!”  “Jeez!  They were here a minute ago.”……..Having departed in 1492 with the Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria, explorer Christopher Columbus arrived back in Lisbon, Portugal with only the Niña left from his discovery voyage to America. The Niña and Pinta were caravals (See Prince Henry the Navigator 1394 above). The Santa Maria was a larger, round-hulled ship, called a nao (See It’s Nao or Never, Elvis Presley). On Christmas Day 1492, the Santa Maria ran aground and was completely destroyed.  The Pinta disappeared in a windstorm in February 1493.

            1678 –Friday-  Going for baroque……Happy Birthday, Antonio Vivaldi, Italian composer born in Venice. He is currently decomposing. He is famous for his oratorios, operas and solo concertos, most notably, Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons), op. 8 no. 1, RV 269 - E Major.

            1774 –Friday- The first sighting of Orion Nebula by British astronomer William Herschel using a self-built reflecting telescope of 6-foot focal length. Herschel would go on to discover the planet Uranus (be careful of the pronunciation, it’s “your a nus”, not your anus) in 1781.The Orion Nebula is the brightest star forming, and the brightest diffuse nebula in the sky, and also one of the brightest deepsky objects. You’ll find it just south of Orion’s Belt – three stars (Alnitak, Alnilam, Mintaka) in a row.        A nebula is A diffuse mass of interstellar dust or gas or both, visible as luminous patches or areas of darkness depending on the way the mass absorbs or reflects incident radiation.  Stars are born within the clouds of dust. In 1976, Barbra Streisand, Kris Kristofferson, and Gary Busey were born in a nebula.  In  1954, Judy Garland, James Mason, and Jack Carson were born in a nebula and in 1937 Janet Gaynor, Frederic March and Adolphe Menjou were born in a nebula.

             1791-Friday- Vermont, the 14th state, was admitted to the union.  In 1609, the same year that Henry Hudson discovered his river in what would be New York, Samuel de Champlain explored and claimed Vermont for France.  During the French and Indian War (1754-1763), France and Britain fought for control of North America.  At the end of the war Britain received all land east of the Mississippi River, including Vermont…..mainly because of the ski resorts……..In 1777, settlers of the New Hampshire Grants united to form their own state.  They named it Vermont, a French word for “green mountain.”  Vermont settled a border dispute with New York in 1790 by paying $30,000 and 100,000 tons of snow to New York.. Included in its state symbols, Vermon has both a state cold water fish – brook trout and a warm water fish – walleye pike. Its got a reptile – painted turtle and an amphibian -Northern Leopard Frog. Also – a state flavor (we don’t know of any other states that have a state flavor) – maple from the sugar maple tree.  Plus the usual suspects; animal -Morgan Horse ,beverage -Milk

bird -Hermit Thrush, butterfly -Monarch Butterfly, flower -Red Clover , fossil -White Whale,  fruit –Apple, gem -Grossular garnet,  insect –Honeybee,  mineral –Talc,  pie- Apple Pie,  multiple rocks -Granite, Marble, Slate  and the state  song is These Green Mountains.

            1792 –Sunday- But still they begin
Needles and pins
Because of all my pride
The tears I gotta hide….The Searchers……co-written by Sonny Bono. Happy Birthday, Samuel Slocum, American inventor born in Poughkeepsie, New York and manufacturer of pins. In the 1835 he devised and patented a machine for making pins with solid heads. Here, Professor Sy Yentz refrains from remarks about “pin heads”. In 1841, his machine for sticking pins in paper – it is believed to be the first stapler, but we can’t pin it down- was patented.

            1837 –Saturday-  With the population reaching 4,170 the former Fort Dearborn, now, Chicago became incorporated as a city. The name "Chicago" is a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, meaning “wild onion”…..which may be why Cubs fans cry every year…… Fort Dearborn, a military fort erected on what became the site of downtown Chicago. It was established in 1804 on land ceded by the Indians on the Chicago River near Lake Michigan. The fort was a wooden stockade with log blockhouses. The fort was abandoned in 1837 and demolished in 1856.

            1854 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Sir Napier Shaw, English meteorologist. Shaw introduced the  millibar, a unit of measurement of air pressure, and the tephigram, a graphical representation of the first law of thermodynamics - The first law of thermodynamics basically states that a thermodynamic system can store or hold energy and that this internal energy is conserved -as applied to Earth's atmosphere. He wrote Manual of Meteorology in 1826.  A millibar is a bar where you drink millis.

            1859 –Friday-  Happy Birthday, Aleksandr Popov   physicist and electrical engineer who is proclaimed in Russia as the inventor of radio. It is said he built his first primitive radio receiver, a lightning detector in 1895, without knowledge of the contemporary work of the Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi. Marconi’s  first radio signal was sent and received in 1895. In 1899, the first wireless signal was sent across the English Channel. In 1902, the letter 'S' was telegraphed from England to Newfoundland. Meanwhile, in March 1896, Popov achieved transmission of radio waves (Z-102, a lite rock Latino format) across disparate campus buildings in St. Petersburg.

            1861-Monday-  Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated as the 16^th president of the United States. His attempts to be conciliatory towards the South failed and six weeks later, the Confederates fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South Carolina, and the Civil War began.  Jefferson Davis had been inaugurated as the President of the Confederacy two weeks earlier. Chief Justice Roger Taney, of the infamous Dred Scott Decision,  administered the executive oath of office to Lincoln.  

            1865-Saturday- Same date, four years later Abraham Lincoln was inaugurated for his second term as President. His speech, one of his greatest speeches in a career filled with great speeches, “With malice toward none, with charity for all….” again showed a conciliatory policy towards the south.  In 1861 six weeks later war broke out. Now, six weeks later he would be assassinated.  John Wilkes Booth, David Herold, George Atzerodt, Lewis Paine, John Surratt and Edmund Spangler, the conspirators involved with his assassination were present in the crowd at the inauguration

            1877-Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Garrett A. Morgan, African-American inventor. Among his inventions were; the gas mask, the belt fastener, and the automatic traffic light.  On July 25, 1916, Morgan made national news for using his gas mask to rescue 32 men trapped during an explosion in an underground tunnel 250 feet beneath Lake Erie.  The Morgan gas mask was later refined for use by U.S. Army during World War I.

            1877 – Sunday- The debut of Peter Illyich Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. The Bolshoi Theater had commissioned the ballet from the 35-year-old composer in 1875. The choreographer was Julius (Wentzel) Reisinger, an Austrian who was ballet master in Moscow from 1873-78. After initially deciding on the type and placement of dances, Tchaikovsky composed his music and Reisinger set about the choreography after the music was written. By many accounts Reisinger was baffled by the score and had the dancers compose their own variations. Little is written of Reisinger today except for the failure of his Swan Lake. A critic of the day wrote "Mr. Reisinger’s dances are weak in the extreme.... Incoherent waving of the legs that continued through the course of four hours - is this not torture? The corps de ballet stamp up and down in the same place, waving their arms like a windmill’s vanes - and the soloists jump about the stage in gymnastic steps." http://www.balletmet.org/Notes/SwanHist.html

            1881-Friday-  Happy Birthday, Richard Tolman, U.S. physical chemist and physicist, born in Massachusets. Tolman demonstrated that the electron is a charge-carrying particle in the flow of electricity in metals and also determined the electrons mass. Always one to come up with a catchy phrase, In 1912, he coined the concept of relativistic mass by writing that "the expression m0(1 - v2/c2)-1/2 is best suited for the mass of a moving body."

            1887 –Friday- Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It's the only way to live
In cars
Here in my car
I can only receive
I can listen to you
It keeps me stable for days
In cars………Gary Numan…………. Gottlieb Daimler unveiled his first automobile and then had test runs in Esslingen and Cannstatt, Germany.  It was the first four-wheeled vehicle to feature Daimler's gasoline-powered, water-cooled internal combustion engine, the prototype of the engine that continues to be the most widely used to this day. Unfortunately, he was unable to find a parking space and had to go home.

            1913 –Tuesday- Recalling that U.S Presidents used to be inaugurated on or about the fourth of March (now January 20), President Woodrow Wilson delivered his first inaugural address. And in

            1932 – Franklin D. Roosevelt, the 32^nd President delivered the first of his four inauguration speeches. His next inauguration would be on January 20, 1937.  Other inaugural firsts:

            1797 - In the first ever peaceful transfer of power between elected leaders in modern times, John Adams was sworn in as President of the United States, succeeding George Washington.

            1837 -Martin Van Buren First President the first president who was not born a British subject. This was the first time the President-elect and President rode to the Capitol for the Inauguration together. The initial departure was delayed as Van Buren and Andrew Jackson argued over who called “shotgun” before they got in the wagon.

             1841 - William H. Harrison became the First President to arrive in Washington by railroad and well rested, delivered the longest Inaugural address (8,445 words). He then proceeded to contract pneumonia in the rainy weather and went kaput  a few weeks later.

            1853 - Party pooper Franklin Pierce Affirmed the oath of office rather than swear it; cancelled the Inaugural ball.

             1857 - James Buchanan’s was the First Inauguration known to have been photographed

            1897 - William McKinley’s was the first Inaugural ceremony recorded by a motion picture camera and McKinley was the first President to have a glass-enclosed reviewing stand. He could have used that in 1901 when he was assassinated in Buffalo, NY

            1921 - Warren G. Harding  was the first President to ride to and from his Inauguration in an automobile.

            1908 –Wednesday-  The Collinwood's Lake View Elementary School became the site of the country's worst school tragedy.  Shortly after 9:00 a.m., and while school was in session, overheated steam pipes ignited nearby wood joists.  The fire spread quickly, and roughly half of the students were unable to escape.  In the end, 172 children, 2 teachers and 1 rescuer perished in the fire. The community of Collinwood, Ohio has since been absorbed into Cleveland. 

            1929 –Monday-  With the inauguration of Herbert Hoover as President, Charles Curtis became the first native-American Vice President.  Curtis had served as a  Congressman from Kansas from 1892–1906, where he championed Native American rights to self-government with the Curtis Act  in 1898. He served in the U.S. Senate from 1907 to 1913 and from 1915 to 1929.

            1934-Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Jane Goodall, British scientist famous for her work involving the social and family life (including tool making) of chimpanzees in Gombe Stream National Park in  Tanzania. In 1977, Goodall established the Jane Goodall Institute (JGI), which supports the Gombe research and is a global leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats.  Today, the park is ravaged by logging, and home to only about 40 chimps, who live confined to a few protected square miles. Yes, her chosen vocation involved monkeying around with primates

            1944-Saturday- ……..You're messin' with murder incorporated
Now you check over your shoulder everywhere that you go
Walkin down the streets, there's eyes in every shadow
You better take a look around you (come on now)
That equipment you got's so outdated
You can't compete with murder incorporated
Everywhere you look now there's murder incorporated…….Bruce Springsteen………… Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, head of Murder Incorporated was kaputed at Sing Sing Prison in New York State.  Lepke, subject of countless gangster movies, had been betrayed by his own men and a fatal error.  In 1935, associate, Dutch Schultz, another gangster movie favorite, wanted to “knock off” crusading District Attorney, Thomas E. Dewey.  Lepke was afraid of the backlash from such a murder and failed to give the order to kill Dewey.  Eventually, Dewey convicted Buchalter and Lepke was “kaputky”.  Lepke is the only major mob boss ever to have been executed by state or federal authorities for his crimes. Buchalter was involved in one of the great crime mysteries.  Murder Inc. hit man Abe Reles was arrested in 1939 for the murder of one Red Alpert. Reles cooperated with the legal authorities to receive immunity instead of the electric chair. For two weeks Reles, also known as "Kid Twist", gave detailed information about 85 murders including one committed by Lepke.  This led to Lepke’s conviction and execution. On November 12, 1941, while in the protection of six police officers, Reles mysteriously “fell” to his death from a window of the Half Moon Hotel in Coney Island, Brooklyn.  Reles was forever known as “the canary who could sing but could not fly”.  Dewey went on to be Governor of NY, lose to FDR in the 1944 presidential election and snatch defeat from victory with Harry Truman in the 1948 presidential election.

            1954 –Thursday-  Peter Bent Brigham Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, announced the first successful kidney transplant.  Drs. Joseph E. Murray, Hartwell Harrison, David Hume, and John Merril performed the transplant from Ronald Herrick into his identical twin Richard. Richard Herrick lived for another eight years. Murray became one of the co-winners of the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine along with E.D. Thomas "for their discoveries concerning organ and cell transplantation in the treatment of human disease." Later they moved onto kidney bean transplants (at dinner), kidney stone transplants (spread the suffering) and kidney pie transplants (at dessert).

            1959-Wednesday-  “A little to the left….no, no…more to the right…now up just a bit and …… the U.S. Pioneer 4 spacecraft missed Moon (well, it flew by but at 58,983 km it was twice the planned altitude) but became the second (U.S. first) artificial planet (after Explorer) and the first to escape Earth’s gravitational pull.   

            1962-Sunday- Atomic power came to  Antarctica as the Atomic Energy Commission announced that the first atomic power plant in Antarctica, the PM-3A, Naval Nuclear Power Unit, was in operation at McMurdo Sound. In 1972, it was decommissioned and replaced with a diesel electricity generator after scientists found that it had created giant mutant penguins that sang and danced and could kill with their cuteness.

             1979-Sunday-  With this ring I promise I'll always love you, always love you
With this ring I promise I'll always love you, always love you…..The Platters……A ring around the planet Jupiter was discovered by the Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977.  This ring lies roughly 31,000 miles (50,000 km) above the top cloud layer of this planet and inside the orbit of the innermost moon. The outer edge of the ring is sharply defined, but it is only a few tens of kilometers thick. The dark particles that make up the ring may have been chipped off by meteorite impacts on two small moons that lie very close to the ring itself. Subsequently rings have been discovered around Uranus and Neptune also.

            1982 –Thursday-  NASA launched Intelsat V, major advancement in satellite communications. It had something to do with Ku and C bands but Professor Sy Yentz tends to glaze over at this stuff. Maybe it was “K U and the Sunshine Band”…..no, no, no actually, the ku band is used particularly for editing and broadcasting satellite television.  The first commercial television network to extensively utilize the Ku Band for most of its affiliate feeds was NBC, in 1983.  Somehow this may be responsible for the epidemic the dread disease, Enhancius Cheekius which causes excessive plastic surgery in those with too much dispensable income

            1985 -Monday The Food and Drug Administration approved a blood test for AIDS. It has since been used  for screening all blood donations in the United States.

             1991 –Monday- The "Rotoblator," an artery cleaning tool, was announced by Dr. Maurice Buchbinder at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology. Rotoblator is a procedure similar to an angioplasty except instead of using a balloon, the catheter has a microscopic diamond crystal burr at the tip. The catheter is attached to a high speed motor that rotates the burr to grind the blockage away. It was hoped that the movie version, The Rotoblator, Revenge of the Cholesterol, would star Arnold Schwarzenegger.

            1994 –Friday- The launch of Discovery, STS-62, for a 13 day, 23 hours, 16 minutes, 41 seconds mission. Unbeknownst to the crew of John H. Casper , CommanderAndrew M. Allen , Pilot,Pierre J. Thuot , Mission Specialist 1, Charles D. Gemar, Mission Specialist  and Marsha S. Ivins , Mission Specialist 3, space microbes were brought back to Earth.  These microbes created a mutant gene that causes people to talk loudly on their cell phones while waiting to pay at the check out counter.

            2006 –Saturday Hello, hello, hello
Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me.
Is there anyone at home? …….Pink Floyd………A final contact attempt with Pioneer 10 by the Deep Space Network was made.  No response was received. Sort of like when you call your cable TV company. Originally designed for a 21-month mission, Pioneer 10 lasted more than 30 years. It was launched from Cape Canaveral  on March 2, 1972. Pioneer's last, very weak signal was received on Jan. 22, 2003.  Pioneer 10 is heading in the direction of Aldebaran, about sixty five light years away,  located in Taurus.

Back

5.       

1133 –Sunday- Happy Birthday, King Henry II of England, the first Plantagenet king and son of the Empress Matilda and Henry I.  Henry married Eleanor of Aquitaine, was the father of Kings Richard I, and John (the only King John so he doesn’t get a number).  He was also responsible for the death of his former friend Thomas Becket.  Henry was among the most effective of all England's monarchs. He came to the throne after the anarchy of King Stephen's reign (Civil War with forces of Matilda and barons running amuck) and promptly controlled the ever feuding barons. He refined Norman government and created a capable, self-standing bureaucracy. Of course he spoke no English.  Nor did his son, Richard I (Lion Heart).

            1324 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday, David II, King of Scotland, the son of the great King Robert the Bruce (brother of Lenny the Bruce) .  David ascended to the throne at age five. Continuing what would be a centuries long Scottish tradition his guardians lost a series of battles to King Edward III of England. The Scots cherished their victories through history, alas there were so few compared to the defeats. David fled to France.  Returning as an adult, he lost yet another battle, was captured and ransomed. He was unable to pay the ransom so he offered to turn his kingdom over to Edward. Needless to say, David was one of the lesser lights in Scottish history.

            1496 –Thursday-  King Henry VII “hired” Giovanni Caboto of Venice to explore. The petition for letters patent was presented to King Henry VII on this date by “John Cabotto, Citezen of Venice” and his three sons (PRO, P.S.O. 2, 146). The letters patent, under the same date, authorized Cabot, his sons, their heirs, and their deputies to sail with five ships “to all parts, countries and seas of the East, of the West, and of the North,” thus excluding them from the region of the Spanish discoveries in the Caribbean. They were however empowered to “discover and find whatsoever isles, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world they be, which before this time were unknown to all Christians”; if Cabot found new land in the zone to which he was restricted by the preceding clause, he was therefore permitted to follow its coast into the latitudes of discoveries by other nations. The patentees were to hold newly found lands under the king and received other privileges; no other subjects of the king might frequent lands discovered by the patentees without their license. http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?BioId=34223 In the summer of 1497, he crossed the Atlantic and discovered the mainland of North America—probably the Labrador coast. On this achievement was based the claim of England to North America.

            1512-Tuesday- Happy Birthday, Gerard Mercator, Flemish geographer and map maker.         His Mercator projection map developed in 1569 is the one that makes Greenland look like a continent. In his map, Mercator drew straight, equidistant longitude lines, perpendicular to latitude lines, forming a grid which could be used to accurately determine sea routes. He also did maps of Italy, Slavonia, Greece and Candia, Europe as a whole and a detailed map of EuroDisney with the “best rides” with “shortest lines” highlighted.  Mercator coined the word "atlas" to mean a group of maps.

            1558 –Wednesday- Smokin' in the boys' room
Smokin' in the boys' room
Now, teacher, don't you fill me up with your rules
But everybody knows that smokin' ain't allowed in school.
All right!.........Brownsville Station……..In a cloud of noxious fumes, smoking tobacco was introduced in Europe by Francisco Fernandes.  Fernandes was, of all things, a doctor.  He had been sent to the New World by King Philip II to report on its products and brought back some plants, seeds and an MP3 player. Tobacco was reputed to have wonderful healing properties (probably Native American revenge for European diseases) and that caused the habit of smoking and snuff-taking to spread with great rapidity over almost the whole of Europe. Jean Nicot, the French ambassador to Portugal, who gave his name to the genus Nicotiana, helped spread the stuff to France via the court of Marie DeMedici. From Nicot, we of course get nicotine.         

            1574 –Sunday- Slip sliding away, slip sliding away
You know the nearer your destination, the more you slip sliding away….Paul Simon….. Happy Birthday, William Oughtred, English mathematician who is best known for his invention the slide rule. He also invented many new symbols including X for multiplication and :: for proportion. In 1620, Edmund Gunter plotted a logarithmic scale along a single straight two foot long ruler. He added and subtracted lengths by using a pair of dividers, operations that were equivalent to multiplying and dividing. In 1630 Oughtred invented a circular slide rule. In 1632 he used two Gunter rulers so that he could do away with the dividers. The present form of the slide rule was designed in 1850 by a French army officer, Amedee Mannheim.

            1616-Thursday-  The  Copernican theory of the sun-centered Solar System was declared "false and erroneous" in a decree written by Cardinal Robert Bellarmine. It was a reaction to the publication of Paolo Antonio Foscarini's book, the intriguingly titled tract Lettera sopra l'Opinione de' Pittagorici, e del Copernico della Mobilità della Terra, e Stabilità del Sole, e del Nuove Pittagorica Systema del Mondo ("Letter concerning the Opinion of the Pythagoreans and Copernicus about the Mobility of the Earth and Stability of the Sun, and about the New Pythagorean System of the World"), defending the Copernican system from the charge that it clashed with the Scriptures. Bellarmine said that the theory was poopy.  He then said to Galileo, “bite me”, followed by “If mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy “, Bellarmine then warned Galileo to cease promulgation of the theory.  When Galileo did not cease and violated the decree, he was put on trial and held under house arrest for the final eight years of his life. Bellarmine was canonized in 1930.

            1749-Monday- Every boy wants a girl
He can trust to the very end
Baby, that's you
Won't you wait but 'til then
When I see lips beggin' to be kissed (stop)
I can't stop (stop)
I can't stop myself
(Stop, stop)
Lightning is striking again
Lightning is striking again ……..Lou Christie……..Benjamin Franklin installed a lightning rod on his home in Philadelphia.  Even then he couldn't get cable T.V.  We presume he was not shocked by this. In addition to wanting to prove that lightning was electricity, Franklin began to think about protecting people, buildings, and other structures from lightning. This grew into his idea for the lightning rod. Franklin described an iron rod about 8 or 10 feet long that was sharpened to a point at the end. He wrote, "the electrical fire would, I think, be drawn out of a cloud silently, before it could come near enough to strike..." He finally perfected the lightening rod in 1752.  Surprisingly, he never wrote letters about his legendary kite experiment; someone else wrote the only account 15 years after it took place

            1770-Saturday-  The “Boston Massacre” (the original massacre had nothing to do with the Yankees and Red Sox) occurred as a mob of American colonists gathered at the Customs House in Boston to protest the occupation of their city by British troops.  The troops had been sent to Boston in 1768 to enforce unpopular taxation measures passed Parliament. American colonists had no representation at the Parliament hence the slogan, “no taxation without representation” .The colonists threw snowballs and other objects at the British regulars, and Private Hugh Montgomery was hit by a snowball. He reacted as any of us would when being hit by a snowball………… by  firing his rifle at the crowd!   The other soldiers began firing a moment later, and when the smoke cleared, five colonists were dead or dying - Crispus Attucks, Patrick Carr, Samuel Gray, Samuel Maverick, and James Caldwell.

            1821-Monday  Presidents used to be inaugurated on March 4.  Since March 4 was a Sunday this year, the “no inauguration on the Sabbath” rule went into effect and James Monroe (the fifth president –with John Adams being  the exception- four of the first five were from Virginia) was inaugurated on this day, March 5.  The Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution changed the presidential inauguration date from March 4 to January 20. The change was first instituted in 1937 for Franklin D. Roosevelt but the “no inauguration on the Sabbath” rule is still in effect.

            1830 –Friday- Happy Birthday, Sir C. Wyville Thomson, Scottish naturalist who was one of the first marine biologists to describe life in the ocean depths. Thomson was director of the scientific work of the Challenger expedition (1872-76) and wrote an account of the cruise, The Voyage of the Challenger (1877).  Earlier, he participated in three deep-sea dredging expeditions (1868-70) and obtained evidence that animal life abounded in depths previously believed to be azoic. Among the life forms discovered were non English speaking cabbies in New York, rude waiters, and Martha Stewart (see this day 2004).

            1830 –Friday- Happy Birthday, Étienne-Jules Marey, French physiologist and chronophotographer, and birthday twin of Wyville Thompson (see above) who while studying how blood moves in the body invented the sphygmograph. This device made a graphical record of the pulse and variations in blood pressure. He published, Le mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie.  While the sphygmograph went a long way towards standardizing the measuring of the pulse, it never replaced palpation—the measurement of the pulse by touch. Later, Marey immersed himself into the study of flight, first of insects and then birds. His aim was to understand how a wing interacted with the air to cause the animal to move.

            1868 –Thursday- The stapler was patented in Birmingham, England by C.H. Gould. The stapler seems to have had quite a few “fathers”.  Recall that Samuel Slocum invented a stapler-like machine in 1842 although it was just for sticking pins in paper, not fastening. Gould came the closest to the modern stapler with his wire “stitcher” for use in binding magazines. Gould's wire stitcher used uncut wire, which then cut and inserted the wire in the folds of the magazine as well as folding the wire ends over. However, if one starts researching the history of staplers….whew!....one can get stuck…..It starts with (oh, this is sooooooo Clintonesque) how you define a stapler.   If you define a stapler as a portable device or machine that inserts and clinches a wire staple in paper in a single operation – the American stapling site is  http://www.oldstaplers.com/stapler_history.html.  However, the first stapler in recorded history was the stapling machine or fastener of King Louis XV of France in the 1700s. Each staple had to be handmade and was inscribed with the insignia of the royal court. On July 24, 1866, George W. McGill was awarded U.S. Patent No. 56,587 for a small, bendable brass paper fastener, the precursor to the modern staple. On August 13, 1867, he received U.S. Patent No. 67,665 for a press to insert the fastener into paper. He showed his invention at the 1867 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, and continued to work on these and other various paper fasteners through the 1880s. On February 18, 1879, Patent No. 212,316 was given for the McGill Single-Stroke Staple Press. This device weighed over two and a half pounds and was able to load a single 1/2 inches wide wire staple at a time and drive it through several sheets of paper. http://www.edinformatics.com/inventions_inventors/stapler.htm  One thing is for certain. You will run out of staples in the middle of a project.

            1872 –Tuesday- Stop, in the name of love
Before you brake my heart
Think it o o over…..The Supremes……..George Westinghouse patented the air brake.  Initially used as brake for railway trains, the invention went through several modifications through the years, but it was a revolutionary invention for railways as it allowed trains to travel at higher speeds more safely. It is now also used in big trucks, buses, amusement park rides and controlling flatulence.

            1876-Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Edouard Belin, inventor in 1907 of the phototelegraphic apparatus. This was a  system that was able to send photographs, via telephone and telegraphic networks. Today’s photo copiers work on the same principal. Belin’s first telephoto transmission was from Paris to Lyon to Bordeaux and back to Paris. The first transatlantic transmission was made in 1921 between Annapolis, Md., and Belin's laboratories at La Malmaison, France. Earlier in 1907, Arthur Korn,  a German inventor, used the light-sensitive element selenium to convert the different tones of a scanned image into a varying electric current.

            1893 -Sunday"Hey Culligan Man"....Happy Birthday, Emmett J. Culligan, inventor of the water-softening device. And what is water softening?  Hard water contains calcium and magnesium which can cause "scale" to form on the inside of pipes, water heaters, tea kettles and so on. The calcium and magnesium precipitate out of the water and stick to things. The scale doesn't conduct heat well and it also reduces the flow through pipes. Eventually, pipes can become completely clogged. Ew! With a water softener the calcium and magnesium ions in the water are replaced with sodium ions. Since sodium does not precipitate out in pipes or react badly with soap, both of the problems of hard water are eliminated.

            1904 –Saturday-  It's like thunder and lightning,
the way you love me is frightening.
You better knock, knock on wood, baby. ………Eddie Floyd…..One hundred and fifty five years to the day after Benjamin Franklin’s installation of a lightening rod, Serbian/American inventor and physicist, Nikola Tesla, in Electrical World and Engineer, described the process of ball lightning formation, a rare phenomenon that resembles a glowing sphere of electricity.  Ball lightening is observed floating or moving through the atmosphere close to the ground in the shape of a glowing red ball that can last anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes. Typically associated with thunderstorms, these spheres are thought to consist of ionized gas.

            1915 –Friday-  Happy Birthday, Laurent Schwartz ( brother of Bermuda Schwartz), French mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal (the Mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize) in 1950 for his work in functional analysis.  And what is functional analysis you may ask?  Functional analysis is the branch of mathematics, and specifically of analysis, concerned with the study of vector spaces and operators acting upon them.  That should clear things us nicely…..if you know what a vector space is, that is. According to Wolfram Mathworld, A vector space  is a set that is closed under finite vector addition and scalar multiplication. The basic example is -dimensional Euclidean space , where every element is represented by a list of  real numbers, scalars are real numbers, addition is componentwise, and scalar multiplication is multiplication on each term separately. So there.

            1934 –Monday Happy Birthday, Daniel Kahneman American psychologist who was awarded a share of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty." No one disputed the prize because no one could understand the explanation.  However, Kahneman performed his research in order to increase understanding of how people make economic decisions. He drew on cognitive psychology in relation to the mental processes used in forming judgments and making choices. This obtuse explanation would from the same organization that in 2008 awarded President Barack Obama a Nobel Peace Prize for doing …….well…..he didn’t really do anything.

            1938 – Saturday- Mother in Law  Mother In Law
Mother in Law Mother In Law
The worst person I know
(Mother-in law, mother-in law)
(Mother-in law, mother-in law)
A she worries me, so
If she'd leave us alone
A we would have a happy home
Sent from down below
Mother in Law Mother in Law …..Ernie K. Doe…………The first Mother-in-Law Day was celebrated in Amarillo, Texas. Within a few years, mothers-in-law by the thousands were gathering in Amarillo to celebrate their important contributions to the American history.  The idea came from newspaperman, Gene Howe.  Howe good-naturedly claimed March 5, 1938, as Mother-in-Law Day, in an effort to make up with his wife’s mother, whom he had angered in a column. His efforts helped attract First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to town to observe a large parade, which included one float that carried 650 mothers-in-law. http://www.amarillo.com/agn100/forward/

            1940 –Tuesday-  When mass murderers collide.  Following the invasion of Poland, shared with the Nazis in September, 1939, members of Soviet politburo – see Josef Stalin (this day, 1953)- signed an order for the execution of 25,700 Polish intelligentsia, including 14,700 Polish POWs, known to history as the Katyn massacre.

            1943 –Friday-  The premiere of Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman.  This sequel to sequel to both the Ghost of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man, would be followed next by House Of Frankenstein. “A Death Fight . . . Between Two Beasts !” First, Lawrence Talbot, the Wolfman is resurrected.  Whoops! He’s still a wolfman so he goes in search of Dr. Frankenstein for help but Dr. Frankenstein is no more.  Complications arise and somehow Talbot finds Frankenstein’s monster frozen in ice.  Once thawed out and epic battle ensues.  The film is notable for Dracula himself, Bela Lugosi, playing Frankenstein’s monster.  Frankenstein would turn into quite the social butterfly with follow up movies; Frankenstein Meets the Space Monster, Frankenstein Meets Dracula, and, of course  Bud Abbott and Lou Costello Meet Frankenstein.

            1946 –Tuesday-  Winston Churchill delivered his famous "Iron Curtain" speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri. The reference was to the Communist takeovers of eastern European nations, not a suggestion of what to do about wrinkly window treatments.

            1953-Thursday-  Oh the weather outside is frightful
But the fire is so delightful
And since we've no place to go
Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow! …………lyricist Sammy Cahn, composer Jule Styne….. Snow fell at the 8,500 ft. level on Hakeakala, Maui, Hawaii. Tourists discovered that there are no sweaters or parkas for sale anywhere in Hawaii and a request for one results in immediate deportation.

            1953 –Thursday-  Malevolent Communist Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, one of the most evil humans in history, went kaput at age 73 after 29 years in power,  responsible for millions of deaths. After coming to the fore under Lenin in the early 1920s, he gradually assumed control of the Communist Party and the country by subtly liquidating all rivals, real and imagined. In 1934 and 1938 he inaugurated a massive purge of the party, government, armed forces, and intelligentsia in which millions of so-called ‘enemies of the people’ were imprisoned, exiled, and executed. In 1939 he signed the Non-Aggression Pact with Hitler and attacked Poland. The pact with the Nazis lasted until the German invasion  of 1941,  and magically, the USSR became a member of the “Allies”  - he was now “Uncle Joe” since, he was fighting the Nazis. Stalin took part in the conferences of Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam which resulted in Soviet military and political control over the liberated countries of post-war Europe. From 1945 until his death he resumed his even more repressive measures at home, and conducted a foreign policy with the goal of global domination which initiated the Cold War (see Churchill 1946 above) between the Soviet Union and the West.

            1958 –Wednesday-  Explorer 2 kaput as the unmanned spacecraft launched, but failed to reach Earth orbit. That means it crashed. In the days before NASA, Explorer was the U.S Army’s space project.  Three of these attempts ended in failure. They were: Explorer II, RS-26, on 5 March 1958; Explorer V, RS-47, on 24 August 1958; and Explorer VI, RS-49, on 23 October 1958 The three successful ones were Explorer I Explorer III, RS~24, on 26 March 1958 and Explorer IV, RS-44, on 26 July 1958. Explorer IV RS-44 resulted in a rain of nano microbes that caused the annoying disease of Parasitisia Attorneyasisium, the epidemic of personal injury lawyer commercials.

            1963-Tuesday- The Hula-Hoop, which had been first marketed by Wham-O in 1958, was finally  patented by the company's co-founder, Arthur  Melin on this date. Why the six year delay?  Wham-O was unable to obtain a patent for their plastic hoop, since a hoop is a hoop no matter what it is made of. However, they were able to market their hoops under the brand name and later trademark of 'Hula Hoop’. You might also know Wham-O from their Frisbees. Melin and co-founder Richard Knerr were inspired to develop the Hula-Hoop after they saw a wooden hoop that Australian children twirled around their waists during gym class. Wham-O began producing a plastic version of the hoop, dubbed "Hula" after Hawaiian dance of the same name.  Hula Hoops, while never completely went away, made something of a comeback early in the 21^st Century as fitness equipment.

             1963 –Tuesday- Country music singer Patsy Cline, her greatest hit was Crazy, died in a plane crash near Camden, Tenn., at age 30.  Cline, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Cowboy Copas and Cline’s manager, Randy Hughes were en route to Nashville, home of the Grand Ole Opry, from a benefit show in Kansas City when their plane went down during bad weather.

            1968 –Tuesday- Meanwhile, on the Explorer front (see 1958 above),  the  U.S. launched Solar Explorer B, aka Explorer 37 from Wallops Island, off the coast of Virginia,  to study the Sun by monitoring solar x-ray emissions. These same x-ray emissions would cause an irresistible urge in some women to get sun tans by lying on machines with UV lights (now called “tanning beds”) that would occasionally turn them orange.)

            1970 –Thursday-  Dubnium atoms were first detected conclusively. Dubnium, Atomic Number:  105, Atomic Weight:  268 is named for n amed for the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research at Dubna, Russia. Russia, which has at one time or another claimed every invention or discovery ever made, claimed to have found it in 1967.  On this day, in 1970, a group of scientists working at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory, in Berkeley, California, bombarded atoms of californium-249 with ions of nitrogen-15, forming atoms of dubnium-260 and 4 free neutrons. Credit for the discovery of dubnium is still under debatium. Dubnium has a half-life of about 16 hours. It decays into lawrencium. And that’s itium.

            1973 –Monday- The strangest trade in baseball history. Two New York Yankee pitchers, Fritz Peterson and Mike Kekich announced that they had traded wives.  The two loons and their equally loopy spouses, announced they had swapped wives, two children apiece and even family dogs, the Kekiches had a terrier, the Petersons a poodle. Peterson and the female Kekich stayed together but the male Kekich and female Peterson broke up. No word on the dogs.

            1982 –Friday- Actor/comedian John Belushi was found kaput of a drug overdose at age 33.  Belushi was injected with a "speedball," a potent mixture of heroin and cocaine. Early that afternoon the wasted comedian was dead in his hotel bed, and a Hollywood parasite named Cathy Smith later confessed to administering the fatal shot.

            1982 –Friday-  Venera 14,after a four month cruise to Venus landed on the planet at 13,25° S, 310° E (about 950 km southwest of  where Venera 13 had landed)  on a basaltic plain. The lander had cameras to take pictures of the ground and spring-loaded arms to measure the compressibility of the soil. The camera windows were covered by lens caps which popped off after descent. In a Laurel and Hardy moment, Venera 14, however, ended up measuring the compressibility of the lens cap (!!!) instead of the soil since the lens cap landed right where the probe was supposed to measure the soil.

The lander survived for 57 minutes (the planned design life was 32 minutes) in an environment with a temperature of 465 °C and a pressure of 94 Earth atmospheres (9.5 MPa). No word on the lens cap survival.

            1991-Tuesday- U.S. patent No. 5,000,000 was issued for a process turning garbage into fuel to microbiologist Lonnie. O. Ingram of the University of Florida. His method involved the creation of a new species of bacterium (also known as Chavezius Hugoius) genetically formed from two other bacteria.  And wherefore Patent No. 1? The United States Patent Office was established in 1790. The very first patent was issued July 31 of that year to one Samuel Hopkins. Hopkins patented a process for making potash and pearl ash, types of potassium compounds used to make soap and fertilizer and resulting in a pain in the ash. Nearly 10,000 United States patents were granted between July 31, 1790 and July 2, 1836. These patents were not numbered but were referenced only by name and date. So, who’s number 1? Patent  No. 1 was  issued on July 13th, 1836, to inventor John Ruggles of Thomaston, Maine for railroad traction wheels

And ? his daughter
Chubby Clementine. …………Bobby Darin……….. NASA announced that the Clementine probe orbiting the Moon had found enough water to support a human colony……In fact a colony was already there!  In the years since then immigrants from the Moon Colony have returned to Earth.  They are easy to identify by their uncontrollable urges towards self mutilation via tattoos and body piercings.

            2004 –Friday- Relentless self promoter, talentless and inexplicably popular TV doyenne, Martha Stewart was convicted for, conspiracy, making false statement and obstruction of justice. She had conveniently unloaded 3,298 shares of ImClone Systems stock just before the price plummeted. She would go on to make the list for the National Enquirer's "Worst Celebrity Beach Bodies of 2006".

Back

6.       1340 –Sunday - Happy Birthday-  John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster  and one of William Shakespeare’s favorite characters.  John, the son of Edward III, wasn’t gaunt but was born in Ghent, (what is now Belgium), he was Gaunt of Ghent. His brothers were Edward, the Black Prince, Lionel, the Duke of Clarence, Edmund, Duke of York and Thomas the Duke of Gloucester, as well as  Bo and Luke, the Dukes of Hazzard , and Gene Chandler, Duke of Earl. After the death of his elder brother, the Black Prince, John became increasingly powerful as the protector of his brother's young son, Richard II and effectively ruled England during Richard’s minority. Later in life he took Katherine Swynford as his mistress and then married her when he was fifty-six years old. They had four children who he had legitimized as Beaufort and these  would be the ancestors of the Tudors. His eldest son from his first wife, Blanche,  the Duke of Hereford became Henry IV when Richard II was de-throned. Henry IV was the first of the royal line of Lancaster. John is also remembered as the patron of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer (Canterbury Tales).

            1405 –Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Juan II, King of Castile from 1406 to 1454. He was the son of Henry III of Castile and his wife Katherine of Lancaster, daughter of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster (see 1340 above).  He was also great-grandson of King Edward III of England through the maternal line. Like the majority of kings he was rather inept. Juan was first influenced by his “favorite” – nudge nudge wink wink - one Alvaro de Luna, until his second wife, Queen Isabella of Portugal outfavorited de Luna and became his primary influence.

            1475-Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, and poet. Michelangelo’s  paintings and sculptures changed the art forever. In a body of work that lasted over seventy years, he is probably most famous for his sculptures of the Pieta, now in St. Peter’s in Rome, and David , at the Accademia in Florence, as well as  his artwork on  the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and The Last Judgement  on the Alter Wall.  For a biography with particular attention to his work in Rome, The Gnus Editorial Board highly recommend Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling by Ross King

            1521 –Sunday-  After months at sea, Ferdinand Magellan arrived at Guam, the largest island in the Marianas Archepelegos. On Oct. 21, 1520, his flotilla entered the Strait of Magellan. It proceeded cautiously, taking over a month to pass through the strait. During this time the master of the San Antonio deserted and sailed back to Spain, and so only three of the original five ships entered the Pacific on November 28. There followed a long, monotonous voyage northward through the Pacific, and it was only on March 6, 1521, that the fleet finally anchored at Guam. There they went scuba diving, dolphin,  watching, jet skiing, parasailing, visited Tatafoto Falls,  purchased handcrafts, curios, “I Heart Guam T shirts and visited the Micronesia Mall.

            1619-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday Cyrano de Bergerac, French soldier, satirist, and dramatist, whose life has been the basis of many romantic but unhistorical legends. Cyrano is more famous for what was written about him, notably, Edmond Rostand’s verse drama Cyrano de Bergerac in1897 from which almost everything else is derived, than his actual life.  The drama featured his conspicuous proboscis.  Also of note is his rather unheroic denouement – he was hit on the head by a falling plank as he was walking down a street.

            1806-Thursday-  "How do I love thee. Let me count the ways...." from the Sonnets from the Portuguese, Happy Birthday,  Elizabeth Barrett Browning, English poet. A self taught classical scholar, during her teenage years, instead of texting her friends, she read the principal Greek and Latin authors and Dante's Inferno — all in the original languages. She even learned enough Hebrew to read the Old Testament from beginning to end. In 1821, Elizabeth injured her spine as a result of a fall. When her brother died in 1838, she seemingly became a permanent invalid. She spent the majority of her time in her room writing poetry. In 1844, Robert Browning wrote to Elizabeth of his admiration for her poems. He continued to write to her and it turned into a wooing.  They became engaged in 1845. Elizabeth's father disapproved of the courtship and engagement. In 1846, Elizabeth and Robert eloped and ran off to Italy where Elizabeth's health improved. She continued to live in the villa of Casa Guidi for the remainder of her life.

            1812 –Friday As I was walking down the street one day
A man came up to me and asked me what
The time was that was on my watch, yeah...And I said
(I don't) Does anybody really know what time it is
(Care) Does anybody really care (about time)
If so I can't imagine why (Oh no, no)
We've all got time enough to cry……Chicago…………… Happy Birthday, Aaron Lufkin Dennison, who, in 1850, and began to produce the first inexpensive factory-made watches with interchangeable parts to enhance quality and lower the price of watches. He is regarded as the father of American watch making. Yes, another “father of”… We’ve compiled a fairly comprehensive “fathers of list thanks to Economic Expert.com.  See  

            1834 –Thursday-   With its population, reaching 9,000, York, Upper Canada was incorporated as Toronto.   Toronto is a Huron Indian word meaning 'Meeting Place'. The first settlement in the entire Toronto area, was Teiaiagon, which was populated by the Seneca Indians and then later by the Mississauga Indians on the east bank of the Humber River and lately a lousy hockey team.

1836-Sunday-  Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, Colonel William Travis, John Wayne, Fess Parker, Dennis Quaid, Billy Bob Thornton, Richard Widmark, James Arness, Brian Keith, Laurence Harvey and 186 other Americans were killed as the 13 day siege of the Alamo ended when it was overrun by General Santa Ana's Mexican Army troops. Santa Anna's army arrived in San Antonio on February 23  1836. Some 145 Texans in the area took refuge in the fortified grounds of an old mission known as the Alamo, under the joint command of William B. Travis (for the regular army) and Jim Bowie (for the volunteers).  Over the following two weeks, the Mexican forces continually strengthened to over 2000 troops. With odds of over 2000 vs. 189, this was a battle that even the consistently inept Santa Anna could win.  During the same period, a few reinforcements for the Texans answered Travis' famous “Appeal for Aid” and managed to penetrate enemy lines and enter the Alamo grounds, bringing the total strength of the defenders to about 189 men. After periodic bombardment, the siege ended on this morning when the Mexicans stormed the fortress. All of the Texan defenders were killed. Contrary to movie lore, there were some survivors as several non-combatants were spared, including Susanna Dickenson, the wife of one of the defenders, Susanna's baby, and a servant of Travis.

            1853 –Sunday- Libiamo, libiamo ne'lieti calici
che la belleza infiora.
E la fuggevol ora s'inebrii
a volutt
Libiamo ne'dolci fremiti
che suscita l'amore,
poich quell'ochio al core
Omnipotente va.
Libiamo, amore fra i calici
pi caldi baci avr.
All:
Ah, libiamo;
amor fra i calici
Pi caldi baci avr................Composer Giuseppe Verdi's opera La Traviata,based on Alexandre Dumas's play,  La Dame aux Camélias, premiered at Teatro la Fenice, Venice, Italy.

                         1857 –Friday-  In the Dred Scott decision, the United States Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice, Roger Taney, issued a ruling in which the court affirmed the right of slave owners to take their slaves into the western territories. This negated the doctrine of popular sovereignty and severely undermined the platform of the newly created Republican Party. Dred Scott was a slave whose owner, an army doctor, had spent time in Illinois, a free state, and Wisconsin, a free territory at the time of Scott's residence. When the Army ordered his master to go back to Missouri, he took Scott with him back to that slave state, where his master proceeded to go  kaput. In 1846, Scott was helped by Abolitionist (anti-slavery) lawyers to sue for his freedom in court, claiming he should be free since he had lived on free soil for a long time. The case went all the way to the United States Supreme Court. Unfortunately, for Scott, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Taney, was a former slave owner from Maryland.  The court decision rolled back the Compromise of 1850 and declared slaves to be property.  Civil War followed within 4 years.

1869 –Saturday- There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.
There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.
Isn't that interesting? ……Tom Lehrer……..Russian chemist, Dmitry Mendeleev published his first version of the periodic table of the elements.  His original notes read; “there are a lot of them and they have long names that get confusing and lots of them really smell bad and some of them explode”.  Of course being Russian, he would have said “Есть много и они имеют длинные имена, что получить в заблуждение и множество из них очень плохой запах, а некоторые из них взорвались”. When Mendeleev became a professor of general chemistry at the University of St. Petersburg, he was unable to find an appropriate textbook and thus began writing his own. That textbook, written between 1868 and 1870, would provide a framework for modern chemical and physical theory. In his book, The Principles of Chemistry, Mendeleev created a table or chart that listed the known elements according to increasing order of atomic weights.  

1879 –Thursday- Happy Birthday, Benton MacKaye, American forester, planner, and conservationist. He was a co-founder of The Wilderness Society, but is best known as the originator of the Appalachian Trail, an idea he presented in his 1921 article, An Appalachian Trail: A Project in Regional Planning. The Appalachian Trail is a continuous marked footpath that goes from Katahdin in Maine to Springer Mountain in Georgia, a distance of about 2160 miles. The Editorial Board of the Gnus highly recommends, Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods  to get you acquainted with the trail.

            1896- Friday- Ten years after Carl Benz patented the first gasoline automobile in          Germany, and three years after the Duryea Brothers’ first vehicle, Charles B.         King tested his automobile on the streets of Detroit, Michigan thus becoming the    first man to drive a car in what would become the center of automobile manufacturing and also become known as the “Motor City”.  Ironically, King     was followed by Henry Ford, who was riding a bicycle.            http://automotivehalloffame.org/honors/index.php?cmd=view&id=751&type=ind           uctees King’s vehicle was immediately carjacked by several local “youth”.

1899-Monday "Aspirin" was patented by German chemist, Felix Hoffmann. He had successfully developed the chemically pure and stable form of acetylsalicylic acid in 1897 to help treat his father’s rheumatoid arthritis. In 400 BC Greek physician Hippocrates had prescribed the bark and leaves of the willow tree (rich in a substance called salicin) to relieve pain and fever. Many people broke their teeth before Hippocrates reminded them to “mush the bark up first”. During the 1830’s scientists had  discovered and worked with salicin and found, as Hippocrates had found,  it gave one temporary relief from pain.  The problem was that salicylic acid was tough on stomachs (there was no Tums in those days) resulting in a pain in the aspirin, and a means of 'buffering' the compound was searched for. The first person to find it was a French chemist named Charles Frederic Gerhardt. In 1853, Gerhardt neutralized salicylic acid by buffering it with sodium (sodium salicylate) and acetyl chloride, creating acetylsalicylic acid. Gerhardt's product worked but he had no desire to market it and abandoned his discovery. There it sat until Hoffman, working for the Bayer Company, picked up on the research.

               1906-Tuesday- Costello: Well then who's on first?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: I mean the fellow's name.

Abbott: Who.

Costello: The guy on first.

Abbott: Who.

Costello: The first baseman.

Abbott: Who. C

ostello: The guy playing...

Abbott: Who is on first!

Costello: I'm asking YOU who's on first.

Abbott: That's the man's name.

Costello: That's who's name?

Abbott: Yes. Happy Birthday, Lou Costello, American comedian and the heavier half of the team of Abbott and Costello. Famous for vaudeville routines, radio, movies  such as Buck Privates, Pardon My Sarong, the excellent The Time of Their Lives, and the monster series with the best being Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.   After their movies had devolved to Abbott and Costello Meet Captain Kidd, with Charles Laughton as Captain Kid, and Abbott and Costello Go to Mars, they turned to television (while still churning out potential Academy Award cinema efforts such as Abbott and Costello Meet the Keystone Kops) for the Abbott and Costello television show which ran for fifty three episodes.

1915 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Pete Gray, American baseball player. Pete Gray was unique in the history of baseball.  He had only one arm.  Playing with only his left arm, he came to national attention in 1944 when he batted .333 for minor league, Memphis. He  hit five home runs and  tied a league record by stealing 68 bases while being named the Southern Association's MVP. Major League Baseball had a shortage of able players due to World War II. Gray earned a spot with the 1945 St. Louis Browns. We’d like to tell you how well he did but Gray was overmatched. In seventy seven games he hit .218 and failed to hit a home run.  When baseball returned to full strength in 1946, the Browns sent Gray down to the minor leagues. Yes, it was a Farewell to Arm.

1927-Sunday-  Lots of astronaut birthdays this month. Happy Birthday, Gordon Cooper, one of the original 7 American astronauts. Can you name the other six? Hint: they are not Dopey, Sneezy, Doc, Bashful…………… On May 15-16, 1963, he piloted the Faith 7 spacecraft on a 22-orbit mission which concluded the operational phase of Project Mercury. During the 34 hours and 20 minutes of flight, Faith 7 Cooper became the first American to sleep in orbit after being forced to watch Meet the Press. Cooper also served as command pilot of the 8-day 120-revolution Gemini 5 mission which began on August 21, 1965.

1930 –Thursday-  The first individually packaged frozen foods were put on sale by General Foods - Birds Eye Frosted Foods - in Springfield, Massachusetts.  In this test market, the veggies, chicken, and beef proved successful.  The frozen musk ox, rattlesnake, pancreas de platypus and prairie dog brains, considerably less so.

1937 –Saturday- Happy Birthday, Valentina Tereschova, Soviet cosmonaut who was the first woman to fly in space, and remains the only woman to fly in space solo. That meant she didn’t have to worry about some guy leaving the toilet seat up.  She was launched in  Vostok 6 on  June 16,  1963, two days after Valery F. Bykovsky in Vostok 5. Tereshkova made 48 orbits of Earth in 71 hours. The two cosmonauts both landed on June 19.  Tereshkova left the program shortly after her return. The flight was 20 years before that of the first American woman into space, Sally Ride

            1947-Thursday- The first air conditioned naval ship, the USS  Newport           News was launched from the shipbuilding yard at (surprise!) Newport News,             VA.  It was a Des Moines class heavy cruiser (one class lighter than a   battleship) and would eventually be scrapped  in 1992.  The American Navy     likes to recycle names so there were three Newport Newses in all. The first      Newport News (AK-3) was a German cargo ship named Odenwald, taken over        by the U.S. Navy during World War I and renamed. The second was this one   and the third Newport News (SSN-750), a ''Los Angeles''-class submarine, is             still in service

            1947 –Thursday- Happy Birthday,  Dick Fosbury, American high jumper.  Prior to Fosbury, high jumpers would approach the bar and throw their leg over and roll with the body to follow.  Fosbury created the “Fosbury Flop” in which he ran to bar at speed and heaved himself over leading with his head then shoulders with both legs following.  All contemporary  high jumpers use variations of the “Fosbury Flop”.

            1950-Monday- Silly Putty was introduced as a toy by Peter Hodgson.  Hodgson, unemployed at the time, packaged one-ounce portions of the rubber-like material in plastic eggs. It could be stretched, rolled into a bouncing ball, or used to transfer colored ink from newsprint. Silly Putty was discovered in 1943 by scientist James Wright, who was working on a synthetic rubber substitute – there was a shortage of rubber - for General Electric during World War II. While the mixture of silicone oil and boric acid was a dud as a rubber substitute, the substance did have some unique properties. Wright found that it could be molded, stretched and bounced. Perhaps if the idea had caught on in 1943, they would have sold tires in giant plastic eggs. Hodgson attended a party at which "nutty putty" (as it was called) was the main entertainment. Seeing its marketing potential as a children's toy, Hodgson borrowed $147, bought the production rights from GE, and began producing the goo. He renamed it Silly Putty®, and packaged it in plastic eggs because Easter was on the way. http://web.mit.edu/invent/iow/sillyputty.html The march of progress - Binney & Smith, the manufacturer of Silly Putty, makes between 17,000 and 20,000 "eggs" a day at its plant in Pennsylvania. That translates into about 425 to 500 pounds of Silly Putty each day……and you were worried about the ozone melting……we’ll be buried under silly putty within a hundred years! According to Wayne Schmidt’s Silly Putty Page, Silly Putty has a density of 1.17, slightly heavier than water.  Silly Putty has a shelf life of 24 months.  After two years it morphs into beings who appear on a show called Bridezillas.

1959 –Friday- Bo-bo, doo-doot-doo-doo-doo-doo)
(There she goes) (doo-doot-doo-doo-doo-doo)
(There she goes) (doo-doot-doo-doo-doo-doo)
(Bo-bo) (doo-doot-doo-doo)
(Bo-bo) (doo-doo-doo-doo)
There goes my baby, movin' on down the line
Wonder where, wonder where, wonder where she is bound?
I broke her heart and made her cry
Now I'm alone, so all alone
What can I do, what can I do?
(There goes my baby) Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh
(There goes my baby) Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
(There goes my baby) Whoa-oh-oh-oh
(There she goes) Yeah! (There she goes) ……………The Drifters recorded There Goes My Baby.  Written by lead singer Ben E. King, Jerry Lieber and Mike Stoller.  By the time There Goes My Baby"was finished, the song's tempo slowed to a ballad, and Ben E. King took over as lead vocal after Charlie Thomas went through a few takes. In a fit of inspiration, producers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller mixed in a string section and tympani to the song, something seldom attempted in an R&B record. http://www.chuckthewriter.com/drifters.html  The single was released with Save the Last Dance for Me on the B-side. There Goes My Baby went on to score #2 on the Hot 100 and #1 on the R&B charts. It is also ranked #193 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

1985 –Wednesday- Getting to know you, getting to know all about you.
Getting to like you, getting to hope you like me.
Getting to know you, putting it my way,
But nicely,
You are precisely,
My cup of tea. …Oscar Hammerstein……..Yul Brynner, who knew a good thing when he had it, appeared in his 4,500^th  performance of The King and I. Brynner had opened on Broadway in 1951 in the  Rodgers and Hammerstein musical. That go round lasted 1,246 performances.  The play was supposed to be a vehicle for Gertrude Lawrence, with the King an important but secondary role; but so powerful was Brynner's work that the role was beefed up in rehearsal. The King and I was an enormous hit and he repeated his performance in the film version, winning a Best Actor Oscar. After Gertrude Lawrence, Brynner had Constance Towers, Virgina McKenna and Mary Beth Piel as “I”.

1988- SundayOn this date 1853, La Traviata had its debut.  Proving that the taste of the music loving public can never be underestimated, Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up became the number one song.  This resulted in an anniversary year malaise as exactly one year later…

1989 –Monday-  Debbie Gibson’s Lost in Your Eyes became number 1.

1994-Sunday-  This day began the experiment known as  Biosphere 2, a glass enclosed ecosystem. A group of seven people from five countries began a study in self-contained living. The aim was to live within the structure, supported by the several simulated types of ecosystems inside and to provide information which might be applied to solving ecological problems created by man. Biosphere 2 was built in the desert outside of Oracle, Ariz. Most notable was the pre Survivor and other reality show squabbling by the Biosphere-ites. Oxygen levels fell within the structure, and prolonged sensory deprivation—as well as good, old-fashioned politics—ultimately led to the group’s split into warring factions, Lord of the Flies style according to Jane Pointer in The Human Experiment: Two Years and Twenty Minutes Inside Biosphere 2 We look forward to future attempts with some television connections: America's Top Model in the Biosphere in which models try to spell biosphere,  American Idol in the Biosphere in which people try to sing with no oxygen, and The Evening News in the Biosphere in which man eating plants devour your favorite clueless newsreaders and grinning sports reporters.

2009 –Friday-  NASA's Kepler mission lifted off without a hitch just before 11 p.m. local time Friday from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. Now, for the next three and a half years, Kepler would trail Earth in orbit and stare at a single patch of sky in the  Cygnus-Lyra region of the Milky Way looking for Earth-like planets that may sustain life.  We know that the planet from which an epidemic of effeminate men migrated to Earth to appear on television shows.  I

Back

7.        1671 –Saturday-Now, Rob Roy's from the Highlands come
Unto our lowland border
And he has stolen a lady awa'
To keep his house in order
"Come go with me, my dear," he said
"Come go with me, my honey
And you shall be my own true wedded wife
I love you best of onie" ….Unknown…….Happy Birthday, Rob Roy McGregor, better known as Rob Roy, Scottish folk hero.  The name 'Rob Roy' comes from the Celtic for 'Red Robert', a reference to his red hair.  The legend of Rob Roy grew out of his famous feud with the Duke of Montrose. As with all farmers and ranchers, Rob Roy found it difficult to get money expand his regular cattle business and turned to Montrose for a loan (or investment money). Rob Roy claimed that one of his men ran off with £1000.  Montrose claimed Rob stole the money.  Montrose quickly became the “bad guy” in this tale of rich vs. poor.  He  brought charges of embezzlement against Rob hoping to gain his lands. Failing to answer the charge, Rob Roy was declared an outlaw and began his campaign of harassment against the Duke (rustling his cattle). Rob Roy rallied the MacGregor clan and led them in battle against the English, making many successful raids. Afterwards, he was tried for treason and lived life on the run, being captured twice but making spectacular escapes both times. Finally, in 1725, he turned himself in and received a pardon from the king, George 1. He died quietly at home in 1734.

            1788-Friday-  Happy Birthday- Antoine César Becquerel, French physicist who was the first to use electrolysis as a means of isolating metals from their ores. Becquerel also conducted innovative work on voltaic cells, in which he solved the problem of how electricity in the cell is produced. He demonstrated that electricity is generated by the contact of dissimilar bodies when they are rubbed together, differ in temperature, or react together, and that every chemical reaction is capable of producing electricity. He was the grandfather of Henri Becquerel who discovered radio activity.

            1792-Wednesday-  A good month for Herschels (see William Herschel and Caroline Herschel)  as well as astronaut births.  Happy Birthday Sir John Herschel (who opened a tavern and called it, yes..........a “Herschel Bar” ), son of William, who continued his father's research in astronomy. He also invented chrysotype (or gold print),  a photographic process in 1842.

1814 –Monday-  The Battle of Craonne (aka the “Crayola Battle”)ended in a slight, but pyrrhic victory for the French. Prussian Marshal Blucher had recovered from his earlier defeats more quickly than Napoleon Bonaparte had hoped but the French pushed the Allies over the Aube River in France. While Blucher planned his attack on Napoleon with some 85,000 men, Bonaparte's 37,000 troops attacked first. Unfortunately, for the French, the coordination was poorly timed the Allies managed to extricate themselves from a sticky situation. Craonne cost Blucher 5000 casualties, while Bonaparte lost some 5400. The outcome of the battle proved a minor but short-lived success for the French; with 5,400 casualties, French losses were slightly higher than the Coalition forces but Napoleon had at least out-maneuvered his opponents  and the French had held their ground in the face of superior numbers. It was, however, merely a prelude to the Battle of Laon which two days later resulted in a reversal of fortunes and the beginning of the end for Napoleon

1849-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Luther Burbank, American botanist, born in Lancaster, Massachusetts.  Burbank developed more than 800 strains and varieties of plants, including 113 varieties of plums and prunes, 10 varieties of berries, 50 varieties of lilies, and the Freestone peach, a peach of an idea in which the peach  has a 'free' stone, which means the flesh of the fruit can easily be removed from the stone; little to none remains. We certainly know who wore the plants in his family!  His Burbank potato was introduced in Ireland to combat the blight epidemic. Burbank sold the rights to the potato for $150.  Plants were not patentable until 1930. Consequently, Burbank received his plant patents posthumously. He eventually ran out of names for them and resorted to referring to the  newer ones as; “the big one with the shiny leaves that turns brown when you give it too much water, the one that smells like a used sweat sock, the one that’s smarter than the average television news reader, and and the one that ate the dog.

1854-Tuesday-  Charles Miller of St. Louis, Mo., patented the first U.S. sewing machine to produce the herringbone or whipstitch buttonhole stitch. It’s a good thing to have button holes if you have buttons. This is the earliest mention of an over-edge stitch. It had people in stitches. The first functional sewing machine had been invented by the French tailor, Barthelemy Thimonnier, in 1830.  In 1846, the first American patent was issued to Elias Howe for "a process that used thread from two different sources." And that sewed it up until Isaac Singer built the first commercially successful sewing machine.

1857 –Saturday-  The Baseball rules committee stated that 9 innings shall constitute an official game rather than the previous requirement of a team scoring 9 runs. Also, the first time‚ the rules specify 9 men to a side‚ even though the game had been played that way since 1845. In this way they could end a game, tied at 7, that began in summer of 1856.   The players were getting a bit tired.  The rules committee then met at the first baseball convention, held in New York, in 1858. The New York Game rules were modified by representatives from 16 Manhattan and Long Island clubs. Though the Knickerbocker Club recommended that a winner be declared after seven innings, the conventions (there would be four in all, March 1858, March 1859, March 1860 and and December 1860 ) decided on nine innings, at the recommendation of Lewis F. Wadsworth. The base paths were fixed by D.L. Adams at 30 yards and the pitching distance at 15 yards. http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/mediacenter/baseball_discovered/timeline.jsp

1862-Friday -Ever play in a playground?  Happy Birthday, Joseph Lee, inventor and "Father of the American playground movement," who introduced the first contemporary neighborhood playground in the U.S. in Boston, Mass. Lee’s playground featured a pile of sand and swings.  Today, thanks to ADA laws, safety issues, the disease of Blindus Politicallus Correcticus, installation issues, building a playground (remember, the idea is “play”) can equal the planning required to build a suspension bridge. Professor Sy Yentz is still riled at the demise of the see saw.

1872 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Piet Mondrian, Dutch neoplasticism painter. His most famous compositions are made up of black lines and colored rectangles and his most famous painting is probably Composition with Red, Yellow and Blue – 1921- composed of primary colors in rectangles on a grid of black lines. And what is neoplasticism? Not surprisingly, it is a style of abstract painting, as found in the work of Mondrian, using black, gray, white, and the primary colors, and horizontal and vertical lines and planes

1875-Sunday- Happy Birthday, Maurice Ravel, the French composer. He is most famous for Bolero.

1876-Tuesday-   Alexander Graham Bell received a patent for what he called  "Improvement in Telegraphy"  which established the principle of the telephone. He held earlier patents. Bell and Eisha Gray had been working independently on the invention.  The work pace was so close that they actually got to the patent office on the same day.  Bell got there before Gray.  Gray sued. Bell won……that’s history. That’s also not the whole story.  Both Bell and Gray had filed on February 14, but Bell filed a patent application, with the claim that stated “I have invented.“ Gray, on the other hand, filed a caveat, a document used at the time to claim “I am working on inventing.“ Priority in American patent law follows date of invention, not date of filing. So that, and filing first helped Bell avoid a possible costly and time-consuming dispute. The U.S. Patent Office issued patent #174,465 to Bell on March 7, 1876.  Got it?

1897-Sunday- Dr. John Kellogg served the world's first cornflakes to his patients at his sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. Before long, ex-patients of the sanitarium were requesting the cereal flakes via the mail. Brother Will Kellogg fulfilled the orders and in so doing began a packaged food enterprise. Two years after the discovery of the wheat flakes they were calling Granose, Will successfully created corn flakes. He tried to persuade John that they should sell their discoveries to grocery stores, but John refused.  He believed such a blatant commercial venture might compromise his integrity as a medical professional. He added, though that based on the successful introduction at the mental hospital, a great ad campaign would be “I’m crazy about Granose”.

            1904 –Monday- Happy Birthday,  beyz, Reinhard Heydrich, German Nazi official and one of history’s monsters. Second in importance to Heinrich Himmler in the Nazi SS hierarchy, he was named "Hangman Heydrich" .  Heydrich had insatiable greed for power and was a cold, calculating manipulator without human compassion who was the leading planner of Hitler's Final Solution in which the Nazis attempted to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe. The plan was developed at the Wannsee Conference in Berlin with 15 top Nazi bureaucrats to coordinate the Final Solution to exterminate the, an estimated 11,000,000 persons. "Europe would be combed of Jews from east to west," Heydrich bluntly stated.  He was assassinated on May 27, 1942 by Free Czech agents who had been trained in England and brought to Czechoslovakia to assassinate him. In reprisal, Hitler ordered the small Czech mining village of Lidice to be liquidated on the trumped up charge that it had aided the assassins. In one of the most infamous single acts of World War Two, all 172 men and boys over age 16 in the village were shot on June 10, 1942, while the women were deported to Ravensbrück concentration camp where most died. Ninety young children were sent to the concentration camp at Gneisenau, with some taken later to Nazi orphanages if they were German looking. http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/biographies/heydrich.htm

            1908 –Saturday-  Making the statement that is his sole claim to a place in history,  Cincinnati's mayor, Mark Breith, suffering from what some called PMS – Pre Mazda Syndrome-  announced before the city council that, "Women are not physically fit to operate automobiles." At the time, there were fewer than 200,000 cars in the whole country and they required some strength to start with a hand crank. With the invention of the electric starter in 1911, things began to change and the advertising of the 1920s stressed how easy automobiles were for women to drive. The Gnus, always searching for more information, found that of the twenty eight websites mentioning Mark Breith – we searched Mark Brieth biography- his pronouncement on women’s automotive driving skills was the citation at every site. Party affiliation? Reaction from city council? Reaction from women – aside from the one who crashed into his car that morning- nada, zilch.

            1911-Tuesday-  No change? No place to put your clothes at the gym  because it’s a coin operated locker? Blame it on Willis Farnworth of Petaluma California who patented the coin-operated locker.  Farnsworth and co-inventor, William H. Reed called the infernal machine a "Magazine Hinge and Conveyer". They assigned their invention to the Coin Controlled Lock Co.

            1923-Wednesday “ the woods are dark and deep and I have promises to keep. And miles to go before I sleep…..” The New Republic published Robert Frost's poem Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

            1926- The first successful trans-Atlantic radio-telephone conversation took place, between New York City and London on the 50^th anniversary of Alexander Graham Bell’s patent.  The call was also the first time two news bureaus, the Associated Press and Reuters, had ever transmitted a story across the ocean through the telephone. The Gnus has located a transcript of the call: Reuters -  “Hello?” A.P-  “Reuters? This is A.P”. Reuters - “ A pea?” A.P - “Yes, A.P”. Reuters – “We didn’t know a pea could talk. Imagine, a talking pea. This is big news”.  A.P “No, it’s not a talking pea.  It’s A.P”. Reuters – “A urinary tract infection?”.  A.P “ No, it’s A.P”.  Reuters – “Ape E?, a talking gorilla?”…….

            1930 –Friday-  Happy Birthday, Stanley L. Miller, American chemist who conducted a series of famous experiments beginning in 1953, to determine the possible origin of life from inorganic chemicals on the primeval, just-formed earth.  So how did life begin on Earth? It remains an unanswered question although we could always ask Larry King who some believe was the result of the development of life from inorganic materials.

            1933-Tuesday- The game "Monopoly" was created and trademarked by Charles Darrow in Atlantic City.  Although there had been other board  games in the past, notably "The Landlord's Game,", invented by Quaker Lizzie Magie of Virginia in 1903. Darrow created his own version, modeled on his favorite resort, Atlantic City. He made numerous innovations for his game. He color-coded the properties and deeds for them, allowing them to be bought, not just rented. The playing pieces, ship, boot, dog, iron, hat, and car were modeled on items from around his house. http://www.monopoly-history.com/

            1938 – Monday- Happy Birthday, Janet Guthrie, American race car driver, Janet Guthrie was the first woman ever to drive in the Indianapolis 500 and Daytona 500 auto races, both in 1977.        We not also that on this day in 1908 Cinncinnati mayor, Mark Breith announced before the city council that, "Women are not physically fit to operate automobiles." In 1977 at Indianapolis, twenty-seven laps into the race, Guthrie's day came to an early end when the car had mechanical problems.  In 1978, however, when she finished ninth at Indy with a team that she formed and managed herself. In the 1977 Daytona 500,  she became the first woman to earn a starting spot. She was running eighth ten laps from the end when her engine went sour -- she finished 12th and was the top rookie of the race.

            1938 –Monday- Happy Birthday, David Baltimore, American microbiologist. In 1970 he and his wife Alice Huang discovered a virus caused by an enzyme that could transcribe DNA into RNA. The virus was later identified as congressman Henry Waxman of California. Baltimore shared the 1975 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Renato Dulbecco and Howard Temin for his study on the connections between viruses and cancer.

            1939 -Tuesday Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians recorded Scottish poet Robert Burns’ composition,  Auld Lang Syne on Decca Records. He had been playing it on his radio broadcasts for a number of years. "The Sweetest Music This Side of Heaven" was the logo of Lombardo & His Royal Canadians, who by 1930 had established themselves as America's top dance band. It was his annual New Year's Eve show that made Auld Lang Syne a national standard. Between 1927 and 1954, Lombardo sold well over 100 milllion records on a variety of labels, including Columbia, Brunswick, Decca, and RCA/Victor.   He became so closely associated with Auld Lang Syne that when  appearing on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In in 1969, he said, “when I go, I’m taking Auld Lang Syne with me. 

            1946 –Thursday-  Remember Leave it to Beaver?  Remember the father played by Hugh Beaumont?  Well on this date we saw the premiere of Murder is My Business, a film noir starring Hugh Beaumont as private eye Michael Shayne. The movie co-starred Cheryl Walker, Lyle Talbot and George Meeker.

            1955 –Monday Producer’s Showcase on NBC – premiered Peter Pan starring Mary Martin. Co-starring Cyril Ritchard as Captain Hook and featuring Kathleen Nolan (who would go on to star with Richard Crenna and Walter Brennan in The Real McCoys), with choreography by Jerome Robbins, the show would become a television classic. Peter Pan proved an immediate and spectacular success, garnering an overnight rating of 48. The production was remounted, live, in January of 1956 and was rebroadcast annually for years thereafter. It was singled out in the 1955 Emmys as the best single program of the year.

            1957 –Thursday-   “Happy, happy birthday, baby
            Although you're with somebody new
            Thought I'd drop a line to say
            That I wish this happy day
            Would find me beside you.”
             One of the great early “girl groups”…..sort of…the group consisted of Margo Sylvia, her husband, Johnny Sylvia, her brother Gilbert Lopez, and Charlotte Davis.  The Tune Weavers recorded Happy Happy Birthday Baby on Casa Grande Records.  The song went nowhere.  Later in the year it was “discovered” by Dick Clark (before he became a self promoting cliché, he did great things for Rock and Roll).  It was re-recorded on Chess Records and became a major hit and a standard “birthday song” despite its bittersweet message.

            1965 – The number one song on the Billboard Charts was the Beatles’ Eight Days a Week.  A year later it was Barry Sadler’s Ballad of the Green Berets.

            1979-Wednesday- There was now a  third planet surrounded by rings as scientists discovered a ring around Jupiter while examining photographs taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The rings of Saturn had been known since 1610. Astronomers had recognized rings around Uranus in 1977.  And yes, post 1979, they have found rings around Neptune.  There are no rings around the former planet now demoted to dwarf planet Pluto. Perhaps when a planet is demoted they take away its rings?

            1981 –Saturday -  In the sequels rarely work department, Bring Back Birdie, the decades later sequel to Bye Bye Birdie, went kaput after four performances.  The show starred  a creaky  Donald O’Connor, making his Broadway debut after over a hundred years in show business and Chita Rivera resurrected from the original show). It was directed by Joe Layton who also “conceived” the bomb. Critic Frank Rich in  The New York Times said “''Bring Back Birdie,' which begins as an amiable shambles, devolves into total chaos. Mr. Stewart unleashes a slew of confused, satirically toothless subplots that involve everything from an extramarital affair to a Hare Krishna cult to a fraudulent funeral to the heretofore secret identity of Albert's domineering mother (Maria Karnilova). By the end, the show has run off in so many cryptic directions that you may think each member of the cast has been handed a different lousy script. The score that interrupts this book has a death wish….

            1986-Friday-  Susan Butcher won the Iditarod dogsled race from Anchorage to Nome Alaska in 11 days, 5 hours, and 6 minutes. She later discovered she could have done it in seconds if she clicked her heels together as repeated   "There's no place like Nome, There's no place like Nome........"

            1986 –Friday-  NASA had said and most people had believed that the Challenger Astronauts had died instantly in the explosion of January 28. They were wrong.  The astronauts were alive all the way down. They worked frantically to save themselves through the plummeting arc that would take them 2 minutes and 45 seconds to smash into the ocean. On this day, a horrible discovery  was made as divers from the USS Preserver  located wreckage of the crew compartment of the space shuttle Challenger lying on the ocean bottom in 100 feet of water.  Challenger exploded 73 seconds into its flight, killing all seven aboard. The crew members were commander Francis Scobee, pilot Michael Smith, Ellison Onizuka, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis and teacher Christa McAuliffe. On first inspection, it was obvious that the shuttle Challenger’s crew vessel had survived the explosion during ascent. 

            1988- Monday- Cyclone Bola hit New Zealand  on the East Coast of the North Island on this date and  did not finish up  until March 10. 

            1989 –Tuesday-  Poland accused the Soviet Union of a World War II massacre in Katyn. The Soviets responded by saying, “yes you’re right we’ve been murdering millions of people and lying about it since 1917”. Well, not really. Katyn  saw the mass killing of Polish military officers by the Soviet Union in World War II. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the Polish government-in-exile agreed to cooperate with the Soviets against Germany, and the Polish general forming the new army asked to have the Polish prisoners placed under his command, but the Soviet government informed him in December 1941 that most of those prisoners had escaped to Manchuria and could not be located. In 1943 the Germans discovered mass graves in the Katyn forest in western Russia. A total of 4,443 corpses were recovered; the victims had apparently been shot from behind and then piled in stacks and buried. The Soviet government claimed the invading German army had killed them.  In 1992 the Russian government released documents proving that the Soviet secret police were responsible for the executions and cover-up.

            1996-Thursday- The first surface photos  of the dwarf planet Kuiper Belt Object that used to be a planet Pluto were released. Although the only solar-system (at the time) planet never visited by spacecraft, it was successfully photographed by the Hubble Space Telescope. The Gnus wonders if they would have bothered if it had only been a dwarf planet in 1996.  Most of the surface features are likely produced by frosts that migrate across Pluto's surface with its orbital and seasonal cycles. Pluto isn't large enough to retain much of an atmosphere, but it has a thin one that appears to be mostly nitrogen with some methane. We know essentially nothing about Pluto's interior at this point.

Back

8.        

1618-Thursday-  Johann Kepler formulated his Third Law of Planetary Motion.  The law states that all “A fixed number of  popular science fiction movie creatures must be cute enough to be turned into action figures”.  No, no , no it’s also known as the Harmonic Law and unlike the first and second laws, which describe the motion characteristics of a single planet, the third law requires a harmonica and makes a comparison between the motion characteristics of different planets. The ratio of the squares of the revolutionary periods for two planets is equal to the ratio of the cubes of their semi major axes.  The comparison being made is that the ratio of the squares of the periods to the cubes of their average distances from the sun is the same for every one of the planets. Nothing like a developmentally appropriate explanation and we hope that clears it up for you. Kepler realized that the orbits of the planets were not the circles demanded by Aristotle and assumed implicitly by Copernicus, but were instead the "flattened circles" called ellipses. Kepler's laws were derived for orbits around the sun, but they apply to satellite orbits as well.

            1669-Sunday- Mount Etna, a volcano on the island of Sicily, blew its top and began erupting. Multiple eruptions over the next few weeks killed more than 20,000 people and left thousands more homeless. Most of the victims could have saved themselves by fleeing, but stayed, in a vain attempt to save their homes The moral of the story is don’t mess with a volcano.  Mt Etna has the longest period of documented eruptions in the world. The record goes back to about 1500 B.C. Etna is noted for the wide variety of eruption styles, notably, terminal eruptions that occur from one or more of the summit craters, subterminal eruptions occur from vents very close to the summit craters, and "take over" their activity.  lateral eruptions are fed by dikes radiating away from the central conduit system and occur at some distance from the summit craters, eccentric eruptions are not genetically linked to the (upper part of) the central conduit system, but are fed by conduits originating at depth, rather than by radial dikes, http://boris.vulcanoetna.it/ETNA_styles.htmland popping a pimple type eruptions in which vast amounts of volcanic pus spew out into the Mediterranean.

            1700ish –Mondayish-  No one is sure of the date of the birth, some sources give “late 1690s” of  pirate Anne Bonny but 1700 is as good as any. Born in Ireland, raised in the U.S colonies, Anne Bonny, history's most infamous woman pirate, was a plunderer, cutthroat, sailor, ransomer, raider, and general menace to maritime commerce in the Caribbean but aside from that she was really nice. She had met and married pirate Jack Bonny and moved with him to what is now Nassau in the Bahamas.  There, Jack was disposed of and Anne took up both pirating and another pirate, Calico Jack Rackham, the man who allegedly invented the skull and crossbones symbol. She sailed with him disguised as a man – women were not allowed on pirate ships- and discovered another woman, Mary Read, also disguised as a man on the ship. Many sites and some books show Bonny and Read as scantily clad hot babes…..not true, the man disguises worked well until Bonny became pregnant.  She abandoned the baby and returned to plundering and murdering with Read and Rackham. http://www.geographia.com/Bahamas/annebonny.htm

            1702-Wednesday-  Queen Anne, daughter of the deposed Catholic king, James II, and the last Stuart ruler, ascended the British throne after the kapution of  her brother in law, William III.  Anne, like William was a Protestant. The second daughter of James II, Anne supported the overthrow of her father by her sister Mary and the diminutive William of Orange in 1688 (the "Glorious Revolution").  Anne was in ill health during most of her reign. This was understandable because, married to Prince George of Denmark since 1683, she endured 17 or 18 ill-fated pregnancies (only one of her children lived past infancy, and he died at the age of 12). With no issue, 0 for 17 is not good…..she was succeeded after her demise in 1714 by  the Teutonic George I of Hanover, known by his subjects as “German Georgie”.

            1765 –Friday-  The British House of Lords approved the Stamp Act to tax the American colonies. It would be signed two weeks later by King George III (see Queen Anne, 1702 above). Facing a massive national debt following the Seven Years War (known as the French & Indian War in America) the Stamp Act was Parliament's first serious attempt to assert governmental authority over the colonies. The act required the use of stamped paper for legal documents, diplomas, almanacs, broadsides, newspapers and playing cards. The presence of the stamp on these items was to be proof that the tax had been paid.

            1775 – Wednesday He's a rebel and he'll never ever be any good
He's a rebel and he'll never ever be understood
And just because he doesn't do what everybody else does
That's no reason why I can't give him all my love
He is always good to me, always treats me tenderly
'Cause he's not a rebel, no no no
He's not a rebel, no no no, to me…………..The Crystals………Famous for his pamphlets, particularly Common Sense, Thomas Paine's African Slavery in America was published. It was the first article in the United States calling for the emancipation of all slaves and the abolition of slavery.

            1782-Friday   The Gnadenhütten massacre in Gnadenhutten, Ohio. In one of the more disgraceful episodes of the American Revolution,160 Pennsylvania militiamen murdered 96 Christian Indians--39 children, 29 women and 28 men--by hammering their skulls with mallets from behind as they knelt unarmed, praying and singing, in their Moravian Mission at Gnadenhuetten in the Ohio Country. Although the militiamen claimed they were seeking revenge for Indian raids on their frontier settlements, the Indians they murdered had played no role in any attack. Gnadenhutten, in eastern central Ohio, was founded as a settlement of German and Lenape Native Americans affiliated with the Moravian Church.

                1787-Thursday- Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go I wanna be sedated
Nothin' to do and no where to go-o-oh I wanna be sedated….The Ramones…. This gentleman’s birthday should be a day of celebration in acting, celebrity and wealthy circles.  Happy Birthday, Karl Ferdinand von Gräfe, German surgeon who helped to create modern plastic surgery. All of his early patients ended up looking like Michael Jackson. He improved the rhinoplastic process, and its revival was chiefly due to him. He based his work on 16th-century surgeon Gasparo Tagliacozzi’s “Italian method” of plastic surgery on the nose which uses a skin graft from the upper arm. Gräfe also developed an operation for repairing a cleft palate and made technical improvements in the administration of blood transfusions. Just like, beer on  St. Patrick’s Day, perhaps Hollywood could celebrate this day with nose jobs.

            1804 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Alvan Clark, American astronomer and maker of astronomical lenses. Together with his sons, George Bassett Clark, and Alvan Graham Clark, he founded Alvan Clark & Sons at Cambridgeport, Massachusetts.It became famous as the manufacturer of the largest and finest telescope lenses. The first achromatic lenses made in the United States were produced there. And why, you may ask is that important?  Well, glad you did.  No single lens can ever be free of chromatic aberration, but by combining lenses of different types, the effects of the component lenses can be made to cancel one another. Such an arrangement is called an achromatic lens.

            1836-Tuesday- Well the dawn was coming,
heard him ringing on my bell.
He said, ``My name's the teacher,
that is what I call myself.
And I have a lesson
that I must impart to you.
It's an old expression
but I must insist it's true.
Jump up, look around,
find yourself some fun,
no sense in sitting there hating everyone.  ……….Jethro Tull………Happy Birthday, Sir Michael Foster, English physiologist and educator who introduced modern methods of teaching biology and physiology that emphasize the laboratory training that we still see today. Foster's use of laboratory experimentation and research became standard in the teaching of the biological sciences in English universities and then spread to other countries. Barbara Hawgood notes in the Journal of Medical Biography that Foster, a great teacher, had a remarkable ability to attract talented students and to inspire them to undertake research. He himself took inspiration from the scientific philosophy of Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95) and of Claude Bernard (1813–78).

            1841-Monday- Happy Birthday, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, United States Supreme Court justice from 1902-1932. He was the son of the son of the prominent poet and physician, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. and abolitionist Amelia Lee Jackson.  Holmes Jr. served as first lieutenant in the Twentieth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. He saw action, from the Peninsula Campaign to the Wilderness, suffering wounds at the Battle of Ball's Bluff, Antietam, and Fredericksburg and achieved some early notoriety by yelling at Abraham Lincoln during the Battle of Fort Stevens, saying "Get down, you fool!" when Lincoln stood, making him a susceptible target for a sniper.

            1862  -Saturday In one of the worst days in American Naval history, the C.S.S Virginia, formerly the U.S.S Merrimac, a scuttled Union wooden ship but now covered with armor that was four inches thick,  wrecked havoc at the Union Naval base in Hampton Roads , Virginia.  The Virginia sunk the wooden warships  Cumberland and Congress and caused the Minnesota to run aground.  When the Virginia returned the following day, it was met by the Union ironclad, Monitor.  See March 9.

                1874 and 1930 and 1999 – What do Millard Fillmore, William Howard Taft and Joe DiMaggio have in common? Former president Millard Fillmore, former president William Howard Taft, and baseball star and American icon, Joe DiMaggio all died on this day.

                1879-Saturday- Happy birthday, Otto Hahn, co-discoverer with radiochemist Fritz Strassmann, (the third member of the team, Lise Meitner had to leave Berlin because the Nazis were closing in on all people of Jewish ancestry) of nuclear fission in 1938.  Yes, the sign on his lab door said "Gone Fission".  He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944 (many thought  Lise Meitner should have received a share) and shared the Enrico Fermi Award in 1966 with Strassmann and Lise Meitner.  Hahn also discovered protactinium, the long-lived mother substance of the actinium series,  and uranium Z, the first case of a nuclear isomerism of radioactive kinds of atoms. He also collaborated with Meitner and Fritz Strassmann on the processes if irradiating uranium and thorium with neutrons and using it to roast marshmallows.

            1887 –Tuesday-  The first telescopic fishing rod (did you have to look through it to see a fish?) was patented by Everett Horton, who according to the Horton Mfg. Co. website, wanted to sneak off and fish on a Sunday in the Puritanical village of Bristol Connecticut.  Not surprisingly, his rods were called Bristol rods.  Telescopic fishing rods are designed to collapse down to a short distance and open to a long rod. 20 or even 30 foot rods can close to as little as a foot and a half. This makes the rods very easy to transport to remote areas or travel on buses, compact cars, or public buses and subways should you live in a Puritanical village and wish to go fishing on a Sunday.

            1894-Thursday-  You now had to be 16 or over to drive a dog…….or, maybe it allowed dogs to drive….anyway,  New York State issued the first dog license law. All dogs living in New York State had to be licensed.

            1902 –Saturday-  Let's go surfin' now
Everybody's learning how
Come on and safari with me
(Come on and safari with...)
Early in the morning we'll be startin out
Some honeys will be comin' along
We're loadin' up my woody
with the boards inside
and heading out singing our song
Come on (surf route) baby wait and see (surfin' safari)
Yes I'm gonna (surf route) take you surfin' (surfin' safari) with me
Come along (surf route) baby wait and see (surfin' safari)
Yes I'm gonna (surf route) take you surfin' (surfin' safari) with me