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1.       Loggerhead sea turtles begin nesting in the southeastern U.S.  Yep, they check their little turtle PDAs and wait till May 1 and then book a beach front condo and some golf T times in Hilton Head and then nest merrily away away. 

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2.        

1335 –Monday-  Otto the Merry, Duke of Austria, became Duke of Carinthia. We note this because of the dozens of royal nicknames we’ve come across, Charles the Bald, Edward the Confessor, Richard the Lion Hearted, ……Otto (a Hapsburg)  is the only “Merry”. But then it is the “merry month of May.”

            1536 –Saturday-  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…..After three years of marital bliss and a few earlier years of being a mistress (six years of “courting”), Henry VIII’s wife number 2,  Anne Boleyn, Queen of England, was arrested and imprisoned on charges of adultery, incest, treason, witchcraft, cheating at Scrabble and watching reruns of Jeopardy and calling out the questions. On May 15th 1536 Anne was tried for treason, adultery and incest in the Great Hall of the Tower of London with her brother George Boleyn.  On May 19th she was executed on Tower Hill. Anne's body and head were buried (together)  in an unmarked grave in the Chapel of St. Peter ad Vincula

            1670 –Friday-  The Hudson Bay Co. was chartered by England's King Charles II for his cousin, Prince Rupert. One of the first to realize the potential of trade in North America was Samuel de Champlain. In 1603, he made his first trip to North America. At first, fur was not the most important thing that was traded. Then, around the year 1600, hats made from beaver felt became very fashionable. Everybody wanted one. It was the 17^th century version of Jimmy Choo shoes except men could wear them too. Coincidently (can’t imagine why) at the same time, beavers were becoming extinct in Europe. So how do we make the leap from the French Champlain to the English?  Two French explorers/traders, Médard Chouart des Groseilliers and Pierre Radisson. had not gotten a license to trade fur before they began their adventure. The furs were taken away, Des Groseilliers was put in jail and both were given fines for breaking the law. The two became very annoyed. They decided to work for the English instead of the French. The king of England's cousin, Prince Rupert, knew that there was money to be made in the fur trade. He purchased furs from des Groseilliers and Radisson (who had opened a chain of hotels) The king gave Prince Rupert and his partners (known as "The Company of Adventurers Adventurers of England tradeing into Hudsons Bay") a charter, which gave the company a monopoly. On May 6, 1670, Hudson's Bay Company (or HBC, for short) was formed. It was given all the land whose rivers drained into the Hudson Bay, which became modestly known as Rupert's Land.  The company started with a string of trading posts in Canada and gradually grew up along the river networks of the west laying the foundation for the modern cities that would succeed the trading posts, Winnipeg, Calgary,  and Edmonton.

            1729 –Monday- Wild horses couldn’t drag me away.  Wild wild horses couldn’t drag me away…..Rolling Stones….. Happy Birthday Catherine II (Catherine the Great) of Russia. Catherine, who became the ruler when she deposed (soon to be slewn  by her lover, Orlov) her husband, Peter III,  on June 28, 1762. One of Russia’s great rulers, her personal life was more like “Gossip Girl” meets 18^th century Russia.  While her personal life was the stuff of soap opera, she did have many lovers, Serge Saltykov (who probably fathered her son Peter), Orlov and  Grigori Potemkin among them. Contrary to tall tales, she did not go kaput attempting carnal knowledge of a horse.  She died of a heart attack in 1796. She consolidated power from the serfs and feudal lords by continuing the political reforms started by Peter the Great.  Land expansion dramatically increased during the Polish civil war in the late 1760's and again in 1768 when a Russian victory over the Ottoman Empire gave Russia its long sought port on the Black Sea . In addition to this, Catherine imported many great works in literature, art, and print from the Western European nations.  Education and law codes further developed under her reign.  At the end of her thirty-four year reign from 1762 to 1796, Catherine had catapulted Russia into the world scene as a major world empire.    

            1765-Thursday--  The first medical school opened in the colonies, The College of Philadelphia. It was organized by Dr. John Morgan who implemented his "Discourse upon Institution of Medical Schools in America" and was appointed Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine by the Trustees of the College on May 3, 1765. We’ve also seen the opening date as May 30, the date Morgan delivered his first public address.

            1775 –Tuesday- Almost lost in the amazing number of his inventions, discoveries and accomplishments – uber mensch, Benjamin Franklin completed the first scientific study of the Gulf Stream. His observations began in 1769 when as deputy postmaster of the British Colonies he found ships took two weeks longer to bring mail from England than it was for sailing from the Colonies to England. During Franklin's final Atlantic crossing, he was still trying to uncover the secrets of the Gulf Stream. By measuring the temperature of the ocean at various depths, Franklin rightly surmised that the Gulf Stream was like a warm river flowing over and through the Atlantic Ocean. This may have been the first reported streaming on line.  He suggested that the Gulf Stream could be used to improve the speed of vessels sailing between America and England if those vessels stayed in the current when traveling east and avoided it while traveling west. Franklin's other contribution to the understanding of the Gulf Stream was a map he drew that showed its movement with a high degree of accuracy.

            1797-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Abraham Pineo Gesner, Canadian, born in Nova Scotia,  chemist and geologist who pioneered the extraction of kerosene (which he named) by the dry distillation of asphalt rock. He invented the process for distilling kerosene from coal. This product, also called paraffin, was cheaper than whale oil, and therefore resulted in some  reduction in whale hunting.

            1800-Friday-  English chemist William Nicholson was the first to produce a chemical reaction by electricity. Electrolysis of water is an electrolytic process which decomposes water into oxygen and hydrogen gas with the aid of an electric current, where a power source – Nicholson used a voltaic pile- is commonly used.  Today electrolyis is used to remove unsightly hair. We’re not sure if it helps with piles…voltaic or otherwise.

             1802-Sunday- Happy Birthday, Heinrich G. Magnus, German chemist and physicist who discovered the eponymous Magnus effect - the lift force produced by a rotating cylinder. We know it, for example, in baseball when it gives the curve to a curveball. He was also the first person to prepare a platino-ammonium compound- ‘Magnum’s green salt’ and in 1837 noticed that the ratio of oxygen to carbon dioxide in blood was higher in the arteries.  Women were attracted to him because of his “magnustism.”

        1860 –Wednesday- Happy Birthday, D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson, Scottish zoologist and classical scholar noted for his book 
On Growth and Form. The book is a consideration of the shapes of living things, starting from the simple premise that "everything is the 
way it is because it got that way.'' Thompson emphasized looking at living things by using mathematics to describe their shapes and fairly simple physics
 and chemistry to explain them.  He was the first biomathematician. Immanuel Kant declared that the criterion of true science is in its relation to mathematics.
 Added Thompson, "numerical precision is the very soul of science." Woody Allen concluded, “Standard mathematics has recently been rendered 
obsolete by the discovery that for years we have been writing the numeral five backward. This has led to reevaluation of counting as a method of
 getting from one to ten. Students are taught advanced concepts of Boolean algebra, and formerly unsolvable equations are dealt with by threats of reprisals.”

            1860-Wednesday-  Born on the same day as Thomson, see above, Happy Birthday, Sir William M. Bayliss, British physiologist who, in 1902 co-discovered the first hormone (the sound emitted by prostitutes pretending to enjoy sex) . He found a certain chemical substance is secreted when food comes into contact with part of the small intestine. This secreted chemical substance, which they cleverly named secretin, upon being carried by the blood to the pancreas, stimulates the secretion of pancreatic juice, the most important of the digestive juices. They coined the word "hormone" based on a Greek word for "to set in motion."

            1863 –Saturday-  Late in the day of the 2^nd day of the Battle of Chancellorsville (Virginia) and following one of his most brilliant military maneuvers, the flanking of “Fighting Joe” Hookers army,   Thomas Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee’s most aggressive general, was shot by his own men - an unknown member or members of the 18th North Carolina Infantry Regiment. He died eight days later on May 10. Jackson’s loss would be keenly felt during the disaster at Gettysburg beginning July 1. However, the arm that was amputated on May 2 was buried separately by Jackson's chaplain, at the J. Horace Lacy house, "Ellwood", in the Wilderness of Spotsylvania County, near the field hospital. The rest of him is interred at Stonewall Jackson Memorial Cemetery, Lexington, Virginia.

                 1865-Tuesday- The first paid fire department was initiated in New York City. A state act was passed to create the Metropolitan Fire District and the Metropolitan Fire Department (MFD).  Initially the paid fire service only covered New York City (present day Manhattan), until the act of 1865 which united Brooklyn with New York to form the Metropolitan District. Brooklyn would become part of New York City in 1898. The same year the fire department consisted of 13 Chief Officers and 552 Company Officers and firemen. The officers and firemen worked a continuous tour of duty, with 3 hours a day off for meals and one day off a month, and were paid salaries according to their rank or grade. No word on the status of dalmatian dogs.

            1880 –Sudnay- Paving the way for the cruise liners of today, an Edison "A" type dynamo- a generator for producing direct current- was placed in operation to illuminate the passenger rooms and main salons of the S.S. Columbia. It was the first commercial order for Edison's light bulb, and the first time a U.S. steamboat successfully installed electric lights.  None of the cardboard-filament lamps blew out during the two-month voyage.  We’re not sure how people did with the Rock Wall and the ship board production of A Chorus Line but they enjoyed well lit “All you can Eat” buffets.

            1887 –Monday- They’re gonna put me in the movies.  They’re gonna make a big star out of me….Ringo Starr…… Hannibal Goodwin and celluloid. The Reverend Goodwin devised a process for making celluloid (a tough flammable thermoplastic composed essentially of cellulose nitrate and camphor) film and applied for a patent in 1887, but for various reasons the patent was not granted until 1898. In the meantime ---follow this carefully now, George Eastman had started production of rollfilm using his own process. It was eventually ruled that Kodak had infringed Goodwin's patent which by then had been sold to Anthony & Scovill (Ansco) after Goodwin's death. With (now) Eastman’s process, with this new flexible film, Thomas Edison and  his assistant William Kennedy Laurie Dickson invented the kinetoscope. The kinetoscope was a large cabinet which housed 50 feet (15 meters) of film which revolved on spools. A person looking through a peephole in the cabinet would be able to see the moving pictures.  John Carbutt, an English photographer who had emigrated to America, had  produced a thin celluloid film which was sufficiently transparent. He did this by slicing a thin layer from a block of celluloid - this was then pressed between heated polished plates to remove the slicing marks. Carbutt started to manufacture cut film using this material sometime before1888, but it was slow to catch on. Two key events which would make celluloid film a necessity had yet to happen - roll film cameras and motion pictures…..see Eastman and Edison.

            1890-Friday- OOOOk-lahoma, where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain,
And the wavin' wheat can sure smell sweet, When the wind comes right behind the rainQ
OOOOk-lahoma, Ev'ry night my honey lamb and I, Sit alone and talk and watch a hawk makin' lazy circles in the sky.
We know we belong to the land (yo-ho)
And the land we belong to is grand!
And when we say
Yeeow! Aye-yip-aye-yo-ee-ay!
We're only sayin'
You're doin' fine, Oklahoma!
Oklahoma O.K.! …..Rogers and Hammerstein……The Oklahoma Territory was organized. Actually, the western part of the state was organized as a federal territory. The eastern part, excepting the extreme northeastern corner, remained under the ownership and governments of the Five Civilized Tribes (the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole). Seventeen years later, these regions were united under the name "Oklahoma" and admitted as the 46th State.    

            1892 –Monday-  Happy Birthday, Manfred von Richtofen, WW I German war ace, and perhaps the greatest fighter pilot who ever lived .  He painted the fuselage of his Albatross D-III a bright red and was nicknamed the Red Baron. Richthofen was killed when he was brought down by ground fire on April 21, 1918. He was 25 years old.

            1903-Saturday- (Be my be my baby) Be my little baby
(I want it only say) Say you'll be my darling
(Be my be my baby) Be my baby now
(I want it only say) Ooh, ohh, ohh, oh ….The Ronettes…….Happy Birthday, Dr. Benjamin Spock, American pediatrician who was the most influential child-care authority of the 20th century. His book Baby and Child Care sold over 50million copies worldwide and was translated into 42 languages. Dr. Spock's brother, Mr. Spock, from the planet Vulcan brought the Vulcan Mind Meld to Earth.  He also wrote Baby Alien Care.

            1903 –Saturday-  Born on the same day as Dr. Spock, Happy Birthday Bing (Harry Lillis) Crosby, American singer and actor. He performed his signature song, White Christmas  in the film Holiday Inn (1942). Before this he had appeared during the 1930s in several light musicals, and in the 1940s he carved out a new career as the wisecracking companion of Bob Hope in the seven ‘Road’ pictures. He also made several serious films and won an Academy Award for his role in Going My Way in 1944.

            1933 –Tuesday- Stories of a beast living in Scotland's Loch Ness go back 1,500 years, the modern legend of  the Loch Ness Monster was actually born when a sighting made local news on May 2,1933. The newspaper Inverness Courier carried an account of a local couple who claimed to have seen "an enormous animal rolling and plunging on the surface." (It turned out to be Rosie O’Donnell)  The story of the "monster" (a name chosen by the Courier editor) started a media feeding frenzy, with London newspapers sending correspondents to Scotland and a circus offering a 20,000 pound  reward for capture of the beast. The tourist industry has not been the same since. Loch Ness, located in the Scottish Highlands, has the largest volume of fresh water in Great Britain. It. reaches a depth of nearly 800 feet and a length of about 23 miles. In case you didn’t know, a loch is a lake.

              1945 –Wednesday-  Na na na na, hey hey-ey, goodbye
Na na na na, na na na na, hey hey-ey, goodbye….Steam……Approximately 1 million German soldiers gave up as the terms of the German unconditional surrender, signed at Caserta (Italy) on April 29, came into effect. Early that same day, Russian Marshal Georgi K. Zhukov accepted the surrender of the German capital, Berlin.  The Red Army took 134,000 German soldiers prisoner.

            1950-Tuesday-   H.B Taussig became the first woman elected to the Association of American Physicians.  Helen Brooke Taussig classified and described many of the heart  malformations. She is known for saving the lives of "blue babies" (infants whose color at birth indicated inadequate oxygenation of their blood.), and played an important role in preventing the use of thalidomide in the USA. In the late 1960s and early 1960s, thalidomide, a tranquillizing drug, had produced large numbers of deformed newborns in Europe. In January 1962 one of Taussig’s students drew her attention to these congenital malformations, known as phocomelia, occurring in Germany and England and possibly caused by thalidomide. Taussig saw the emergency and in February went to Europe to check thalidomide reports. By the end of her tour through Europe, she was convinced that the sleeping pill was causing the birth defects and that more people had to be warned. She returned to the United States where she addressed the American College of Physicians about thalidomide in April 1962, and reported her findings to the Food and Drug Administration. The U. S. Government as well as doctors throughout America took her recommendations seriously, and the use of the sleeping pill by pregnant women was stopped. As early as in March, 1963 a law requiring more careful drug testing went into effect. http://www.whonamedit.com/doctor.cfm/2034.html

            1952 –Friday- So kiss me and smile for me
Tell me that you'll wait for me
Hold me like you'll never let me go
Cause I'm leavin' on a jet plane
Don't know when I'll be back again
Oh babe, I hate to go  ……John Denver…..The world's first ever commercial jet airliner, the De Havilland Comet 1 made its maiden voyage, flying from London to Johannesburg. This was a big deal.  The Comet was an immediate sensation, for obvious reasons. Trains and ships were still the dominant means of travel in 1952. Air travel was still a novelty for most travelers. Instead of a 40 hour flight to Johannesburg, South Africa, the Comet could fly from London to Johannesburg , via Rome, Beirut and Khartoum, in 23 hours, at speeds up to 500 MPH.

            1953 –Saturday Oops! Exactly a year after its maiden voyage, a De Havilland Comet mysteriously crashed shortly after takeoff. Two similar crashes in early 1954 forced British authorities to ground the entire fleet pending investigation. Over the following months, extensive tests were performed on the aircraft to determine what could have caused these mysterious accidents. During a four year hiatus in Comet operations, most prospective customers went to the rival Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 which soon claimed the bulk of the market. Only about 90 Comets ever reached commercial operators, and most were removed from service by the early 1980s.

            1955 –Monday- Tennessee Williams was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The play had opened on Broadway on March 24 starring Barbara Bel Geddes (later of Dallas), Burl Ives, Mildred Dunnock, and Ben Gazzara. This was his second Pulitzer, the first was in 1948 for A Streetcar Named Desire. Other 1955 Pulitzers went to: Fiction: A Fable by William Faulkner History: Great River: The Rio Grande in North American History by Paul Horgan, Biography or Autobiography:

The Taft Story by William S. White, Poetry: Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens; Music:

The Saint of Bleecker Street by Gian-Carlo Menotti

            1956 - I'm gonna tell Aunt Mary, about Uncle John
Says he has the blues, but he's got a lot of fun
Oh baby.yes, baby.
Oo-oo-ooooh, baby. havin me Some fun tonight!
well Long Tall Sally she’s, built for speed.
she got, everything that Uncle John need
Oh baby.yes, baby.
Oo-oo-ooooh, baby. havin me Some fun tonight! ….Little Richard….For the first time in "Billboard" chart history, the same five singles were in both the pop and the R&B top 10. We should note that none of them were number 1.  The number 1 song was The Third Man Theme by Anton Karas. Runners up but all on both lists (for some reason Anton Karas was not on the R&B list) were singles Elvis Presley's Heartbreak Hotel, Carl Perkins' Blue Suede Shoes, Little Richard's Long Tall Sally, the Platters' Magic Touch, and Frankie Lymon & the Teenagers' Why Do Fools Fall in Love.

1965 –Sunday-  The Rolling Stones made their second appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show. They performed The Last Time, Little Red Rooster and Someone to Love. They were totally upstaged by Topo Gigio, the Italian Mouse. Also appearing were singers Tom Jones (another Brit)– It’s Not Unusual, Leslie Uggams Melancholy Baby, Dusty Springfield, (still another Brit) All Cried Out; comedians, Totie Fields, Morecambe & Wise (yes, Brits again), and jugglers, The Half Brothers and Gitta Morrelly. Roy Orbison took a bow from the audience.

1969 –Friday-  The British ocean liner Queen Elizabeth 2 departed on her maiden voyage to New York City.  She would arrive in New York to a tumultuous welcome with  Mayor John Lindsay taking time out from destroying the city, greeting the ship. Still in service, the ship had a gross tonnage  of 65,863 tons. It was  270.37 x 32.09m (887.1 x 105.3ft) and could accommodate - 564 1st class, 1,441 tourist class passengers. All of who would be on line in front of you with questions at the information desk.

1982 –Sunday-  The Falklands War was so one sided it wasn’t even fun…sort of like the Dallas Cowboys playing Roosevelt High School.  The British submarine HMS Conqueror sank Argentina's only cruiser, the General Belgrano  (and that just about did it for the Argentinean Navy during the Falkland Islands War) . More than 350 people died. The General Belgrano started nautical life as the USS Phoenix, built in Brooklyn,  a light cruiser (at 10,000ish tons it is heavier than a destroyer but lighter than, yes, a heavy cruiser) that served during WWII. She was sold to Argentina in 1951 for reduced rate tango lessons and a used bolo.  The Belgrano has the dubious distinction of  being the only ship ever to have been sunk by a nuclear-powered submarine

2008 –Friday The Myanmar (Burma) cyclone. Named Nargis, the cyclone began over the Bay of Bengal and hit Myanmar devastating  five divisions and states - Yangon, Bago, Ayeyarwaddy, Kayin and Mon, of which Ayeyarwaddy and Yangon sustained the heaviest casualties and infrastructural damages. To make matters worse,  Myanmar/Burma was ruled by a military dictatorship, a collection of loons who would not allow international aid organizations to assist the helpless victims.

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3.      

International Tuba Day---yes, it's hard to believe that another year has passed and we can once again echo the words of Hamlet and  ask "tuba or not tuba", that is the question.  Although "tis nobler to use a tuba toothpaste........" Tuba Day is celebrated the first Friday in May.  Joel Day founded International Tuba Day in 1979 while attending Lower Merion High School in suburban Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Being one of only two tuba players in the band and finding a lack of respect from his fellow classmates, he decided to set a day aside for recognition of tubaistas as reputable musicians rather than form a tuba ligation.  The tuba was originally invented as “the serpent” by Edme Guillaume  of France ca 1590. Though metal versions exist, the original and most predominant materials this instrument was fashioned from was wood covered with leather. The mouthpiece was variously made of wood, bone, ivory, oxhorn, ceramic, and various metal alloys such as brass, bronze and pewter.  Then in 1821 it morphed into the ophicleide in Dublin Ireland, by bugle-maker Joseph Halliday. The name being constructed from the two words “ophis” (Greek for “serpent”) and “kleis” (for “stopper” or “cover”). The tuba proper was first patented by Prussian bandmaster Wilhelm Wieprecht and German instrument-builder Johann Gottfried Moritz in 1835. This instrument was soon adopted by British brass bands http://www.blackdiamondbrass.com/tbahist/tubahist.htm

            1469 –Monday- “Before all else, be armed.”Happy Birthday, Niccolo Machiavelli Italian writer, statesman and political theorist.  A native of Florence, he is most famous for his political treatise, The Prince written in 1513. The Prince has become a cornerstone of modern political philosophy…..especially for people who haven’t read it but think they know what it says. Machiavelli originally wrote Principe (The Prince) in hopes of securing the favor of the ruling Medici family, and he deliberately made its claims provocative. The Prince is a  practical guide to the exercise of raw political power over a Renaissance principality. Allowing for the unpredictable influence of fortune, Machiavelli argued that it is primarily the character or vitality or skill of the individual leader that determines the success of any state. He also thought that 1999 was his best single although he also enjoyed his duet with Sheena Easton on U Got the Look.  The books for which he is remembered were published only after he went kaput in  1527.

            1568-Friday- French forces under the command of Dominique de Gourgues returned to the site of Fort Caroline, now renamed Fuerte San Mateo. De Gourgues destroyed the Spanish garrison at San Mateo, avenging the earlier Pedro Menéndez de Avilés massacres. The French massacre completed the merry cycle of French/Spanish massacres in northern Florida and Georgia.The Spanish had massacred French settlers at Ft. Caroline- over forty years before the English colonized Jamestown.

            1662 –Wednesday- Happy Birthday, Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann, German architect, best known for his design of the Zwinger, (yes, it was an early version of the “zwinging sixties”) a building complex in Dresden that is considered one of the most successful examples of the Baroque aesthetic. Oh course, he was going for baroque. The Zwinger is a space surrounded by single-storey galleries linking two-storey pavilions and a gateway

             1802 –Monday-  Washington, D.C., was incorporated as a city.  The Charter granted by Congress made Washington an incorporated city and gave voters the right to elect a local legislature (called a Council) that could pass laws and levy a tax on real estate to pay for city services. The local government also included a mayor appointed by the President. Washington has gone on to earn its place in the Hall of Fame for Corrupt Local Governments…..highlighted by the video taping of a mayor making a drug deal.   Demonstrating the usual intelligence of the local D.C voter, the criminal was re-elected after serving his jail term.  

            1810 –Thursday-  If, in the month of dark December,
            Leander, who was nightly wont
            (What maid will not the tale remember?)
            To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
            Beginning his training regimen for the 1896 Olympics and without use of swimming pool noodles, Lord Byron swam Hellespont. It was in emulation of Leander's legendary swims to visit his beloved Hero. Byron was twenty-two, and ten months into his two-year tour of the Mediterranean. He was not yet famous for his poetry although he had finished a first draft of Childe Harold. The Hellespont connects the Aegean Sea in the southwest to the Sea of Marmara and Black Sea in the northeast, and has always been regarded as the boundary between Europe in the northwest and Asia to the southeast. Byron swam about a mile to cross it. Hero was a  priestess of Aphrodite. She was the beloved of Leander, a youth from Abydos. Each night he swam across the Hellespont to reach her where he would croon Bobby Freeman’s C’mon and Swim - C'mon everybody come on it!
Bobby's gonna show you how to do the swim
Kinda like the monkey
Kinda like the twist
Pretend you're in the water
And you go like this...
Now baby swim!
Baby do the swim!

            1817 –Saturday- Happy Birthday, Horatio Emmons Hale, American anthropologist and linguist. He sailed with Charles Wilkes on his 1836 expedition to the south Pacific.  Hale published a 700-page book entitled Ethnology and Philology. His comparison of carefully collected vocabularies and grammars, which he used as the basis for determining the widespread migration of Polynesian groups, was a forerunner of comparative linguistics a generation later. Hale was also the first to discover that the Tutelos of Virginia belonged to the Siouan family, and to identify the Cherokee as a member of the Iroquoian family of speech. However, he was completely unable to decipher conversations between teenage girls as they texted and gossiped about each other and the Jonas Brothers.

            1860-Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Vito Volterra,  Italian mathematician.  He developed a general theory of functionals – functionals is a branch of analysis which studies the properties of mappings of classes of functions from one topological vector space to another (glad we could clear that up!). Volterra strongly influenced modern calculus and analytical methods, and worked on integral equations, mathematical physics, and the mathematics of population change in biology. His most famous work was done on integral equations which, of course, are linked to functionals.  An integral equation is an equation in which an unknown function appears under an integral sign. Aha! You may shout.  That sounds like a differential equation. Yes, there is a close connection between differential and integral equations, and some problems may be formulated either way. Volterra was a professor at Pisa, Turin, and Rome. In 1931 he was fired from his chair (no, it’s not like being shot out of a cannon) at Rome for refusing to sign an oath of allegiance to the Fascist government, and he spent most of the rest of his life in exile.             

            1892 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, George Paget Thompson, son of  physicist John Joseph (J.J) Thompson who discovered the electron as a particle. George Thompson, also an English physicist,  followed in his father’s footsteps and followed electrons too.  He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1937 for demonstrating that electrons undergo diffraction, (sort of atomic puberty) a behavior peculiar to waves that is widely exploited in determining the atomic structure of solids and liquids.

            1902 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Albert Kastler, French physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1966 for his discovery and development of methods for observing Hertzian resonances within atoms.  Hertzian resonances  are produced when produced when atoms interact with radio waves or microwaves. His method of stimulating atoms in a particular substance so that they attain higher energy states was called “optical pumping.”(he gave the atoms little tiny bar bells and they did curls and …………)  Since the light energy used to stimulate the atoms was reemitted, optical pumping marked an important step toward the development of the maser and the laser. A side effect was a breakout of an entertainment disease known as Shriekiustus Showofficum, in which singer thinks it is more important to lengthen notes showing off their vocal powers rather than just singing the song.

            1902-Saturday- Jockey James Winkfield, the last African American rider to win the Kentucky Derby, won his second consecutive Derby aboard Alan-a-Dale trained and owned by Thomas Clay MacDowell.

            1915 –Monday-  In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
                        Between the crosses row on row,
                        That mark our place; and in the sky
                       The larks, still bravely singing, fly
                        Scarce heard amid the guns below.
            The poem In Flanders Fields , possibly one of the most affecting poems ever composed, was written by Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae. It was written after the the terrible battle in the Ypres (Belgium) salient in the spring of 1915. In fact, it was very nearly not published. Dissatisfied with it, McCrae tossed the poem away, but a fellow officer retrieved it and sent it to newspapers in England. The Spectator, in London, rejected it, but Punch published it on 8 December 1915. http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/flanders.htm John McCrae was a Canadian physician and fought on the Western Front in 1914, but was then transferred to the medical corps and assigned to a hospital in France. He died of pneumonia while on active duty in 1918. His volume of poetry, In Flanders Fields and Other Poems, was published in 1919.

1916-Wednesday- Irish nationalists Padraic Pearse , Thomas MacDonagh, James Connelly,  and Tom Clark were executed by the British for their roles in the Easter Rebellion.  They were among the seven signatories of the proclamation of Poblacht na hÉireann, or Irish Republic. They are buried together at Arbour Hill Cemetery in Dublin. The executions of  Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, a sick invalid who had married just hours before his execution, and James Connolly, who was unable to stand up in front of the firing squad due to his wounds and was shot while bound on a chair, disgusted Ireland. The summary trial and executions were not announced until after the executions had been carried out.

            1921-Tuesday-  The “eyes of Taxes are upon you.” West Virginia imposed the first state sales tax.  It was a gross sales tax but then most taxes are gross.  The tax went into effect on July 1 of the same year. Typical of state governments, the legislature did not take the time to figure out how to enforce or implement the system

            1933 –Wednesday-  Mrs. Nellie Ross assumed leadership of  the United States Mint. She was the first woman to be in charge. Earlier, less successful, versions of the U.S Mint included the U.S Chewing Gum, the U.S Tootsie Roll, U.S Good n’ Plenty, and the Perry Mason Mint. Ross oversaw the automation of many moneymaking procedures. She was also, just barely, the first woman governor of a state.  Her husband went kaput in 1922 with two years left in his term.  Nellie was elected in a special election.  At just about this same time, Miranda “Ma”  Ferguson was elected Governor of Texas on the same day, after her husband, Governor James Ferguson, had been impeached. The state laws were different and  Ross took office in Wyoming about two weeks before ”Ma” was sworn in as Governor of Texas

            1933 –Wednesday-  Actually two closely related singers share a birthday, “Godfather of Soul” James Brown born on the day and folk singer Pete Seeger born on this day in 1909- Monday.  It was Seeger who taught Brown to do splits and the bit with dropping the cape and being pulled back on stage when singing Please Please Please.  Brown taught Seeger how to play the guitar and helped with If I Had a Hammer. Brown also taught Seeger how to do splits and do the little “yips” so important to delivering a song’s message.

            1934 – Thursday- Big day for singers (see James Brown and Pete Seeger above) – Happy Birthday Francis Castelluccio, aka Frankie Valli, born in Newark, New Jersey, three octave falsetto lead singer of the Four Seasons.  Their first big hit in 1962 was Sherry, written by keyboardist and tenor Bob Gaudio with Valli’s  signature
 She - e - e-e-e-e-ry baby
She - e - rry, can you come out tonight
She - e - e-e-e-e-ry baby (Sherry Baby)
She - e - rry, can you come out tonight

            1942 –Sunday-  Only six months after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor came the beginning of the Battle of the Coral Sea, about five hundred miles from Australia, the first modern navel battle. It was fought exclusively with air attacks between aircraft carriers. Neither surface fleet sighted the other.  The battle would be waged from late May 3 – May 8.  The Japanese were preparing to invade New Guinea. After skirmishing for a few days, the Japanese and Allied fleets found each other on May 8 and each sent aircraft to attack the other.  Both air attacks occurred at about the same time approximately 200 miles apart with both sides suffering moderate losses.  The most significant Allied loss during the battle was the sinking of the American carrier, USS Lexington.  That evening, with the battle roughly a draw, both sides retreated but would meet again a month later at the decisive Battle of Midway, 3,000 miles away in the Hawaiian Islands. Although a draw, it stopped the string of Japanese victories.  It is also called the “battle that saved Australia”.

            1946 –Friday- In Europe it would be the Nuremberg Trials.  In the Pacific the Japanese war crimes trials began in Tokyo as the International Military Tribunals for the Far East began hearing the case against 28 Japanese military and government officials accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity during World War II. The emperor, Hirohito's role in WW II  was supposedly not clear. He was generally seen as ineffectual, although there was some evidence offered in the 1990's that showed he was an active participant in the war planning. However, to maintain order in Japan, the Emperor was not indicted. Among the crimes for the accused were mass killings, human experimentation and biological warfare, use of chemical weapons,  preventable famine torture of POWs, cannibalism, forced labor, comfort women (forced prostitution) and looting.  On November 4, 1948, all of the defendants were found guilty. Seven were sentenced to death, sixteen to life terms, two to lesser terms, two had died during the trials and one had been found insane. On December 23, 1948, General Tojo and six others were hung at Sugamo prison.

            1952 –Saturday-   The Kentucky Derby was televised nationally  for the first time by CBS. It had been televised regionally by  local station WAVE in 1949.  The winner was Hill Gale, ridden by Eddie Arcaro with Sub Fleet 2^nd and Blue Man 3^rd.

             1952 –Saturday-  U.S. Air Force C-47 piloted by Lieutenant Colonel Joseph O. Fletcher of Oklahoma and Lieutenant Colonel William P. Benedict of California became the first  to land an aircraft on the North Pole. Fletcher climbed out of the plane and walked to the exact geographic North Pole, probably the first person in history to do so. On April 6, 1909, Robert Perry, Mathew Henson and four Eskimos, Oatah, Egingwah, Seegloo, and Ookeah thought they reached the North Pole.  After congress settled a dispute with Frederick Cook, who claimed to have reached the Pole a year earlier, Perry and Henson were acknowledged as first to the Pole.  Unfortunately, they were a few miles off but no one quibbled and they traveled over land (ice).  Fletcher and Benedict flew and walked and then purchased t-shirts, refrigerator magnets, and shot glasses with their names on them at the North Pole Visitor’s Center.

            1957 –Friday  A dark day in New York baseball history as greedy Brooklyn Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley, given little choice by the short sighted administration, which refused to give him a stadium site in Brooklyn (they offered a site in  Queens) of the excruciatingly dull Mayor Robert Wagner, agreed to move the team from Flatbush to smoggy Los Angeles. To add insult to injury, O’Malley convinced addled NY Giants owner Horace Stoneham to move his team to San Francisco just to keep him company.  

            1960 – Tuesday- Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain was yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a tender and callow fellow.
Try to remember, and if you remember,
Then follow. …..The musical comedy The Fantasticks, a  variation on Romeo and Juliet by composer Harvey Schmidt and writer-lyricist Tom Jones (not the Tom Jones who sang It’s Not Unusual and had women’s underwear thrown at him) opened off-off-Broadway at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in New York's Greenwich Village. The show, became the longest-running musical of all time and is still running today. It starred  William Larsen, Kenneth Nelson, Harvey Schmidt, Tom Jones, Rita Gardner and Jerry Orbach who went on to star on Broadway, the movies and television - best known for his role as Detective Lennie Briscoe on TV's Law and Order . Orbach performed the musical’s signature song, Try to Remember.

            1962 –Thursday-  In a tragic “Keystone Cops” real life disaster, two commuter trains and a freight train collided near Tokyo, Japan. The freight train went through a red signal, causing it to jump the track and it collided with a commuter train. Most of the passengers survived this first collision. The survivors were able to get out of the train and escape down a 30-foot embankment adjacent to the rails. Minutes later, a second commuter train on the same line came down the tracks unaware of the crash ahead and crashed into the back of the first commuter train. This first commuter train was now pushed over and down the embankment right on top of the passengers who had escaped from it minutes earlier. More than 400 people were either killed or required hospitalization. The subsequent investigation into the accident resulted in the indictment of nine of the freight train’s crew members for criminal negligence.

            1964 –Sunday-  The “British Invasion” of singing groups started sending  the second string as Gerry & the Pacemakers made their U.S. television debut on CBS' Ed Sullivan Show. Also passing through customs were – The Dave Clark Five, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, The Searchers, The Rolling Stones, The Animals, and The Kinks. Soon to come would be the syrupy and painfully cute, Herman’s Hermits and  the ghastly Freddy and the Dreamers. On the waiting list were; Peter and Gordon, Manfred Mann, Petula Clark, Wayne Fontana and the Mindbenders, The Troggs, and Donovan and then, things got better……The Who

            1968-Thursday- Dr. Denton Cooley of the Texas Heart Institute performed the first successful heart transplant in the United States on Everett Thomas.  Thomas’ heart was damaged from rheumatic heart disease and the donor was a 15-year old girl. The patient lived for 204 days with the heart donated from the girl during which time he listened to Hannah Montana CDs, texted friends, chewed gum, and said “oh, my God” every fifteen seconds.

            1982-Monday The Weather Channel went on the air as the only 24 hr. all weather, cable network. Now we thrill to the site of people in parkas standing in snow storms and braving the winds of hurricanes as they tell us it is snowing and/or windy.

            1986 –Friday- A Delta rocket carrying a $57 million weather satellite exploded shortly after lift-off from Cape Canaveral. The was the first American attempt at a space launch since the Challenger tragedy of January 28. Apparently, two abnormal surges of power occurred in the electrical system of the rocket's main engine a split second before the spacecraft lost power after launching Saturday. The electrical system used in the rocket had not been modified since 1960, but the officials said there had been no previous reported cases of power surges. ''We feel this is quite a significant find,'' while whistling in the dark, said William Russell, the Delta project manager  for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The rocket failure had long term effects with the outbreak of the disease, Headgearius Interioritis,  which causes people to wear baseball caps when they are eating indoors at a restaurant.

            1991 –Friday Dallas kaput.  Not the city, not the Cowboys (too bad) but the kitschy television show. The last episode was aired on this day. After 357 episodes they were clearly running out of ideas and this final gem was part 2 of a rip off of It’s a Wonderful Life as J.R. continued his journey with Adam (Joel Grey – no, he didn’t break into song with Cabaret) , seeing how the Ewing family would have evolved if he'd never existed. By this time only Larry Hagman, Patrick Duffy and Ken Kerchival were left and they were barely going through the motions.

            2000 –Wednesday-  Did you know about Geocaching? The sport of geocaching began, with the first cache placed and the coordinates from a GPS posted on Usenet. Geocaching is a worldwide game of hiding and seeking treasure…….sort of like the government and your money.  A geocacher can place a geocache in the world, pinpoint its location using GPS technology and then share the geocache’s existence and location online. Anyone with a GPS unit can then try to locate the geocache. The word Geocaching refers to GEO for geography, and to CACHING, the process of hiding a cache. A cache in computer terms is information usually stored in memory to make it faster to retrieve, but the term is also used in hiking/camping as a hiding place for concealing and preserving provisions. http://www.geocaching.com/faq/ Of course if it were hidden in Alaska you might cache a cold.

            2003 –Saturday- I just looked around and he was gone….Dion…. The Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire went kaput. The “Old Man” was a rock formation on the side of a cliff that in profile looked like, well, yes, and old man.  The two previous days were cloudy and when the clouds cleared on this day, poof!, it was gone, specifically the forehead and the nose.  Now it looks a bit like Joan Rivers.  It was located in Franconia Notch State Park.  http://www.mountwashington.org/about/visitor/oldman.php

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4.       

It's National Teachers Day!  Behave Yourselves!!!

            The origins of National Teacher Day are murky but they probably have something to do with coverages. Around 1944 Arkansas teacher Mattye Whyte Woodridge began corresponding with political and education leaders about the need for a national day to honor teachers. Woodbridge wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, who in 1953 persuaded the 81st Congress to proclaim a National Teacher Day. The NEA, lobbied Congress to create a national day celebrating teachers. Congress declared March 7, 1980, as National Teacher Day for that year only.  Then in 1985 the National PTA established Teacher Appreciation Week as the first full week of May. The NEA Representative Assembly then voted to make the Tuesday of that week National Teachers Day.

            1471 –Thursday- Probably the climactic battle in the War of the Roses, the Battle of Tewkesbury as the Yorkist army led by  King Edward IV rumbled with the  Lancastrian forces led by the Duke of Somerset on behalf of Queen Margaret, wife of  the fuddlebrained and occasionally sane former King Henry VI.  When the dust settled, the Lancastrians had lost (slewen, kaputed) Prince Edward, the last legitimate descendant of Henry IV. Somerset and his principle aides were tried and executed, perhaps after being taken from sanctuary in Tewkesbury Abbey. Queen Margaret heard the news of her son's death and the disaster on the battlefield at Payne's Place, across the Severn. She fled, but was captured and brought before Edward IV at Coventry. She remained a prisoner for four years until ransomed by Louis of France. Edward's comprehensive victory at Tewkesbury ended the voices of opposition - at least for a time and for the next 12 years Edward ruled in (relative) peace.  Although we note that one of the Lancastrian commanders was Jasper Tudor, whose nephew, Henry would defeat Edward’s brother King Richard at Bosworth in 1485.

            1493-Thursday-  Pope Alexander VI – the “Borgia Pope, father of Cesare and Lucretia) defined the spheres of Spanish and Portuguese possessions in the New World by drawing the Line of Demarcation. Portuguese and Spanish explorers had been merrily sailing all over the place and claiming the lands for their respective monarchs. This settled who owned what even though the inhabitants of the territories involved did not know they were “owned”.  Portugal was assigned Brazil, the west and east coasts of Africa, the southern and eastern shores of Asia, and the East Indies. Spain was assigned the Americas, the Philippines, the lands encountered by or to be encountered by Columbus, and a beach front tract in Atlantic City.

            1494 –Friday-  On his second voyage to the Americas, Christopher Columbus landed on the island of Jamaica and claimed it for Spain. He spent some  time at Montego Bay and participated in a volley ball tournament.  Later, he and his crew enjoyed Ocho Rios and the swimming pool with the floating bar before going to a Ziggy Marley concert and having a few tokes.

            1626 -Monday Dutch explorer Peter Minuit landed on what is now Manhattan. He was sent by the Dutch East India Company looking for condos in Trump Tower, the free admission day at MOMA, and a spot at the front of the ½ price Broadway Show ticket line.  Minuit is famous for buying the island of Manhattan (in what is now New York) from Native Americans with trinkets valued at about $24. He tried to get tickets to Phantom of the Opera for the same trinkets but ended up with Manhattan instead.  He founded New Amsterdam on the southern tip of the island.  The Manhattan of 1626 was just a tad different from today’s Manhattan.  It was full of wildlife (well, today’s Manhattan is full of wildlife too – most of it on two legs). Wild roses grew there. The fragrance of flowers drifted far out to sea.  Now the fragrance of garbage, and the garbage drifts far out to sea.  The oysters were huge, 12 inches (as Jonathan Swift said “twas a brave man that first ate an oyster”); there were giant lobsters, six feet across and so many fish in the streams (yes, it had streams) they could be caught by hand. There were also flocks of wild swans and blackbirds.  The trains ran on time, there was no traffic gridlock at the lighting of the Christmas Tree at Rockefeller Center, the City Council was honest, and Rudy Giuliani was still married to his first wife.

            1655-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Bartolomeo Cristofori of Padua, Italy. Cristofori was an Italian harpsichord maker who is credited with the invention of the piano. The piano first known as the pianoforte was developed from the harpsichord around 1720.  Three of Cristofori's pianos survive to this day.  One is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City a second at the Museo Strumenti Musicali in Rome and the third is at the Musikinstrumenten-Museum of Leipzig University. The Metropolitan's Cristofori, the oldest surviving piano, outwardly resembles a harpsichord. It has a single keyboard and no special stops, in much the same style as Italian harpsichords of the day. It has 54 keys, and thinner strings and hammers than today's pianos so it sounds more like a harpsichord than a piano, except for when Jerry Lee Lewis played it with his feet during a performance of Great Balls of Fire.

            1733 –Monday- Happy Birthday, Jean-Charles de Borda, (when he went to school it was the Borda Education) French mathematician and nautical astronomer who made good use of the differential calculus and of experimental methods to unify areas of physics for his studies of fluid mechanics and his development of instruments for navigation and geodesy, the study of the size and shape of the Earth. One of his instruments, the Borda repeating circle, was used during the time of the French Revolution to measure an arc of a meridian as part of a project to introduce the decimal system. This instrument was proposed by Borda around 1785 and it had developed from instruments designed for use on ships.

            1776-Saturday- Rhode Island declared its freedom from England, the first colony to do so, two months before the Declaration of Independence was adopted. But of course Rhode Island is so small that no one noticed. In fact, when notified of the declaration the entire government of William Pitt the Younger repaired to the map for a look  and they couldn’t find the place so they didn’t know where to send troops.

            1796-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Horace Mann, American educator and philanthropist. He was elected to act as Secretary of the newly-created Massachusetts Board of Education in 1837 and used his position to enact major educational reform. He spearheaded the Common School Movement, ensuring that every child could receive a basic education funded by local taxes. He placed a major emphasis on “moral training”, standardization and classroom drill……..all (particularly the first) have faded from today’s classrooms.

            1825-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Thomas H. Huxley, English biologist who made his reputation as a marine biologist while working as a ship's surgeon. He is best known today as the main advocate of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution as he did more than anyone else to advance its acceptance among scientists and the public alike. Huxley coined the word “agnostic” to describe his own beliefs.  He is best known for his famous debate in June 1860, at the British Association meeting at Oxford. His opponent, Archbishop Samuel Wilberforce, was, not-so-affectionately known as "Soapy Sam" for his renowned slipperiness in debate. Wilberforce was coached against Huxley by the odious Richard Owen of  stolen credit for dinosaur fame. During the debate, Archbishop Wilberforce ridiculed evolution and asked Huxley whether he was descended from an ape on his grandmother's side or his grandfather's. Accounts vary as to exactly what happened next, but according to one telling of the story, Huxley muttered "The Lord hath delivered him into my hands," and then rose to give a brilliant defense of Darwin's theory, concluding with the rejoinder, "I would rather be the offspring of two apes than be a man and afraid to face the truth." http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/thuxley.html

            1854-Thursday-  Asa Fitch became the first state entomologist in the U.S. when he was appointed in New York State by the executive committee of the N.Y. State Agricultural Society.  He had been bugging them about this for years! He was “fitch”  to be tied.

           1869 –Tuesday-  "Take me out to the ball game,
Take me out with the crowd.
Buy me some peanuts and Cracker Jack,
I don't care if I never get back,
Let me root, root, root for the home team,
If they don't win it's a shame.
For it's one, two, three strikes, you're out,
At the old ball game." …..Jack Norworth…..The first professional baseball game.  The Cincinnati Red Stockings were the first professional baseball team. They began with a close pitchers duel, a 45-9 crushing of a team called the Great Western of Cincinnati.  They then proceeded to win nearly every one of their more than seventy games against overmatched amateur teams in the Midwest. The Red Stockings finally lost a game in 1870, when the Brooklyn Atlantics beat them 8-7 in extra innings. Alexander Joy Cartwright  of New York had invented the modern baseball field in 1845. Cartwright and the members of his New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, devised the first rules and regulations for the modern game of baseball.  The first recorded baseball game in 1846 when Alexander Cartwright's Knickerbockers lost to the New York Baseball Club. The game was held at the Elysian Fields, in Hoboken, New Jersey.

            1886 –Tuesday-  At Haymarket Square in Chicago, Illinois, a bomb was thrown at a squad of policemen attempting to break up a labor rally. On May 1, the workers at the McCormick Harvesting Machine Co. in Chicago began a strike in the hope of gaining a shorter work day. On May 3, police were used to protect strikebreakers and a scuffle broke out; one person was killed and several others injured. On this day immigrant German anarchists stirred the pot with a rally to protest alleged police brutality. About 1,500 people showed up at Haymarket Square, (not quite the 20,000 predicted by rally leaders). When the police sent units into the crowd to force it to disperse, a pipe bomb was thrown into the police ranks; the explosion killed seven policemen and injured more than 60 others. The police fired into the crowd of workers, killing four.       

            1886 –Tuesday-  Chichester Bell (cousin of Alexander Graham Bell) and Charles S. Tainter using prize money they were awarded by the Volta Laboratory Association to develop an improved phonograph called the graphophone. On this day they received a patent for the gramophone. It was the first practical phonograph. Thomas Edison had used tinfoil as the recording medium for his first phonograph in 1877.  Chichester Bell and Tainter saw the tinfoil as a major obstacle in any further development of the instrument, and after much experimenting came upon the idea of replacing the fragile tinfoil with a wax compound onto which they could engrave the sound waves directly. This portentous technological breakthrough made such cultural musical highlights as the recording of Lady Gaga’s interpretation of Chopin’s Andante spianato et Grande Polonaise in E-flat major (Op. 22), possible.

            1910 –Wednesday-  Having finally built a ship, the Royal Canadian Navy was created.

             1922-Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Dr. Eugenie Clark, American biologist and ichthyologist, born in New York City. Dr. Clark studied  behavior of sharks for decades and after all that she still had  both arms, both legs, all her fingers and all her toes. How did she get started? We’ll cite the source so you don’t think we made it up (we never make anything up) http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/educ/exhibits/womenshall/html/clark.html Clark's interest in fish began at the age of nine when her mother took her to visit an aquarium.  She became fascinated by the fish she saw, especially the shark, and was soon going back every week.  This fascination was fostered by her mother, who bought her a small tank of guppies. 

            1926-Tuesday- Happy Birthday, David Allan Bromley, Canadian-American nuclear physicist who was considered the "father of modern heavy ion science" (we note the Gnus continuing fascination with “fathers of……..see our Who’s Your Daddy page- http://sciencegnus.com/Who%27s%20Your%20Daddy.html ) for his experiments on both the structure and dynamics of atomic nuclei. Speaking of heavy ions, the Gnus has long been concerned with obesity in ions and believes that diet and exercise may be a valuable treatment.  A heavy ion is the nucleus of a heavy element. When such nuclei are caused to collide at high velocities, new elements are created. Bromley was nationally known as the most influential science adviser in U.S. history as the architect (1989–93) of President George H.W. Bush’s science and technology policy. He was an early advocate of the so-called data superhighway (the Internet) and was instrumental in securing funds for scientific research

            1929-Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Audrey Hepburn, perpetually waif-like actress born near Brussels, Belgium.  Hepburn was known for her beauty, elegance, and grace. Often imitated, she is still one of Hollywood’s greatest style icons.  In 1954, she won Best Actress Academy Award for Roman Holiday. Her filmography includes; Sabrina, Funny Face, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Charade, My Fair Lady, and Wait Until Dark.

            1932 –Wednesday-  Chicago gangster Al Capone was sentenced to eleven years in prison.  Murder? Robbery? Inspiring generations of bad actors to play him in the movies? No.  It  was income tax evasion.  “Big Al” had neglected to pay it. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison. Illness got him released on parole in 1939 so he never served out his prison term (which, happily for tourism, included a stay at Alcatraz). He developed a horrible case of syphilis and died a drooling broken man in 1947.

            1956 –Friday- Gene Vincent and his group, The Blue Caps, went into the echo chamber and recorded his biggest hit, the erudite yet abstruce, Be-Bop-A Lula.
Well, be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby
Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe
Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love
My baby love, my baby love             

            1957 –Saturday-  Alan Freed's Rock 'n' Roll Revue TV show premiered 7:30  on ABC.  Many believe Freed gave Rock n Roll its name. The show starred  the Dell-Vikings, Come Go With Me- the Clovers, Devil or Angel - Guy Mitchell, Singin’ the Blues -  Sal Mineo, actor trying to be a singer, and "Screamin'" Jay Hawkins, I’ve Put a Spell on You.

            1959 –Monday- Volare, oh oh,
cantare, oh oh oh oh.
Nel blu dipinto di blu,
felice di stare lassu`.
E volavo volavo felice
piu` in alto del sole ed ancora piu` su
mentre il mondo pian piano spariva
lontano laggiu`.
Una musica dolce suonava soltanto per me. ……….The winners of the first annual Grammy Awards (grammy is short for gramophone, patented on this day in 1886) –recognizing songs from 1958- were announced. Among the winners were: Record of the Year Domenico Modugno for Nel Blue Dipinto di Blu (Volare) Album of the Year Henry Mancini for The Music from Peter Gunn, Song of the Year Domenico Modugno for Nel Blu Dipinto di Blu (Volare)” Best Rhythm & Blues Performance The Champs for Tequila, Best Comedy Performance Ross Bagdasarian (David Seville)  for The Chipmunk Song, performed by Ross Bagdasarian. as David Seville and the Chipmunks. Lest we be confused, frequently the 1959 awards are mixed up with the 1960 awards – songs from 1959- which featured, Record of the Year: Mack the Knife - Bobby Darin, Album of the Year: Come Dance With Me - Frank Sinatra, Song of the Year: The Battle of New Orleans and Best Artist of 1959: Bobby Darin

            1970 –Monday-  Tin soldiers and Nixon coming,
We're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming,
Four dead in Ohio. -Neil Young.  Four unarmed Kent St. students were killed by National Guard fire during anti-Vietnam War demonstrations.  Shortly after noon on that Monday, 13 seconds of rifle fire by a contingent of 28 Ohio National Guardsmen left four students dead, one permanently paralyzed, and eight others wounded.

            1973-Friday- The Sears Tower at 233 S. Wacker claimed, for a while, the honor of world’s tallest building.  It was the first building over 1,400-ft  and topped out at 1,454-ft. It took 3 years to build, and is 1,707-ft tall including its antennas. We note that the Empire State Building of New York City which had been dedicated on May 1 1931. See May 1 for tallest buildings. On July 10, 1997, the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat met in Chicago to announce new standards with four categories for measuring tall buildings. These categories are: 1. Height to the structural or architectural top. 2. Height to the highest occupied floor. 3. Height to the top of the roof. 4.  Height to the top of antenna. Another category “so high it looks like it reaches the sky” was rejected. In 2009 a company called Willis Group Holdings, a London-based insurance broker, announced that it had bought most of the office space in the tower as part of the deal, get to put its own name on the skyscraper. Oh that worked well. It was Sears Tower for thirty six years. It will always be Sears Tower. Besides, Willis Tower is a narish name.

            1989-Thursday-   The space probe Magellan was carried in the cargo bay by the STS-30 Space Shuttle Atlantis mission launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The space probe was named after the 16th-century Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan who was slewn in the Philippines. This was the first planetary spacecraft to be released from a shuttle in Earth orbit and it arrived at Venus ten months later. Taking the “great circle route”, Magellan looped around the Sun one-and-a-half times before arriving at Venus on August 10, 1990. A solid-fuel motor on the spacecraft then fired, placing Magellan into a near-polar elliptical orbit around Venus. The highly successful imaging radar mapped more than 98 percent of the planet's surface and collected high-resolution gravity data of Venus. It also found life on Venus that turned out to be Hungarian actress, and serial bride, Zsa Zsa Gabor and a band of Amazon women, thus proving the movie Queen of Outer Space made in 1958, was in fact a documentary.

          1990-Friday-  Jesse Tafero, convicted rapist, drug dealer and murderer was executed via electric chair in Florida for the murders of Florida Highway Patrol officer Phillip Black and Donald Irwin, a visiting Canadian constable and friend of Black. Took a while to get rid of Jesse as the electric chair malfunctioned three times, causing flames to leap from his head.

        2000-Thursday- Another reminder about playing with fire as The National Park Service started a "prescribed burn" in New Mexico. The prescribed burn would have died out on its own had it been left to burn. Instead, inspectors said, it was a backfire set by firefighters that erupted into an out-of-control forest fire which  eventually which devoured 50,000 acres, destroyed 400 homes, and came within 300 yards of a plutonium storage facility at Los Alamos.  

            2002 –Saturday-  An EAS Airline plane crashed into the town of Kano, Nigeria, killing 148 people. The Nigerian BAC 1-11-500 aircraft exploded in a densely populated section of the northern Nigerian city. The cause of the crash was never determined.

                 2003 –Sunday-  A "pain in the ass" - the first cloned equine, a mule foal was “born”  at the University of Idaho.  Named Idaho Gem, researchers cloned the mule using a cell from a mule fetus (fetal attraction) and an egg from a horse. Mules are almost always sterile because donkeys have 62 chromosomes, horses have 64 and mules end up with 63.  An unexpected side effect occurred as the after birth congealed and developed a life of it’s own eventually morphing into one of those “news babes” the hot, yet chronically clueless, young women who read the news on cable television.

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5.  

Look for the Eta Aquarid meteor shower – remnants of Halley’s Comet- tonight.

            1260 –Wednesday-  Kublai Khan became the ruler of the Mongol Empire. Kublai Khan was grandson of the conqueror Genghis Khan. (Remember the famous cheer “ Ghengis Ghengis he’s our Mhan.  If he can’t do it, Kublai Khan”…).  Kublai was acclaimed "Great Khan" in the North in 1260 but his younger brother, Ariq Böge, disputed the election and proclaimed himself khan at Karakorum, Mongolia. In the following years Kublai fought his brother, defeating him in 1264. He developed a new type of control (different from the brutal subjugation preferred by many of his predecessors) by adapting  Mongols adopted divide-and-rule tactics. The Mongols and central Asians remained separate from Chinese life; in many ways life for the Chinese was left basically unchanged. Kublai was also well known for his acceptance of different religions. The rule of the Mongol minority was assured by dividing the population of China into four social classes: the Mongols; the central Asians; the northern Chinese and Koreans; and the southern Chinese. He showed tolerance towards the religions of his new subjects and because of his leniency, a relationship formed between him and the people. Along with providing religious freedom, he created aid agencies, increased the use of postal stations, established paper currency, reorganized and improved roads, and expanded waterways. Under his rule, the winter capitol was moved from Mongolian territory to the Chinese City of Dadu, which is modern day Beijing. He established the summer capitol in Shangdu, which was referred to as Xanadu.

(In Xanadu did Kubla Khan

A stately pleasure-dome decree :

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran

Through caverns measureless to man

Down to a sunless sea.)- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

In 1275, Marco Polo, visited Xanadu and a relationship based on trust was formed between Polo and the Khan. Polo’s reports on Xanadu and China were new to Western Europeans and sparked trade with the eastern world.

            1640 –Saturday-  King Charles I of England dissolved the Short Parliament. This was mainly because he couldn’t find them.  They were all under five ft. tall and were lost amidst the benches and desks.  Actually,  it was the fourth Parliament of King Charles I's reign was called during the crisis brought about by the Bishops' Wars against Scotland. Note – they were always warring against Scotland.  Lasting only three weeks it was the first Parliament to be called in eleven years and was the beginning of the end of the King's Personal Rule.  Of  course a week after the Short Parliament ended, the Long Parliament (they certainly had a way with words in 17^th century England) would begin. That one would last until 1660. Charles would be kaputed via beheading in 1849.

            1809-Friday- The first U.S. patent granted to a woman was issued to Mary Kies for "a new and useful improvement in weaving straw with silk or thread." Unfortunately, the patent file was destroyed in the great Patent Office fire in 1836. Until about 1840, only 20 other patents were issued to women. The inventions related to apparel, tools, cook stoves, and fire places. For you patently patent fans out there, since 1848, the U.S patent office issues its patents on Tuesdays so be patient while waiting to file your patent.

            1813 –Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Soren Kierkegaard, Danish religious philosopher.  He is known as the "father of existentialism", the philosophy that emphasizes the uniqueness and isolation of the individual experience in a hostile or indifferent universe, regards human existence as unexplainable, and stresses freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of one's acts. Existentialism is derived from Hegalian Absolutism – but then you knew that- actually Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegal and the German Romantics. An existentialist question was posed to three men."When you are in your casket and friends, family and congregates are mourning over you, what would you like to hear them say?" The first said: "I would like to hear them say that I was a wonderful husband, a fine spiritual leader, and a great family man." The second said: "I would like to hear them say that I was a wonderful teacher and a servant of God who made a huge difference in people's lives." The 3^rd  said: "I would like to hear them say, 'Look , he's moving.'"

            1818 –Tuesday- Speaking of philosophy (See Kierkegaard above) Happy Birthday, political philosopher Karl Marx, born in Prussia.  Author of many notably dense political tracts, rarely read but frequently discussed, he is perhaps most famous for his co-authorship, with Friedrich Engels of the Communist Manifesto and of Das Kapital.   Although he was largely ignored by scholars in his own lifetime, his social, economic and political ideas gained rapid acceptance in the socialist movement after his kapution in 1883. Interestingly he started out as a follower of Georg Wilhelm Hegal who’s beliefs worked Kierkegaard into such a lather.

            1820 -Friday Happy Birthday Elkanah Billings, the Canadian geologist and paleontologist, who was actually the first Canadian paleontologist.  He began publishing his own magazine—The Canadian Naturalist and Geologist and Sir William E. Logan, Director of the Geological Survey of the United Provinces of Canada, recognized the quality of Billings’ work and made him the first paleontologist of the Survey.  Billings went on to identify 526 new species of Paleozoic invertebrates including Nancy Pelosi, Regis Philbin, Kirk Douglas, Whoopie Goldberg and  Silvio Berlusconi.

            1821 –Saturday- Emperor Napoleon kaput. Napoleon died in exile on the island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic Ocean.  The Emperor had been sent there following his defeat at Waterloo in 1815. An autopsy at the time determined that stomach cancer was the cause of his death. But some arsenic found in 1961 in the general’s hair sparked rumors of poisoning. Another theory centered on watching too many reruns of The View. While alive, Napoleon was a threat to escape exile. He could have changed the balance of power in Europe; therefore murder speculations didn’t seem too far fetched. A study released in 200 , combining current medical knowledge, autopsy reports, Bonaparte’s physician memoirs, eyewitness accounts, and family medical histories — found that gastrointestinal bleeding was the immediate cause of death.  The bleeding was caused by cancerous lesions.  Yes, Napoleon had joined the “French Foreign Lesion.”

            1861-Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Peter Cooper-Hewitt, American electrical engineer who invented the mercury-vapor lamp, a major step in electrical lighting. He was experimenting with electric conductivity and he was able to prove that a gas can conduct an electrical charge. By doing this, Cooper-Hewitt was able to pass an electric current through mercury gas sealed in a quartz tube. He also unveiled America’s first steam locomotive, known as the Tom Thumb in 1825.  Attention jello fans, Cooper –Hewitt obtained the very first American patent for the manufacture of gelatin His grandfather was the famous Peter Cooper, who founded and endowed the Cooper Institute in New York City and his father was one of the most aggressive mayors New York City ever had and also made a notable record as a member of Congress

            1862-Monday- Cinco de Mayo – It has nothing to do with the five original varieties of Hellman’s.  It is not Mexico’s Independence Day (that’s September 16). The holiday of Cinco De Mayo, The 5th Of May, commemorates the victory of the Mexican militia over the French army at The Battle Of Puebla in 1862. It is primarily a regional holiday celebrated in the Mexican state capital city of Puebla and throughout the state of Puebla, with some limited recognition in other parts of Mexico, and especially in U.S. cities with a significant Mexican population. Lead by Mexican General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin, a smaller, poorly armed militia estimated at 4,500 men were able to stop and defeat a well outfitted French army of 6,500 soldiers, (but then everyone defeats French armies) which temporarily stopped the invasion of the country. The victory was a glorious moment for Mexican patriots. Unfortunately, the victory was short lived. Upon hearing the news of the defeat, French leader Napoleon III sent 30,000 more troops and a full year later, the French were eventually able to depose the Mexican army, take over Mexico City and install the conspicuously inept Maximilian as the ruler of Mexico. Maximillian would be kaputed in 1867.  http://www.mexonline.com/cinco-de-mayo.htm

             1864 –Thursday-  One year after the Battle of Chancellorsville, the forces of Generals Grant and Lee began their maneuvering towards Richmond with the Battle of the Wilderness.  The woods were so thick that entire units were lost.  In fact, Union soldiers came upon the bodies of Union soldiers killed at Chancellorsville that had been unearthed during spring rains.  The victory went to Lee but it was pyrrhic.  Unlike previous Union commanders, Grant would not retreat.  The armies clashed again at Spotsylvania, and again at Cold Harbor.  Each a Confederate victory and each resulting in irreplaceable Confederate losses during Grant’s relentless march towards Richmond.

            1867-Sunday- Happy Birthday, Nelly Bly, born Elizabeth Cochrane in Cochran Mills, Pennsylvania.  In 1887 Bly was recruited by Joseph Pulitzer to write for his newspaper, the New York World. Over the next few years she pioneered the idea of investigative journalism by writing articles about poverty, housing and labor conditions (an unending supply of subject matter even today) in New York. After reading Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, Bly suggested to Pulitzer that the newspaper should finance an attempt to break the record illustrated in the book. He liked the idea and used Bly's journey to publicize the New York World. The newspaper held a competition which involved guessing the time it would take Bly to circle the globe. Over 1,000,000 people entered the contest and when she arrived back in New York on January 25, 1890, she was met by a huge crowd to see her break the record  in 72 days, 6 hours, 11 minutes and 14 seconds- which beat the imaginary record of Verne’s fictional  Phineas Phogg by almost 8 days. She is also remembered in the famous song from the movie Casablanca, As Time Goes Bly

            1874-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Frank Conrad, He began what are considered to be the first regular radio broadcasts from his Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania garage in 1920, and is responsible for the founding of the first licensed broadcast station in the world: KDKA. Conrad worked for Westinghouse for 51 years during which  time he received over two hundred American, English, and German patents on mechanical and electrical devices such as refrigerators, carburetors, radio transmitters and receivers, televisions, clocks, arc lamps, gear shifts, air conditioners, insulators, vacuum tubes, and electric meters- Mr. Conrad was a busy man!  He is probably beloved by all of you as the inventor of the round type electric meter now in general use – you know, the one that is spinning madly, running up your electric bill every time you look at it.

            1881-Thursday- Louis Pasteur tested inoculations against anthrax upon an ox, several cows 25 sheep, 3 french hens, 2 turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree. His experiment proved successful, and was a milestone in the treatment of disease.

            1891-Tuesday-  Carnegie Hall (then named Music Hall) opened in New York City. Financed by Andrew Carnegie, the opening night headliner was the great composer and conductor, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky with Jimi Hendrix sitting in on guitar, Elton John on piano, and “special guest appearance” by Pat Boone singing April Love and Speedy Gonzalez. Actually, The first performer at Carnegie Hall was a pianist named Franz Rummel. He was a well known artist but just an average performer with average talent thus he did not perform on opening night. He played one month before opening night in the basement hall.

            1904 – Pitching against the Philadelphia Athletics at the Huntington Avenue Grounds,  Denton True “Cy”  Young of the Boston Americans pitched  the first perfect game in the modern era of baseball, 3-0.  The losing pitcher was Hall of Famer Rube Waddell. The Athletics’ shortstop was one of Professor Sy Yentz’ favorite baseball names Ossee Schreckengost

            1925-Tuesday- John T. Scopes was taken under arrest for violating a new state law against the teaching of Darwin's theory of evolution in a Tennessee public school. He was found guilty at what became known as the Scope's "Monkey Trial" the following month, and fined $100. He was also accused of "monkeying" around with the curriculum and this caused some state legislators to go bananas.  Although upon appeal the fine was ruled excessive and over-ruled, the state law itself was not found unconstitutional and the government of Tennessee could go back to their research on how to invent the wheel.

           1930-Monday- Twenty seven year old, Amy Johnson left Croydon, England  on the first solo flight by a woman between England and Australia, a distance of 11,000 miles. She flew a single-engine De Havilland Gipsy Moth named Jason, and landed in Darwin, Australia on  May 24 just in time to “throw another shrimp on the Barbie”. She had learned to fly only a year before.  Her first important achievement, after flying solo, was to qualify as the first British-trained woman ground engineer. For awhile she was the only woman Ground Engineer in the world.

             1936-Tuesday- A patent (remember….since 1848 patents are issued on Tuesdays) was issued for the first bottle with a screw cap and a pour lip to Edward A. Ravenscroft, Glencoe, Illinois This replaced his earlier, less successful, occasionally messy model which featured a pour cap and a screw lip.

            1945 –Saturday- The only known American deaths in the continental United States during World War II occurred in Lakeview, Oregon as Mrs. Elsie Mitchell and five neighborhood children were killed while attempting to drag a Japanese balloon out the woods. Unbeknownst to Mitchell and the children, the “balloon”  was explosive and armed, and it blew up soon after they began tampering with it.  Killed in the explosion were: Sherman Shoemaker, 12; Jay Gifford, 12; Edward Engen, 13; Joan Patzke, 11; Richard Patzke, 13; and Elsie Mitchell, 26.

            1951 –Saturday-  In honor of the birthday of Karl Marx we note The premiere of I Was a Communist for the FBI.  Released at the height of the “red scare”, with the tag line “I had to sell out my own girl -- so would you!”, as the The FBI infiltrates one of their agents in the US Communist Party and get this………..not even his family knows he’s not a Communist.  Whew! Directed by Gordon Douglas, it starred Frank Lovejoy, Dorothy Hart, Philip Carey, and Paul Picerni who would go onto a supporting role in television’s The Untouchables.

            1955 –Thursday-  The musical Damn Yankees opened at the 46^th St. Theater onBroadway. Based on the book by Douglass Wallop, The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, the lyrics and music were by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross, and it was staged by George Abbott. The Faustian story line (selling soul for success) starred Stephen Douglass as Joe Hardy of the Washington Senators, Gwen Verdon as Lola (Whatever Lola Wants)and Ray Walston in the Mephistophelian role of Applegate. Damn Yankees stayed on Broadway for over a thousand performances

             1961-Friday Mercury 3 carried Alan Shepard reasonably close to being in space during a suborbital flight of 115 miles that lasted 15 minutes.  We Americans were told he went to space and coming shortly after the shock - less than a month -after of the Russians being first into space - Yuri Gagarin – we, in the “Free World” celebrated this as a major accomplishment.  The space craft name Freedom Seven was Shepard's choice. "Freedom" because it was patriotic and "Seven" because it was the seventh Mercury capsule produced. It also represented the seven Mercury astronauts. Shepard did not orbit the Earth, and the flight lasted only 15 minutes and 28 seconds (about how long it takes to get through security at Newark Airport on a good day). Freedom 7 reached an altitude of 116.5 statue miles and flew a distance of 303 statute miles. NASA had hoped to launch the mission earlier, even as early as December 1960, but several different issues, both technical and weather, delayed the flight. During his flight, Shepard took manual control of the spacecraft and tested its flight capabilities. Shepard reported the spacecraft handled and responded well although he experienced some difficulty in parallel parking.

             1963-Sunday-  The world's first human liver transplant was performed in America by Dr. Thomas E. Starlz at a Denver, Col., hospital. His patient, a 48-year-old man, survived for 22 days. This liver transplant was more successful than the cheaper, cost saving liverwurst transplant (performed at the counter of a New York delicatessen) in which the liver was replaced by slices of liverwurst (mustard-no mayo....although today is Cinqo de Mayo). He had also performed the world's first spleen transplant four months earlier in the same year.   This did, however allow the patient to "vent his spleen" at a later date.

          1968 – For What It’s Worth,  The feudin’  and a fightin’ Buffalo Springfield disbanded after one last concert at Long Beach, California. The seminal rock group had only formed in 1966, with Dewey Martin, left, Richie Furay, Stephen Stills (having been rejected in his audition for the Monkees) , Bruce Palmer and Neil Young. Although the band lasted only a couple of years, its influence is still felt today. Jim Messina replaced Palmer in 1968 just in time for the break up.

            1981 - Irish Republican Army hunger-striker Bobby Sands died at the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. It was his 66th day without food.  The 27-year-old republican spent the last days of his life on a water bed to protect his fragile bones. He had been in a coma for 48 hours before being pronounced dead by medical staff at the Maze prison in Northern Ireland. Sands, who had served five years of a 14-year sentence for possessing a gun, began his hunger strike on 1 March.  He was making five main demands: that republican prisoners be allowed to wear their own clothes, that they be given free association time, visits and mail, that they should not to have to carry out penal work and should be given back lost remission.

            1986 – After assurances that the Cuyahoga River would no longer catch fire, Cleveland was named as the site for the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame Museum. The idea had originated in 1983.  It would finally open in September 1995.  The first inductees were performers Chuck Berry, James Brown, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Fats Domino, Everly Brothers, Buddy Holly, Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, and Little Richard. Early influences Robert Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers, and Jimmy Yancey. Lifetime Achiever John Hammond. Non-performers Alan Freed and Sam Phillips. It was Freed, a disc jockey from Cleveland who probably coined the phrase “Rock n Roll”. Why Cleveland?  Good question. Cleveland ended up being chosen, most industry professionals agreed that it is because the city offered the best financial package. As the Cleveland  Plain Dealer music critic Michael Norman noted, "It wasn't Alan Freed. It was $65 million... http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816,134633,00.html

            1994 –Monday-  American brat, eighteen year old Michael Fay was caned in Singapore for vandalism. He received four lashes. After pleading guilty to vandalism charges which involved spray painting several cars, throwing eggs at cars and switching license plates, he was sentenced March 3 to four months in jail, a $2,200 fine -- and six strokes of the cane, later reduced to four.

              2000 –Friday-  A conjunction of the five "naked eye" planets -  Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - formed a rough line across the sky with the Sun and Moon. Unfortunately, nothing was visible from the Earth, because the line of planets was behind the Sun. Such a conjunction last happened in Feb 1962 and will not happen again until Apr 2438....so mark your calendars because maybe it won't be behind the sun next time and to paraphrase the words of the great Shorty Long it’ll be a Function at the Conjunction

 Back to Calendar

6.        

1536 –Wednesday- King Henry VIII ordered English language Bibles be placed in every church (and every hotel room too although he drew the line at also placing Conrad Hilton’s biography in them too). Henry had been suppressing Protestant bibles for years. It wasn’t a  change of conscience though. Besotted by young hottie Anne Boleyn, King Henry VIII had requested that the Pope permit him to divorce his wife (Catherine of Aragon)  and marry his mistress. The Pope refused. Always one for a calm, thoughtful response, Henry responded by getting her pregnant, marrying Anne anyway, thumbing his nose at the Pope by renouncing Roman Catholicism, taking England out from under Rome’s religious control, and declaring himself as the reigning head of State to also be the new head of the Church. His first act was to further defy the wishes of Rome by funding the printing of the scriptures in English… the first legal English Bible… just for spite.

     1742-Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Jean Senebier, Swiss pastor, naturalist and botanist who’s experiments showed  that green plants consume carbon dioxide and release oxygen under the influence of light. In 1782 he first demonstrated the basic principle of photosynthesis, which he published in Physiologie végétale in 1800 – the centerfold was an airbrushed philodendron.  Though Marcello Malpighi and Stephen Hales had shown that a great part of the mass of plants must be obtained from the atmosphere, it was Charles Bonnet (while wearing his  Easter Bonnett) who observed the effects on leaves plunged in aerated water, bubbles of gas, which Joseph Priestley recognized as oxygen. While bubbling over with enthusiasm, it was Senebier who demonstrated that that this process was confined to the green parts, and to these only in sunlight, and first gave a connected view of the whole process of vegetable nutrition in strictly chemical terms.  He was ultimately sued by the American Civil Liberties Union in a class action on behalf of the plant’s non-green parts and those not in sunlight.

           1758 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Maximilien Robespierre, French Jacobin leader, principal figure in the French Revolution and the “Reign of Terror” during which thousands were guillotined. After the downfall of the monarchy in August 1792, Robespierre was elected first deputy for Paris to the National Convention. The convention abolished the monarchy, declared France a republic and put the king on trial for treason, all measures strongly supported by Robespierre. The country had a monarcharectomy as king was kaputed in January 1793. Control of the country passed to the Committee of Public Safety, of which Robespierre was a member. He rapidly became the dominant force on the committee. The committee began the 'Reign of Terror', ruthlessly eliminating all those considered enemies of the revolution. These included leading revolutionary figures such as Georges Danton and Camille Desmoulins. Need we remind you that all were lawyers. In May 1794, Robespierre insisted that the National Convention proclaim a new official religion for France - the cult of the Supreme Being. Notre Dame was changed into the Temple of Reason. The “Reign of Terror’ and Robespierre's autocracy made him increasingly unpopular. and a conspiracy was formed to overthrow him. On 27 July 1794, he was arrested after a struggle. The following day Robespierre, wounded from a bullet to the jaw, and twenty one of his closest supporters were kaputed at the guillotine. The “Reign”  had ended ended with Robespierre suffering the same fate he prescribed for Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and thousands of others. We recommend Hilary Mantel’s historical novel; A Place of Greater Safety.

                 1806-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Chapin A. Harris American dentist who was one of the founders of dentistry as a profession. His most influential text, the riveting, The Dental Art: A Practical Treatise on Dental Surgery  was published in 1830. Professor Sy Yentz is currently working on a book about dentistry –The Dental Challenge: How Many Fingers and Devices Can I Fit In Your Mouth at the Same Time…..While Engaging You in a Conversation.  Harris was a co-founder of the first dental school in the world, Baltimore College of Dental Surgery in 1840, and cofounder of the first dental journal in the world, the American Journal of Dental Science in 1849. Establishing dentistry was a difficult task.  In fact, it was almost like pulling teeth.

            1840-Wednesday-  This development caused people to be glued to their mail:  The concept of adhesive postage stamp was introduced by Scotsman, James Chalmers in Great Britain in 1834 and the world’s first prepaid postage stamp, known as Penny Black, (invented by Rowland Hill) was issued on May 6, 1840, with the profile of Queen Victoria printed on it.  In the United States, the adhesive postage stamp was officially issued in 1847.  The postal rate of one penny meant that a letter not exceeding half an ounce in weight could be sent to any part of the United Kingdom. The purpose of the stamp was to indicate that the postage had been prepaid. Before the invention of the stamp the receiver paid the postage rather than the sender.

1851-Tuesday-  John Gorrie of Florida, (whose blueprints can be described as the “Gorrie details”) got a patent for the mechanical refrigerator. As a physician,  
he became convinced that cold was a healer. Gorrie began to experiment with making artificial ice and invented a machine that produced ice. Horse, water, wind-driven sails, or steam power could power his compressor. Gorrie’s machine set the groundwork for modern refrigeration and air-conditioning. He died in 1855 after suffering a nervous breakdown when he was unable to obtain financing for production of his invention.  One might say he was frozen out of the process.

1851-Tuesday-  On the same day as the refrigerator was patented, a. patent was issued to Linus Yale Jr. of  Massachusetts for his invention of a "clock" lock, the first such patent to be issued in the U.S. He modestly called it the “ Yale Infallible Bank Lock" for safes and vaults. The design allowed the owner to change its combination and would also allow the key to secure the lock while being hidden away from the exterior of the door by a hardened steel plate, which covered the key-hole behind it. The design superseded the keyhole lock and the first double locks (two locks within one case).  Yale's best-known lock design, however, was for a cylinder pin-tumbler lock. This would eventually be followed by the "forgot the combination" lock...which could only be used once.The basic concept for locks was used in ancient Egypt around 4,000 years ago, in locks that were very large (up to two feet long) and made out of wood.

1856-Tuesday- -Sweet dream baby
Sweet dream baby
Sweet dream baby
How long must I dream?
Dream baby
Got me dreamin' sweet dreams
The whole day through
Dream baby
Got me dreamin' sweet dreams
Nighttime too….Roy Orbison………..Born on the same day department (see below):  Happy Birthday, Sigmund Freud , (who was afreud of the dark) born in Moravia (what is now the Czech Republic), father of modern psychiatry. In 1899, he published The Interpretation of Dreams, the book that  Freud regarded as his most important work. Freud worked briefly with Carl Jung, was a professor in Vienna and co-founded the Vienna Psychoanalytical Society and the International Psychoanalytic Association. In 1938 he left Austria for England to escape the Nazi government.  Two psychologists meet at their twentieth college reunion. One of them looks like he just graduated, while the other psychologist looks old, worried and withered.

The older looking one asks the other, "What's your secret? Listening to other people's problems every day, all day long, for years on end, has made an old man of me." The younger looking one replies, "Who listens?"

1856 –Tuesday- And, Edward Peary  American polar explorer who made the first successful expedition to the North Pole arriving April 6 1909 with his black assistant Matthew Henson and four Inuit Eskimos. His claim was disputed by Frederick Cook who claimed to have reached the pole in 1908, a controversy  which continues to this day, though most geographers have accepted that Peary was in fact the first to arrive reasonably close to the pole. He spent several prior years, from 1891, exploring northern Greenland. During one of these expeditions, he discovered what is still known as the largest meteorite.

1861 –Monday-  Arkansas seceded from the Union.  Reaction in the rest of the country was, “who cares?” It was the 9^th state to secede.  North Carolina, Tennessee, Missouri, and Kentucky would follow.  Among battles fought in Arkansas during the Civil War were those at Pea Ridge and Prairie Grove in 1862.

            1868 –Wednesday-   Happy Birthday, Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, the last Russian emperor and one of history’s leading examples of monarchial incompetence. During his reign, Russia was involved in two wars. In 1904-5, the country suffered a heavy defeat by Japan -- 400,000 men were killed, wounded or captured, and material losses were valued at 2.5-billion gold rubles. Even greater losses, however, were suffered in World War I, which Russia entered on the Allied side on August 1, 1914. Loss of territory and massive casualties as well as starvation and poverty on the home front were the main reasons for the Second Russian Revolution in February 1917. On March 2, 1917, Nicholas abdicated. In April 1918, the Bolshevik government, under Lenin, decided to move the Imperial family to Ekaterinburg in the Urals. The tsar, his wife and five children were shot dead by a Bolshevik firing squad in Yekaterinburg on  July 17, 1918.  The bodies were hidden and were found and identified in 1991.

1877 –Sunday-   Just under a year after his great victory of over the reckless George Custer at the Little Big Horn, Chief Crazy Horse of the Oglala Sioux surrendered to United States troops of General Nelson Miles in Nebraska. Except for Gall and Sitting Bull, he was the last important chief to yield, He would be slewn by army guards on Sept. 5, 1877.

1879 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Bedrich Hrozný, Czech archaeologist and linguist who, who deciphered cuneiform Hittite, opening a major path to the ancient history of the Near East. He was working with cuneiform tablets (cuneiform script is the earliest known form of written expression) created by the Sumerians from ca. 3000 BC. Cuneiform writing began as a system of pictographs. Over time, the pictorial representations became simplified and more abstract….(current examples of cuneiform include prescriptions written by doctors and high school student essays).  The Hittites were an ancient people of Asia Minor (Turkey) and Syria who flourished from 1600 to 1200 B.C. The Hittite empire, with its capital at Bogazköy (also called as Hattusas), was the chief power and cultural force in Western Asia from 1400 to 1200 B.C.

1882 –Saturday- While strolling through the park one day
In the merry merry month of May
I was taken by surprise
By a pair of roguish eyes……Ed Haley and Robert A. Keiser,……..The Phoenix Park Murders. No, not a Miss Marple mystery.  Lord Frederick Cavendish, British secretary for Ireland, and Thomas Henry Burke, his undersecretary were walking in Phoenix Park, Dublin when they were kaputed via being stabbed to death by members of the "Invincibles," a terrorist splinter group of the Fenian movement

1889 –Monday-  The Eiffel Tower was officially opened to the public at the Universal Exposition in Paris. There was immediately a 45 minute wait on line – a tradition that continues to this day. Since the mid-19th century, Universal Expositions were held in Paris every eleven years. In 1889, the event coincided with the centennial of the French Revolution. The commissioners tastefully rejected plans for a 300-meter-tall guillotine, selecting Gustave Eiffel's tower instead. The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII of England, opened the tower. The tower was almost torn down in 1909, but was saved because its antenna was used both for military and other purposes, and the city let it stand after the permit expired.  The Tower is 300m / 984 ft. (320.75m / 1,052 ft. including antenna) and weighs 7000 tons.

1895 –Monday-  Happy Birthday, Rudolph Valentino, Italian-born American silent screen actor – The Sheik. Valentino died in 1926 of peritonitis caused by a ruptured appendix. Professor Sy Yentz notes these appendix fatalities throughout history because he suffered a ruptured appendix in 2005.

1896-Wednesday- The Aerodrome No. 5 made the first successful flight of an unpiloted, engine-driven, heavier-than-air craft. Its inventor, Samuel Pierpont Langley, launched the craft using a spring-actuated catapult mounted on top of a houseboat on the Potomac River, near Quantico, Virginia. This first flight traveled 1,005-m (3,300-ft),  and was followed by a second of 700 m (2,300 ft) on the same afternoon at speeds of 20 – 25 mph and altitudes of 80 – 100 ft.  before circling Dulles Airport for an hour  waiting for permission to land.

1910 –Friday-  Speaking of Edward VII, who officially opened the Eiffel Tower (when he was Prince of Wales) in 1889, he went kaput on this day and George V became King of the United Kingdom. Edward was sixty years old when he finally succeeded his Methuselah -like mother, Queen Victoria in 1901. He usually smoked twenty cigarettes and twelve cigars a day. He liked to drink too.  Bronchitis, pneumonia and several heart attacks would send Edward to that big throne in the sky.  George V would in turn sire the criminally stupid, alcoholic, womanizing, Nazi sympathizing Edward VIII, who would abdicate the throne in 1936 so he could marry serial divorcee and  American gold digger, Wallace Simpson.

1915 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Orson Welles, American actor, director, producer and writer who combined his talents in the movie Citizen Kane, – generally recognized as the greatest movie ever made. Having created his masterpiece at age twenty five, years later Welles would declare "I began at the top and have been making my way down ever since." All the films he directed were interesting, but none matched his initial achievement of Citizen Kane. Among his other films were The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Lady From Shanghai (1946), Othello (1952), Touch of Evil (1958), The Trial (1962). Most of those films were  marked by soap operaish disputes with producers and studios and Welles often disowned the final version.

 1937-Thursday-  The zeppelin Hindenburg exploded at Lakehurst, New Jersey.  This was also the first recorded coast to coast radio broadcast. Announcer Herbert Morrison described the explosion as it occurred.  "Oh  the humanity……."  The Hindenberg was 200 feet over its intended landing spot at New Jersey's Lakehurst Naval Air Station. Thirty-five people on board the flight were killed (13 passengers and 22 crewmen), along with one crewman on the ground.  The cause is still uncertain although hydrogen, sabotage, the ingredients of the “skin”, someone sticking a pin in the side of it,  or a combination of one and three have been cited.

1954-Thursday-  In Oxford, England, 25-year-old medical student Roger Bannister broke track and field's most famous barrier in distance running: the four-minute mile. Bannister, won the mile race with a time of 3 minutes and 59.4 seconds. For years, so many athletes had tried and failed to run a mile in less than four minutes that people made it out to be a physical impossibility.  Bannister, who was being pursued by four bill collectors, the U.S Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Marilyn Mansonl, and Rosie O’Donnell, proved them wrong.

1957 -Monday Just let me hear some of that

                    {Refrain}

                    Rock and roll music

                    Any old way you choose it

                    It's got a back beat, you can't lose it

                    Any old time you use it

                    It's gotta be rock and roll music

                    If you want to dance with me

                    If you want to dance with me

                    I have no kicks against modern jazz

                    Unless they try to play it too darn fast

                    And change the beauty of the melody

                    Until it sounds just like a symphony

                    Just let me hear some of that

 Rock and roll music………………..

 Chuck Berry recorded Rock & Roll Music for Chess Records (blue label). It was released on his album, One Dozen Berries. Listen carefully, Blues legend Willie Dixon played bass. The song was later covered by the Beatles.

1962-Sunday-  The first U.S. nuclear warhead fired from a Polaris submarine was launched. The submerged USS Ethan Allen test-fired a Polaris A-2 missile with a live nuclear warhead across the Pacific Ocean toward Christmas Island, 1,700 miles (2,700 km) away. The test was the only one the U.S. ever conducted of any nuclear ballistic missile from launch through detonation…….. yet, it resulted in the eventual development of a mutant strain of virus that resulted in the disease of Vocalinus Stupiditus Theaterus, which causes people to talk during movies or shows.

1991-Monday Happy Birthday, Hannah N. Ake, Marine Biologist, Gaucho, and noted water polo pioneer who, at U.C Santa Clara, developed the first horse snorkel to enable the horses to stay underwater during the water polo match.

            1992 –Wednesday-  The New York Mets are infamous for the litany of failures and ineptitude marking the franchise’s history. On this day pitcher Anthony Young began a losing streak of 27 games.  This is a remarkable feat.  Think about it.  Losing twenty six games in a row with the same team!  Young pitched six seasons in the major leagues with the New York Mets, Chicago Cubs, and Houston Astros. While with the Mets, from May 6, 1992 to July 24, 1993, he lost 27 consecutive games in which he had a decision. This losing streak is the longest in Major League Baseball history.  He was 0-14 as a starter and 0-13 as a reliever.

            1994 Friday- Bo-bom doo-wop, bo-bom doo-wop,
bo-bom doo-wop, bo-bom doo-wop.)
(Bo-bom doo-wop, bo-bom doo-wop,
bo-bom doo-wop, bo-bom doo-wop.)
You cheated, you lied,
You said that you love me

You cheated, you lied,
You said that you want me. …..The Shields……..Former Arkansas state worker Paula Jones filed suit against Presidential stud muffin and horn dog, Bill Clinton, alleging he'd sexually harassed her in 1991. Gee, gosh, the President couldn’t have been (gasp) lying when he denied it. Nah, Clintons never lie.

             1994 –Friday-  The tunnel under the English Channel from France to England (or vice versa), popularly called the “Chunnel” (although in France it is called le tunnel sous la Manche) opened in Calais at a ceremony presided over by England's Queen Elizabeth II and French President Francois Mitterand. This was the first  connection between Britain and the European mainland for the first time since the Ice Age. The channel tunnel, connects Folkestone, England, with Sangatte, France, 31 miles away. The original plan for a “Chunnel of Love” featuring open topped six car, four seater trains had been revised into a train chunnel.  “Squeegee men”, windshield cleaners quickly followed up the Queen and the President trying to clean the train windows with dirty rags.

            2009 –Wednesday-  Chemists with Professor Thomas M. Klapötke at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität (LMU) München analyzed a molecule, which has an extremely short bond length.  As reported by the researchers in Nature Chemistry, the carbon atom and the chlorine atom in the so-called chlorotrinitromethane molecule are only 1.69 Angstroms apart from one another. An angstrom is a metric unit of length equal to one ten billionth of a meter (or 0.0001 micron). The description of compounds and interactions between atoms is one of the basic objectives of chemistry. The cause of the bonding appears to have been an evening of molecules singing, Kumbaya, roasting marshmallows, and engaging in “team building activities”.

2010 ––Tuesday- A newly discovered species of monitor lizard, a close relative of the Komodo dragon, was reported in the journal Zootaxa this week by Sam Sweet, a professor in the department of Ecology, Evolution and Marine Biology at UCSB, and Valter Weijola, a graduate student at Abo Akademi University in Turku, Finland. The monitor lizard is easily identified by it’s white Sam Brown belt and conspicuous hall pass as it carries messages from teachers to the office and reminds children not to run in the lunchroom.  The scientific name of this lizard is Varanus obor; However, it's called Torch monitor because of its bright orange head with a glossy black body. The Torch monitor can grow to nearly four feet in length, and thrives on a diet of small animals and carrion. The Torch monitor exists only on the small island of Sanana in the western Moluccan islands.

 Back to Calendar

7.        

1660-Friday-  Isaack B. Fubine of The Hague, Netherlands, did not invent macaroni, he patented macaroni. We don't know if it was penne, rigatoni, or shells. Yes, Italian cooking favorite, macaroni was patented in the Netherlands. The process involved "sticking a feather in his cap and calling it macaroni" (note macaronis were aides to British officers in the late 18^th century).  Pasta itself was first prepared in China over 3,000 years ago (Professor Sy Yentz had some the original product at a cheap restaurant the other night) from rice beans and flower.  It was introduced to Italy by the brothers Polo, Niccolo (Marco’s dad) and Maffeo in the late 13^th century.  By 1353, pasta (spaghetti-like noodles and turnip shaped ravioli) was a favorite food in Italy.  Even American President Thomas Jefferson developed a macaroni making machine.  It’s also mentioned in Boccaccio’s Decameron.  Isaak B. Fubine is not mentioned anywhere except in the first sentence of this item and that first sentence is all over the internet.

            1713 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday- Alexis Claude Clairaut  French mathematician who as child prodigy was studying calculus at age 10. In 1726, age thirteen, he read his paper Quatre problèmes sur de nouvelles courbes to the Paris Academy. Clairaut was the only one of twenty children of his parents to reach adulthood He was the first person to estimate the mass of Venus to a close value. Amazing, mentioning mass, we didn’t even know there were any Catholics on Venus.

            1763 –Saturday-  Ottawa Indian chief, New France supporter, and eventually a car, Pontiac began his war on the British in the Great Lakes Region. Pontiac began organizing many Indian tribes together to rebel against the British. Pontaic's message of united Indian resistance against the British was accepted among many groups, including the Delawares, Hurons, Illinois, Kickapoos, Miamis, Potawatomies, Senecas, Shawnees, Ottawas, and Chippewas (sounds like a list of the mascots for college athletics). The Indians attacked Fort Detroit and Fort Pitt but were unsuccessful in capturing the forts. They  were counting on French support against the British in order to take these two forts. The French support never came. Good old French. Without controlling Fort Pitt or Detroit, the Indians had no real chance of driving the British out of the western frontier. Smaller battles continued for several years. In 1766, Pontiac signed a peace treaty at Oswego, New York.  Pontiac was neither the originator nor the strategist of the rebellion, but he kindled it by daring to act, and his early successes, ambition and determination won him a temporary prominence not enjoyed by any of the other American Indian leaders so the British regarded him as the leader even if his allies didn’t. http://www.ohiojudicialcenter.gov/pontiac.asp

             1812 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Poet Robert Browning, born in London. Robert married poet Elizabeth Barrett in 1846. Elizabeth wrote her love poems Sonnets from the Portuguese to Robert. “How do I love thee.  Let me count the ways….” Robert, in turn, penned “roses are red, violets are blue”…..no, no, he didn’t.  Professor Sy Yentz has his iambic sense of humor. To Elizabeth he dedicated Men and Women, which contains his best poetry. Public sympathy for him after her death (she was a much more popular poet during their lifetimes) helped the critical reception of his Collected Poems . He is buried in Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey.

            1824 –Friday-  World premiere of Ludwig van Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (actually Symphony No. 9 in D minor, op. 125) at the Kärntnertor Theatre in Vienna. Friedrich Schiller’s poem The Ode to Joy (actually, Schiller had called it An die Freude)had interested Beethoven from 1793 when he sought to write a song which became the choral symphony but the musical theme of Part IV was written only a year before the completion of the symphony.  The performance was conducted by Michael Umlauf under the (by now)  deaf composer's supervision.

            1833-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, composer (he is currently decomposing) Johannes Brahms, born in Hamburg, Germany and famed for his Double Concerto for violin and cello, Liebeslieder Waltzes, and Academic Festival Overture. and  Wang Dang Doodle (recorded by Howlin’ Wolf)

            1840 –Thursday-  The Great Natchez Tornado hit Natchez, Mississippi killing 317 people. There was no National Weather Service in 1840 and no warnings of what was to come. Because of that, no one was prepared. The tornado formed southwest of Natchez and moved northeast along the Mississippi River. It then moved into the town of Natchez and destroyed many buildings. The final death toll was 48 on land and 269 on the river, mostly from the sinking of flatboats.  It was the second deadliest tornado in United States history surpassed only by the Tri-state Tornado (Missouri, Illinois, Indiana)  of 1925 with 695 deaths.

            1840 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Russian composer.  In 1875 he composed what is perhaps his most universally known and loved work, the Piano Concerto No. 1.  Also popular was Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake (1876). It is the most successful ballet ever written if measured in terms of broad audience appeal. Tchaikovsky has quite a list of “greatest hits”.  You’ll also find The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, the Pathetique, and the opera Eugene Onegin.

             1841 –Friday- Happy Birthday, Gustave Le Bon, French social psychologist best known for his study of the psychological characteristics of crowds. His most notable work The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind was crowded out of bookshelves.  He stated that crowds maintained a collective mind and that the group mind was not simply a summary of the individual persons. Instead, a new distillation of traits emerged, primarily unconscious in nature, which reflected racially inherited characteristics. Obviously, Le Bon spent a lot of time at Miley Cyrus and Lil’ Wayne  concerts. Over one hundred and fory  years later he changed  his name from Gustave to Simon Le Bon and became the lead singer for Duran Duran.

1847-Friday- Delegates to a national medical convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, approved a resolution to establish the American Medical Association. Dr. Nathaniel Chapman was elected as its first president. The American Medical Association (AMA) prescribes the standards for the medical profession.

            1874-Thursday-  The wayward wind is a restless wind
A restless wind that yearns to wander …Gogie Grant….The Beaufort Scale, developed by Englishman, Admiral Sir Francis Beaufort - which measures wind force, was adopted for international use by the British Admiralty.   Prior to this the scale was used to weigh Beaufort during his periodic diet regimens. The scale, which he conceived in 1805 would undergo underwent major changes in the 100 years following it initial adaptation since the scale was originally devised with frigates in mind.  After frigates faded from the nautical scene, the scale was adjusted to “states of the sea” and “degrees of motion of trees”. It wasn’t totally finalized until 1946.                                           

1878-Tuesday-  Joseph R. Winters, a black American inventor, received a patent for a fire escape ladder.  It was a wagon-mounted fire escape ladder for the city of Chambersburg, PA.  The ladder could be raised to 2^nd, 3^rd, and 4^th floor windows of buildings. Presumably if you were on the 5^th floor you were in a bit of trouble.

1885 –Thursday   Happy  Birthday George 'Gabby' Hayes, American actor  and professional side kick to Hopalong Cassidy, John Wayne, Roy Rogers, and Randolph Scott.

1887-Saturday- Happy Birthday, Edwin Land ( brother of Disney Land, Ice Land and Ire Land, and Po Land…….yes, it was a large family!), American physicist, manufacturing executive, and inventor,   Land developed the first modern polarizers for light, (light oriented in a plane with respect to the source) a sequence of subsequent polarizers, and theories and practices for applications of polarized light from which came the Polaroid Land Camera.  He first demonstrated his camera in 1947, which gave fully developed prints in 60 seconds.

            1896 –Thursday-  Dr. H. H. Holmes, (Herman Webster Mudgett) one of America's first well-known serial killers, was hanged in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.  As described in Erik Larson’s excellent book, The Devil in the White City – which juxtaposes the activities of the murderous Holmes with wonders of the Chicago Exposition of 1893- Holmes preyed on tourists visiting the Fair and he also selected female victims from among his employees (many of whom were required as a condition of employment to take out life insurance policies for which Holmes would pay the premiums but also be the beneficiary), lovers and hotel guests, and would torture and kill them.

                1902-Wednesday-   Martinique’s Mount Pelé exploded in the deadliest volcanic eruption of the 20th century. The following day, the city of Saint Pierre, which some called the “Paris” of the Caribbean, was virtually wiped off the map.  Although in January,  Mt. Pelée began to show an abrupt increase in fumarole activity, the public showed little concern. This changed, however, on April 23 when minor explosions began at the summit of the volcano. Over the next few days, St. Pierre was rocked by earth tremors, showered in ash, and enveloped in a thick cloud of choking sulfurous gas. These nightmarish conditions deteriorated further and became the stuff of horror movies when the city and outlying villages were invaded by ground-dwelling insects and snakes driven from the slopes of Mt. Pelé by the ashfalls and tremors. Horses, pigs, and dogs screamed as red ants and foot-long centipedes crawled up their legs and bit them. Thousands of poisonous snakes joined in the fun. An estimated 50 humans, mostly children, died by the snake bites, along with some 200 animals. But, as Billy Mays would say “wait, there’s more”,  things would go from bad to worse around this day as the volcano erupted with, pardon us, volcanic energy. A large black cloud composed of superheated gas, ash and rock rolled headlong down the south flank of Mt. Pelé at more than 100 miles per hour.  In less than one minute it struck St. Pierre with hurricane force. The searing heat of the cloud ignited huge bonfires. Thousands of barrels of rum stored in the city's warehouses exploded, sending rivers of the flaming liquid through the streets and into the sea. The cloud continued over the harbor where it destroyed at least twenty ships anchored offshore. The hurricane force of the blast capsized the steamship Grappler, and its scorching heat set ablaze the American sailing ship Roraima, killing most of her passengers and crew.  In a masterpiece of timing (remember the volcano had been erupting for a few days) the Roraima had arrived only a few hours before the eruption. Of the 28,000 people in St. Pierre, there were only two known survivors. Mount Pelé, the name meaning “bald” in French, was a 4,500-foot mountain on the north side of the island.

                . 1915- Friday- They almost made it from New York to Britain but the British ocean liner Lusitania was torpedoed without warning by the German submarine U-20 off the south coast of Ireland. Within 20 minutes, the vessel sank into the Celtic Sea. Of 1,959 passengers and crew, 1,198 people were drowned. On May 6th, the Lusitania received the first of a number of warnings from the British Admiralty about U-boat activity off the south coast of Ireland. The crew went through a number of safety drills and some watertight bulkheads were closed.  The next day, May 7th, the Lusitania came into sight of the Irish coast. The ship's captain, Captain Turner, became concerned as he could see no other ship ahead of him - he was really really concerned that he could see no protective naval ships. This was not good. It was as if all other ships had cleared the waters as a result of the Admiralty's warning so guess which ship was the only target for U-20?   The submarine fired one torpedo but there were two explosions. It is thought that a second explosion occurred because the Lusitania was carrying  4,200 cases of small arms ammunition.

            1939 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday,  Johnny Maestro, American  rock n roll singer. Maestro was lead singer of doo woppers, the Crests during the 1950s with hits including now standard, 16 Candles, as well as The Angels Listened In, Step By Step, (“first step, a sweet hello, 2^nd step, my heart’s aglow”)  and Trouble In Paradise. In 1968, he combined with a Del Satins, who had backed up Dion after he left the Belmonts and formed the Brooklyn Bridge. Along came The Worst That Could Happen, Blessed Is The Rain, Welcome Me Love (my name is lonely, tell that girl that I think of her only…) and the absolutely appalling  Your Husband, My Wife.             

            1945 –Monday-  World War II came to an end in Europe as German Commander in Chief (Hitler having kaputed himself on April 30) Admiral Karl Doenitz surrendered to Allied forces.  Hitler had selected Joseph Goebbels to succeed him but Goebbels kaputed himself (and his wife and his eight children) the next day. Authorizing German forces in northwestern Europe to surrender on May 4, Doenitz instructed Colonel General Alfred Jodl to sign the instrument of unconditional surrender on May 7.

           1952 –Wednesday- The concept of the integrated circuit, the basis for all modern computers, was first published by radar scientist Geoffrey W.A. Dummer.  Dummer, employed by the Royal Radar Establishment of the British Ministry of Defense published the idea at the Symposium on Progress in Quality Electronic Components in Washington, D.C Unfortunately, the unfortunately named Dummer couldn't figure out how to make and integrated circuit – remember this was before Brown vs. Kansas Board of Education so integration was a year or so away- so the first integrated circuits were developed independently by two scientists. Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments who filed a patent for a "Solid Circuit" on February 6, 1958 and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor who was awarded a patent for a more complex "unitary circuit" on April 25, 1961. Noyce's silicon circuit ended up being the prototype on which the microprocessors we now use are based. http://www.velocityguide.com/computer-history/integrated-circuit.html

             1954 –Friday- Another war another loss for France. In northwest Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh communist forces defeated the French at Dien Bien Phu, a French stronghold that had been under siege by the Vietnamese communists for 57 days. The Viet Minh victory at Dien Bien Phu signaled the end of French colonial influence in Indochina and cleared the way for the division of Vietnam along the 17th parallel at the conference of Geneva. It led to increased U.S involvement, the “domino theory” – that if one Southeast Asian country went communist, the rest would fall like dominos- the Vietnamese War, and ultimately the reunification of the country under Communist rule in 1975 when the United States’ congress refused further financing for the South Vietnamese government and it collapsed like a badly prepared soufflé.

                1957 –Tuesday-  Brilliant young Cleveland Indians' lefty pitcher Herb Score was  hit by a line drive off the bat of New York Yankee, Gil McDougald.  McDougald's shot caught Score flush in the right eye, breaking his nose, cutting his eyelid and causing massive swelling and hemorrhaging. He was out for the rest of the year. Score regained his sight and was back on the mound in 1958 with  a three-hit, 13-strikeout shutout of  the Chicago White Sox but his career – due to an elbow injury- would sputter and he would be out of baseball by 1961.

                 1963-Tuesday-  The United States launched the Telstar II communications satellite on behalf of its private owner, AT&T. On its tenth orbit, it transmitted the first transatlantic TV program seen in color.  Telstar I, launched in 1962 had also broadcast but those pictures were in black and white. That first color transmission, the Eurovision Song Contest caused viewers to run screaming from their homes.

            1964-Thursday-  The record low temperature for May in the continental U.S. was set   -15  F. at White Mountain, California.  This put a distinct chill on the annual “Nudist Romp and Frolic in the Sun Picnic” scheduled for noon this day.

8.        

450 –Wednesday-  Jack Cade's Rebellion as Jack Cade (believed to be his name - some of his followers called him John Mortimer, and claimed that he was related to Richard, Duke of York, and also that he had fought for France against England in the Hundred Years War. He appeared to history out of nowhere in the spring of 1450)  led an uprising against the policies of the addled Henry VI. The majority of the participants were peasants and small landowners from Kent, who objected to forced labor, corrupt courts, the seizure of land by nobles, the loss of royal lands in France, heavy taxation and being forced to listen to Herman’s Hermit’s Greatest Hits. Led by Cade, an ex-soldier, a mob gathered in Kent, defeated a government force and entered London. At first the Londoners supported Cade, but the violent behavior of Cade's men turned the City against them. Most of the mob accepted a pardon issued by the king, and returned home. Cade himself was also pardoned, but later killed by the Sheriff of Kent, Alexander Iden, who  pursued Cade and caught him. Cade was mortally injured, and he died on his way back to London. His corpse was hung, drawn, and quartered, and his head placed on a pole on London Bridge. http://www.britainexpress.com/History/medieval/cade.htm

1541-Thursday-  Hernando De Soto discovered the Mississippi River. Reportedly, his first words were "you mean I missed Mardi Gras?"  DeSoto, besotted with dreams of riches (he was with Pizarro for the looting of the Inca Empire), first landed in Florida, Bradenton claims  to be the spot, and set off in search of riches committing countless atrocities, enslaving hundreds and killing thousands of Indians as he cut a swath across what is now the Southeastern United States.  He first sighted the Mississippi south of Memphis, Tennessee. After crossing the river he explored Arkansas (possibly sighting White Water and alerting the Clintons to the real estate possibilities) and established his winter quarters near the present site of Fort Smith. After months of exploration, he resolved to return to the sea, he reached the mouth of the Arkansas River, where he promptly died of fever on May 21, 1542 never having found his riches.  His current whereabouts are unknown as his companions buried the body in a large hole which the natives had dug near one of their villages to get materials to build their houses. However, the Indians afterwards disinterred the body. They then hollowed out the trunk of a large tree and, placing the body in it, sank it in the Mississippi which they called the Grande.

            1698-Thursday- Happy Birthday Henry Baker, English naturalist who introduced microscopy to the general public with papers on his microscopical examinations of water creatures, fossils and politicians. Among his publications were the riveting Microscope made Easy in 1743, followed by the scintillating Employment for the Microscope

In 1753. Baker also developed new methods of teaching the hearing and speech-impaired. The novelist, Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe, was his father-in-law. Influenced by Baker's work, Defoe even wrote a book about a deaf magician, The Life and Adventures of Duncan Campbell in 1720.

            1742-Tuesday Happy Birthday, Lionel Lukin, English, inventor who in 1785 patented  the construction of the modern "unsinkable" lifeboat.  He patented his design of watertight compartments, cork, and other lightweight materials to build small boats that would not sink even when filled with water. He is considered by some to have been the inventor of the lifeboat (although some think William Wouldhave –really, that was his name - would have (pun intended) a competing claim –although his model didn’t really work until three years after Lukin’s model). Lukin’s other inventions included a raft for rescuing persons under ice, an adjustable reclining hospital bed, and a rain gauge.

            1786 –Monday-  Happy Birthday, Thomas Hancock, English inventor who founded the British rubber industry. Hancock invented the masticator, (sounds like something that helps teenagers when they’re alone in their rooms) a machine that shredded rubber scraps, allowing rubber to be recycled after being formed into blocks or rolled into sheets. Hancock, the master of mastication, remember this was before tires were needed, teamed up with waterproof rubber inventor Charles MacIntosh and the mastication process was used for pneumatic cushions, mattresses, pillows and bellows, hose, tubing, solid tires, shoes, packing and springs.  

            1790-Saturday-   Setting off hundreds of years of confusion over measurement systems, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand convinced  the French National Assembly decided to create a simple, stable, decimal system of measurement units. The earliest meter unit chosen was the length of a pendulum with a half-period of a second.

             1794-Thursday- Antoine Lavoisier, the father of modern chemistry, was guillotined by a revolutionary tribunal that stated, "We need no more scientists in France." Lavoisier may have said," Let's not lose our heads over this”. Lavoisier was tried, convicted, and guillotined all on one day In spite of his contributions to science and to France, Lavoisier had, unfortunately, joined the Ferme Générale, a private company that collected taxes for the Crown.  Owners, called 'tax farmers,' were empowered to collect taxes of all kinds, but especially duties on imported goods.  The system was easily and often abused by the tax farmers who enriched themselves and lived in extravagance.  They were the target of popular hatred among the peasants and merchants alike. He had also made incurred the enmity of Jean Paul Marat. When Marat tried to become a member of the Academy of Science., Lavoisier pointed out that his writings were empty. All members of the Ferme Générale were executed during the “Reign of Terror”- See Robespierre, May, 6 1758. Prior to his headectomy,  Lavoisier established the consistent use of chemical balance, used oxygen to overthrow the phlogiston theory, and developed a new system of chemical nomenclature.

            1840 – Friday- The first U.S. photographic patent was issued to Alexander S. Wolcott of New York City.  It was a daguerreotype camera with concave reflector. Instead of a lens, it had inside it a large concave mirror which reflected intense light on to the plate, thus greatly lessening the required exposure time. The disadvantage was that the size of the pictures were limited to two square inches so he could only take pictures of tiny people or sometimes just a nose…..ha ha ha Professor Sy Yentz has his photographic sense of humor…... Wolcott had opened the world's first portrait studio in March 1840, and in 1841 later sold exclusive rights to Richard Beard, who opened the first studio in Europe a year later

            1842-Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Emil Chrstian Hansen, Danish botanist who revolutionized beer-making, while working for the Carlsberg Brewery,  through development of new ways to culture yeast.  Yes, yeast is yeast and west is west and………… He also proved that there are different species of yeast. He refused to patent the method, but instead made it available for free to other brewers. Some yeast cultures went on to develop into people who kiss dogs on the mouth.

             1846-Friday- Five days before the formal declaration of war, General Zachary Taylor defeated a much larger Mexican army in the Battle of Palo Alto north of the Rio Grande River, near Brownsville Texas. The battle consisted mostly of a lopsided artillery duel. Attempts by the Mexican cavalry to turn the U.S. flank proved unsuccessful, and Mexican General Mariano Arista retreated to a strong defensive position at Resaca de la Palma. Arista lost between 250 and 400 men at Palo Alto, double the number of American losses.  Zachary Taylor emerged from the war a national hero. "Old Rough and Ready" was elected president in 1848. In July 1850, Taylor returned from a public ceremony and complained that he felt ill. Suffering from a recurring attack of cholera, he died several days later paving the way for the immortal Millard Fillmore to become President.

            1847-Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Oscar Hammerstein, German/American inventor, cigar maker, opera impresario, theater builder; and Oscar II's (of Rogers & Hammerstein) grandfather. His development of the theater district in New York City, his acoustic and populist innovations in theater design, his introduction of the new and controversial into the staid conventions of opera, his bankrolling of opera productions with the profits from vaudeville comedy and cigar machines, combined to create the area near Broadway that would become Times Square in Manhattan

            1855 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday,  John Warne Gates, known as John "Bet A Million" Gates, was an American inventor, promoter and speculator. He discovered a market for Joseph Glidden’s invention, barbed wire fencing on the Western plains and helped convince ranchers to adopt it for use. “Bet a Million” was a founder of the The Texas Company which became the Texaco oil company. He became influential in the development of the city of Port Arthur, Texas.  In a 1900 horse race in England, Gates won $600,000 on a $70,000 bet, which rumors escalated to over $1 million and earned him the nickname "Bet-A-Million".

            1864 –Sunday- A mere two days after the Battle of the Wilderness, the armies of Grant and Lee met again at Spotsylvania. This ferocious battle, featuring the "Bloody Angle", in which the Union forces found and attacked an open area in Lee’s line of defense, resulted (as did the Wilderness) in a greater number of Union loses. However, Grant could replace his losses, Lee could not.  As with the Battle of the Wilderness, Grant would not retreat and continued his march towards Richmond and more punishing/high casualty battles before the inevitable victory of April, 1865.

            1873-Thursday-  Happy Birthday Nevil Vincent Sidgwick English chemist who contributed to the understanding of chemical bonding, especially in coordination compounds. As we have noted, chemical bonding usually occurred after a day of team building activities and  an evening of sitting around the campfire, roasting marshmallows while singing Kumbaya.

            1879-Thursday-  Here in my car
I feel safest of all
I can lock all my doors
It's the only way to live
In cars…Gary Numan……No, he didn’t invent the car. He never even built one but the first U.S. patent for an automobile was filed by George Baldwin Selden of Rochester, N.Y. It was not issued until almost twenty years later, on Nov, 5 1898. He called it “a unique combination of an internal combustion engine and a road vehicle. Selden was a Rochester, New York, patent attorney. He applied for a patent on what he hoped to be the prototype for all future automobiles, a basic road vehicle propelled by a liquid hydrocarbon engine. Remember, he applied for the patent without ever having manufactured a single car.  Charles Duryea built his first car in 1892. It was not until 1896 that Charles King, Ransom Olds and Henry Ford produced their first cars in Detroit.       

            1884-Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Harry S Truman, 33rd president of the U.S.  The S stands for just S, no middle name so, no period after the S (except when ending a sentence). Truman became President when Franklin D. Roosevelt went kaput shortly after beginning his fourth term as President.  Truman led the nation through the final stages of World War II and through the early years of the Cold War, vigorously opposing Soviet expansionism in Europe and sending U.S. forces to turn back a communist invasion of South Korea.  Elected President (with Vice President Alben Barkley) in an upset over Thomas E. Dewey in 1948, Truman decided not to seek reelection in 1952. He retired to Independence, Missouri.

1886-Saturday-  Druggist John S. Pemberton invented and sold a new drink called Coca Cola at his Atlanta, Georgia store. Pemberton concocted the Coca Cola formula in a three legged brass kettle in his backyard. It was not exactly an immediate hit.  About nine servings of the soft drink were sold each day. Sales for that first year added up to a total of about $50. Pemberton’s expenses were over $70 so the first year of sales were a loss.  Until 1905, the drink, marketed as a "brain and nerve tonic," contained extracts of cocaine as well as the caffeine-rich cola nut. The name, using two C's from its ingredients, was suggested by his bookkeeper Frank Robinson, whose excellent penmanship provided the first scripted "Coca-Cola" letters as the famous logo. In 1887, another Atlanta pharmacist and businessman, Asa Candler bought the formula for Coca Cola from  Pemberton for $2,300.

            1937 –Saturday- Happy Birthday, Thomas Pynchon, American novelist.  He has been described as one of the most important postmodern writers. We love that because no one quite knows what postmodern is.  His books are intriguing and readable (except perhaps Mason and Dixon) and Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) is a great novel by any standard, postmodern or not. Other notables include The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) and Vineland, 1990.

            1940 –Wednesday-  Happy Birthday- Eric Nelson, son of radio stars Ozzie and Harriet Nelson.  Eric, later known as Ricky, grew up to play himself on his parents' TV series, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, and became a teenage idol

Some people call me a teenage idol

Some people say they envy me

I guess they got no way of knowing

How lonesome I can be

and pretty good country/rock singer. Like his band leader father, he had a knack for hiring good musicians, including hiring the great James Burton as guitarist and mainstay of his band.  Nelson also had a good eye (ear?) for songs.  His hit, Poor Little Fool – 1958- was written by Sharon Sheeley (Eddie Cochran’s girlfriend) and Hello Mary Lou was written by Gene Pitney.  Nelson’s Stone Canyon Band with its mellow, California-based country-rock sound – Garden Party- anticipated the sounds of groups like the Eagles.

             1942 –Friday-  Only six months after the Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor came the end of the Battle of the Coral Sea, about five hundred miles from Australia, the first modern navel battle. It was fought exclusively with air attacks between aircraft carriers. Neither surface fleet sighted the other.  The Japanese were preparing to invade New Guinea. After skirmishing for a few days, the Japanese and Allied fleets found each other on this day and each sent aircraft to attack the other.  Both air attacks occurred at about the same time approximately 200 miles apart with both sides suffering moderate losses.  The most significant Allied loss during the battle was the sinking of the American carrier, USS Lexington.  That evening, with the battle roughly a draw, both sides retreated but would meet again a month later at the decisive Battle of Midway, 3,000 miles away in the Hawaiian Islands. Although a draw, it stopped the string of Japanese victories.  It is also called the “battle that saved Australia”.

            1944-Monday- New York Hospital established the first eye bank in a plan that  included 19 other hospitals.  When a vote was taken on whether to join, the eyes had it.  The opening of the New York bank marked the first organized attempt to facilitate the transfer of tissue from donor to patient. Other areas and tissue communities then successfully replicated this eye-banking model.  Professor Sy Yentz anxiously awaits the opening of the first appendix bank to replace his ruptured and removed appendix.

            1945 –Tuesday-  Following the surrender of Germany under Karl (Dunkin) Doenitz and Alfred Jodl the previous day, both Great Britain and the United States celebrated V E Day, Victory in Europe Day.  It was also President Harry Truman’s sixty first birthday.

      1951-Tuesday- I just got down from the Isle of Skye

I'm not very big but I'm awful shy

All the lassies shout as I walk by,

"Donald, Where's Your Trousers?"

Dacron men's suits were introduced in New York City. Dacron is a  polymer fiber—polyethylene terephthalate--that John Rex Whinfield and J. T. Dickinson developed in Great Britain in 1941. Whinfield and Dickinson called their new synthetic fiber Terylene. Dacron a registered trademark of DuPont, (along with Terylene in England) and  became the first commercially marketed polyester fiber.  The discovery of Dacron revolutionized the textile industry. As one of the first artificial fibers, it could be used both in wool blends or by itself. Dacron doesn’t wrinkle easily so men could wear the same suit for months at a time.

            1956 –Tuesday-  Norman Mingo’s Alfred E. Neuman became Mad Magazine’s permanent mascot as he appeared on the cover for regularly the first time.  A running joke since 1956 has been Neuman's campaign for the U.S. presidency and his slogan: "You could do worse, and always have! An original sold for  $203,150 in 2008.

            1958 –Thursday Just what the world needed, another Dracula movie.  This one, Dracula starred Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing (who along with Vincent Price) had a monopoly on late 20^th century horror films.  In the United States the title was changed to Horror of Dracula to avoid confusion with the classic 1931 version.  The film premiered at the Warner Theater in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. According to Guinness Attraction, Dracula is featured in 161 movies, as contrasted with the 2nd most popular horror movie character of all time, Frankenstein, who is only in 115 movies.  The Eerie Books Blog lists just fifty five of them: http://www.eeriebooks.com/blog/horror-movies/55-dracula-movies-you-should-see-before-you-die/

Our favorites include: Dracula’s Daughter,  Son of Dracula, House of Dracula, Dracula Istanbul’da – 1953 – A Turkish movie production of Dracula., Brides of Dracula, Billy the Kid VS Dracula, Countess Dracula, Dracula A.D. 1972, Blacula, Dracula, Father and Son, and Dracula 3000. Christopher Lee starred in eight Dracula films

            1961-Monday-  The first seawater treatment plant opened in Texas.  The need for fresh water had created a need to take the salt out of sea water.  The large-scale evaporation method used then has now been replaced by reverse osmosis as scientific advances have produced special polymers suitable for use as filtering membranes. “Osmosis” is what Moses said when he introduced himself to the Israelites.

            1961 –Monday Meet the mets,
Meet the mets,
Step right up and greet the Mets!
Bring your kiddies,
bring your wife;
Guaranteed to have the time of your life
because the Mets are really sockin' the ball; knocking those home runs over the wall!...at least until the moved to cavernous Citifield…. Ruth Roberts and Bill Katz ………On the same day that the seawater treatment plant opened in Texas, New York's National League club announced that the team nickname would be  "Mets," a natural shortening of the corporate name ("New York Metropolitan Baseball Club, Inc."). The Mets would replace the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants, stolen by two California cities in 1957 and facilitated by greedy and incompetent New York politicians.

            1965 –Saturday- Johnny's in the basement, mixing up the medicine
I'm on the pavement, thinking about the government
The man in the trench coat, badge out, laid off
Says "He's got a bad cough, wants to get it paid off"
Look out kid, it's somethin' you did
God knows when but you're doin' it again
You better duck down the alley way, lookin' for a new friend
The man in the coon-skin cap, in the big pen
Wants eleven dollar bills, you only got ten …….Oft imitated (enough already!) never duplicated, Bob Dylan filmed one of the earliest music videos, the famous "flashcard" clip for Subterranean Homesick Blues. It was seen in DA Pennebaker's film, Dont Look Back, a documentary of Dylan’s tour of England.

            1970-Friday The album Let It Be  (still vinyl in those days)  by the Beatles was released.  This was the Beatles’ final album. Although not one of the best, it does have several great tracks. Beatles producer, George Martin was not involved with this one. Phil Spector, of early 60s “wall of sound” fame, was the producer.  The last time The Beatles performed together in a studio was on August 20, 1969. On January 4, 1970, the final taping was completed for Let It Be. In April 1970, Paul McCartney announced that he had left The Beatles, citing personal, business, musical differences and bizarre Japanese groupies. Highlights of the album were, of course, Let It Be, the mucilaginous wailing of  The Long and Winding Road, Across the Universe, and Get Back.

            1973 –Tuesday-  Hall of Fame shortstop, Ernie Banks filled in for Cubs manager Whitey Lockman after Lockman was  ejected during the game, thus technically becoming baseball's 1st black manager as the Cubs beat the San Diego Padres 3-1.  Frank Robinson of the Cleveland Indians would officially become the first Black manager in 1975.  

            1984 –Tuesday-  After the United States boycotted the 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow, the Soviets shocked (ha ha ha) the world by boycotting the U.S Olympic Games in Los Angeles thus reminding us once again that diplomacy is basically 2^nd graders trying to get even with each other. In the absence of the Communist countries and their performance enhancing drugs (the women looked like they could play middle linebacker for the NY Giants) the U.S. captured 173 medals--including a record 83 gold medals.

            1988 –Sunday- Oh oh Telephone Line, give me some time, I'm living in twilight
Oh oh Telephone Line, give me some time, I'm living in twilight ..ELO…“ Hi mom, Happy Mother’s D….oops…….. hello?  Hello? Hello?...........Is anyone there?............A fire at Illinois Bell's Hinsdale Central Office triggered an extended 1AESS network outage.  Outage is telephone company talk for “you can’t make any calls and no one can call you”. One of the largest switching systems in the state, the Hinsdale facility processed more than 3.5 million calls each day while serving 38,000 customers, including numerous businesses, hospitals, and Chicago’s O’Hare and Midway Airports. The timing, Mother’s Day, when people actually call their mothers, was perfect. At the time it was  considered the 'worst telecommunications disaster in US telephone industry history'. But technological glitches being what they are, it was surpassed two years later when virtually the entire AT&T network toll tandems switches went in and out of service over and over again on Jan. 15, 1990 disrupting long distance service for the entire nation.

             1992-Friday-  The source of a "red tide" in the Gulf of Mexico was identified by scientists at a conference on the ecology of the Gulf. The red tide produced huge blooms of reddish algae in sufficient quantity to kill fish, cause severe respiratory problems for humans, and result in a seeming epidemic of effeminate men appearing on television shows. The scientists cited  a "green river" of pollution that started 60 miles inland of Florida as the source of the algae. The wind and water currents that bring nutrients from the floor of the ocean to the surface provided the food that caused the algae population to explode once it reached the Gulf. The “red tide” also resulted in a number of human mutations including Handicpapicus Ignoramicus -  non-handicapped people who park in handicap reserved spots, and  Moronicus Securitus - people who try to bring scissors through security checkpoints at airports.

1994 –Sunday-  Climb every mountain, search high and low
Follow every by way, every path you know
Climb every mountain, ford every stream
Follow every rainbow, till you find your dream……..Rogers and Hammerstein……Norwegian,  Erling Kagge was the first person to surmount the "three poles challenge" – North Pole, South Pole and Mount Everest by reaching the summit of Everest.  In 1992-93, he completed the first unsupported solo expedition to the South Pole (starting from Berkner Island), covering the 814-mile (1340 km) route in 51 days. In 1990 Kagge set out from Ellesmere Island in Canada for the North Pole without receiving any supplies underway and completed the trip in 58 days (March 8 to May 4, 1990). This was the first unsupported ski trek to the North Pole; a distance of 800 km. Tina Sjögren of Sweden became the very first woman to complete the challenge in 2002.

 Back to Calendar

9.      

1457 BC –Saturday-  The Battle of Megiddo  between Thutmose III and a large Canaanite coalition under the King of Kadesh. It is said to be the first battle to have been recorded in what is accepted as relatively reliable detail.  Most of what we know about the battle was compiled by the military scribe, Tjaneni, and inscribed on the walls of the Hall of Annals in the Temple of Amun at Karnak in ancient Thebes (modern Luxor). The Egyptians soundly defeated the Canaanites and could have captured the city of Megiddo but………. instead of attacking the city the Egyptians began to loot the abandoned camps, (which were filled with little souvenir pyramids autographed pictures of Gamel Abdel Nasser) which gave many more of the enemy a chance to escape and time to organize their defense of the city. http://www.touregypt.net/featurestories/megiddo.htm Megiddo is also known as Armageddon. Strategically, Megiddo was an important city because it overlooked the route from Egypt through Syria to Mesopotamia.

            1502-Friday- Christopher Columbus and his 13 year old son, Fernando, set out from Cadiz, Spain on his 4^th voyage to America.  As the old saying goes, “he shoulda stood in bed”.  The expedition included four ships and 150 men.  Columbus had miserable luck with the weather and a hostile governor of Hispaniola – who would not let him land. He eventually lost all his ships and his men mutinied.  Columbus was stranded for an entire year on the island of Jamaica. Other than that, everything was fine. He managed to charter a small caravel, which arrived at Jamaica on June 29, 1504, and rescued the expedition. Columbus returned home to Spain on November 7, 1504, his last voyage complete. He had been  rescued and returned to Spain just in time for the Columbus Day Sale.

                1671 –Saturday-  Thomas “Captain” Blood, attempted to steal the crown jewels of England. Blood had fought for Oliver Cromwell in Ireland but lost all his lands with the restoration of King Chares II. So, disguised as a priest, he managed to convince the Jewel House keeper (obviously not the sharpest knife in the drawer) to hand over his pistols. Blood's three accomplices then appeared, and together they forced their way into the Jewel House. Inconveniently, they were caught red handed when the keeper's son showed up unexpectedly, and sent out an alarm to the Tower guard. One man shoved the Royal Orb down his trousers (“is that the royal orb in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?”) while Blood flattened the Crown with a mallet and tried to run off with it. The Tower guards apprehended and arrested all four of the perpetrators, and Blood was brought before the king. Charles was so impressed with Blood's audacity that, instead of punishing him, he restored his estates in Ireland and made him a member of his court with an annual pension. Captain Blood became a colorful celebrity all across the kingdom, and when he died in 1680 his body had to be exhumed in order to persuade the public that he was actually dead. He reappeared in the movies with swashbuckling actor Errol Flynn starring in the title role.

            1754 –Thursday-  The first newspaper cartoons in America were political in nature and not necessarily humorous.  On this day the first cartoon appeared in Ben Franklin's newspaper The Pennsylvania Gazette.  It was part of an editorial by Franklin commenting on 'the present disunited state of the British Colonies showed a divided snake with the rather unfunny caption of "Join or die".  It depicted a divided snake in eight pieces representing as many colonial governments. The drawing was based on the popular superstition that a snake that had been cut in two would come to life if the pieces were joined before sunset . http://www.earlyamerica.com/earlyamerica/firsts/cartoon/

            1785 - Joseph Bramah invented the beer-pump handle.  It was based on a prior invention, the hydraulic press.  From his work on the hydraulic press, Bramah went on to invent a pump by which beer or other liquors can be raised from casks in a cellar to the counter over which it is sold. Patented in 1797, his rotary motion pump was subsequently adapted for use in fire engines. More importantly it gets the alcohol from the container into the tap and into your glass. From that point you are on your own.

            1860 –Wednesday-  For those of us who “won’t grow up”, Happy Birthday James Barrie, Scottish  creator of Peter Pan. The play Peter Pan or, The Boy Who Would Not Grow Up was first performed in 1904 and published in 1928. “All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. One day when she was two years old she was playing in a garden, and she plucked another flower and ran with it to her mother. I suppose she must have looked rather delightful, for Mrs. Darling put her hand to her heart and cried, "Oh, why can't you remain like this for ever!" This was all that passed between them on the subject, but henceforth Wendy knew that she must grow up. You always know after you are two. Two is the beginning of the end”.

1865-Tuesday-  Richard Jordan Gatling received a patent for the Gatling gun. He had invented it in 1861 and it was the first gun to successfully combine reliability, high firing rate and ease of loading into a single device.  It was a six-barreled weapon capable of firing a (then) phenomenal 200 rounds per minute. The Gatling gun was a hand-driven, crank-operated, multi-barrel, machine gun and the first machine gun with reliable loading.  Oddly enough, Gatling was motivated to develop the invention because he noted that most Civil War casualties were the result of illness.  He believed his weapon would allow for fewer troops, hence fewer casualties.  O.K………but then there would also be more dead via bullet so there would be fewer survivors to get sick.

1873-Friday- Happy Birthday, Howard Carter, British archaeologist who made one of the richest and most celebrated contributions to archeological history; the discovery  in 1922 of the largely intact tomb of King Tutankhamen.  Carter began his archaeological work in Egypt in 1891, at the age of seventeen. There he worked on the excavation of Basi Hassan, the gravesite of the princes of Middle Egypt, circa 2000 BC. In 1899 he was offered a position working for the Egyptian Antiquities service, from which he resigned as a result of an incident in which a drunken French tourist got into a dispute with Egyptian workers over the correct recipe for Ful Mudammas.  Carter had them kicked off the site.  Carter was introduced, in 1907, to Lord Carnarvon, who was prepared to supply the funds necessary for Carter's work to continue. Soon, Carter was supervising all of Lord Carnarvon's excavations. Lord Carnarvon financed Carter's search for the tomb of a previously unknown Pharaoh, Tutankhamun, whose existence Carter had discovered. On  November 4^th, 1922 Carter found Tutankhamun's tomb, the only unplundered tomb of a Pharaoh yet found in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor.

1882-Tuesday- A stethoscope that looks like the stethoscope that we all know and love – including the cold metal pieces at the end- was patented by William F. Ford.  The stethoscope was invented in 1816 by the French physician René Théophile Hyacinthe Laënnec who is generally (yes, another in a long list of “fathers of”) considered to be the father of chest medicine.  In 1850, George Camman substituted rubber for stiffer materials and made a more comfortable model—the forerunner of today's stethoscopes.  

            1914-Saturday -  The first official “Mother’s Day” as  President Woodrow Wilson issued a presidential proclamation that officially established the first national Mother’s Day holiday to celebrate America’s mothers. The idea for a “Mother’s Day” is credited by some to Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, who tried to establish a “Mother’s for Peace” day and by others to Anna Jarvis - the elder Anna Jarvis who influenced Mrs. Howe- and her daughter Anna Jarvis. Whosever idea it was, the first Mother's Day was celebrated in West Virginia in 1907 in the church where the elder Anna Jarvis had taught Sunday School. By 1909 Mother's Day services were held in 46 states plus Canada and Mexico but it was not until Wilson lobbied Congress in 1914 that Mother’s Day was officially set on the second Sunday of every May (even though this first one was on a Saturday). In his first Mother’s Day proclamation, Wilson stated that the holiday offered a chance to "[publicly express] our love and reverence for the mothers of our country." And, “if your mother had no children it is highly unlikely that you will have children.”

1926-Sunday- The first men to fly over the North Pole were Richard Byrd and Floyd Bennett.  Actually S.Claus already had frequent flyer rights to that route. Roald Amundsen, the first man ever to reach the South Pole, had announced he would be crossing over the North Pole in a dirigible.  Byrd made his attempt. Flying with Floyd Bennett in the Josephine Ford, named after the daughter of a major contributor to his expedition, Byrd met with success……according to Byrd. He said that he and Bennett flew over the North Pole, despite having developed a dangerous oil leak. When they arrived back at the Spitsbergen airfield much earlier than expected and announced his feat, skeptics voiced their doubts (sort of like Rosie Ruiz in the Boston Marathon. Spitzbergen is is a Norwegian island, the largest island of the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean.

            1931 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Vance Brand, American astronaut.  One of the 19 pilot astronauts selected by NASA in April 1966, Brand flew on four space missions; Apollo-Soyuz, the flight that resulted in the historic meeting in space between American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts. STS-5, STS 41-B, and STS-35. He logged 746 hours in space and commanded three Shuttle missions. The STS 41-B mission (Challenger) resulted in a space microbe being lodged in the protective tiles. On landing, after exposure to the super heated conditions of re-entry, the microbe mutated into a virus that causes the disease Studentitis Procrastinatitus Deceasedium Relativium, which results in students putting off projects until the last minute and then asking the teacher for more time because the untimely demise of a relative caused the failure to do the work.

        &nbs