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1. 

1715 –Sunday-  King Louis XIV kaput. It was sunset for  The “Sun King” as he  died after a reign of 72 years—the longest of any major European monarch. He had succeeded his father, the aptly named Louis XIII in 1643.  He did not assume actual personal control of the government until the death of his prime minister, Cardinal Mazarin, in 1661. Famous for saying “L’etat c’est moi” - I am the State, Louis’ legacy is his magnificent palace at Versailles, “gloire” (the glory of France) , and quite a few wars including, The War of Devolution, the Dutch War, The Nine Years War, and the War of the Spanish Succession.

1804 –Saturday-  Juno, one of the largest main belt asteroids, was discovered by German astronomer Karl Ludwig Harding. One of the largest asteroids, and the third to be discovered, Juno is of 150 miles across, Juno essentially is a leftover building block of the solar system.

1807 –Tuesday-  Sleazy former U.S. vice president, and killer of Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr was acquitted of plotting to annex parts of Louisiana and Spanish territory in Mexico to be used toward the establishment of an independent republic. He was acquitted on the grounds that, though he had conspired against the United States, he was not guilty of treason because he had not engaged in an "overt act," a requirement of the law governing treason.

1819 –Wednesday-   Plowing ahead with the development of the plow - Jethro Wood, a blacksmith of Scipio, New York, received a patent for his removable parts plow. His plow was of cast iron, but in three parts, so that a broken part might be replaced without purchasing an entire plow.  Scotsman, developed the first cast iron plow in 1785.  As Harper’s New Monthly Magazine of December 1874 describes it Poor Jethro “but lost his fortune in developing his invention and defending his rights. He however, overestimated the extent of novelty in his invention.  He seems to have thought it the first iron plow.  http://www.todayinsci.com/Events/Plow/Plow_CastIron.htm

1826 –Friday- Happy Birthday, Alfred E. Beach ( brother of Myrtle Beach, Malibu Beach, Jones Beach and sometimes  referred to as a Son of a Beach), American inventor and publisher, whose magazine, Scientific American helped stimulate 19th-century technological innovations and became one of the world's most prestigious science magazines…..even though the layman can have some difficulty understanding some of the articles.  In 1856 Beach won First Prize and a gold medal at New York's Crystal Palace Exhibition. Beach had invented a typewriter for the blind. It resembled the modern typewriter in the arrangement of its keys and type bars, but it embossed its letters on a narrow paper strip instead of a sheet.  Beach's most famous invention was New York City's first subway, the Beach Pneumatic Transit.

 Don't sleep in the subway, darlin'

Don't stand in the pouring rain

Don't sleep in the subway, darlin' …Petula Clark

According to the history of the NYC Subways,  http://www.nycsubway.org/articles/beach.html, he thought the pneumatic (air-driven) system viable for transit operation in underground tunnels. He applied for a permit from the Tammany Hall (the ridiculously corrupt Boss Tweed) city government, and after being denied, decided to build the line in secrecy, in an attempt to show that subterranean transit was practical. (He actually did receive a permit to built a pneumatic package delivery system, originally of two small tunnels from Warren St. to Cedar St., later amended to be one large tunnel, to "simplify construction" of what he really intended to build.) The Beach tunnel was constructed in only 58 days, starting under Warren Street and Broadway, directly across from City Hall. The single track tunnel ran east into Broadway, curved south, and ran down the middle of Broadway to Murray Street, a distance of one block, about 300 feet in all. The subway opened to the public on February 26, 1870. Operated as a demonstration from 1870 to 1873, the short tunnel had only the one station and train car.

          1837-Friday-  Dit dot ditty dit dot a ditty ditty 

Dit dot ditty dit dot a ditty ditty 

Dit dot ditty dit dot a ditty ditty 

Dit dot ditty, Baby come home to me 

I sent my baby a telegram asking to be her man 

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

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

And I'm begging pretty please 

Honey honey, come back home to me (Baby come home to me) …Morse Code of Love (originally recorded by the Capris but later by Manhattan Transfer,The Tokens; The Alleycats; Wild Wind; The Shackshakers; The Van-Dells; 

The Mighty Echoes; The Showvinistics.

Samuel Morse, (brother of Re Morse), filed a patent for his telegraph machine. In 1830, Joseph Henry  had demonstrated the potential of William Sturgeon's electromagnet for long distance communication by sending an electronic current over one mile of wire to activate an electromagnet which caused a bell to strike…and two boxers started round 1 of the fight…no,no,no Professor Sy Yentz has his pugilistic sense of humor. Later, in 1837, British physicists, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone patented the Cooke and Wheatstone telegraph using the same principle of electromagnetism. However, it was Morse who successfully exploited the electromagnet and bettered Joseph Henry's invention. Morse made sketches of a "magnetized magnet" based on Henry's work. Morse invented a telegraph system that was a practical and commercial success.  Morse used pulses of current to deflect an electromagnet, which moved a marker to produce written codes on a strip of paper - the invention of Morse Code.

           1854-Friday-  Happy Birthday, Anna Comstock, biologist, artist and nature study pioneer. When she carried all of her work at once, it was called the Comstock Load.

           1864 –Thursday-  Rhett Butler, Scarlet O’Hara take note; Confederate General John Bell Hood evacuated Atlanta, Georgia, at the climax of a four-month campaign by Sherman to capture the vital Rebel supply center.

             1865-Friday-  Joseph Lister performed the first antiseptic surgery. He used carbolic acid - the common name for phenol -a caustic poison obtained by distillation of coal tar or produced synthetically.  Lister based his work on that  of Louis Pasteur, who demonstrated in wine fermentation that  germs entered from the outside air. Lister believed that if infection arose spontaneously within a wound, (common belief) it would be virtually impossible to eliminate it. However, if germs entering from the air outside the wound caused infection (in the same way that the wine became contaminated), then those germs could be killed and infection prevented. He learned that carbolic acid was being used as an effective disinfectant in sewers and could safely be used on human flesh. Beginning in 1865, Lister used carbolic acid to wash his hands, his instruments, and the bandages used in the operation. Lister also sprayed the air with carbolic acid to kill airborne germs.       

          1887-Thursday- “Ich bin ein Berliner".  Emile Berliner filed for a patent (he would receive it on November 8) for his invention of the lateral-cut, flat-disk gramophone. It is now called the record player…..but then we don’t use the record player anymore so…… History lesson for the digital age, The first records were made of glass, later zinc, and eventually plastic. A spiral groove with sound information was etched into the flat record. Emile got the patent, but Thomas Edison got the fame because he was the one that made it work and make music with his American invention. Berliner's legacy still lives on in his trademark (later adopted by RCA): a picture of a dog listening to "his master's voice" issuing from a gramophone. 

     1905 –Friday-Alberta and Saskatchewan become the eighth and ninth provinces.  Alberta, the westernmost of Canada's three prairie provinces, shares many physical features with its neighbors to the east, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. The Rocky Mountains form the southern portion of Alberta's western boundary with British Columbia.  In case you were wondering, there are ten Canadian provinces and three territories. The provinces are Alberta, Manitoba, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, and Saskatchewan. The territories are the Northwest Territories, Nunavut, and the Yukon Territory. Alberta in terms of year-round comfort was ranked as the best in Canada in 2005 by Environment Canada.  It is the only Province in Canada to be debt free and rat free, not including human rats. It has the most sunny days year round in Canada. Saskatchewan is the only province with entirely artificial boundaries. It lies between the 49th and 60th parallels of latitude, bordered by the US and the Northwest Territories, and between long 101°30´ and 102° W and 110° W, bordered by Manitoba and Alberta. It was created from the North-West Territories in 1905, at the same time as Alberta, and shares with that province the distinction of having no coast on salt water. 

1914-Tuesday-  The last passenger pigeon, Martha, died at the Cincinnati Zoo. The passenger pigeon was hunted to extinction; the fact that it traveled and nested in large flocks made it easy to slaughter. The adult male passenger pigeon had grey upper parts, the tips of the wings and the tail were black; its throat was a dark rust, while its breast was a lighter rust; its eyes were red. The adult female was of a duller color, with brownish upper parts and a lighter, brownish throat and breast; its eyes were black . See our Extinct-Kaput page http://www.sciencegnus.com/Extinct%20Animals.html

1923 –Saturday-  The Great Kanto Earthquake estimated at 7.9 magnitude destroyed one third of Tokyo and most of Yokohama, leaving 2.5 million people homeless. The quake resulted in the Great Tokyo Fire. Floods followed as the rivers Fukuro Chiyo and Takimi burst their banks. At least 143,000 people were killed, although unofficial estimates say as many as 300,000 may have died.

1939 –Friday-  World War II began At  4:45 a.m.,as  1.5 million German troops invaded Poland all along its 1,750-mile border with German-controlled territory. Simultaneously, the German Luftwaffe bombed Polish airfields, and German warships and U-boats attacked Polish naval forces in the Baltic Sea. Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (just like the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in 2008 while attacking Georgia) claimed the massive invasion was a defensive action……sort of like “he punched me in the fist with his nose”.

1974 –Sunday-   In a hurry to get to Europe? The SR-71 Blackbird set (and holds) the record for flying from New York to London: 1 hour 54 minutes and 56.4 seconds. Just about the length of a flight delay in Newark Airport on a normal day.  

1979-Saturday-  Pioneer 11, an unmanned spacecraft launched in April 1973, made the 1st flyby of Saturn  and returned the 1st close-up images of the planet. Pioneer 11 followed Pioneer 10 which had been the first man made spacecraft to fly by Jupiter. Among its discoveries were two new moon and a new ring; it also charted the magnetosphere, the magnetic field, and the general structure of Saturn's interior. The spacecraft's instruments measured the heat radiation from Saturn's interior and discovered that Saturn is the home planet of doyenne Martha Stewart.

1983 –Thursday-  Soviet jet fighters intercepted  a Korean Airlines passenger flight that had mistakenly crossed into Russian airspace and shot the plane down, killing 269 passengers and crewmembers.

1985 –Sunday- The “unsinkable” Titanic was found. The British luxury passenger liner sank on April 15, 1912 en route to New York on it's maiden voyage. The vessel sank with a loss of approximately 1,500 lives. The wreck is about 640 km south of Newfoundland.  At the time of her construction she was the largest and most luxurious ship afloat. American Robert D. Ballard headed the joint U.S/French expedition, which used an experimental, unmanned submersible developed by the U.S. Navy to search for the ocean liner. The submersible, Argo traveled just above the ocean floor, sending photographs up to the research vessel Knorr. As Argo was investigating debris on the ocean floor it suddenly passed over one of the Titanic's massive boilers, lying at a depth of about 13,000 feet. It also found Leonardo DiCaprio, a ring, and several Celine Dion CDs.  The CD’s were left at the bottom.

1989-Friday-  The federal government passed new car safety legislation on this day, requiring all newly manufactured cars to install an air bag on the driver's side. In 1971, Ford built an experimental airbag fleet. General Motors tested airbags on the 1973 model Chevrolet that were only sold for government use. The 1973, the Oldsmobile Toronado was the first car with a passenger air bag intended for sale to the public. By 1988, Chrysler became the first company to offer air bag restraint systems as standard equipment.

2004 –Wednesday-  Chechen terrorists entered a school in southern Russia and took more than 1,000 people hostage. The thugs demanded the withdrawal of Russian troops from the disputed nearby region of Chechnya. Nearly 340 people, about half of them children, died in the ensuing three-day ordeal.

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2.          

44 BC –Friday- Pharaoh Cleopatra VII of Egypt declared her son (age three) co-ruler as Ptolemy XV Caesarion. Yes, this was THAT Cleopatra and the son was her son by Julius Caesar. That lasted until 37 BC.  By then Cleopatra had taken up with Marc Antony and  Cleopatra now hoped to continue her dynasty through the children of Marc Antony, the twins Alexander Helius and Cleopatra Selene. This all came to a brutal end when….see below.

31 BC –Tuesday-  Battle of Actium - Off the western coast of Greece, forces of Octavian defeated troops under Mark Antony and Cleopatra in a naval battle. The fighting continued throughout the day of September 2, 31 B.C., until, inexplicably, Cleopatra took her troops, sailors, ships and asp and left the naval battle. Mark Antony, also leaving his troops behind, followed his sweetie back to Egypt. The result was that Octavian’s forces, led by  Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, won the battle. Octavian would become emperor and change his name to Augustus. Cleopatra’s son, Caesarion, was killed after the suicide of his mother and the suicide of Marc Antony following Octavian’s occupation of Alexandria.

1666-Thursday-  “Try to set the night on fire”….The Doors

The Great Fire of London. began on the night of September 2, 1666, as a small fire on Pudding Lane, in the bakeshop of Thomas Farynor. Faryonr happened to be the baker for King Charles II. At this time, most London houses were constructed of wood and pitch so they were dangerously flammable, and poof, the fire to expand.  The fire became one of the major events in the history of England. It destroyed the medieval City of London inside the old Roman City Wall. It threatened, but did not reach, the aristocratic district of Westminster, (perish the thought!),  Charles II's Palace of Whitehall, and most of the suburban slums. It did, however, destroy13,200 houses, 87 parish churches, St. Paul's Cathedral, and most of the buildings of the City authorities. It is estimated that it destroyed the homes of 70,000 of the City's ca. 80,000 inhabitants

 1752 –Saturday- This was the last day of the Julian calendar in Great Britain and the British colonies (that includes America for you history buffs out there) the Gregorian Calendar designed to correct the extra leap year day problem went into effect the next day with Sunday becoming September 14, hence 11 days were dropped.  People celebrating birthdays or having appointments during the next 11 days must have been a bit confused.  Most other countries had made the adjustment in 1582. The delay had its origin in the Reformation. Britain, a Protestant country would not follow the lead of the Catholics (Pope Gregory) See Sept. 3 for the start of the confusion

1789 –Wednesday- The United States Department of the Treasury was founded during the first session of Congress. The first Secretary of the Treasury would be Alexander Hamilton of New York. The Treasury Department is the second oldest department in the federal government after the Department of State.  We note that on September 13, 1789 - The United States government took out a loan for the first time. The loan was taken from banks in New York City.

1838 –Wednesday- Happy Birthday, Queen Liliuokalani, the last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian islands. She felt her mission was to preserve the islands for their native residents. In 1898, Hawaii was annexed to the United States and Queen Liliuokalani was forced to give up her throne.  On July 4, 1894, the Republic of Hawaii with Sanford B. Dole – as in pineapples- as president was proclaimed. It was recognized immediately by the United States government. Hawaii was annexed to the United States through a joint resolution of the U. S. Congress in 1898.

1850-Monday-  Happy Birthday, Albert Spalding, 19^th century baseball player and tireless promoter of baseball's interests nationally and internationally, and, coincidently, simultaneously further his own sporting-goods enterprises, the A.G Spalding Company.  Spalding published the first official rules guide for baseball. In it he stated that only Spalding balls could be used (previously, the quality of the balls used had been, shall we say widely varied.) Spalding also founded the Baseball Guide, which at the time was the most widely-read baseball publication. Spalding retired from playing baseball in 1878, although he continued as a major force as owner of the Chicago White Stockings (now the Chicago Cubs) and major influence on the National League- which he co-founded.   Spalding was inducted into the Hall of Fame by the Committee on Baseball Veterans in 1939, the year the Hall opened. Professor Sy Yentz, growing up in NYC during the 1950s and 60s fondly remembers the Spalding rubber ball, the “spaldeen” used for punch ball (it expanded slightly after a few days of “punching”) games because of it’s superior bounce and longevity.

 1853-Friday-  Happy Birthday, (Friedrich) Wilhelm Ostwald, German chemist who almost along with Jacobus Henricus van  Hoff, and Svante Arrhenius organized physical chemistry into a nearly independent branch of chemistry. Physical chemistry is study of the properties, changes, and the relationships between energy and matter.  Ostwald won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1909 for his work on catalysis - the process in which the rate of a chemical reaction is increased by means of a chemical substance known as a catalyst Catalysts can be divided into two main types - heterogeneous and homogeneous. In a heterogeneous reaction, the catalyst is in a different phase from the reactants. Oscar Wilde was a homogeneous.

 1877 –Sunday “Soddy, wrong number”… Happy Birthday, Frederick Soddy, English chemist and physicist who received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1921 for his investigations of  radioactive substances.  Soddy worked with Ernest  Rutherford at McGill University in Montreal and with Sir William Ramsay at the University  of London. He suggested that different elements produced in different radioactive transformations were capable of occupying the same place on the Periodic Table, and on  Feb. 18  1913 he named these elements "isotopes" from Greek words meaning "same place." His scientific texts are still used.  They include The Interpretation of Radium -1909, rev. ed. 1922, Matter and Energy -1912, The Chemistry of the Radio-Elements -2 parts, 1911–14, Atomic Transmutation -1953, and Love’s Tender Passion, The Spinster’s Caribbean Vacation With Dirk.

1901 –Monday- Vice President of the United States -days from taking over for an assassinated McKinley- Theodore Roosevelt uttered the famous phrase, "Speak softly and carry a big stick” (and you will go far) at the Minnesota State Fair. Roosevelt attributed it to a West African proverb but its origin isn't known

1935 –Monday- The Labor Day Hurricane in Florida. In the days before hurricanes were named, this storm virtually snuck up on Florida. The hurricane was the first ever Category Five Hurricane on record to hit the United States. In fact, it held the distinction of being the only Categroy  Five storm to hit the United States coastline for 34 years until Hurricane Camille in August, 1969.  After the storm had demolished the sparsely populated (in those days) Florida Keys, it then turned northward, and made a second landfall in Florida's Big Bend area this time as a Category Two hurricane.  This was the same path that Hurricane Andrew (another Category five) would follow in 1992.

1938 –Friday- Happy Birthday, Wilson Markle, Canadian engineer who invented the film colorization process in 1983. Colorization is the computer process by which black and white film images are converted to color. During the 1960s and 1970s  his company, Image Transform put color to black and white NASA space footage to add more interest to the lunar missions. Of course the process plummeted to unforeseen depths of taste when Ted Turner got his hands on the process and started colorizing classic black and white movies

1945 –Sunday- Three and a half months after it ended in Europe, combat in World War II ended in the Pacific Theater: The final official surrender of Japan was accepted by General Douglas MacArthur aboard the battleship USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay.

1948 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Birthday  Christa MacAuliffe, astronaut, first teacher in space, who died in the Challenger Space Shuttle when 73 seconds into its 10th launch, STS-51L exploded in midair, killing its crew of seven. Space shuttle flights were suspended until 1988. An independent U.S. commission blamed the disaster on unusually cold temperatures that morning and the failure of the O-rings, a set of gaskets in the rocket boosters…..and the geniuses that went ahead with the launch despite all the warnings.

 1952-Thursday-  The first human heart operation was performed by using the deep- freezing method. Professor Sy Yentz refers to this the ventricle as popsicle procedure.

1969 –Tuesday-  The first automatic teller machine in the United States was installed in Rockville Center, New York.  In 1939, Luther George Simjian had patented an early and not very successful prototype of an ATM. John D White is often credited with inventing the first free-standing ATM design. Then in  1967, John Shepherd-Barron invented and installed an ATM in a Barclays Bank in London.  Don Wetzel was a co-patentee and chief conceptualist of the automated teller machine, an idea he thought of while he just happened to be waiting in line at a Dallas bank .The first one wasn't in a lobby, it was actually in the wall of the bank, out on the street. They put a canopy over it to protect it from the rain and the weather of all sorts. Unfortunately they put the canopy too high and the rain came under it. They ended up with wet money (could this be the first incidence of money laundering?)

1969 –Tuesday It was also a sad day for histrionic acting devotees as on the same day that the ATM made its debut, Star Trek went kaput as the science-fiction television series aired its last first run episode.. Although Star Trek ran for only three years (starting in 1966) and never placed better than No. 52 in the ratings, the show, starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, became a cult classic and spawned four television series; the original, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Deep Space 9 Star Trek: Voyager  and ten (and counting) movies. Leonard Nimoy was the only actor to appear in every episode of the series, including "The Cage", the original pilot episode which starred Jeffrey Hunter as the Captain. In this last episode, The Enterprise is in danger (surprise!) when Janice Lester, one of Kirk's former lovers, steals his body. Why was it aired in September? The episode was originally scheduled to air on March 28, 1969 but was postponed to Sept. 3rd due to the kapution of the 34th President of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower.

1970 –Wednesday-  Due to budgetary constraints, NASA announced the cancellation of two Apollo missions to the Moon, Apollo 15 (the designation was re-used by a later mission), and Apollo 19. The remaining missions were then renumbered 15 through 17.

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3.          

 301 –Tuesday-  San Marino, one of the smallest nations in the world and the world's oldest republic still in existence, was founded by Saint Marinus. So where is San Marino? In the Apennine Mountains. It is a landlocked enclave, completely surrounded by Italy. San Marino is the sole survivor of the independent states that existed in Italy at various times from the downfall of the Western Roman Empire to the proclamation of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. As for St. Marinus?  Tradition is that he was a blacksmith by trade who came from the island of Rab on the other side of the Adriatic.

1189 –Sunday- Richard I of England (Richard "the Lionheart") was crowned at Westminster. Richard, the son of Henry II, spent most of his reign in France.  That is when he wasn’t leading the 3^rd Crusade or being taken prisoner by Holy Roman Emperor Henry VI.  In all, Richard spent about 6 months of his ten year reign in England until his predictably stupid death via arrow during a petty siege of a castle in France (where else?) in  1199.

1643 –Thursday- Happy Birthday, Lorenzo Bellini, Italian physician and anatomist, born in Florence.  Bellini described the collecting, or excretory, tubules of the kidney, known as Bellini's ducts (tubules). Bellini is considered a founder of Italian iatromechanism, which regarded the body as a Cartesian machine, conforming in its functions to mechanical laws.

1658-Tuesday-  Oliver Cromwell kaput.  Cromwell, the Lord Protector of England had led the Parliamentary forces against King Charles I in the English Civil War.  He later ravaged Ireland setting the stage for hundreds of years of religious tension and conflict. Different accounts cite cancer or a bladder stone as the cause of kapution. Because of "this small piece of gravel," reflected French philosopher Blaise Pascal years later, "he is dead, his family is cast down, all is peaceful, and the king is restored." In 1661, according to Trivia Library.com, old Oliver was disinterred and dragged through the streets. The next day, the 12th anniversary of Charles I's execution, they were taken to Tyburn, where, according to diarist John Evelyn, they were "hanged on the gallows from nine in the morning until six at night." They were cut down, their heads were bludgeoned off, and their bodies were tossed in a pit beneath the gallows. Their heads were paraded through London on poles and then were stuck on spikes atop Westminster Hall.  About 25 years later, a storm dislodged Cromwell's mummified head from its perch. It landed in the street, where it was picked up by a sentry and sold. It passed from owner to owner down through the years. In the 20th century it was given to Cromwell's alma mater, Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, where studies confirmed its identity. It matched Cromwell's death mask, and a brown spot on the parchmentlike skin indicated Cromwell's distinctive wart. In March, 1960, the head was buried in a secret location at the college to protect the protector from further disturbance. http://www.trivia-library.com/b/famous-exhumations-english-lord-protector-oliver-cromwell.htm

1728 –Friday-  Happy Birthday, Matthew Bolton, British manufacturer and engineer who financed and introduced James Watt's steam engine. After meeting James Watt and asking “Watts that” he became fascinated by the development of steam power and became the money man in the system that produced steam engines which sold all over the world.

 1752 –Sunday- Does anybody really know what time it is
Does anybody really care
If so I can't imagine why
We've all got time enough to cry ….Chicago

Remember the change to the Gregorian Calendar on Sept.2? You should, after all it was yesterday’s entry…Well the day of 3rd of September never happened - nor did the next 10. England and the American Colonies dropped the Roman era Julian Calendar, which had become 10 days out of synchrony with the solar cycle, and adopted the Gregorian Calendar. People rioted in the streets thinking the government stole 11 days of their lives. Instituted by Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, the calendar has 365 days with an extra day every four years (the leap year) except in years divisible by 100 but not divisible by 400. Thus, the calendar year has an average length of 365.2422 days. It moved the day's date up from September 3rd to September 14th. Some other countries, including the ever progressive Russia, did not change until the twentieth century. Got it?

1777-Wednesday-  The American flag was flown in battle for the first time, during a Revolutionary War skirmish at Cooch's Bridge, Maryland. Patriot General William Maxwell ordered the stars and strips banner raised as a detachment of his infantry and cavalry met an advance guard of British and Hessian troops. Unfortunately, rebels were defeated and forced to retreat to General George Washington's main force near Brandywine Creek in Pennsylvania, where they would be defeated again. Three months before, on June 14, (now celebrated as Flag Day) the Continental Congress adopted a resolution stating that "the flag of the United States be thirteen alternate stripes red and white" and that "the Union be thirteen stars, white in a blue field, representing a new Constellation."  

1783 –Wednesday-  The American Revolution officially came to an end when representatives of the United States (John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin), Great Britain, Spain and France signed the Treaty of Paris on this day in 1783. The signing signified America's status as a free nation, as Britain formally recognized the independence of its 13 former American colonies, and the boundaries of the new republic were agreed upon: Florida north to the Great Lakes and the Atlantic coast west to the Mississippi River. In case you noted that throughout history there have been a lot of Treaties of Paris, here are a few

Treaty of Paris (1229)—ended the Albigensian Crusade

Treaty of Paris (1259)—between Henry III of England and Louis IX of France

Treaty of Paris (1623)—between France, Savoy, and Venice against Spanish forces in Valtelline

Treaty of Paris (1763)—ended the Seven Years' War (French and Indian War in the U.S)

Treaty of Paris (1783)—ended the American Revolutionary War

Treaty of Paris (1810)—ended the war between France and Sweden

Treaty of Paris (1814)—ended the war between France and the Sixth Coalition(Treaty of Paris (1815)—followed the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo (War of 1812 in the U.S)

Treaty of Paris (1856)—ended the Crimean War

Treaty of Paris (1898)—ended the Spanish-American War

Paris Peace Conference, 1919—treaties with the defeated powers of the First World War Treaty of Paris (1920)—united Bessarabia and Romania

 Paris Peace Treaties, 1947—formally established peace between the World War II Allies and Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Romania, and Finland

 Paris Peace Accords (1973)—ended American involvement in the Vietnam War. You’ll also note that the U.S likes to end its wars with Treaties of Paris – see French & Indian War, the Revolution, The War of 1812, the Spanish American War, and Vietnam.

1802 –Friday-  Earth has not anything to show more fair:…Dull would he be of soul who could pass by…..A sight so touching in its majesty:…….This City now doth, like a garment, wear…….The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,…..Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky;…

We have a pretty good idea when English poet William Wordsworth composed this sonnet.  The  title is  Composed upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.

1803 –Satuday-  English scientist John Dalton started using symbols to represent the atoms of different elements.  His atomic theory stated that all matter was composed of small indivisible particles termed atoms, atoms of a given element possess unique characteristics and weight, and three types of atoms exist: simple (elements), compound (simple molecules), and complex (complex molecules). You’ll find some the symbols at http://elements.vanderkrogt.net/chemical_symbols.html

1866-Monday- Happy Birthday, Christian Herter, American physician who investigated the role of bacteria in the gastrointestinal tract. He discovered that favorite roles included Hamlet, Lady MacBeth, James Bond, and letter turner on Wheel of Fortune. He also developed techniques for measuring their products such as indol. Herter's early research interests culminated in the publication of his best know work, the scintillating The Diagnosis of Diseases of the Nervous System  in 1892

1875 –Friday-  Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz ? ….Janis Joplin

Happy Birthday, Ferdinand Porsche, Austrian automotive engineer who designed the popular Volkswagen car. In 1934, the order from Hitler to design and build the first "peoples car" was received. Porsche designed the Volkswagen Beetle, as well as many military vehicles used by the Nazis during WWII.  Yes, he also designed the Porsche too.

1899-Sunday- Happy Birthday, Sir (Frank) Macfarlane Burnet, Australian physician, virologist, and recipient, with Sir Peter Medawar, of the 1960 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of acquired immunological tolerance to tissue transplants. Yes, they took Scotties out of the Scotties box and put them in Kleenex boxes and then put…voila, a tissue transplant.  It’s nothing to sneeze at! 

 1905-Sunday- Happy Birthday, Carl David Anderson, American physicist who, with Victor Francis Hess of Austria, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1936 for his discovery of the positron, or positive electron, the first known particle of antimatter. Positrons are usually produced by nuclear decay, sort of like Regis Philbin.  The positron is identical to the electron in mass, but has an opposite charge of +1 (the electron is defined to have a charge of -1)

1966-Saturday-  The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet aired its last episode after more than a decade on television. The sitcom focused a real life family playing a TV family based on the real life family. It starred 1940’s band leader Ozzie Nelson and wife, singer Harriet Nelson, nee Hilliard. The show premiered as a radio comedy in 1944 and ran for 10 years. Even before the radio show ended, a TV version was launched in 1952. The show, featuring controversial  plots such as -Ozzie decides that he wants to go on a diet so he can fit into a pair of size 33 pants. Or, Ozzie buys Thorny a lighter for his birthday…..yes, it was a simpler time.  The teenage sons, David and Ricky were not wise cracking brats (note; that the post All in the Family sitcoms). Ricky became a rock star, rejuvenating the show. For a period of years, beginning in 1957, each episode would conclude with a song by Ricky Nelson and his band, led by the great  lead guitarist James Burton.

1967 –Friday September 3 may lay claim to the most confusing day in history.  In addition to the lost days with the implementation of the Gregorian Calendar, in Sweden motorists stopped driving on the left side of the road and began driving on the right side. Wouldn’t you have loved to  have been there?.  A Time Magazine report noted Once Parliament decided to switch, Swedish bureaucracy mobilized with terrifying efficiency. Psychologists made studies of drivers and pedestrians; traffic engineers surveyed Sweden's 70,000 miles of roadway from Malmo to remotest Lapland. Thousands of new signs and traffic lights were ordered and every home, hospital and prison received manuals detailing the 107 basic European road symbols that would replace the helter-skelter Swedish markers. To make sure foreign workers and visitors got the message, the Commission on Right-Hand Traffic printed pamphlets in nine languages from Portuguese to Serbo-Croatian.  For all the predictions of mayhem on the highway on H-day, the elaborate preparations were well worth the $120 million that they cost motorists in special taxes. Aside from a few bent fenders and dented egos, the change was, in fact, so bloodless that two days passed before Sweden reported a single traffic fatality.  Somehow we don’t think this would have gone as smoothly in the United States.

  1970-Thursday-  A hailstone found in Coffeyville, Kansas, weighed in at 1.5 lbs. and was 17 inches around. This was surpassed in 2003 in south-central Nebraska in June with the largest hailstone ever recovered in the United States, a seven-inch (17.8-centimeter) wide chunk of ice almost as large as a soccer ball.  The National Climate Extremes Committee, which is responsible for validating national records, formally accepted the measurements last month: seven inches in diameter (17.8 centimeters) and a circumference of 18.75 inches (47.6 centimeters). We’re not sure how this compared to Oliver Cromwell’s gallstone ( see 1658).

1970-Thursday- A dark day in Rock history as Rolling Stone reported that the Dave Clare Five were no longer Glad All Over and had broken up.

1976 –Friday- The unmanned spacecraft Viking II landed on Mars and took the first pictures of the surface of Mars. Its twin, Viking I was the first to arrive on the surface of Mars on July 20, 1976. Each lander contained instruments that examined the physical and magnetic properties of the soil; analyzed the atmosphere and weather patterns of Mars; and determined any evidence of past or present life, including the possible amino acid mixture that resulted in the formation of Tom Cruise.

2000 –Sunday- The ever growing Ozone hole as NASA data showed the hole at just under 11 million square miles - the biggest it had ever been. Record low temperatures in the stratosphere are believed to have helped the expansion of the ozone hole during the southern hemisphere’s spring season. Antarctic ozone depletion starts in July, when sunlight triggers chemical reactions in cold air trapped over the South Pole during the Antarctic winter. It intensifies during August and September (particularly in September when the U.S Congress returns from vacation and the amount of hot air in the atmosphere quadruples) before tailing off as temperatures rise in late November of early December. Depletion of the ozone layer over Antarctica and the Arctic is being monitored because ozone protects Earth from harmful ultraviolet radiation. Only 10 or less of every million molecules of air are ozone. The majority of these ozone molecules resides in a layer between 10 and 40 kilometers (6 and 25 miles) above the Earth's surface in the stratosphere. The ozone hole, like Hilary Clinton’s ego, continues to expand to this day.  http://www.theozonehole.com/

2009-Thursday- In case you have a strong desire to capture insects with your tongue, Scientists at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Disease (GICD) htraced the evolution of the four-chambered human heart to a common genetic factor linked to the development of hearts in turtles and other reptiles. The research, published in the September 3 issue of the journal Nature, showed how a specific protein that turns on genes is involved in heart formation in turtles, lizards and humans. "This is the first genetic link to the evolution of two, rather than one, pumping chamber in the heart, which is a key event in the evolution of becoming warm-blooded," said Gladstone investigator Benoit Bruneau who led the study

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4.           

  476 - Romulus Augustus, the last emperor of the Western Roman Empire, was deposed by Odoacer, a German barbarian who proclaimed himself king of Italy. Odoacer was a mercenary leader in the Roman imperial army when he launched his mutiny against the young emperor, Romulus, little more than a child, acted as a figurehead for his father's rule. He reigned, if you could call it that,  only ten months, At Piacenza, he defeated Roman General Orestes, the emperor's powerful father, (who once had been an assistant to Attila the Hun)and then took Ravenna, the capital of the Western empire since 402. Although Roman rule continued in the East, the crowning of Odoacer marked the end of the original Roman Empire, which centered in Italy.

1781 – La La Land invented.  In  1771 Father Junipero Serra and a group of Spaniards founded the San Gabriel Mission as the center of the first "community" in an area inhabited by small bands of Gabrielino Indians.Twelve years after Portola's trek, which began in San Diego and ended in Monterey, a company of settlers called "Los Pobladores" were recruited in the states of Sonora and Sinaloa in Mexico. Their mission, under authority of Governor Felipe de Neve, was to establish pueblos in the name of the king of Spain. On September 4, 1781, the Pobladores, a group of 12 families - 46 men, women and children led by Captain Rivera y Moncada - established a community in the area discovered by Portola, and named it El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reyna de Los Angeles de Porciuncula, after the nearby river. Unable to fit El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reyna de Los Angeles de Porciuncula Dodgers on a uniform, they had to shorten the name. Over time, the area became known as the Ciudad de Los Angeles, "City of Angels," and on April 4, 1850 became the City of Los Angeles

1801 - Happy Birthday, Cullen Whipple, American inventor and machinist of Providence, RI, who patented the first practical screw machine, a method of mass-producing pointed screws for making pointed screws. Prior to this invention, screws had blunt ends, and it was necessary to drill a starter hole. So yes, many people were screwed.  For most historians, Archimedes of Syracuse is the grandfather of the screw. The Greek scientist and mathematician popularized its mechanical principles when he concocted his helix-shaped water-lifting device in the 3rd century B.C., known as the "Archimedes' screw".

 1833 – “Hey getcha papers here….read all about it….” Newspaper Carrier Day on Sept. 4 marks the anniversary of the hiring of the first paperboy in the United States. In 1833, The New York Sun ran the following ad: "To the Unemployed - - A number of steady men can find employment by vending this paper. A liberal discount is allowed to those who buy to sell again." Ten-year-old Barney Flaherty, although not a man, was the first to answer the ad and got the job and a cultural icon was born.

1848- Happy Birthday, Louis Latimer, Black inventor who received a patent for an improved process for manufacturing the carbon filaments in light bulbs. These improvements allowed for a reduction in time to produce and an increase in quality. During his life time he had worked with and for Alexander Bell, Hiram Maxim and Thomas Edison. Latimer was the only black member of an exclusive social group, the Edison Pioneers.  He also supervised the installation of electric lights in New York, Philadelphia, Canada, and London. Other Latimer patents included a ‘Water Closet for Railroad Cars’ 1874, ‘Apparatus for Cooling and Disinfecting’ 1886, and ‘Locking Rack for Hats, Coats, and Umbrellas’ 1896.

            1866- Happy Birthday, Simon Lake, U.S. inventor whose submarine, the Argonaut, was the first to make extensive open-sea operations and to salvage cargo from sunken vessels.  Lake, a  Quaker American mechanical engineer and naval architect who obtained over two hundred patents for advances in naval design and competed with John Philip Holland to build the first submarines for the United States Navy. Ironically, Lakes submarines operated in rivers and bays but not lakes.

1882- On the birthday of  Lewis Latimer –see 1848 above- ,  the first central electric station to supply light and power was the Edison Electric Illuminating Company at 257 Pearl Street in New York City. It was shocking! Electrifying!  Edison had always wanted to grow up and “join the circuits”. The station's "Jumbo No.1" generator was a direct-current steam-powered dynamo. The armature (an armature is one of the principal electrical components of an electromechanical machine--a motor or generator) alone was 6 tons of its total 27 ton weight, and used air cooling. It was built at the Edison Machine Works in 1881, and had its first test on  July 5,  1882. It could power about 700 sixteen candlepower lamps. Within 14 months, Edison's first power station served 508 subscribers.

1886- Apache chief Geronimo surrendered to U.S. government troops. He had battled the U.S forces for over 30 years. However, by 1886 the Apaches were exhausted and hopelessly outnumbered. General Nelson Miles accepted Geronimo's surrender, making him the last Indian warrior to formally give in to U.S. forces and signaling the end of the Indian Wars in the Southwest .  At the end, his group consisted of only 16 warriors, 12 women, and 6 children. Upon their surrender, Geronimo and over 300 of his fellow Chiricahuas were shipped to Fort Marion, Florida. One year later many of them were relocated to the Mt. Vernon barracks in Alabama, where about one quarter died from tuberculosis and other diseases. Geronimo died on Feb. 17, 1909, a prisoner of war, unable to return to his homeland. He was buried in the Apache cemetery at: Fort Sill, Oklahoma

 1888- George Eastman patented the first roll-film camera and registered the name Kodak. "You press the button, we do the rest" promised George Eastman in 1888 with this advertising slogan for his Kodak camera.  Eastman’s key break through was with cellulose. It produced a cleaner image than paper and was easily spooled onto a film roller, making it compact. It proved to be the birth of modern camera film.            

1951- President Harry S. Truman’s opening speech before a conference in San Francisco is broadcast across the nation, marking the first time a television program was broadcast from coast to coast. The speech focused on Truman’s acceptance of a treaty that officially ended America’s post-World War II occupation of Japan. Later, Truman sang some of his favorite vaudeville songs, did a little magic act, hosted a dance contest, showed how to cook a soufflé, and knocked out Richard Nixon in a three round boxing match.  

1966 – A world already reeling from the kaputing  of Ozzie and Harriet just a year and a day earlier, was stunned as Gilligan’s Island went kaput. Gilligan's Island, a seminal intellectual, political satire that paved the way for West Wing and….no, no, no  Professor Sy Yentz has his video politically correct sense of humor…. It was comedy about seven people stranded with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of supplies, on a deserted island during a “three hour tour” and aired its last episode on this day in 1967. Featuring Bob Denver as the moronic yet innocently endearing, Gilligan, first mate of the ill-fated SS Minnow, the show also starred Alan Hale as the Skipper, Jim Backus (voice of Mr. Magoo) as millionaire Thurston Howell III, and Tina Louise as the glamorous starlet Ginger. Although the show ran for only three years, it aired in reruns for decades. The characters were resurrected in three TV movies. While they would be rescued from the island in future specials, the last episode featured King Killiwani and two other natives coming  to the island looking for a 'White Goddess.'  This turned out to be Gilligan.

2006- A vaccine for a type of meningitis was offered for the first time in Great Britain for all babies at two, four and 13 months as part of the national childhood immunization program. The vaccine is designed for protection against pneumococcal disease which causes meningitis and septicaemia, a very serious infection, with a death rate of 20 per cent. Meningitis is an infection of the fluid of a person's spinal cord and the fluid that surrounds the brain. People sometimes refer to it as spinal meningitis. Since 2006 they program has been used successfully world wide, particularly in Africa.

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5.    

1698 –Friday  Almost cut my hair
It happened just the other day
It's gettin' kind of long
I could've said it was in my way….Crosby, Stills and Nash…………….A close shave!  In an effort to move his people away from archaic customs, Tsar Peter I of Russia imposed a tax on beards. Z.Z Top immediately cancelled their scheduled tour.  Furthermore, Peter ordered his noblemen to wear fashionable Western clothes  such as, cowboy hats,  Nehru Jackets, burgundy tuxedoes with pink shirts, polo shirts with madras shorts, black leather pants with black leather shirts and spikey Mohawk hairdos, instead of their archaic long costumes. To add insult to injury, Peter personally cut off the beards of his noblemen and had many others cut by former NY Giant pitcher Sal, the Barber, Maglie . All men except the peasants and priests had to pay Peter's yearly beard tax and wear a medal proclaiming, "Beards are a ridiculous ornament." According to Diane Stanley in her book, Peter the Great

              1774 –Monday - The first session of the Continental Congress convened at Carpenter's Hall in Philadelphia. Fifty-six delegates from all of the colonies except Georgia drafted a declaration of rights and grievances and elected Virginian Peyton Randolph as the first president of Congress. Patrick Henry, George Washington, John Adams and John Jay were among the delegates. The Congress was a response to the British Parliament's enactment of the Coercive Acts, called the "Intolerable Acts" by colonists, in 1774. The Coercive Acts closed Boston to merchant shipping, established formal British military rule in Massachusetts, made British officials immune to criminal prosecution in America required colonists to quarter British troops, forced the colonists to buy Spice Girls CDs, compelled the boiling of all food when cooking, and required daily viewing of the show Upstairs, Downstairs.

              1847 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Jesse James, famous American outlaw.  With his brother Frank James and several other ex-Confederates, including Cole Younger and his brothers, the James gang robbed their way across the Western frontier targeting banks, trains, stagecoaches, and stores from Iowa to Texas. James is believed to have carried out the first daylight bank robbery in peacetime, stealing $60,000 from a bank in Liberty, Missouri. On July 21, 1873 the James-Younger gang pulled off the first successful train robbery in the American West by taking $3,000 from the Rock Island Express (Down the Rock Island Line she’s a mighty road
The rock Island Line it’s a road to ride
The rock island line it’s a mighty good road
Well if you ride you got to ride it like you find it
Get your ticket at the station for the Rock Island Line……..Kelly Pace and first recorded by John Lomax in 1934 )   in Adair, Iowa. Actors who have played Jesse James on film and TV include; Brad Pitt. Colin Farrell, Tyrone Power, James Keach, James Coburn, Roy Rogers, Rob Lowe, Clement Moore (aka TV’s Lone Ranger), Robert Wagner, Kris Kristofferson, Wendell Corey (twice), Audie Murphy,  and Robert Duvall. Henry Fonda played Frank James twice.

            1850-Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Eugene Goldstein, German physicist.  He was an early researcher in X-rays who discovered and named canal rays.  Canal Rays have nothing to do with the Suez Canal or the Gowanus Canal but emerge through holes in the anodes of low-pressure electrical discharge tubes. These were later shown to be positively charged particles. Goldstein used a tube filled with hydrogen gas. The positive particle had a charge equal and opposite to the electron. It also had a mass of 1.66E-24 grams or one atomic mass unit. The positive particle would eventually be named the proton by Ernest Rutherford.  In 1976 Goldstein coined the term "cathode ray" (he had had no success with “protestant rays”) emitted from a cathode. He was the first to see that cathode rays could cast a shadow, and were emitted at right angles to the surface

            1862-Friday-  At Wolverhampton, England, Meteorologist James Glaisher and pilot Henry Tracey Coxwell attained the greatest height that had been reached by a balloon carrying passengers. The object of this flight, and others was to carry out observations on the temperature and  humidity  of the atmosphere at high elevations. As no automatically recording instruments were available, and Glaisher was unable to read the barometer at the highest point, mainly because he passed out, the precise altitude can never be known, but it is estimated at about 7 miles from the surface of the Earth.

            1877-Wednesday-  Victor over the hapless George Custer and th 7^th Cavalry at the Battle of the Little Big Horn, in June of 1876, Oglala Sioux chief Crazy Horse (Tashunca-uitco)was  fatally bayoneted by a U.S. soldier after “resisting” confinement in a guardhouse at Fort Robinson, Nebraska. Crazy Horse had been pursued by the forces of General Nelson Miles. He surrendered in May of 1877.  When he left the reservation without authorization, to take his sick wife to her parents, General George Crook ordered him arrested, fearing that he was plotting a return to battle. Crazy Horse did not resist arrest at first, but when he realized that he was being led to a guardhouse, he began to struggle, and while his arms were held by one of the arresting officers, a soldier ran him through with a bayonet.

            1882 –Tuesday-  The first Labor Day. The holiday was born in New York and was intended to be a tribute to the toil and achievements of the nation's workers. It grew out of a celebration and parade in honor of the working class by the Knights of Labor. In 1884, the Knights held a large parade in New York City. The holiday was also a testament to the strength of the burgeoning labor movement, which helped push the event onto the national stage. Thanks to the efforts of various union leaders, Labor Day became an official holiday in 1894. The day had its origins in April 15, 1872 as the Toronto Trades Assembly (TTA) organized the first North American "workingman's demonstration". Some 10,000 Torontonians turned out to watch a parade and to listen to speeches calling for abolition of the law which decreed that "trade unions were criminal conspiracies in restraint of trade and to protest the changes in management of the Toronto Maple Leafs and the trading of Frank Mahavolich.

            1885-Saturday-  The first gasoline pump was bought by Jake Gumper of Fort Wayne, Indiana. It was manufactured by Sylvanus Bowser, also of Fort Wayne. The gasoline pump tank had marble valves and wooden plungers that would be used to push kerosene up through a pipe. It had a capacity of one barrel. Not surprisingly, the pump was used to fill a  barrel of kerosene in his store.

               1892-Monday-  When I was sixteen
All of my dreams
Revolved around one thing
All I wanted was a car
All I wanted was a car………………Brad Paisley…..And continuing with our gas powered theme….the first gasoline automobile in the U.S. was built by Charles and Frank Duryea at Chicopee, Massachusetts.  Charles, the designer, called on his younger brother Frank, a trained machinist, to complete the prototype as he attended to his bicycle business (the Wright Brothers were also in the bicycle business) in Peoria, Illinois. The first Duryea is now in the Smithsonian Institution. Duryea Motor Wagon Company of Springfield, Massachusetts sold 13 identical gasoline-powered vehicles. The company would last only three years, however Charles and Frank  had became the first Americans to attempt to build and sell automobiles at a profit. This began the commercial period of the American automobile industry.  It may be available during the special Labor Day “Fall Tent Event” with O% interest, no money down, and  three years of gasoline at $2.99 a gallon.

            1905 –Tuesday- Won't you please surrender to me
Your lips, your arms, your heart, dear
Be mine forever
Be mine tonight…..Elvis………..Continuing to perfect the Japanese tradition of surprise attacks on Naval bases, and following the Russian rejection of a Japanese plan to divide Manchuria and Korea into spheres of influence, Japan had  launched a surprise naval attack against Port Arthur, a Russian naval base in China. The Russian fleet was decimated. During the subsequent Russo-Japanese War, Japan won a series of decisive victories over the Russians. On this day The Russo-Japanese War came to an end brokered by President Theodore Roosevelt (who, like Barack Obama, would win the Nobel Peace Prize….except Obama didn’t really do anything), as representatives of the two nations signed the Treaty of Portsmouth in New Hampshire. Russia, defeated in the war, agreed to cede to Japan the island of Sakhalin and Russian port and rail rights in Manchuria.

            1914 –Saturday World War I had begun in August. On this day the Battle of the Marne began –just thirty miles northeast of Paris. The French 6th Army under General Michel-Joseph Maunoury attacked the right flank of German forces advancing on the French capital. By the next day, the attack was total. More than two million soldiers fought in the Battle of the Marne, and 100,000 of them were killed or wounded. On September 9, the Germans began a fighting retreat to the Aisne River. The Battle of the Marne was the first significant Allied victory of World War I. It saved Paris and thwarted Germany's plan for a quick victory over France.

            1972 –Tuesday Palestinian Islamic terrorists attacked the Summer Olympics in Munich, Germany. They assaulted the Olympic Village apartment of Israeli athletes, killing two and taking nine others hostage. The terrorists, known as Black September, demanded that Israel release over 230 Muslim prisoners being held in Israeli jails as well as two German terrorists for good measure. In an ensuing shootout at the Munich airport, the nine Israeli hostages were killed along with five terrorists and one West German policeman. The Munich operation was ordered by Yasser Arafat and carried out by Fatah, Arafat's faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)

            1975 –Friday-  Hit Me With Your Best Shot!
Why Don't You Hit Me With Your Best Shot!
Hit Me With Your Best Shot!
Fire Away!........Pat Benetar……….In another episode of the slapstick presidency of the muddled Gerald R. Ford (it featured falling down frequently in public as well as setting free Soviet satellite states while engaging in debates, the Swine Flu scare and the immortal “Whip Inflation Now” [Win] campaign), Charles Manson roboid, Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme attempted to assassinate Ford  in Sacramento, California. The attempt was  foiled when a Secret Service agent wrestled a semi-automatic .45-caliber pistol from the Squeakster.  Fromme was pointing the loaded gun at the president when the Secret Service agent grabbed it. Seventeen days later, Ford escaped injury in another assassination attempt when 45-year-old loon Sara Jane Moore fired a revolver at him. Moore, a deranged leftist radical who once served as an informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a history of mental illness. She was arrested at the scene, convicted, and sentenced to life.

            1977 – Monday- Getting it slightly backwards, Voyager 1 was launched.  Voyager 2 had already been launched on August 20. Like, “2”, Voyager 1 explored all the giant planets of our outer solar system, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune; 48 of their moons; and their unique systems of rings and magnetic fields.  Voyager 1  is now the most distant human-made object in the cosmos, having reached 100 astronomical units from the sun in 2006. That means the spacecraft, is 100 times more distant from the sun than Earth is. In more common terms, Voyager 1 is about 15 billion kilometers (9.3 billion miles) from the sun.  And why was Voyager 2 launched before Voyage 1?  Did it “jump the line”?  Pay off mission control so it could go first?  Was it a member of the “Elite Pass” Club?  Was it on the run from the law? No. Although Voyager 1 left Earth 16 days after Voyager 2, because Voyager 1’s  faster flight path allowed it to pass the slower craft and arrive at Jupiter more than four months ahead of Voyager 2.

            1980 –Friday-  The world’s longest auto tunnel, the 16.3 km (10.1 mi) Saint Gotthard Road Tunnel opened. The road tunnel runs through the Ticino Canton, a state of the Swiss confederation, connecting Göschenen (near Andermatt) with Airolo. It was completed after 11 years' work. The road tunnel  improved links between Switzerland and Italy and  accommodated more than 1,500 motor vehicles per hour. It is closed periodically due to horrific traffic accidents

            1984 - STS-41-D: The Space Shuttle Discovery landed after its maiden voyage. Launched on August 30, the Discovery deployed three communications satellites and its toilet failed.  Judith Resnik was a crew member.  She was the second American woman in space.  She would be killed in the Challenger explosion of January 1986. 

            2000 –Tuesday-  Tuvalu  became the latest country that no one had ever heard of to join the United Nations. Tuvalu has an “about Tuvalu” website which informs us that Tuvalu is an independent constitutional monarchy in the southwest Pacific Ocean between latitudes 5 degrees and 11 degrees south and longitudes 176 degrees and 180 degrees east. Formerly known as the Ellice Islands, they separated from the Gilbert Islands after a referendum in 1975, and achieved independence from Great Britain on October 1, 1978. The population of 11,636 (est 2005) live on Tuvalu's nine atolls, which have a total land area of 10 square miles, or 27 square kilometerss. This ranks Tuvalu as the fourth smallest country in the world, in terms of land area.  The national anthem is Skip Tuvalu My Darling.  Other members of the United Nations that no one has ever heard of include:  Kiribati, Nauru, Vanuatu, and Sao Tome and Principe (which appears to be one place made of two islands).

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6.            

1492 –Tuesday- Christopher Columbus sailed from La Gomera in the Canary Islands, his final stop before crossing the Atlantic for the first time on a five week voyage.  Remember, the Canary Islands are not named after canaries. Noooooooooo. When the Romans explored the islands they found a fierce breed of dogs (can, canis in latin), was called "Canaria"... Gran Canaria was inhabited by a tribe who called themselves the "canarii". During the 15th century, the island of Canaria became famous for the brave defense deployed by their natives against the landings of the conquistadores. They started to call all islands "the Islands of Canaria", from which they were later called "Canary Islands" (Canarias, in Spanish).

         1522 (see Sept. 20) –Wednesday- We all were sea-swallow'd, though some cast again
(And by that destiny) to perform an act
Whereof what's past is prologue; what to come,
In yours and my discharge……Antonio….The Tempest Act 2, scene 1, 245–254

One of Ferdinand Magellan's five ships--the Vittoria—finally arrived at Sanlúcar de Barrameda in Spain, thus completing the first circumnavigation of the world. Of course Magellan did not complete the voyage having been slewn in the Philippines while foolishly interfering in local tribal disputes. The Vittoria was now commanded by  Basque navigator Juan Sebastián de Elcano, who had taken charge of the ship after the kaputing  of Magellan in April of 1521. Of the 270 men who originally sailed with Magellan in 1519, only Elcano, 17 other Europeans, and four Indians survived to reach Spain.   Professor Sy Yentz strongly recommends, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan's Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe by Laurence Bergreen. Great  history that reads like a novel.

         1628 –Wednesday- A company of Puritans led by Roger Conant (indigenous people described him as “Conant the Barbarian), settled Salem, which would  later become part of Massachusetts Bay Colony. The name 'Salem' is related to the Hebrew word 'shalom' and Arabic word 'salam'. Puritans…..Pilgrims……the two have become confused over the years.  What’s the difference?  Glad you asked.  According to Richard Howland Maxwell in  the Pilgrim Society Note, Series Two, March 2003, Pilgrims who settled Plymouth were puritans seeking to reform their church, and the Puritans who settled Massachusetts Bay were pilgrims (with that lower-case "p") who moved to a whole new land because of their religious convictions. We apply the name Pilgrim (with a capital "P") to the small band of English people who came here in 1620 on the the Mayflower and settled in Plymouth. (John Wayne applied the cognum “Pilgrim” to James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance).  We use the name Puritan to refer to a much larger group of English immigrants, led by John Winthrop, who came here ten years later and started Massachusetts Bay Colony. Both groups were motivated by their religious convictions. Both groups wished to purify their church by applying the principles of the Protestant Reformation. Got it? There’s going to be a quiz.   

            1757 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Marquis de Lafayette -Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier-, the very long named French soldier and statesman .  Lafayette was a general (at age 20) in the American Revolution and a leader of the Garde Nationale during the French Revolution. Yes, he was revolting. During the American Revolution, Lafayette served in the Continental Army under George Washington. While serving in that war, he was wounded at the Battle of Brandywine and organized a successful retreat. He served with distinction in the Battle of Rhode Island which apparently involved getting some of the limited seats on the ferry to Block Island on Labor Day. In the middle of the war, he returned to France to negotiate an augmented French commitment to the war. Upon his return, he blocked Cornwallis' troops at Yorktown, while the combined armies of Washington and Rochambeau arrived, thus surrounding the rather inept Cornwallis resulting in his surrender in 1781.

            1766-Saturday-  Happy Birthday, John Dalton, English meteorologist who switched to chemistry when he saw the applications for chemistry of his ideas about the atmosphere. He proposed the Atomic Theory in 1803. Dalton inferred proportions of elements in compounds by taking ratios of the weights of reactants. He set the atomic weight of hydrogen to be identically equal to the number 1 and developed the table of atomic weights for the other elements. Hence he is known as one of the fathers of modern physical science. In the extended atomic family, he is also  the uncle of elements, the cousin of atomic weights, brother-in-law of reactants and the second cousin, once removed of solutes.

          1802-Monday-  Happy Birthday, Alcide Dessalines D’Orbigny, French paleontologist and zoologist who founded the science of micropaleontology. Micropaleontology is that branch of paleontology which studies microfossils. Microfossils are fossils generally not larger than four millimeters, and commonly smaller than one millimeter. Microfossil brains have devolved over the years in a human version resulting in people who cover themselves with tattoos and body piercings.

            1811-Friday-  Happy Birthday, James Melville Gilliss, U.S. naval officer and astronomer who founded the Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. He also In 1846 he published Astronomical Observations, a pioneer work in the field; and, from 1849 to 1852, he led an astronomical observation expedition to South America where he established an observatory at Santiago, Chile. The Naval Observatory was the first U.S. observatory devoted entirely to research.  Next door, the white 19th Century Superintendent’s house overlooking Massachusetts Avenue in Washington D.C. was built in 1893 for the superintendent of the United States Naval Observatory. The house was so attractive  that the chief of naval operations kicked out the superintendent and made the house his home in 1923. The house was "taken over" again in 1974 when Congress turned "Number One Observatory Circle" into the official residence of the Vice President. Other than housing the Vice Presidents, the Observatory’s primary use is to care for the United States Navy chronometers and navigational equipment.

            1847 –Monday- He enjoys true leisure who has time to improve his soul's estate. After living in a shack he built himself near Walden Pond for two years, writer Henry David Thoreau (hopefully, he bathed first)  moved in with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his family in Concord, Massachusetts.  There, he feasted on delivered pizza, watched American Idol, and got into fights over who would hold the remote control for the TV.

       1885 –Sunday- A big day in Bulgarian history as Eastern Rumelia  (which only existed from 1879 to 1885) declared its union with Bulgaria. The Unification of Bulgaria was accomplished. The independent Kingdom of Bulgaria had been re-established by the San Stefano Treaty in 1878 after five centuries of Turkish domination. The Kingdom was down rated (like bonds or Pluto) to a Principality of Bulgaria and would not regain kingdom status until 1908  when the country gained full independence, changing its name into Kingdom of Bulgaria.

            1888-Thursday- Happy Birthday, Joseph P. Kennedy, American business man, movie producer, swain of Gloria Swanson, serial adulterer, probable bootlegger, Nazi appeaser and possible sympathizer, ambassador and patriarch of the “Kennedy Clan”, father of President John F. Kennedy and Senators Robert and Ted. 

            1891-Sunday-  The medication's wearing off
Gonna hurt not a little, a lot
Keep on tickin' you're not lickin' me …..The Eels……..The first operation to suture the pericardium (the fluid sac surrounding the heart muscle) took place at the City Hospital in St. Louis. Henry C. Dalton, professor of abdominal and clinical surgery at the Marion Sims College of Medicine repaired a 2" tear of the pericardium of a man stabbed during a fight. An unwillingness to pay medical bills resulted in patients being told “suture self”.

             1892 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Sir Edward Appleton, English physicist who won the 1947 Nobel Prize for Physics for his discovery of the eponymously named Appleton layer of the ionosphere. He began research into the strength of the radio signals received at Cambridge from the BBC station in London when he had difficulty receiving the latest American’s Top Forty on his radio He soon discovered that the strength of the signal was constant during the day but varied during the night, rising and falling in an almost regular manner. He suggested that, at night, the Cambridge apparatus was receiving not one but two waves, one traveling directly and the other being reflected by the atmosphere.  Appleton realized that the latter was the layer responsible for reflecting short wave radio round the world.  The Appleton layer that now enables communication with Australia and America.

            1901 –Friday- McKinley hollered , McKinley squalled
Doc said A“McKinley I can't find the cause
You're bound to die, you're bound to die
Doc told the horse, he'd throw down his rein
He said to the horse you gotta outrun this train
From Buffalo to Washington
The doc came a-running, he took off his specs
Said A“Mr Mckinley better cash in your checks
You've bound to die, you're bound to die
Look here, you rascal, you see what you've done
Shot down my husband and I've got your gun
I'm carrying you back, to Washington
Well, Roosevelt's in the White House, doing his best
McKinley's in the graveyard taking his rest
He's gone, for a long time  ………Bill Monroe…….Anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot and fatally wounded US President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley appeared at a public reception in the Temple of Music on the Exposition grounds. A large crowd had assembled to shake hands with the president and possibly exchange a few words. Czolgosz stood near the front of the line with his right hand wrapped in a handkerchief to make it appear as if he were protecting an injured hand. When his turn came, Czolgosz extended his left hand toward the president while firing two shots from a .32 caliber revolver concealed behind the covering. Mckinley died on Sept. 14.  Czolgosz received a hasty trial, was found guilty of murder and was electrocuted in the state prison at Auburn, New York on October 29.  Vice President Theodore Roosevelt became President.

            1908 –Sunday- For thogh we slepe or wake, or rome, or ryde, Ay fleeth the tyme; it nil no [will no] man abyde.
c 1390 Chaucer -Clerk's Tale l. 118]…………. Happy Birthday, Louis Essen, English physicist who invented the quartz crystal ring clock and the first practical atomic clock. These clocks were the most accurate time measurements built thus far……and yet, people are still late for work and appointments….. He built a cesium-beam (“we have come to praise cesium, not barium”) atomic clock, a mechanism that would change the way time is measured. A major factor in Essen’s work was that the definition of the second of time had now become a major block to realizing the potential of his new clock.  Essen fought to change the way the second is defined. Finally, in 1967 it was agreed internationally that the second should not be linked to the duration of the day or year (both of which vary) but to the natural periodicity of an atom of cesium specifically, as exactly 9,192,631,770 oscillations or cycles of the cesium atom's resonant frequency. So in the time it takes you to read this, an atom of cesium has had a lot of oscillations.  It took a further 12 years before astronomical time ceased to exist replaced by atomic time.          

1919-Saturday-  Happy Birthday Wilson Greatbatch, one of  America’s greatest inventors with more than 140 patents. His most famous invention, the cardiac pacemaker, keeps the rhythm of millions of heartbeats and helps people live longer and better. The pacemaker was the first electronic device ever surgically implanted inside human bodies. Of course as frequently happens in scientific discovery, the invention was serendipitous.  In an attempt to record the sound of a heartbeat,  Greatbatch inadvertently created something far more crucial—a device that emitted electricity pulses to the heart. It was this discovery that led to his implantable cardiac pacemaker

            1943 –Monday-  Happy Birthday, Richard J. Roberts, English molecular biologist and co-winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine, with Phillip A. Sharp, for their discovery of "split genes." Yes, each of them, in separate places at different times bent over and split their jeans!  Actually, in 1977, each scientist independently discovered that genes could be discontinuous. Non-coding, intervening sequences of dNA that are transcribed, but are removed from within the primary gene transcript and rapidly degrade during maturation of messenger RNA that is, a given gene could be present in the genetic material (DNA) as several, well-separated segments. Well that certainly clears that up.

            1954 –Monday- The New York Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox 6-5. Notable during the game was the Yankee manager Casey Stengel’s use of ten pinch hitters: Eddie Robinson, Jerry Coleman, Enos Slaughter, Joe Collins, Bob Cerv, Phil Rizzuto, Tommy Byrne, Woody Held, Bob Grim (a pitcher), and Tom Morgan (pitcher). We leave this item in as an example of the dangers of the internet.  When Professor Sy Yentz looked up the box score of the game, it turns out the Red Sox won 8-7 and the Yankees used “only” five pinch hitters.   

            1956 –Thursday-  The world premiere of the epic Fire Maidens from Outer Space. Starring no one we ever heard of, not even obscure character actors, ImDB summarizes the plot as “After landing on the 13th moon of Jupiter, the men from Earth debark from their ship to find a forested area containing the last remnant of lost Atlantis: an old man named Prossus, a bevy of nubile young women eager for husbands, and -- The Creature. ‘The beast with the head of a man,’ laments Prossus. "It must be destroyed -- yet it is indestructible!" http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0046977/plotsummary

            1958 –Saturday- The premier of Wanted, Dead or Alive, starring Steve McQueen. McQueen, one of several 50’s TV stars who would go on to movie stardom, starred as bounty hunter, Josh Randall. Guest stars on the first episode, The Martin Poster, included   Michael Landon (Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie and Nick Adams, The Rebel). As with most 50’s television westerns, the hero’s horse also had a name.  Randall’s was named Ringo.

            1959 -Sunday The first Barbie Doll was sold by Mattel Toy Corporation. The original Barbie, along with her pals, Ken and Skipper, are now collectors items, although new versions are continually being produced including Divorced Barbie.  Divorced Barbie costs $250.  The cost is so high because with her you get Ken’s car, his house, his boat…….Barbie, who’s real name is Barbara Millicent Roberts, was created by American businesswoman Ruth Handler and the doll's design was inspired by a German doll called Bild Lilli.

            1968 - Look at you all see the love there that's sleeping
While my guitar gently weeps
I look at the floor and I see it need sweeping
Still my guitar gently weeps …..Eric Clapton recorded the guitar solo for the Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps. He and George Harrison were good friends, (Clapton wrote Layla about Harrison’s wife Patti.  In fact he later married her) but George had to convince him to come to the studio because Clapton was worried the other Beatles wouldn't want him there.

            1978-Wednesday-  U.S. scientists announced the production of human-type insulin by a strain of E. coli bacteria, that had been genetically engineered after months of creative use of gene-splicing techniques. The genetically engineered E. coli also became a contestant on Dancing With the Stars, partnered with Hugo Chavez of Venezuela. Insulin is a hormone made by the islet cells of the pancreas. Insulin controls the amount of sugar in the blood

            1991 –Friday- The original name of Russia’s second largest city was restored on this day. The city of St. Petersburg, located on the Neva River (named after Russian national hero Alexander Nevsky)  at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea, was founded in 1703 by Peter the Great, who eponymously, yet modestly named it after himself , St. Petersburg. In 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Russian leaders felt that Petersburg was too German-sounding (Peter the Great admired the Prussians). So they changed the name of the city to Petrograd -- to make it more Russian-sounding. Then, in 1924, the country’s Communist leaders wanted to honor the founder of the Soviet Union, Vladimir I. Lenin. Petrograd became Leningrad and was known as Leningrad until 1991 when it reverted to St. Petersburg.  Future names may include Putingrad or Putinsberg.  

            1992 -Sunday A man who had received a transplanted baboon liver 10 weeks earlier died at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center. The recipient of the cross-species transplant, also called a xenotransplant, was a patient with chronic, active hepatitis B, a liver disease that would lead to death as it progressed.  Before his death the patient enjoyed a diet of bananas and leaves, liked to groom the nurses and be groomed in turn and enjoyed swinging from tree to tree.

            1995-Wednesday- To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time; ………..MacBeth…… Macbeth Act 5, scene 5, 19–28 ……….Baltimore Orioles shortstop Cal Ripken Jr. played in his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking former New York Yankee great Lou Gehrig’s (The Iron Horse)  record for most consecutive games played.  Ripken went on to play in 2632 consecutive major league baseball games (he was switched to 3^rd base later in the streak). The string ran from May 30 1982 to September 19, 1998, when Ripken voluntarily sat out a game so that he could participate in a Brighton Beach Mahjong Tournament.

            2008 -Saturday A strange Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) was discovered orbiting the Sun in the wrong direction. The object, designated as 2008 KV42 but nicknamed Drac (after Dracula, as vampires are fabled to have the ability to walk on walls), has a highly inclined orbit of 103.5°. Drac is a rarity since very few objects in the Solar System have retrograde orbits; in fact this kind of orbit is usually exclusive to Halley-type comets that have orbits that take them very close to the Sun. Drac on the other hand travels through the Kuiper Belt in a stable orbit at a distance of between 20-70 AU from the Sun. The Kuiper (pronounced Ki-Per) Belt has been called our Solar System's 'final frontier.' It is a disk-shaped region of icy debris is about 4.5 to 7.5 billion km (2.8 billion to 4.6 billion miles), 30 to 50 Astronomical Units (AU) from our Sun. No spacecraft has ever traveled to the Kuiper Belt.  Drac may provide clues as to where Halley-type objects originate or it may be a “death star”  with rays sent by Klingons to eliminate men who wear baseball caps in restaurants.

Back to  Calendar

7.        

 1251 BC –Thursday- According to legend, solar eclipse on this date might have marked the birth of the legendary Hercules (Heracles, Steve Reeves, David Suchet as Hercule Poirot) at Thebes, Greece. Hercules was  the son of the god Zeus and Alcmene. It was the stuff of mythical soap opera as Alcmene was  the wife of Amphitryon, but the night she conceived Hercules and his twin brother Iphicles, Alcmene did the horizontal mambo with both Zeus, who had disguised himself as her husband, and Amphitryon. As a result, Zeus was Hercules' father, but Amphitryon was the father of Iphicles. Hercules’ gift was fabulous strength; he strangled two serpents in his cradle, and killed a lion before manhood. His main antagonist was Hera. She eventually drove him mad, during which time he killed his own children and his brother's. He was so grieved upon recovery that he exiled himself and consulted the oracle of Apollo. The oracle told him to perform, yes, the twelve labors of Hercules. This also marks the artistic birthplace of the following cinematic masterpieces thanks to Video Hound: (1963)   The Fury of Hercules

(1961)  Hercules

(1997)   Hercules

(1958)    Hercules 2

(1985) Hercules against the Moon Men

(1964) Hercules and the Captive Women

(1963)   Hercules in New York

(1970)   Hercules in the Haunted World

(1964)  Hercules the Legendary Journeys, Vol. 1: And the Amazon Women

(1994)   Hercules the Legendary Journeys, Vol. 2: The Lost Kingdom

(1994)   Hercules the Legendary Journeys, Vol. 3: The Circle of Fire

(1994)   Hercules the Legendary Journeys, Vol. 4: In the Underworld

(1994)  Hercules Unchained

(1959)   Hercules vs. the Sons of the Sun

(1964)   Hercules, Prisoner of Evil

(1964) Jason and the Argonauts

(1963) The Loves of Hercules

(1960)  Samson and His Mighty Challenge

(1964)   The Three Stooges Meet Hercules

(1961)   The Triumph of Hercules

(1966)  Young Hercules

            1191 –Saturday-  During the Third Crusade, Richard I (the Lion Hearted) of England defeated Saladin at Arsuf.  The victory of Arsuf allowed Richard to continue unimpeded down the Mediterranean coast. Though Richard believed he could take the city of Jerusalem, he knew that once most of the crusaders returned home, those remaining would be unable to hold it.  Naturally, King Phillip II of France decided to go home.  After several more actions, including the amphibious retaking of the port of Jaffa, and a proposed marriage between Richard's sister and Saladin's brother, the King of England concluded a peace with Saladin and left the Holy Land in 1192, bringing an end to the Third Crusade. The Third Crusade (1189-1192) had been a response to the overwhelming victories of Saladin in the previous years. Richard went on to become the often referred to but never seen character in the Prince John, Sheriff of Nottingham, Robin Hood Stories.  Saladin changed his name to Paladin and starred in Have Gun Will Travel, a late 1950’s western series.

            1533 –Thursday-  Like a virgin
Touched for the very first time
Like a virgin
When your heart beats
Next to mine
Gonna give you all my love, boy
My fear is fading fast
Been saving it all for you
'Cause only love can last…….Madonna………Happy Birthday, Queen Elizabeth I of England, daughter of Henry VIII and wife number two, the soon to be headless Anne Boleyn. Elizabeth, one of Britain’s greatest monarchs, came to the throne following the death of her half-sister, Mary daughter of Henry’s first wife Catherine of Aragon in 1558.  Mary had ascended to the throne (following a brief attempt to bestow the queenship on the hapless Lady Jane Grey)  following the death of Edward VI, Henry’s son by wife number three, Jane Seymour. Whew! After the Catholic Mary’s kapution in 1558, Elizabeth quickly consolidated power and returned the country to Protestantism, passing the Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity, although by Reformation standards Catholics fared well under these acts. With the help of advisors like Sir William Cecil and the spy-networks of Francis Walsingham, she ruled the country well and initiated an era of economic prosperity. In international affairs, she toyed with the monarchs of  Europe, using the prospect of marriage to her (and thus joint control over England) as a bargaining tool.  Called the “Virgin Queen” (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), she manipulated so much that  preferring the power that came with perpetual eligibility, she ultimately never married at all. She was, however, involved in a scandalous romance with Robert Dudley (later called the Earl of Leicester). The Tudor history site concludes, she was probably a virgin. It's difficult to imagine any secret affair remaining secret for long. And birth control was tricky and untrustworthy in the 16th century. She knew that any affair would risk a pregnancy - and that would destroy her life. Furthermore, it is worth noting Elizabeth's own strict and methodical character, and the disdain she showed for women who could not control their feelings or appreciate the consequences of their actions. She died childless and husbandless in 1603 to be succeeded by James VI of Scotland, son of her decapitated cousin, Mary Queen of Scots.

             1776 –Saturday- During the Revolutionary War, the American submersible craft Turtle attempted to attach a time bomb to the hull of British Admiral Richard Howe's flagship Eagle in New York Harbor. It was the first use of a submarine in warfare. Large enough to accommodate one operator, the submarine was entirely hand-powered. Lead ballast kept the craft balanced. During the Battle of Fort Lee, (over who would pay for the E Z Pass at the George Washington Bridge)  the Turtle went kaput when the American sloop transporting it was sunk by the British.

            1812-Monday- The Battle of Borodino, one of Napoleon’s great victories was fought between Napoleon's 130,000 troops, with more than 500 cannon, and 120,000 Russians with more than cannon . Napoleon's success allowed him to occupy Moscow. Oops! This, ultimately, was not so good as ahead lay that achievement and a horrendous retreat from Russia that would kill most of his troops.

             1813-Tuesday-  Choosing from among, Cousin Elmer, Aunt Felicity, 2^nd Cousin Once Removed Bob,  United States got its nickname, Uncle Sam. The name is linked to Samuel Wilson, a meat packer from Troy, New York, who supplied barrels of beef to the United States Army during the War of 1812. Wilson stamped the barrels with "U.S." for United States, but soldiers began referring to the supplies as "Uncle Sam's." The local newspaper picked up on the story and Uncle Sam eventually gained widespread acceptance as the nickname for the U.S. federal government. Later, in the late 1860s and 1870s, political cartoonist Thomas Nast (who also popularized the image of Santa Claus) began popularizing the image of Uncle Sam. Nast continued to evolve the image, eventually giving Sam the white beard and stars-and-stripes suit that are associated with the character today. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/SAM/sam.htm

            1816 –Saturday-  I’ve got you under my skin
I’ve got you deep in the heart of me
So deep in my heart, that youre really a part of me
I’ve got you under my skin …..Cole Porter

Happy Birthday, Ferdinand von Hebra .Austrian physician who founded the New Vienna School of Dermatology, which became a basic foundation for modern dermatology. He described and named many diseases of the skin, among them lupus, pityriasis, rubra and tinea cruris, and was the first to describe dermatitis herpetiformes.  Hebra emphasized local factors in skin diseases, maintaining that diseases of the skin were related to local irritation, disputing the previously held humoral doctrine that related them to a disease-producing condition of body fluids, that skin diseases were secondary to a general metabolic upset of blood poisoning. He worried about his complexion  and used Clearasil regularly.

            1819-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Thomas Kendricks, 25^th Vice President of the United States.  He was Governor of Indiana 1872, unsuccessful candidate for Vice President of the United States on the Democratic ticket with Samuel Tilden in 1876, and finally elected Vice President of the United States in 1884 on the Democratic ticket with Grover Cleveland but served only until November 1885 when he went kaput.  Speaking of kaput, how many Vice Presidents died in office? Seven vice presidents have died in office: George Clinton (served under James Madison) Elbridge Gerry (served under James Madison) William Rufus De Vane King (served under Franklin Pierce) Henry Wilson (served under U.S. Grant) Thomas Hendricks (served under Grover Cleveland) Garret Hobart (served under William McKinley) James Sherman (served under William Howard Taft) Two vice presidents resigned: John C. Calhoun (served under Andrew Jackson) and Spiro Agnew (served under Richard Nixon). And of course, eight Presidents died in office, one (guess who), resigned.

            1821 –Friday-  The Republic of Gran Colombia (a federation covering much of present day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador) was established, with Simón Bolívar as the President and Francisco de Paula Santander as vice president. Bolívar dreamt of uniting South America but was unable to achieve this during the struggle for independence from Spain. The Republic of Gran Colombia was his initial attempt at creating a single South American state. Other South American politicians, however, were not thrilled with his idea and  so a disgruntled Bolívar resigned in 1828.  The federation went kaput in 1830, despite the efforts of General Rafael Urdaneta in Bogotá, due to internal strife between the different regions, who would get Hugo Chavez, who would get credit for Tortas y Pasteles, and Bolivar’s comment, “you go Uruguay and I’ll go mine,  which strengthened after Bolívar's resignation.

            1822-Saturday- Too bad there were no Olympic Games until 1896 as a treadmill was completed to grind corn at the New York City Prison. It  employed the labor of 8 to 16 prisoners at a time walking on what looked like a very wide, 5-ft diameter paddle wheel. Prisoners held on to a bar and climbed the paddle boards, like endlessly walking up stairs. Their cholesterol was down, the body fat down, and they learned to smile the insane grin of fitness instructors everywhere as they developed it into the Walking on a Paddle Wheel Ab and Calf Builder program.

             1829-Monday-  Happy Birthday, Ferdinand Vandiveer Hayden, American geologist who explored the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain region.  His efforts provided the foundation for the U.S. Geological Survey and for the establishment of Yellowstone National Park.  It is generally accepted that the first discovery of dinosaur remains (which turned out to be Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia) made in North America was in 1854, by Vandiveer Hayden during his exploration of the upper Missouri River in Montana.

            1840-Monday-  Happy Birthday, Luther Crowell, American inventor who obtained over 280 patents for printing press improvements as well as designing a machine for making the square-bottomed paper bag that you find in grocery stores and are coming back into vogue replacing plastic bags (which have a half-life of 400-1,000 years, Plastic never fully decomposes. Over time it goes through a process of photo degradation and breaks down into smaller and smaller pieces).  Anyway, Luther Crowell invented the machine. Margaret (Mattie) Knight was an employee in a paper bag factory when she invented a new machine part to make square bottoms for paper bags. Paper bags had been more like envelopes before. Knight (that old bag) can be considered the mother of the grocery bag,

            1876 –Thursday-  The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid ended very badly for the Jesse James/Cole Younger Gang. While they were happily robbing the bank, a teller ran out and alerted the local (well armed) citizenry.  Eventually six members of the gang would be killed. Jesse's brother, Frank, was hit in the leg, while their criminal partners--Jim, Cole, and Bob Younger--were also badly wounded. Jesse James was the last one out of the bank. After pausing briefly to shoot the uncooperative teller (Joseph Lee Heywood) in the head, he escaped (we note that Cole Younger, on his death bed said that in fact it was Frank James that shot poor Heywood) . James would eventually be killed by Robert Ford “the dirty little coward who shot Mr. Howard” in 1882.

            1888 –Friday- Edith Eleanor McLean became the first baby to be placed in an incubator. She weighed 2 pounds, 7 ounces. She was born at State Emigrant Hospital on Ward's Island, New York City. Originally, the incubator was called a "hatching cradle." It was constructed under the instructions of Drs. Allan M. Thomas and William C. Deming who were in charge of the maternity ward at the hospital. It was 3-ft square and 4-ft high. One of its two sections contained 15 gallons of water

           1908 –Monday- Happy Birthday, Dr. Michael DeBakey, American physician, and pioneer cardiovascular surgeon who invented or perfected many medical devices, techniques and procedures, including arterial bypass operations, artificial hearts, heart pumps and heart transplants. In 1964, Dr. DeBakey was the first to perform a successful aortocoronary artery bypass, using the large vein in the leg to bypass the blocked or damaged area between the aorta and coronary arteries, a life-saving operation now used throughout the world.  In 1968, he led a team of surgeons in a historic multiple transplantation procedure in which the heart, kidneys, and one lung of a donor were transplanted into four recipients. If you’re familiar with the old TV show M.A.S.H, set during the Korean War, DeBakey also played a key role in developing the Mobile Army Surgical Hospitals (M.A.S.H.) located only minutes from the battlefield to reduce the fatality rate for critically wounded soldiers

            1909 –Tuesday-  Eugene Lefebvre went kaput while test piloting a new French-built Wright biplane. He crashed at Juvisy France when his controls jammed. Lefebvre died and earned the dubious honor of becoming the first 'pilot' in the world to lose his life in a powered heavier-than-air craft.

             1912 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, David Packard, American electrical engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded the Hewlett-Packard Company, a manufacturer of computers, computer printers, and analytic and measuring equipment

            1914-Monday-  Happy Birthday, James Van Allen, U.S. physicist who discovered the radiation belt around the Earth which he then eponymously named the Van Allen Suspenders, no, we’re just kidding, it was the Van Allen Radiation Belt.  The Earth actually has two radiation belts. The inner belt, the one discovered by Van Allen's geiger counter, occupies a compact region above the equator and is a by-product of cosmic radiation. It is populated by protons……we’re positive about that.   Both manned and unmanned spaceflights tend to stay out of this region. The outer radiation belt is nowadays seen as part of the plasma trapped in the magnetosphere.

            1914 –Monday- Mister Postman, look and see
(Oh yeah)
If there's a letter in your bag for me
(Please, Please Mister Postman)
Why's it takin' such a long time
(Oh yeah)
For me to hear from that boy of mine…..The Marvelettes

 On the same day that James Van Allen (see above) entered the world, the New York Post Office Building on 33^rd St. and 8^th Ave. in Manhattan opened to the public.  It’s the one with "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds," inscribed above the door.  The original saying was actually "Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds" and was originally said about 2500 years ago by the Greek historian, Herodotus. He coined the adage during the war between the Greeks and Persians about 500 B.C. in reference to the Persian mounted postal couriers whom he observed and held in high esteem. The New York Post Office is now is a national historic landmark, and occupies two full city blocks.

            1915 –Tuesday-  Former cartoonist  John Barton “Johnny Gruelle” was given a patent for his Raggedy Ann doll.  He had found a faceless rag doll in his attic.  He drew a face on it, cleaned it up and gave it to his daughter as a gift. It became his daughter’s constant playmate.

            1936-Monday- Extinct – Kaput - the last known Tasmanian Tiger (Thylacine) died at the Hobart Zoo. This dog-like marsupial, named from its striped hind-quarters, was the first known mammal species to become extinct in Tasmania. The animal had been systematically exterminated by European settlers as an undesirable predator of farm animals. After it was eliminated in the wild, a few remained alive in zoos, but no effort was made to breed the species. See Science Gnus - http://www.sciencegnus.com/Extinct%20Animals.html

            1936 –Monday- Tasmanian Tiger kaput but Happy Birthday, Charles Hardin - Buddy Holly, American rock singer born in Lubbock, Texas. The hits of Holly (and his group the Crickets), Rave On, Peggy Sue, That’ll Be the Day, Oh Boy! and Maybe Baby had a profound influence on rock music and especially on the Beatles and Hollies (both of whom derived their names from his). Even the Rolling Stones had their first major British hit with Holly’s Not Fade Away. Buddy Holly was killed on the “day the music died”, - February 3, 1959, as traveling to  Moorhead, Minnesota  with two other performers, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper, he chartered a plane that left the Mason City, Iowa, airport at one in the morning and crashed in a cornfield a few minutes later, killing all aboard. Holly was 22 years old.

            1949 –Wednesday-  Go on now, go walk out the door
Just turn around now
'Coz you're not welcome anymore
Weren't you the one who tried to hurt me with goodbye?
Did you think I'd crumble?
Did you think I'd lay down and die?
Oh no not I, I will survive
For as long as I know how to love, I know I'll stay alive
I've got all my life to live
And I've got all my love to give
I'll survive
I will survive
Hey hey   Happy Birthday, Gloria Gaynor (born Gloria Fowles) American singer, best-known for the disco era  anthem, I Will Survive which went to number 1 on the record (yes, they still had records then) charts in 1979.

            1955 –Wednesday- The other day at dinner, someone said “hey how about that restricted Burnside problem”. We hashed it around for a while and then decided to see what Efim Isaakovich Zelmanov thought about it.  Happy Birthday, Efim Isaakovich Zelmanov , Russian (formerly Soviet) mathematician, perhaps best known for his solution of the restricted Burnside problem. Almost half a decade before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Zelmanov left for America and taught at Yale University and later at UC San Diego. In 1994 he was awarded the Fields medal (the Mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize). The restricted Burnside problem came up when Burnside was restricted to just the living room of his house and he had to figure out how to get to the bathroom and also the kitchen when he was hungry and…….no,no,no Professor Sy Yentz has his restricted sense of humor….The restricted Burnside problem (formulated in the 1930s) asks another related question: are there only finitely many finite r-generator groups of exponent n, up to isomorphism? (An r-generator group is group which can be generated by r elements.).  If this holds for a given r and n, then consider subgroups H and K of B(r, n), where both H and K have finite index. The intersection of H and K then also has finite index. Let M be the intersection of all subgroups of B(r, n) which have finite index. M is a normal subgroup of B(r, n) (otherwise, there exists a subgroup g -1Mg with finite index containing elements not in M). We can then define B0(r,n) to be the factor group formed by B(r,n)/M. B0(r,n) is a finite group; and every finite r-generator group of exponent n is a homomorphic image of B0(r,n).  Well that certainly clears that up. Got it??  Well, Nationmaster Encyclopedia has it. http://www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/Restricted-Burnside-problem

            1958- Sunday- The premiere of the epic, Queen of Outer Space (tag line - Mankind's first fantastic flight to Venus - the female planet!). This cinematic triumph starred  Zsa Zsa Gabor as, yes the Hungarian accented Venusian love interest of astronaut Eric Fleming, also Gil Favor to Clint Eastwood’s Rowdy Yates on TV’s Rawhide. It was directed by Edward Bernds who’s ouevre also includes: The Three Stooges in Orbit, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules, The Bowery Boys Meet the Monsters, Bowery to Bagdad, and Reform School Girl

            1963 –Saturday-

You gotta be football hero

To get along

With the beautiful girls.

You gotta be

A touchdown getter,

You bet.

If you wanna get

A baby to pet……. Al Sherman, Buddy Fields and Al Lewis

 The Pro Football Hall of Fame opened in Canton, Ohio with 17 charter members.  Why Canton?  Why it’s the mother (father?) of Pro Football. On December 6, 1959, the Canton Repository, a newspaper in Canton, Ohio, called for the National Football League (NFL) to create a football hall of fame in the community. The city had played an instrumental role in creating professional football. On September 17, 1920, the American Professional Football Association (APFA) formed in the city. This organization eventually became the National Football League. Who were the original members? Slingin’ Sammy Baugh, Bert Bell, Joe Carr, Earl (Dutch) Clark
Harold (Red) Grange (the Galloping Ghost), (Papa Bear) George Halas, Mel Hein
Wilbur (Pete) Henry, Robert (Cal) Hubbard (also a major league umpire), Don Hutson
Earl (Curly) Lambeau (Green Bay Packers), Tim Mara(New York Giants),
George Preston Marshall (Washington Redskins), John (Blood) McNally, Bronko Nagurski, Ernie Nevers, and Jim Thorpe

            1967-Thursday-  The first successful U.S. biological research satellite was launched carrying 13 experiments to test the effects of cosmic radiation and the space environment on simple small animal and plant life. The life forms included millions of orange head mold spores, thousands of vinegar gnats, flour beetles and bacteria cells, hundreds of wasp and amoeba, 120 frog eggs as well as dozens of wheat seedlings and blue wild flowers, three French hens, two turtle doves, and a partridge in a pear tree. It was the first of a  series of three NASA satellites to assess the effects of spaceflight, especially radiation and weightlessness, on living organisms. Each was designed to reenter and be recovered at the end of its mission. Many of the vinegar gnats mutated, returned to earth and became intellectually challenged “celebrities” who infest contemporary reality shows on TV. The orange head mold spores degenerated into the people who watch them.  

            1977 –Wednesday Ditsy President Jimmy Carter and Panamanian dictator Omar Torrijos signed a treaty agreeing to transfer control of the Panama Canal from the United States to Panama at the end of the 20th century. The Panama Canal Treaty also authorized the immediate abolishment of the Canal Zone, a 10-mile-wide, 40-mile-long U.S.-controlled area that bisected the Republic of Panama. Fortunately, the loopy Carter was only in office for four years, otherwise he may have given back the Gadsden Purchase, Alaska and the Louisiana Purchase.

            1978 –Thursday-  The Village Voice headline would read, “Keith Moon Dies Before He Got Old”. Moon, the great drummer of the Who’s hit My Generation “ I hope I die before I get old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)” died of a drug overdose.

            1979 –Friday-  The Entertainment and Sports Programming Network (ESPN) made its debut. Originally designed to give sports highlights and updates, it has degenerated into “World’s Strongest Man” contests, log chopping, and endless highlights of “check me out” athletes doing silly dances or attempting to actually speak.  The network sports readers are more interested in being pseudo clever and developing shtick than, gasp, actually being  knowledgeable….sad.

            1998 –Monday O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a
king of infinite space……Hamlet, Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 251–259.     The search engine, Google was founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, two students at Stanford University.  Gerard Salton, who went kaput August 28th of 1995, was the father of modern search technology. His teams at Harvard and Cornell developed the SMART informational retrieval system. Ted Nelson created Project Xanadu in 1960 and coined the term hypertext in 1963.  While an independent contractor at CERN from June to December 1980, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a project based on the concept of hypertext, to facilitate sharing and updating information among researchers.  Search engines consist of 3 main parts. Search engine spiders follow links on the web to request pages that are either not yet indexed or have been updated since they were last indexed. These pages are crawled and are added to the search engine index (also known as the catalog). When you search using a major search engine you are not actually searching the web, but are searching a slightly outdated index of content which roughly represents the content of the web. The third part of a search engine is the search interface and relevancy software. http://www.searchenginehistory.com/

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70 - Roman forces under Titus sacked Jerusalem. Son of the emperor, Vespasian, Titus had begun his siege during Passover on April 14.  The Zealots had begun the Jewish rebellion in 66 A.D. but they quarreled among themselves, to the point of combat, and did little to prepare themselves for a war against Rome. They were rebels, not soldiers, and the leadership and discipline necessary to train and prepare did not exist.  Thousands of Jews were killed, sold into slavery, or kept prisoner to be sacrificed at the games for Roman sport. Jerusalem's fall certainly marked the beginning of the end of a Jewish homeland, for the Diaspora soon saw Jews spreading across the world as their political and religious capital was gone.

            1157 – Happy Birthday, King Richard I of England, aka Richard the Lion Hearted, 2^nd son of King Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine, brother of King John (his successor).

            1504 – Michelangelo Buonarotti’s  great marble sculpture of David was unveiled in Florence. In 1501, the City of Florence commissioned Michelangelo to create a statue to be placed high above Florence on one of the Cathedral fortresses. Michelangelo produced "David" at the age of 26. The City of Florence deemed "David" a civic patriotic symbol and placed it in front of the Palazzo Vecchio.  Nowadays, you can find David in the Galeria dell'Academia in Florence (Firenze) although you’ll find a nice copy ouside the Palazzo Vecchio in the Piazza della Signoria.

            1514 - Battle of Orsha, one of the biggest battles of the century, Lithuanians and Poles defeated the Russian army. The Battle of Orsha was part of a long chain of wars conducted by Russian tsars striving to gather all the Old Ruthenian (A Slavic people from Southern Russia, Galicia and Bukowina in Austria, and North-eastern Hungary) lands under their rule .The much smaller army of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and Poland defeated the Muscovite forces, capturin g their camp and commander.

            1565 - Pedro Menéndez de Avilés settled St. Augustine, Florida, the oldest continually-inhabited city in the United States He purchased a nice waterfront condo three bedrooms, 21/2 baths, in a complex with a pool, tennis courts, hand ball courts, and a Bingo room.  Aviles returned to Spain in 1567, and later died while fighting the British in a naval battle at Santander, Spain.

             1664 - Dutch Governor Peter Stuyvesant surrendered New Amsterdam, the capital of New Netherland, to an English naval squadron under Colonel Richard Nicolls. Stuyvesant had hoped to resist the English, but he was an unpopular ruler, and his Dutch subjects refused to rally around him. Following its capture, New Amsterdam's name was changed to New York, in honor of the Duke of York,  James, the brother of King Charles II, who organized the mission.

            1828 – Happy Birthday, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, American Civil War soldier and hero and of the great Americans in the country’s history. Most notably, Chamberlain, leading the 20^th Maine Infantry Regiment, held the exposed Union end at Little Round Top on the 2^nd day of the pivotal battle of Gettysburg against soldiers from General Law's Alabama Brigade. The 15th Alabama Infantry, commanded by Colonel William C. Oates, Had the 20^th not held, the Confederates could have rolled up the Union line, the battle result and American history could have been very different.  Chamberlain led his brigade through the bloody Overland Campaign in the spring of 1864 at the battles of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, North Anna and Cold Harbor. On June 18, 1864, Chamberlain was seriously wounded while leading his men in an assault on Rives' Salient, a stronghold in the Confederate defenses outside of Petersburg. Eight months later, in April 1865, (now) General Chamberlain led his troops at the Battle of Five Forks, which broke the Confederate hold on Petersburg. August 1865, he returned to civilian life and was elected governor of Maine in 1866. But his true interest lay in education and in 1871 he was persuaded to accept the president's position at Bowdoin College where he restructured the college curriculum to include science and engineering.  

            1831 - William IV was crowned King of Great Britain. William, who succeed what seemed to be an unending series of Georges (I-IV) was a genial, frank, warm-hearted man, but a blundering, though well-intentioned prince. He was succeeded by his niece Queen Victoria.

            1854-Dr. John Snow single handedly stopped a cholera epidemic in London when he  removed the handle of the Broad Street water pump thus effectively halting further spread of the disease He had mapped the outbreaks, and thus suspected contamination of this community source of water. He was correct in this, one of the most symbolic gestures in the history of public health. Within days after the pump handle was removed, new cases of illness had ceased. Site investigation showed raw sewage from a leaking sewage cesspool that had contaminated the well water. This may have been the first “button down cholera”……no starch.  In 1959, American singer Connie Francis had a hit single, Lipstick on Your Cholera. In a March 2003 survey by Hospital Doctor magazine, John Snow was voted the "greatest doctor" of all time, with Hippocrates (460-370 BC) coming in second.  While the poll was likely biased with over-representation of John Snow supporters, the findings do point to the increased prominence of Dr. Snow among contemporary physicians. http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/snow.html

            1857 - Happy Birthday, Ida H. Hyde  (sister of Formalde Hyde and Raw Hyde) , American physicist who invented the microelectrode in the 1930's. This small device stimulates a living cell either chemically or electrically, and records the electrical activity inside the cell. With the paucity of women scientists in the 19^th century, her firsts include being the first woman to graduate from the University of Heidelberg in 1896, the first woman to do research at the Harvard Medical School (in the Department of Physiology.) and the first woman to be elected to the American Physiology Society. Her discoveries could be called “Hyde and seek”……but then……………maybe not.

            1888- In London, the body of Jack the Ripper's second murder victim, Annie Chapman, was found.  On Friday, August 31 1888, the body of Polly Nichols was discovered lying on the ground before a gated stable entrance on Whitechapel’s Buck’s Row – a narrow, dimly lit passage. She suffered a deep slash to her throat and severe cuts to her abdomen and womb. Polly was believed to be the first victim of Jack the Ripper. Annie Chapman, known as "Dark Annie," was a 47-year old destitute prostitute who roamed the streets and moved from one common lodging house to the next when she could afford to pay for a room. On the morning of September 8, 1888 she was thrown out of her lodging house to earn money for her bed. Her body was found several hours later in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street in the same condition as Polly Nichol’s.  There would be three more victims for certain and several for rumor.  Jack the Ripper’s identity has never been ascertained. http://www.casebook.org/victims/

          1900 - A Category 4 hurricane swamped Galveston, Texas, killing an estimated 6,000 to 8,000 people. A 15-foot storm surge flooded the city. The problem was that the city was only nine feet, above sea level. Numerous homes and buildings were destroyed. The hurricane remains the worst weather-related disaster in U.S. history in terms of loss of life. Under the leadership of Clara Barton, the American Red Cross helped establish an orphanage for storm victims and helped to acquire lumber to rebuild houses. The organization raised money by selling photographs of the storm devastation.

            1903- Happy Birthday, Marthe Vogt, German-born British pharmacologist who left Nazi Germany (one of many) for Britain and became a leading authority on neurotransmitters in the brain. A neurotransmitter is chemical that permits nerve signals to bridge the gap, or synapse, between nerve cells. You can access them by wearing funnel shaped hat made of aluminum foil on your head. In 1936 she co-authored a classic paper proving that acetylcholine from nerves originating in the spinal cord triggers movement in muscles.

             1906 - Robert Turner invented  the automatic typewriter return carriage.  The carriage (the roller mechanism holding the paper) moves one space to the left, so when you hit the next key it doesn't obliterate the mark you've just made. The carriage continues to advance as you type, until you get to the right edge of the paper. Then a bell sounds and you have to press the carriage return lever . This turns the paper up and moves the carriage back to the start of the next line.

            1918-  Happy Birthday, Derek Richard Barton, English chemist and the Father of Conformational Analysis in Organic Chemistry, which is a strange name for a child . In conformational analysis  he proposed that the orientations in space of functional groups affect the rates of reaction in isomers.  An isomer is a molecule or compound that has the same number of atoms as another but a different structure. Barton shared the 1969 Nobel Prize for Chemistry with Odd Hassell.

            1922- Happy Birthday, Sid Caesar, American comedian, 1950’s television star of Your Show of Shows.

            1925 – Happy Birthday, Peter Sellers, English comedic actor, famous as Inspector Clouseau in the (original, not the pathetic copies) Pink Panther movies. “She killed him in a rit of fealous jage”.

            1930 - Scotch tape was developed by Richard Drew, a banjo playing (did he come from Alabama with a banjo on his knee?) engineer at the 3M company. Scotch tape, the world's first transparent tape, added a nearly invisible adhesive, made from rubber, oils and resins, to a coated cellophane backing. The adhesive was waterproof and withstood a wide range of temperature and humidity, because it was designed to seal cellophane food-wrap. But the public, forced by the Great Depression to be thrifty, found hundreds of uses for it at work and at home, from sealing packages to mending clothes to preserving cracked eggs. The Scotch in Scotch tape is said to have come from workers complaining about the cheaply made original product.”take this back to your Scotch bosses”. He also invented masking tape, a two-inch-wide tan paper strip backed with a light, pressure-sensitive adhesive which he invented because of the difficulties auto body painters had keeping borders between two colors. And, in case you were wondering – and we know you were - John A. Borden, another 3M engineer invented the first tape dispenser with a built-in cutter blade in 1932.

            1932 – Happy Birthday, Patsy Cline, American singer – Crazy, (written by Willie Nelson) and I Fall to Pieces.  Killed in a plane crash in 1963.

            1935 - Senator Huey Long, the “Kingfish” was shot in the Louisiana state capitol building. He died about 30 hours later. Eight U.S Presidents have died in office, seven Vice Presidents have died in office and three senators have been shot while in office.  Three United States Senators have died violent deaths while in office.  In 1859, the antislavery Sen. David C. Broderick of California was killed in a duel with the proslavery David S. Terry, a former justice on the California Supreme Court.  Murder charges against Terry for killing Broderick were dismissed, but Terry's career was blighted.  In 1889, in a railway station restaurant in tiny Lathrop, Calif., Terry – yes, the same Terry, this guy definitely had anger management issues--attacked and struck in the face U. S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field.  A federal marshal assigned to protect Field shot Terry dead on the spot. In 1968, Sen. Robert Kennedy was shot to death.  Sirhan Sirhan, the man convicted of the murder, received a life sentence. Immediately after Long was shot, his alleged assassin, Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, a 29-year old local physician, was slain by Long's bodyguards, who pumped between 30 and 60 pistol bullets into the doctor's body as it lay on the corridor floor.

           1953 - Continental Trailways offered the first transcontinental express bus service in the U.S. The 3,154-mile ride from New York City to San Francisco lasted 88 hours and 50 minutes, of which only 77 hours was riding time. A one-way ticket cost $56.70. No word about whether the person you were stuck next to for the 77 hours had bathed recently. Nowadays it’s almost guaranteed that they didn’t.

            1966- Going where no man has gone before and inflicting William Shatner on an unsuspecting public, Star Trek premiered.  There would be seventy nine episodes, the last show would be June 3, 1969 but like a rash, it won’t go away and keeps coming back in different forms. In this first show, Kirk and his crew are at deadly risk from an alien creature that feeds on the salt in a human body and can take on any form. Starring in the first show were DeForest Kelley (Dr. Leonard Horatio "Bones" McCoy), Grace Lee Whitney (Yeoman Janice Rand), George Takei (Lt. Hikaru Sulu), Nichelle Nichols (Lt. Nyota Uhura),

            1966- Premiering on the same night as Star Trek got started (see above), That Girl starring Marlo Thomas – daughter of comedian Danny Thomas- made its debut. In a typical sit-com plot reminiscent of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ann meets Donald (who would be the boyfriend) in their office building, but their first days of getting acquainted include a clash over a rolltop desk they each want to buy and Donald unwittingly ruining Ann's role in a commercial. Plots like this kept us rolling in our chairs with laughter until March, 1971 when the show, mercifully, went off the air.

             1967- Surveyor 5 spacecraft was launched -landed on the moon Sept. 11- to photograph potential landing areas. After 180,000 pictures of smiling craters, happy mountains, and moody mares, the Sea of Tranquility was selected for the July1969 landing site.

            1974 – Former President Richard Nixon burped, said “pardon me” and accidental President Gerald Ford said “O.K” and did. Ford pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed or participated in while in office. Ford later defended this action before the House Judiciary Committee, explaining that he wanted to end the national divisions created by the Watergate scandal. Ford had been Speaker of the House of Representatives when Nixon’s Vice President, the odious Spiro T. Agnew, resigned in disgrace. Ford was appointed Vice President and assumed the Presidency when Nixon resigned in disgrace in August of 1974.

            1986 – Twenty years to the day after Star Trek and That Girl premiered (see 1966 above) – we’re not sure about the symbolism here…..The Oprah Winfrey show premiered, as the first talk show hosted by a black woman. It is the highest-rated talk show in syndication history. And yes, if she married Deepak Chopra, she’d be Oprah Chopra.

            1998- Steroid laden mutant, St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire hit his 62nd home run of the year, breaking New York Yankee (steroidless)Roger Maris’ record for most home runs in a single season set in 1961.

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9.      

    1513 – Tuesday-  James IV (grandfather of Mary Queen of Scots) of Scotland was defeated and was then slewn fighting the forces of English King Henry VII  in the Battle of Flodden Field, in yet another of a series of devastating defeats for  Scotland. James’ son became king at the grand old age of one. The battle site is in the Cheviot Hills in Northumberland, England.  Few of King James's men survived the encounter with the English troops, led by the 70-year-old Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey. James had invaded England as the climax of a long quarrel with Henry VIII. Up until James VI became King of England following the death of Elizabeth, Jameses had not done very well.  James I was assassinated by his nobles, James II was blown up when one of his cannons exploded, James III was killed in battle with rebels who included his son….James IV, kaputed at Flodden, and James V died after yet another defeat, Solway Moss, at age thirty.  This brings us to…………………………..

            1543 –Thursday-  Mary Stuart, at nine months old, was crowned "Queen of Scots" following in the kapution of the aforementioned James (James V) – see James IV above- and another yet devastating defeat at the hands of the English (the Battle of Solway Moss) in the central Scottish town of Stirling. On his deathbed James V said, 'It cam wi' a lass and it will gang wi' a lass', remembering how the crown had come to his family through Marjorie Bruce and fearing that no woman could ever rule his nation. Six days later, he was kaput.  

            1585 -Monday  Happy Birthday, Armand Jean du Plessis, aka, Cardinal Richelieu, French statesman and macher . Richelieu was head of the Royal Council and prime minister of France. King Louis XIII was a rather mushy ruler and Richelieu filled the void, by running the French empire via his advice to the king. Richelieu expanded royal power, punished dissent harshly, and built France into a  European power. At the same time he supported the arts and learning and founded the famous French Academy. Novelist Alexandre Dumas made Richelieu a crafty villain in his 1844 book The Three Musketeers.

            1737-Monday- Henry Frankenstein: Look! It's moving. It's alive. It's alive... It's alive, it's moving, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, it's alive, IT'S ALIVE!
Victor Moritz: Henry - In the name of God!
Henry Frankenstein: Oh, in the name of God! Now I know what it feels like to be God! Happy Birthday, Luigi Galvani, Italian physicist, physician, born in Bologna. He established the premise that bioelectric forces exist within living tissue. Galvani was one of the first to investigate experimentally the phenomenon of what came to be named "bioelectrogenesis". While cutting a frog leg, (possibly preparing a meal of pattes de grenouilles) Galvani's steel scalpel touched a brass hook that was holding the leg in place. The leg twitched. In a series of experiments started around 1780, Galvani, working at the University of Bologna, found that the electric current delivered by a Leyden jar or a rotating static electricity generator would cause the contraction of the muscles in the leg of a frog and many other animals, either by applying the charge to the muscle or to the nerve. Science was galvanized by these discoveries. Charges could make frog legs jump even if the legs were no longer attached to a frog.  Following Galvani’s experiments, Bologna was overrun with little legless frogs rolling around in little wagons with little wheels.

            1739 –Wednesday- The Stono Rebellion, the largest slave uprising in Britain’s mainland North American colonies prior to the American Revolution, broke out near Charleston, South Carolina. When the slave owners caught up with the rebels from the Stono River in 1739, they engaged the 60 to 100 slaves in a battle. More than 20 white Carolinians, and nearly twice as many black Carolinians, were killed. As a result, South Carolina's lawmakers enacted a harsher slave code. This new code severely limited the privileges of slaves. They were no longer allowed to grow their own food, assemble in groups, earn their own money, learn to read or listen to James Brown records.

            1754 -Monday  Happy Birthday, William Bligh, misunderstood British naval officer. Bligh served as Captain of the Bounty during the infamous Mutiny. Bligh, having served as sailing master to Captain James Cook on H.M.S Resolution during his 3^rd voyage, was commissioned by Sir Joseph Banks and the British Admiralty, to undertake a voyage in a small ship, HMS Bounty. The goal of the voyage was to obtain a large number of breadfruit plantings to be taken to the Caribbean where they would be transplanted to provide food for the slaves in those colonies. After the Bounty mutiny and his voyage in a lifeboat to safety, (Mutiny on the Bounty and Men Against the Sea – the novels by Nordhoff and Hall), Bligh commanded a number of scientific voyages. His naval career was distinguished. He was in the battle line with the great Horatio Nelson at Copenhagen in 1801. The wartime period ended in 1802, and Bligh again commanded a scientific voyage, this time a hydrological expedition. In 1805, he was appointed Governor of New South Wales. His success in the realm of politics, unfortunately, did not match his prowess as a Naval commander. His appointment lasted until 1808 when the colonists 'mutinied' and sent him back to England.

             1776 –Monday- Come on everybody!
I say now let's play a game
I betcha I can make a rhyme out of anybody's name
The first letter of the name, I treat it like it wasn't there
But a B or an F or an M will appear
And then I say bo add a B then I say the name and Bonana fanna and a
fo……….Shirley Ellis,……… The Second Continental Congress changed the name of our country from the United Colonies to the United States of America.  In the year before independence, many in the colonies went with the name used by Benjamin Franklin in his July 1775 draft of an articles of confederation: United Colonies of North America.  It appears that the name United States was first coined by John Dickenson of Pennsylvania on June 17, 1776.  Thomas Jefferson used the term in his June 21 draft of the Declaration of Independence.

            1789-Wednesday- Happy Birthday, William Cranch (W.C) Bond, American astronomer who, with his son, George Phillips Bond, discovered Hyperion, the eighth moon of Saturn, and an inner ring called Ring C, or the Crepe Ring…which was later cooked and turned into the crepe suzette ring. Hyperion is notable for its irregular shape, its chaotic rotation, and its unexplained sponge-like appearance………sort of like Congressman Henry Waxman….  The moon is named after Hyperion, a Titan in Greek mythology. Hyperion is also is an uncompleted epic poem by 19th-century English Romantic poet John Keats. The days of peace and slumberous calm are fled… Hyperion. Book ii.  It is based on the Titanomachia, and tells of the despair of the Titans after their fall to the Olympians

            1828 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Leo Tolstoy, Russian novelist and author of War and Peace – which came to a climax during the Battle of Borodino – see Sept. 6, 1814 above-.He began War and Peace in 1862 and completed it (there were six volumes in all) in 1869. Tolstoy began Anna Karenina in 1873 and had it published in 1878 with it’s opening line that alluded to his own life, Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. In January of 2007, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878) and War and Peace were placed on Time Magazine’s ten greatest novels of all time, first and third place respectively.

            1830-Thursday-  Twenty eight year-old, Charles Durant made the first American hot air balloon flight. He lifted off from New York's Castle Garden to drop leaflets that contained a poem he had written about the joys of flight. We note that the Xeroxian world of the internet contains dozens of references to just that comment.  The Gnus has actually found the poem:  Freddie: Feeling's gettin stronger
Larry: Music's gettin longer too
Rose: Music is flashin me
Sly: I want to take you higher
Baby baby baby light my fire

All: Boom shaka-laka-laka Boom shaka-laka-laka

Freddie: Feeling's nitty-gritty
Larry: Sound is in the city too
Rose: Music's still flashin' me
Sly: Don't ya want to get higher
Baby baby baby light my fire. The flight came to an abrupt end as an exceptionally long-armed squeegee man attempted to clean the balloon with industrial cleanser.  Modern hot air ballooning began in France in 1783. Two brothers, Joseph Michel and Jacques Etienne Montgolfier, launched the first successful hot air balloon in September of 1783 with an odd trio of passengers - a sheep, a duck, and a rooster…..sounds like the beginning of a joke – A sheep, a duck, and a rooster lift off in a hot air balloon and…………..

             1836 –Friday- Abraham Lincoln received his license to practice law.  The Illinois Supreme Court examined Lincoln (“look up and cough”) and issued him a license to practice law in all of the courts in the state, which was the final step to become an attorney. Lincoln practiced law for nearly twenty-five years in the Illinois courts. Other than part-time service in the Illinois legislature and the United States Congress, law was his full-time occupation. Lincoln handled cases in almost all court levels: justice of the peace, county, circuit, appellate, and federal. He had three successive formal partnerships: junior partner to John Todd Stuart (1837-1841), junior partner to Stephen T. Logan (1841-1844), and senior partner to William H. Herndon (1844-1861). Like many of his colleagues at the bar, Lincoln was a general practice attorney and represented clients in a variety of civil and criminal actions including debt, slander, divorce, dower and partition, mortgage foreclosure, and murder. http://www.papersofabrahamlincoln.org/narrative_overview.htm

He also advertised his law practice on TV with special emphasis on people injured in truck accidents.

               1839 –Monday- John Herschel, son of astronomer William Hershel, the discoverer of Uranus, took the first glass-plate photograph. It was a picture of his father's 40-foot telescope, now a half-century old. It is also to Herschel that we also owe the word "photography", a term which he used in a paper entitled "Note on the Art of Photography, or The Application of the Chemical Rays of Light to the Purpose of Pictorial Representation," presented to the Royal Society on  March 14, 1839. He also coined the terms "negative" and positive" in this context, and also the "snap-shot". http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/history/herschel.htm

             1843 –Saturday- like ice cream. Yes I do!
One scoop for me?
No! Make it two!
Hmmm two scoops of ice cream,
I want more
How about three?
No, make that four!
1, 2, 3, 4,
Splat! "oh no! It's on the floor!" …author unknown……One of the great inventions in history as Nancy M. Johnson (1795-1890) (it is not certain where she was from - some say New Jersey, Washington D.C., and even Philadelphia) patented the hand-cranked ice cream freezer (her basic design of the freezer is still used today). Johnson’s invention simplified the process of making ice cream. The development of this machine marked a revolution in the history of ice cream. From this time on, anyone could make the very best quality ice cream at home (especially since rock salt, which came to be commonly called "ice cream salt" until the early 20th century, had became a cheap commodity). Who invented ice cream? Ice cream appears to have evolved from chilled wines and other iced beverages during the 16^th century.   Because of the difficulty in producing ices and ice cream, and the limited amount of ice during most of the year, they were still enjoyed primarily by the wealthy.  http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/IceCream/IceCreamHistory.htm

          1850 –Monday- I love you, California, you're the greatest state of all

I love you in the winter, summer, spring, and in the fall.

I love your fertile valleys; your dear mountains I adore,

I love your grand old ocean and I love her rugged shore.

Chorus……………………California became the 31^st state.  Though it had only been a part of the United States for less than two years, California achieved statehood without ever even having been a territory, sort of like skipping a grade in elementary school. As part of the Compromise of 1850,  California was admitted as a free state; Texas received financial compensation for relinquishing claim to lands east of the Rio Grande in what is now New Mexico; the Territory of New Mexico (including present-day Arizona and a portion of southern Nevada) was organized without any specific prohibition of slavery; the slave trade (but not slavery itself) was terminated in the District of Columbia; and the stringent Fugitive Slave Law was passed, requiring all U.S. citizens to assist in the return of runaway slaves regardless of the legality of slavery in the specific states. It's thought that the name California comes from a sixteenth century novel, Las Sergas de Esplandian by Garcia Ordonez de Montalvo. Spanish conquistadors Hernando Cortez and Ortuno. Ximenez were familiar with the work of Montalvo and probably named the territory after the gold filled island described in the novel. Some California symbols:  Animal California Grizzly Bear; Bird California Valley Quail; Dance West Coast Swing Dance Fish California Golden Trout ;Flower Golden Poppy
Folk Dance Square Dance; Fossil Sabre-Toothed Cat;  Gemstone Benitoite 1985; Gold Rush Ghost Town Bodie; Insect California Dogface Butterfly; Marine Fish Garibaldi
Marine Mammal California Gray Whale; Reptile Desert Tortoise; Song "I Love You, California," words by F.B. Silverwood and music by A.F. Frankenstein;  Tree California Redwood

            1893-Saturday- Havin' my baby
What a lovely way of sayin' how much you love me
Havin' my baby
What a lovely way of sayin' what you're thinkin' of me
I can see it, face is glowin'
I can see in your eyes, I'm happy you know it …..Paul Anka…….President Grover Cleveland's daughter, Esther Cleveland, became the first president's child to be born in the White House. She would have been better off named Typhoid Mary as She contracted measles when it spread through the White House, leading to a quarantine. Five years later, she contracted diphtheria. Inspite of it all, she lived to be 86.  Mom, Francis Folsum  married President Cleveland on  June, 2 1886. It was the first wedding held in the White House. Esther was their second child of five children.

            1898-Friday-  Happy Birthday -  Frankie  Frisch ‘”The Fordham Flash’”. 2^nd baseman for the New York Giants (you know them as the San Francisco Giants) and the St. Louis  Cardinals. Frisch was traded (by John McGraw) in 1927 to the Cardinals for another Hall of Fame 2^nd baseman, Rogers Hornsby.  Frisch also uttered the timeless baseball quote “Oh those bases on balls!”.

            1926-Thursday-  The National Broadcasting Company (NBC) was created by the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), shortly after the purchase in May 1926 of the radio network operations of AT&T. AT&T had cleverly decided to withdraw from radio.  The purchase price was $1,000,000. (RCA's Chairman, David Sarnoff coined the phrase, "when life hands you a lemon, make lemonade"). At this point a new company was formed, the National Broadcasting Company, which took over the Broadcasting Company of America assets, and merged them with the radio group's fledgling network operations. AT&T's original WEAF Chain was renamed the NBC-Red network, with WEAF continuing as the flagship station, and the small network that the radio group had organized around WJZ became the NBC-Blue network. In September, 1926 NBC's formation was publicized in full-page ads that appeared in numerous publications: Announcing the National Broadcasting Company, Inc. The new network's debut broadcast followed on November 15, 1926…….whew!  After seeing NBC fare such as The Biggest Loser and America’s Got Talent, AT&T refused to take back the network.

            1942 – A Japanese floatplane dropped incendiary bombs on an Oregon state forest. This was the first and only air attack on the U.S. mainland in the war. Launched from the Japanese sub I-25, Nobuo, the pilot flew over the state of Oregon and firebombed Mount Emily, starting a forest fire and ensuring his place in the history books as the only man to ever bomb the continental United States. After considering surrender (not really), President Roosevelt immediately called for a news blackout for the sake of morale. No long-term damage was done, and the U.S responded by sending Godzilla, Mothra, Paris Hilton and a series of monsters to attack Tokyo.

             1945 –Sunday- It's the latest, it's the greatest,

Mashed Patato, ya, ya ,ya

A Mashed Potato started long time ago

With a guy named Sloppy Joe,

You'll find this dance is so cool to do,

Come on baby, gonna teach it to you.

Happy Birthday singer, Dee Dee Sharp, born Dione LaRue in Philadelphia. Her biggest hit Mashed Potato Time (1962) was released on Cameo/Parkway Records (sort of orange.creme colored label). Of course her follow up hit was Gravy, For My Mashed Potatoes, also 1962. She also contributed to Chubby Checker’s endless milking of The Twist with a duet with the Chubster entitled Slow Twistin’.

            1947-Tuesday- The first "bug" in a computer program was discovered by Grace Hopper, a moth (really) was removed with tweezers from a relay and taped into the log. When the machine was experiencing problems, an investigation showed that there was a moth trapped between the points of a relay. The operators removed the moth and affixed it to the log. The entry reads: "First actual case of bug being found." The word went out that they had "debugged" the machine and the term "debugging a computer program" was born. And remember, a myth is a female moth. Hopper is best-known contribution to computing was the invention of the compiler, the intermediate program that translates English language instructions into the language of the target computer. She did this, she said, because she was lazy and hoped that "the programmer may return to being a mathematician."

             1956 –Sunday- You know I can be found,
sitting home all alone,
If you can't come around,
at least please telephone.
Don't be cruel to a heart that's true. On a Sunday night, 82.6 percent of the U.S. television audience turned their TV dials (remotes were very rare in those days)  to CBS to see and hear 21-year-old Elvis Presley. Elvis sang Don’t Be Cruel (with the Jordanaires) Love Me Tender, Ready Teddy and Hound Dog. Also on that show; - really, we don’t make these up – actor, Charles Laughton read limericks, poems & did a stand-up comedy routine titled "Little Girl And Wolf" (about the sadistic side of Little Red Riding Hood).  Presley returned on Oct. 28, 1956, continuing to provoke ecstatic screams- again- with  Don't Be Cruel, Love Me Tender and Hound Dog. In fact, these hip swiveling performances were so “suggestive” that Elvis was filmed above the waist during his final Sullivan show appearance on January 6, 1957.

            1963 –Monday-The first ever live birth in captivity of a giant panda in the world took place at Beijing Zoo, China, when a male cub, Ming Ming was born to the mother Li Li. The happy father passed out bamboo shoots to relatives and friends.  Attempts to breed pandas in captivity had begun in China in 1955. Yes, a baby panda is a cub. Some other babies: Antelope – calf Bear – cub Beaver – kit

Birds - fledgling, nestling Cat – kitten Codfish - codling, sprat Cow – calf Deer - fawn, yearling Dog - pup, puppy Duck – duckling Eagle – eaglet Eel – elver

Elephant – calf Elephant seal – weaner (our personal favorite name) Fish – fry Fox - cub, pup Frog - polliwog, tadpoleGoat – kidGoose – goslingGrouse – cheeper Guinea fowl – keetHawk – eyas Hen – pullet Hippo – calf Horse - foal, yearling, or colt (male), filly (female) Kangaroo – joey Owl – owlet Partridge – cheeper (in groups of twelve they are cheeper by the dozen)  Pig - piglet, shoat, farrow,suckling Pigeon - squab, squeaker Quail – cheeper (see partridge) Rabbit - bunny, kit Rat – pup Rhino – calf Rooster – cockerel Salmon - parr, smolt, grilse Seal – pup Shark – cub Sheep - lamb, lambkins Swan – cygnet Tiger - cub, whelp Turkey – poult Whale – calf Zebra - foal

            1971 –- Thursday- Convicts rioted and seized control of the maximum-security Attica Prison near Buffalo, New York. State police retook most of the prison, but 1,281 convicts occupied an exercise field called D Yard, where they held 39 prison guards and employees hostage for four days. After negotiations stalled, state police and prison officers launched a disastrous raid on September 13, in which 10 hostages and 29 inmates were killed.

            1976 –Thursday-  Mao Zedong kaput. Chairman Mao, Communist dictator and founder of the People's Republic of China, considered one of the most influential figures of the 20th century, and pedophile. Mao joined Hitler and Stalin as the greatest mass murderers of all time, died of Parkinson’s disease.

            2001 –Sunday- Now I’ve tasted martinis at flash city clubs,
Swallowed bad whiskey at waterfront pubs,
Mixed with the Knobs that are social, I do,
But I'd rather a bottle of Finny's home brew.
Now Finney's a bushman, who lives all alone,
In a little tin hut in the hills on his own,
With only his horses, the possums and 'roos
And an ol’ black fermented powerful brews. …Slim Dusty…..The dangers of drinking home made liquor were highlighted in the Parnu Methanol Tragedy in Estonia. A few days earlier, ten 200-liter canisters of methanol were stolen from Baltfet (a company processing industrial fats, esters and animal feed). The thieves proceeded to sell the stolen methanol to Aleksandr Sobolev, a known smuggler, claiming it was “technical spirit.” ….it’s not, it’s a light volatile flammable poisonous liquid alcohol; used as an antifreeze and solvent and fuel and as a denaturant for ethyl alcohol. Sobolev  blithely  mixed the liquid with water and lemon flavoring agents at about 30 % by volume, bottled the resulting liquid, attached fake labels of various well-known brands, and distributed it through a underground network. Hundreds of people ended up buying and then drinking the resulting product, thinking it was vodka, and acquired methanol poisoning resulting in 68  dead,  and 40 suffering extreme disability including blindness or brain damage.

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10.    1608 -  Due to bad government and ensuing chaos, English adventurer John Smith was elected council president of Jamestown, Virginia--the first permanent English settlement in North America. He instituted a policy of rigid discipline, strengthened defenses, and encouraged farming with this admonishment: "He who does not work, will not eat." Because of his strong leadership, the settlement survived and grew during the next year. Unfortunately, Smith was accidentally injured by a gunpowder burn and had to return to England for treatment in October 1609, never to return to Virginia again.

              1624 -Happy Birthday, Thomas Sydenham, English doctor who became known as the "English Hippocrates." He is recognized as a founder of clinical medicine since he emphasized bedside observation of disease, and kept a notebook of his clinical observations and (possibly) said “take two aspirin and call me in the morning”.  He named scarlet fever, recognized it was different from measles, and was among the first to describe it. Sydenham explained the nature of hysteria (probably after watching the one-day wedding dress sale at Vera Wang).  He invented laudanum (alcohol tincture of opium) for use in medical practice, was one of the first to use iron in treating iron-deficiency anemia.  He also helped popularize quinine in treating malaria

        1776 – Whoops, might want to re-think that move Nathan, as General George Washington asked for a volunteer for an extremely dangerous mission: to gather intelligence behind enemy lines before the coming Battle of Harlem Heights. Captain Nathan Hale of the 19^th Regiment of the Continental Army stepped forward and subsequently become one of the first known American spies of the Revolutionary War.

            1797- Happy Birthday, Carl Gustaf Mosander,  Swedish chemist and mineralologist; who discovered several rare-earth elements with closely similar chemical properties. In 1839 he discovered lanthanum (La) which is used as a component of misch metal (used for making lighter flints) and which caused a mishegas. He also discovered erbium (Er) in 1842 and terbium (Tb) but neither of them caused a mishegas.

            1798 – The  Battle of St. George's Caye as  the Baymen of  British Honduras (currently Belize defeated Spain. People in Spain were probably saying “ o.k, o.k we can lose to France or England, maybe even Austria but British Honduras??? Yeesh”.

             1813 - Commodore Oliver Hazzard Perry sent his famous message, "We have met the enemy, and they are ours," after defeating the British in the Battle of Lake Erie in the War of 1812. Nine small American ships  (armed with fifty four guns) defeated a British squadron of six ships (armed with sixty three cannons).  Perry composed his now famous message to William Henry Harrison – of later fame at the Battle of Tippicanoe, then on to be elected President and then on to giving a 3hr. inauguration speech in the rain and then on to being kaput a month later…..  Scrawled in pencil on the back of an old envelope, Perry wrote, "Dear General: We have met the enemy and they are ours.  Two ships, two brigs, one schooner and one sloop.  Yours with great respect and esteem, O.H. Perry".The Battle of Lake Erie proved one of the most resounding triumphs of the War of 1812.  The victory secured control of the lake, forcing the British to abandon Fort Malden and retreat up the Thames River.  Harrison's army pursued, and defeated the small British army and its allied Indian force on October 5, 1813 at the Battle of the Thames.  And later, during the peace talks, the dual victories of Lake Erie and the Thames insured that the states of Ohio and Michigan would remain the sovereign territory of the United States of America.        

            1823 - Simón Bolívar was named President of Peru. In 1819, agreat victory for Bolívar and the army of the revolution resulted in the creation the Angostura Congress which founded Gran Colombia (a federation of present-day Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, and Ecuador) which named Bolívar president.  Peru was the last bastion of Spanish dominance in South America (yeesh ! , they had already lost to British Honduras – see 1798 above), and in 1823 Bolívar took command of the invasion of Peru and in September arrived in Lima with Antonio José de Sucre to plan the attack. On August 6, 1824, Bolívar and Sucre jointly defeated the Spanish army in the Battle of Junín. On December 9 Sucre destroyed the last remnant of the Spanish army in the Battle of Ayacucho, eliminating Spain's presence in South America.

            1855- Happy Birthday, Robert Koldewey, German archaeologist who discovered the Hanging Gardens of Babylon (ca. 580 BC) – one of the original seven wonders of the world - in modern day Iraq, thus confirming its historical existance and it was not just a legend. Accounts indicate that the garden was built by King Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled the city for 43 years starting in 605 BC (There is a less-reliable, alternative story that the gardens were built by the Assyrian Queen Semiramis during her five year reign starting in 810 BC). This was the height of the city's power and influence and King Nebuchadnezzar constructed an astonishing array of temples, streets, palaces and walls. http://www.unmuseum.org/hangg.htm Koldewey’s excavations from 1899-1917 at Babylon unearthed many of its features including the outer walls, inner walls, foundations of the ziggurat Marduk - A type of step-pyramid temple first built by the Sumerians 5,000 years ago in southern Mesopotamia, made of sun-dried mud bricks.-, Nebuchadnezzar's palaces, the wide processional roadway which passed through the heart of the city and the Ishtar Gate.        

            1846- Elias Howe, (brother of Some Howe, Any Howe and No Howe), patented the first sewing machine. Reaction on the part of some was "Sew What". Isaac Singer patented a sewing machine five years later. Singer built the first sewing machine where the needle moved up and down rather than the side-to-side and the needle was powered by a foot treadle. Previous machines were all hand-cranked.  Howe sued Singer for infringement and won...but by that time Singer was well ahead in the sewing machine business.  In 1834, Walter Hunt built America's first (somewhat) successful sewing machine. He later lost interest in patenting because he believed his invention would cause unemployment. (Hunt's machine could only sew straight steams.) Hunt never patented and in 1846, the first American patent was issued to Elias Howe for "a process that used thread from two different sources."

            1897 – Quickly following the invention of the car, came the drunk driver.  On this day a 25-year-old London taxi driver named George Smith initiated a long tradition of studpidity by becoming the first person ever arrested for drunk driving after slamming his cab into a building. Smith later pled guilty and was fined 25 shillings.

          1898 - Happy Birthday, Waldo Semon, American chemical engineer who invented plasticized PVC (vinyl).  Yes quiz show fans, it was his vinyl answer. He joined the chemical and rubber company BF Goodrich at Akron, Ohio in 1926 to research rubber to metal bonding and synthetic rubber.. The discovery of a method of plasticising poly(vinyl- chloride), usually known as PVC, was a by-product of this research.  Polyvinyl chloride was discovered late in the nineteenth century. Scientists observing the newly created chemical gas, vinyl chloride, also discovered that when the gas was exposed to sunlight, it underwent a chemical reaction (now recognized as polymerization) resulting in an off-white solid material. But, the solid material was so difficult to work with that it was cast aside in favor of other materials. It was Semon who produced usable pvc.

          1918 – Introducing our animal them for the day – see 1945 and Mike the Headless Chicken- Happy Birthday, Rin Tin Tin, German shepherd dog.  Rin Tin Tin starred in twenty six movies for Warner Brothers studios during the 1920s.  Another Rin Tin Tin starred in a 1950’s television western. At the peak of his popularity, Warners maintained 18 trained stand-ins to reduce any stress on their dog star, while providing Rinty with a private chef who prepared daily lunches of tenderloin steak (consumed as live classical music was played to help ease the dog's digestion.) Rin Tin Tin died in 1932 at the age of 16, returned to his birthplace in France, and interred (but not stuffed) in "The Cimetière des Chiens in the suburb of Asnieres. Today, Rin Tin Tin's continuous bloodline carries on at a Texas kennel, where a litter of 8-11 pups are born each year.

             1931 –Mafia leader, Salvatore Maranzano was shot and stabbed (they left nothing to chance) to death in New York City by Maranzano was born in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily in 1868. He arrived in the United States after the First World War where he became involved in bootlegging. By the late 1920s Maranzano had become one of the important gang leaders in New York.  Maranzano was involved in bootlegging, prostitution and drug smuggling. In an attempt to hold on to his lucrative trade, in 1930 he declared war on his main rival, Joe Masseria. Over the next few months over sixty men were killed during this gang war, called the Castellammarese War.  Joe (the Boss) Masseria was murdered on 15th April, 1931 probably by Albert Anastasia, Bugsy Siegel and Lucky Luciano, on 15th April, 1931. Six months later, o gangsters hired by Luciano, walked into Maranzano's Park Lane office and killed him. With Maranzano and Masseria dead, Luciano was now the most important gang leader in New York.

            1932 - The New York City Subway's third competing subway system, the municipally-owned IND – not connected to the IRT and BMT lines, was opened.  The The Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) subway opened in 1904. The BMT(Brooklyn – Manhattan Transit)  opened in 1915, and construction work began on a third subway in 1925. In 1932 New York City’s Board of Transportation completed the Eighth Avenue Line, creating the Independent -- independent from private interests -- City Owned Rapid Transit Railroad, or IND. The Sixth Avenue line, the last major piece of the IND system, opened in 1940. The city now had three separate, separately owned and operated subways -- forming the largest subway system in the world. Now it’s all numbers and letters and some are better than others (the worst are the N and W lines - The W line operates between Astoria, Queens and downtown Manhattan; the N runs between Astoria and Coney Island. but veteran New Yorkers miss the IRT and the BMT

            1934- Happy Birthday, Maxie Leroy "Max" Anderson, American aviator and  balloonist who (with fellow Albuquerque, NM, residents Ben Abruzzo and Larry Newman) made the first transatlantic balloon flight aboard their Double Eagle II balloon, 3108 miles from Presque Isle, Maine to Miserey, France thus escaping the crowds at boarding gates, being “number 14 in line for take off”,  flight attendant safety “ballet” for those geniuses who don’t know how to buckle or unbuckle a seatbelt. Sadly, Anderson died in 1983 when the Communist controlled East Germans would not let him fly across the the East German border and a faulty release clamp used at landing caused him to crash.

            1941 - Happy Birthday, Stephen Jay Gould American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and science writer - who wrote about paleontology and evolutionary biology in terms the understood by us "lay folks" - and, by the way, grew up in New York City.

            1945 - Mike the Headless Chicken is decapitated; he survives for another 18 months before choking to death. Mike, a young Wyandotte rooster, was about to become the dinner of Fruita, Colorado, farmer Lloyd Olsen. Mr. Olsen swung his ax thereby lopping off poor Mike's head. Mike shook off the event, then continued trying to peck for food. http://www.miketheheadlesschicken.org/    returned to his job of being a chicken. He pecked for food and preened his feathers just like the rest of his barnyard brethren. Note: it is unclear exactly when the headless chicken was named “Mike”.  When Olsen found Mike the next morning, sleeping with his "head" under his wing, he decided that if Mike had that much will to live, he would figure out a way to feed and water him. With an eyedropper ( a funnel might have been faster) Mike was given grain and water. It was becoming obvious that Mike was special. A week into Mike's new life Olsen packed him up and took him 250 miles to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City . The skeptical scientists were eager to answer all the questions regarding Mike's amazing ability to survive with no head. It was determined that ax blade had missed the jugular vein and a clot had prevented Mike from bleeding to death. Although most of his head was in a jar, most of his brain stem and one ear was left on his body. Since most of a chicken's reflex actions are controlled by the brain stem Mike was able to remain quite healthy.  See final guillotine execution 1977 below.

            1955- Gunsmoke, the quintessential television western in which Marshal Matt Dillon (James Arness – who played the “The Thing” in the original movie of the same name) was outdrawn by a the same villain every week during the opening credits, made its debut.  John Wayne playing Himself, made the introduction to the Series which would last for twenty years starring Arness, Milburne Stone, Dennis Weaver – replaced by Ken Curtis-, Amanda Blake and at the end, Burt Reynolds as Quint.

            1977- On the same day that we honor Mike the Headless Chicken (see 1945). Last execution by Guillotine in France, one Hamida Djandoubi, convicted for torture and murder.  Some guillotine facts for you, Total weight of a guillotine is about 1278 lbs. The guillotine metal blade weighs about 88.2 lbs. The height of guillotine posts average about 14 feet. The falling blade has a rate of speed of about 21 feet/second Just the actual beheading takes 2/100 of a second The time for the guillotine blade to fall down to where it stops takes 70th of a second.  The first guillotining took place on April 25, 1792, when Nicolas Jacques Pelletie was guillotined at Place de Grève on the Right Bank. The most famous to lose their heads over this were King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinetee. Thousands of people were publicly guillotined during the French Revolution.

            1984- Attention CSI and all  the others, by accident,  DNA fingerprinting was discovered in Leicester, England, by Alec Jeffreys.  X-ray films of his tests first revealed the possibility. As he studied the image, at first what he saw seemed just a complicated mess, sort of like a CSI TV show plot, then he realized this could be DNA-based biological identification since every person has a unique DNA profile.  The first crime conviction based on DNA fingerprinting, in Portland Oregon

             1985 - Karl Hassel of Plain City, Ohio was awarded a patent for his built-in child's car seat.  Actually, Car seats for children have been manufactured since 1933. The Bunny Bear Company made several designs of children's car seats, but their purpose was not to protect the child in the event of an accident. Instead, these seats confined the children, raised them above the level of the passenger seat, and made them more visible to adults from the front seat. Built-in child-safety seats are a factory option on some vehicles, mainly minivans. This handy feature is integrated into the seatback and folds out when needed.

 2008 - The first beams were fired in the Large Hadron Supercollider,  one of the world's biggest and most expensive experiments Wednesday in Switzerland – a 17-mile, $8 billion racetrack for protons that they hope will solve many of mankind's mysteries such as why does your chewing gum lose its flavor so quickly, "jumbo" shrimp, Paris Hilton, the New York City Council, why Cleveland exits, how come unreadable books are so popular?  Actually it is a energy particle accelerator complex, intended to collide opposing beams of protons (one of several types of hadrons - subatomic particles that are composed of quarks and which are acted on by the strong nuclear force. Hadrons may be subdivided into mesons and baryons. Mesons consist of quark-antiquark pairs, whereas, baryon are made of three quarks) with very high kinetic energy. Its main purpose is to explore the validity and limitations of the Standard Model, the current theoretical picture for particle physics. It is theorized that the collider will confirm the existence of the Higgs boson -a theoretical spin-0 boson that is the proposed mechanism by which particles acquire mass, the observation of which could confirm the predictions and missing links in the Standard Model, and could explain how other elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.  The LHC was built by the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), and lies underneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, Switzerland. It is funded by and built in collaboration with over eight thousand physicists from over eighty-five countries as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories.

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11.           

 1297 –Wednesday-  In one of their rare victories during the wars with the English, the Scots temporarily stopped their petty quarrels and the their battling amongst each other, united under the command of William Wallace and defeated the English at the Battle of Stirling Bridge. Oh for want of an alarm clock! At dawn the English and Welsh infantry started to cross the bridge only to be recalled due to the fact that their leader, John de Warenne, had overslept. Again they crossed the bridge and again they are recalled: as Warenne believed the Scots might finally negotiate. Two Dominican friars were sent to Wallace to acquire his surrender and return shortly afterwards with William Wallace's first recorded speech: 'Tell your commander that we are not here to make peace but to do battle, defend ourselves and liberate our kingdom. Let them come on, and we shall prove this in their very beards.” Victory resulted in the collapse of English occupation. Wallace, became Guardian of Scotland, and went on to devastate the north of England in the hope of forcing Edward I to acknowledge defeat.  Anyone who watched the movie Braveheart (despite the numerous historical inaccuracies) knows that venture didn’t turn out so well.

             1609-Friday- Henry Hudson, on board the Half Moon, discovered what we now know as Manhattan Island. His first words were “ $750,000 for a one-bedroom condo on the West Side?  That’s ridiculous!”. Hudson’s voyage was funded by the Dutch East India Company as a result of their interest in shorter routes to the east.  They commissioned a new ship for the English navigator’s use, the Halve Maen (Half Moon). They spent four months exploring the east coast of North America, including Manhattan, Maine, and Cape Cod (didn’t like the prices of beach front land there either). They first Europeans to describe these locations (although Giovanni da Verrazano explored the same coast in 1524) and sailed a distance up the Hudson River, (took one look at the hideous city of Albany and immediately left)  which bears his name. The Dutch would later claim the area and set up a colony as New Amsterdam. The name Manhattan derives from the word Manna-hata so written earliest in the 1609 log book of Robert Juet, an officer on Hudson’s ship. He hoped the river would provide a passage west to the Pacific. Things got ugly for Hudson afterwards.  When he returned  to England on his way to Holland, he was arrested for sailing under another nation's flag, considered treason at the time. He and his crew stayed in England while the Dutch ship and the Dutch sailors in the crew went home, apparently with Hudson's record of the voyage. On his next voyage, he discoved Hudson Bay but his crew mutinied.  Led by the same Robert Juet who named Manhattan, they put the captain, his son and others they didn't like into a small boat and set it adrift while the Discovery sailed away. None of the abandoned crew, including Hudson,  were ever seen again

            1649 –Saturday-  The  Siege of Drogheda ended as Oliver Cromwell's English Parliamentarian troops took  the town –about 25 miles north of Dublin on the River Boyne.  Around 2,000 people died in the storming and massacre. A number of prisoners who surrendered before Cromwell gave the order for no quarter were murdered in cold blood. Surviving members of the garrison captured the following day were transported to Barbados. Parliamentarian losses were around 150. In the stage of sectarian strife in Ireland, the massacre of Drogheda left an indelible stain on Cromwell's character. It has lived on in Irish folk memory – Catholics and Protestants alike, making his name into one of the most hated in Irish (Catholic) history.

            1777 –Thursday- Another of George Washington’s losing battles, the  Battle of Brandywine  was a major American Revolutionary war victory for British in Chester County, Pennsylvania. For Lieutenant-General Sir William Howe, commander of the British forces in North America, it was the first chance he had to come fully to grips with General George Washington's army since the British victory of Long Island in August 1776. The official British casualty figure was 89 killed and 488 wounded, but was probably slightly higher. The American losses were estimated at 1,100, including 200 killed, 500 wounded and 400 captured. The battle had clearly been an American defeat, and was to lead to the loss of Philadelphia on September 26. http://www.wtj.com/articles/brandywine/

            1789 –Friday- President George Washington appointed American Revolutionist and stalwart Federalist Alexander Hamilton as the first secretary of the treasury. The move came a week after the official founding of the Treasury Department.  Hamilton was in favor  of a strong, centrally controlled Treasury, and did constant battle with Thomas Jefferson, then Secretary of State, and Albert Gallatin, then a Congressman, over the amount of power the Department of the Treasury would be allowed to wield.

            1792 –Tuesday-  A kiss on the hand
May be quite continental,
But diamonds are a girl's best friend…….Marilyn Monroe

The Hope Diamond was  stolen along with other French crown jewels when six men broke into the house used to store the jewels.  The first we know of the Hope Diamond is when the French merchant traveler, Jean Baptiste Tavernier, purchased a 112 3/16-carat (A carat is a measure of weight used for gemstones, and is equal to 200 milligrams). diamond. This diamond, which was most likely from the Kollur mine in Golconda, India, was triangular in shape and crudely cut. Its color was described by Tavernier as a "beautiful violet."  Tavernier sold the diamond to King Louis XIV of France in 1668 .  In 1791, after an attempt by Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to flee France during the Revolution, the jewels of the French Royal Treasury were turned over to the government. During a week-long looting of the crown jewels in September of 1792, the French Blue diamond was stolen.  After a long round of bought and sold and donated by sundry rich people and the Harry Winston company the diamond  is currently at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C http://www.si.edu/Encyclopedia_SI/nmnh/hope.htm

             1816-Wednesday- Happy Birthday, Carl Zeiss, German industrialist who gained a worldwide reputation as a manufacturer of fine optical instruments.  In 1846 Zeiss opened a workshop for producing microscopes and telescopes. He later formed a partnership with the physicist and mathematician Ernst Abbe. Zeiss lenses are still used today. Some have been changed, you’ll know them as Uncle Ben’s Converted Zeiss.

            1847 –Saturday- Oh! Susanna, by Stephen Foster, (which described the awkwardness of travel with a banjo stuck to one’s knee) was performed for the first time. The song, which became Foster's first big hit, was played at a concert in a Pittsburgh saloon and soon became a standard for minstrel troupes. Foster wrote several other classic popular songs, including Old Folks at Home, Beautiful Dreamer, Camptown Races, Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair, Inna Gadda Da Vida, and Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.

             1883-Tuesday-Oh chute! The mail chute was patented by James G. Cutler, a former Mayor of Rochester, NY. The device was first used in the Elwood Building in Rochester. Mail chutes can still be seen -- and sometimes, they still work -- in many old office buildings. A mail chute is a small shaft for dropping  letters from an upper floor to a post-box on the ground.

        1915 –Saturday-  The Pennsylvania Railroad began electrified commuter rail service between Paoli and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, using overhead AC trolley wires for power.  The Pennsylvania railroad, currently available for $200 lies between Virginia Avenue and St. James Place.

             1921 –Sunday Roscoe “Fatty”  Arbuckle, a silent-film comedic star was arrested in San Francisco for the rape and murder of aspiring actress Virginia Rappe during a wild party. After two mistrials, the jury in Arbuckle’s third trial found him not guilty and even issued him an apology. Arbuckle’s career (he had just been signed to a multimillion dollar contract) never fully recovered and he sought solace in a bottle.  The alcoholic Arbuckle died of heart failure at age 46 on June 29, 1933, in New York City. Nowadays, he would have gone into rehab for a few days, granted exclusive interviews to the Entertainment Network, written a biography, launched a series of comebacks and married a series of mutant celebutards.

              1935 –Wednesday- Happy Birthday, Gherman Titov, Russian cosmonaut who was pilot of the Vostok 2 spacecraft on its August 6-7 1961 orbital flight of 25 hrs 18 min. After Yuri Gagarin, Titov was the second man to orbit the Earth but was the first man to orbit more than once, the first to spend more than a day in space, and the first to sleep in space, and quite possibly, the first to poop in space since  Vostok 2 was the first to use an on-board toilet. He also suffered from the syndrome analogous to seasickness that would plague space travelers for decades to come.  

             1937 –Friday- Happy Birthday, Robert L. Crippen, U.S. astronaut who piloted the first orbital test flight of the U.S. space shuttle program STS-1, 12-14, Columbia in  Apr 1981. He was the commander of three additional shuttle flights, STS-7, Challenger,  June 18-24, 1983; STS-41C, Challenger,  April 6-13,1984; and STS-41G, Challenger, October 6-13,1984. Note, Challenger would explode on take-off in January 1985.

            1946-Wednesday-  A dark  day  for the normal since most of us who have to share the roads with these idiots. The first mobile long-distance car-to-car telephone conversation took place between Houston, Texas and St. Louis, Missouri. In the words of Peggy Noonan, “Cell phones are wonderful, they empower the obnoxious and amplify the ignorant”.

            1962 -TuesdayThe Beatles recorded their first single, Love Me Do and B side, P.S. I Love You, at EMI studios in London . It was written by Paul McCartney but credits went to Lennon/McCartney. The song would be covered by: The Brady Bunch, The Chipmunks, Dick Hyman, Flaco Jimenez, Madooo, The Persuasions, Sandie Shaw, Ringo Starr, and Bobby Vee.

        1970 –Friday-  

               Bobby: (Jack Nicholson)“Wait, I've made up my mind. I want

               a plain omelette, forget the

               tomatoes, don't put potatoes on the

               plate, and give me a side of wheat

               toast and a cup of coffee.

                               WAITRESS (Lorna Thayer) 

               I'm sorry, we don't have side

               orders of toast. I can give you an

               English muffin or a coffee roll.

                               BOBBY

               What do you mean, you don't have

               side orders of toast? You make

               sandwiches, don't you?

               You have bread, don't you, and a

               toaster of some kind?

                               WAITRESS

               I don't make the rules.

                               BOBBY

               Okay, I'll make it as easy for you

               as I can. Give me an omelette,

               plain, and a chicken salad sandwich

               on wheat toast -- no butter, no

               mayonnaise, no lettuce -- and a cup

               of coffee.

WAITRESS

               One Number Two, and a chicken sal

               san -- hold the butter, the mayo,

               the lettuce -- and a cup of

               coffee... Anything else?

                               BOBBY

               Now all you have to do is hold the

               chicken, bring me the toast, charge

               me for the sandwich, and you

               haven't broken any rules.

WAITRESS

                               (challenging him)

               You want me to hold the chicken.

                               BOBBY

               Yeah. I want you to hold it between

               your knees.

 The premiere of Five Easy Pieces starring Jack Nicholson, Karen Black, Fannie Flagg, Sally Struthers and a pre Waltons  Ralph Waite.  Directed by Bob Rafaelson.

            1972 –Monday-  On the same day as the Pennsylvania Railroad was electrified (see 1915, Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) in San Francisco, California began regular service. Note: Professor Sy Yentz suggests that should Fresno, CA. transit system should be called F.A.R.T.

            1977 –Sunday- David Bowie (taking a break from his effeminate persona) and Bing Crosby filmed Bing's last Christmas TV special, singing a completely ghastly version of "Little Drummer Boy"

            1985-Wednesday-   The International Cometary Explorer (ICE) flew relatively unscathed through the gas tail of comet P/Giacobini-Zinner, at a speed of 21 km/sec at its closest approach of some 7,800-km downstream from the nucleus of the comet. After successfully exploring the comet, ICE explored Drano, Tide, and Kaboom! With less successful results, as it was clogged by Drano, bleached by Tide, and wiped out by Kaboom!  ICE was shutdown on May 1997. The spacecraft will return to the vicinity of the Earth in 2014, when it may be possible to capture it and bring it home. NASA has already donated it to the Smithsonian Institute in the event of a successful recovery.

            1997-Thursday- The Mars Global Surveyor, launched in Nov 1996, went into an elliptical orbit around Mars. After ten years of successful observations – four times longer than expected, Mars Global Surveyor last communicated with Earth on Nov. 2, 2006. Within 11 hours, depleted batteries likely left the spacecraft unable to control its orientation. It secretly returned to Earth carrying Martian pods who took over human bodies and we know them today as the people who bring more than 10 items to the express check out line in the supermarket.  

             2001-Tuesday-  Nineteen Islamic terrorists high jacked two United Airlines and two American Airlines commercial jet airliners.  Two were crashed into the towers of the World Trade Center in Manhattan, one into the Pentagon in Washington and one crashed – probably due to passenger heroism into a field near Pittsburgh.  Almost 3 thousand people were killed in what may have been the worst day in American History. As the years went by, many forgot who perpetrated the terrorist attacks. They are referred to as just attacks, the “events of” and “the tragedy.  The terrorists were Muslim. Arabs demonstrated their joy by dancing in the streets. In an address to the nation that evening, President Bush said, "Terrorist attacks can shake the foundations of our biggest buildings, but they cannot touch the foundation of America. These acts shatter steel, but they cannot dent the steel of American resolve." In a reference to the eventual U.S. military response he declared: "We will make no distinction between the terrorists who committed these acts and those who harbor them."

2002 –Wednesday-  The Pentagon was rededicated after repairs are completed, exactly one year after the attack on the building.  Eight years later, corrupt, incompetent New York/New Jersey politicians, insurance companies, builders, and government agencies still squabble over the hole in the ground that is now called Ground Zero in New York.

2007 –Tuesday-  Peace loving, non Communist Russia tested what it called “The Father of All Bombs”, which it described as the world's most powerful non-nuclear weapon.

Back to  Calendar

12.         

490 BC -Tuesday Athens defeated Persia at the Battle of Marathon in one of history’s earliest recorded battles.  This was also the origin of the marathon long-distance race (attributed to Phidippides.......later disqualified for using PEDs). Facing the Persians on the flat plain of Marathon and outnumbered by the Persian cavalry, Greek commander, Miltiades ordered the Greek hoplites (A heavily-armed footed soldier. Greek hoplites often fought in large, disciplined groups called phalanxes) to form a line equal in length to that of the Persians. Then he ordered his Greek warriors to attack the Persian line at a dead run. In the ensuing melee, the middle of the Greek line weakened and gave way, but the flanks were able to engulf and slaughter the trapped Persians. An estimated 6,400 Persians were slaughtered while only 192 Greeks were killed.  The primary source is the writer Herodotus (born 484 BC - 6 years after the battle of Marathon) - who's 'Histories' is the authoritative account of the battle. He mentions Phidippedes as running to Sparta (145 km!!!) before the battle but mentions no messenger to Athens.  Anyway, Phidippedes, only won the Bronze medal for the marathon as he was passed by two Kenyan runners during the last three miles.

            1575 –Friday- Happy Birthday (sort of, historians are not sure of the exact date – nor are we sure of when he went kaput), Henry Hudson, English explorer, who had discovered Manhattan Island on the previous day and the Hudson River (of course then it wasn’t called the Hudson River –it was called the Mauritius River, which is the name given by Hudson in honor of Prince Maurice of Nassau. Verrazano, who had sailed to the same river in 1525 had called it “The River of the Steep Hills”.) Hudson made four voyages in all.  For the first,  in 1607, he was hired by the English Muscovy Company to lead the ship Hopewell on an expedition north of the European continent, in an effort to discover a northeastern sea passage to the spice islands of the South Pacific. Whoops, not quite, he reached Greenland and Spitzbergen before his path was blocked by ice. The last, in 1611 aboard Discovery (1610-11), was financed by English merchants seeking the Northwest Passage across America to the Far East. He made it as far as his eponymously named bay and then the crew mutinied. They put Hudson and eight others (including his son) adrift on a small boat in the bay in June of 1611 and he was never heard from again.

              1725 -Wednesday Happy Birthday, Guillaume-Joseph-Hyacinthe-Jean-Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galaziere, (his business card was 18 cm wide!), French astronomer.  La Gentil proved that some days it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed…..He attempted to observe the transit of Venus across the sun by traveling to India in 1761. He failed to arrive in time due to an outbreak of war so he stayed in India to see the next transit which came eight years later. This time, he couldn’t see it because of cloudy weather, and so returned to France. There, he found his heirs had assumed he was dead and taken  all of his property.

            1793- Thursday- Due to an outbreak of yellow fever in Philadelphia, the first quarantine in the U.S. on a city was declared when the governor of  Maryland, Thomas Sim, stopped commerce from Philadelphia to Maryland. Contemporary cities without yellow fever but which should be quarantined anyway include Los Angeles, Detroit, and Cleveland

          1812 –Saturday- Happy Birthday, Richard March Hoe, ( ho ho ho, he was constantly called a “hoe”) American inventor and manufacturer, invented a high-speed printing press that helped revolutionize the newspaper industry in the United States. He got rid of  the old flat-bed model and placed the type on a revolving cylinder, a model later developed into the well-known Hoe rotary or "lightning" press, patented in 1846, and further improved under the name of the Hoe web perfecting press. Hoe hit upon the idea of fastening lead type around the circumference of a very large cylinder in the center of the press. By rotating the cylinder, he had created a rotary press that turned constantly in one direction. The number of pages printed per hour now depended on how fast this large cylinder turned--and on how many type cylinders were fitted around its circumference.  Hoe's invention was first introduced to the printing industry in 1847 in the offices of the Philadelphia Public Ledger. The resulting eight thousand papers per hour revolutionized newspaper printing. Although this new speed- printing made huge daily editions possible, publishers were still limited to single sheet printing. Hoe continued to add improvements to his press and by 1871 devised a rotary web perfecting press which was fed by continuous rolls of paper, or webs, and printed on both sides in one move. The New York Tribune was the first newspaper printed with this process. http://www.madehow.com/inventorbios/79/Richard-M-Hoe.html

1818- Saturday-Happy Birthday, Ricard J. Gatling, U.S. inventor, of yes, the eponymous Gatling gun  in 1861. It  was first successful machine gun and a crank-operated, six-barreled weapon .Gatling used the six barrels to partially cool the gun during firing. Since the gun was capable of firing – here is the math problem of the day –600 rounds a minute and it had six barrels, how many shots could each barrel fire? Did you say one hundred?  Very good. The gun many drawbacks, however,  and was so radical in design and purpose that Gatling was unable to interest the U.S. government. The army purchased none of his guns, but Union Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, after a field test, purchased 12 for $1,000 each. They were used on the Petersburg front in 1864 and were apparently considered successful. That, however, was the only active service the guns saw.

            1846 –Saturday- On a social note, poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browing eloped on this day. While her family was away, the thirty eight year old Barrett sneaked out of the house and met Browning at St. Marylebone Parish Church, where they were married. She returned home for a week, keeping the marriage a secret, then left with Browning to Italy where they lived for the next fifteen years until Barrett-Browning’s kapution in 1861. At the time of the elopement Barrett composed her Songs of the Portugese.  Elizabeth composed the poems for Robert's eyes only, but he was convinced they constituted the finest series of sonnets since Shakespeare, and persuaded her to publish them. She agreed, but referred to them as translations from the Portuguese, rather than her own works.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
I love thee with a passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, --- I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! --- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

            1857 –Saturday- The SS Central America sank during a hurricane about 160 miles east of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, drowning a total of 426 passengers and crew. Bound for New York with 578 passengers and crew, and 38,000 pieces of mail, the Central America also held 15-18 tons of gold ingots, coins, nuggets, and dust mined  from the San Francisco Gold Rush.