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Child Health Day

            Gray Whale migration begins along the west coast of the United States to Baja,

            California, Mexico.  Why do whales migrate?  Off season rates in Cancun?  Bullfights? the Orson Whales film festival?

            331 BC –Thursday-  At the Battle of Gaugamela, 25 year old Alexander the Great defeated Darius III of Persia. Alexander began his war against the Persians in 334 BC. At the time the Macedonian leader was twenty-two years old. At his death eleven years later, Alexander ruled the largest empire of the ancient world. His victory at the battle of Gaugamela on the Persian plains - near Tel Gomel, east of Mosul in northern modern-day Iraq -was a decisive victory both insured the defeat of his Persian rival King Darius III and assured Alexander of the cognomen, “Great” as opposed to “Pretty Good”.

            1207 –Monday-  Happy Birthday, King Henry III of England. One of the more obscure of the eight Henrys, Henry was the son of King John.  When John went kaput in 1216, Henry was nine years old.  He would reign until 1272. Learning flourished, particularly at Oxford, where Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon inspired many by their pursuit of knowledge and their championing of the natural sciences. Many magnificent buildings were erected, including Salisbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey. Otherwise, Henry’s reign was a political failure and foreign policy, notably a bizarre attempt  get control of Sicily for his son Prince Edmund,  disaster. The addled Henry was eventually defeated in a rebellion led by Simon de Montfort, but a year later was succeeded by his son, Edward I, one of England’s great kings.

            1814 –Saturday-  Opening of the Congress of Vienna, intended to redraw the European political map after the defeat of Napoléon the previous spring. Guided by Prince Klemens von Metternich of Austria, (the “Coachman of Europe”), the decisions of the congress would affect Europe and the world to this day.  France was stripped of all territory conquered by Napoleon. The Dutch Republic was united with the Austrian Netherlands to form a single kingdom of the Netherlands under the House of Orange.  Norway and Sweden were joined under a single ruler.  Switzerland was declared neutral.  Russia got Finland and effective control over the new kingdom of Poland.  Prussia was given much of Saxony and important parts of Westphalia and the Rhine Province.  Austria was given back most of the territory it had lost and was also given land in Germany and Italy (Lombardia and Venice). Britain got several strategic colonial territories, and they also gained control of the seas.  France was restored under the rule of Louis XVIII.  Spain was restored under Ferdinand VII and Lichtenstein was so small that no one could find it.

            1816 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Ernst Werner von Siemens, German electrical engineer who played an important role in the development of the telegraph industry. Siemens Company was founded in Berlin in 1847.  Siemens' name has been adopted as the SI unit of electrical conductance, the siemens.

            1847-Friday-  Maria Mitchell, the first woman astronomer in the United States discovered a comet. The discovery of a comet wasn't a rare event in the nineteenth century, but women astronomers were very rare. In1865 she was appointed professor of astronomy and director of the observatory at the newly founded Vassar College.

            1869 –Friday-  Austria issued the world's first postcards. A copyright on a private postal card had been issued to John P. Charlton of Philadelphia in 1861, and was later transferred to his fellow townsman, H.L. Lipman. The early cards, decorated with a slight border pattern and labeled "Lipman's postal card, patent applied for", were for sale until 1873. The Austrian cards required a postage stamp. Thanks to Roland Hill of Great Britain, postage stamps were available.  The philatelic Mr. Hill had created the first postage stamp. On May 6, 1840, the British Penny Black stamp was released. The Penny Black was engraved the profile of Queen Victoria's head, who remained on all British stamps for the next sixty years until she went kaput. And, oh yes, vocabulary fans, postcard collecting is called deltiology.

            1880 –Friday- So many nights I sit by my window
Waiting for someone to sing me his song
So many dreams I kept deep inside me
Alone in the dark but now
You've come along
You light up my life
You give me hope
To carry on
You light up my days
and fill my nights with song ….Debbie Boone…. The first electric incandescent lamp factory in the U.S. was opened in Menlo Park, N.J. The Edison Lamp Works. This proved to be a very illuminating experience. In 1879, Thomas Edison discovered that a carbon filament in an oxygen-free bulb glowed but did not burn up for 40 hours. Edison eventually produced a bulb that could glow for over 1500 hours.  An electric current passes through a thin filament, heating it until it produces light. The enclosing glass bulb prevents the oxygen in air from reaching the hot filament, which otherwise would be destroyed rapidly by oxidation.

            1890-Wednesday An act (we have gotten so used to their overacting) of Congress created Yosemite National Park, nearly 1,200 square miles of mountainous terrain in the Sierra Nevada of California.It is the home of such natural wonders as Half Dome, Yosemite Sam, “varmints”,  and the giant sequoia trees. Environmental trailblazer John Muir and his colleagues campaigned for the congressional action, which was signed into law by President Benjamin Harrison

            1891-Thursday- Happy Birthday William Boeing, airplane manufacturer. In 1914 Boeing believed he could build a better plane than those currently in the air, he enlisted his engineering friend, George Conrad Westervelt, to design and build the B&W, a twin-float seaplane. Encouraged by this first effort, Boeing decided to begin his own plane-building company, Pacific Aero Products. He renamed it the Boeing Airplane Company the following year.

            1903 –Thursday-  The Pittsburgh Pirates of the National League defeated the Boston Americans of the American League 7-3 in the first official “World Series” game at Huntington Avenue Grounds in Boston, MA Nine years earlier, the two top teams in the National League competed in an experimental post-season championship in which Boston beat Pittsburgh five games to three. Deacon Phillippe pitched a six hitter and right fielder Jimmy Sebring hit the first home run in World Series history. Cy Young was the losing pitcher.  However, the Americans would defeat the Pirates five games to three. In 1908, the Boston players donned red hosiery and played under the name "Red Sox."

            1904-Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Otto Robert Frisch, Austrian-British nuclear physicist, born in Vienna, who, with his aunt Lise Meitner, described the division of neutron-bombarded uranium into lighter elements. He named the process fission.  Yes, he had “gone fission”.  Frisch did further work on fission, collaborating with Rudolph Peierls in confirming Niels Bohr's suggestion that a chain reaction would be more likely to result with uranium–235 rather than with the more common isotope, uranium–238. After much work Frisch came to the basic conclusion that an “explosive chain reaction” could be produced with a pound or two of uranium–235 rather than the tons of it which he first thought would be necessary. Frisch and Peierls were probably the first two people in the world to be aware of the possibility of a nuclear bomb.

            1903 –Thursday-  The Pittsburgh Pirates of the National League defeated the Boston Americans of the American League 7-3 in the first official “World Series” game at Huntington Avenue Grounds in Boston, MA Nine years earlier, the two top teams in the National League competed in an experimental post-season championship in which Boston beat Pittsburgh five games to three. Deacon Phillippe pitched a six hitter and right fielder Jimmy Sebring hit the first home run in World Series history. The Americans would defeat the Pirates five games to three. In 1908, the Boston players donned red hosiery and played under the name "Red Sox."

            1908 –Thursday- I see a line of cars and they're all painted black….The Rolling Stones….. The Ford Model T car, the first car to be made on an assembly line, was introduced for a price of $825.  This "very special 'Sales Event'  (“we have to clear our showrooms for the 1909 models”)also featured employee equivalent discounts, show rooms filled with happy people looking at cars as if they were sculptures at MoMA,  and manufacturer 'cash-back incentives." Henry Ford is believed to have said “you can paint it any color as long as it’s black”. In the Model T's nineteen years of production, its price dipped as low as $280. Nearly 15,500,000 were sold in the United States alone.

            1910 –Saturday- Bonnie and Clyde got to be public enemy number one
Running and hiding from ev'ry American lawman's gun.
They used to laugh about dyin',
But deep inside 'em they knew
That pretty soon they'd be lyin'
Beneath the ground together
Pushing up daisies to welcome the sun
And the morning dew.
Acting upon reliable information
A fed'ral deputation laid a deadly ambush.
When Bonnie and Clyde came walking in the sunshine
A half a dozen carbines opened up on them.
Bonnie and Clyde, they lived a lot together
And finally together they died,….Georgie Fame…..Happy Birthday,  Bonnie Parker, American bank robber. Born in Rowena, Texas, she met up with Clyde Barrow in 1930. Together, they led police on a nation-wide crime and killing spree starting in 1932 and ending in 1934 with their deaths. Faye Dunaway played Bonnie Parker in the 1967 movie Bonnie and Clyde with Warren Beatty. The 4’ 11” Bonnie and lover Clyde were toodling along in a stolen car on May 23, 1934 when at approximately 9:00 a.m. a posse, concealed in the bushes waited in ambush. The posse's official report had Clyde stopping to speak with a colleague’s father, planted there with his truck that morning to distract Clyde and force him into the lane closest to the posse, the lawmen opened fire, killing Bonnie and Clyde while shooting a combined total of approximately 130 rounds. By 9:15, the couple were dead.

            1924 –Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, James Earl “Jimmy” Carter, born in Plains Ga., the thirty ninth President of the United States.  Carter had the distinction of being the first president to be born in a hospital. He was also, quite possibly, the worst ex-president in history as his meddling in foreign affairs was a continuous source of embarrassment to his successors.

            1936 –Thursday- During the Spanish Civil War, (Republicans vs. Fascists) General Francisco Franco was named head of the rebel Nationalist government in Spain. It would take more than two years for Franco to defeat the Republicans in the civil war and become ruler of all of Spain. He subsequently served as dictator until his death in 1975 – his lingering, extended dying process was made even more famous by comedian Chevy Chase on the Saturday Night Live television show, who would announce weekly, “Francisco Franco is still dead.”

            1940 –Tuesday- I'm on a highway to hell
On the highway to hell
Highway to hell
I'm on the highway to hell
No stop signs
Speed limit
Nobody's gonna slow me down
Like a wheel
Gonna spin it
Nobody's gonna mess me 'round ……..AC/DC……..The Pennsylvania Turnpike, often considered the first superhighway in the United States, opened to traffic. It was built on the right of way of a failed railroad construction by William Vanderbilt in 1884. The original roadway was 160 miles long, running from Irwin, just east of Pittsburgh to Middlesex, just west of Harrisburg, Pa. This 160 mile piece of roadway, however, revolutionized automobile travel in the United States. The Pennsylvania Turnpike was the first roadway in the United States that had no cross streets, no railroad crossings, and no traffic lights over its entire length.

         1946-Tuesday- And thus I clothe my naked villany
With odd old ends stol'n out of holy writ,
And seem a saint, when most I play the devil…..Richard……King Richard III (I, iii, 336-338)  Twelve high-ranking Nazis were sentenced to death by the International War Crimes Tribunal in Nuremberg. Among those condemned to death by hanging were Hans Frank, Gauleiter of Poland since 1939, Wilhelm Frick, Minister for Internal Affairs, Hermann Goering, as Prussian Minister for Internal Affairs created the Secret Police, which later developed into the Gestapo. He was responsible for the mobilization of the economic resources of the Reich for rearmament, Alfred Jodl, Wehrmacht General and advisor of Hitler in strategic and operative matters, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Security Police (SD). Alfred Rosenberg, Gauleiter for occupied territories in the East; Fritz Sauckel, who orchestrated the forced labor programs in occupied Europe, Wilhelm Keitel, General Field Marshall, Arthur Seyss-lnquart, Gauleiter of the Netherlands; and Julius Streicher, who founded in 1923 the virulently anti-Semitic Nazi weekly newspaper Der Stürmer. Fittingly, their bodies were taken to Dachau where they were cremated. Seven others, including Rudolf Hess, Adolf Hitler's former deputy, were given prison sentences ranging from 10 years to life. Three others were acquitted.  Hermann Goering committed suicide the day before his planned execution by swallowing a cyanide pill. On 16 October 1946 the ten remaining defendants were hangedhttp://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/verdicts.html

            1957-Tuesday-  The soon to be infamous drug thalidomide was first marketed in West Germany and shortly sold in at least 46 countries, including the U.S. It was first synthesized in 1953 by Chemie Grünenthal, as a sedative, but it seemed  like a wonder drug for pregnant women to combat symptoms associated with morning sickness. Unfortunately, after thousands of women had taken the medicine, it was found that the drug's  molecules crossed the placental wall, especially during the first trimester, affecting the proper growth of the fetus. Worldwide, over 10,000 babies were born by the early 1960's with substantial birth defects, including deafness, blindness, internal disabilities, cleft palate, deformed or even missing limbs. Believe it or not…it’s back.  In 1998, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the drug thalidomide (Thalomid) as a treatment for a severe skin disorder

        1974 –Tuesday  The premiere of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the first of the Chop ‘em Up cinematic genre.  
Stop me if you’ve heard this before  but….five friends visiting their grandpa's old house are hunted down and terrorized by a chainsaw
 wielding killer and his family of, yes,  grave-robbing cannibals. Directed by Tobe Hooper, it starred, Marilyn Burns, one of the original “scream queens”. 
Today in Movie History informs us that the movie was titled Blutgericht in Texas (Germany)
Non Aprite Quella Porta (Italy),  Massacre A La Tronconneuse (France), Motorsavs-Massakren (Denmark), 
Masacre De Texas, La (Argentina), and  Matanza De Texas, La (Spain). 
At  last count, with considerable body count, movie audiences have been treated to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) 
Leatherface: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre III- 1990, Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation 1994, 
The 2003 remake, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre,  and a prequel, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning- 2006. 
The body count is over fity. 


               1982 –Friday-  SONY trotted out its first Compact Disc player.  
And what, you may ask, is a CD?  A Compact Disc is a 1.2 mm thick polycarbonate plastic disc weighing around 16 grams. 
To make the surface reflective, a very thin layer of aluminum is applied on one side of the disc. A film of lacquer is also applied to act as a protective shield. 
The label is printed on the other side using normal printing methods like offset or screen printing. 
The label does not work well on home copied CD’s as Professor Sy Yentz has found that the manually applied labels will gum up a car CD player
 resulting in a $275 bill for a new one……The data is stored on a CD in form of an array of tiny indentation called pits that are encoded in a spiral track. 
A pit is just 500 nm wide and 100 nm deep and the length varies from 850 to 3500 nm. The areas between two pits are called lands. 
In a technological “putting the cart before the horse”….the first music CD was released two months earlier, in August.  
It was The Visitors (1981) by ABBA.  Despite of this lapse in taste, compact discs went on to huge commercial success. 

        1983 –Saturday- Once upon a time I was falling in love
But now I'm only falling apart
There's nothing I can do
A total eclipse of the heart
Once upon a time there was light in my life
But now there's only love in the dark
Nothing I can sayA total eclipse of the heart….Jim Steinman…… Bonnie Tyler made her contribution to enhance science knowledge as her song, Total Eclipse of the Heart reached number 1 on the Billboard Charts. People who were heretofore ignorant of the meaning of the word eclipse increased their science vocabulary by one more word.

            2005-Saturday-  Islamic terrorist suicide bombers attacked  three restaurants in two tourist areas on the Indonesian island of Bali, a popular resort area. The bombings killed 22 people, including the bombers, and injured more than 50 others. This was the second suicide-bombing incident to rock the island in less than three years. In 2002,  Islamic terrorists set a series of three bombs killed 202 people, many of them foreign nationals in Bali on vacation, including 88 Australians.  

Back to Calendar

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1263 –Tuesday- War! Scotland vs. Norway and the world trembled. In the battle of Largs, Scottish King Alexander III defeated the Norse army of King Haakon by luring Haakon's fleet far from its bases. He induced it to come up into the trap of the Firth of Clyde with a promise of vegan Haggis. He held off action until the inevitable friendly ever present Scottish gales forced much of Haakon's fleet on the shore by Largs. Alexander  then attacked and forced Haakon back to sea, and back to his base in Orkney, where he died. 

            1452 –Saturday- An honest tale speeds best, being plainly told. Richard III (Act IV, Scene IV). Happy Birthday,  King Richard III of England.  Poor Richard, whose history was written by Tudor sympathizers, and was immortalized by William Shakepeare as the evil hunchback – Elizabeth Tudor was Queen at the time- has been ill treated by history. Richard was the last Yorkist king of England, whose death at the Battle of Bosworth effectively ended the Wars of the Roses with the victorious Henry Tudor becoming Henry VII.  Richard has become infamous because of the disappearance of his young nephews, the sons (Edward V and Richard) of his brother Edward IV- the “Princes in the Tower” who disappeared after Richard claimed the throne following Edward IV’s going kaput.  Recommended reading – Daughter of Time by Josphine Tey.

            1535 –Wednesday- Jacques Cartier discovered Montreal, Quebec. He visited the Casino, climbed Mount Royal, complained that everyone spoke a different French than  that spoken in France, and attended a Canadiens hockey game.  The French navigator was  first explorer of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and discoverer of the St. Lawrence River. He made three voyages to the region,

            1608 –Thursday- Who's watching
Tell me, who's watching
Who's watching me ………………….Rockwell
First refracting telescope was demonstrated to the Netherlands States General by Hans Lippershey. As Lippershey described it, "Here’s what you do, you look in this end and it makes stuff that is far away look closer". In 1609, Italian scientist, Galileo Galilei learned of Lippershey's device and began constructing his own, eventually increasing the magnification to a factor of 20. He soon discovered the four moons of Jupiter (note: there were A LOT more yet to be discovered.) A refracting  telescope uses a lens to gather and focus light from a distant object. A reflecting telescope uses a mirror to gather and focus light from a distant object.  Lippershey applied to the government of the Netherlands for a patent in 1608. Eventually, the patent was denied. The government thought that the device could not be kept a secret.

            1800 –Thursday- Happy Birthday, Nat Turner who led a slave rebellion in 1931. On August 20, 1831, Turner and six other men met in the woods and  went to the home of Turner’s master. They killed his master's entire family. Then they went house-to-house, killing other whites. In the process, they gained the assistance of fifty to sixty slaves who helped kill at least 55 white people.  The rebellion ended when the militia began pursuing Turner and the other slaves. During the pursuit, some slaves were captured and about 15 were hanged. Turner escaped and hid out for about six weeks until he was captured. He was imprisoned, and was sentenced to execution on November 5, 1831. On November 11, 1831, he was hanged and skinned.

             1832-Tuesday-Happy Birthday, Julius von Sachs a German botanist. He demonstrated the importance of transpiration in plants and the role of chlorophyll.  His discovery was the "Joy of Sachs" or....."Sachs in the City".

            1836 –Sunday-Woo..
I'm ahead, I'm a man
I'm the first mammal to wear pants, yeah
I'm at peace with my lust
I can kill 'cause in God I trust, yeah
It's evolution, baby ….Pearl Jam.......Charles Darwin returned from his voyage on the HMS Beagle  (see Sept. 16 for Galapagos landing) to the Pacific. He was convinced of the idea that all organisms, including humans, are modified descendents of previously existing forms of life.  Darwin’s ideas developed in two stages: the realization that organisms are not fixed and unchangeable and to provide an explanation of the process of evolutionary change.  It would be 23 years before he published Origin of Species.

            1852-SaturdayHappy Birthday, Sir William Ramsey, Scottish chemist who discovered the "inert " or noble gases; neon, krypton and xenon, and co-discovered argon, radon, calcium and barium. “We have come to praise cesium, not barium”. Ramsay received the 1904 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In a chain reaction of discovery, in 1892 Ramsay's investigated  Lord Rayleigh's observation that the density of nitrogen extracted from the air was always greater than nitrogen released from various chemical compounds. Ramsay then set about looking for an unknown gas in air of greater density, which—when he found it—he named argon. While investigating for the presence of argon in a uranium-bearing mineral, he instead discovered helium, which since 1868 had been known to exist, but only in the sun. This second discovery led him to suggest the existence of a new group of elements in the periodic table. He and his coworkers quickly isolated neon, krypton, and xenon from the earth's atmosphere…..and before you know it, you had OxyClean…..

            1866 –Tuesday - The tin can with key opener, like you see on sardine cans, coffee cans, and even tea,  was patented by J. Osterhoudt in New York City. Note: we’re still working on what his first name was, all references (in the Xeroxian world of the internet) refer to him as J. The first tin cans were so thick they had to be hammered open. As thinner cans were manufactured, it became possible to invent dedicated can openers. In 1858, Ezra Warner of Waterbury, Connecticut patented the first can opener.

            1869 --Saturday Happy Birthday, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi - Mahatma Ghandi, a mensch, and Indian practitioner of passive resistance and the moving force behind Indian independence from Great Britain. "Mahatma" is a phrase derived from Sanskrit words meaning "great soul."   Mahatma Gandhi was assassinated on January 30, 1948, shot at point-blank range by Nathuram Godse, an activist of the Hindu Mahasabha.

            1886-Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Robert Julius Trumpler, Swiss/American astronomer who moved to the US in 1915 and worked at the Lick Observatory. In 1922, by observing a solar eclipse, he was able to confirm Einstein's theory relativity. Relativity –all relatives look alike-  “ Yup, now it looks like my Uncle Ernst, and now it looks like Cousin Awilda, and now it looks like my mother-in-law on a bad day… and now……”Trumpler’s most significant discovery and contribution to astronomy, was his investigation of distances, dimensions, and space distribution of galactic open star clusters. This work also contained a table of 37 new open clusters, now known as the Trumpler catalog. Moreover, from these studies, Trumpler discovered the interstellar extinction; this effect has significant impact on distance estimates and considerable effect on the distance scale of the Milky Way and the universe.

            1890 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, “ Groucho” Marx, American comedian and actor. Groucho, who deviated from the Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, played the mustached, cigar-chomping leader of a foursome of brothers, alternately dispensing humorous invective and puns while acting as exasperated straight man for his brothers' loonacy; Chico (Leonard), the pun-happy Italian;  Harpo (Adolph), the non-speaking, madman; and Gummo (Milton) (later replaced by Zeppo –Herbert-), the hopelessly lost straight man in some of the funniest movies ever made; A Night at the Opera, Duck Soup, Horse Feathers, A Day at the Races, The Cocanuts, and Animal Crackers. “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I’ll never know”.  “Your eyes, your eyes, they shine like the pants of a blue serge suit. That’s not a reflection on you—it’s on the pants.”

            1895 –Wednesday= Happy Birthday, Bud Abbott, American comedian and actor . Straight man for partner, Lou Costello…..”Who’s on first?” As IMBD tells us, in 1931 while cashiering at the Brooklyn Theater, he substituted for comic Lou Costello's ill straight-man. The two formed their famous comedy team and, through the 1930s, they worked burlesque, minstrel shows, vaudeville and movie houses. In 1938 they got national exposure through the Kate Smith Hour radio show, and signed with Universal the next year for their film debut in One Night in the Tropics (1940). Their 1941 movie Buck Privates (1941), with The Andrews Sisters, grossed what was then a company record $10 million, and in 1942 they topped a poll of Hollywood stars. They had their own radio show (ABC, 1941-6, NBC, 1946-9) and TV show ("The Abbott and Costello Show" (1952)).

Abbott: Well Costello, I'm going to New York with you. You know Bucky Harris, the Yankee's manager, gave me a job as coach for as long as you're on the team.

Costello: Look Abbott, if you're the coach, you must know all the players.

Abbott: I certainly do.

Costello: Well you know I've never met the guys. So you'll have to tell me their names, and then I'll know who's playing on the team.

Abbott: Oh, I'll tell you their names, but you know it seems to me they give these ball players now-a-days very peculiar names.

Costello: You mean funny names?

Abbott: Strange names, pet names...like Dizzy Dean...

Costello: His brother Daffy.

Abbott: Daffy Dean...

Costello: And their French cousin.

Abbott: French?

Costello: Goofè.

Abbott: Goofè Dean. Well, let's see, we have on the bags, Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know is on third...

Costello: That's what I want to find out.

Abbott: I say Who's on first, What's on second, I Don't Know's on third.

Costello: Are you the manager?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: You gonna be the coach too?

Abbott: Yes.

Costello: And you don't know the fellows' names?

Abbott: Well I should.

Costello: Well then who's on first?

Abbott: Yes.  ……….

http://www.baseball-almanac.com/humor4.shtml

            1906-Tuesday Happy Birthday, Willy Ley, German-American engineer who was a founder of the German Rocket Society. The society was the first group of men (with the sole exception of Robert Goddard) to experiment with rockets. Ley even got  Wernher von Braun into the society. Ley was consultant for the science fiction film Frau im Mond in which the countdown from ten to zero was introduced. He was vehemently anti-Nazi, unlike Von Braun, and in 1934, he emigrated to the U.S. rather than cooperate with the development of rockets for military applications for the Nazis.  In the U.S., he became a popularizer of space exploration and travel, writing many popular books such as The Conquest of Space and Beyond the Solar System.

            1908 –Friday- Cleveland Indians pitcher, Addie Joss pitched a perfect game beating the Chicago White Sox 1-0. Joss had the shortest career of any player in the Hall of Fame playing only nine seasons, all with Cleveland.   During spring training of 1911, Joss fainted on the field in an exhibition game. He shrugged the incident off initially. Within a week, however, Joss was hospitalized with tubercular meningitis, and on April 14, 1911, he died.

            1917 –Tuesday- Lysosomes And peroxisomes and liddle lamzy divey A kiddley divey too, wouldn't you? ….apologies to Johnny Mercer……….Happy Birthday, Christian René de Duve, Belgian cytologist and biochemist who discovered lysosomes and peroxisomes. Lysosomes are the cells' garbage disposal system. They degrade the products of injestion.  Peroxisomes are organelles that contain oxidative enzymes. They may resemble a lysosome, however, they are not formed in the Golgi complex. Peroxisomes are self replicating, like the mitochondria or a Kardashian. de Duve shared the 1974 Nobel Prize for Medicine, with Albert Claude and George Palade

            1919-Thursday- President Woodrow Wilson, who had just cut short a tour of the country to promote the formation of the League of Nations, suffered a near fatal stroke. Wilson had collapsed in Pueblo Colorado after traveling 8,000 miles in 22 days.  He returned to Washington and suffered his stroke.  The President’s stroke left him physically incapacitated but his condition was not made public. His controversial second wife, Edith Wilson jealously guarded her husband, and later claimed that his resignation would sap his will to live. To her he was "first my beloved husband whose life I was trying to save ... after that he was the president of the United States." Yeah, sure. As a result, his Cabinet members were denied access to him. His wife decided what printed materials he could see, and his state papers became fewer and increasingly unsatisfactory.  Vice President Thomas C. Marshall of Indiana would have become President on Wilson’s resignation. The process for declaring a President incapacitated was at that time unclear, and Marshall was fearful of the precedent that might be set in establishing one The country was virtually leaderless (sort of like the Jimmy Carter administration) until the inauguration of Warren G. Harding in 1921. After leaving office Wilson retired to a house on S Street in Washington, D.C., where he lived in virtual seclusion. He died on February 3, 1924

            1925 –I bought a bourgeois house in the Hollywood hills
With a truckload of hundred thousand dollar bills
Man came by to hook up my cable TV
We settled in for the night my baby and me
We switched 'round and 'round 'til half-past dawn
There was fifty-seven channels and nothin' on
Fifty-seven channels and nothin' on
Fifty-seven channels and nothin' on ………….Bruce Springsteen

    Friday-Don’t touch your remote! John Logie Baird of Scotland conducted the first test of the working television system.  Baird and American Clarence W. Hansell patented the idea of using arrays of transparent rods to transmit images for television and facsimiles respectively. Baird's 30 line images were the first demonstrations of  television by reflected light rather than back-lit silhouettes.  His 1928 trans-Atlantic transmission of the image of a human face was a broadcasting milestone. Color television, in1928, stereoscopic television and television by infra-red light were all demonstrated by Baird before 1930. The credit as to who was the inventor of modern television really comes down to three different people in three different places both working on the same problem at about the same time: In addition to Baird, Vladimir Kosma Zworykin, a Russian-born American inventor working for Westinghouse, and Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a privately backed farm boy from the state of Utah. “Zworykin had a patent, but Farnsworth had a picture…” Zworykin is usually credited as being the father of modern television. This was because the patent for the heart of the TV, the electron scanning tube, was first applied for by Zworykin in 1923, under the name of an iconoscope. Farnsworth was the first of the two inventors to successfully demonstrate the transmission of television signals, which he did on September 7, 1927. So YOU figure out who invented television.

            1945-Tuesday - A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while. Happy Birthday, Don McLean born in New Rochelle, New York and writer/singer of one the greatest, most often played, frequently quoted, lengthy single records of all time….American Pie.  McLean graduated from Iona Prep in 1963, and briefly attended Villanova University, dropping out after four months he demonstrated his intelligence and good taste by attending Iona College in New Rochelle (the alma mater of Professor Sy Yentz). Obviously Iona taught him everything he would need to know.  

1950 –Monday- Charles M. Schulz's comic strip Li'l Folks was accepted by United Features Syndicate, re-christened Peanuts (which Schulz didn’t like)and debuted in seven newspapers - The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Minneapolis Tribune, The Allentown Call-Chronicle, The Bethlehem Globe-Times, The Denver Post and The Seattle Times. The very first strip was four panels long and showed Charlie Brown walking by two other young children, Shermy and Patty. (Snoopy was the also an early character in the strip, but he did not appear in the very first one.) Most of the other characters that eventually became the main characters of Peanuts did not appear until later: Schroeder (May 1951), Lucy (March 1952), Linus (September 1952), Pigpen (July 1954), Sally (August 1959), “Peppermint” Patty (August 1966), Woodstock (April 1967), Marcie (June 1968), and Franklin (July 1968

            1956-Yes time, time, time is on my side, yes it is
Time, time, time is on my side, yes it is
Oh, time, time, time is on my side, yes it is
I said, time, time, time is on my side, yes it is
Oh, time, time, time is on my side
Yeah, time, time, time is on my side……The Rolling Stones

Tuesday -The first atomic clock in the United States, the Atomicron, started ticking at the Overseas Press Club in New York City. The basis of the timing was the constant frequency of the oscillations of the caesium atom - 9,192,631,830 MHz. It was priced at $50,000. It came with a snooze control, 30 preset stations, sound effects such as “tropic rain forest”, gentle breeze, and toilet flushing. An atomic clock is a very precise clock that operates using the elements Caesium or Rubidium. We have come to praise  Caesium, not Barium …..a clock has an error of one second per million years.

            1959-Friday- The premier episode on CBS (Friday nights at 10:00) of The Twilight Zone, the anthology series of weirdness hosted by Rod Serling. In this first episode, Mike Ferris (Earl Holliman – Sundance in the series Hotel D’Paree, and co-star with Angie Dickenson in Police Woman) finds himself in a town strangely devoid of people. But despite the emptiness, he has the odd feeling that he's being watched... This is the original 1959 series, not the CBS The Twilight Zone (1985) version nor the dumbed down UPN The Twilight Zone (2002) version. The last original episode aired on June 1, 1964. Rod Serling, who’s narrative introduction (actually there were several but the best ) was –“You're traveling through another dimension -- a dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination. That's a signpost up ahead: your next stop: the Twilight Zone!” In all, Serling wrote over eighty five episodes.

            1961 –Monday-  There's a story I want you to know
'bout my baby how I love him so.
There's no other like my baby no no no no.
(Now I say now)
There's no other, don't mean maybe no no no no.
Walkin' down the street in a crowd
Looking at my baby feeling so proud.
Wo ho ho, There's no other like my baby no no no no. ……The first single released by Phil Spector’s (“wall of sound”) eponymously named, Phillies Records was The Crystals, There’s No Other Like My Baby. Next would come He’s a Rebel and Uptown….on which Spector used Darlene Love and the Blossoms billed as the Crystals.

 1962 –Tuesday- …….But it was, as I receiv'd it
—and others, whose judgments in such matters cried in the top of
mine—an excellent play, well digested in the scenes, set down
with as much modesty as cunning……Hamlet…..Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 431–440 Hereeeeeeerse Johnny!.  Johnny Carson made his debut has host of the Tonight Show on NBC.  Six months after Jack Paar made a rather stormy departure from The Tonight Show (over jokes about Communism, among other issues) and viewers enduring a succession of "substitute" hosts (and an ill-fated attempt at a magazine-type show), NBC finally settle on a permanent host. Opening night guests were Joan Crawford, Rudy Vallee and The Phoenix Singers. Carson would continue has host until May 22, 1992.

            1965 –Saturday Sloopy lives in a very bad part of town
and everybody else, tries to put my sloopy down
Sloopy I don't care, what your daddy do
Cuz you know sloopy, girl, I'm inlove with you
and so I say now
Hang on sloopy, sloopy hang on
Hang on sloopy, sloopy hang on…….The McCoys Beethoven’s Ninth?, Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik, Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue? All pale musically to the genius of the McCoys’ Hang on Sloopy (lead singer Rick Derringer)which reached number 1 on the Billboard Charts on this day.

            1968-Wednesday- The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act was passed by congress.  It established a National Wild and Scenic Rivers System and prescribed the methods and standards through which additional rivers would be identified and added to the system. The Act authorized the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of Agriculture to study areas and submit proposals to the President and Congress for addition to the system.  The act was sponsored by Sen. Frank Church of Idaho and signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Thus far, a total of 156 rivers have wild and scenic status.

            1978 –Monday The New York Yankees beat the Boston Red Sox 5-4 in a one game play off.  Shortstop Bucky Dent’s three run home run provided the margin of victory.

            1985 –Wednesday Rock Hudson kaput. Born Leroy Harold Scherer Jr., on November 17, 1925, in Winnetka, Illinois, was a Hollywood heartthrob – short on acting ability  - whose career in movies and TV spanned nearly three decades. Homosexuals were not looked on kindly in the Hollywood of the 1950s 60’s and 70’s. Hudson covered up with a pseudo marriage to his secretary in 1955. It lasted three years.  In 1984 he was diagnosed with AIDS.

2002 – Wednesday- The Beltway sniper attacks began, extending over three weeks. In all, 10 people were murdered and three wounded  by Muslims Lee Malvo and John Muhammed during the October 2002 shootings in Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C.

2006 –Monday- And while we’re on the subject of senseless, brutal murders of innocents, five school girls are murdered by Charles Carl Roberts in a shooting at an Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. Sparing the government the expense of a trial and sob stories of why he became a homicidal maniac, Roberts committed suicide.

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1226 –Saturday-My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go…..King…….Hamlet (III, iii, 100-103) ..Death of St. Francis of Assisi (Giovanni Bernadone). He was 45 years old and had been preaching (and living the life he preached) for twenty years. In his life and preaching, Francis emphasized simplicity and poverty, relying on God's providence rather than worldly goods. The supporters worked or begged for what they needed to live, and any surplus was given to the poor. Francis was canonized by Gregory IX less than two years later on July 16, 1228. His feast day is celebrated on October 4.

            1613 –Thursday- Smokin' in the boys' room

Smokin' in the boys' room

Now, teacher, don't you fill me up with your rules

But everybody knows that smokin' ain't allowed in school……Brownsville Station….

Tobacco was first successfully harvested for export by John Rolfe of the Jamestown Colony.  This variety, which seemed “smoother” than any other that England had ever tasted, became wildly popular. By 1614 Virginia had entered the world trade market protected under English laws. By 1620 tobacco was being used as currency in Virginia, a trade option that endured for two centuries Rolfe was also the future husband of Pocahontas.  

            1803-Monday-  Happy Birthday, John Gorrie, American physician and early leader in the invention of the artificial manufacture of ice, refrigeration, and air conditioning. While he was a Naval officer stationed at Apalachicola Florida he needed ice to treat malaria patients with fever. He reasoned, fairly correctly, that  people living in cold climates never got malaria ( Prof. Sy Yentz suggests that perhaps they froze to death first) He built a small steam engine that drew heat from the brine. The chilled brine was used to cool air or make ice. He was granted the first U.S. Patent for mechanical refrigeration in 1851 and those are the Gorrie details.

            1830 –Sunday - Happy Birthday, George Brayton, U.S. mechanical engineer and pioneer in the development of internal combustion engines. Braydon invented the continuous ignition combustion engine that later became the basis for the turbine engine.  The Patent Office identified George Brayton's 1872, 2-cycle engine as a hot-air engine that ran quietly with petroleum fuel. The Brayton Cycle became the basis for all gas turbine engines and he is believed to have manufactured the first gas turbines commercially in Providence, Rhode Island. For a while his hot air engine became the preferred engine of the American auto industry. You can see a  Brayton Engine  in the Smithsonian in the American History museum, and a later Brayton engine which powered one of John Holland's early submarines is preserved in the Great Falls Museum in Paterson, New Jersey.

            1844-Thursday Happy Birthday, Sir Patrick Manson, Scottish parasitologist, born in Old Meldrum, Aberdeenshire. In the long list of scientific “fathers”, Manson was the "father of tropical  medicine." His greatest achievement was to demonstrate conclusively what had long been suspected, namely, that certain diseases are transmitted by insects. His first success, in 1877, was to link the mosquito Culex fatigans with the presence of the parasite Filaria sanguinis hominis (FSH) in many of his patients suffering from elephantiasis.

            1863 –Saturday- Three months after the victory at Gettysburg, expressing gratitude for the crucial Union Army defeat of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, President Abraham Lincoln announced that the nation would celebrate an official Thanksgiving holiday on November 26, 1863. The speech, which was actually written by Secretary of State William Seward, declared that the fourth Thursday of every November thereafter would be considered an official U.S. holiday of Thanksgiving. During the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt, with an eye on retail sales, tried to move it to the 3^rd Thursday in November but changed it back to the 4^th Thursday in 1941 following pressure from Congress.

            1895 –Thursday- He had burned several times to enlist. Tales of great movements shook the land. They might not be distinctly Homeric, but there seemed to be much glory in them. He had read of marches, sieges, conflicts, and he had longed to see it all. His busy mind had drawn for him large pictures extravagant in color, lurid with breathless deeds. ..The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, was published in book form. The story of a young man's experience of battle – Antietam- was the first American novel to portray the Civil War from the ordinary soldier's point of view. The tale originally appeared as a serial published by a newspaper syndicate. Crane contracted tuberculosis and died June 1900 at the age of twenty eight.

            1899 –Tuesday-  The motor-driven vacuum cleaner was patented by J.S. Thurman of St. Louis, Mo. The vacuum cleaner had been patented by inventor Ives McGaffey who called it a  "sweeping machine" on June 8 1869. This was the first patent for a device that cleaned rugs. Thurman started a horse drawn (door to door service) vacuum system His vacuuming services were priced at $4 per visit He invented his gasoline powered vacuum cleaner, earlier in 1899 and some historians consider it the first motorized vacuum cleaner. Yes, this business truly sucked.

           1906-Wednesday-  The second international conference on wireless telegraphy in Berlin adopted SOS as the official international distress signal, replacing the catchy call sign CQD developed by the Marconi Wireless Company in 1904. Other suggestions such as OH  DAMN !, WHOOPS!, and ARGGH! were all rejected.

            1910-Monday-  British comedians Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel arrived in the United States on tour with Fred Carno’s famous British vaudeville company. The troupe broke up when Chaplin returned to Britain. Both later became silent film stars. Chaplin became a superstar comedian, actor and director.  Laurel teamed up with American Oliver Hardy briefly in 1919 and famously in 1926.

            1916-Tuesday-  I think we're alone now,
There does't seem to be anyone around.
I think we're alone now,
The beating of our hearts is the only sound….Tommy James and the Shondells….Happy Birthday, James Francis (Frank)  Pantridge, Irish cardiologist who developed the life-saving portable defibrillator. Pantridge found out that death occurred within the first hour for 60% of males (up to middle-age) that suffered a heart attack, and of these, 90% suffered ventricular fibrillation. To begin earliest possible treatment, in 1965, Pantridge equipped an ambulance with a portable defibrillator. It achieved a 50% long-term patient survival rate.  Defibrillators, are used to apply an electric shock to the chest to overcome ventricular fibrillation, a typically fatal irregular rhythm of the heart.

            1922-Tuesday- The first fax was faxed as city telephone lines were used for the  transmission of a facsimile photo in Washington, DC. Charles F. Jenkins sent an image (Note: the fax was invented in 1843 by Alexander Bain of Scotland – yes before the invention of the telephone but after the invention of the telegraph) from 1519 Connecticut Ave to the U.S. Navy Radio Station NOF at Anacostia, D.C. The fax, a photo of  exotic dancer Babette La Touche…..no no no, it was of President Calvin Coolidge.

            1922 –Tuesday-  Same day as the fax, Rebecca L. Felton, D-Ga., became the first woman member of the U.S. Senate. She was appointed, by Governor Thomas Hardwick to serve out the remaining term of the kaput Sen. Thomas E. Watson

            1941-Friday- The first aerosol can used in a commercial application was patented. It had been invented by two U.S. Dept. of Agriculture researchers, a chemist and an entomologist, L.D. Goodhue and W.N. Sullivan. They were looking for a way to apply oil-free insecticides in mushroom houses. Weren’t we all? The mushrooms, who had moved from a 3-bedroom condo to a split level ranch in Levittown, L.I were having trouble with ants.  Mr. Mushroom reportedly said, “now I’m a fungi but this is going too far”. It was Goodhue and Sullivan’s  design that made products like hair spray possible.  In 1837, Parisian Antoine Perpigna invented a soda siphon incorporating a valve. Metal spray cans were being tested as early as 1862. They were constructed from heavy steel and were too bulky to be commercially successful. In 1899, inventors Helbling and Pertsch patented aerosols pressurized using methyl and ethyl chloride as propellants.  The first aerosol can was patented on November 23, 1927 by engineer Erik Rotheim

1944 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday, Pierre René Deligne, Belgian mathematician who was awarded the Fields Medal (mathematics equivalent of the Nobel Prize) at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Helsinki, Finland, in 1978 for his work in algebraic geometry. Deligne’s work originated with André Weil's ideas on polynomial equations which led to three questions on what properties of a geometric object can be determined purely algebraically. These three problems quickly became major research challenges to mathematicians. A solution of the three Weil conjectures was given by Deligne. We like to put in these items (this, thanks to Today in Science History) because we have no idea what they mean but you’d have to be like, have a ginormous brain and be like totally smart to like, you know, understand what it totally means because it’s, it’s, it’s just sooooo amazing.

1947-Friday-  After 11 years of grinding and polishing a 200-inch diameter telescope lens for the Mount Palomar Observatory was completed at the California Institute of Technology. This lens, the first 200 “incher” to be made in the U.S., originated with 20 tons of molten glass at 2,700 ° Fahrenheit which was poured into a ceramic mold at the Corning Glass Works, NY in 1934. The glass lens was allowed to cool very slowly until it was room temperature. The telescope in which the lens was mounted was named the Hale Telescope in recognition of Dr. George E. Hale who had initiated the project. Hale had already built a 100-inch telescope in Mount Wilson, California. This 5-ton instrument remained the largest telescope in the world until the creation of the monster 200-inch Hale telescope. The tube alone of the 200-inch Hale telescope weighs 150-tons. The telescope was dedicated in 1948 and was first used on  February 1, 1949 by taking pictures of a certain Babette La Touche, an exotic dancer…….no we’re just kidding.  It took pictures of the Milky Way.

            1951 –Wednesday-  At the Polo Grounds in Manhattan (long demolished), New York Giants third baseman Bobby Thomson hit a three-run home run off Brooklyn Dodger reliever Ralph Branca in the bottom of the ninth inning (the “shot heard round the world”) to win the deciding game of a three-game playoff series against the Brooklyn Dodgers, sending the Giants into the World Series…….where they would lose to the New York Yankees. The Dodgers took a 4-1 lead into the bottom of the ninth inning, and the Giants appeared doomed. The Scottish born Thompson’s home run made for a 5-4 victory.  The moment was immortalized by the famous call of Giants play-by-play announcer Russ Hodges who cried, "The Giants win the pennant! The Giants win the pennant!"

            1952-Friday-  The first U.S. video recording on magnetic tape giving viewable results of off-air black and white recordings was made by John T. Mullen at the electronics division of Bing Crosby Enterprises in Los Angeles, Cal. Video taping was considerably less expensive that filming. In magnetic taping, electrical signals from a television camera or television receiver are stored as patterns of magnetized regions of iron oxide on a plastic ribbon.  When the recorded tape is played back, the original signals are reconstructed. These signals can then be disseminated by broadcast antenna or by cable to television receivers that translate the signals into images and sounds.  And that’s how you can enjoy Judge Judy.

            1955- A historic day for children’s TV programming, as…. Smoking cigarettes and watching Captain Kangaroo.
Now, don't tell me I've nothing to do. …..Statler Brothers…. Captain Kangaroo premiered on CBS and   ….. Who's the leader of the club
That's made for you and me
M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E
Hey! there, Hi! there, Ho! there
You're as welcome as can be
M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E
Mickey Mouse!
Mickey Mouse!
Forever let us hold our banner
High! High! High! High!
Come along and sing a song
And join the jamboree!
M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E…….The Mickey Mouse Club premiered on ABC. Captain Kangaroo, Bob Keeshan, became the most successful children’s program of all time.  Keeshan had also played Clarabell the Clown on the Howdy Doody Show as well as Corny the Clown on his own Corny the Clown Show.  The Mickey Mouse Club was hosted by Big Mouseketeer, Jimmy Dodd and co-host Mooseketeer, Roy Williams.  While there seem to be hundreds of former child actors running around claiming to be mouseketeers, it appears that there were 39  kids on the first show 1955-59 and only 9 lasted the entire filming: Annette, Karen, Sharon, Doreen, Darlene, Cubby, Lonnie, Bobby, Tommy. The show only ran for 360 episodes. ABC wanted to run more ads and Walt Disney refused. His contract would not allow him to “shop” the show to another network

             1962-Wednesday- Five years minus one day after the launch of Sputnik, U.S Navy Commander Walter Schirra (brother of Kay Schirra Schirra - whatever will be will be….) orbited the Earth almost six times in the Project Mercury capsule, Sigma 7. Schirra’s was the fifth of the 6 Mercury flights.  Sigma 7 was a six-orbit mission lasting 9 hours, 13 minutes, and 11 seconds. The capsule attained a velocity of 17,557 miles per hour and an altitude of 175 statute miles, the capsule traveled almost 144,000 statute miles before reentry into Earth's atmosphere. He proved that an astronaut could carefully manage the limited amounts of electricity. Schirra was the only astronaut to fly a Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo (see Oct. 11) mission. Unfortunately, alien (undocumented?) molecules attached themselves to the exterior of the capsule, returned to Earth, mutated and resulted in the development of people who yell at the screen in a movie theater.

            1981 -Saturday A hunger strike by Irish nationalists at the Maze Prison in Belfast in Northern Ireland was called off after seven months and 10 deaths. The first to die was Bobby Sands, the imprisoned Irish Republican Army (IRA) leader who initiated the protest on March 1, 1981. You can see a mural dedicated to them on the Falls Road in the Catholic section of Belfast.

            1985 –Thursday-  First flight of the space shuttle, Atlantis. Atlantis, the fourth orbiter to become operational at Kennedy Space Center, was named after the primary research vessel for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts from 1930 to 1966. This was the second Space Shuttle mission totally dedicated to the Department of Defense.  It lasted four days and was very secret.  In order to maintain security,  all communications were in Esperanto and the crew wore false mustaches and glasses.

            1992 –Saturday-  Understated, refined, restrained Irish chanteuse, Sinead O’Connor appearing on Saturday Night Live, ended her song War by producing a photograph of Pope John Paul II, and  ripping it  into pieces. There was stunned silence, and then the station went to a commercial.

            1994-Monday And on the same day (different year as the birth of the Frank  Pantridge,  developer of the defibrillator, the Food and Drug Administration approved the Left Ventricular Assist Device, which helps failing hearts continue to function. The left ventricle is the large, muscular chamber of the heart that pumps blood out to the body. A left ventricular assist device (LVAD) is a battery-operated, mechanical pump-type device that's surgically implanted. It helps maintain the pumping ability of a heart that can't effectively work on its own.    The right ventricle Diversity and Multicultural association immediately sued, crying discrimination.

            1997 –Friday- A ligner hert zich zeineh ligen azoi lang ein biz er glaibt zich alain. (A liar tells his story so often that he gets to believe it himself ).  In a shocking development, U.S Attorney General Janet Reno said she had found no evidence that U.S. President Clinton had broken the law with White House coffees and overnight stays for big contributors.

            2003 –Friday- Food glorious food
What is there more handsome
Gulped swallowed or chewed
Still worth a kings ransom
What is it we dream about?
What brings on a sigh?
Piled peaches and cream about six feet high….. Lionel Bart…..Oliver…………
 Apparently mistaking him for Wolfgang Puck, a 7-year old tiger named Montecore attacked  Ray Horn, of the duo "Siegfried & Roy," during a performance.

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1363 –Tuesday-   My how time flies……the naval battle of Lake Poyang which had begun on August 31 came to a conclusion.   It was one of the final battles that lead to  the fall of China's Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. There were at this time a number of rebel groups who sought to topple the Yuan (“Looks like it’s just Yuan me kid”); the three most powerful were called the Ming, the Han, and the Wu. The navy of the Ming force, under Zhu Yuanzhang, engaged the Han navy, commanded by Chen Youliang, on Lake Poyang, China's largest freshwater lake. This battle was the largest naval battle of the medieval age and, by some definitions, the largest naval battle in history.  On this last day, the Ming employed fire ships , and at one point in the conflict Chen Youliang suffered an arrow through his skull and went kaput. The Han surrendered shortly afterwards.

            1535-Friday-  The first complete English translation of a printed Bible – the Matthew Bible was published. Some background….John Wycliff's hand-written manuscripts were the first complete Bibles in the English language (1380's). Wycliff (or Wycliffe), an Oxford theologian translated out of the fourth century Latin Vulgate. Gutenburg invented the printing press in the 1450's, and the first book to ever be printed was the Bible (in Latin). With the onset of the Reformation in the early 1500's, the first printings of the Bible in the English language were produced illegally. Tyndale’s version, a New Testament, did not exactly meet with popular critical acclaim as he was incarcerated for 500 days before he was strangled and burned at the stake for heresy in 1536. It was later finished by Myles Coverdale and John Rogers who were Tyndale's  assistants. Coverdale finished translating the Old Testament, and in 1535 he printed the first complete Bible in the English language, making use of Luther's German text and the Latin as sources. The first complete English Bible is known as the Coverdale Bible.

            1582 –I love, I love my calendar girl
Yeah, sweet calendar girl
I love, I love, I love my calendar girl
Each and every day of the year…..Neil Sedaka

Monday-  “Didn’t we have an appointment on October 7?  Pope Gregory XIII implemented  the Gregorian Calendar. In Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, October 4 of this year was followed directly by October 15.  The Gregorian Calendar replaced the Julian Calendar implemented by Julius Caesar.  Caesar's calendar, which consisted of eleven months of 30 or 31 days and a 28-day February (extended to 29 days every fourth year), was actually quite accurate: it erred from the real solar calendar by only 11½ minutes a year. After centuries, though, even a small inaccuracy like this adds up…..just like cost overruns on almost every government project.  By the sixteenth century, it had put the Julian calendar behind the solar calendar by 10 days. Gregory Pope Gregory XIII ordered the advancement of the calendar by 10 days and introduced a new corrective device to curb further error: century years such as 1700 or 1800 would no longer be counted as leap years, unless they were (like 1600 or 2000) divisible by 400. Got it?   The Gregorian calendar year differs from the solar year by only 26 seconds—accurate enough for even the nittiest of nit pickers, since this only adds up to one day's difference every 3,323 years. However, there was still a problem…….the Reformation. Many Protestant countries, including England and the U.S colonies ignored Gregory’s  papal bull. Germany and the Netherlands agreed to adopt the Gregorian calendar in 1698; England and the U.S colonies came around in 1752; Russia only accepted it after the revolution of 1918, and Greece waited until 1923 to join the parade.

            1675 –Friday-  Time, time, time, time, time (Just give me some)
Time, time, time, time, time (Just give me some)
Time, time, time, time, time (Just give me some)
Time, time, time, time, time
Give me some, give me some,
Just give me some, give me some, give me some time...
Give me some... [Tick tock - tick tock]. …..The Mad Hatter…….Christian Huygens was a Dutch astronomer, physicist and telescope lens maker who established the wave theory of light and discovered Saturn’s moon, Titan as well as describing the elongation of Saturn’s rings. On this day, Huygens patented his invention, the pocket watch. Watches or portable clocks had been invented early in the sixteenth century, and by the end of that century were fairly common, but they were clumsy and unreliable since they were driven by a main spring and regulated by a conical pulley and verge escapement; and…… until 1687 they had only one hand ! The first watch whose motion was regulated by a balance spring was made at Paris under Huygens's directions, and presented by him to Louis XIV. He also patented the first pendulum clock in 1656, which he had developed to meet his need for exact time measurement while observing objects in space.

            1723 –Monday- Happy Birthday, Nikolaus Poda von Neuhaus, Austrian entomologist born in Vienna. He was the author of Insecta Musei Graecensis the first purely entomological work to follow the binomial nomenclature of Carolus Linnaeus. It was highlighted by such innovative insect classifications as; “the ones that fly in your ear”; “the ones that taste like chicken”; “the ones that suck your blood and give you horrible diseases”, and “the one with a thorax that looks like Representative Barney Frank”.

            1777-Saturday- Continuing his string of early Revolutionary War defeats, George Washington's troops launched an assault on the British at Germantown, Penn., resulting in heavy American casualties. A heavy morning fog threw Washington's divisions – and plans- into disarray, and by 10 o'clock the battle was over and the Americans were forced into a retreat. However, both sides suffered heavy losses, and the battle demonstrated Washington's strategic abilities. Plus, he learned not to make a complicated attack in an early morning fog. Although…..fog could be his friend too as fog  had helped cover the Continental Army’s retreat after the loss in the Battle of Brooklyn. Coupled with the American victory, led by Horatio Gates, at the Battle of Saratoga in New York on October 17, the Battle of Germantown convinced France to recognize and support American independence and give open military assistance, thus marking a turning point in the American Revolution. The news wasn’t all good. Following the battle, Washington took his troops into winter quarters at Valley Forge.        

            1822-Friday- Happy Birthday Rutherford B. Hayes (brother of Purple Hayes) 19th president of the U.S.—Hayes won the infamous disputed election of 1876 over Democrat Samuel Tilden when with Tilden ahead in electoral votes 184 to 165 with 20 votes in dispute, it went  to a Congressional Committee for resolution (always problematic).  The committee, awarded all 20 to Hayes and he won 185 to 184 (an Oregon Elector was disqualified when it was discovered he was an elected official). Hayes also found a needle in a pile of his personal papers and became the only president to find a needle in a Hayes stack. As president, Hayes ended the Reconstruction period after the Civil War by withdrawing federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana in 1877. And of course you knew that his Vice President was………………….William A. Wheeler.  Hayes also instituted the first Easter Egg Roll on the White House lawn after Easter Egg Bagel and Easter Egg Bialy proved to be unsuccessful.

            1858 – Long distance information give me Memphis, Tennessee
Help me find the party trying to get in touch with me
She could not leave her number but I know who placed the call
My uncle took the message and he wrote it on the wall ……Chuck Berry, Elvis, Johnny Rivers, Bobby Bare, Buck Owens, Flatt & Scruggs, The Animals, The Hollies and Tom Jones.

             Monday-Happy Birthday, Michael Pupin Serbian-American physicist.  Thank him the next time you make a long distance telephone call.  After emigrating to the U.S,  Pupin became an instructor in mathematical physics at Columbia University, New York City. In 1886, he discovered that atoms struck by X rays emit secondary X-ray radiation. This meant that he had developed a means of greatly extending the range of long-distance telephone communication by placing loading coils (of wire) at predetermined intervals along the transmitting wire. He also invented a means for taking short-exposure X-ray photographs. He also hated to be placed on “hold” forced to listen to looped advertisements when making his long distance calls

            1895 –Friday-  Happy Birthday, stone faced, silent film comedian Buster Keaton, born in Piqua, Kan. Keaton starred in dozens of short movies and classic full length movies such as The General and Sherlock Jr. The three top comedians in silent era Hollywood were Keaton, Charlie Chaplin (Charles Chaplin) and Harold Lloyd. All three comics produced, controlled and owned their own films. Keaton was convinced to sell his studio and films to MGM in the 1920s, while Chaplin and Lloyd retained ownership of their films. Chaplin and Lloyd became wealthy, while Keaton endured years of financial and personal problems- imdb.com

            1903 –Saturday- Happy Birthday, John Atanasoff, American electronics engineer. Atanasoff was yet another in the long list of scientists involved in one of “who discovered/invented” the discovery/invention first controversies.  Professor Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry built the world's first electronic-digital computer at Iowa State University between 1939 and 1942. The Atanasoff-Berry Computer involved several innovations in computing, including a binary system of arithmetic, parallel processing, regenerative memory, and a separation of memory and computing functions. Whew!  Meanwhile, elsewhere in Technology Land, Presper Eckert and John Mauchly (Atanasoff had actually sent his ideas to Mauchly for review) were the first to patent a digital computing device, the ENIAC computer. A patent infringement case (Sperry Rand Vs. Honeywell, 1973) resulted in the voiding (It was a “must to a void” as the Beatles would say) the ENIAC patent citing it as a derivative of John Atanasoff's invention. Eckert and Mauchly received most of the credit for inventing the first electronic-digital computer. Historians now believe that the Atanasoff-Berry computer was the first.  What will the textbooks say?  Moreover, what will the Electronic text books say? Stay tuned.

          1927 –Tuesday- “Pass me the hammer and chisel…..oh, and we’re going to need a ladder”. Sculpting began on the face of Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills National Forest of South Dakota. The monument was the brainchild of a South Dakota historian named Doane Robinson, who was looking for a way to attract more tourists to his state. He hired  sculptor Gutzon Borglum to carve the faces into the mountain. Originally planned for Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, and William Henry Harrison,  it would take another 12 years for the images of four of America’s most revered and beloved presidents—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt--to be completed. According to the National Park Service, the first face to be chiseled was that of George Washington.

             1934 –Thursday-  So a neutron walks into a bar, orders a drink, offers to pay and the bartender says, “for you, it’s no charge”. Enrico Fermi measured the speed of a neutron. The neutron had only been discovered in 1932 when James Chadwick used scattering data to calculate the mass of this neutral particle.  Fermi was busy bombarding elements with neutrons (there were 92 known elements at the time).  His summary – “neutrons are really fast…..Wow!.....Look!....There goes another one!”.  Actually that is Prof. Sy Yentz summary. Believe it or not, there are fast neutrons and slow neutrons. Fast neutrons have an energy greater than 1 eV, 0.1 MeV or approximately 1 MeV, depending on the definition. Slow neutrons have an energy less than 1 eV. Remember, eV is an electron volt.  That should clear it up for you.

            1957-Friday The U.S.S.R changed the world as it launched the world’s first artificial satellite,  Sputnik, weighing 183 pounds and taking 98 minutes to orbit the earth in an elliptical path. What did Sputnik look like?- Think basketball with car antennae sticking out and pointing to the rear. This event stunned America, launched the Space Age and, ultimately, a revolution in Science Education. How?  Actually the initial American response was bigger textbooks. What happened in America when the satellite was launched?  Yes, the first of decades (continuing today) wailing over "what is wrong with American education".  Immediately after the Sputnik I launch in October, the U.S. Defense Department responded to the political furor by approving funding for another U.S. satellite project. As a simultaneous alternative to Vanguard (which, unfortunately lifted off about 15 ft off the ground during the first attempt and then collapsed like the New York Mets), Werner von Braun and his Army Redstone Arsenal team began work on the Explorer project.  On January 31, 1958, the United States successfully launched Explorer I. This satellite carried a small scientific payload that eventually discovered the magnetic radiation belts around the Earth, named after principal investigator James Van Allen. The Explorer program continued as a successful ongoing series of lightweight, scientifically useful spacecraft.  The Sputnik launch also led directly to the creation of National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In July 1958, Congress passed the National Aeronautics and Space Act (commonly called the "Space Act"), which created NASA as of October 1, 1958 from the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) and other government agencies. In all there were three Sputnik missions launched by the Soviets and two by the Russians. Sputnik traveled 500 miles above the earth at 18,000 miles-per-hour and circled the globe in 96 minutes. The satellite had two radio transmitters that sent signals even amateur radio operators could pick up.

Sputnik 1 lasted six months in space before falling back into the atmosphere. The Russian word sputnik literally means "co-traveler", "traveling companion" or "satellite. It could also mean “just some more technology we “espionaged”  from the Americans after WW II.” Long term effects of the Sputnik experience include distribution of space anaerobes that infiltrated human brains and caused the people to text message while driving. People with particularly small brains also brush their teeth while driving.

            1957 –Friday-  Same day as Sputnik and because of Sputnik, you have your GPS – Global Positioning System.  Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory scientists tracking Sputnik found they could determine its orbit by analyzing the Doppler shift (The wavelength of light emitted by a moving object is shifted.) If the object is coming toward you, the light is shifted toward shorter wavelengths, blue shifted. If the object is going away from you, the light is shifted toward longer wavelengths, red shifted. The amount of shift is bigger if the emitting object is moving faster…..except when the shift hits the fan.  We don't normally notice this for light. But it is easy to observe for sound) of its radio signals during a single pass. They theorized that if a satellite's position were known and predictable, then the Doppler shift of its signals could be used to locate a receiver on Earth - thus, one could navigate by satellite. A system called Transit, was developed and from 1964 assisted the security of U.S. nuclear deterrent submarines. From 1967, this evolved into a navigation system for all nations, a forerunner of the present Global Positioning System (GPS). Et voila! Now you can find Straight Arrow Road in Beaver Creek, Ohio.

            1957 –Friday- Oh this is just too too much….On the same day as Sputnik was launched.  On the same day as the idea for Global Positioning Systems (GPS)  was hatched….came the debut of Leave it to Beaver.  Leave It to Beaver, proved to be much more popular once reruns began airing, then it was during its actual network run. In the fall of 1958, CBS dropped the series and ABC, having faith in it, picked it up and ran it for an additional 5 years. Starring Hugh Beaumont, Barbara Billingsly, Tony Dow and “Jerry Mathers as the Beaver”, Leave it to Beaver was the first American television show that  was broadcast, behind the Iron Curtain. That, explains , why Ward always wore a suit to dinner. Why, June, was always dressed perfectly. Even when she was doing housework. It also explains, why there are so many references, to God, Sunday School, Breaking Bread, etc. Off setting that was Eddie Haskell, an early version of Vladimir Putin. The last telecast was September 1963.

            1955 –Tuesday-  Take that Sysiphus!  The Brooklyn Dodgers won the World Series at last, beating the New York Yankees 2-0. They’d lost the championship seven times already, and they’d lost five times just to the Yanks--in 1941, 1947, 1949, 1952 and 1953. But in 1955, thanks to nine brilliant innings in the seventh game from 23-year-old lefty pitcher Johnny Podres, “Dem Bums”, starring Duke Snider, Roy Campanella, Gil Hodges, Carl Furillo, and Don Newcombe,  finally managed to beat the Bombers for the first (and last) time. Three years later they lost their soul and moved to La La Land. …where they would beat the Yankees again in 1963 thanks to Brooklyn’s Sandy Koufax.

           1970 –Sunday-  Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose,
Nothing don't mean nothing honey if it ain't free, now now.
And feeling good was easy, Lord, when he sang the blues,
You know feeling good was good enough for me,
Good enough for me and my Bobby McGee. Rock singer, Janis Joplin went kaput from a heroin overdose at the Landmark Hotel in Hollywood.  The gravelly voiced singer started with Big Brother and the Holding Company, then formed the Kozmic Blues Band in 1969 and finally formed Full Tilt Boogie but the latter record was posthumously released. She was 27 years old qualifying her for membership in the “27 Club” – rock stars who when kaput at age twenty seven.  Other members include, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Kobain, Brian Jones, legendary Bluesman, Robert Johnson, Jesse Belvin (Goodnight My Love), Alan Wilson (Canned Heat – Goin Up the Country), and Ron “Pig Pen” McKernan of the Grateful Dead

            1971-Monday- Q: What did Avogadro teach his students in math class?
A: Moletiplication

Q: What kind of fruit did Avogadro eat in the summer?
A: Watermolens

Q: Why was there only one Avogadro?
A: When they made him, they broke the Moled

Q: What kept Avogadro in bed for two months?
A: Moleonucleosis ……………….. The mole - the amount of substance (matter) – not the creature digging holes in my back yard- was adopted as a chemical measurement added to the six base quantities of the SI (International System of scientific units). The Italian chemist Amadeo Avogadro (1776-1856) believed that particles could be composed of molecules and that molecules could be composed of still simpler units, atoms. The number of molecules in a mole (one gram molecular weight) was termed Avogadro's number (sometimes called Avogadro's constant) in honor of Avogadro's theories. Avogadro's number has been experimentally determined to be 6.023x10²³ molecules per gram-mole. Got it?  An alternate Avocado’s number is 1. That is how many avocados should be but in a fresh salad.  The mole, of course you knew this was coming, replaced the groundhog, which had replaced the chipmunk as a unit of measurement.  Thus we have “the mole the merrier”.

            1992 –Sunday- So, you’re sitting at home watching television and a Boeing 747 comes crashing through your window.  A cargo plane carrying 114 tons of machinery crashed into an apartment building near an airport in Amsterdam, Holland. Four people aboard the plane and approximately 100 more in the apartment building lost their lives in the disaster. The plane, an El-Al Boeing 747 cargo jet had just taken off from Amsterdam in good weather. However, only minutes after takeoff, fires broke out in the plane’s third and fourth engines and they fell right off the wing. The crew tried to make it back to the airport but crashed into the building.

            2004 –Monday- SpaceShipOne  won the 10 million dollar Ansari X Prize for private spaceflight. SpaceShipOne was the first private craft to fly into space as it  exceeded an altitude of 328,000 feet twice within the span of a 14 day period The Ansari X PRIZE was modeled after the Orteig Prize, won by Charles Lindbergh in 1927 for being the first man to fly non-stop from New York to Paris……..upon landing he realized he had forgotten his passport and had to fly back to New York to get it.

Back to Calendar

5         

1641-Saturday- Take it with a grin of salt.......Yogi Berra………Samuel Winslow of Massachusetts received the first patent in the New World.  It was for the manufacture of salt.  The oldest form of a patent was seen during the Middle Ages. Medieval rulers would grant an exclusive right to a "monopoly." This was an attempt to raise funds without taxing, although taxes were still imposed.  This later formalized into “letters patent” in England. These letters patent were issued by the British Royalty to inventors of their choice. During the colonial era, all intellectual property in America was owned by Great Britain. In order to protect an invention, a formal approval from the colony's chief was required. Winslow’s patent for a new method of making salt was granted by the Massachusetts General Court

            1713 –Thursday-  In the encyclopedia, E-n-c-y-c-l-o-p-e-d-i-a …..Jimmy Dodd on the Mickey Mouse Club…. (that’s how Professor Sy Yentz learned to spell encyclopedia) …Happy Birthday, Denis Diderot, French philosopher and famous as an encylopedist.  Encyclopedias date back to 2nd-century Rome. But Ephraim Chambers's English encyclopedia broke new ground in 1728. In his  Encyclopédie, ou Dictionanaire raisonné des sciences, des arts, et des métiers pars une société de gens de lettres, Diderot undertook the bulk of the editorial work and the composition of many articles. He was assisted by the mathematician and philosopher Jean le Rond d'Alembert and many anonymous contributors including Voltaire, Montesquieu, Turgot, Condillac, and Rousseau. Under Diderot's editorship, 17 volumes of text and 11 of plates were published between 1751 and 1772. At its completion, it consisted of 35 volumes of text, plates, and indices. The Encyclopedia was intended as a compendium of all valuable knowledge and as a guide to the interdependence of the various disciplines and spheres of enquiry and technology.

            1804-Friday- Send lawyers, guns and money
The shit has hit the fan
Send lawyers, guns and money
Send lawyers, guns and money
Get me out of this
Send lawyers, guns and money
You know the shit has hit the fan ….Warren Zevon…..Happy Birthday, Robert Parrott, U.S. inventor who developed the rifled cannon known as the Parrott gun, the most formidable cannon of its time. In addition the parrott gun could request a cracker, whistle, and sit on your shoulder. Used by both sides during the Civil War, Parrott Rifles were manufactured by Parrott at the West Point Foundry in Cold Spring New York in different sizes, from 10-pounders up to a 300-pounder. In the field, the 10- and 20-pounders were the most commonly used.

            1813-Tuesday-  At age 45, the great chief and Indian leader Tecumseh was killed during the Battle of the Thames near Ontario, Canada during the War of 1812. A combined British and Indian force was defeated by General William Harrison's American army. The leader of the Indian forces was Tecumseh, the Shawnee chief who organized intertribal resistance to the encroachment of white settlers on Indian lands. Harrison went on to greater fame winning the battle of Tippicanoe. This led to his 1840 presidential slogan of "Tippicanoe and Tyler too."

            1830-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday Chester A. Arthur, (Chet Art to his friends) 21st president of the U.S. When Chester Arthur was Vice-President, who was President?  Did you say James Garfield? What happened to him? Did you say shot and then suffered a long decline into kaputedness thanks to incompetent doctors in 1881? Arthur’s presidency was notable for the Pendleton Act which created the modern civil service system. Arthur not only signed the bill into law but readily enforced the new system. His staunch support of the law lead former supporter to become disenchanted with him. This probably cost him the republican nomination in 1884.

            1848 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Edward Livingston Trudeau pioneer in the treatment of tuberculosis. As a result of taking care of his brother, who had tuberculosis, Trudeau, in turn, developed the disease. He went to live in the Adirondacks – a mountain range in northern New York State- spending his time in the fresh air, (hopefully not the winter) and regained his health. Seeking to aid others suffering from tuberculosis, he founded in 1884, at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, the Trudeau Sanatorium, where he employed the open-air treatment of the disease and organized in 1894 the first laboratory for the study of tuberculosis.  Tuberculosis is a bacterial disease usually affecting the lungs -pulmonary TB. It is spread through the air when a person with untreated pulmonary TB coughs or sneezes. Prolonged exposure to a person with untreated TB usually is necessary for infection to occur.- as with Trudeau and his brother.

1864 –Wednesday-  They're gonna put me in the movies
They're gonna make a big star out of me …..Ringo Starr……..Happy Birthday, Louis Lumiere, French inventor who has one of the strongest claims to the title of inventing movies.  It  was he (with his brother Auguste) who invented the cinematographe: a machine that improved on Edison’s kinetescope and combined the functions of camera and projector and was thus able to project films onto a screen to an audience. The invention was patented on February 13 1895, and a program of short films directed and photographed by Louis was first unveiled to the general public on  December, 28 1895. Lumiere lived long enough to become the first president of the Cannes Film Festival.  

            1864 –Wednesday-  The Indian city of Calcutta was almost totally destroyed by a            cyclone. 60,000 people died. Cyclones are huge revolving storms caused by winds   blowing around a central area of low atmospheric pressure. In the northern         hemisphere, cyclones are called hurricanes or typhoons and their winds blow in      an anti-clockwise circle. In the southern hemisphere, these tropical storms are known as cyclones, whose winds blow in a clockwise circle.

1869-Tuesday- [Aside] Though this be madness, yet there is method in't…. Polonius:
…Hamlet Act 2, scene 2, 193–20. The first U.S. patent for a "water velocipede" (yes, a bicycle for the water) was granted to F.A. Spofford and Matthew G. Raffington of Columbus, Ohio. It was fitted with removable floats and paddle wheels. The great success of the bicycle as a means of transportation on land spurred many would be inventors  to develop an aquatic counterpart.

            1882- Thursday -Just remember - when you think all is lost, the future remains. Happy Birthday Robert Goddard  U.S physicist and father of modern rocketry. In 1914, Goddard received two U.S. patents. One was for a rocket using liquid fuel. The other was for a two or three stage rocket using solid fuel. His classic document was a study that he wrote in 1916 requesting funds  from  the Smithsonian Institution so that he could continue his research. This was later published along with his subsequent research in a Smithsonian Miscellaneous Publication No. 2540 (January 1920). In a piece of classic understatement, it was entitled A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes. As befitting a “father”, Goddard had a number of firsts; the first  to explore mathematically the practicality of using rocket propulsion to reach high altitudes and even the moon in 1912);  the first to prove, by actual static test, that a rocket will work in a vacuum, that it needs no air to push against;  the first to develop and shoot a liquid fuel rocket, March 16, 1926 – in a cabbage field (note- attempts launches in a corn beef and cabbage field were less successful;  the first  to shoot a scientific payload (barometer and camera) in a rocket flight   in 1929, Auburn, Massachusetts); the first to use vanes in the rocket motor blast for guidance  in 1932, New Mexico; the first to develop gyro control apparatus for rocket flight , again in 1932, New Mexico); the first to develop the Death Star with which the Emperor attempted to take over the Universe only to be foiled by Luke Skywalker and Han Solo….

1892 –Wednesday-Robbing people with a six gun
I fought the law and the law won
I fought the law and the law won  …..Bobby Fuller……….The notorious Dalton Gang went kapt.  The American bank robbers, possibly attempting to get recognized by the Guiness Book of World Records, attempted to rob two banks in the same day in Coffeyville, Kansas.  Big mistake. Cleverly wearing false beards so the wouldn’t be recognized (the rifles they carried may have been a giveaway though), Emmett, Grat,  and Bob, Dalton along with Dick Broadwell, and Bill Power rode into Coffeyville. As Grat, Broadwell, and Power walked into the Condon Bank and Bob and Emmett entered the First National Bank. The beards fooled no one and the heavily armed, angry,  townspeople attacked the gang as they tried to get away.  Emmett Dalton, who had been shot more than 20 times, was the only one that managed to survive. He received a life sentence for the murder of the men who tried to stop him but was released a mere 15 years later. He lived a peaceful and law-abiding life until his death in 1937.

1902 –Sunday--A-bay, B-E-bee, B-I-bicky-bi, B-O bo, bicky-bi bo, B-U bu, bicky bi bo bu.
C-A-cay, C-E-cee, C-I-cicky-ci, C-O co, cicky-ci co, C-U cu, cicky ci co cu.
D-A-day, D-E-dee, D-I-dicky-di, D-O do, dicky-di do, D-U du, dicky di do du.
F-A-fay, F-E-fee, F-I-ficky-fi, F-O fo, Ficky-fi fo, F-U fu, ficky fi fo fu.
G-A-gay, G-E-gee, G-I-gicky-gi, G-O go, Gicky-gi go, G-U gu, gicky gi go gu.
Dat-da-da-da
H-A-hay, H-E-hee, H-I-hicky-hi, H-O ho, hicky-hi ho, H-U hu, hicky hi ho hu.
J-A-jay, J-E-jee, J-I-jicky-ji, J-O jo, Jicky-ji jo, J-U ju, jicky ji jo ju.
K-A-kay, K-E-kee, K-I-kicky-ki, K-O ko, Kicky-ki ko, K-U ku, kicky ki ko ku.
L-A-lay, L-E-lee, L-I-licky-li, L-O lo, Licky-li lo, L-U lu, licky li lo lu.
M-A-may, M-E-mee, M-I-micky-mi, M-O mo, Micky-mi mo, M-U mu, micky mi mo mu…..Alphabet Song, The 3 Stooges…….Moe, Curly and Happy Birthday, Larry Fine, American comedian and the fuzzy-haired member of the Three Stooges, noted cultural iconoclasts of the 1930s,40s and 50s. The trio, Moe, Larry, and Shemp first appeared on Broadway in A Night in Venice. Larry also appeared in The Stooges first full length motion picture, Soup to Nuts, in 1930 for 20th Century Fox. Of course, Larry went on with Moe and Curly to form The Three Stooges, who appeared in the Columbia shorts beginning in 1934. Shemp came and went but nyuk nyuk nyuk, we liked Curley.

1923-Friday-  American astronomer Edwin Hubble identified the first inter galactic (Andromeda) Cepheid variable star. A variable star is someone (Warren Beatty  who makes a box office hit one year and then a total bomb, like Ishtar, the next.  Actually a Cepheid variable star is one that oscillates between two states (Nevada and California): In one of the states, the star is compact and large temperature and pressure gradients build up in the star. These large pressures cause the star to expand. When the star is in its expanded state, there is a much weaker pressure gradient in the star. Without the pressure gradient to support the star against gravity, the star contracts and the star returns to its compressed state. Earlier, Henrietta Levitt, part of a group of female astronomers working at Harvard College Observatory, had shown there was a tight correlation between the period of a Cepheid variable star and its luminosity (intrinsic brightness). By knowing the luminosity of a source it is possible to measure the distance to that source by measuring how bright it appears to us: the dimmer it appears the farther away it is. Thus, by measuring the period of these stars (and hence their luminosity) and their apparent brightness, Hubble was able to show that these nebula were not clouds within our own Galaxy, but were external galaxies far beyond the edge of our own Galaxy.

1929 –Saturday- Happy Birthday,  Richard F. Gordon Jr., American astronaut.  Gordon was one of the third group of astronauts named by NASA in October 1963. He served as backup pilot for the Gemini 8 flight. He  piloted  the 3-day Gemini XI mission in 1966--on which rendezvous with an Agena was achieved in less than one orbit. In 1969 the good news was occupied the command module pilot seat on Apollo 12, November 14-24.  Other crewmen on man's second lunar landing mission were Charles Conrad, spacecraft commander, and Alan L. Bean, lunar module pilot. The bad news was Conrad and Bean landed on the moon. Throughout the 31-hour lunar surface stay by Conrad and Bean, Gordon remained in lunar orbit aboard the command module, a sort of designated driver.

1930 –Sunday-  Happy Birthday, Pavel R. Popovich, the first Ukrainian cosmonaut who piloted the Vostok 4 spacecraft, launched August 12, 1962. He and Andriyan G. Nikolayev, who was launched a day earlier in Vostok 3, became the first two men to be in space simultaneously. Popovich was given the code phrase 'observing thunderstorms' to be used if he felt severe motion sickness and needed to return on the next opportunity. Unfortunately he actually did report seeing thunderstorms over the Gulf of Mexico, and ground control took this as a request for an early return, causing a scramble before the misunderstanding was cleared up. http://www.astronautix.com/flights/vostok4.htm

1930 –Sunday Many a tear has to fall, but it’s all in the game…Tommy Edwards…...Happy Birthday, Reinhard Selten, German mathematician who shared the 1994 Nobel Prize for Economics with John F. Nash (yes, the same John Nash from A Beautiful Mind) and John C. Harsanyi for their development of game theory, a branch of mathematics that examines rivalries among competitors with mixed interests. Game theory is the study of the ways in which strategic interactions among rational players produce outcomes with respect to the preferences (or utilities) of those players, none of which might have been intended by any of them. It’s all too much for the Gnus but http://faculty.lebow.drexel.edu/McCainR//top/eco/game/game.html has a good explanation.

1930 –Sunday-  Laura Ingalls –no,  not that Laura Ingalls - became the first woman to make a transcontinental airplane flight as she departed from Roosevelt Field, New York. She flew her D.H. Gypsy Moth bi-plane to Grand Central Air Terminal, Glendale, Cal., making nine stops and arriving four days later. She logged 30 hrs 27 min. of flying time. Or, just about the same time as it would have taken if she had to change planes at O'Hare airport today.

1931 –Monday- Oh, Oh big ol' jet airliner
Don't carry me too far away
Oh, Oh big ol' jet airliner
Cause it's here that I've got to stay …….Steve Miller…….Speaking of flights (see 1930 above), Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon completed the first nonstop flight across the Pacific Ocean, arriving in Washington state about 41 hours after leaving Japan…or just about the same time as it would have taken to get from O’Hare airport’s  Concourse L in Terminal 3 to Concourse C in Terminal 1.

1947-Sunday- The first T.V. broadcast of a Presidential Address was made from the White House by Harry S. Truman. “...and I live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. So that's my address.” Actually, it was asking Americans to cut back on their use of grain in order to help starving Europeans. At the time of Truman's food-conservation speech, Europe was still recovering from World War II and suffering from famine.

1959 –Sunday- Oh the shark babe, has such teeth dear ….. Mack the Knife by Bobby Darin reached number 1 on the Billboard the charts and stayed there for 9 weeks. The finger snapping Darin, who was transitioning from rock star (Splish Splash) to night club crooner,  recorded the song originally Die Moritat von Mackie Messer, composed by Kurt Weill with lyrics by Bertolt Brecht for their music drama Die Dreigroschenoper, or, as it is known in English, The Threepenny Opera. Mack the Knife replaced Sleepwalk by Santo and Johnny and was in turn replaced by Mr. Blue by the Fleetwoods.

1966 –Wednesday- A Bi Gezunt: So long as you're healthy. Near Detroit, Michigan, there was a partial core meltdown at the Enrico Fermi demonstration nuclear breeder reactor caused by a sodium cooling system malfunction.  It was announced that the radiation was contained...yeah...sure...and the check is in the mail......This resulted in mutations in humans that cause them to never use their turn signal when driving. A partial core meltdown, thin the more famous Three Mile Island,  occurs in a reactor, the reactor "melts". That is, the temperature rises in the core so much that the fuel rods actually turn to liquid, like ice turns into water when heated. If the core continued to heat, the reactor would get so hot that the steel walls of the core would also melt. This was a partial core meltdown. In a complete reactor meltdown, the extremely hot (about 2700º Celsius) molten uranium fuel rods would melt through the bottom of the reactor and actually sink about 50 feet into the earth beneath the power plant. The molten uranium would react with groundwater, producing large explosions of radioactive steam and debris that would affect nearby towns and population centers.

            1969- And now for something completely different.  The first episode of the famous comedy show Monty Python's Flying Circus aired on BBC. Possibly the funniest show ever televised, starring John Cleese, Michael Palin, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and Graham Chapman, along with American animator Terry Gilliam, it was buried late at night and was moved round the schedules to make way for other programs. Occasionally it was dropped altogether, while certain regions of the UK never got to see it at all. Despite all this, the show developed a significant word-of-mouth following; enough for the BBC to commission a second series in 1970. After the second series, the Pythons expanded it into a movie with the release of And Now For Something Completely Different. The third series of Flying Circus was shown in 1972-73. Of course they did make a few movies   too, Monty Python and the Holy Grail,  Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, and Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life. Highlights of the first episode included: Historical Impersonations- Cardinal Richelieu as Petula Clark and Marcel Marceau mimes a man being struck on the head by a sixteen-ton weight; schoolboys 'I want to have Raquel Welch dropped on top of me. She's got a big bottom!' and insurance agents; cops and robbers; Probearound looks at Magic and the police force; A.T. Hun turns himself in 'Curses! Curses!'; letters of protest, animated letter falls apart; Psychiatrist Larch sees a man about strange voices the man is hearing, man goes to see Larch's friend who specializes in these sort of things and gets an expensive operation, man found to have squatters in his stomach 'Are you rolling your own jelly babies in there?'; animation- man complains 'What a way to end a series',

1974 –Saturday -  Walkin' along my merry way
Singin' a song I will be gay
I found a love and love is here to stay
Walking along just feeling glad
Singin' a song I won't be sad
Oh, happy day
I'm just walkin' along

When I'm walkin' feel just like a king
When I'm singin' don't care 'bout a thing
The reason I feel the way I do
You love me, whoo
I love you, who-ooh …….The Diamonds…..In a month that featured the birth of the father of rocketry, Robert Goddard, a non-stop flight across the Pacific, and the first woman to make a  transcontinental flight,  American David Kunst completed the first round-the-world journey on foot. Kunst, who obviously was not in a hurry and had nothing better to do, took four years and 21 pairs of shoes to complete the 14,500-mile journey across the land masses of four continents. He left his hometown of Waseca, Minnesota, on June 20, 1970. He completed his journey in 1974 . When asked why he said "have you seen the price of gas these days?  And don't get me started about airfares...."

1984 –Friday-  Astronaut Marc Garneau became the first Canadian in space as payload specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger.  With 7, it was the largest crew to that point.  They  deployed Earth Radiation Budget Satellite; performed high resolution Earth imagery.  The peace loving communists of the Soviet Union in response to the American Strategic Defence Initiative and continued military use of the shuttle, the Soviet Union fired a 'warning shot' from the Terra-3 laser complex at Sary Shagan. The facility tracked Challenger with a low power laser on 10 October 1984. This caused malfunctions to on-board equipment and discomfort / temporary blinding of the crew, leading to a US diplomatic protest.....and we know how effective they are......

2009 –Monday....Ego venit ego saw ego dug .....A "peculiar" horned tyrannosaur, about 70 million years old was added to the family tree of the king of dinosaurs. Dubbed Alioramus altai – alternate name was Kingus Larryum- (named after Mongolia's Altai Mountains), the slim tyrannosaur was dug up from a fossil site in Mongolia's Gobi Desert in 2001. "This new tyrannosaur is small-bodied and possesses a bizarre long-snouted and gracile skull with eight discrete horns," we were infomed by Proceedings of the National Academies of Science study authors led by Stephen Brusatte of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Compared to Tyrannosaurus, this new animal is like a ballerina, (which explained the fossilized tutu) " says Brusatte, in a statement. When alive, the dinosaur weighed a mere 810 pounds and was only about 13 feet long, small for a tyrannosaur.

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6         

National Birds of Prey Conservation Week ...... prey? Do atheistic birds have a separate week.

            National Fire Prevention Week...note, this week is always held during the week of October, 8th, the anniversary of the Great Chicago Fire

            105 BC – Tuesday – A big day for Roman battles (but then most days were big days for Roman battles) as we have three occurring on Oct. 6. First, the Battle of Arausio as the Cimbri dealt  the heaviest defeat ever on the Roman army of Gnaeus Mallius Maximus. This conflict was the result of the migration of a large federation of Germanic and Gallic tribes, led by the Cimbri and Teutones (led by Tommy Teutone singing 867-5309).  After their victory the Germans did not take advantage of the situation but split into three parts, under Boiorix, Teutobod and Getorix respectively. Boiorix decides to march to Spain for Tapas via a route north of Roman Gaul. Teutobod went to Spain via a more southerly route and Getorix and the gang stayed in Central Gaul.

            69 BC –Sunday- At the  Battle of Tigranocerta, forces of the Roman Republic defeated the army of the Kingdom of Armenia led by King Tigranes the Great. The battle arose from the Third Mithridatic War (the last of the three) being fought between Roman Republic and Mithridates VI of Pontus, whose daughter was married to Tigranes. Mithridates, a real pain in the  tuchus to the Romans,  fled to seek shelter with his son-in-law, and Rome invaded the Kingdom of Armenia. The Roman force was led by Consul Lucius Licinius Lucullus, and Tigranes was defeated. His capital city of Tigranocerta was lost to Rome as a result.

            68 BC –Saturday – A year later and Tigranes was back again for the Battle of Artaxata. This time Lucullus again defeated Tigranes who was demoted to Tigranes The Pretty Good But Not Great Enough to Beat the Romans.  Two years later, at the Battle of the Lycus - Pompey the Great decisively defeated Mithridates VI, effectively ending the Third Mithridatic War

            1600 –Friday-  Jacopo Peri's Euridice, (librettist, Ottavio Rinuccini )the earliest surviving opera, had its première performance in Florence. This was the beginning of the Baroque Period. The opera was performed for the wedding of Henry IV (“Paris is worth a Mass”)of France to Marie de' Medici. Following the opera the groom, in a suit of armor by Ralph Lauren and the bride in Vera Wang and their guests enjoyed the music mix of D.J Savonarola as they did the Macarena and the Electric Slide.

            1683  -Wednesday-  The first Mennonites arrived in America. Quaker, William Penn had offered 5,000 acres acres of land in the colony of Pennsylvania and the freedom to practice their religion.  The Mennonites, members of a Protestant sect founded by Menno Simons in the 16th century, were widely persecuted in Europe. Mennonite Francis Daniel Pastorious led a group from Krefeld, Germany, and founded Germantown, the first German settlement in America and now part of the city of Philadelphia. Both Mennonites (or Anabaptists) and Quakers (Friends Society) are peace faiths born out of a movement of groups who objected to basic tenets of the Church of England..

            1846-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday George Westinghouse, American engineer and inventor. He founded his own company to manufacturer his invention, the air brake. Compressed air pushes on a piston in a cylinder. The piston is connected to a brake shoe which can rub on the train wheel, creating friction and stopping the train. Before air brakes, trains used a primitive brake system that required an operator, or brakeman, in each car to apply a hand brake at the signal of the train director or engineer. He began at age 21 to work on a new tool he invented to guide derailed train cars back onto the track. For the next 46 years he produced safer rail transportation, steam turbines, gas lighting and heating, and electricity. In a shocking development, in 1910 he invented a compressed air spring for taking the shock out of automobile riding.

            1866 –Saturday-  All we hear is Radio ga ga
Radio goo goo
Radio ga ga
All we hear is Radio ga ga
Radio blah blah
Radio what's new?
Radio, someone still loves you! …..Queen…..Happy Birthday, Reginald Fessenden, Canadian inventor.  Think of him when you turn on a radio.  He discovered amplitude modulation (AM) radio and explained its scientific principles. In fact, Fessenden is second only to Edison – in fact he worked as a chemist for Edison for a while -  in the number of patents held in his name, including, included the radio direction finder (a type of compass), the submarine fathometer (an echo depth finder), and a turboelectric drive for battleships.   In 1906, Reginald Fessenden became the first person to broadcast words and music over radio waves……”And moving up the charts in this week’s Top Forty is Billy Ray Cyrus with  Achy Breaky Heart.

            1866-Saturday-  The first train robbery in the United States occurred as the Reno gang carried out the first robbery of a moving train in the U.S., making off with over $10,000 from an Ohio & Mississippi train in Jackson County, Indiana. Prior to this innovative criminal breakthrough, robberies had taken place only on trains sitting at stations or freight yards. The Reno brothers came to a rather unhappy end two years later as they all were finally captured after committing a series of train robberies and other criminal offenses. In December of that year, a mob stormed the Indiana jail where the bandits were being held and lynched the brothers Frank, Simeon and William Reno (their brother John had been caught earlier and was already serving time in a different prison) and fellow gang member Charlie Anderson. They were promptly arrested for loitering and told to stop “handing around.”

            1893-Friday Cream of Wheat, a hot breakfast cereal (that can leave your mouth so gooey and sticky that you can’t speak), was created by millers in North Dakota. After all, what else is there to do in North Dakota? There was an economic crisis in 1893 – the “Panic of 1893”.  A small flour mill in Grand Forks, North Dakota was in danger of closing.  One of the partners, Tom Amidon, sold the others on the idea of producing for profit a “breakfast porridge” which he had used at home. Amidon’s “porridge” was that part of the wheat taken from the first break rolls of the flour mill.  Referred to as “the top of the stream,” this is the source of flour of the highest grade.  Amidon called it “Cream of Wheat” and breakfast history was made.

            1889-Friday- The movie wasn’t so hot, it didn’t have much of a plot
We fell asleep, our goose is cooked, our reputation is shot
Wake up little Susie
Wake up little Susie, ….Everly Brothers………..First movies shown at the Thomas A. Edison laboratory using his kinetescope. “Here's me on my summer vacation. Here’s me at the beach." Here’s me in the water." “ Watch when this wave comes and knocks down the sand castle’. Here’s me eating lunch”.......”Here’s another one – Rocky Meets Shrek..

            1903 –Tuesday- Happy Birthday, Ernest Walton, Irish physicist.  Walton is the only Irishman to win the Nobel Prize for a science. Walton “split the atom”.  On April, 14 1932, Walton and  John Douglas Cockroft used their proton accelerator to bombard a target made of lithium, the third lightest natural element. The lithium nucleus contains 3 protons and 4 neutrons. The proton bombardment induced the lithium nucleus to disintegrate into 2 alpha particles, each composed of 2 protons and 2 neutrons, and those disintegrations produced little flashes of light on a scintillation screen. This was the first time an artificial disintegration of an atomic nucleus was witnessed. Oh, the other non-science Irish Nobel Prize winners? William Butler Yeats ( Literature 1923), George Bernard Shaw (Literature 1925), Samuel Beckett (Literature 1969), Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan ( Peace -1976), Seamus Heaney (1995), John Hume and David Trimble ( Peace -1998).

            1914-Tuesday- Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity. Happy Birthday Thor Heyerdahl, Norwegian explorer and author of KonTiki, , the story of  about sailing from Peru to Hawaii on a raft.  He was a Norweigan ethnologist and adventurer who organized and led Kon-Tiki, 1947 and Ra 1969-70, transoceanic scientific expeditions on replica rafts.  Gilligan, the Skipper, Ginger and the Professor were alsoon board.  There were also daily jazzerzize and hokey pokey events. Both expeditions were intended to prove the possibility of ancient transoceanic contacts between distant civilizations and cultures. The balsa wood raft Kon-Tiki was built as a copy of a prehistoric South American vessel and was constructed of nine balsa logs collected from Equador.  Heyerdahl built Ra I, the 45 foot long copy of an ancient Egyptian papyrus vessel in 1969. It sailed from Egypt to Barbados. It almost made it but had to be abandoned. The Ra had no “sis boom ba”. Ten months later  Ra II went on to complete a successful transatlantic crossing, covering the 4000 miles to Barbados in just 57 days. Kon Tiki is honored each year during the horse race at Churchill Downs, the Kon Tiki Derby.

            1927-Thursday Toot-toot Tootsie, goodbye.
Oh no, Tootsie, don't cry.
That choo-choo train that takes me
Away from you, no words can
Tell how sad it makes me.
Kiss me tootsie and then
Do it over again.
Watch for the mail
I'll never fail.
If you don't get a letter
Then you'll know I'm in jail.
Toot-toot Tootsie, good-bye.
Toot-toot Tootsie, good-bye! The premiere of The Jazz Singer, thought of as first talking motion picture—note this to the day was 38 years after the first movies shown by Edison.. The Jazz Singer starred vaudeville star Al Jolson, May MacAvoy, and Warner Oland (who would go on to be one of the Charlie Chans).

The film featured such songs as Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Mother o' Mine, Mammy, and Blue Skies. Jolson's first spoken words—Wait a minute, wait a minute, you ain't heard nothing yet. Wait a minute, I tell you. You ain't heard nothing yet. Do you want to hear 'Toot, Toot, Tootsie?. The Jazz Singer  was not the first sound film, nor the first 'talkie' film or the first movie musical. It was the first feature-length Hollywood "talkie" film in which spoken dialogue was used as part of the dramatic action. It is, however, only part-talkie (25%) with sound-synchronized, vocal musical numbers and accompaniment. The first "all-talking" (or all-dialogue) feature-length picture was Warner Brothers’ gangster film Lights of New York  in 1928. Regretably, the Jazz Singer was not allowed to rest on its laurels. An execrable remake make starring Neil Diamond was released in 1982.   

             1956 –Saturday-  Dr. Albert Sabin developed the oral Polio vaccine. In 1952, In Dr. Jonas Salk was the first to develop a successful vaccine using a mixture of the three types of virus, grown in monkey kidney cultures. He developed a process using formalin, a chemical that inactivated the whole virus. With Dr. Sabin’s live, oral form of vaccine in which the infectious part of the virus was inactivated.  The Sabin oral vaccine is given in 3 doses in the first two years of life, and a booster is given when the child starts school. The advantages of a live, oral vaccine are its long-lasting immunity, the prevention of re-infection of the digestive tract, and the lower cost of administering the vaccine orally because sterile syringes and needles are not necessary.

            1976 –Wednesday- Things are more like they are now that they have ever been…Gerald Ford…… In a debate with Democratic candidate and space cadet,  Jimmy Carter, slapstick President Gerald R. Ford asserted there was "no Soviet domination of eastern Europe." Ford later conceded that he had misspoken although that and his propensity to fall down stairs probably cost him the election.

            1981 –Tuesday-  Egyptian President Anwar Sadat paid the price for trying to accommodate Islamic extremists as he was assassinated by same as he reviewed troops on the anniversary of the Yom Kippur War. The terrorists, all wearing army uniforms, stopped in front of the reviewing stand and fired shots and threw grenades into a crowd of Egyptian government officials. Sadat, who was shot four times, died two hours later. Ten other people also died in the attack.

            1991 –Sunday- They tried to make me go to rehab but I said 'no, no, no'
Yes I've been black ….Amy Winehouse……Serial bride, Elizabeth Taylor was married for the 8th time to one Larry Fortensky whom she had met in re-hab. The roll of honor for Taylor, who went from serious actress to celebrity – with a penchant for being hospitalized with life threatening diseases when she needed publicity- train wreck, started with hotel heir, Nicky Hilton, then actor, Michael Wilding, then producer Mike Todd, then singer Eddie Fisher (soap operaishly stolen from actress Debbie Reynolds), then actor Richard Burton (stolen from Sybil Burton), then Richard Burton again, then politician John Warner and then the immortal Mr. Fortensky.

            1995 –Friday-  The first discovery of a planet around a star similar to the sun was announced. The planet is about 160 times the mass of the Earth around the star 51 Pegasus. Visitors from the planet have included Senator Charles Schumer of New York, Wolf Blitzer of CNN, Madonna and acolyte Lady Ga Ga, Sylvester Stallone, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

            1997-Sunday-  American biology professor Stanley B. Prusiner won the Nobel Prize for medicine for discovering "prions". A prion is a nonliving, self-replicating infectious agent made of protein (human equivalents include the cast of Operation Repo). . It can reproduce with the aid of its host's biological machinery, like a virus. "Prion" is short for "proteinaceous infectious particle."

            2007 –Saturday- Some people will do anything to avoid escalating airfares, checked baggage charges, lines at security, lines at passport control, idiots on cruise line ships, ridiculous gasoline prices, and sharing a train compartment with someone who hasn’t bathed since 1973. Jason Lewis of Great Britain left  Greenwich, London in July, 1994 to travel round the globe while providing his own power.  Expedition 360 was the first man-powered circumnavigation of the globe.  Using no motors or sails, only  bicycles, in-line skates, kayaks, swimming, rowing, walking and a unique pedal powered boat- a pedalo- Lewis and an international team to traveled over 45,000 miles across five continents, two oceans and one sea from July 12, 1994 – October 6, 2007. Lewis crossed the Atlantic and Pacific oceans in a wooden pedal boat. He roller bladed across North America. He was hit by an idiot driver in Pueblo, Colorado and spent nine months recovering from two broken legs before returning to the trek in May 1996. He kayaked from Australia to Singapore. He biked (no training wheels) from Singapore to the Himalayas. He hiked through the Himalayas. He pedaloed (pedalos work by utilizing the pedaling motion to rotate a paddle wheel similar to the propulsion used in the earlier paddle wheel boats) from Mumbai (formerly Bombay), India crossing the Indian Ocean to Djibouti (where he got to “shake Djibouti”).  The expedition’s objectives were to promote environmentally friendly travel and raise awareness of climate change among young people.

            2010-Saturday-  A research team achieved the quantum entanglement of three solid-state qubits, or quantum bits, for the first time. The  accomplishment represents the first step towards quantum error correction, a crucial aspect of future quantum computing. Follow closely: according to the journal Nature, The rules that govern the world of the very small, quantum mechanics, are known for being bizarre. One of the strangest tenets is something called quantum entanglement, in which two or more objects (such as particles of light, called photons) become inextricably linked, so that measuring certain properties of one object reveals information about the other(s), even if they are separated by thousands of miles. Einstein found the consequences of entanglement so unpalatable he famously dubbed it "spooky action at a distance." And whither the errors?  Such errors might include a cosmic ray hitting one of the qubits and switching it from a 0 to a 1 state, or vice versa. By replicating the qubits, the computer can confirm whether all three are in the same state (as expected) by checking each one against the others. Now you can sleep better at night.

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  7    

1542 –Wednesday- Twenty-six miles across the sea
Santa Catalina is a-waitin' for me
Santa Catalina, the island of romance
Romance, romance, romance

Water all around it everywhere
Tropical trees and the salty air
But for me the thing that's a-waitin' there, romance …..The Four Preps

Spanish explorer, Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo, discovered Santa Catalina Island. The visit was duly noted in the ship's log and the Island was given the name San Salvador, after Cabrillo's ship. Cabrillo sailed on up the coast after about half a day of surfing, ogling young women in bikinis, and munching on chimichungas.  Cabrillo had reached "a very good enclosed port" which is now San Diego bay, on September 28, 1542, naming it "San Miguel". It was given its present name (honoring St. Catherine) by SebastianVizcaíno in 1602.

            1806 –Tuesday- Englishman Ralph Wedgwood secured the first patent for carbon paper, which he described as an "apparatus for producing duplicates of writings". For those of the “Xerox” generation, carbon paper is thin paper coated with a mixture of wax and pigment, that is used between two sheets of ordinary paper to make one or more copies of an original document.  Originally, Wedgewood’s invention was meant to help blind people write through the use of a metal stylus instead of a quill, and the "black paper" was really just a substitute for ink. Horizontal metal wires on the writing-board acted as feeler-guides for the stylus and presumably helped the blind to write. http://www.kevinlaurence.net/essays/cc.php

            1826-Saturday Driving that train, high on cocaine,
Casey Jones YOU BETTER, watch your speed.
Trouble ahead, trouble behind,
And you know that notion just crossed my mind……Grateful Dead……..The first U.S. railroad, the Granite Railway (a horse and gravity powered operation) began service at Quincy Massachusetts, carrying granite to nearby Milton,  Mass. Everyone could take this railway for “granite”.  Solomon Willard was looking for a source of stone for his Bunker Hill Monument. He selected the Quincy site for the stone and would need a way to get the stone from Quincy to the building site. Railway would be best but of course there were no railroads in America so…..after many delays, and much obstruction, (sort of like New York’s rebuilding of the World Trade Center site)  his railway was granted a charter on March 4, 1826, with right of eminent domain to establish its right-of-way. Designed and built by Gridley Bryant, it began operations on October 7, 1826. The Railway ran three miles (4.8 km) from quarries to the Neponset River. Railroads had been around for a while in England.  The major breakthrough was James Watt’s steam engine in 1774. In 1804 Matthew Murray of Leeds, England invented  a steam locomotive which runs on timber rails. This is probably the first railroad engine.

            1848 –Saturday-  Edgar Allen Poe kaput and his kapution is the final mystery of his life. The author of The Pit and the Pendulum, Murders in the Rue Morgue (the first detective story), The Tell Tale Heart, Evangeline and the Raven was discovered lying unconscious on September 28 on a wooden plank outside Ryan's saloon on Lombard St. in Baltimore. He was taken to Washington College Hospital (now Church Hospital). The Baltimore Commissioner of Health, Dr. J.F.C. Handel certified that the cause of Poe's death was "congestion of the brain." But the common belief has been alcoholism.  In 1996 Poe's medical case was reviewed by R. Michael Benitez, M.D., a cardiologist at the University of Maryland Medical Center. He stated,  "No one can say conclusively that Poe died of rabies, since there was no autopsy after his death," but the historical accounts of Poe's condition in the hospital a few days before his death point to a strong possibility that he had rabies." http://www.umm.edu/news/releases/news-releases-17.htm

            1856-Tuesday-  Cyrus Chambers of Pennsylvania (member of a family involved in the business world, the “Chambers of Commerce”) was awarded a patent for the first machine to fold newspapers and books automatically. Prior to this the folding of printed sheets for books or newspapers was performed, rather tediously it would seem, by hand. By 1874 over seventy two of the machines were in use.  The cost of running the machines was $2 a day and accomplished the work of five men…which cost $8.75 per day. Appletons' Journal, Issues 328-353

            1858-Thursday-  Happy Birthday, Charles Marvin, American meteorologist who invented the clinometer that figures height of clouds over airports and causes delays at Newark Airport.  He was Chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau  from 1913-34. The clinometer is an optical device for measuring elevation angles above horizontal

            1879 – I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
alive as you and me.
Says I "But Joe, you're ten years dead"
"I never died" said he,
"I never died" said he. …..Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, the Dubliners…

Happy Birthday,  Joe Hill, Swedish/American labor activist, back when unions were needed,  and poet .  Born in Sweden, as Joseph Hillstrom. He came to the United States in 1902 and, as a maritime worker, joined the Industrial Workers of the World in 1910. He wrote several labor songs, including Casey Jones and the bucolic, The Union Scab. Found guilty in 1915 of murdering a prominent Salt Lake City man, Hill was kaputed.

            1885 –Wednesday-  Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution. It forces us to change our thinking in order to find it…..Happy Birthday to physicist and Nobel Laureate ,1922 -"for his services in the investigation of the structure of atoms and of the radiation emanating from them"), Niels Bohr. Bohr, one of the greatest physicists, In 1912, he worked in Ernest Rutherford's laboratory in Manchester, England. Based on Rutherford's theories, Bohr published his model of atomic structure in 1913. The model is still commonly used and taught today as an educational simplification. The Bohr model introduced the theory of electrons traveling in orbits around the atom's nucleus, the chemical properties of the element being largely determined by the number of electrons in the outer orbits. Bohr also introduced the idea that an electron could drop from a higher-energy orbit to a lower one, emitting a photon (light quantum) of discrete energy. This – quantum leap - became the basis for quantum theory. Later other physicists expanded his theory into quantum mechanics. This theory explains the structure and actions of complex atoms but not how aspirin knows where to go in your body. After the Germans invaded Denmark during WW II, Bohr escaped arrest by German police in 1943, eventually making it to the United States where he worked at Los Alamos on the Manhattan Project, though it seems that his role was primarily that of a consultant.

             1913-Tuesday- For the first time, Henry Ford's entire Highland Park, Michigan automobile factory was run on a continuously moving assembly line. A motor and rope pulled the chassis past workers and parts on the factory floor. This reduced  the man-hours required to complete one "Model T" from 12.5 hours to six. Within a year, further assembly line improvements reduced the time required to “93 man-minutes”. By 1916 the cost of a Model T had been reduced from $850 to$300…or about what a car stereo can cost today.

            1924-Tuesday-  It’s wonderful. It’s marbleous…almost George Gershwin.

The beginning of 160 consecutive days of 100 temperatures in cool, refreshing, Marble Bar, Australia.  Marble Bar is a mining town located 1476 km north of Perth on the Great Northern Highway, 192 km south-east of Port Hedland and 173 meters above sea level.  That helps, doesn’t it? To further complicate matters, you’d think mining town?  Marble Bar? They must mine marble.  However, Marble Bar was named after a local deposit of mineral first thought to be marble, but which later proved to be jasper, a highly colored cryptocrystalline variety of quartz.

            1952 –Tuesday- We're goin' hoppin'
We're goin' hoppin' today
Where things are poppin'
The philadelphia way
We're gonna drop in
On all the music they play
On the bandstand …..Barry Manilow (1975) “It has a good beat and is good to dance to…” Still to come were "The Spotlight Dance," "Rate-A-Record" and The "American Bandstand" Top 10 Countdown as American Bandstand made its local television debut (Philadelphia). Then called Bandstand, the host was Bob Horn (Dick Clark would take over in 1957) and Ed McMahon (Hereeeeeeees Johnny!) was an uncredited announcer. The series was retitled American Bandstand on August 5, 1957 when ABC began broadcasting it nationwide. For its first 6 seasons, American Bandstand aired Mondays through Fridays at 3:00. We note that B.B. King was the only performer NOT to lip-synch on American Bandstand

            1952 –Tuesday-  Yes, and on the same day that American Bandstand made its debut, The ubiquitous bar code was patented. So, what is a bar code? It is method of automatic identification and data collection. That first patent for a bar code type product was issued to inventors Joseph Woodland and Bernard Silver. The Woodland and Silver bar code looked like "bull's eye" symbol, made up of a series of concentric circles rather than a bar.  Bar code was first used commercially in 1966, however, it was soon realized that there would have to be some sort of industry standard set. By 1970, the Universal Grocery Products Identification Code or UGPIC was written by a company called Logicon Inc. The first company to produce bar code equipment for retail trade use (using UGPIC) was the American company Monarch Marking in 1970. http://inventors.about.com/library/inventors/blbar_code.htm

            1955 –Friday-  Happy Birthday, Yo-Yo Ma, French-born American cellist. The gifted and versatile Ma has performed and recorded Baroque pieces on period instruments, American Bluegrass music, traditional Chinese melodies, the Argentinian tangos, Brazillian music, the soundtrack to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Philip Glass's minimalist score of Naqoyqatsi in addition to nearly the Dvorak Concerto and Brahms Sonatas expected of every cellist.

            1959 –Wednesday- All that is now
All that is gone
All that's to come
and everything under the sun is in tune
but the sun is eclipsed by the moon.
"There is no dark side of the moon really. Matter of fact it's all dark." – Eclipse, Pink Floyd.
The dark far side of the Moon was photographed for the first time and pictures relayed back to Earth by Russia's Luna 3 spacecraft. Without this event, Pink Floyd's bestselling album (Dark Side of the Moon)would have been titled "Whatever is  on the Other Side of the Moon that We Can't See".

            1959 – Wednesday and 1960 –Friday-  Just because the editorial board of the Gnus likes the juxtaposition – The premieres (59) of Pillow Talk and Spartacus (60).  Starring perdurable virgin, Doris Day and manly Rock Hudson, ironically, as a womanizer and featuring ceaseless second bananas Tony Randall and Thelma Ritter (Nick Adams, star of televison’s The Rebel was also stuck in there), a man and woman share a telephone line (slightly dated in the age of twitter) and despise each other, but then he has fun by romancing her with his voice disguised. A year later, “ I’m Spartacus”, I’m Spartacus”, “I’m Spartacus”, “I’m Spartacus”…..Spartacus, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis, ethereal Jean Simmons, Peter Ustinov, Lawrence Olivier, Charles Laughton,  and a cast of thousands, all 184 minutes of it,  premiered.

            1960-Friday- Well if you ever plan to motor west,
Just take my way , that's the highway that's the best.
Get your kicks on Route sixty-six.

Well it winds from Chicago to LA
More than two-thousand miles all the way.
Get your kicks on Route sixty-six.

Well it goes through St. Louie down to Missouri
Oklahoma City looks oh so pretty.
You'll see Amarillo, Gallup, New Mexico
Flagstaff, Arizona, don't forget Winona,
Kingsman, Barstow, San Bernardino. …..Bobby Troup….. Every week they met someone new. The first episode of Route 66 starring Martin Milner and George Maharis and a Corvette was broadcast today. The show, featuring the highway, lasted until 1964.  By then they weren’t even close to Route 66 anymore. In this opening episode, Tod's wealthy father dies, leaving the Yale grad penniless but for his 1960 blue Chevrolet Corvette. He meets Buz, who worked for Tod's father, and the two decide to start driving across the country. Martin Milner had been a cast member of Life of Riley with William Bendix and would star in Adam 12.  George Maharis would in the cast of Rich Man Poor Man and Most Deadly Game but he also appeared in over seventy four television shows and movies. Maharis, one of many television stars who thought that it would translate into movie success, left the show in 1963 and was replaced by Glen Corbett.  The show jumped the shark would go kaput in 1964.

            1968 –Monday-  The Motion Picture Association of America adopted a film-rating system. Original ratings were G, M, R, and X. They have failed to protect us from Howard the Duck, Catwoman (1990), Heaven’s Gate, Ishtar, Gigli, Battlefield Earth, Swept Away (the Madonna version…” we could say it was ‘like a version’….”) Leonard, Part 6, and the Adventures of Pluto Nash.

            1982 –Thursday- Memory
All alone in the moonlight
I can smile at the old days
I was beautiful then
I remember the time I knew what happiness was
Let the memory live again......... Cats opened on Broadway. It would run for nearly 18 years and 7397 performances.  Based on T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Books of Practical Cats, a 1939 collection of fourteen poems written for children, Cats had opened in London in 1981. . Directed by Trevor Nunn of the Royal Shakespeare Company and composed by Andrew Lloyd Webber, it featured outfitted in feline body suits, foot-long whiskers and swirling face makeup and prowl the theater's aisles, stealing popcorn from children's hands and purring into people's faces. The actors had no bathroom facilities but a large container of kitty litter was placed backstage.

            1985 –Monday Islamic Palestinian terrorists hijacked the luxury cruise ship Achille Lauro shortly after it left Alexandria, Egypt. The terrorists demanded that Israel release imprisoned PLF members and sought entry to a Syrian port. When Syria denied the request, the terrorists lost control of the situation. Gathering the American tourists on board, the terrorists randomly chose to kill 69-year-old Leon Klinghoffer. The wheelchair-bound American was shot in the head and thrown overboard.  The terrorist leader, Abu Abbas, was captured by U.S. Special Forces in Baghdad in 2003 and (happily) died in 2004.

            1993 – Crash on the levee mama,
Water's gonna overflow,
Swamp's gonna rise,
No boat's gonna row.
Now you can train on down ….The Band

Thursday-  The Great Flood of 1993 came to an end at St. Louis, Missouri, 103 days after it began, as the Mississippi River fell below flood stage.  The flood constituted the most costly and devastating flood to ravage the United States in modern history. Levees were broken, farmland, town, and transportation routes were destroyed, thousands of people were forced to abandon their homes, and 47 people died as a direct result of the flood. At least 75 towns were completely inundated, some of which have not been rebuilt. In all, the flood waters inundated more than 20 million acres in nine states. Approximately 54,000 people had to be evacuated from flooded areas at some time during the flood, and approximately 50,000 homes were destroyed or damaged. Losses were estimated at 15 to 20 billion dollars.  During June through August 1993, rainfall totals surpassed 12 inches across the eastern Dakotas, southern Minnesota, eastern Nebraska, Wisconsin, Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. More than 24 inches of rain fell on central and northeastern Kansas, northern and central Missouri, most of Iowa, southern Minnesota, and southeastern Nebraska, with up to 38.4 inches in east-central Iowa. These amounts were approximately 200-350 percent of normal from the northern plains southeastward into the central United States.  All that water had to go somewhere.

            2001-Sunday-  Steroidically enhanced, giant headed (evidently his feet grew several sizes too) baseball player Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants wrapped up his tainted record-breaking season with his 73rd homer

            2003 – Tuesday- Having defeated the Predator, several Terminators, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected Governor of California.  Other highlights on Schwarzenegger’s resume include; Hercules in New York, The Jayne Mansfield Story, The San Pedro Beach Bums, assorted Conans and Twins (with Danny Devito).

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8. 

National Metric Week (2^nd week in October…unless you convert it to English Standard and then we don’t know when it is.        

        451 – Sunday - At Chalcedon, a city of Bithynia in Asia Minor, the first session of the Council of Chalcedon. 150 bishops under Pope Leo the Great and the Emperor Marcian -- defined the two natures (Divine and human) in Christ against Eutyches, who was excommunicated. Eutyches insisted that Christ's humanity was absorbed in his divinity.

            1075 –Friday- Evo pjesma o Dmitra Zvonimira. To ne pjesmica na hrvatskom bilo. …….Dmitar Zvonimir was crowned King of Croatia.  Zvonimir was a part of the Svetoslavić branch of the House of Trpimirović none of whom could pronounce the name. He was the last native king who exerted any real power over the entire Croatian state, which he inherited at its height.

            1829 –Thursday Everybody's doin' a brand-new dance, now
(Come on baby, do the Loco-motion)
I know you'll get to like it if you give it a chance now
(Come on baby, do the Loco-motion)
My little baby sister can do it with me;
It's easier than learning your A-B-C's,
So come on, come on, do the Loco-motion with me. …Little Eva…….Robert Stephenson's The Rocket emerged triumphant in The Rainhill Trials.  The directors of the Liverpool & Manchester company were unsure whether to use locomotives or stationary engines on their line. To help them reach a decision, it was decided to hold a competition where the winning locomotive would be awarded £500. The idea being that if the locomotive was good enough, it would be the one used on the new railway.  Ten locomotives were originally entered for the competition but only five turned up: the Rocket, Sans Pareil, Novelty, Cycloped and Perseverance. On this day, the third in the competition, Rocket covered 35 miles in 3 hours 12 minutes……or about what the Long Island Railroad does when you need to get home on a Friday evening. Hauling 13 tons of loaded wagons, the Rocket averaged over 12 mph After studying all the evidence, the three judges, John Rastrick, Nicholas Wood and John Kennedy, awarded the £500 first prize to the owners of the Rocket.

    1789 –Thursday-  Happy Birthday -William John Swainson, English ornithologist, malacologist, (the branch of zoology that deals with mollusks….Good Golly Miss Mollusk…..) conchologist,( the branch of zoology that deals with the study of shells) entomologist and artist   

            1850 –Tuesday- Happy Birthday, Henry Louis le Chatelier, French chemist famous for the discovery for which he is best known today-- Le Châtelier's principle. Announced in 1884, the principal states that when a system is in equilibrium and one of the factors affecting it is changed, the system will respond by minimizing the effect of the change. Basically, the principle predicts the direction that a chemical reaction will take when pressure, temperature, or any other condition is altered. By employing Le Châtelier's principle, scientists were able to maximize the efficiency of chemical processes. Here’s an example from Chemistry Tutorial, http://www.ausetute.com.au/lechatsp.html that should clarify things for you:

Changes in Concentration.
Consider the following system at equilibrium:
Fe3+(aq) + SCN-(aq)
(colorless)  FeSCN2+(aq) (red)
Increasing the concentration of either Fe3+(aq) or SCN-(aq) will result in the equilibrium position moving to the right, using up the some of the additional reactants and producing more FeSCN2+(aq).
The solution will become a darker red color.
Removing some of the Fe3+(aq) or SCN-(aq) will result in the equilibrium position moving to the left to produce more Fe3+(aq) and SCN-(aq).
The solution will become less red as FeSCN2+(aq) is consumed.
Increasing the concentration of FeSCN2+(aq) will result in the equilibrium position moving to the left to use up some of the additional FeSCN2+(aq) and producing more Fe3+(aq) and SCN-(aq).
The solution will become less red.
Removing some of the FeSCN2+(aq) will result in the equilibrium position moving to the right to produce more FeSCN2+(aq)
which will lead the solution to become a darker red color.

            1869 –Friday-  Take me for a ride in your car-car
Take me for a ride in your car-car
Take me for a ride, take me for a ride,
Take me for a ride in your car-car……Peter Paul and Mary……….Happy Birthday, James Frank Duryea, who, with his brother Charles Duryea invented the first automobile that was actually built and operated in the United States. In Chicago in 1895, Frank drove an improved model to win the first U.S. auto race. In 1896 their company manufactured the first commercially produced U.S. automobiles; 13 cars were sold before the company failed and the brothers went their separate ways. Both started new automobile manufacturing ventures; Frank later developed the Stevens-Duryea limousine, which was produced into the 1920s

            1871-Sunday-  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings. …Cassius……Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141) …or, the fault could be bovine….The Great Chicago Fire began.  It burned for over 39 hours and reduced four square miles of the city to ashes.  Definitely a pain in the ash, it was probably not started by Mrs. O’Leary’s cow but it did start at the home of Mrs. O’Leary in the cow barn at 137 DeKoven Street on Chicago’s west side.  The conflagration began on a Sunday and burned for 2 days until rain on Monday night helped extinguish it. 300 people were killed, 90,000 were left homeless and property loss was put at $200 million….and the cow was barbecued.   

          1879 –Wednesday- The Chilean Navy defeated the Peruvian Navy in the Battle of Angamos, Peruvian Admiral Miguel Grau was slewn in the encounter. Well, it wasn’t exactly navy vs. navy…as it was fought off Angamos Point, north of Antofagasta in Chile  between the Peruvian ironclad Huascar and the Chilean ironclads Blanco Encalada and Almirante Cochrane, assisted by the corvette Covadonga. The Pervuians surrendered after the kaputing of Admiral Grau.

            1890 –Wednesday- Happy Birthday, Eddie Rickenbacker, American pilot, WW I flying ace. His twenty-six aerial victories came in only two months of combat flying.  During WW2, he carried out special assignments for Henry Stimson, the Secretary of War. In October, 1942, flying in a B-17 over the Pacific, on such a mission to Douglas MacArthur, the plane went down in the Pacific. Rickenbacker and seven other men, rode a raft for twenty-two days before they were rescued. One man died; Rickenbacker, the oldest man in the raft, lost 54 pounds.  This launched the “Rickebacker Diet”, the South Beach Diet of its day, hundreds of overweight people jumped out of airplanes and floated in rafts for three weeks and reported big weight losses and a fondness for sushi.

            1895 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday to one of our favorite kings, Zog I, King of Albania. There was no Zog II so the Zogster was it for Albania. Born Ahmed Bey Zogolli, he  became Prime Minister in 1922 and changed his name to Zog, considering "Zogolli" to be too “turkified” for an Albanian nationalist. He declared himself King Zog I in 1928. In 1939, when Mussolini invaded Albania, the Muslim, Zog fled to Britain, never to return to Albania. He formally abdicated in 1946.

             1906 –Monday- Happy Birthday, Harry G. Day ( brother of Holly Day, Birth Day, and Some Day), American nutritional biochemist who helped develop (with Joe Muhler and William Nebergall) the fluoride (fluoride is a waste by-product of aluminum mining) additive used in toothpaste to combat tooth decay.  In 1955, the Food and Drug administration approved stannous fluoride for use in toothpaste. Proctor and Gamble, which had funded the research at the University of Indiana introduced Crest toothpaste in Jan 1956 with the ingredient, which they called fluoristan. The development of toothpaste began as long ago as 300/500BC in China and India. According to Chinese history, the theories of a a learned man, Huang-Ti, led to the development of dental cream. First attempts at tooth cleaning included using abrasives such as crushed bone, crushed egg and oyster shells, which were used to clean debris from teeth. Tooth powders were the first noticeable advance and were made up of elements like powdered charcoal, powdered bark and some flavoring agents. This would be applied to teeth using a simple stick. Modern toothpastes were developed in the 1800s. A dentist called Peabody was the first to add soap to toothpaste in 1824. Chalk was first added to toothpaste by John Harris in the 1850s.

          1906-Monday- Gimme head with hair
Long beautiful hair
Shining, gleaming,
Streaming, flaxen, waxen
Give me down to there hair
Shoulder length or longer
Here baby, there mama
Everywhere daddy daddy
Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
Flow it, show it
Long as God can grow it
My hair ……. James Rado,Gerome Ragni and Galt MacDermot.A German, from Todnau in the Black Forest, Karl Ludwig Nessler, demonstrated the first "permanent wave" for hair, in his beauty salon in Oxford Street, London, to an invited audience of hair stylists. Think of a cow milking machine…..that’s what Nessler’s hair curler looked like. The hair was soaked with an alkaline solution and rolled on metal rods which were then heated strongly. The process took over 5 hours.  It is very impressive that the birthday of the developer of fluoride and the demonstration of the first permanent wave took place on the same day.  Whew! Only in the Gnus do get this stuff.

            1913-Wednesday- Happy Birthday, Robert R. Gilruth, American aerospace scientist, engineer, and a pioneer of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space programs. He developed the X-1, first plane to break the sound barrier.  The first airplanes to approach the speed of sound encountered a number of unexpected conditions: sharply increased drag, violent shaking of the airplane, and loss of lift and control. Airplanes that approached this threshold often broke apart and crashed, as though there existed a "sound barrier"--a speed limit that could not be broken. When a plane travels faster than 760 a sound barrier forms in front of the plane. If a plane is going at the speed of sound it is traveling at Mach 1. "Gilruth was one of the greatest men I worked for and with," said Dr. Christopher C. Kraft Jr., who succeeded Gilruth as Johnson Space Center director. "He was the father of spaceflight and certainly never got the credit he deserved." Gilruth organized NASA's space task group, which evolved into Project Mercury and, with Gilruth in charge, launched Alan Shepard into space as America's first astronaut in 1961. Gilruth was the first director of NASA's Manned Spacecraft Center, from 1962-72, overseeing the Gemini and Apollo missions culminating in Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's walk on the moon in 1969. His last work at NASA was early planning for the Apollo-Soyuz mission of July 1975

            1917- Happy Birthday, Rodney Porter, British biochemist who (with Gerald M. Edelman) was awarded the 1972 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries concerning the chemical structure of antibodies. Antibodies are the female equivalent of Unclebodies.  Antibodies, also called immunoglobulins are large y-shaped proteins which function to identify and help remove foreign antigens such as viruses and bacteria.  Antibodies are created by plasma cells which are derived from the B-cells in the immune system. Due to the fact that antibodies exist freely in the bloodstream or bound to cell membranes, they are said to be part of the humoral immune system.

            1918 –Monday-  In one of those conspicuous acts of heroism seen in war, U.S. Corporal Alvin C. York was credited with single-handedly killing 25 German soldiers and capturing 132 in the Argonne Forest of France. The action saved York's small detachment from annihilation by a German machine-gun nest and won the soldier from Tennessee the Congressional Medal of Honor.  York was promoted to the rank of sergeant and hailed as the greatest civilian soldier of the war by several Allied leaders. He was given a hero's welcome upon his return to the United States in 1919.  Gary Cooper would play him in the movie, Sergeant York.

            1952 –Wednesday-  The premiere of cinematic triumph, Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.  The movie, thought to have a profound influence on the works of Ingmar Bergman and Francois Truffaut, starred, yes Bela Lugosi and Martin & Lewis wannabees, Duke Mitchell and Sammy Petrillo. It also featured Milton Newberger  ...  Bongo, the Witch Doctor.  IMbD tells us that the plot involved entertainers Mitchell and Petrillo parachuting into the jungles of the Pacific island of Cola-Cola, where they meet primitive tribesmen, the chief's sarong-clad daughter Nona, and mad scientist Dr. Zabor (played by guess who) conducting experiments in evolution.  The movie earned  $50,000 at the box office.

1956 –Monday- Is that the best game you (Don Larsen) ever pitched? - Associated Press Reporter in Locker Room……. New York Yankees right-hander Don Larsen pitched the first no-hitter in the history of the World Series. In fact, it was a perfect game--that is, there were no runs, no hits and no errors, and no batter reached first base – 27 men up and 27 men out. The victims (as usual) in the 2-0 victory, were the Brooklyn Dodgers.  The Yankee runs were driven in by Mickey Mantle and Hank Bauer. The last batter of the game (this was game 5 of the series) was Dale Mitchell, the Dodgers’ pinch hitter. He fouled off the 1-2 pitch and then watched the third strike, a fastball, over the edge of home plate. Ump Babe Pinelli, in the last ball/strike call of his career, called it. Larson, a journeyman who had actually had a 3 win 21 loss record for the Baltimore Orioles in 1954, pitched the only perfect game in World Series history. The Dodgers would win the next game 1-0.

            1957 – Jerry Lee Lewis recorded Great Balls of Fire.

1967 –Sunday- Che Guevara kaput. An Bolivian guerrilla force led by peace loving Cuban Communist revolutionary Che Guevara was defeated in a skirmish with a special detachment of the Bolivian army. Guevara was wounded, captured, and executed the next day.  Wouldn’t have happened if he stayed in Cuba.

            2005 –Saturday-7.6-magnitude earthquake hit the Kashmir border region between India and Pakistan. An estimated 70,000 people—nearly half of them children--were killed and 70,000 more were injured. More than 3 million were left homeless and without food and basic supplies.  The epicenter was near the capital of Pakistani administered Kashmir, Muzaffarabad.  The USGS reported that earthquakes and active faults in northern Pakistan and adjacent parts of India and Afghanistan are the direct result of the Indian subcontinent moving northward at a rate of about 40 mm/yr (1.6 inches/yr) and colliding with the Eurasian continent. This collision is causing uplift that produces the highest mountain peaks in the world including the Himalayan, the Karakoram, the Pamir and the Hindu Kush ranges. As the Indian plate moves northward, it is being subducted or pushed beneath the Eurasian plate.

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1003-Leif Erikson Day, celebrating the discovery of the New World  by the Viking explorer who was always the Leif of the party. Erikson landed in L'Anse aux Meadows, Canada. Leif, also spelled Ericsson, or Eiriksson, was the second of three sons of Erik the Red, who established a settlement in Greenland after he was exiled from Iceland. He is thought to have visited Norway in around 1000 where he was converted to Christianity by King Olaf I, who sent him back to Greenland to convert the settlers there. Allegedly, on his voyage to Greenland, he sailed off-course and arrived in a place he called 'Vinland', because of the abundant grapes growing there, and the general fertility of the land. In another version - the Groenlendinga saga - he heard of a land in the west from an Icelandic trader, and went to find it. In a third, he had heard about the Winter Carnival in Quebec and wanted to learn to play hockey. The precise identity of Vinland remains uncertain, with various locations on the North American coast identified. In 1963 archeologists found ruins of a Viking-type settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows, in northern Newfoundland, which correspond to Leif's description of Vinland.

          1201 – Happy Birthday, Robert de Sorbon, French theologian, confessor to King Louis IX (St. Louis), and founder of the Sorbonne.

            1604 - The supernova now called "Kepler's nova" was first sighted in the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent Bearer. Astronomer Johannes Kepler observed it from the time of its appearance as an apparently new star. It encouraged him to write the cleverly titled, The New Star in 1606.  Several observers spotted the supernova on Oct. 9, 1604. Kepler didn't see it until Oct. 17, due to cloudy skies in his part of the world. But he studied the event so extensively that it was named after him. The Kepler supernova is now a remnant, However, Kepler is selling the naming rights to his Nova, it may become the Wells Fargo Nova, the Pepsi Nova, or the Kentucky Fried Chicken Nova.

            1635 - Roger Williams was kicked out of  the Massachusetts Bay Colony by the General Court of Massachusetts which had discovered that he was a fan of the New York Yankees. In addition, Williams had spoken out against the right of civil authorities to punish religious dissension and to confiscate Indian land.  Williams went to Rhode Island, where he founded Providence. He worked as a farmer, Indian trader, and civil magistrate. When visiting the Indians, Williams worked on a dictionary, entitled A Key into the Language of America  in 1643.

            1776 – On the other side of the continent from the British Colonies and their fight for independence, Father Francisco Palou founded Mission San Francisco de Asis in what is now San Francisco, California. Asis is located in the San Francisco Bay which had been discovered by accident when Gaspar de Portal's 1769 expedition was looking too avoid paying the tolls on the Golden Gate Bridge, no, no no, they were looking  for Monterey Bay. It was immediately seen as an important naval base for the Spaniards to protect their colony from outside invaders. In March, 1776, a scouting party under the direction of Lt. Don Jose Joaquin Moraga visited the area. He returned to Monterey to convey the news and received his commission to establish a presidio and mission in the name of Carlos III of Spain. Lieut. Jose Joaquin Moraga with a small expeditionary band of 16 soldiers left Monterey Presidio on June 17, 1776, for San Francisco bay to establish both a presidio and a mission here. Father Francisco Palou and Father Pedro Cambon accompanied the expedition as founders of the mission. They were welcomed by a small community early hippies who got them high and made them listen to Grateful Dead records.

             1831 - Capo d'Istria kaput. Joannes Antonios Capodistrias or Kapodistrias actively elicited support for Greek independence. In 1827 the Greek national assembly elected him president of Greece. He was a dedicated reformer, and by both his military and diplomatic policies between 1828 and 1831 he helped Greece secure larger boundaries than it otherwise would have.  Petros Mavromichales, commonly known as Petrobey, had played a leading part in the War of Independence. When he was brought under guard to an appointed interview, Capo d'Istria, refused to see him. Sent back to prison, Petrobey called out to his son George and his brother Constantine, command to take revenge. Next daythe two placed themselves at the door of the church where Capo d'Istria was accustomed to worship. As he passed in Constantine shot him down, and as he fell George thrust a knife into his heart.

            1858 - Mail service via stagecoach between San Francisco and St. Louis was started. It took 23 days, four hours for that first run.............or about the time it takes some mail to be delivered, especially when it is a bill you are mailing, today.

        1900 -  Happy Birthday, Alastair Sim, Scottish actor. Sim played Ebenezer Scrooge in the best movie version of  Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol.  There have been six in all, Sim’s Scrooge in the 1951 version set the standard. They are: A Christmas Carol (1938) starring Reginald Owen, Gene Lockhart, Kathleen Lockhart, June Lockhart, Leo G. Carroll, and Terry Kilburn. A Christmas Carol (1951) starring Alastair Sim, Meryvn Johns, Michael Hordern and Glyn Dearman 86 min. Scrooge (1970) starring Albert Finney, Sir Alec Guinness, Edith Evans and Kenneth More. 115 min. A Christmas Carol (1984) starring George C. Scott, David Warner, Susannah York, Frank Finlay, Edward Woodward and Nigel Davenport. 100 min. Scrooged (1988) starring Bill Murray, John Forsythe, Karen Allen, Carol Kane, and Bobcat Goldthwait. 111 min.  A Christmas Carol (1999) starring Patrick Stewart, Nick Adams, Desmond Barrit, Charlotte Brittain. And,(dinner conversation for a slow evening) 7 Christmas Carol cartoons; An All Dogs Christmas Carol (1998) Christmas Carol: The Movie. (2001) A Flintstones Christmas Carol (1994) The Jetsons Christmas Carol (1985) Mickey's Christmas Carol (1983)  Mr. Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962), The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992)

            1919- The Cincinnati Reds won the World Series defeating the Chicago White Sox five games to three. The problem was, eight members (including pitchers Eddie Cicotte and Claude (Lefty) Williams, outfielders “Shoeless” Joe Jackson and Happy Felsch, first baseman Chick Gandil, shortstop Swede Risberg, third baseman Buck Weaver and reserve infielder Fred McMullin) of the White Sox had been bribed to “throw” the World Series. This was the infamous Black Sox scandal (read Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series by Eliot Asinof). It wasn’t really a big secret, the heavily favored Sox suddenly became the underdogs and discussions of throwing the games was fairly open.  After a lengthy investigation in 1920, the members of Chicago's tainted team were amazingly acquitted the following year despite their own confessions (which were recanted later). All of the players involved were banned from baseball by new commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis because of their undeniable link to gamblers- most likely New York gambler, Arnold Rothstein. 

             1940 – Happy Birthday, John Lennon, one of the founders of the Beatles, arguably the most influential rock group of all time.

            1940 – And……this is just too much…….born on the exact same day as John Lennon…..former Yankee first baseman, Joe Pepitone.  

             1963 – Damn Dam… The Vaiont Gorge is  located in a section of the Alps known for instability. Following  heavy rains—about 90 inches by October 9, the wet land could no longer hold and a massive landslide came crashing down from Mount Toc, causing a huge pile of dirt and rocks to plunge into a reservoir at about 70 miles per hour. The impact of the debris caused an immense wave of water to rise as high as 300 feet above the level of the dam. The displaced water crashed over the dam and into the Piave River below. It gushed down the river and engulfed the town of Longarone. Within minutes the town had virtually vanished and nearly 2,000 people were dead. The tsunami-like wave then rushed down to San Martino, where it killed hundreds more. As a postscript, in the aftermath of the disaster, Mario Pancini, the engineer of the dam project, was summoned to court to answer questions regarding what was known of the geology of the area prior to the dam’s construction. He killed himself before his scheduled appearance

            1979- Happy Birthday, Max von Laue, German physicist. He won the Nobel Prize for measuring the wavelength of x-rays by their diffraction through the closely spaced atoms in a crystal. This work led to the techniques of X-ray spectroscopy, used in nuclear physics.

            1989 - An official news agency in the soon to be former Soviet Union reported the landing of a UFO in Voronezh. Several young children who claimed to have seen a three-eyed alien with a robot escort. The alien was said to be about nine foot tall. The craft, according to eye witness testimony, landed on the outskirts of the city. Shortly thereafter, the tall alien appeared, and upon seeing the young lad, shot a type of weapon at him, causing him to vanish before the eyes of the other people around him. The pilot of the craft, Vladimir Putin, would later be elected president and then become de-facto dictator of Russia.  

            1992 - Can you imagine her call to the insurance company? A large meteor, seen from Kentucky to New York, was observed at 7:50 pm EDT. It landed as a stone  meteoite........................and crashed onto the Chevrolet Malibou car of Mrs. Michelle Knapp of Wells Street in Peekskill, NY.  Since getting hit by the meteorite, the car has toured Germany, Switzerland, Japan, France and the US. 

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10     

732 –Monday- The Battle of Tours – Yes, it was color brochures at 20 paces as Liberty Lines battled Arthur Frommer. At the other  the Battle of Tours near Poitiers, France, Frankish leader Charles Martel, a Christian, defeated a large army of Spanish Moors – one of many Muslim attacks on Europe, halting the Muslim advance into Western Europe. Abd-ar-Rahman, the Muslim governor of Cordoba, was killed in the fighting, and the Moors retreated from Gaul, never to return in such force. It was not the Moor the Merrier The Battle of Tours is considered the high water mark of the Moslem invasions of Western Europe.

            1580 –Friday- Well, I think I'm goin' out of my head
Yes, I think I'm goin' out of my head
Over you, Over you……Little Anthony & the Imperials….. After a three-day siege, the English Army beheaded over 600 Irish and Papal soldiers and civilians at Dún an Óir, Ireland. On September 10, 600 Papal troops commanded by Sebastiano di San Guisseppi (Italians and Spaniards), landed in Smerwick. They had been paid for and sent by Pope Gregory to aid the Desmond rebellion (this was the second Desmond Rebellion - staged by the Earls of Desmond against Elizabeth I's attempts to impose her control on the province of Munster.. Desmond was unable to  link up with the expeditionary force. After a three-day siege, commander Di san Giuseppe surrendered on 10 October 1580. Grey de Wilton, ordered the massacre of the invasion forces, sparing only the commanders. Italian and Spanish troops, and Irish men and women, were beheaded and their bodies thrown into the sea.

             1731-Wednesday- Q: If H-two-O is the formula for water, what is the formula for ice?
A: H-two-O-CUBED…. Happy Birthday Henry Cavendish, discoverer of the hydrogen in the compound nature of water. Cavendish an English chemist and physicist was one of the great minds in science history.  He was also a notable eccentric.  He was very shy and had difficulty speaking with people in social situations.  He was even more shy with women and communicated with his female servants via notes.  He was so shy, in fact, that he told almost no one about the extent of his work.  He performed numerous scientific investigations, but published only twenty articles and no books. His experiments on electricity were only published a century after they were performed, when Scottish mathematician and scientist, James Maxwell rediscovered them in 1879. Cavendish's experiments included the investigation of capacitance (a measure of the amount of electric charge stored (or separated) for a given electric potential). In his experiments, he measured the strength of a current by shocking himself and estimating the magnitude of the pain (remember this was BEFORE the work of the Marquis de Sade). In addition to his work with gases (he discovered what Lavoisier would later call hydrogen), Cavendish also used a sensitive torsion balance to measure the value of the gravitational constant G. This allowed him to calculate the mass of the Earth. Cavendish later changed his name to Butch Cavendish, migrated to the United States and led a vicious gang of outlaws who ambushed a group of Texas Rangers.  The only survivor became the Lone Ranger.  

               1770- I've got a mule, her name is Sal, 
15 miles on the Erie Canal
She's a good old worker and a good old pal, 
15 miles on the Erie Canal
We've hauled some barges in our day
filled with lumber, coal and hay
And we know every inch of the way from 
Albany to Buffalo.
Chorus:
Low bridge, everybody down
Low bridge for we're coming to a town
And you'll always know your neighbor, you'll always know your pal
If you've ever navigated on the Erie Canal.…. Happy Birthday Benjamin Wright 
American engineer who directed the construction of the Erie Canal. A one-time judge, he helped survey the Erie Canal route.
 When the Erie Canal was finally funded in 1817, Wright was selected as one of the three engineers to design and build it, then named chief engineer. 

        1780 –Tuesday-  Happy Birthday  John Abercrombie, Scottish physician,  a member of the famous Edinburgh School of the eighteenth 
and early nineteenth centuries. Abercrombie was the  first to treat neuropathology (scientific study of diseases of the nervous system. )as a separate entity.
 He is best known through his Pathological and Practical Researches on Diseases of the Brain and Spinal Cord (1828), the first textbook o
f neuropathology

        1780 –Tuesday- Here I am, rock you like a hurricane
Here I am, rock you like a hurricane ……The Scorpions……
The Great Hurricane of 1780.  Considered the deadliest Atlantic tropical cyclone of all time, about 22,000 people
died when the storm pounded Barbados, Martinique, and Sint Eustatius in the Lesser Antilles between October 10 and October 16. 
Thousands of deaths also occurred offshore. The hurricane struck the Caribbean in the midst of the American Revolution and took a 
heavy toll on the British and French fleets contesting for control of the area..     

        1796 –Monday-10 millipedes = 1 centipede; 
2000 mockingbirds = two kilomockingbirds; 
1 milliHelen = the amount of beauty required to launch a single ship
 According to tradition, the official metric system was born. The Oct 10 (10/10) date was chosen since it seems to signify the base 
10 way of using measurements. Most historians agree that Gabriel Mouton, the vicar of St. Paul's Church in Lyons, 
France, is the “founding father” of the metric system. He proposed a decimal system of measurement in 1670. 
Mouton based it on the length of one minute of arc (no relation to Joan of Arc or Noah’s for that matter – 
a minute of arc is a unit of angular distance equal to a 60th of a degree) of a great circle of the Earth (now called a nautical mile, 1852 meters).
 He also proposed the swing-length of a pendulum with a frequency of one beat per second as the unit of length (about 25 cm). 
A pendulum beating with this length would have been fairly easy to produce, thus facilitating the widespread distribution of uniform standards. 
So they went from “the pits to the pendulum”.

            1813 –Sunday-   Happy Birthday Joe Green, aka, Giuseppe Verdi, Italian composer born at Roncole, Parma. He is famous for the themes of freedom, heroism, love and liberty which is evident in his works. He wrote mostly Italian grand operas, also marches, symphonies, church music and secular music. Verdi's first opera, Oberto, was brought to the stage at La Scala in November 1839. He began work on his next opera, Un Giorno di Regno but….talk about heartbreaking…… he was interrupted when, one by one, his family fell ill. Over the course of a few weeks, Verdi lost his son, his daughter, and his wife to illness. To complete the tragedy, Un Giorno  was a complete failure. Joe Green’s best know compositions include, Nabucco, Ernani, Rigoletto, "Il trovatore, "La traviata, Don Carlos, Aida,Messa da Requiem, Otello and Falstaff.

1817 –- You don't need a weather man
To know which way the wind blows…..Bob Dylan……………
Happy Birthday Christophorus Henricus Didericus Buys Ballot , Dutch meteorologist, particularly remembered for his observation in 1857 that the wind blows at right angles to the atmospheric pressure gradient.  Buys-Ballot also conducted one of the most famous experiments to confirm the Doppler shift.  He put a group of musicians on a train and took up his position on a station platform. He asked the train driver to rush past him as fast as he could while the musicians played and held a constant note, and was able to detect the Doppler shift (as a change in pitch) as the train passed him

1845 –Friday- The United States Naval Academy opened in Annapolis, Maryland. The student population was  50 midshipmen students and seven professors for a very good teaching ratio of 7:1 It was known as the Naval School until 1850, the curriculum included mathematics and navigation, gunnery and steam, chemistry, English, natural philosophy, and French as well as Women’s Studies, Multicultural Diversity in Arthropods and The Movies of Whit Bissel. The Naval School officially became the U.S. Naval Academy in 1850, and a new curriculum went into effect, requiring midshipmen to study at the academy for four years and to train aboard ships each summer--the basic format that remains at the academy to this day.

            1846-Saturday- Neptune's moon, Triton, was discovered by William Lassell while he was observing the newly discovered planet Neptune . He was attempting to confirm his previous observation, that Neptune had a ring. Instead he discovered that Neptune had a satellite, which he named Triton.  Triton was a Greek god, the messenger of the deep. He was the son of Posiedon (Neptune in Roman “god dom”) god of the sea. He was usually represented as a merman (Ethel Merman?) having the upper body of a human and the tail of a fish or dolphin. We now know that Triton is colder than any other measured object in the Solar System with a surface temperature of -235° C (-391° F).

           1865 – Tuesday- The billiard ball was patented by John Wesley Hyatt. Basically, Hyatt saved elephants from extinction.  They had been hunted for their ivory tusks, which were then made into billiard balls (and cue sticks).  Actually, it was kind of good news/bad news.  Good news for Jumbo but Hyatt ,in his Albany lab had mixed camphor with nitrocellulose under extreme pressure. He was awarded a $10,000 purse in 1869 for creating the new round billiard item.  But………………..remember the first five letters of nitrocellulose are nitro. The resultant plastic substance ball was flammable in play…”7 ball in the corner pocket”…kapow!...... and even exploded occasionally during manufacture

            1881 – Monday Charles Darwin published The Formation of Vegetable Mold Through the Action of Worms. He considered the work a more important accomplishment than his The Origin of Species (1859), which turned out to be one of the most influential and controversial books in history. And frankly, we consider The Formation of Vegetable Mold Through the Action of Worms to be more important than Origin of the Species too.  The title alone is a grabber and inside, the imagery, the use of metaphor, the powerful existentialism, and the surprise ending...................

            1892-Monday Happy Birthday, Earle Dickson, inventor of Band-aids. His wife, a clutz, was prone to kitchen accidents - cuts or burns - (aren't we all?)  Dickson was dressing her small wounds with cotton gauze and adhesive tape. After a number of these accidents, he devised a way she could easily apply her own dressings (he probably got tired of “doctoring” this bunglesome babe). He prepared ready-made bandages by placing squares of cotton gauze at intervals along an adhesive strip and covering them with crinoline. Now all his wife had to do was cut off a length of the strip and wrap it over her cut. Since he was employed was as a cotton buyer at Johnson & Johnson, his suggestion to make this a product became ---drum roll please--- the precursor to Band-aids.

            1913-Friday- “Isthmus be the place”.  Woodrow Wilson dedicated the Panama Canal just before the Shirelles dedicated it       ..................to  the one I love.  The Canal opened a year later in 1914.  In 1899 the US Congress had created an Isthmian Canal Commission to examine the possibilities of a Central American canal and to recommend a route. The commission first decided on a route through Nicaragua, but later reversed its decision because the price for beach front condos was outrageous. The United States and the new state of Panama (formerly part of Colombia thanks to a U.S instigated and supported revolution….) signed the Hay-Bunau-Varilla treaty, by which the United States guaranteed the independence of Panama and secured a perpetual lease on a 10-mile strip for the canal. Panama was to be compensated by an initial payment of $10 million and an annuity of $250,000, plus gift certificates for the Home Shopping Network beginning in 1913. This strip is now known as the Canal Zone. It takes approximately fifteen hours to traverse the canal through its three sets of locks (about half the time is spent waiting due to traffic). Ships passing through the canal from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean actually move from the northwest to the southeast, due to the east-west orientation of the Isthmus of Panama.  In 1977, addled U.S. President Jimmy Carter signed a treaty which agreed to return 60% of the Canal Zone to Panama in 1979. The canal and remaining territory, known as the Canal Area, was returned to Panama at noon (local Panama time) on December 31, 1999.

            1930 – Friday-  Q: What's the most important thing to learn in chemistry? A: Never lick the spoon…… Happy Birthday Yves Chauvin, French chemist, French chemist who was corecipient, with Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock, of the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2005 for developing metathesis, an important chemical reaction used in organic chemistry.  Metathesis is a chemical reaction between two compounds in which parts of each are interchanged to form two new compounds (AB+CD=AD+CB).  Of course in English, metathesis is a linguistic process of transposition of sounds or syllables within a word or words within a sentence.  Remember: Organic chemistry is the study of carbon compounds; biochemistry is the study of carbon compounds that wriggle.

1933-Tuesday- Happy Birthday, astronaut William Anders, born in Hong Kong. Anders was a member of the crew, with Frank Borman and Jim Lovell, of Apollo 8 – the first space craft to orbit the moon.

            1933- Tuesday  And this was his vinyl answer….Waldo L. Semon received a patent  for a method of making plasticized PVC, now known simply as vinyl. When he was inducted into the Inventor’s Hall of Fame in 1995, Semon said “'People then thought of PVC as worthless back then,' Semon recalled. 'They'd throw it in the trash.' Semon, a researcher at The BFGoodrich Company in Akron, Ohio, was attempting to find an adhesive that would bond rubber to metal. He began experimenting with the discarded material by combining it with other chemicals and exposing it to heat. The result was plasticized polyvinyl chloride - which we now call PVC or vinyl - a flexible "gel" that had striking similarities to natural rubber. But decades later PVC has become the world's second-best-selling plastic, generating billions of dollars in sales each year.

           1935 – Thursday- George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess (lyrics by Dubose Hayward) opened at the Alvin Theater on Broadway… It ran for 124 performances until Janury 25, 1936.  A classic American opera, it featured Summertime, Bess You Is My Woman Now, I Love’s You Porgy, It Ain’t Necessarily So, and I Got Plenty O Nuttin.  We are awaiting the all white version. featuring; Bess, You Are My Woman Now, It Isn’t Necessarily So, and I Have Plenty of Vacuum.

            1938 –Monday- I believe it is peace for our time . . . peace with honour.....Neville Chameberlain…. Proving once again that appeasement works for the appeased, not the appeeaser….The Munich Agreement basically destroyed Czechoslovakia as Germany, France, Britain, and Italy ceded the Sudetenland to Nazi Germany.  Adolf Hitler's threats to occupy the German-populated part of Czechoslovakia stemmed from his avowed broader goal of reuniting Europe's German-populated areas. Though Czechoslovakia had defense treaties with France and the Soviet Union, both countries agreed that areas in the Sudetenland with majority German populations should be returned.   Neville Chamberlain negotiated an agreement permitting Germany to occupy the areas but promising that all future differences would be resolved through, and this is hilarious………. consultation. The agreement, which became synonymous with appeasement, was abrogated when…..surprise…… Hitler annexed the rest of Czechoslovakia the next year.

            1960 –Monday- >(That famous day in history the men of the 7th Cavalry went riding on)
(And from the rear a voice was heard)
(A brave young man with a trembling word rang loud and clear)
What am I doin' here??
Please Mr. Custer, I don't wanna go
Hey, Mr. Custer, please don't make me go
I had a dream last night about the comin' fight
Somebody yelled "attack!"
And there I stood with a arrow in my back.
I wonder what the injun word for friend is
Let's see--friend-- kemo sabe, that's it
KEMO SABE!, HEY OUT THERE, KEMO SABE! Nope, that itn't it
Look at them durned injuns
Theyre runnin' around like a bunch of wild Indians-heh, heh, heh
Nah, this ain't no time for jokin'
 Larry Verne’s Mr. Custer reached number 1 on the Billboard Charts. Songfacts  tells us that Mr Custer, which was written by Al DeLong, Fred Darian and Joseph Van Winkle. Larry Verne worked in a photographer's studio down the hall from their office, and after hearing his Southern drawl there was only one person who could record the song.According to Steve Otfinoski in The Golden Age Of Novelty Songs, the demo was turned down repeatedly, possibly because originally it ran to four and a half minutes. A shorter version was taken up by Era Records, and backed by Okeefenokee Two Step, it became the biggest selling novelty record of the year.
Please Mr. Custer, I don't wanna go
Listen, Mr. Custer, please don't make me go
There's a redskin a-waitin' out there, just fixin to take my hair
A coward I've been called cuz I don't wanna wind up dead or bald

            1962 –Wednesday-  I was working in the lab late one night
When my eyes beheld an eerie sight
When my monster from his slab began to rise
And suddenly to my surprise
He did the mash
He did the monster mash
The monster mash
It was a graveyard smash
He did the mash
It caught on in a flash
The monster mash
It's called the monster mash……..Big day for novelty songs (see Mr. Custer 1960) as the BBC banned the song Monster Mash by Bobby "Boris" Pickett claiming it may be deemed grotesque or otherwise tasteless to some listeners. Speaking of tasteless and grotesque, Britain would later send us Freddy and the Dreamers, Herman’s Hermits, and Chad & Jeremy…

            1970 –Saturday-  Pierre Laporte, the labor minister of Quebec, was kidnapped by the Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ) during the October Crisis in Canada. Laporte (was a member of the Quebec Provincial Liberal Party. He was provincial minister of immigration, manpower and of labor. Laporte was kidnapped from his home, by masked men. Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act on October 16, 1970. Laporte was killed by the Chénier cell of the FLQ, and his body found in the trunk of a car on October 18.

            1971 – Sunday- How come every time you come around
My London London Bridge wanna go down like
London London London, wanna go down like
London London London, we goin? down like
How come every time you come around
My London London Bridge wanna go down like
London London London, wanna go down like
London London London, we goin? down like ………Fergie…………The Old London Bridge of nursery-rhyme fame was built by Peter of Colechurch between 1176 and 1209, replacing an earlier timber bridge. Because of uneven construction the bridge required frequent repair. The bridge survived more than 600 years.  By 1924, the east side of the bridge was some three to four inches (102 mm) lower than the west side; it soon became apparent that this bridge would have to be removed and replaced with a more modern one.  In 1967, the Common Council of the City of London placed the bridge on the market and began to look for potential buyers. On 18 April 1968, what is called  Rennie's bridge was sold to the American entrepreneur Robert P. McCulloch of McCulloch Oil for $2,460,000. Sold, dismantled and moved to the United States, London Bridge reopened in Lake Havasu City, Arizona. As the bridge was taken apart, each piece was numbered to aid re-assembly. The bridge was reconstructed and re-dedicated on 10 October 1971. The reconstruction of Rennie's London Bridge spans the Bridgewater Channel canal that leads from Lake Havasu to Thomson Bay. Rennie's London Bridge has become Arizona's second-biggest tourist attraction, after the Grand Canyon.

            1973 –Wednesday-  I apologize for lying to you. I promise I won't deceive you except in matters of this sort.Vice President of the United States Spiro Agnew resigns after being charged with federal income tax evasion. Agnew popularized nolo contendre in the lexicon meaning no contest-to one charge of income tax evasion in a federal court in Baltimore. This plea was tantamount to an admission of guilt and by making it he avoided being charged with bribery, fraud, and conspiracy. The Justice Department dropped all pending charges, and Agnew was fined $10,000 and placed on three years' probation. On October 12 President Richard Nixon nominated slap stick House minority leader Gerald R. Ford of Michigan to be the new Vice-President. ….. I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all….Spiro T. Agnew

                         1986-Friday- A tiny Asteroid- 3753, was found to be orbiting the Earth by J. D. Waldron at Siding Spring Observatory. It was called Cruithne (pronounced "Croo-een-ya") after Celtic tribes circa 880 and 500 BC. It is pulled alternately by the Sun and Earth. It actually passes closer to the Earth than the Moon. At its closest approach it gets to within about 15 million km (9 million miles) of our planet. Cruithne’s diameter ranges between 2.9 - 6.4 km diameter wide. Cruithne will remain in a suspended state around Earth for at least 5,000 years.  In 1997 it was described as a companion, and an unusual one, of the Earth. This asteroid shares the Earth's orbit, its motion "choreographed" in such a way as to remain stable and avoid colliding with our planet. The will make it the possible of subject of “asteroid destroys Earth” theories whenever other asteroids aren’t hanging around. 3753 was responsible for the deliver of astronomical picornavirus which in susceptible humans causes the dreaded Prostate Posse Syndrome on golf courses. Easily identified symptoms include frequent visits by groups of elderly men into the woods for micturation purposes.

            1987 –Saturday-  Rowboat
Row me to the shore
She don't want to be my friend no more
She dug a hole in the bottom of my soul
She don't want to be my friend no more…..Johnny Cash……….Tom McClean finished rowing across the Atlantic Ocean. He set the record at 54 days and 18 hours.  Seeking to avoid rising air fares and long lines at passport control, 20ft dory (a dory is a small boat of shallow draft with cross thwarts for seats and rowlocks for oars with which it is propelled)  Skol 1080. McClean, in his 20 ft. dory, Skol 1080, merrily merrily merrily merrily rowed  his way from Canada to the Bishop's Rock Lighthouse. Enroute, he survived his rowing boat turning upside down in the middle of the night in 50ft waves emptying essential equipment into the ocean.

            1996- Thursday- When you do dance, I wish you a wave o' the sea, that you might ever do nothing but that….Florizel….. The Winter's Tale (IV, iv, 159-161) …..A sacred day for fin de siecle and commence de siecle (but maybe it’s with us forever) weddings as Macarena [Bayside Boys Mix] Los Del Rio reached number 1 on the Billboard Charts. In the US, this was the biggest dance craze of the 1990's. It was played at weddings, office parties, cruise ships, and just about anywhere there was dancing. Like the earlier dance craze, the "Electric Slide," it was easy to learn and was done in a group, making it perfect for the constitutionally uncoordingated who lacked rhythm. All the ills of mankind, all the tragic misfortunes that fill the history books, all the political blunders, all the failures of the great leaders have arisen merely from a lack of skill at dancing…..Moliere…….It was originally released  in Spain in 1993, where it did fairly well. In America, it was a minor hit until the summer of 1996, when the Macarena dance craze hit America. The song went to #1 in July and stayed there for 14 weeks.

            2008 –Friday-Orakzai bombing killed 110 and injures 200 more. Surprise surprise, a Muslim a suicide bomber drove and detonated a pick-up truck packed with 300 kg of explosives into a meeting of 600 people, killing 40 instantly and injuring 81, although the toll later rose to 110 as many died in hospitals.

            2009 –Saturday-  After having closed borders for about two hundred years, Armenia and Turkey signed protocols in Zurich, Switzerland to open their borders.  The accord has was  met by protests in Armenia, where many people said it did  not fully address the 1915 genocide  of hundreds of thousands of Armenians when they were deported en masse from eastern Anatolia by the Ottoman Empire. They were killed by troops or died from starvation and disease.

Back to Calendar

11        

1582 – Monday  Monday Monday, can't trust that day,
Monday Monday, sometimes it just turns out that way
Oh Monday morning, you gave me no warning of what was to be…Mamas and Papas

Because of the implementation of the Gregorian calendar (courtesy of Pope Gregory XIII) which replaced the Julian Calendar and resulted in a jump from this day does not exist in this year in Italy, Poland, Portugal and Spain. The Gregorian calendar year differs from the solar year by only 26 seconds—accurate enough for most of us mortals, since this only adds up to one day's difference every 3,323 years.

             1776 –Friday-  The Battle of Valcour Island – Lake Champlain.  Fifteen American gunboats (the Colonial Navy) were almost wiped out by a vastly superior British force of thirty vessels.  However, the battle took two days and significantly delayed British preparations, by a year, for attacking New York State.  Their goal was to destroy the rebel fleet on Lake Champlain, take the vital American forts at Ticonderoga and Mt. Independence, and drive a wedge between the eastern and western parts of the Colony. Several days behind this naval force was an invading army, some 7,000 troops in almost 400 bateaux and an army of tourists anxious to take advantage of off season rates. The American commander?....... Benedict Arnold, who’s name became a synonym for treason when he attempted to give the British the plans to West Point in 1780.           

            1793 –Friday-Fever
In the morning
Fever all through the night
Everybodies got the fever
That is somethin you all know
Fever is'nt such a new thing
Fever start long ago …..Peggy Lee…….Yellow Fever – tropics – Walter Reed - Panama Canal?  Actually it was a major problem in the early United States. In fact, the death toll from a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia hit 100 on this day. By the time it ended, 5,000 people were dead. Yellow fever is a viral disease that begins with fever and muscle pain. Next, victims often become jaundiced (hence, the term "yellow" fever), as their liver and kidneys cease to function normally. Some of the afflicted then suffer even worse symptoms. Famous early colonist Cotton Mather painted the rather attractive verbal picture of "turning yellow then vomiting and bleeding every way." The virus is carried and transferred by mosquitoes but this was not to be “discovered” for another 100 years. The first yellow fever outbreaks in the United States occurred in late 1690s. In 1793, refugees from a yellow fever epidemic in the Caribbean fled to Philadelphia. Within weeks, people throughout the city were experiencing symptoms. By the middle of October, 100 people were dying from the virus every day.

            1809 –Wednesday-  Just three years after the completion of his most famous feat came the  mysterious kapution of the famous explorer Meriwether Lewis in the early hours of the morning after spending  the night at Grinder's Tavern along the Natchez Trace in Tennessee.  Since completing his epic journey  to the Pacific with William Clark Lewis’ life had been one failure after another. Most historians think it was a suicide – he shot himself and when that didn’t work, he stabbed himself.  A vocal minority think it was murder – either by the innkeeper or bandits.  He was 35 years old.

             1811-Friday-  The world’s first steam ferryboat, the Juliana, (named after Col. John Stevens’ daughter), began running between New York and New Jersey (Hoboken, which was Stevens’ home).   Stevens hoped to make Hoboken a weekened resort for New Yorkers. http://www.stevens.edu/sit/about/steamboats.cfm

Stevens, he inventor had followed close on Robert Fulton’s steamship, Clermont. Stevens’ engines were built in America, while those of the Clermont had been imported from England

           1844-C'mon, take a bottle, shake it up
Break the bubble, break it up
Pour some sugar on me
Ooh, in the name of love
Pour some sugar on me
C'mon fire me up
Pour your sugar on me
Oh, I can't get enough…………………Def Leppard

            Friday-  Happy Birthday, Henry J. Heinz, businessman, born in Pittsburgh, Pa.,  who founded H.J. Heinz Co. and invented the "57 varieties" slogan. Many boys play sports or build things (wreck things too) but little Henry became particularly adept at grinding horseradish, and his later fortune rose and fell with this powerful herb.  Henry maintained his childhood fascination with horseradish and pickles as an adult and went into the vegetable business. Along the way he fell in love with tomatoes too.  Heinz soon became the world's largest tomato processor, even going so far as calling itself "tomato-obsessed." The company eventually provided more than one half the ketchup in the world. After adding veggie upon veggie, when Henry Heinz created ' 57 Varieties' in 1896, the company already had over 60 varieties of products.

            1871-Wednesday-  Happy Birthday, Harriet Hawes American archaeologist and social activist who gained fame for her discoveries of ancient remains  (such as Warren Beatty, Joan Rivers, Cher, Larry King, Robert Morganthau, Betty White and Zsa Zsa Gabor) in Crete. She went to Crete in 1900, and with the encouragement of archaeologist Arthur Evans and began to excavate a Minoan site at Kavousi where she discovered some Iron Age Tombs-     where she found Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. The first woman to direct an excavation, she was also the first archaeologist to discover an Early Bronze Age Minoan town site.

             1881-Tuesday- Happy Birthday,  Louis F. Richardson, British physicist and psychologist who first applied mathematics in weather predictions.  He wasn’t terribly successful at first since it generally took him three months of mathematical calculating to predict the weather for the next 24 hours. With the advent of electronic computers after World War II, his method of weather prediction, somewhat altered and improved, became practical.

                1881-Tuesday-  Kodachrome
They give us those nice bright colors
They give us the greens of summers
Makes you think all the world's a sunny day, Oh yeah
I got a Nikon camera
I love to take a photograph
So mama don't take my Kodachrome away……Paul Simon……….Same day as Richardson’s birth -- roll film (much more effective than bagel film) for cameras was patented by David H. Houston, who was a Scottish immigrant who traveled to homestead in North Dakota in 1879 on a 400-acre farm, 30 miles NE of Fargo. Yes, Scotland to North Dakota! In another of those capricious twists of fame, it was his business relationship with George Eastman (who was the one who became famous for cameras) that encouraged Houston to further improve photography equipment. Eastman, who was a high school dropout, had great vision. He bought 21 camera patents from Houston, including the invention that made them famous – a portable camera. Up until then, people had to rely on professional photographers. For this new hand-held camera, Eastman paid Houston $5000, as well as monthly royalties for the rest of his life, and portraits of notable North Dakota cows.

            1899-Wednesday-  The South African Boer War began between the British Empire and the Boers of the Transvaal and Orange Free State. Many think the war was fought by obnoxious people but that was the Boor War.  Others think it was fought between rival pig gangs.  That was the Boar War.  A third school thinks it was rather dull and was the Bore War. This one was between the British and the descendents of the original Dutch settlers, the Boers.  The cause?  Diamonds were discovered in Boer territory.

            1899-Wednesday- The same day as the outbreak of the Boer War, in U.S baseball, the Western League renamed itself the American League and placed teams in Cleveland and Chicago. This was done with the approval of the National League, then the only major league, which, at the time, did not recognize the move as a threat. The American League remained a minor league during the 1900 season, however, the  league did not renew its National Agreement membership when it expired in October 1900, and on January 28, 1901, the American League officially declared itself a major league…..guess which major league they would raid to get their major league players? Eventually more than 100 players, dissatisfied with the low salaries and dictatorial policies of 1890s National League management, gladly jumped at the chance to change leagues. Among the biggest names were John McGraw, Cy Young, Clark Griffith, Hugh Duffy, and Jimmy Collins.  This declaration was followed by an epidemic of franchise relocations. So, in the 1901 baseball season, for the first time in a decade, there were two major leagues. The American League opened for business in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Washington, Baltimore, (later to move to New York and become the Highlanders and ultimately, the Yankees)  Detroit, Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, with the latter three franchises competing with established National League teams in the same city. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/American_League

            1932-Tuesday- The first American political telecast took place as the Democratic National Committee sponsored a program from a CBS television studio in New York.  This was of course one month before the Presidential Election of 1932 in which Franklin D. Roosevelt defeated Republican Herbert Hoover (considering Hoover’s lack of popularity due to the Depression, the Democrats could have nominated comedian Buster Keaton and still won). Not sure how many minds were changed by the broadcast since in 1932 there were about like two televisions in the entire  country.

            1958 – Saturday- A year and a week after the launch of Sputnik , NASA ( up until the Pioneer  failure in August of this year  the Army, Navy, and Air Force each launched their own satellites) which took over the space program in September, launched Pioneer I for orbit around the Moon.  Unfortunately, the second stage was shut down too early, leaving Pioneer 1 with a lack of speed to fulfill its mission. Pioneer 1 flew up to a height of 113854 km, less than a third of the distance of the Moon and fell back, disintegrating in the atmosphere after a 43 hours, 17 seconds flight. The mission was a failure, but fallout led to the mutation of a virus that causes people to fail to use their turn signals while driving a car.

            1968-Friday- Launch of Apollo 7, the first manned Apollo mission.   Astronauts Walter Schirra, Donn Eisele and Walter Cunningham—163 orbits in 260 hours. Apollo 11, the moon landing would come in July 1969.  An interesting footnote is that this flight included the first disease in space.  About 15 hours into the flight, Schirra developed a bad cold, and Cunningham and Eisele soon fell victim also. A cold is miserable enough here on earth but in the weightlessness of space mucus accumulates, filling the nasal passages, and does not drain from the head. The only relief is to blow hard, which is painful to the ear drums – and also brings Newton’s 3^rd Law of Action and Reaction to a, shall we say head. Several days before the mission ended, they began to worry about wearing their suit helmets during reentry, which would prevent them from blowing their noses. The buildup of pressure might burst their eardrums. Schirra told his crew that they would make reentry without their helmets on. Donald Slayton, in mission control, tried to persuade them to wear the helmets but Schirra was adamant and felt he was ultimately responsible as commander on the flight. They each took a decongestant pill about an hour before re-entry and made it through the acceleration zone without any problems with their ears.  The failure to obey orders to wear their helmets during re-entry was a costly one though. Schirra had announced his retirement before the flight and didn't care what anyone thought. Eisele and Cunningham were making their first flight and felt they had to follow their commander but, because of their actions, neither one would ever fly in space again…and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

      1975- Live, from New York, it’s Saturday Night  from the ashes of Howard Cosell’s Saturday night show came…NBC Saturday Night (later Saturday Night Live) made its debut from NBC’s famed Studio 8H in New York City’s Rockefeller Center with guest host George Carlin.  There were twenty four episodes that first year.  The “Not Ready for Prime Time Players” were: Dan Aykroyd John Belushi Chevy Chase, George Coe (who left after October 25) Jane Curtin Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman,  Michael O'Donoghue (National Lampoon writer who also left after October 25) and Gilda Radner

1983- Tuesday- In the  dawn of the personal computer age – 110 years after Alexander Graham Bell- the last hand-cranked telephones in the United States went out of service as 440 telephone customers in Bryant Pond, Maine, were switched to direct-dial service. Prior to that time a resident's number could be as short as 33.  Scores of reporters and telephone buffs from around the country were on hand as Oxford County Telephone, located in Elden Hathaway’s living room made the switch http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=miMSAAAAIBAJ&sjid=6e4DAAAAIBAJ&pg=5495,6079556&dq=history+of+hand+cranked+telephone&hl=en

 1984- Thursday-   Space shuttle Challenger astronaut (and oceanographer) Kathryn Sullivan became the first American woman to walk in space. Note, first American woman in space, Sally Ride was also a member of the crew. Sullivan participated in two other space flights, the 1990 Discovery flight that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope, and the 1992 Atlantis flight that deployed the Space Lab.

            1994-Tuesday- The space probe Magellan ended its mission to explore Venus when flight controllers lowered its orbit into Venus' dense atmosphere and it plunged toward the surface – thus committing “probe icide”. Radio contact was lost the next day …..after a long scream followed by a series of “Wahoooooooooooooo”s.  Magellan was launched on May 4, 1989 from  the cargo bay of the  Space Shuttle Atlantis. Magellan arrived at its planned polar orbit around Venus on 1 Aug 10, 1990 where it discovered a civilization of Amazon women earlier documented the 1958 movie Queen of Outer Space

             1995 –Wednesday-  It is disconcerting to reflect on the number of students we have flunked in chemistry for not knowing what we later found to be untrue…….Robert L. Weber…………Americans Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland, and Dutch scientist Paul Crutzen won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work warning that CFCs are eating away Earth's ozone layer. Man-made chlorofluorocarbons had been invented by the odious Thomas Midgely (he also invented lead based gasoline) in 1928.

            2007 –Thursday-The Allen Array, the biggest and best tool ever developed to search for signs of extraterrestrial life came online thanks to the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute. It's an array of radio dishes in Northern California. The Allen Array, located in an arid valley near the town of Hat Creek, just north of Lassen Volcanic National Park  started gathering data with 42 radio dishes ( as well as 63 cups and saucers plus 2 salt and pepper shakers). There will eventually  be 350 dishes pointed to space, listening for the faint communications from an extraterrestrial intelligence.  It has already picked up communications from Joseph Biden, NPR’s Nina Totenberg, and Bill O’Reilly but discounted them since, we are reminded, they are looking for intelligence.

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12     

1492-Wednesday- I like to be in America!
O.K. by me in America!
Ev'rything free in America
For a small fee in America! …….Stephen Sondheim, Leonard Bernstein…..Christopher Columbus sailed to the New World on August 3 and landed today at Guanahani in the Caribbean just in time for the Columbus Day sales. A sailor aboard the Pinta sighted land. Columbus had reached what are now the Bahamas, an island group off the southeastern coast of the state of Florida. Columbus first set foot on an island called Guanahani by the people who lived there.  Interestingly, Columbus’ original route was further north but upon spotting sea birds – and correctly assuming they came from a land source – he diverted south.  If he had continued on his previous course he would have landed in Florida.

            1537 – Tuesday- Happy Birthday, Edward VI, English king and son and successor to  Henry VIII.  Edward died, probably of tuberculosis,  at age 16 in 1553 after “ruling” for six years and was succeeded by his step-sister Mary (Bloody Mary) who was succeed by her step sister (and daughter of Anne Boleyn) Elizabeth I.  When the bloated Henry VIII went kaput in 1547,  the boy was young, not even 10 years old, when he became king. His uncle, Edward Seymour (his mother Jane Seymour had gone kaput just after giving birth to young Edward, became Lord Protector, and through Edward, sought to control England. Seymour's brother, Thomas, was made Lord Admiral and was an early influence on the life of the King's sister, the Princess Elizabeth. Protector Somerset was later overthrown by John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland, who then took control as Edward's chief advisor.
                1810 –Friday- He was a wise man who invented beer…..-Plato…….. In a boost for future tourism, Bavarian Crown Prince Louis, later King Louis I of Bavaria, married Princess Therese von Sachsen-Hildburghausen. The Bavarian royalty invited the citizens of Munich to attend the festivities, held on the fields in front of the city gates. The decision to repeat the festivities and the horse races in the subsequent year gave rise to the tradition of the annual Oktoberfest, which now begins in late September and lasts until the first Sunday in October. Alcohol consumption is an important part of the modern festival, and more than 1 million gallons of beer are consumed annually at Oktoberfest.  We also note it is a boost for the porta potty industry.

             1823-Sunday-  When shall we three meet again?
 In thunder, lightning, or in rain?  …First Witch………MacBeth, Act 1 Scene 1…. Chemist Charles Macintosh of Scotland began selling raincoats. He had  patented a method for making waterproof garments by using rubber dissolved in coal-tar naphtha – a waste product of the Glasgow gasworks and also a volatile liquid hydrocarbon mixture - for cementing two pieces of cloth together.  MacIntosh had invented water-proof fabric.  In 1819 Macintosh began experimenting with the naphtha and discovered that it dissolved rubber. Applying the knowledge of textiles he had gained as a dye-maker, Macintosh had the idea of using the liquid rubber to waterproof fabrics. He painted one side of wool cloth with the rubber solution, then laid a second thickness of cloth over it. The rubber interior made the resulting sandwich of cloth waterproof.

          1860 –Friday-  Happy Birthday, Elmer Sperry, the “father of modern navigation technology"  and American inventor best known for perfecting the use of gyroscopes.  Sperry engineered a gyrocompass that made piloting ships, airplanes, and even spacecraft more reliable. G. M. Hopkins had invented the first electrical gyroscope -- a disk mounted so that it remained in a fixed position despite the movements of its base in 1890. . Taking the technology to the next level, Sperry engineered a gyroscope that would replace the magnetic compass, a faulty and unreliable form of navigation used on ships since they kept getting stuck together.. His gyrocompass was first installed on the U.S. dreadnought battleship Delaware in 1911. During World War I, the U.S. Navy adopted the gyrocompass for its activities. It proved so effective that it remained in use through World War II.

             1870 –Wednesday-  General Robert Edward Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia, died of pneumonia two weeks after suffering a stroke at his home in Lexington, Virginia

            1915 –Tuesday-  British nurse Edith Cavell was executed by a German firing squad in Brussels for helping Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium during World War I. After a quick trial and sentence, she told the prison chaplin, "I want my friends to know that I willingly give my life for my country. I have no fear nor shirking. I have seen death so often that it is not strange or fearful to me." When reminded that her murder would rank with the burning of Louvain and the sinking of the "Lusitania" in stirring the civilized world with horror, Count Harrach, the civil governor's aide, remarked that his only regret was that they did not have "three or four more old English women to shoot." Miss Cavell was shot at 2 am, October 13, 1915. In 1907 Cavell had established a training school for nurses in Brussels in which hundreds of Belgian and German nurses were trained

            1918 –Saturday- A spark neglected makes a mighty fire….. Robert Herrick…. A recipe for a disaster near Duluth, Minnesota; mix the following  ingredients;  the timber industry used slash methods in the thick forests, leaving behind dry scraps that were perfect kindling for wildfires. They also (cleverly) tended to leave these scraps lying around the rail lines that carried wood from the lumber mills. Since train engines of the time often gave off sparks, fires were nearly inevitable. Add to that hot and dry months prior to October. Guess what?  Called the Cloquet-Moose Lake fire, 38 towns and villages were destroyed by the fire. Four hundred and fifty three deaths were reported and another 85 people were seriously burned. Four thousand houses, 6,000 barns and 40 schools all went up in flames.

            1920 –Tuesday-  Light at the end of the tunnel? We don't even have a tunnel; we don't even know where the tunnel is……Lyndon B. Johnson…. Construction of the Holland Tunnel began. The tunnel would provide a direct link between Twelfth Street in Jersey City, NJ and Canal Street in New York City.  It was opened to traffic on November 13, 1927.  The first "squeegee men" cleaning windshields appeared at the entrances later that day. Spanning 8,557 feet beneath the Hudson River, the Holland Tunnel became the longest tunnel in the world upon its completion. The Holland Tunnel was named for Clifford Milburn Holland, the civil engineer who died while directing the tunnel's (and current day traffic nightmare) construction.

            1928 –Friday- Sometimes, all I need is the air that I breathe
And to love you
All I need is the air that I breathe
Yes to love you
All I need is the air that I breathe ….The Hollies……The artificial respirator, called usually an iron lung - an airtight metal tank that encloses all of the body except the head and forces the lungs to inhale and exhale through regulated changes in air pressure -was first demonstrated in a Boston hospital.  The iron lung was invented by Philip Drinker, an industrial hygienist from the Harvard School of Public Health in 1927. Its cylindrical chamber encases a person's entire body, save for the head, and uses regulated air pressure to help a patient breathe when the muscle control necessary for normal breathing has been lost.  People could spend months, even years in them. The first patients of the iron lung were polio sufferers with chest paralysis. Later, John Emerson improved upon Philip Drinker’s invention and invented an iron lung that cost half as much to manufacture.

            1933-Thursday- First thing one Monday morning, a robber broke into the bank, and pointed his guns at the cashier said, Give me all your money, or you'll be GEOGRAPHY! The cashier laughed and said, You mean to say 'HISTORY.  The robber answered, Don't change the subject.  Depression era bank robber and popular culture/media hero, John Dillinger escaped from a jail in Allen County, Ohio, with the help of, Harry Pierpont, Charles Makley, and Russell Clark. These four  would later form the core of the Dillinger gang. It was Pierpont  who killed the sheriff, Jess Sarber.  On Monday, Sept. 23, 1933  Dillinger had been captured while visiting a girl friend in Dayton. He was carrying $2,604 in new currency when apprehended. Dillinger was killed in an ambush (July 22, 1934) by D.O.I. special agents while leaving the Biograph Theatre after watching Clark Gable in Manhattan Melodrama. Pierpont and Makley, captured in Tuscon, Arizona, got the death penalty, while Clark got a life sentence. Makley was killed in a prison break, Pierpont wounded but survived to be executed in 1934.

            1960 –Wednesday- The main difference for the history of the world if I had been shot rather than Kennedy is that Onassis probably wouldn't have married Mrs Khrushchev……….In one of the highlights of diplomatic history, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev (also see item below) disrupted a U.N. General Assembly session by pounding his desk with a shoe during a dispute.  Khrushchev then launched into a hearty rendition of  There’s No Business Like Shoe Business…Lorenzo Sumulong, the leader of the Phillipine delegation had  questioned Khrushchev about his stance on western imperialism when the Soviets had, themselves, swallowed all of Eastern Europe.  At that point, Khrushchev furiously banged his shoe on the podium, calling Sumulong “a jerk, a stooge, and a lackey of imperialism.” He also accused Sumulong of secretly watching Dancing With the Stars because he thought the “stars” were famous.

            1964- In its continuing efforts to remain ahead of the U.S in the space race, the USSR launched  Voskhod 1 with Col. Vladimir Komarov as pilot. It was the world's first multi-manned spacecraft, with three cosmonauts. In the rush to launch before the US Gemini flights, the crew  were left at risk with no spacesuits, ejection seats, or escape tower. Other than that, everything was fine. The trio landed after 16 orbits of the earth, 24 hours and 17 min after they had left. Booster power for the launch was supplied by twenty female Soviet shotputters and the East German Women’s Swim Team…. Professor Sy Yentz is just complimenting the manliness of the female communist athletes……..Also of note; USSR Prime Minister Nikita S. Khrushchev was removed from power while the crew was in flight

            1973 –Friday-  President Richard Nixon nominated  House Minority Leader Gerald R. Ford, R-Mich., to succeed the disgraced crook Spiro T. Agnew (the man who put “nolo contendre” on the legal map) as vice president.  The announcement was delayed several days as it took a while to explain to the not particularly bright – he could have donated his brain to science as a neutrino collector- Minority Leader what a vice president is and what he does (although most of us still don’t know the answer to the latter).

            1976-Tuesday- This little piggy went to market.
This little piggy stayed at home.
This little piggy had roast beef.
This little piggy had none.
And this little piggy went "cough, sneeze" and the whole world's media went mad over the imminent destruction of the human race, all the way home……..After scaring the public with tails of epidemics, pandemics and “killer flu” and comparing it to the Spanish Flu of 1918, the U.S. swine flu vaccinations were halted in nine states after three elderly people in the Pittsburgh area suffered heart attacks and died within hours of getting the shot. The nationwide vaccination effort began as a result of a virus that was first identified at Fort Dix, N.J., and labeled a "killer flu." In fact, the virus never moved outside the Fort Dix area. Later research showed it would probably have been much less deadly than the Spanish flu. The initial victim was the only death from the swine flu itself in 1976. But as the critics pointed out, hundreds of Americans were killed or seriously injured by the inoculation the government gave them to stave off the virus.

            2000 –Thursday-  A forty foot hole was blown into the hull of the destroyer, USS Cole.  Islamic terrorists in a rubber dinghy attacked the Cole as it was refueling in Yemen. Seventeen sailors were killed and 38 wounded.  The USS Cole was lifted aboard the Norwegian heavy transport ship M/V Blue Marlin and towed back to the United States.

            2002 –Saturday-  Islamic terrorists killed 202 people on the island of Bali.  Three explosions set off on the mostly Hindu island killed a large number of Australian tourists as well as thirty eight Balinese.

            2006 - ……. The hole I'm digging I can keep
It's only been half of a week
And I'm already five feet deep ….Welbilt…….Q: What do you get if you cross a pig with a dinosaur? A: Jurassic Pork!....A study published in Science announced the discovery of  600 million year old embryo fossils (of an unknown species), that were in the process of cell division when they were killed.  It was later discovered to an ancestor of any member of the cast of Jersey Shore.

             2007 –Friday-  Get out your “floaties” and your raft and your umbrella drinks…. Radar images from the Cassini spacecraft discovered hydrocarbon lakes and seas on the north pole of Saturn's moon Titan, while a new radar image reveals that Titan's south pole also has lakes. Approximately 60 percent of Titan's north polar region (north of 60^o latitude) has been mapped by Cassini's radar. About 14 percent of the mapped region is covered by what scientists believe are lakes filled with liquid methane and ethane. Some the methane has attached itself to Titanian protozoa, returned to the planet of Cassini origin and affected susceptible humanoids with the Ameezing Virus. Symptoms usually manifested in females who repeatedly describe things as “sooooooo ameezing…..”

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13.    

54  -Tuesday-  Oh here she comes
Watch out boy she'll chew you up
Oh here she comes
She's a maneater
Oh here she comes
Watch out boy she'll chew you up
Oh here she comes
She's a maneater…Hall & Oats….The Roman emperor Claudius went kaput after being poisoned by his wife, Agrippina (sister of Caligula….what was he thinking?). Indications are that he was poisoned by tainted mushrooms. Sixteen year old loon Nero, who had been officially adopted by Claudius was immediately hailed as the new Emperor without any consideration for Claudius’ own son, the much younger Britannicus, son of wife number three, the nymphomanical Messalina. 

            1307 –Thursday-  Torture, Torture
Baby, you're torturing me
Why do you lead me around and make me chase ya
When I catch ya, you won't let me embrace ya
Please baby, have a heart 'cause can't you see
You're torturing me, torturing me …Everly Brothers…….Hundreds of Knights Templar including Grand Master  Jacques de Molay in France were simultaneously arrested by agents of  the ironically cogmented, Phillip the Fair, to be later tortured into "admitting" heresy. We note that this was described as Friday the 13^th – the origin of bad luck on Friday the 13^th, yet we checked October 13, 1307 in our magic whiz bang day looker upper - http://www.searchforancestors.com/utility/dayofweek.html. but this was Julian calendar, not Gregorian so…. it turned up as a Thursday.  The Templar Knights or 'Poor Knights of Christ' were a monastic order of knights founded in 1112 A.D. to protect the pilgrims along the path from Europe to the Holy Lands (Jerusalem). They took a vow of poverty which was rare for knights, and had to supply themselves with a horse, armor and weapons. The Templars were organized as a monastic order, following a rule created for them by Bernard of Clairvaux, the founder of the Cistercian Order. Philip, who seized the treasury and broke up the monastic banking system, was jealous of the Templars' wealth and power, and sought to control it for himself.

            1773 –Wednesday- The Whirlpool Galaxy (aka Messier 51a) was discovered by Charles Messier. Messier also discovered the Maytag, Kenmore, GE, Frigidaire, and Amana Galaxies. The Whirlpool Galaxy is the dominating member of a small group of galaxies, which also contains M63 and a number of fainter galaxies. It is about 37 million light years from Earth

             1775 –Friday  The Continental Congress authorized construction and administration of the first American naval force, the Continental Navy--the precursor of the United States Navy.  They authorized the building of 13 frigates.  Esek Hopkins, of Rhode Island, was appointed commander-in-chief of the navy. The object of the armament was to intercept British vessels bearing supplies for the British armies in America, but the Continental war-ships were frequently more aggressive. Hopkins sailed on his first cruise in February, 1776. He left the Delaware with a small squadron of five vessels, carrying an aggregate of ninety-eight guns. The Alfred, was his flag-ship, and his first-lieutenant was John Paul Jones

            1792 –Saturday- The cornerstone was laid for a presidential residence in the newly designated capital city of Washington. In 1800, President John Adams became the first president to reside in the executive mansion, which soon became known as the "White House" because its white-gray Virginia freestone contrasted with the red brick of nearby buildings.  Thomas Jefferson was among the many people who submitted a plan for the White House. His design, however, was not chosen. Instead, James Hoban, an Irish immigrant architect living in Charleston, South Carolina, won the competition and a $500 prize, with a design modeled after Leister House in Dublin, Ireland. The presidential mansion was called the White House as early as 1809. President Theodore Roosevelt officially adopted the term in 1902.

            1820–Friday- Watson:  Holmes!  What kind of rock is this!  Holmes:  Sedimentary, my dear Watson. That is not a gneiss joke…………..John William Dawson, Canadian geologist and professor at McGill University.  In 1852 he discovered the Dendrerpeton acadianum, Pupa vetusta, and other fossil reptiles, and in 1864 the Eozoon canadense, the most important of his geological discoveries. Dawson concluded that Eozoon was the shell of a foraminiferan, a single-celled protistan complete with chambers and canal systems…but whoops……it was immediately challenged by two Irish geologists thus setting off a ten year kerfuffle. They claimed that Eozoon was not organic, but a metamorphic feature formed from the segregation of minerals in marble through the influence of great heat and pressure.

            1843 –Friday  Henry Jones and 11 other  German-Jewish immigrants gathered in Sinsheimer's Café in New York city and founded B'nai B'rith (the oldest Jewish service organization in the world). It was a  basis of humanitarian aid and service that became a system of fraternal lodges and chapters grew in the United States and, eventually, around the world. In 1868, when a devastating flood crippled Baltimore, B'nai B'rith responded with a disaster relief campaign. This act preceded the founding of the American Red Cross by 13 years and was the first of many domestic relief programs.  That same year, B'nai B'rith sponsored its first overseas philanthropic project, raising $4,522 to aid the victims of a cholera epidemic in what was then Palestine.  

            1845-Monday-        You know the good part about all those executions in Texas? Fewer Texans…..George Carlin……….A majority of the citizens of the independent Republic of Texas 7664-430 approved a proposed constitution, that when accepted by the Congress, will make Texas the 28th American state. Once approved by Texas voters, the proposed Annexation Ordinance and State Constitution were submitted to the United States Congress. The United States House and Senate, in turn, accepted the Texas state constitution in a Joint Resolution to Admit Texas as a State which was signed by the president on December 29, 1845 . Although the formal transfer of government did not occur until February 19, 1846, Texas statehood dates from the 29th of December.

                1853 –Thursday- It's a business. If I could make more money down in the zinc mines I'd be mining zinc…….Roger Maris…… Zinc or swim….the Pennsylvania and LeHigh Zinc Company Mill was erected in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This mill produced the first commercial zinc.  The zinc was not from the kitchen (the kitchen zinc) it was obtained from calamine ores (a mixture of zinc oxide (ZnO) with about 0.5% iron(III) oxide (Fe₂O₃).

            1860 –Saturday-  The first successful aerial photo in the U.S. was taken over Boston by James Wallace Black in a balloon, The Queen of the Air held by a cable 1,200 feet above the city. Of the eight pictures that were exposed, using wet plates prepared in the balloon, one good photograph resulted. It was later titled, Boston as the Eagle and the Wild Goose See It. The photo showed an area bounded by Brattle Street on the north, the harbor on the east, Sumner Street on the south, and Park Street on the west.......and a line of undies drying on a clothesline behind a building on Park St.

            1884 -Monday Greenwich was adopted as the universal meridian. At the request of U.S. President Chester Arthur delegates from 25 countries met in Washington, DC, for the International Meridian Conference. At the Conference several important principles were established: a single world meridian passing through the principal Transit Instrument at the Observatory at Greenwich, England; that all longitude would be calculated both east and west from this meridian up to 180°; a universal day; and studies of the decimal system to the division of time and space. The resolution fixing the Meridian at Greenwich was passed 22-1 (San Domingo voted against, France (naturally!) & Brazil abstained). Greenwich lies on the Thames River, a few miles from central London.

           1892 –Thursday-  American astronomer Edward Emerson Barnard discovered  D/1892 T1, the first comet discovered by photographic means, on the night of October 13–14. Barnard was using the 15-cm Willard lens and was photographing the Milky Way west of the star Altair. The comet was last detected on December 8. 1980 but has disappeared and become the Jimmy Hoffa of comets.

            1903 –Tuesday-  7,455 fans at the Huntington Avenue Baseball Grounds in Pittsburgh saw the Boston Americans, led by star pitcher Cy Young beat the Pittsburgh Pirates and star shortstop, Honus Wagner,  3-0 to win the first  Baseball World Series five games to three. Bill Dineen was the winning pitcher.  Deacon Phillippe, the loser. All three of Bostons runs were driven in by 2^nd baseman, Hobe Ferris.

             1914 –Tuesday- Happy Birthday, Garrett Morgan, American Black scientist who invented and patented a gas mask. On July 25, 1916, he made national news for using the gas mask to rescue several men trapped during an explosion in an underground tunnel beneath Lake Erie. After the rescue, Morgan's company received requests from fire departments around the country who wished to purchase the new masks. The Morgan gas mask was later refined for use by U.S. Army during World War I.  Morgan also received a lot of credit for the traffic signal.  With the number of cars multiplying, there was increasing number of crashes.  While other inventors had patented traffic signals to help sort out the mess, Morgan was one of the first to apply for and acquire a U.S. patent for an inexpensive to produce traffic signal. The Morgan traffic signal was a T-shaped pole unit that featured three positions: Stop, Go and an all-directional stop position. This “third position” halted traffic in all directions to allow pedestrians to cross streets more safely.

            1923 – Istanbul was Constantinople
Now it's Istanbul not Constantinople
Been a long time gone
Old Constantinople's still has Turkish delight
On a moonlight night
Evr'y gal in Constantinople
Is a Miss-stanbul, not Constantinople
So if you've date in Constantinople
She'll be waiting in Istanbul…….The Four Lads……Ankara replaced Istanbul as the capital of Turkey.  About 2000 BC the Hittities has occupied the city and called Ankara with the name Ankuwash.  Somehow, Ankara was Ankuwash. Now it’s Ankara not Ankuash….doesn’t have the same resonance. Following World War I, Ankara (Turkey – called “the sick man of Europe by Czar Nicholas-  was allied with the Germans) was elected as the base of the Kemal Ataturk’s resistance forces during the Independece War and its fight against the Greek invasion. After gained the independence and the Ottoman Empire were defeated, Ataturk declared Ankara as the Capital of the new Republic

            1926 –Wednesday-  Happy Birthday - Walter "Killer" Kowalski professional wrestler. Killer Kowalski and his“claw hold“ – it seemed to involve making the hand look like a claw and grab the opponent’s abdomen resulting in a speedy submission – was one of the great villains of late 1950s –early 60’s wrestling.

            1957 –Sunday-  The premiere of  The Amazing Colossal Man. This celluloid masterpiece revolved around a character named Colonel Manning, who strayed, yes,  too close to the test of an atomic device in the Nevada desert.  Though burned over 90% of his body, he survives, and begins to grow in size. As he grows, his heart and circulatory system fail to keep pace with his growth, and he is gradually losing his mind as a result of reduced blood supply to his brain……sort of like George Stephanopolis……..The movie starred Glen Mangan, who reappeared in 1995’s Attack of the 60 Foot Centerfolds, and Cathy Downs, who played the title role in John Ford's My Darling Clementine. Also in 1957  we would see The Incredible Shrinking Man, they mixed in pesticides with radiation so instead of growing, he shrunk. The following year we would get The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

                1957- Sunday – As the Amazing Colossal Man was premiering…. CBS television presented a sixty minute commercial disguised as  a star-studded new musical variety special sponsored by the Ford Motor Company.  It starred  Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney, Louis Armstrong, The Four Preps and Lindsey Crosby (at the time Bing was attempting to inflict members of his brood on the American public). The show celebrated the launch of the Ford Edsel, a new model which would soon be considered the standard by which all automobile flops (or any kind of flop)  are measured.  Not the first, but currently the oldest surviving show on videotape. It was aired live in 1957 in prime time, and simultaneously taped and filmed in kinescope for the sole purpose of broadcasting for the three-hour time delay on the West coast. In those days, shows which were taped (and not erased later) were ALSO kinescoped because the thought was that the tape might malfunction in the middle of the broadcast, but a kinescope film- which was all recorded off of a monitor and developed like motion picture film- would remain intact. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0346927/

                1958-Monday-  Problems, problems, problems all day long
Will my problems work out right or wrong
My baby don't like anything I do-o-o
My teacher seems to feel the same way too
Worries, worries pile up on my head
Woe is me I should have stayed in bed
Can't get the car my marks ain't been so go-o-ood
My love life just ain't swingin' like it shou-ou-ould
Problems, problems, pro-o-o-o-blems
They're all on account-a my lovin' you like I do-o-o-o-o
Problems, problems, pro-o-o-o-blems
They won't be solved until I'm sure of you-o-ou
You can solve my problems with a love that's tru-u-e
Problems, problems, problems all day long. The Everly Brothers recorded Problems, which never got the recognition it deserved. The song zeroed in perfectly on the existential experience of being a teenager.  

         1962 –Saturday Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;….. Amiens:…..As You Like It (II, vii, 174-176) The normally dreary drizzly Pacific Northwest experienced a cyclone the equal of a Category  3 hurricane, The Columbus Day Windstorm. Winds measured above 150 mph at several locations. Forty six people died. The "storm" was actually three storms in quick succession. The first formed as a trough off the coast of Oregon on the 11th; it moved northward, and then northwestward, and began to taper off on the 12th. The second (and most destructive) storm formed from the remnants of Typhoon Freda, which moved northeastward from the Philippines, nearing the west coast early on the 12th. As it neared California, the storm nearly stopped moving, intensified, and began to slowly move northward just off the coast. As it moved, it wreaked havoc from northern California to British Columbia

            1965-Wednesday- People try to put us d-down (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Just because we get around (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
Things they do look awful c-c-cold (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I hope I die before I get old (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
This is my generation
This is my generation, baby
Why don't you all f-fade away (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
And don't try to dig what we all s-s-say (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm not trying to cause a big s-s-sensation (Talkin' 'bout my generation)
I'm just talkin' 'bout my g-g-g-generation (Talkin' 'bout my generation)…… The Who recorded My Generation. Famously Roger Daltrey sang the lead vocals with a st st st st stutter, which was very un un un usual. After recording two takes with normal singing, their manager, Kit Lambert,  suggested to Daltrey that he stutter to sound like a British kid on speed. This contains the famous line, "I hope I die before I get old." Who drummer Keith Moon did, dying of a drug overdose in 1978.

            1967 – Friday- The first game in the history of the American Basketball Association is played as, using the red, white, and blue basketball,  he Oakland Oaks led by Rick Barry, defeated the Anaheim Amigos, led by Larry Bunce from Utah State. Steve Chubin and Les Selvage  134-129 in Oakland, California. The ABA existed from 1967 to 1976 -- for until June 1976 when it merged with the National Basketball Association.  Four of the strongest ABA teams the New York Nets, Denver Nuggets, Indiana Pacers, and San Antonio Spurs) joined the NBA and the remaining ABA teams the Kentucky Colonels, the Spirits of St. Louis, and the Virginia Squires went kaput.

            2007 –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……Scientists successfully inseminated a rhinoceros with formerly frozen sperm. This world-first artificial insemination of a white rhino with frozen rhino sperm took place in Budapest Zoo. The proud test-tube father called Simba was 38 years old and lived in the Zoo of Colchester, UK. The pregnant female was Rosie O’Donnell. Unfortunately, this first rhino ever conceived by artificial insemination died in the womb a few hours before its birth. The death occurred on August 9, 2008 in the Budapest Zoo. The mother of the unborn rhino, Lulu (aged 25), had suffered from uterine bleedings.

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14.     

 1066-Sunday -I'll tell of the Battle of Hastings
As 'appened in days long gone by
When Duke William became King of England
And 'Arold got shot in the eye
It were this way - one day in October
The Duke  - who was always a toff -
'Aving no battles on at moment
'ad given his lads day off
They'd all tekken boats and gone fishing
'Till some chap in to' Conqueror's ear
Said "Let's go put breeze up Saxons"
Says Bill "By gum, that's an idea"
Then turning around to his soldiers
He lifted his big Norman voice, shouting
'Ands up who's coming to England?That were swank 'cos they 'adn't no choice…..Traditional folk song…….. Battle of Hastings, 
one of those seminal battles that changed the course of history. William, Duke of Normandy defeated Harold, king of Saxons. Harold was killed 
when shot in the eye with arrow and William, previously known as "William the Bastard", was now known as William the Conqueror. English King Edward
 (known as Edward the Confessor) had gone kaput in January 1066.  While Edward was good at confessing he was not so good at impregnating his queen. 
He left no heirs, and his  passing ignited a three-way rivalry for the crown. The leading pretender was Harold Godwinson, the second most powerful man in 
England and an advisor to Edward. Harold and Edward became brothers-in-law when the king married Harold's sister.  His claim was strengthened when 
the dying Edward supposedly uttered "Into Harold's hands I commit my Kingdom." The 2nd claimant was Harald Hardrada, King of Norway.  The 3rd, 
William, justified his claim through his blood relationship with Edward (they were distant cousins) and by stating that some years earlier, Edward had 
designated him as his successor. In a single day Duke William of Normandy (note William was later to change is name to Ol’ Dirty Bastard and be
 one of the founding members of Wu Tang Clan) conquered a kingdom that had resisted Viking invasions for years on end, ending a line of Anglo-Saxon
 kings that claim decent from Alfred the Great. This conquest altered the whole outlook of England, taking a nation that had looked towards Scandinavia, 
especially under three Danish kings, and locking her into a partnership and a struggle with France that was to last for centuries. Hastings was a day long battle. 
 William’s faltering, the infantry withdrew and the Norman cavalry moved in to attack. This too was beaten back with the horses having difficulty climbing a 
steep ridge. Late in the day, William altered his tactics and ordered his archers to shoot at a higher angle so that their arrows fell on those behind the shield
 wall. This proved lethal for Harold's forces and his men began to fall. Legend states that he was hit in the eye with an arrow and killed. With the Saxons 
taking casualties, William ordered an assault which finally broke through the shield wall. If Harold was not struck by an arrow, he died during this attack. 

            1322 –Wednesday-  Robert the Bruce (brother of Lenny the Bruce) of Scotland defeated forces of the testeronically challenged King Edward II of England at Byland, forcing Edward to accept Scotland's independence.  Edward’s siege of  Berwick had failed and  he retreated, pursued by Robert Bruce. The Bruce's men attacked over the hills from Northallerton. They dispersed the royal rearguard at Old Byland but Edward escaped to York. A king of England in flight in his own country was mortifying.

            1633- Friday-The Duke of York in all things but in his codpiece, is led by the nose by his wife- Samuel Pepys (writing about James II, before he became king, and the influence of his wife Anne Hyde). Happy Birthday King James II of England or ’Dismal Jimmy’ as the Scots called him. The hopelessly inept James succeeded Charles II and was either a Catholic or had strong Catholic sympathies.  When his wife, Anne  gave birth to a son, Parliament, fearing the return of a Catholic dynasty, invited William of Orange of Holland to become king (William’s wife, Mary was a daughter of James II but Protestant.  In 1688 William landed in England (at Brixham) with a large Dutch army, the English army deserted to his side, and James was left with no supporters…..athletic or otherwise…..On December 11, 1688 he was forced to flee Britain, an event that effectively ended his reign.

On January 28, 1689, the Parliament of England decided that James' flight was an abdication of the throne and therefore gave William and Mary the legal right to assume power. This coup d'état cemented the primacy of parliament over monarch and became known as The Glorious Revolution

            1644 –Friday-  Happy Birthday, William Penn, English Quaker and advocate for religious liberty; founded American colony of Pennsylvania.  He created a written constitution for the colony that amazingly limited the power of government. It also called for freedom of the press and the right to own private property. In this way, Pennsylvania had many of the rights and liberties that would later be granted the citizens of the United States through its constitution.  On March 4, 1681, Charles II signed a charter for territory west of the Delaware River and north of Maryland, approximately the present size of Pennsylvania. The King proposed the name "Pennsylvania" which meant "Forests of Penn"--honoring Penn's late father, the Admiral.  Penn sailed to America on the ship Welcome and arrived November 8, 1682. With assembled Friends, he founded Philadelphia--he chose the name, which means "city of brotherly love" in Greek.

                    1687 –Tuesday- Our love, our love is like a triangle
Which one will have a broken heart
The memories, the memories we shared together
I cant believe you want us to part ……Janie Grant……..Happy Birthday Robert Simson, Scottish mathematician best know for best known for the Simson line of a triangle. The Simson line is the line containing the feet, and of the perpendiculars from an arbitrary point on the circumcircle of a triangle to the sides or their extensions of the triangle.  Cut the Knot.com clears it all up for us by explaining that this definition is somewhat strange, for nowhere in the works of Robert Simson (1687-1768) any reference was found to the line that bears his name. On the other hand, Simson is said to have discovered the theorem that bears the name of Stewart. He's also proved the identity F_n+1F_n+1 - F_nF_n+2 = (-1)ⁿ between the Fibonacci numbers that explains the Fibonacci Bamboozlement puzzle……which is how and why one can cut an area and rearrange the pieces to get a bigger area.

            1773 –Thursday-  Having failed to establish a Ministry of Silly Walks, the first recorded Ministry of Education, the Komisja Edukacji Narodowej (Polish for Commission of National Education), was formed in Poland.  Komisja Edukacji Narodowej, właściwie Komisja nad Młodzi Szlacheckiej Edukacja dozor Mająca, podległy królowi, Państwowego zarzad nad Oświata w polsce. Pierwsza w Europie państwowa instytucja oświatowa ocharakterze odrębnego ministerstwa, której podlegały wszystkie szkoły od akademii do szkół parafialnych, z wyjątkiem Szkoły Rycerskiej . Pierwsza w EUROPIE Państwowa instytucja oświatowa o charakterze odrębnego ministerstwa, ktorej parcianePaski podlegały szkoly OD akademii nie Szkół parafialnych, z wyjątkiem.  It was reated by the Sejm and king Stanisław August Poniatowski on October 14, 1773. Because of its vast authority and autonomy, it is considered the first ministry of education in the history of mankind. Its' main organizer and chief figure was a Catholic priest Hugo Kołłątaj. Initially the body was formed of 4 senators and 4 members of Sejm, half of them representing the eastern voivodships of Poland (former Grand Duchy of Lithuania). The first head of the KEN was prince bishop Michał Jerzy Poniatowski.

             1857 –Wednesday -  Happy Birthday, Elwood Haynes American inventor who built one of the first successful gasoline-powered automobiles. In 1893, he purchased a gasoline engine and designed a "horseless carriage." We call your attention to the 1899 entry  below from the Literary Digest which announced that the horseless carriage would never be as common as the bicycle.  Haynes then went on to invent the muffler and different metal alloys. Specifically, he invented stellite alloy, which may be his most important invention. This metal alloy - cobalt-chromium (sometimes tungsten)  designed for wear resistance- was the first step in the development of a series of space-age alloys.  Of course the U.S, Britain, France and others were “alloys” during WW II.

             1863 –Wednesday- Second to agriculture, humbug is the biggest industry of our age…….Alfred Nobel……….Culminating work begun in 1960. Alfred Nobel was granted his first patent, a Swedish patent for the preparation of nitroglycerin as an industrial explosive (his company had gone bankrupt during the Crimean War when Russia cancelled all orders.  In 1964 Ludwig, Alfred Nobel's brother, went kablooey during the preparation of nitroglycerine at Heleneborg, Stockholm.  A  French newspaper mistakenly ran an obituary for Alfred which called him the "merchant of death."

Not wanting to go down in history with such a horrible epitaph, Nobel, a pacifist, created a will that established the now famous Nobel Prizes. Later, in 1868, Nobel patented dynamite as a form for safer handling nitroglycerin.  Either way it was an explosive situation.

            1890-Tuesday- Happy Birthday Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th president of the U.S, born in Texas in 1890, brought up in Abilene, Kansas. One of the great leaders in American history (although a conspicuously dull public speaker),  in June 1942 Eisenhower was made the leader of the November 1942 invasion of North Africa. The plan for the invasion of North Africa was to trap the Axis troops led by Erwin Rommel (1891–1944) between British and U.S. forces. By May 1943 the North African operation had succeeded and the Allies had taken control of Africa. On December 24, 1943, he was appointed supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, and the next month he was in London making preparations, while diplomatically handling Churchill, DeGaulle, and jealous British generals, for the massive thrust into Europe. On June 6, 1944, Eisenhower gambled on a break in bad weather and gave the order to launch the Normandy Invasion, the largest amphibious attack in history. On D-Day more than 156,000 troops landed in Normandy. Germany surrendered on May 7, ending the war in Europe. Although Eisenhower was criticized, then and later, for allowing the Russians to capture the enemy capital of Berlin, he and others defended his actions on several grounds that the Russians were closer, had more troops, and had been promised Berlin at the Yalta Conference by the fading Franklin Roosevelt. He announced his candidacy for the Republican Party nomination for President on June 4, and, surprise!, was nominated at the Republican convention and elected on November 4, 1952. Eisenhower served two terms as President of the United States, January 20, 1953 to January 20, 1961. His administration saw the end of Korean War, (we hope) promoted Atoms for Peace, (well that sure worked out well) and dealt with crises in Lebanon, Suez, Berlin, and Hungary in foreign affairs. Alaska and Hawaii become states.  Including Ike, twelve generals have become president; Twelve presidents were generals: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, William Henry Harrison, Zachery Taylor, Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield,  Chester A. Arthur, and Benjamin Harrison,

       1899 –Saturday-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…….On this day the Literary Digest declared (see Elwood Hayes, 1857 above) that "the ordinary horseless carriage is at present a luxury for the wealthy; and although its price will probably fall in the future, it will never, of course, come into common use as a bicycle."  The Literary Digest returned to fame again in 1936 when, as the result of a postcard poll, it predicted that Alf Landon of Kansas would beat President Franklin D. Roosevelt in a landslide.

      1912 –Monday-  Former President, Theodore Roosevelt, running for a 3rd term under his “Bull Moose” Party banner was shot by a 
saloon keeper, one John Schrank in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Roosevelt was getting ready to deliver a a campaign speech  and was greeting the 
public in front of the Gilpatrick Hotel. Schrank's .32-caliber bullet, aimed directly at Roosevelt's heart, failed to mortally wound the former president 
because its force was slowed by a glasses case and a bundle of manuscript in the breast pocket of Roosevelt's heavy coat--a manuscript containing
 Roosevelt's evening speech. Roosevelt actually went on to deliver the speech with the bullet in his body! Roosevelt said "You see, it takes more than 
one bullet to kill a Bull Moose." He spoke for nearly an hour and then was rushed to the hospital. Shrank was found to be insane and committed to 
a mental hospital, where he died in 1943. Other failed assassination attempts included; Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Gerald Ford, and Ronald Reagan.

             1922-Saturday-  Got my shoes shined up
I got my hair slicked down
'Cause baby I wanna hit the town
Call me - Pennsylvania 6-5000
I'm gonna shake you up (all night)
Rock you all night long (all right)
Baby you got something
Goin' on
Call me - Pennsylvania 6-5000
Write it down,in your book
On your wall,oh baby just call
Pennsylvania 6-5000……Glenn Miller….. The first automated telephones, the Pennsylvania exchange in N.Y. City, become operational. A telephone exchange or telephone switch is a system of electronic components that connects telephone calls.  The first telephone exchange opened in New Haven, Connecticut in 1878.  In 1891 Almon Strowger, an undertaker in Kansas City, Missouri, patented the stepping switch, a device which led to the automation of the telephone circuit switching.  We guess that gave new meaning to the term “line is dead”. 

            1944 –Saturday-In the absence of orders, go find something and kill it …..Erwin Rommel……Rommel kaput……German General Erwin Rommel, nicknamed "the Desert Fox," because of his exploits in North Africa from 1940 – 1943,  was given the option of facing a public trial for treason, as a co-conspirator in the July 1944 plot headed by Claus von Stauffenberg to assassinate Adolf Hitler, or taking cyanide. He chose the latter.  Because Rommel was such a great hero, the German people were told he died as a result of a head wound suffered on July 17 when his staff car was strafed by British bombers.

             1947-Saturday-  Unfortunately, many people do not consider fun an important item on their daily agenda. For me, that was always high priority in whatever I was doing. ………….Charles (Chuck) Yeager was the first person to fly a plane faster than the sound barrier.  Of course when he landed he became ground chuck. By the way, what is the speed of sound? Did you say 720 mph depending on altitude? The X-1 had gone through "the sonic wall" without so much as a bump. As the speed topped out at Mach 1.05, Yeager had the sensation of shooting straight through the top of the sky. The sky turned a deep purple and all at once the stars and the moon came out - the sun shone at the same time. ... He was simply looking out into space. ... He was master of the sky. His was a king's solitude, unique and inviolate, above the dome of the world. It would take him seven minutes to glide back down and land at Muroc. He spent the time doing victory rolls and wing-over-wing aerobatics while Roger Lake and the High Sierras spun around below….Tom Wolfe….The Right Stuff.

            1955 –Friday - Well, that'll be the day, when you say goodbye
Yes, that'll be the day, when you make me cry
You say you're gonna leave, you know it's a lie
'Cause that'll be the day when I die ……………Unknown singer and guitarist, nineteen year old  Buddy Holly opened for Elvis Presley in Holly's hometown of Lubbock, TX. A few days later, opening for Bill Haley and His Comets  at the Fair Park Auditorium,  (note: we’ve seen him opening for Elvis on the Buddy Holly Timeline and opening for Bill Haley on Oct. 14 on History of Rock.com)   Either way, Holly impressed Nashville talent scout Eddie Crandell so much that Crandell  set him up with studio time for his first demo.

             1962 –Saturday- The Cuban Missile Crisis began.  It would  bring the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear conflict. Photographs taken by a high-altitude U-2 spy plane offered incontrovertible evidence that Soviet-made medium-range missiles in Cuba--capable of carrying nuclear warheads--were now stationed 90 miles off the American coastline. President John F. Kennedy announced an embargo on Communist ships going to Cuba. On the 18^th, President Kennedy met with Soviet Foreign Minister Andrie Gromyko and advised him that America would not tolerate Soviet missiles in Cuba. Fingers crossed behind his back, Gromyko denied the presence of any Soviet weaponry in Cuba.  On the 25^th, U.S. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson confronted the Soviets at the U.N. but they refused to answer. American military forces were instructed to set DEFCON 2 - the highest ever in U.S. history.

                1964 –Wednesday-  Happy birthday, Leonid Brezhnev
What a lovely seventy-fifth
We watched the party on TV
You seemed to be taking things casually
What a mighty heart must beat in your breast
To hold forty-nine medals on your chest
Think of all the gifts that you've got
Some were acquired and some were not
Like a natural talent for marionettes
Who do your dirty work and cover your bets
So with one hand waving free
The other one crushed a budding democracy  …….Joan Baez…………Warm, cuddly, Leonid Brezhnev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and thus the leader of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). Continuing the honored communist tradition of one man-one government, old Leonid had ousted the former monolithic leader, shoe banging Nikita Khrushchev, and sent him into retirement as a nonperson in the USSR.

            1966-Friday-  Soon to be the object of an 1960’s crush by Professor Sy Yentz, Gracie Slick made her first stage appearance with  Jefferson Airplane at Fillmore in San Francisco. Lead singer, Signe Anderson, had her final performance (she was pregnant) with the group on the 13^th and Gracie, former lead singer of the Great Society took over the following night.

            1968- First live T.V broadcast from space——Apollo 7.  Captain Walter Schirra, Jr., Major Donn Eisele and Major Walt Cunningham showed views of the satellite and views through the windows. They also gave several press conferences, performed a Punch and Judy puppet show, cooked fajitas, and did imitations of several politicians (just kidding about the last three)  from earth orbit during the flight. Apollo 7 was the first piloted Apollo flight.

            1968 –Monday-  Jim Hines of the United States of America, being pursued by the Real House Wives of  Orange County,  became the first man ever to break the so-called "ten-second barrier" in the 100-meter sprint in the Olympic Games held in (high altitude, thin air) Mexico City with a time of 9.95 seconds. Hines remained the only athlete to sprint 100 meters in under 10.0 seconds until the year 1977.  The Real House Wives also finished in under 10 seconds.

            1982 –Thursday- You know I've smoked a lot of grass
O' Lord, I've popped a lot of pills
But I never touched nothin'
That my spirit could kill
You know, I've seen a lot of people walkin' 'round
With tombstones in their eyes
But the pusher don't care
Ah, if you live or if you die
God damn, The Pusher
God damn, I say The Pusher
I said God damn, God damn The Pusher man ……..Steppenwolf……….President Ronald Reagan proclaimed a War on Drugs.  Well that sure worked out well.

            1998 –Wednesday-  Eric Robert Rudolph was charged with six bombings including the 1996 Centennial Olympic Park bombing in Atlanta, Georgia.  By 1999, on the third anniversary of the bombing, Rudolph had not been seen for over a year, and authorities sometimes voiced a belief or hope that survivalist Rudolph had gone kaput due  to the elements. After more than five years on the run, Rudolph was arrested on May 31, 2003, in Murphy, North Carolina. On April 8, 2005, the government announced that the terrorist Rudolph would plead guilty to all four bombings, including the Centennial Olympic Park attack. Rudolph was sentenced to four life terms without the possibility of parole at ADX Florence supermax prison in Florence, Colorado.

Back to Calendar

15     

70 B.C –Wednesday- I am of Ithaca and sailed for Troy,
a comrade of unfortunate Ulysses;
my name is Achaemenides. - Virgil, The Aeneid, Book 3, lines 794-6 ……. Happy Birthday, Virgil (Publius Vergilius Maro) regarded as the greatest Roman poet. His epic, the Aeneid  - prompted by a “request” from the emperor Augustus and written about 29 B.C, adopted the literary model of  Homer’s epic poems Iliad and Odyssey and There Once Was a Young Man From Troy…...  Aeneas, a Trojan traveled to Italy, where he became the ancestor of the Romans. It is written in dactylic hexameter (a poetic meter common in epic poetry [Homer used  the same style] and characterized by lines measuring six dactyls each. A dactyl is a poetic unit consisting of one long and two short syllables (or one stressed and two unstressed [unless one becomes “dis stressed”] syllables). Of course if you are afraid of it it is a  “terror dactyl” It is said that the poet had instructed his executor Varius to destroy The Aeneid, but Augustus ordered Varius to ignore this request, and the poem was published.  In The Divine Comedy, masterpiece of Italian poet Dante Alighieri, the narrator was guided by Virgil, mainly on the tour of Hell.

                 1492 –Saturday-  Salem, don’t inhalem” -  Columbus mentioned  tobacco use by the Indians. "We found a man in a canoe going from Santa Maria to Fernandia. He had with him some dried leaves which are in high value among them, for a quantity of it was brought to me at San Salvador" -- Christopher Columbus' Journal

            1582 –Friday  Friday, thank God it's Friday, Friday
Thank God it's Friday, Friday, Friday, Friday …..Love and Kisses

Back to normal after the missing days. Pope Gregory XIII implements the Gregorian calendar. In Italy, Poland, Portugal, and Spain, October 4 of this year is followed directly by October 15.  Use of the Gregorian calendar in the United States stems from an Act of Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1751, which specified use of the Gregorian calendar in England and its colonies. We were going to give the list of who changed and when but Gregory opened a centuries long can of calandaric worms.  Look at http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/year-countries.html for the complete list but of all places, the last to change was Greece in 1923.

             1608 –Wednesday- I claim that the force which keeps the mercury from falling is external and that the force comes from outside the tube…………….. Happy Birthday, Evangelista Torricelli, Italian scientist born in Faenza, Italy. He was a physicist, mathematician and the inventor of the barometer (barometer is an instrument for measuring atmospheric pressure – it was originally  known as a “Torricelli Tube”) In 1641, Torricelli moved to Florence to assist Galileo Galilei.  Using the liquid metal mercury, Torricelli became the first scientist to create a sustained vacuum and to discover the principle of a barometer when he realized that the variation of the height of the mercury from day to day was caused by changes in the atmospheric pressure.

                 1783 –Wednesday-  The first tethered balloon flight was made by Frenchman Jean Pilâtre de Rozier in the gardens of La Muette. The Montgolfier-made balloon, Aerostat Reveillon, carrying Pilâtre, first man to leave the earth, rose to the end of its 250- ft tether …. Where Pilâtre dropped water balloons on the spectators…..no, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his airborne sense of humor…  It stayed aloft for15 minutes, then landed safely nearby.

            1829 –Thursday- Happy Birthday, Asaph Hall, American astronomer born in Goshen, Ct. Hall discovered and named the two moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos, in August, 1877 and calculated their orbits. In mythology, Phobos and Deimos were the sons of Ares (Roman god Mars) and Aphrodite (Roman god Venus) conceived after a night of Beer Pong. Phobos is Greek for the root of fear. Deiomos is panic, sort of what some folks get before high stakes tests or job interviews.  For a list of “fears”- “We have nothing to phobe but phobe itself” see the Brain Stuff page - http://www.sciencegnus.com/page16.html

            1844 –Tuesday- How many existentialists does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to change the lightbulb and one to observe how the lightbulb symbolizes an incandescent beacon of subjectivity in a netherworld of Cosmic Nothingness.

 Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. ……..Happy Birthday, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, German philosopher. Nietzsche is often referred to as one of the first existentialist philosophers. Existentialism is a philosophy concerned with finding self and the meaning of life through free will, choice, and personal responsibility. The belief is that people are searching to find out who and what they are throughout life as they make choices based on their experiences, beliefs, and outlook. Read Camus and you’ll understand….at least until your existence changes. Nietzsche  achieved renewed fame with his quote “God is Dead” (from Thus Spoke Zarathustra) in the 1970s  which spawned the famous graffiti of “God is Dead… Nietzsche    Nietzsche is Dead….God”.

            1860 –Monday - Who says politicians don’t listen?  Eleven-year-old Grace Bedell of Westfield, N.Y., wrote a letter to presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln, suggesting he could improve his appearance by growing a beard.  And so he did.

            1863 –  It’s déjà vu all over again…..Yogi Berra............Thursday-  The Confederate submarine CSS Hunley (named after its inventor) sunk again.  The Hunley could dive but it required calm waters.  Upon its arrival at Charleston Harbor, it sank on it’s first test run when a crewman got entangled in the machinery (don’t ask!) and it dived with the hatch open.  A few days later on Oct. 15, Hunley, the inventor and crew took another dive to prove how safe it was.  Spectators watched as they stayed under water, and stayed under water, and stayed under water…yup, they drowned.  Incredibly, the Hunley was brought to the surface, emptied of the corpses and another crew was  rounded up.  Even more incredibly, it actually worked and sunk the Union ship Housatonic. That was the Hunley’s first and only successful mission.  Yup, it sunk again taking yet another crew with it.  It stayed at the bottom of Charleston Bay until 2000 when it was raised for exhibition in the Charleston History Museum.   

            1878-Tuesday- Oh no, we gonna rock down to Electric Avenue
And then we'll take it higher
Oh, we gonna rock down to Electric Avenue
And then we'll take it higher ……Eddy Grant………….The First electric light company formed, or switched on. It would be incorporated on Nov. 15.  The Edison Electric Light Co. would have its headquarters on 5th Ave. in N.Y.C.  Shortly afterwards rival business’s started turning on. The Thomson-Houston electric company, was formed in 1883 from the merger of the Elihu Thomson’s American Electric Company (Thompson’s inventions include the street arc lamp) and the interests of Edwin Houston (American electrical engineer) to compete against Edison’s company. …...and the results were shocking as well as illuminating. This competition led Edison to bring together his various businesses under the banner of…..tada………… the Edison General Electric Company by 1890. However, the electric companies  leaders realized that it was in their best interests to come together and form a conglomerate. Thus, together they formed the General Electric company in 1892 

            1880- Friday-  You can take no credit for beauty at sixteen. But if you are beautiful at sixty, it will be your soul's own doing.……….. Happy Birthday, Marie Stopes, Scottish scientist, educator, birth control advocate, and poet born in Edinburgh. She became a famous paleobotanist writing such riveting books as The Constitution of Coal, published in 1918, and The Four Visible Ingredients in Banded Bituminous Coal: Studies in the Composition of Coal,  published in 1919.   Her first book, Married Love, was published in 1918 making the then highly controversial argument that posited  marriage should be an equal relationship between husband and wife.  Her married life wasn’t a rousing success as it turned out her husband was impotent……….probably after reading The Constitution of Coal.  Her second marriage was more successful.  She made her name through her writing and campaigning on family planning services. But, as she had promised herself as a young girl, she would eventually become a poet.     

    1910 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Torbjörn Oskar Caspersson, Swedish cytologist (a biologist who studies the structure and function of cells) and geneticist (a biologist who specializes in genetics ) – which made him a cytogeneticist - who initiated the use of the ultraviolet microscope (A special type of purple microscope which uses electromagnetic radiation in the range 180-400 nanometers; it requires reflecting optics or special quartz and crystal objectives as well as the music of  the Mantovani Orchestra in the background) to determine the nucleic acid content of cellular structures such as the nucleus and nucleolus. This was preliminary work necessary for the discovery in the 1950’s of the double helix by Crick, Watson and Franklin and Wilkins.

            1917 – Monday Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
Tell me why
I don’t like Mondays
I wanna shoo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oot the whole day down …..Boomtown Rats - …… Mata Hari kaput. Mata Hari, the Dutch exotic dancer, courtesan and spy, was executed for espionage by a French firing squad at Vincennes outside of Paris.  Margaretha Zelle, her real name, was a “horizontally accessible” woman who slept with both allied and German officers.  There is much debate to this day as to the extent of her spying or the French using the case to distract attention from their dismal performances on the battlefield.  In fact, she was betrayed by Germans sending her identity in a code that they knew the allies had already broken.  See same day, 1945

             1945 –Monday-  Pierre Laval, the puppet leader of Nazi-occupied Vichy France, was kaputed  by firing squad for treason against France.

            1946 –Tuesday- In the smallest World Series share since 1918, each member of the victorious St. Louis Cardinals  (four games to three) received $3,748 and Johnny Pesky and Red Sox received $2,140. We note that the losing Red Sox share would not be sufficient to buy one luxury seat for one game at the new Yankee Stadium. Shares rose over the next fifty years above $300,000 per player.

            1946 –Tuesday-  Herman Goering kaput.  Herman Goering, commander in chief of the Luftwaffe, president of the Reichstag, head of the Gestapo, prime minister of Prussia, chief forester of the Reich, chief liquidator (i.e art thief) of sequestered estates, supreme head of the National Weather Bureau, mass murderer and Hitler's designated successor cheated justice by committing suicide via swallowing a cyanide pill (origin unknown – American guard suspected) just hours before his scheduled hanging after being found guilty of war crimes at the Nuremburg Trials. 

            1951 –Monday-  The situation comedy  I Love Lucy  premiered on CBS.  Lucille Ball, and Desi Arnez would go on to make 181 episodes (and millions of dollars) before the show stopped making new episodes in 1957.  It has never really gone off the air. Note; Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) appeared in 176 episodes and William Frawley (Fred Mertz) appeared in 175.

            1964 – Thursday- Many mothers think they have seen the longest skid marks, however, while trying to set a new one mile land-speed record, Craig Breedlove inadvertently lost control of the Spirit of America jet-powered car on the Bonneville Salt Flats testing area in Utah. The vehicle began a skid moments into the run, taking nearly six miles to decelerate from an initial speed of well over 400mph. When the dust cleared, Breedlove was record-holder for the longest skid marks ever recorded and a ticket issued by the local sheriff for failure of his break lights.   Later,  he went on to set several land speed records.

             1966 –Saturday-  The worst driver in American history – according to the History Channel.   On this day in McKinney, Texas, it was reported that a 75-year-old male driver received 10 traffic tickets, drove on the wrong side of the road four times, committed four hit-and-run offenses, and caused six accidents, all within 20 minutes. Professor Sy Yentz disagrees.  Some NYC taxi drivers have done all that in just one block! 

            1971 –Friday-  I went to a garden party to reminisce with my old friends
A chance to share old memories and play our songs again
When I got to the garden party, they all knew my name
No one recognized me, I didn't look the same……….

Now, if you gotta play a garden party, I wish you a lotta luck,
But if memories were all I sang, I rather drive a truck……Rick Nelson   Rick (formerly Ricky)  Nelson played his, what came to be known  “Garden Party” at Madison Square Garden in New York City.  Nelson, former teen idol of the Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet was invited to play in a reunion show at Madison Square Garden, alongside such early rock stars as Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Little Richard and others. By this time his hair had grown shoulder length and he was heavily into the country rock genre on which, his music would be a major influence.  (see Eagles and quite a few others). When he mixed in new material with his old music, the audience began to boo.

            1990 –Monday- Attack of the Killer Bees! The killer bees, bypassing passport control and entering the country illegally,  like millions of others from Mexico, reached the southern tip of Texas, in the city of Hidalgo. They are called “killer bee” because of their intense defensive swarming behavior. Arizona was the second state to be invaded by these illegal alien insects. The bees had originated with (what else!) a scientific experiment in cross-breeding gone bad – mixing African bees with domestic bees in Brazil in the 1950s.  They had been moving northward ever since.            By 2004 they were in Oklahoma, however upon reaching Nevada they promptly lost all their money in a Keno game at Harrah’s and ………..Anyway, by 2007 they were in Florida (looking for beachfront condos) and New Orleans.

            1997 – On the expressway to your heart
The expressway is not the best way
At five o'clock it's much too crowded
Much too crowded, so crowded
No room for me (too crowded)
Oh, too crowded……Soul Survivors   Wednesday-  The first supersonic land speed record was set by Andy Green in ThrustSSC, exactly 50 years and 1 day after Chuck Yeager first broke the sound barrier in the Earth's atmosphere. He reached 763.035 mph (1227.99 km/h), the first supersonic record (Mach 1.016) at the Black Rock Desert in Nevada.  He would have gone faster but he had to slow down for a merge onto I 90.

            1997 – Wednesday – same day as the sound barrier was broken on land, the launch of the Cassini Mission to Saturn.  Due to a slight error in the Google Directions, Cassini was launched heading first to Venus for one of a series of "slingshot" maneuvers that used gravity to boost its velocity and send the craft on its way to the outer solar system. Even so, the journey to Saturn took about seven years.  In October 2004, the Cassini spacecraft made the first of 45 close flybys of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon at one point passing only 1,200 kilometers above the moon. On Chistmas Day 2004, the Huygens probe separated from the Cassini orbiter, landing three weeks later, sending data for about 90 minutes after reaching the surface. The probe touched down on land, near the border of the Shangri-la and Adiri regions. The mission is named for the 17th century, astronomers, Holland's Christiaan Huygens and Italian Giovanni Domenico Cassini. Huygens and Cassini, observing  Saturn discovered its five largest moons and the birthplace of Madonna on the Saturnian moon Enceladus .

            2001 –Monday-  Io Io it’s off to work we go…….  NASA's Galileo spacecraft passed within 112 miles of Jupiter's  moon Io. In all Galileo Galileo had 35 encounters of Jupiter's major moons - 11 with Europa, 8 with Callisto, 8 with Ganymede, 7 with Io and 1 with Amalthea. The mission ended when the spacecraft crashed into Jupiter on Sunday, Sept. 21, 2003  sending millions of spores back to Earth that resulted in people who actually buy the smiley cursors that pop up on the screen when they drag their won cursor across a webstie

            2003-Wednesday-   China became the third nation to send a man into space. Lieutenant Colonel Yang Liwei, 38, was launched on a Long March (cleverly named after Mao Zedong’s 1934 stroll of the same name) CZ-2F rocket in the Shenzhou (Shenzhou translates as “divine vessel”)-5 spacecraft. He completed 14 Earth orbits during a 21-hour flight which ended with a parachute-assisted landing in the on the grasslands of Inner Mongolia in northern China. Afterwards, Col. Liwei complained that the flight was like Chinese food, an hour later you want to have “launch” again.

            2009-Thursday-  NASA's IBEX spacecraft has discovered a vast, glowing ribbon at the edge of the solar system. One mission scientist calls the discovery "shocking" and said  theorists are "working like crazy" to explain the finding. IBEX is not an antelope.  IBEX is a small explorer NASA mission to map the boundary of the solar system. The acronym IBEX stands for Interstellar Boundary EXplorer. The IBEX spacecraft is a small satellite the size of a bus tire. IBEX observes the solar system boundary while in orbit around Earth. It has "telescopes" on the spacecraft that looks out towards the edge of the solar system. The ribbon, wrapped around a gift wrapped black hole, was to be a surprise wedding gift for the merging of two spiral galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163.  Although the ribbon looks bright in the IBEX map, it does not glow in any conventional sense. The ribbon is not a source of light, but rather a source of particles--energetic neutral atoms or ENAs. IBEX's sensors can detect these particles, which are produced in the outer heliosphere where the solar wind begins to slow down and mix with interstellar matter from outside the solar system

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16.    1430 –Saturday-   Happy Birthday, King James II of Scotland. We note James II because Scottish kings, especially named James,  were not particularly long lived and because in the history of medieval betrayals and sleazy behavior, James earned a place of honor.  Throughout most of his reign, the powerful Douglas family posed a perceived threat to his throne. When he was ten, his advisers invited the young 6th Earl of Douglas and his and his 14 year old brother David to dinner at Edinburgh Castle. There they were murdered at  what is known as 'The Black Dinner' in 1440. In spite of this William, the  8^th Earl of Douglas, (Douglases frequently did to each other what was done to them by others) was a strong supporter of the King.  Following a quarrel, William was invited to meet with the King.  He cleverly left his sword and shield outside. Whoops…big mistake. James himself stabbed him to death in Stirling Castle.  Later, at age twenty nine, while besieging Roxburgh Castle (held by the English for more than a century),  James stood next to one of his cannon and it exploded, killing him instantly.

            1708 –Tuesday- Happy Birthday, Albrect von Haller, the father of experimental physiology, which is a very strange name for a child if you think about it.  Experimental physiology is the biological study of the functions of living organisms and their parts. Haller revolutionized the knowledge of blood flow and heart action  and clarified the relation between respiration and blood flow. He explained nerve action in muscles and also presented new insights into human reproduction and birth defects. Not content with science, he also studied higher mathematics (that’s it, see?  Way up there…) with one of the thousands of Bernoulis that populated the 16^th and 17^th centuries, John.

            1714 –Tuesday- He took a hundred pounds of clay
And then He said "Hey, listen"
"I'm gonna fix this-a world today"
"Because I know what's missin' "….Gene McDaniels.

             Happy Birthday, Giovanni Arduino Italian geologist, known as the father of Italian geology, who introduced the terms Primary, Secondary, Tertiary, and Quaternary in 1760 to classify four broad divisions of the Earth's rock surface

            1758-Monday-  Happy Birthday, Noah Webster, American lexicographer.  What is a lexicographer?  Thanks to Webster, you can look it up. Noah, described by contemporaries as a dour, humorless individual, used American spellings like "color" instead of the English "colour" and "music" instead " of "musick". He also added American words that weren't in English dictionaries like "skunk" and "squash". It took him over 27 years to write the book. (Just about what it’s taking us to write the Gnus Almanac) When he considered it finished in 1828, at the age of 70, Webster’s dictionary had 70,000 words in it. The rights to An American Dictionary of the English Language, Corrected and Enlarged were bought by publishers George and Charles Merriam in 1843. So today you look things up in your Merriam-Webster Dictionary…..and you can do it on line too.

           1793 –Wednesday. “Here’s your cake”…. Marie Antoinette kaput. Nine months after the execution of her husband, the former King Louis XVI of France, Marie-Antoinette lost her head over it as she went to the guillotine. Marie, not the brightest bulb in the chandelier, the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Francis I, had been married Louis in 1770 to strengthen the French-Austrian alliance. After the Bastille was stormed on July 14, 1789, the queen urged the king to resist the Assembly's reforms, making her even more unpopular, and leading to the attribution to her of the remark, "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche!" -- "Let them eat cake!" In October, 1789, the royal couple were forced to move to Paris. In 1792, the French monarchy was abolished, and Louis and Marie-Antoinette were condemned for treason.  November 2 would have been her 38^th birthday.

             1846-Friday-  American dentist, Dr William Thomas Green Morton made the first public demonstration of the administration of anesthesia ( note: Anna Sthesia was a Greek philosopher who put everyone to sleep with her boring soliloquies. Many of her adherents currently lecture in colleges all over the world).  Morton used ether as the anesthetic and  the patient inhaled it from a blown glass flask, during an operation performed by Dr. John Collins Warren at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. The patient, Gilbert Abbott, age 20, had a small superficial tumor removed from beneath the left lower jaw. Two weeks before on Sept. 30,  Morton had privately made a painless tooth extraction for a patient.

            1854 –Monday-  Happy Birthday Oscar Wilde, Irish author and wit. (brother of Born to Be Wilde and Girls Gone Wilde), writer of, among others, Picture of Dorian Gray and  Importance of Being Earnest),

            1855-Tuesday- The process for making steel was patented. A famous song was written about the process, It’s called In the Steel of the Night recorded by the Five Satins in 1956. American inventor, William Kelly, had held a patent for "a system of air blowing the carbon out of pig iron" a method of steel production known as the pneumatic process of steelmaking.  He went bankrupt and sold his process to Henry Bessemer (who also had a song written about him, you may remember, Bessemer Mucho).  Bessemer’s patented his process for rendering cast iron malleable by the introduction of air into the fluid metal to remove carbon. Bessemer's industrial process was similar to a Chinese method to refine iron into steel, developed in the second century BC. They called this process the "hundred refinings method" since they repeated the process 100 times.

            1859-Sunday- Abolitionist John Brown and his band overran the U.S arsenal at Harper’s Ferry. The goal was to incite an insurrection and destroy the institution of slavery.  A company of U.S. marines arrived the next day,  October 17, led by Colonel Robert E. Lee and Lieutenant J. E. B. Stuart. On the morning of October 19, the soldiers defeated and captured Brown and his survivors. Ten of his men were killed, including two of his sons. The wounded Brown was tried by the state of Virginia for treason and murder, and he was found guilty on November 2. He went to the gallows and was kaput on December 2. In 1861 after hearing Union soldiers singing “John Brown’s body lies a moulderin in the grave”, Julia Ward Howe took the tune and wrote the lyrics to the Battle Hymn of the Republic.

            1875 –Saturday-  Happy Birthday, Henry C. Sherman, American biochemist who did pioneer work in developing assay (while occasionally suffering from a pain in the assay) methods and determining functions of vitamins. Assay is the qualitative or quantitative analysis of a substance, especially of an ore or drug, to determine its components. Merrily working his way through the vitamin alphabet, he established the average human requirements for calcium, phosphorus, and iron. He also determined the human daily requirement of B vitamins, and his study on vitamin A defined a suitable weekly dose, and its storage in the body. In other nutrition studies, he debunked the value of spinach after which he was assaulted by a pipe smoking sailor with bulging forearms.

            1888-Tuesday-  Happy Birthday,  Eugene O'Neill, American playwright.  He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1936. Long Day's Journey into Night (produced posthumously 1956), was the greatest of a series of great plays which included Beyond the Horizon (1920), Anna Christie (1922), Strange Interlude (1928), Ah! Wilderness (1933), and The Iceman Cometh (1946).

            1890-Thursdasy-  Happy Birthday, Michael Collins hero of the Irish struggle for independence. He is remembered for his daring strategy in directing the campaign of guerrilla warfare during the intensification of the English-Irish War from 1919–21.  Collins became the most wanted man in Ireland, with a price of £10,000 on his head. Luckily, the police did not have a good photograph of him and Collins was able to bicycle around Dublin from place to place.  The Irish Republican Army split over concessions to the British (the six counties of Northern Ireland).  Collins took part in the negotiations. He favored the split. More internecine violence ensued and  he was killed in an ambush by rival IRA gunman in 1922. He was 32 years old

          1916-Monday-  The first birth control clinic in the U.S. was opened - by Margaret Sanger, her sister, Ethel Byrne, both nurses, and an associate, Fania Mindell –(the first birth control clinic was founded in 1878 in Amsterdam by Aletta Jacobs) in Brooklyn, NYC. A circular announcing its opening was printed in English, Yiddish (vos macht) and Italian. In the few weeks of its existence it served 464 women. On October 26 Sanger and her sister, were arrested for selling obscene materials and the clinic was closed. Out on bail, Sanger re-opened it. The police closed it in November under the public nuisance laws. Sanger and her sister were convicted and each spent 30 days in prison.  Sanger was also an advocate of eugnics - the application of the principles of genetics to the "improvement" of humankind.  She believed that birth control served a great eugenic purpose by stopping those she described as the genetically "unfit" from reproducing.  In her 1920 book, Woman and the New Race, Sanger explicitly called her work "nothing more or less than the facilitation of the process of weeding out the unfit, of preventing the birth of defectives or those who will become defectives."

          1923-Tuesday- Happy Birthday, Cyril Ponnamperuma, Ceylonese-American chemist and exobiologist, (The branch of biology that deals with the search for extraterrestrial life and the effects of extraterrestrial surroundings on living organisms) who became a  leading authority on the chemical origins of life. He built on the work of Stanley Miller and Clayton Urey studying chemical reactions in "primordial soup"  and later chicken soup experiments. Ponnamperuma focused on producing compounds related to the nucleic acids and offered a theory about series of chemical reactions that gave rise to precursors of life on earth, notably Cher and Joyce Behar.

          1923 –Tuesday-  And speaking of the origins of life (see above), from this came Mickey, Donald, Goofy, the T-shirts, the toys, the Disney Worlds and all of the applications designed to separate you from your money…Walt Disney had made a short film in Kansas City about a little girl in a cartoon world, called Alice's Wonderland, and he planned to use it as his "pilot" film to sell a series of these Alice Comedies to a distributor. On October 16, 1923, a New York distributor, M. J. Winkler, contracted to release the Alice Comedies, and this date became the formal beginning of The Walt Disney Company. Originally known as the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio, with Walt Disney and his brother Roy as equal partners, the company soon changed its name, at Roy's suggestion, to the Walt Disney Studio

                1925-Friday-  The Texas School Board prohibited the teaching of evolution.  Afterwards, they climbed a tree for a lunch of bananas and nuts while squatting and picking insects out of each others hides.

           1927- Sunday- Peking Man (or actually his tooth), a well-preserved left lower molar was uncovered by Swedish paleontologist Birgir Bohlin at an  archaeological dig in caves inside Zhoukoudian Cave, outside Peking (now Beijing), China. After studying the new tooth and the earlier finds, Davidson Black deduced that they were from an early human ancestor that he named Peking Man, Sinathropus pekinensis.  The original fossils disappeared during WW II in 1941 while being shipped to the United States for safety, following the Japanese attack on China.  They were last known to be in the possession of U.S soldiers who were captured by the Japanese, and that’s the whole tooth and nothing but the tooth, but excellent casts and descriptions remain. Since the war, other erectus fossils have been found at this site and others in China

            1946 –Wednesday-  With Herman Goering having cheated justice by committing suicide the day before, 10 high-ranking Nazi officials were executed by hanging for their crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, and war crimes during World War II.  Unfortunately, they could only be hung once. Hanged for war crimes (and the deaths of millions of humans) were  Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister, Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, once head of the Nazis' security police; Alfred Rosenberg, muddled philosopher of Nazi culture in foreign lands; Hans Frank; Gauleiter of Poland; Wilhem Frick, Nazi minister of the interior; Fritz Sauckel, boss of slave labor; Colonel General Alfred Jodl; the odious Julius Streicher, who guided the anti-Semitism drive of the Hitler Reich and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, former Gauleiter of Holland and Austria.

            1946 –Wednesday- When  he was 15, the New York Rangers invited Gordie Howe  to a tryout camp. The camp director was unimpressed. "You're too awkward, son, " he remarked to Howe. "You'll never make the major leagues." ... The next year, a Detroit  Red Wings scout discovered him and sent him to the team's training camp in Windsor, Ontario. Two years later, at 18, Howe was playing in the NHL. On Oct. 16, 1946, in his first game, he scored the first of 975 regular-season goals as the Red Wings skated to  a 3-3 tie with the Toronto Maple Leafs.  We’re not sure if this first game included the famed “Gordie Howe hat trick” consisting of a goal, an assist, and a fight.

            1964-Friday-  China detonated its first atomic bomb at its Lop Nor (in southeastern China) test site. With the test China became the fifth nuclear power. Fallout from the bomb resulted in the development of a  plate of General Tso’s chicken loaded with about 40 percent more sodium and more than half the calories an average adult needs for an entire day. The battered, fried chicken dish with vegetables has 1,300 calories, 3,200 milligrams of sodium and 11 grams of saturated fat

            1968 –Wednesday-  United States athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos were kicked off the USA's team for embarrassing their country by doing their Black Power salute during the Mexico City Olympic awards ceremony. Carlos, who finished 3^rd was passed at the last moment of the 200 meter race by Australian Peter Norman while  he foolishly celebrated as he approached the finish line.

             1969 –Thursday-  Improbably, the New York Mets won the World Series, beating the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles 4 games to 1.

            1972 –Monday-  Creedence Clearwater Revival broke up.  We note this because, unlike most bands who break up, “unbreak up” (usually for monetary reasons), they stayed broke up. For years lead singer and song writer John Fogarty would refuse to perform Creedance songs.  Then, in February, 1987, at the Palomino Club in Los Angeles, Fogerty broke his ban on performing his CCR hits, after a verbum sapienti from Bob Dylan and George Harrison (who both joined him onstage) that "if you don't, the whole world's gonna think Proud Mary is Tina Turner's song."

            1976 –Saturday-  In one of the saddest moments in music history,  and once again proving that one cannot underestimate the taste of the public, Disco Duck Pt. 1 by Rick Dees achieved the number 1 spot on the Billboard Top 100. All the more terrifying is the thought that there was a Disco Duck Pt. 2. All in all, it wasn’t a good month for music. Disco Duck was preceded by Play that Funky Music White Boy, and A Fifth of Beethoven. It was succeeded at number one by something by Chicago…hard to tell since they all sounded alike.

            1978 –Monday-  Polish Cardinal Karol Wojtyla of Krakow was elected pope by the Roman Catholic Church's College of Cardinals. Since predecessor, John Paul I had lasted only thirty three days,  he took the name John Paul II.

            1982-Saturday-  Halley's Comet was first observed on its 30th recorded visit to Earth, using the 5-m (200-in) Hale Telescope at the Mount Palomar Observatory. The team of astronomers led by David Jewett and G. Edward Danielson found the comet, beyond the orbit of Saturn, about 11 AU (1.6 billion km) from the Sun. Of course during 1986, the year of the “official visit” when we were all supposed to see it with the naked eye…….we couldn’t! It was barely visible to the naked eye. However back in 1705, Edmund Halley used his friend Isaac Newton's theories to compute the orbit and correctly predicted the return of this comet about every 76 years. After his death, as an honor for correctly predicting its reappearance, it was named after Halley.

              1987 –Friday-  The youngest person to have an organ transplant, Paul Holc received a new heart at just three hours old. The heart transplant was performed at Loma Linda University Medical Center. At birth, the baby suffered from hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a fatal heart defect in which the heart's left chamber is missing or atrophied. He was delivered early by Caesarian section because a donor heart became available from a brain-dead baby in Canada.

            1998-Friday- Another cultural milestone as The Bride of Chucky, directed by Ronny Yu starring Jennifer Tilly (does she keep this on her resume?) premiered. Also appearing were Brad Dourif, Katherine Heigl, and John Ritter.

             2006 –Monday-  I just looked around and he was gone….. Dion

            Scientists continued their quest for new elements that could only exist for a brief period of time with the creation of the heaviest man-made element which  was announced by researchers from Russia's Joint Institute of Nuclear Research and the U.S. Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The element, which was named Californium (#118) when confirmed in 2007, is the first man-made noble gas, look for it below radon on the periodic table. Californium resulted from the collision of accelerated calcium ions with atoms of the man-made heavy element californium, (on the interchange leading to the Oakland Bay Bridge…..a trailer truck may have also been involved) and existed barely a millisecond before decaying into element 114, then element 112 and then split in half.

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 17     1777 -Battle of Saratoga (NY). During the American Revolution, British General John Burgoyne ("Gentleman Johnny") surrendered 5,000 British and Hessian troops to Continental Army General Horatio Gates at Saratoga, New York. The battle had actually begun weeks earlier with a costly British victory.  However, reinforcements never arrived and after  miserable march in mud and rain, Burgoyne's troops took refuge in a fortified camp on the heights of Saratoga. There, an American force that had grown to nearly 20,000 men surrounded the exhausted British army. Faced with such overwhelming numbers, Burgoyne surrendered. The victory demonstrated that the Colonials were capable of waging a competitive war with the British and was a factor in subsequent French support for the colonists.

           1833- If  have flown at high altitudes or you are a diver, if you have heard of the “bends”, you should know Paul Bert, French physiologist and the founder of modern aerospace medicine. His research into the effects of air pressure on the body helped make possible the exploration of space and the ocean depths.  He found that animal illnesses at high altitudes were caused mainly by the low oxygen content of the sparse atmosphere. Bert also made a study of "the bends", suffered by deep-sea divers coming up too quickly to the surface from the great pressures of the depths. Bert demonstrated that “the bends” is caused by high external pressures forcing large quantities of atmospheric nitrogen to dissolve in the blood, then during rapid decompression the nitrogen forms gas bubbles that obstruct capillaries and you can become kaput.  He published La Pression barometrique in 1878.

            1888 - First issue of National Geographic was published.  Subsequent issues came out on an irregular basis as the National Geographic Society would wait until they had enough material for an issue before publishing.  The magazine began in a 6 x 9 1/2 inch format, becoming 7 x 10 in 1900. There were no pictures of bare breasted native women in the first issue.  Attention collectors, first issue will generally fetch upwards of $4000, the usual range is from $7-9,000, with a very few sales over the $10,000 mark. It is considered to be one of the most highly-prized of any magazine within the past 150 years and it is very difficult to find in anything better than good condition…even without the bare breasted south pacific women.

           1912- In an important precursor to WWI,  following the example of Montenegro, their smaller ally in the tumultuous Balkan region of Europe, Serbia and Greece declared war on the Ottoman Empire (Turkey), beginning the First Balkan War..

            1931 – The man responsible for the cottage industry of gangster movies and TV shows, and probably the most notorious gangster of the 20^th century, Al Capone was sentenced to 11 years in prison for….not murder, not racketeering, not being responsible for having Jason Robards Jr. portray him in the movies, but for tax evasion and fined $80,000. Capone was initially sent to the U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta, but amid accusations that he was manipulating the system and receiving cushy treatment, he was transferred to the maximum-security lockup at Alcatraz. He was released early in 1939 for “good behavior”, after spending his final year in prison in a hospital, suffering from syphilis. His brain turned to mush from the STD and  “Scarface Al” (although no one would dare call him that to his face) Capone died in 1947 at age 48 at his home in Palm Island, Florida.

            1933- Albert Einstein arrived in America as a refugee from Nazi Germany. He settled in Princeton, NJ, choosing it over Dubuque, Iowa which he couldn't find. Einstein had visited the U.S several times and had already done some teaching at Princeton.  Finally in 1933, anti-Semitism in Germany became overwhelming and dangerous. Einstein permanently relocated to the U.S

            1956- The first full-scale atomic power plant opened in Shippingport, Pennsylvania.  It was completed at a cost of $72,500,000 and became the country's first large-scale civilian atomic power plant started generating electricity for commercial use on December 18, 1957. The plant, on the Ohio River twenty-five miles northwest of Pittsburgh, was built in thirty-two months. It is “the world’s first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses..  And nearby rabbits and other small mammals are now the size of elephants and giant spiders have attacked Pittsburgh…and it created Iranian Ahmadjinedad  and………….no, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his nuclear sense of humor.

            1956 -Happy Birthday, Mae Jemison, born in Decatur, Alabama.  American physician and the first African-American woman in space aboard the shuttle Endeavor in September 1982 as Science Mission Specialist -a NASA first. She conducted experiments in life sciences, material sciences, and was co-investigator in the Bone Cell Research experiment.   A huge Star Trek fan, after leaving NASA she actually appeared in an episode of Star Trek – The Next Generation

            1957 - French author Albert Camus was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature.  Usually described as an existentialist, Camus always denied the label.  He was born in Algeria, thus becoming the first “African” and also the youngest (he was  44) to win the Nobel.  The author of such works as The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall. He died in an automobile accident just three years later.

            1973 - The Arab-dominated Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) announced a decision to cut oil exports to the United States and other nations that provided military aid to Israel in the Yom Kippur War of October 1973.  During this Oil Embargo, many of us remember the long gas lines, the "odd and even" license plate days and the getting and keeping of gas to keep our cars running, so we could get to work as the focus of daily life.

         1974 - President Gerald Ford explained to Congress why he had chosen to pardon his predecessor, Richard Nixon, rather than allow Congress to pursue legal action against the former president.  Ford, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, had had the definition of “pardon” explained to him over the course of several weeks.  He announced that  that a long, drawn-out trial would only have further polarized the public.  Professor Sy Yentz has learned that what really occurred was a Nixon burp during a phone conversation with Ford.  Nixon said “pardon me” and Ford said. “o.k.”.

            1977 – In one of the rare happy endings to an Islamic terrorist story, West German commandos stormed a hijacked Lufthansa jetliner on the ground in Mogadishu, Somalia, freeing all 86 hostages and killing three of the four hijackers.

            1989 - The deadliest earthquake to hit the San Francisco area since 1906 hit at 5:04 p.m. and lasted for 15 seconds. The quake measured 7.1 on the Richter scale, and its aftermath was witnessed on live television by millions of people tuning in for the third game of the World Series of baseball between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics, held at Candlestick Park in San Francisco. The tremor collapsed a section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. Damage was estimated at almost three billion dollars in San Francisco, which was approximately one-half of the total damage figure for the entire earthquake zone.  The earthquake triggered a four-foot tsunami wave in Monterey Bay as well as a huge undersea landslide. The sea level at Santa Cruz dropped three feet as water rushed out of the harbor. The tsunami wave took 20 minutes to travel from Santa Cruz to Monterey.  The earthquake caused the Cypress Viaduct  to collapse, resulting in 42 deaths. The Viaduct was a raised freeway which was part of the Nimitz freeway in Oakland, which is Interstate 880. The Viaduct had two traffic decks and the upper collapsed on the lower. The epicenter was near Loma Prieta, hence its name “Loma Prieta Earthquake”,  which is a peak in the Santa Cruz mountains. This location is 10 miles northeast of the city of Santa Cruz.

            1994 – The world’s longest taxi ride came to an end as Taxicab driver Jeremy Levine returned to London, England, from a round-trip journey to Cape Town, South Africa. Passengers Mark Aylett and Carlos Aresse paid 40,000 pounds, or approximately $65,000, for the 21,691-mile trip which passed through Eastern Europe, Turkey, Syria, Jordan, and down into Africa, They left on June 3 so the 4 ½ month trip probably equaled the time it takes to get across town in Manhattan during the Christmas season.

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18      1469 – A social note; Ferdinand of Aragon married Isabella of Castile in Valladolid.  The bride was resplendent in a pink taffeta gown designed by Vera Wang. The marriage began  t a cooperative reign that would unite all the dominions of Spain and elevate the nation to a dominant world power. In 1492, the reconquest of Granada drove the muslim invaders from Spain. Also in 1492, Christopher Columbus, an Italian explorer sponsored by Isabella and Ferdinand, discovered the New World for Europe and claimed the rich, unspoiled territory for Spain.

      1685 - King Louis XIV of France revoked the Edict of Nantes, which had established the legal toleration of France's Protestant population, the Huguenots. King Henry IV had signed The Edict of Nantes in 1598 for his Protestant subjects. France was of course a primarily Catholic nation, yet Henry himself had been a practicing Protestant until his coronation, when he underwent a conversion to Catholicism (famously remarking, "Paris is worth a mass.")  The Edict granted Protestants many rights, including amnesty from persecution and prosecution; the right to meet publicly (in specially marked-off areas); and the right to work for the State, all of which had been banned previously. However, Henry IV's grandson, Louix XIV, believed that in order to consolidate his power, he would have to unify religion in France. He issued the Edict of Fontainebleau, more popularly known as "The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes".The edict's desired effect worked: some 200,000 Huguenots left the country, heading for the United States, Germany, and Great Britain.

            1767- Mason and Dixon draw the line.. Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon completed their four year survey of the boundary between the colonies of Pennsylvania and Maryland as well as areas that would eventually become the states of Delaware and West Virginia. The Penn (Pennsylvania) and Calvert (Maryland) families had hired Mason and Dixon, English surveyors, to settle their dispute over the boundary between their two proprietary colonies, Pennsylvania and Maryland.  Mason and Dixon had originally teamed up to survey the “transit of Venus” – Venus passing in front of the Sun – in 1760. They were hired to begin their survey of the colonies in 1763. Considering their fame, not much is known about either man.  There are no likenesses and few written references. 

             1854 – Happy Birthday, Salomon Andree, Swedish explorer, balloonist on the ill-fated expedition of 1897 to fly over the North Pole in a balloon.  The expedition was financially backed by  Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite and donor of the Nobel prizes. Despite meticulous preparation, the balloon had one dangerous flaw: it leaked. They tried patching it with varnish.  An hour after take off, the balloon vanished and Andree and the crew were never seen again. Their skeletons were found on White Island by a Norwegeian ship over thirty three years later.  Andree had left a detailed diary of their crash and their failed attempts at survival.

            1867- The U.S officially  bought Alaska. The formal transfer of Alaska from Russia to the United States, which took place on this day. The  agreement had originally s signed in March 1867 when Secretary of State William Seward paid a visit to the “Spring Clearance Event” at “Territories Are Us”.  Alaska, slightly pre-owned (but at a glacial pace) was the special of the day.  The sale transferred Alaska to the United States in return for a payment of $7.2 million, amounting to a price of about 2.5 cents per acre for an area twice the size of Texas. The treaty was ratified by the U.S. Senate by a single vote. Criticism in the press was harsh, portraying the newly acquired wasteland as “Seward’s Folly,” “Seward’s Icebox” or Andrew Johnson’s “polar bear garden.” It was not until the 1890s with the discovery of gold that public attitudes regarding Alaska began to change. In addition to Alaska, the U.S received a free album of “Donny Osmond salutes Mariah Carey” for paying in cash.

            1849- Elizabeth Blackwell became the first woman in the U.S to receive a medical degree.  She wanted to meet the needs of women who would prefer to consult with a woman about health problems. She graduated 1^st in her class at Geneva Medical College, Geneva, NY.

          1870 - Sandblasting was patented by its inventor Benjamin Chew Tilghman, born in Philadelphia Pa.  It involves compressed air forces sand as an abrasive material through the nozzle of a sandblasting gun.  Initial attempts to use this as a dental tool …..no, no, no Professor Sy Yentz has his calcified sense of humor, really it was used for  sharpening files, engraving bottles, cleaning boilers or bringing out the grain in wood.

             1902- Happy Birthday, Pascual Jordan was a German physicist who in the late 1920s founded (with Max Born and later Werner Heisenberg) quantum mechanics (the laws of physics that apply on very small scales, eg to elementary particles and atoms) They contacted Keanu Reeves and used  “matrix” methods, showing how light could be interpreted as composed of discrete quanta (in light quanta are photons) of energy. Later, (with Wolfgang Pauli and Eugene Wigner), he contributed to the quantum mechancs of electron-photon interactions, now called quantum electrodynamics, which is (of course) a relativistic quantum theory of the electromagnetic interactions of photons and electrons and muons. ( What’s a muon? A charged lepton [a fundamental subatomic particle that interacts only weakly with other particles] about 200 times more massive than an electron). So it’s all rather complicated albeit small.  

            1926 - Happy Birthday, Rock & Roll icon Chuck Berry (brother of Boysen Berry, Blue Berry and the technologically advanced, Black Berry), writer and recorder of Sweet Little Sixteen, Rock & Roll Music, Roll Over Beethoven, and Johnny B. Goode.

           1929 - The Judicial Committee of England’s Privy Council ruled that women were to be considered as persons in Canada. Previously, under English common law, women were persons in matters of pains and penalties, but were not persons in matters of rights and privileges

            1931 – Edison kaput.  It was “lights out” for Thomas Edison, age 84, one of the most prolific inventors in history

             1955 – And speaking of sub atomic particles (see 1902 above), a new atomic sub-particle called a negative proton, called an antiproton (Scientists are still searching for uncle-proton.).  Scientists are still searching for uncle-proton.