Where are my parents today?

View Larger Map

Today in History, 4/30

711: The Islamic conquest of Spain gets underway as Moorish troops land at Gibraltar.
1006: Supernova SN 1006, the brightest supernova in recorded history, appears in the constellation Lupus.
1492: Spain gives Christopher Columbus his commission of exploration.
1789: George Washington takes the oath of office and is sworn in as the first elected president of the United States.
1803: The United States purchases the Louisiana Territory from France for a cool $15 million, more than doubling the size of the country overnight.1812: The territory of Orleans becomes the 18th US state under the name Louisiana.
1877: Alice B. Toklas, longtime companion of Gertrude Stein is born.1900: Casey Jones dies in a train wreck in Vaughan, MS while trying to make up time on the Cannonball Express.1908: Eve Arden is born. She was in tons of stuff, but I remember her as the principal of Rydell High in Grease.1923: Al Lewis is born. He played Grandpa on The Munsters and was a perennial candidate for Mayor of New York.1925: Johnny Horton is born. He did Sink the Bismark and a bunch of other great songs.

1926: Cloris Leachman is born.

1927: Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford become the first celebrities to leave their footprints in the cement outside of Grauman's Chinese Theater in Hollywood.
1933: Willie Nelson is born.
1939: NBC begins regularly scheduled television broadcasts in New York with the broadcast of the opening ceremonies to the New York World's Fair. The means that FDR is the first president to appear on TV.
1943: Operation Mincemeat kicks off as the submarine HMS Seraph surfaces in the Mediterranean. Its mission: deposit a dead man with fake invasion plans and dressed as a British military intelligence officer. This worked even better than planned - after the documents were discovered as fake the Germans later disregarded genuine document finds. Right up there with the decoding of Enigma at Bletchly Park, it's one of the great spy stories of WWII. I recommend The Man Who Never Was by Ewen Montagu. The movie's good too.
1945: Adolf and Eva commit suicide.
1947: The Boulder Dam is officially renamed the Hoover Dam (again).1973: During the Watergate Scandal, Nixon announces the resignations of John Ehrlichman and H.R. Haldeman.
1975: The Vietnam War ends as Communist forces capture Saigon and South Vietnam unconditionally surrenders.
1993: The World Wide Web is born at Cern.
1995: Bill Clinton becomes the first US President to visit Northern Ireland.

Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.

Today in History, 4/29

1429: Joan of Arc arrives to relieve the Siege of Orleans and is considered the Second Coming of Christ.1770: James Cook arrives and names Botany Bay, Australia. Botany Bay!1861: Maryland's House of Delegates votes not to secede from the Union.
1863: William Randolph Hearst is born.1899: Duke Ellington is born.

1901: Hirohito, Emperor of Japan is born.1907: Fred Zinnermann is born. He directed From Here to Eternity, High Noon and A Man for All Seasons.

1933: Rod McKuen is born.1945: Adolf Hitler marries Eva Braun and designates Admiral Karl Donitz as his successor.
1945: The Dachau concentration camp is liberated by US forces.
1946: Former Prime Minister Japan Hideki Tojo and 28 former Japanese leaders are indicted for war crimes.1947: Tommy James of The Shondells is born.

1952: Nora Dunn is born.

1952: Conspiracy theorist David Icke is born. He feels that the world is secretly governed by shape-changing humanoid lizards who feast on the blood of blond children. One of the world leaders that the lizards are in the guise of is none other than Boxcar Willie. I always wanted to know how that particular lizard felt about having to be Boxcar Willie. I mean, you're there in line with the rest of the aliens taking part in Operation: Human Nuggets and you're all getting your assignment for which powerful human you're going to impersonate. "OK, Bok-Sno, you're going to be George W. Bush, Loc-Nat, you're going to be Rupert Murdoch, Bik-Lor, you're going to be Queen Elizabeth and Reg-Tak, you're going to be Boxcar Willie." It would be hard not to feel a little hurt. Or maybe the alien lizards have assumed their identities when their victims were children. Does that mean that the George W. Bush alien spent the 80's blowing lines of coke off a strippers ass in Houston? The other lizards would be all, "Hey, Bok-Sno, I know you're a real method actor and all about living your part but you've spent the last fifteen years drunk and stoned. At what point are you going to get on with conquering the world?" 1954: Jerry Seinfeld is born. Ironically, he's one of the people who David Icke believes is a lizard.

"What's with the blond children?
Why do we need to feast on their blood?
Won't any other children do?"

1955: Kate Mulgrew is born. She is best known as the take-no-prisoners Captain Kathryn Janeway on Star Trek: Voyager, but she was also in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins, one of my favorite bad movies.1957: Daniel Day Lewis is born.
1957: Timothy Treadwell is born. He was so into grizzly bears that he lived among them for 13 seasons until they got sick of him and devoured him and his girlfriend. That's why I don't hang out with grizzlies.
1958: Michelle Pfeiffer is born.1958: Eve Plumb is born. She played Jan Brady (the middle daughter) on The Brady Bunch.
1960: Robert J. Sawyer is born. He is a science-fiction writer who wrote, among others, Calculating God.
1967: After refusing induction into the US Army, Muhammad Ali is stripped of his boxing titles.
1968: Carnie Wilson of Wilson-Phillips is born.
1970: Uma Thurman is born.1986: Roger Clemens sets a major league baseball record with 20 strikeouts in nine innings against the Seattle Mariners.
1992: Following the acquittal of the police officers in the Rodney King beating case, Los Angeles is engulfed by three days of rioting.

Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.

Today in History, 4/28

1758: James Monroe, 5th President of the United States is born.1788: Maryland becomes the 7th state to ratify the US Constitution.
1789: The crew of the HMS Bounty mutinies.1878: Lionel Barrymore is born. He played Mr. Potter "The richest and meanest man in town" in It's a Wonderful Life.
1908: Oskar Schindler is born.1922: Alistair MacLean is born. He wrote the thrillers Guns of Navarone and Where Eagles Dare.1926: Harper Lee is born. She wrote To Kill a Mockingbird.1930: The first night game in organized baseball takes place in Independence, KS.
1930: Carolyn Jones is born. She is best known for playing the delicious Morticia Addams on the old The Addams Family TV show.1932: A vaccine is introduced for yellow fever.
1937: Saddam Hussein is born.
1938: Madge Sinclair is born. She, among other things, played the first black, female starship captain depicted on screen in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.1941: Ann-Margaret is born. Here she is in Kitten With A Whip. If I had been John Forsythe, I would have forgotten all about my Senate career.

1945: Benito Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci are executed by firing squad by members of the Italian resistance. The bodies were then hung by piano wire from street lamps and pelted with stones until they were a shapeless mass. I feel kind of sorry for the mistress - she was just boning the wrong guy at the wrong time.
1947: Thor Heyerdahl and a crew of five set out aboard the Kon-Tiki to prove that Peruvian natives could have settled Polynesia.1948: Terry Pratchett is born. He wrote the Discworld series of novels.1950: Jay Leno is born.

1952: Mary McDonnell is born. She plays President Laura Roslin on the new Battlestar Galactica.1952: Dwight D. Eisenhower resigns as Supreme Commander of NATO.
1952: The United States occupation of Japan ends, seven years after it began.
1967: Kari Wuhrer is born. She's been in a ton of B-movies (Beastmaster II: Through the Portal of Time to name one) but I remember her best as one of the "hostettes" on the cult game show Remote Control.

1981: Jessica Alba is born. She can't act, but my gosh is she easy on the eyes.1988: When part of the plane's fuselage rips open, flight attendant Clarabelle Lansing is blown out of Aloha Flight 243 over the Pacific Ocean and falls to her death.

Where are my parents today?

View Larger Map

Today in History, 4/27

1124: David I becomes King of Scotland.
1296: The Scots are defeated by Edward I at the Battle of Dunbar, leading directly to Edward's conquest of Scotland.1495: Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, is born.1521: Ferdinand Magellan is killed by Filipino natives at the Battle of Mactan.
1650: At the Battle of Carbisdale, a Royalist army invades mainland Scotland from Orkney Island but is repulsed.
1667: Blind and impoverished, John Milton sells the copyright to Paradise Lost for 10 pounds.1759: Mary Wollstonecraft is born. She wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women.1773: The Parliament of Great Britain passes the Tea Act, which was designed to save the British East India Company by granting them a tea monopoly in North America.
1791: Samuel Morse is born. He invented the telegraph and was a skilled painter. He was also a raging anti-Semite, anti- Catholic and anti-immigrationist, but we'll just remember him for the telegraph and the painting. He could paint an entire apartment in one day! Two coats! (with apologies to Mel Brooks)1810: Beethoven composes Fur Elise.

1813: During the War of 1812, US forces capture the capitol of Ontario, York (now known as Toronto).
1822: Ulysses S. Grant, Civil War general and 18th President of the United States, is born. Lesser known is how he fearlessly stood up to Arliss Loveless and his giant mechanical spider at the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Summit, UT.1861: During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspends the writ of habeas corpus.
1865: The Steamboat Sultana explodes and sinks in the Mississippi River, killing 1700 most of whom were Union survivors of Andersonville Prison.1894: George Petty, WWII-era pinup artist, is born.1900: Walter Lantz, creator of Woody Woodpecker is born.

1922: Jack Klugman is born.1932: Casey Kasem is born.1939: Judy Carne is born. She used to say "Sock it to me!" on Laugh In. I couldn't find that on YouTube but I did find her and Arte Johnson selling freezers for Sears & Roebuck, which is a lot more funny than Laugh In ever was.

1947: Babe Ruth Day is held at Yankee Stadium to honor the Babe.
1948: Kate Pierson of The B-52's is born.

1950: In South Africa, the Group Areas Act is passed, formally instituting apartheid.
1951: Ace Frehley of KISS is born. Was he Space Ace or Starchild? I don't know, I never gave a damn about KISS.1959: Sheena Easton is born.

1963: Russell T. Davies is born. He spearheaded the current rebirth of Doctor Who and created the spinoff Torchwood. 1981: Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) introduces the computer mouse.
Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.

Today in History, 4/26

121: Marcus Aurelius, Roman Emperor, is born.
1607: English colonists of the Jamestown settlement make landfall in Virginia.
1805: The US Marines capture Derne, Tripoli under the command of 1st Lt. Presley O'Bannon.1822: Frederick Law Olmstead is born. He designed many famous urban parks including Central Park.1865: Union soldiers corner and shoot John Wilkes Booth.
1886: Ma Rainey "The Mother of the Blues" is born.

1894: Rudolph Hess is born. He was a high-ranking Nazi who, before the war, thought he could salvage an alliance between England and Germany. On his own initiative, he flew a plane to England and was promptly arrested. He spent the rest of his life behind bars until he died in 1987. He's kind of a pitiful figure for being so naive, but he was also a Nazi so I don't feel all that sorry for him.1912: A.E. van Vogt is born. He was a titan of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.1917: Architect I.M. Pei is born. He designed, among other things, the glass pyramids outside of the Louvre. I almost shattered one of them while waiting in line and idly skipping francs across the fountains. Stupid Americans!1918: Faith an' begorrah, Stafford Repp is born! He played the comically Irish chief of police on the old Batman TV show.1933: The Gestapo is formed.
1933: Carol Burnett is born.

1937: During the Spanish Civil War, Guernica, Spain is bombed by the Luftwaffe.1938: Duane Eddy, guitar god, is born.

1942: Bobby Rydell is born. He was a 50's-era teen idol who sang such hits as "Volare" and "Diana." "Diana" is interesting in that it is a creepy statutory rape song from the 50's about a younger man with an older woman instead of vice-versa, which was the norm for creepy statutory rape songs from the 50's.1943: Gary Wright is born. He sang "Dream Weaver" which is enough to damn him in my book.1947: Warren Clarke is born. He is most famous for playing the slow-witted droog Dim in A Clockwork Orange.1960: Roger Taylor, drummer for Duran Duran is born.

1961: Joan Chen is born. She was just gorgeous in Twin Peaks and also proved to be a good director in Xiu Xiu: The Sent Down Girl, which chronicles the Great Leap Forward in Maoist China. Don't take a first date to go see it.1986: An explosion and fire in the #4 reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant causes the worst nuclear disaster in history.
Today in History elements mostly cribbed from The History Channel, Wikipedia, The New York Times, The Jewish World Review, The Writer's Almanac and anything else I can dig up.