This Day in History

[xoxoxoBruce]

If mind your own bidness, then you won't be minding mine.

Unfortunately there are people making big bucks minding your bidness, so they won't stop... neither will the gumint.

I seem to remember my first PC as having about 500 MB of ram, and the old hands (who had one a year before me), put the fear of Bill Gates in me not to try to overfill or the blue screen of death would get me. Like being potty trained, or the monster under the bed, it stayed with me.

Now when I clear my cookies, which I do a half dozen times a day, there will be several hundred MB, and occasionally 8 or 9 hundred. Yeah some is the make things more better surfing the net, but a shitload of the in info gathering.

[Gravdigr]

Apologies for missing yesterday's installment.

Better late than never.


January 29

1790 – The first boat specializing as a lifeboat is tested on the River Tyne.

1834 – US President Andrew Jackson orders first use of federal soldiers to suppress a labor dispute.

1845 – "The Raven" is published in The Evening Mirror in New York, the first publication with the name of the author, Edgar Allan Poe.

1850 – Henry Clay introduces the Compromise of 1850 to the U.S. Congress.

1861 – Kansas is admitted as the 34th U.S. state.

1863 – The Bear River Massacre: A detachment of California Volunteers led by Colonel Patrick Edward Connor engage the Shoshone at Bear River, Washington Territory, killing hundreds of men, women, and children.

1886 – Karl Benz patents the first successful gasoline-driven automobile.

1907 – Charles Curtis of Kansas becomes the first Native American U.S. Senator.

1916 – World War I: Paris is first bombed by German zeppelins.

1936 – The first inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame are announced.

1963 – The first inductees into the Pro Football Hall of Fame are announced.

1967 – The "ultimate high" of the hippie era, the Mantra-Rock Dance, takes place in San Francisco and features Janis Joplin, Grateful Dead, and Allen Ginsberg.

1991 – Gulf War: The Battle of Khafji, the first major ground engagement of the war, as well as its deadliest, begins.

2002 – In his State of the Union address, President George W. Bush describes "regimes that sponsor terror" as an Axis of evil, in which he includes Iraq, Iran and North Korea.

2005 – The first direct commercial flights from mainland China (from Guangzhou) to Taiwan since 1949 arrived in Taipei. Shortly afterwards, a China Airlines flight lands in Beijing.

2009 – Governor of Illinois Rod Blagojevich is removed from office following his conviction of several corruption charges, including the alleged solicitation of personal benefit in exchange for an appointment to the United States Senate as a replacement for then-U.S. president-elect Barack Obama.

Births

1754 – Moses Cleaveland; 1756 – Henry Lee III; 1761 – Albert Gallatin; 1843 – William McKinley; 1860 – Anton Chekhov; 1880 – W. C. Fields; 1901 – Allen B. DuMont; 1913 – Victor Mature; 1917 – John Raitt; 1918 – John Forsythe; 1923 – Paddy Chayefsky; 1936 – James Jamerson; 1937 – Bobby Scott; 1940 – Katharine Ross; 1945 – Tom Selleck; 1948 – Marc Singer; 1949 – Tommy Ramone; 1950 – Ann Jillian; 1954 – Terry Kinney; 1954 – Oprah Winfrey; 1960 – Greg Louganis; 1962 – Nicholas Turturro; 1968 – Edward Burns; 1970 – Heather Graham; 1970 – Paul Ryan; 1975 – Sara Gilbert; 1979 – Andrew Keegan; 1981 – Jonny Lang; 1982 – Adam Lambert

Deaths

661 – Ali; 757 – An Lushan; 1820 – George III; 1933 – Sara Teasdale; 1956 – H. L. Mencken; 1963 – Robert Frost; 1964 – Alan Ladd; 1977 – Freddie Prinze; 1980 – Jimmy Durante; 1992 – Willie Dixon; 2008 – Margaret Truman; 2009 – Hélio Gracie; 2015 – Rod McKuen