Is it me or

have the tabloid magazines become obsessed with activity of the uterus’s of today's young Hollywood stars.

Just a thought.

On January 31, 1940, the first monthly retirement check was issued to Ida May Fuller of Ludlow, Vermont, in the amount of $22.54. Miss Fuller, a Legal Secretary, retired in November 1939. She started collecting benefits in January 1940 at age 65 and lived to be 100 years old, dying in 1975.




Ida May Fuller worked for three years under the Social Security program. The accumulated taxes on her salary during those three years were a total of $24.75. Her initial monthly check was $22.54. During her lifetime she collected a total of $22,888.92 in Social Security benefits.

January 31, 1945 -
Private Eddie Slovik is the first U.S. soldier to be shot for desertion since the Civil War. Although over twenty-one thousand soldiers were given varying sentences for desertion during World War II—including forty-nine death sentences—only Slovik's death sentence was carried out.



January 31, 1950 -
President Truman gives the go-ahead for the development of Edward Teller's hydrogen bomb.



Explorer-I, officially Satellite 1958 Alpha (and sometimes referred to as Explorer 1), was the first Earth satellite of the United States, having been launched at 10:48 pm EST on January 31, 1958, as part of the United States program for the International Geophysical Year. The satellite was launched from LC-26 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida onboard a Juno I rocket.

Electrical power was provided by mercury chemical batteries that made up approximately 40 percent of the payload weight. These provided power that operated the high power transmitter for 31 days and the low-power transmitter for 105 days.




January 31, 1961 -
The United States sends its first space monkey into space, Ham the chimpanzee. His Mercury/Redstone 2 achieves an altitude of 158 miles. Ham's capsule splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean and was recovered by a rescue ship later that day.




After the flight, Ham lived for 17 years in the National Zoo in Washington D.C., then at the North Carolina Zoo before dying at the age of 27 on January 19, 1983. Ham appeared repeatedly on television, as well as on film with Evel Knievel. Truly, a great way to honor this space pioneer - appear with Evel Knievel.

On January 31, 1966, the Soviet lunar probe Luna 9 is launched. On February 3rd, the spacecraft was the first spacecraft to achieve a lunar soft landing and to transmit photographic data to Earth. Betcha didn't know that.




January 31, 1974 -
Ted Bundy commits what is sometimes regarded as his first murder, Lynda Ann Healy, a 21 year old senior at the University of Washington. Her skull is not found until a year later. By the time he was executed, Bundy had committed nearly 30 murders, mostly women with dark long hair. It is believed that he may have murdered as early as 1961, when he was 15, but proof is at best circumstantial.


January 31, 1989 -
Copies of the March Playboy with LaToya Jackson posing with...snakes! hit the newsstands. She also has a snake tattoo. Face it, the lady really, really likes snakes.




And so it goes.