Sue Simmon's dropped the 'F' bomb while teasing the 11 PM news the other night.
Here is your Today in History -
May 14, 964 -
Pope John XII dies of injuries inflicted eight days prior by a jealous husband who caught him in flagrante delicto with his wife. The 26-year-old pontiff had received a blow to the temple, causing immediate paralysis. Critics had accused John of converting the Lateran Palace into a whorehouse. Give me that old time religion.
The first inoculation against smallpox was administered on May 14, 1796, by Edward Jenner, whose descendant Bruce would become an Olympic decathlon champion. This medical wonder came only four days after Napoleon's army defeated the Austrians in the Battle of Lodi.
Exactly twenty-two years prior to that, King Louis XV had died of smallpox (on May 10, 1774).
When he died, Louis XVI became king, and only five years later (on La Quatorze Juillet, French for "the Fourth of July"), the Revolution began (mostly because Louis's wife kept telling everyone to eat cake), which resulted in the Rain of Terror, which resulted, eventually, in Napoleon.
Which practically brings it all full circle, if you're not a stickler for circularity.
May 14, 1976 -
Keith Relf, former vocalist of the Yardbirds, is electrocuted in his London home while either tuning or playing a guitar which was not properly grounded, belonging to either him or his son (The tale that he died while playing in the bathtub is an urban legend.) . Details are sort of sketchy, resulting from the family's reticence to describe the death scene.
May 14, 1998 -
The final episode of Seinfeld airs. Jerry Seinfeld holds both the record for the "most money refused" according to the Guinness Book of World Records by refusing an offer to continue the show for $5 million per episode, and another record for the Highest Ever Annual Earnings For A TV Actor, while the show itself held the record for the Highest Television Advertising Rates until 2004, when the final episode of Friends aired. Not too shabby for a show about nothing.
May 14, 1998 -
"He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night...." F. Scott Fitzgerald
Francis Albert Sinatra, Ole' Blue Eyes, died on this date. Chairman of the Board of Show Business had an oddly appropriate personal motto: "You gotta love livin' baby, 'cause dyin's a pain in the ass."
As no one put dibs on the world, I claimed it a highly leveraged buyout the next day and it still remains my world and I happily let you all live on it.
And so it goes
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