Here's your Today in History -
May 20 1867 -
Queen Victoria laid the foundation stones in the Royal Albert Hall.
Two thoughts immediately came to mind:
a.) Why was she thought such a prude?
b.) Wow, Keith Richards is really old.
May 20 1956 -
The first hydrogen bomb to be dropped from the air was exploded over the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific, but it was a much earlier (July 1, 1946), non-aerial atomic detonation that originally inspired the bikini swimsuit.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, $90 million has been appropriated by Congress "to be used by the Bikinians to clean up their atoll" since 1990. How embarrassing must it have been for the guy who had to call the Bikinians and tell them we had soiled their atoll—that we wanted to help them clean their filthy atoll?
(Which isn't to say it'd be a cakewalk being called a Bikinian.)
May 20 1960 -
Music DJ Alan Freed, originator of the term "Rock and Roll," is indicted in New York in the Payola scandal. Freed had accepted $30,650 from five record companies to play their records, although to be fair "pay for play" was the accepted practice up to that point.
May 20 1987 -
Conservative British MP Harvey Proctor pleads guilty to committing acts of gross indecency against minors -- paying rent boys to spank them in his London flat.
May 20 1989 -
The Chinese government imposed martial law on Beijing on this date, in response to student-led protests that had brought millions of people onto the streets. The demonstrations continued, however, until the brutal military crackdown on June 3 and 4 in Tiananmen Square, in which thousands of Chinese dissidents were killed by the Chinese military. In a June 9 speech, Deng Xiaoping announced that the government had suppressed a "counterrevolutionary rebellion" in which the "dregs of society" had tried to "establish a bourgeois republic entirely dependent on the West."
China still has a veto on the U.N. Security Council.
May 20, 1989
Gilda Radner, Emmy Award winning American comedienne and actress, best known for her five years as part of the original cast of the NBC comedy series Saturday Night Live, died at 42 of ovarian cancer on this date.
May 20 1991 -
The Soviet parliament sort of approved a law that would allow citizens to travel abroad freely. They approved it "in principle," which is why I say they only "sort of" approved it. But they were on to something: by December 26 of that year, there wasn't a single Soviet citizen left in the country.
May 20 1999 -
The dissolving body parts of eight people are discovered inside six plastic barrels sitting in an abandoned bank vault in Snowtown, Australia.
Did somebody forget this deposit?
And so it goes.
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