Happy Leon Day

LEON Day - LEON is NOEL spelled backwards. It is now six months until Christmas. And who better to celebrate this day then birthday boy George Michael:



Now that you are in a slightly nauseated mood, watch this -



Here's your Today in History:

June 25, 1876 -
This is a little cautionary tale about pissing off the wrong people. During the Battle of Little Big Horn, General George Armstrong Custer witnesses a large group of Indians fleeing their village, and decides to press his advantage. The cavalry officer shouts, "We've caught them napping, boys!" Then he splits his force of 210 men into three groups, in order to slaughter as many of the retreating noncombatants as possible. Which is right about the time Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse sweep in and kill the white men. Two days later, Custer's body is found amidst a cluster of 42 other corpses, the general entirely naked except for one boot, one sock, and an arrow stuck in his penis.

This is the native way a sending a very serious message.



Eric Arthur Blair was born on this day in 1903, in the Indian village of Motihari near the Nepalese border. His British father was an agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. The family returned to England in 1907 so that young Eric could struggle and fail out of school. By 1921 he had returned to the subcontinent and joined the police in Burma. He spent five years with the Burmese police before returning to England to quit and struggle. He stayed in England for a year, then went to France to be poor.

Finally he returned to England and wrote a book about being poor in Paris but no one wanted to publish it. He told his mother to burn the book (she did not), then wrote a new one about being a policeman in Burma. It too was rejected by several publishers. Meanwhile, however, his mother had been sneaking around with the book she hadn't burned and had found a publisher for her son.

Upon submitting the final manuscript to the publisher, Blair decided that a book about being poor in Paris written by a middle-class servant of the British Empire might not look good, so he decided to write under a pen-name. The name he chose was George Orwell.

Later he wrote a book about the political frivolities of farm animals, and another one about a future that sucked (he later acknowledged that it would have been a cheerier book if he hadn't been dying of tuberculosis). Finally he became a Famous Author and even a Great Writer, but by then he was dead, whatever his name was.







June 25, 1910 -
The Mann Act, sometimes known as the White Slave Traffic Act of 1910, makes it a federal crime to convey or assist in transporting women across state lines for prostitution, debauchery, or "any other immoral purpose." Men convicted of this heinous (if vague) statute face up to five years and a $5,000 fine for each count. Penalties are doubled if the female is underage, but men and boys are apparently not covered. This is, by far, the biggest party pooper in legislative history. Unless you're into guys.



June 25, 1940 -
France officially surrenders to Nazi Germany. Rick Blaine and Ilsa Lund, consumed large quantities of champagne at a local bistro rather than let the Nazis have it. Ilsa believing her husband, Victor Laszlo, Czech freedom fighter had been killed while in a Nazi concentration camp, promises to meet Rick at the train station where they will flee the Nazi. Unbeknownst to Rick, Ilsa has heard from her husband, that he was in fact still alive, she left Rick abruptly without explanation and returned to Laszlo, leaving Rick feeling betrayed. But that's another story.



June 25, 1949 -
Jimmy Walker's dyn-o-mite birthday.



And so it goes.