Looking for a good recipe

The eighth day of the Lunar New Year is believed to be the birthday of millet. As one of ancient China’s “Five Grains,” it has been a staple food for thousands of years and remains central to certain rituals during the 15-day Spring Festival. According to folk proverbs, if this day is bright and clear, the year will bring a plentiful harvest; however, if it is cloudy or rainy, the year will suffer poor crops. (It sounds more poetic in the original language.)

The eighth day of the Lunar New Year is also the birthday of Yen-Lo King (also known as Yanluo Wang), the fifth king of the legendary Hell, who presides over the fifth palace. This fifth palace of Hell is said to lie beneath the northeastern side of a great scorching stone in the sea. (Location, location, location.) He is typically depicted with a scowling red face, bulging eyes, and traditional judge’s robes. Despite his fearsome appearance, he is regarded as a just and fair judge rather than an evil deity, embodying the principle that every action has consequences.

The palace has 64,000 square miles long. It contains 16 divisions of the small hells. (Be thankful you don't have to clean it. That's what all those idle hands are for.)

Yen-Lo King was originally in charge of the first palace of Hell. He presides over the underworld (Diyu), maintaining the “Records of Life and Death” and determining a soul’s next reincarnation based on its earthly deeds. He was later demoted to the fifth palace of Hell. (At least he didn’t have to test rectal thermometers.)



The day is also referred to as Completion Day - a time when people return from the holiday and go back to work. All the meat and cakes prepared for the Lunar New Year should be finished by this day. Everything returns to normal.

On the eighth day of the Lunar New Year, some people release pet fish or birds into the wild in a ritual known as Fang Sheng (“Life Release”) to show respect for nature. Rooted in Buddhist and Taoist teachings, this practice is believed to generate good karma and spiritual merit. By saving a creature from captivity or potential slaughter, practitioners hope to gain blessings, health, and prosperity for their families in the coming year.


Raise your Frozen Margaritas tonight (but don't double dip,)



today is National Tortilla Chip day. Contrary to popular belief, Tortilla Chips are not from Mexico.



They were invented in Los Angeles in the late 1940s by Rebecca Webb Carranza.


February 24, 1951 -
The Looney Tunes cartoon, Putty Tat Trouble, directed by Friz Freleng and starring Tweety and Sylvester, debuted on this date.



After Sylvester beans the other cat, there's an upside-down box in the background for Friz: America's favorite gelatin dessert, a reference to director Friz Freleng.


February 24, 1951 -
The Looney Tunes cartoon, Rabbit Every Monday, directed by Friz Freleng and starring Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, debuted on this date.



Yosemite Sam breaks the fourth wall before the audience member interruption, when he talks about smelling carrots cooking.


February 24, 1964 -
The World War II based anti-war movie, None But The Brave, directed and starring Frank Sinatra, Clint Walker, Tommy Sands, Tony Bill, Brad Dexter, Tatsuya Mihashi, and Takeshi Kato, opened onm this date.



During the shooting the picture, Brad Dexter saved Frank Sinatra from drowning when he dived into the ocean and rescued the floundering singer.


February 24, 1968 -
Fleetwood Mac (popularly known then as Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac) released their eponymous debut album on this date. At the time, the band (Peter Green, Mick Fleetwood, Jeremy Spencer, and John McVie) was a blues-rock group.



The album also marks the only Fleetwood Mac LP to not include keyboardist and vocalist Christine McVie (wife of John), who joined the group in 1970.


February 24, 1969 -
Twentieth Century-Fox adaptation of the novel and play, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, directed by Ronald Neame and starring Maggie Smith and Pamela Franklin, premiered in London on this date.



According to Pamela Franklin, even though they were eighteen, she and the other young girls were asked not to eat their lunch in the Pinewood cafeteria in their school uniform costumes for appearance's sake, as beer and wine was served there.


February 24, 1973 -
The song, Killing Me Softly with His Song by Roberta Flack topped the charts on this date.



Robert Flack heard Lori Lieberman original version of the song on an in-flight tape recorder while flying from Los Angeles to New York. She loved the title and lyrics and decided to record it herself.



The song was written by the songwriting team of Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel, and recorded by Lori Lieberman in 1972. The story goes that the song was inspired by Don McLean, a singer/songwriter famous for his hit American Pie. After being mesmerized by one of his concerts at the Troubadour theater in Los Angeles - and in particular McLean's song Empty Chairs - Lieberman described what she saw of McLean's performance to Norman Gimbel and Charles Fox, who were writing songs for her new album, and they wrote the song for her.



The Fugees did a hip-hop version featuring the vocals of Lauryn Hill. It was a hit for the Fugees in the US and went to #1 in the UK in 1996. The Fugees wanted to change the lyrics and make it a song about poverty and drug abuse in the inner city with the title Killing Him Softly, but Gimbel and Fox refused.


February 24, 1975 –
Led Zeppelin release their sixth album Physical Graffiti on this date. It’s a double album featuring eight new songs, and songs left over from their previous albums Led Zeppelin III, Led Zeppelin IV and Houses Of The Holy.



Featuring an intricate die-cut cover of a New York City brownstone, the album goes on to sell over eight million copies in the U.S.


February 24, 1996 -
The HBO original movie The Late Shift, documenting the late-night television conflict between Jay Leno and David Letterman, directed by Betty Thomas, and starring Kathy Bates, John Michael Higgins, Daniel Roebuck, Bob Balaban, Ed Begley Jr., and Treat Williams debuted on this date.



A few days after the film's premiere, John Michael Higgins was booked on Late Show with David Letterman to talk about the movie and what it was like to portray Letterman. Letterman's A-guest that night was Julia Roberts. During the commercial break, Letterman reportedly asked the star if she wouldn't mind staying longer as a favor to him. Higgins sat in the green room watching the show, hearing Letterman occasionally plug his "coming up" interview (at commercials breaks). At the end of the show Letterman apologized to Higgins for "running out of time", pointedly saying he hoped the actor could "come back again soon." According to producer Rob Burnett, Letterman fully intended on going through with the interview but his insecurities got the better of him; Burnett confirmed Higgins would not be invited back.


February 24, 2002 -
CBS-TV aired the bio-pix Ride to Freedom: The Rosa Parks Story starring Angela Bassett, on this date.



Angela Bassett won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Actress in a Television Movie, Mini-Series or Dramatic Special for her performance.


February 24, 2023 -
A dark comedy thriller, inspired by the true story of a bear that ingested a large amount of cocaine, Cocaine Bear, directed by Elizabeth Banks and starring Keri Russell, O'Shea Jackson Jr., Alden Ehrenreich, Brooklynn Prince, Isiah Whitlock Jr., Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Ray Liotta opened on this date.



Ray Liotta's final completed film role before his death on May 26, 2022. Liotta died a week after he came to re-record his lines in post-production. Elizabeth Banks said that Liotta praised the look of the bear once he got a look at it.


Today's moment of Zen


Today in History:
On February 24, 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued a proclamation that made everyone change their calendars from the Julian calendar to his own new and improved Gregorian calendar. (Obviously he was in cahoots with the calendar printing people, or he would have done it in November or December.)



It was this shameless act of self-promotion that led to subsequent Vatican proclamations being called Papal Bull.


February 24, 1807 -
It was not a good day for a hanging - In a crush to witness the hanging of John Holloway, Owen Heggerty and Elizabeth Godfrey in England on this date, 17 people died and 15 were injured.

People, please, remember that you can see the executions perfectly well, if you stand back.


February 24, 1838 -
Thomas Benton Smith, brigadier general in the Confederate States Army, was born in Mechanicsville, Tennessee, on this date. He was wounded at Stone’s River/Murfreesboro and again at Chickamauga. He was captured at the Battle of Nashville (December 16, 1864) where he was beaten over the head with a sword by Col. William Linn McMillen of the 95th Ohio Infantry. His brain was exposed and it was believed he would die.

He recovered partially, ran for a seat in the U. S. Congress in 1870, but lost and spent the last 47 years of his life in the State Asylum in Nashville, Tennessee, where he died on May 21, 1923.

Now you know


February 24, 1868 -
President Andrew Johnson was impeached for High Crimes and Misdemeanors on this date, which is fancy talk for his attempt to remove Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton from his job.



The Senate later acquitted Johnson. This remains an honor not bestowed again until the blowjob years of the Clinton Administration and (for the moment) the two non-witness trials of Cheeto.


On February 24, 1920, the spokesman of a radical political group in Germany announced that it would change its name to the National Socialist German Workers' Party. The group had previously been called the East Munich Crips. Rejected names had included The Genocidal Maniacs Party, The World Conquest Party and The Party of Smiley People Who'll Make Life a Happy Little Picnic for Everyone (but in German.)



This name change made all the difference in the world, and eventually led to Evil Nazi Bastards, who later teamed up with the Evil Fascist Bastards of Italy and became a Significant Problem. They did not kill quite as many people as the Evil Communist Bastards of the Soviet Union, however, and were therefore unable to scare posterity into producing apologists.



(The party spokesman who had announced the change was of course, Adolf Hitler, who did not change his own name and is therefore known to history as... you guessed it... Adolf Hitler.)


February 24, 1927 -
The Ouija board was developed by spiritualist businessman William Fuld in the late 1890s, and was named for the French and German words for yes - oui and ja.



William Fuld built a factory according to what the board told him.

On this date in 1927, Fuld climbed to the roof of his three-story factory to supervise the installation of a flagpole. When the rail against which he was leaning gave way, Fuld fell to the ground below and died.


February 24, 1942 -
Just over three months after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, Unidentified Flying Objects were sighted over Los Angeles this evening. The Plane / Blimp / Weather Balloon / UFO was fired on with a massive anti-aircraft artillery barrage but is not hit. Air raid sirens were sounded throughout Los Angeles County at 2:25 a.m. and a total blackout was ordered. The events became known as the Battle of Los Angeles by the contemporary press.



While the military eventually attributed the incident to "war nerves" and the sighting of an errant weather balloon, many skeptics have speculated for years that our guns were actually firing at extraterrestrial spaceships—a theory that provided inspiration for the 2011 film Battle: Los Angeles (Steven Spielberg's film 1941 was also loosely based on the event).


February 24, 1990 -
Businessman Malcolm Forbes died of a heart attack, at his home in Far Hills, New Jersey on this date.

As the years pass, there are even fewer and fewer aging Chelsea leather boys still around who remember and mourn his passing.



And so it goes.

It's a party today

The seventh day of the first lunar month is known as Ren Ri, also called “People’s Day” or the “Birthday of Mankind.” It is celebrated as a key part of the Lunar New Year festivities and is traditionally regarded as the day when everyone grows one year older, effectively serving as a shared birthday for all humanity.

According to Chinese mythology, the mother goddess Nüwa created human beings on the seventh day.

Legend has it that Nüwa created mankind because she felt lonely. She molded humans from clay into different shapes and sizes. Handmaking humans became tiring, so Nüwa taught them about marriage, allowing them to reproduce on their own.



Many communities consume a dish made of seven different vegetables - such as mustard greens, celery, and leeks - each representing a specific blessing, such as wisdom or wealth. Eating long noodles on this day also symbolizes a wish for a long and healthy life. Because it is considered the “birthday” of various animals on the preceding days, people may avoid killing animals or punishing prisoners on Ren Ri as a show of respect for life.


Today is Curling Is Cool Day. I'm not sure how many millions of dollars will be lost with the number of people are taking the day off from work.

Do not make a rookie mistake; just encourage all those involved - Celebrate Responsibly.


February 23, 1940 -
The second animated feature film produced by Walt Disney Productions, Pinocchio, premiered in the US on this date.



During the musical number When You Wish Upon a Star, when a spotlight is seen on Jiminy Cricket, one is able to see two books to the left of the screen, which are Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland. Walt Disney started developing these two stories for the big screen at the time of this film's release, and they would be released respectively in 1953 and 1951.


February 23, 1945 -
The Merrie Melodies cartoon, The Unruly Hare, directed by Frank Tashlin and starring Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, debuted on this date.



This was the final cartoon in which Frank Tashlin received onscreen credit; he was uncredited in his final four cartoons Behind the Meat-Ball, Tale of Two Mice, Nasty Quacks and Hare Remover, which were released following his official departure from the Warner Bros. Cartoons studio.


February 23, 1950 -
A nearly forgotten Alfred Hitchcock film, Stage Fright starring Marlene Dietrich, Jane Wyman, Richard Todd, and Michael Wilding, premiered in New York City on this date.



In an extraordinary move for the normally controlling director,  Alfred Hitchcock provided Marlene Dietrich an exceptional amount of creative control for this movie, particularly in how she chose to light her scenes. Hitchcock knew that Dietrich had learned a great deal of the art of cinematography from Josef von Sternberg and Günther Rittau, and allowed her to work with Cinematographer Wilkie Cooper to light and set her scenes the way that she wished.


February 23, 1952 -
The Looney Tunes cartoon, Mouse-Warming, directed by Chuck Jones and featuring Claude Cat debuted on this date.



The rodent moving team bears a slight resemblance to the popular comedy sketch characters of Ralph and Ed from what would become the TV sitcom The Honeymooners a few years later.


February 23, 1964 -
The Beatles appear for the third consecutive appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show on this date. They performed Twist and Shout and Please Please Me and closed the show once again with I Want to Hold Your Hand.



The third broadcast, February 23, showed a performance taped earlier in the day of the original February 9th appearance.


February 23, 1967 -
The Star Trek episode A Taste of Armageddon first airs on NBC, on this date. In it, the Enterprise visits a planet fighting a war with its neighboring planet via computers.



In his memoir, Beam Me Up, Scotty, James Doohan described Gene Lyons (Ambassador Robert Fox) as being "out of his element" and "completely discombobulated" during filming. He added that it took Lyons many takes to get his lines right and that they finally "went to having him speak off-screen." Doohan speculates that Lyons, who was an experienced actor, may have been thrown off by the science fiction element as such shows were relatively rare at the time.


February 23, 1969 -
The BBC2 documentary series, Civilisation, hosted by Kenneth Clark, guided us through the history of Western art, architecture and philosophy, debuted on this date.



While popular at the time of its release, the Civilisation series has been criticized over the decades for presenting a 19th-century worldview of history being shaped by relatively few "highly influential and unique individuals" with extraordinary abilities. This historical theory had originally been proposed by Thomas Carlyle in the 1840s, and remained fashionable until the 1920s. Both the original theory and the documentary series have been criticized for largely ignoring the impact of social history, economic history, and political history on art and art movements. The program also minimized the role of female writers and artists within the art movements covered in the show, because they did not fit in its main writer's "traditional choice" of great artists, a group which he viewed as exclusively male.


February 23, 1980 –
The Queen's song Crazy Little Thing Called Love hit the No. #1 spot on the Billboard Charts on this date.



This was the first song on which Freddie Mercury played rhythm guitar. He was keen to keep the song minimal, despite his limited guitar knowledge, and producer Mack claimed that he rushed into the studio to record it "before Brian could get there!"


February 23, 1985 -
The Smiths scored their first UK No.1 album with Meat Is Murder on this date. The album's sleeve uses a 1967 photograph of Marine Cpl. Michael Wynn in the Vietnam War, though with the wording on his helmet changed from "Make War Not Love" to "Meat Is Murder".



The Smiths produced Meat Is Murder themselves, assisted only by engineer Stephen Street, whom they had first met on the session for Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now.


February 23, 1991 -
Oliver Stone's bio-pix about Jim Morrison and his group, The Doors, starring Val Kilmer, Meg Ryan, Kyle MacLachlan, Frank Whaley, Kevin Dillon, and Kathleen Quinlan premiered in Los Angeles on this date.



The surviving members of The Doors claim that Val Kilmer did such a good job playing and singing as Jim Morrison that they could not distinguish his voice from the real Jim Morrison.


Word of the Day


Today in History:
February 23, 303 -
Roman Emperor Diocletian issues an edict to suppress Christianity, "to tear down the churches to the foundations and to destroy the Sacred Scriptures by fire". Further edicts require that church officials engage in animal sacrifice to appease traditional Roman gods.



One can only weep that they did not have the lubricant concessions given the kind of orgies that when on that night.


February 23, 1821 -
English poet John Keats died in Rome on this date. Mr. Keats was Romantic and therefore wrote an Ode to a Nightingale, an Ode to Psyche, and even an Ode to a Grecian Urn.



None of them would have him, so the poor man died alone.


February 23, 1861 -
President-elect Abraham Lincoln arrived secretly in Washington D.C. to take office after an assassination plot was foiled in Baltimore on this date. Allan Pinkerton, founder of the Pinkerton Detective Agency, may have saved Lincoln’s life by uncovering the plot to assassinate the president-elect in Baltimore, Md.



At the detective’s suggestion, Lincoln avoided the threat by secretly slipping through the city at night.


February 23, 1836 -
The Siege of the Alamo began on this date. It was quite an adventure. For years afterward people would sigh, Remember the Alamo?



And they'd kind of nod and smile, but eventually they forgot.


February 23, 1885 -
The British hangman at Exeter Gaol tried three times on this date, to hang John Lee of Devonshire, for the murder of Emma Keyse. The trap refused to open.



His sentence was commuted to life, and he was eventually released.


February 23, 1896 -
The Tootsie Roll was introduced by Leo Hirshfield an Austrian immigrant, in his small candy shop located in New York City on this date.



He was America's first candy maker to individually wrap penny candy. Current production is over 49 million pieces a day. For many, this day should be a Federal holiday.


February 23, 1903 -
Tomás Estrada Palma, the first president of Cuba, leased Guantanamo Bay to the US in perpetuity on this date. Guantanamo Bay was the only US military base in a country with which the US did not have diplomatic relations, until a few years ago.

Guantanamo Bay is also home to Cuba's first and only McDonald's restaurant. I'm guessing it's McDonald's fault that we're still in Gitmo.


February 23, 1915 -
Nevada enacts a law reducing the quickie divorce residency requirements down to six months,



a figure further reduced in 1931 to six weeks.


February 23, 1945 -
U. S. Marines raised the flag on Mt. Suribachi (Battle of Iwo Jima) on this date.



The photograph of the event was extremely popular, being reprinted in thousands of publications. Later, it became the only photograph to win the Pulitzer Prize for Photography in the same year as its publication, and ultimately came to be regarded as one of the most significant and recognizable images of the war, and possibly the most reproduced photograph of all time.


February 23, 1954 -
The students of Arsenal Elementary School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania participated in the first mass vaccination of children against polio with the vaccine (using the dead virus to induce immunization) developed by Jonas Salk, on this date.



Poliomyelitis is a viral attack of the central nervous system and can cause paralysis and death by asphyxiation (I have nothing else to say.)


February 23, 1996 -
The Freeway Killer William G Bonin was executed at San Quentin on this date. He was the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the history of California.

For his last meal, Bonin requested two large pepperoni and sausage pizzas, three pints of coffee ice cream and three six-packs of regular Coca Cola.

That kind of diet will kill you.



And so it goes.

Once again - take the forecast seriously

Just because it hasn't started snowing yet, doesn't mean things can't rapidly deterorate -

If you have to, run out now. Then stay in and catch up on some of our past blog posts


Today is the sixth day of the Lunar New Year, and the garbage from the first five days of celebrating is piling up. The rubbish from the first to the fourth day of the Lunar New Year is considered “wealth,” but after the fifth day, that garbage becomes a sign of “poverty.” So, on the sixth day of the Lunar New Year, families participate in a traditional ritual called “Sending Away Poverty” (Song Qiong). This day marks a symbolic transition from the festive restrictions of the New Year to the resumption of normal life and work. The God of Poverty is believed to visit each household.

According to Chinese folklore, the God of Poverty was the son of the ancient Emperor Zhuanxu, one of the legendary rulers among the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors of ancient China.

He was said to be short and weak, fond of wearing ragged clothes and living on a diet of coarse porridge. Even when people presented him with new clothes, he would not wear them until he had ripped them apart or burned them. Because of this, he was called “the man of poverty,” and over time, he gradually came to be regarded as the ghost of poverty.



In the legend of Nüwa, the sixth day of the Lunar New Year is also the Birthday of the Horse.



The horse is one of the “six domestic animals” (Liu Chu) that were critical to ancient Chinese agriculture and survival. On this day, rituals and beliefs focus on honoring the animal’s contribution to society.

According to tradition, today is also known as “Pouring Out Manure Day” (Yi Fei). Families clean their toilets because the God of Toilets is said to come and inspect the cleanliness of the household.

In an agricultural society, before modern plumbing, Chinese farmers would have someone clean the manure pit every three to five days. The sixth day was designated for this task. (And yes, it always stinks when you have to clean the manure pit.)


It's National Margarita Day. Margarita, in Spanish means Daisy





Remember, because of today's blizzard, you probably don't have work tomorrow - celebrate responsibly.


February 22, 1934 -
Frank Capra's romantic comedy It Happened One Night, starring Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert, premiered at Radio City Music Hall on this date.



Clark Gable gave the Oscar he won for his performance in this movie to a child who admired it, telling him it was the winning of the statue that had mattered, not owning it. The child returned the Oscar to the Gable family after Clark's death.


February 22, 1935 -
The Fox Film Corporation film, The Little Colonel, starring Shirley Temple, Lionel Barrymore and Bill Robinson, premiered in the US on this date. The film featured the famous stair dance sequence, making Shirley Temple and Bill Robinson Hollywood's first interracial dance couple. This scene was cut when the film played in the southern United States.



Shirley Temple memorized every line of dialogue in this movie, and while filming a scene with Lionel Barrymore, the veteran actor forgot a line. When Temple prompted him, Barrymore flew into a such a rage that one crew member took Temple away for fear that Barrymore might harm her. He later apologized to her, and they remained friends for many years.


February 22, 1956 -
Elvis Presley's song Heartbreak Hotel debuted on the Billboard pop chart at No. 68, on this date.





Mae Axton, a Nashville songwriter who wrote the music for Heartbreak Hotel, was living in Jacksonville when this song was written. She got a local country singer named Glenn Reeves to do the demo for Elvis, who did the demo the way he thought Elvis would do it. Elvis liked it, and did it exactly that way.


February 22, 1956 -
The film widely considered the worst film produced by a major studio in the 50s, The Conqueror, directed by Dick Powell and starring John Wayne as Genghis Khan, Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, and Pedro Armendáriz, premiered in the US on this date.



The film was shot downwind from a nuclear test site and is considered the cause of cancer and death of many of the cast and crew.


February 22, 1977 -
The single New Kid in Town, the first release from the album Hotel California, was the Eagles' first to be certified gold for selling more than 1 million copies on this date.



Glen Frey mentioned in an interview at the time that the song was about Steely Dan whom the band saw as a new and upcoming group that was possibly taking over the spotlight from the Eagles (there has been some dispute as to whether or not Glen Frey was joking.) Given that the two bands shared a manager (Irving Azoff) and that the Eagles proclaimed their admiration for Steely Dan, this was more friendly rivalry than feud.


February 22, 2001 -
Mira Nair's wonderful Monsoon Wedding, opened in both Los Angeles and New York on this date. (if you don't already know it, Ms. Nair is the mother of the mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani.)



A large portion of the original footage (including the wedding itself) was ruined by an airport x-ray machine. The scenes had to be re-shot, when additional funds had been raised to do so, some months later.


Another album from the discount bin at The ACME Record Shoppe


Today in History:
Associate with men of good quality if you esteem your own reputation; for it is better to be alone than in bad company - George Washington

Young George Washington was born on February 11, 1731 (or so he thought.)



Unfortunately for him, England had been tenaciously clinging onto the Julian calendar - they wanted none of that Papist Gregorian calendar crap. But England finally wanted to get with the times, so in 1752, Parliament adopted the Gregorian calendar. Many prominent colonists supported the new system; including Benjamin Franklin and George Washington. Washington updated his own birthday from the old February 11th to the Gregorian February 22.



But wait, there's more - the calendar switch of 1752 included another significant change. Under the Julian system, the year began on March 25. That means a colonist who went to bed on March 24, 1700, would wake up on March 25, 1701. The new Gregorian rules set the start of the year to January 1st. This created some confusion, since anyone who was born between January 1st and March 25th in the old system would have the wrong birth year in the new one - thus George's new birthday was February 22, 1732.



So you have to wish the Father of Our Country birthday greetings for the third time this month.



Much heavy drinking ensued.


On February 22, 1862, Jefferson Davis was officially inaugurated for a six-year term as the President of the Confederate States of America in Richmond, Virginia.

He was previously inaugurated as a provisional president on February 18, 1861.

I guess his mother was proud of him.


February 22, 1902 -
Sen. Elizabeth Warren pours herself a cold one somewhere, opining the events that occurred on this date

After years of souring relations between the two Democrats from South Carolina, Sen. John McLaurin took to the Senate floor on this date and claimed that his state’s senior senator, “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, had spread a “willful, malicious and deliberate lie” about him. Tillman, who was standing nearby, then “spun around and punched McLaurin squarely in the jaw,” according to an official write-up of the incident on the Senate webpage.

“The chamber exploded in pandemonium as members struggled to separate both members of the South Carolina delegation,” it continues. The Senate later adopted Rule 19, after voting to censure both South Carolinians over the incident. The obscure rule has so infrequently been invoked that several media sources could only find two previous votes on this question in the history of the Senate -- on January 29, 1915, and April 21, 1952, until the good senator was herself censured on February 8, 2017, for impugned Jeff Session's character.


February 22, 1925 -
I just kind of conjured them up out of my subconscious and put them in order of ascending peculiarity.



The gothic illustrator and professed 'child hater' Edward St. John Gorey was spawned on this date.


February 22, 1974 -
A failed assassination attempt on President Nixon took place on this date. Samuel Joseph Byck, an unemployed tire salesman, attempted to hijack a plane and crash it into the White House to kill President Nixon.



When police stormed the plane, he committed suicide. No one else was injured, and Nixon was unaffected, although he did resign several months later.


February 22, 1980 -
During the XIII Olympic Winter Games in Lake Placid, New York, the United States hockey team defeats the Soviet Union hockey team 4-3 on this date.



It is considered to be one of the greatest upsets in sports history (the Miracle on Ice.)


February 22, 1987 -
Andy Warhol died of complications after gallbladder surgery, though the details are hazy. The official cause was listed as cardiac arrhythmia, but speculation includes his fear of hospitals as well as possible Cefoxitin allergy. Mr. Warhol is best known for painting pictures of Campbell's Soup cans and Marilyn Monroe, although never together.



Warhol's death brings him a bonus 15 minutes of fame.



His work can be seen in museums and galleries around the world to this very day.



Campbell's Soup cans can still be found in the canned goods section of your favorite supermarket to this very day.


February 22, 1994 -
CIA agent Aldrich Ames and his wife were charged by the United States Department of Justice with spying for the Soviet Union on this date.



Somehow by 1989 Ames had acquired the unexplained wealth from his spying and did very little to conceal the spying, he somehow managed to evade being caught for five more years.


February 22, 1997 -
The first cloning of an advanced mammal, a sheep known as Dolly, was announced in the news media, on this date. Dolly, actually born on July 5, 1996, was cloned from a mammary cell -



Dolly was purportedly named after Dolly Parton.

I guess that's a compliment.


February 22, 2002 -
Charles Martin Chuck Jones, director of many of the classic short animated cartoons starring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, died on this date.



At 85, Chuck signed a long-term contract with Warner Bros. to supervise the animation department. His thoughts on the contract were: "At 85 you can only think ahead for the next 50 years or so."




And so it goes.