Sunday, March 9, 2008

It's almost 2:30 here, what day is it where you are?

Getting more than a little late start to the day today, so I'll jump right into -

Today in History -

March 9, 1170 -
In Essex, a UFO is spotted over St. Ostwyth, manifesting itself as a "wonderfully large dragon ... borne up from the Earth through the air". The craft kindled the air and destroyed a house. And all of that was before LSD.




March 9, 1454 -
Amerigo Vespucci was born. He was an Italian explorer who made many voyages to the new world at about the same time as Columbus. The two continents of the new world were therefore named for him, and it wasn't until the seventeenth century (Greenwich time) that North and South Vespucci were renamed the Americas.




March 9, 1556 -
David Rizzio, the secretary to Mary, Queen of Scots, is stabbed 56 times by a gaggle of Scottish nobles. Her husband Henry Lord Darnley had orchestrated the murder with Mary witnessing, hoping to precipitate a miscarriage. Isn't love among the royalty grand?




March 9, 1967 -
Josef Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, walks into the U.S. Embassy at New Delhi and asks to defect. Isn't parental love grand?




March 9, 1995 -
Jon Schmitz (straight) kills Scott Amedure (gay) three days after an appearance on the trashy Jenny Jones TV talk show, where Amedure admitted having a crush on Schmitz. Allegedly the two men had an affair that evening after the show, but the backlash from their rural community was going to be so severe that Schmitz panicked to defend his manlihood, filling his admirer with buckshot. Amedure's famly later sued the Jenny Jones show for $50M. Isn't love among the rednecks grand?




March 9, 1997 -
Notorious B.I.G. (Christopher Wallace) killed in a drive-by outside the Soul Train Music Awards in Los Angeles. The murder has never been officially solved, though an ongoing feud with Death Row Records may have had something to do with it. Are we lucky that most of us aren't hip hop stars.



And so it goes

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