Saturday, September 13, 2008

Ike is marching through Texas

Hopefully the people who didn't evacuate will be ok.

September 13 1848 -
A 13-pound tamping iron is blown through the head of railroad construction foreman Phineas P. Gage, entering beneath the left cheekbone and exiting the top of his head. The metal bar lands 30 yards away, taking with it much of his left frontal lobe. Gage never loses consciousness, even while the doctors examine his wound. Two months later, he is well enough to return home and resume an active life of work and travel.



The steel rod, along with a cast of Gage's head, and his skull, are now on display at Harvard Medical School's Warren Anatomical Museum.

September 13 1916 -
Mary the circus elephant is publicly executed in the Erwin, Tennessee railyard, after killing a drifter named Red Eldridge the previous day. The five-ton animal is hanged from a derrick car in front of 3,000 onlookers, and left hanging for half an hour.



Give the people what they want ...

September 13 1916 -
Roald Dahl was born on this date in Llandaff, South Wales. He was sent off to private boarding schools as a kid, which he hated except for the chocolates, Cadbury chocolates. The Cadbury chocolate company had chosen his school as a focus group for new candies they were developing. Every so often, a plain gray cardboard box was issued to each child, filled with eleven chocolate bars. It was the children's task to rate the candy, and Dahl took his job very seriously. About one of the sample candy bars, he wrote, "Too subtle for the common palate." He later said that the experience got him thinking about candy as something manufactured in a factory, and he spent a lot of time imagining what a candy factory might be like.



Today, he's best known for his children's book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and for the fact he ran off with his children's nanny after his wife, the actress Patricia Neal, recovered from a stroke. But even more interesting, a recently published biography of Dahl, purports that he was a spy for the British government during World War II, paid to sleep with wealthy U. S. women to gain information for the British government. And you thought only 007 had a way with women.

September 13 1971 -
After 1,300 rioting prisoners reject a list of proposed concessions because it lacks immunity from prosecution, New York Governor orders an attack to retake Attica prison. In all, 29 prisoners die and 85 are wounded; and 10 hostages are killed. For months thereafter, prisoners receive inhumane beatings from guards.

September 13 1974 -
The Rockford Files debuts on NBC television.



And so it goes

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