Raise your Frozen Margarita's tonight - contrary to popular belief, tortilla chips are not from Mexico. They were invented in Los Angeles in the 1940s by Rebecca Webb Carranza. Stick that in your guacamole!
Margaritas and chips - what's a great way to celebrate Mardi Gras is next week!
February 24, 1921 -
It's Abe Vigoda's birthday.
Still not dead yet!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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, 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.
And so it goes.
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