On This Day In History...

Some things that happened on this day. Most information courtesy of Wikipedia.

Events

79 - Mount Vesuvius erupts. The cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae are buried in volcanic ash.
• 1215 - Pope Innocent III declares the Magna Carta invalid.
• 1349 - Six thousand Jews are killed in Mainz because they are blamed for the bubonic plague.
• 1456 - The printing of the Gutenberg Bible is completed.
• 1459 - Vlad Tepes (aka Dracula) had 30,000 of the merchants and officials of the Transylvanian city of Bra?ov impaled.
• 1572 - Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre: On the orders of king Charles IX of France, a massacre of Huguenots (French Protestants) begins.
• 1662 - Act of Uniformity requires England to accept the Book of Common Prayer.
• 1690 - Calcutta, India is founded.
• 1814 - British troops invade Washington, D.C. and burn down the White House and several other buildings.
• 1831 - Charles Darwin is asked to travel on HMS Beagle.
• 1847 - Charlotte Brontë finishes Jane Eyre.
• 1853 - Potato chips are first prepared.
• 1891 - Thomas Edison patents the motion picture camera.
• 1909 - Workers start pouring concrete for the Panama Canal.
• 1912 - Alaska becomes a United States territory.
• 1932 - Amelia Earhart is the first woman to fly across the United States non-stop (from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey).
• 1949 - The treaty creating NATO goes into effect.
• 1967 - Led by Abbie Hoffman, a group of hippies temporarily disrupt trading at the NYSE by throwing dollar bills from the viewing gallery, causing a cease in trading as the brokers scramble to grab them up.
• 1968 - France explodes its first hydrogen bomb, thus becoming the world's fifth nuclear power.
• 1971 - Pink Floyd performs their most famous concert, in an abandoned Pompeii amphitheatre on the 1892nd anniversary of the infamous disappearance of Pompeii.
• 1981 - Mark David Chapman is sentenced to 20 years to life in prison for murdering John Lennon.
• 1989 - Voyager 2 passes Neptune.
• 1990 - A judge rules that Judas Priest are not responsible for the deaths of two youths who committed suicide after listening to the band's music.
• 1991 - Mikhail Gorbachev resigns as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
• 1991 - Ukraine declares itself independent from the Soviet Union.
• 1995 - Windows 95, a computer operating system by Microsoft, is released with much fanfare.
• 2004 - Two airliners in Russia, carrying a total of 89 passengers, explode within minutes of each other after flying out of Domodedovo International Airport, near Moscow, leaving no survivors. The explosions were caused by suicide bombers (reportedly female) from the Russian Republic of Chechnya.

Births

• 1552 - Lavinia Fontana, Italian painter (d. 1614)
• 1580 - John Taylor, English poet (d. 1654)
• 1591 - Robert Herrick, English poet (d. 1674)
• 1759 - William Wilberforce, English campaigner against slavery (d. 1833)
• 1787 - James Weddell, Antarctica explorer (d. 1834)
• 1817 - Aleksey Konstantinovich Tolstoy, Russian writer (d. 1875)
• 1872 - Max Beerbohm, British parodist and caricaturist (d. 1956)
• 1897 - Fred Rose, American songwriter and publishing executive (d. 1954)
• 1899 - Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine writer (d. 1986)
• 1934 - Kenny Baker, English actor
• 1936 - A. S. Byatt, English novelist
• 1944 - Jim Capaldi, British drummer, singer, and songwriter (Traffic) (d. 2005)
• 1948 - Kim Sung-Il, Chief of Staff of Republic of Korea Air Force
• 1948 - Jean-Michel Jarre, French musician
• 1957 - Stephen Fry, English comedian, author, and actor
• 1958 - Steve Guttenberg, American actor
• 1966 - Peter Moore, English actor, director and database administrator.
  
• 1988 - Rupert Grint, English actor

Deaths

• 79 - Pliny the Elder, Roman writer and naturalist (b. 23)
• 1680 - Thomas Blood, Irish-born thief of the British crown jewels (b. 1618)
• 1841 - Theodore Edward Hook, English author (b. 1788)
• 1958 - Paul Henry, Northern Irish artist (b. 1876)
• 1967 - Henry J. Kaiser, American industrialist (b. 1882)
• 1978 - Louis Prima, American band leader (b. 1910)
• 1980 - Yootha Joyce, British actress (b. 1927)
• 1990 - Sergei Dovlatov, Russian writer (b. 1941)
• 1991 - Bernard Castro, Italian inventor (b. 1904)
• 1995 - Alfred Eisenstaedt, German-born photographer (b. 1898)
• 1998 - E.G. Marshall, American actor (b. 1910)
• 2003 - Sir Wilfred Thesiger, British explorer (b. 1910)
• 2004 - Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Swiss-born psychiatrist (b. 1926)

How Much?

I've been away for two weeks. Obsessively dull details will follow in a day or two.

Just so you know why I haven't been reading/replying/blogging/commenting for a while.

Ciao!

Better Late Than Never

Good Lord, I'm useless. A whole week since I last posted. Trouble is, I have fantastic ideas for a post, but they usually occur to me when I'm driving home from work. I have no way of noting them down while I'm on the move, so 45 minutes later, when I'm back home, I've forgotten what the brilliant idea was!

Yesterday I bought a digital voice recorder. You know - a "Dictaphone"-type thing, though presumably "Dictaphone" is a registered trademark, so I should make it very clear that it was definitely not one of those that I bought.

Anyway, I bought it so that I can record the read-through for our next play. I can then copy the recording to my PC and isolate the sections I'm in and burn the recording to CD; all the better for learning my lines.

So maybe I should carry it around at all times, murmuring into it when an idea occurs to me. But then I have a mental image of Alan Partridge in a Rover and wearing driving gloves ("Idea for a programme entitled 'Yachting Mishaps'. Some funny, some tragic. Presented by that man who was trapped upside-down in his hull eating chocolate.") and it seems very foolish all of a sudden.