NEW Improved Monday Open Thread: August 13 is International Lefthanders Day

August 13 is the 225th day of the year; as well as Setting Orange, Bureaucracy 6, 3184 YOLD to discordians.

Sandy Koufax, Ted Williams, The Snake. Any question?

Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift, look out kid, ...

On this day in:

1521 - Cortes the asshole and his forces captured King Tlatoani Cuauhtemoc and the city of Tenochtitlan, effectively ending the Aztec empire and civilization. Thereafter Christian barbarians ran the show.

1553 - Michael Servetus was arrested for heresy by John Calvin. He was, of course, burnt at the stake, because thought crimes warrant such treatment.

1704 - English and Imperial troops under Marlborough and Eugene of Savoy hammered the French and Bavarian troops opposed to them at the Battle of Blenheim. The War of the Spanish Succession, nonetheless continued for another decade, but it was a Glorious Victory all the same.

1792 - King Louis XVI of France was formally arrested by the National Tribunal, and declared to be an enemy of the people, as indeed he was. Unfortunately, so few of them were ever thusly taken down that it never caught on.

1889 - William Gray of Hartford, Connecticut received United States Patent Number 408,709 for a "Coin-controlled apparatus for telephones." This, of course, led to the once ubiquitous 'phone booth. Raise your hand if you remember them. Raise your other hand if you've used one in the past 3 years (both hands raised here.)

1898 - US and Spanish troops fought the mock battle for Manila, after which the Spanish surrendered to the yanks. It was all a scheme and show to keep the Filipino rebels from taking the city, which just wouldn't do.

1905 - Norwegians voted to end the union with Sweden. The US made no attempt to intervene or challenge the election.

1918 - Opha May Johnson became the first woman to enlist in the US marines.

1961 - East Germany closed the border between the eastern and western sectors of Berlin.

-

-

Born this day in:

1814 - Anders Jonas Ãngstrom, physicist and astronomer

1818 - Lucy Stone, abolitionist and suffragist

1819 - Sir George Stokes, 1st Baronet, mathematician and physicist. Raise your hand if you know the Navier-Stokes equations.

1860 - Annie Oakley, shooter

1914 - Grace Bates, mathematician

1919 - George Shearing, jazz pianist and bandleader

1930 - Don Ho, singer and ukulele player

1933 - Joycelyn Elders, admiral, general, and opinionated physician; fired for being uppity

1938 - Dave "Baby" Cortez, happy pianist, organist, and composer

1951 - Dan Fogelberg, singer, songwriter and guitarist

1952 - Hughie Thomasson, southron rock singer, songwriter and guitarist

1963 - Valerie Plame, spook infamously outed by GW Bush in his successful propaganda campaign to lie us into the Iraq war.

-

Died this day in:

1863 - Eugene Delacroix, painter

1910 - Florence Nightingale, nurse

1946 - H. G. Wells, novelist and historian

2003 - Ed Townsend, singer, songwriter and producer

2004 - Julia Child, Julia Child

2009 - Les Paul, Les Paul

2012 - Helen Gurley Brown, journalist and author

-

Holidays, Holy Days, Festivals, Feast Days and such:

International Lefthanders Day

National Prosecco Day

National Filet Mignon Day

No, do NOT drink prosecco with filet mignon

-

-

-

-

Asshole Cortes

pay phones

George Shearing

Don Ho

Dave "Baby" Cortez

Dan Fogelberg

Hughie Thomasson

Valerie Plame

Ed Townsend

Les Paul

-

-

-

-

picture: Jimi, public domain

It's an open thread, so do your thing

Crossposted from http://caucus99percent.com

Note: as a test, I only manually inserted singly crlf pairs when I did my edit to remove the effects of the sites concatenation fetish.