The place where the world comes together in honesty and mirth. Windmills Tilted, Scared Cows Butchered, Lies Skewered on the Lance of Reality ... or something to that effect.
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Theodosius of Rome passes legislation prohibiting all pagan worship in the empire.
1226
Louis IX succeeds Louis VIII as king of France.
1576
The 17 provinces of the Netherlands form a federation to maintain peace.
1620
The King of Bohemia is defeated at the Battle of Prague.
1685
Fredrick William of Brandenburg issues the Edict of Potsdam, offering Huguenots refuge.
1793
The Louvre opens to the pubic in Paris.
1861
Charles Wilkes seizes Confederate commissioners John Slidell and James M. Mason from the British ship Trent.
1864
Lincoln steals office in the first wartime election in the United States.
1887
Doc Holliday, who fought on the side of the Earp brothers during the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral 6 years earlier, dies of tuberculosis in Glenwood Springs, Colorado.
1889
Montana becomes the 41st state of the Union.
1900
Theodore Dresier’s first novel Sister Carrie is published by Doubleday, but is recalled from stores shortly due to public sentiment.
1904
President Theodore Roosevelt is elected president of the United States. He had been vice president until the assassination of McKinley.
1910
The Democrats prevail in congressional elections for the first time since 1894.
1923
Adolf Hitler attempts a coup in Munich, the “Beer Hall Putsch,” and proclaims himself chancellor and Ludendorff dictator. .
1932
Franklin D. Roosevelt is elected 32nd president of the United States.
1938
Crystal Bird Fauset of Pennsylvania, becomes the first African-American woman to be elected to a state legislature.
1942
The United States and Great Britain invade Axis-occupied North Africa.
1960
John F. Kennedy is elected 35th president, defeating wingnut candidate Nixon.
1965
Vietnam War,
Operation Hump takes place: US 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team is
ambushed by over 1,200 Viet Cong in Bien Hoa Province. Nearby, in the
Gang Toi Hills, a company of the Royal Australian Regiment also engage
Viet Cong forces.
1966
Edward Brooke of Massachusetts becomes the first African American elected to the Senate in 85 years.
1977
Greek archaeologist Manolis Andronikos discovers what is believed to be the tomb of Philip II of Macedon at Vergina in northern Greece.
1983
Wilson B. Goode is elected as the first black mayor of the city of Philadelphia.
1987
A dozen people are killed and over 60
wounded when the IRA detonates a bomb during a Remembrance Day ceremony
in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, honoring those who had died in wars
involving British forces.
2000
Dispute begins over US presidential
election between George W. Bush and Al Gore; Supreme Court ruling on
Dec. 12 results in a 271-266 electoral victory for Bush.
2004
More than 10,000 US troops and a few Iraqi army units besiege an insurgent stronghold at Fallujah.
2013
Super Typhoon Haiyan, one of the strongest
storms ever recorded, slams into the Philippines, with sustained winds
of 195 mpg (315 kph) and gusts up to 235 mph (380 kph); over 5,000 are
killed (date is Nov 7 in US).
James Corden has welcomed lots of interesting guests into his car for the Carpool Karaoke segment on The Late Late Show with James Corden, but he's never had a hero like Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in his car.
Of
course, James didn't know Anthony was a hero when he invited him to
sing and get silly in the car, but a dire circumstance presented itself
during filming and Anthony sprang into action:
We
danced off, we tied and then we were going to celebrate with some
Mexican food on the corner. And a woman came out of her house, holding a
child saying ‘My baby, my baby, my baby can’t breathe!’ We all ran
across the street, the woman thrust the baby into my arms, the baby was
not breathing and I thought ‘I’m gonna try and do a little baby CPR
real quick, see if I can get some air in this kid.’ Tried to open the
mouth, [it was] like locked shut. So I started rubbing the belly,
bubbles came out of the mouth, the eyes rolled back into place, the
ambulance showed up and I handed the baby over, who was now breathing
and fine, and we went back to Carpool Karaoke.
Controversies over what books are taught in class or shelved in the
school library typically start when an adult—usually a parent or
community member—feels that a book selected by teachers and librarians
is inappropriate, offensive or objectionable. Most often, the
objections relate to sexual scenes, offensive language, or depictions of
drug and alcohol use. Concerned adults worry that the book promotes
ideas that conflict with their personal values and beliefs, or that
children will imitate fictional characters and engage in undesirable
behavior.
Ironically, some of the most frequently challenged books are the very
books that young readers say are especially important and meaningful to
them.
“There was no protest. We were there to
check on the family to make sure they were safe. Next thing we knew, we
were surrounded by a bunch of angry white people.”
Funeral
directors and their employees are compassionate and professional around
grieving families. They take care of details and do their best to ease
the way for the deceased's loved ones during the hardest time of their
lives. Behind the scenes, things are different, in which there all all
kinds of things you aren't supposed to see. They take shortcuts to make
the deceased look good. They play pranks on each other. They've all had a
weird funeral request they'll never forget. And they have their
personal failings, just like everyone else. Read the secrets some funeral home employees were willing to share anonymously at Buzzfeed.
Cracked
has the stories of men who refused to die under circumstances in which
most would have succumbed. Whether it was luck, skills, or an inner
toughness, we can't say. But just putting oneself into these various
circumstances takes bravery far beyond most people. Here's what Jack
Lucas did during the war. The big one.
14-year-old
Jacklyn "Jack" Lucas was big for his age. But rather than squander his
gifts playing football or buying beer for his friends, Lucas instead
forged his mother's signature on a recruitment form and went to fight
with the Marines in World War II. While trenched in on the shores of Iwo
Jima, two grenades threatened to take out Lucas and his squad-mates.
Here's what happened next, in Lucas' own words: "I hollered to my pals
to get out and did a Superman dive at the grenades. I wasn't a Superman
after I got hit. I let out one helluva scream when that thing went off."
Lucas'
heroism earned him "more than 250 pieces of shrapnel in his body and
every major organ, including six pieces in his brain and two in his
heart." He returned home at 17 years old -- not even old enough to
technically enlist today -- where he became the youngest Marine to ever
be awarded the Medal Of Honor.
Amelia
Earhart has captured the imagination of generations since her
disappearance in 1937, but as much as her disappearance has added to her
mystique it also left her tragic tale without resolution.
So why haven't investigators been able to find her body?
Because
they probably already did back in 1940, when a skeleton discovered on
Gardner Island (now called Nikumaroro) was dismissed as male by a doctor
and eliminated from evidence.
In
the British doctor’s notes, the humerus was reported to be 32.4
centimeters long. The radius was 24.5 centimeters – a ratio of 0.756 to
the length of the humerus. Statistically, women born in the late 19th
century (Earhart was born in 1897) had an average radius to humerus
ratio of 0.73.
In other words, if the castaway was a middle-aged,
ethnically European woman, she had forearms considerably longer than
average. Dr. Jantz wondered if Amelia may have had similarly longer than
average forearms. To answer that question we called on
forensic imaging specialist Jeff Glickman. Selecting an historical
photo of Amelia where her bare arms were clearly visible, and working
with Dr. Jantz to identify the correct points on the shoulder, elbow
and wrist for comparing bone length, Jeff found that Earhart’s humerus
to radius ratio was 0.76 – virtually identical to the castaway’s.
We'll
probably never know for sure if the bones belong to Amelia Earhart, but
maybe it's time to simply accept these findings and put this mystery to
rest once and for all.
Filmmaker Brian Gersten writes, "'The Hollerin' Contest at Spivey's
Corner' is a documentary short about the history, characters, and sounds
of the National Hollerin' Contest.
Ryan Hunter (redditor yanray) is the co-author of the coloring book Coloring for Grownups. He also came up with these crayon colors for a contest. These are the colors you don't forget.
Life
took hold on land at least as early as 3.2 billion years ago, suggests a
study by scientists from Berlin, Potsdam and Jena (Germany). The team
led by Sami Nabhan of the Freie Universität Berlin studied ancient rock
formations from South Africa's Barberton...
The
birth of massive stars is still a mystery to us, because these stars
are embedded in an extremely dense medium of gas and dust, says Rolf
Kuiper, the leader of the Emmy Noether Research Group for Massive Star
Formation, funded by the German Research Foundation...
Primates
are our closest relatives in the animal kingdom.
How close?
According
to some unconventional scientific research, we may have more in common
with them than we thought.
RAISING CANE
About
250 miles east of Puerto Rico is an island in the Caribbean called
Saint Kitts. Today it’s a popular tourist destination, but for more than
300 years it was best known as a producer of both sugarcane and rum,
the liquor made from sugarcane. The first cane plantations were
established in the 1640s by England and France, which both had
settlements on the island. In those days, France also had colonies in
Africa, and when French colonists from West Africa came to Saint Kitts,
they often brought monkeys called vervets with them as pets. Many of
these monkeys escaped into the wild, where they thrived in the tropical
paradise, free from predators and disease. The vervet population
exploded in the years that followed. There were plenty of mangoes for
them to eat, and when mangoes weren’t in season, the vervets happily
devoured the sugarcane, as an English visitor named Lady Andrews
observed in 1774:
They are the torment of the
planters, they destroy whole cane pieces in a few hours and come in
troops from the mountains, whose trees afford them shelter… When
pursued, they fly to the mountain and laugh at their pursuers, as they
are as little ashamed of a defeat as a French general.
MONKEY SEE
And
just as vervets —like humans— acquired a taste for cane sugar, they
also developed a taste for the rum produced from it. The monkeys
probably got their first taste of alcohol by eating naturally fermenting
cane stalks in the fields, then graduated to stealing rum whenever the
opportunity presented itself. Islanders soon learned that an easy way to
catch a vervet was to set out some rum in a bowl, then wait for one to
come along and drink itself into insensibility.
As the years
passed and Saint Kitts’s economy evolved from sugar and rum production
to tourism, the vervets may have had an easier transition than the
islanders did— at least as far as imbibing was concerned. Instead of
heading out to the cane fields or into town in search of rum, the
monkeys simply staked out the vacation resorts and stole drinks from
tourists whenever their backs were turned. Some visitors found this
annoying, of course, but for others, watching vervets steal drinks was
—and still is— part of the experience of visiting Saint Kitts.
BIRDS OF A FEATHER Vervets are one of few
primate species (other than humans) that choose to drink alcohol. Though
they’re covered in gray fur, have long tails, stand only two feet tall,
and weigh less than 20 pounds, they share 90 percent of their DNA with
humans. That has prompted scientists to study their drinking habits in
the hopes of developing insights into the drinking behavior of humans.
Frank
Ervin, a professor of psychiatry at McGill University in Montreal, has
been observing the behavior of a colony of vervets in Saint Kitts since
the 1970s. Earlier in his career he ran a rehabilitation clinic for
alcoholics in Boston, Massachusetts, and after witnessing the ravages of
alcoholism firsthand, he began studying vervet to “understand more
about alcoholism so the damage can be reduced.” MONKEY BARS Ervin
has conducted numerous studies over the years. Many have a similar
structure. Vervet are given access to three kinds liquids: 1. Plain water 2. Water mixed with fruit juice or some other sweetener 3.
Alcoholic beverages ranging in potency from 7.5 percent alcohol, about
as strong as malt liquor, to 25 percent, which is stronger than wine but
not as strong as the rum the vervet drink “in the wild.” The
vervet select what they want to drink and in what quantities. In some
studies, the alcohol is available all the time; in others, it is only
available at certain times of the day. Some times the vervet choose
between alcohol served straight, diluted with water, or mixed with fruit
juice. Whatever the case, the vervets decide for themselves what to
drink. GROUP DYNAMICS “The parallels between the vervet’ behavior and human drinking is striking,” Ervin says. He divides vervet into four categories: 1. Teetotalers Fifteen
percent of vervet studied drink little or no alcohol at all. That’s a
larger proportion than is found in those human societies where alcohol
consumption is not forbidden for religious or other reasons. The
teetotalers preferred sweetened, non-alcoholic “soft drinks” over
water. This distinguishes them from the vervets who do drink alcohol:
all categories of those drinkers prefer water over soft drinks when they
aren’t drinking alcohol.
2. Social Drinkers
Sixty-five percent of vervets drink small to moderate quantities of alcohol, and only when other monkeys are around.
Social drinkers prefer alcohol mixed with fruit juice or other sweeteners and rarely drink before noon.
Social drinkers are more likely to be female than male, and older males rather than younger males. 3. Abusive Binge Drinkers
Five
percent of vervets will drink until they pass out in an alcoholic coma,
“sometimes repeatedly within a 24-hour period,” if the alcohol isn’t
allowed to run out or isn’t taken away. “They will stand at the alcohol
bottle,” Ervin writes, “and will drink continuously, blocking access for
all other monkeys.”
Binge drinkers prefer their alcohol straight
or mixed with water rather than mixed with fruit juice or other
sweeteners. They drink more in the morning than they do in the
afternoon.
If access to alcohol is restricted to certain times
of the day, the binge drinkers can consume an entire day’s worth of
alcohol in as little as an hour. They will not drink water as long as
alcohol is available.
Left to their own devices, abusive binge drinkers can drink themselves to death in amateur of months or even weeks.
Most abusive binge drinkers are young males.
4. Heavy Steady Drinkers
Fifteen
percent of vervets drink as much as abusive binge drinkers but do so
gradually, sipping it over time instead of drinking it all at once.
Heavy steady drinkers prefer their alcohol either straight or diluted with water, not sweetened with juice.
They tend to be dominant, sociable animals with strong leadership skills.
Males
who drink heavily as adolescents, either as binge drinkers or heavy
steady drinkers, are likely to continue drinking heavily into adulthood.
Their off spring will, on average, drink twice as much as the offspring
of social drinkers. OTHER FINDINGS Behavior
In
vervet studies where access to alcohol is restricted to certain times
of the day, in the hour before that time, the orkneys show “significant
attention to the external environment” and “anxious attention to
stimuli.” After the alcohol is made available, this heightened
attentiveness and anxiety diminish considerably.
As wit humans,
how vervets respond while under the influence of alcohol varies from one
individual to the next. Some become more social; others are playful but
keep to themselves and interact little with others in the group. Still
other monkeys become withdrawn and remove themselves from the group,
often retreating to a corner or sitting next to the alcohol bottle so
that they can continue drinking. If approached by other vervets, they
will either ignore the overture or respond aggressively.
For
the group as a whole, when the monkeys are drinking, the total number
of social interactions increases… but the number of friendly or
“affiliative” behaviors such as grooming and huddling decreases. “The
increase was accounted for by fragmentary and inappropriate behaviors…
There were many aggressive overtures, including threats or slapping…
which were neither responded to nor followed up by the initiator,” Ervin
writes.
Play sessions between males who have been drinking are more likely to end in fights than play session between sober males.
Miscellaneous
Adolescent
vervet of both sexes, and adult females who have low social status in
the group, Ervin writes, are not “over-represented among drinkers.”
Young vervet showed a greater preference for sweetened alcoholic drinks than did older vervets.
In
one study, alcohol was available in unlimited quantities for three
weeks and then suddenly taken away. The result: “abrupt withdrawal led
to restlessness, cage pacing, voluminous consumption of [sweetened
water], hyperirritability to sound or observer intrusion, tremulousness…
and repeated approaches to the drinking bottle together with handling,
rattling, and banging of the drinking bottle.
