Friday, January 6, 2012

Friday! History, Music, Cinema, Sports, Quotes, More!

On This Date In 0871 England's King Alfred (Alfred the Great) defeated the Danes at the Battle of Ashdown in Berkshire. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/alfred_the_great.shtml
On This Date In 1066 Following the death of Edward the Confessor, Harold Godwineson, head of the most powerful noble family in England, was crowned King Harold II.
On This Date In 1205 Philip of Swabia (1177 – June 21, 1208), king of Germany and duke of Swabia, and rival of the emperor Otto IV, was crowned for the second time.
On This Date In 1759 26-year-old George Washington married Martha Dandridge Custis. The recently widowed, Virginia-born Martha was an educated mother of two. George Washington--then a rising young officer in the colonial British army--moved his new bride and family to his estate at Mount Vernon. Washington soon adopted Martha's two young children, Jack and Patsy. The couple were married until his death in 1799, a 40-year union.
On This Date In 1777 After two significant victories over the British in Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey, General George Washington marched north to Morristown, New Jersey, where he set up winter headquarters for himself and the men of the Continental Army on this day in 1777. The hills surrounding the camp offered Washington a perfect vantage point from which to keep an eye on the British army, which was headquartered across the Hudson River in New York City. Morristown's position also allowed Washington to protect the roads leading from the British strongholds in New Jersey to New England and the roads leading to Philadelphia, where the leaders of the American Revolution were headquartered.
On This Date In 1781 The Battle of Jersey was fought, an attempt by France to invade Jersey and remove the threat the island posed to American shipping in the American War of Independence. Jersey was used as a base for privateering by the British, and France, engaged in the war as an ally of the United States, sent an expedition to gain control of the island. The expedition ultimately failed, and its commander, Baron Phillipe de Rullecourt, died of wounds sustained in the fighting.
On This Date In 1838 Samuel Morse's telegraph system was demonstrated for the first time at the Speedwell Iron Works in Morristown, New Jersey. The telegraph, a device which used electric impulses to transmit encoded messages over a wire, would eventually revolutionize long-distance communication, reaching the height of its popularity in the 1920s and 1930s.
On This Date In 1912 New Mexico was admitted into the United States as the 47th state.
On This Date In 1916 Through January 8 the Battle of Sheikh Sa'ad was fought during the Mesopotamian Campaign of the First World War. The battle took place along the banks of the Tigris River between the Anglo-Indian Tigris Corps and elements of the Ottoman Sixth Army. The engagement was the first in a series of assaults by the Tigris Corps to try and breakthrough the Ottoman lines to relieve the besieged garrison at Kut.
On This Date In 1919 President Theodore Roosevelt died in his sleep in his Oyster Bay, New York home of a coronary thrombosis (heart attack), preceded by a 2 1/2-month illness described as inflammatory rheumatism, and was buried in nearby Youngs Memorial Cemetery. http://www.theodoreroosevelt.org/life/nytobit.htm
On This Date In 1928 “The Circus,” a silent film written and directed by Charlie Chaplin with Joseph Plunkett as an uncredited writer, was released. The film stars Chaplin, Al Ernest Garcia, Merna Kennedy, Harry Crocker, George Davis and Henry Bergman.
On This Date In 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed the 77th Congress in an effort to move the nation away from a foreign policy of neutrality. The president had watched with increasing anxiety as European nations struggled and fell to Adolph Hitler's fascist regime and was intent on rallying public support for the United States to take a stronger interventionist role. In his address, Roosevelt stated that the need of the moment is that our actions and our policy should be devoted primarily--almost exclusively--to meeting the foreign peril. Roosevelt insisted that people in all nations of the world shared Americans' entitlement to four freedoms: the freedom of speech and expression, the freedom to worship God in his own way, freedom from want and freedom from fear.
On This Date In 1942 President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced to Congress that he was authorizing the largest armaments production in the history of the United States. He announced to Congress that the first year of the supercharged production schedule would result in 45,000 aircraft, 45,000 tanks, 20,000 antiaircraft guns, and 8 million tons in new ships. Congressmen were stunned at the proposal, but Roosevelt was undeterred: “These figures and similar figures for a multitude of other implements of war will give the Japanese and Nazis a little idea of just what they accomplished.”
On This Date In 1945 George Herbert Walker Bush, on leave from active duty in World War II, married former Smith College student Barbara Pierce. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/today/jan06.html
On This Date In 1948 The Ministries Trial (or, officially, The United States of America vs. Ernst von Weizsäcker, et al.) was the eleventh of the twelve trials for war crimes the U.S. authorities held in their occupation zone in Germany in Nuremberg after the end of World War II, held between January 6 – April 13, 1949.
On This Date In 1952 “Peanuts,” an American comic strip written and illustrated by Charles M. Schulz, debuted its first Sunday newspaper strip in the half page format, which was the only complete format for the entire life of the Sunday strip.
On This Date In 1958 The Soviet Union announced plans to cut the size of its standing army by 300,000 troops in the coming year. The reduction was part of a 1956 policy announced by Soviet Premier Nikita Krushchev in anticipation of “peaceful coexistence” with the West, and an indication that Cold War relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were undergoing a slight thaw in the mid- to late-1950s.
On This Date In 1967 Operation Deckhouse Five was conducted by the United States Marine Corps and South Vietnamese Marine Corps forces along the Mekong River Delta, as part of the Vietnam War. The operation was notable in that it was a sizable, combined U.S. Marine and Vietnamese Marine amphibious operation and it was the last Special Landing Force (SLF) amphibious landing to take place beyond the boundaries of I Corps. The operation occurred January 6–15, 1967.
On This Date In 1971 The U.S. Army dropped charges of an alleged cover-up in the My Lai massacre in Vietnam against four officers. After the charges were dropped, a total of 11 people had been cleared of responsibility during the My Lai trials. The only conviction was of 1st Lt. William Calley, a platoon leader in the 23rd (Americal) Division, who allegedly led his men to massacre innocent Vietnamese civilians, including women and children, in a cluster of hamlets in Son Tinh District in the coastal south of Chu Lai. A Fort Benning court-martial jury found Calley guilty of the premeditated murder of at least 22 South Vietnamese civilians and sentenced him to life in prison. Subsequent counter-rulings and interventions by President Richard Nixon and the federal courts would eventually reduce his sentence to 20 years, and be paroled after serving 40 months for good behavior.
On This Date In 1975 During the Vietnam War, Phuoc Binh, the capital of Phuoc Long Province, about 60 miles north of Saigon, fell to the North Vietnamese. Phuoc Binh was the first provincial capital taken by the communists since the fall of Quang Tri on May 1, 1972.
On This Date In 1975 Ronald Reagan served his last day as the Governor of California.
On This Date In 1993 Dizzy Gillespie (October 21, 1917 – January 6, 1993), the last of the primary originators of Be-Bop jazz, died in Englewood, New Jersey of pancreatic cancer at age 75, and was buried in the Flushing Cemetery, Queens, New York. The trumpeter-composer-bandleader had laid the foundation of modern jazz with pianist Thelonius Monk, drummer Kenny Clarke, guitarist Charlie Christian, and alto saxophonist Charlie "Yardbird" Parker.
On This Date In 1996 The Blizzard of 1996 began in Washington, D.C., and moved up the Eastern seaboard, killing 154 people and causing over $1 billion in damages before it ended. President Bill Clinton was forced to shut down the federal government for nearly a week, and declared D.C. and nine states to be disaster areas after this record-breaking snowstorm.
On This Date In 1998 The spacecraft Lunar Prospect was launched into orbit around the moon. The craft was crashed into the moon, in an effort to find water under the lunar surface, on July 31, 1999.
On This Date In 2001 After a bitterly contested election, Vice President Al Gore presided over a joint session of Congress that certified George W. Bush as the winner of the 2000 election. In one of the closest Presidential elections in U.S. history, George W. Bush was finally declared the winner more than five weeks after the election due to the disputed Florida ballots. George W. Bush took the oath of office on January 20, 2001, to become the 43rd President of the United States.

Hat tip to any included contributing sources, along with:


Happy Birthday Earl Scruggs (1924), Lou Holtz (1937), Bonnie Franklin (1944), Alan Stivell (1944), Rowan Atkinson (1955), Howie Long (1960), Julie Chen (1970), and Pierre Woods (1982).


RIP Jedediah Smith (1799 – 1831), Charles Sumner (1811 – 1874), Victor Horta (1861 – 1947), Carl Sandburg (1878 – 1967), Tom Mix (1880 – 1940), Danny Thomas (1912 – 1991), Loretta Young (1913 – 2000), Mickey Hargitay (1926 – 2006), Vic Tayback (1930 – 1990), and Syd Barrett (1946 – 2006).


Quotes

Just remember, the same as a spectacular Vogue magazine, remember that no matter how close you follow the jumps: Continued on page whatever. No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day. This is all practice. None of this matters. We're just warming up. Chuck Palahniuk

Life is full of beauty. Notice it. Notice the bumble bee, the small child, and the smiling faces. Smell the rain, and feel the wind. Live your life to the fullest potential, and fight for your dreams. Ashley Smith

Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. Howard Thurman

The life that conquers is the life that moves with a steady resolution and persistence toward a predetermined goal. Those who succeed are those who have thoroughly learned the immense importance of plan in life, and the tragic brevity of time. W.J. Davison

For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be got through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life. Fr. Alfred D'souza


Courtesy YouTube et al

just amazing

Researchers now believe that about a fifth of planet 55 Cancri e (once thought to be mostly rocky) is comprised of light elements in a supercritical state, comparable to the condition of rocket propellent when firing from a spaceship during launch.

See what the world watched on YouTube in 2011 with YouTube Rewind:
http://www.youtube.com/rewind
Buy Avicii - Levels on Android Market (http://goo.gl/cO10Y) and iTunes (http://goo.gl/mYIWH).
Re-watch the year's most viewed videos and use the interactive timeline to see the moments that defined YouTube in 2011 - the year YouTube hit one trillion views.
Video Produced by Portal A Interactive [http://portal-a.com]
Top 10 Most Viewed:
Rebecca Black - Friday (OFFICIAL VIDEO) - http://youtu.be/kfVsfOSbJY0
Ultimate Dog Tease - http://youtu.be/nGeKSiCQkPw
Jack Sparrow (feat. Michael Bolton) - http://youtu.be/GI6CfKcMhjY
Talking Twin Babies - OFFICIAL VIDEO - http://youtu.be/_JmA2ClUvUY
Nyan Cat [original] - http://youtu.be/QH2-TGUlwu4
Look At Me Now - Chris Brown ft. Lil Wayne, Busta Rhymes (Cover by @KarminMusic) - http://youtu.be/khCokQt--l4
The Creep (feat. Nicki Minaj & John Waters) - http://youtu.be/tLPZmPaHme0
Maria Aragon - Born This Way (Cover) by Lady Gaga
The Force: Volkswagen Commercial - http://youtu.be/R55e-uHQna0
Cat mom hugs baby kitten - http://youtu.be/Vw4KVoEVcr0


This is my wish for you: Comfort on difficult days, smiles when sadness intrudes, rainbows to follow the clouds, laughter to kiss your lips, sunsets to warm your heart, hugs when spirits sag, beauty for your eyes to see, friendships to brighten your being, faith so that you can believe, confidence for when you doubt, courage to know yourself, patience to accept the truth, Love to complete your life. Ralph Waldo Emerson



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