THIS DAY IN HISTORY

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630 million years BCE -- The first significant "January thaw." Thankfully, no record of insufferable dinosaurs wearing a Bermuda shorts/black socks combo and doing stretches in public while wearing headphones, even though it wasn't that warm.

180,000 BCE - The first known conversation -- primarily, monosyllabic, uninspired, and inane, pretty much as it is today.

14,300  BCE - Beginning a 16,000-year run, the first joke:    "I migrated on foot all the way from sub-Saharan Africa to the Steppes and all I got were these lousy peanuts."  Then, as now, it brought down the house.

14,299 BCE - The first re-run. Predictably, a joke about peanuts -- or the lack thereof. 

13,745 BCE - The first dog is domesticated in a yurt in what is now Mongolia.  Almost as if on cue, he does his business on the rug the next day. As of this post, the evidence is almost undetectable.

5,100  BCE - The Maya, with their Long Count cycle calendar, predict that the world will end on December 21, 2012.  They also predict that "A Chorus Line" will be a big flop. So...

5,000 BCE - The Nubians invent astronomy,  but realizing that it's too damn cold to hang around outside at night, they soon lose interest, go inside, and sit around telling variations of peanut jokes.

4,723 BCE -- First archeological find in Mesopotamia, but nobody will take the discipline seriously for another 6,000 years, because, back then, nothing found in the dirt was all that old, and, frankly, looked a lot like the stuff that was already in the kitchen.

3,023 BCE - Methuselah begins to collect social security.  900 years later, the system is nearly bankrupt.  Thanks a lot, Methuselah!

713 BCE -- January is discovered by the semi-mythical successor of Romulus, King Numa Pompilius (together with February), allowing the calendar to equal a standard lunar year (355 days). Prior to this time, no Washington Birthday sales.

143 CE -- Paper makes a big splash in China. But until the first crude paper clips are fashioned out of wattle and daub centuries later, it proves largely to be a big pain in the ass.

129 BCE - The first fortune cookie fortune: "No man is an island, but some men are a peninsula -- lucky numbers 3, 6, 14, 33, 47."

13 CE -- Jesus is bar mitzvahed. His haftarah is entitled: "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child." 

500 CE -- Paper, now over 600 years old, is really piling up.  But with no clips, staples, shredders, or 3-ring binders, the problem just keeps getting worse. The ribbon-makers are happy, though.

501 CE -- First paper airplane tested at Kitty Hawk, Scotland, about 3,200 miles of the coast of North Carolina. Maiden flight distance: 9 feet -- a record for the time.

1490 CE -- The Japanese, attempting to curb the monstrous surfeit of paper, invent origami.  They fail to solve the problem.

1503 CE -- Leonardo da Vinci, in a spasm of inspiration, suddenly and simultaneously, thinks up the lightbulb, acid jazz, and the Internet, but distracted by his obsession with the "Mona Lisa,"  abandons and then forgets about these "inventions."

1698 CE -- The Danish composer, Dieterich Buxtehude pens the popular song "Caroline," which will go on to become the theme of the Boston Red Sox for reasons known only to the gods.  Some people, erroneously, credit Neil Diamond with the composition, but, no, it was Buxtehude.

1784 - A chief of the Semminole Nation instructs a Spanish soldier how to perfect 3-minute popcorn, but with no on-demand available, the significance of the instruction is lost on the Spaniard.

1871 - The Boston Blush & Rouge baseball club is formed, and quickly changes its name to the much more manly "Red Stockings."

1886 - At the dedication of the Statue of Liberty, New Yorkers, thinking they have figured out how to get rid of excess paper, hold the first ticker-tape parade.  Nice try.

1902 - The Great Paper Shortage of "Aught Two" is exposed as a hoax...in a newspaper.

1919 -- Charles Pyramid devises a fraudulent investment scheme.  It doesn't take. Carlo Ponzi thinks of the same thing a year later, and his becomes much more popular. (Charles Dickens wrote about it in "Little Dorrit," in 1857 -- years before Ponzi and Pyramid were born, but "Dorrit Scheme" just sounds ridiculous).

1930 --  Father Bertrand Gore wakes up from a months-long coma, picks up a New York Times that has been lying about the hospital room since November 24, the year before, and reads the following headline:

PARK SEEKS CAUSE OF COLDER WINTERS; Old Treatise Predicts That Ice Age Will Return to Northern Hemisphere in 10,000 Years.

1939 -  Edged out by "The Wizard of Oz" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," among others, the now- forgotten film, "A Day in the Life of Pincus Ming Mandelbaum" fails to garner a single Academy Award nomination.  

1945 - Little Harry Reid uses the term "Negro" in a first grade book report in the little town of Searchlight , Nevada. He receives plaudits for his progressiveness and forward thinking, as he would 65 years later when, as Speaker of the House, using the term to describe a presidential candidate

1991 -  Rosie's Bakery rolls out a new medley of confections called "Operation Dessert Storm."  By sheer coincidence, the White House rolls out a program of its own on the same day with a nearly identical name.

2006 - The 900 bezillionth piece of paper since time began is cut

2010 - "Return to Cranford" airs on WGBH TV.



Birthdays --


1976 --    Trisha Stillwell, Miss USA-Oklahoma, 1997,

1960 --    Sade, Helen Ady, Nigeria, Grammy winning singer

1933     Susan Sontag (Rosenblatt), author

1929  Allard Lowenstein, founder - Students for Democratic Action

1930     Norman Podhoretz, author/editor

1912     Nigel Dennis, British Writer

1911     Jay Hanna "Dizzy" Dean, pitcher, St. Louis Cardinals

1908     Ethel Merman,  actress

1885     Wladyslaw Raczkiewicz, Polish president, 1939-40 (the Not-too-Fun years)

1749     Vittorio Alfieri, Italian Dramatist

1697     Richard Savage, poet

3088 BCE  Methuselah

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