Dammit, I love my birthday and I ain’t ashamed of it. Today I turn the big two-six. (And the lovely Chelsea Clinton turns 21.) If I were really smart, I would have set up a wish list at Amazon, from which you could have selected a charming gift and sent it my way. Instead, why don’t you head on over to the Rainforest Site, the Hunger Site, the Kids AIDS Site, the Child Survival Site, the Breast Cancer Site, or the Landmine Site and make a donation with your single click. Now that would be a great birthday present. The kind folks at eTour sent me a birthday email, “Today in History.” Remember those machines in Hallmark that would spit out a nice certificate with this exact same information, which you could then frame and gift to your loved one? Those kids and their computers these days, taking the fun out of everything.
| On this date in: | |
| 1801 | The District of Columbia was placed under the jurisdiction of Congress.
Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was born in Portland, Maine. |
| 1861 | In Warsaw, Russian troops fired on a crowd protesting Russian rule over Poland. Five marchers were killed. |
| 1922 | The Supreme Court unanimously upheld the 19th Amendment to the Constitution that guaranteed the right of women to vote. |
| 1933 | Germany’s parliament building, the Reichstag, caught fire. The Nazis, blaming the Communists, used the fire as a pretext for suspending civil liberties. |
| 1939 | The Supreme Court outlawed sit-down strikes. |
| 1960 | The U.S. Olympic hockey team defeated the Soviet Union 3-2 at the Winter Games in Squaw Valley, Calif. The U.S. team went on to win the gold medal. |
| 1972 | President Nixon and Chinese Premier Chou En-lai issued the Shanghai Communique at the conclusion of Nixon’s historic visit to China. |
| 1982 | Wayne B. Williams was found guilty of murdering two of the 28 young blacks whose bodies were found in the Atlanta area over a 22-month period. |
| 1986 | The U.S. Senate approved telecasts of its debates on a trial basis. |
| 1997 | Divorce became legal in Ireland. |
| 1998 | With the approval of Queen Elizabeth II, Britain’s House of Lords agreed to end 1,000 years of male preference by giving a monarch’s first-born daughter the same claim to the throne as any first born son. |
Apparently, someone thought yesterday’s post was a stroke of genius. Me too.
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