PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR JUNE 16

On this day in the year 1755, the Loyalist Colonel Moncton and his army attack and defeat the Acadian enclave of Fort Beausejour on Canada's east coast. After that, it all turns nasty for yer old pal Jerky's ancestors. Within weeks, the Brits are burning down Acadian homes and crops, slaughtering and stealing livestock, and otherwise making a real mess of the place. Towards the end of that long, hot summer, the Brits decide they'd rather not have any French-speaking neighbors. So they round them up, load them onto rickety boats, steal their few remaining possessions, and ship over three-quarters of the Acadian population madly off in all directions. "Anywhere but here" was their motto. Most of the deportees ended up in Louisiana, where they invented Cajun cooking and taught themselves to talk funny for tourists.

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On this day in 1816, leading Romantic movement figure Lord Byron issues a challenge to his four house guests at the Villa Diodati. His proposal, that he, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, Claire Clairmont, and John Polidori each write a tale to terrify the others, culminates in Mary Shelley writing the novel Frankenstein, Polidori writing the short story The Vampyre, and Byron writing the poem Darkness.

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On this day in 1883, at the Victoria Hall theatre in Sunderland, England, the audience at a Fay Family Children’s Variety Show were told that there would be door prizes for children who held tickets bearing a particular number. In the ensuing mad dash for free goodies, an incredible 183 children had the life squeezed out of them as they were crushed against a heavy iron door bolted in such a manner as to only allow one child through at a time.

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This day in 1904 is the day on which all the fictional events in James Joyce's ground-breaking novel Ulysses supposedly take place. Literary wanks call this day Bloomsday, while the Irish call it... Wednesday.

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On this day in 1911, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company is founded in the city of Endicott, New York. The company would switch to the much more memorable International Business Machines, or IBM, in 1924.

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In the history of the US Open golf tournament, only 21 holes-in-one have ever been sunk. Four of them happened on this day in 1989 when Weaver, Wiebe, Pate and Price all sink the sixth hole on a single shot.

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On this day in 2010, the South Asian nation of Bhutan becomes the first country in the world to institute a total ban on the cultivation, harvesting, production, and sale tobacco.