PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 30

A shitload of funny people were born on this day, including Jonathan Swift (1667) who wrote Gulliver's Travels and suggested the wealthy should eat poor babies in his black satirical masterpiece, A Modest Proposal, Samuel Clemens (1835) who, as Mark Twain, was even better as a political muckraker than he was as a novelist; Sir Winston Churchill (1874), whose rapier wit left his verbal adversaries twitching like bugs in the dust; and, finally, G. Gordon Liddy (1930), the fascistic Watergate felon whose syndicated radio show used to provide more laughs-per-hour than any episode of Saturday Night Live, notwithstanding the fact that he isn't joking.

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From this day in 3340 BC, we have the first ever confirmed historical recording of a solar eclipse.

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On this day in 1554, "Bloody" Mary Tudor becomes Queen of England and re-instates Roman Catholicism as the state religion. Once installed, Mary promptly gives orders for over three hundred Protestant leaders to be burned at the stake.

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On this day in 1936, London's Crystal Palace is destroyed by fire. Who knew crystal could burn?!

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Despite the fact that The Beatles had only just split up a few months earlier, George Harrison somehow managed to throw together a triple album of all-new material which was released on this day in 1970. Entitled All Things Must Pass, the record spawned the hit single "My Sweet Lord", which spawned a lawsuit over the similarities between that tune and "He's So Fine (Do Lang Do Lang Do Lang)". Ah, George Harrison... Now, more than ever, "the quiet one."

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On this day in 1982, the biggest selling record in history is unleashed upon an unsuspecting world: Michael Jackson's second solo album, Thriller, produced by Quincy Jones.

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Operation Desert Storm officially ends on this day in 1995.

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On this day in 1999, in Seattle, Washington, The Powers That Be suffer a rude awakening when protests against the WTO meeting by anti-globalization protesters prove to be so intense and forceful that the elite, anti-democratic event's opening ceremonies have to be cancelled. HA-ha! Ever since that game-changing day in Seattle, however, TPTB have ratcheted up the police state tactics and strong-arm rhetoric. Not so HA-ha, that...

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 29

On this day in 1729, Natchez Indians massacre 138 Frenchmen, 35 French women, and 56 children at Fort Rosalie, near the site of modern-day Natchez, Mississippi. One hundred and thirty five years later, on this day in 1864, 150 Cheyenne Indians – mostly women and children – are slaughtered by a restless band of Colorado militiamen. Despite the fact that the tribe was supposedly under the protection of the U.S. Army, the militia's leader – Col. John M. Chivington of the Colorado Volunteers – was never brought up on charges.

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On this day in 1781, the crew of the British slave ship Zong murders 133 Africans by dumping them into the sea to in one of the most black-hearted insurance scams in history.

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On this day in 1929, U.S. Admiral Richard Byrd becomes the first person to fly over the South Pole.

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On this day in 1947, French troops massacre hundreds of Vietnamese, including 170 women and 157 children, in the village of My Trach, during the First Indochina War. Jeez, what is it about this day in history that leads to so much evil and death?!

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40 years of non-stop LIES began on this day in 1963 when president Lyndon Johnson set up the Warren Commission to "investigate" the assassination of JFK. Today, things are so bad that we have to rely on information sources such as High Times to give us a brief glimpse of truth.

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On this day in 1972, Japanese entertainment conglomerate Atari announces the release of "Pong", the first commercially successful video game.

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On this day in 1981, actress Natalie Wood takes the Big Swim about twenty years too late to become a James Dean-level Hollywood legend. Now she's just a Rock Hudson-level Hollywood legend... and Christopher Walken's first murder victim. I kid, of course.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 28

On this day in 1520, after navigating through a strait at the southern end of South America, three ships under the command of Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan reach the Pacific Ocean, becoming the first Europeans to sail from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific.

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On this day in 1582, in Stratford-upon-Avon, William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway pay a £40 bond for their marriage licence.

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On this day in 1895, America's first ever auto race takes place. Six cars participate in the race, which covers a 55 mile course. The winner averages a white-knuckle speed of 7 miles per hour. No foolin!

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On this day in 1905, Irish nationalist Arthur Griffith founds Sinn Féin as a political party with the main aim of establishing a dual monarchy in Ireland.

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On this day in 1907, in Haverhill, Massachusetts, scrap-metal dealer Louis B. Mayer opens his first movie theater.

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On this day in 1909, Sergei Rachmaninoff makes the debut performance of his Piano Concerto No. 3, considered to be one of the most technically challenging piano concertos in the standard classical repertoire.

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On this day in 1925, the Grand Ole Opry begins broadcasting in Nashville, Tennessee as "WSM Barn Dance".

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On this day in 1942, in Boston, Massachusetts, a fire in the Cocoanut Grove nightclub kills 491 people.

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On this day in 1966, Michel Micombero overthrows the monarchy of Burundi and makes himself the first president.

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On this day in 1994, cannibal murderer Jeffrey Dahmer is bludgeoned to death by fellow inmate Christopher Scarver, who also kills the third man on their work detail. This incident goes a long way towards discrediting the cherished notion that cannibals-are-indestructable-genius-psychopaths-who-can't-be-stopped-by-mere-mortals myth that the movies try to propagate.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 27

On this day in 511, King Clovis I dies at Paris and is buried in the Abbey of St. Genevieve. The Merovingian Dynasty is continued by his four sons – Theuderic I, Chlodomer, Childebert I and Chlothar I – who divide the Frankish Kingdom and rule from the capitals at Metz, Orléans, Paris and Soissons.

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On this day in 602, Emperor Maurice is forced to watch his five sons be executed before being beheaded himself. Their bodies are thrown into the sea and their heads are exhibited in Constantinople.

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On this day in 1835, James Pratt and John Smith are hanged in London; they are the last two to be executed for sodomy in England.

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On this day in 1895, at the Swedish-Norwegian Club in Paris, Alfred Nobel signs his last will and testament, setting aside his estate to establish the Nobel Prize after he dies.

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On this day in 1924, in New York City, the first Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade is held.

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On this day in 1971, the Soviet space program's Mars 2 orbiter releases a descent module. It malfunctions and crashes, but it is the first man-made object to reach the surface of Mars.

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On this day in 1973, the United States Senate votes 92 to 3 to confirm the 25th Amendment, declaring Gerald Ford Vice President of the United States. The House confirms it 387 to 35 on December 6 of the same year.

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On this day in 1975, the Provisional IRA assassinates Ross McWhirter, after a press conference in which he'd announced a reward for the capture of those responsible for multiple bombings and shootings across England.

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On this day in 1978, angered over a political snub, homo-hating retired police officer Dan White strolls into San Francisco City Hall and empties his gun into Mayor George Moscone, then reloads and guns down City Supervisor Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay men in America to hold political office. After being apprehended, former star athlete White blamed his murderous rampage on the fact that he had recently gorged on Coca-Cola and Twinkies snack cakes, a defense which managed to convince the rogue-cop-friendly jury that found him guilty of voluntary manslaughter rather than murder. Imagine if somebody murdered New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and others, then got off with a seven year sentence, and you begin to comprehend the outrage this sparked among San Franciscans and others at the time. In 1986, White finally did the right thing, taking a long swim up a tailpipe and into the bright white light of the sweet oblivion he so richly deserved.

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On this day in the year 2000 – on Day 20 of the Election 2000 fiasco – Al Gore's lawyers file three challenges objecting to Katherine Harris's premature certification of Dubya as the winner in Florida, while Dubya's lawyers continued to insist that hand-counting votes, even statewide, would somehow lead to pro-Gore shenanigans. Meanwhile, north of the border, in a move seemingly designed to embarrass and shame the USA, Canada holds their federal elections. Every single vote is counted by hand. Incumbent Prime Minister Jean Chretien is declared the winner on the very same day.

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On this day in 2001, a hydrogen atmosphere is discovered on the extra-solar planet Osiris by the Hubble Space Telescope, the first atmosphere detected on an extra-solar planet.

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On this day in 2005, the first partial human face transplant is completed in Amiens, France. 

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 26

On this day in 1476, Vlad the Impaler - the historical figure that inspired Bram Stoker to create Dracula - defeats Basarab Laiota with the help of Stephen the Great and Stephen V Bathory and becomes the ruler of Wallachia for the third time.

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On this day in 1789, the first ever instance of nation-wide, federally-mandated "giving of thanks" takes place in the good ol' US-of-A. Ever since then, we've been celebrating the holiday of Thanksgiving, or, as our native friends refer to it: "Genocidal, Treaty-breaking, Smallpox-spreading Assholes Day!"

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On this day in 1825, at New York's Union College, Kappa Alpha - the first ever college fraternity - is founded. This seminal unveiling is soon followed by the first ever keg party and the first ever hazing-related death.

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On this day in 1922, in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, British archaeologists Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon enter King Tutankhamen's tomb, becoming the first human beings to lay eyes on the Boy King in more than 3,000 years. Meanwhile, as Carter and Carnarvon breach the impregnable, halfway around the world, Stanley Applebaum is pulled, kicking and screaming, from his mother's bleeding loins. He would grow up to become Charles Schulz, beloved creator of the syndicated comic strip Peanuts. Coincidence? Don't make me laugh.

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On this day in 1965, in the Hammaguir launch facility in the Sahara Desert, France launches a Diamant-A rocket with its first satellite, Asterix-1 on board, making France the third country to enter outer space.

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On this day in 1977, an unidentified hijacker named Vrillon, claiming to be the representative of the 'Ashtar Galactic Command', takes over Britain's Southern Television for six minutes starting at 5:12 pm.

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On this day in 2000, Florida's Secretary of State Katherine Harris certifies George W. Bush the winner of Florida's electoral votes, despite the fact that he'd obviously lost the popular vote both in Florida and across the USA in total.

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On this day in 2004, a man stabs and kills eight people and seriously wounds another four in a school dormitory in Ruzhou, China. American 2nd Amendment absolutists rejoice over this bit of news because it proves that GUNS don't kill people... Chinamen with KNIVES do!

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On this day in 2004, the world's last black-faced honeycreeper dies of malaria at the Maui Bird Conservation Center in Hawaii before it had a chance to breed. The species is now extinct.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 25

On this day in 1491, the siege of Granada – the last Moorish stronghold in Spain – begins.

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On this day in 1947, the Hollywood Ten are blacklisted by Hollywood movie studios over their supposed ties to communist and left-wing organizations. From Ring Lardner Jr. to Dalton Trumbo, this august group includes some of the finest writers and performers to ever work in the entertainment industry.

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On this day in 1960, three of the Mirabal sisters – four Dominican political dissidents who opposed the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo – are assassinated. In 1999, the United Nations establishes the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women to commemorate these murders.

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On this day in 1963, assassinated President JFK is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

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On this day in 1970, Japanese author, poet, playwright, film director and militaristic right-wing cult leader Yukio Mishima commits ritualistic seppuku - suicide by gutting one's self with a katana blade - after an unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the government in a coup designed to bring back Emperor Worship in Japan. If you haven't already seen it, I highly recommend watching Paul Schraeder's unjustly overlooked masterpiece of a biopic, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters.

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And speaking of coups, it was on this day in the year 1973 that a bloodless military coup headed by General Phaidon Gizikis, Prime Minister Adamantios Androutsopoulos and secret police chief Demetrios Ioannidis ousts Greek President George Papadopoulos. You know, next to being a public school science teacher in the South, being a tombstone engraver in Greece must be the most frustrating job in the world.

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On this day in 1981, Pope John Paul II appoints Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. Ratzinger would go on to succeed JPII as Pope Benedict XVI, or, as I prefer to call him, “Ratz Benedict”.

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On this day in 1984, 36 top musicians gather in a Notting Hill studio and record Band Aid's "Do They Know It's Christmas" in order to raise money for famine relief in Ethiopia.

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On this day in 1986, Reagan Administration officials announced that some of the proceeds from the sale of U.S. arms to Iran had been diverted to Ollie North, who used the funds to support the Contras in Nicaragua. According to Reagan's logic, only left-wing rebels could be called terrorists. Right-wing rebels were "freedom fighters," even if they spent most of their time burning down orphanages and decapitating nuns.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 24

On this day in 1859, Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, starting an argument some folks still refuse to admit is over and done with.

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On this day in 1932, in Washington, DC, the FBI Scientific Crime Detection Laboratory (better known as the FBI Crime Lab) officially opens.

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On this day in 1962, Kilroy was no longer "here," as James J Kilroy - the World War II tank inspector who allegedly started the inspirational war-zone grafitti craze - died in his home at age 60.

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On this day in 1963, The Powers That Be tie up some loose ends in the basement garage of a Dallas, Texas police station, if you get what I mean. Meanwhile, in Washington DC, in a totally unconnected incident, newly sworn-in US President Lyndon B. Johnson confirms that the United States intends to continue supporting South Vietnam both militarily and economically. Totally unconnected… totally.

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On this day in 1966, a toxic smog creeps across New York City, killing over 400 people.

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On this day in 1971, during a severe thunderstorm over Washington state, a hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper – a.k.a. D. B. Cooper – parachutes from a Northwest Orient Airlines plane with $200,000 in ransom money. He has never been found.

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On this day in 1974, paleontologists Donald Johanson and Tom Gray discover the 40% complete Australopithecus Afarensis skeleton, nicknamed Lucy after The Beatles' song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds", in the Awash Valley of Ethiopia's Afar Depression.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 23

On this day in 534 BC, Thespis of Icaria becomes the first recorded actor to portray a character onstage.

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On this day in 1174, Saladin enters Damascus, and adds it to his domain.

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On this day in 1876, corrupt Tammany Hall leader William Magear Tweed (better known as Boss Tweed) is delivered to authorities in New York City after being captured in Spain.

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On this day in 1889, the first jukebox goes into operation at the Palais Royale Saloon in San Francisco.

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On this day in 1924, Edwin Hubble's scientific discovery that Andromeda, previously believed to be a nebula within our galaxy, is actually another galaxy, and that the Milky Way is only one of many such galaxies in the universe, was first published in a newspaper. Wow.

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On this day in 1936, LIFE Magazine is reborn as a photo magazine and enjoys instant success.

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On this day in 1963, the BBC broadcasts the first episode of Doctor Who (starring William Hartnell), which is now the world's longest running science fiction drama.

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On this day in 1981, Ronald Reagan signs the top secret National Security Decision Directive 17 (NSDD-17), giving the Central Intelligence Agency the authority to recruit and support Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

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On this day in 1992, the first Smartphone IBM Simon was introduced at COMDEX in Las Vegas, Nevada.

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On this day in 1993, Rachel Whiteread wins both the £20,000 Turner Prize award for best British modern artist and the £40,000 K Foundation art award for the worst artist of the year.

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On this day in 1996, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 is hijacked, then crashes into the Indian Ocean off the coast of Comoros after running out of fuel, killing 125 and leading to some awesome heroic behavior.

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On this day in 2006, a series of bombing kills at least 215 people and injures 257 others in Sadr City, making it the second deadliest sectarian attack since the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003.

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On this day in 2011, after 11 months of protests in Yemen, The Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh signs a deal to transfer power to the vice president, in exchange for legal immunity.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 22

On this day in 1908, the Congress of Manastir establishes the Albanian alphabet. The strange thing is, it’s only got twelve letters! This, despite including the number “7” and having three different versions of the letter “Q”!

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On this day in 1928, the premier performance of Ravel's Boléro takes place in Paris.

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On this day in 1940, following the initial Italian invasion, Greek troops counterattack into Italian-occupied Albania and capture Korytsa.

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On this day in the year 1963, President John F. Kennedy is gunned down in cold blood while touring the city of Dallas, Texas. His killers were never apprehended. It's been fifty years, and we're still being drowned in a river of disinformation. Other notables who died on this day in 1963 were Christian children's fantasy author C.S. Lewis, and novelist/psychedelic stuntman Aldous Huxley, of Brave New World infamy. In the darkness of the shadow cast by the Kennedy assassination, the snuffing of these once-bright candles was essentially passed unnoticed.

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On this day in 1986, Mike Tyson defeats Trevor Berbick to become youngest Heavyweight champion in boxing history.

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On this day in 1987, two Chicago television stations are hijacked by an unknown pirate dressed as Max Headroom.

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On this day in 1989, in West Beirut, a bomb explodes near the motorcade of Lebanese President René Moawad, killing him.

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On this day in 1995, Toy Story is released as the first feature-length film created completely using computer-generated imagery. It's been all down-hill ever since.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 21

On this day in 164 BC, Judas Maccabaeus, son of Mattathias of the Hasmonean family, restores the Temple in Jerusalem. This event is commemorated each year by the festival of Hanukkah.

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On this day in 1877, Thomas Edison announces his invention of the phonograph, a machine that can record and play sound.

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On this day in 1905, Albert Einstein's paper “Does the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?” is published in the journal "Annalen der Physik". This paper reveals the relationship between energy and mass. This leads to the mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc².

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On this day in 1927, striking coal miners in Columbine, Colorado, are attacked with machine guns by a detachment of state police dressed in civilian clothes in what some people refer to as the FIRST Columbine Massacre.

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On this day in 1953, the world famous Piltdown Man fossil, which had allegedly been discovered in 1912, is exposed as a hoax. Naturally, a whole lot of stupid people took this to mean that evolution was a fraud, that science was suspect, that dinosaur bones were put on the Earth by God to test our faith, and that every time a bell rings, an angel gets it's wings. Now go to bed and shut yer cakehole, Captain Curious!

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On this day in 1963, a number of known assassins associated with the Mafia, Cuban exiles and Intelligence agencies stayed at a Dallas motel and other sites in and around the city. Meanwhile, across town at the home of Dallas millionaire Clint Murchison, vice-President LBJ, future President Richard Nixon and Jack Ruby's close friend H.L. Hunt all attend a party together. The guest of honor was the cross-dressing, Martin Luther King-hating head of the FBI: J. Edgar Hoover.

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On this day in 1969, the first permanent ARPANET link is established between UCLA and SRI.

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On this day in 1973, a gap of 18-1/2 minutes is revealed in one of the Watergate tapes. Nixon's lawyers' claims that the gap wasn't important because it consisted mostly of "a really boring drum solo" didn't fly with prosecutors.

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On this day in 1974, the Birmingham Pub Bombings kill 21 people. The Birmingham Six are sentenced to life in prison for the crime but subsequently acquitted.

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On this day in 1980, a deadly fire breaks out at the MGM Grand Hotel in Paradise, Nevada (now Bally's Las Vegas). 87 people are killed and more than 650 are injured in the worst disaster in Nevada history.

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On this day in 1985, US Navy intelligence analyst Jonathan Pollard is arrested for spying after being caught giving Israel classified information on Arab nations. He is subsequently sentenced to life in prison.

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On this day in 1986, National Security Council member Oliver North and his secretary Fawn Hall start to shred documents allegedly implicating them in the sale of weapons to Iran and channeling the proceeds to help fund the Contra rebels in Nicaragua. Just one more sordid chapter in the Iran-Contra Affair.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 20

On this day in 1820, an 80-ton sperm whale attacks the Essex, a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts, 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America. Herman Melville's 1851 novel Moby-Dick is in part inspired by this story.

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On this day in 1962, the Cuban Missile Crisis ends when, in response to the Soviet Union agreeing to remove its missiles from Cuba, U.S. President John F. Kennedy ends the quarantine of the Caribbean nation.

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By this day in 1963, several high-ranking politicians implore President John F. Kennedy to cancel his trip to Dallas. Governor Connally even flies in to Washington to plead cancellation. Senator William J. Fulbright and Ambassador Adlai Stevenson plead with Kennedy to bypass the seething hotbed of racism and anti-Catholic bigotry. Congressman Hale Boggs tells Kennedy: "Mister President, you're going into quite a hornets nest." Texas National Committeeman Byron Skelton has a premonition of violence and sends frantic telegrams to administration officials pleading that Kennedy stay away from Dallas on his Texas tour. Unfortunately (in hindsight), Kennedy remains resolute. He believes that the President should not be afraid of visiting any part of the nation. He flatly refuses to bypass Dallas, and the trip goes ahead as scheduled.

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On this day in 1969, the Cleveland Plain Dealer publishes explicit photographs of dead villagers from the My Lai massacre in Vietnam.

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On this day in 1980, Lake Peigneur drains into an underlying salt deposit. A misplaced Texaco oil probe had been drilled into the Diamond Crystal Salt Mine, causing water to flow down into the mine, eroding the edges of the hole. The resulting whirlpool sucked the drilling platform, several barges, houses and trees thousands of feet down to the bottom of the dissolving salt deposit.

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On this day in the year 1983, myself and 100 million other people hunker down in our living rooms to watch the ABC-TV movie of the week: The Day After. Many cultural theorists contend that this morbid nuclear war movie was vital in helping to shape the fractured, nihilistic nonchalance that defines the front-heavy first wave of Generation X. If you ever want to experience the pervasive dread that saturated American culture in the early 1980's - when many weren't convinced mankind would live to see another decade - rent this massive downer and re-live it for yourself.

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On this day in 1985, Microsoft Windows 1.0 is released.

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On this day in 1998, a court in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan declares accused terrorist Osama bin Laden "a man without a sin" in regard to the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania.

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 On this day in 1998, the first module of the International Space Station, Zarya, is launched.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 19

Hmmm... let me figure this out. Okay, I got it. Ahem. Seven score and ten years ago, President Abraham Lincoln presented his Gettysburg Address, in which he made the following prediction: "The world will little note nor long remember what we say here." Yer old pal Jerky understands that hindsight is 20/20, but come on! What was he thinking?! That speech was KILLER!!!

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On this day in 1881, a meteorite lands near the village of Grossliebenthal, southwest of Odessa, Ukraine.

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On this day in 1916, Samuel Goldwyn and Edgar Selwyn establish Goldwyn Pictures.

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On this day in 1942, Soviet Union forces under General Georgy Zhukov launch the Operation Uranus counterattacks at Stalingrad, turning the tide of the battle in the USSR's favor.

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On this day in 1943, Nazis liquidate Janowska concentration camp in Lviv, western Ukraine, murdering at least 6,000 Jews after a failed uprising and mass escape attempt.

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On this day in 1949, Prince Rainier III is crowned reigning regent over the tiny, casino-dependent Eurotrash principality of Monaco. His coronation moves him a full five slots down the Top Ten list of Least-Given-a-Fuck-About Royal Families of the World.

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On this day in 1955, right-wing magazine National Review publishes its first issue. It sucks, and has continued to suck ever since.

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On this day in 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean land at Oceanus Procellarum (the "Ocean of Storms") and become the third and fourth humans to walk on the Moon.

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On this day in 1979, Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini orders the release of 13 female and black American hostages being held at the US Embassy in Tehran.

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On this day in 1988, Serbian communist representative and future Serbian and Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic publicly declares that Serbia is under attack from Albanian separatists in Kosovo as well as internal treachery within Yugoslavia and a foreign conspiracy to destroy Serbia and Yugoslavia.

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On this day in 1990, pop group Milli Vanilli are stripped of their Grammy Award because the duo did not sing at all on the Girl You Know It's True album. Session musicians had provided all the vocals.

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On this day in 1998, the Congressional Judiciary Committee begins impeachment hearings against President Bill Clinton for letting Monica Lewinsky suck his dick.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 18

On this day in 1307, archer William Tell shoots an apple off his son's head, offering a chilling historical foreshadowing of the fatal head-shot of President John F. Kennedy, 656 years later. See today's third item for details.

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On this day in 1928, the animated short film Steamboat Willie, the first fully synchronized sound cartoon, directed by Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks, featuring the third appearances of cartoon characters Mickey Mouse and Minnie Mouse takes place. This is also considered by the Disney corporation to be Mickey's birthday.

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(Guest Post by fellow blogger Albert Venczel) 

On this day in 1963, a gaggle of un-indicted co-conspirators meet up in a smokey back room to plot the assassination of JFK by publicly shooting him in the head. At the same meeting, they decide to appoint Allen Dulles (whom JFK had personally fired from the CIA over the Bay of Pigs fiasco mere months before) to the Warren Commission - which is, in effect, a cover-up orchestrated by Dulles and "company". To this day, many suspect that future President George Herbert Walker "Poppy" Bush - a.k.a. "41" - was the Grassy Knoll trigger-man, bringing to mind the famous line by Argentinian metaphysical wordsmith Jorge Luis Borges: "If I kill you, do I become you?" Subsequently, a great many of JFK's associates die under mysterious circumstances, including Marilyn Monroe, who was allegedly done in because of JFK's pillow-talk about both a secret, unaccountable "shadow government" and UFOs, the existence of which he wished her to disclose to the public by slipping it into Hollywood movies in order to cause a global awakening, forcing The Powers That Be to stop her dead in her tracks with a drug overdose.

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On this day in 1978, in a cleared-out patch of Guyanese jungle, the Reverend Jim Jones orders nearly 1000 members of his ex-pat congregation to drink cyanide-laced FlavorAde (not Kool-Aid, as popular mythology suggests). Two days and 917 corpses later, the world first hears about Jonestown from CIA operatives who just happened to be in the neighborhood at the time.

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On this day in 1987, the U.S. Congress issues its final report on the Iran-Contra Affair.

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On this day in 1988, U.S. President Ronald Reagan signs a bill into law allowing the death penalty for drug traffickers.

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The cliche about Texas is that they make everything bigger down there. Well, on this day in the year 1999, this obsession with bigness costs twelve A&M University students their lives when a ridiculously huge bonfire they'd been helping to build collapses on top of them, teaching us all a valuable lesson about letting Texans bite off more than they can chew.

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR NOVEMBER 17

On this day, we celebrate everybody's favorite little-known holiday: CANAL DAY! We celebrate Canal Day on November 17 because it was on this day in 1913 that the Panama Canal officially opened its locks, making the trip from East to West (and vice-versa) a helluva lot easier than it had previously been. And as if that weren't enough, it was also on this day, in the year 1869, that the storied Suez Canal put up its "Open For Business" sign. So before you go to bed tonight, make sure to say a little prayer to Johnny Canal, patron saint of people who can't get enough man-made waterway trivia!

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On this day in 1800, the United States Congress holds its first session in Washington, D.C..

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On this day in 1871, the National Rifle Association (NRA) is granted a charter by the state of New York.

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On this day in 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party splits into two groups: the Bolsheviks (Russian for "majority") and Mensheviks (Russian for "minority").

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On this day in 1947, the Screen Actors Guild implements an anti-Communist loyalty oath.

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On this day in 1950, Lhamo Dondrub is officially named the 14th Dalai Lama.

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On this day in 1970, Lieutenant William Calley goes on trial for the My Lai Massacre.

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On this day in 1973, In Orlando, Florida, U.S. President Richard Nixon tells 400 Associated Press managing editors "I am not a crook."

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In order to break into the porn business, succulent starlet Traci Lords got a fake ID that said she was born on this day in 1962. Unfortunately for the motley assortment of sleazebags and mobsters who financed her career, she was actually born May 7, 1968, thus necessitating the total erasure of the most lucrative catalog of adult cinema in the history of the genre. Oops!