PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR APRIL 23

On this day in 1985, the Coca-Cola Company changes its formula and releases New Coke. The response was originally mixed, but soon became overwhelmingly negative, forcing Coca-Cola to revert to the original formula in less than 3 months… or did they? Coke’s sudden about-face on New Coke led to a number of conspiracy theories to help explain how one of the world’s biggest companies could make such a huge blunder. The three most popular theories are as follows: 

1. The company WANTED the new formula to fail, knowing consumers would cause a storm of controversy and demand the original formula’s return.

2. The change provided cover for the removal of coca derivatives from the product, in order to placate the Drug Enforcement Administration, which was trying to eradicate the cocaine-producing plant worldwide.

3. It was a double-switcheroo, concocted to cover the change from sugar-sweetened Coke to less expensive high fructose corn syrup.

Seeing as Coke did switch to HFCS when the brought back the “original” recipe, and seeing as the U.S. sugar trade association took out full-page ads letting consumers know about this switch when it happened, I’d say that this is one conspiracy theory that we can safely assume to be conspiracy fact. This, despite the fact that Coke’s CEO at the time replied to these theories by saying: "We're not that dumb, and we're not that smart.”

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Speaking of “new formulas”, it was on this day in 1984 that researcher Robert Gallo of the US National Cancer Institute “found” HIV, the retrovirus that causes AIDS. Soon thereafter, researcher Luc Montagnier of the Pasteur Institute in France filed a lawsuit claiming he discovered AIDS first, and that Gallo had stolen the virus after it was sent to his lab for study. Anyway, if you’re one of those blinded-by-the-Enlightenment “skeptics” who refuses to even consider the possibility that the AIDS epidemic is a man-made bioweapon created for the most sinister of all imaginable purposes, I suggest you read this eye-opening editorial… just for starters, anyway.

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On this day in 2005, the first ever YouTube video is uploaded, titled "Me at the zoo".

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR JUNE 17

On this day in 1631, Mumtaz Mahal dies during childbirth. Her grief-stricken husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan I, will spend the next 17 years building her mausoleum, a little building you and I know as… the Taj Mahal.

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On this day in 1856, the Republican Party opens its first national convention in Philadelphia. Chaos ensues.

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On this day in 1885, sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi’s colossal neoclassical statue, the Statue of Liberty, arrives in New York Harbor in pieces aboard the French steamer ship Isere, a gift to the American people from the nation of France.

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On this day in 1939, the final public execution in France takes place when convicted murderer Eugen Weidmann is guillotined before an unruly crowd of gawkers in Versailles, France, just outside the Saint-Pierre prison. The execution was surreptitiously filmed from an apartment adjacent to the prison. That fact, combined with the crowd’s unruly behavior, caused French President Albert Lebrun to pass legislation stipulating that all future executions were to take place behind closed doors. The guillotine would continue chopping off heads until September of 1977, when it was used to dispatch Tunisian immigrant Hamida Djandoubi, who had been convicted of torturing, then murdering, his girlfriend.

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Happy Birthday to the plucky, eccentric island nation of ICELAND, which declared its independence from Denmark on this day in 1944!

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Also celebrating a birthday today is the WAR ON (some) DRUGS, which was launched by President Richard Nixon on this day in 1971!

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On this day in 1994, the world watches on CNN as OJ Simpson leads the LAPD on the most infamous police chase in history. Yes, that's right... this is the 31st anniversary of Bloody Orenthal's abortive "excape" attempt! Can you believe it?! Quothe Uncle John's Band: "Where does the time go?"

PARACULTURAL CALENDAR FOR APRIL 9

"Read Free or DIE!!!" The first ever tax-supported public library opens its doors in Peterborough, New Hampshire on this day in 1833.

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On this day in 1860, a French fellow by the name of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville makes the oldest known recording of an audible human voice - his own, singing Au Clair de la Lune, very slowly - on a machine of his own devising, which he christened the Phonautograph Machine! You can listen to this brief but creepy echo from the far, distant past here, on the machine's Wikipedia page.

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On this day in 1865, after four years of bloody combat that left 600,000 dead, Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrenders the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant at the Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. This effectively ends the American Civil War. Today, many revisionists try to argue that the Civil War wasn't about slavery - either the practice at it had evolved in the South, or its expansion into the newly developing Western states. Anybody who tries to argue this point is either pathetically ignorant of history or a bald-faced liar, and anything they have to say about any topic can therefore be dismissed as a-historical balderdash and/or right-wing propaganda.

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On this day in 1992, a U.S. federal court finds former Panamanian dictator and notorious, CIA asset, and Bush Crime Family crony Manuel Noriega guilty of drug and racketeering charges. Sentenced to 30 years in prison, Noriega was ultimately extradited to France in 2010, where he was tried for money laundering, and then back home to Panama in 2011, where he was tried over the murder of a domestic political challenger, and where he remains behind bars to this day.

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On this day in 2003, the world first learns that Patient Zero in the SARS pandemic just happened to fly on seven different planes to six different international locations in the span of six fucking days just two weeks earlier. He flew from Hong Kong to Munich on March 30, then flew to Barcelona where, according to authorities, he began developing symptoms. Undaunted, he hopped another plane to Frankfurt, then switched off and flew to London (same day, different plane). The day after that, he flew to Munich, then headed back to Frankfurt, again on a different plane. Eventually, he made his way back to Hong Kong, where he checked into a hospital and was confirmed to have SARS. Regarding these suspiciously ostentatious travel habits, authorities said: "He travels a lot." In other words: "Move along, nothing to see here."

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On this day in the year 2003, after the application of a little "Shock and Awe" by the "Coalition of the Willing", the city of Baghdad falls to advancing American forces. In the center of the city, a statue of Saddam Hussein is pulled down in what the mainstream media described as regular, everyday Iraqis turning on symbols of their former leader. In fact, that's still the way Wikipedia portrays those events. In reality, however, even the Pentagon was forced to admit that the whole thing was a stage-managed psychological operation. Oh well, it might have been a Big Lie, but at least it ended the war!

I'm kidding, of course. Because even though Preznit Dubya and all the bought-and-paid-for whores in the right-wing military/industrial/media propaganda complex declared victory, in reality, the war in Iraq had barely just begun. Ten years, six thousand dead Americans, a hundred times that many dead Iraqis and over a TRILLION wasted dollars later, the only undeniable truth about the war in Iraq. is that it was a wasteful, Satanic enterprise built upon a foundation of propaganda, forgery, and lies. There was no valid ethical, moral or legal justification for it, no matter how "easy" the task might have seemed back in the early days of what would ultimately turn out to be a completely Pyrrhic victory.