1535 – Pope Paul II deposed & excommunicated King Henry VIII over a question of annulment and divorce. Henry says “Feh! You want to run a church, run THAT church. I’m starting my own.” And the Church of England comes into being. Another memorable moment in history precipitated by the ongoing pursuit of the Great Bearded Clam.

1803 – Lewis and Clark start their expedition from Pittsburgh at 11 o clock in the morning. In 1803, Pittsburgh was pretty much the end of civilization. Many politicians in Washington still believe that today.

1895 – German Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin patents his Navigable Balloon.

1914 – German General von Kluck decides not to attack Paris. Denies Paris a chance to meet future clientele, goes down in history as the German general who DIDN’T go to Paris. Parisian restaurateurs have to destroy all the menus they’d had printed up in German and Parisian brothel stocks plunge.

1939 – Nazi Germany mounts a staged attack on Gleiwitz radio station, giving them an excuse to attack Poland the following day, starting World War II in Europe. Never let a crisis go to waste, and if you don’t have a convenient crisis, INVENT one.

1942 – In Ternopil, western Ukraine, at 4.30 am, German SS organize the first deportation of Jews from Ternopil ghetto to death camp in Belzec, about 5,000 Jews were deported to face death in Belzec. When the Germans captured Ternopil, about 18,000 Jews lived in the city. The horror of REAL Nazis is that 1939-1945 has dozens of sad dates like this where they loaded up entire populations and sent them off to death camps. This is what REAL Nazis did.

1954 – Hurricane Carol (1st major named storm) hits New England, 70 die. FEMA slow to react, Bush widely blamed.

1954 – US Census Bureau forms. In 2009, it is taken over by ACORN.

1971 – Dave Scott becomes first person to drive a car on the moon. That’d be AMERICAN astronaut Dave Scott… And an American car.

1997 – Diana, Princess of Wales and her ‘companion’ Dodi Al-Fayed and driver Henri Paul died as a result of a car crash in Paris. Hey! It’s a big deal to a lot of women…

1998 – North Korea reportedly launches Kwangmyongsong, its first satellite. The claim is widely assumed to be bullsh*t.

1146 – European leaders outlaw crossbows, intending to ending war for all time. Except for longbows, lances, pikes, battle flails, etc., etc., ad infinitum.

1836 – The city of Houston is founded by Augustus Chapman Allen and John Kirby Allen. “Houston” was a lot snappier-sounding than “mosquito-ridden, festering bayou”.

1918 – Fanny Kaplan shoots and seriously injures Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. This, along with the assassination of Bolshevik senior official Moisei Uritsky days earlier, prompts the decree for Red Terror.

“To overcome of our enemies we must have our own socialist militarism. We must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”“Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.”

And that’s how a handful of radicals gain control of a nation.

1939 – Isoroku Yamamoto appointed supreme commander of Japanese fleet. A couple of years later, he attacks Pearl Harbor.

1956 – Lake Pontchartrain Causeway opens. Longest continuous over-water bridge in the world. Unfortunately, one end is in New Orleans, making it roughly equivalent to a concrete enema pipe…

1979 – President Jimmy “I never met a despot I didn’t like” Carter attacked by a rabbit on a canoe trip in Plains Ga. This says a lot about the quality of this man’s presidency. I wholly expect Obama to be chased by war gerbils.

1786 – Shays’ Rebellion, an armed uprising of Massachusetts farmers, begins in response to high debt and tax burdens.

“I have been greatly abused, have been obliged to do more than my part in the war, been loaded with class rates, town rates, province rates, Continental rates and all rates … been pulled and hauled by sheriffs, constables and collectors, and had my cattle sold for less than they were worth … The great men are going to get all we have and I think it is time for us to rise and put a stop to it, and have no more courts, nor sheriffs, nor collectors nor lawyers.”

Plough Jogger

1793 – Slaves in French colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti) freed. The French Revolution comes to Haiti, decapitates the ruling French, and Haiti goes on to become a green jewel in the paradise of the Caribbean. Right?

1831 – Michael Faraday discovers electromagnetic induction. It’s powerful and mysterious and provides me with a neat career…

1885 – Gottlieb Daimler patents the world’s first motorcycle.

1914 – Arizonian is first vessel to arrive in San Francisco via Panama Canal instead of that months-long journey down and around the tip of South America.

1949 – Soviet atomic bomb project: The Soviet Union tests its first atomic bomb, known as First Lightning or Joe 1, at Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan. On the same day in 1953, they pop their first hydrogen bomb.

1982 – 38 degrees F – lowest temperature ever recorded in Cleveland in August. Some of that ‘global warming’.

1991 – Supreme Soviet suspends all activities of the Soviet Communist Party. 2008 – Putin says he don’t need no stinkin’ party to be the dictator… Barack Obama says “Why didn’t **I** think of that?”

2005 – Hurricane Katrina devastates much of the U.S. Gulf Coast from Louisiana to the Florida Panhandle, killing more than 1,836 and causing over $115 billion in damage. What? It hit MORE than those poor people in New Orleans? Where’s mah FEMA check?

1565 – Oldest city in the US, St Augustine Florida, established. Immediately overrun by snowbirds…

1830 – The Tom Thumb presages the first railway service in the United States by racing a horse-drawn car. When a belt slipped off, killing the blower to the boiler, the horse won! Besides, all it takes to make a horse is two horses. It took an industrial revolution to make a locomotive.

1837 – Pharmacists John Lea & William Perrins manufacture Worcester Sauce. Life is good!

1859 – The Carrington event – a geomagnetic solar storm – disrupts electrical telegraph services and causes aurora to shine so brightly that they are seen clearly over the Earth’s middle latitudes. If it happened today the world would be in the dark.

1862 – American Civil War: Second Battle of Bull Run Battle of Second Manassas.  The Confederacy won, but General Longstreet’s disobedience here made the victory smaller, and Longstreet later would cost us the Battle of Gettysburg.

1898 – Caleb Bradham renames his carbonated soft drink “Pepsi-Cola“.

1909 – A group of mid-level Greek Army officers launches the Goudi coup, seeking wide-ranging reforms. The civilization that gave us Aristotle and Pythagoras in antiquity can’t organize, in the words of an English friend, a piss-up in a brewery today.

1962 – 22 inches (55.9 cm) rainfall at Hackberry, Louisiana (state record). Hackberry is about fifteen miles south of me.

1963 – Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a dream” speech at Lincoln Memorial in front of a crowd of 200,000. Poor, poor deluded man. Who’s gonna believe that “they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character” nonsense?

1981 – The National Centers for Disease Control announce a high incidence of Pneumocystis and Kaposi’s Sarcoma in gay men. Soon, these will be recognized as symptoms of an immune disorder, which will be called AIDS. At that point the spread can be prevented by sitting on your butt and keeping your mouth shut…

1859 – Petroleum discovered in Titusville, Pennsylvania. World’s first successful oil well. Several polar bears mysteriously drown.

1918 – Battle of Ambos Nogales: U.S. Army forces skirmish against Mexican Carrancistas and their German advisors in the only battle of World War I fought on American soil.

1928 – Kellogg-Briand Pact, outlawing war, signed by sixty nations. Ah, yes, the notable “signing a piece of paper will stop crazed lunatics with armies” ploy. WE all KNOW this one works…

1939 – First flight of the Heinkel He 178, the first modern jet aircraft. Nothing quite like the quest for military dominance to further science.

1945 – US troops land in Japan after Japanese surrender. That’d be Dad puttering around the anchorage in Tokyo Bay in a landing craft.

2003 – Mars makes its closest approach to Earth in nearly 60,000 years, passing approximately 34,646,416 miles (55,758,006 kilometers) from Earth. “Dude! Like, you could FEEL the breeze!”