1717 – King George I of Great Britain sails down the Thames River with a barge of 50 musicians, where George Friederic Handel’s Water Music is premiered. A bit more difficult than clicking a track on your iPod, but you DO have to admire his tastes in music.

1794 – The sixteen Carmelite Martyrs of Compiegne are executed 10 days prior to the end of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. You know you’re doing your revolution wrong when you get around to guillotining nuns. This is the logical conclusion to ‘separation of church and state’ as promulgated by the Left. It starts when you’re forced to bake cakes…

1902 – Willis Carrier creates the first air conditioner in Buffalo, New York. This should be a national holiday.

1917 – King George V of the United Kingdom issues a Proclamation stating that the male line descendants of the British royal family will bear the surname Windsor, mainly because the real name, Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, sounds just a wee bit too German in the middle of World War I.

1918 – On the orders of the Bolshevik Party carried out by Cheka, Emperor Nicholas II of Russia, his immediate family and retainers are murdered at the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, Russia. You’re doing your revolution wrong when you shoot little kids just because their daddy is the Czar. On the same day in 1998, their recovered remains are officially interred in Russia, eighty years after their murder and the failure of the commie regime that killed them.

1938 – Douglas Corrigan takes off to fly the “wrong way” to Ireland and becomes known as “Wrong Way” Corrigan. The Feds said his plane was unsafe and denied him permission for the flight, so he took off, ostensibly for home in Los Angeles, and ended up in Ireland, claiming he’d gotten lost. He lost his license for fourteen days and became a legend.

1944 – World War II: Napalm incendiary bombs are dropped for the first time by American P-38 pilots on a fuel depot at Coutances, near St. Lô, France.

1945 – World War II: The main three leaders of the Allied nations, Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin, meet in the German city of Potsdam to decide the future of a defeated Germany. Our dimmocrat president gives away half of Germany and ALL of eastern Europe to a man who makes Adolf Hitler look like an irate Sunday School teacher. We should’ve turned the Wehrmacht around and together pushed the Russkis back to Moscow…

1955 – Disneyland televises its grand opening in Anaheim, California. Can you say “centrifugal bumblepuppy”? (Extra points if you can tell me where ‘centrifugal bumblepuppy’ comes from.)

1962 – Nuclear weapons testing: The “Small Boy” test shot Little Feller I becomes the last atmospheric test detonation at the Nevada Test Site. This W54 warhead weighs just 51 pounds and is equivalent to twenty TONS of TNT. Fifty-one pounds. Like carry-on luggage…

1981 – A structural failure leads to the collapse of a walkway at the Hyatt Regency in Kansas City, Missouri killing 114 people and injuring more than 200. An engineering screw-up, departing from the original design ‘because this is easier’.

1989 – First flight of the B-2 Spirit Stealth Bomber.

1996 – TWA Flight 800: Off the coast of Long Island, New York, a Paris-bound TWA Boeing 747 explodes, killing all 230 on board. many theories of the cause are in conflict with the official findings.