Sunday, February 10, 2008

DBKP Today in Weird History: February 10, 2008

WAR, TERRORISM, DISASTERS, WEDDINGS, POLITICS, MAN Vs. MACHINE, CLINTONS, COMMIES, REPEAL, GOLD, THEATRE, SWAP, DEMOCRATS, NUDITY, WONDER DOG, MAINSTREAM MEDIA, PROGRESS, JEWS, CARTOONS, SKI, CONTAMINATED, PRO WRESTLING, BORN, BIRTHDAYS, DEATH




1933 Delivery of 1st singing telegram (Postal Telegram Company NYC).

WAR!

1763 Britain, Spain and France signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the Seven Years' War.

2003 France, Germany and Belgium jointly vetoed a U.S.-backed measure to authorize NATO to make plans to protect Turkey if Iraq attacked it. Iraq agreed to allow U-2 surveillance flights over its territory, meeting a key demand by U.N. inspectors searching for banned weapons; President Bush, however, brushed aside Iraqi concessions as too little, too late.

2007 Gen. David Petraeus took charge of U.S. forces in Iraq.

DISASTERS

1883 Fire at un-insured New Hall Hotel in Milwaukee WI, kills 71.

1942 The former French liner Normandie capsized in New York Harbor a day after it caught fire while being refitted for the U.S. Navy.

1959 Tornado in St Louis kills 19 & injures 265.

1964 Australian destroyer "Voyager" sinks in collision, killing 82.

1970 Dry powder avalanche moving at 120 mph smashes into youth hostel killing 40 Belgian, French, & German youths (Val d'Isere, France).

1973 83 meter wide gas tank on Staten Island NY explodes, crushing 40.

1981 8 killed & 198 injured by fire at Las Vegas Hilton.

WONDER DOG

1998 Buddy the Wonder Dog dog (Air Bud), dies of cancer at 9.

NUDITY

1535 12 nude Anabaptists run through Amsterdam streets.

CLINTONS

1998 Monica Lewinsky's mother, Marcia Lewis, testified before the grand jury investigating her daughter's relationship with President Clinton.

SKI

1982 28 skiers perform backflips while holding hands, Bromont Québec.

PRO WRESTLING

1989 To gain deregulation WWF admits pro wrestling is an exhibition & not a sport, in a New Jersey court.

1990 6th Largest wrestling crowd (63,900-Tokyo Dome).

CONTAMINATED

1990 Perrier Water pulls product from shelf due to benzene in water.

COMMIES

2003 A Chinese court convicted U.S.-based dissident Wang Bingzhang on spying and terrorism charges and sentenced him to life in prison.

POLITICS

1841 Upper Canada and Lower Canada were proclaimed united under an Act of Union passed by the British Parliament.

1967 The 25th Amendment to the Constitution, dealing with presidential disability and succession, was ratified as Minnesota and Nevada adopted it.

2007 2007 Barack Obama announced his bid for president, telling thousands at the campaign's kickoff in Springfield, Ill.: "Let us transform this nation."

REPEAL

1998 Voters in Maine become the first to repeal a state gay rights law.

CARTOONS

1940 Tom & Jerry created by Hanna & Barbera debut by MGM.

JEWS

1934 1st Jewish immigrant ship to break the English blockade in Palestine.

1977 Yehonathan Netanyou Lane in the Bronx named in honor of Bronx-born Israeli soldier who died freeing hostages in Entebbe Raid (1976).

1997 Lemrick Nelson found guilty in the fatal stabbing on Hasidic Jew Yankel Rosenbaum in Crown Heights Brooklyn in 1991.

EXECUTIONS

1495 Sir William Stanley English lord chamberlain, executed for conspiracy.

WEDDINGS

1840 Britain's Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

1863 PT Barnum stages wedding of Tom Thumb & Mercy Lavinia Warren (New York NY).

MAN Vs. MACHINE

1996 After three hours, world chess champion Gary Kasparov loses the first game of a six-game match against Deep Blue, an IBM computer capable of evaluating 200 million moves per second. Man was ultimately victorious over machine, however, as Kasparov bested Deep Blue in the match with three wins and two ties and took home the $400,000 prize. An estimated 6 million people worldwide followed the action on the Internet.

Kasparov had previously defeated Deep Thought, the prototype for Deep Blue developed by IBM researchers in 1989, but he and other chess grandmasters had, on occasion, lost to computers in games that lasted an hour or less. The February 1996 contest was significant in that it represented the first time a human and a computer had duked it out in a regulation, six-game match, in which each player had two hours to make 40 moves, two hours to finish the next 20 moves and then another 60 minutes to wrap up the game.

MURDER

1567 Lord Darnley Stuart husband of English queen Mary, murdered.

MAINSTREAM MEDIA

1897 New York Times begins using slogan "All the News That's Fit to Print".

GOLD

1942 RCA Victor presented Glenn Miller and his Orchestra with a "gold record" for their recording of "Chattanooga Choo Choo," which had sold more than 1 million copies.

THEATRE

1949 Arthur Miller's play "Death of a Salesman" opened at Broadway's Morosco Theater with Lee J. Cobb as Willy Loman.

SWAP

1962 The Soviet Union exchanged captured American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers for Rudolf Abel, a Soviet spy held by the United States.

DEMOCRATS

1989 Ron Brown was elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, becoming the first black to head a major U.S. political party.

BORN

1890 Boris L Pasternak Russia, novelist/poet (Dr Zhivago, Nobel 1958).

1893 Jimmy Durante New York NY, long-nosed comedian (and good-night Mrs Calabash).

1906 Lon Chaney Jr Oklahoma City OK, actor (Dracula vs. Frankenstein, The Phantom, Hawkeye, Pistols 'n' Petticoats).

BIRTHDAYS

Opera singer Leontyne Price is 81. Actor Robert Wagner is 78. Singer Roberta Flack is 71. Singer Jimmy Merchant (Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers) is 68. Olympic gold-medal swimmer Mark Spitz is 58. Country singer Lionel Cartwright is 48. Movie director Alexander Payne ("Sideways") is 47. ABC News correspondent George Stephanopoulos is 47. Actress Laura Dern is 41. Country singer Dude Mowrey is 36. Actress Elizabeth Banks is 34. Pop singer Rosanna Taverez (Eden's Crush) is 31. Country musician Jeremy Baxter (Carolina Rain) is 28. Rock singer Eric Dill (The Click Five) is 26. Rock musician Ben Romans (The Click Five) is 26. Actress Emma Roberts is 17. Actress Makenzie Vega is 14. Actress Chloe Moretz is 11.

DEATH

1957 Laura Ingalls Wilder US author (Little House on Prarie), dies at 90.

2003 President Nixon's press secretary, Ron Ziegler, died in Coronado, Calif., at the age of 63.

2003 Former Minnesota Congressman Clark MacGregor, who'd led the Nixon re-election campaign in 1972, died in Pompano Beach, Fla., at age 80.

2005 Playwright Arthur Miller died in Roxbury, Conn., at age 89 on the 56th anniversary of the Broadway opening of his "Death of a Salesman."

February 10, the 41st day of 2008. There are 325 days left in the year.

compiled by Mondoreb
image:
Sources:
* Today in History
* This Day in History
* Today in History

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