Monday, January 18, 2016
The 18 day of the year
348 days left to go
THIS WEEK IS
- International Snowmobile Safety and Awareness Week
- Hunt For Happiness Week
- National Activity Professionals Week
- National Fresh Squeezed Juice Week
- National Handwriting Analysis Week
- Healthy Weight Week
- National Bible Week
- Week of Christian Unity
- No Name Calling Week
- Sugar Awareness Week
TODAY IS
- Martin Luther King Jr. Day
- National Crowd Feed Day
- National Day of Service
- Pooh (Winnie The) Day
- Thesaurus Day
- National Sanctity of Human Life Day
- Robert E. Lee Day
- National Peking Duck Day
ON THIS DATE...
474: Seven-year-old Leo II succeeds his maternal grandfather Leo I as Byzantine emperor.
1535: Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro founded Lima, the capital of Peru
1778: James Cook is the first known European to discover the Hawaiian Islands, which he names the "Sandwich Islands" (read more)
1866: Wesley College, Melbourne is established.
1884: Dr. William Price attempts to cremate the body of his infant son, Jesus Christ Price, setting a legal precedent for cremation in the United Kingdom.
1886: Modern field hockey is born with the formation of The Hockey Association in England.
1896: The x-ray machine was exhibited (in New York City) for the first time. To see the machine, one had to pay a 25¢ admission charge (read more)
1911: For the first time an aircraft landed on a ship. Pilot Eugene B. Ely flew onto the deck of the USS Pennsylvania in San Francisco harbor.
1916: A 611 gram chondrite type meteorite strikes a house near the village of Baxter in Stone County, Missouri (read more).
1939: Louis Armstrong and his orchestra recorded Jeepers Creepers on Decca Records. Satchmo lent his vocal talents to this classic jump tune.
1943: U.S. commercial bakers stopped selling sliced bread. Only whole loaves were sold until the end of World War II (sliced bread)
1944: Soviet forces liberate Leningrad, effectively ending a three year Nazi siege, known as the Siege of Leningrad.
1967: Albert DeSalvo, the "Boston Strangler," is convicted of numerous crimes and is sentenced to life imprisonment.
1975: The Jeffersons was seen for the first time on CBS-TV. The show was a spin-off; based on the black family that moved next door to the bigoted Archie Bunker in All in the Family. The show lasted for several seasons and is still seen in syndicated reruns. Sherman Hemsley plays the part of George Jefferson, Isabelle Sanford is in the role of Weezie (Show Open)
1977: Scientists identify a previously unknown bacterium as the cause of the mysterious Legionnaires' disease.
1978: The roof structure of the Hartford Civic Center collapses after a significant snowfall.
1981: Phil Smith and Phil Mayfield parachute off a Houston skyscraper, becoming the first two people to BASE jump from objects in all four categories: buildings, antennae, spans (bridges), and earth (cliffs).
1983: The International Olympic Committee restores Jim Thorpe's Olympic medals to his family (Read more).
1990: Washington, D.C. Mayor Marion Barry is arrested for drug possession in an FBI sting.
1993: Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is officially observed for the first time in all 50 states.
1997: Boerge Ousland of Norway becomes the first person to cross Antarctica alone and unaided.
2000: The Tagish Lake meteorite impacts the Earth (read more).
2007: The strongest storm in the United Kingdom in 17 years kills 14 people, Germany sees the worst storm since 1999 with 13 deaths. Hurricane Kyrill, causes at least 44 deaths across 20 countries in Western Europe.
2012: Wikipedia began a 24-hour "blackout" in protest against proposed anti-piracy legislation (S. 968 and H.R. 3261) known as the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. Many websites, including Reddit, Google, Facebook, Amazon and others, contended would make it challenging if not impossible for them to operate
HISTORY SPOTLIGHT
1981: First Successful BASE Jumping (Source)
On January 18, 1981, two adventurers, Phil Smith and Phil Mayfield, parachuted from the top of a skyscraper in Houston, Texas. With this jump, they became the world’s first BASE jumpers—the first people to successfully jump from all four of the extreme sport’s namesake structures—buildings, antennas, spans, and the Earth.
BASE jumping only gained a name in the 1970s, but daredevils have been using parachutes to jump off tall structures for much longer. In 1966, skydivers jumped off the famous peak of El Capitan in Yosemite National Park, California. (Cliffs and mountains are the “Earth” in BASE jumping.) Today, BASE jumpers have plummeted from the Burj Khalifa, the tallest building in the world; an antenna tower near Chernobyl, Ukraine, nicknamed the “Russian Woodpecker”; the Sydney Harbor Bridge (a “span”) in Sydney, Australia; and even a peak in the Andes, Cerro El Plomo, Chile.
BASE jumping is incredibly dangerous and often illegal. One study, conducted in 2002, found that one of every 60 BASE jumpers died as a result of the jump. The National Park Service briefly issued permits for BASE jumping from places such as El Capitan, but banned the practice after less than a year. Jumping from buildings, antenna towers, and bridges (spans) is usually prohibited, because of the financial and physical danger to nearby residents, workers, or commuters.
QUICK TRIVIA
The Boston Strangler (Source)
In the 1960s, single women across Massachusetts were the target of a serial killer and rapist. When it was over, the Boston Strangler had killed 11 women. The case baffled the five separate District Attorney's offices investigating the murders because of the spread-out locations of the victims.
Tim DeSalvo, a convicted rapist, made a jailhouse confession claiming that he was the Boston Strangler and provided details on the 11 murdered women.
However, DeSalvo was never charged in the case and was found dead in his cell under mysterious circumstances at Walpole state prison in 1973.
DNA evidence positively linked DeSalvo to the crimes in 2013.
WORD OF THE DAY
Accord
[uh-kawrd] Noun or Verb
to be in agreement or harmony; agree
All the teens agreed with one accord to eat pizza after the football game.
WORD FROM THE WORD
For if, when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, being reconciled, we shall be saved by his life.--Romans 5:10
Read "Our Daily Bread"
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