Wednesday, December 07, 2011

Dies illa, vivet in ignominiam

So, beside that unpleasantness outside Honolulu in 1941, what else happened on December 7?
43 BC – Marcus Tullius Cicero is assassinated.

1815 - Execution of Marshal Ney.

1862 – US Civil War: Battle of Prairie Grove, Arkansas.

1869 – American outlaw Jesse James commits his first confirmed bank robbery in Gallatin, Missouri.

1917 – World War I: The United States declares war on Austria-Hungary.

1930 – W1XAV in Boston, Massachusetts broadcasts video from the CBS radio orchestra program, The Fox Trappers. The broadcast also includes the first television commercial in the United States, an advertisement for I.J. Fox Furriers, who sponsored the radio show.

1963 – Instant replay is used for the first time in an Army-Navy game by its inventor, director, Tony Verna.

1965 – Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras simultaneously revoke mutual excommunications that had been in place since 1054.

1972 – Apollo 17, the last Apollo moon mission, is launched. The crew takes the photograph known as The Blue Marble as they leave the Earth.

1982 – In Texas, Charles Brooks, Jr. becomes the first person to be executed by lethal injection in the United States.
Also the birthday of Bernini, Nestroy, and Cather, as well as Noam Chomsky and our own Thad Cochran. And who could forget the feast day of St. Ambrose?

That's a lot to commemorate - get busy!

... Kingfish links a fine collection of photos of Pearl Harbor. The captions leave something to be desired; # 28, "the battleships U.S.S. Casin and the U.S.S. Downes," promotes two destroyers to battleships, as well as misspelling the name of the Cassin. (The single-gun turrets was my second clue, right after the absence of any states named "Casin" or "Downes.")

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