Sunday, February 15, 2009

The wheel turns

Last day of Lupercalia (ancient Rome).

In 1564, Galileo Galilei was born.

In 1571, Michael Praetorius was born.

In 1764, the city of St. Louis was established as a trading post where Pierre LaClede and his stepson Auguste Chouteau had notched a couple of trees to mark their landing on the bank of the Mississippi.

In 1898, the U.S.S. Maine was blown up in Havana Harbor, now widely believed to have been a false-flag operation intended to start a war with Spain.

In 1905, composer/songwriter Harold Arlen was born (“Paper Moon,” “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” “Stormy Weather,” among some 400 others).

In 1954, Matt Groening was born.

In 2002, over 300 corpses were found in buildings and woods on the property of Tri-State Crematory, in Georgia. Only four years later, Tri-State was implicated in the mis-handling of bodies recovered from Hurricane Katrina by Service Corporation International. The lawsuit accused SCI-owned funeral homes of sending bodies to the unlicensed, unregulated crematorium. Ahh, gotta love that unregulated capitalism, eh?

No comments: