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[GermanStar]

Jul 30 1419
Hussites marching on the Prague Town Hall defenestrate (throw from windows to splatter down below) the Catholic city government, replacing them with a system of four Captains.

Jul 30 1938
In his Dearborn, Michigan office Henry Ford proudly accepts a Nazi medal on his 75th birthday. The Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle is the highest award the Reich can bestow on foreigners. The medal arrives with a note of personal greetings from Adolf Hitler. A rabid anti-semite, Ford paid for copies of the racist hoax Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion to be deposited in major U.S. libraries.

Jul 30 1975
Jimmy Hoffa probably dead. God we miss him.

Jul 30 1987
During the annual hajj, Saudi police open fire on a mob of pilgrims protesting America in Mecca. 402 Muslims, including 275 Iranians, are shot and killed during their "Renunciation of Infidels" rally. Iran boycotts the hajj for the next three years.

[GermanStar]

Jul 31 1941
Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering issues an order directing Reinhard Heydrich to carry out the final solution to the "Jewish question."

Jul 31 1945
Wearing a stolen army uniform, prisoner John Giles attempts to escape from Alcatraz island by boarding an outbound cargo boat. But instead of San Francisco, the vessel heads for Angel Island, where Giles is promptly captured.

Jul 31 1966
Beatles records are burned in Birmingham, Alabama -- only because John Lennon innocently declared that the band happens to be "more popular than Jesus."

Jul 31 1969
The San Francisco Chronicle, the Examiner, and the Vallejo Times-Herald receive nearly identical letters from the Zodiac Killer. Specific details are given about recent murder scenes, along with the demand that a "cipher" be printed on on the front page of the papers (or else Zodiac will go on a "ram-Page").

Jul 31 1998
Diminutive actor Gary Coleman, former child star of the ABC television sitcom Diff'rent Strokes, is arrested in Hawthorne, California for allegedly battering an autograph seeker in a uniform shop. Coleman, then a security guard at Fox Hills Mall, was shopping for a bulletproof vest.

Jul 31 1999
Police arrest James Donald Ray for f**king two sheep to death at El Capitan High School in Lakeside, California. A previous sexual attack against one of the sheep prompted the police stakeout, which nabs the 38-year-old in flagrante delicto cum ewe.

[GermanStar]

Aug 1 1589
King Henri III of France is assassinated by a crazy Jacobin monk. Among his crimes are opposing the Catholic League, and his love of... handsome young men.

Aug 1 1936
Adolf Hitler presides over the opening ceremony of the Olympics. The Chancellor of Germany announces: "I proclaim the games of Berlin, celebrating the eleventh Olympiad of the modern era, to be open." The whole thing makes for a great film by Leni Riefenstahl.

Aug 1 1954
The middle and lower reaches of the Yangtze River overflow, submerging 8 million acres. The floodwaters kill more than 30,000 Chinese and displace 18.9 million others.

Aug 1 1966
Former Eagle Scout and United States Marine Charles Whitman carries a sniper rifle onto University of Texas at Austin. There he climbs to the top of UT tower and begins firing indiscriminately at dozens of people, killing 13. Whitman is finally taken out 96 minutes later by three Austin PD officers.

Aug 1 1971
The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour debuts on CBS television as a summer replacement show.

Aug 1 1981
Cable music network MTV launches, by airing "Video Killed the Radio Star" by The Buggles, followed by Pat Benatar's "You Better Run." That's right, kids: once upon a time, MTV actually played music videos.

Aug 1 1994
Trading on the NASDAQ stock market is halted for 34 minutes after a squirrel commits suicide by gnawing through a power line near the organization's computer center in Trumbull, Connecticut. Systems in place to perform automatic switchover to standby generators didn't exactly, uh, work.

[GermanStar]

Aug 2 1876
Drinking at a saloon in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, Jack McCall notices Wild Bill Hickok playing poker at a corner table. Then he calmly walks over to the table and blows a wide hole in the back of Hickok's head with a .45 revolver. The professional gambler and onetime lawman was holding a pair of Aces and a pair of eights, now known as the "Dead Man's Hand."

Aug 2 1923
President Warren G. Harding dies suddenly at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. His wife Florence forbids an autopsy, and the President's body is embalmed shortly after death. It is speculated by many that the cause of death, initially reported as "a stroke of apoplexy," was in fact poison administered by the First Lady.

Aug 2 1990
After Kuwait refuses to waive Iraq's war debts, 100,000 Iraqi soldiers stream across the border and seize control of Kuwait City. Their troops outnumbered 5-to-1, the Kuwaitis mount no resistance whatsoever. In so doing, Saddam Hussein precipitates the first Gulf War.

[GermanStar]

Aug 3 1950
The U.S. Army knowingly kills hundreds of civilian refugees when Maj. General Hobart R. Gay gives the order to demolish the bridge, including refugees, over the Naktong River at Waegwan, Korea.

Aug 3 1963
Almost a year after the world barely averted World War III during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Hotline between the Pentagon and the Kremlin goes live. The system consists of two teletype machines, with a full-time communications link routed through London, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Helsinki. Not to be confused with the Batphone.

Aug 3 1966
Comedian and social critic Lenny Bruce dies of a morphine overdose in his Hollywood Hills home, two years after his original obituary was published in The Realist. At the time of his death, Bruce was being maliciously harassed by police and districts attorney in various states for his groundbreaking standup performances, causing great difficulty in finding venues at which to perform.

Aug 3 1996
An angry God makes "Macarena" by Los Del Rio #1 on the pop charts. The accompanying dancing disease afflicts millions before final eradication.

[GermanStar]

Aug 4 1892
Someone takes an axe and kills Lizzie Borden's millionaire parents. Andrew receives 10 whacks, and Abby 14. Lizzie is later tried for the murders, but acquitted.

Aug 4 1964
Vietcong torpedo boats launch an unprovoked attack against the U.S.S. Maddox, while the destroyer is patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin. Except that it's only a hoax. Regardless, the Congress responds by passing the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, authorizing President Johnson "to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression." Which is how we wound up napalming those babies.

Aug 4 1993
Japan finally acknowledges that it forced 200,000 Korean and Chinese "comfort women" to service members of its armed forces between 1932 and 1945. Japan apologizes for the "immeasurable pain and incurable psychological wounds" it inflicted by forcing these women to be state whores, but makes no offer to pay reparations.

Aug 4 1994
Howard Stern withdraws his candidacy for governor of New York, ostensibly to avoid complying with the financial disclosure laws.

[GermanStar]

Aug 5 1955
Fruit-hat-wearing Brazilian superstar Carmen Miranda dead from cancer at 46.

Aug 5 1962
In her Brentwood, California home, Marilyn Monroe dies in bed, naked, after swallowing an overdose of sleeping pills. Or maybe she's killed by the CIA with a barbiturate enema. Either way, she's dead.

Aug 5 1963
The U.S., U.K. and Soviet Union agree to ban almost all nuclear testing. Underground testing is still permitted, however.

Aug 5 1980
The Osmonds musical group breaks up.

Aug 5 1983
Yankees outfielder Dave Winfield is charged in Toronto with cruelty to animals after fatally beaning a seagull with a baseball.

[GermanStar]

Aug 6 1890
Axe murderer William Kemmler becomes the first American executed by the Electric Chair, an invention created primarily to malign alternating current. It takes about four minutes for the electrons to kill the prisoner, by which time the odor of burnt flesh is inescapable. A newspaper headline the following morning reads KEMMLER WESTINGHOUSED, much to the glee of DC power proponent Thomas Edison.

Aug 6 1927
Andrew Warhola is born in Pittsburgh.

Aug 6 1945
At 9:15am, Col. Paul Tibbets releases "Little Boy" over Hiroshima and executes a hard, 159-degree turn. 40 seconds later, the Atomic Bomb detonates, yielding a 12.5 kiloton explosion and a huge, black mushroom cloud. About 45,000 people are killed immediately, and another 200,000 are killed in later years by leukemia and other radiation illnesses.

Aug 6 1970
750 unkempt Yippies show up at Disneyland, hell-bent "to liberate Minnie Mouse, have free rein of the park and infiltrate Tom Sawyer's Island," according to Youth International Party leaflets. Instead, they wind up scuffling with Disney security and other patrons, eventually prompting Anaheim police to close the park early and forcibly eject the dirty longhairs.

[GermanStar]

Aug 7 1882
Ellison Hatfield is stabbed 26 times and shot in the back by Tolbert McCoy and two of his brothers. Two days later, the Hatfield clan captures the three McCoys and executes them by firing squad. Thus begins generations of bloodshed between the families, ultimately causing about 100 casualties.

Aug 7 1953
Eisenhower signs legislation retroactively granting Ohio official statehood for the previous 150 years. In 1803, apparently everyone just assumed that Ohio was a state, even though Congress had never passed legislation to that effect. The nation remained blissfully unaware of this fact until nosy historians began snooping around in preparation for Ohio's sesquicentennial.

Aug 7 1956
A convoy of seven army trucks loaded with dynamite explodes in front of the railway terminal in Cali, Colombia. The downtown district is instantly leveled, killing 1,200 people and injuring thousands more in the process.

Aug 7 1960
Film and television actor David Duchovny is born in New York City. Two of his most popular TV roles include Special Agent Fox Mulder from The X-Files, and transvestite DEA agent Dennis Bryson in three episodes of Twin Peaks (second season, though).

Aug 7 1998
224 are killed and 2,200 injured when the U.S. Embassies in Kenya, Nairobi and Tanzania are simultaneously struck by powerful car bombs. Nairobi is hit particularly hard, with a multitude of charred corpses littering the streets. Three months later, the United States indicts Osama bin Laden and Muhammad Atef in absentia for the attacks.

[GermanStar]

Aug 8 1925
40,000 robed Klansmen march down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. -- a bit less than 1% of total Klan membership.

Aug 8 1960
Brian Hyland's song "Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini" reaches number one on the pop charts.

Aug 8 1963
By tampering with railway signals, a 15 man team halts the Glasgow-to-Euston Royal Mail train in Buckinghamshire. The criminals make off with 120 sacks containing £2.6 million in cash. The incident goes down in history as "The Great Train Robbery."

Aug 8 1973
Elmer Wayne Henley confesses to killing his partner and to the the sadistic murders of 27 teenage boys beginning in 1970. Following Henley's instructions, police dig up 27 bodies before calling off the search. This beat Juan Corona's record of 25 victims.

[GermanStar]

Aug 9 1945
Because of the dense cloud cover over Kokura, USAF Maj. Charles Sweeney diverts his B-29 Bock's Car to the designated secondary target, 95 miles to the south. There he drops "Fat Man" -- a 22 kiloton Atomic Bomb -- over the city of Nagasaki, population 270,000. The blast kills 24,000 immediately, but another 46,000 perish from radiation-related illnesses over the next four months.

Aug 9 1960
Harvard professor Timothy Leary consumes seven Psilocybe caerulescens mushrooms in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Five hours later, the self-described atheist experiences a "fullblown conversion experience" next to a swimming pool. It is Leary's first drug trip.

Aug 9 1969
Tate Murders by Charles Manson's followers: Frykowski - shot twice, bludgeoned 13 times, stabbed 51 times; Pregnant Sharon Tate stabbed in the neck, breast, back, womb.

Aug 9 1974
Finally bowing to pressure from Senator Barry Goldwater and RNC chairman George Bush, President Richard M. Nixon resigns from office. His successor, Gerald Ford, assures the American people that their "long national nightmare is over."

Aug 9 1995
Jerry Garcia dies of a heart attack at Serenity Knolls near Novato, California. He had checked himself into the drug rehab center a few days prior, in hopes of kicking his longstanding heroin habit.

Aug 9 1997
Officers of Brooklyn's 70th precinct sodomize 30 year old Haitian immigrant Abner Louima with a toilet plunger, then insert the feces-contaminated plunger into Louima's mouth. Later, NYPD officials try feebly to dismiss the suspect's injuries as having resulted from ordinary homosexual activity, but a medical examination proves that to be inconsistent with the evidence.

Aug 9 1999
The U.S. Government closes the Mustang Ranch, a 104 room bordello near Reno, Nevada. U.S. Customs seized the house of ill repute for tax violations, which it believed to be operated by a front corporation controlled by Joe Conforte, original owner of the property when it first opened in 1955.

[GermanStar]

Aug 10 1628
To assist in the war with Poland, Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus builds a magnificent warship, the Vasa, with 64 bronze cannon on two tiers. But on its maiden voyage, the lower gunports are accidentally left open, and the ship immediately sinks to the bottom of Stockholm harbor. The ship remains submerged until it is raised in 1961 to become a tourist attraction.

Aug 10 1966
Last words of James French, sent to the Electric Chair by the state of Oklahoma: "How about this for a headline for tomorrow's paper? FRENCH FRIES."

Aug 10 1969
Leno and Rosemary LaBianca are brutally murdered in their Los Feliz, California home by followers of Charles Manson. They take some of their victims' blood and smear HEALTER SKELTER on the refrigerator door.

Aug 10 1972
Paul McCartney and his wife Linda are arrested in Sweden after postal officials intercept a parcel of hashish addressed to their band, Wings.

Aug 10 1989
Disgruntled postal worker John Merlin Taylor blows his wife's brains out with a .22 Ruger, then drives to his job at the Orange Glen post office in Escondido, California. There he kills two coworkers on the back loading dock, then wounds another inside before blowing his own brains out.

Aug 10 1996
Heated by the sun, power lines begin to sag in Oregon. Somehow this triggers a series of failures which cascades throughout the Western states. Four million people lose electrical service in Oregon, Washington, California, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, Montana, and Texas.

[GermanStar]

Aug 11 1772
The summit of Papandayan volcano in West Java suddenly implodes, unleashing a catastrophic debris avalanche which blankets an area of 250 square km. Tumbling boulders flatten 40 villages and their 2,957 inhabitants.

Aug 11 1965
A white motorcycle cop from the California Highway Patrol pulls over a car at 116th and Avalon, near Watts. When Marquette Frye fails the field sobriety test, the CHP officer places him under arrest and radios for a transportation unit and a tow truck. 15 minutes later, with more than 1,000 spectators gathered to watch the scene, a scuffle breaks out between police officers and members of the driver's family. This altercation sets the stage for the bloody Watts riots two days later.

Aug 11 1975
Paratroopers from Indonesia invade the island of East Timor, ostensibly to end a civil war, but in reality to seize the territory. They perpetrate a reign of terror against the inhabitants, which continues to this day.

Aug 11 1984
Not realizing that his weekly radio address is already on the air, President Ronald Reagan quips into his live microphone: "My fellow Americans, I'm pleased to tell you today that I've signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes."

Aug 11 1997
Responding to reports of a domestic disturbance at the L'Elysee condominiums in West Los Angeles, LAPD officers encounter Christian Slater "swinging his arms and yelling incoherently" in the building stairwell. The movie actor reveals to police that "the Germans are coming and they will kill us." He also mentions that he has been awake for most of two days, and the last thing he remembers is "snorting a couple of lines of cocaine this morning." When officers attempt to put him in handcuffs, Slater knocks one of them to the floor and makes an unsuccessful grab for the cop's weapon. His punishment? 59 days in jail.

[GermanStar]

Aug 12 30 BC
Cleoptara, Queen of Egypt and former wife to Julius Caesar, commits suicide by means of venomous snakebite to the mammary gland.

Aug 12 1676
Wampanoag chieftain Metacom (or "Philip") is killed in a swamp near Mount Hope. Thus ends King Philip's War, the first war between Indians and European settlers.

Aug 12 1869
In San Francisco, Emperor Norton I issues a stern edict outlawing both the Republican and Democratic political parties. Violators face a prison term of five-to-ten years.

Aug 12 1948
Russian schoolteacher Oksana Kosenkina is injured when she jumps out the window of the Soviet Consulate in New York City. Soviet officials claim they had rescued her from "White Russian" kidnappers, but Kosenkina says she was trying to escape from the Soviets. The US later expels the consul general, and the Soviets close their consulate.

Aug 12 1951
Dr. Jean Vieu discovers two patients stricken with abdominal pain and grotesque hallucinations in Pont St. Esprit, France. They are just the first of more than 230 afflicted townspeople, thanks to bread tainted with ergot.

Aug 12 1953
In Siberia, the Soviet Union successfully tests its first thermonuclear device, based on Andrei Sakharov's fission-fusion "Layer Cake" design: alternating layers of uranium and hydrogen fuel sandwiched together and wrapped around a conventional Atomic Bomb. The fission explosion compresses the hydrogen, causing a fusion reaction.

Aug 12 1985
30 minutes after takeoff, JAL flight 123 loses all hydraulic pressure, rendering the controls inoperable. The crew attempts a return to Tokyo-Haneda airport by adjusting power to the engines, but the 747 crashes into a mountain ridge near Mt. Osutaka. When rescue workers arrive the following morning, they find 4 survivors and 520 dead.

[GermanStar]

Aug 13 1521
After an 80-day siege, Spanish conquistador Hernando Cortés captures Tenochtitlan, capital of the Aztec Empire. When the Spaniards fail to discover Montezuma's treasure, they torture Cuauhtemoc by pouring hot oil over his feet. The emperor responds by asking, "Am I on a bed of roses?" They hang him three years later.

Aug 13 1926
Fidel Castro is born on his father's 23,000-acre sugar cane plantation near Biran, Cuba.

Aug 13 1942
Walt Disney's Bambi premieres in New York City.

Aug 13 1986
11 Mexican peace officers abduct DEA special agent Victor Cortez, Jr. along with an informant. The two are taken to a Guadalajara police station, where the men are beaten and tortured for four hours in an attempt to extract the names of other American drug enforcement agents operating in Mexico. The pair are freed only after Cortez's superior somehow arrives at the station and demands their immediate release.

[GermanStar]

Aug 14 410
Visigoths under King Alaric sack Rome after slave co-conspirators open the city gates for them. Looting lasts for six days.

Aug 14 1941
Corporal Josef Jakobs, a German spy, is the final prisoner executed at the Tower of London. Having a broken ankle, he is seated in a fine wooden Windsor chair and executed by an eight man firing squad of Scots Guards.

Aug 14 1945
Over the radio, Hirohito announces his unconditional surrender to Allied forces, thus bringing an end to World War II. This broadcast is the first chance the Japanese people have had to hear their god-emperor's speaking voice.

Aug 14 1951
Newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst dies at home in Beverly Hills, California.

Aug 14 1965
Salvatore Bono and Cherilyn Sarkisian La Pierre capture #1 on the American pop charts with their song "I Got You Babe," launching the careers of Sonny & Cher.

Aug 14 2126
The next scheduled perihelion for the "Doomsday Rock," also known as the Swift-Tuttle Comet. The six-mile-diameter mass is thought to be roughly the same size as the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs and will probably come within 15 million miles of planet Earth.

[GermanStar]

Aug 15 1057
Macbeth is killed in the Battle of Lumphanan in Aberdeenshire. He had been king of Scotland for 17 years.

Aug 15 1935
Will Rogers, the most famous man in America, dies near Barrow, Alaska when his sea plane plunges into a lagoon. At the time, he and one-eyed aviator Wiley Post were surveying possible flight paths between Seattle and the Soviet Union.

Aug 15 1969
Woodstock begins on Max Yasgur's farm in upstate New York. Tickets are $18 for three days of counterculture musical acts, including Jimi Hendrix, The Who, and Sha-Na-Na.

Aug 15 1994
International terrorist Carlos the Jackal is jailed in France. The assassin was turned over by the Sudanese government after he checked into a Khartoum hospital for varicose vein surgery on one of his testicles.

[GermanStar]

Aug 16 1819
60 cavalrymen charge into a crowd of approximately 70,000 protesters at St. Peter's Field in Manchester, England. The soldiers begin to hack away at the people with their sabers and trample them under hoof. 11 die and 400 are wounded in the Manchester Massacre, also called the Battle of Peterloo.

Aug 16 1938
Blues musician Robert Johnson, who presumably sold his soul to the devil (the story somewhat being told by the movie Crossroads), is poisoned by a jealous husband in Three Forks, Mississippi.

Aug 16 1960
Emmett O. Hashfield abducts Avril Terry, an 11-year-old girl in Booneville, Indiana. He then proceeds to murder, dismember, and eat portions of her, before tossing the leftovers in a river.

Aug 16 1977
Elvis Presley dies in his home at the age of 42, while sitting on the toilet. In the bathroom, he had been reading The Scientific Search for the Face of Jesus. Presumably, Elvis' search was concluded shortly thereafter.

Aug 16 1987
Mercury, Venus, and Mars all get bunched up near the Sun in what some call the Harmonic Convergence. Thousands of nutballs clustered at sacred locations like Mount Shasta, California begin meditating their asses off for some damn reason.

Aug 16 1997
Aida Nur El-Din, a night nurse at Alexandria University's El-Mairy Hospital, confesses to Egyptian authorities that she killed at least 18 ICU patients by injecting them with drugs stolen from the pharmacy. Before she can be taken downtown, El-Din jumps out a three-story window in a failed suicide attempt.

[GermanStar]

Aug 17 1896
Bridget Driscoll, a 44-year-old mother of two, becomes the world's first automobile fatality when she steps in front of a car outside the Crystal Palace in London. At the coroner's inquest, Arthur Edsall states he had been driving at only 4 mph. The motorist also claims that when he saw the pedestrian, he rang his bell and shouted "Stand back!" For whatever reason, the coroner accepts Edsall's preposterous story.

Aug 17 1948
Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard is arrested for bad checks in San Luis Obispo, California. In court a fortnight later, Hubbard pays the $25 fine.

Aug 17 1980
Dingos snatch baby Azaria from a campground near Ayers Rock, Australia. Her mother, Lindy Chamberlain, is later convicted of murder and spends three years in prison, but the conviction is ultimately overturned. Apparently there have been a number of baby/dingo incidents over the years, the dingo not differentiating animals from humans. (The fact that if you rearrange the letters in LINDY CHAMBERLAIN you get CHILDREN BY ANIMAL is just a coincidence.)

Aug 17 1987
Rudolf Hess found hanged by an electrical cord at Spandau Prison, aged 93. He was incarcerated there for 40 years, 21 of those years as the solitary inmate. In 1941 Hess flew to Scotland with ideas of peace in his head, making Hitler very very upset.

Aug 17 1996
Belgian police discover the bodies of two eight-year-old children kidnapped for pedophilic purposes in the town of Jumet, a suburb of Charleroi. The children had starved while Marc Dutroux was jailed for theft, there being nobody to feed them. Along with the two is the body of Bernard Weinstein, one of the perpetrators of the kidnappings. In early September, two additional teenage bodies are discovered in a house owned by Marc Dutroux. The revelations send the entire Belgian nation into shock.

Aug 17 1998
Long-running comic strip Jerkcity begins. It was created by Rands using Microsoft's abandoned Comic Chat, a chat client featuring artwork by Jim Woodring, as a harness for the artwork. Slurping and drooling and hurrrr.

[GermanStar]

Aug 18 1227
Genghis Khan dies in his sleep, after a fall from his horse. His old age and drinking probably contributed to his death, which the Mongols manage to keep secret for some time.

Aug 18 1503
Pope Alexander VI dies. He was the father of seven illegitimate children, and during his reign chose as his lover the lovely sixteen year old Guilia Farnese. A portrait of Guilia dressed as the Virgin Mary appeared over Alexander's bedchamber door, but by no means was she his only liaison.

Aug 18 1590
Sent to England to get supplies three years prior, John White finally returns to Roanoke Island and discovers his colony "strongly enclosed with a high palisade of great trees, with [curtain walls] and [bastions] -- very fort-like." There is no sign of the settlers or where they may have gone.

Aug 18 1999
A giant black rainbow encircles the Earth, sucking all oxygen from the atmosphere. The air returns shortly thereafter, but only after millions die from asphyxiation. On the bright side, the survivors go on to build a utopian civilization. It all happens precisely as predicted in the 1950s by Criswell, the TV psychic immortalized in the movie Plan 9 from Outer Space.