On August 20th these people were born ...
1625 Thomas Corneille, French playwright.
1833 Benjamin Harrison, 23rd President (1889-1893)
1860 Raymond Poincare, French statesman.
1890 H P Lovecraft, US writer.
1905 Jack Teagarden, US jazz trombonist.
1921 Jaqueline Susann, writer (Valley of the Dolls).
1924 Jim Reeves, US country singer.
1942 Isaac Hayes, soul musician.
1948 Robert Plant, rock musician.
1951 Phil Lynott, singer. (Thin Lizzy)
1962 James Marsters, actor.
1974 Amy Adams, actress.
1992 Demi Levato, actress
... and these people died ...
1854 Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, German philosopher.
1905 Adolphe William Bourguereau, French painter.
1912 William Booth, British founder of the Salvation Army.
1915 Paul Ehrlich, German biochemist.
2000 Harry Oppenheimer, South African mining magnate.
2002 Abu Nidal, Palestinian terror commander, suicide in Baghdad.
2008 Hua Guofeng, the man who succeeded Mao Zedong as leader of China. (87).
2012 Dom Mintoff, Former Maltese Prime Minister. (96)
2012 Phyllis Diller, comedienne, actress. (95)
... and these things happened - On August 20th
Admission Day (celebrated in Hawaii).
1710 French were defeated by the Austrians in the Battle of Saragossa
1866 President Andrew Johnson formally declared the Civil War over
1914 German forces occupied Brussels.
1920 First US radio station, 8MK later WWJ, Detroit begins broadcasting.
1924 Eric Liddel refused to run heats in Olympics as it was Sunday.
1930 Dumont's first TV Broadcast for home reception, NY city
1940 'Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by
so many to so few'. Winston Churchill on the RAF pilots.
1956 Calder Hall nuclear power plant (Britain's first), fired up.
1959 The anti-apartheid Progressive Party started in South Africa.
1960 Senegal gained independence from France.
1968 Russian troops invaded Czechoslovakia.
1977 Voyager I launched, first man made object to leave solar system.
1987 Michael Ryan murders 14 people in Hungerford, it is the UK's
worst shooting incident. At the end he shot himself.
1989 The Marchioness pleasure boat in collision on The Thames, 51 dead
1991 Estonia declared independence from USSR.
2000 Romes's World Youth Day sees 2 million addressed by the Pope.
2001 Bail was granted to 21 white Zimbabwe farmers on riot charges.
2001 Caribbean had it's first tropical storm of the year - Chantal.
2001 Palace of Westminster's Big Ben clock was given a damn good clean
2001 The average price of a pint of lager is now £2.
2002 Britain's first solar power cattle trough tested in Somerset.
2002 Series of Peter Pan stamps - 150th anniv of Great Ormond St Hosp
2003 Powerful thunderstorms caused flash flooding in Las Vegas.
2003 Princess Alice became the oldest British royal in history at 101.
2003 Suicide truck bomber rammed UN HQ in Baghdad killing the UN rep.
2004 $1bn was on display at US Numismatic Association's World's Fair in Pittsburgh
2004 Shrek 2 became Britain's most successful animated film.
2005 Annual twin V Festival entertained 180k in Essex and Staffordshire.
2005 Merck Drugs Co paid $253 mil to widow of Vioxx (drug withdrawn last year) victim.
2005 The dictionary supplied by Apple contained the following definition,
Blogger: twentysomething Americans with at least an unhealthy interest in computers.
2006 Pakistan forfeited the 4th Cricket Test against England at The Oval after a ball-tampering controversy.
2007 Australias opposition leader Kevin Rudd, after visiting a NY strip club, admitted being too drunk to remember details
2007 The V Music festival ended - 41 arrested for drug offences and 17 for theft.
2008 Each Briton was using 4,645 litres of water a day.
2008 Worlds top games developers decided to sue 25k people in the UK for £300 each for illegal downloading.
2009 Michelle Obama debuted at no.40 in Forbes Magazine list of 100 most powerful women, German Chancellor Angela Merkel was top.
2009 Study of banknotes found that 95% of dollar bills in Washington DC had traces of the illegal drug cocaine.
2009 The number of UK working-age adults claiming benefits hit six million.
2010 The average Briton spent almost half of their waking life using media and communications, often multi-tasking.
2010 The last American combat brigade in Iraq left the country ending the US combat mission.
2011 After his £10.000 pw Italian villa holiday was cut short by the riots in England, David Cameron took his 5th break this year, in Cornwall.
2011 The latest Concise Oxford English Dictionary included 400 new words, many from the internet; retweet, wOOt, textspeak and sexting.
2012 Katniss Everdeen and The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins, passed the Harry Potter books to become the best-selling series on Amazon.com .
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The Alternative Dictionary
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Boredom:
(1) the desire for desires.
(2) what happens when we lose contact with the Universe.
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