Today is the anniversary of the first meeting of the U.S. Congress in the new capitol of Washington, D.C.
President George Washington laid the cornerstone for the new center of government in 1793, but elected officials didn’t meet in Washington, D.C. until this fall day in 1800.
They were in a hurry to leave Philadelphia, where malaria and cholera were making even the most eloquent statesmen say, “’tis a bummer, indeed.”
[Nov. 22 update: YouTube has pulled the clip at the insistence of NBC, alas.]If you haven’t seen the cool-irritating video by Willow “Another One of Will Smith’s Kids” Smith for her song “Whip My Hair,” you can see it here. Like most music videos of pop songs, you don’t have to watch the whole thing.
Prince William and his new fiancee Kate Middleton had a royal engagement photocall today, in the State Apartments of St. James Palace in London. Nice setting.
Prince William and his longtime girlfriend Kate Middleton are engaged to be married.
Tycho Brahe, the genius Danish astronomer and wearer of metal noses, is being exhumed by scientists in Prague who want to know how he died.The cause-of-death candidates are:
English author J. G. Ballard was born today in 1930, in Shanghai, China. He died last year at the age of 78. In his honor, I stacked some stuff on a cat.
I will be gone for a few days, so I’ll leave you with some cool links:
Letters of Note — I’d steal something from this every day, if it weren’t so uncool to do that.
Another great site to visit is from the U.S. National Archives, their Today’s Document from the National Archives. Always something interesting there.
Hollywood Insider reported this week on plans to make a movie based on the Rubik’s Cube, the puzzle toy created by Hungarian designer Erno Rubik in 1974.
Sure, there are board games based on movies, but movies based on board games and puzzles?
On this day in 1918 Spiro Theodore Agnew was born in Baltimore County, Maryland.
He was the son of Greek immigrants whose original name was Anagnostopoulos. He liked to be called Ted. His law school education was interrupted by service in the Tenth Armored Division during World War II. He saw combat in France and Germany.
Spiro Agnew was a suburban Baltimore lawyer, and a Democrat until 1947, when he became a Republican. From a background in county politics, he was elected Maryland’s governor in 1966.