Today in History.

Randy Orton

WC's Resident Alchoholic

Feb 19 1942
Roosevelt signs E.O. 9066, the internment order permitting Japanese Americans to be held in concentration camps for the duration of the war.

Feb 19 1969

Marianne Faithfull was found in a coma after a suicide attempt in Australia.

Feb 19 1983

Benjamin Ng and Willie Mak kill 13 in a Seattle robbery attempt.

Feb 19 1995

Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee married. Watch for the video.

Feb 19 1998

Lt. Col. Larry Wayne Harris (Aryan Nations) and William Leavitt are arrested in Henderson, NV for possession of the biological toxin anthrax, military grade, enough to kill an entire city. Their Mercedes is hermetically sealed by authorities and brought to Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada for hazmat.

Chewy

Feb 19 2006
Rambo gets banned again.

Randy Orton

WC's Resident Alchoholic

Feb 22 1987


Andy Warhol dies of complications after gallbladder surgery, though the details are hazy. The official cause was listed as cardiac arrhythmia, but speculation includes his fear of hospitals as well as possible Cefoxitin allergy. Warhol's death brings him a bonus 15 minutes of fame.

Feb 22 1993

The United States Supreme Court rejects a move by singer Chuck Berry to move his case to Federal court. Various women sued Berry alleging he videotaped them going potty in his St. Louis restaurant.

Feb 22 1994

CIA agent Aldrich Ames charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. His betrayal, starting in 1985, resulted in the executions of a good number of important undercover agents within the Soviet Union. The CIA knew without doubt there was a mole in its ranks. And though by 1989 Ames had acquired unexplainable wealth from his spying and did very little to conceal the spying, he somehow managed to evade being caught for five more years.

Feb 22 1997

The first cloning of an advanced mammal, a sheep known as Dolly, is announced in the news media. Dolly was cloned from a mammary cell, her name being taken from the topheavy Dolly Parton, star of the Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. [Editor's note: You can never have too many sheep.]

Randy Orton

WC's Resident Alchoholic

Feb 25 1922



Henri Landru, the notorious French serial killer known as "Bluebeard", guillotined for murdering ten women, and one boy. His motive was purely financial; by placing classified ads Landru lured selected women into his clutches, married them, and disposed of their bodies without a trace. While denying guilt to the end, a drawing given to his attorney had written on the reverse, "I did it. I burned their bodies in my kitchen oven".

Feb 25 1932

Austrian Adolf Hitler granted German citizenship, to meet a "minor" technical requirement in order to run for president.

Feb 25 1983

Playwright Tennessee Williams found dead in his New York hotel room after he choked on a bottle cap during the night.

Feb 25 1986

Egyptian Military Police enter four luxury hotels near the Pyramids, setting fires and looting. Hotel guests were terrorized. The police were upset over tours of duty that were being extended.

Feb 25 1994

Baruch Goldstein fires on Palestinians at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, slaughtering 29 of them. Goldstein, born and raised in Brooklyn New York, was a follower of Rabbi Meir Kahane and had been plotting acts of violence for two years.

Feb 25 1996

Dr. Haing S. Ngor, the Cambodian who won the 1984 Best Supporting Actor Oscar for The Killing Fields, shot during a robbery attempt in the carport of his Los Angeles apartment.

Randy Orton

WC's Resident Alchoholic

Feb 27 1859
Congressman Dan Sickles of New York shoots and kills Philip Barton Key, the son of Francis Scott Key (who wrote the Star Spangled Banner). The younger Key was having an affair with the congressman's wife. Sickles later pleads insanity and is acquitted.

Feb 27 1937



The Reichstag conveniently burns. A mad Dutchman who was arrested at the scene, Marinus van der Lubb, may have been partially responsible but if this is so, he is likely someone's patsy. The Nazi Party benefitted greatly from the subsequent crackdown, and it's suspected that SA stormtroopers set things up for van der Lubb.

Feb 27 1977

Rolling Stone Keith Richards arrested in Toronto with his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg for possession of heroin. Found guilty at trial over one year later, he manages to get off with a suspended sentence plus benefit concerts for the blind.

Feb 27 1982

Freelance photographer Wayne B. Williams found guilty of two counts of murder, though he is suspected of killing 22 other Atlanta area black boys. Williams was caught dumping a suspicious load from atop a bridge in the middle of the night.

Feb 27 1991

Mitchell brother Jim shoots and kills Mitchell brother Artie for reasons that aren't exactly clear. The brothers had built up a San Francisco porn empire centered around the O'Farrell Theater, and were responsible for one of the best-selling porno films of all time: Behind the Green Door, starring Marilyn Chambers and John Holmes.

Feb 27 1992

Trying to get the lid off her McDonald's coffee to add cream and sugar, 79-year-old Stella Liebeck accidentally splashes the 180-degree liquid on herself, causing third-degree burns to the thighs, genitals, and buttocks. After skin graft surgery and weeks of recuperation, Liebeck asks McDonald's to turn down the temperature of their coffee and pay $20,000 to defray her hospital bills. McDonald's tells the old lady to fuck off, as they had done for a decade of similar burn claims. Ultimately, a jury awards Liebeck $2.9 million in the resulting lawsuit, which immediately triggers a renewed call for legislative tort reform.

Randy Orton

WC's Resident Alchoholic

Feb 28 1574
Two impenitent heretics are burned at the stake in Mexico at a spectacular auto-da-fe comparable to those in Spain. The two are the first victims of the Inquisition in the New World, dying for their heretical crimes of... Lutheranism.

Feb 28 1968

Singer and early 60's heartthrob Frankie Lymon is found dead from a heroin overdose next to his syringe, in his grandmother's New York City apartment.

Feb 28 1986

Prime Minister of Sweden Olof Palme assassinated as he left a movie theater in Stockholm. It is unknown who the assailant was, though some suspect a South African death squad.

Feb 28 1993



Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco use armed force attempting to serve Branch Davidian leader David Koresh with a search warrant (one with no actual evidence of any illegal activity whatsoever), in what the BATF viewed as a publicity stunt to improve their image. While the agents carefully coordinated the raid with eleven different media outlets, something apparently tipped off Koresh and things do not go well: six Davidians and four ATF agents were killed. The warrant instead could have been served peacefully, while Koresh did his daily morning jog.

Feb 28 1995

Members of the group "Patriot's Council" in Minnesota are convicted under the Biological Weapons Anti-Terrorism Act of 1989, for manufacturing quantities of the ricin toxin. The substance is nearly indetectible when used as a poison, but is difficult to administer.

Randy Orton

WC's Resident Alchoholic

Mar 1 1815
Jesse Sharpless is convicted in Pennsylvania of exhibiting a "certain lewd, wicked, scandalous, infamous and obscene painting, representing a man in an obscene, impudent and indecent posture with a woman" in his own house. It is the first obscenity trial in the United States.

Mar 1 1932

A man climbs a makeshift ladder to the 2nd floor of Charles Lindbergh's New Jersey home and snatches his twenty-month-old son, Charles Jr. Whoever took the baby left behind a poorly-written ransom note demanding $50,000 in small bills.

Mar 1 1954

Four Puerto Rican nationalists open fire on House of Representatives from visitors' gallery, wounding five representatives. All four captured by security guards.

Mar 1 1954

The first hydrogen bomb is detonated at Bikini. Even though the bomb was hundreds of times more powerful than the atomic bomb exploded there in 1946, no islanders were evacuated this time. Almost 300 people suffered radiation exposure.

Mar 1 1969



While performing with the Doors, Jim Morrison asks the audience "Do you wanna see my ****?" then exposes himself briefly on a Miami stage. For thus showing his peepee Morrison received a sentence of six months hard labor.

Mar 1 1971

The radical group Weather Underground explodes a bomb in a restroom of the U.S. Capitol building, causing significant damage. The bomb exploded after an intensive search of the building yielded no results. Nobody is ever convicted of the attack.

Mar 1 1978

The body of Charlie Chaplin is stolen for ransom by Galtcho Ganav (Bulgaria) and Romnan Wardas (Poland) from a cemetery in Corsier, Switzerland. The actor's corpse is recovered two months later.

Mar 1 1999

Eight tourists at the Buhoma Homestead (including two Intel executives), in Uganda to visit wild mountain gorillas, are kidnapped and hacked to death with machetes by Rwantan Hutus.

Randy Orton

WC's Resident Alchoholic

Mar 3 1863
The National Conscription Act is signed, forcing all men between 20 and 45 years of age into the draft lotteries. Except for rich bastards, who could buy their way out for $300, or hire another man to serve in his place. The inevitable result is the weeklong New York Draft Riots.

Mar 3 1931

An English beer drinking song becomes the National Anthem of the United States.

Mar 3 1934

John Dillinger escapes from an escapeproof jail in Crown Point Indiana, using a wooden pistol he carved himself. It's his second escape.

Mar 3 1967

The Berkeley Barb reports that banana peels can make you high. Apparently lots of people can be fooled into thinking that the resulting "bananadine" extract is a hallucinogenic Mellow Yellow.

Mar 3 1991



Los Angles Police officers are filmed beating black motorist Rodney King with nightsticks. Television news stations repeatedly air the film nationwide. Four whites are charged with the beating on March 15, and when they are found not guilty, Los Angeles erupts in riot.

Reilly

Your blowing my mind.

Give it time

Crocker

Corrected for you