Bicycle Day

Hedy Lamarr celebrates Bicycle Day

April 16 is a most interesting day. 

Bicycle Day!!! Let us remember some events which have happened on this  day, April 16: (mostly taken from the Daily Bleed, but other calendars were used) 
74- Defenders of Masada commit mass suicide rather than surrender to the Romans...

1452 Leonardo Da Vinci is born...
1715 US: The Wamasees & Catawbas attack Charleston, South Carolina, which leads to counter-attacks resulting in their virtual extermination....
1813 US Troops seize the Spanish fort at Mobile, thereby invading & occupying the eastern half of West Florida. ...

1834 France: The  end of the "Bloody Week" in Lyon, The Second Canut Revolts. The second great insurrection of the Silk workers is subdued in a blood bath, with several hundred victims. Those insurrectionists captured, rather than killed, will appear in a "monster trial" in Paris in April 1835...
1865 US: President Abraham Lincoln dies, 7:22 am...

1898 Bessie Smith is born... Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer

Twenty-five cents?
Ha! No! No!
I wouldn't pay twenty-five cents to go in nowhere 'cause listen here:

Up in Harlem ev'ry Saturday night when the high-browns git together it's just too tight,
They all congregates at an all night strut and what they do is tut-tut-tut
Old Hannah Brown from 'cross town gets full of corn and starts breakin' 'em down
Just at the break of day you can hear old Hannah say,
"Gimme a pigfoot and a bottle of beer"
Send me gate

I don't care
I feel just like I wanna clown
Give the piano player a drink because he's bringin' me down
He's got rhythm, yeah!
When he stomps his feet, he sends me right off to sleep
Check all your razors and your guns
We gonna be rasslin' when the wagon comes
I wanna pigfoot and a bottle of beer
Send me 'cause I don't care
Slay me 'cause I don't care

Gimme a reefer and a gang o' gin
Slay me, 'cause I'm in my sin
Slay me 'cause I'm full of gin

Check all your razors and your guns
Do the shim-sham shimmy till the risin' sun

1912 Titanic sinks at 2:20am killing 1,502 humans. Harry Elkins Widener goes down clutching his 1598 edition of Bacon's Essays...
1919 US: Start of victorious six-day strike across New England by first women-led US union, Telephone Operators Department of IBEW....
1920 US: In South Braintree, Massachusetts, two men armed with handguns shoot & kill Frederick Parmenter & Alessandro Berardelli, employees of the Slater & Morrill Shoe Company. The thieves rob the men of the $15,776.51 payroll they were carrying. The thieves are picked up by a car carrying other men. The anarchists Sacco & Vanzetti will ultimately be blamed & railroaded to their deaths....
 

Bob gets the leg kick going in spring training 1941

1941 Bob Feller pitches an opening day no hitter for the Cleveland Indians.....
1943 "Bicycle Day" - Albert Hofmann, a research chemist at the Sandoz Laboratories (now Novartis Pharmaceuticals) in Basel, Switzerland, left work due to "a remarkable restlessness" and "dizziness." Later, he experienced a "stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes" and "intense...colors." Dermal absorption of LSD-25, a substance he was working with, was the suspected cause. Although unintentional, this was the first LSD-induced psychedelic experience......

1945 April 16 proves for a second time to be a bad day for ships. More than 7,000 die when the German refugee ship Goya is sunk by a Soviet submarine torpedo. The Germans successfully evacuated 2,000,000 people from Prussia as the Red Army advanced. Three overcrowded ships were sunk by Soviet U boats which had previously been bottled up in the gulf of Finland by a German blockade. Two ships were sunk by the RAF resulting is 25,000 dead. No sinking of a ship in the history of the world has killed more human beings.  ......

The Monsanto plant at Texas City goes up in smoke.

1947 Texas City Disaster: An explosion on board freighter S.S. Grandcamp docked near the Monsanto plant, causes the city of Texas City, Texas, to catch fire, killing almost 600.....
1947 a man identified as Rudolph Hess, a leading member of the Nazi party, is hanged....

1955 US: Ray Kroc starts the McDonald's chain of fast food restaurants. ...
1961 Cuba: CIA invasion force lands at the Bay of Pigs. A fiasco, defeated within two days. .... 

1964 First Rolling Stones Album released...
1967 US: First mass burning of draft cards as 400,000 march in New York City & 80,000 in San Francisco opposing the Vietnam War...
1981 Guatemala: Security forces murder 69, Cocob, Quich (Reagan's Beloved "Freedom Fighters")...
1982 Guatemalan soldiers ( Reagan's "Freedom Fighters") murder 100 children & 73 women, Baja Verapaz...
1986 In response to a Berlin night club bombing US bombs Libya and Gaddafi's home killing at least 100 people including the adopted daughter of the Libyan leader (or was she really killed?)...
1989 England: Before a Liverpool/Nottingham Forest FA Cup semifinal soccer match, 95 fans are crushed to death against a fence surrounding the field as gatecrashers surge into Hillsborough Stadium, Sheffield, England....

1990 "Doctor Death", Jack Kevorkian, participates in his first assisted suicide...
2007 Virginia Tech massacre: Seung-Hui Cho kills 32 and injures 23 before committing suicide....

2010 US: Jack Herer dies, Eugene, Oregon. Wrote The Emperor Wears No Clothes ....
And last and certainly least.....Happy Birthday to deposed Pope Benedict!