Author Archives: dcaligari

April 19, 1986 –Prince’s single Kiss hits #1 on the US Billboard Charts, on this date. The #2 song is Manic Monday by the Bangles, which was written by Prince. The band Mazarati, which was formed by Prince’s bass player Brown Mark and signed to his Paisley Park record label, asked Prince for a songContinue reading “Today in Rock History”

Today is Velociraptor Awareness Day. Velociraptors are small vicious dinosaurs that usually ruin everyone’s day at your local millionaire’s amusement park. Remember large windows and doorways are Velociraptor points of entries. Mark them accordingly and avoid at all cost. Once you’ve finished locating possible velociraptor entry points within your building, you can mark those areasContinue reading “Celebrate very responsibly”

It was a tense April in Boston in 1775. The colonists were simmering with resentment toward the motherland, on account of King George III having strewn the colonies with excessive tacks, painful to step on and bothersome to the horses. Furthermore, British cabbies had refused to unionize, and the colonists were adamantly opposed to taxisContinue reading “Listen my children”

April 17, 1960 – Eddie Cochran, the man behind Summertime Blues and C’mon Everybody, was killed, and Gene Vincent was injured, when the taxi carrying them from a show in Bristol, England, crashed en route to the airport in London, where he was to catch a flight back home to the US. The taxi driverContinue reading “Today in Rock History”

April 16, 1943 –LSD was first synthesized on April 7, 1938 by Swiss chemist Dr. Albert Hofmann at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, Switzerland, as part of a large research program searching for medically useful ergot alkaloid derivatives. Its psychedelic properties were unknown until five years later, when Hofmann, acting on what he has calledContinue reading “This may be on the test”

April 16, 1178 BC –… The sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world. – Theoclymenus A solar eclipse may have marked the return of Odysseus, legendary King of Ithaca and one of the most recurrent characters in Western literature, to his kingdom after the Trojan War on thisContinue reading “Tell me. O Muse”

April 16, 1178 BC –… The sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world. – Theoclymenus A solar eclipse may have marked the return of Odysseus, legendary King of Ithaca and one of the most recurrent characters in Western literature, to his kingdom after the Trojan War on thisContinue reading “Tell me, O Muse”

A junior wireless operator at Cape Race, Newfoundland, received a report from the Virginian that they were trying to reach the Titanic ocean liner, but had lost communication. Titanic’s last signals at 12:27 a.m. were “blurred and ended abruptly.” The ‘unsinkable‘ ship Titanic sank after being torn by iceberg, with a loss of 1493 passengersContinue reading “April 15, 1912: 12:50 a.m. EST-“

April 15, 1865 – Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president of the United States, died from a bullet wound inflicted the night before by John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathizer. The president’s death came only six days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered his massive army at Appomattox, effectively ending the American CivilContinue reading “She won’t think anything about it.”

April 14, 1865 –So, how was the play Mrs. Lincoln? On the evening of Good Friday, just after 10 p.m., President Abraham Lincoln received a cranial gunshot wound from well-known actor, John Wilkes Booth, while attending a performance of the play, Our America Cousin at the Ford Theatre on this date. Booth shouted out “sicContinue reading “Avoid the Theatre”