A Brief History On March 28, 845 A.D., a Viking raiding party led by Ragnar Lodbrok (a.k.a. Lothbrok) sacked Paris, the future capital of France, proving that it was not just coastal towns that were susceptible to such raids. As was typical, they were given an enormous ransom to leave. Digging Deeper Ragnar Lodbrok is also the star character of the current History Channel series Vikings, in which he is depicted as a semi-mythical Viking hero kind of a George Washington, Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, King Arthur, Hercules, Theseus, Perseus, all rolled into one. A first-class production, the television series has superb acting and…
Browsing: March
Read More
A Brief History The recent days have been full of headlines regarding the devastating crash of Germanwings flight 9525 in the French Alps, killing everyone on board, on March 24, 2015. At first inconceivable how such an incident could take place at all and why no distress signal had been sent, general horror spread through the world when the recovered black box revealed that the co-pilot had locked the captain out of the cockpit and then purposely denied him re-entry, the desperate captain supposedly going so far as to attempting to break the door down with an ax! The general…
A Brief History On March 27, 1998, the little blue pill known as Viagra was approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of the United States, giving aphrodisiacs such as “Spanish Flies” a run for their money. This prescription drug to defeat male impotence quickly went mainstream and, along with the other erectile dysfunction drugs Cialis and Levitra, remains a hot commodity to this day. Thanks to pharmacology, all these newly virile men can take their restored vitality to their local strip clubs and admire the beautiful dancers with confidence. While there, they can reflect on the music being…
A Brief History On March 26, 1999, Dr. Jack Kevorkian, alias “Dr. Death,” was convicted of second-degree murder in Michigan for giving a terminally ill man a lethal injection at the man’s request. The 52-year-old man was succumbing to Lou Gehrig’s Disease (ALS), a particularly dreadful way to die. Digging Deeper Kevorkian had previously championed the right of dying people to end their own suffering with medical assistance and had devised machines that allowed the patient to kill themselves by either adding a lethal drip to an IV or by inhaling lethal gas through a mask they put on themselves. He had already been tried…
A Brief History On March 25, 1865, the long drawn out series of battles known to us as The Siege of Petersburg ended in Union victory by the forces under the command of Lt. General US Grant. General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate Army of Northern Virginia could no longer withstand the pressure of almost 10 months of trench and raid warfare by superior Union forces, and the under-supplied Confederates had to abandon Richmond, the Capital City of the Confederate States of America, and Petersburg, a nearby city vital to the supply lines into Richmond. Digging Deeper Starting on June 9,…