Half of the reason things happen around April 20th is because it’s Hitler’s birthday, an oft-celebrated date by psychos
In my lifetime:
September 11, 2001
October 17, 2002 - The day my mother died
April 16, 2007 - The Virginia Tech shootings
Columbine, Sept. 11 and the day my brother died this year, Aug. 26th.
I am well-read on current affairs on a worldwide basis. I have an excellent memory for arbitrary numbers & factoids.
Other than dates which got drilled into my head, like Dec 7 1941 & Sep 11 2001, I can’t remember the anniversary of any other significant historical event. (I had to think a bit to get the year 2001 into the 9/11 date).
As a 20-something I watched the Challenger liftoff on live TV & saw the original footage of the mishap as it occurred. I have no idea what the date was or even what time of year. I can regenerate the year +/- by reference to the city I was living in, but that’s it.
JFK? I was 5, and it was November 1963. No idea what the date is.
My Dad died in April of 1997 just barely post-retirement. We were very close & it was a short sharp illness & decline from rude health & the expectation of another 20 years. I was pretty torn up for a year. I don’t remember the exact date he died.
I don’t rememember good anniversaries either, so I don’t think this is some psychological defense against painful memories. Ask me the address I lived at 7 houses ago & I can tell you immediately, and probably come up with the phone number. Ask me which year I moved in or out & I’ll nail it, which season maybe. Which date? Forget it.
Strange.
In answer to the OP, I got nuthin’
Amazed that no-one yet has mentioned August 6th 1945 .
Good point. It is so boring to non-believers. I was enjoying reading the thread and then it gets hijacked. This kind of bullshit ruins SDMB. It’s hard to imagine the equivalent sort of stuff on the right.
Well, this is the forum for opinions, so get used to it. And in the opinion of many people, including me, GWB is quite infamous. Hardly a hijack. Frankly, I’m much more tired of people whining about Bush-bashing than I am of hijacks to Bush-bash.
Jan 30th 1972. An event that very nearly tore my country apart. Ireland was probably the closest it had ever come to another Civil War becuase of this event.
Indeed.
April 6th 1994 and we just sat back and let it happen. Possibly a million people, gone.
just to flesh this out a bit. A large section were not happy with the reaction of the Irish government to the event. My father was present in a meeting in Lesson Street that organised a march and other actions to protest the reaction or lack of it. Present at that meeting were everyone from major IRA members (like the major players in the Dublin, Derry and Belfast brigades) to anarchists, socialists and a lot of others. The protest march was supposed to go past the parliament but the government feared that there would be at least violence and maybe it would go further than that.
They blocked all the area off with troops and police. The march went a different route and ended at the British Embassy. That was burnt down along with an old RAF club on Harcourt Street. The Embassy event released a lot of pressure on the day but the government was under a lot of public pressure for a long time after.
9/11/01 - Along with the obvious tragedy of the deaths back east, just the surrealness of the whole day. Trying to reach major law firms in downtown LA that I worked with to find out they were closed, then to find out my wife’s company at the time, a major internet provider, was sending all their employees home. Then meandering home from work myself in a daze.
4/29/92 - Rodney King riots. My high school was adjacent to a lot of the action. We were off for three days. From the outside of where I was living at the time, the smoke rising from the fires was very clear. And one of my idiot schoolmates was caught looting on television. And properly expelled. I watched a lot of the area I grew up in burn live on TV.
1/17/94 - Northridge Earthquake. Probably the most scared out of my wits I’ve ever been in my entire life. One of my best friends and I often remark about the fact that on the prior evening we had witnessed a very, very bizarre non-accident on a portion of the 10 Freeway that collapsed the next morning. Again, very surreal.
The loss of the Alexandria Library
http://physics.weber.edu/carroll/honors-time/cosmos.htm
As a measure of what was lost, look at the few fragments from that period that made it through, such as the Archimedes palimpsest - this survived,( in a way) but its too bad it wasn’t available much sooner as it hints strongly at a new from of mathematics which we now call calculus.
Imagine if we had more of such works instead of them being lost, we might be a hundred years ahead of where we are now technologically, instead of geometry based maths we might had had something very differant, and a thousand years or more sooner, and the loss of so many works by Sophocles, Aeshylus and many others - the loss of these works alone is a tragic cultural loss.
Me, I’m still bitter that William the Bastard won at the battle of Battle
You may know it by a differant name, however the village in the area is still called ‘Battle’.
Of course none of us can forget that infamous day on Bosworth field that installed the Tudors and their propagandists
Imagine that the Tudors are not victors, no Henry VIII and no break from the Catholic church, history would have been very differant, damned turncoat Stanleys.