May the candles on your cake...

[gridlore]

A post in customers_suck about people being jerks about a birthday celebration led to a long list of comments about the horrible things that happened on birthdays. A link was given to Wikipedia's date entries (and as an aside, I am loving Wiki more and more..)

So, why can't I celebrate my birthday anymore?

1187 - Saladin defeats Guy of Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, at the Battle of Hattin.

1712 - 12 slaves are executed in New York for starting an uprising that killed 9 whites

1918 - Bolsheviks kill Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his family

1941 - Mass murder of Polish scientists and writers, committed by Nazi Germans in captured Polish city of Lwów.

1998 - Lin "Spit" Newborn and Daniel Shersty are murdered by neonazis in the desert just outside Las Vegas.

2002 - A Prestige Airlines cargo Boeing 707 crashes just short of the runway in Bangui, Central African Republic killing 25

So, what awful things happened on your birthday?

Comments

[kshandra]

1648 - Margaret Jones is hanged in Boston for witchcraft in the first such execution for the Massachusetts colony.

1789 - Mutiny on the Bounty: HMAV Bounty mutiny survivors including Captain William Bligh and 18 others reach Timor after a nearly 4,000 mile journey in an open boat.

1863 - American Civil War: Battle of Second Winchester – A Union garrison is defeated by the Army of Northern Virginia in the Shenandoah Valley town of Winchester, Virginia.

1905 - Battleship Potemkin uprising: Sailors start a mutiny aboard the Battleship Potemkin, denouncing the crimes of autocracy, demanding liberty and an end to war. (See also Eisenstein's classic film on the subject, The Battleship Potemkin).

1940 - World War II: Paris falls under German occupation.

1940 - A group of 728 Polish political prisoners from Tarnów become the first residents of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

1941 - Soviet mass deportations and murder of Estonians, Lithuanians and Latvians begun.

1959 - A group of left-leaning Dominican exiles in Cuba landed in the Dominican Republic with the intent of assassinating Trujillo. They would later be known as the J14 or "Catorce de Junio" (14th of June) group.

1962 - Anna Slesersby becomes the first victim of Albert DeSalvo, better known as the Boston Strangler.

1964 - In Pretoria, South Africa, black leader Nelson Mandela is among eight activists to be sentenced to life imprisonment for acts of sabotage. Mandela is sent to the notorious Robben Island - 7 miles from Cape Town on the South African coast.

1976 - The Gong Show debuts on NBC.

1985 - TWA Flight 847 is hijacked by Hezbollah.

2002 - Twelve are killed and 50 injured by a car bomb explosion in front of the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan.

[kshandra]

DUDE! Harry Turtledove shares my birthday!