ON THIS DAY

Ah yes, April Fool’s Day or All Fool’s Day which dates back to 1392. Imagine all those practical jokes in the past 618 years!
Probably the most famous was BBC’s Panorama program – probably the equivalent of our 7.30 Report – ran ran a famous hoax in 1957, showing Italians harvesting spaghetti from trees. They had claimed that the despised pest, the spaghetti weevil, had been eradicated. A large number of people contacted the BBC wanting to know how to cultivate their own spaghetti trees.
And, in 1998, Burger King ran an advertisement in USA Today saying that people could get a Whopper for left-handed people whose condiments were designed to drip out of the right side. Not only did customers order the new burgers, but some specifically requested the ‘old’, right-handed burger.
This is also Edible Book Day which we’re not even going into …

• 1857 – Herman ‘Moby Dick’ Melville publishes The Confidence-Man (good day for it).
• 1912 – The Greek athlete Konstantinos Tsiklitiras breaks the world record in the standing long jump jumping 3.47 meters.
• 1924 – Adolf Hitler is sentenced to five years in jail for his participation in the ‘Beer Hall Putsch’. However, he spends only nine months in jail, during which he writes the book Mein Kampf.
• 1946 – A 7.8 magnitude earthquake near the Aleutian Islands creates a tsunami that strikes the Hawaiian Islands killing 159.
• 1970 – President Richard Nixon signs the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act into law, requiring the Surgeon General’s warnings on tobacco products and banning cigarette advertisements on television.
• 1976 – Apple Computer is formed by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.
• 1981 – Daylight saving time is introduced in the USSR (which would really help with their two hours of daylight during winter).
• 1984 – R & B singer, Marvin Gaye, shot and killed by his father … with the gun he’d given his old man four months previously.
• 2001 – Former Yugoslavian President Slobodan Milošević surrenders to police, to be tried on charges of war crimes.
•  2001 – Same-sex marriage becomes legal in the Netherlands, the first country to allow it.
• 2002 – The Netherlands legalizes euthanasia, becoming the first nation in the world to do so.

Arrivals

Toshirō ‘Seven Samurai’ Mifune (1920), Debbie Reynolds (1932), Ali McGraw (1938), David Gower (1957) and Susan ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ Boyle (1961).


Quote




“If you can’t find peace within yourself, you’ll never find it anywhere else”
- Marvin Gaye

Steve Jobs to John Sculley, encouraging the Pepsi President to join Apple:
“Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
(After joining Apple, Sculley later sacked Jobs)