James Leroy Wilson's one-man magazine.

Friday, March 14, 2014

March 14, 2014

March 14, 2014: today in history (from Wikipedia)

44 BC – "Casca and Cassius decide, on the night before the Assassination of Julius Caesar, that Mark Antony should stay alive." Julius Caesar, that's a Shakespeare play, right? Is it based on real events?

1794 – "Eli Whitney is granted a patent for the cotton gin." With one unfortunate consequence:
The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As a result, the South became even more dependent on plantations and slavery, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of the Southern economy.[14] While it took a single slave about ten hours to separate a single pound of fiber from the seeds, a team of two or three slaves using a cotton gin could produce around fifty pounds of cotton in just one day.[15] The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850.
1964 – "A jury in Dallas finds Jack Ruby guilty of killing Lee Harvey Oswald, the assumed assassin of John F. Kennedy." Well, duh! That remains the only thing we really know about the JFK assassination. 

Notable Quotes (from BrainyQuote unless otherwise sourced)

"Despotism has so often been established in the name of liberty that experience should warn us to judge parties by their practices rather than their preachings." - Raymond Aron (14 March 1905 – 17 October 1983)

"Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath."

"I am in so many movies that are on TV at 2:00 a.m. that people think I am dead."
Michael Caine (born March 14, 1933)

"You cannot get an A if you're afraid of getting an F."
- Quincy Jones (born March 14, 1933)

"At 60, I could do the same things I could do at 30, if I could only remember what those things are." - Billy Crystal (born March 14, 1948)

Song of the Day

Happy 31st, Taylor Hanson!


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