Tolkien Day!

[msmoon]

On This Day:
Wednesday January 3, 2007

This is the 3rd day of the year, with 362 days remaining in 2007.

Fact of the Day: Alaska

Alaska is a land of superlatives. It is, first and foremost, the biggest state in the Union. At 570,000 square miles (365 million acres) it has the equivalent of one-fifth of the landmass of the combined Lower 48 states. (Yes, it's bigger than Texas -- twice as big, in fact -- and it would take three Californias, 12 New Yorks, or 470 Rhode Islands to equal it in size!) It is home to North America's tallest peak, Mount McKinley (known to the locals as Denali) whose 20,320-foot crown dominates the Alaska Range. Barrow, on the Arctic Ocean, is the most northerly community in the U.S. Even its disasters lead the pack: the Good Friday earthquake near Anchorage in 1964 measured 9.2 on the Richter scale, the highest ever recorded in the nation.

Holidays

• Feast day of St. Peter Balsam, St. Bertilia of Mareuil, St. Antherus, pope, and St. Genevieve or Genovefa.
• The U.S. Congress assembles, according to the Constitution of the United States of America, unless a different day is appointed.

Events

• 1521 - Martin Luther was excommunicated from the Roman Catholic Church by Pope Leo X.
• 1777 - General George Washington's army routed the British, led by Lord Cornwallis, in the Battle of Princeton, New Jersey.
• 1833 - Britain seized control of the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic.
• 1868 - The Meiji Restoration reestablished the authority of Japan's emperor (after 700 years) and brought the fall of the military rulers known as shoguns.
• 1888 - The drinking straw was patented by Marvin Stone of Washington, D.C.
• 1903 - South Dakota's Wind Cave National Park was established.
• 1924 - Two years after British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the tomb of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen near Luxor, Egypt, he uncovers the greatest treasure of the tomb -- a stone sarcophagus containing a solid gold coffin with the mummy of Tutankhamen.
• 1938 - The "March of Dimes" campaign to fight polio was organized.
• 1947 - U.S. Congressional proceedings were televised for the first time; these were the opening ceremonies of the 80th Congress.
• 1959 - President Dwight Eisenhower signed a proclamation admitting Alaska to the Union as the 49th state.
• 1961 - The United States broke diplomatic relations with Cuba.
• 1962 - Pope John XXIII excommunicated Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro.
• 1990 - Ousted Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega surrendered to U.S. forces.
• 1993 - President George Bush and Russian President Boris Yeltsin signed a historic nuclear missile-reduction treaty in Moscow.
• 2004 - Spirit, the first of the two Mars Exploration Rover missions, landed.

Births

• 106 B.C.E. - (Marcus Tullius) Cicero, Roman statesman.
• 1624 - William Tucker, the first African-American believed to have had his birth recorded in the New World.
• 1793 - Lucretia Coffin Mott, American women's rights advocate and founder of the first Women's Rights Convention.
• 1892 - J.R.R. Tolkien, British writer. British writer? That's it?! How about 'Kick-ass Author' ? That works better for me at least.
• 1945 - Stephen Stills, American singer and songwriter.
• 1956 - Mel Gibson, Australian film actor.

Deaths

• 1967 - Jack Ruby, American who shot accused presidential assassin Lee Harvey Oswald, of cancer in a Dallas hospital.
• 1979 - Conrad Hilton, American hotelier and founder of the Hilton Hotel chain.
• 1980 - Joy Adamson, Austrian naturalist and author, best known for her book, "Born Free."