September 30

The 30th in 1888 was not the best day that either Elizabeth Stride or Catherine Eddowes had ever had. In fact, it was probably their worst day. In any event, good or bad, it was their last day. On that day, they became numbers three and four of the five confirmed victims of Jack the Ripper. Jack’s last victim, Mary Jane Kelly wasn’t murdered until November 9. After this, for a long time, any miscellaneous body part found floating in the Thames River (Several turned up there) and any corpse found inconveniently lying around London seems to have been attributed to Jack but none were ever confirmed as his victims. I’m reasonably certain that the t-shirts proclaiming “My friends went to London and all I got was this nasty cut on my throat” weren’t even printed by the time Jack’s trail went cold.

September 29

There are a growing number of people who are clamoring for a resumption of the development of nuclear power as an energy source. I hope that those in positions to bring this about will make note of the incidents of failure in the nuclear arena. The Three Mile Island nuclear disaster, on March 28, 1979 affected only 25,000 people and the effects remained localized; on the other hand the Chernobyl Disaster occurred over a number of days, beginning on April 26, 1986, and resulted in the relocation of more than 336,000 people and the abandonment of an entire city because of the meltdown of a nuclear reactor. Hopefully someone will remind the ‘powers that be’ what happened on September 29, 1957 when a non-nuclear explosion, which had the impact of 75 tons of TNT at a nuclear processing facility in the Russian city of Mayak, caused a failure of a cooling unit for a tank holding tens of thousands of tons of dissolved nuclear waste. The explosion of this tank resulted in the relocation of well over 370,000 people and the total abandonment of an entire region, an area that may never be habitable at any point in the future. But, heck, we’ll be much more careful this time around, right?

September 28

What television personality gave their first nationwide television exposure to Bo Diddley, Elvis Presley, The Beatles the Doors and the Rolling Stones and banned Jackie Mason from appearing on his show because of a perceived slight? Surprisingly, it was Ed Sullivan, who was born on the 28th in 1901.

September 27

Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, Representative Hale Boggs, Senator John Cooper, Allen Dulles, Director of the CIA, Representative Gerald Ford, John J. McCloy, Director of the World Bank, and Senator Richard Russell, Jr. were called upon to investigate the assassination of President John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Future Senator Arlen Spector acted as counsel for the commissioners. Why this was referred to as the Warren Commission is beyond me, though I’m sure there is a pretty good story behind that one. On the 27th in 1964, the Warren Commission, released its report. Controversy has dogged the Warren Commission ever since. It’s report, also the focal point of controversy, firmly concluded that it had been Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, who killed Kennedy. The current administration has recently released classified documents which prove with a clarity that has come to be expected of President Bush that it was actually Professor Plum in the Library with the candlestick that killed Kennedy.

September 26

When Francis Drake limped in to Plymouth England on the 26th in 1580, he became the first Englishman to circumnavigate the globe. He wasn’t the first person to sail around the world, Magellan and others beat him to that by over 60 years, and he wasn’t ‘Sir’ Francis Drake at the time; the whole sir bit would have to wait until 1581. Drake’s ship, the Golden Hind, with its crew of 59 were all that was left of five ships and more than 150 men he had when he left Plymouth in 1577 with a commission from Queen Elizabeth to essentially take what he could from the Spanish ships he might encounter. Drake was quite successful at taking down Spanish treasure ships and Elizabeth’s share of what Drake brought back in the Golden Hind exceeded all of the crown’s income for the entire year, which is why Elizabeth knighted him on April 4, 1581. So much for all the romantic stories that have clung to Drake throughout the centuries, though I suspect that in Spain they have a much different view of him.

September 25

In the late 17th century, in Boston, Massachusetts, Richard Pierce and Benjamin Harris tried to put out a newspaper with the ambitious name of "Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick". Their intent was to publish a monthly newspaper with multiple pages as a counterpoint to the broadsides that were widely published in the North American colonies. This would be the first newspaper published in the Americas. The broadsides were large sheets of paper that had news items printed on them that were published by affixing them to what were essentially bulletin boards. Pierce and Harris intended for their newspaper to have 10 pages of all the news fit to print, focusing on meeting the needs of all the enquiring minds lurking in the shadows of late 17th century North America. The paper was supposed to be published “monthly, or if any glut of occurrences happen, oftener”. The newspaper, in spite of their best intentions, had only three pages when it made its first and only appearance on the 25th in 1691.

September 24

It seems as if no aspect of sports is free from controversy. At the 1988 Summer Olympics, the 100-meter sprint event was held on September 24th. In this event, Ben Johnson beat both Carl Lewis and Linford Christie winning with a record time of 9.79 seconds. I know virtually nothing about this, or any other event, but that seems like an incredibly fast time in which to run 100 meters. Unfortunately for Johnson he was subsequently disqualified in what became a rather a high profile case of doping in sports. I looked into that a bit and was surprised to find out that doping was not the act of displaying really dopey behavior instead had a great deal to do with the use of performance enhancing drugs, in this instance some sort of steroid. Further research reveals that Johnson was disqualified not for use of steroids but for bad writing (Volpone is a good example of that) and for the fact that he had died on August 6, 1617.