March 14

Some days are just busier than others are. The 14th is one such day. For instance, on the 14th in 1489, Catherine Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, (pictured) woke up one morning and found herself a bit short of cash. To remedy this singularly unpleasant turn of events, she sold her kingdom to Venice. The reaction of her subjects has been lost to time. Also on the 14th, in 1757, on-board the HMS Monarch, Admiral John Byng was executed by a firing squad for neglect of duty. Who would have imagined that the British were such sticklers for details of that sort? The 14th in 1883 saw the death of Karl Marx. Contrary to popular belief, he was not the fifth Marx Brother, but a social theorist whose work has been largely misunderstood by university undergraduates and tenured professors everywhere. This date in 1984 was not a particularly good one for Gerry Adams, head of Sinn Fein. He was the target of, and seriously wounded in, a rather amateurish assassination attempt in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Overall, the 14th is more or less a wasteland brightened only in the latter part of the twentieth century by the birth of Marieke Elizabeth Perchik in 1990.