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A lifetime of therapy cannot reveal in as vivid detail, or affect one as viscerally, as a dog’s behavioral diagnosis of our innermost feelings.
— Kevin Behan
Reading Time: 5 minutes 30 seconds
Today is Wednesday, September 27th, the 270th day of 2023. There are 95 days left in the year. It is Ancestor Appreciation Day, National Chocolate Milk Day, National Corned Beef Hash Day, and World Tourism Day.
On This Day
In 1777, Lancaster, Pennsylvania became the capital of the United States for one day after Congress evacuated Philadelphia.
In 1854, the steamship SS Arctic, making its way from New York from Liverpool, collided in fog with the French steamer Vesta. More than 300 people perished.
In 1908, production of the Model T began at Ford’s Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit.
In 1938, comedian Bob Hope premiered a new song, “Thanks for the Memory,” on his eponymous NBC radio show.
In 1940, the Tripartite Pact was signed in Berlin by Germany, Japan, and Italy.
In 1956, U.S. Air Force Captain Milburn G. Apt became the first person to exceed Mach 3. Shortly thereafter, his Bell X-2 spun out of control, and Apt was killed.
In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. A wildly inaccurate screed against pesticides, the book helped spark the “environmental” movement, and contributed to the banning of DDT, which cost millions of lives around the world.
In 1996, the Battle of Kabul ended in a Taliban victory, and the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was established.
In 2012, in Minneapolis, a gunman shot seven people, killing five, and then killed himself.
In 2020, Azerbaijan launched an offensive against the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh, inhabited predominantly by ethnic Armenians.
Today’s Birthdays
Baseball Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt is 74. Former actress and all-around dingbat Gwyneth Paltrow is 51. Singer-songwriter Avril Lavigne is 39.
The Links
The cluelessness of Neil deGrasse Tyson (spiked)
“There is a particular kind of American science populariser or (to use Tyson’s preferred term) ‘educator’ that seems particularly prone to fall into this trap. They can often be identified by a waistcoat, or a quirky bow tie. A few years ago, it was Bill Nye the Science Guy. His Netflix series, Bill Nye Saves the World, featured a cringe segment about the gender ‘spectrum’, in which he insisted that sex is not binary (it really is). Even worse was the rap it included about ‘sex junk’ that precipitated a spike in eye-bleach sales that could be seen from the moon.”
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