41 AD – After a night of negotiation, Claudius is accepted as Roman Emperor by the Senate. They were caught off guard by the sudden death of Caligula and didn’t know what to do about a competent candidate after the reign of Caligula, marked by scandal and licentiousness.

750 AD – In the Battle of the Zab, the Abbasid rebels defeat the Umayyad Caliphate, leading to overthrow of the dynasty. With no infidels to slaughter, Muslims will quite happily hack away at each other.

1533 – Henry VIII of England secretly marries his second wife Anne Boleyn. She’s already pregnant, but he’s willing to fight the Church to marry her.

1759 – Tipping my hat to my friends of Scottish ancestry, Robert Burns, Scottish poet, is born.

1825 – First US engineering college opens, Rensselaer Polytechnic, Troy, NY

E to the x, dy, dx,
E to the x, dx.
Secant, tangent, cosine, sine,
3.14159.
Square root, cube root, log base e,
Cheers for Rensselaer Poly T.

1858 – The Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn becomes a popular wedding recessional after it is played on this day at the marriage of Queen Victoria’s daughter, Victoria, and Friedrich of Prussia. And that’s how that got started… Today many weddings are ostentatious displays of “Princess For A Day” and dad’s still paying off the bills when the divorce is final.

1915 – Alexander Graham Bell inaugurates U.S. transcontinental telephone service, speaking from New York to Thomas Watson in San Francisco. I remember when a long distance phone call was a big deal: expensive, and usually a portent of some dire and drastic event.

1918 – The Ukrainian people declare independence from Bolshevik Russia. Russia says “no way”. Millions of Ukrainians die, but since it’s communists doing the killing, it’s like no big deal because everybody knows you need to break a few eggs to make an omelet, and communists are, like, good people who are trying to make the world a better place.

1919 – The League of Nations is founded. With all the functionality of tits on a lizard…

1942 – World War II: Thailand declares war on the United States and United Kingdom. Like an ant climbing an elephant’s leg with rape on its mind.

1950 – 73 degrees F (23 C) is the highest temperature ever recorded in Cleveland in January. Environmentalists riot and trash SUV’s.

1971 – Idi Amin leads a coup deposing Milton Obote and becomes Uganda’s president. Becomes the archtype for African dictators, wearing improbable “military” uniforms and terrorizing his people, until the top slot is taken over by Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe, who tends to favor expensive tailored business suits.

1996 – Billy Bailey becomes the last person to be hanged in the USA. We still have the technology.

2011 – The first wave of the Egyptian revolution begins in Egypt, with a series of street demonstrations, marches, rallies, acts of civil disobedience, riots, labor strikes, and violent clashes in Cairo, Alexandria, and throughout other cities in Egypt. The Left is sure that this is going to usher in a new golden age of Egypt. The ‘revolution’ is co-opted by organized fundamentalist Muslims almost immediately. “But it’s like “ARAB SPRING”, man! Freedom ‘n’ stuff, yaknow…” It’s part of the triumphant collusion between the international acumen of Barack Hussein Obama who was raised Muslim and his equally competent Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, who’s all up into Muslim stuff herself since she’s bedding Huma Abedin, Anthony Weiner’s squeeze.