March 13th Thought for the day plus some interesting historical facts

March 13th and look what's peeping through the soil in my yard. I don't know about the rest of you but I'm ready for Spring.

Here's some interesting historical facts courtesy of Wikipedia

874 – The bones of Saint Nicephorus are interred in the Church of the Holy Apostles, Constantinople.
1138 – Cardinal Gregorio Conti is elected Antipope as Victor IV, succeeding Anacletus II.
1639 – Harvard College is named for clergyman John Harvard.
1781 – William Herschel discovers Uranus.
1845 – Felix Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto receives its première performance in Leipzig with Ferdinand David as soloist.
1862 – American Civil War: The U.S. federal government forbids all Union army officers to return fugitive slaves, thus effectively annulling the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and setting the stage for the Emancipation Proclamation.
1865 – American Civil War: The Confederate States of America agree to the use of African American troops.
1881 – Alexander II of Russia is killed near his palace when a bomb is thrown at him. (Gregorian date: it was March 1 in the Julian calendar then in use in Russia.)
1897 – San Diego State University is founded.
1930 – The news of the discovery of Pluto is telegraphed to the Harvard College Observatory.
1933 – Great Depression: Banks in the U.S. begin to re-open after President Franklin D. Roosevelt mandates a "bank holiday".
1938 – World News Roundup is broadcast for the first time on CBS Radio in the United States.
1943 – The Holocaust: German forces liquidate the Jewish ghetto in Kraków.
1954 – Battle of Điện Biên Phủ: Viet Minh forces attack the French.
1957 – Cuban student revolutionaries storm the presidential palace in Havana in a failed attempt on the life of President Fulgencio Batista.
1964 – American Kitty Genovese is murdered, reportedly in view of neighbors who did nothing to help her, prompting research into the bystander effect.
1969 – Apollo program: Apollo 9 returns safely to Earth after testing the Lunar Module.
1985 – The Kenilworth Road riot takes place at an association football match at Kenilworth Road in Luton, England with disturbances before, during and after an F.A. Cup 6th Round tie between Luton Town F.C. and Millwall F.C..
1988 – The Seikan Tunnel, the longest undersea tunnel in the world, opens between Aomori and Hakodate, Japan.
1991 – The United States Department of Justice announces that Exxon has agreed to pay $1 billion for the clean-up of the Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska.
1992 – An earthquake registering 6.8 on the Richter scale kills over 500 in Erzincan, eastern Turkey.
1996 – Dunblane massacre: in Dunblane, Scotland, 16 Primary School children and 1 teacher are shot dead by a spree killer, Thomas Watt Hamiltonwho then committed suicide.
1997 – India's Missionaries of Charity chooses Sister Nirmala to succeed Mother Teresa as its leader.
1997 – The Phoenix lights are seen over Phoenix, Arizona by hundreds of people, and by millions on television.
2003 – Human evolution: The journal Nature reports that 350,000-year-old footprints of an upright-walking human have been found in Italy.
2008 – Gold prices on the New York Mercantile Exchange hit $1,000 per ounce for the first time.


And here's our March 13th Thought for the day

“…the banality of consumer society; shopping till it drops.” ~ Professor Niall Ferguson *Niall Ferguson Niall Campbell Douglas Ferguson (born 18 April 1964) is a Scottish historian. He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University. His speciality is international history, economic history, particularly hyperinflation and the bond markets, and British and American imperialism. He is known for his provocative, contrarian views. *Source