THE "ME, ME, ME!" MEME...

A couple of you have posted a Wikipedia Birthday Meme. You go to Wikipedia, enter the day and month of your birth, and look at what it brings up for events. It's rather cool. Then you post three events, two births and a death and pass it on.

That's where I fall down. Because I am so blown away by the results of the Wikipedia search that I can't restrict myself to just three of anything. So here you are, Wikipedia's idea of what April 15th can bring, besides me:

TOO COOL (or WEIRD)
FOR ME TO COPE WITH:

1492: EXACTLY 500 years before yours truly,
1492: Leonardo da Vinci is born.

1832: EXACTLY 120 years before yours truly,
1832: Wilhelm Busch, German satiric poet and
1832: one of my life-long culture heroes, is born.

1912: EXACTLY 40 years before yours truly,
1912: Kim Il-sung, founder of North Korea, is born.


STILL PRETTY COOL:

1469: Guru Nanak Dev, founder of Sikhism, born

1684: Catherine the Great of Russia born

1738: premiere of Handel's opera Serse
1738: [that's "Xerxes" in Italian, guys]

1755: publication in London of Samuel Johnson's
1738: Dictionary of the English Language

1889: Thomas Hart Benton, great US muralist, born

1894: Bessie Smith born (sing it!)

1947: Jackie Robinson debuts for the Brooklyn
1738: Dodgers, breaking the color line

1990: Emma Watson, English actress born


NOW THIS IS PECULIAR:

1865: John Wilkes Booth shoots Abraham Lincoln;
1912: Lincoln dies

1912: The Titanic strikes an iceberg and sinks
1912: (Leonardo di Caprio NOT onboard, alas)

1945: Bergen-Belsen concentration camp liberated
1738: by the British 11th Armoured Division

2002: apparently in honor of my fiftieth birthday,
1738: an Air China Boeing 767-200, flight CA129
1738: crashes into hillside during heavy rain and fog
1738: near Busan, South Korea, killing 128



AND THESE ARE THE DEATHS:

1446: Filippo Brunelleschi, designer of the
1738: Florence cathedral's "impossible" dome (b. 1377)

1764: Madame de Pompadour, mistress of King Louis XV
1738: (b. 1721)

1889: Father Damien, Belgian missionary to Hawaii's lepers
1738: (b. 1840)

1927: Gaston Leroux, author of The Phantom of the Opera
1738: (b. 1868)

1980: Jean-Paul Sartre, French philosopher and writer,
1738: Nobel Prize laureate (b. 1905)

1983: Corrie ten Boom, Dutch author
1738: and Holocaust survivor (b. April 15, 1892)

1986: Jean Genet, French author
1738: (b. 1910)

1990: Greta Garbo, Swedish actress
1738: (b. 1905)

1998: Pol Pot, Cambodian dictator
1998: (b. 1925)

and last, but for DARN TOOTIN' SURE not least, my idol,

2000: Edward Gorey, American illustrator (b. 1925)