Today in History

[leo-rcc]

22-April-1915: Germans use poison gas

German forces shock Allied soldiers along the Western Front by firing 168 tons of lethal chlorine gas against two French divisions and one Canadian division at Ypres, Belgium. This was the first major gas attack by the Germans and it devastated the Allied line. Immediately after the attack, France and Britain began developing their own chemical weapons and gas masks. With the Germans taking the lead, an extensive number of projectiles filled with deadly substances such as mustard gas, polluted the trenches during the First World War. Using sophisticated gas masks and protective clothing, however, soldiers on both sides eventually negated the military importance of chemical weapons. The Geneva Protocol of 1925 banned the use of chemical weapons in war and the belligerents of the War largely honoured this agreement, primarily for strategic military reasons. Since then, chemical weapons have only been used in a handful of conflicts, and always against forces that lacked gas masks.

[Beelzebub2]

1500 Pedro Alvares Cabral discovered Brazil and claimed it for Portugal.

1509 Henry VIII became king of England.

1616 The Spanish poet Cervantes died in Madrid. (Some sources say April 23.)

1864 Congress authorized the inscription "In God We Trust" on coins minted as U.S. currency.

1889 The land rush in Oklahoma began when it was opened to settlers.

1970 The first Earth Day was observed.

1994 Richard M. Nixon died of a stroke at the age of 81.

[Animavore]

1989 Marathon becomes Snickers.

[leo-rcc]

1989 Marathon becomes Snickers.

It never was Marathon in our country to begin with.

[Animavore]

1989 Marathon becomes Snickers.

It never was Marathon in our country to begin with.

Not my fault you live in a back arse third world country.

[leo-rcc]

1989 Marathon becomes Snickers.

It never was Marathon in our country to begin with.

Not my fault you live in a back arse third world country.

Or that we get our naming convention right first time around.

[Animavore]

I think it's more probable there was a copyright reason it couldn't be called Snickers in UK and Ireland the first time around.

Anyway my post was a joke. It's a reference to Father Ted.
Shame on you for not picking it up

[Feck]

1861 - Colonel Robert E. Lee was appointed commander of Virginia's forces with the rank of major general.

1863 - Union Colonel Benjamin Grierson's troops cut telegraph wires near Macon, Mississippi.

1864 - Union Lieutenant Colonel Francis Drake's troops left Camden, Arkansas

1918: The Royal Navy carries out a daring raid on Zeebrugge, Belgium, briefly blocking the German-held port.

1951: An heroic stand by the 'Glorious Glosters' at the Imjin River, Korea, allows UN forces to regroup.

[leo-rcc]

23-April-1984
In America, Scientists announce the discovery of HTLV-3 virus – which is later renamed HIV.

[Bella Fortuna]

1989 Marathon becomes Snickers.

It never was Marathon in our country to begin with.

Not my fault you live in a back arse third world country.

Or that we get our naming convention right first time around.

*snicker*



or should I say *marathon*

[FBM]

Shakespeare was born and died on the same day. He must have been pretty busy! Max Planck did the first one. I'm constantly reminded of E=hv. Oh, and New Coke was introduced on this date, too.

(I looked all this up for my students earlier today.)

[Feck]

In the UK and Ireland, it was originally sold under the name "Marathon". Mars standardised many of its global brand names and the name was changed to Snickers in 1990. For 18 months before the name changed, the words "Internationally known as Snickers" were printed on the side of the Marathon wrapper. Following the name change, the bar moved from being Britain's ninth most popular bar to the third most popular.

Mars have since re-registered the original name as a UK trademark.

[Pappa]

1985 – Coca-Cola changes its formula and releases New Coke. The response is overwhelmingly negative, and the original formula is back on the market in less than 3 months.

[Animavore]

In the UK and Ireland, it was originally sold under the name "Marathon". Mars standardised many of its global brand names and the name was changed to Snickers in 1990. For 18 months before the name changed, the words "Internationally known as Snickers" were printed on the side of the Marathon wrapper. Following the name change, the bar moved from being Britain's ninth most popular bar to the third most popular.

Mars have since re-registered the original name as a UK trademark.

Yeah. Copying and pasting Wiki is great. Innit?

[FBM]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sada_Abe

[edit] The "Abe Sada Incident"

Site of the "Abe Sada Incident"Ishida and Abe returned to Ogu, where they remained until his death. During their love-making this time, Abe put the knife to the base of Ishida's penis, and said she would make sure he would never play around with another woman. Ishida laughed at this. Two nights into this bout of sex, Abe began choking Ishida, and he told her to continue, saying that this increased his pleasure. She had him do it to her as well. On the evening of May 16, 1936, Abe used her obi sash to cut off Ishida's breathing during orgasm, and they both enjoyed it. They repeated this for two more hours. Once Abe stopped the strangulation, Ishida's face became distorted, and would not return to its normal appearance. Ishida took 30 tablets of a sedative called Calmotin to try to soothe his pain. According to Abe, as Ishida started to doze, he told her, "You'll put the cord around my neck and squeeze it again while I'm sleeping, won't you... If you start to strangle me, don't stop, because it is so painful afterward." Abe commented that she wondered if he had wanted her to kill him, but on reflection decided he must have been joking.[33]

About 2 a.m. on the morning of May 18, 1936, as Ishida was asleep, Abe wrapped her sash twice around his neck and strangled him to death. She later told police, "After I had killed Ishida I felt totally at ease, as though a heavy burden had been lifted from my shoulders, and I felt a sense of clarity." After lying with Ishida's body for a few hours, she next severed his genitalia with the kitchen knife, wrapped them in a magazine cover, and kept them until her arrest three days later.[9][34] With the blood, she wrote, Sada, Kichi Futari-kiri ("Sada, Kichi together") on Ishida's left thigh, and on a bed sheet. She then carved 定 ("Sada", the character for her name) into his left arm. After putting on Ishida's underwear, she left the inn at about 8 a.m., telling the staff not to disturb Ishida.[35] When asked why she had severed Ishida's genitalia, Abe replied, "Because I couldn't take his head or body with me. I wanted to take the part of him that brought back to me the most vivid memories."[36]

After leaving the inn, Abe met Goro Omiya. She repeatedly apologized to him, but Omiya, unaware of the murder, assumed that she was apologizing for having taken another lover. Abe's apologies were for the damage to his political career that she knew his association with her was bound to cause. On May 19, 1936, the newspapers picked up the story. Omiya's career was ruined, and Abe's life was under intense public scrutiny from that point onwards.[37]


[edit] Abe Sada panic
The story immediately became a national sensation, and the ensuing frenzy over her search was called "Abe Sada panic".[9] Police received reports of sightings of Abe from various cities, and one false sighting nearly caused a stampede in the Ginza, resulting in a large traffic jam.[26] In a reference to the recent failed coup in Tokyo, the Ni Ni-Roku Incident ("2-26" or "February 26"), the crime was satirically dubbed the "Go Ichi-Hachi" Incident ("5-18" or "May 18").[28]

On May 19, 1936, Abe went shopping and saw a movie. She stayed in an inn in Shinagawa on May 20, 1936, where she had a massage and drank three bottles of beer. She spent the day writing farewell letters to Omiya, a friend, and Ishida.[35] She planned to commit suicide one week after the murder, and practiced Necrophilia. "I felt attached to Ishida's penis and thought that only after taking leave from it quietly could I then die. I unwrapped the paper holding them and gazed at his penis and scrotum. I put his penis in my mouth and even tried to insert it inside me... Then, I decided that I would flee to Osaka, staying with Ishida's penis all the while. In the end, I would jump from a cliff on Mount Ikoma while holding on to his penis."[38]

At 4:00 in the afternoon, police detectives, suspicious of the alias under which Abe had registered, came to her room. "Don't be so formal," she told them, "You're looking for Sada Abe, right? Well that's me. I am Sada Abe." When the police were not convinced, she displayed Ishida's genitalia as proof.[39]

Abe was arrested and interrogated over eight sessions.[16] The interrogating officer was struck by Abe's demeanor when asked why she had killed Ishida. "Immediately she became excited and her eyes sparkled in a strange way."[40] Her answer was: "I loved him so much, I wanted him all to myself. But since we were not husband and wife, as long as he lived he could be embraced by other women. I knew that if I killed him no other woman could ever touch him again, so I killed him....."[2] In attempting to explain what distinguished Abe's case from over a dozen other similar cases in Japan,[41] William Johnston suggests that it is this answer which captured the imagination of the nation. "She had killed not out of jealousy but out of love."[42] Mark Schreiber notes that the Sada Abe incident occurred at a time when the Japanese media were preoccupied with extreme political and military troubles, including the Ni Ni Roku incident and a looming full-scale war in China. He suggests that a sensationalistic sex scandal such as this served as a welcome national release from the disturbing events of the time.[28] The incident also struck a chord with the ero-guro-nansensu ("erotic-grotesque-nonsense") style popular at the time, and the Sada Abe Incident came to represent that genre for years to come.[43]

When the details of the crime were made public, rumors began to circulate that Ishida's penis was of an extraordinary size. However, the police officer who interrogated Abe after her arrest denied this, saying, "Ishida's was just average. [Abe] told me, 'Size doesn't make a man in bed. Technique and his desire to please me were what I liked about Ishida.'"[40] After her arrest, Ishida's penis and testicles were moved to Tokyo University Medical School's pathology museum. They were put on public display not long after the end of World War II, but they have since disappeared.[9][44]