…-Dary! Legendary! So now that you’ve decided to stick with me after all, let’s make the wheels of time come off the sense wagon, shall we? First column of History Bites – here we go! (Note: the fact that this entry hasn’t been posted yesterday as intended could be attributed to any number of technical reasons, but I’d rather tell the truth: God played a prank on me)
On this day in 1192 King Conrad of Montferrat, also known as Conrad 1, was relieved of his crown and ability to breath only one day after being elected to the throne of Jerusalem. The monarch had been targeted by a Muslim sect named – and I’m not making that up- the Hashshashin.
1902 marked a milestone for Western civilization as calculations using the Gregorian calendar’s definition of Year Zero proclaimed April 28th to be the crossing of History’s one billionth minute. Celebrations for the momentous event were quickly dampened when Thomas Edison filed a lawsuit claiming he was the sole inventor and patent owner of the Gregorian calendar. His subsequent campaign to rename it the “Edisonian” calendar has yet to stop being laughed at.
The date was also graced by famed explorer Thor Heyerdahl, in 1947 this time, with the launching of his 101-day expedition on a raft to prove the possibility of colonization in Polynesia by Peruvians centuries ago. His book Kon Tiki relating the journey remained a disappointing bomb until Thor decided to write a 1000-page companion book to explain his last name’s pronunciation; that one would later be revealed to have been ghostwritten by Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou. A filmed version is currently being developed out of Heyerdahl’s third book “This is How You SPELL my Friggin Name”, starring Shia LaBeouf and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau.
Twenty years after was the grand opening for the gigantic Expo 67, the world fair held in Montreal Canada which had been delayed by copyright lawsuits from the estate of Thomas Edison. The international gathering eventually originated the very unfortunate naming of the city’s newly acquired major league baseball team. And that’s not even a joke – they were actually named the Montreal Expos…
1998 was the stage of another lawsuit, this time by former child star Alyssa Milano against people who made a few hundred thousand fazools selling allegedly truncated pictures of her denuded self through pornographic outlets. The young woman recanted her legal actions when told by her agent that more people had bought said pictures than seen her last 10 acting projects, combined. Instead of condemning the product, the agent argued, more money could be made from claiming copyrights on them, much like a certain inventor of the late 19th /early 20th century.
And finally, on a more serious note, April 28th 2005 was the date where international agreements were finally reached on the long-gestating Patent Law Treaty, which aims to avoid issuing multiple patents of identical nature all over the globe. Guess who was spinning in his grave on that day…
WOW: Words Of (a certain) Wisdom
“I haven’t failed. I’ve found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”
- Thomas Alva Edison