Birth Date Meme

[rj_anderson]

It's everywhere by now, but I gacked this particular version from npkedit:

Go to Wikipedia and look up your birthday (excluding the year). List three neat facts, two births and two deaths in your journal, including the year.

March 23

Neat Facts:

1801 - Tsar Paul I of Russia is struck with a sword, then strangled, and finally trampled to death in his bedroom at St. Michael Palace.
1839 - First recorded use of "OK" as an abbreviation for "oll korrect" in the Boston Morning Post.
1989 - A 1,000-foot diameter Near-Earth asteroid misses the Earth by 400,000 miles.

Births:
1429 - Margaret of Anjou, queen of Henry VI of England (d. 1482)
1912 - Wernher von Braun, German-born physicist and engineer (d. 1977)

Deaths:
1754 - Johann Jakob Wettstein, Swiss theologian (b. 1693)
1964 - Peter Lorre, Hungarian-born actor (b. 1904)

Considering that I know about eight people who share my birthday (one of them my sister-in-law, another the son of my next-door neighbour), the results of this meme were surprisingly... not that interesting. Though I do feel sorry for Tsar Paul, because ouch.

Comments

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

Apparently it was a bunch of upper crust young men who went in for jokey mis-spellings.

Paul sounds as if he needed nearly as much effort to kill as Rasputin.

[pharnabazus.livejournal.com]

Rasputin sounds as though someone had given him a Bezoar! He seems to have been immune to "any" poison! What else was tried in the end? Drowning? Bullets?