Tuesday, June 3, 2008

Did they burp it for freshness?




I swear this isn't the punchline to a joke. "Where do Pringles tube inventors go when they die??" "Their ashes are buried in a potato chip can!" When 89-year-old retired chemist Dr. Fredric J. Baur gathered his family members to discuss his eventual passing on into the great beyond, he told them he wanted to have his remains buried in the invention of which he was most proud: the Pringles tube.

Dr. Baur was working at Procter and Gamble when the iconic potato flake chip-type product was created, and he designed and obtained the patent for its tube-shaped can. According to his daughter Linda, he considered this his "proudest accomplishment."

Today in History -

June 3, 1791 -
The French Assembly passes a resolution bringing decapitation to the common criminal: "Every person condemned to the death penalty shall have his head severed." So it wasn't just for the rich anymore.

June 3, 1888
"Casey at the Bat", subtitled "A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888", is a baseball poem written in 1888 by Ernest Thayer,was published in the San Francisco Examiner on this date.



June 3, 1943 -
Three days after a sailor had been badly injured in a brawl with a group of Hispanics, a mob of 60 servicemen leaves the Los Angeles Naval Reserve Armory and bludgeons anybody wearing a zoot suit. The first two victims are a couple of boys, aged 12 and 13, who were just sitting in the Carmen Theater watching a movie. Thus begins the famous weeklong Zoot Suit Riot.



June 3, 1968 -
Valerie Solanas, author of the SCUM Manifesto, arrives at the art studio of Andy Warhol and shoots him three times in the torso. Warhol barely survives the attempt on his life. Solanas is later jailed and institutionalized. Doctors finish the job Solanas attempted several years later in a NY hospital when they botch a gall bladder operation in 1987.



June 3, 1955
Barbara Graham, a convicted murderer who was executed in the gas chamber along with two accomplices. Susan Hayward won an Academy Award for playing Graham in the movie I Want to Live!



June 3, 1989 -
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini dies after 11 days in a hospital, recovering from surgery to stop internal hemorrhaging. Khomeini became ill when he reallized that through a very bad translation, 73 virgins were not waiting for him but 73 raisins.

June 3, 1991 -
Students throw eggs at South Korean Prime Minister Chung Won Shik. Nobody is injured in the incident at Hankuk University in Seoul. Unfortunately, eight dozen egg embryos are destroyed. South Southern Baptist ministers call for the immediate execute for the rabid pro-choice students.

June 3, 1998 -
15-year-old teen idol Brad Renfro is arrested in Knoxville, Tennessee and charged with possession of marijuana and cocaine. He died January 15, 2008, due to an accidental overdose of heroin and morphine. Gee, I was at least eighteen years old before I was in possession of - oh never mind.

And so it goes.

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