July 16 (according to AOL): a VERY auspicious day.

[BlueIris]

For those of you who don't use AOHell, I just wanted to post the charming (and for that service provider, bizarre) list of events under the AOL "Today in History" segment on its home page. One term comes to mind, people: instant-karma:

Today is Saturday, July 16, the 197th day of 2005. There are 168 days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

On July 16, 1945, the United States exploded its first experimental atomic bomb, in the desert of Alamogordo, N.M.

On this date:

In 1790, the District of Columbia was established as the seat of the United States government.

In 1862, David G. Farragut became the first rear admiral in the United States Navy.

In 1918, Russia's Czar Nicholas II, his empress and their five children were executed by the Bolsheviks.

In 1935, the first parking meters were installed, in Oklahoma City.

In 1951, the novel ''The Catcher in the Rye'' by J.D. Salinger was first published.

In 1969, Apollo 11 blasted off from Cape Kennedy on the first manned mission to the surface of the moon.

In 1973, during the Senate Watergate hearings, former White House aide Alexander P. Butterfield publicly revealed the existence of President Nixon's secret taping system.

In 1979, Saddam Hussein became president of Iraq.

In 1980, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan won the Republican presidential nomination at the party's convention in Detroit.

In 1999, John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, Carolyn, and her sister, Lauren Bessette, died when their single-engine plane, piloted by Kennedy, plunged into the Atlantic Ocean near Martha's Vineyard, Mass.

Ten years ago: William Barloon and David Daliberti, the two Americans who were imprisoned in Iraq for crossing the border from Kuwait four months earlier, were released.

Five years ago: Families and friends of the victims of the TWA Flight 800 explosion broke ground for a new memorial on the Long Island shore not far from where the plane went down, killing all 230 people on board.

One year ago: Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in prison and five months of home confinement by a federal judge in New York for lying about a stock sale. Some 90 children were killed in a school fire in southern India. Former Georgia Gov. George Busbee died in Savannah at age 76.

Today's Birthdays

TV director Vincent Sherman is 99. Actor Barnard Hughes is 90. Former Attorney General Dick Thornburgh is 73. Soul singer William Bell is 66. Actor Corin Redgrave is 66. Former tennis player Margaret Court is 63. Violinist Pinchas Zukerman is 57. Actor-singer Ruben Blades is 57. Rock composer-musician Stewart Copeland is 53. Dancer Michael Flatley is 47. Actress Phoebe Cates is 42. Country singer Craig Morgan is 40. Actor-comedian Will Ferrell is 38. Actress Rain Pryor is 36. Actor Corey Feldman is 34. Rock musician Ed Kowalczyk (Live) is 34.

Thought for Today

''In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.'' - J. Robert Oppenheimer, American physicist (1904-1967).

Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. All active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.

[BlueIris]

1. Kick. Yes, I am kicking my own post.

Because--!! People, will you LOOK at these events! They're insane. What do you think 2005 will add to the list?

[BlueIris]

2. Kick, one more time.

For some reason, I never noticed until looking at the Thought for the Day here that Oppenheimer died at age 63. Oldish for that generation, but still. I didn't know it had happened then. I always pictured him an old, old man at his death.

[Squeech]

3. Oppenheimer was suspected by red baiters

By the time of the HUAC hearings, the McCarthyist paranoids had decided Oppenheimer was politically unreliable, probably because of statements like the above. So, despite the fact that he had kept the biggest secret of the war effort (there was a spy in the Manhattan Project, but it wasn't Oppenheimer) and was also one of the world's foremost experts in the field, they wouldn't let him work on anything-- they withheld his clearance.

Apparently they wanted more people like Teller, who wouldn't mind a bit if his efforts incinerated millions.

[BlueIris]

6. Yes, I know about Oppenheimer's "fall from grace" in the eyes

of the Spy Hunters during the Red Scare, but I had lost track of what happened to him later in his life.

[biscodawg]

4. oh BlueIris

you still use aol...

[BlueIris]

5. Well, we have it at my house. I monitor its contents based on

the idea of "know thine enemy."

[biscodawg]

7. hehe i was just messing with you

:hi:

[BlueIris]

8. Okay. Just as long as everyone knows I don't LIKE looking at it.

It's not something I do for kicks. Well, except for the astrology part (the zodiac stuff is written by my beloved Rick Levine). That's fun.

[supernova]

9. I always knew about Alexander and family

and of course Apollo 11 lifting off on my birthday.

But it's quite a heavy list of significant events for one day. I hadn't known when the atomic experiment was.