This Month in History:

• 2001 AD: After opening a box of Lucky Charms™ cereal, cashier David Bowman exclaims “My God, it’s full of stars!”
• 1978 AD: Six-year-old Ruth West of Dublin, Virginia completes a wax-crayon-on-paper rendering of her family.
• 1950 AD: Edward Teller successfully convinces the US Government to fund his “Super Atomic Destruct-o-Pod,” later renamed the Hydrogen Bomb.
• 1932 AD: Former choir-boy Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili finds a new, snappier name for himself after reading through an imported comic book about Superman.
• 1915 AD: A friend convinces Manfred Von Richthofen that red might be more suitable plane color than pink or periwinkle.
• 1876 AD: American President U.S. Grant, in an incident echoing Canute, spends half an hour firing a shotgun into the Potomac River.
• 1805 AD: Napoleon Bonaparte, in celebration of his victory at Austerlitz, shaves off his famous mustache and orders all extant portraits changed to reflect his new, mustache-less state.
• 1770 AD: Georgia resident George Walton is forced to pay a Window Tax of seven shillings.
• 1654 AD: Haudenosaunee trader Nowadaga asks Frenchman Jacques Harve about the cost of metal axes.
• 1485 AD: Edsin of Leeds attempts to take up Richard III on his now-famous deal, by offering the king a pony. Angered, Richard tries in vain to explain hyperbole to the man.
• 901 AD: Rolf Gadweneson decrees that the gog should replace the hulf as the official unit of field size.
• 79 AD: Using the power of steam and water pressure, Hero of Alexandria becomes the first person to split an atomic nucleus. While the experiment does succeed, the nearby city of Pompeii never recovers.
• 14 AD: Caesar Augustus, shortly before his death, asks for and receives the little-known Third Settlement from the Roman Senate granting him the title of Auarca Formator Magnus, or Great Cobbler.
• 3 AD: The unluckiest man in Han China, Li Yuan Bo, trips over a pig, falls down a flight of stairs, bowls over an imperial eunuch, and sprains his ankle, thus missing his civil service test for Xindu City fowl purveyance inspector (goslings), grade 3.
• 12 BC: Finding a comet in the sky, his noodle soup cold, and the court bards incredibly dull, King Geumwa of Korea decides to play with his magnet collection.
• 102 BC: Lost on a trip from Puerto Rico, an Arawak Indian lands in Florida. He settles there. He is one of the few people to make such a voyage who could legitimately start a sentence with “When I first came to this country…”
• 323 BC: Bectobenthes of Sparta, hanging around Mesopotamia after Alexander the Great’s death, makes one of the most artful, witty and elegant put downs in history. Unfortunately the Babylonian he mocks doesn’t speak any Greek and goes about his business undisturbed.
• 568 BC: Pythagoras, age 14, struggles to learn how to tie his sandals.
• 776 BC: Parshvanatha, a revered figure of perfect enlightenment in Jainism, is found locked in a closet, tangled in his robes, with a particularly frustrated look on his face. One rescuer is heard to snicker loudly.
• 803 BC: A penguin is caught by fishermen off the Iberian Peninsula. Though no one really complains, everyone agrees the meat is a bit gamy.
• 965 BC: Orctobaleneomathimphus the Cupbearer finally gets a vacation after fifteen years of service.
• 1500 BC: Polynesians import the pig to Fiji. While the pig doesn’t particularly wish to go, it realizes its social calendar is rather empty and thinks “Oh, what the hell?”
• 1675 BC: The ancestors of the Yuki peoples arrive near Mount Hood in California. In an episode of historical coincidence, they also name the mountain Hood, though in their language this roughly translates as “fetid pancreas.”
• 2001 BC: D’vshar Bo-min is accidentally infected with a bacteria which kills the parasitic worm that caused his lifelong blindness. “Bless the gods, it’s full of those things,” he exclaims upon seeing the night sky for the first time.
• 2263 BC: Melthep the Akkadian has a bit too much prot-beer and insults Sermin the Akkadian’s wife. Sermin offers to let Melthep sleep with his wife in order to disprove the charges.
• 12000 BC: Upnashatar breaks his leg on a solo hunting expedition. While he does figure out the secret of setting and splinting a broken bone, he dies before he reaches home, delaying the spread of this valuable discovery for another 3000 years.
• 600,000 BC: Durg of the Brown Field People kills the last surviving dinosaur who, thanks to luck and an indeterminate life-span had survived for millions of years.