December 12!

Hi.  Welcome back and all that.  Away we go for this date.

It's 1408. and you're a Luxembourger who happens to be king of Hungary.  You decide to create a new Order of chivalry.  Eventually, you widen the membership to include all kinds of relatively unimportant people who owe you fealty.  You call it The Order of the Dragon.  Well, said order was founded on this date.  Today, nobody knows much about it, or cares.  But we do!  Because one of the later members was Vlad II of Wallachia, and he was known as "Vlad the Dragon".  After he died, his son was given a nickname that was a diminutive of that.  He was called "Dracula".  And now you know the rest of the story, which is admittedly pretty weak.

In 1911, India gets a new capital, as the government moves from Calcutta to Delhi.  No idea why, but as somebody said about Constantinople "that's nobody's business but the Turks".  Which has nothing to do with India, mind you. 

Things get exciting in 1941, all over the place.  Japanese Zero fighters raid Batangas Field in the Phillipines, while over at Wake Island the Marines sink 4 Japanese ships via aircraft.  The UK declares war on Bulgaria.  Hungary and Romania declare war on the US, and India declares war on Japan.  Got all that?  Oh, and in Berlin, Hitler announces the extermination of the Jews.  I presume by "announce" they mean he tells those people who will think it's a good idea, and not that he goes on the radio to tell everyone.  But I could be wrong. 

And finally, in 2000 the US Supreme Court rules that when a state has a clearly written law stating that X shall occur, it means that X shall occur; not that X might occur unless some of the people there want the opposite of X, in which case they can change the rules on the fly in order to make it look like something happened other than what really did.  Specifically, they rule that since Florida's election laws state that, on a given day,  the State SHALL certify the candidate with the most votes as the winner of the election; and that Bush had the most votes on that day, despite numerous recounts (using magically changing rules, all of which just happened to favor Gore); therefore Bush won the election there.  To a democrat, of course, this means that Bush won more votes than their candidate, and therefore must have stolen the election.  And they continue to hold this belief, despite all the evidence that their candidate tried to, you know, steal the election.  Ah, the glories of stupidity.