Well first on our list is Louis XVI (that's 16, for those counting at home) of France. Needless to say, we all know how he died- Dr. Guillotine's little toy. He supported the Americans in our Revolution, which makes it ironic that he was killed in order to further the French Revolution, which had some of the same ideals, albeit carried to a crazy extreme. Oddly, rather than execute Louis XVI of France, the revolutionaries referred to him as Louis Capet, after the name of the Founder of the French Dynasty. (Louis was a Bourbon, but the Bourbons were directly descended from Hugh Capet, who was king of France in the late 10th century.
We haven't done an RIH for a while, which you might recall stands for "Rot in Hell", and is used for those who don't deserve to rest in peace. And oh, look: we have an RIH today. For Vladimir Lenin. It was 1924 when he removed his evil stench from the world, though his ugly visage is still kept out for public display. (I would say "ridicule", but even now God help you if you ridicule him too much- especially in Russia). If you don't know about him, then you seriously need a history class, and I don't have time to teach you. Go read up on him. But I feel safe in believing that he's someplace in the bowels of Hell, drinking rat urine with Adolph Hitler and Lenin's fellow Marxists Stalin and Mao. Hopefully Che Guevara is their bus boy, as he wasn't really up to their level of evil (only by a trick of destiny- he didn't have the large stage that they did. Had he been Russian, he would be mentioned in the same breath, but he spent his life in the Americas, and was also incompetent, unlike the others).
And ironically, speaking of communists and their ilk, George Orwell also died on this date in 1950. It's actually surprising he lived that long, given the health issues he'd been dealing with for decades. Not all of them were his fault, of course. The bullet wound to the throat during the Spanish Civil War being one of the latter. But he seemed to contract every major illness that came along the pike. I will say that, if a broad base of experience is considered a necessity for a writer, then Orwell (aka Eric Arthur Blair, according to his birth certificate) certainly had that ticket punched. He was born in India, and later worked as an Imperial Policeman in Burma. And lots of other stuff too, which are too numerous to go into. At any rate, he wrote Animal Farm, which apparently didn't appeal to his Communist friends. And I'm guessing that 1984 didn't go over real well either. Both books are cited nowadays as examples of government perfidy, treachery, and misinformation. Of course, a lot of it is misunderstood. Especially Animal Farm, which is a story about how a revolution goes awry, when certain animals (who are "smarter" than the others, at least in their own minds), take charge instead of going along with the previous tenet that all animals are equal. There are a lot of parallels to how people today think, and sadly many of our elected officials- including the president- believe that some animals are more equal than others. At least that's how it looks to those of us who don't get to make up or change the rules to suit ourselves.
In 1959, filmmaker Cecil B. DeMille died. He must have killed almost as many men as the Waco Kid. And if you don't get that one, go watch Blazing Saddles. It's one of the best movies EVER! At any rate, DeMille directed a lot of Epic Movies, which resulted in lots of deaths (hence the above quote). His last, best, and most successful film was The Ten Commandments. Now do you understand?
It was 1993 that we lost Charlie Gehringer. He is one of the greatest second basemen of all time. A teammate nicknamed him "the Mechanical Man", on the grounds that you could wind him up on Opening Day and then forget about him. He was durable, a very good hitter, and a solid fielder. He was born in Fowlerville Michigan (and trust me, I've spent enough time there to know he's still the best thing to ever happen to that town), and played for the Detroit Tigers- so those two facts, and his Hall of Fame career make him incredibly, stupendously, overwhelmingly cool! One of his managers, Mickey Cochrane, joked about Gehringer that he "says 'hello' on Opening Day, 'goodbye' on closing day, and in between hits .350". He once gave a speech which consisted of "I'm known around baseball as saying very little, and I'm not going to spoil my reputation". He also was the first player to ever get a "natural cycle" in the Major Leagues. That's a single followed by a double, then a triple, and finally a home run. Quite a guy.
In 1998, the REAL Steve McGarrett died. You might know him as Jack Lord. His real name was John Joseph Patrick Ryan. He attended the Merchant Marine Academy, and was interested in art even as a boy- which isn't surprising, since he had quite a reputation as an artist in his later years. He was apparently offered a certain TV role, to replace the actor who made an appearance or two in the role, but had to be replaced. Lord wanted 50% ownership, so Gene Roddenberry instead gave the role of Kirk to William Shatner. (At least according to Shatner, who was in a position to maybe know). When he later was given the role in Hawaii 5-0, he insisted that some of the roles be given to native Hawaiians, rather than people from the Mainland. He also owned a chunk of the show. Sadly, his final years included Alzheimer's Disease, but he died of congestive heart failure. When his wife died, his considerable estate went to Hawaiian charities.
A few months ago, I stumbled on an interesting article online about a now-extinct Native language in Alaska. The language is called Eyak, and the article told about a young Frenchman who somehow got interested in speaking it, despite its lack of usefulness. So he taught himself to speak it, and ultimately got to Alaska, where he met a professor who assisted him in the details of the tongue. The guy now speaks it fluently, and gives lessons in speaking it. All of which is relevant only because it was on this date in 2008 (before the French guy went to Alaska, sadly) that Marie Smith Jones died. She's important only because she was the last person to speak Eyak natively, so it was her death that made it "extinct".
And speaking of extinct, today's lesson is also extinct.
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