1590: Tokugawa Ieyasu enters Edo Castle, which he establishes as the shogun base. Tom Cruise is nowhere to be seen. Yet.
1800: Gabriel Prosser leads an unsuccessful slave rebellion in Richmond, Va. If it had been successful, we wouldn’t have had the Civil War and - ooh, note to self: Find someone with a time machine and go back and make the rebellion a smashing success. But if it is, then I’ll never have written this post, and then no one will have gone back, causing a recurring historical loop that could destroy the time-space continuum. Dammit.
1835: Melbourne, Australia, is founded. Its motto: “Fewer convicts than Sydney.” Thank you, I’ll be performing in the Starlight Lounge all week.
1918: Fanny Kaplan shoots and seriously injures Vladimir Lenin. This event leads to the decree for “Red Terror” and the Bolshevik Revolution, which, as we all know, led to the fall of the tsars and the Soviet Union. Thus, Fanny Kaplan is to blame for the U.S. not participating in the 1980 Olympic games in Moscow, not Jimmy Carter.
1989: A federal jury in New York finds “hotel queen” Leona Helmsley guilty of income tax evasion but acquits her of extortion. Good thing, too, or else she wouldn’t have had all that money to leave to her dog when she died. Too soon?
