Apr. 17 - It was a lovely April day and a certain beautiful young woman walked about in a daze, heavy of heart and despairing of hope. She was betrothed to a rich and cruel young man who didn’t love her. In the course of her sad meanderings she encountered a boyishly handsome young ruffian who was drawn to her lovely appearance. He cheered her with his quick wit and charmed her with his sympathetic nature; she opened herself up to him as a flower opens up to the sun. He fell madly in love her—with who she really was, unlike the fiancé who only saw her as an ornament with which to adorn his fortune. The carefree young man’s every sentiment seemed to echo those in our heroine’s own soul, sentiments that had gone too long unanswered. His smile radiated warmth and quickened the beating of her young heart, which had withered too long from neglect; his touch sent shivers down her spine, which had always consisted of numerous vertebrae. They were instantly in love. She vowed to break off her engagement with her rich and heartless fiancé so she and her lover could start a life of their own together in America—but no sooner had they agreed to do so than the sea broke through the dikes and they were drowned along with 100,000 other less interesting people on April 17, 1421, in Dort, the Netherlands.
So say reliable sources at the Chicago Tribune and UPI, as well as my old Almanacs, but I’m damned if I can find any other evidence of such a lethal flood occurring in the Netherlands in April 1421. There was a flood in Dort in November of that year that may have killed up to 10,000 people, and there was a flood in the Netherlands that killed around 100,000 people in 1530, but it had nothing to do with Dort. It isn’t just AI that hallucinates.
On April 15, 1912, however,the unsinkable Titanic sank, drowning 1523 of her 2200 passengers and crew, including a star-crossed couple just like the one described above. On April 16, 1951, the British submarine Affray sunk in the English Channel, drowning 75 (presumably without any star-crossed lovers among them, but you never know). On April 18, 1906, the San Francisco earthquake left 200,000 homeless and over 1000 dead.
So whatever happened or didn’t happen six centures ago in Holland or the Netherlands or wherever, the middle of April is clearly a perilous time. Let’s be careful out there.
On April 17, 1961, the Kennedy administration’s secret plan to cripple Castro by inundating Cuba with thousands of wild boars backfired, as the nervous beasts leaped from their cargo ships and drowned just a few hundred yards from shore, resulting in the infamous “Bay of Pigs.”
On April 17, 1521, the Diet of Worms excommunicated Martin Luther (see previous almanacs for an in-depth discussion if the digestion problems Luther experienced as a result of that ill-chosen Diet).
April 17 is the birthday of Olivia Hussey (1951), Harry Reasoner (1923), William Holden (1918), Nikita Khrushchev (1894), and Karen “Isak Dinesen” Blixen (1884).
It’s Independence Day in Syria, Territorial Flag Day in American Samoa, and Women’s Day in Gabon.
Happy hump day!
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