Jimmy McAleer (1864–1931) was an American center fielder, manager, and
stockholder in Major League Baseball who helped establish the American
League. He spent most of his 13-season playing career with the
Cleveland Spiders, and went on to manage the Cleveland Blues, St. Louis
Browns, and Washington Senators. Shortly before his retirement, he
became a major shareholder in the Boston Red Sox. His career ended
abruptly. During his brief tenure as co-owner of the Red Sox, McAleer
quarreled with longtime friend and colleague Ban Johnson, president of
the American League. McAleer's rift with Johnson, along with his sudden
retirement, damaged his professional reputation, and he received little
recognition for his contributions to baseball. Today, he is most often
remembered for initiating the customary request that the President of
the United States throw out the first ball of the season.
Read the rest of this article:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_McAleer>
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Today's selected anniversaries:
1879:
Fighting in the War of the Pacific between Chile and a
Peruvian–Bolivian alliance, opened with the Battle of Topáter.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_the_Pacific>
1905:
1,500 Cretans, led by Eleftherios Venizelos , met at the village of
Theriso to call for the island's unification with Greece, beginning the
Theriso revolt.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theriso_revolt>
1931:
Bhagat Singh, one of the most influential revolutionaries of the Indian
independence movement, and two others were executed by British
authorities.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhagat_Singh>
1991:
The Sierra Leone Civil War began when the Revolutionary United Front,
with support from the special forces of Charles Taylor's National
Patriotic Front of Liberia, invaded Sierra Leone in an attempt to
overthrow Joseph Saidu Momoh.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sierra_Leone_Civil_War>
2001:
The Russian Federal Space Agency forced the space station Mir to
deorbit and crash into the Pacific Ocean.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deorbit_of_Mir>
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Wiktionary's word of the day:
couch potato (n):
A person who spends a lot of time sitting or lying down, often watching
television, eating snacks, and drinking alcohol
<http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/couch_potato>
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Wikiquote quote of the day:
Society must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving
nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with
it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane
and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any
society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in
the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities
of human nature.
--Erich Fromm
<http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erich_Fromm>