The Ridge Route was the popular name given to an early 20th-century road in the United States. The Ridge Route was California's first highway, linking the Los Angeles Basin with the San Joaquin Valley; it was particularly used to travel from the city of Los Angeles to Bakersfield. Its official name was the Castaic-Tejon Route. In 1895, the State Bureau of Highways was created by Governor James H. Budd who appointed three highway commissioners: R.C. Irvine of Sacramento, Marsden Manson of San Francisco and L. Maude of Riverside. Though a great deal of the route had been daylighted (widened) and paved in asphalt by the mid-1920s, much of the 1919 concrete pavement remains intact. In some areas, Model T tire tracks can still be seen, left decades ago in the still-soft concrete.

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Today's selected anniversaries:

1399 The Duke of Lancaster deposed Richard II to become Henry IV of England, merging the Duchy of Lancaster with the crown. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_IV_of_England)

1980 Ethernet specifications were published by Xerox, working with Intel and Digital Equipment Corporation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethernet)

1982 Cyanide-laced Tylenol killed six people in the Chicago, Illinois area. Seven were killed in all. The incident is known as the Tylenol scare. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tylenol)

1991 Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was overthrown in a coup d'�tat and replaced by General Raoul C�dras. A large-scale exodus of boat people ensued. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean%2dBertrand_Aristide)

1999 Japan's worst nuclear accident took place at a uranium reprocessing facility near Tokyo, exposing workers and local residents to very high levels of radiation. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_accident)

Wikiquote of the day:

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects." ~ Herman Melville (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Herman_Melville)