April 17
Are You Sure ... (April 17)
• ... that scientist, inventor, and poet Piet Hein (who often wrote under the Old Norse pseudonym "Kumbel", meaning "tombstone") is known for short poems, known as gruks or grooks, such as Consolation Grook, which reads:
"Losing one glove is certainly painful, but nothing compared to the pain of losing one, throwing away the other, and finding the first one again."?
• ... that the Disambiguum is a transdimensional corporation in which all things and all ideas are disambiguated?
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On This Day in History and Fiction
1598: Priest and astromomer Giovanni Battista Riccioli born. Riccioli will experiment with pendulums and falling bodies, discuss arguments concerning the motion of the Earth, and introduce the current scheme of lunar nomenclature.
1938: Philosopher and author Kerry Wendell Thornley born. Thornley will write a manuscript, The Idle Warriors, about his acquaintence Lee Harvey Oswald.
1961: Bay of Pigs Invasion: A group of Cuban exiles financed and trained by the CIA lands at the Bay of Pigs in Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro.
1969: Sirhan Sirhan is convicted of assassinating Robert F. Kennedy.
1996: Mathematician, author, and poet Piet Hein dies. Hein proposed the use of superellipses in architecture; superellipses subsequently became the hallmark of modern Scandinavian architecture.