Close enough

I'm pretty sure it was after midnight when I finished the Barry Bonds post (no, there's no link. Just scroll down. Oh, come on. It's right below this one. But blogger records the start time of a post, not the time it goes to press.

So here's TDiS for August 3. There's some doozies in here. But then again, there always are ...

1492 Columbus set sail from Spain to spread Spanish hegemony and diseases throughout the Caribbean.

1811 Elisha Otis was born. He invented elevators. That's super.

1852 College sports were invented when Harvard and Yale race in boats. The rest of the college world later would find better things to compete at (ask Rutgers and Princeton), but these two schools still like to row. How nice for them.

1936 James Cleveland Owens is an Ohio State alum, which would normally earn him some snark, if not unfair hostility here. It won't come from me, though, because 71 years ago this Slawgust he gave Hitler's ideas about race a giant middle finger with the whole world watching. Then he returned to the United States, where American society treated him ... well, about as well as it treated black men in those times, which is to say: shittily at best. Ohio State, however, called its new track and field venue Jesse Owens Stadium. Why they didn't name the Horseshoe for him, I'll never know. Maybe the descendants of Jebediah Ohio would have squawked. I like to think that he and Raoul Wallenberg have an annual bet on the game.

1977 Tom Brady is born, 10 days late. He originally wasn't going to come out of the womb at all, and the family didn't know what to do. But then a fat man with a spiked haircut and an "ND" jacket, convinces the infant Brady to emerge, and there is much rejoicing. But the mysterious midwife disappears before the Bradys can thank him, although he is seen in the shadows of other watershed moments in a young Tom Brady's career, including toilet training, his First Communion and the night he discovered masturbation after getting into a tickle fight with his babysitter, Samantha.