Will has a rather nifty meme to take Wikipedia‘s ‘On this Day’ function and find out things about your birthday.

Go to Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/). Type in your birth date (but not year). List three events that happened on your birthday. List two important birthdays and one interesting death. Post this in your journal.

Birthday:  August 3rd

Events

• 1914 – First World War: Germany declares war against France.
• 1923 – Calvin Coolidge is inaugurated as the 30th President of the United States.  (August is a weird time for presidential inaugurations.  Coolidge was Warren Harding’s VP and succeeded when Harding became the 6th President to die in office)
• 1990 – The highest temperature recorded in the UK until 10 August 2003 – 37.1°C at Cheltenham in Gloucestershire.

Birthdays
I’m not going to count Terry Wogan because I already knew about him.  And I want to give three not two:

• 1867 – Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom (d. 1947)
• 1887 – Rupert Brooke, English poet (d. 1915)
• 1940 – Martin Sheen, American actor

Deaths

And three deaths, too.

• 1181 – Pope Alexander III (c. 1105)
• 1460 – King James II of Scotland (b. 1430)
• 2004 – Henri Cartier-Bresson, French photographer (b. 1908)