[The Poet]

With apologies to Scott, and all you other Francophobes, I would be remiss if I did not note that today, in 1789, Parisian revolutionaries and mutinous troops stormed and took the Bastille fortress, then used as a prison for the most uncommon of criminals and political troublemakers . . . such as the only French writer Scott will read, the Marquis de Sade. And speaking of the storming of fortified walls, in 1099 knights and infantry of the First Crusade captured the Holy City of Jerusalem, which they then cleansed with the blood of thousands of its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants.

In 1811 poet George Gordon (Lord) Byron returned to England after a 2-year tour of Europe and the Near East, and penned his first highly-successful work inspired by this sojourn, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. In 1968 Hank Aaron hit his 500th home run. He managed to knock a few more before he retired. And in 1995 a new file compression algorithm used to reduce the size of digital music files was dubbed MP3. Though I don't condemn it as fiercely as, say, Neil Young, I do feel it corrupts musical fidelity. Then again, considering what is being foisted off as music these days, that may not be a bad thing. Less is more, if the more so totally sucks.