April 11, 1954, Not So Boring!

A programmer unleashes a computer on the history of the 20th century …   The ads have been infiltrated by Bob Dobbs! Yikes!   …. and discovers that April 11, 1954 ….   Good grief, even the comics were dull!   … was the most “boring day” in history.

Well, not quite. In truth, this was a brilliant publicity stunt by William Tunstall-Pedoe to advertise his search engine, True Knowledge. The idea was to search material on the 20th century and quantify the importance of each day based on birth and death dates, and significant events, such as World War II. Obviously, in selecting those criteria, one date had to come out with the fewest significant events, births and deaths, and that happened to be April 11, 1954, which through the notion that the 20th century was the most significant,  was deemed the “most boring day in history.” Of course, Tunstall-Pedoe has been shrewd in not revealing the “least boring day in history,”  because under this program, there must be one.  So what actually happened on April 11….

There was, for example, a killing and a murder-suicide…. A 10-year-old boy with severe muscular dystrophy got his first visit to the zoo…  A car making a left turn into Hillside Cemetery was struck by an oncoming auto, killing two people and badly injuring a third…. Four sailors were injured in an attack by gang members…. A gigantic beer bottle landed between City Hall and the Hall of Justice! (OK, I’m cheating, it was April 12!) Did I mention the deadly TV antenna? … or the two-headed baby? The Cubs beat the Chisox 12-9! Tell me that’s not news! I do have a serious point, though, and it’s this: April 11, 1954, was Palm Sunday, which everyone seems to have overlooked.

Comments

[Native Angeleno]

I dunno about 'the most boring day', designated by a guy with way too much time on his hands, but apparently spending none of it studying any history. Right there smack on the front page is the battle of Dien Bien Phu, which forced the French colonialists out of Vietnam, then in the West called "Indo-China", as if the Vietnamese were in any way part of their ancient enemy China.

The French had returned just after WW2 to "their" former colony, only to face the likes of Ho Chi Minh, who fought the Japanese invaders during WW2 and who begged the West to disallow returning his country to the French, to no avail. The US under Truman had declared the Philippines free and independent in the beginning of 1946, to avoid another bloodbath in the retaking of their former colony akin to the one Theodore Roosevelt fought when he took over the Philippines from Spain at the beginning of the 20th century. Seeing this seemingly enlightened act coming from the US, Ho actually requested diplomatic and/or military help from the US to stop the French, who were determined to resurrect their lost world empire. But the only assistance he was given came from the Soviet Union, under the quid pro quo Ho and Vietnam become Communist in the orbit specifically of the Russians, and not the Chinese, as protection from the latter.

The significance of this? As the French were expelled, who but the US, under Eisenhower, stepped in to oversee elections approved by the UN, and before the elections could be held unilaterally designated the South of Vietnam off limits to the North, Ho's base where he defeated the French, beginning a new 21 year struggle to evict their unwanted US landlords from half their country, who in shock from seeing China and North Korea taken over by anti-colonialist Communists, saw Vietnam as a domino that would supposedly foreshadow the fall of the entirety of Southeast Asia, which included oil-rich Indonesia.

OF COURSE, once Vietnam was united and their US dominators expelled, no such domino "fell", the US never having cared to understand Vietnam's case as an ethnic group that solely wanted independence for themselves, and who never saw themselves as a springboard or launching pad for Communist advances to the south, knowing that such war would be dominated by their neghbor China, who would overrun and control them as the French and Americans had. Within a few years after their liberation from the US, as if to prove the point the US was too pigheaded to discern, Vietnam fought a defensive territorial war against the Chinese.

So this boring day wasn't very boring to the Vietnamese, nor to the next loser to the cause of Vietnamese independence, the US, after all.

Beware the seeming innocuous.

[benito]

Excellent points about Vietnam, but more importantly, we gotta know more about that 2 headed baby!

[Diane Ely]

Regarding Suzan Ball - according to IMDB she was a cousin to Lucille Ball. However, in all the literature I've ever read about Lucy, I've never seen a reference to her. (I once posted in inquiry about her on a Lucy fan site, but no one seemed to have heard of her.) Sadly, Suzan died of cancer only a year after her marriage to Richard Long (later of "Nanny and the Professor").

[moonmaid]

In regards to the comment by Diane, I wondered about that, too. If Lucille Ball was a guest at the wedding it wasn't mentioned on the front page of this article. IMDb doesn't mention Lucy being at the wedding, either. Yet, Suzan Ball was born in Jamestown,NY, so she must be a relative, second cousin, as IMDb says. I'd love to know the origin of the IMDb item that she murmured the name 'Tony' on her death bed-supposedly a reference to her earlier affair with Anthony Quinn. Who put that item in?
A too short life, sounds like she and Richard Long would have had a long, happy marriage.