Piano

Piano means "quiet", so inside voices, please.

Lt. Calley:  Calley was putatively convicted of murder and sentenced to life, but neither thing is true.  He only served a day or two of his original sentence, after which he was sentenced to a short period of house arrest, most of which he spent out and about pursuing various appeals and such.  Like the astonishlngly few US troops tried for war crimes, atrocities and the like, Calley was really tried for getting caught flagrante delecto, essentially, for stupidity.  If and only if one does something heinous and not only gets caught, but gets caught in circumstances that pretty much force the US to hold some sort of show trial, then one will be tried for the offense of putting the US in that position, otherwise such trials never occur.  FWIW, everybody under him got off because "following orders" which almost always carries the day in US tribunals even though it was definitively held at Nuremberg that it is not a valid defense.  Of course, the Exceptional US is an exception to all of the Nuremberg rules, including the one that says that the absolute unquestionably worst war crime is to start an unprovoked war, literally our forte' as a nation.  Vietnam, like Iraq, Laos, Cambodia, Argentina 1 and 2 and innumerable invasions throughout South America, Africa and the Pacific was unprovoked, but nobody involved in bringing it about was ever tried for anything.  So Lt. Calley was, though a perpetrator of a truly horrific atrocity, essentially a fall guy for a whole war and for a president who ordered the carpet bombing of civilian residential and shopping areas as well as outlying villages, killing over 2,300 and destroying over 5400 houses plus shops, clinics, schools, hospitals, temples, theaters and more in but one single named operation.

Terence Hill  Do yourself an enormous favor and  watch My Name is Nobody  starring Terence Hill and Henry Fonda, and then delve into the Trinity films, also starring Hill.

On this day in history:

1549 – The city of Salvador da Bahia was founded.

1632 – Treaty of Saint-Germain was signed

1806 – Construction of the Great National Pike was authorized

1847 –  US forces took Veracruz after a siege.

1849 – The United Kingdom annexed the Punjab.

1857 – Sepoy Mangal Pandey mutinied, leading to the  Indian Rebellion of 1857

1867 – Queen Victoria gives Royal Assent to the British North America Act

1871 – Royal Albert Hall was opened by Queen Victoria.

1886 – John Pemberton made the first batch of Coca-Cola

1927 – Sunbeam 1000hp broke the land speed record at Daytona Beach

1941 – The North American Regional Broadcasting Agreement went into effect

1941 – The Battle of Cape Matapan ended

1942 – The Bombing of Lübeck, the first successful RAF bombing of a German city.

1945 – The last day of V-1 flying bomb attacks on England

1945 – The German 4th Army was nearly destroyed by the Red Army.

1946 – Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México was founded.

1947 – Malagasy Uprising against French colonial rule in Madagascar.

1957 – The New York, Ontario and Western Railway mades its final run,

1961 – The Twenty-third Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified,

1971 – Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of premeditated murder in the My Lai Massacre:  and sentenced to life in prison, which, of course, he never served, serving at most 2 days of it.  He did wind up serving 3 years of wink-wink, nudge-nudge,  "house arrest" most of which he spent out and about working on appeals and such.

1973 – The last United States combat soldiers left South Vietnam.

1973 – Covert US bombing in Laos allegedly ended

1974 – NASA's Mariner 10 became the first space probe to fly by Mercury.

1974 – The Terracotta Army was discovered in Shaanxi province, China.

2004 – Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia joined NATO as full members.

2014 – The first legal same-sex marriages in England and Wales were performed.

2017 – PM Theresa May invoked Article 50 of the Treaty on the European Union, formally starting Brexit

“Capital does not participate where no profit can be made. Humanity is not quoted on the stock exchange.”

~~  Wilhelm Liebknecht

1826 – Wilhelm Liebknecht, journalist and politician
1869 – Aleš Hrdlicka, anthropologist and scholar
1873 – Tullio Levi-Civita, mathematician and academic
1888 – Enea Bossi, Sr., engineer
1896 – Wilhelm Ackermann, mathematician
1907 – Braguinha, singer, songwriter, and producer
1909 – Moon Mullican, singer, songwriter, and pianist (d. 1967)
1916 – Peter Geach, philosopher and academic
1918 – Pearl Bailey, actress and singer
1923 – Betty Binns Fletcher, lawyer and judge
1923 – Bob Haymes, singer, songwriter, and actor
1927 – John Vane, pharmacologist and academic,
1928 – Vincent Gigante, businessman
1929 – Sheila Kitzinger, activist, author, and academic
1929 – Richard Lewontin, biologist, geneticist, and academic
1936 – Richard Rodney Bennett, composer and educator
1939 – Terence Hill, actor, director, and producer
1940 – Ray Davis, bass singer
1940 – Astrud Gilberto, singer and songwriter
1941 – Joseph Hooton Taylor Jr., astrophysicist and astronomer
1943 – Vangelis, keyboard player and songwriter
1943 – Chad Allan, singer, songwriter ,and guitarist
1944 – Terry Jacks, singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1944 – Lynne Segal, feminist academic and activist
1945 – Speedy Keen, singer, songwriter, keyboard player, and producer
1946 – Billy Thorpe, singer, songwriter, guitarist, and producer
1946 – Segun Bucknor, musician and journalist
1947 – Robert Gordon, singer and actor
1947 – Bobby Kimball, singer and songwriter
1949 – Dave Greenfield, musician
1951 – William Clarke, harmonica player
1956 – Patty Donahue, singer
1959 – Perry Farrell, singer, songwriter
1969 – Shinichi Mochizuki, mathematician

Died this day in:

“Let's go and get drunk on light again - it has the power to console.”

~~ Georges Seurat

1772 – Emanuel Swedenborg, astronomer, philosopher, and theologian
1891 – Georges Seurat, painter
1948 – Harry Price, parapsychologist and author
1982 – Carl Orff, composer and educator
1999 – Joe Williams, jazz singer
2001 – John Lewis, pianist and composer
2003 – Carlo Urbani, physician and microbiologist
2004 – Lise de Baissac, SOE agent and war hero
2004 – Joel Feinberg, philosopher and academic
2014 – Ruth A. M. Schmidt, geologist and paleontologist
2017 – Alexei Alexeyevich Abrikosov, physicist

Holidays, Holy Days, Festivals, Feast Days, Days of Recognition, and such:

Piano Day
National Lemon Chiffon Cake Day
Smoke and Mirrors Day
National Vietnam War Veterans Day (United States of America)
Day of the Young Combatant (Chile)
Festival of Smoke and Mirrors

Music goes here, iirc, well, With apologies

Piano Day

Moon Mullican

Pearl Bailey

Bob Haymes

Ray Davis

Astrud Gilberto

Vangelis

Robert Gordon

Bobby Kimball

William Clarke

Carf Orff

Joe Williams

John Lewis

It's an open thread, so do your thing, got it? Below this point this is a public forum, your forum, nothing is off topic, so go for it