Birthday catastrophes
Bad shit that has happened on my birthday (August 24th) throughout history:
- 79 BC - Mount Vesuvius erupts. The cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae are buried in volcanic ash.
- 410 - The Visigoths under Alaric begin to pillage Rome for three days.
- 1459 - Vlad Ţepeş (aka Dracula) had 30,000 of the merchants and officials of the Transylvanian city of Braşov impaled.
- 1572 - Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre: On the orders of king Charles IX of France, a massacre of Huguenots (French Protestants) begins.
- 1968 - France explodes its first hydrogen bomb, thus becoming the world's fifth nuclear power.
- 1995 - Windows 95, a computer operating system by Microsoft, is released with much fanfare.
- 2006 - The International Astronomical Union (IAU) redefines the term "planet" such that Pluto is no longer considered a planet.