Famous dead people born today: 86 Georg Philipp Telemann 3/14/1681 - 6/25/1767 German composer of the late Baroque period; 45 Johann, elder Strauss 3/14/1804 - 9/24/1849 Austrian composer of Viennese waltzes; 57 Victor Emmanuel II 3/14/1820 - 1/9/1878 Italian king of Sardinia-Piedmont and first king of united Italy; 75 Giovanni Schiaparelli 3/14/1835 - 7/4/1910 Italian astronomer and senator; 61 Paul Ehrlich 3/14/1854 - 8/20/1915 German Nobel Prize-winning medical scientist; 36 Casey Jones 3/14/1864 - 4/30/1900 American railroad engineer; 82 Algernon Blackwood 3/14/1869 - 12/10/1951 British mystery writer; 75 Sylvia Beach 3/14/1887 - 10/5/1962 American owner of Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris; 70 Adolph Gottlieb 3/14/1903 - 3/4/1974 American Abstract Expressionist painter; 78 Raymond Aron 3/14/1905 - 10/17/1983 French sociologist, historian and political commentator; 48 Diane Arbus 3/14/1923 - 7/26/1971 American photographer; and of course, Albert Einstein 3/14/1879 - 4/18/1955 German-American Nobel Prize-winning physicist.
On this day in History:
1743 The first recorded town meeting in America was held, at Faneuil Hall in Boston.


1794 Eli Whitney received a patent for the cotton gin.


1883 German political philosopher Karl Marx died in London.


1900 Congress ratified the Gold Standard Act.


1923 President Harding became the first chief executive to file an income tax report.


1939 The Republic of Czechoslovakia was dissolved, opening the way for Nazi occupation.


1943 Aaron Copland's ''Fanfare for the Common Man'' premiered in New York City, with George Szell conducting.


1951 United Nations forces recaptured Seoul during the Korean War.


1964 A jury in Dallas found Jack Ruby guilty of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin of President Kennedy, the previous November.


1967 The body of President Kennedy was moved from a temporary grave to a permanent memorial site at Arlington National Cemetery.


1990 The Soviet Congress elected Mikhail S. Gorbachev to the country's new, powerful presidency, a day after creating the post.


1993 An independent U.N.-sponsored commission released a report blaming the bulk of atrocities committed during El Salvador's civil war on the country's military.


1994 Associate Attorney General Webster Hubbell, a longtime friend of President and Mrs. Clinton, resigned because of controversy over billings he'd charged while in private law practice.


1995 Astronaut Norman Thagard became the first American to enter space aboard a Russian rocket as he and two cosmonauts blasted off aboard a Soyuz spacecraft, headed for the Mir space station.


2000 Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore clinched their presidential nominations in a sweep of Southern primaries.


All this according to the NY times, mind you.