I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies

Here is your open thread for March 17, 2020.

Andrew John Hozier-Byrne turns 30 years old today:

The siege of Boston ended on March 17, 1776, after George Washington ringed the harbor with stolen British cannons. As if people in Boston needed another reason to celebrate on March 17. (Please don’t do that this year. Stay home. Stay the F— Home.)

On this day in 1968, ranchers in Utah found more than 6,000 of their sheep dead. This was how the United States Army found out its experimental chemical weapons worked.

Twenty years ago today, nearly 800 members of the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God sect were killed in a mass-murder-suicide after their leaders’ predictions of rapture and apocalypse didn’t come true.

Roger B. Taney was born 243 years ago today. If he’d only been born 40 years ago, the GOP would be nominating him for a lifetime seat on the federal bench.

Edith New was born 143 years ago today. She wasn’t allowed to vote in 1908, so she broke some windows at the prime minister’s residence at 10 Downing Street. Since she still wasn’t allowed to vote two months later when she got out of prison, New suggested that maybe she’d have to set something on fire instead. Women’s right to vote was finally legally acknowledged in the UK in 1918 and there’s no record of Edith New breaking any windows or setting any fires after that. So.

Bayard Rustin  — born 108 years ago today — would not have approved of New’s vandalism, but he would have understood. Rustin, the great general of the Civil Rights Movement, helped to orchestrate the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the March on Washington. Here’s what I wrote about Rustin back on what would have been his 100th birthday.

The great Kurt Russell turns 69 today. Nice. I’ll go with The Thing, Big Trouble, and Overboard.

Gary Sinise turns 65 today and Billy Corgan turns 53. They’ll both be voting for Trump, again, in November. Stephanie Clifford, aka, Stormy Daniels, turns 41. She probably won’t be voting the same way as them.

Rob Lowe turns 56, Mia Hamm turns 48, John Boyega turns 28. Attack the Block is really, really good.

Talk amongst yourselves.