Wikipedia:Main Page history/2019 April 8

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From today's featured article

Billy Martin (1928–1989) was an American Major League Baseball second baseman and the on-again, off-again manager of the New York Yankees. Known first as a scrappy infielder on the championship Yankee teams of the 1950s, he built a reputation as a manager who would initially make bad teams good, and then be fired amid dysfunction. In each of his stints with the Yankees, he led them to winning records before being fired or forced to resign by team owner George Steinbrenner. Martin led the team to consecutive American League pennants in 1976 and 1977; they lost in the 1976 World Series but triumphed over the Los Angeles Dodgers in 1977, Martin's only World Series championship as a manager. He was forced to resign midway through the 1978 season, returned in 1979, and was fired at season's end. From 1980 to 1982, he managed the Oakland A's, earning a division title with an aggressive style of play known as "Billyball". After the A's fired him, he managed the Yankees three more times. (Full article...)

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Did you know...

Pacu jawi

... that in pacu jawi (pictured), the traditional cattle race of Tanah Datar, Indonesia, the jockey holds the tails of two cattle while they sprint across a muddy rice field?
... that Raphaëlle Boitel worked as a contortionist street performer at age eight to earn tuition for circus school?
... that the storyline of Holby City's two-part episode "A Simple Lie" was compared to the Charlie Gard case?
... that U.S. Coast Guard Vice Admiral Lloyd Toulmin Chalker has been credited as the "father of Coast Guard aviation"?
... that Promachocrinus is unusual among crinoids in having ten pairs of arms?
... that instead of attending Columbia University, Taiwanese engineer Ye Qingyao joined the February 28 rebellion, was jailed, and then escaped to China on a sampan?
... that the European Commission's Joint Research Centre recommends using the spectral G-index rather than correlated color temperature to select streetlights that have low blue light content?
... that Librotraficante smuggled books into Arizona?

In the news

Cambridge win the 2019 women's Boat Race

In rowing, Cambridge win both the women's and men's Boat Races (women's crew pictured).
In Iran, widespread flooding since late March kills at least 62 people.
Zuzana Čaputová is elected president of Slovakia, becoming the country's first female president and its youngest.
A Special Counsel investigation, headed by Robert Mueller, concludes and reports its findings to the United States Attorney General.

On this day

April 8

Capture of Princesa

217 – Roman emperor Caracalla was assassinated near Harran and succeeded by his Praetorian Guard prefect Macrinus.
1271 – The Knights Hospitaller surrendered the Krak des Chevaliers to the army of the Mamluk sultan Baibars.
1740 – War of the Austrian Succession: The Royal Navy captured the Spanish ship of the line Princesa (pictured), which was later mustered into British service.
1904 – France and the United Kingdom signed the Entente Cordiale, agreeing to a peaceful coexistence after centuries of intermittent conflict.
1959 – A team of computer scientists and others met to discuss the creation of a common business-oriented programming language that became COBOL.

Niels Juel (d. 1697) · Marie Byles (b. 1900)

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From today's featured list

Shah Rukh Khan

The 2010 Indian Hindi-language drama film My Name Is Khan won 25 awards from 84 nominations. It was directed by Karan Johar. The film features Shah Rukh Khan (pictured) and Kajol in the lead roles, with Jimmy Sheirgill, Zarina Wahab, Sonya Jehan, Vinay Pathak and Parvin Dabas playing supporting roles. My Name Is Khan led the 56th Filmfare Awards with ten nominations, including Best Film (Hiroo Yash Johar, Gauri Khan) and Best Music Director (Shankar–Ehsaan–Loy). It went on to win four, including for Best Director (Karan Johar), Best Actor (Khan) and Best Actress (Kajol). The film won five awards out of eight nominations at the 12th IIFA Awards, including for Best Director (Karan Johar), Best Actor (Khan) and Best Lyricist (Niranjan Iyengar for "Sajda"). It garnered fourteen nominations at the sixth edition of the Producers Guild Film Awards, with Karan Johar winning for Best Director. (Full list...)

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Rootabaga Stories is a children's book of interrelated short stories by Carl Sandburg, written in 1922. The stories are whimsical and sometimes melancholy, making use of nonsense language. Rootabaga Stories was originally created for Sandburg's own daughters, Margaret, Janet and Helga—whom he nicknamed "Spink", "Skabootch", and "Swipes"—and those nicknames occur in some of the Rootabaga stories. The book was born of Sandburg's desire for fairy tales to which American children could relate, rather than the traditional European stories involving royalty and knights. He therefore set the book in a fictionalized American Midwest called the "Rootabaga country", in which fairy-tale concepts were mixed with trains, sidewalks, and skyscrapers.

This picture shows the frontispiece of the 1922 edition of the book.

Illustration: Maud and Miska Petersham; restoration: Adam Cuerden

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