GMT

Today in History: July 31

1703 English novelist Daniel Defoe is made to stand in the pillory as punishment for offending the government and church with his satire The Shortest Way With Dissenters.

1760 Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, drives the French army back to the Rhine River.

1790 The U.S. Patent Office opens.

1891 Great Britain declares territories in Southern Africa up to the Congo to be within its sphere of influence.

1904 The Trans-Siberian railroad connecting the Ural mountains with Russia's Pacific coast, is completed.

1971 Apollo 15 astronauts take a drive on the moon in their land rover.

1987 An F4 tornado in Edmonton, Alberta kills 27 and causes $330 million in damages; the day is remembered as "Black Friday."

1991 The US and the USSR sign a long-range nuclear weapons reduction pact.

1999 NASA purposely crashes its Discovery Program's Lunar Prospector into the moon, ending the agency's mission to detect frozen water on Earth's moon.

2006 Fidel Castro temporarily hands over power to his brother Raul Castro.

2007 The British Army's longest continual operation, Operation Banner (1969-2007), ends as British troops withdraw from Northern Ireland.



Born on July 31

1803 John Ericsson, naval engineer and inventor, developed the screw propeller.

1951 Evonne Goolagong, Australian tennis player.

1965 J.K. Rowling, author (Harry Potter series).


JOTD

A woman driving along at speed passed over a bridge only to find a cop with a radar gun on the other side lying in wait. The cop pulled her over, walked up to the car, with that classic patronizing smirk & asked, 'What's your hurry?'

She replied, 'I'm late for work.'
'Oh yeah,' said the cop, 'what do you do?'
'I'm a Rectum Stretcher,' she responded.
The cop stammered, 'A what?............
'A Rectum Stretcher!'
'And just what does a rectum stretcher do?'
'Well,' she said, 'I start by inserting one finger in the rectum, then work my way up to two fingers, then three, then four, then with my whole hand in I work from side to side until I can get both hands in, and then I slowly but surely stretch it, until it's about 6 feet'
'And just what the hell do you do with a 6 foot arsehole?' he asked.
'You give him a radar gun & park him behind a bridge...