On This Day:
Saturday March 22, 2014 This is the 81st day of the year, with 284 days remaining in 2014. Fact of the Day: parrots Parrots have been kept as caged pets since ancient times because they are beautiful, amusing, intelligent, and affectionate. The African gray parrot is the great talker. It is fairly easy to teach it how to talk, especially the male, which is an expert at mimicking human speech; the average African gray parrot has a vocabulary of over 200 words. According to the Guinness Book of World Records, one African gray parrot, named Prudle, had a vocabulary of over 800 words and was capable of having a polite conversation. Parrots do not have vocal cords like humans, but can control the movement of the muscles in their throat to direct the airflow in such a way as to reproduce certain tones and sounds. There is no reason to believe that they understand the meaning of the words they say.
Holidays Feast day of St. Deogratius, St. Basil of Ancyra, St. Paul of Narbonne, St. Nicholas Owen, and St. Benvenuto of Osimo. It is also the earliest possible date for Easter.
India: New Year's Day.
International Day of the Seal.
Puerto Rico: Emancipation Day.
Events 1638 - Religious dissident Anne Hutchinson was expelled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
1765 - Britain enacted the Stamp Act to raise money from the American colonies.
1790 - Thomas Jefferson became the first U.S. Secretary of State.
1882 - The U.S. Congress outlawed polygamy.
1893 - The first women's collegiate basketball game was played at Smith College in Massachusetts.
1894 - Hockey's first Stanley Cup championship game was played, between Montreal and Ottawa.
1895 - Auguste Lumiere and Louis Lumiere showed their first movie to an invited audience in Paris.
1933 - President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed a bill legalizing the sale and possession of beer and wine containing up to 3.2 percent alcohol.
1935 - Persia was renamed Iran.
1941 - The Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state went into operation.
1945 - The Arab League was formed -- Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Yemen, in Egypt. Fifteen more Arab nations eventually joined the organization.
1960 - The first laser was patented by Arthur Schawlow and Charles Townes.
1968 - President Lyndon Johnson named General William Westmoreland as Army Chief of Staff.
1972 - Congress sent the proposed Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution of the United States to the states for ratification; it fell three states short of the 38 needed for approval.
1990 - A jury in Alaska found former tanker captain Joseph Hazelwood innocent of major charges in connection with the Exxon Valdez oil spill, but convicted him of a minor charge of negligent discharge of oil.
Births 1599 - Sir Anthony Van Dyck, Flemish artist, namesake of the beard style.
1908 - Louis L'Amour, American author.
1914 - Karl Malden (Mladen Sekulovich), American actor.
1923 - Marcel Marceau (Mangel), French mime.
1930 - Stephen Sondheim, American composer.
1948 - Andrew Lloyd Webber, British composer.
Deaths 1820 - U.S. Navy officer Stephen Decatur, hero of the Barbary Wars, in a duel with disgraced U.S. Navy Commodore James Barron in Maryland.
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