It's a Meme from History!

Meme via elfbiter:
Go to Wikipedia. In the Search box, type your birth month and day (but not year). List three events that happened on your birthday. List two important birthdays and one interesting death. Post this in your journal.

I like meme's that I do not have to think too hard. This pretty much does itself. Yay Wikipedia. (ahem)

December 20.

Events:
* 1860 - South Carolina becomes first state to secede from the United States.
* 1917 - Cheka, first Soviet secret police, founded.
* 1999 - Vermont's Supreme Court rules that homosexual couples are entitled to same benefits and protections as married heterosexual couples.

Births:
* 1957 - Billy Bragg, English singer and songwriter
* 1960 - Nalo Hopkinson, Canadian writer

Deaths:
* 1968 - John Steinbeck, American writer, Nobel Prize laureate.

Nothing really dramatic. I like the Cheka-bit. Billy Bragg I just had to put here, I remember having this same discussion with Matti Tanska way back then. We were reading some English music mag in Suomalainen kirjakauppa and happened to see this "Star Birthdays" article. I had Billy Bragg and Matti had one or the other from Salt'n'Pepa. Pepa says the internet. Why is there no Väinö Linna here? Or Jan Caloun? Or Patti Smith? Or Wendy Hamilton, playmate Dec 1991 and born in 1967!

And deaths! George Roy Hill died the day he was birn, only 80 years later. And where the heck is Aulus Vitellius, the 7th emperor of Rome? Oh yeah, it must've been the rather dignity-free attempt to escape Rome in filthy clothes, when Titus Flavius Vespasianus' (the future Ceasar) troops found him at that day, tortured him for few hours and then killed and unceremoniously dumped into Tiber.

Ahaa! Wikipedia says Vitellius died the 22nd of December... Do we believe Wikipedia here or all the other historical information? December 22nd was the day when Vespasian became the emperor, but Vitellius had already been dead for two days. Could it be that there is a mistake in Wikipedia?