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Cyclone Taylor (June 23, 1884 – June 9, 1979) was a Canadian professional ice hockey player and civil servant. Born and raised in Southern Ontario, Taylor moved to Houghton, Michigan, and played in the International Hockey League for two years. He then joined the Ottawa Senators, winning the Stanley Cup with the team in his second year. While in Ottawa he began working as an immigration clerk. Two years later he signed with the Renfrew Creamery Kings, becoming the highest-paid athlete in the world on a per-game basis. He then played for the Vancouver Millionaires until 1922, where he won five scoring championships and his second Stanley Cup victory with the team. In 1914 Taylor was the first Canadian official to board the Komagata Maru, a major incident relating to Canadian immigration. In 1946 he was named a member of the Order of the British Empire for his services as an immigration officer and inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1947. (Full article...)

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On this day

June 23: Grand Duke's Official Birthday in Luxembourg

Pierre de Coubertin

1594 – Anglo-Spanish War: During the Action of Faial, an English attempt to capture a Portuguese carrack, reputedly one of the richest ever to set sail from the Indies, caused it to explode with all the treasure lost.
1894 – Led by French historian Pierre de Coubertin (pictured), an international congress at the Sorbonne in Paris formed the International Olympic Committee to revive the ancient Olympic Games.
1944 – The Holocaust: After a closely supervised visit to Theresienstadt Ghetto in German-occupied Czechoslovakia, Red Cross official Maurice Rossel reported that conditions there were "almost normal".
2014 – Under the terms of UN Security Council Resolution 2118, the last of Syria's declared chemical weapons were shipped out for destruction.

Aymer de Valence, 2nd Earl of Pembroke (d. 1324)
Len Hutton (b. 1916)
Bill Torrey (b. 1934)
Joss Whedon (b. 1964)

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Today's featured picture

Long Tack Sam (1884–1961) was a Chinese-born American magician, acrobat, and vaudeville performer. Little is known about his early years, although he is known to have joined a group of acrobats around 1900 called the Tian-Kwai, with whom he toured the world. Several years later, amid unrest in China, he brought his troupe of entertainers to the United States, where he performed extensively for several decades. This colour lithograph poster featuring Long was printed in Hamburg, Germany, in 1919. It illustrates his conscious use of luxurious embroidered costumes and elaborate scenery to enhance his mystique and capitalise on Western notions of "the mysterious Orient".

Poster credit: Studio of Adolph Friedlander; restored by Adam Cuerden

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