Birthdays
Lucille Ball. Andy Warhol. The atomic bomb. The World Wide Web.
In one way or another, all were born on this date. All have changed the world in ways large and small.
The oldest, Lucille Ball, made us laugh.
Andy Warhol helped us see ordinary things in a different light, and promised us each a brief moment of fame.
The atomic bomb killed or maimed hundreds of thousands in Hiroshima, Japan, on that day. Its mushroom cloud changed warfare and has haunted our dreams ever since.
Forty-five years later Tim Berners-Lee described his "WorldWideWeb (WWW) Project" that soon changed communication and culture in ways that we're still struggling to understand. These words you're reading exist because of it.
Google from time to time commemorates a date with a visual tribute to a person or event. I expected today to be some variation of a Campbell's soup can. Instead we got Lucille Ball trying to keep up with candy on an assembly line. Neither Hiroshima nor the World Wide Web made the cut.
