Google celebrates its birthday

September 27, 1998

IN 2005, September 27 was chosen by Google to celebrate its ‘birthday’ to coincide with the announcement of the record number of pages that the search engine was indexing. However, September 4, is the actual date when Google was founded.

Google is an American multinational corporation founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, US. The corporation specialises in internet-related services and products which include online advertising technologies, search, cloud computing and software.

September 30, 1207 C.E.

ON this day, the famous thirteenth century Persian Sufi poet Rumi was born in Balkh Province, Afghanistan, then on the eastern edge of the Persian Empire. Rumi is regarded as jurist, theologian and spiritual master.

He is widely regarded as not only one of the greatest Sufi poets, but has also been described by Western Orientalists as ‘the most eminent Sufi poet whom Persia has produced’, and even ‘the greatest mystical poet of any age.’

When Rumi was still a young man, his father led their family more than 2,000 miles west to avoid the invasion of Genghis Khan’s armies.

They settled in present-day Turkey, where Rumi lived and wrote most of his life. He is the author of the famous Mathnawi, a poem of 25,700 couplets, considered his greatest work that was composed in his later years, containing a great number of stories and anecdotes of diverse styles.

October 3, 1964

THIS day, the first plate of chicken wings was served at a family-owned establishment in Buffalo called the Anchor Bar, New York. The wings were the brainchild of Teressa Bellissimo, who covered them in her specially cooked sauce and served them with a side of blue cheese and celery because that’s what she had available.

There are two versions to this creation. In one, Teressa Bellissimo’s husband, Frank, tells that the bar had accidentally received a shipment of wings (instead of other chicken parts) and didn’t know what to do with them so they created such a dish.

In the second version, which is by Bellissimo’s son, Dominic, he claimed that the wings were an impromptu midnight snack Teressa created on his request; but as all three Bellissimo family members have since passed away, so it’s impossible to verify which version is correct.