• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Future Expats

Create an Untethered Life Overseas

  • Home
  • Start Here
  • About
    • Big Fat Disclaimer
    • Privacy Policy
  • Portable Careers
    • Blogging
      • Blogging for Expats WordPress Tutorials
    • Life Coaching
    • Photography
    • Teaching
    • Websites
    • Writing
  • Prepping the Move
    • Countdown
    • Narrowing Your Country/City Search
      • Africa
      • Asia
      • Australia/New Zealand
      • Central America
      • Europe
      • North America
      • Region
      • South America
    • Visas and Residency
    • Quality of Life
    • Learning the Language
    • Health Care
    • Technology
  • Panama
  • Blog
  • Resources
    • Hire Me!
    • Expat Resources: Prepping the Move
    • Expat Resources: Portable Careers
    • Expat Resources: Technology
    • Book and Movie Reviews
You are here: Home / General / April 15: Day of Dread for Most Americans

April 15: Day of Dread for Most Americans

April 14, 2010 by FutureExpat

April 15 happens to be my sister’s birthday, and she was always fond of reciting the list of disasters that occurred on that date.

  • It’s tax day for Americans residing in the US. (But if you live in another country you get an automatic extension until June 15.)
  • President Abraham Lincoln died after being fatally shot by actor John Wilkes Booth.
  • The Titanic sank.


In honor of the day, here are a few fun — and not-so-fun — important events that she missed, in no particular order:

  • Ray Kroc opened his first McDonald’s so-called restaurant, thus beginning the scourge of fast food in the USA and throughout the rest of the civilized world.
  • In 1900 the International Exposition opened in Paris. The iconic Eiffel Tower had been built for the 1889 Exposition and was reviled by French notables including Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Alexandre Dumas and Charles Garnier, as “useless and monstrous” and an offense to “French taste and endangered French art and history.”
  • Hu Yaobang, a Chinese official with a pro-Democracy, anti-corruption reputation, died in 1989. Protesters gathered in Tiananmen Square, Beijing to mourn his passing. The gathering lasted for seven weeks, and showed the world the repressive face of the Chinese regime that left 241 dead and 7,000 wounded according to official figures. Unofficially, numbers as high as 9,000 were reported. With the government control over its own media and its crackdown on foreign journalists, the truth may never be known. One wonders how much more the world would have seen if Twitter had been available then.
  • The WTO (World Trade Organization) was created.
  • Kenneth Lay was born in 1942. Lay became notorious in his later years as the CEO of Enron Corp.
  • In 1927, Gaston Leroux died. He was the French author of Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, the original novel on which Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Phantom of the Opera was based.
  • Cambodian dictator Pol Pot died in 1998, and actress Greta Garbo did the same in 1990.
  • In 1924, Rand McNally published their first road atlas.
  • According to Dates In History, Ireland saw its first balloon flight in the year 784.

Happy Tax Day, US resident citizens. And to those of you already residing overseas with your automatic extension, “bah, humbug!”

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Tax Day

Primary Sidebar

Visit Panama

Panama Relocation Tours

VPN Services

Best VPN for TravelersBest VPN for Travelers

Sale on .COM Domains!

KINGCOM domain salepixel

More Posts

every expat should have a VPN

VPN4All: A Virtual Private Network that’s Truly Private

Blogging for Expats: Choose Your Plugins Wisely

An elephant in Paddington Station, London

The Next Big Thing

The Holiday: Expat Movie Review

Google Plus

Google Plus for Expats

Tell Us About It

Top Expat Blogs – How Cool is That?

Here's a new award. . . We've just been named to the Top Expat Blogs list at Ranked Blogs! If you like us, click the link and vote us up! we're one of the top expat blogs at Ranked Blogs! Future Expats was recently awarded a spot in the Top 100 Expat Blogs.

Follow Me

  • Twitter

Copyright © 2023 Future Expats Forum
Proudly running on a Genesis Theme by StudioPress