Melissabee and Steve (from the STCC) are both from San Jose, California so we will visit that city today.

The photos are: 1) the Guadalupe River, 2) the Winchester Mystery House, 3) St. Joseph's Cathedral, and 3) downtown San Jose looking over the Tech Museum towards Mount Hamilton.

San José is the third-largest city in California, and the tenth-largest in the United States. It is the county seat of Santa Clara County. San Jose is located in Santa Clara Valley, at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region referred as Silicon Valley. Once a small farming city, San Jose became a magnet for suburban newcomers in new housing developments between the 1960s and 1990s, and is now the largest city in Northern California. The official United States Census Bureau population estimate for July 1, 2006 is 929,936. The California Department of Finance estimates, San Jose's population on January 1, 2008 was 989,496.
Originally known as El Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe, San Jose was founded on November 29, 1777 as the first town in the Spanish colony of Nueva California, which later became Alta California. The city served as a farming community to support Spanish military installations at San Francisco and Monterey. When California gained statehood in 1850, San Jose served as its first capital. After more than 150 years as an agricultural center, increased demand for housing from soldiers and other veterans returning from World War II, as well as aggressive expansion during the 1950s and 1960s, led San Jose to become what would later be known as the Capital of Silicon Valley. Growth in the 1970s attracted more businesses to the city. In the late 1980s, after four decades of heavy development and population growth, San Jose surpassed San Francisco in population to become the third most populous city in California. By the 1990s, San Jose's location within the booming local technology industry earned the city the nickname Capital of Silicon Valley.

Prior to western settlement, the area was inhabited by several groups of Ohlone Native Americans. The first lasting European presence began with a series of Franciscan missions established from 1769 by Father Junípero Serra. On orders from Antonio María de Bucareli y Ursúa, Spanish Viceroy of New Spain, San Jose was founded by Lieutenant José Joaquín Moraga as Pueblo de San José de Guadalupe (in honor of Saint Joseph) on November 29, 1777, to establish a farming community. The town was the first civil settlement in Alta California.
In 1797, the pueblo was moved from its original location, near the present-day intersection of Guadalupe Parkway and Taylor Street, to a location in what is now Downtown San Jose. San Jose came under Mexican rule in 1825 after Mexico broke with the Spanish crown. It then became part of the United States, after it capitulated without bloodshed in 1846 and California was annexed. Soon afterwards, on March 27, 1850, San Jose became the first incorporated city in the state, with Josiah Belden its first mayor. The town was the state's first capital, as well as host of the first and second sessions (1850-1851) of the California Legislature.
Though not impacted as severely as San Francisco, San Jose suffered damage from the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Over 100 people died at the Agnews Asylum (later Agnews State Hospital) after its walls and roof collapsed, and the San Jose High School's three-story stone was also destroyed. During World War II many Japanese were sent to internment camps and, following the Los Angeles zoot suit riots, anti-Mexican violence took place in the summer of 1943.
As World War II started, the city's economy shifted from agriculture (the Del Monte cannery was the largest employer) to industrial manufacturing with the contracting of the Food Machinery Corporation (FMC) by the United States War Department to build 1000 Landing Vehicle Tracked. After World War II, FMC (later United Defense, and currently BAE Systems) continued as a defense contractor, with the San Jose facilities designing and manufacturing military platforms such as the M113 Armored Personnel Carrier, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, and various subsystems of the M1 Abrams. IBM established its West Coast headquarters in San Jose in 1943 and opened a downtown research and development facility in 1952. Both would prove to be harbingers for the economy of San Jose, as Reynold Johnson and his team would later invent RAMAC, as well as the disc drive, and the technological side of San Jose's economy grew.
Downtown San Jose looking over the Tech Museum towards Mount Hamilton; hills in the background show their winter green color.
During the 1950s and 1960s, city manager Dutch Hamann led the city in a major growth campaign. The city annexed adjacent areas, such as Alviso and Cambrian Park, providing large areas for suburbs. An anti-growth reaction to the effects of rapid development emerged in the 1970s championed by mayors Norman Mineta and Janet Gray Hayes. Despite establishing an urban growth boundary, development fees, and incorporations of Campbell and Cupertino, development was not slowed, but rather directed into already incorporated areas. San Jose's position in Silicon Valley triggered more economic and population growth, which led to the highest housing costs increase in the nation, 936% between 1976 and 2001. Efforts to increase density continued into 1990s when an update of the 1974 urban plan kept the urban growth boundaries intact and voters rejected a ballot measure to ease development restrictions in the foothills. Sixty percent of the housing built in San Jose since 1980 and over three-quarters of the housing built since 2000 have been multifamily structures, reflecting a political propensity toward Smart Growth planning principles.

Today's Jumble (8/20/08):

ERQUE = QUEER; TEPIN = INEPT; HECARB = BREACH; EMTYSS = SYSTEM

CIRCLED LETTERS = ETHTE

What the executives needed when they met for a bite - - -

"TEETH"

Today is St. Stephen's Day in Hungary. It is also Radio Day in the U.S. Alas, the only other thing I found is that it is Get Ready for Kindergarten Month. Isaac Hayes would have been 66 today had he not passed away recently. Alan Reed was born on this day in 1907. He was the original voice of Fred Flinstone.

Other things on this day in history:

636 - Battle of Yarmouk: Arab forces led by Khalid ibn al-Walid take control of Syria and Palestine away from the Byzantine Empire, marking the first great wave of Muslim conquests and the rapid advance of Islam outside Arabia.
917 - Battle of Anchialus: Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria invades Thrace and drives the Byzantines out.
1000 - The foundation of the Hungarian state, Hungary is established as a Christian kingdom by Stephen I of Hungary.
1391 - Konrad von Wallenrode becomes the 24th Hochmeister of the Teutonic Order.
1672 - Former Grand Pensionary Johan de Witt and his brother Cornelis were brutally murdered by an angry mob in The Hague.
1775 - The Spanish established a presidio (fort) and the town came to be called Tucson, Arizona.
1794 - Battle of Fallen Timbers - American troops force a confederacy of Shawnee, Mingo, Delaware, Wyandot, Miami, Ottawa, Chippewa, and Potawatomi warriors into a disorganized retreat.
1804 - Lewis and Clark Expedition: The "Corps of Discovery", exploring the Louisiana Purchase, suffers its only death when sergeant Charles Floyd dies, apparently from acute appendicitis.
1858 - Charles Darwin first published his theory of evolution in The Journal of the Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London alongside Alfred Russel Wallace's same theory.
1866 - President Andrew Johnson formally declared the American Civil War over.
1882 - Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture debuts in Moscow.
1888 - Mutineers imprison Emin Pasha at Dufile.
1900 - Japan's primary school law is amended to provide for four years of mandatory schooling.
1914 - World War I: German forces occupy Brussels.
1920 - The first commercial radio station, 8MK (WWJ), begins operations in Detroit, Michigan.
1926 - Japan's public broadcasting company, Nippon Hōsō Kyōkai (NHK) is established.
1938 - Lou Gehrig hits his 23rd career grand slam - a record that still stands.
1940 - Exiled Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky is fatally wounded in Mexico City by an assassin's ice axe. He dies the next day.
1944 - World War II: The Battle of Romania begins with a major Soviet offensive.
1953 - The Soviet Union publicly acknowledged it had tested a hydrogen bomb.
1955 - In Morocco, a force of Berbers from the Atlas Mountains region of Algeria raid two rural settlements and kill 77 French nationals.
1960 - Senegal breaks from the Mali federation, declaring independence.
1968 - 200,000 Warsaw Pact troops and 5,000 tanks invade Czechoslovakia to end the "Prague Spring" of political liberalization.
1969 - All four Beatles were together in the recording studio for the final time as they finished the Abbey Road LP.
1974 - Congress votes to reduce aid to South Vietnam from $1 Billion to $700 Million. Majority of the cuts were for military supplies.
1975 - Viking Program: NASA launches the Viking 1 planetary probe toward Mars.
1977 - Voyager Program: The United States launches the Voyager 2 spacecraft.
1979 - The East Coast Main Line rail route between England and Scotland is restored when the Penmanshiel Diversion opens.
1982 - Lebanese Civil War: A multinational force lands in Beirut to oversee the PLO withdrawal from Lebanon.
1986 - In Edmond, Oklahoma, U.S. Postal employee Patrick Sherrill guns down 14 of his co-workers and then commits suicide.
1988 - "Black Saturday" of the Yellowstone fire in Yellowstone National Park
1988 - Peru becomes a member of the Berne Convention copyright treaty.
1988 - Iran–Iraq War: A cease-fire is agreed to after almost eight years of war.
1991 - Collapse of the Soviet Union, August Coup: More than 100,000 people rally outside the Soviet Union's parliament building protesting the coup aiming to depose President Mikhail Gorbachev.
1991 - Estonia secedes from the Soviet Union.
1993 - After rounds of secret negotiations in Norway, the Oslo Peace Accords were signed, followed by a public ceremony in Washington, D.C. the next month.
1997 - Souhane massacre in Algeria; over 60 people killed, 15 kidnapped.
1998 - The Supreme Court of Canada states Quebec cannot legally secede from Canada without the federal government's approval.
1998 - U.S. embassy bombings: The United States military launches cruise missile attacks against alleged al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and a suspected chemical plant in Sudan in retaliation for the August 7 bombings of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The al-Shifa pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum is destroyed in the attack.
2002 - A group of Iraqis opposed to the regime of Saddam Hussein take over the Iraqi Embassy in Berlin for five hours before releasing their hostages and giving up.