Today is World Hello Day, plus the Anniversary of Many, Many Things...

Continuing our series on historical happenings, let's delve right into the smart, the wacky, and the _flossy events of November 21 in history.

- Judas Maccabaeus restored the Temple in Jerusalem in 164 BC, an event that is commemorated each year with the festival of Hanukkah.

- In 1620, the Plymouth Colony settlers signed the Mayflower Compact.

- François-Marie Arouet was born in France in 1694; he would later author histories, plays, and books, including Candide, under the pen name Voltaire.

- The first un-tethered hot air balloon flight was made in 1783 in Paris.

- North Carolina, in 1789, was the twelfth state to ratify the U.S. Constitution.

- Thomas Edison announced his invention of a machine that can record and play sound, the phonograph, in 1877.

- In 1905, the journal "Annalen der Physik" published Albert Einstein's paper, "Doest the Inertia of a Body Depend Upon Its Energy Content?," which led to the mass-energy equivalence formula, E=mc2.

- Elizabeth George Speare, an American children's author, was born in 1908. Her books "The Witch of Blackbird Pond" and "The Bronze Bow" won Newbery Medals.

- Rebecca L. Felton of Georgia was sworn in as the first female senator in 1922.

- In 1953, 40 years after its discovery, the "Piltdown Man" skull was declared a hoax by the British Natural History Museum.

- The Birdman of Alcatraz, Robert Franklin Stroud, died at the Springfield Center in Missouri in 1963.

- The eclectic Icelandic singer-songwriter / actress, Björk, was born in 1965.

- In 1973, the existence of an 18.5 minute gap on a White House tape recording related to Watergate was revealed by J. Fred Buzhardt, President Nixon's attorney.

- Lake Peigneur, in Louisiana, drained into an underlying salt deposit, changing the lake from a 10-foot-deep freshwater lake to a salt water lake with a deep hole.

- The first feature-length CGI film, "Toy Story," was released in theaters in 1995.

- November 21 is World Hello Day, during which people are supposed to say "hello" to at least 10 other people, as established in 1973 in response to the conflict between Egypt and Israel.

-November 21 is also World Television Day. The UN General Assembly established the day in 1996 to encourage nations to exchange cultural programming focusing on peace and development.