It made history.

In a country where the number of morbidly obese, super-morbidly obese and super-super-morbidly obese people had doubled, quadrupled and quintupled respectively in a little more than a decade, even using the word "veggie" in 2002 to describe a fast food chain product was revolutionary.

Given meatless hamburgers have only really become a thing in Australia in recent times, the 2002 veggie burger makes Burger King look visionary. Who'd have thought it?

And in case you're wondering, a super-morbidly obese woman of my height, about 162 centimetres, would weigh at least 140 kilograms. A healthy woman of that height should weigh about 60 kilograms, or thereabouts.

I only know about the Burger King veggie burger after a few minutes of fluffing about this week while engaging in a pleasant occasional pastime - checking out what happened in history on a particular day of the year.

I picked March 15 because it's my birthday, today, when I will notch up 60 years on this earth. It seems like a nice point to pause and reflect.

Scanning through the "What happened on this day in history" has something for everyone.

If you're in the "Everything happens for a reason... we're all connected... Oh my God it's a sign... You have to be a Pisces because you like trees, butterflies and big-eyed puppies" camp - and apologies, but perish the thought - you'll find enough events in history to show you simply HAD to have been born on the day you were because the fates decreed it.

Take March 15.

I HAD to have been born on that day because there are SO many things that happened on March 15 that are SO relevant to me. I'm a feminist Catholic-born leftie greenie atheist latte-sipping journalist and grandma who likes reading books and gardening.

So OF COURSE on March 15, 1729, the first American nun, Sister St Stanislas Hachard, took her vows in New Orleans, and on March 15, 1875 Catholic Archbishop of New York John McCloskey was named the first American cardinal, and on March 15, 1979, the new Pope John Paul II published his first encyclical, Redemptor Hominis, warning of the growing gap between rich and poor. It was OBVIOUS I would have to be born on March 15 because I would campaign for a royal commission into the Catholic Church by 2012.

Because I'm a feminist there had to be a significant March 15 women's event in history and I found it in 1907, when Finnish women became the first in Europe to win the right to take their place in the Finnish Parliament.

The journalist part of me was delighted to find that on March 15, 1913, US President Woodrow Wilson held the first open presidential news conference, but not so delighted to find that on March 15, 1935 Nazi German Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels banned four Berlin newspapers.

Checking out events in history on your birthday turns up other random but enjoyable stuff.

On March 15 the American state of Louisiana established the first health board to regulate quarantine. I have no idea what that was about but Louisiana seems to have been a bit more switched-on in the 1800s to the health and economic risks of epidemic than President Donald "good things are going to happen" Trump.

The first cricket test between Australia and England started in Melbourne on March 15, 1877. Australia won by 45 runs. Of course the first organised group of Australian cricketers to play England in England was an Indigenous Australian team nine years earlier. And not on March 15.

Oil was discovered in Saudi Arabia on March 15, 1938. The first escalator was patented on March 15, 1892. I didn't know that. I don't mind escalators. I won't be able to travel on one again without feeling some sort of kindred bond. If secateurs and the first decent cappuccino machine were patented on March 15 I'd be delighted.

The murderous rage I can feel at times - say when a $12 million government grant that's supposed to pay for community sporting facilities ends up funding a leagues club's conference and hotel development - I put down to March 15, 44BC when Roman Emperor Julius Caesar was murdered by a group of senators that included his friend Brutus.

It led Shakespeare to pen the line "Beware the Ides of March" in his play, Julius Caesar, and it's as good a motto as any for us March 15, Ides of March, babies.

But I said the "What happened on this day in history" fluffing about has something for everyone.

You only have to look at what happened on your birthday to realise the vast sweep of history that's gone before us, the prioritising of some events over others to record and remember, and the weirdness of trying to find meaning in a birth date based on random factoids plucked from the air.

But it's fun when coincidences happen.

On March 7, 2011, I walked into a Melbourne bookstore and saw a book, Joanna: The Notorious Queen of Naples, Jerusalem and Sicily, with a jacket cover showing a painting from the Middle Ages of a praying woman wearing a crown. I know the date because I recorded it in the front of the book.

I opened it and these were the first words: "The Papal Court at Avignon, March 15, 1348 - on this day, more than 650 years ago, Joanna I, queen of Naples, Sicily and Jerusalem and countess of Provence, stood trial for her life."

Well, I had to buy it. It had my name - almost literally - all over it.

In 2011 I was in the thick of writing about child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church, but it was at least a year before the campaign for a royal commission. I was tired and not much of a fan of the Catholic Church. And I liked the cut of Queen Joanna's jib.

She spoke on her own behalf at a trial in Avignon - when the city was "marked by suspicion and fear" because of the plague - before Pope Clement VI and a jury of cardinals after she was accused of conspiring to murder her husband.

She was found to be "not only innocent but above the suspicion of guilt", at the age of 22.

I'd never heard of her but there she was, the only female monarch of her time to rule in her own name. And today, 672 years later, I'll raise a glass to her.

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