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reetings from Australia.
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Leander, who was nightly wont
(What maid will not the tale remember?)
To cross thy stream, broad Hellespont!
George Gordon Noel Byron (1788 - 1824), British poet; 'Written after Swimming from Sestos to
Abydos' (l.
2 - 4). Gallipoli is near the
Hellespont, or
Dardanelles, scene of the first Anzac Day, April 25, 1915
Those
heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives.
You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country.
Therefore rest in peace.
There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours ...
You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in
peace.
After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons
as well. Mustafa
Kemal Atatürk, commander of Turkish forces at Gallipoli,
'father of the Turkish nation', showing great magnanimity to his former enemies
April 25th. When April shall have six days
left, the season of spring will be in mid course … On that day, as I
was returning from Nomentum to Rome, a white- robed crowd blocked the
middle of the road. A flamen was on his way to the grove of ancient
Mildew [Robigo], Straightway I went up to him to inform myself of the
rite. Thy flamen, O Quirinus, pronounced these words: "Thou scaly
Mildew, spare the sprouting corn, and let the smooth top quiver on
the surface of the ground. O let the crops, nursed by the heaven's
propitious stars, grow till they are ripe for the sickle." Ovid, Fasti,
iv, 901Roman calendarSource
Come listen to me, you gallants so free,
All you that love mirth for to hear,
And I will tell you of a bold outlàw,
That lived in Nottinghamshire. Old
English ballad
Anzac Day,
Australia and New Zealand
Scientists have calculated that in each glass of
water we drink, at least one molecule has passed through the bladder of
Oliver Cromwell. Richard
Dawkins;
Enemies of Reason. Oliver Cromwell was born on April 25, 1599
The countrey tho in general well enough clothd
appeard in some places bare; it resembled in my imagination the back of a
lean cow, covered in general with long hair, but nevertheless where her
scraggy hip bones have stuck out farther than they ought accidental rubbs
and knocks have intirely bard them of their share of covering. Sir Joseph
Banks, British botanist, on the coast near Wollongong, NSW, Australia, from
his journal, April 25, 1770
Ah, but he will be able to hear the still,
small voice of the air. Guglielmo
Marconi's mother at his birth (April 25, 1874), after someone rudely commented on
the baby's rather large ears
Women were everywhere, and their presence in the streets, and leavening the lumps of humanity in the crowded polling-places, no doubt had a refining influence. Never have we had a more decorous gathering together of the multitude than that which distinguished the first exercise of the female franchise on Saturday, April 25, 1896; and rarely since the days of open voting has there been so much excitement, albeit well under control. The charming spectacle
of —
Lovely woman, hesitating
Round the booths in sweet dismay
Her gentle bosom palpitating
Lest she cast her vote away
was presented throughout the livelong day, but it would be a base libel upon a sex whose instinct is less liable to err than man's reason to assert that the women failed to realize their responsibilities-quite the contrary; they did themselves infinite credit, displaying a level-headedness and self-possession that called for admiration. From the Adelaide
Advertiser (South Australia), May 2, 1896,
reporting on the first polling day in Australia which included women voters, in South Australia on April 25
The love of country in Australians and New
Zealanders was intense – how strong, they did not realise until they
were far away from home. CEW Bean,
Australian war historian; Official History of Australia in the War of 1914 - 18. Vol I,
p. 606
It
isn't where you came from; it's where you're going that counts.
Ella Fitzgerald, American jazz singer, born on April 25, 1918
The
only thing better than singing is more singing.
Ella Fitzgerald
I
stole everything that I heard, but mostly I stole from the horns.
Ella Fitzgerald
We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of
deoxyribose nucleic acid (D.N.A.). This structure has novel features
which are of considerable biological interest. James Watson and
Francis Crick, opening sentence of
their article,'A
structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid'. DNA was revealed to
the public on April 25, 1953
Rituals
meant to be preventative against mildew on wheat, in honour of the god Robigus. Some sources say that in Roman mythology, Robigus ('wheat rust'
or 'mildew') was, along with his sister, Robigo or Rubigo, a fertility
deity who protected crops against diseases
– others say that they were the one deity, alternating sex.
Alternatively, Smith,
who seems to try to exonerate Romans of worshipping evil forces, writes,
"A god Robigus or a goddess Robigo is a mere invention from the
name of this festival, for the Romans paid no divine honours to evil
deities (Hartung, Die Religion der Römer, vol. ii p148)"*.
The feast
day, noted in the Esquiline, Caeretan, Maffeian, and Praenestine
calendars, was instituted
by Numa, and celebrated a.d. vii. Kal. Mai. (April 25) (Plin. H.N. xviii.29 s69; Varro, de Re Rust.
i.1 p90, ed. Bip., de Ling. Lat. vi.16, ed. Müll.; Festus, s.v.).
The Romans built a temple to these deities three miles from Rome on
the Via Claudia. For many
years, the Roman Catholic Church litany for St Mark's day followed the
ancient pagan festival.
The Christian Church later adopted
some themes of this festival for the Rogation Days (the three days
preceding Ascension Thursday).
Ovid (Fasti,
iv, 901 - 942) tells us that a white-robed congregation would observe a flamen
(priest) offer up to Robigus a prayer that began: "Thou scaly
Mildew, spare the sprouting corn, and let the smooth top quiver on the
surface of the ground. O let the crops, nursed by the heaven's propitious
stars, grow till they are ripe for the sickle …",
lighting an altar fire and offering the god frankincense and wine.
Those well known preventatives of cereal mildew, the entrails of a dog and
sheep, were sacrificed and thrown into the fire.
"Make the
weapons rust, not the grain"
Today we call a certain disease of
wheat 'rust', and rust is the metaphor used in the flamen's prayer as
recorded by Ovid two millennia ago. The priest urges the deity to rust
not the corn but the weapons of war: "Grip not
the tender crops, but rather grip the hard iron. Forestall the
destroyer. Better that thou shouldst gnaw at swords and baneful weapons.
There is no need of them: the world is at peace. Now let the rustic
gear, the rakes and the hard hoe, and the curved share be burnished
bright; but let rust tarnish the arms, and when one essays to draw the
sword from the scabbard, let him feel it stick from long disuse"
Footraces were held on this day to
honour the mildew gods – separate races for both men and for boys.
It was also the feast day of the puer lenonii (boy prostitutes).
Some sources give April 25 as the Blessing of the Wheat,
in Hungary. Until further information is made available to your
almanackist, I will assume there is a connection with the Robigalia of
old.
*(Bill Thayer
argues against this, citing Pliny the Elder (H.N. 2.v.16):
"there is actually a shrine
to Fever, consecrated by the state on the Palatine, one to Orbona [a
goddess of stillbirths and dead babies] near the temple of the Lares ...
and an Altar to Ill Fortune on the Esquiline".)
Mark was
at various times a companion of the saints
Barnabus,
Paul and
Peter.
In art, he is usually represented as a young man
(but sometimes as an old one, as at left), sometimes
dressed in a bishop's habit, with a lion at his feet and a scroll
with words Peace be to thee, O Mark, My Evangelist. He holds
a pen in his right hand and the Gospel in his left.
He is sometimes represented seated on a throne decorated with lions,
or else helping Venetian sailors.
Mark was the son of Mary, a pious
woman of Jerusalem. It is not known whether he actually wrote the
Gospel
attributed to him.
On St Mark's day, there was an ancient custom in
connection with the admission of freemen of the common. The
persons who were to receive the privilege marched on horseback, in
great ceremony, dressed in white and with swords, to the common,
headed by the Duke of Northumberland's chamberlain's and bailiff. At
the filthy Freemen's Well they walked through it, coming out all
grimy and wet, whereupon they changed their clothes. They then had a
drop of liquor, made a round of the common and proceeded back to
town, where the womenfolk met them, all fantastically dressed. They
called at each other's houses and drank some more. Apparently the
custom came about when King John was in the area and got mired in
the pond. He imposed on the men of the town, in the charter of their
common, an obligation to get as filthy as he had. Alnwick common
lands became enclosed, and the last time the custom was practised
was April 25, 1854.
While it was
traditional in England in the old days to fast on the eve of all
other feast days, there was a fast on St Mark's Day itself rather
than on St
Mark's Eve. However, this was not uniformly observed: on one
side of a street in Cheapside, the side of the street that was in
the diocese of London, people fasted; on the other side of the
street was the diocese of Canterbury, where no fast was expected by
the Church.
English people prayed today for
God's blessing on the growing corn. In North Wales, no ploughman
would work his team for fear of losing an ox.
El zorno del bocolo,
Venice, Italy
This Venetian dialect term means in
English 'the day of the bloom'. On this day, men present their
sweethearts with a red rose in observance of a very old tradition.
According to the legend, a valiant knight was fighting during a
Crusade and was mortally wounded in battle. He was engaged to the
daughter of the Doge and had promised always to love her. Before he
died he entrusted a friend to bring back to his darling a white
rose, which he had held to his heart. Because he was wounded, the
rose turned red, covered with his blood. His friend faithfully
despatched the rose on St Mark's day, so the tradition was born. Source: Sylvia de Vanna, personal correspondence
St Mark's gowk, Britain
The cuckoo, sometimes
in Britain called 'St. Mark's gowk', heralds the arrival of
migratory birds that have wintered in the south, indicating the return of
summer. However, it is just one of a number of claimants to Cuckoo Day,
with April
14 being a strong contender.
(See
also in the Book of Days: April 27's
Marsden, UK, Cuckoo Day, and April 28,
Towednack (UK) Cuckoo Feast.)
Find an error or dead link?
Like to make a suggestion, or just say "G'day"?
Meet me at Corrigenda
Today we mourn the
dead and the criminal stupidity of those who send them to their
fate. It is the anniversary of the Allied invasion of Turkey at the Battle of
Gallipoli on this day in 1915. (The Anzac
covering force, the 3rd Brigade of the Australian 1st
Division, began
to go ashore shortly before dawn at 4.30 am on April 25.) An estimated
131,000 Allied soldiers were killed and 262,000 wounded (sources
vary widely); about 250,000 (some sources say 450,000) Turkish men were killed or wounded
in an area measured in a handful of square kilometres.
Anzac
(or ANZAC) Day, named from the
acronym of theAustralian
and New Zealand Army Corps, commemorates the landing of British and
ANZAC forces on the beach at
Gelibolu (Gallipoli),
Turkey, on this day in 1915, in a failed
invasion of Turkey
in World War One. In Australia, it is generally commemorated with
more reverence and enthusiasm than practically any public holiday,
including
Australia Day and
Easter, and
it is more honoured than
Armistice
Day.
Perhaps only
Christmas is as widely commemorated.
Gallipoli
was the most heavily defended and best-prepared position in the Ottoman Empire,
and the Allied assault was marred by great incompetence. The British
First
Lord of the Admiralty, Winston
Churchill (1874 - 1965) was responsible
for initiating the debacle. Mustafa Kemal
(1881 - 1938) led the Turks,
and became a hero to his nation; he is better known today as Kemal Atatürk,
or 'Father of Turkey', first President of the Turkish Republic.
In Turkey, the
campaign is known as the Çanakkale Savaşlari. In Britain, it is
called the Dardanelles Campaign, and in Australia, New Zealand and Newfoundland, it
is known simply as Gallipoli.
Although the
public holiday commemorates a bloody defeat rather than a victory,
this day is considered one of the most important in the Australian
and New Zealand calendar of holidays. Dawn services are held across
Australia and
politicians make pronouncements that, on the whole, pointedly avoid questioning why
such a large proportion of young Australian manhood died or were
maimed on the other side of the world, on battlefields that had
little or nothing to do with us.
A generation of male youth was decimated: I remember from my
childhood how many old men had limbs missing.
To most
Australians, 'we' fought 'the enemy' bravely at Gallipoli. To the
Turks, a ruthless aggression was courageously turned back. The only
truth is that the actual winners were the manufacturers of armaments
who fuelled the whole calamity called WWI.
Footnote:
In recent years, the Turkish Government has graciously renamed the
landing beach 'Anzac Cove'
and each year on Anzac Day many thousands of international visitors
and Turks commemorate the tragic campaign on the beach at dawn. In
response to the renaming of the beach, in 1985 the town of Albany,
Western Australia, renamed the entrance to Princess Royal Harbour,
'Ataturk Entrance' and in 2002 erected a statue of Kemal Atatürk.
On Anzac Day 2003, the the Mayor of Gelibolu (Gallipoli), Mr
Cihat Bingöl, and
Albany
(Western Australia) Mayor, Ms
Alison Goode, signed a
Friendship Agreement:
"The formation of the Friendship Agreement between Albany and Gallipoli is a key component in progressing Albany's vision to become the quintessential place to commemorate the ANZAC tradition in Australia", Ms Goode
said. "The historical links between Australia and Turkey, and
particularly between Albany and Gallipoli, are as significant today
as they were almost 100 years ago. The connection transcends time
and distance and is a tribute to human endeavour, sacrifice, triumph
over adversity and future optimism."
Gallipoli is a
town in north-western Turkey. Its modern
Turkish name is Gelibolu. The name derives from the Greek:
Kallipolis, meaning 'Beautiful City'. It is located on the Gallipoli
Peninsula (Gelibolu Yarimadasi), with the Aegean
Sea to the west and the Dardanelles
straits to the east. The Dardanelles were formerly called the Hellespont, the
straits that the dashing Lord Byron
swam across on May 3, 1810(deformed
right leg notwithstanding), in an effort to emulate Leander of
the Greek myth.
A tourism
industry has sprung up in and around Gallipoli in recent years,
organizing arrangements for the thousands of people who come to Anzac Cove,
Turkey each year, especially on Anzac Day when the beach is packed
for ceremonies.
This day of days
again we keep – In memory of
those who sleep Away beyond
the quiet sea ... Away in far
Gallipolli.
'Tis Anzac Day – 'tis Anzac Day.. Our soldier
comrades far away, They died in
war – that we in peace May live and
love that war may cease.
"The simultaneous evacuation
of the Anzac and Suvla sectors was certainly a big – and perhaps
the only – Allied success, and was generally considered as a
masterpiece of military planning. At Helles however, the
situation was even more precarious: they had to evacuate three
weeks later, under the eyes of an alerted enemy. Therefore,
additional measures were needed to give the Turks the impression
that the trenches were still fully manned. These dummy troops
are waiting for their orders to go up the line."Source
The bloody toll: how Australia's
young men paid
for the adventurism of European politicians and arms traders
Total population of Australia in WWI
5 million
Total population (approx.) of males of service age
From 'The Band
Played "Waltzing
Matilda"', by
Eric
Bogle
A
'Matilda' was the name given to the pack of an Australian
bushman or swagman. To 'Waltz Matilda' was to carry your pack
around the bush. Fifty-nine thousand soldiers of Australia died at Gallipoli in a
stupid and pointless campaign, which was a staggeringly large number for a small country
like Australia. About the only thing they achieved was a belated
recognition that Australia was 'growing up'; she was becoming a
nation in her own right ...
Every April, marches and dawn services are held on ANZAC DAY to commemorate the
Gallipoli landings during the first
World War, and the dead of the other wars. Like all memorial parades it is both moving and yet
somewhat pointless and pathetic. This song was written after
observing one such parade.
Now when I was a young man I carried me pack
And I lived the free life of the rover.
From the Murray's green basin to the dusty
outback,
Well, I waltzed my
matilda all over.
Then in 1915, my country said, "Son,
It's time you stop ramblin', there's work to be done."
So they gave me a tin hat, and they gave me a gun,
And they marched me away to the war.
And
the band played 'Waltzing
Matilda',
As the ship pulled away from the
Quay,
And amidst all the cheers, the flag waving, and tears,
We sailed off for Gallipoli.
And
how well I remember that terrible day,
How our blood stained the sand and the water;
And of how in that hell that they call
Suvla Bay
We were butchered like lambs at the slaughter.
Johnny Turk, he was waitin', he primed himself well;
He showered us with bullets, and he rained us with shell –
And in five minutes flat, he'd blown us all to hell,
Nearly blew us right back to Australia.
But
the band played 'Waltzing Matilda',
When we stopped to bury our slain,
Well, we buried ours, and the Turks buried theirs,
Then we started all over again ... Complete
lyrics
Australia has about 16,000 vascular plant species (ferns, gymnosperms, angiosperms) but
Australia's trees are almost entirely evergreen and a species that loses its leaves in Autumn is something of a celebrity.
In fact, there are only three genuine Australian deciduous trees:
Antarctic
Beech,
Nothofagus moorei; the Myrtle
Beech, Nothofagus cunninghamii, and Deciduous
Beech (or Tanglefoot Beech),
Nothofagus gunnii.
Anzac Day gives
a rare opportunity to see Autumn gold in the Aussie bush.
"At the end of autumn, a tree in the
middle of the Tasmanian bush does something unusual. It changes
colour to red, orange and gold. Local people call it the
"turning of the fagus" and it's a spectacular reminder of
Australia's Gondwanan heritage.
"The tree is
the Deciduous Beech Nothofagus gunnii. It's the only
deciduous native tree in Tasmania and it's rather rare.
"Nothofagus is
one of the oldest genera of flowering plants in the world with a
fossil record stretching back 80 million years. It's regarded by
scientists as one of the keys to understanding how vegetation
evolved and migrated throughout the southern hemisphere …
"Traditionally,
the ANZAC Day weekend (April 25th) is when bushwalkers head out to
catch the trees in their autumn blaze."Source
[Note: Gondwanaland
is thehypothetical former composite continent in the
Southern Hemisphere, which included South America, Africa,
peninsular India, Australia, and Antarctica.]
Festival of Resurrection of Adonis, ancient Greece Source: The Phoenix and
Arabeth 1992 Calendar
Feast day of
St Anianus, second bishop of Alexandria HagiographerAlban Butler calls him a shoemaker of Alexandria; his hand was wounded
with an awl, and curedby
St Mark, who made him Bishop of Alexandria during his absence.
Another source says he mended Mark's sandal.
Nostradamus predicted that the apocalypse would
occur when Easter
fell on April 25. This has happened four times since he died in
1566, most recently in 1943, and will next occur in 2038.
"In the fourth century BCE,
Egyptian astronomers began to use an era based on the reign of the
Babylonian king Nabonassar, which came to power in 747 BCE.
Not the years, but regnal years of the most important king in the
Middle East were counted. In the beginning, this was Nabonassar,
later the Assyrian, Persian, and Macedonian kings. Eventually,
beginning with Augustus, the Roman emperors' regnal years were
recorded. The years were Egyptian years with an invariable length
of 365 days. The first year of the reign of a certain king was 1
Thot of the year in which he took power. Thus, the Nabonassar era
is 26 February 747 BCE.
"The
lists with regnal years were recorded until the third century
CE."Source
Arbor Day, USA (last Friday in April) "The last Friday in April was
set aside for the honoring and planting of trees. This holiday seems
to have been displaced by Earth Day (see April 22)."Source:
School of the Seasons
Mahavir Jayanti "Birthday of Mahavir, the 24th Tirtankhara, (pioneer of
Jainism).Celebrated in
India in Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh,
Maharashtra, Punjab and Rajasthan." Source:
Earth, Moon and Sky
The Red Hat
Society is a women's organization founded in 1998 by Sue Ellen
Cooper of
Fullerton,
California. It is not a sorority or a
voluntary service club.
There are no initiations, no fundraising projects, no rules and no
bylaws.
Its aim is social interaction, and to
encourage fun, silliness, creativity, and friendship in middle
age and beyond.
The society takes its name from the opening
lines of the poem Warning by Jenny Joseph,
which starts:
When I am an old woman I shall wear
purple
With a red hat that doesn't go and
doesn't suit me ...
King Edward
II was a closet homosexual. "At the feast after his marriage to the
12-year-old Isabella of France, he could not keep his hands off his
lover, Piers Gaveston. Later, he banned all women except his wife
from the court. He was eventually killed by a group of barons who
thrust a red-hot poker up his rectum. The English are a
literal-minded lot."(Reid, Stuart, "Royal Humbuggery", The Independent Monthly,
April 1995, p. 27)
Man of
vision?
His biographer, W Hazlitt, said that Cromwell as a schoolboy had a
vision in which a woman said he would become the greatest man in
England. Cromwell recounted this to his strict Puritan schoolmaster
who had him whipped for his impudence.
1873Walter de la Mare
(1873-1953), Charlton, Kent, England. Novelist, mystic poet, loosely
in the literary tradition of Wordsworthand Coleridge. His material often appears in
horror collections because of their ghostly atmosphere. Aka Walter
Ramal. In 1915 he became one of the legatees of his fellow
poet Rupert Brooke.
At the age of 19, the young Pauli gained fame in
scientific circles for his treatise on Einsteinian relativity.
Einstein saw him as his likely successor in physics.
He studied under Albert Einstein and
Niels Bohr.
All his life he had an intense fascination with the relationship
between spirit and matter, between quantum physics and deep
psychology. He wanted to keep separate the psyche and emotions of
the observer, or scientist, from the matter that he was studying,
believing this to be important. But Pauli's dreams warned him that it
was important for him to explore his own consciousness, so he became
a client of Carl
Jung, the great Viennese psychologist.Later he met Jung's
associate, Marie-Louise Von France, with whom he kept up a
therapeutic relationship and correspondence for many years.
After his death
in 1958 his letters were released and revealed that many symbols of
mathematics and physics had been appearing in his dreams since 1934.
He believed that physics had been on he wrong track since Descartes
and Newton postulated and 'proved' the mechanical functioning of
the Universe.
On several occasions Pauli dreamed the numbers 90, 180
and 360. He saw these as the significant numbers in the division of
a circle into four parts, and this resonated with the importance he
placed on the perfectness of the number four.
He formulated the 'exclusion principle' (1924)
in atomic physics. Pauli was awarded the 1945 Nobel Prize for
Physics.
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68 St
Mark the Evangelist was martyred at Alexandria.
1324 An entry in
the Jornal de la Chambre of King Edward II (coincidentally, born on this
day in 1284) shows pence a day paid to one
'Robyn Hod' for service to the King. (Some sources say that the first appearance in a manuscript is in William
Langland's Piers Plowman, 1377.)
The
son of William Fitz-Ooth, Robin Ooth, or Robin Hood, dissipated his
inheritance and joined a band of outlaws. He is, of course, famous for robbing
from the rich to give to the poor. He is said to have died on December 24, 1247 (the
dates are obviously confused after all these centuries) at a
nunnery in Yorkshire. At Kirklees, Yorkshire, a gravestone once had the
(probably unauthentic) inscription:
Hear undernead
dis laith stean
Laiz Robert Earl of Huntington,
Nea arcir ver American actor hie sa geude
An piple kaud im Robin Heud.
Sic utlawz as hi, an iz men,
Wil England never sigh agen. Obit 24 kal. Dekembris, 1247
The facts about the life of
Robin Hood are hazy at best, and this is only one conjectured date of the
English outlaw's death. It is said he died aged 86 and was bled to death by an
aunt in the convent of Kirklees. Blowing his horn, he summoned Little
John to his bedside and said
Give me my bent
bow in my hand, And an arrow I'll let free,
And where that arrow is taken up, There let my grave digged be.
The alleged grave may still be seen near Huddersfield.
Robin's
origins
The famous English outlaw
who robbed from the rich to give to the poor was first heard of in a Latin
clerical chronicle in 1354 in which Robin was a trespasser in a royal forest. As
early as 1438 a ship was registered at Aberdeen with the name Robin Hood, and in 1486 King Henry VII watched Robin Hood pageants
at York. The English outlaw was in sixteenth-century Scotland a cult figure,
probably because of his resistance to English authority. Tennyson saw the fabled
figure as an alternative to the values of modernism.
We may see Robin Hood's death, coming as it does on
the day before Christmas, the ancient festival wherein the forces of the new
were born again, as an allegory of the annual 'death' of the vegetative
process. The next day, following the Winter Solstice, the process begins anew
and the days grow ever longer, bringer life back to the soil. Such are the myths
and legends associated with death-rebirth deities,
especially at Yuletide.
In his colour of Lincoln Green and his presence in
Nottingham Forest, Robin is a cognate of the archetype, the Green Man, a symbol of uncertain origin common in the British
Isles. Classic examples of the Green Man are most frequently found among the
stonework in and on churches, in
the borders and decorations of bibles and other religious works – he is even
carved, under the instruction of Michelangelo, on the tomb of Pope Julius II in
Rome – though it is more
likely pagan in
nature. The French called him tete de feuilles (head of leaves)
and the Germans called him blattmaske (leaf mask) or blattqesicht.
In the English tradition, this sprite is also called Robin Goodfellow or Puck,
and may be depicted with a goat's cloven hooves like Satan and the wood-dwelling
satyr, Pan, Greek god
of shepherds and flocks. In Roman mythology, he is the god Faunus. Other possible references to him are Green George,
Jack-in-the-Green, and the Green Knight.
The Green
Man image depicts a man with foliage for hair, usually with either a leafy beard
or with leaves growing out of his mouth and nose; sometimes he sports antlers on his head. One
of the earliest known examples of this type of foliate face is carved on a tomb
in France and dates back to 400 CE. Such images appear in early Western art,
stemming from ancient Greek and Roman mythology: Silvanus, the Roman god of the
woods, and Dionysus
(Bacchus). The ancient Celts, too, depicted their god Cernunnos with horns
and leafed hair.
Today's neo-pagan thought identifies the Green Man as
the symbol of the qualities of godhood within the male, as well as being an
expression of the life/death/rebirth cycle.
Was
the king's man a … queen? "… The reassessment is based on studies of the
14th-century ballads of Robin Hood, the earliest known accounts of his deeds,
which detail his relationships with his 'merrie men', especially Little
John and Will Scarlet …" Source
"Robin Hood is mentioned by name in the official documents
(pipe roll) for Yorkshire of 1230 (1225 by some counts), where he is
described as 'Robertus Hood, fugitivis,' who has failed to appear in court.
He is mentioned also as an historical figure in Wyntoun's Chronicle of
Scotland c.1420. A book published in Scotland in 1521 places his life in the
time of Richard I."Source
1357According toRymer's Faedera (Vol. vi., p. 13), Cecilia, wife of John
de Rygeway, was pardoned and released from prison by King Edward III because of
a miracle attributed to God and the Virgin Mary. Mrs de
Rygeway had been imprisoned for the murder of her husband; in Nottingham jail
she ate no food and drank nothing for forty days.
He
is credited with being the actual author of the Hypnerotomachia
Poliphili, a strange fantasy novel, whose typographic
qualities and illustrations have made it legendary as one of the most beautiful
books ever printed.
1523Henry VIII, King of England, forbade private
ownership of firearms by any person with an income of less than 100 pounds per
year. The ban was, of course, cheerfully ignored.
1593TheMoroccans took Timbuktu, 'town of the 333 saints'. In the
English-speaking world, 'Timbuktu' has become a term meaning a very out of
the way place, much like the Australian idioms 'the black stump' and 'back
o' Bourke'. However, in the 15th and 16th centuries,
this African town (now a UN heritage site in Mali)was a bustling centre of trade and
learning.
"For West Africans … Timbuktu was an economic and cultural
capital equal in historical importance to acclaimed cities like Rome, Athens,
Jerusalem, and Mecca. Beginning in the thirteenth century, Timbuktu became the
center of a thriving trade in Africa. Prosperity made by the
trans-Saharan trade routes brought great wealth to the city. This wealth
attracted not only merchants and traders but also men of academic and
religious learning …
"Today, the very fabric of Timbuktu today is threatened by
what once contributed to the city's success—the Sahara
Desert. The desert, which for centuries brought wealth to the city, now
brings only drifting sands, driven by the dry wind of the harmattan,
that threaten to smother the city and its monuments. This desertification
has destroyed the vegetation, water supply, and many historical structures
in the city. In response to the threat of encroachment by desert sands,
Timbuktu was inscribed on the World Heritage List in Danger in 1990 and
UNESCO established a conservation program to safeguard the city."Source
1792Highwayman
Nicolas J Pelletier became the first person executed by guillotine.
The official executioner of the French
Revolution,
Charles-Louis Sanson, said:
"Today the machine invented for the purpose of decapitating criminals sentenced to death will be put to work for the first time. Relative to the methods of execution practised heretofore, this machine has several advantages. It is less repugnant: no man's hands will be tainted with the blood of his fellow being, and the worst of the ordeal for the condemned man will be his own fear of death, a fear more painful to him than the stroke which deprives him of life."
Hark! 'tis the twanging horn! O'er yonder bridge,
That with its wearisome but needful length
Bestrides the wintry flood, in which the moon
Sees her unwrinkled face reflected bright,
He comes, the herald of a noisy world,
With spatter'd boots, strapp'd waist, and frozen locks;
News from all nations lumb'ring at his back …
1816As Lord Byron left England in permanent
exile, friends armed themselves with guns to protect him in case the very sight
of the poet incited a riot.
1846Mexican-American War / Thornton
Affair: Open conflict began over the disputed border of Texas,
triggering the Mexican-American
War. "Mexican forces obligingly attack a US
'scouting party' sent by Beloved and Respected Comrade Leader
President James Polk into disputed territory between the Nueces and
Rio Grande Rivers in hopes of provoking just such a skirmish. The
incident was used by the expansionist Congress as an excuse to start
the Mexican-American War, during which the US seized California
(Surf's Up!)."
1878 Confined to her home in Old Catton, Norfolk, as an invalid for the last eight years of her life, English writer
Anna Sewell (b. 1820) completed Black Beauty: the Autobiography of a Horse, and died. The children's classic is said to have been instrumental in abolishing the cruel practice of using the check-rein.
1896 Women voted in the South
Australian elections. It was the first such occurrence in the world, and South
Australia was the first electorate in the world to grant women the right to both
vote and stand for election, but it was
another six years before women gained the vote nationally (Australia was the
second country after New Zealand to grant women the vote nationally).
1897 "Merkel (Texas). People returning from church
observed a heavy object being dragged along the ground by a rope attached to a
flying craft. The rope got caught in a railroad track. The craft was too high
for its structure to be visible but protrusions and a light could be
distinguished. After about 10 min a man came down along the rope cut the end
free, and went back aboard the craft, which flew away toward the northeast. The
man was small and dressed in a light- blue uniform. (194; Magonia)"Source
1898 Convicted of
embezzlement, William Sydney Porter entered the Ohio penitentiary where he began to
write short stories under a name borrowed from a guard – O Henry.
He was released from prison on July 24,
1901.
1901 USA: Thomas
Black Jack Ketchum (b. 1866) was hanged. He was a notorious outlaw in the late
1890s, after putting together a band of outlaws from the Hole-in-the-Wall area
in the state of Wyoming. On the morning of his execution, Black Jack said to the
voyeurs standing at the foot of the gallows: "I'll be in hell before you start
breakfast, boys!" Then he exclaimed, "Let her rip!" Unfortunately for the
people who had come to see the grizzly spectacle, his last words proved to be
prophetic – or perhaps he was just having the last laugh. The hangman had
miscalculated the outlaw's weight, and Ketchum fell through the gallows
trapdoor at dazzling speed and the noose decapitated him. The executed train
robber's gore soaked the front ranks of the visitors at the foot of the
scaffold.
1935 A shark was
caught in the waters off Sydney and exhibited at the suburb of Manly. There it
disgorged a tattooed human arm, setting off police investigations into Sydney's
famous 'Shark Arm
Mystery'.
"On February 28, 1953, Francis Crick walked
into the Eagle Pub in Cambridge, England, and as James Watson later
recalled, announced that 'We have found the secret of life!'. Actually, they
had. That morning Watson and Crick had figured out the structure of
deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA."Source
"The first artist to use it was Salvador
Dali, who included DNA spirals in his surreal, phantasmagoric
paintings of the 1950s. But he was ahead of his time."Source
1968The
Beatles refused to perform for Queen Elizabeth at a British Olympic Appeal
Fund show. Ringo Starr explained,
"Our decision would be the same no matter what the cause. We don't do benefits."
"Bloodless" must be qualified however: the governmental
forces killed four people before surrendering. However, this revolution is
peculiar in that the revolutionaries did not use direct violence to achieve
their goals.
April 25
is one of the major holidays in Portugal, usually a day of celebration and joy,
though some right-wing sectors of population still regard the developments after
the coup d'état as pernicious for the country.
Carnation is
the symbol of this revolution, since soldiers put these flowers in their guns,
in what came to symbolize the absence of
violence for changing the regime in Portugal – a regime that had been one
of the longest dictatorships of the 20th Century.
1975As
North Vietnamese forces closed in on the South
Vietnamese capital Saigon, the Australian Embassy was closed and evacuated, almost ten
years to the day since the first Australian troop commitment to South Vietnam.
1976The
first democratic elections in Portugal for 49 years were held.
1980 A commando mission in Iran to rescue
American embassy hostages was aborted after mechanical problems grounded the
rescue helicopters. Eight United States troops were killed in a mid-air
collision during the failed operation.
1981Tsuruga,
Japan: More than
100 workers were exposed to radiation during repairs of a nuclear power plant.
1993More than one million marched in Washington,
DC, for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender rights.
1996A
T-43 (military version of a Boeing 737) crashed into mountain near Dubrovnik, Croatia killing
35, including US Secretary of Commerce, Ron Brown.
1996
Australia:
ANZAC Day. Swastikas were painted on front door of Barricade
Books, as well as those of other local anti-fascist activists. A
local demonstration against fascist organising was held, and a march to the
bookstore.
2007Boris Yeltsin's
funeral – the first to be sanctioned by the Russian Orthodox Church for a head
of state since the funeral of Emperor
Alexander III in
1894.
2007 The Dow Jones Industrial
hit 13,000 for the first time in history, closing at 13,089.89.
We're men, we're men in tights.
We roam around the forest looking for fights.
We're men, we're men in tights.
We rob from the rich and give to the poor, that's right!
We may look like sissies, but watch what you say or else we'll put out your lights!
We're men, we're men in tights,
Always on guard defending the people's rights.
[Dance number, chorus line style]
We're men, MANLY men, we're men in tights. Yeah!
We roam around the forest looking for fights.
We're men, we're men in tights.
We rob from the rich and give to the poor, that's right!
We may look like pansies, but don't get us wrong or else we'll put out your lights.
We're men, we're men in tights (TIGHT tights),
Always on guard defending the people's rights.
When you're in a fix just call for the men in tights.
reetings from Australia.
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