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reetings from Australia.
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Holy Vulcan, foremost of this place, to You we pray. Grant peace to the exhausted fire brigades and to those who service the fountains. If none are harmed so very much, if the flames You permit to assault only a few deplorable souls, Holy One, then at each of your altars they will sing your praises, three times, three times they will pour libations and make thick with incense Your altar fires piled high with fruitful boughs. He was hung in a noose, and afterwards let down half-living; next his genitals were cut off and his bowels torn out and burned in a fire; then and not till then his head was cut off and his trunk cut into four pieces. Plunder continued to take precedence over conversion, but the Catholics continued to be embarrassed. Their ideology was not altogether suited to their practice. The Catholics made much of their conquests of Aztecs and Incas, whom they described as empires with institutions similar to those of the Hapsburg Empire and the religious practices as demonic as those of the official enemy, the heathen empire of the Ottoman Turks. But the Catholics did not make much of the wars of extermination against communities that had neither emperors nor standing armies. Such feats, although perpetrated regularly, conflicted with the ideology and were less than heroic. |
Mr and Mrs Jeanie and
Al Tomaini |
You say that I want somebody to elucidate my ideas. But you ought to know that what is grand is necessarily obscure to weak men.
English poet William Blake wrote these words to
John Trusler on August 23, 1799
Now, we are not a failure.
This is our career and our triumph.
Never in our full life could we hope to do such work for tolerance, for justice, for man's understanding of man as now we do by accident. Our words – our lives – our pains – nothing! The taking of our lives – lives of a good shoemaker and a poor fish peddler – all!
That last moment belongs to us – that agony is our triumph.
Nicola Sacco at his sentencing, August 23, 1927
Source
One of the great minds of the Information Age is a Nigerian American named Philip Emeagwali. He had to leave school because his parents couldn't pay the fees. He lived in a refugee camp during your civil war. He won a scholarship to university and went on to invent a formula that lets computers make 3.1 billion calculations per second. Some people call him the Bill Gates of Africa.
US President Bill Clinton; 'Remarks in an address to the Joint
Assembly', House of Representatives Chamber, National Assembly Building, Abuja, Nigeria, August 26, 2000. Philip Emeagwali, a creator of the Internet, was born on August 23, 1954.
It remains the funniest show I've ever seen in my life.
John Cleese, of
Peter Cook and
Dudley Moore's Beyond the Fringe, which began on August 23, 1960
Momma's got a brand new bag yeah
Momma's got a brand new bag yeah
We gonna grove it the whole night long baby yeah
We gonna grove it the whole night long yeah baby yeah
We gonna work it out baby, ughh
We gonna shake it the whole night yeah
Yee hoo!
Stretch out, stretch out baby
I hear you talkin', I hear you talkin'
That's right, woo!
You turn me on baby, mmmmm
Mmmmm, you're burning up now baby.
Peter Cook and Dudley Moore
The nomination of the boar hog Pigasus for President of the United States by the Yippies had been the most "transcendentally lucid" political act of the twentieth century.
Robert Anton Wilson, The
Illuminatus Trilogy: The Eye in the Pyramid, the Golden Apple &
Leviathan; Pigasus was nominated at the Democratic Party Convention
on August 23, 1968
We want to give you a chance to talk to our candidate and to restate our demand that Pigasus be given Secret Service protection and be brought to the White House for his foreign policy briefing.
Jerry Rubin at the nomination of Pigasus for president of the USA
They nominate a president and he eats the people. We nominate a president and the people eat him.
Pigasus nominators' slogan
Everybody's smoking and no one's getting high
Everybody's flying and never touch the sky
There's a UFO over New York and I ain't too surprised
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Nobody told me there'd be days like these
Strange days indeed – most peculiar, mama
John Lennon;
'Nobody Told
Me'; Lennon and his partner, May Pang, claimed to have seen a
UFO on August 23, 1974
Q. Now that you've been living in N.Y. 3 years, do you
still …
A. If you look closely at the wonderful Walls And Bridges, out now, album package, you will notice saying, "I saw a U.F.O…" why don't you ask me about that?
Q. Oh, I hadn't noticed, did you really … where you drunk? High? having a primal?
A. No. Actually I was very straight. I was lying naked on the bed, when I had this
urge …
Q. Don't we all?
A. So I went to the window, just dreaming around in my usual poetic frame of mind, to cut a long short story, there, as I turned my head, hovering over the next building, no more than a hundred feet away was this
thing … with ordinary electric light bulbs flashing on and off round the bottom, one non-blinking red light on the
top … What the Nixon is that! I says to myself (for no one else was there)
… is it a helicopter? No! It makes no noise … ah then, it must be a balloon! (frantically trying to rationalize it, in my all too human way) but no!!! Balloons don't look like that, nor do they fly so low, yes folks, it was flying (very slow, about 30 m.p.h.)
below ... I repeat below most roof tops (i.e. higher than the 'old building' lower than the
'new') all the time it was there, I never took my eyes off it, but I did scream to a friend who was in another room "Come and look at this"
etc. etc. My friend came running and bore witness with me. Nobody else was around. We tried to take pictures (shit on my
Polaroid, it was bust) with a straight camera. We gave the film to Bob Gruen to develop, he brought back a blank
film ... Said it looked like it had been thru' the radar at customs
… Well, it stayed around for a bit, then sailed off …
Q. Did you check to see …
A. Yeah, yeah, the next day Bob ('is it in focus') Gruen rang the Daily
News … Times, police to see if anyone else reported anything. Two other people and or groups of/said they too saw
something … anyway I know what I saw.
Q. Aren't you afraid people won't believe you … crazy
Lennon/Maharishi/etc …
A. That's just one of the many burdens I will have to bear on this day of
water babies, inflation, generation crap, highly influential, but not
untidy …
Interview with John Lennon on his UFO encounter, August 23, 1974; Andy
Warhol's
Interview, Vol. IV, No. II
August 23
is the 235th
day of the year in the
Gregorian
Calendar (236th in
leap years),
with
130
days remaining.
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Festival of the Vulcanalia, Roman
Empire (for Vulcan
and the Nymphs)
Vulcan (Volcunus;
Vulcanus) in Roman Mythology is the son of
Jupiter and
Juno, and
husband of Maia
and
Venus. He was god of fire and volcanoes,
and the manufacturer of art, arms, iron, and armour for gods and heroes.
His smithy was believed to be situated underneath Mount Aetna in Sicily. Today, fish caught from the Tiber near the Temple of Vulcan and small animals were thrown into a fire, and herds of animals were blessed by driving them over fires. The Good Works of Hora, wife of Quirinus, were celebrated at his temple on the Quirinal Hill of Rome, and the flamen (priest of the Roman religion) Portunalis anointed the arms of the god Quirinus. The Temple of Vulcan was built in the Circus Flaminius in the 3rd Century.
The fact that Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae, during the Vulcanalia of 79 CE (August 24, qv), was not lost on the Romans. In the reign of Macrinus (lived c. 165 CE - 218), on the day of the Vulcanalia, the Flavian Amphitheatre was struck by lightning. The upper rows of benches were destroyed by fire, and so much damage was done to other parts of the structure, that the games were for some years celebrated in the Stadium (Dion Cass. lxxix.25).
It was also customary today to commence working
by candlelight, which was probably considered as an auspicious beginning
of the use of fire, as the day was sacred to the god of this element (Plin. Epist. iii.5).
See also Wayland the Smith, November 23
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Sun enters Virgo, 6th
sign of the Zodiac
Feast day of the Nemesia, for the goddess 
