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Folklore of World Holidays
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Hiroshima
Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the
War on Terror
The Passion
Mel Gibson
A Guide to the
Passion
Pattern Recognition
By William Gibson
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Internet Sacred Text Archive CD-ROM
The Elements of Ritual
The Spiral Dance
By Starhawk
20th Anniversary Edition
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Uluru
Medieval Celebrations
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What
Would Jefferson Do?
By Thom
Hartmann
When Corporations Rule the World
The Big Buy - Tom Delay's Stolen Congress
The Corporation
Highly recommended DVD
Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of
Investigative Journalism in America
By Bruce Shapiro
Remotely
Controlled: How Television Is Damaging Our Lives and What We Can Do About It
The Skeptic's Dictionary
The Daily Planet
Life in a Medieval Village
Women's Activism and Globalization
The Atlas of Holy Places and Sacred Sites
Secrets and Lies
The Clash of Civilizations
Imperial Crusades
Aborigine Dreaming
The Medieval Cookbook
The Spiritual Traveler
The Murray Bookchin Reader
Environmental Activism
Astro pic of the day
American Folklore
Permaculture
Dame Edna Everage and the Rise of Western
Civilisation: Backstage With Barry Humphries
Sun Goddess
African Folklore
Daily Everything
A Treasury of Irish Myth, Legend, and Folklore
The Edible Asian Garden
The Secret Language of Birthdays
Live with Passion!
Anthony Robbins
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Celtic Daily Prayer
Hidden Agendas
Poor Richard's Almanack
By Benjamin Franklin
Photo of the day
Wheel of the Year
The Oxford Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
The Survival of the Pagan Gods
By Tim Berners-Lee
|
 Feast
day of the Transfiguration of Jesus Christ
(Meadow saffron, Colchicum
autumniae, is
today's plant, dedicated to this feast day.)
Christian
celebration of the dazzling appearance of Jesus to the Disciples on
Mt Tabor.
(Matthew 17:1-6,
Mark 9:1-8,
Luke
9:28-36): Jesus led three of his apostles, Peter, John, and James, to pray at the top of a
mountain, where he became transfigured, with his face shining like
the sun, and with brilliant white clothes; Elijah
and Moses
appeared with Jesus, and talked with him, and then a bright cloud
appeared overhead, and a voice from the cloud proclaimed, "This is
my Son, the Beloved. Listen to him".
Moses and Elijah have been interpreted to represent
the Law
and the Prophets, respectively, recognizing and adoring
Jesus.
Peter and John briefly allude to the event in their
writings (II Peter 1:16-18,
John 1:14).
Egyptian/Kemetic: Festival of Thoth
Source
Feast day of Artemis, ancient Greece
The sixth day of each month is sacred to the Goddess Artemis.
Source
Feast day of St Gezelin
Feast day of St Hormisdas
Pope Hormisdas was Pope
from July
20, 514
to 523.
In art, Hormisdas is portrayed as a young man with a camel. He is
the patron
saint of grooms and stable-boys. His son became pope under the
name of Silverius
(f. d. June
20).
More
Feast day of St James the
Syrian
Feast day of St Joachim
(husband of St Anne,
father of St. Mary,
according to Catholic tradition – the canonical
Gospel
accounts in the New
Testament do not explicitly name either of Mary's parents).
Feast day of Ss Justus
and Pastor,
martyrs
These martyrs died at the age of just 13 by being whipped and beheaded by Romans in 304 CE, for refusing to reveal the location of hidden Christians during the persecution of Roman Emperor
Diocletian.
Feast day of St Maria
Francesca Rubatto
Feast day of the Martyrs of
Cardena
Feast day of St Octavian
Feast day of St Xystus II (Sixtus
II), pope and
martyr
He was pope
from August 30, 257 to August
6, 258,
following Stephen I as
bishop of Rome
in 257.
More
Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days Shop saints
Tan Hill, Celtic
Commemorates the personified Celtic holy fire, Teinne
or Tan. Festival related to Lammas, takes
place two days after end of the Celtic tree month of Tinne.
Dog Days, ancient Rome (Jul 3 - Aug 11)
Cherokee: Honouring the Earth Goddess, Elihino, and her sister, Igaehindvo.
Source
Independence
Days, Bolivia (Aug 5, 6 and
7)
Anniversary
of the day in 1825 when Bolivia gained its independence from Spain.
Independence Day, Jamaica
Independence Day, Bolivia
HH Sheikh Zayed Bin Sultan Al Nahyan's
Accession Day, United Arab Emirates
Three days before 2nd Monday in August,
Cranham Feast, Gloucestershire,
England
"The locals of Cranham, Gloucestershire, had the
right to take deer from the nearby woods. Each year they reminded
everyone of their right by holding a banquet and roasting a deer.
This three-day festival still begins with a feast of roast meat and
always finishes on the second Monday in August." Source
First
Sunday in August: International
Forgiveness Day
Note:
Different dates can be found
on the Internet for this commemoration. This
e-card site had it for October
24, 2005. We have free
e-cards for this day.
On
the dating of items in the Almanac
First Sunday in August:
International
Friendship Day
Toro
Nagashi (Hiroshima) Japan
Floating lantern ceremony to honour those killed by the USA atomic
bomb in Hiroshima.
On which day of the week were you born? Find out here
1504
Matthew
Parker, Archbishop of
Canterbury
from 1559
until his death in 1575
1651 Francois Fanelon,
French priest and scholar. His 1697 writing, Christian Perfection,
provided a reasoned defence of mystical spirituality, though it
later brought him into disfavour with the pope.
1766 William Hyde Wollaston (d. 1828), noted
English chemist
1775 Daniel O'Connell (d. 1847), Irish political leader
1776 Amedeo Avogadro (d. 1856), chemist
1809 Alfred, Lord Tennyson
(d. 1892), English poet laureate, 'the sage of Victorian
poets', often considered to have one of the finest ears for
musical language among the British poets; "felicity of phrase"
is a term applied to him
More
1821 Edward H Plumptre, Anglican
theologian
and hymnist
1826 Rolf
Boldrewood (b. Thomas Alexander Browne; d. March 11,
1915), Australian author (The Squatter's Dream; Robbery
Under Arms; The Miner's Right; Shearing
in the Riverina, New South Wales)
"Browne was tall and big framed, fond
of hunting and shooting. He began to write as the result of an
accident. He had been kicked on the ankle by a horse and wrote his
articles for the Cornhill while confined to his house. Most
of his work after he became a magistrate was written before
breakfast and in the evening. There was no waiting for inspiration;
once having got his characters together and made a start he could
always see the way to the finish. Robbery Under Arms became a
classic in the author's lifetime, and will continue to rank as one
of the best Australian novels." Source
Lawson
& Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson
1844 Duke Alfred
of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Duke of
Edinburgh (d. July 30, 1900).
Alfred was the first member of Britain's royal family to visit
Australia, was shot by Irish-Australian Henry James O'Farrell, at Clontarf,
a suburb of Sydney,
on March 12,
1868.
In one of Australia's greatest
injustices, despite O'Farrell's apparent mental instability,
anti-Irish sentiment labelled the crime as political assassination
and O'Farrell was put to death merely for injuring Queen Victoria's
son.
1844 James Henry Greathead
(d. 1896), engineer
1868 Paul Claudel (d. 1955), poet
1869
David
McKee Wright (d. February
5, 1928),
Australian poet and journalist; he wrote the preface to Henry
Lawson's book Selected Poems (1918)
" ... the son of William Wright, D.D. (1837-1899), a Congregational missionary, scholar and author. An account of him will be found in the
Dictionary of National Biography. He married a daughter of the Rev. David McKee, an educationist and author of much ability, and their son, David, was born at Ballynaskeagh, Ireland, in 1869, while his parents were home on furlough. He was left with a grandmother until he was seven years old, and was then for 10 years in London. He went to New Zealand when he was about 18 and had some years of station life, during which he did much writing in both prose and verse. He studied for the Congregational ministry and attended university classes at Dunedin in 1897. He had done much private reading, but found that apart from English his education was generally below that of the other students. He won a university prize for a poem, and published about this period,
Aorangi and other Verses (1896), Station Ballads and other Verses (1897),
Wisps of Tussock (1900), and New Zealand Chimes (1900). None of these were important, though they contained some good popular verse. As a clergyman Wright was liked, but he found the work uncongenial and gave it up for journalism in which he had considerable experience in New Zealand. Coming to Sydney in 1910 he did a large amount of successful free-lance work for the
Sun, the Bulletin, and other papers. Becoming editor of the Red Page of the
Bulletin he encouraged many of the rising writers of the time, and continued to do an enormous amount of writing himself in both prose and verse. Much of this appeared over pen-names such as
'Pat O'Maori' and 'Mary McCommonwealth' and much was signed with his initials. As he grew older his mind turned more and more to the country of his birth, and in 1918 he published his most important volume,
An Irish Heart. In 1920 he was awarded the prize for the best poem in commemoration of the visit of the Prince of Wales, and in the same year the Rupert Brooke memorial prize for a long poem,
'Gallipoli'. Neither of these poems has been published in book form. He died at Glenbrook in the mountains near Sydney on 5 February 1928.
"Wright was kind and generous and was loved by his contemporaries. Though much of a Bohemian, something of the clergyman still clung to him. He never indulged in profanity, he had the strictest regard for the truth, and his love for humanity was sincere; it was said of him that his
'only use for an enemy was to forgive him'. He was a great journalist, but his place as a poet is harder to determine. Zora Cross, in
An Introduction to the Study of Australian Literature, gave him a high position among Australian poets. But Wright himself would have discarded his quite capable early work, and charming though
An Irish Heart may be, it is too derivative to be work of the highest kind. It is not a question of individual words or phrases, but rather of a man steeping himself in the modern Irish school of poetry, and with all the skill of his practised craftsmanship reproducing its spirit in another land. A true verdict might be that he was one of the finest craftsmen of our writers of verse, but that under the constant strain of journalism his emotion became too diffused for him to be able to take a really high place among our poets. A large amount of his work, including some short plays, has never been collected."
Source
"Arriving in Otago in 1887, he spent 12 years as rouseabout and rabbiter on Central Otago stations. But he had other interests. He was an omnivorous reader, a keen observer of people and things, with evident ambitions of becoming a poet. At this time he wrote a fair amount of verse, chiefly dealing with the Otago landscape, station life, and the people he met. Most of it was published in the Otago Witness, but in 1896, when he had embarked on divinity studies at Otago University, his first volumes of verse, Aorangi, and Station Ballads, were published. The reception these were accorded, and two special University awards for poetry, greatly encouraged him in this interest, and when he was ordained as a Congregational pastor in 1898, like his father, he found poetry as absorbing as the pulpit. After 10 years of ministry at Oamaru, Wellington, and Nelson, during which time he mixed journalism with sermons, he began to develop a prose style to match with his versifying. It surprised nobody, therefore, when in 1909 he decided to move to Sydney in search of a better market for his pen."
Encyclopaedia
of New Zealand
Lawson
& Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson
1869
Marie Pitt
(d. May 20,
1948), Australian
poet (The Poems of Marie EJ Pitt; Selected Poems of Marie
EJ Pitt), socialist, feminist, ecologist and anarchist, editor
of the Victorian Socialist, partner of the writer Bernard O'Dowd
"Pitt seems to have had differing opinions with O'Dowd over a number of issues including World War 1 on which she took a strong pacifist
line ... Both Pitt and O'Dowd were strong supporters of the Unitarian church from the 1920s onwards."
Source
1880 Hans
Moser (d. 1964), actor
1881
Sir
Alexander Fleming (d. March 11, 1955),
Scottish bacteriologist
who discovered Penicillin
for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology
or Medicine
in 1945
with Australian Howard Florey
and British scientist Ernst Boris
Chain
Did Sir
Alexander Fleming Save Winston Churchill's life?
You've heard the
urban legend. Now read a response.
"His name was Fleming, and he was a poor Scottish farmer. One day, while trying to make a living for his family, he heard a cry for help coming from a nearby bog. He dropped his tools and ran to the bog. There, mired to his waist in black muck, was a terrified boy, screaming and struggling to free himself. Farmer Fleming saved the lad from what could have been a slow and terrifying death.
"The next day, a fancy carriage pulled up to the Scotsman's sparse surroundings. An elegantly dressed nobleman stepped out and introduced himself as the father of the boy Farmer Fleming had saved.
"'I want to repay you,' said the nobleman. 'You saved my son's life.'
"'No, I can't accept payment for what I did,' the Scottish farmer replied, waving off the offer.
At that moment, the farmer's own son came to the door of the family hovel.
"'Is that your son?' the nobleman asked.
"'Yes,' the farmer replied proudly.
"'I'll make you a deal. Let me take him and give him a good education. If the lad is anything like his father, he'll
grow to a man you can be proud of.'
"And that he did.
"In time, Farmer Fleming's son graduated from St. Mary's Hospital Medical School in London, and went on to become known throughout the world as the noted Sir Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin.
"Years afterward, the nobleman's son was stricken with pneumonia. What saved him? Penicillin. The name of the nobleman? Lord Randolph Churchill. His son's name? Sir Winston Churchill."
Source
The facts
"The Churchill-Fleming Non-Connection: The story that Sir Alexander Fleming or his father (the renditions vary) saved Churchill's life has been roaring around the Internet lately. We must have had fifty emails about it. Charming as it is, it is certainly fiction. The story apparently originated in Worship Programs for Juniors, by Alice A. Bays and Elizabeth Jones Oakbery, published ca. 1950 by an American religious house, in a chapter entitled
'The Power of Kindness.'
According to Bays/Oakbery, Churchill is saved from drowning in a Scottish lake by a farm boy named Alex. A few years later Churchill telephones Alex to say that his parents, in gratitude, will sponsor Alex's otherwise unaffordable medical school education. Alex graduates with honours and in 1928 discovers that certain bacteria cannot grow in certain vegetable molds. In 1943 when Churchill becomes ill in the Near East, Alex's invention, penicillin, is flown out to effect his cure. Thus once again Alexander Fleming saves the life of Winston Churchill.
"Dr. John Mather writes: 'A fundamental problem with the story is that Churchill was treated for this very serious strain of pneumonia not with penicillin but with
"MandB," a short name for sulfadiazine produced by May and Baker Pharmaceuticals. Since he was so ill, it was probably a bacterial rather than a viral infection as the MandB was successful.
"'Kay Halle, in her charming book Irrepressible Churchill (Cleveland: World 1966) comments (p. 196) that Churchill
"delighted in referring to his doctors, Lord Moran and Dr. Bedford, as MandB." Then, when Churchill found that the most agreeable way of taking the drug was with whisky or brandy, he commented to his nurse:
"Dear nurse, pray remember that man cannot live by M and B alone."
But there is no evidence in the record that he received
penicillin for any of his wartime pneumonias. He did have
infections in later life, and I suspect he was given penicillin
or some other antibiotic that would have by then become
available, such as ampicillin. Also, Churchill did consult with
Sir Alexander Fleming on 27 June 1946 about a staphylococcal
infection which had apparently resisted penicillin. See
Churchill: Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran (Boston:
Houghton Muffin 1966), p. 335.'
"Official biographer Sir Martin Gilbert adds that the ages of Churchill and Fleming (or Fleming's father) do not support the various accounts circulated; Alexander Fleming was seven years younger than Churchill. If he was plowing a field at say age 13, Churchill would have been 20. There is no record of Churchill nearly drowning in Scotland at that or any other age; or of Lord Randolph paying for Alexander Fleming's education. Sir Martin also notes that Lord Moran's diaries, while mentioning
'MandB,' say nothing about penicillin, or the need to fly it out to Churchill in the Near East."
Source
1881 Leo
Carrillo (d. 1961), American
actor who played Poncho, the Cisco Kid's sidekick
in the TV series
1881 Louella Parsons Oettinger (d. 1972), American gossip columnist
1883 Scott Nearing (d. August 24,
1983), sociologist, pacifist, author (The Good Life) and natural-food advocate
Early
progressives in the Book of Days Helen
and Scott Nearing
1892 Hoot [Edmund] Gibson (d. 1962), American cowboy
actor
1900 Cecil H Green (d. 2003), Texas Instruments founder
1902 Dutch Schultz (d. 1935),
American bootlegger, gangster
1904 Jean Desses (d. 1970), French couturier
1910
Charles Crichton, English film director (The Lavender Hill Mob; A Fish Called Wanda)
1911 Lucille Ball (d. 1989), American
actress, comedian (TV series: I
Love Lucy)
"While Bette Davis was the star pupil
at John Murray Anderson's Dramatic School in New York, another
of her classmates was sent home because she was 'too shy.' It
was pronounced that this girl would never make it as an actress.
It was Lucille
Ball." Source
1916 Richard Hofstadter (d. 1970), historian
1917 Robert Mitchum, American actor: Night of the Hunter,
Cape Fear
(1961
version) (d. 1997)
1918 Otto Wolff von Amerongen,
industrialist
1921 Buddy
Collette (William Collette), musician, reeds instrumentalist,
pianist, composer
1922 Sir Freddie Laker, British cut-price
airline entrepreneur
1928 Andy
Warhol (Warhola ; d. February 22,
1987), American
filmmaker, pop artist (See
also August
8)
Warhol Webcam
1928 Jan Kucera, author
1928 Chung Se Yung, cofounder of the Hyundai Motor Company
1932 Howard Hodgkin, painter and print-maker
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