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Highly recommended:
Folklore of World Holidays
by Margaret
Read MacDonald
Witch-Hunt
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem
The Devil in Massachusetts
Salem Witch Trials
The Salem Witch Trials Reader
Hunting for Witches
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are
Smarter Than the Few
The Price of Loyalty: Bush, the White House, & the Education of Paul O'Neill
The Da Vinci
Code
Ancient Ways
A Short
History of Nearly Everything
Garden Witchery
The Twilight
of American Culture
Golden Bough
Folklore classic
Sabbat Entertaining
Eight Sabbats for Witches
Celebrate the Earth
A Year of Holidays in the Pagan
Tradition
Wheel of the Year
The Trouble
with Islam
Be A Goddess
The Five Biggest Lies Bush
Told Us About Iraq
The Oxford Dictionary of Saints
Lucifer Ascending: The
Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture
White Noise
The Book of Spells
Spellcraft
The Book of Saints
The Encyclopedia of Saints
Daily Everything
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Search by keywords for books, music, computers, software, home and family
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An Inconvenient Truth
By Al Gore; DVD &
book
The Permaculture Home Garden
By Linda Woodrow
The Corporation
Highly recommended DVD
A
Question of Torture
By Alfred McCoy
Remotely
Controlled: How Television Is Damaging Our Lives and What We Can Do About
It
What
Would Jefferson Do?
By Thom
Hartmann
How
Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
Pagan
Christianity
For
God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire
By James Yee
Crimes Against Nature : How George W Bush and His Corporate
Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
By Robert F Kennedy, Jr
The Price of Loyalty
The
Torture Debate in America
A
Question of Torture
By Alfred McCoy
When Corporations Rule the World
Alternatives to Economic Globalization
Feminism Without Borders
The Skeptic's Dictionary
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
365 Goddess
Adventures in a TV Nation
Michael
Moore
Drawing Down the Moon
Globalization/Anti-Globalization
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Celtic Daily Prayer
Dude, Where's My Country?
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Mother Earth Spirituality
Bushwhacked
Shamanism
10 Reasons to
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Lupercalia continues, ancient Rome
"The first
half of the day, the morning, being dies fasti and
belonging to the Lupercalia celebration, and the afternoon or
evening being dies nefasti, and belonging to the Quirinalia.
It is therefore a day sacred to both Mars, as Romulus, and Juno,
the female counterpart of Jupiter. The celebration of both
ancestors and fertility continued on this day.
"Juno, also
called Saturnia and known as Hera by the Greeks, was the
daughter of Cronus (Saturn) and regarded as a paragon of
motherly virtues. She was the divinity of sacred marriage and
childbirth, and was prone to violent wrath at every violation of
her marriage bed with Zeus."
Source
Parentalia, ancient Rome (Feb 13 - 21)
Bonten matsuri, Miyoshi-jinja Shrine, Akita-shi, Akita, Japan (Feb 16 - 17)
"Bonten is a
kind of sign post for god, consisting of a pole on top of which
is a figure of the animal of the year. Teams of young men
carrying Bonten do their best to be the first to reach the
shrine and place it inside. Afterwards, they make an offering to
the god to pray for a bountiful harvest, prosperous business and
the safety of their families during the year."
Source
Akiyoshidai Yamayaki, Akiyoshidai,
Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan
Dry grass on the slopes of the mountain is burned to mark the
beginning of Spring.
Powamu,
Pueblo/Hopi purification ceremony, (Feb 12 - 28)
Feast day of St Aganus
Airola
Feast day of Ss Elias, Jeremy,
Isaias,
Samuel,
and Daniel,
Egyptian martyrs
Feast day of St Honestus of
Nimes
Feast day of St Julian of
Egypt
Feast day of St Juliana,
virgin martyr at Nicomedia
(Lilac primrose, Primula acaulis plena, is
today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)
Feast day of St
Onesimus,
martyr, disciple of St
Paul
The attitude of Paul to Onesimus,
Philemon's
slave, is one of the arguments in the debate about
Christianity and slavery. Some sources give
February 15
as his feast day.
"Slave
of the Colossian Christians Saint
Philemon and Saint
Apphia.
Committed a theft and fled from
punishment to
Rome where he hid with Saint
Paul.
Paul
converted him, then sent him home
carrying the canonical Letter to Philemon. He was freed."
Source
Feast day of St Porphyrius
Feast day of St Tanco, or Tatto, of
Scotland, bishop, martyr at Verdun
Feast day of St Veridiana
Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days Shop saints
Shiwasu Matsuri,
Mikado Jinja, Nango, Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan (Jan 20 - Feb 20)
Sounkyo Ice Festival, Sounkyo Onsen (spa), Hokkaido,
Japan (Jan
29 - Mar
5)
Independence
Day, Lithuania
(1918)
Kyoto
Protocol Day (2005)
The Kyoto Protocol or Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change is an international treaty
on climate
change.
1222 Nichiren, monk,
founder of Nichiren Buddhism
"The baby was born on February 16, 1222, named
Zennichi-maro (The good boy of the Sun) with the father Shigetada
NUKINA and the mother Umegiku-nyo, in a peaceful fishing village
called Kominato. On the day, the pious father had found a flesh
spring near the house, which was adequate for the baby's first
bath.
"The boy who would be the
Buddha of the Latter Day of the Law (Mappo Ages) was born
from the house of a fisherman, the lowest class in the society who
killed living things as the daily work, in order to save the
people of the Mappo Ages, contrastively the Buddha of Former Day
of the Law (Shobo Ages), namely Shakyamuni Buddha (Shakuson),
had been born as the crown prince of a country in India and had
decreased on February 15." Source
His
story in beautiful images (1920) More
1497 Philipp
Melanchthon (d. April 19, 1560), German
theologian
and writer of the Protestant
Reformation and an associate of Martin Luther
1620 Friedrich
Wilhelm
(d. 1688), called 'Great Elector' of Brandenburg-Ducal Prussia
"I am Tituba the witch."
Scene in Longfellow's play Giles Corey of Salem Farms showing Rev. Cotton Mather encountering Tituba in the woods, as Mather travels to Salem Village to investigate the witchcraft accusations.
Source: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, 'Giles Corey of Salem
Farms', in The Poetical Works of Longfellow, Houghton Mifflin Boston, 1902. Artist John W. Ehninger, 1880, p.
723
c. 1675 Tituba,
from an Arawak village in South America, later a slave in Barbados, the
first witch to confess in the Salem witch trials of 1692,
well known from the
play, The Crucible,
by American playwright Arthur Miller.
Enslaved in the home of Reverend Samuel
Parris in Salem, Massachusetts, USA, Tituba entertained
neighbourhood girls with stories from her homeland, including tales
of voodoo and spirits. The girls, in turn, accused a series of
helpless people, including Tituba, of witchcraft. On February 29,
1692, she was the
first of the Salem defendants to be arrested, and was later
convicted and sentenced to death. In 1693, however, a jury failed to agree on her
fate. To pay for her prison expenses, Tituba was sold to another
slave owner.
More
Bridget
Bishop, first Salem 'witch' to be hanged
 1822 Sir Francis Galton (d. 1911), English
explorer,
statistician, anthropologist, advocate of eugenics
(ie, the discredited notion of improving the physical and mental makeup of the human species by selected parenthood;
he coined the term), and investigator of the human mind.
He was born into the remarkable Darwin - Wedgwood family and
was the grandson of Erasmus Darwin
and Charles Darwin's half first cousin. It
was Galton who gave statistics the concept of regression toward the mean.
Galton was an elitist, a believer in the power of a
better class of people, noting "the stupidity and wrong-headedness
of many men and women being so great as to be scarcely credible". It
will come as no surprise to the astute Almaniac that many of
Galton's ideas have been used by the right wing of politics.
Galton and the
ox
Some of his research seemed to show what James
Suowiecki (in his book The
Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How
Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations)
interprets as the superiority of group-think over experts. At one of England's many fairs, he noticed a wagering competition in
which people had to guess on the weight of an ox. In effect, it was
like one of those "how many jelly beans in the jar?"
competitions. Eight hundred people wrote their guesses on slips of
paper; some were butchers and farmers, while others were casual
guessers.
Averaging the estimates, Galton expected the result to
be nowhere near the mark, because so few of the guessers were
professionals in the meat business. To his surprise, however, the
crowd had come within one pound of the ox's weight. The group as a
whole had guessed that the ox would weigh 1,197 pounds, and the
ox's actual weight was 1,198 pounds.
Suowiecki extrapolates from this, and other information,
that, in order to predict winners, political opinion pollsters would
do better to ask people who they think will win an election, rather
than who they want to win, because there is a group wisdom. In fact,
bookmakers are apparently better predictors than pollsters, because bettors
tend to bet on what they think a result will actually be.
"Under the right circumstances," Surowiecki argues,
"groups are remarkably intelligent, and are often smarter than the
smartest people in them."
Suowiecki points out that this 'wisdom of crowds'
that Galton stumbled upon at the fair is basically how Google ranks
pages: "The fascinating thing is that Google does this, roughly
speaking, by asking the internet as a whole, that is to say, each
web page out there, to vote on which sites are most valuable. It
treats a link from one page to another as a vote, and then basically
aggregates them using this somewhat sophisticated method, and then
uses that to basically rank the pages. What's remarkable about this,
to me, is that anybody can start a page on the internet and anybody
can link to any other page, so it's kind of a 'wild, wild west' out
there, it's sort of chaos, you would think. But what Google has
understood and shown is that underneath it there is this kind of
order which I think really does reflect the wisdom of the web, so to
speak, and the wisdom of the crowd more generally."
Suowiecki gives another example as an illustration:
"In 1968 an American submarine called the Scorpion, as you
said, disappeared on its way back to base. It had been on a tour of
duty in the north Atlantic. The navy had had one last transmission
from it but then had no real idea what had happened to the Scorpion,
and so because they didn't know what had happened to it, they
didn't know how far it might have travelled after it had made the
last radio transmission, and so they were really out of luck in
terms of looking for it. When they started, they started with a
circle that was 20 miles wide and it was, of course, thousands of
feet deep.
"So they went out there and they had a hard time,
they couldn't find any trace of it, but there was this one navy
guy named John Craven who had an idea. He had two ideas actually. He
had one idea about what he thought might have happened to the
submarine, but the more important thing was he had an idea of how to
find it. So what Craven did was he put together this team. He
didn't try to find one or two experts; he basically put together a
team. It was a diverse team and they were all knowledgeable people
but they came from different parts of the navy – some were
submarine guys, some were salvage experts, some were just straight
navy men. And then what he had them do was he had them bet on a
series of different scenarios, so basically the different
possibilities of what had happened to the Scorpion. And then
he also had them bet on things like – how fast do you think the Scorpion
was going? How steeply was it falling to the ocean floor?
"The point of getting them to bet was he was trying to
get them to offer their perspective on how confident they were, and
how likely they thought each of their forecasts was, which is kind
of what you want to do when you're aggregating group intelligence.
So anyway, after it was all done, he took all the guesses and he ran
them through this formula that we don't need to talk about but it's
a formula for aggregating probabilities, guesses. And when it was
done he had a location, and they said, 'This is where we think it
is.' And he told the navy. It was a place no one had anticipated
looking, and the navy went out and looked for it, and they found the
submarine and it was 220 yards from where Craven's team had said it
would be." Source
"Common sense has led more than one person astray. Sir
Francis Galton thought there was an obvious, common sense link
between a person's intelligence and his or her head size. We know
today that there is absolutely no truth to this theory. It also
makes you wonder about Sir Francis, whose head was reportedly so
small he could have been nicknamed 'pinhead.'" Source
1826
Joseph
Victor von Scheffel (d. 1886), poet1826 Julia Grant
(d. 1902),
USA First
Lady, wife of USA
President Ulysses S Grant 1834 Ernst Haeckel
(d. 1919),
zoologist and philosopher 1838 Henry
Adams, American historian and novelist, (d. 1918);
both his great-grandfather and his grandfather had been Presidents of the
United States
 1845
Maybanke
Susannah Anderson (first married surname Wolstenholme; d. April 15, 1927), suffragette and
educator of Sydney, Australia, co-founder, with Louisa Lawson,
Rose Scott, and
Dora
Montefiore, of the Womanhood Suffrage League of
New South Wales. Anderson published Women's Voice magazine.
She was born at
Kingston-Upon-Thames,
Surrey,
England, daughter of Henry Selfe,
plumber, and his wife Elizabeth. On
September 3, 1867, Maybanke
married Edmund Kay Wolstenholme, a New South Wales timber merchant,
whom she divorced in 1892. She was foundation president of the Kindergarten Union of New South
Wales, which opened
the world's first free kindergarten at
Woolloomooloo (near the docks in
Sydney) in 1896. On
March 2, 1899, Maybanke Wolstenholme married Sir
Francis Anderson, professor of philosophy at the
University of Sydney. She wrote The
Root of the Matter: Social and Economic Aspects of the Sex Problem,
1916.
A
world chronology of women's suffrage
Maybanke Anderson, Feminist, Suffragist and Federationist
Lawson
& Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson
1852
Charles
Taze Russell (d. October
31, 1916),
founder of the Jehovah's Witnesses
(though this is
disputed)
 1859
William
Robert Winspear (d.
February 20,
1944), English-born Australian journalist, poet and socialist. He
immigrated in 1874 and formed his radical ideas while working as a
coal-miner at
New Lambton, NSW. In March,
1887, with his wife Alice, he
founded the newspaper Radical, which became the mouthpiece of
the
Australian Socialist League. In the 1890s, destitute in Sydney,
he was arrested for burglary; Alice hanged herself on
October 30,
1898, in an apparent attempt to gain government support for their
five children. From 1912 -
'16, 'Bob' Winspear worked as Treasurer of
the Australian Socialist Party, often editing and writing for its
newspaper, International Socialist. A fervent
anti-conscriptionist in WWI, and fly in the ointment of the
Australian Labor Party, Winspear, with
Harry
Holland, wrote the party's 'Open Letter to the Conscript Boys of
Australia'.
WR Winspear –
Anarchist or Socialist?
Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson
1869
Henry Edward Ernest Victor
Bliss (d. March
9, 1926), commonly known as
Baron Bliss,
British-born
traveller who willed some two million United
States dollars to a trust fund for the benefit of the citizens
of what was then the colony of British Honduras (now Belize).
(See Baron
Bliss Day, Belize)
1876 George
Macaulay Trevelyan (d. 1962), historian 1884
Robert J Flaherty, American director of
Nanook
of the North (1922), regarded as the first significant documentary film
1901
Wayne King,
band leader ('The Waltz King')
1903
Edgar Bergen (d. 1978),
American ventriloquist with
dummy Charlie McCarthy. Father of Candice Bergen. (Edgar was, not Charlie.)
1904 George F Kennan,
architect of Cold War policy of containment,
centenarian 1907
Melvin Burkhart, 'the Human Blockhead'
(pictured at right) (d. November 8, 2001), American performer who could drive a five-inch nail
or an ice pick into his head without flinching
1921
Hua Guofeng, Mao
Zedong's designated successor as the paramount leader of the Communist
Party of China and the People's
Republic of China. Upon Zhou
Enlai's death in 1976, he succeeded him as Premier
of the People's Republic of China.
1926 John
Schlesinger (d. July 25, 2003), British film director (Midnight Cowboy;
Sunday, Bloody Sunday;
Marathon Man;
The Falcon and the
Snowman)
1927 June
Brown, British actress1927 Tom Kennedy,
game show host
1929
Peter Porter,
Australian-born (Brisbane)
British poet, whose work is
characterized by a formal style and a rueful, epigrammatic wit. His
first volumes of poetry were published in the
1960s, and include Once
Bitten, Twice Bitten (1961) and A Porter Folio (1969).
His Collected Poems (1983) have been praised for their
"bizarre and gaudy mental landscapes". He was a regular
participant in the weekly meetings of
The Group. In
2001, he was Poet in
Residence at the
Royal Albert Hall, and, in
2002, he received
the
Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.
1931 Otis Blackwell,
songwriter, singer
1935 Stephen Gaskin,
hippie commune leader (of The Farm, Tennessee,
USA); he received
the first
Right
Livelihood Award from the
Right Livelihood Foundation,
1980, "... for
caring, sharing and acting with and on behalf of those in need at
home and abroad".
 "Stephen
gave a kind of impromptu service after the Sunday meal while we
were there. Marijuana was part of the service, but instead of
enhancing his image as a mystical leader, Gaskin's ramblings and
self-aggrandizement made me think more of Charles Manson than an
entheogen-promoting Holy Man. These people were being subjected
to classical cult-brainwashing techniques, and he was living
high-on-the-hog off of their hard work."
Down
on The Farm – a dissident voice
"A counter-cultural leader best known
for his presence in the haight-ashbury in the '60 and his
founding of 'The Farm', a hippy-commune in Tennessee
which grew to over 1,000 people.
"AUTHOR OF:
Amazing
Dope Tales (1999)
Cannabis
Spirituality (1998)
Haight
Ashbury Flashbacks (1990)
This
Seasons People-A Book of Spiritual Teachings (1978) ...
"LINKS
Excerpt from Haight
Ashbury Flashbacks: Some DMT
An
Interview by Philip Farber"
Source
More
Twilight of
Hippiedom
Gaskin
resources on the Internet
Wilson's Almanac Book of Days hip list
CounterCulture Wiki
1935
Sonny Bono
(b. Salvatore Philip Bono;
d.
January 5,
1998),
American singer, music
producer, television producer and
congressman who
died in a skiing accident. According to his widow,
Bono was addicted to pain killers at the time of his death and was
taking up to 20 pills a day.
More
1942 Kim
Jong Il, North Korean dictator1944 Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize
winning novelist 1945 Jeremy Bulloch,
actor 1948 Pete
Postlethwaite, actor 1950 Peter
Hain, British politician 1951 William Katt,
American actor 1954 Iain
Banks, author 1957 LeVar Burton,
actor 1957 James Ingram,
singer 1958 Ice-T,
singer, songwriter, actor 1960
Pete
Willis, ex-Def Leppard
guitarist 1964 Christopher
Eccleston, actor (Our
Friends in the North; Doctor Who) 1975 Aikawa Nanase,
Japanese musician 1977 Ian
Clarke, creator of Freenet
Phew!!
Have a rest before the big
This
day in history section
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reetings from Australia.
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