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Of all discoveries and opinions, none may have exerted a greater effect on the human spirit than the doctrine of Copernicus. The world had scarcely become known as round and complete in itself when it was asked to waive the tremendous privilege of being the center of the universe. Never, perhaps, was a greater demand made on mankind – for by this admission so many things vanished in mist and smoke! What became of our Eden, our world of innocence, piety and poetry; the testimony of the senses; the conviction of a poetic – religious faith? No wonder his contemporaries did not wish to let all this go and offered every possible resistance to a doctrine which in its converts authorized and demanded a freedom of view and greatness of thought so far unknown, indeed not even dreamed of.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (August 28, 1749 - March 22, 1832)

I can't act. I have never acted. And I shall never act. What I can do is suspend my audience's power of judgement till I've finished.
Sir Cedric Hardwicke, British actor, born on February 19, 1893

God felt sorry for actors, so he gave them a place in the sun and a swimming pool. The price they had to pay was to surrender their talent.
Sir Cedric Hardwicke

Actors and burglars work better at night.
Sir Cedric Hardwicke

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Aries  Taurus  Gemini  Cancer  Leo  Virgo  Libra  Scorpius  Ophiuchus  Sagittarius  Capricornus  Aquarius  Pisces

Pisces begins, 12^th sign of the Zodiac
(Feb 19 - Mar 20)

Pisces (the fishes) is a zodiac constellation which lies between Aquarius to the west and Aries to the east.  

According to one version in Greek mythology, this constellation represents fish into which Aphrodite and Eros transformed in order to escape the monstrous Typhon. The two fishes are often depicted tied together with a cord, to make sure they do not lose one another.

Source: Wikipedia

"The 13 Constellations of the Zodiac

"The Zodiac is the ring of constellations that the Sun seems to pass through each year as the Earth orbits around it. Contrary to popular belief, there are actually 13 zodiacal constellations, if you pay attention to the way astronomers define them. In addition to

Capricornus, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries,
Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo,
Virgo, Libra, Scorpius, and Sagittarius,

"the Sun also passes through Ophiuchus.

"Try getting some astrologer to explain THAT one to you ...

"While you're at it, ask them to explain why all the 'Signs of the Zodiac' are off by about one month. (hint: astrology was invented more than 2000 years ago and the precession of the Earth's pole has caused changes in the positions of the stars since then)."   Source

Astrology    The Real Constellations of the Zodiac    Astrology: Pro    Astrology: Con

Parentalia, ancient Rome  (Feb 13 - 21)

Shiwasu Matsuri, Mikado Jinja, Nango, Miyazaki Prefecture, Japan (Jan 20 - Feb 20)

Sounkyo Ice Festival, Sounkyo Onsen (spa), Hokkaido, Japan (Jan 29 - Mar 5)

Powamu, Pueblo/Hopi purification ceremony, (Feb 12 - 28) 

Feast day of St Alvarez of Cordova

Feast day of St Auxibius

Feast day of St Barbatus, bishop of Benevento
(Field speedwell, Veronica agrestis, is today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)

Feast day of St Beatus of Liébana
He is best remembered today as the author of the Commentary on the Apocalypse, written in 776.

More

Feast day of St Belina

Feast day of St Conrad of Piacenza

Feast day of St Gabinus

Feast day of St George of Lodeve

Feast day of St Julian

Feast day of St Marcellus

Feast day of St Mesrop the Teacher

Feast day of St Publius

Feast day of the Seven Virgins of Australia

Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days    Shop saints

Thursday before Lent, Fettiger Donnerstag, Swabia, Germany
Fettiger Donnerstag ('greasy Thursday'), is so called because of the greasy cakes and pastries, or Küchli that are traditionally baked on this day in preparation for the dietary restrictions of the Lenten fast.
A note about the dating of items in Wilson's Almanac

Thursday before Lent, Weiberfastnach (Women's Carnival), Cologne, Germany

"In the thirteenth century, Cologne's market women protested that men had all the fun during Karneval. They stormed Town Hall, and the Lord Mayor turned over his keys in submission. Ever since, the Thursday before Ash Wednesday belongs to women who process in costume through the streets, make all the decisions, and poke fun at the opposite sex."   Source

Chaoflux (Discordianism)

Today in the Discordian Calendar, in the Scriptorium

1473 Nicolaus Copernicus (pictured; d. May 24, 1543), Polish-German astronomer, mathematician and economist. He developed a heliocentric (Sun-centred) theory of the solar system.

"Nicolaus Copernicus is the Latin version of the famous astronomer's name which he chose later in his life. The original form of his name was Mikolaj Kopernik or Nicolaus Koppernigk ...

"While a student in Kraków, Copernicus purchased a copy of the Latin translation of Euclid's Elements published in Venice in 1482, a copy of the second edition of the Alfonsine Tables (which gives planetary theory and eclipses) printed in Venice in 1492, and Regiomontanus's Tables of Directions (a work on spherical astronomy) published in Augsburg in 1490. Remarkably Copernicus's copies of these works, signed by him, are still preserved ...

"In 1500 Copernicus visited Rome, as all Christians were strongly encouraged to do to celebrate the great jubilee, and he stayed there for a year lecturing to scholars on mathematics and astronomy. While in Rome he observed an eclipse of the Moon which took place on 6 November 1500 ...

"By 29 August De revolutionibus orbium coelestium was ready for the printer. Rheticus took the manuscript with him when he returned to his teaching duties at Wittenberg, and gave it the printer Johann Petreius in Nürnberg. This was a leading centre for printing and Petreius was the best printer in town. However, since he was unable to stay to supervise the printing he asked Andreas Osiander, a Lutheran theologian with considerable experience of printing mathematical texts, to undertake the task. What Osiander did was to write a letter to the reader, inserted in place of Copernicus's original Preface following the title page, in which he claimed that the results of the book were not intended as the truth, rather that they merely presented a simpler way to calculate the positions of the heavenly bodies. The letter was unsigned and the true author of the letter was not revealed publicly until Kepler did so 50 years later. Osiander also subtly changed the title to make it appear less like a claim of the real world. Some are appalled at this gigantic piece of deception by Osiander, as Rheticus was at the time, others feel that it was only because of Osiander's Preface that Copernicus's work was read and not immediately condemned.

"In De revolutionibus Copernicus states several reasons why it is logical that the sun would be at the centre of the universe:-

At the middle of all things lies the sun. As the location of this luminary in the cosmos, that most beautiful temple, would there be any other place or any better place than the centre, from which it can light up everything at the same time? Hence the sun is not inappropriately called by some the lamp of the universe, by others its mind, and by others its ruler.

"Copernicus's cosmology placed a motionless sun not at the centre of the universe, but close to the centre, and also involved giving several distinct motions to the Earth. The problem that Copernicus faced was that he assumed all motion was circular so, like Ptolemy, was forced into using epicycles ..."   Source

1594 Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales

1660 Friedrich Hoffmann (d. 1742), physician and chemist; among the first to describe several diseases, including appendicitis and German measles, and to recognize the regulatory role of the nervous system. He wrote a witchcraft book, Dissertation de Potentia Diaboli, for his student Büching.

1717 David Garrick (d. January 20, 1779), English actor, dramatist and theatre manager, and a pupil and friend of Dr Johnson; one of the most influential and popular figures in the whole of British theatre history

1733 Dr Daniel Solander (d. May 16, 1782), Swedish botanist strongly associated with the early study of Australian plants. He studied languages and the humanities at Uppsala University where the Professor of Botany was the celebrated Carolus Linnaeus (1707 - '78), who was soon impressed by young Solander's ability and accordingly persuaded his father to let him study natural history. In 1756 Solander edited Linnaeus's Elementa Botanica.

In 1768, Solander and his fellow scientist Dr Herman Spöring were employed by Joseph Banks, to join him on Captain James Cook's first voyage to the Pacific Ocean on board the Endeavour. In 1772, he accompanied Banks on his voyage to Iceland, the Faroes and the Orkney Islands. Between 1773 and 1782, he was Keeper of the Natural History Department of the British Museum.

"Over his long professional career, Linnaeus had many students and we Australians should rejoice in our almost proprietorial link with one of them, because it was he, Daniel Solander, who, together with his colleague Joseph Banks, had to deal rationally with the mass of new flora and fauna which they encountered and collected as the scientific leaders of James Cook's expedition when it mapped eastern Australia in 1770. We should not minimise the enormity of the scientific challenge which faced them, both in the novelty of the material, and its quantity, nor the challenge which it offered to scientific thinking when it all eventually reached Europe. On that momentous voyage, they discovered 222 completely new species of fish, as well as 110 previously unknown genera and 1300 new species of plants. Solander named and classified them all. No wonder Banks echoed Linnaeus' high opinion of him, and wrote, 'He combined an incomparable diligence and an acumen that left nothing unsettled' ...

"So who was this man whom Linnaeus is believed to have favoured both as a son-in-law and later, his successor as Professor of Theoretical and Practical Medicine in Uppsala?

"The fact that the question needs to be asked tells us something about Australians' capacity for forgetting because, in its time, that voyage was known as the 'Banks-Solander expedition', not the 'Cook voyage'. And with good cause."   Source

More

1743 Luigi Boccherini (d. May 28, 1805), Italian classical era composer and cellist

Boccherini: well of course

1817 King William III of the Netherlands (Willem Alexander Paul Frederik Lodewijk van Oranje-Nassau; Willem III; d. November 23, 1890)

1859 Svante Arrhenius (d. October 2, 1927), arithmetical child prodigy, Swedish chemist and one of the founders of the science of physical chemistry, specialising in the conductivities of electrolytes; he won the The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 1903.

He developed a theory to explain the ice ages, and first formulated the idea that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect ('On the Influence of Carbonic Acid in the Air Upon the Temperature of the Ground', Philosophical Magazine 41: 237-76).

1893 Sir Cedric Hardwicke (d. August 6, 1964), British actor. When Hardwicke was knighted in 1934, the hard-of-hearing King George V, after being prompted by a courtier, announced after dubbing the kneeling actor: "Rise, Sir Cedric Pickwick".

1911 Merle Oberon (d. 1979), Australian (Tasmania)-born Hollywood actress (Wuthering Heights; A Song to Remember)

1917 Carson McCullers, American writer (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; The Ballad of the Sad Café)

More

1924 Lee Marvin (d. 1987), American actor

1940 Smokey Robinson, American singer

1960 Holly Johnson, lead singer of the pop group Frankie Goes to Hollywood

1960 Prince Andrew, second son of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom

1963 Seal, British pop singer

 

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607 Boniface III became Pope.

1401 William Sawtrey, first English religious martyr, burned, London.

1674 England and the Netherlands signed the Peace of Westminster. A provision of the agreement transferred the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam to England, which renamed it New York.

1800 Napoleon Bonaparte proclaimed himself First Consul of the regime.

1807 In Alabama, Former Vice President of the United States Aaron Burr was arrested for treason.

 

1847 The first rescue party reached the Donner Party.

On April 15 [qv], 1846, the families of James F Reed and George and Jacob Donner, 31 people in nine wagons, left Springfield, Illinois, USA. It was the commencement of the Donner Party, the most famous group of American emigrants ever to attempt the cross-country wagon journey to California. Almost ninety wagon train emigrants were unable to cross the Sierra Nevada before winter, and almost one-half starved to death.

However, it was noted that some of the survivors seemed to be remarkably well fed, considering their ordeal. In 2003, near the modern city of Truckee, California by Lake Tahoe, near Alder Creek, archaeologists found a campfire pit and solid evidence that cannibalism took place.

PBS on the Donner Party    New Light on the Donner Party  

Museum of San Francisco on the Donner Party    More

 

1855 Bread riots broke out in Liverpool, England.

1861 Serfdom was abolished in Russia; Tsar Alexander II signed a proclamation freeing 20 million serfs.

1878 Thomas Edison patented the phonograph.

1881 Kansas became the first US state to prohibit all alcoholic beverages.

1887 Eduard Douwes Dekker (b. 1820), best known under his pseudonym, Multatuli (Latin, 'I have suffered much'), died in Germany. The great Dutch anarchist writer/novelist, a one-time civil servant who wrote, and was famous for, the satirical autobiographical novel Max Havelaar (1860), which reflected his disgust with Dutch colonialism and racism, and in which he denounced the abuses of imperialism in the former Dutch colony of Indonesia. Dekker despised middle-class conformism, excoriating religion, the family, and prejudices of all kinds – racist, sexist or sexual.

Multatuli's ideas influenced the socialist and libertarian milieu of his time and practising his libertarian ideals scandalised his contemporaries, living as he did with two women and their children.

Among his other acclaimed works is the seven-volume Radical Ideas.

Source: The Daily Bleed

L to R Standing: Beasley (newsagent), Rochaix (detective), Rosa (newsagent), McNamara (newsagent) 
L to R Seated: Routley (newsagent), Bear (newsagent). 
From Sydney Worker, November 4, 1893, p1. Adapted from source with thanks

1894 Sydney Anarchy Trial of February, 1894: William McNamara (shown at right of cartoon above) and Sam Rosa (colleagues of Sydney anarchist Arthur Desmond) were convicted on charges of selling an edition of the anarchist journal Hard Cash "that contained a libel of the trustees of the Savings Bank of New South Wales". 

McNamara and Rosa managed bookshops that sold radical journals; their sole defence was ignorance of the law concerning the selling of libellous newspapers. Justice Foster sentenced McNamara to six months in Parramatta Gaol and Rosa to three months.

Two other men who worked on the anarchist journal, but were not charged, were writer Henry Lawson's brother-in-law Jack Lang (who became Premier of the State of New South Wales) and William Morris Hughes, who became Prime Minister of Australia.

"New Order noted that only radical newsagents were singled out for summons, 'notwithstanding the fact that every newsagent in the city sold the publication'. In Parliament G.D. Clark asked Attorney-General Edmund Barton why only a small number of newsagents were charged: Barton blandly replied that the police only had evidence for five, inadvertently conceding that the police had deliberately targeted specific newsagents for scrutiny. Justice predicted that 'the incarceration of Rosa and McNamara is the beginning of a reign of terror which has long existed in the old world'.

"The proceedings against both the Hard Cash newsagents and the Justice proprietors could not have succeeded without the diligent efforts of a small group of Sydney detectives who maintained a regular surveillance of radical political activists in Sydney. From early February 1894 Justice was aware of the attentions of a detective Rochaix, one of those 'bloodhounds of society' who, Justice pointedly noted, seemed to prefer the society of the Active Service Brigade to 'the common or garden variety of burglar'. 

"Jules Pierre Rochaix was a native of France, born in 1851, a Catholic by religion and a miner by calling. He joined the NSW Police force in 1883 as a probationary constable. In 1892 Rochaix became one of just 14 detectives in the NSW police, a force with a total of 1,819 officers and constables. The detectives were elite investigators handed the complex or politically sensitive cases. Rochaix was identified in Parliament by Clark as the prosecuting officer in the Hard Cash cases, 'a member of the secret police', and he asked Barton if Rochaix prosecuted the accused 'at the instigation of the Attorney-General': Barton refused to answer. Despite the successful prosecutions of McNamara and Rosa, Rochaix's efforts were not entirely successful: the identity of the Hard Cash editorial staff eluded him. Nonetheless Rochaix was promoted to the rank of detective first class in February 1894. A large front page cartoon in the Sydney Worker memorialised Rochaix in the company of his newsagent 'victims', gathered before a shadowy image of Satan – the editor of Hard Cash."

Source: (PDF) Before the Law, Ch. 5: The Sydney Anarchy Trials, 1894-95  View as HTML

Edmund Barton    Sydney Anarchy trial of June, 1894

Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson

 

1906 Wheat flakes made by Dr John Kellogg and his brother Will went on sale in the USA.

1909 USA President Theodore Roosevelt called for a world conference on conservation.

1914 British explorer J. Campbell Besley announced his discovery of lost Inca cities.

More

1915 A Franco-British fleet began shelling Turkish fortifications along the Dardanelles straits in a bid to defeat Turkey and reopen the important Black Sea supply route to Russia.

1921 Etienne Oehmichen (Étienne Œhmichen) successfully made the first flight by helicopter, over Paris.

1930 Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi), Indian leader and proponent of civil disobedience, was appointed by All India Congress Committee as Congress Dictator to launch Civil Disobedience movement.

1937 Italian forces began pillaging Addis Ababa, Ethiopia's capital.

 

1942 World War II: About 150 Japanese warplanes attacked Darwin, Australia, by far the biggest ever attack by a foreign power against the Australian mainland.

The first Japanese bombing raids on Darwin, Australia, took place, continuing until the 64^th and final air raid on November 12 in the following year. Numbers killed are uncertain, but probably many hundreds died. The official figure for the raids on this and the next day is usually put at 243 but was probably much higher.

"It is also often forgotten that the 19 February attacks were only the first of 64 raids made on Darwin between February 1942 and November 1943. Here it is important to focus on what is significant. None of these raids was as heavy as the first, and most caused no damage or casualties at all. Their significance, however, is often missed. They were part of an air campaign fought across northern Australia during those years."   Source

Betty bomber

"By far the heaviest attack was the air raids on Darwin on 19 February 1942. Various estimates regarding the loss of life in this devastating series of attacks on 19 February 1942 have been put forward but these days, the 'official' number seems to be 243 killed and about 350 injured or missing. The Brisbane Courier Mail of the 20 February 1942 reported the large Japanese attack on Darwin and reported that 'Damage to property was considerable. There were some casualties. Details not yet available'

"As part of the leadup to this attack the Japanese carried out some reconnaissance flights. On 10 February 1942 a Japanese Mitsubishi C5M reconnaissance aircraft of the 3rd Kokutai which was based at Ambon flew over Darwin. They spotted 27 ships in the harbour and approximately 30 aircraft at the Darwin Civil and RAAF airfields.

"There was a lot of confusion regarding the number of Japanese aircraft involved in these raids. The Brisbane Courier Mail reported the two raids on Darwin stating that 93 bombers were involved in the first raid. It indicated that four Japanese bombers were shot down. It also made mention that a Japanese 'spy plane' had flown over Darwin the previous week. This would have been the Japanese reconnaissance flight on 10 February 1942 ...

"As Fuchida's force had approached Darwin, Japanese aircraft were already taking off for a second air raid on Darwin for the 19 February 1942. Twenty seven G4M1 'Betty' bombers of the Tokao Kokutai, 23rd Koku Sentai took off from Kandari in the Celebes, while another twenty seven G3M1 "Nell" aircraft took off from their new base at Ambon. Their target was the airfields in Darwin."   Source

Wikipedia article on the air raids

 

1942 World War II: President Franklin D Roosevelt signed an executive order allowing the United States military to relocate Japanese-Americans to Japanese internment camps.

1945 World War II: Battle of Iwo Jima – about 30,000 United States Marines landed on Iwo Jima, starting the battle.

1949 Ezra Pound was awarded the first Bollingen Prize in poetry by the Bollingen Foundation and Yale University.

1951 Andre Gide, 81, died in Paris. A telegram with Gide's signature appeared on a bulletin board in a hall of the Sorbonne a few days later: "Hell doesn't exist. Better notify Claudel." Paul Claudel, the Catholic mystic poet, had once unsuccessfully tried to convert him.

1959 The United Kingdom, Greece and Turkey guaranteed the independence of Cyprus.

1964 Paul Simon wrote 'The Sounds of Silence', the song which, in a year and a half, catapulted him and Art Garfunkel to stardom as Simon and Garfunkel.

Wilson's Almanac Book of Days hip list

1972 Paul McCartney's 'Give Ireland Back to the Irish', was immediately banned by the BBC.

1976 Iceland broke off diplomatic relations with Britain during the 'Cod Wars' – a dispute over fishing areas.

1980 Bon Scott, 33, lead singer of Aussie heavy metal band AC/DC, died, choking on his own vomit after an all-night drinking binge in London – just months after the bands' first big American hit album, Highway To Hell.

1981 The New York State Supreme Court ruled that Beatle George Harrison "subconsciously plagiarized" 'He's So Fine', the 1963 hit song by The Chiffons, with his 1970 hit, 'My Sweet Lord'.

1985 Artificial-heart patient William Schroeder became the first such patient to leave hospital.

1986 The Soviet Union launched the Mir space station.

1986 Better late than never? Thirty-seven years down the track, the United States Senate finally ratified the 1948 UN treaty outlawing genocide (90 other nations had already ratified). Between 1991 and 2000, 1,500 children under the age of 5 per month died in Iraq due to US-imposed economic embargo of Iraq, according to the UN.

1988 USA: Passaic County Prosecutor's Office filed a motion to dismiss the 1966 indictments against Rubin 'Hurricane' Carter, championed in the song 'Hurricane' by Bob Dylan.

1991 Boris Yeltsin, President of the Russian Federation, called on the Soviet President, Mikhail Gorbachev, to resign.

1997 The last of the Republic of China's major revolutionaries, Deng Xiaoping, died at 92.

1997 A New York judge dismissed a $7 million lawsuit that a fan filed against Mötley Crüe for hearing loss suffered at one of their concerts.

2000 RU Sirius announced his candidacy for President of the USA. Sirius was founder and publisher (until 1992) of the influential cybermag, Mondo 2000. His political slogan: THE REVOLUTION®.

"Combining left and libertarian politics with a kind of post-political futurism and the love of a good laugh, Chairman Sirius intended to bring all the subcultural tribes together to wrest control of the world from the drug warriors, the cultural ayatollahs and the various corporate mega-destructo gangs. This is common sense for the forgotten ones who comprise most of the population."   Source: The Daily Bleed

RU Sirius website

2002 NASA's Mars Odyssey space probe began to map the surface of Mars using its thermal emission imaging system.

2003 (February 19 - 21) Indian activist Vandana Shiva was a featured speaker in Time magazine's 'The Future of Life' Summit in Monterey, California, USA. The conference was designed to bring together scientific, business, legal, medical, and government leaders for a debate about the complex issues surrounding the future of life.
Source

See also: biopiracy, green revolution

2004 Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal was awarded an honorary knighthood in recognition of a "lifetime of service to humanity." 

 

Tomorrow: Kurt Cobain

 

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