1729 William Congreve (b. 1670), the English playwright, was killed in a carriage accident in London.

William Congreve's will

Congreve led a parsimonious life and left £10,000 to Henrietta, the Duchess of Marlborough, who spent £7,000 of it on a pearl necklace. He left nothing to Mrs Bracegirdle ("with whom Congreve was very intimate for years" – Robert Chambers, (Ed.), The Book of Days: A miscellany of popular antiquities in connection with the calendar, etc, W & R Chambers, London, 1881) nor to his poor relatives.

1764 John Wilkes, English political theorist, was expelled from the British House of Commons for seditious libel.

1790 The Second Fleet set sail for Botany Bay, New South Wales (Australia) under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, carrying 1,006 convicts.   

More in the Scriptorium

1793 France's King Louis XVI was sentenced to death.

1806 The United Kingdom occupied the Cape of Good Hope.

1825 Americans Ezra Daggett and his nephew Thomas Kensett patented food storage in tin cans.

Can history

1829 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Faust premiered.

1839 The British East India Company captured Aden.

1840 Captain Charles Wilkes circumnavigated Antarctica, claiming for the United States what became known as Wilkes Land.

1847 Death of Charles Bent, New Mexico pioneer.

1853 Giuseppe Verdi's opera Il Trovatore premiered in Rome.

1861 USA: Georgia seceded from the Union.

1870 The world's first women stockbrokers, sisters Victoria Claflin Woodhull (the radical, feminist and spiritualist who became the first woman to run for US presidency) and Tennessee Claflin, opened an office in New York City, USA.

1883 The first electric lighting system employing overhead wires began service (Roselle, New Jersey). It was built by Thomas Edison.

1887 Victoria and South Australia were linked by rail.

1889 "The Salvation Army split, as one faction within the denomination renounced allegiance to founder William Booth. Booth's son Ballington and his wife Maud led the American splinter group, which in 1896 incorporated itself as a separate denomination known as the Volunteers of America."   Source

William Booth in the Book of Days

1899 Anglo-Egyptian Sudan was formed.

1903 The first greetings telegram was sent, by USA President Theodore Roosevelt to King Edward VII of the United Kingdom.

1905 Death of Debendranath Tagore (b. 1817), philosopher, father of poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941).

1915 Georges Claude patented the neon discharge tube for use in advertising.

1915 German zeppelins bombed the cities of Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn in the United Kingdom killing more than 20, in the first major aerial bombardment of a civilian target.

1918 Finnish Civil War: The first serious battles between the Red Guards and the White Guard.

1920 The United States Senate voted against joining the League of Nations.

1935 Coopers Inc. sold the world's first briefs.

1937 Howard Hughes set a new air record by flying from Los Angeles to New York City in 7 hours, 28 minutes and 25 seconds.

1939 While in Australia, British socialist author HG Wells (1866 - 1946) gave to the audience of ABC Radio a talk called 'Utopias', in which he said:

"All scientific workers are Utopians after the school of Francis Bacon. That is why I am here in Australia talking to you. I came here to learn what I could from the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science, which has just been meeting at Canberra. All the men and women in that Association, I warn you, are Utopians, and they believe their Utopia is real. They believe that this world of ours can only be put in order and kept in order by the perpetual refreshment of scientific thought. They believe as firmly as any human beings have ever believed, that swords can be beaten into plough-shares and spears into pruning-hooks, that nation need not lift up its hand against nation, nor should they learn war any more."

1941 World War II: British troops attacked Italian-held Eritrea.

1942 World War II: Japanese forces invaded Burma.

1946 General Douglas MacArthur established the International Military Tribunal for the Far East in Tokyo to try Japanese war criminals.

1949 Cuba recognised Israel.

1953 Sixty-eight per cent of all United States television sets were tuned in to I Love Lucy to watch Lucy (Lucille Ball) give birth.

1955 The Scrabble board game debuted.

Ming the Comparatively Merciful

1966 Australia's longest-serving prime minister, Sir Robert Menzies, resigned. His nickname, 'Ming', came both from the traditional pronunciation ('Mingis') of his Scottish surname and from a movie serials character, Ming the Merciless (pictured below). His other common nickname was 'Pig Iron Bob', because he arranged for the sale of Australian pig iron (smelted but fairly raw metal) to Japanese corporations, not long before WWII, something the left-wing unions never let him live down as Japan invaded Australia, with the loss of many lives.

No one on any side of politics would disagree that Menzies was a conservative through and through (even his demeanour appeared British-aristocratic), and the Liberal Party that he founded and headed for decades was and still is a misnamed conservative party. However, there was some true democratic liberalism in the Libs originally, long before the party's swing to the extreme right under PM John Howard in the late-1990s.

Michael Pusey, a prominent progressive Sydney sociologist (and, I believe, the one who introduced the term 'economic rationalism' to Australian political discourse) is on record as having praised Pig Iron Bob for what were in their day progressive social policies. It might be that the groan you hear is not Little Johnny Howard delivering a heartless speech against the tinted people of Oz and the world, but Ming the Comparatively Merciful rolling in his grave.

Love Ming or hate him, all agree that his sharpness of mind and wit was remarkable. When an interjector once called from the floor of a meeting, "Menzies, what are ya gunna do about 'ousing?!", Menzies immediately retorted dryly, "To begin with, I'll put an aitch on it". As a boy, I heard him launch an election campaign in the Hornsby (Sydney suburb) Town Hall. A woman from the audience heckled him: "Menzies, you're a dirty little prawn!"

The corpulent patrician paused for half a moment then carefully replied, "Madam … I must object to that word … little".  

Menzies Virtual Museum

1966 Tully, north Queensland, Australia: At about 9:00 a.m., George Pedley, a 28-year-old banana farmer, discovered at Horseshoe Lagoon what the Australian media and public came to call a 'flying saucer nest'.

As he rode his tractor, Pedley heard a hissing sound over the sound of his vehicle.

"Suddenly," Pedley told the press later, "an object rose out of the swamp. When I glanced at it, it was already 30 feet above the ground, and at about tree-top level. It was a large, grey, saucer-shaped object, convex on the top and bottom and measured some 25 feet across and 9 feet high. While I watched, it rose another 30 feet, spinning very fast, then it made a shallow dive and took off with tremendous speed. Climbing at an angle of 45 degrees it disappeared within seconds in a south-westerly direction."

In the lagoon was a large circular area, approximately nine metres in diameter, that was clear of reeds and in which the water was rotating slowly. Pedley left, but returned to the site some three hours later; the circular area was covered by a floating mass of green reeds distributed in a clockwise radial pattern. 

George Pedley soon reported the 'nest' to the landowner, Albert Pennisi, who told later the excited media that his dog had been acting strangely that morning, barking loudly and rushing off towards the lagoon at about 5:30 am. Very soon, the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) was alerted, and so were the media. The best explanation that the RAAF could come up with was that the nest was created by a willy willy, a type of small whirlwind known to occur in the area and throughout Australia. 

Albert Pennisi told the Sun newspaper that before Pedley's experience he had been having dreams about unidentified flying objects: "I'd get them almost every night. And they were beginning to worry me. I couldn't understand them. It was always the same. This thing like a giant dish would come out of nowhere and land nearby. And I would watch it in my dream and get real afraid before it went away."

By the next day, the whole nation was talking about the flying saucer nest of Tully. Ever since, tropical Tully has been famous for more than being Australia's wettest town (annual median rainfall of 4048 mm, or 159.4 inches).

Devil men?

The Brisbane Sunday Mail of January 20, 2002, featured an article, 'Something in the Air', in which 79-year-old Aboriginal elder Jack Muriata recalled seeing a bright light in his childhood.

"Devil men, we Aboriginals call them, or chic ah bunnahs," said Mr Muriata.

"White people call them UFOs, and if you get caught by one, our grandmothers told us, you will die. 

"One night I was with my friends and we wandered too far from our camp to the river. 

"We were playing in the dunes when this great big ball of light, so bright, you have never seen such a light, came flying down from the sky above us. 

"It lit up the whole river, and then it zoomed down low along the banks, like it was looking for us. 

"My friends were yelling, 'Run! Run!' and we all took off as fast as we could back towards camp and our mothers. 

"You don't want to get caught by the devil man."

Tully residents, the article reported, frequently see UFOs, but not all of them like to talk about the subject.

One Tully shop owner, who asked not to be named in the article, had this to say about his town's unusual reputation. 

"They're all nutters, the lot of them," he said. "It's not good for the town, makes us all look stupid, dumb, gullible country clowns if you ask me. 

"Other towns get known for their scenery or their history; these people want it to be like, 'Come to Tully, meet the local fruitcakes'."

Some more Australian UFOs    More    And more

1966 Indira Gandhi, daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, herself was elected Prime Minister of India.

1969 Student Jan Palach died after setting himself on fire three days previously in Prague's Wenceslas Square to protest the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the Soviet Union (August 20, 1968). His funeral turned into another major protest.

1971 A revival of No, No, Nanette premiered (46^th Street Theatre, New York City).

1975 Radio Double Jay began broadcasting in Sydney, Australia.

1975 Adelaide, South Australia: House painter John Nash had predicted earthquake and tidal waves to destroy the city on this day, and quite a few people took him seriously. The state premier, Don Dunstan (1926 - '99), however, was one of many who thought it was nonsense. Dunstan, somewhat in the manner of King Canute, went to the beach and stood on the seashore, defying the prophecy. Nothing extraordinary happened. The largest wave measured was 15 cm.

Apocalypse when? On failed prophecies and beliefs that don't work

Contemporary news clipping of the non-event

1977 President Gerald Ford pardoned Iva Toguri D'Aquino (aka Tokyo Rose).

"Iva Ikuko Toguri was an American college student stranded in Japan when Pearl Harbor was attacked. She was arrested and forced to broadcast in English to American troops using the name Orphan Ann. Following the war, she was convicted of treason despite assertions that she, and other POWs in the same role, had purposely made themselves ridiculous on the air and had never been disloyal. She was stripped of her citizenship, sentenced to ten years in prison, and fined $10,000. In the '70s the truth came out that witnesses against her had been coached, and that her defense had been truthful. A public clamor arose and the woman the world ridiculed as 'Tokyo Rose' regained her status."   Source

1977 Snow fell in Miami, Florida, the only time in the history of the city that this had occurred.

1978 In Germany, the last Volkswagen Beetle rolled out of the factory.

1980 USA President Jimmy Carter announced that the USA would boycott the Moscow Olympics if the USSR did not withdraw its forces from Afghanistan.

Beijing Olympics: Never too early to think 'boycott'

It's not too early to start planning to boycott the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

Many will scoff, as competition is a modern mythology with few agnostics or atheists, but it's worth remembering that the USA boycott of Moscow in 1980 had many positive effects, even though it didn't stop the communists killing 1.5 million Afghans in the following decade. (Australian sportsmen and women, to their shame, put narcissism and "gold, gold, gold" before international solidarity, and competition before cooperation and did not follow Jimmy Carter's boycott.)

The Olympic movement is a discredited beast and agency of chauvinism and nationalist propaganda whether it is at Sydney, Beijing, Athens, or Berlin, where Hitler was early to recognise its PsyOps value. It was run from 1980 till 2001 by Juan Antonio Samaranch, national councillor under the fascist dictatorship of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, and the man who presided over the Olympics' descent into the corrupt, drug-riddled spectacle that they are today.

Let's keep our countries out of Beijing in 2008 on behalf of a quarter of the world's population still living under dictatorship.

A New Wave of Repression Justified by the Olympics
"While a wide majority of International Olympic Committee (IOC) members were voting, on July 13, 2001, to attribute the 2008 Summer Olympics to Beijing, Chinese police received an order to step up their executions of delinquents and intensify repression against 'subversive Internet users'. IOC members, encouraged by their president, Juan Antonio Samaranch, who personally supported China's bid, paid no attention to the repeated calls against the Beijing bid ...

"The Olympic movement was discredited in 1936, when it allowed the Nazis to make the Games a spectacle to glorify the Third Reich. In 1980, in Moscow, the IOC suffered a terrible defeat when more than 50 countries boycotted the Olympics. The Netherlands, Germany, the United States, Egypt and so many others refused to countenance the Soviet regime. In 2008, the international sporting movement must refuse to tolerate one of the world's bloodiest dictatorships.

Boycott Beijing    Sign the petition

New Lords of the Rings
"The world of modern Olympic sport is a secretive, elite domain where decisions are taken behind closed doors, where money is spent on creating a fabulous life-style for a tiny circle of officials and funds destined for sport are siphoned away to offshore bank accounts. This investigation of the hidden corruption behind the Olympic ideal reveals: how Princess Anne's attempt to unseat the unpopular athletics supremo Primo Nibiolo was sabotaged by secret deals from within, how bribes were paid to win gold medals for Korean boxers in the Seoul Olympics, that Berlin's bid for the 2000 Olympics was so corrupt that the State parliament set up an enquiry, that millions of dollars are spent by bidding cities to woo those who decide where the games will be held, when in fact often the decision has already been made, and that the Olympic number two, Korea's Dr Kim Un Yung, is a trained killer and a former spy."
The New Lords of the Rings: Olympic Corruption and How to Buy Gold Medals (from Cafe Diem, our store)

1981 United States and Iranian officials signed an agreement to release 52 American hostages after 14 months of captivity.

1983 Klaus Barbie, Nazi war criminal, was arrested in Bolivia.

1983 The Apple Lisa, the first commercial personal computer from Apple Computer, Inc. to have a graphical user interface and a computer mouse, was announced.

1989 In Prague, demonstrators led by dissident writer Vaclav Havel commemorated the twentieth anniversary of the death of Jan Palach, and were attacked by police.

1993 IBM announced a $4.97 billion loss for 1992 which was the largest single-year corporate loss in United States history.

1997 Yasser Arafat returned to Hebron after more than 30 years and joined celebrations over the handover of the last Israeli controlled West Bank city.

2001  USA: The Whitewater special prosecutor closed down his investigations relating to President Bill 'Slick Willie' Clinton, in a deal in which Clinton admitted giving false testimony under oath about Monica Lewinsky, was barred from law practice for 5 years, and paid a $25,000 fine in return for being freed from the threat of being indicted. Even in his official statement on the scandal, Willie was unable fully to admit fault, pretending that he had not known at the time that he was being dishonest, but had just come to "recognize" it.

William Jefferson Clinton's appalling record

"He has signed a bill providing for federal funds to be distributed to 'faith-based' charitable organizations.

"He has expanded the number of federal crimes for which the death penalty can be given to a total of sixty.

"He has signed a bill outlawing gay marriages and has taken out ads on Christian radio stations touting his opposition to any form of legal same-sex couplings.

"In a short span of time, he has been able to kick ten million people off welfare – that's ten million out of fourteen million total recipients.

"He has promised states 'bonus funds' if they can reduce their welfare numbers further, and made it easier to get these funds by not requiring the states to help the ex-welfare recipients find jobs.

"He has introduced a plan that would bar any assistance to teenage parents if they drop out of school or leave their parents' home.

"Though he is careful not to draw attention to it, he supports many of the old provisions of Newt Gingrich's 'Contract With America,' including lowering the capital gains tax.

"In spite of calls from Republican governors like George Ryan of Illinois to support a moratorium on capital punishment, he rejected all efforts to slow down the number of executions even after it was revealed that there are dozens of people on death row who are innocent.

"He has released funds for local communities to hire over a hundred thousand new police officers and supports laws that that put people behind bars for life after committing three crimes--even if those crimes were shoplifting or not paying for a pizza.

"There are now more people in America without health insurance than when he took office, even though he campaigned on the idea of universal health care. And universal health care has now been removed from the Democrats platform.

"He has signed orders prohibiting any form of health care to poor people who are in the United States illegally.

"He supports a ban on late-term abortions and promised to sign the first bill to cross his desk that includes an exemption only if the mother is in jeopardy.

"He has signed an order prohibiting any U.S. funds going to any country to be used in helping women secure an abortion.

"He signed a one-year gag order that prohibits using any federal funds in foreign countries where birth control agencies mention abortion as an option to pregnant women.

"He refused to sign the international Land Mine Ban Treaty already signed by 137 nations – but not by Iraq, Libya, North Korea, or the United States.

"He has scuttled the Kyoto Protocol by insisting that 'sinks' (e.g., farmlands and forests) be counted toward the U.S. percentage of emissions reductions, thus making a mockery of the whole treaty (which was written primarily to reduce the carbon dioxide pollution from cars and factories.)

"He has accelerated drilling for gas and oil on federal lands at a pace that matches, and in some areas exceeds, the production level during the Reagan administration.

"He has approved the sale of one California oil field in the largest privatization deal in American history, and he opened the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska (something even Reagan wasn't able to do).

"And he became the first President since Richard Nixon not to force the auto manufacturers to improve their mileage per gallon – which would have saved millions of barrels of oil each day."

Source: Michael Moore, Stupid White Men, Chapter 10, 'Democrats, DOA'

Tomorrow: Oscar Wilde and St Sebastian's connection

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