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I am a redneck myself, born and bred on a submarginal farm in Appalachia, descended from an endless line of dark-complected, lug-eared, beetle-browed, insolent barbarian peasants, a line reaching back to the dark forests of central Europe and the alpine caves of my Neanderthal primogenitors.
Edward Abbey, American writer, born on January 29, 1927, from 'In Defense of the Redneck', Abbey's Road

Literature, like anything else, can become a wearisome business if you make a lifetime specialty of it. A healthy, wholesome man would no more spend his entire life reading great books than he would packing cookies for Nabisco.
Edward Abbey

Recorded history is largely an account of the crimes and disasters committed by banal little men at the levers of imperial machines.
Edward Abbey

As war and government prove, insanity is the most contagious of diseases.
Edward Abbey

Orthodoxy is a relaxation of the mind accompanied by a stiffening of the heart.
Edward Abbey

I come more and more to the conclusion that wilderness, in America or anywhere else, is the only thing left that is worth saving.
Edward Abbey

If wilderness is outlawed, only outlaws can save wilderness.
Edward Abbey

Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.
Edward Abbey

Highly recommended:
Folklore of World Holidays
by Margaret Read MacDonald

Ancient Ways

Be A Goddess

The Oxford Dictionary of Saints

Desert Solitaire

The Fool's Progress

Spellcraft

The Encyclopedia of Saints

Daily Everything

Lord of the Rings

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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

The Chronicles of Narnia Boxed Set
By CS Lewis

Hello Laziness!
By Corrine Maier

The Great War for Civilisation
By Robert Fisk

The God Who Wasn't There

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

Adventures in a TV Nation
Michael Moore

Drawing Down the Moon

Globalization/Anti-Globalization

Body Wisdom


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10 Reasons to Abolish the IMF & World Bank

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Feast day of St Gildas the Wise (Gildas Sapiens; Gildas Badonicus), Scottish abbot

St Gildas (c. 494 or 516 - c. 570), a prominent Celtic Christian and contemporary of St David, was a son of Caunus (Can; Caw), a king of the Britons of Alcluyd or Dumbarton, Scotland. He was one of 24 brothers, most of whom with their father were at war with King Arthur. At the invitation of St Brigid, Gildas visited Ireland where he founded several monasteries.

He returned to England, bringing back a wonderful bell which he carried to the Pope in Rome. On his way home stopped at Brittany where he founded a monastery. The Bretons asserted that he died there and that they possessed his relics, but the Welsh say he went to Wales, bringing back the bell which was long preserved at Lancarvan.

Driven away by northern pirates, Gildas settled on a deserted island in the Severn River. Later he settled at Street, Somerset, near Glastonbury, where he died and was buried in Glastonbury Abbey. The legends are so confused that the scholars say there were two saints of this name, one called 'Badonicus' or 'Wise', the other the 'Albanian' or 'Scot'. According to the Breton legend, he died at Saint-Gildas-de-Rhuys, Brittany, on January 29, and his body, according to his wishes, was placed on a boat and allowed to drift. Three months later, on May 11, men from Rhuys found the ship in a creek with the body of Gildas still intact. They took the body back to Rhuys and buried it there.

Considered by some to be the earliest British historian, his works were used by Bede. His main work, De Excidio Britanniae (The Ruin of Britain), was written in about 540; in it he denounces the rulers (Brythonic kings) and churchmen of his day. See also Groans of the Britons.

Pictured is the Chappelle of St Gildas in Brittany

Festival of the Lênaia to Dionysus, god of wine and pleasure, ancient Greece  (c. Jan 28 - Feb 5)

Festivals in ancient Greece

Feast day of St Aquilinus of Milan

Feast day of St Barbea

Feast day of St Blath of Kildare

Feast day of St Caesarius of Angoulême

Feast day of St Constantius

Feast day of St Juniper

Feast day of St Sabinian of Troyes

Feast day of St Sarbellius

Feast day of St Sulpicius Severus

Feast day of St Valerius of Treve

Feast day of St Voloc

Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days    Shop saints

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

Parade of the Unicorns, Vietnam   Source

Winter-een-mas (Jan 25 - 31)
Fifth day: Ethan celebrates with classic Winter-een-mas carols and is locked in the closet by Lucas. Celebrated Ghosts: Racing Games, Role Playing Games.

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"In Earths in the Universe Swedenborg claimed, that moon is peopled by a race which speak through their stomachs- the sound is like belching. Contemporaries took Swedenborg's psychic powers of clairvoyance seriously: he impressed Queen Louisa Ulrica, sister of Frederick the Great, by delivering a private message from her dead brother, Augustus William. He believed he had the ability to slow down his breathing. "I became so completely accustomed to this type of respiration," he once said, "that I sometimes passed an entire hour without taking a breath. I had breathed in only enough air so that I could think." Occasionally he conversed with such prominent figures as Abraham, Solomon, and the apostles."   Source

Swedenborg's remote viewing

The philosopher Immanuel Kant wrote that a friend of his was witness in 1756 (it was actually 1759), on a Saturday in late February, at about 6 pm, to an extraordinary occurrence in the town of Gottenburg. 

Swedenborg had become agitated. He described in perfect detail a large fire that he said was burning in Stockholm, and that the house of his friend was burnt down, and his own was in danger. On the Monday evening, the news reached Swedenborg and his friends in Gottenburg that every detail as described by the esoteric philosopher was perfectly correct. Kant's information of the event led him to believe it completely. 

Aha! :: Synchronicity Central :: Log your synchronicities and coincidences

1737 Thomas Paine (d. June 8, 1809), English philosopher and radical activist, author of Common Sense and Rights of Man. When he was 37, in London, he met Benjamin Franklin, who advised him to emigrate to America, giving him letters of recommendation.

In 1791, while in Britain, Paine came into conflict with the monarchical authorities for his best-selling radical publications, for which he had become very famous. His works had been translated into numerous languages and were influencing many freethinkers in places as far afield as Portugal and Croatia. Thomas Muir, a Scot, was sentenced to 14 years' transportation to Australia for distributing tracts by Paine, and took the Englishman's revolutionary ideas with him – a strong tradition holds it that USA President George Washington helped Muir escape the Australian penal colony, which had been established when Britain lost its American penal colonies after the American Revolution.

In 1792, Paine's friend, the poet William Blake, wisely suggested that Paine leave Britain at once, or he would be a dead man. Prudently, he left for Paris and was prosecuted in absentia by the British Crown for seditious libel. In France, ironically, where Paine was an enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution, as a member of the National Convention he was imprisoned for opposing the execution of King Louis XVI, which gives Paine the rare distinction of having been prosecuted for being too radical for one country and not radical enough for another.

From Wikipedia: Imprisoned and sentenced to death by Robespierre, Paine escaped beheading apparently by chance. A guard walked through the prison placing a chalk mark on the doors of the condemned prisoners. He placed one on Paine's door — but because a doctor was treating Paine at that moment, the prison door was open. When the doctor left, the door was swung closed, such that the chalk mark faced into the cell. Later, when the condemned prisoners were rounded up for execution, Paine was spared because there was no apparent chalk mark on his cell door.

In prison, convinced he would soon be dead, Paine wrote The Age of Reason, an assault on organized religion. A second part was written and published after his release from prison. The content of the work can be briefly summarized in this quotation:

The opinions I have advanced... are the effect of the most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty; that the only true religion is Deism, by which I then meant, and mean now, the belief of one God, and an imitation of his moral character, or the practice of what are called moral virtues – and that it was upon this only (so far as religion is concerned) that I rested all my hopes of happiness hereafter. So say I now – and so help me God.

Purportedly in 1800, Napoleon met Paine, and stated that "a statue of gold should be erected to him in every city of the earth". Paine did not like Napoleon, by all accounts.

Paine was in his last years quite eccentric, neglecting personal hygiene. He died at 59 Grove Street in Greenwich Village, in New York City on June 8, 1809. At the time of his death, most US newspapers reprinted the obituary notice from the New York Citizen, which read in part: "He had lived long, did some good and much harm." Only six mourners came to his funeral. His remains were later removed to Britain, but became lost.

"I feel as though my third grade teacher lied to me when she said that there should be no taxation without representation, because I am not represented."
Dissenting view on Thos. Paine

Was the USA founded on Christianity?, at the Scriptorium

Selected Works of Thomas Paine    Major & Minor Works and Letters of Thomas Paine

1841 Henry Morton Stanley (d. May 10, 1904), Welsh-born American explorer and author (How I found Livingstone (1872); Through the Dark Continent (1877); In Darkest Africa (1890)) who found Dr David Livingstone, on November 10, 1871. Stanley visited Australia in 1891 on a lecture tour; he was in Sydney in mid-November, in the same week as Rudyard Kipling.

"Most famous for allegedly uttering the words, 'Dr. Livingstone, I presume,' Henry Morton Stanley was one of the most well-known of all nineteenth-century British explorers. In his early years (as a naturalized American) he led a roving life, fighting in the American Civil War, serving in the merchant marine and the federal navy, and reporting as a journalist on the early days of frontier expansion. He became famous when the New York Herald commissioned him to 'find Livingstone' in Africa ...

"After finding Robert Livingstone (no mean feat, since Livingstone was living in the interior of Zanzibar, where even his friends could not find him), and following in the footsteps of Livingstone, Richard Burton, John Hanning Speke, and others, Stanley went on to explore the rivers and lakes of central Africa. Through the Dark Continent (1877) is his account of those explorations."  Source (Atlantic Online; subscription)

More

1841 Joseph Symes (d. December 29, 1906), combative British-born President of the Australasian Secular Association during the 1880s; former Methodist clergyman; acolyte of Charles Bradlaugh (1833 - 1891), the founder of the National Secular Society in Britain.

He delivered his first Freethought lecture at Newcastle, UK on December 17, 1876, later writing for the National Reformer and Freethinker. At the end of 1883 he immigrated to Melbourne, where he founded the Liberator and agitated for the publication of Sunday newspapers and Sunday opening of art galleries and libraries. His thinking and style influenced Rose Summerfield. Symes strongly opposed the spread of socialism in the ASA. Symes was a pamphleteer ('Christianity at the Bar of Science'; 'Christianity Essentially a Persecuting Religion'; 'The Life and Death of my Religion'); popular lecturer and open-air speaker (along with Chummy Fleming, et al) at the Queens Wharf and North Wharf Sunday afternoon meetings at the Yarra River, Melbourne. He remained in Australia till returning to England in 1906, dying later that year.

Early progressives in the Book of Days    Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson    More

1843 William McKinley, 25^th President of the United States, who died on on September 14, 1901 eight days after having been shot by Leon Czolgosz (who was executed on October 29, 1901). McKinley was President at the time of the sinking of the USS Maine, used as pretext for war by those who were already inclined to go to war with Spain. That incident is believed by many to have been a false flag operation.

1850 Lawrence Hargrave (d. July 6, 1915), Australian engineer, explorer, astronomer, aeronautical pioneer and inventor of the box kite. 

Hargrave was nearly lost to science and aviation. On February 26, 1872 the brig Maria ran aground on a Queensland, Australia, reef, with the loss of 21 by drowning and 14 killed by natives. Among the passengers was 22-year-old Hargrave.

Hargrave, seen below with his friend, fellow inventor Alexander Graham Bell, believed that a "patentee is nothing but a legal robber", preferring his inventions to be used for the betterment of mankind, and like physicist Pierre Curie and X-ray discoverer Wilhelm Röntgen, he refused on moral grounds to take out patents. Apart from the kites that helped the birth of aviation, he contributed to the early study of the curved aerofoil and the rotary engine, which was to power many early aircraft up until about 1920.

Hargrave had papers published in the journal of the Royal Society of New South Wales (Australia), which were also published abroad. In the USA, Octave Chanute, another pioneer of aeronautics and aviation, became aware of Hargrave's experiments and reported on them in the October 1893 issue of the American Engineer and Railroad Journal, spreading the Australian inventor's discoveries even further afield.

"On November 12, 1894, Lawrence Hargrave, the Australian inventor of the box kite, linked four of his kites together, added a sling seat, and flew 16 feet. By demonstrating to a sceptical public that it was possible to build a safe and stable flying machine, Hargrave opened the door to other inventors and pioneers. The Hargrave-designed box kite, with its improved lift-to-drag ratio, was to provide the theoretical wing model that allowed the development of the first generation of European (and American) airplanes."   Source

"While the Wright brothers denied that they owed anything to Hargrave, his discovery of the cellular kite and his investigations into the superiority of curved wing surfaces played an important part in European experimental work which culminated in the first public flight by Santos-Dumont in France in 1906."   Source

Lawrence Hargrave and Scottish inventor Alexander Graham Bell 
shared a friendship and a scientific curiosity about the applications of 
Hargrave's box kite invention and its developments for aviation

"Point Piper has a long roll of distinguished residents, political, legal and academic. One of the most interesting was the aeronautical pioneer, Lawrence Hargrave, who lived on Woollahra Point from 1902 to 1915.

"He was a charming, rather absentminded man, 'the crank with a kite'. This English immigrant was fascinated by the flight of both birds and kites. He either had no business sense, or was one of those noble souls who believe that science, like music, hath no boundaries, for when Wilbur Wright contacted him in 1900 about the use of his aircraft models, he told the American inventor that he had no patents, and his aeronautical discoveries were 'at the disposal of all'.

"Grannies of present Point Piperians were occasionally treated to the delightful spectacle of Mr Hargrave strolling on the water across Double Bay. He wore on his feet 'something like blown-up tennis racquets'.

"The major Hargrave legend still drifting about Point Piper is his strongly-held theory of the Spanish rock carvings. In brief, he believed that one ship from Mendana's expedition from Callao to the Solomons in 1595 was blown south and sought shelter in Port Jackson. There are many rock carvings and letters on the rock-faces of Point Piper, and Hargrave wove these into a fantastic but credible story. His papers and sketches about this romantic curiosity can be seen at the Mitchell Library, and the story is retold at some length in Nesta Griffiths' entertaining Point Piper, Past and Present. Odd clues to early Spanish discovery of Australia do turn up in coastal waters now and then, chunks of metal, nubbins of china, cannonballs."
Park, Ruth, The Companion Guide to Sydney, Collins, Sydney, 1973, p. 132

See also December 5, 1927: George and Florence Taylor; March 18, 1910, Harry Houdini first powered flight in Australia

Hargrave Files    Hargrave/Wright Brothers    More    And more    Yet more

1862 Frederick Delius (d. 1934), English-born composer (A Village Romeo and Juliet; Appalachia)

1874 John D Rockefeller Jr (d. 1960), American business boss and philanthropist

Related: Ludlow Massacre

1876 Havergal Brian (d. 1972), composer

1880 WC Fields (d. December 25, 1946), (William Claude Dukenfield), American comic actor

"WC Fields the juggler bears little resemblance to WC Fields of later movie and radio fame. The young, trim, and handsome juggler presented a silent act, hiding behind a bizarre tramp face. The W.C. Fields drawl and clever wit were confined to off-stage appearances, as he did not add any talking to his act until about 1915. This worked to his advantage while touring Europe, as he was not confronted with a language barrier. He also felt that he wanted the audience to concentrate on his juggling skills, and that talking would be distracting."   Source

The man who started life (in Philadelphia) as William Claude Dukefield and lived it to the hilt as the children- and dog-hating WC Fields, was sometimes credited in pictures – as screenwriter – by other names as well, such as Charles Bogle, Otis Criblecoblis and Mahatma Kane Jeeves. He died on Christmas Day, 1946.

Offical Fan Club

1888 Leadbelly (Huddie William Ledbetter), multi-instrumentalist American blues singer, who twice sang himself out of jails, and who helped to inspire the folk and blues revivals of the 1950s and '60s. (Some sources give January 15 and perhaps others as Leadbelly's date of birth.) In Texas, it was a song written for the Governor that won his freedom. In Louisiana, John and Alan Lomax discovered him in Angola Prison and persuaded the Governor to set him free.

Pete Seeger and The Weavers took his (Goodnight) Irene to the top of the charts just six months after the great blues artist died of amyathopic lateral sclerosis on Devcember 6, 1949. Rock Island Line was a hit for Lonnie Donegan and Leadbelly's classic Cottonfields became a major success for the Beach Boys.

"Born Huddie William Ledbetter, on Jeter Plantation in Mooringsport Louisiana, on January 29 1885 (though this date is disputed). Died of lateral sclerosis, in New York, on December 6, 1949. The nickname "Leadbelly" was acquired in prison and referred to his physical toughness."   Source

The Leadbelly Web
 

'Bourgeois Blues'
Click here to listen to Real Audio format 28.8 modem

Huddie Ledbetter/Alan Lomax)
(G7) - (C7) - (G) - (D7)

(G7) Me and my wife went all over town
And everywhere we went people turned us down
Lord, in a (C7) bourgeois town
It's a (G) bourgeois town
I got the (D7) bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all a- (G) round

Home of the brave, land of the free
I don't wanna be mistreated by no bourgeoisie
Lord, in a bourgeois town
Uhm, the bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around

Well, me and my wife we were standing upstairs
We heard the white man say "I don't want no niggers up there"
Lord, in a bourgeois town
Uhm, bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around

Well, them white folks in Washington they know how
To call a colored man a nigger just to see him bow
Lord, it's a bourgeois town
Uhm, the bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around

I tell all the colored folks to listen to me
Don't try to find you no home in Washington, DC
'Cause it's a bourgeois town
Uhm, the bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues
Gonna spread the news all around

1901 Allen Du Mont, television pioneer

1905 Barnett Newman (d. 1970), painter

1910 Maurice Joyeux, outstanding figure of French anarchism, founder of the newspaper Le Monde Libertaire (Libertarian World)

1913 Peter von Zahn (d. 2001), journalist and writer

1915 Victor Mature (d. 1999), actor

1918 John Forsythe, actor

1923 Paddy Chayefsky, writer (d. 1981) who won Oscars for Marty (1955) and Network (1976)

"Chayefsky's last film was the Ken Russell extravaganza Altered States (1980). The director's decision to have the actors deliver Chayefsky's dialogue in breathless, rapid-fire manner so infuriated the author that he had his name withdrawn from the credits."   Source

1924 Luigi Nono, (d. 1990) composer

1926 Franco Cerri, Italian jazzman

1927 Edward Abbey (d. March 14, 1989), American anarchist/ecologist/writer. His uncompromising works include Monkey Wrench Gang (illustrated by R Crumb); Desert Solitaire; Hayduke Lives. The term 'monkeywrenching' comes from Abbey's writings.

"When Edward Abbey died in 1989 at the age of sixty-two, the American West lost one of its most eloquent and passionate advocates. Through his novels, essays, letters and speeches, Edward Abbey consistently voiced the belief that the West was in danger of being developed to death, and that the only solution lay in the preservation of wilderness. Abbey authored twenty-one books in his lifetime, including Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Brave Cowboy, and The Fool's Progress. His comic novel The Monkey Wrench Gang helped inspire a whole generation of environmental activism. A writer in the mold of Twain and Thoreau, Abbey was a larger-than-life figure as big as the West itself."
Cover text from the Edward Abbey Video

More

1939 Germaine Greer, Australian feminist author (The Female, Eunice)  

1940 Katharine Ross, American actress (Oscar The Graduate)

1945 Tom Selleck, American actor (TV series Magnum P.I.; Movie Three Men and a Baby; Quigley Down Under)  

1950 Jody Scheckter, South Africa racing driver

1954 (Some sources say 1953) Oprah Winfrey, American actress (The Color Purple), talk show host, producer, publisher; host of The Oprah Winfrey Show, the highest-rated talk show in television history

More

1968 Edward Burns, actor

1970 Heather Graham, actress

1975 Sara Gilbert, actress

1976 Grigorios Paliouras, Canadian, scientist

1979 Pixie, glamour model

1981 Jonny Lang, musician

1990 Jessica D Stone, actress

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904 Sergius III came out of retirement to take over the papacy from the deposed Pope Christopher.

1119 Death of Pope Gelasius II.

1595 Romeo and Juliet, the play by William Shakespeare concerning the fate of two young star-crossed lovers, was probably first performed.

1676 Feodor III became Tsar of Russia.

1743 Death of Cardinal André-Hercule de Fleury, Bishop of Fréjus (b. 1653), chief minister of France under Louis XV.

1814 France defeated Russia and Prussia in the Battle of Brienne.

1820 Death of King George III of the United Kingdom (b. 1738) at Windsor Castle. He was the longest-lived and, at 59 years on the throne, the longest-reigning English monarch. Those around him believed him to be mad in his last years. It is believed by some today that George suffered from the disease porphyria, which drove him insane, but, although popularly believed, it is still a hypothesis and unproved (see John CG Röhl, Warren Martin, and David Hunt, Purple Secret, Bantam Press, London, 1998)

"Shelley in his sonnet 'England in 1819,' called him 'an old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king.' Poet-laureate Robert Southey penned a shamelessly adulatory elegy, 'A Vision of Judgment,' not only envisioning the King's triumphal entry into Glory but in the Preface condemned Lord Byron as the leader of what Southey deemed a 'Satanic' school of poetry. Byron retaliated in his masterpiece, 'The Vision of Judgment,' in which George's soul goes on trial at the Pearly Gates. Southey is the real butt of the satire."   Source

 

George III and other mentally ill monarchs

Waiting in the wings in the old king's last years was a power clique who would have loved to propagate the belief that the king should be declared mad and force him to abdicate, putting his son on the throne.

Productions of Shakespeare's King Lear, about a mad king, were outlawed in Britain from 1788 to 1820 in deference to the mad king.

Charles VI of France (Charles the Mad) was indeed crazy, probably suffering from schizophrenia. At times he forgot he was king; he also heard voices and was known to physically assault even his closest supporters.

Then there was King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was homosexual though there is no evidence that he practised. In fervently democratic times he was a romantic monarchist who dreamed of being an absolute ruler, building extravagant castles that look more at home in Disneyland – in fact, Disneyland's Sleeping Beauty's Castle was modelled on Ludwig's edifice. The actual evidence that he was insane is quite slender, but he did have such a reputation.

1845 The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe was published for the first time (New York Evening Mirror).

1850 Henry Clay introduced the Compromise of 1850 to the US Congress.

1853 Napoleon III married Eugénie de Montijo in Paris.

1854 The first shipment of Australian cotton was exported from Queensland to England.

1856 Queen Victoria instituted the Victoria Cross, Britain's highest military decoration.

1861 Kansas was admitted as the 34^th US state.

1863 USA: The Bear River Massacre.

1891 Liliuokalani (1838 - 1917) was proclaimed Queen of Hawaii (overthrown January 16, 1893) by American sugar corporations.

1916 World War I: Paris was bombed by German zeppelins for the first time.

1916 Britain began trials of the tank.

1922 Union of Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador was dissolved.

1929 The Seeing Eye Dog organization was formed.

1933 President of Germany Paul von Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.

1944 World War II: USA: Battleship Missouri was launched.

1944 Battle of Cisterna in central Italy.

1944 A total of about 300 men, women and children were massacred indiscriminately at the Massacre in Koniuchy in Poland.

1948 Angry refugees asked Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma Gandhi; 1869 - 1948), Indian leader and proponent of civil disobedience, to retire to the Himalayas.

Gandhi Timeline

 

1957 Danish architect, Jørn Utzon (b. 1918), was named as the winner of a competition to find the person to design the Sydney Opera House.

Eventually the building was completed, at a cost of $100 million, exceeding the original budget by $97 million. Utzon had constant quarrels with the State government of New South Wales, and left for his native Denmark before the building's completion and never returned. The building was opened on October 20, 1973, but Utzon has never seen his masterpiece.

1959 Sleeping Beauty, the last animated feature produced by Walt Disney to be based upon a fairy tale, was first released.

1958 USA: Police captured Charles Starkweather in Wyoming.

1966 The first of 608 performances of Sweet Charity opened at the Palace Theatre in New York City.

1978 Sweden banned the use of aerosol sprays.

1979 USA: Convicted bank robber Patty Hearst's seven-year prison sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter after three years.

1986 The Height 611 UFO Incident.

"... a steel-coloured, globe-shaped UFO crashed on height 611 on the Izvestkovaya mountain near the small town of Dalnegorsk. Debris was recovered and examined."   Source  

List of major UFO sightings

1987 Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev urged the Central Committee of the Communist Party to institute free local council elections.

1990 The trial of the former skipper of the Exxon Valdez, Joseph Hazelwood, began in Anchorage, Alaska. He was accused of negligence that resulted in America's worst oil spill.

 

1993 The death of Gustav Hasford, American Vietnam veteran and author of The Short-Timers (filmed by Stanley Kubrick as Full Metal Jacket). He died of heart failure on the Greek island of Aegina where he had made his home.

"Gustav Hasford was one of the most accomplished writers of Vietnam fiction, yet today all three of his novels are out of print.  He collaborated with Stanley Kubrick for three years on Full Metal Jacket, yet they met in person only once, where Kubrick leaned over to Michael Herr during dinner and said 'I can't deal with this man.'"   Source

In 1988, Hasford was arrested in San Luis Obispo for grand theft. He was accused of stealing thousands of books from more than 70 libraries throughout the USA and England. Hasford ultimately pleaded no contest to reduced charges of possessing stolen property, paid a fine and shipping charges to return 748 books, and served three months of a six-month sentence.   Source: The Daily Bleed

Alabama screenplay writer sought in connection with 10,000 recovered books
ASSOCIATED PRESS, March 21, 1988

University investigators said they are seeking Hasford for questioning but did not immediately seek an arrest warrant, because they want to investigate the estimated 10,000 books in 396 cardboard boxes.

Officers took a weekend break from the mammoth job of cataloging the pile of books, which measures 27 feet long, 5 feet wide and 5 feet tall, police dispatcher Suzi Goodwin said Sunday.

A sampling of headlines from around the country:

WRITER'S BLOCK: HE FAILS TO RETURN LIBRARY BOOKS

OVERDUE FOR QUESTIONING?

BOOK 'EM, DANO!

FULL METAL LOCKERS

WILL THEY THROW THE BOOK AT AUTHOR?

WRITER TO BE IN FULL METAL CELL

 

1996 President Jacques Chirac announced a "definitive end" to French nuclear testing.

1996 La Fenice, the opera house of Venice, Italy, was destroyed by fire.

1996 The first release of Duke Nukem 3D

1998 In Birmingham, Alabama, USA a bomb exploded at an abortion clinic killing one and severely wounding another. Serial bomber Eric Robert Rudolph was suspected as the culprit.

2001 Thousands of student protesters in Indonesia stormed parliament and demanded that President Abdurrahman Wahid resign due to alleged involvement in corruption scandals.

 

 

 

"By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States."

2002 In his State of the Union Address, USA President George W Bush described "regimes that sponsor terror" as an Axis of Evil. How the ruling parties of three unaligned nations (Iraq, its traditional rival Iran, and North Korea) came to be likened to the German-Italian-Japanese Axis of World War II is a mystery known only to Bush and his former speechwriter, David Frum.

2002 Daniel Pearl (b. 1963), American journalist was killed by terrorists (one possible date).

2004 A whale exploded in the town of Tainan, Taiwan. A build-up of gas in the decomposing 56-foot long Sperm whale is what is claimed to have caused the explosion.

2006 International Internet-free day as proposed by someone, sometime at the Global Ideas Bank.

 

Tomorrow: The Calves'-Head Club

 

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Zebaroo

Wikipedia and David Brown's prodigious Daily Bleed are both excellent resources that aid my research.
I frequently make use of their generously liberal 'fair use', 'copyleft' and 'anti-copyright' policies, with much gratitude.
© My own copyright policy is also liberal, but as this is my livelihood, conditions apply.

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