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Heroes
Robyn Arianhrod
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Folklore classic
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The Pagan Book of Days
Eight Sabbats for Witches
Celebrate the Earth
A Year of Holidays in the Pagan
Tradition
Wheel of the Year
The Trouble
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A Calendar of Festivals
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Told Us About Iraq
Lady Godiva
Lucifer Ascending: The
Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture
Dogs That Know When Their
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The Book of Spells
Spellcraft
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The Encyclopedia of Saints
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How
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For
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Crimes Against Nature : How George W Bush and His Corporate
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The Price of Loyalty
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A
Question of Torture
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When Corporations Rule the World
Alternatives to Economic Globalization
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 The
second Equiria (Equirria), Roman Empire
Horse races were held in honour of
the god of war, Mars (whose month this was), at the Campus
Martius (the field of Mars). Romulus instituted this tradition to
herald the beginning of the sacral year. Purification rites were
held for the army, which must have taken a lot of energy and time.
This is the second Equiria (or
Equirria), with the first held on February 27.
We know of the Second Equiria from Ovid's Fasti, ii.859, ii.519. If the Campus
Martius was overflowed by the Tiber, the races took place on a part
of the Mons Coelius, which was called from that circumstance the
Martialis Campus.
Four racing
factions were popular in Rome – the blues, greens, whites and
reds, the colours worn by the charioteers who often became the
wealthy sports superstars of their day. Portrayals of them in
sculpture, mosaics and moulded glassware have survived, sometimes
with their names.
Roman
festivals and notable days in the Book of Days
Deities
of many cultures in the Book of Days
Farvardigan, The
Ten Days of the Dead,
ancient Persia,
Zoroastrianism
(Mar 10
- 20)
Festival of the god Mars, ancient Rome (Mar 1
-
19)
Feast day of Kemet, ancient Greece
Sacred to the ancient Egyptian Reptile and Mother Goddess Uazit,
also known as Lady of the Night.
Source:
Earth, Moon and Sky
Festivals in ancient Greece
Diasia festival, ancient Greece
Held to ward off poverty.
Source:
Earth, Moon and Sky
Elaphebolion Noumenia, ancient
Greece (eve of Mar 14 - eve of Mar
15)
Ancient Greek festival honouring all the gods and goddesses.
"Flutes were played; prayers were said; offerings of barley, olive oil, incense, and food were burned in an offering hearth; and libations of water and wine were
made." Source
Runic half-month of Beorc commences
Half-month ruled by the goddess of the birch tree; a time of
purification for rebirth and new beginnings.
Feast day of the
god Tou Tei (Tou Dei; Toutei),
Macau
On the dating of items in the Almanac
Commemorated on the second day of
the second lunar month.
Miniature shrines are erected at homes and in
places of work. Tou Tei is the Earth God and he is said to be
omnipresent. Celebrations are held at the
Tou Tei Temple on
Taipa, where also worshipped are the
Buddha and
Kun Iam (Goddess of Mercy).
Egyptian day (dies egypticus, dies ægypticus or
dies mala), unlucky day in
Medieval Europe. ("But, notwithstanding, I will trust the Lord"
was the associated saying.)
Feast day of St
Acepsimus, bishop in Assyria, Joseph, and Aithilahas, martyrs
Feast day of St Ambrose Fernandez
Feast day of St Boniface
Curitan, bishop of Ross, Scotland
Feast day of St Dominic Jorjes
Feast day of St Giacomo Cusmano
Feast day of St James of Viterbo
Feast day of St Leobinus
Feast day of St Matilda
(Maud; Mathildis), Queen of Germany
(Mountain soldanel,
Soldanella alpina, is
today's
plant, dedicated to this saint.)
Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days Shop saints
Pilgrimage to the Dragon Pagoda,
Rangoon,
Burma
To wash the dust from
the thousand Buddhas within.
Source: The
Daily Bleed
Independence
Days (March 14 and 15),
Paraguay
Todai-ji
Shunie, Tōdai-ji
temple, Nara,
Japan, (Mar 1 -
14)
Commonwealth
Day (2005, second Monday in
March)
White Day (Japanese
holiday similar to Valentine's Day),
Japan
From Wikipedia: White
Day is a holiday that was created by a concerted marketing effort in
Japan. White Day is celebrated in Japan, Korea,
and Taiwan
on March
14, one month after Valentine's Day. On White Day, men give
gifts to the women who presented them with chocolate on Valentine's
Day. The holiday began in 1965, when a marshmallow
maker started marketing to men the idea that they should pay back the women
who gave them chocolate, and other gifts, with marshmallows.
Originally it was called Marshmallow Day, and later it was changed
to White Day.
Soon, the chocolate companies started
realizing that they could capitalize as well on this day, and began
marketing white chocolate.
Now, Japanese men give marshmallows, white chocolate, as well as
non-white, edible and non-edible gifts to the women who were kind
enough to think of them and give them chocolate on Valentine's Day a
month prior.
Those who didn't give or receive gifts on Valentine's Day or White Day,
get together in commiseration on Black Day,
April 14.
Colour Days in Korea
"In addition to White Day, Black
Day, Yellow Day, Blue Day and other color days are known for 14th
day of the following months." Source
" … as well as Rose Day (May 14) and even Kiss Day (June 14). As the effectiveness of the so-called
'day marketing' is no more a secret, a great variety of 'uniquely Korean' celebration days have appeared recently.
"January 1 of every year is Pear Day. Its celebration originated at a New Year festival in Naju, South Jeolla, as pears came to symbolize abundance (the word
'pear' in Korean sounds exactly as the word 'double' or 'multiples'). Samgyepsal Day, or the day when Koreans eat
'samgyepsal,' or three-layered pork, is March 3, whereas '3' symbolizes the three layers of meat. This day is marked to boost pork consumption. The National Agricultural Cooperative Federation designated September 9 as
'Gugu Day,' or 'nine-nine day,' as the day of eating chicken meat and eggs ('gugu' means
'Cluck! Cluck!' in Korean). May 2 is Cucumber Day ('5/2' is pronounced as
'oi' in Korean, which sounds exactly as the Korean word 'cucumber.'). It is also Duck Day, or the day of eating duck meat, because
'duck' in Korean ('ori') resembles the word 'oi,' or '5/2.' Peach (boksunga) Day is celebrated in summer to wish happiness as
'bok' also means 'happiness' and 'summer' in Chinese characters.
"Why so many new events?
"The peculiarity of all these new 'days'
is that nobody knows for sure who designated them and for what
reasons. Not only is it almost impossible to grasp how many
'days' we have to celebrate, but also their number keeps
proliferating among teenagers and people in their 20s on the
Internet and by word of mouth. People ascribe special meanings
to new anniversaries, while businesses target consumers'
sentimentality to make profits."
Anniversary and celebration boom in Korea
 Pi Day
From Wikipedia: March 14,
written 3/14 in the USA date format, is the
official day for Pi day derived from the common three-digit
approximation for the number π: 3.14. It is usually celebrated
at 1:59 PM (in recognition of the six-digit approximation: 3.14159).
Some, using a twenty-four-hour
clock rather than a twelve hour clock, say that 1:59 PM is
actually 13:59 and celebrate it at 1:59 AM instead. Parties have
been held by mathematics
departments of various schools around the world.
This day has been celebrated in a
variety of ways. Groups of people, typically pi clubs, give thought
to the role that the number π has played in their lives and
imagine the world without π. During such an event, pi
celebrants may devise alternative values for π, eat pi (pie), play
pi (piñata),
or drink pi (piña colada).
The "ultimate" pi day occurred on March
14, 1592, at
6:54 AM. When written in American-style date format, this is
3/14/1592 6:54, which corresponds to the ten-digit approximation of
pi: 3.141592654. However, considering this was well before any kind
of standardized world time had been
established, and the general population, excluding mathematicians,
scholars, etc, had no concept of π, the holiday went unnoticed.
Pi Approximation Day is one of two
days: either July 22
(written 22/7 — 22 divided by 7 is an approximation to π —
in some date formats), or April 26,
the day on which planet Earth completes
approximately two Astronomical
units' worth of its annual orbit: on this day the
total length of Earth's orbit, divided by the length already
travelled, equals π.
Pi not as random as was thought
"Physicists including Purdue's Ephraim Fischbach have completed
a study comparing
the 'randomness' in pi to that produced by 30 software random-number
generators and one chaos-generating physical machine. After
conducting several tests, they have found that while sequences of
digits from pi are indeed an acceptable source of randomness --
often an important factor in data encryption and in solving certain
physics problems -- pi's digit string does not always produce
randomness as effectively as manufactured generators do."
Source:
Slashdot
The
Ridiculously Enhanced Pi Page
Pi Day in Maine
with Dr Wilson's Memory Elixir
Friends of Pi – Freunde der Zahl Pi
A
simple proof that 22/7 exceeds pi
One
Million Digits of Pi!!! (http://3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592.com/)
See also: Newtonmas, Darwin_Day,
Mole Day, Square root day
Steak
and Blowjob Day, which was created to be
the male equivalent of Valentine's
Day
Microsoft
Excel, a popular spreadsheet program, uses
March 14, 2001, in many recent versions as the sample date when
editing date formatting
1681 Georg
Philipp Telemann (d. 1767), German composer1804 Johann Strauß,
Sr (Johann Strauss I; d. 1849), Austrian
composer 1813 Joseph
Philo Bradley (d. 1892), associate justice of the United States Supreme
Court 1820 Victor Emmanuel
II (d. January 9, 1878), King of Italy
1835 Giovanni
Schiaparelli (d. 1910), Italian astronomer1853
Ferdinand
Hodler, (d. 1918) Swiss painter 1854 Paul Ehrlich (d. 1915),
physician, winner of the 1908
Nobel
Prize in Physiology or Medicine
1860
Arthur
Rae (d. November
25, 1943), New Zealand-born shearer, journalist, labor activist,
member of the New South Wales and Australian parliaments.
He was an organizer for the
Australian Workers' Union, editor of
Hummer and Sydney Worker.
On November 1,
1912, he became the first Senator suspended from the
Australian Senate (only for the rest of the day's sitting) for describing a statement attributed to him by Senator Edward Millen (Anti-Socialist, NSW) as
"a deliberate falsehood" and then failing to withdraw it. In 1892,
he was involved with a terrorist bomb plot in Sydney involving
anarchist Larry
Petrie, Mary
Gilmore (Australia's leading female poet of the first 7 decades
of the 20th Century), and Chris
Watson, third Prime Minister of Australia (read
more), but despite his colourful past, he became a Senator in
the Australian Parliament for two periods: 1910 - '14 and 1929 -
'35.
"Shearer-journalist. Educated at primary school in
Blenheim, New Zealand. Arrived in Australia in 1878 and worked as a miner, shearer, journalist and joint editor. Vice president of Australian Workers Union in 1893. President in 1895. Honorary General secretary from 1898 until 1899 and was excluded from membership in 1920. Member of Coal Miners Federation and Australian Journalists Association. Labor foundation member."
Source
"Arthur Rae was a one-time organiser for the AWU and was one of the first 36 Labor members elected to Parliament in 1891, representing Murrumbidgee. In 1910 he was elected as a Senator until 1914, and again was a Senator from 1918 to 1935. He died at the age of 83, in 1943."
Source
"Arthur Rae (ALP/Lang Labor) was a
union organiser who was fined for getting shearers to strike in
support of maritime workers in 1890. Refusing to pay the fine, he
was sentenced to 'sixty-one consecutive fortnights' in jail. He was
released after a month in response to widespread protest. Rae went
on to be the first Labor member of the NSW Legislative Assembly
(1891-94) and, after failing to win a House of Representatives seat
in 1903 and 1907, was elected as a Senator for two periods: 1910-14
and 1929-35." Source "Organising
the shearing workforce in the latter part of the nineteenth century
was an arduous and often dangerous task. Travelling on horseback and
often on foot, organisers followed the migratory trails recruiting
members shed by shed in the face of staunch and sometimes violent
opposition from the pastoralists. These men were the pathfinders ... "During
the Maritime Strike in 1890, Rae exhibited leadership qualities ...
by managing to convince some 300 angry unionists in Hay, New South
Wales to surrender a 'scab' they were about to lynch and accept his
judgement of the man. Rae ruled the 'scab' had 20 minutes to leave
the town or the crowd could have him back. Spence claims the man
would have been hung but for Rae's intervention ... "Rae
also became interested in women's issues in the early 1890s a fairly
unusual pursuit for a male unionist. His main influence was Rose
Scott, the social reformer and philanthropist ... "By
1898 Rae was the general secretary of the AWU and part of a
leadership group which was now convinced that the rank and file
should have no more than a token role in the creation of union
policy"
Arthur
Rae: A 'Napoleon' in Exile
Lawson
& Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson
1869 Algernon
Blackwood (d. 1951), British writer
1879 Albert Einstein, (d. 1955) physicist, winner of
the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921
Einstein
was born in Ulm,
Baden-Württemberg, of Jewish parents, Hermann and
Pauline
Einstein.
He was
apparently a late
developer, and it has been reported that he could not speak fluently even at age nine. His parents
feared he was 'subnormal' and he probably was dyslexic in early
childhood. According to his sister, he had a terrible temper: once
he threw a chair at his violin teacher.
However, despite frequent assertions to the contrary, he did quite well at high school, as suggested by his graduation diploma (image opens in new window).
In 1952, he was
invited to be President of Israel. In refusing, he said, "I know a
little about Nature but hardly anything about men".
At his own
request, his brain was removed for study after his death (April 18,
1955). It was forgotten for many years until a journalist for the New Jersey Monthly went looking for it in August 1978. He found it
in various jars in a lab at Wichita, Kansas.
Einstein's
Heroes Was Einstein a Space Alien?
Einstein Archives Online
1882 Waclaw
Sierpinski (d. 1969), Polish mathematician1885 Raoul Lufbery (d.
1918),
World War I American flying
ace 1887 Sylvia Beach
(d. 1962),
American expatriate publisher 1903 Mustafa Barzani
(d. 1979),
leader of Kurdistan
Democratic Party 1912 Les
Brown (d. 2001), band leader 1914 Bill
Owen (d. 1999), British actor 1916
Horton
Foote, two-time
Academy Award and one-time
Pulitzer Prize and
Emmy Award-winning and
Tony Award-nominated
American author and
playwright 1918
Dennis Patrick (d. October 13,
2002), American
actor, television's first vampire (as Dennis Harrison) in a 1950
episode of Stage
13. At age 84 he died in a fire at his home in Los Angeles,
California. 1920 Hank Ketcham
(d. 2001), cartoonist
(Dennis the
Menace)
Comix, comics and cartoons in the Book of Days
1923 Diane Arbus (d.
[suicide]
July 26, 1971), American photographer
1928 Frank Borman,
astronaut and former Eastern
Airlines president1933 Sir Michael Caine,
British actor (Alfie;
The IPCRESS File;
Dirty
Rotten Scoundrels;
The Quiet American;
Bewitched;
Batman Begins)
More
1933 Quincy Jones, American composer and record producer
(Michael
Jackson's
Thriller)1934 Eugene Cernan,
Gemini and Apollo astronaut, last human to leave his footprints on
the moon 1940 Rita Tushingham,
English
actress
(Girl with Green
Eyes;
Doctor
Zhivago;
Being Julia)
1941 Wolfgang
Petersen, German director, Das Boot1945
Jasper Carrott (born
Robert Davis), British comedian (Carrott del sol;
Beat the Carrott) 1946
Steve Kanaly, actor 1947 Billy Crystal,
US comedian and actor (This Is Spinal Tap;
City Slickers;
When Harry Met
Sally)
"His famous uncle, record producer Milt Gabler, founded Commodore Records and later Decca Records, where he produced the Bill Haley hit (We're Gonna) Rock Around the Clock."
Source
1947 Pam
Ayres, British poet1958 Prince
Albert of Monaco 1965 Kevin
Williamson, American screenwriter 1983 Taylor Hanson,
musician in the group Hanson, record
producer 1986 Jamie
Bell, British actor Phew!!
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March
9
Telephone Day
10
Money Day
11
Dream Day
11
Frankenstein's Birthday
12
Plant A Flower Day
12
Alfred Hitchcock Day
12
Department Store Day
13
Uranus Day
14
Pi Day
14
Potato Chip Day
14
Genius Day
14
White Day
15
Ides Of March
15
Buzzard Day
16
Everything You Do Is Right Day
16
St Urho's Day
16
Curlew Day
16
Hiccup Day
17
St Patrick's Day
17
St Patrick's Day Parade (New York)
17
Submarine Day
18 Paper
Dress Day
18
Grandparents And Grandchildren Day
18
Quilting Day
19
Let's Laugh Day
19
St Joseph's Day
19
Chocolate Caramel Day
19
Swallows Day
20
Autumnal
Equinox / Spring
Equinox
20 Smile
Rejuvenation Day
20 Astrology
Day
21 Nowruz
21 Flower
Day
21 Baha'i
New Year
21 Single
Parents Day
22 Sing
Out Day
22 International
Goof Off Day
22 Roller
Coaster Day
22
World Water Day
23
Cuddly Kitten Day
23
Liberty Day
24
Chocolate Covered Raisins Day
24
Houdini Day
25
Pecan Day
25
Independence Day (Greece)
26
Birthday Of Robert Frost
27
Photography Day
27
Fly A Kite Day
27
World Theatre Day
28
Hot Tub Day
28
Respect Your Cat Day
30
Doctors' Day
31
Bunsen Burner Day
...
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1471 Sir Thomas Malory died in
London's Newgate Prison.
Malory (b. c. 1405) was the author
or compiler of Le Morte
d'Arthur. In 1450, he apparently turned towards a life of crime and was
accused of murder, robbery, stealing, poaching, and rape. Supposedly while
imprisoned for most of the 1450s (mostly in Newgate), he began writing an Arthurian
legend that he called The Book of King Arthur
and His Noble Knights of
the Round Table.
1489 The Queen of Cyprus, Catherine
Cornaro, sold her kingdom to Venice.
1492 Queen
Isabella of Castille ordered her 150,000 Jewish subjects to convert
to Christianity or face expulsion. 1647 Thirty Years
War: Bavaria, Cologne,
France
and Sweden
signed the Truce of Ulm. 1757 At
Portsmouth, England, on-board
the HMS Monarch, Admiral
John
Byng was executed by firing
squad for neglecting his duty.
Byng's execution was satirized by Voltaire in
his novel Candide. In
Portsmouth, Candide witnesses the execution of an officer by firing
squad:
Talking thus, we approached Portsmouth. A multitude of people covered the shore, looking attentively at a stout gentleman who was on his knees with his eyes bandaged, on the quarter-deck of one of the vessels of the fleet. Four soldiers, placed in front of him, put each three balls in his head, in the most peaceable manner, and all the assembly then dispersed quite satisfied.
"What is all this?" quoth Candide, "and what devil reigns here?" He asked who was the stout gentleman who came to die in this ceremonious manner.
"It is an Admiral," they answered. "And why kill the Admiral?" "It
is because he has not killed enough of other people. He had to give
battle to a French Admiral, and they find that he did not go near
enough to him." "But," said Candide, "the French Admiral was as far
from him as he was from the French Admiral." "That is very true," replied they;
"but in this country it is useful to kill an Admiral now and then,
just to encourage the rest [pour encourager les autres]."
1794 Eli Whitney
was granted a patent for the cotton
gin, a device for automatically removing seeds from cotton bolls.1800 Cardinal Barnaba
Chiaramonti was elected Pope Pius VII.
1861 Big Ben strikes the Duchess's death.
On the morning of March 14, 1861, the inhabitants of Westminster, London, awoke
to the sound of Big Ben striking ten times for 4 o'clock and twelve times for 5
o'clock. The rumour went around that there must have been a death in the royal
family.
Strangely,
although Big Ben had been uncustomarily malfunctioning on that morning, within a
day it was announced that the Duchess of Kent (Queen Victoria's mother) was
dying. The next day she was, in fact, dead.
Big Ben is actually the name of the
bell hanging in the Clock Tower of the Palace of Westminster,
the home of the Houses of Parliament
in the UK, but vernacular has it otherwise
(ie, that it is the clock itself). It was cast on April 10,
1858, at the
Whitechapel Bell
Foundry, which also cast America's
Liberty Bell.
1869 The
third Maori rebellion in 15 years ended with the defeat of the warrior Titokowaru.
1883 Karl Marx
(b. 1818), political
theorist, died in poverty
in London.
1891 The first underwater telephone cable was laid across the
English Channel by the submarine Monarch.
1900 The Gold Standard
Act was ratified, placing United
States currency on the gold standard.
1903 The Hay-Herran
Treaty, granting the United States
the right to build the Panama Canal,
was ratified by the United
States Senate. The Columbian Senate would later reject the
treaty. 1903 USA
President Theodore
Roosevelt issued an executive order
making Pelican Island,
in Florida,
a "preserve and breeding ground for native birds," marking the
birth of the National
Wildlife Refuge System. 1913 Despite the
campaigning of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (Mahatma
Gandhi), Indian leader and proponent of civil disobedience,
Indian marriages in South Africa were invalidated by Supreme Court judgment.
1915 World
War I: Cornered off the coast of Chile by the Royal
Navy after fleeing the disastrous Battle
of the Falkland Islands, the German light cruiser SMS
Dresden was abandoned and scuttled by her crew.1932
George Eastman,
who founded the
Eastman Kodak Company and invented
roll film, committed
suicide.
1951 Korean
War: For the second time, United Nations
troops recaptured Seoul.1953 Nikita Khrushchev replaced
Georgi Malenkov as First Secretary of
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
1961 The
New English Bible was
published.
1964 A jury in
Dallas,
Texas,
found Jack Ruby
guilty of killing John F Kennedy's
assassin, Lee Harvey
Oswald.1966 Britain's first
'coloured' police officer, Muhammad Yusuf
Daar, was sworn in.
1967 The body of
USA
President John F Kennedy
was moved to a permanent burial place at Arlington
National Cemetery.
1968 The first liver transplant operation in Australia was performed
in Sydney.
1978 The Israeli
Defense Force, in retaliation for a terrorist attack three days
earlier, invaded and occupied southern Lebanon, under
codename Operation
Litani, resulting in the evacuation of at least 100,000
Lebanese, and approximately 2,000 deaths, as well as the creation of
United
Nations Interim Forces In Lebanon (UNIFIL).
1979 China: A military Hawker-Siddeley
Trident jet
cargo plane on a training mission crashed into a factory outside Beijing, killing
at least 200.
1984 Gerry Adams,
head of Sinn Féin, was
seriously wounded in an assassination
attempt in in central Belfast.
1989 Gun
control: USA President George HW Bush
banned the importation of assault rifles
into the United States.
 1989 American naturalist novelist (The
Monkey Wrench Gang), anarchist, xenophobe, Edward Abbey (b. 1927),
died.
"He wanted his
body transported in the bed of a pickup truck. He wanted to be buried as soon
as possible. He wanted no undertakers. No embalming, for Godsake. No coffin.
Just an old sleeping bag ... Disregard all state laws concerning burial. 'I
want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or
sagebrush or tree,' said the message.
As for graveside ceremony: He wanted
gunfire, and a little music. 'No formal speeches desired, though the
deceased will not interfere if someone feels the urge. But keep it all
simple and brief.' And then a big happy raucous wake. He wanted more music,
gay and lively music. He wanted bagpipes 'and a flood of beer and booze!
Lots of singing, dancing, talking, hollering, laughing, and lovemaking,'
said the message. And meat! Beans and chilis! and corn on the cob. Only a
man deeply in love with life and hopelessly soft on humanity would specify,
from beyond the grave, that his mourners receive corn on the cob." Source
'A
Prayer for the Traveler'
By
Edward Abbey
May your trails be crooked, lonesome,
dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and
above the clouds, May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral
valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a
dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and
mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and
pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient
unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk
across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon
the high crags, where something more beautiful and more full of wonder than your
deepest dreams waits for you – beyond that next turning of the canyon walls.
Source
1991 After 16
years in prison for allegedly bombing a pub in an Irish
Republican Army attack, the 'Birmingham Six'
were freed when a court determines that the police fabricated evidence.See also Guildford Four
and
Sydney Hilton
Bombing, cases involving anti-terrorism mania and extreme
miscarriages of justice.
1995 Manned
space mission: Astronaut Norman Thagard
became the first American astronaut to ride
to space on board a Russian launch
vehicle.
1996 American
President Bill Clinton
committed $100 million to an anti-terrorism
agreement with Israel to track down
and root out terrorists. 1997 The Chinese
city of Chongqing
(formerly Chunking) was upgraded to a centrally
administered municipality. 1998 An earthquake
measuring 6.9 on the Richter scale
hit southeastern Iran.
2004 Pope John Paul II
became the second-longest serving pope in history.
2004 Vladimir Putin
was re-elected president of Russia.
2004 PSOE
won elections in Spain just days after terrorist attacks in Madrid.
2005
The online statistics service SOTKAnet
was opened for the public in Finland.
2005 Mass protests against Syrian
influence in Lebanon
took place in Beirut
as part of the Cedar
Revolution.
Tomorrow: "Beware the Ides of March!"
Main calendar
| Yesterday |
Tomorrow | Search
Albert Einstein arrives at a party and introduces himself to the first person he sees and asks,
"What is your IQ?" to which the man answers "241." "That is wonderful!" says Albert.
"We will talk about the Grand Unification Theory and the mysteries of the universe. We will have much to discuss!"
Next Albert introduces himself to a woman and asks, "What is your IQ?" to which the lady answers,
"144." "That is great!" says Albert. "We can discuss politics and
current affairs. We will have much to discuss!"
Albert then goes to another person and asks, "What is your IQ?" to which the man answers,
"51." Albert ponders this for a moment, and then says, "Get them
terrorists!"
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.
Read more about today at Wilson's
Blogmanac
|
reetings from Australia.
How it works
This ritual of scapegoating is not
uncommon in world cultures and religions – Frazer investigates some of
these – and may be said to find an echo in the passion and execution of
Jesus Christ. The Old Testament (Leviticus
16) deals with the concept of the scapegoat (literally an animal) and
prescribes the methods of ritual: But the goat chosen by lot as the
scapegoat [Azazel goat; pronounced in Hebrew as aw-zah-zale,
translated as scapegoat in the King James Version] shall be
presented alive before the LORD to be used for making atonement by sending
it into the desert as a scapegoat (Lev. 16:10).
