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Highly recommended:
Folklore of World Holidays
by Margaret
Read MacDonald
The Price of Loyalty: Bush, the White House, & the Education of Paul O'Neill
The Da Vinci
Code
Ancient Ways
A Short
History of Nearly Everything
Garden Witchery
The Twilight
of American Culture
Golden Bough
Folklore classic
The Fatal Shore
Prehistory of Australia
Australia: Literature and History
Aborigine Dreaming
Rough Guide: Australian Aboriginal Music
The Explorers
Tim F Flannery
A Concise History of Australia
Celebrate the Earth
A Year of Holidays in the Pagan
Tradition
Wheel of the Year
The Trouble
with Islam
A Calendar of Festivals
The Five Biggest Lies Bush
Told Us About Iraq
Lady Godiva
Why People Believe Weird Things
Lucifer Ascending: The
Occult in Folklore and Popular Culture
Dogs That Know When Their
Owners Are Coming Home, and Other Unexplained Powers of Animals
Rupert Sheldrake
The Book of Spells
Spellcraft
The Book of Saints
The Encyclopedia of Saints
Daily Everything
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An Inconvenient Truth
By Al Gore; DVD &
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The Permaculture Home Garden
By Linda Woodrow
Ghost Plane
A
Question of Torture
By Alfred McCoy
Remotely
Controlled: How Television Is Damaging Our Lives and What We Can Do About
It
What
Would Jefferson Do?
By Thom
Hartmann
How
Mumbo-Jumbo Conquered the World
Pagan
Christianity
For
God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire
By James Yee
Crimes Against Nature : How George W Bush and His Corporate
Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy
By Robert F Kennedy, Jr
The Price of Loyalty
The
Torture Debate in America
A
Question of Torture
By Alfred McCoy
When Corporations Rule the World
Alternatives to Economic Globalization
Feminism Without Borders
The Skeptic's Dictionary
Brewer's
Dictionary of Phrase and Fable
365 Goddess
Adventures in a TV Nation
Michael
Moore
Drawing Down the Moon
Globalization/Anti-Globalization
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Celtic Daily Prayer
Dude, Where's My Country?
Photo of the day
Mother Earth Spirituality
Rich Media, Poor Democracy
Robert McChesney
Shamanism
10 Reasons to
Abolish the IMF & World Bank
The Iran-Iraq War: Chaos in a Vacuum
By Stephen C Pelletiere
America's Oil Wars
By Stephen C Pelletiere
Iraq and the International Oil System: Why America Went to
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By Stephen C Pelletiere
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Feast day of St Urho,
the grasshopper slayer
Finland's answer to Ireland's St Patrick, Urho expelled the grasshoppers from Finland. Raising his
staff, he intoned, "Grasshopper, grasshopper, go to hell!", and
they accommodated him, and the country's wine-grape crop was saved
forever. Of course, St Urho is a made-up saint, just for fun.
Some
say that a Finnish-American store owner in Minnesota, USA, became
weary of his Irish-American employees always asking for March 17 off
in honour of St Patrick, and it was he who invented St Urho. Waverly
Fitzgerald (School
of the Seasons) says that it was at a 1856 St Patrick's Day
party that the saint, whose name means 'hero', was first mooted. There are
other explanations.
All over the USA,
Finnish Americans commemorate today as a national celebration. For
example, the town of Hood River, Oregon, celebrates with a parade in
which locals are costumed as locusts, shouting "Grasshopper,
grasshopper, go to hell!" A large fibreglass statue is at Menahga,
Minnesota
('Home of St Urho') to the saint who never was.
Whether Finland
ever had a wine industry, and the fact that there are still
grasshoppers in that country, are matters to puzzle the scholars.
Farvardigan, The
Ten Days of the Dead,
ancient Persia,
Zoroastrianism
(Mar 10
- 20)
Lesser
Panathenaea, festival of Athena, ancient Greece (Mar 15 - 18)
Festival of the god Mars, ancient Rome (Mar 1 -
19)
Festival
of Hilaria, in honour of the Mother of Gods, ancient Rome (Mar 15 - 27)
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 of
Spring, Latvia
Feast day of St Abban of
Kill-Abban
Feast day of St Abraham
Kidunaia
Feast day of St Aninus
Feast day of St Aristolubus
Feast day of St Benedicta
Feast day of St Denis
Feast day of St Dentlin
Feast day of St Eusebia
Feast day of St Felix
Feast day of
St Finian
Lobhar (or, Leper), of Ireland
St Finian built the abbey of Innis-Falien in an island on the lake
of Loughlane, Ireland, as well as others. He visited St Ruadanus who
had a miraculous tree in his cell, dropping a liquor that fed him
and his brotherhood every day.
Once, when St Ruadanus was absent, St
Finian performed a miracle to impress on Ruadanus the need to live
like ordinary people. When St Ruadanus returned he found the liquor
stopped and turned water into the nectar. St Finian turned it back
into water.
Feast day of St Gregory
Makar
Feast day of St Heribert of
Cologne
Feast day of St Hilary
Feast day of St John Amias
Feast day of St John Sordi
Feast day of St Julian of
Anazarbus, martyr
(Nodding daffodil,
Narcissus nutans, is
today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)
Feast day of St Largus
Feast day of St Leocritia
of Cordova
Feast day of St Malcoldia
of Asti
Feast day of St Megingaud
Feast day of St Patrick of
Malaga
Feast day of St Robert
Dalby
Feast day of St Tatian
Feast day of St Torello of
Poppi
Feast day of St William of
Hart
Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days Shop saints
Time for feeding the Poteau Mitan (=
centrepost), Loko Davi (Eating of the ritual wood and of its guard), Voudon
(Voodoo) Source
Latvia Legions Day, Latvia
The controversial Latvia Legions were formerly celebrated in Latvia,
where about 140,000 men joined the Waffen SS National Legions during
World War II,
trying to defend their homeland. Since February 23,
2000,
this day has been no longer an official celebration day.
1585 Gerbrand
Adriaensz Bredero
(d. 1618), Dutch poet and playwright1750
Caroline
Herschel (January
9, 1848), German-born English
'first lady of astronomy'; sister and colleague of William
Herschel (1738 -
1822), who
discovered Uranus
"Her first accomplishments were the detection of nebulae. William
[her brother] gave her a
small telescope with which to look for comets. Trivial though it
may sound, in this era, comet hunting was the main focus of many
astronomers. Caroline's first experience in mathematics was her
catalogue of nebulae. She calculated the positions of her
brother's and her own discoveries and amassed them into a
publication. One interesting fact is that Caroline never learned
her multiplication tables. She studied them so late in life that
she never got a hold on them. She carried a table on a sheet of
paper in her pocket when she worked." Source
More
1751 James Madison (d. 1836),
4th
President
of the United States
 1774
Matthew
Flinders (d. July 19, 1814),
English-born Australian explorer, who circumnavigated and named the
continent.
In
1789 he entered the Royal Navy and in
1791 joined HMS
Providence as a midshipman,
serving under William
Bligh on his second 'breadfruit
voyage' to Tahiti. In 1798 he
circumnavigated Van Diemen's Land (later renamed Tasmania)
aboard the sloop Norfolk, therefore proving it to be an island.
The Flinders story has a tragic turn to it. In
1803,
while attempting to return to England aboard The Cumberland,
he was forced to put in at Mauritius
for repairs on December 17.
Unbeknown to Flinders, England was at war with France, and the
French governor, General De Caen, had Flinders detained as a spy. He
would be imprisoned on Mauritius for almost seven years.
Flinders finally returned to England in
October 1810, where he immediately began work on preparing A
Voyage to Terra Australia for publication. On July 18,
1814, the book was published, introducing the name
'Australia'.
The next day found, Matthew Flinders, one of history's great explorers,
dead at the age of only 40.
The Matthew
Flinders Electronic Archive
1789 Georg Simon Ohm (d. 1854),
German physicist and discoverer of Ohm's law
"Electricity
was not the only topic on which Ohm undertook research, and not
the only topic in which he ended up in controversy. In 1843 he
stated the fundamental principle of physiological acoustics,
concerned with the way in which one hears combination tones.
However the assumptions which he made in his mathematical
derivation were not totally justified and this resulted in a
bitter dispute with the physicist August Seebeck. He succeeded
in discrediting Ohm's hypothesis and Ohm had to acknowledge his
error." Source
1829 René François
Armand Sully-Prudhomme (d. 1907), French writer,
laureate of the first Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1901
1834 James Hector
(d. 1907),
Scottish geologist1878 Clemens
August Graf von Galen (d. 1946), German archbishop of Münster
and cardinal 1878 Reza Pahlavi (d. 1941), shah of Iran 1901 Edward Pawley,
American actor 1902 Leon Roppolo (d. 1943),
American jazz
clarinetist 1905 Elisabeth
Flickenschildt (d. 1977), German actress 1906 Henny Youngman
(d. 1998),
American comedian 1911 Josef Mengele (d. 1979),
Nazi war
criminal 1912 Pat
Nixon (d. 1993) , American actress, First
Lady1918 Frederick
Reines, (d. 1998) American physicist (1995 Nobel
Prize in Physics)
1920 Leo
McKern, (d. 2002) Australian-born English actor (TV series: Rumpole)
1926 Jerry
Lewis (born Joseph Levitch), American comedian (The Nutty Professor;
The King of
Comedy), who contracted
meningitis in Darwin, Australia. He is very involved with the
American Muscular Dystrophy
Association.
Dissenting
view on MDA
Trivia
While contending his birth name is Joseph Levitch, official birth
records show his first name to be Jerome.
Jerry took his last name from his actor-father's stage name.
Jerry is known as clothes horse. He gives away suits rather than
having them cleaned and refuses to wear a pair of socks more than
once.
Jerry was presented the French Legion of Honour in 1984 and was
nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1977.
He taught a class in film at the University of California; his students included
Steven Spielberg and
George
Lucas.
More
1928 Christa Ludwig,
German mezzo-soprano 1927 Vladimir
Komarov (d. 1967), Russian cosmonaut 1927 Daniel
Patrick Moynihan (d. 2003), US Senator
from New York 1929
Nadja Tiller,
Austrian actress 1934 Ray Hnatyshyn
(d. 2002),
former Governor-General
of Canada 1940 Bernardo
Bertolucci, Italian film director (Last Tango in Paris;
Luna;
Little Buddha;
The Last Emperor);
voted by Entertainment Weekly the 44th Greatest Director of all time 1940 Chuck Woolery,
game show host
1942 James
Soong, Taiwanese politician
What the ~~$$$~~~???
 1946 Judith Darlene
Hampton (aka JZ Knight and Ramtha),
American woman who claims to "channel" the
spirit of a 35,000 year-old (Cro-Magnon?) male spirit-warrior named Ramtha
(7 feet tall, with "black dancing eyes"), who
first appeared in Knight's kitchen in Tacoma, Washington in 1977.
"What be you? You are God!"
Ramtha inexplicably speaks in accented semi-Jacobean English – the
language of the age of King
James I of
England – which perhaps he
picked up on the way from Atlantis via Lemuria,
two of his former mythical nations of residence. (Or perhaps he got it from the angel who
gave the
golden plates to Mormonism founder Joseph Smith, as they exhibit the same
anachronistic linguistic quirk – note that
Hampton is not the first such charlatan, nor will probably be the
last, to invoke the language of the King James Bible and Shakespeare
to impart a ring of authority.) Hampton is also known for adopting
physical poses that look something like the characters on pyramid
walls.
Hampton has thrown together a hodge-podge of all
the usual essentials of phoney New Ageism: a bit of gnosticism, add
some Edgar Cayce
and Madame Blavatsky, mix with some UFO alien
stuff (Hampton was born in Roswell, NM,
after all), stir with high school
science, add a pinch of ersatz Egyptology and roast in a moderate
brain. Ramthaism is perhaps not as dangerous (yet) as some cults such as
Jim Jones's People's Temple (Jonestown),
Marshall
Applewhite's Heaven's Gate
and L Ron
Hubbard's Scientology, but it has to be one of the silliest, and
somehow is making Hampton a very rich Cro-Magnon man: it has been
estimated she's raking in $10 million a year from seminars and
merchandizing.
As if to underline Hampton's contempt for the
credulity of her thousands of dupes, it has
been asserted that Ramtha revealed in September, 2004 that [wait
for it ... drum roll!! ...] a sugary kids' snack called Hostess Twinkies contain an ingredient that can prolong life.
Apparently Twinkies are selling well in Yelm, Washington, where
Hampton's followers have congregated.
'Ramtha' Hampton
gained quite a bit of publicity in the mid-'80s, most of it
ridiculing her, so she went underground during much of the 1990s.
Apparently she continued building her money-making machine, and she
is making waves again, gaining many more followers and about 75
pounds in weight. The movie, What
the Bleep do We Know ('Bleep' apparently being an American
euphemism for an expletive), starring Marlee Matlin,
was produced by followers of Judith Hampton.
"Knight has been married at least five times. Her messy divorce to Jeffrey Knight finalized in 1989 after a long court battle.
"In 1992 Knight discovered that a German woman, Judith Ravell, was claiming to also be in contact with Ramtha. After a three-year battle in the Austrian courts, J.Z. Knight won the right to exclusively channel Ramtha. The 1995 ruling was appealed, but was upheld in 1997 by the Austrian Supreme Court.
"Ramtha went on a five-continent speaking tour in 1999.
"J.Z. Knight now lives in a multi-million dollar French chateau-styled mansion in Yelm, Washington, where she teaches courses and runs Ramtha's School of Enlightenment."
Source
'Ramtha's
channeler' can't testify
She says she was in a trance during alleged sex-case confession
YELM—The woman who claims to channel a 35,000 year-old warrior spirit called Ramtha says she can't take the witness stand against a couple accused of sexual misconduct with a 15-year-old girl.
J. Z. Knight said she doesn't remember the confession of voice instructor Wayne Allen Geis and his partner, Ruth Beverly Martin; the confession is said to have occurred about a year ago in front of about 800 stunned students at Ramtha's School of Enlightenment on Knight's Yelm estate.
Knight said she was in a trance at the time—that it was Ramtha who questioned the couple and elicited the confession.
"There is a being outside of me which is him," Knight said.
The Associated Press Source
"What most viewers don't realize is that
What the Bleep (which also screens as What the #$*! Do We
Know?) is the work of a strange sect headquartered a couple of hours north of Portland in the prairie town of Yelm,
Wash ...
"Ramtha says mirrors are portals to a parallel universe. Ramtha says children with Down syndrome have
'chosen' their condition. Ramtha says you can read minds, alter your own DNA, reverse aging, teleport, travel through time, and prolong your life with Twinkies.
"Seriously ...
"Ramtha's disciples (known as
'masters') have now swelled to an estimated 5,000 people around the globe, who plunk down $1,000 for a weeklong spell of ancient wisdom every year. To cater to this spiritual hunger, Knight employs 60 people churning out books, tapes, CDs, videos, posters, scents, lotions, candles and elvish capes.
"Her company, JZK Inc., refuses to
divulge any financial information, but one observer pegs its annual
income at $10 million at least. Whatever the figure, it is
substantial enough that the girl who was born in a one-room shack
now lives in a 12,000-square-foot French-style chateau with six
bedrooms, seven fireplaces, a spiral staircase and an indoor pool."
What the #$*! is Ramtha
Ramtah website (turn down
speakers) Quantum
Quackery JZ
Knight controversies
Ramtha's School
of Quantum Flapdoodle Critical study of Gordon Melton's book on Ramtha
What the #$*!
Do We Know?! We know it's CRAP!!! ["I created my own
reality by walking out of the theater"]
1949 Erik Estrada,
Puerto Rican actor1949 Victor Garber,
Canadian actor 1952 Philippe Kahn,
French/American entrepreneur 1953 Isabelle
Huppert, French actress 1953 Richard
Stallman (Richard M Stallman; often abbreviated 'rms'), American Free
Software activist and founder of GNU;
hacker, and
software
developer 1954 Nancy
Wilson, guitarist, singer, actress 1959 Flavor
Flav, rap musician 1959 Jens
Stoltenberg, Prime
Minister of Norway 1990 James Bulger
(d. 1993),
English toddler abduction/murder victim 1992 Carlie Brucia,
(d. 2004)
kidnap/murder victim Phew!!
Have a rest before the big
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reetings from Australia.
How it works
The boys removed the phallic
bullae
charms -
which had protected them in youth -
from around their necks and offered them to the household gods. Their
fathers took them to the Forum in Rome and presented them as adults and
citizens. This was in the days when male rites of passage were encouraged.
