|
 Khordad
Sal,
Zoroastrianism
Khordad Sal is
celebrated as the birthday of
Zoroaster (Zarathustra).
This is known as
the 'Greater Noruz' and happens six days after
Noruz.
(Within the Zoroastrian community today there is not full consensus
as to when to celebrate the birthday but the generally accepted date
is around March 26.) Zoroastrians gather in fire temples for prayers
and then celebrate with feasting.
While
Zoroastrianism was once the dominant religion of much of
Greater Iran,
the number of adherents has dwindled to not more than 200,000
worldwide, with concentrations in India (where the religion is now
primarily limited to the
Parsi, or Parsee,
community), Iran, the United States and Canada.
"The exact
year of Zarathushtra's birth is not known, but commonly
acknowledged that he was born in the beginning of the first
millennium BC. So the celebration is marked symbolically. In the
past, the king and nobility, observed Khordad Sal as
Navroz-I-Khas. On this day, many historic events of Iran are
believed to have happened. Years later, it is observed as
Zarathushtra's birthday.
"Celebrating Khordid Sal
"Parsis wear new clothes, the house is cleaned and decorated
with rangolis, fragrant flowers are arranged and delicious meals
are also prepared. The ritual of Jashan, or thanksgiving prayers
are offered at the temples. A grand feast is prepared to mark
the occasion."
Source
Zoroastrian calendar
Zoroastrian religious calendar
Zoroastrian festivals
More
Akitu Festival,
Sumeria (c. Mar
20 - 31)
Urban Dionysia,
ancient Greece (c. Mar 24 - 28)
Festival of
Hilaria, in honour of Cybele the Mother of Gods, ancient Rome (Mar 15 - 27)
"
the twenty-sixth of March, was given to repose, which
must have been much needed after the varied excitements and fatigues
of the preceding days."
Sir
James George
Frazer (1854 - 1941), The
Golden Bough, 1922, p. 351
Feast Day of St Basil the Younger
Feast Day of St Bathus and Companions
Feast Day of
St Braulio,
Bishop of Saragossa
(Lurid henbane, Hyosycam scopolia, is
today's plant, dedicated to
this saint.)
St Braulio, one of Spain's most
popular saints, is the patron of Aragon.
Feast Day of St Cassian
Feast Day of St Emmanuel
Feast Day of St Garbhan
Feast Day of St Jovinus
Feast Day of St Ludger,
Bishop of Munster
Feast Day of St Maddalena
Caterina Morano
Feast Day of St Marcian
Feast Day of St Mochelloc
Feast Day of St Thecla
Feast Day of St Theodosius
Feast Day of St William of
Norwich
William of Norwich (1132-1144) was an apprentice tanner who was alleged to have
been crucified by Jews during Passover. Jewish people were
frequently scapegoated in medieval times for such heinous crimes. The cultus was disapproved of
by the Papacy, and was gone by the
Reformation. He was patron of kidnap victims and torture victims.
"WILLIAM OF NORWICH is another of these children martyrs. His
parents were simple country folk, but his mother was taught by a
vision to expect a Saint in her son. As a boy he fasted thrice a
week and prayed constantly, and he was only an apprentice twelve
years of age, at a tanner's in Norwich, when he won his crown. A
little before Easter, A.D. 1137, he was enticed into a Jew's
house, and was there gagged, bound, and crucified in hatred of
Christ. Five years passed before the body was found, when it was
buried as a saintly relic in the cathedral churchyard. A
rose-tree planted hard by flowered miraculously in midwinter,
and all manner of sick persons were healed of their diseases at
St. William's shrine." Source
Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days Shop saints
Independence Day, Bangladesh
This public
holiday commemorates the establishment proclamation, March 26, 1971.
"The day Independence
of Bangladesh was formally declared
on the eve of a 9 month long war of Independence with Pakistan
that led to the emergence of Bangladesh as a sovereign nation.
After many years of exploitation,
both politically and economically, the Bengali national sentiments
led to the massive victory of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman and the Awami
League in the Pakistan National Elections of 1970. The ruling
oligarchs in the then West Pakistan balked at having to give up
the reigns of power to East Pakistanis. They stalled the
installation of the newly elected parliament, and on the dark
night of March 25, 1971 embarked on a genocidal
reign of terror aimed at extinguishing all signs of Bengali
nationalism. In the face of this, the inevitable declaration of
independence was proclaimed, and the fight was on for the people
of Bangladesh to achieve independence, at a terrible price of 3
million people killed by the marauding armies of Pakistan." Source
Prince Kuhio Day, Hawaii
This holiday celebrates the
birthday of Hawaii's first delegate to US Congress. In 1920,
Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole, the adopted son of Queen Kapiolani,
designed the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, by which many
native-born Hawaiians obtained freehold land leases. He was jailed
for trying to overthrow the US government to restore the monarchy.
Native Hawaiians celebrate with garlanded float parades, a ball,
hula performances and outrigger canoe races.
Arbor
Day, Spain
The Fiesta del Arbol, 'fκte of
the tree, began on March 26,
1895, with a ceremonial tree planting
by King Alfonso near Madrid.
Week of Solidarity with
the Peoples Struggling Against Racism and Racial Discrimination
(UN) (Mar 21
- 28)
Prophet Zarathushtra's
(Zoroaster's)
Birthday, Zoroastrianism
1516 Conrad von Gesner
(Konrad von Gesner; Conrad Gessner; Conradus Gesnerus; d. December 13,
1565,
of plague), Swiss naturalist,
a founder of modern zoology; after him
the plant family Gesneriaceae is
named
1819
Louise
Otto-Peters, German founder of feminist movement in her
country
"
in 1865, Louise founded the German
Women's Association, the country's oldest women's rights
group, and continued the crusade for equal pay in the workplace.
Louise headed the group from its inception until just before her
death in 1895. This reformer and women's rights advocate was
decades ahead of her time." Source
A
world chronology of women's suffrage US
chronology Louisa
Lawson, Australian suffragette
1838 WEH Lecky
(William Edward Hartpole Lecky; d. October 22,
1903),
Anglo-Irish historian
Positive
Atheism's Big List of WEH Lecky Quotations
 1850
Edward
Bellamy (d. May 22, 1898), American
author of the utopian novel set in
the year 2000,
Looking
Backward: 2000 - 1887, published in 1888.
The book was very
influential worldwide, no more so than in Australia among
working-class radicals during the 1890s. According to the Democrat
of May 28,
1894, a single copy
of Looking Backward "was said to have run a course of 29
friends and acquaintances before moving on to a wider unknown field
of readers" and "The Woman's Voice listed amongst
the books 'that all women should read', England's Ideal by
Edward Carpenter, Politics for the People by Morrison
Davidson, Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward ..." Source
(Australia's blossoming radical movement at this time had many
journals serialising such authors as Thomas Paine,
Edward Bellamy, Henry George
and Peter
Kropotkin.)
Edward Bellamy
was a cousin of socialist
Francis
Bellamy, author of America's 'Pledge
of Allegiance'.
"Bellamy's
novel [Looking Backward] is almost a fictionization of
Laurence Gronlund's The Cooperative Commonwealth (1884),
and also shows influences of Ismar Thiusen's The Diothas, or
A Look Far Ahead (1882) and August Bebel's Woman in the
Past, Present, and Future. Other books of Bellamy are Six
to One (1878), The Duke of Stockbridge (1879), Dr.
Heidenhoff's Process (1880), Miss Ludington's Sister: a
romance of immortality (1884), Equality (1897),
Other Stories (1898)."
Source
Works
by Edward Bellamy as e-texts on Project
Gutenberg
Free eBook of Looking
Backward From 2000 to 1887 at Project
Gutenberg
Edward
Bellamy at the Internet
Speculative Fiction Database
Parable
of the Water-Tank National
Socialism in Looking Backward
A negative viewpoint on Edward and Francis Bellamy Early
progressives in the Book of Days
1851 Andrew
Cecil Bradley (AC Bradley; d. September 2,
1935),
English literary critic and pre-eminent Shakespearean
scholar of the late-19th
and early-20th
centuries. He was Professor of
Poetry at Oxford from 1901 to
1906; his Oxford Lectures on Poetry were published in 1909.
Bradley published Shakespearean Tragedy
in 1904. It was immediately hailed as a brilliant achievement.
Though Bradley has sometimes been criticised for writing of Shakespeare's
characters as though they were real people, his book is probably the
most influential single work of Shakespearean
criticism ever published. It has been reprinted more than two
dozen times and is itself the subject of a scholarly book, Katherine
Cooke's A. C. Bradley and His Influence in Twentieth-Century
Shakespeare Criticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972). His other works
were: Poetry for Poetry's Sake (1901), A Commentary on
Tennyson's In Memoriam (1901), and A Miscellany (1929).
After the publication of Shakespearean
Tragedy, Britain's Punch
magazine famously published the quip:
I dreamed last night that Shakespeare's
ghost
Sat for a civil service post.
The English paper of that year
Contained a question on King Lear
Which Shakespeare answered very badly
Because he hadn't studied Bradley!
Later, when G Wilson Knight became a leading Shakespearian scholar,
Dr James
F Forrest of Canada's University of Alberta in Edmonton added
the lines:
Still Shakespeare hasn't got it right:
He hasn't studied Wilson Knight.
1859 Alfred
Edward Housman (d. 1936), English poet and
scholar
1866
Barcroft Boake
(d. May 2,
1892), Australian surveyor, stockman, drover and poet greatly
admired by Australian writer
Henry Lawson.
All but a few of his poems were published in
The Bulletin.
On July 14,
1888, he and a
friend at Rocklands station in the
Monaro district of southern
New South
Wales had a mock hanging which Boake engaged in rather more
seriously than his companion.
Cecil
Hadgraft writes: "The friend's performance was tentative, but
Boake's was almost fatal. After two days he wrote a rueful account
of it to his father. A more imaginative version was published in the
Bulletin nearly four years later."
Apparently a sufferer from
bipolar disorder, when he was jilted by a
lover and beset by family and financial troubles, he hanged himself
from a tree with his stockwhip at Long Bay,
Middle Harbour,
Sydney. Nearly all his published verse was collected and issued in
1897 by
Alfred Stephens. It has been suggested that he might have killed
himself for the love of one of the sisters of the horseman,
Charlie
McKeahnie.
"Physically tough, emotionally
sensitive, temperamentally unstable, financially inept, Boake
may appear a predestined victim. This picture, however
exaggerated, is closer to the record than one of him reasonedly
rejecting materialistic civilization, finding God dead in
Australia, and accordingly hanging himself."
Source
Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson
Boake poems online
More
1868
Fuad I, King of
Egypt
and
Sudan,
Sovereign of
Nubia,
Kordofan, and
Darfur,
the first
King of Egypt in the modern era
1872
Ernest
Juin Armand
(b. Ernest-Lucien Juin; d. 1962), individualist, free love activist. He wrote
L'Initiation individualiste anarchiste (1923) and La rιvolution sexuelle et la camaraderie amoureuse
(1934).
More
1873 Condι Nast (d.
September 19,
1942),
founder of Condι
Nast Publications, a major American magazine publisher
(Vogue; House and Garden; Vanity Fair)
 1874 Robert Frost (d. January 29,
1963), American poet.
One of America's best-loved poets, Frost was
aptly named. Many of his poems dealt with the cold north-east of
America, and this snowy-haired poet read poetry on a wintry
Washington day for the 1960 inauguration of President John Kennedy.
Widely read in his own day and
acclaimed by critics, Robert Lee Frost has enjoyed a position in
American letters like a poet laureate. Yet he was 39 before he
gained any recognition for his talents, with his first collection A Boy's Will. Though
this famous American poet is usually associated with New England, he
spent his boyhood in San Francisco. Among his best-known poems are The Road Not
Taken, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, Mending Wall and The Wood-Pile.
'The Freedom of the Moon'
By Robert Frost
I've tried the new moon tilted in the air
Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster
As you might try a jewel in your hair.
I've tried it fine with little breadth of luster,
Alone, or in one ornament combining
With one first-water star almost shining.
I put it shining anywhere I please.
By walking slowly on some evening later
I've pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,
And brought it over glossy water, greater,
And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,
The color run, all sorts of wonder follow.
More late
starters and late achievers More on Frost
Bibliography
of Frost's works
Several of
Frost's books A
collection of poetry by Robert Frost
1875 Syngman Rhee (d. 1965),
President of South Korea1879 Othmar Ammann (d. 1965),
engineer, Verrazano
Narrows Bridge 1884 Wilhelm
Backhaus (d. 1969), pianist
 1888 Elsa Brδndstrφm
(d. March
4, 1948), 'The Angel of
Siberia'.
From Wikipedia:
Elsa Brδndstrφm,
born in St Petersburg, was the daughter of
General Edvard Brδndstrφm, the Swedish
Ambassador to Czar Nicholas the Second of Russia
during World War I. She was known as The Angel
of Siberia for her ministrations to German prisoners of war
during that war.
Gazing down from the window of the Embassy in St.
Petersburg, Russia, onto German prisoners of war on their way to the
frozen tundra of Siberia, Brδndstrφm was moved to leave the luxury
of diplomatic life and became a nurse. She ministered to the
prisoners of war in Siberia, in part privately and in part as a
delegate of the Swedish Red Cross and with the protection of the
Swedish and Danish embassy authorities. The prisoners of war
benefited tremendously and named her The Angel of Siberia.
1893
James Bryan
Conant (d. 1978), chemist and politician,
President of Harvard
1904 Joseph
Campbell
(d. October 31, 1987), American
author (The Hero
with a Thousand Faces), mythologist
"It was the publication of The Hero
With a Thousand Faces in 1949 that established Joseph Campbell
as the preeminent comparative mythologist of our time. He wanted the
book to be a guide to reading a myth. Campbell explained how
challenging experiences could be seen as initiatory adventures. It
was this connection between ancient stories and the emotional
concerns of modern life that was distinctive. As Campbell observed,
'The latest incarnation of Oedipus, the continued romance of Beauty
and the Beast, stand this afternoon on the corner of 42nd Street and
Fifth Avenue, waiting for the traffic light to change.'"
Source
Shop Joseph Campbell
1909
Chips Rafferty (born John William Pilbeam Goffage;
d. May 27,
1971),
Australian actor
1911 Tennessee Williams
(b. Thomas
Lanier Williams; d. February 25,
1983) (d. 1983),
American playwright (A
Streetcar Named Desire;
The
Glass Menagerie)
More
1913 Paul
Erdφs (d. 1996), mathematician1914 General William
Westmoreland, United States
commander during the Vietnam War
1917 Rufus Thomas
(d. 2001),
musician 1920
Gregory Corso
(d.
January 17,
2001), American poet and
leading member of the Beats. Convicted of theft at 17, he discovered
literature in prison and later met Allen
Ginsberg and published his first book, The Vestal Lady on
Brattle in 1955.
Off_Corso
The Beat Museum
Wilson's
Almanac Book of Days hip list
1923
Gert Bastian,
German military officer and politician with the
Die Grόnen
(the German Green Party). He was found dead with his lover, Die
Grόnen leader
Petra Kelly
(b. 1947),
having mysteriously died on
October 1,
1992.
1923 Bob
Elliott, comedian
1925 Pierre Boulez,
French composer and conductor
1930 Sandra Day
O'Connor, United
States Supreme Court Justice
1931 Leonard Nimoy,
actor, director (played Mr Spock in
Star Trek)
1934 Alan
Arkin, actor
1935 Mahmoud Abbas,
President of the Palestinian
National Authority
1939 James
Caan, actor
1940 Michael
Savage, Prime
Minister of New Zealand from 1935 - '40
 1941 Richard Dawkins,
Kenyan-born
British zoologist
and author (The
Extended Phenotype; The
Selfish Gene; The
Blind Watchmaker; A
Devil's Chaplain;
The God Delusion) probably
best known for his popularization of the concept of the
selfish
gene.
Dawkins is one of the major proponents of sociobiological theory and coined the term meme,
which spawned the theory of memetics.
Dawkins is an outspoken atheist
and popularizer of the concepts and value of atheism,
as well as an Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society (UK) and
vice-president of the British Humanist Association.
His best-known rival in the
so-called 'Darwin Wars' was Stephen Jay
Gould.
"Meme: an information pattern, held in an
individual's memory, which is capable of being copied to another
individual's memory.
"Memetics: the theoretical and empirical
science that studies the replication, spread and evolution of
memes
"Cultural evolution, including the evolution of
knowledge, can be modelled through the same basic principles of
variation and selection that underly biological evolution. This
implies a shift from genes as units of biological information to a
new type of units of cultural information: memes.
"A meme is a cognitive or behavioral
pattern that can be transmitted from one individual to another
one. Since the individual who transmitted the meme will continue
to carry it, the transmission can be interpreted as a replication:
a copy of the meme is made in the memory of another individual,
making him or her into a carrier of the meme. This process
of
self-reproduction (the memetic life-cycle), leading to
spreading over a growing group of individuals, defines the meme
as a replicator, similar in that respect to the gene (Dawkins,
1976; Moritz, 1991)."
Source: Memetics
Dawkins on The God
Delusion, from Google Video
See related: Darwin Wars; and in the Book
of Days, Stephen
Jay Gould and Edward O Wilson
Dawkins
on intelligent design, clip from
BBC documentary War on Science
Multimedia
files featuring Dawkins Edge.org
profile of Dawkins
Livejournal
community dedicated to discussing Dawkins' ideas, work, and
activities
"Revolutionary
Evolutionist", profile by Michael Schrage, Wired,
July 1995
"Darwin's
dangerous disciple", interview with Frank Miele, Scepsis,
1995
"Darwin's
child", profile by Simon Hattenstone, The
Guardian, February 10, 2003
The
Atheism Tapes, program 4, transcript of an extended
interview with Dawkins for the Jonathan
Miller BBC TV series, 2004
Belief
radio interview, transcipt of a BBC radio interview for the Belief
series, 2004
"The
Man Behind the Meme: An interview with Richard Dawkins",
interview with Jim Holt, Slate,
December 1, 2004
"The
Atheist", interview with Gordy Slack, Salon.com,
April 28, 2005
"Richard
Dawkins: Beyond belief", profile by John Crace, The
Guardian, January 10, 2006
Dawkins
at Infidels.org
Shop
Richard Dawkins
Richard Dawkins videos free online
Richard
Dawkins quotations
at Wikiquote
Dawkins website More
1942 Erica
Jong, American feminist and misandrist author
1943 Bob Woodward, American journalist who helped scoop the Watergate story
1944 Diana
Ross, singer, lead singer of the Supremes
1948 Steven Tyler,
musician (Aerosmith)
1949
Jon English, UK-born Australian singer
1949 Patrick Sόskind,
writer (The Perfume)
1950 Teddy
Pendergrass, singer
1950 Martin Short,
comedian
1953 Elaine
Chao, US Secretary of Labor
1954 Curtis Sliwa, founder
of the Guardian
Angels youth anti-crime patrols and right-wing
talkshow host.
On June 19,
1992
Sliwa was
shot
five times as he hailed a taxi near his Manhattan home. Sliwa
underwent surgery for internal injuries and leg wounds. John A
'Junior' Gotti, son of the late crime boss John Gotti
and two members of the Gambino
crime family were charged with conspiring to murder Sliwa.
1960 Jennifer Grey,
actress
1961 William Hague,
British politician
1968 James
Iha, musician (Smashing
Pumpkins)
1974 Julia Wilson,
my beloved daughter
1985
Keira Knightley,
actress
Phew!!
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March
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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
April
1 April
Fools' Day
1 Firefighters
Day
1 World
Catfish Festival (Mississippi, USA)
1 Taro
Festival (Hawaii, USA)
2 Great
Lovers Day
2 Reconciliation
Day
2 Peanut
Butter And Jelly Day
3 Find
A Rainbow Day
3 Chocolate
Mousse Day
3 Circus
Day
3 Workplace
Napping Day
4 Tell
A Lie Day
4 Vitamin
C Day
4 Independence
Day (Senegal)
5 Lady
Luck Day
5 Thank
Your School Librarian Day
5 Bell
Bottoms Day
5 Tomb
Sweeping Day
6 Animated
Cartoon Day
6 California
Poppy Day
6 Caramel
Popcorn Day
6 International
Fun At Work Day
6 Tartan
Day
6 International
Special Librarians' Day
7 Coffee
Cake Day
7 Lets
Someone Else Clean Day
7 Ham
Radio Day
7 World
Health Day
8 Buddha
Day (Japan)
8 Hana
Matsuri
... More
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668 Theodore
(Theodore of Tarsus) was consecrated as Archbishop of
Canterbury. Bede
wrote that he was the first archbishop to whom all the "church of the
Angles" submitted.
922 Death of Al-Hallaj,
(b. c. 858)
Sufi
teacher and writer.1026 Pope John XIX crowned
Conrad
II as Holy Roman
Emperor. 1199 Richard I, 'Lionheart',
was wounded by a crossbow at Chalus,
France.
"Richard spent but six
months of his ten-year reign in England. He acted upon a promise to his father
to join the Third Crusade and departed for the Holy Land in 1190 (accompanied by
his partner-rival Philip II of France). In 1191, he conquered Cyprus en route to
Jerusalem and performed admirably against Saladin, nearly taking the holy city
twice. Philip II, in the meantime, returned to France and schemed with Richard's
brother John. The Crusade failed in its primary objective of liberating the Holy
Land from Moslem Turks, but did have a positive result - easier access to the
region for Christian pilgrims through a truce with Saladin." Source
1212 Death of
King Sancho I of
Portugal (b. 1154).
 1339 The Battle of Buironfosse (intended to be the first engagement
between France and England in the Hundred Years' War) was called off when a
frightened rabbit scampered between the two armies and the soldiers on both
sides fell about laughing. Perhaps the peace movement could adopt this bunny as
its mascot and add some levity to the campaign.
"The word 'laugh' appears for the first time in
the Bible very early on, in Genesis 17:17. God informs the
one-hundred-year-old Abraham that his ninety-year-old wife Sarah will give
birth to a son. Recognizing a divine sense of humor, 'Abraham bowed to the
ground, and he laughed, thinking to himself, "Is a child to be born to a man
one hundred years old, and will Sarah have a child at the age of ninety?"'
"God commanded Abraham to name his son 'Isaac,'
which in Hebrew means 'God's laugh.' In Arabic, 'ithaac' also means 'he
laughs.'
(Cal Samra, The Joyful Christ , p. 55)
"Although the Bible is notably lacking in jokes and belly laughs, it does
contain the phrase 'Ha ha!' (Job 39:25). " Source
1517 Death of Heinrich Isaac
(b. c. 1450),
composer.
1552 Guru Amar Das
became the Third Sikh Guru.
1574
Irish pirate-chieftain, Grace
O'Malley (Grainne; Grαinne Ni Mhaol; Granuaile) (1530?-1603?),
surrounded
since March 8 in her
Rockfleet Castle stronghold by Captain William Martin of England, managed to
turn the tables on her attacker.
"8 March, 1574 Captain William Martin lead [sic] a
force of ships and troops and laid siege to Grainne in Rockfleet castle. She
rallied her defences and on the 26th turned the siege into an attack.
Captain Martain was forced to beat a hasty retreat, and at the age of 44 the
victory no doubt could only enhance her reputation."
Source
"Madeleine Katkov, an English wall painting
restorer who has been employed at the Abbey by the Office of Public Works
each summer since 1991, said there was a presumption Grainne Uaile was
interred in a tomb in the north wall of the Abbey "but the architecture of
the building pre-dates her death by three centuries so that is very
unlikely." Source
Granuaile:
The Life and Times of Grace O'Malley 1503-1603
Granuaile
links
Grace O'Malley song (contributed by Nora
Ui Dhuibhir from Ireland) More
1636 Utrecht
University was founded in The Netherlands.
1639 The first patent was signed for the
Drury Lane
Theatre, London.
1660 Britain's "Long Parliament" dissolved itself, setting the stage for the restoration of
the monarchy under King Charles
II.
1674 The
second Drury Lane Theatre opened, London.
1694 The Bank of England was incorporated.
1707 The Act of Union
became law, making England and Scotland
one nation.
1726 Death of
Sir John Vanbrugh
(b. 1664),
dramatist and architect.
1780 Britain's
first Sunday newspaper, the British
Gazette and Sunday Monitor, was launched.
1793 The Holy Roman Empire declared war on
France; France annexed the bishopric of Basle.
1793 Britain
and Russia signed a convention to
interdict all Baltic trade with France.
1802
Investigator Strait in South Australia was discovered by explorer Matthew Flinders and named after his
ship.
1804 The
first official notice to Indians from US government that all Indians must move
west of the Mississippi River. 1805 Richard Brandon patented his pills to cure scrofula, scurvy, leprosy, gout and rheumatism, containing more than 100 herbs, including stinking arrack, wound-wort and deadly nightshade. 1808 Charles IV of
Spain abdicated in favour of his son, Ferdinand
VII. 1812 A major earthquake
rocked Caracas, Venezuela on
Holy Thursday, heavily damaging 90 per cent of the city and killing 15,000.
1814 Death of Joseph-Ignace
Guillotin (b. 1738), inventor of the guillotine.1820 Liberty
of the individual was curtailed in France.
1827 Death of Ludwig van Beethoven,
(b. 1770)
composer,
in Bonn, after having been prescribed champagne and wine for
his dropsy.
1839 The first Henley Royal Regatta was raced at
Henley-on-Thames in Oxfordshire, UK.
1854 Charles
III, Duke of Parma, was murdered.
1859 French physician
Edmond Modeste Lescarbault sighted a planet between
Mercury and the Sun.
Thinking it to be a sunspot,
Lescarbault was not at first surprised, but after some time had passed he
realized that it was moving. Having observed the transit of Mercury
in 1845, he assumed
that he what he was observing was another transit, but of a previously
undiscovered body. He took some hasty measurements of its position and direction
of motion, and using an old clock and a pendulum with which he took his
patients' pulse, he estimated the duration of the transit at 1 hour, 17
minutes and 9 seconds.
Not everyone accepted the veracity of
Lescarbault's "discovery," however. An eminent French
astronomer, Emmanuel Liais,
who was working for the Brazilian government in Rio de Janeiro
in 1859,
claimed to have been studying the surface of the Sun with a
telescope twice as powerful as Lescarbault's at the very moment
that Lescarbault said he witnessed his mysterious transit. Liais,
therefore, was "in a condition to deny, in the most positive
manner, the passage of a planet over the sun at the time
indicated" (Popular Science, Volume 13, pages 732-735,
1878).
Based on Lescarbault's
"transit," the French mathematician Urbain Le
Verrier computed Vulcan's
orbit.
1871 The Paris Commune
was formally established in Paris. (See March 18)
1878 The Sabi Game Reserve, South Africa -
the world's first -
was designated.
1881 Domnitor
Carol I
of the Principality of
Romania
was proclaimed the first King of Romania.
1885 The
first cremation in Britain took place, at Woking Crematorium in Surrey.
1892 Death of Walt Whitman
(b. 1819),
American
poet.
Whitman worked for various government departments after the Civil
War, until
1873 when
he suffered a stroke.1892 The Labour Department was formed, Germany.
1902 Capetown,
South Africa: Death of Cecil Rhodes
(b. 1853),
explorer and entrepreneur.1913 Balkan
War: Bulgarian forces
took Adrianople.
1915 Virginia
Woolf suffered a nervous breakdown following publication of her first novel, The
Voyage Out.
1917 World
War I: First
Battle of Gaza British troops were halted after 17,000 Turks
blocked their advance.
1918 US:
Anarchist draft resister Philip Grosser reported from Alcatraz Prison that he
and other opponents of World War I were being tortured.
1920 Death of William
Chester Minor (b. 1834),
murderer and one of the Oxford
English Dictionary's most famous contributors. See
also Sir James
Murray.1920 British
"Black and Tans" soldiers arrived in Ireland to engage the IRA.
1923 The BBC
broadcast weather forecasts for the first time.
1925
Paul von Hindenburg was elected President of the German Republic.
1926 The
Romanian-Polish alliance was signed.
1933 The new constitution in Portugal went into
effect.
1934 Driving
tests were introduced in Britain.
1936 The
first broadcast of New Zealand radio went to air.
1937 In Crystal
City, Texas, USA, spinach growers
erected a statue of the cartoon
character Popeye.
1942 World War II:
In Poland,
Auschwitz
received its first female prisoners.
1943 World War
II: Battle of Komandorski Islands In the Aleutian
Islands the battle began when United States
Navy forces intercepted Japanese attempting to
reinforce a garrison at Kiska.
1946 The
Allied Control Commission limited the level of German production.
1947 Australia: The first concert by Queensland
Symphony Orchestra was performed.
1958 The United States
Army launched Explorer III.
1962 Sydney, Australia radio personality (his fame
as a right-wing jock came later) John Laws entered hospital suffering
from polio.
1964 Barbra
Streisand won acclaim on the opening of her Broadway show, Funny Girl.
1964 Seven
of the men who carried out the Great Train Robbery received 30 years in prison each.
1964 Chuck
Berry recorded No Particular Place to Go.
1965
Alice Herz died after setting herself on fire, on March 16 in Detroit,
USA as a protest against USA actions in Vietnam.
WAR IS OVER. IF YOU WANT IT.
 1969 The Bed Peace
During
their honeymoon, John
Lennon and Yoko Ono
started a seven day 'bed-in'
at the Amsterdam Hilton
Hotel (until March 31).
By the very weirdness and
audacity of the stunt, the canny artists drew more coverage in the media for the
anti-war cause than had hitherto been achieved by any single event. They
repeated the event in Montreal, Canada, beginning on
May 26 (qv).
View also 'The
Ballad of John and Yoko'; read the
lyrics
Bedbug? Calling all Dutch readers
One
night in 1979,
Dick Diamonde of the Australian '60s band,
The Easybeats, told
me that it was because of something that he said, that John came up
with the name for his Amsterdam bed-in. His story was that John was
talking about the different 'peace' stunts he was doing, and also
how he would be honeymooning in Amsterdam and was planning the
bed-in. Dick Diamonde was Dutch-born, and his story went that he said
to John, "You should call it 'Bed Peace' because a word that
sounds like that means 'bedbug' in
the Dutch
language".
I have no
way of verifying this fascinating anecdote, but no special reason to
disbelieve it, either. The Easybeats were also topping the charts
worldwide in the sixties with great rock songs like 'Friday on My
Mind', and to presume that Diamonde was on intimate terms with John
Lennon would be unremarkable. Unfortunately, however, the
translation for 'bedbug' into Dutch, according to this online
translation dictionary, is 'wandluis'. Was Dicky being
tricky, and pulling my leg, or perhaps there is another explanation
you can help me with. I suppose a Dutch slang term for that little
sucker, the 'bedbug', might be a homophone of 'bed peace'. Or
maybe I was just a sucker myself. Maybe it is a regional standard
word or slang.
Dear Pip
Regarding your question on the Dutch meaning of 'bed peace'; in Dutch we have a bug called
'pissebed'; according to my vocabulary this is a wood louse in English. So Dik Diamant (not Dick Diamond, whatever he may think his name is) was not completely wrong, but also not completely right. As you may have guessed the word
pissebed in Dutch has a remote connection with bed watering. This might or might not have been among the motives of
Mr Diamant for suggesting the name bed peace.
Sincerely
Jan Blom
The Netherlands
"For a week, John and Yoko give interviews,
ignoring the mockery and hostility to spread their words of peace to a global
audience.
"London's Daily
Mirror noted: 'A not inconsiderable talent seems to have gone completely
off his rocker.'
"
Source
Photo
album
Bed-in resurrected: Mobile couple adopts late Beatle's peace protest
John and Yoko Bed-In Video
1969
"A group called Women Strike for Peace demonstrates in
Washington DC, in the first large antiwar demonstration since
President Richard Nixon's inauguration in January. The antiwar
movement had initially given Nixon a chance to make good on his
campaign promises to end the war in Vietnam. However, it became
increasingly clear that Nixon had no quick solution."
Source
1971 East
Pakistan declared its independence from Pakistan
to form the People's
Republic of Bangladesh, and the Bangladesh
Liberation War began.
1973
USA :The soap opera
The
Young and the Restless debuted on CBS
television.
1973 Mrs
Susan Shaw, the first female stockbroker in England started work at the London
Stock Exchange.
1975
The Biological
Weapons Convention entered into force.
1979 Anwar
al-Sadat, Menachem
Begin and Jimmy
Carter signed the Egyptian-Israeli
peace treaty in Washington,
DC.
1980 Seven
years after Pink Floyd released The Dark Side of the Moon, it broke the record for the
longest-charting pop album, previously held by Carole King's Tapestry.
Wilson's
Almanac Book of Days hip list
1981 The
Social Democrat Party, UK, was launched.
1982 A
groundbreaking ceremony for the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial was held in Washington,
DC.
1982
Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser fell off a bench he was sharing with
several children, some of whom fell with him, in Melbourne's Treasury Gardens.
No one was injured.
1983 One
year after the Melbourne bench incident, Malcolm Fraser had the Melbourne car
incident: his Saab was hit by another vehicle.
1984
Australia introduced the $100 note.
1985 Alleged drug
baron and organized
crime boss Robert
Trimbole, wanted for questioning by Australian police in the matter of the
murder of anti-drugs campaigner Donald
Mackay (who had disappeared on July 15, 1977), was freed by the Supreme Court in
Dublin, Ireland, giving him the opportunity to disappear from the police altogether. He
died on May 12, 1987
in a country villa
in Spain.
1987 Australia: The New South
Wales Government sacked the City of Sydney Council.
1995
The Schengen
Treaty went into effect.
1996 NASA's alleged heavenly secret.
 "It probably comes as no surprise to learn NASA
have several hundred unreleased photographs from the Hubble space telescope.
"Rumours are currently circulating in the world of
astronomy that one taken on 26 March 1996, and being held back, shows a
white city of massive proportions just floating in deep space, reminiscent
of heaven!"
Night Sky Guide for September/October
'96
1996 The International
Monetary Fund approved a $US10.2 billion loan for Russia.
 1997 Thirty-nine
bodies were found in the Heaven's Gate cult
suicides.
Marshall
Applewhite (b. 1931),
a Heaven's Gate leader (with Bonnie Nettles,
d. 1985)
died in the cult's suicide on or about this day. Heaven's Gate
believed that Comet
Hale-Bopp was associated with apocalyptic prophecies, and their
suicide was timed just prior to when it passed perihelion on April
1, 1997.
They believed they were leaving their earthly bodies to travel to
the spaceship following the comet.
Their suicide, conducted in shifts, was
accomplished by ingestion of phenobarbitol-laced
apple sauce and vodka. A video of the
bodies in bunkbeds, covered neatly with purple blankets and
wearing identical brand new Nike sneakers,
was shown repeatedly during the media coverage following the
suicides. They had also packed suitcases and money, presumably for
the UFO trip.
Heaven's Gate website
(mirrored)
1998 Oued
Bouaicha massacre in Algeria: Fifty-two people
were killed with axes and knives, 32 of them babies under the age of
2.
1999 The Melissa worm
infected e-mail systems around
the world.
1999 A jury in Michigan, USA,
found Dr Jack Kevorkian
guilty of second-degree murder for
administering a lethal injection to a terminally ill man.
See
March 22
2000
Presidential elections were held in Russia, and Vladimir Putin
was elected President.
2000
Alex Comfort (b.
1920) died. He was a British physician, sexologist, anarchist, pacifist, poet
and novelist.
From 'The Soldiers'
You have only to speak for once they will melt like the dust:
you have only to spit in their faces they will go
howling like devils to swindle somebody else
but if you choose to obey, we shall not blame you
for every lesson is new. We will make room for you
in the cold hall were every cause is just.
Perhaps you'll go with us to frosty windows
putting the same choice as the years go round
or sit debating "When will they disobey?
wrapped in our coats against the impartial cold."
All this I think the buried men would say,
clutching their white ribs and their rusted helmets
nationless bones, under the still ground.
Alex Comfort (1920 - 2000)
Guardian
obituary
2003 The Supreme
Court of the United States heard oral arguments in Lawrence
v. Texas.
2005 Hundreds of thousands of people
in Taipei, Republic of China, chanting "Oppose war, love Taiwan" protested against China's anti-secession law that sanctions the use of force against the island.
2005 The revived series of British
science
fiction program Doctor
Who began broadcasting on British
Television.
2006
In Scotland
the prohibition of smoking
in all public places came into force.
Tomorrow: Brando declines Oscar
Main calendar
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A man goes to the doctor with a long history of migraine headaches. When the doctor does his history and physical, he discovers that his poor patient has had practically every therapy known to man for his migraines and STILL no improvement.
"Listen," says the Doc, "I have migraines, too and the advice I'm going to give you isn't really anything I learned in medical school, but it's advice that I've gotten from my own experience. When I have a migraine, I go home, get in a nice hot bathtub, and soak for a while. Then I have my wife sponge me off with the hottest water I can stand, especially around the forehead. This helps a little. Then I get out of the tub, take her into the bedroom, and even if my head is killing me, I force myself to have sex with her. Almost always, the headache is immediately gone. Now, give it a try, and come back and see me in six weeks."
Six weeks later, the patient returns with a big grin. "Doc! I took your advice and it works! It REALLY WORKS! I've had migraines for 17 years and this is the FIRST time anyone has ever helped me!" "Well," says the physician, "I'm glad I could help." "By the way, Doc," the patient adds, "You have a REALLY nice house."
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
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reetings from Australia.
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Day for goddess Mata Syra
Zemmlija (Mata Syra Zemlya/Zemlia; Matisyrazemlia)
