Veneration of Ernestus
"The Magister Solis; sage, Liberal Ecologist and father of the retort; 'Every silver lining has a cloud'."   Source

Feast day of St Amadeus IX of Savoy

Feast day of St Cronan Mochua
Irish saint, flourished in the period 596 - 637, when he died on this day. Founder of the See of Balla, subsequently merged into that of Tuam, Ireland. Numerous miracles are recorded of him.

Feast day of St Fergus

Feast day of St Irene

Feast day of St Joachim of Fiore

Feast day of St John Climacus, the Scholastic, abbot of Mt Sinai
(Rough carameni, Cardemeni hirsute, is today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)
A hermit in a rock near Mt Sinai, in Syria. At 75 he became in charge of all the Christian monks and hermits of Syria.

Feast day of St Quirinus

Feast day of St Regulus (or Rieul), Bishop of Senlis

Feast day of St Tola

Feast day of St Zozimus, Bishop of Syracuse
(Lesser daffodil, Narcissus minor, is another of today's plants, dedicated to this saint.)

Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days    Shop saints

Seward Day, Alaska  

Spiritual Baptist/Shouter Liberation Day, Trinidad and Tobago

At the Scriptorium

The origins and folklore of April Fools' Day

The origin and folklore of Easter

1746 Francisco de Goya (d. 1828), Spanish painter

1820 Anna Sewell (d. April 25, 1878), British writer, best known as the author of the classic novel, Black Beauty: the Autobiography of a Horse

1844 Paul Verlaine (d. January 8, 1896), French lyric poet, lover of poet Arthur Rimbaud (1854 - '91)

"French poet and leader of the Symbolist movement in poetry. Verlaine's life style wavered between criminality and naive innocence; he married a young girl in 1870 but after a year fell in love with the young poet Arthur Rimbaud, who was seventeen. With Stéphane Mallarmé and Charles Baudelaire he formed the so-called Decadents. In Verlaine's works two impressions predominate: that only self is important, and that the function of poetry is to preserve moments of extreme sensation and unique impressions. In spite of the 'vagueness' of his poetry, Verlaine was craftsmanly careful in his compositions, using simple, musical language. He maintained outward form of classical poetry, but his work opened the way for free verse.

"There is weeping in my heart
Like the rain falling on the city."
(from Romances sans Paroles, 1874)

"… Although Verlaine had homosexual tendencies, he married in 1870 Mathilde Mauté de Fleurville, and shared sometimes with his wife, his inlaws, and with the younger poet Arthur Rimbaud the same dwelling. For Mathilde Verlaine wrote LA BONNE CHANSON (1870), revealing his anxieties and hopes for happiness, but he also showed bad temper, attacked his wife and once he hurled his infant son Georges against a wall. When Verlaine started an affair with Rimbaud, the marriage was shattered. In this impossible situation Verlaine left his family to live a Bohemian life with his poet friend in London and Brussels. Their relationship ended on July 12, 1873 when Verlaine, drunk and desolate, tried to shoot Rimbaud in the wrist after a quarrel. He was jailed for two [sic] 18 months."

Source

'The white moon'

By Paul Verlaine (1870)

The white moon
Shines in the woods,
From each branch
Leaves a voice
Under the oar ...

Oh, beloved friend.

The pond reflects,
Deep mirror,
The silhouette
Black willow
Where the wind cries...

Let us dream, it is the hour.

A vast and tender
Appeasing
Seem to go down
From strength
That the star makes iridescent ...

It is the exquisite hour.

1853 Vincent van Gogh, painter (d. July 29, 1890), generally considered the greatest Dutch painter after Rembrandt, though he had little success while he was alive. 

The only painting he sold during his lifetime, The Red Vineyard, was created in 1888. It is now on display in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, Russia.  

Vincent and the Starry Night

1874 Commander Charles Lightoller (d. December 8, 1952), second officer on board the RMS Titanic, and the most senior officer to survive the disastrous sinking in 1912. He was a key witness at both the British and American inquiries into the event. He was also a prankster.

Other remarkable occurrences figured in the life of this son of a widowed miller of Chorley, England, long before and long after the Titanic.

While he crewed on the Holt Hill in the South Atlantic, the ship was demasted in a storm and forced to put in at Rio de Janeiro – in the midst of a smallpox epidemic and a revolution – where repairs were made. Another storm on November 13, 1889 in the Indian Ocean caused the ship to run aground on an uninhabited, four and a half square mile island now called Île Saint-Paul. Lightoller and his fellow sailors were rescued by the Coorong and taken to Adelaide, Australia.

In 1900, with the Boer War raging in Africa, the White Star Line ship Medic sailed to Sydney Harbour and dropped anchor in Neutral Bay. One evening, the fourth officer, Charles Lightoller, and four midshipmen rowed to Fort Denison, climbed the tower and shot the cannon, hoping to fool Sydneysiders into believing a Boer raiding party was attacking Sydney.

After the Titanic disaster, Lightoller commanded the Royal Navy's first aircraft carrier. During WWI, he won the Distinguished Service Cross twice and eventually finished with the rank of Commander. After retiring, in 1940 he sailed his private launch, Sundowner, in the WWII evacuation of Dunkirk. Twelve years later, the man with a life of adventure died of heart disease at the age of 78 and his ashes were scattered at Mortlake Crematorium, Richmond, London.

1882 Melanie Klein (d. September 22, 1960), Austrian child psychiatrist

1880 Sean O'Casey (d. 1964), Irish dramatist

1895 Nikolai Bulganin (d. 1975), Premier of the Soviet Union

1905 Albert Pierrepoint (d. July 10, 1992). the most famous member of a Yorkshire family who provided three of Britain's Chief Executioners in the first half of the 20^th Century. Among the estimated 450 people he killed were William Joyce ('Lord Haw Haw') and the innocent man Timothy Evans. Pierrepoint came to be an opponent of capital punishment.

1913 Richard Helms (d. 2002), director of the Central Intelligence Agency

1913 Frankie Laine (d. February 6, 2007), American singer ('Rawhide')

1914 Sonny Boy Williamson (d. June 1, 1948), musician

1930 Rolf Harris, likable and idiosyncratic Australian artist and entertainer who made it big in Britain and has been a source of entertainment, amusement and not a little embarrassment for several decades. He introduced the wobble-board to modern music, and people have been trying to give it back ever since.

As he approached his 70s, having made his name with cute novelty songs such as the un-PC 'Tie Me Kangaroo Down, Sport' and the tongue-twisting 'Court of King Caractacus', Harris courted a young audience and more or less won them, gaining increased fame and fortune with bemused youngsters.

Discovering that parodying himself worked, he also improved his standing with the glitterati, who had ridiculed him since the 1950s, with his hilarious, self-effacing wobble-board and didjeridu renditions of 'Stairway to Heaven' and 'Bohemian Rhapsody', 'Satisfaction' and the Divinyls' naughty classic, 'I Touch Myself'.

Harris's career seems to have thrived on his own awareness of how corny he is. He made a fortune from advertising house paint, having partly built his career on his TV appearances executing quite masterly paintings using that medium on large cardboard 'canvases'.

British TV's comedy program, The Goodies, satirised Harris in a program (No. 41, The Existence of Rolf Harris, aka Scatty Safari) in which the Goodies visit Australia to capture Rolf Harris. After he is mated with the Russian Rolf Harris, there is a plague of six million Rolf Harrises, causing consternation among the general public.

Cornball or not, Harris is an accomplished painter whose works hang in some prestigious galleries. His BBC television programme Rolf on Art attracted over 24.5 million viewers and had the highest ratings ever in the history of television for a program on the visual arts.

Rolf Harris Jukebox

(Harris also sang 'I've Been Everywhere', in this case a British version of the tongue-twisting Aussie classic by Lucky Starr, some of the lyrics of which are below)

'I've been everywhere'  (Midi)

Well I was humping my bluey,
on the dusty Oodnadatta road,
When along came a semi,
With a high and canvas covered load,
"'ere if ya goin' to Oodnadatta mate, urr
With me ya gunna ride"
So I climbed up in the cabin,
And settled down in side;
He asked me if I'd ever seen a road
with so much sand and dust,
I said now listen mate,
I've travelled every road in this 'ere land, cause

I've been every where man,
I've been every where man,
I've crossed the deserts bare man,
I've breathed the mountain air man,
Of travel of had my share man,
I've been every where;

I've been to Tullamore, Seymour, Lismore,
Maroochydore, Kilmore, Nambour, Moolimbah, Birdsville,
Emaville, Wallaville, Cundamunda, Cundabine, Strathpine,
Prosapine, Ulladulla, Darwin, Gin Gin, Deniliquin, Muckadilla, Emmaville, Kullavilla
I'm a killer
I've been everywhere ...

1930 John Astin, American actor (Gomez in 1964 TV series The Addams Family)

John Astin trivia

John Astin is a vegetarian

He and his wife Val are leaders of a Buddhist group in Santa Monica, CA, USA.

(February 2001) Is a visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University, teaching acting and directing in the Department of Writing Seminars in the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences.

Source: IMDB

1937 Warren Beatty, American actor/director

1940 Astrud Gilberto, singer

1941 Wasim Sajjad, former President of Pakistan

1945 Eric Clapton, blues guitarist/vocalist with Cream, Derek and the Dominoes, Bluesbreakers, Blind Faith and the Yardbirds. His was the guitar work on George Harrison's While My Guitar Gently Weeps. IN the late 1960s, one of the most prominent pieces of graffiti seen in Western countries was "Clapton is God". Hits include Wonderful Tonight; Layla; Cocaine; Tears in Heaven

"As an adolescent, Clapton glimpsed the future when he tuned in to a Jerry Lee Lewis appearance on British television. Lewis's explosive performance, coupled with young Eric's emerging love of the blues and American R&B, was powerful enough to ignite a desire to learn to play guitar. He commenced studies at the Kingston College of Art, but his intended career path in stained-glass design ended permanently when the blues-obsessed Clapton was expelled at seventeen for playing guitar in class. He took a job as a manual laborer and spent most of his free time playing the electric guitar he persuaded his grandparents to purchase for him. In time, Clapton joined a number of British blues bands, including the Roosters and Casey Jones, and eventually rose to prominence as a member of the Yardbirds, whose lineup would eventually include all three British guitar heroes of the sixties: Clapton, Jimmy Page, and Jeff Beck. The group became a sensation for their blues-tinged rock, as did the budding guitar virtuoso Clapton, who earned the nickname "Slowhand" because his forceful string-bending often resulted in broken guitar strings, which he would replace onstage while the crowd engaged in a slow hand-clapping."   Source

1949 Lene Lovich, singer

1950 Robbie Coltrane, actor, comedian

1957 Paul Reiser, actor

1957 Debbie Byrne, Australian singer

1964 Tracy Chapman, singer

1968 Céline Dion, singer

1979 Norah Jones (Geetali Norah Jones Shankar), American singer-songwriter, pianist, keyboardist, guitarist, and occasional actress of Anglo-American and Bengali descent, daughter of the sitar maestro, Ravi Shankar, and sister of sitar virtuoso, Anoushka Shankar

Phew!! Have a rest before the big This day in history section

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Zodiac birthday Free astrology e-cards Doctors' Day [ Mar 30 ] Birthdays Easter [Varies ] April Fools' Day [ Apr 1 ]

Varies Full Moon Day
Varies Friday the 13^th
Varies Vasant Panchami
Varies Tu B'Shvat
Varies Maha Shivaratri
Varies Mardi Gras 
Varies Shrove Tuesday (Pancake Day)
Varies Ash Wednesday / Lent
Varies Holi
Varies Purim
Varies Mothers' Day (UK)
Varies Ugadi
Varies Gudi Padwa
Varies Daylight Saving Time Begins / Ends
Varies Ram Navami
Varies Palm Sunday

March

20 Spring Equinox
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
9 Astronauts Day
10 Siblings Day
10 Salvation Army Founder's Day

  ... More Events

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240 BCE First recorded perihelion passage of Halley's Comet.

 

1282 The Sicilian Vespers

The tragedy of what has come to be called 'the Sicilian Vespers' massacre had its origin in the struggle between the Holy Roman Empire, represented by the Hohenstaufen emperors, and the Papacy for control over Italy.

Charles of Anjou (Charles I of Sicily), brother of King Louis IX of France, having defeated the Hohenstaufen King Manfred of Sicily at the Battle of Benevento on February 26, 1266 to enforce his own claim to the throne of Sicily, became a tyrant over his new subjects in Sicily and the southern portion of the Italian peninsula. Charles dreamed of establishing an Angevin empire in the East.

The people of Sicily rose up against the French occupiers, massacring about 8,000 of them, after a French soldier searched for weapons under the dress of a Palermo nobleman's daughter, at an Easter procession at the start of the evening prayer service of vespers on Easter Monday.

Another version has it that a group of French officials joined the native Sicilians at vespers that day, despite the antipathy of the locals. Some of the Frenchmen began approaching the Sicilian women; a French sergeant took a married woman away from the crowd, and her husband then stabbed him to death. The French, rushing to avenge their comrade, were attacked and killed by the crowd. As the church bells throughout the city tolled for vespers, messengers ran throughout Palermo calling for an uprising. Over the next six weeks, angry Sicilians slaughtered virtually all the French inhabitants of the island. Slaughtered were not only the French military and settlers, but also women who had married Frenchmen.  

Palermo (1572)

"Ma fia! Ma fia!"

The legend has it that the rebellion started after a Sicilian woman went to a Palermo church to look for her young daughter, who had spent the whole day there praying. The mother found her daughter being raped in the church by a French soldier, whereupon the mother then ran into the streets, shouting "Ma fia! Ma fia!" ("My daughter! My daughter!" in medieval Sicilian dialect). Some have claimed that this tale provides a plausible explanation as to where the word Mafia might have originated.

The French on the island were identified by a shibboleth, that is, a password. (The term shibboleth comes from the Bible, Judges 12: 5-6, in which the Gileadites identified their enemies, the Ephraimites, by their inability to pronounce the Hebrew word shibboleth – a stream, or ear of corn, or else a torrent of water, depending on source.) The French on the day of the so-called Sicilian Vespers massacre were required to pronounce the word cecceri, Italian dialect for chick peas, which they had difficulty saying.

The Sicilian Vespers was more than a mere spontaneous uprising of the common folk, although this picture has been painted by some commentators. As the Catholic Encyclopedia records, "The popular and spontaneous nature of the uprising of 1282 is an indisputable fact, but on the other hand the negotiations between Michael Palæologus and Pedro of Aragon unquestionably took place. In these Giovanni da Procida played a part which it is impossible to define precisely, and possibly certain of the Sicilian nobles were aware of this intrigue." 

It is likely that the insurrection was provoked and paid for by the Byzantine Emperor Michael VIII, to avert an anticipated Angevin crusade to Constantinople. However that may be, the uprising did secure Sicilian independence for more than a century, with the house of Aragón keeping Sicily and the Angevin dynasty holding the Kingdom of Naples in the southern Italian mainland. These two territories were finally reunited (1442) under Alfonso V of Aragón.

The legend of the Sicilian Vespers took on a new significance in the mid-19^th Century as a catchcry for Italian nationalism in the lead-up towards Italian state reunification. In 1854, Giuseppe Verdi, Italy's leading composer, wrote the score for the opera Ivespri Siciliani, to a libretto based on the legend of the Sicilian Vespers. The Italian national anthem, Fratelli d'Italia, composed in 1847 by Michele Novaro to words by the poet Goffredo Mameli, contains the lyrics:

Every trumpet blast
Sounds the Sicilian Vespers.
Let us gather in legions,
Ready to die!
Italy has called!

In the 20^th Century, the name Sicilian Vespers would come to refer to the night of September 10 / September 11, 1931, when gangster Lucky Luciano ordered the deaths of several Mafia soldiers loyal to crime boss Salvatore Maranzano and his rival, Joseph Masseria, ending the Castellammarese War in New York City.

(Note: Most sources, such as The Columbia Encyclopedia, say the rebellion broke out on Easter Monday, March 30, while others, such as The Catholic Encyclopedia, say Tuesday, March 31.)

The Sicilian Vespers by Steven Runciman    More

The Story of the Shibboleth by Prof. S Kemmer tells more about this unusual word

 

1492 Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella of Castile signed a decree aimed at expelling all Jews from Spain unless they converted to Roman Catholicism.

1533 Thomas Cranmer became Archbishop of Canterbury.

1594 Sir John Spencer, Lord Mayor of London, nicknamed 'Rich Spencer', died, leaving an estate of £800,000. His daughter wanted to marry Lord Compton, who did not have as much wealth as Rich Spencer wanted her to marry into. Consequently he disowned her when she married.

Queen Elizabeth I played a clever trick on Spencer, by getting him to adopt a boy, which he agreed to do, as he no longer had a daughter. The lad turned out to be his own grandson, the son of Lady Compton. The boy thus became the ultimate inheritor of his wealth.

 

There is a fascinating line of genealogy from Sir John Spencer to the following famous people:

Winston Spencer Churchill
Lady Diana Spencer
George Washington
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Calvin Coolidge
Both Presidents George Bush

1783 Death of William Hunter (b. 1718), anatomist.

1791 Following a proposal by the Académie des Sciences, the French National Assembly proclaimed that a metre would be a one ten-millionth of the distance between the north pole and the equator.

1814 Napoleonic Wars: Sixth Coalition forces marched into Paris.

1822 Florida Territory was created in the United States.

1842 Anaesthesia was used for the first time in an operation (Dr Crawford Long performed the operation and ether was used).

1842 Death of Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (b. 1755), painter.

1855 The end of the twelve-year-long Anglo-Afghan wars with the signing of treaty by Afghan leader Dost Mohammed (1793 - June 9, 1863).

More (from British Army perspective)

1855 Origins of the American Civil War: Bleeding Kansas – 'Border Ruffians' from Missouri invaded Kansas and forced the election of a pro-slavery legislature.

1856 The Treaty of Paris (1856) was signed, ending the Crimean War.

1858 Hyman Lipman patented a pencil with an attached eraser.

1863 Prince Wilhelm Georg of Sleeswÿk-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg was chosen as King George I of Greece.

 

William Seward (second from left) at the signing
of the treaty of cessation, March 30, 1867

1867 Alaska was purchased for US$7.2 million, about 2 cents/acre ($4.19/km²), by United States Secretary of State William H Seward. The news media called this Seward's Folly.

1870 USA: Texas was readmitted to the Union following Reconstruction.

1879 Death of Thomas Couture (b. 1815), French painter and teacher.

1912 France established a protectorate over Morocco.

1932 Amelia Earhart became the first woman to make solo crossing of the Atlantic.

1940 Sino-Japanese War: Japan declared Nanking to be the capital of a new Chinese puppet government, nominally controlled by Wang Ching-wei.