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I loafe and invite my soul.
Walt Whitman, American poet born on May 31, 1819; Song of Myself

Now I see the secret of making the best persons: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
Walt Whitman

I stayed a long time by the bedside of a new patient ... In an adjoining ward I found his brother ... It was in the same battle both were hit. One was a strong Unionist, the other Secesh; both fought for their respective sides, both badly wounded, and both brought together after a separation of four years. Each died for his cause.
Walt Whitman; from one of his wartime newspaper dispatches. While a supporter of the Union cause, the poet comforted dying soldiers of both sides of the American Civil War.

Walt Whitman 

Highly recommended:
Folklore of World Holidays
by Margaret Read MacDonald

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Leon Battista Alberti's Hypnerotomachia

Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass

Walt Whitman


A Historical Guide to Walt Whitman

Worse Than Watergate
John Dean

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The Case Against Wal-Mart

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The Great War for Civilisation

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The God Who Wasn't There

When Corporations Rule the World

A Question of Torture
By Alfred McCoy

The Corporation
Highly recommended DVD

Outfoxed - Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism

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 Skeptic's Dictionary

Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America
By Bruce Shapiro

Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them

8 Weeks to Optimum Health

Kings, Queens, Bones and Bastards

Fraud

Salam Pax
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High Priest

The Politics of Psychopharmacology

Politics of Self-Determination

Timothy Leary

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Green Week (May 31 - Jun 3)

Climate change is happening. Over the past century the average temperature has risen by more than 0.6° Celsius globally and by almost 1°C in Europe. An overwhelming majority of the world's climate experts believe most of the warming is caused by human activities which emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

Green Week 2005 looked at all aspects of climate change and in particular at the human factor. Our way of life, production, consumption and transport need to change if we want to halt global warming.

NASA's Global Change Master Directory     Climate Change (news popup)

Measuring the reality of climate change    Global Warming: Early Warning Signs    More

Hekate, or Hecate
"The last day of each month is sacred to the Goddess Hekate. In ancient times, worshippers would leave a 'Hecate's Supper' with specially prepared foods as offerings to Hecate. The offerings were also gifts to appease the restless ghosts, called apotropaioi by the Greeks. These offerings are best prepared for the goddess on the eve of the new moon, to be left behind at crossroads at night, without looking back."   Source

Ambarvalia, ancient Rome, Festival of Dea Dia (date varies)

Ambarvalia was a Roman agricultural fertility rite held at the end of May. No work was undertaken today, and ploughs and tools were wreathed in flowers. Silent processions were held, with incense, chanting of priests, and animal sacrifices to Ceres, Bacchus and other gods of the Roman pantheon. Urns of the dead were decked in flowers, followed by wine and noisy feasting.  The word derives from ab ambiendis arvis, going round the fields.

This ancient Roman festival celebrates the goddess in her aspect as the cosmic mother of humanity. A goddess of growth, Dea Dia is identified with Ceres, goddess of agriculture, grain, and the love a mother bears for her child (known as Demeter in ancient Greece). Her priests were the Fratres Arvales, who honoured her in this feast. During the Ambarvalia, the priests blessed the fields and made offerings to the underworld powers. In order to disperse evil, each farmer led his household and one of his animals in a procession around the boundaries of his fields. At the end of the rite the beast was sacrificed. During the procession, prayers would be made to the goddess Ceres.

This festival, involving farm boundaries, and sacrifices held outside the city's borders, resembles a later, Christian, ritual from around this time of year, the 'beating of the bounds' of the Rogation days.

Roman festivals and notable days in the Book of Days    Deities of many cultures in the Book of Days  

Festival of the goddess Diana, Roman Empire (May 26 - 31, 17 BCE)

Feast day of Ss Cantius and Cantianus, brothers, and Cantianilla, their sister, martyrs

Feast day of St Crescentian

Feast day of St Hermias

Feast day of St James Salomone

Feast day of St Mancus

Feast day of St Mary, Mediatrix of All Graces

Feast day of St Mechtildis

Feast day of St Mybrad

Feast day of St Paschasius

Feast day of St Petronilla
(Yellow turkscap lily, Lilium pomponicum flavum, is today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)
Her name is the feminine and diminutive of Peter, and she was said to have been a daughter of the Apostle Peter. He might have cured her of the palsy.

Feast Day of Stella Maris
"'Star of the Sea' (Venus) (Venice, Italy)."
Source: The Phoenix and Arabeth 1992 Calendar

Feast day of the Visitation
Commemorates the visit of Mary to her cousin St Elizabeth after the Annunciation and before the birth of John the Baptist, the precursor of Jesus Christ. It is celebrated with the canticle, Magnificat.

Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days    Shop saints

Rabbits on the last day of the month
In the 1920s, there was a custom in the UK to say the word 'rabbit' three times when going to bed on the last day of the month. The superstition did not end there: on rising, the person was to say 'hare' three times. However, sources differ on this point, with one saying that the words 'rabbit, rabbit, rabbit', and not 'hare' should be said on the morning of the month's first day ...

Read more at Wilson's Almanac http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/ed4.html

Gumstool Hill woolsack races at Tetbury, Cotswolds, UK

The town of Tetbury, England leaps into festive action today when relay teams of four run carrying 27-kilo (60 lb) – 15 kilos (35 lb) for women – woolsack to the crown of Gumstool Hill – and back down again. The gradient of Gumstool is about 1 in 4, which is steep enough to raise a sweat. When it began in the 17^th Century, this race was run between the Royal Oak and the Crown pubs. Tetbury was once an important producer of wool, and no doubt the race was originally run as a way for men in that industry to show off their prowess. These and other Cotswold district games are part of the rich folkloric customs of Whitsuntide, the time around the Christian feast day of Pentecost.

Read more at the Whitsuntide article at the Scriptorium

Day of Oggum, Cuba

Syaday (Discordianism)
Fifth day of the season of Confusion, honours Apostle Sri Syadasti.

Today in the Discordian Calendar

Royal Brunei Malay Regiment Day
A holiday to commemorate the formation of the regiment.

Johnstown Flood Day, Johnstown Pennsylvania, USA
Commemorates the flood caused by the collapse of the Conemaugh Dam on May 31, 1889 with a high loss of life.

National Reconciliation Week, Australia (May 27 - Jun 3)

On which day of the week were you born? Find out here

1443 Margaret Beaufort (d. 1509), mother of Henry VII of England

1469 King Manuel I of Portugal (d. 1521)

1750 Karl August von Hardenberg (d. 1822), statesman and reformer

1753 Pierre Victurnien Vergniaud (d. October 31, 1793), French orator and revolutionary

1773 Ludwig Tieck (d. April 28, 1853), German poet, translator, editor, novelist and critic

1801 Johann Georg Baiter (d. October 10, 1877), Swiss philologist and textual critic

1819 Walt Whitman (d. March 26, 1892), American poet and humanist born on Long Island, New York. His most famous work is the collection of poetry, Leaves of Grass.

From 'Song of Myself'
By Walt Whitman

I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.

My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same,
I, now thirty-seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death. 

Creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy. 

 

Leaves of Grass at Project Gutenberg

1838 Henry Sidgwick (d. 1900), philosopher

1857 Pope Pius XI (d. 1939)

1860 Walter Sickert (d. 1942), British impressionist painter and etcher

1872 William Heath Robinson (d. September 13, 1944), English illustrator and cartoonist, creator of fantastic machines; illustrator of fairy tales.

In Britain, Robinson's cartoons were and still are so popular, that even to this day, the name 'Heath Robinson machine' is applied as a shorthand for an improbable, fantastic machine. (The corresponding term in the USA is 'Rube Goldberg machine', after the American cartoonist who drew similarly odd machinery.) 

Heath Robinson drew more conventional illustrations, such as 'Sydney' for Rudyard Kipling's 'The Song of the Cities'.

Patently absurd inventions    More

1883 Lauri Kristian Relander (d. 1942), Finnish president

1894 Fred Allen (d. 1956), American comedian

1898 Dr Norman Vincent Peale (d. 1993), American clergyman

1908 Don Ameche (d. 1993), American actor

1912 Alfred Deller (d. 1979), singer, early modern countertenor

1915 Judith Wright (d. June 26, 2000), Australian poet

"Prolific Australian poet, critic, and short-story writer, who published more than 50 books. Wright was also an uncompromising environmentalist and social activist campaigning for Aboriginal land rights. She believed that the poet should be concerned with national and social problems. At the age of 85, just before her death, she attended in Canberra at a march for reconciliation with Aboriginal people …

"In the early 1960s Wright helped to found Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland. She fought to conserve the Great Barrier Reef, when its ecology was threatened by oil drilling, and campaigned against sand mining on Fraser Island. In her passionate poem 'Australia 1970' Wright expressed her feelings of disappointment and anger, seeing her wild country die, 'like the eaglehawk, / dangerous till the last breath's gone, clawing and / striking.' The Coral Battleground (1977) was her account of the campaign to protect the 'great water-gardens, lovely indeed as cherry boughs and flowers under the once clear sea.' In 'The Cry for the Dead' (1981) Wright examined the treatment of Aborigines and destruction of the environment by settlers in Central Queensland from the 1840s to the 1920s."   Source

From 'Train Journey'
By Judith Wright

Glassed with cold sleep and dazzled by the moon,
out of the confused hammering dark of the train
I looked and saw under the moon's cold sheet
your delicate dry breasts, country that built my heart;

and the small trees on their uncoloured slope
like poetry moved, articulate and sharp
and purposeful under the great dry flight of air,
under the crosswise currents of wind and star ...

Obituary    More

1922 Denholm Elliott (d. October 6, 1992), British actor

1923 Prince Rainier III of Monaco

1926 James Krüss (d. 1997), author

1929 Menahem Golan, producer

1930 Clint Eastwood, Hollywood actor and director (Dirty Harry)

1932 Jay Miner (d. 1994), American designer of microchips

1938 Johnny PayCheck (d. 2003), American country music singer

1938 John Prescott, Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

1938 Peter Yarrow, American singer (Peter, Paul and Mary)

1939 Terry Waite, British humanitarian who was held hostage in Lebanon for more than four years, from January 24, 1987 to November 17, 1991  

1940 Gilbert Shelton, American cartoonist and underground comics artist. He is the creator of The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Fat Freddy's Cat, and Wonder Wart-Hog.

Comix, comics and cartoons in the Book of Days    Gilbert Shelton interview

1943 Sharon Gless, actress

1945 Rainer Werner Fassbinder (d. June 10, 1982), controversial German movie director, playwright and actor, one of the most important representatives of the New German Cinema. He attracted attention with politically committed and non-illusory work. His central themes were misuse of power and consequences of oppression.

Fassbinder was influenced by Jean-Luc Godard. Among his over 40 full-length films are The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979), Lola (1981), Veronika Voss (1982), and the 14-part TV film, Berlin Alexanderplaz (1980). During his most prolific period (1969-76) Fassbinder made theatre productions in Munich, Bremen, Bochum, Nuremberg, Berlin, Hamburg, and Frankfurt, did four radio plays, and took roles in other directors' films, including the title role in Volker Schlöndorff's Bertolt Brecht adaptation, Baal (1970).

Fast living and fast working, he died of drug overdose in Munich, aged only 36. His death symbolically marks the end of the most experimental period of the German cinema since the 1920s.

More
 

1948 John Bonham (d. 1980), British drummer (Led Zeppelin)

1949 Tom Berenger, American actor

1950 Gregory Harrison, actor

1960 Chris Elliott, comedian

1961 Lea Thompson, actress

1962 Corey Hart, singer/songwriter

1965 Brooke Shields, American model and actress (Pretty Baby; The Blue Lagoon).

Nude photos of Brooke, taken by photographer Garry Cross, when Shields was 10, were displayed in Manhattan's American Fine Arts Gallery, September 10, 1998. The actress had sued Gross in 1981, tearfully testifying that the pics embarrassed her, but a court decision in 1983 gave Ross the okay to display the photos.  Source

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

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Zodiac birthday Free astrology e-cards Shintoism Birthdays World No Tobacco Day [ May 31 ] Poetry Day [ May 31 ]

Varies Full Moon Day
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Varies Hindu holidays
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Varies Memorial Day (USA)
Varies Dragon Boat Festival (China)
Varies Pentecost

 

May

28 Whale Day
29 Mount Everest Day
29 Wisconsin Day
30 Compact Disc Day
31 Poetry Day
31 World No Tobacco Day

June

1 Children's Day (China)
3 Love Conquers All Day
3 Egg Day
3 Family Day
3 Tattoo Day
3 Repeat Day
3 Strawberry Festival (New Jersey, USA)
3 Blueberry Festival (Florida, USA)
4 Cheese Day
5 World Environment Day
6 Applesauce Cake Day
6 D-Day Anniversary
7 Boone Day
8 Best Friends Day
8 Ice Cream Day
8 World Ocean Day
9 Cuddle Up Day
9 Profess Your Love Day
10 Iced Tea Day
10 Great Turtle Races Day
10 Strawberry Festival (West Virginia, USA)
10 Tomato Festival (Louisiana, USA)
10 Mourn For Your Money Day
10 Tomato Festival (Texas, USA)
11 Red Rose Festival
11 King Kamehameha Day (Hawaii)
12 Diary Day
13 Kitchen Klutzes Of America Day
13 Lobster Day
14 Flag Day
15 Sneak A Kiss Day
15 Smile Power Day
15 Electricity Day

  ... More Events

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455 Death of Valentinian III, Roman Emperor.

455 Death of Petronius Maximus, Roman Emperor (killed by a mob).

1246 Death of Queen consort Isabella of Angouleme.

1578 Sir Martin Frobisher sailed from Harwich, England, destined to mine fool's gold at Frobisher Bay, the ore of which was used to pave streets in London.

On September 18, 1578 Martin Frobisher's men, including Thomas Wiars who wrote an account, discovered the mysterious Buss Island in the North Atlantic at 57.5 degrees latitude.

The discovery of this island was published in a compilation by Richard Hakluyt about Frobisher's third voyage. Frobisher had been attempting to find the 'North-west passage', the legendary shortcut to Kathay (China), with a fleet of 15 vessels. His main purpose was to find gold and other minerals … More

Phantom islands at Wikipedia

1578 The Catacombs of Rome were discovered by accident.

1669 Samuel Pepys (1633 - 1703), suffering failing eyesight, discontinued his famous diary of life in London around the time of the Great Plague and Great Fire.

1678 The Lady Godiva procession through Coventry began.

1680 Death of Joachim Neander, clergyman.

1740 Death of King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia.

1759 The Province of Pennsylvania banned all theatre productions.

1779 General George Washington ordered the Iroquois native Americans suppressed. A scorched-earth policy, in which dozens of villages were burned, followed. Washington ordered General John Sullivan to invade the Iroquois Confederacy in New York and told him his mission was the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible:

"It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more".

During the next six months, Sullivan carried out the most ruthless scorched-earth policy in US history. His army destroyed 40 villages and burned thousands of fruit trees, vegetable gardens and an estimated 160,000 bushels of corn.

This day's orders were Washington's response to the Iroquois' alliance with Great Britain, but the British offered the Indians no protection.

Source: The Daily Bleed

They work more effectively against us than the enermy's armies. They are a hundred times more dangerous to our liberties and the great cause we are engaged in. It is much to be lamented that each state, long ago has not hunted them down as pests to society and the greatest enemies we have to the happiness of America – the Jews.
Did George Washington make this anti-Semitic statement that has been attributed to him? No, says snopes.com, the urban legends reference site

 

1790 Alferez Manuel Quimper explored the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

1799 Death of Pierre Lemonnier, astronomer.

1809 Death of Joseph Haydn (b. 1732), composer.

"A few days after he was buried, his body was dug up by grave-robbers and his head cut off. The body was then reburied, and the head was taken to the man who had financed the desecration, a local phrenologist. The phrenologist removed the flesh and subjected Haydn's skull to close examination, whereupon he found the music bump well-developed. Following his examination, the phrenologist turned the skull over to a Mr. Rosenbaum, secretary to Haydn's former patron, Prince Esterhazy. Mr. Rosenbaum, in turn, gave Haydn's skull to his wife, a socialite who spent her time and money putting together intimate musical concerts. Haydn's skull, enclosed in a glass case, soon became the focal point of her little soirees.

"It wasn't until 1820 that the authorities discovered the theft of Haydn's head when his remains were disinterred for removal to a new location where they were to be placed beneath a fine monument. Once Haydn's skull was located, Mrs. Rosenbaum managed to retain possession of it through legal maneuvers until 1852. At that time she presented it to the Society of the Friends of Music. The Society kept the skull until early this century when new legal action was set in motion. But with the intervention of two world wars, along with other complications, it wasn't until 1954 that Haydn's skull, after nearly a century and a half, was finally reunited with the rest of his body, and all of him was given the kind of burial he deserved."   Source

1859 Big Ben went into service. It was designed by the lawyer and amateur horologist Edmund Beckett Denison, later Lord Grimthorpe. 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). The bell weighs 13.762 tonnes (13 long tons 10 cwt 99 lb or 30,339 lb), with a striking hammer weighing 203 kg (4 cwt), and was originally tuned to E.

1862 American Civil War: The Battle of Seven Pines.

1864 American Civil War: The Battle of Cold Harbor began.

1866 In the Fenian Invasion of Canada, John O'Neill led 800 Fenian raiders across the Niagara River at Buffalo, New York/Fort Erie, Ontario, as part of an effort to free Ireland from the English.

1884 John Harvey Kellogg patented corn flakes.

1889 Johnstown Flood: More than 2,200 people died in the town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, USA.

1902 Second Boer War: The last Afrikaner resistance forces signed a peace treaty with the invading British at Pretoria, ending the war, and ensuring control of South Africa to the British.

1910 Creation of the Union of South Africa.

1913 The Seventeenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, authorising direct election of United States Senators, was declared ratified.

1916 World War I: The Battle of Jutland.

 

1921 More than 300 were killed in a race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA – the most devastating race riot in US history in terms of lives lost.

This sad, and little known, day (also known as the 1921 Race Riot, the Tulsa Race War, or the Greenwood Riot) marks the worst racial violence in American history. Angered by false rumours, whites were shooting throughout the night of the 31^st, looting and burning in the early hours of June 1.

Earlier on this day, the Tulsa Tribune newspaper ran a front page article entitled 'Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator', and a back page editorial entitled 'To Lynch Negro Tonight'.

The accusation against Dick Rowland, a black shoe-shiner said to have assaulted a white girl named Sarah Page, proved false. However, by the time this was determined, the black community of Greenwood was destroyed by a white mob, who murdered many and razed the entire 35-block area.

After the governor declared martial law, black people were rounded up by the National Guard and put into the baseball stadium. No one was ever arrested or charged in the mass murder and arson that happened that day, although many white Tulsans to this day know who the perpetrators were and simply refuse to say it. This is because many of those responsible were 'pillars of the community'.

Sources: The Daily Bleed, Wikipedia

Tulsa Race Riot Report    Photos    PBS video documentary (Real Player)

Archaeologists search for mass graves    Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America

 

1921 The Sacco and Vanzetti trial began.

1921 American comedian Buster Keaton married actress Natalie Talmadge, sister of Norma Talmadge, whose imprint started the Grauman's Chinese Theater's wet cement routine (May 18, 1927).

1924 The Soviet Union signed an agreement with the Peking government, referring to Outer Mongolia as an "integral part of the Republic of China", whose "sovereignty" therein the Soviet Union promised to respect.

1927 Henry Ford's last Model T Ford, No 15,007,003, rolled off the assembly line.

1928 Charles Kingsford Smith and three others began the attempt to cross the Pacific from the US to Australia.

1939 Britain interned Sir Oswald Mosley and thousands of other fascist sympathisers and aliens.

1942 The Luftwaffe bombed Coventry, England.

1942 Three Japanese midget submarines entered Sydney Harbour. Nineteen Australian sailors were killed when the ferry they were on was torpedoed.

1952 Dwight D Eisenhower retired from active service in the United States Army.

1956 Brendan Behan became a folk hero overnight after appearing, drunk and unintelligible, on a BBC television interview with Malcolm Muggeridge.

1957 American playwright Arthur Miller was convicted of contempt of Congress for refusing to name other writers as Communists.

1958 Dick Dale invented surf music with Let's Go Trippin' for all the Dick heads in the world.

1958 Moscow agreed to talks with the USA on an atmospheric nuclear test ban.

1961 Creation of the Republic of South Africa, independent from the British Commonwealth.

1962 The West Indies Federation dissolved.

1962 Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was hanged in Israel.

1974 Syria and Israel signed a disengagement agreement to resolve the Yom Kippur War.

1977 The Trans-Alaska Pipeline System was completed.

1985 The US-Canadian Outbreak occurred. Forty-one tornadoes occurred in Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York and Ontario; 76 people died.

1989 Jim Wright, Speaker of the USA House of Representatives, resigned following a financial scandal.

1991 The Angolan civil war came to an end after 17 years.

1996 American psychonaut, Dr Timothy Leary (b. 1920) crossed over. His last words, his son Zachary said, were "Why not?" and "Yeah."  

Following his cremation, 7 grams of his ashes were launched into space. Stored in the 9-by-12-inch canister with Leary are ashes of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, space physicist Gerard O'Neill, rocket scientist Krafft Ehricke and others. Together they orbit Earth every 96 minutes.

In the months before his death from inoperable prostate cancer, Leary authored a book called Design for Dying. The book was an attempt to show people a new way of viewing death and dying.

"May 31, 1996. Today Tim Leary's life drew to a close. The report on NPR that brought me the long expected news reported that Tim's last words were 'Why not?' I cannot claim that we were close, our times together were few and often occurred in scenes crowded with other people. He amazed me with his enthusiasm and his ability to listen very carefully to whatever was being said. He was consistently the most up person I have known. Gentle, non-judgemental, ever bemused Tim, whatever one thought of the positions he took and the controversies in which he was embroiled, it was hard to resist his charm and his essential decency. I believe that his reputation will outlast his critics and that when the future instructs its children in the short version of the history of the Twentieth Century that his name and legacy will be warmly recalled. Farewell, Tim. Wherever you are right now, I can hear you laughing."   Source

"There have been a lot of rumors, speculation, and half-truths surrounding the myth of Leary's death. Here is a place you can get some insight into the events that actually occured [sic], by people who were actually there. Hopefully this will help set the record straight and answer some questions with facts and truths ..."   Source

 

Timothy Leary prepares for his last trip Erowid Timothy Leary Vault LSD Timeline 1938 - 1973 Lots of Leary links Shop Timothy Leary The Man Who Turned on America (BBC documentary)

More about Leary The Declaration of Evolution 8-Circuit Model of Consciousness Leary as US government informant Wilson's Almanac Book of Days hip list CounterCulture Wiki

 

1997 The Confederation Bridge opened, spanning Northumberland Strait, linking Prince Edward Island with mainland New Brunswick, Canada.

2002 The Guardian reported: 'Wildflowers study gives clear evidence of global warming'. See also our piece on phenology.

2003 The final flight of an Air France Concorde took place.

2003 USA: 1996 Atlanta Olympic bomber Eric Rudolph was captured in Murphy, North Carolina.

2004 A foul-up during routine software update at the Royal Bank of Canada led to a three-day misplacement of ten million account balances.

2005 W Mark Felt admitted in the magazine Vanity Fair that he was the anonymous source Deep Throat in the Watergate scandal.

 

Tomorrow: Strange pilgrimage to St Patrick's Purgatory

 

 Main calendar | Yesterday | Tomorrow | Search

 

 

Texas Razorbacks

The President gets off the helicopter in front of the White House, carrying a baby pig under each arm.

The Marine guard snaps to attention, salutes, and says: "Nice pigs, sir."

The President replies: "These are not pigs, these are authentic Texan Razorback Hogs. I got one for VP Cheney, and I got one for Defense Secretary Rumsfeld."

The Marine again snaps to attention, salutes, and replies,

"Nice trade, sir!"

 

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