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reetings from Australia. 

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Pip Wilson

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Today is

When the first baby laughed for the first time, the laugh broke into a thousand pieces and they all went skipping about, and that was the beginning of fairies.
Sir James Barrie, born on May 9, 1860; Peter Pan

Every time a child says 'I don't believe in fairies' there is a little fairy somewhere that falls down dead.
Sir James Barrie; ibid

For several days after my first book was published I carried it about in my pocket, and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.
Sir James Barrie

Modern society calls the beggar bum and panhandler and gives him the bum's rush. But the Greeks used to say that people in need are ambassadors of the gods.
Peter Maurin, activist, born on May 9, 1877; co-founder with Dorothy Day (1897 - 1980) of the Catholic Worker Movement

The future will be different if we make the present different.
Peter Maurin

Minorities are individual or groups of individuals especially qualified. The masses are the collection of people not specially qualified.
José Ortega y Gasset, Spanish philosopher, born on May 9, 1883; The Revolt of the Masses, 1930

Conversation is the socializing instrument par excellence, and in its style one can see reflected the capacities of a race.
José Ortega y Gasset; Invertebrate Spain, 1922

The modern world is a civilized one; its inhabitant is not.
José Ortega y Gasset

I am not my life. This, which is reality, is made up of me and of things. Things are not me and I am not things: we are mutually transcendent, but both are immanent in that absolute coexistence which is life.
José Ortega y Gasset; Unas lecciones de metafisica, 1966

When television is good … nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, violence blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder and, endlessly, commercials – many screaming, cajoling and offending. And most of all, boredom.
US Federal Communications Commission chair Newton N Minow speaking on May 9, 1960, at a meeting of National Association of Broadcasters members in Washington, DC

I had no real ambition about acting. But I knew there had to be something better than the bloody chemist's shop.
Glenda Jackson, British actress, activist and socialist Member of Parliament, born on May 9, 1936

My mother polishes them to within an inch of their lives until the metal shows. That sums up the Academy Awards – all glitter on the outside and base metal coming through. Nice presents for a day. But they don't make you feel any better.
Glenda Jackson; on her Oscars

If I'm too strong for some people, that's their problem.
Glenda Jackson

An actor can do Hamlet right through to Lear, men of every age and every step of spiritual development. Where's the equivalent for women? I don't fancy hanging around to play Nurse in 'Romeo and Juliet'. Life's too short.
Glenda Jackson

Ideally, one would love to work in England. But if no one in England is going to take their courage in both hands and dig into their pockets and finance films - then, you're going to have to work abroad.
Glenda Jackson; speaking in 1974

I was the archetypal spotty teenager who suffered the tortures of the damned because I wasn't like those girls in the magazines. I had lank, greasy hair and I was fat and spotty.
Glenda Jackson

If anyone thinks I looked sexy stripped in 'The Music Lovers', they must think Minnie Mouse is sexy.
Glenda Jackson

You'd think it something one would grow out of. But you grow into it. The more you do, the more you realise how painfully easy it is to be lousy and how very difficult to be good.
Glenda Jackson; on acting

Men can be a great deal of work for very little reward.
Glenda Jackson

Attorney General John Ashcroft is in intensive care. He's suffering from a severe case of pancreatitis, which they can't really figure out because he's not really a drinker. They think he might have picked up some type of infection while wiping his ass with the Bill of Rights.
Bill Maher; John Ashcroft, USA Attorney General, was born on May 9, 1942

More Ashcroft jokes

May 9 is the 129^th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (130^th in leap years), with 236 days remaining.
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Mothers' Day (2004)

On the dating of items in the Almanac

In Britain, the fourth Sunday of Lent (Mid-Lent, typically in March or early April) was known as Mothering Sunday, when furmenty, a sweetened boiled cereal dish, was often served at the family dinner. Originally, it was a time for visiting one's 'mother church' – the church in the town where one hailed from, and people would travel back home to attend – but gradually came to be a day for honouring one's mother and giving her gifts. Thus, it is the progenitor of today's Mothers' Day.

It is believed that Mothers' Day emerged from the custom of mother worship in ancient Greece. Mother worship, which kept a festival to Cybele, a great mother of gods, and Rhea, the wife of Cronus, was commemorated between March 15 and March 18 around Asia Minor. The modern commemoration began with Ann Jarvis (1832 - 1905), who organized a series of Mothers' Day Work Clubs in West Virginia, USA. to improve health and sanitary conditions. Jarvis died on this day, May 9, 1905.

In 1870, Julia Ward Howe (1819 - 1910), prominent United States abolitionist, social activist, and women's suffrage campaigner, pacifist and poet, author of Battle Hymn of the Republic, was the first to proclaim Mothers' Day.

This is the text of Julia Ward Howe's first proclamation for Mothers' Day (long before Hallmark Cards and others watered down the intention that the day would be a general strike for peace):

Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise all women who have hearts,
Whether your baptism be that of water or of tears
Say firmly:
"We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage,
For caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We women of one country
Will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs."
From the bosom of the devastated earth a voice goes up with
Our own. It says, "Disarm, Disarm!"
The sword of murder is not the balance of justice!
Blood does not wipe out dishonor
Nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war.
Let women now leave all that may be left of home
For a great and earnest day of counsel.
Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them then solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions.
The great and general interests of peace.

"Mother's [sic] Day in the United States was first proclaimed in 1870 in Boston by Julia Ward Howe, and Howe called for it to be observed each year nationally in 1872. As originally envisioned, Howe's "Mother's Day" was a call for Pacifism and disarmament by women. Early "Mother's Day" was mostly marked by women's peace groups. A common early activity was the meeting of groups of mothers whose sons had fought or died on opposite sides of the American Civil War.

"The first known observance of Mother's Day in the U.S. occurred in Albion, Michigan on May 13, 1877, the second Sunday of the month. According to local legend, Albion pioneer, Juliet Calhoun Blakeley, stepped up to complete the sermon of the Rev. Myron Daughterty, who was distraught because an anti-temperance group had forced his son and two other temperance advocates to spend the night in a saloon and become publicly drunk. In the pulpit, Blakeley called on other mothers to join her. Blakeley's two sons, both travelling salesmen, were so moved that they vowed to return each year to pay tribute to her and embarked on a campaign to urge their business contacts to do likewise. At their urging, in the early 1880s, the Methodist Episcopal Church in Albion set aside the second Sunday in May to recognize the special contributions of mothers.

"In 1907 Mother's Day was first celebrated in a small private way by Anna Jarvis in Grafton, West Virginia, to commemorate the anniversary of her mother's death two years earlier on May 9, 1905. Jarvis's mother, also named Anna Jarvis, had been active in Mother's Day campaigns for peace and worker's safety and health. The younger Jarvis launched a quest to get wider recognition of Mother's Day. The celebration organized by Jarvis on May 10, 1908 involved 407 children with their mothers at the Andrew's Methodist Episcopal Church in Grafton (this church is now the International Mother's Day Shrine). Grafton, West Virginia is the place recognized as the birthplace of Mother's Day. The following campaign to recognize Mother's Day was financed by clothing merchant John Wanamaker. As the custom of Mother's Day spread, the emphasis shifted from the pacificism and reform movements to a general appreciation of mothers. The first official recognition of the holiday was by West Virginia in 1910. A proclamation designating the second Sunday in May as Mother's Day was signed by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson on May 14, 1914."
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

May crowning
May crowning is a traditional Roman Catholic ritual that occurs in the month of May of every year. In some countries, it takes place on or about May 1, however, in many United States Catholic parishes, it takes place on Mothers' Day.

More

On the pesky apostrophe: why Mothers' Day and not Mother's Day?

Someone – I think it was Albert Einstein – said that common sense is a set of prejudices learned before the age of 19. I was taught to put the apostrophe to the right of the word 'Mothers', and unless I can be shown that this is either illogical or so outdated (or quirky), I'd like to stick with it, as I also think it's historically the most correct, and semantically the most meaningful. I'm not sure, but I think my preferred spelling is also the norm in the English-speaking world, except (fairly recently) in the USA:

"Mothering Sunday, also called 'Mothers' Day' in the United Kingdom and Ireland ..."
Source: Wikipedia

However, the spelling 'Mother's Day', the one increasingly seen in advertising, seems to be more unconventional and, to me, denies the essence of the day and its origins:

"Another nineteenth-century precursor of the day for mothers was Julia Ward Howe's Mothers' Day for Peace, established in Boston in the wake of the Civil War.

"Note the placement of those apostrophes. Jarvis and Howe organized Mothers' Days, in the plural, as vehicles for organized social and political activity by mothers, not the private celebration of a mother's services within the home. In the migration of the apostrophe one letter to the left—from Mothers' Day to Mother's Day—Coontz sees a declension both grammatical and political."   Source

Conservapedia says: "The position of the apostrophe varies; older sources tend to put it after the s, modern usage puts it before the s."

See also:

"An increasing number of editors of British English publications are ... opting for ... (no apostrophe) arguing that Mothers Day is a day *for* mothers, not a day belonging to mothers. US usage, though, seems most commonly to include an apostrophe
before the 's'.

"Having said this, there is a great deal of inconsistency about the issue, and you will certainly continue to see all three forms in use regardless of where you live."   Source

Further, this blogger makes good points:

"Here's an even trickier one: farmers market. The market is used by the farmers, populated by the farmers, but generally not owned by the farmers. So it seems reasonable to conclude that you don't use an apostrophe because the word farmers is there to identify the type of market. It's an adjective.

"I should note that there are credible people who firmly believe the apostrophe is required in farmers market, writers strike and similar phrases. It's a contentious topic, and you may have to defend your choice to someone no matter which choice you make."

ChazBear on the same page argues well that 'Mothers' is attributive (adjectival), not genitive (possessive), so no apostrophe is needed at all!

I note that place names in Australia, such as Milsons Point, are not spelt with apostrophes either.

Plenty of differing views may be found at Google.

See also Matronalia (celebrated March 1), at the Scriptorium    A world chronology of women's electoral rights    More

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Festival of the Lemuralia (Lemuria), festival of ghosts, ancient Rome (also May 11 and 13) In Roman religion, Lemures were wandering spirits of departed loved ones. They were said to revisit their homes at this time, and were shown respect by the Roman people, who set aside a week to appease, or exorcize them. We may think of it as similar, and serving a similar function to, Halloween (Samhain). The prosimian primates called lemurs were so named by Linnaeus for their big eyes, noctural habits and unearthly noises they make at night, like the ancient Roman spooks. The myth of origin of this ancient festival was that it had been instituted by Romulus to appease the spirit of his unfortunate brother, Remus (Ovid, Fasti, v. 473 ff). Originally called the Remuria, this festival was celebrated at night and in silence. At this time, people behaved in an OCD kind of way, walking barefooted, washing their hands three times, and nine times throwing black beans behind their backs, believing that these rituals would protect them against the Lemures. At midnight, each household's male head would wash his hands in spring water, then throw away one black bean for each resident of the household. He then washed his hands again, and clashed bronze cymbals together to summon the spirits. This ritual was repeated on the other two days of the Lemuralia. The temples of the gods were closed during the Lemuralia, and it was believed unlucky for women to marry at this time and during the whole month of May – those who do so will surely die soon after. Or, so it is said. From this custom came the proverb Mense Maio malae nubent ('They wed ill who wed in May'), and thus the rush of June weddings in our own day, although the weather in the Northern Hemisphere is obviously involved in the customs of both eras. Vestal Virgins prepared the sacred mola salsa (salt cake) from the first ears of wheat of the season. In the Julian calendar, on May 11 there were games in the Circus Maximus in honour of Mars. On the 13th, thirty dolls known as argei, made of rushes, were thrown from the Pons Sublicius into the Tiber by the Vestal virgins (Ovid, Fasti, v.621), and there was also a festival of the merchants (festum mercatorum), in honour of Mercury. Then, probably because the temple of Mercury had been dedicated on this day in the year 495 BCE, the merchants burned incense, and, using a laurel branch, sprinkled themselves and their produce with water from the well of Mercury at the Porta Capena, believing that these rites would assure prosperity. From Wikipedia: On the culminating day of the Lemuralia, May 13 in 609 or 610 … Pope Boniface IV consecrated the Pantheon at Rome to the Blessed Virgin and all the martyrs, and the feast of the dedicatio Sanctae Mariae ad Martyres has been celebrated at Rome ever since. This ancient custom was Christianized in the feast of All Saints Day, established in Rome first on May 13, in order to de-paganize the Roman Lemuria. In the 8th century, as the popular observance of the Lemuria had safely faded over time, the feast of All Saints was shifted to November 1, coinciding with the similar Celtic propitiation of the spirits at Samhain. Pope Gregory III (731 - '41) consecrated a chapel in the Basilica of St. Peter to all the saints and fixed the anniversary, not by chance, for November 1. The idea that this festival was the origin of that of All Saints, which was moved later to November 1, has now been abandoned by Roman Catholics, though not by cultural historians ... For a similar Japanese custom, see Setsubun. Roman festivals and notable days in the Book of Days     Deities of many cultures in the Book of Days    More   Feast day of St Beatus of Lungern, first apostle to Switzerland Beatus was probably a legendary monk and hermit of early Christianity. Legends claim that he was the son of a Scottish king, while other legends place his birth in Ireland. When Beatus arrived at Lake Thun, he found the local people terrorized by Ponzo, a dragon who lived in the lake and surrounding grottoes, where Beatus set up his home. Rebuked by Beatus, the dragon fell to his death on the rocks and plunged into the lake. Dragons and serpents in the Book of days Feast day of St Bienheuré (Beatus of Vendôme) A semi-legendary saint of Vendôme, northern France. Tradition states that he lived in a cave near the town. Like St George, he is said to have fought a dragon so large that it drained the Loir River when it drank from it. Bienheuré killed it with one blow from his staff. His legend was conflated with that of Beatus of Lungern (see above). Feast day of St Brynoth I, Bishop of Scara, in Sweden Feast day of St Christopher (Greek Orthodox Church) Feast day of St George Preca Feast day of St Gerontius Feast day of St Gorfor Feast day of St Gregory Nazianzen (Solomon's seal, Convollaria multiflora (Polygonatum), is today's plant, dedicated to this saint.) Feast day of St Gregory of Ostia Feast day of St Hermas Feast day of St John of Châlon Feast day of St Nicholas, Bishop of Lincopen, in Sweden Feast day of St Nicholas Albergati Feast day of St Pachomius Feast day of St Theresa of Jesus Gerhardinger Feast day of St Tudy of Landevennec Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days    Shop saints Second weekend of May, Prapheni Bun Bang Fai (Rocket Festival), northeast Thailand and Laos Best seen in Yasothon, northeast Thailand. Before monsoon time, northeast villagers construct gigantic rockets that they launch to ensure plentiful rain during the coming rice season. The festival also helps people let off steam before the hard rice farming work begins. Features beauty parades, folk dances, "ribald and high-spirited revelry before the rockets are ceremoniously launched". From a tourist brochure, I think published by the Thai government   Victory Day, Russia and some other parts of the former USSR Commemorates the end of the 'Great Patriotic War'. Inflated figures are regularly given for the number of people who died in the USSR during WWII (eg, "Twenty-seven million soldiers and citizens died during the war, many of them fighting what turned out to be some of the most decisive battles." – Eleanor Hall, The World Today, ABC Radio National, Australia, May 9, 2005). However, it has been well documented that the Soviet Union's official figures were a subterfuge to cover up the many millions killed in Josef Stalin's purges and forced collectivization policies, and the real military death toll figures were less than half that. See Robert Conquest's classic 1968 accounts, The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, University of Alberta Press, 1986. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that from the collectivisation of agriculture to the death of Stalin in 1953, the communists killed 66 million people in the Soviet Union and concluded that "110 million Russians fell, victims of socialism". "We may now conveniently sum up the estimated death toll roughly as follows:   Peasant dead: 1930-37   11 million Arrested in this period dying in camps later   3.5 million TOTAL   14.5 million Of these:     Dead as a result of dekulakization   6.5 million Dead in the Kazakh catastrophe   1 million Dead in the 1932-3 famine:     in the Ukraine 5 million 7 million in the N. Caucasus 1 million elsewhere 1 million "As we have said, these are enormous figures, comparable to the deaths in the major wars of our time."    Source: Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow, Ch. 16, free online "Precise deductions are not possible. Older men died as soldiers in the war. But on the other hand, the mass dispatch to labour camps of prisoners of war returned from Nazi hands in 1945 must have led to an extra, and non-military, death rate among the younger males. So must the guerrilla fighting in the Baltic States and the Western Ukraine, which lasted for years after the war; and so must the deportations from the Caucasus and the general renewal of Purge activities in the post-war period. But in any case, the general effect of the figures is clear enough. The wastage of millions of males in the older age groups is too great to be masked, whatever saving assumptions we may make. We here have, frozen into the census figures, a striking indication of the magnitude of the losses inflicted in the Purge." Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: Stalin's Purge of the Thirties, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1968, pp. 711-12   Source "According to Conquest, extrapolating plausibly from Soviet statistics, the toll may be an almost unthinkable 14.5 million – some 11 million peasants killed, the majority from the Ukraine, with 3.5 million arrested and dying later in camps."   Source "Stalin was a true Leninist in that he faithfully followed his patron's political philosophy and practices. Every ingredient of what has come to be known as Stalinism save one – murdering fellow Communists – he had learned from Lenin, and that includes the two actions for which he is most severely condemned: collectivization and mass terror. Stalin's megalomania, his vindictiveness, his morbid paranoia, and other odious personal qualities should not obscure the fact that his ideology and modus operandi were Lenin's. A man of meager education, he had no other source of ideas." Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime   Europe day, European Union Commemorating the Schuman declaration.  Liberation Day, Jersey, Guernsey       On which day of the week were you born? Find out here 1439 Pope Pius III (d. 1503) 1785 James Pollard Espy ('The Storm King'; d. January 24, 1860), American meteorologist who was one of the first to collect meteorological observations by telegraph   1800 John Brown (d. December 2, 1859), American abolitionist, who attempted a guerrilla war in the very heart of The South. Born in Connecticut, he was a drover, wool merchant and farmer, who campaigned for the abolition of slavery. In 1859, he led a raid on a government armoury at Harper's Ferry, was captured and later hanged. There's a flutter in the Southland, a tremor in the air; For the rice-plains are invaded, the cotton fields laid bare; And the cry of "Help" and "Treason" rings aloud from tongue and pen John Brown has crossed the border with a host of fifteen men. The Civil War marching song 'John Brown's Body (Lies A-Mouldering in the Grave)' is sung to the tune of Battle Hymn of the Republic by American peace activist and creator of the modern Mothers' Day, Julia Ward Howe. "On October 16, 1859, Brown led 21 men in an attack on the federal armory at Harpers Ferry, [West] Virginia. The arsenal was a large complex of buildings that contained 100,000 muskets and rifles. He planned to seize the weapons and arm local slaves. They would then head south, and a general revolution would result. The 21 raiders included a fugitive slave, a college student, and several free blacks. Three of the men were Brown's sons. The raid initially went well. They cut the telegraph wires and easily captured the armory, which was being defended by a single watchman. They also gathered hostages, including Col. Lewis Washington, great-grand-nephew of George Washington.