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The Harvest of Sorrow
By Robert
Conquest
Diva Julia [Ward Howe]
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Julia Ward Howe
Sisters in Spirit
The Power of Nonviolence
The Voice of Hope
Aung San Suu Kyi
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Walt Disney's Peter
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Peter Pan
The Pagan Prosperity
The Triumph of the Moon
The Celtic Dragon
Tarot
Sabbat Entertaining
The Pagan Book of Days
The Rise of the Creative
Class
Celebrate the Earth
A Year of Holidays in the Pagan
Tradition
Wheel of the Year
The Trouble
with Islam
Brave Hearts, Rebel
Spirits
The Five Biggest Lies Bush
Told Us About Iraq
Lady Godiva
Lucifer Ascending: The
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The Book of Spells
Spellcraft
The Book of Saints
The Encyclopedia of Saints
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Brewer's
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What
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By Robert Fisk
The God Who Wasn't There
A
Question of Torture
By Alfred McCoy
When Corporations Rule the World
Outfoxed - Rupert Murdoch's War on
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The Corporation
Highly recommended DVD
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
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By Bruce Shapiro
A Dictionary of Saints Days, Fasts, Feasts and
Festivals
Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them
365 Goddess
Adventures in a TV Nation
Michael
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Drawing Down the Moon
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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.
Things started
to go wrong when an eastbound Baltimore & Ohio train approached
the town. The train's baggage master tried to warn the
passengers. Brown's men yelled for him to halt, then opened
fire. The baggage master, Hayward Shepherd, became the first
casualty of John Brown's war against slavery. Ironically
Shepherd was a free black man." Source
A Plea for
Captain John Brown by Henry David Thoreau
Documenting
Difference: An Illustrated & Annotated Anthology of Documents on
Race, Class, Gender & Ethnicity in the United States
1837
Adam Opel, German
engineer and industrialist
1860 Sir
James M Barrie
(JM Barrie; d. 1937),
Scottish dramatist, author of Peter
Pan
Peter Pan guy
1873 Howard Carter (d. 1939), British archaeologist
who found the tomb of Tutankhamun
 1877 Peter
Maurin (Aristide Pierre Maurin; d. May 15, 1949), co-founder, with Dorothy Day
(1897 - 1980),
of the Catholic Worker
Movement. He founded farming communes, which he preferred to call
"agronomic universities".
He died of heart failure at Maryfarm in Newburgh, New York.
Dressed in a donated suit of clothes, he was buried in a donated grave in
St John's Cemetery, Brooklyn. His program of Roundtable discussions, houses of hospitality, and Catholic Worker farms remain central to the Catholic Worker Movement.
"The name
Maurin proposed for the paper was The Catholic Radical. The
radical – from the Latin word radix meaning root – is
someone who doesn't settle for cosmetic solutions, he said, but goes
to the root of personal and social problems. Day felt that the name
should refer to the class of the readers she hoped the paper would
have and so named it The
Catholic Worker. 'Man proposes and woman disposes,' Maurin
responded meekly." Source
"He saw no point in struggling for
better hours or more pay in places where the work was dehumanizing.
It was time, he said, 'to fire the bosses.' But where, he was
asked, could they go? How would they live? 'There is no
unemployment on the land,' Maurin replied. The Catholic Worker
should stand for a decentralized society stressing cooperation
rather than duress, with artisans and craftsmen in worker-owned
small factories, and agricultural communities. Coming together in
agricultural communities, worker and scholar could both sweat,
think and pray together and in the process develop 'a
worker-scholar synthesis.'
"Maurin was often accused of being a
utopian romantic longing to return to travel backward rather than
forward in time. But Day gradually became more open to his
critique of assembly-line civilization and came to share his view
that improved, unionized industrialism wasn't enough, that
community was better than mass society." Source
"Today over 185 Catholic Worker
communities remain committed to nonviolence, voluntary poverty,
prayer, and hospitality for the homeless, exiled, hungry, and
foresaken. Catholic Workers continue to protest injustice, war,
racism, and violence of all forms." Source
Maurin's
essays Dorothy Day on Peter
Maurin (PDF file) More
on Peter Maurin
Dorothy
Day, Peter Maurin and the Catholic Worker Movement: Who Will Inherit
the Legacy of Dorothy Day?
Dorothy
Day, Peter Maurin and the Catholic Worker Movement: All Souls: The
Day of the Dead
Early
progressives in the Book of Days
CounterCulture
Wiki
1882 George Barker, American painter
(d. 1965)
1883
José Ortega y Gasset
(d. 1956), Spanish
philosopher. He wrote The Revolt of the Masses,
characterising 20th-Century society as dominated by masses of
mediocre and indistinguishable individuals. His ideas converged with
other 'mass society' theorists such as
Karl Mannheim,
Erich Fromm
and Hannah Arendt. He went into exile during the
Spanish Revolution,
refusing to support either side or hold academic office under
Francisco Franco.
More
Postmodern
philosophy
1892 Zita of Bourbon-Parma (d. 1989), empress of Austria-Hungary
1914 Hank
Snow (d. 1999), American country musician
1920 Richard Adams, author (Watership
Down)
1921
Daniel Berrigan, peace
activist and Roman
Catholic priest. Daniel and his brother Philip
Berrigan performed non-violent
actions against war and were for a time on the FBI
Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list. The Berrigans were founders of
the Plowshares
Movement.
Christian
anarchism Plowshares
Movement Chronology
Activism & action page
1921 Sophie Scholl, resistance fighter with
White
Rose in Nazi Germany
1934 Alan Bennett, British author
1936
Glenda Jackson,
British parliamentarian and actress (Oscars: Women in Love and A Touch of Class).
In 1990, she mounted an unsuccessful campaign to run for Parliament,
as a member of the Labour Party; she ran again in
1992, and
succeeded. She is the only British Member of Parliament ever to have
won an Oscar, long before
Tony Blair even tried.
1936 Albert Finney, English actor (Tom Jones; The Dresser). Finney trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic
Art. In 1960, he gained famed for his role in Billy Liar in London's West End. Greater fame came with his part
in Tom Jones.
1940 James L Brooks, producer, writer
1942 John Ashcroft, United States Attorney
General, co-überbastard of Homeland
Security
Why does listening to John Ashcroft make me feel like the world has already ended? If we're going to be warned about terrorism, can't it be by someone who actually makes us want to
live?
Jon Stewart
More Ashcroft
jokes Homeland
Security jokes
Terror alerts! from Wilson's Almanac
Myths of the 'war
on terrorism' and Iraq
Lots
of stuff on Homeland Security at InfoClearinghouse
1944
Richie Furay, musician (Poco; Buffalo Springfield)
1946 Candice Bergen, American actress (TV series,
Murphy
Brown)
1949 Billy
Joel,
American musician
and singer
1956
Jana Wendt, Australian current affairs broadcaster
1982 Rachel Boston, actress
Phew!!
Have a rest before the big This
day in history section
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Moon Day
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the 13th
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holidays
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Jayanti
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Jayanti
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Arbor
Day
Varies
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Care Professionals Day
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Day (Malaysia)
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Purnima
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Day
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Day
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May
6 Astronomy
Day
6 Freud
Day
7 School
Day
7 Unmothers'
Day
8 Senior
Citizens Day
8 Student
Nurses Day
8 World
Red Cross Day
8 V-E
Day
9 Tear
Tags Off Mattresses Day
10 Blood
Pressure Day
10 School
Nurse Day
10 Clean
Up Your Room Day
10 Golden
Spike Day
11 Minnesota
Day
11 Chair
Day
12 Kite
Day
12 Limerick
Day
12 Military
Spouse Day
12 Receptionists
Day
13 Frog
Jumping Day
13 Tulip
Day
13 Leprechaun
Day
14 Motorcycle
Riders Day
14 Stars
And Stripes Forever Day
14 Dance
Like A Chicken Day
14 Crazy
Day
15 Butterfly
Day
15 Flip
Your Mattress Day
15 International
Day Of Families
16 Clergy
Day
17 Rubber
Band Day
17 Emergency
Medical Services For Children Day
17 Constitution
Day (Norway)
18 Visit
Your Relatives Day
19 Plant
Something Day
19 Hug
Your Cat Day
19 Circus
Day
20 Pick
Strawberries Day
20 Be
A Millionaire Day
20 Flower
Day
20 Strawberry
Festival (Maryland, USA)
... More
Events
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application. Further details
328 St
Athanasius was elected bishop of Alexandria.
1092 Lincoln
Cathedral was consecrated. The body of Richard
Fleming, Bishop of Lincoln,
lies in the first cadaver tomb ever, in a chantry on the north wall.
1502
Christopher Columbus departed Spain for his fourth
and final trip to the New World.
 1671
Irish-born Colonel
Thomas
Blood (1618
- '80), disguised as a clergyman,
attempted to steal the Crown Jewels from the Tower
of London. He was immediately caught in the bungled heist.
Later, he was condemned to death and then mysteriously pardoned by King Charles II,
even given land in Ireland worth £500 a year. It might have been that Blood
convinced the king that there were other
conspirators who would avenge the colonel's death. It has also been suggested
that his action had the connivance of the king himself, because
Charles was very short of money at the time.
The Crown Jewels have been kept at the Tower since
1303, when
most of them were retrieved from the window of a London jeweller's shop after
they were stolen from Westminster Abbey.
According to tradition, King John (1167
- 1216) of Magna
Carta fame, once lost the
Crown Jewels and much of his treasure whilst attempting to cross at low tide The Wash, a wide but shallow estuary and arm
of the North Sea.
According
to contemporary chronicles, John was travelling from Spalding in
Lincolnshire to King's Lynn in Norfolk, but unwisely sent his baggage
train, including his crown jewels, along the coast road, which would only have
been passable at certain times of day. The horse-drawn carts moved too slowly
for the incoming tide, and many were lost. The present-day location is supposed
to be somewhere near Sutton Bridge, on the River Nene.
The
misfortune affected John's physical and mental health, and he succumbed to
dysentery, dying in 1216, at Newark in Lincolnshire,
to be succeeded by his nine-year-old son as King Henry III of England. John, the younger brother
of Richard the Lionheart, and known as Evil King John in the Robin Hood legend, is
buried in Worcester Cathedral in the city of Worcester.
That "King John lost the Crown Jewels in the Wash"
might have been a tragedy for the monarch, but it has long been the source of
many a schoolyard pun.
Thomas Blood
More
1726 Five
men who were arrested during the raid on Mother
Clap's molly house
(a brothel
for homosexual
men) in London
were executed at Tyburn. At the time, homosexuality in England
was a capital offence. Margaret Clap, for whom it is believed the slang term for gonorrhoea,
clap, was named, herself died after spending time in the stocks.
 1754 Benjamin Franklin published, and probably drew, the first
American cartoon, a rough picture of a snake divided into eight pieces,
representing the American colonies, with the caption Join, or die.
1770 According to sports historian, Prof. Peter Radford, an English costermonger named James
Parrot might have run the first four-minute mile, at London. More at May 6, 1954 (Roger
Bannister).
1788 A motion was
made in the British Parliament for the abolition of the slave
trade. Slavery was not finally abolished in the Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and its colonies,
until 1833, after years of intense lobbying by William
Wilberforce, who died on July
29, 1833, just before the
Slavery
Abolition Act came into effect.
Early
progressives in the Book of Days
1791 Death of Francis
Hopkinson, American
author and signer of the Declaration of Independence.
1805 Death of Friedrich Schiller, German poet and
historian.
1882 William F Ford patented a
stethoscope of the modern design.
1887 Buffalo Bill's Wild
West Show opened in London.
1893 " … the first motion picture
exhibition was given by Thomas Alva Edison in Brooklyn, New York to an audience
of 400 people at the Dept of
Physics, Brooklyn Institute, Brooklyn, N.Y. using Edision's Kinetograph. An
optical lantern projector showed moving images of a blacksmith and his tow
helpers passing a bottle and forging a piece of iron. Each filmstrip had 700
images, each image being shown for 1/92 sec. The event was reported in the
Scientific American of 20 May 1893."
Source
1901 The first Australian
Federal Parliament met in the
Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne. The Duke of York (later King George
V) opened the first Commonwealth Parliament in the temporary capital city.
It was filmed by the Salvation Army's Limelight
Department, producing what is arguably the world's first documentary film.
"In May 1901, the Duke and Duchess of Cornwall
and York, (later King George V and Queen Mary) came to Melbourne to open the
first Federal Parliament. The royal visit confirmed Australia's links with
Britain, and transformed a potentially dull political event into a grand
ceremonial and festive occasion." Source
Pictures
Chronology
of the Australian Federation Movement, 1883 - 1901 More
More
1905 Death of Mrs Jarvis, the model for Mothers'
Day.
1915 World War I:
Second Battle of Artois – German and French forces
fought.
1918
British
troops blocked the Germans at Ostend,
Belgium.
1918
Bolshevik troops opened fire on workers
protesting food shortages in the Russian town of
Kolpino.
1926
American explorer, Richard Byrd,
with Floyd Bennett, became the first person to fly over the North
Pole.
Or, so he claimed – in 1996 an examination of his diaries, indicated he had
not actually flown over the Pole.1927 The
Australian Parliament first convened in Canberra, in
the building now known as
Old Parliament House.
1936 Italy formally
annexed Ethiopia
after taking the capital Addis Ababa on May 5.
1941 World War
II: The German
submarine U-110
was captured by United Kingdom's Royal Navy.
On board was the latest Enigma cryptography machine which Allied
cryptographers later use to break coded German messages.
Enigma
machine stolen
1945 World War II: Hermann
Göring was captured by the United States Army; Norway arrested Vidkun
Quisling; the Soviet Union marked V-E Day; the
liberation of Czechoslovakia.
1946 King
Victor Emmanuel III of Italy abdicated
and was succeeded by Humbert II.
1949 Rainier III of Monaco became Prince of Monaco.
1950 Robert
Schuman presented his proposal on the creation of an organized Europe,
indispensable to the maintenance of peaceful relations. This proposal, known as
the 'Schuman declaration', was considered to be the
beginning of the creation of what is now the European
Union.
1950 Barking mad, or greedy liar (no one knows
for sure), L
Ron Hubbard published his book on Dianetics,
entitled Dianetics:
The Modern Science of Mental Health.
1955 Cold War: West
Germany joined NATO.
1956 First
ascent of Manaslu,
the world's eighth highest mountain.
1956 John
Osborne's anti-hero play, Look Back in Anger, opened in London to
mixed reviews.
1960
Reproductive rights: The Food and Drug Administration approved
the sale of the birth control pill.
1962 The Beatles signed up with Parlophone, an EMI label, after
having been turned down at Decca with
the infamous "Guitar bands are on the way out."
Wilson's
Almanac Book of Days hip list
1972 Passengers on a plane
hijacked by Palestinian Black September terrorists were freed by Israeli
commandos.
1974 Watergate
Scandal: The United
States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee opened formal and public
impeachment
hearings against President
Richard
M Nixon.
1976 German
Marxist terrorist,
Ulrike
Meinhof, was found hanged in a German jail cell,
Stuttgart, allegedly by her
own hand. She was a member of the 'Baader-Meinhof
Gang', also known as the
Red Army Faction, with
Andreas Baader. Meinhof
was widely hated and some question the circumstances of her death. During May, massive
demonstrations against the 'murder' of Meinhof were held throughout Germany.
Bombs also exploded in Nice and
Paris,
France, and at the American air base in
Frankfurt.
Timeline
A year-by-year account of the German Post-War decade of terror
1968 - '77.
1978 The body of
kidnapped Italian prime minister, Aldo Moro, was found in a car in central Rome.
1978 Ninety thousand tickets for Bob Dylan's London concerts
sold out within only eight hours.
"Dylan's 1978 tour was
dubbed as his comeback tour. He hadn't played in England since his Isle of Wight
appearance in 1969 and hadn't toured here since the famous/infamous '66 tour. It
was also dubbed the alimony tour for obvious reasons." Source
1988
Australia's
Parliament House was opened by Queen Elizabeth
II.
1991 USA:
William Kennedy Smith, nephew of Senator Edward
Kennedy, was
charged with sexual assault.
1994 Nelson
Mandela was inaugurated as South
Africa's first black president.
2002 The
38-day stand-off in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem
came to an end when the Palestinians inside agreed to have 13 suspected
militants among them deported to several different countries. The standoff had
started on April 2.
2002 In
Kaspiysk, Russia, a remote-controlled bomb exploded during a
holiday parade, killing 43 and injuring at least 130.2004 Chechen
president Akhmad
Kadyrov was killed in a land mine
bomb blast under a VIP stage during a World
War II memorial victory parade in Grozny,
Chechnya.
2005
Cardinal Joseph
Ratzinger was selected as the successor of Pope
John Paul II.
2006
Australia:
Two miners, Todd Russell
and Brant Webb, were freed
after 14 days trapped underground in a goldmine at
Beaconsfield,
Tasmania.
2006
Estonia ratified the
European
Constitution.
Tomorrow: Laura Jean Daniels had a dislocation in time
Main calendar
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Late-Night Jokes About John Ashcroft
"Our top story, in 'Threat Matrix Reloaded' news ... Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Muller held a press conference today to announce that Al Qaeda is planning attacks somewhere inside the United States at sometime in the future. So go about your normal lives, but with a vague sense of foreboding." —Craig Kilborn
"Ashcroft went on to say that our way of life is being threatened by a group of radical religious fanatics who are armed and dangerous. And then he called for prayers in the schools and an end to gun control." —Jay Leno
"Why does listening to John Ashcroft make me feel like the world has already ended? If we're going to be warned about terrorism, can't it be by someone who actually makes us want to live?" —Jon Stewart, on Ashcroft's announcement that America's terror alert level had been raised from yellow to orange
"According to USA Today, President Bush was very annoyed with Attorney General John Ashcroft for overstating the danger of that dirty bomb incident, like today when Ashcroft called it the biggest threat to America since those naked statues." —Jay Leno
"Yesterday, Attorney General John Ashcroft had surgery to remove his gall bladder. Doctors say the surgery was difficult because Ashcroft refused to take his clothes off." —Conan O'Brien
"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
"Attorney General John Ashcroft has been hospitalized. I believe he is suffering from homophobia. No, actually, it was just gallstones, but when they gave him the hospital gown that opens in the back, he refused to wear it, he thought it was a gay wedding dress." —Jay Leno
"Attorney General John Ashcroft was admitted Thursday to the intensive care unit of a Washington hospital for gallstone pancreatitis. While he was there, doctors may also try to remove the stick from his butt." —Tina Fey
"It was quite a Superbowl show, if you think about it. There was a streaker, Janet Jackson's breast was exposed and then Kid Rock wore an American flag as a poncho. You know, I'm surprised John Ashcroft's head didn't explode." —Jay Leno
"A lot of people are now criticizing Attorney General John Ashcroft for his policy on detaining what he considers suspicious people. I think he's going a little overboard. Today, he arrested the entire band Foreigner." —Jay Leno
"On Monday, Attorney General John Ashcroft issued a terrorism warning, asking all Americans to be on the high alert this week. Then on Friday, he announced that the period of high alert would be extended indefinitely. I think I speak for all Americans when I say, 'Bitch, I can't be any more alert than I already am. Okay?' I'm opening my mail with salad tongs. I take my passport in the shower with me. I am watching so much CNN, I am having sex dreams about Wolf Blitzer." —Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live's "Weekend Update"
"Attorney General John Ashcroft said there is a new credible terrorist threat. He said everything is under control; not to panic. And then he went back to his
hermetically sealed bunker." —Jay Leno
"President Bush delivered his first State of the Union address, riding high on an 82-percent approval rating, and with Attorney General John Ashcroft dispatching agents to interview the other 18 percent." —Daily Show host Jon Stewart
Source
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
|
reetings from Australia.
How it works
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.
