|
Leonids meteor
showers (Nov 12 - 23
annually)
The celestial lightshow peaks on November 17
and we'll have more on that day.
Feast day of St Albertus
Magnus (Albert the Great; Albert of Cologne)
Albertus Magnus (1193?
- November 15,
1280)
was a
Dominican friar noted for his learning and
also his belief in the peaceful coexistence of science and religion.
Widely considered the greatest German philosopher and theologian of
the
Middle Ages, he was the first medieval
scholar to apply
Aristotle's philosophy to Christian
thought at the time. However, the term 'magnus' is not
descriptive; it is the
Latin
equivalent of his family name, de Groot.
More
Feast day of St Gurias
Feast day of St Hugh
Faringdon
Feast day of St John Eynon
Feast day of St John Rugg
Feast
day of St John Thorne
Feast day of St Leopold
Leopold III (1073
- November
15, 1136),
Margrave
of Austria
from 1095
- 1136,
also known as Saint Leopold, patron
saint of Austria in general and of Vienna,
Lower
Austria and jointly with St Florian
of Upper
Austria in particular. Today is a school
holiday in Vienna, Lower Austria and Upper Austria.
Feast day of St Malo (Machutus;
Maclou), first Bishop of
Aleth in Brittany
Born in England, Malo was sent to
Ireland for education. He was later offered a bishopric but declined
it. He became bishop of Aleth, Brittany and died in November, 565.
Feast day of St Philip the Apostle and the beginning
of Winter Lent, Eastern Orthodoxy
Feast day of St Richard
Whiting
Shop Saints
Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days
Egyptian day (dies egypticus, dies ægypticus or
dies mala), unlucky day in
Medieval Europe. ("But, notwithstanding, I will trust the Lord"
was the associated saying.)
Mid-November, Sukagawa Taimatsu, Sukagawa, Fukushima, Japan
A fire festival anticipating the coming of winter. Thirty massive torches, each 10 metres tall and about 3 tons in weight, are lit to the rhythms of
taiko drums.
Elephant Round-Up, Surin,
Thailand
"Internationally famous, this annual event brings crowds of
visitors to the provincial city of Surin, where some 100 trained
elephants are assembled. Among the spectacular shows are elephant
football, tug-of-war between elephants and men, demonstrations of
log-pulling skills and a spectacular parade of elephants outfitted
for medieval warfare."
Source
Herring
Festival, Etaples, France
"Etaples celebrates the herring. Fishermen and cooks dressed in
local costume serve the fish, available smoked or grilled. Packed
with protein and goodness, they are extremely filling, so you'd do
well to pace yourself.
"The festival's aim is to encourage
visitors to appreciate the fish, which has been caught off the
French coast since the 11th century."
SourceWuwuchim
(Hopi) Fire Ceremony (Nov 5 - 21)
Kitano
Odori, Kyoto, Japan (Nov 1 - 15)
International day of the Indian
Declared by World Council of Indigenous Peoples in 1997.
Shichi-Go-San
(Shichigosan; '7-5-3') ceremony, Japan
Shich-Go-San literally means 'seven-five-three'; the ceremony is
performed in families who have daughters of seven, sons of five, and
sons and daughters of three years of age. The children are taken to
shrines to drive out evil spirits and
receive the blessings of the deities. It's one of the few
occasions these days on which Japanese women wear the kimono.
Chitoseame, literally 'thousand year
candy', is given to children on Shichi-Go-San. Chitoseame is long,
thin, red and white candy, which symbolizes and ensures healthy
growth and longevity. It is given in a bag with a
crane and a
turtle on it, which are also symbols of
long life, as well as pines, bamboo and
ume.
Holidays of Japan
Republic Proclamation Day, Brazil
Independence Day, Palestine
(declared
1988)
America
Recycles Day,
USA
King's day,
Belgium
Not an official holiday, but some state
institutions are closed
On which day of the week were you born? Find out here
1397 Pope
Nicholas V
 1535
Possible date of birth of
Giambattista della
Porta (date of birth uncertain; Wikipedia says he lived 1538 - 1615),
Italian magus, author (Natural Magick), physician, scientist
and playwright.
Della
Porta worked on
cryptography and also on optics. He claimed to be the inventor of
the telescope although he does not appear to have constructed one
before Galileo. Thanks
to della Porta's idea of inserting a lens into the opening of the
camera obscura, the camera obscura became far
more popular, so della Porta is an important pioneer in the
development of photography.
Della Porta established the Accademia
dei Segreti (or Academia secretorum naturae) in the
mid-late 1570s. Meeting in his home in Naples, it was
founded on the model of the classical literary academies, and
devoted itself to discussion and study of the secrets of Nature. The Academia was suspected of dabbling in the occult and Della
Porta was summoned to Rome by Pope
Paul V. The Society was closed down by the Inquisition
but Della Porta defended and justified his search for truth in
nature.
His most famous work, first published in 1558,
entitled Natural Magic, was expanded into 20
books in 1584 and translated from Latin into several European
languages.
His private museum was visited by travellers and was
one the earliest examples of natural history museums, inspiring the
Jesuit Athanasius Kircher to begin a similar
collection in Rome. The remarkable Porta died
on February 4,
1615.
"For many years the date of
Della Porta's birth was, owing to his own mis-statements, a
controversial subject, providing material for numerous little
scholarly notes and articles and resulting in the
playwright-scientist's being considered in some quarters a
monster of unscientific inaccuracy, and in others a congenital
liar. The preface to the first edition of Magiae
naturalis gives an impression of experience and wisdom,
but in the preface to the second edition of 1589, Della Porta
stated that he was then fifty and that he had first published the
book at fifteen. The earliest known edition, however, is
that of 1558. In 1612 he wrote not [sic] Cardinal Borromeo that
his Taumatologia contained the labors of seventy-seven
years. Della Porta was, in fact, seventy-seven at this time, but
since even Hercules could hardly have begun such intellectual
labors in the cradle, some scholars have been misled by his
statement to think he was eighty-five when he died in 1615, a
misconception carelessly launched by Prince Cesi in 1625. Even
the date of his death was temporarily cast in doubt by a
stonecutter's error in lettering the family tomb. Such
discrepancies and the equivocation of Della Porta's own account
are responsible for Gabrieli's and Duchesne's dating his birth
1538 and 1545, respectively, and for Guiscardi's dating his
death 1610. Now that Gioacchino Paparelli has persuasively
marshaled the arguments for dating Della Porta's birth between
October 3 and November 15, 1535, there remains in question only
the reason for the mystery. It is likely that Della Porta's
conflicting statements about his age were dictated less by
forgetfulness or sheer inability to tell the truth than by his
instinct for showmanship in presenting an image of himself to
the world, and in part by the necessity of self-defense. He
loved secrets and ceremony, enjoyed mystifying the public, and
cultivated a remarkable variety of interests, some of which were
frowned on by the Inquisition. Had the Holy Office not
threatened, or had he not felt the Renaissance urge to be, or at
least seem to be, simultaneously as many things as possible, he
might have spared himself his unsynchronized attempts to appear
now more precocious, now more mature than he actually was." Source
More on Porta
More
Yet more
1708 William Pitt, 1st Earl of
Chatham (d. 1778), English politician
1730
Friedrich Wilhelm Augustus Steuben, Baron von
Steuben (d. November 28,
1794),
considered one of the founding spirits of the United States
Army. He was a German army officer
who served with George
Washington in the American
Revolutionary War and is credited with teaching American
troops the essentials of military drill and discipline.
1731
William Cowper
(d. April
25, 1800),
English poet
and hymnodist,
co-author with John
Newton of Olney Hymns (sources differ as to Cowper's
date of birth)
1738 William Herschel (d. August 25, 1822), German-born
astronomer
and composer
who became famous for discovering the planet Uranus; brother of Caroline
Herschel, 'first lady of astronomy'
1741 Johann Kaspar Lavater (d. 1801), philosopher
 1778 The Great Belzoni, Giovanni Battista Belzoni
(d. December 3, 1823), larger than life showman
extraordinaire, who died of dysentery in Guinea, after
attempting to travel to Tombouctou, often
called Timbuctu or Timbuktu, a city on the Niger
River in the West African country of Mali.
The explorer of Egypt and its antiquities was
born the 14th child of a poor barber in Padua, Italy.
Before becoming a famous traveller, he was a barber, a Capuchin monk,
magician, and a strongman
in a circus. For years he learned hydraulic engineering and
worked as a merchant trader. When Napoleon
invaded his native land in 1798, Giovanni fled. In 1802, the
178cm (6'7") tall Belzoni adventurer moved to London where he was
employed as a circus strongman called the 'Patagonian Samson', and
later earned the name 'The Great Belzoni'.
In Cork, Ireland in 1812, he promised to cut a man's head off and
put it back on again, but never quite got round to it.
By a
stroke of good fortune, Belzoni met up with a British Consul-General
named Henry Salt who persuaded him to gather Egyptian treasures to
send back to the
British
Museum. Although he can
well be described as a tomb plunderer, he is perhaps the most
important and yet least remembered explorer and archaeologist of the
last two centuries. Under extremely adverse conditions he
transported the colossal granite head of Rameses
II from Thebes to England, where it is now one of the treasures
of the British Museum.
 Abu Simbel and Valley of the Kings
Belzoni went on to excavate the
great temple of Abu Simbel.
He discovered six major royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings,
including that of Seti I, and brought to the British Museum a
spectacular collection of Egyptian antiquities. He was the first
person to penetrate the heart of the second pyramid at Giza and the
first European to visit the oasis of Siwah and discover the ruined
city of Berenice on the Red Sea. He stumbled into the tomb of
King Ay, but only noted a wall painting of 12 baboons, leading him
to name the chamber 'Tomb of the 12 Monkeys' – because
hieroglyphs had not yet been deciphered, he usually had no idea who
or what he had found.
On his return to London, Belzoni
mounted an exhibition based on the tomb of Seti I and it was hugely
successful. The publisher John Murray encouraged Belzoni to produce
his Narrative of the
Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the Pyramids, Temples,
Tombs, and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia, consisting
of a volume of text and a volume of magnificent plates. His
exhibitions and best-selling memoirs
made him a major celebrity in Regency London, where he was a huge
influence on the vogue for Egyptian style in art, design and
architecture.
His
love of writing graffiti on monuments led to the grandeur of many
Egyptian antiquities being marred by the name 'Belzoni' written
upon them. However, although Belzoni has been vilified as a
treasure hunter, there is little doubt that his enthusiasm and
energy intensified the level of inquiry into Egypt's antiquity.
Belzoni, Mississippi, USA was named for Belzoni; it was originally
known as 'Greasy Row' because of the row of saloons along the
bank of the Yazoo River.
The Great Belzoni : The Circus
Strongman Who Discovered Egypt's Ancient Treasures
Adventures of Belzoni
Belzoni's travels : narrative of the operations and
recent discoveries in Egypt and Nubia
1784 Jerome Bonaparte (d. 1860), French
King of Westphalia
1825
Sarah Jane
Woodson Early (d. August,
1907), African-American feminist,
educator, temperance activist and author
More
1859 Christopher Hornsrud (d. 1960), Norweigen
Prime Minister
1862 Gerhart Hauptmann (d. 1946), narrator and
dramatist (play Before
Dawn); recipient of
the 1912
Nobel Prize in literature
1879 Lewis
Stone (d. 1953), actor
1881 Franklin Pierce Adams (d.
1960), American
newspaper columnist
1882 Felix Frankfurter (d. 1965), United States Supreme Court
justice (1939 -
62)
1887 Marianne Moore (d. 1972),
US poet who won the Pulitzer Prize for Collected Poems, 1951. Her often-quoted advice was that poets should present imaginary gardens with real toads in them.
| On
Moore's Life and Career | A
Moore Chronology | On
'Poetry' | On
'The Fish' | On
'Sojourn in the Whale' | On
'A Grave' | On
'Silence' | On
'Marriage' | On
'An Octopus' | On
'No Swan So Fine' | On
'The Pangolin' | On
'Bird-Witted' | On
'The Paper Nautilus' | On
'Spenser's Ireland' | On
'Peter' | On
'An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish' | Moore's
Use of Quotation in 'Marriage' and 'An Octopus' |
1887 Georgia O'Keeffe (d. 1986), painter
Georgia O'Keeffe Museum
1889 King Manuel II of Portugal (d. 1932)
1890
Richmal Crompton,
British writer, best known for her
Just William humorous short stories
1891 Averell Harriman (d. 1986), American businessman
and politician
1891 Erwin Rommel (d. 1944),
German field marshal, commander of the Afrika Korps
1895 Antoni Słonimski (d. 1976), Polish
poet and writer
1899 Iskander Mirza (d. 1969), first President of Pakistan
1905
Mantovani
(Annunzio Paolo Mantovani;
d. 1980),
Italian composer, musician, music arranger
1906 Curtis LeMay (d. 1990), United States Air Force general,
candidate for Vice President of the
United States
1925 Howard Baker, former Senator from Tennessee,
former White House Chief of Staff
1925 Heinz Piontek, German writer
1929 Ed
Asner, actor
1930 J.G Ballard, science fiction author
1931 Pascal Lissouba, Republic of the Congo politician | reetings from Australia.
How it works
Leopoldstag
(also called Goose Day; Leopoldi Tag)
