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 Feast day of St Ceelict
(Callistus I; St Calixtus), pope and martyr
(Indian fleabane, Inula indica, is
today's plant,
dedicated to this saint.)
Patron of
cemetery workers. Commemorated on the same day as Battle of
Hastings Day (see below, 1066). Browne Willis tells us there was once a
tablet in the parish church at Battle,
a town in East
Sussex, England,
with these words:
This place of war is Battle called, because in battle here
Quite conquered and o'erthrown the English nation were.
This slaughter happened to them upon St Ceelict's day.
"Born a slave,
owned by Carpophorus, a Christian of the household of Caesar.
His master entrusted a large sum to Callistus to open a bank,
which took in several deposits, made several loans to people who
refused to pay them back, and went broke. Knowing he would be
personally blamed and punished, Callistus fled, but was caught
and returned to his owner. Several depositors begged for his
life, believing he had not lost the money, but had stolen and
hid it. They were wrong; he wasn't a thief, just a victim, but
he was sent to the tin mines. By a quirk of Roman law, the
ownership of Callistus was transferred from Carpophorus to the
state, and when he was later ransomed out with a number of other
Christians, he became a free man. Pope Saint Zephyrinus put
Callistus in charge of the Roman public burial grounds, today
still called the Cemetery of Saint Callistus. Archdeacon. 16th
Pope. Most of what we know about him has come down to us from
his critics, including an anti-Pope of the day."
Source
Apaturia, ancient Greece
(Oct 14 - 16)
Meeting of the clans;
festival of family reunion.
Source: The Phoenix
and Arabeth 1992 Calendar
Feast day of St Angadrisma
Feast day of St Burchard
(Birckard; Burkard), first bishop of Wurtzburg
Feast day of St Donatian,
Bishop of Rheims and patron of Brussels
Feast day of St Gaudentius
of Rimini
Feast day of St Petca
Paraskeva
Petca dressed poor people in her
expensive clothes, which led to her patronage of people involved in
spinning and needlework.
Shop Saints
Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days
Ram Mating Ceremony,
Anatolia, Turkey (Oct 1 - 20)
Doburoku
(unrefined sake) Festival, Shirakawago, Gifu Prefecture, Japan (Oct
14 -19)
Doburoku
is a harvest festival in which visitors to the shrines in the area
are treated to the local doboroku, a milky-white and slightly
sweet home-brewed sake.
Doburoku is created by adding steamed rice at the end of
fermentation, starting a second fermentation and raising the alcohol
level.
"In the Battle of Dannoura
during the late Heian period (1185), the Heike army was overcome
by Minamoto and his clan. The defeated general Heike went on to
establish a settlement that became known as Shirakawa Village. The
residents of Shirakawa were highly refined folk, resulting in a
culture and lifestyle highly unique to the area. One defining
characteristic of their lifestyle was the effort made to avoid
contact with surrounding regions.
"Consequently, these people
placed much emphasis on the enjoyment that could be had drinking
sake. It is uncertain as to the time when people began to make 'doburoku',
the local sake of the region. However as time passed, it was used
without fail in festivals to honor and pay gratitude to the
mountain gods, a tradition that has survived until this day.
"'Doburoku'is another word
for 'unrefined sake', since it not filtered like standard
brews. Despite originally being made of barnyard grass or millet,
doburoku now employs rice as its standard ingredient and is brewed
in shrine distilleries during the heavy snow of January. During
September and October every year, the Doburoku Matsuri is held at
5 shrines throughout the Shirakawa area, attracting large numbers
of residents and tourists alike.
"Since in this case sake is customarily drunk when paying homage
to gods, visitors are only permitted to drink within the shrine
and its precincts. A special brew of sake is prepared for this
occasion, the ingredients and brewing process of which remain a
tightly kept secret. For 300 yen, a visitor can purchase a sake
cup and enjoy 'all-you-can-drink' sake at the Doburoku Matsuri.
Side attractions also feature, taking place in the precincts of
the shrine concerned. Though the session only lasts
approximately 1 hour, it is more than enough time to take in the
atmosphere of such an exciting event!"
Source
President's Day, Zaire
World Standards Day (from ISO,
IEC,
ITU)
World Organ Donation Day
Teachers'
Day, or National Education Day, Poland
On which day of the week were you born? Find out here
1257
King Przemysl
II of Poland (d. 1296)
1493
Shimazu
Tadayoshi (d. 1568),
Japanese warlord
1499
Claude
of France (d. 1524),
wife of Louis
XII of France
1574
Anne
of Denmark (d. 1619),
wife of James
I of England and VI of Scotland
1630 Sophia of Hanover
1633 James II of England and VII of
Scotland (d. September 16,
1701),
whose subjects distrusted his religious policies and alleged
despotism, leading a group of them to depose him in the Glorious
Revolution
"From the time
of James II up to the birth of Princess Margaret, at least one
member of the government -
and sometimes the entire Privy Council, along with the Archbishop of
Canterbury and other dignitaries -
had to witness the birth of a royal child. This was to establish
beyond doubt the maternity of the new heir."
Cawthorne, Nigel, The Sex
Lives of the Kings and Queens of England, quoted in Reid,
Stuart, "Royal Humbuggery", The Independent Monthly,
April 1995, p. 27
1644 William Penn (d. 1718), English
founder of the American Quaker colony of Pennsylvania
 1797
Ida
Pfeiffer (Ida Laura Pfeiffer; d. October 28,
1858), Viennese-born world traveller and author (A
Visit to Iceland and the Scandinavian North; A
Woman's Journey Around the World) who wrote 13 books from
her seven journeys around the world, visiting such countries as
Egypt, Iraq, Brazil, Iceland, Tahiti, China, Madagascar and India.
On her travels, Pfeiffer collected insects and reptiles; these and other souvenirs she sold back in Vienna, with which to finance further journeys. Her best-sellers were translated into seven languages
and showed a dry humour.
On one of her journeys, the remarkable adventuress was attacked by cannibals, fending them off alone with an umbrella. Both she and an aggressor were wounded in the incident and after this experience she decided to carry a double pistol. She kept the broken-off handle of the umbrella as a trophy.
When she was in Madagascar, in May,
1857, when the island was embroiled in political turmoil, Pfeiffer became unwittingly involved in the troubles. Queen Ranavalona I punished her for this, sending Pfeiffer for 50 days through the dangerous swamplands of Madagascar up to the coast. To the queen's dismay, Pfeiffer survived, but on her return to Vienna she succumbed to fever and died in October,
1858, of 'Madagascar fever'.
Pictured below is the palace in Antananarivo,
Madagascar, of which Pfeiffer wrote:
"... the building of their wooden palace in Antananarivo cost the life
of 15,000 humans. Ringing the building 80-foot-tall (approx. 24 metres)
columns rise, bearing a tent-like roof, whose peak is at 120 feet (approx. 40 meters). All these columns had to be brought here out
from forests 60 miles away. Since the way was almost impassable, one must rank the building of this palace among the miracles of the world."
"She continued
on to Baghdad in Mesopotamia (today's Iraq) where she joined a
camel caravan for a 300-mile journey across the desert to the
city of Mosul and then to Tabriz in northern Persia. The British
consul stationed in Tabriz was amazed to see her. He didn't
think it possible for a woman to travel alone in that part of
the world without even knowing local languages." Source
"Ida inherited a considerable fortune from her father, and it was probably with the idea of her contracting a splendid alliance that she was thwarted in her present wishes. But though many other eligible suitors proffered themselves, she would listen to none of them, and the result was a sad series of domestic contentions.
'Worn out at last by importunity, she consented to receive the proposals of Dr. Pfeiffer, an advocate of considerable celebrity in Lemberg, but twenty four years older than herself, and a widower with a grown up son. He was a man of the highest honour and integrity, almost too much so, as would seem from his subsequent history; and
though there was never any profound feeling of sympathy between him and his wife, he treated her throughout with the most uniform kindness and attention. But his resolute denunciation of abuses stirred him up many enemies, and he was obliged to resign his appointment of counsellor at Lemberg, and remove to Vienna, where from being looked on by the authorities with suspicion, as an enemy of existing institutions, the same star of ill fortune pursued him, and he was soon reduced to great straits. His generosity also was excessive, rendering him the dupe of numerous individuals, who borrowed large sums of money from him, including his wife's fortune, which was lent to a friend in pecuniary embarrassment, and entirely lost. The distress to which his family was subjected in consequence of these acts of improvidence is thus stated by Madame Pfeiffer.
 "'Heaven only knows what I suffered during eighteen years of my married life not, indeed, from any ill treatment on my husband's
part, but from poverty and want! I came of a wealthy family, and
had been accustomed, from my earliest youth, to order and
comfort; and now I frequently knew not where I should lay my
head, or find a little money to buy the commonest necessaries. I
performed household drudgery, and endured cold and hunger; I
worked secretly for money, and gave lessons in drawing and
music; and yet, in spite of all my exertions, there were many
days when I could hardly put anything but dry bread before my
poor children for their dinner. I might certainly have applied
to my mother or my brothers for relief, but my pride revolted
against such a course. For years I fought with poverty, and
concealed my real position: often was I brought so near to
despair, that the thought of my children alone prevented me from
giving way. At last the urgency of my necessities quite broke my
spirit, and I had recourse several times to my brothers for
assistance.'
"Perseverance and self denial enabled Madame Pfeiffer to struggle through her difficulties, give her two sons a good education, and see
them prosperously established in the world. She was now at liberty to indulge that darling wish of her heart, the desire of seeing strange countries, which had haunted her from girlhood, but which circumstances had hitherto prevented her from gratifying. The feeling may indeed be regarded as eccentric, which could prompt the mother of a family, at the age of forty five, and almost wholly inexperienced in travelling, to set forth on such an expedition. But she quitted no duties at home to embark on it, and as she had so bravely fulfilled these in the day of privation and trial, she may well be excused for following her own inclinations afterwards, when the doing so involved no dereliction of maternal or conjugal obligations. The funds which she possessed were by no means ample, but adversity had taught her economy, and her own nature was one that shrank not from hardship and privation. Her first journey was a visit to the Holy Land, which she accomplished in 1842, proceeding down the Danube to the Black Sea and Constantinople, thence to Syria and Palestine, and returning by way of Egypt, Sicily, and Italy."
Robert
Chambers, (Ed.), The
Book of Days:
A miscellany of popular antiquities in connection with the
calendar, etc,
W & R Chambers, London, 1881 (1879
Edition is online and 1869
edition here with CD-ROM available; See also The
English Year: A Personal Selection from Chambers's Book of
Days)
Project Gutenberg Titles by
Pfeiffer, Ida Shop
Ida Pfeiffer More
And more
1857 Elwood Haynes,
American inventor and automobile
pioneer
1861 Artur Gavazzi
(d. 1944), Croatian
geographer
1879 Miles
Franklin (Stella Martin Sara Miles Franklin; d. September
19, 1954), Australian
best-selling author (My
Brilliant Career), 'discovered' by Henry Lawson,
who contributed a preface and took it to his own publishers in
Edinburgh when he was in the UK.
Franklin was born at Talbingo,
New
South Wales and grew up in the Brindabella
Valley. Shortly after the publication of My Brilliant Career,
Franklin wrote a sequel, My
Career Goes Bung, which would not be published until
1946.
In 1906,
Franklin moved to the USA
and undertook secretarial work for Alice
Henry, another Australian, at the
Women's Trade Union
League in Chicago, and co-edited the league's magazine, Life and
Labor.
In her will, she
bequeathed her estate to establish an annual literary award known as
the Miles
Franklin Award. A revival of interest in Franklin occurred
in the wake of the celebrated Australian New Wave film
My
Brilliant Career. In this 1979
film adaptation, Sybylla was played by Judy
Davis and Harry by Sam
Neill. The film was directed by Gillian
Armstrong and produced by Margaret
Fink. It won numerous awards and was nominated for an Academy
Award for Costume Design.
"However, Mr Brunton says Miles Franklin did not have a life without romance.
"'There were a great many romances – in Australia and America – she was in fact a flirt all her life and a most engaging one at that.'
"Mr Brunton says at one stage Banjo Patterson even proposed.
"'She arranged for Henry Lawson to publish or help publish
My Brilliant Career and on its publication AB Patterson fell rather smitten with Miles and it's believed he proposed marriage,' he said.
"'He certainly proposed a South Pacific cruise.
"'But she had
other suitors in Australia, in America, many suitors in Chicago all
of whom were either rich, very rich or disgustingly rich but she
rejected all of these of course for a single life.'
"On publication of
My Brilliant Career Miles Franklin became a celebrity, it was reviewed well by the critics and sold well but it was not what she wanted.
"'First of all the title she wanted was
My Brilliant? Career, which of course changes the whole tone of the novel,' Mr Brunton said.
"'Second of all Henry Lawson wrote a preface to the novel, in which he blew her cover, and told everyone she was a young bush girl when she said she wanted to be a
"bald headed steer of the sterner sex".
"'Of course she thought that if people thought she was a man the book would be reviewed better.
"'Thirdly,
because it was published in Britain they toned down her
Australianisms, which she was very upset about, so it wasn't quite
the book she had wanted published.'
"Despite
critical acclaim for her novel Miles Franklin was only paid 25
pounds for her efforts."
Source
[I
think it's likely my erudite friend Paul Brunton, Manuscripts
Librarian at Sydney's Mitchell Library, was somewhat misquoted in
this interview about a Miles Franklin exhibition he was curating
at the National Library in Canberra in May, 2005. Paul would know
that Miles didn't "arrange" for Henry Lawson to to "publish or help publish
My Brilliant Career". The unknown teenage Franklin wrote
to the famous Lawson and he replied from Chaplin Cottage, Charles
St, North Sydney on December 29, 1899 (beginning "Mr M.
Franklin, Dear sir ..." and an apology for his tardy reply,
saying "Send your yarn and I'll read it and tell you what I
think of it". Young Miss Franklin had obviously written to the
great Lawson hoping he would read her novel and was in no position
to arrange anything. Ensuing Lawson correspondence with Franklin, David Scott
Mitchell and George
Robertson shows Lawson's enthusiasm for the novel and his
efforts to have it published, at a time that he himself was
feeling the pangs of destitution. Follow the interesting
correspondence in Colin Roderick, Henry Lawson Letters
1890-1922, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1970, pp 110 ff.]
Works
by Miles Franklin at Project
Gutenberg Miles
Franklin: A Brilliant Career?
(PDF file)Lawson
& Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson
AB 'Banjo'
Paterson
A
Miles Franklin chronology PDF
View
as HTML More
1882 Eamon de Valera (d. 1975), American-born Irish patriot, Irish Republic
prime minister and its first president
 1884 Lala
Har Dayal (Hardayal; Hardyal; d.
March 4, 1939), Indian
revolutionary and scholar dedicated to the removal of British
influence in India. Har
Dayal graduated from the Government College, Lahore (University of
the Punjab). On a government of India scholarship to St. John's
College at Oxford, he became a supporter of the Indian revolutionary
movement. In March, 1914, he was arrested by US immigration
authorities for his undesirable activities. Released on bail, he
fled to Switzerland and then to Berlin, where he tried to foment an
anti-British rising in north-western India.
1888
Katherine Mansfield
(d. January
9, 1923),
New
Zealand-born author.
From Wikipedia:
Born into a socially-prominent Wellington,
New Zealand family, Beauchamp moved to London
in 1902.
A talented cellist, she was not at first attracted to literature,
and after finishing her schooling in England,
she returned to her New
Zealand home in 1906.
Weary of the provincial New Zealand lifestyle, Beauchamp returned to
London two years later.
It was upon her return to London that
Kathleen Beauchamp began writing short stories and entered London's
cultural circles, where she met such contemporaries as DH
Lawrence and Virginia
Woolf. Her work drew the attention of several publishing houses,
and Beauchamp took on the pen-name Katherine Mansfield upon the
publication of her first collection of short stories, In a German
Pension, in 1911.
Discouraged by the volume's lack of
success, Mansfield met and moved in with her future husband, fellow
writer John
Middleton Murry. Though she continued writing between her first
and second collections (Prelude, 1918), she rarely published
her work, and sank into depression. Her health declined further when
she contracted tuberculosis
in 1917.
It was while combating the disease in health spas across Europe,
that Mansfield began writing the works for which she would become best known.
'Miss Brill', the bittersweet story of a
fragile woman living in an ephemeral life of observation and simple
pleasures in Paris,
established Mansfield as one of the pre-eminent writers of the Modernist
period, upon its publication in 1920's
Bliss. The title story from that collection, 'Bliss',
which involved a similar character facing her husband's infidelity,
also found critical acclaim. She followed with the equally praised
collection, The Garden Party, published in 1922.
Mansfield spent her last years at the Institute
for the Harmonious Development of Man in Fontainebleau,
France,
where she continued to write despite her failing health. After
publishing an additional two volumes, one of poetry, and the other
short stories, Mansfield succumbed to tuberculosis shortly after her
thirty-fourth birthday. She was buried in a cemetery in the
Fontainebleau District in the town of Avon.
1890 Dwight D Eisenhower (d. 1969), US General
of the Army, 34th president of the United
States, commander of the Allied invasion in
World War
II
1893 Lillian Gish (d. 1993),
actress (The
Birth of a
Nation)
1894
ee cummings (Edward Estlin
Cummings; d. 1962),
American poet,
famous not only for his skills as a poet, but for using neither capitals
nor punctuation
mOOn Over tOwns mOOn
whisper
less creature huge grO
pingness¡@
whO perfectly whO
flOat
newly alOne is
dreamest¡@
oNLY THE MooN o
VER ToWNS
SLoWLY SPoUTING SPIR
IT
1904 Christian Pineau, French
World War II resistance fighter
1906 Hannah Arendt, German
political
theorist
1906 Hassan al Banna, founder of Muslim Brotherhood movement.
1908 Allan
Jones (d. 1992), actor, singer
1911 Le
Duc Tho (d. 1990), Nobel Peace Prize recipient
1916 C Everett Koop, United States Surgeon Ge |
reetings from Australia.
How it works
Vinternatsblót/Haustblót/Winter's
Day, Norse
(Viking/Ásatrú)
