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reetings from Australia.
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Farewell, my children, forever. I am going to your father. Last words of French Queen Marie
Antoinette, who was executed on October 16,
1793
Some cause happiness wherever
they go; others, whenever they go. Oscar Wilde, Irish
playwright, novelist and poet, born on October 16, 1854
Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes. Oscar Wilde
A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not even worth glancing at.
Oscar Wilde
I think I am rather more than a Socialist. I am something of an Anarchist, I believe.
Oscar Wilde
Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man's original virtue.
Oscar Wilde
Always forgive your enemies – nothing annoys them so much. Oscar Wilde
Work is the curse of the drinking classes. Oscar
Wilde
Oscar Wilde
I like talking to a brick wall, it's the only thing in the world that never contradicts me. Oscar Wilde; Lady Windermere's Fan, 1892
We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars. Oscar Wilde; ibid
To lose one parent may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness. Oscar Wilde; The Importance of Being Earnest, 1895
Misfortunes one can endure. But to suffer for one's own faults – ah! – there is the sting of life. Oscar Wilde
Fashion is merely a form of ugliness so unbearable that we are compelled to alter it ever six months. Oscar Wilde
Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. Oscar Wilde
Most modern calendars mar the sweet simplicity of our lives by reminding us that each day that passes is the anniversary of some perfectly uninteresting event. Oscar Wilde
Bigamy is having one wife too many; monogamy is the same. Oscar Wilde
Religion is the fashionable substitute for belief. Oscar Wilde
I have made an important discovery ... that alcohol, taken in sufficient quantities, produces all the effects of intoxication. Oscar Wilde
A true friend stabs you in the front. Oscar Wilde
And the wild regrets and the bloody sweats
None knew so well as I:
That he who lives more lives than one,
More deaths than one shall die. Oscar Wilde
Nowadays people know the price of everything, and the value of nothing. Oscar Wilde
The past is what man should not have been. The present is what man ought not to be. The future is what artists are. Oscar Wilde
To love yourself is the beginning of a lifelong affair! Oscar Wilde
I can resist everything except temptation. Oscar Wilde
The public is wonderfully tolerant. It forgives everything except genius. Oscar Wilde
Nowadays most people die of a sort of creeping common sense, and discover when it is too late that the only things one never regrets are one's mistakes. Oscar Wilde
A visionary is one who can find his way by moonlight, and see the dawn before the rest of the world. Oscar Wilde
[The woman's] mission is not to enhance the masculine spirit, but to express the feminine; hers is not to preserve a man-made world, but to create a human world by the infusion of the feminine element into all of its activities. Margaret Sanger (September 14, 1879 - September 6, 1966), American contraception advocate, who opened her first birth control clinic on October 16, 1916
The real hope of the world lies in putting as painstaking thought into the business of mating as we do into other big businesses. Margaret Sanger
No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother. Margaret Sanger
Diplomats make it their business to conceal the facts. Margaret Sanger
When a motherhood becomes the fruit of a deep yearning, not the result of ignorance or accident, its children will become the foundation of a new race. Margaret Sanger
There, in the middle of this mall is the Washington Monument, 555 feet high. But if we put a one in front of that 555 feet, we get 1555, the year that our first fathers landed on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia as slaves.
In the background is the Jefferson and Lincoln Memorial, each one of these monuments is 19 feet high.
Abraham Lincoln, the sixteenth president. Thomas Jefferson, the third president, and 16 and three make 19 again. What is so deep about this number 19 ? Why are we standing on the Capitol steps today? That number 19 – when you have a nine you have a womb that is pregnant. And when you have a one standing by the nine, it means that there's something secret that has to be unfolded ... Louis Farrakhan waxes incomprehensible at the Million Man March, October 16, 1995
Progress
has been slow in efforts to reach the World Food Summit goal of cutting by
half the number of the world's chronically hungry and under-nourished
people by 2015. This goal will not be met if we continue doing 'business
as usual'.
FAO estimates
that 840 million human beings on our Earth remain chronically hungry, 799
million of them in the developing world. The number has been decreasing by
barely 2.5 million per year over recent years. At that rate, we
will reach these goals one hundred years late, in 2115.
Niihama Drum Festival, Niihama,
Ehime, Japan (Oct 16 - 18) A festival going back more than three centuries. Each drum
float, or Taiko-dai, decorated with cloth woven
with gold and silver tassles,
weighs about two tons.It
is carried by teams of over 150 men called Kakifu.More than 30 drums and their
Kakifu teams parade throughout the town, and competitions are
held at three places of the city.
"Nepal: Lakshmi Puja - festival of
lights in honor of the Goddess Lakshmi."Source
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.)
Feast day of St Gall,
abbot (Yarrow,
Achillea millefolium, is
today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)
Saint Gall or Gallus (c.
550 -
c. 646) was an Irish disciple and one of the traditionally
twelve companions of St Columbanus
on his mission from Ireland
to the continent and established themselves with him at first at Luxeuil
in Gaul.
Preaching
of the
Lion Sermon, St Katharine Cree
(formerly Catherine Cree) Church, London
Each year on October 16 at
St Katharine
Cree Church, Leadenhall Street, London, a sermon used to be preached to commemorate
'the wonderful
escape' of noted fishmonger, royalist and
Lord Mayor of London
(in 1646), Sir
John Gayre (some sources give 'Gayer'), from a
lion that he met in the desert whilst travelling in
Turkey (Brewersays while shipwrecked on the coast of Africa;
some sources say Arabia).
While Sir John knelt and prayed, the lion approached and sniffed him,
circled him, then left him alone. In gratitude to God, Sir John bequeathed, by a will dated
December 19,
1648, £200 for the relief of the poor on condition that a commemorative
sermon was preached annually at the church, and this sermon
traditionally contained verses from the
Book of Daniel,
in which the prophet
Daniel was similarly spared being devoured by lions in their den.
"Sir John Gayer, Knt.,
left by will dated 19th Dec. 1648, £200 for an annual Sermon to be
preached at St Catherine Cree Church, 'in memory of his deliverance
from the paws of a lion in Arabia.' The sum of £10 is applied to the
use of this charity as follows: £1 to the minister for a sermon on
16th October; 8s. to the clerk and sexton; and £8 17s. on the same
day to the poor inhabitants."
Source
While Gayre might have
knelt before a lion,
history records that he would not kneel "as
a delinquent" before the House of Lords. However, it was for
High Treason
(charged with having "traiterously and maliciously complotted,
contrived, and actually levied War, against the King, Parliament, and
Kingdom",
source) that on
September 25,
1647, with three of his
aldermen, he
ended up a prisoner in
The Tower:
"Hereupon the Lords
ordered that Sir John Gayre Knight now Prisoner in the Tower of
London be brought to their Bar on Wednesday Morning next to receive
this Charge of High Treason and other high Crimes and Misdemeanors
brought up from the House of Commons against him and this Order to
be directed to the Lieutenant of the Tower."
Source
Feast of 'Ilm (Knowledge) – First day of the 12th
month of the Bahá'í
Calendar
Boss's
Day (Bosses Day; Bosses' Day), United States Boss's Day is a United
States secular
holiday celebrated on October 16. It has traditionally been a
day for employees to thank their superiors for being kind and fair
throughout the year. The holiday has been the source of some
controversy and criticism in the United States, where it is often
mocked as a Hallmark
Holiday.
Patricia Bays Haroski registered National
Boss's Day with the US Chamber of Commerce in 1958. She was
working for State Farm Insurance Company at the time and chose October
16 because it was the birthday of her loving boss, her father.
"Webster published his
first dictionary of the
English language in
1806, and
in 1828
published the first edition of his An American Dictionary of the
English Language, whose title reveals his ambitions. Webster
changed the spelling of many words in his dictionaries in an attempt
to make them more phonetic. Many of the differences between
American English and other English
variants evident today originated this way."Source: Wikipedia
"Today when we spell the word
'catalog' instead of 'catalogue' we can thank a crotchety, humorless man for saving the wear on our fingers, not to mention savings on paper and those obscenely expensive inkjet printer cartridges. Oct 16 marks the birth anniversary of Noah Webster (1758-1843), who compiled the 1828 American Dictionary of the English Language, the first authoritative lexicon of American English.
"Webster believed in establishing cultural independence from Britain and as such he emphasized a distinct American spelling and pronunciation. His dictionary listed various unusual and shortened spellings of the words. He would have hardly imagined how the tide would turn one day. According to reports, more British and Australian children spell
'color' instead of 'colour', for example. Webster's suggestion of using
'tung' instead of 'tongue' didn't stick, though. As he said,
'the process of a living language is like the motion of a broad
river which flows with a slow, silent, irresistible current.'"
Source
Imagine, if you will,
that the spirit of
Walt Whitman mysteriously comes to life in an
autographed first edition of his famous anthology, 'Leaves of
Grass', in Oscar Wilde's personal collection.
Imagine, too, that the ghost of Whitman
swears to make amends for a great injustice done to the Irish
playwright -- the forced auctioning of Wilde's beloved library.
Imagine that book passing through several
hands, all the while containing
the outraged soul of the American poet, who swears:
Daisy Bates and a group of
Australian indigenous women,
c. 1911
1863Daisy
Bates (Daisy May O'Dwyer; Kabbarli; d. April
18, 1951), Irish-born Australian woman who lived for
more than three decades among desert Aboriginal people in tents in
small settlements from Western Australia to the edges of the Nullarbor
Plain, notably at Ooldea
in South Australia. She was the author of The Passing of
the Aborigines (1938)
and wrote millions of words on Australia's indigenous people.
On March 13, 1884, she
married legendary Australian
horsebreaker and Bulletin
poet, Breaker
Morant, but kicked him out after he was caught stealing pigs. Or, so
it is said. She married again, this time to John Bates, a breaker of wild horses,
a bushman and drover, on February 17,
1885. The bigamous
nature of their marriage (as she was still married to Morant) was
kept secret during Bates's lifetime. She also married Ernest C
Baglehole on
June 10, 1885 at St Stephen's near Sydney. In
1933, she was created a
Commander
of the Order of the British Empire by King George
V.
Much about
Bates's life is uncertain, as it seems probable that she gave
misinformation about her early days. It was not until long after her death
that the true facts of her early life emerged. 'Kabbarli' was noted for
wearing a Victorian style of dress in and out of the cities and well into
the 20th Century. She was a friend of eccentric Sydney anthropologist Georgina King.
"From 1894 to 1899, she worked in London as a journalist while her family remained in Australia. Subsequently, she was commissioned by
The Times to return to Australia and investigate the alleged cruelty to the Aboriginal population.
"Thus began her life living amongst the Aborigines, for 26 years from 1919 to 1945, all up some 35 years."
Source
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1649New World: The colony of Maine granted religious freedom to all
citizens, on condition that those of contrary religious persuasions behave
acceptably.
"The house is said to be haunted by the ghost of a Roundhead, a soldier fighting on the side of Cromwell during the English Civil war. He appears sitting near to the fire in one of the bedrooms."
Source
1867
Australia: James Nash, from Wiltshire, England, discovered gold at Gympie,
Queensland, at the site
now occupied by the Gympie
Town Hall. Nash uncovered 75 ounces of gold in six days, staked his
claim, and the Gympie Gold Rush was on. At the time Queensland was suffering
from a severe economic depression and the discovery probably saved the colony
from bankruptcy. The lode yielded the two largest nuggets found in Queensland:
975 oz (The Curtis) and 804 oz in Sailors Gully. Over the years the Gympie field produced more than 4 million ounces of
gold, and was depleted by about 1920.
"By October 31 that year, an area of 25 square
miles around Nashville was declared the Upper Mary River Goldfields. Official
figures for 1868 show 84,792 ounces of gold was taken out.
"Nash is said to have earned 10,000 pounds in 12
months on the field in addition to the thousand-pound government reward for
finding gold." Source
"Within six months there were 15,000 men on the field. Some of the areas were, Nash's Gully, Whites Gully, Sailor's Gully, Deep Creek. I
[sic] was a common occurrence to obtain an ounce of gold in the dish and large nuggets were unearthed. The most famous nugget,
a great mass of pure gold, found by a Mr. George Curtis in February 1868, weighing 975 ounces, valued at 3,675 pounds."
Source
1869The Cardiff
Giant, one of the most famous American hoaxes, was discovered, in New York
state by workers digging a well behind the barn of William C 'Stub'
Newell in Cardiff.
It became the subject of
huge interest and debate, with some saying it was an ancient statue and others
saying it was a petrified human giant from days of old. Eventually it turned out
that the Giant was the creation of a New York tobacconist named George Hull who
spent $2,600 having the Giant carved and buried but who sold the creation for
$37,500 to a syndicate of five men headed by David Hannum. It was moved to Syracuse,
New York for exhibition.
It drew such crowds that showman PT
Barnum (1810 - 1891)
offered $60,000 for a three-month lease of it. When he was turned down he made a
plaster replica and put it on display, claiming that his was the real giant and
the Cardiff Giant was a fake. As the newspapers reported Barnum's version of the
story, David Hannum was quoted as saying, "There's a sucker born every
minute." This was in reference to the suckers paying to see Barnum's giant.
Over time, the quotation has been misattributed to PT Barnum himself.
Hannum sued Barnum and it was revealed that both giants
were fake on February
2, 1870. The
judge ruled that Barnum could not be sued for calling a fake giant a fake.
"A large (ten and a half feet tall) stone
figure of a human that was unearthed and supposed to be a fossilized man.
Supposedly discovered by a farmer, William C. Newell, on his property in upstate
New York on October 16, 1869 as he was digging a well. It had actually been
created by George Hull. Hull was a New York tobacconist who in 1866 had hired a
stone mason to carve the giant out of stone, and then had treated it to make it
appear old. He then transported it to Cardiff, New York where it was buried on
Newell's farm. Once 'discovered', it was displayed and attracted huge amounts of
attention. Finally, experts came to look at it. First came Dr. John F. Boynton
who declared it a statue made by Jesuit missionaries to impress the indians.
Then Othniel C. Marsh examined it and declared it a humbug of very recent
origin. Still the public remained fascinated, and the giant was moved to New
York City. P.T. Barnum offered to buy it, but his offer was declined. Barnum
then fashioned a copy of the giant and displayed this. The copy drew more people
than the fake due to Barnum's promotional skills. Historians suggest people
might have wanted to believe in it out of a combination of local pride and
curiosity about natural science awakened by Darwinian theory. The giant is now
on display in the Farmer's Museum in Cooperstown, New York."Source
1902 USA: Activist
Ida Craddock ('Sexual Mystic and Martyr for
Freedom'; b.
1857) slashed her wrists and
turned on the gas, killing herself in preference to returning to court for
sentencing to a mental asylum. Craddock left a
poignant suicide note in
which she strangely instructs her mother in morality. The feminist author had been found guilty of obscenity; the judge said her sex
education pamphlet 'The
Wedding Night' was too obscene to show to the jury, when in fact its real
crime was its misinformation, particularly in its 'spiritual' sexual advice
to men:
Do not expend your seminal fluid at any time, unless
you and the bride desire a child, and have reverently and deliberately prepared
for its creation on that especial occasion. Your semen is not an excretion to be
periodically gotten rid of; it is a precious secretion, to be returned to the
system for its upbuilding in all that goes to emphasize your manhood. It is
given to you by Nature for the purpose of begetting a child; it is not given to
you for sensual gratification …
"Whosoever is born of God," writes the
Apostle John, in the third chapter of his first Epistle, "doth not commit sin;
for his seed remaineth in him; and he cannot sin, because be is born of God."
… No bridal couple who have once shared the joy of a controlled orgasm and
sustained thrill with God will ever care to leave God out of the partnership in
future … Only that wedding night, only that honeymoon in which spiritual communion with
the Ultimate Force of the universe forms part and parcel of the sexual act, is
truly blest. Advice to men byIda
Craddock, American activist; 'The Wedding Night'
Voigt purchased parts of used captain's uniforms from
two different shops and tested their effect on soldiers. He had resigned from
the shoe factory ten days previously. He took the uniform out of baggage
storage, put it on and took a train to
Köpenick,
east of Berlin.
In Köpenick,
he went to the local army barracks, stopped four grenadiers
and a sergeant
on their way back to barracks and told them to come with him. Indoctrinated to
obey officers without question, they followed. He dismissed the commanding
sergeant to report to his superiors and later commandeered 6 more grenadiers
from a shooting range. Then he took the soldiers to the Köpenick city
hall and told them to cover all exits.
He had the town secretary, Rosenkranz, and mayor
Georg Langerhans arrested for suspicions of crooked bookkeeping
and confiscated 4000 marks and 70 pfennigs – with a receipt, of course. Then he
commandeered two carriages and told the grenadiers to take the mayor and the treasurer,
Wiltberg, to Berlin to General Moltke for interrogation. He told the remaining
guards to stand in their places for half an hour and then left for the railway
station. In the train, he changed to civilian
clothes and slipped out.
In the following days, the German press speculated on
what had really happened. At the same time, the army ran its own investigation.
The public seemed to be positively amused by the daring of the culprit.
Voigt was arrested on October
26, and on December
1 sentenced to four years in prison for forgery, impersonating an officer
and wrongful imprisonment. However, much of the public opinion was on his side.
German Kaiser Wilhelm IIpardoned him on
August
16, 1908. There
are some claims that even the kaiser had been amused by the incident.
1916 Margaret Sanger (1879 -
1966), American contraception advocate, with Ethel Byrne, opened her first birth control clinic in Brooklyn, New York. Sanger spent 30 days in jail for this, convicted of creating a public nuisance and violating the
Comstock Law, which prohibited distribution of contraceptives.
Margaret Sanger coined the term
'birth control' and made the cause a worldwide
movement. Born in Corning, New York, she went
on to found the American Birth Control League, which later became Planned
Parenthood.
1949Nikos Zakhiariadis, leader of the Communist Party of Greece, announced a
"temporary cease-fire to prevent the complete annihilation of Greece",
effectively marking the end of the Greek
Civil War.
1978
Karol Józef Wojtyła was elected
Pope
John Paul II. He was the first
non-Italian pope since 1542.
Papal succession lore
When
a pope dies, the papal secretary from the
Prefecture of the Pontifical Household is required to call out his name three times
before he is officially declared dead. In the
19th Century, the secretary
also had to tap the corpse on the head with a silver hammer. His 'Fisherman's Ring', given to him at his coronation, is broken. His papal
seal is also destroyed.
In
1272, the cardinals took nearly three years to elect a new pope. Exasperated,
angry Catholics locked them up in a room till they came to a decision. The
practice has continued ever since. After a pope is elected, the outside world is
informed by puffs of white smoke issuing from a chimney above the sealed room,
indicating the cardinals have burnt their ballot papers. Black smoke indicates
they have been unable to agree on a successor to the deceased pope.
John May, The Book of Curious Facts,
Collins and Brown, London, UK, 1993, pp 50-1
1987
Paramedic and fireman, Robert O'Donnell, rescued baby
Jessica McClure from a
well in the backyard of her
Midland, Texas, USA home (she had fallen in on October
14). O'Donnell became a
national celebrity but, unable to handle life after the attention died down, he
shot himself dead on April 23, 1995.
1991
Unemployed sailor, George Hennard, 35, crashed his pick-up truck through the
front of Luby's Cafeteria, Killeen,
Texas, USA, and systematically
opened fire on the lunchtime crowd, killing 24. He finally turned the gun on
himself.
reetings from Australia.
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