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reetings from Australia.
Welcome to this Red-Letter Day. Below you will find today's global celebrations, birthdays and events.
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Listen to this famous speech (Sir Lawrence Olivier; 627 kb .wma)
Now shoemakers will have a frisken
All in honour of St Crispin.
Traditional rhyme, St Crispin's day
The twenty-fifth of October:
Cursed be the cobbler
That goes to bed sober.
Traditional rhyme, St Crispin's day
It is magnificent, but it is not war. (C'ést magnifique, mais ce n'ést pas la guerre.)
French General Bosquet criticising the British Charge of the Light Brigade, at Balaclava, October 25, 1854
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
'Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!' he said:
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred ...
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volley'd and thunder'd;
Storm'd at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the six hundred.
Alfred, Lord Tennyson; from
' The Charge of the Light Brigade'; written on
April 10, 1864
It is curious that ... the charge of the Light Brigade should loom so large in British legend. Only 673 men were involved, and they lost 157 men out of 20,000 war dead. Why have the British chosen to make a sentimental legend out of a pointless effort arising from muddled orders? The entirely successful and equally gallant charge of the Heavy Brigade earlier on the same day is generally forgotten ...
Corelli Barnett, historian
The object of oratory alone is not truth but persuasion.
Lord Macaulay, English statesman, born on October 25, 1800, ' Essay on
Athenian Orators'
The business of everybody is the business of nobody.
Lord Macaulay; Historical Essays, 'Hallam's Constitutional
History'
The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.
Lord Macaulay; ibid
The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.
Lord Macaulay; History of England, I. 2
In every age the vilest specimens of human nature are to be found among demagogues.
Lord Macaulay; ibid, I. 5
I don't search. I find.
Pablo Picasso, Spanish artist, born on October 25, 1881
All currency is neurotic currency.
Norman O Brown, American philosopher, born on October 25, 1913
In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known
– that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.
Norman O Brown
The dynamics of capitalism is postponement of enjoyment to the constantly postponed future.
Norman O Brown
The view only changes for the lead dog.
Norman O Brown
Freedom is poetry, taking liberties with words, breaking the rules of normal speech, violating common sense. Freedom is violence.
Norman O Brown; Love's
Body, 1967
The boundary line between self and external world bears no relation to reality; the distinction between ego and world is made by spitting out part of the inside, and swallowing in part of the outside.
Norman O Brown; ibid, ch. 8
Brautigan is good for you. No writer you can think of is quite like him today, nor was any writer anytime – unless you can imagine the kind of things Mark Twain might have written had he wandered into a field of ripe cannabis with a pack of Zig Zag papers in his pocket. That's about as close as I can come to Brautigan, a kind of cracker-barrel surrealist whose humor is essentially Nineteenth-Century Western American.
Bruce Cook, The National Observer, quote from the back cover of
The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western. Richard Brautigan (b. 1935), American writer, committed suicide on October 25, 1984.
I pray that in thirty-two years
passing that flowers and vegetables
will water the Twenty-First Cen-
tury with their voices telling that
they were once a book turned by
loving hands into life.
Richard Brautigan; 'Shasta Daisy'
I thank the energy, the gods and the
theater of history that brought
us here to this very moment with
this book in our hands, calling
like the future down a green and
starry hall.
Richard Brautigan; 'Carrot'
October 25
is
the 298th
day of the year in the Gregorian
Calendar (299th in leap years), with 67
days remaining.
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Feast day of Ss Crispin and Crispian (Crispinian;
Crispianus), the Gemini saints
(Fleabane starwort, Aster conizoides and Meagre starwort, Aster miser were designated today's plants, dedicated to Saints Crispin and Crispinian respectively, whose feast day this is.)
St Crispin and St Crispinian were supposedly nobly-born brothers at Soissons, France, who worked as shoemakers by night to support their good works. They were tortured and executed under Maximiar Herculeus in about 287, and their remains were thrown into the sea and washed up at Romney Marsh, England, or, so it is said. There is an annual cobblers' procession held at their home town. Also, until 2004, the English town of Northampton had an annual street fair named for St Crispin.
Crispin's and Crispian's traditional patronage includes cobblers, glove makers, lace workers, leather workers, saddlers, shoemakers, and weavers.
However, these saints were removed from the liturgical
calendar (but not declared to no longer be saints) during the
Catholic Church's
Vatican II reforms. The
The reasoning used by Vatican II for this decision was that there was insufficient evidence that the Saints Crispin and Crispinian actually existed. Indeed, their role as shoemakers, their relationship as twins, and the timing of their holiday are suggestive of the possibility that they could have represented a local Celtic deity Lugus-Mercurius (Lugh/Mercury) which had been made into a saint as a result of syncretism.
Today is a day most famous for battles that occurred on it: the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Pacific theatre in 1944, the Battle of Balaklava (Charge of the Light Brigade) during the Crimean War, and the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, dramatised by William Shakespeare in Henry V.
Cobblers' Feast, or Snob's Holiday
These shoemaker saints were supplied with leather by an angel. It is said that they were pricked to death with cobbler's awls in about 287. On this day, in England, it used to be customary for shoemakers to hold processions and feasts. Today is also known as Snobs' Holiday.
St Crispin's effigy
On St
Crispin's Day in old Tenby, England, shoemakers used to cut down an
effigy of this patron saint of shoemakers, from a steeple or other high
place where it had hung overnight. The effigy was carried through the town
and stopped at every shoemaker's door, where the saint's " last will and
testament" was read and
an item of his clothing left as a souvenir. Finally, his body was kicked
round like a football, commemorating the saint's martyrdom in about 287.
His long-noseship
Charles V of
France ('the Wise'; 1338 - 1380) loved to walk incognito amongst his subjects and get to know them.
One day in Brussels while walking, the emperor needed to have a boot
repaired, but it was St Crispin's Day, the shoemakers' and cobblers'
holiday. He offered one cobbler a handsome fee if he would mend his boot,
but the cobbler said he would not work that day even for Charles V. He
invited Charles in for a drink, however, and toasted the health of the
emperor. "Then you love Charles V?" asked the emperor? "Ay" said
the cobbler, "I love his long-noseship well enough but I should love him
better would he but tax us a little less." The emperor revealed his true
identity to the cheeky cobbler and rewarded the cobblers of Flanders with
the right to precede shoemakers in processions, a custom that lasted for
centuries.
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