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Even if Luther had spoken everything in the most unobjectionable manner, I had no inclination to die for the sake of truth. Every man has not the courage to make a martyr; and I am afraid, if I were put to the trial, I should imitate
St Peter. Erasmus of Rotterdam, born on October 27, 1466 (?)
He calls a spade a spade. Erasmus (attrib.)
Make a virtue of necessity. Erasmus (attrib.)
Betwixt the devil and the deep sea. Erasmus (attrib.)
Talk of the devil and he'll appear. Erasmus (attrib.)
You reckon your chickens before they are hatched. Erasmus (attrib.)
All they seem'd to
want was for us to be gone.
Captain James Cook, English navigator born on October 27, 1728; from
his journal while charting the coast of Australia,
April 29,
1770
I wish to preach ... the doctrine of the strenuous life.
Theodore Roosevelt, born on October 27, 1858
The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.
Dylan Thomas, Welsh poet, born on October 27, 1914; from 'The Hand That Signed the Paper', 1936
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames
After the first death, there is no other.
Dylan Thomas; from 'A Refusal to Mourn the Death'
When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.
Dylan Thomas
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas
My education was the liberty I had to read indiscriminately and
all the time, with my eyes hanging out.
Dylan Thomas
Having been unpopular in high school is not just cause for book publication.
Fran Lebowitz, American writer, born on October 27, 1950
There is no question that the Communist menace in French Indo-China has been stopped.
General J Lawton Collins, the US Army's Chief of Staff, announcing good news on October 27, 1951
In 1954 the United Nations General Assembly
recommended (Resolution 836 - IX) that all countries institute a Universal
Children's Day, to be observed as a day of worldwide fraternity and
understanding between children and of activity promoting the welfare of
the world's children. That the observance of Universal
Children's Day should be used for a concrete and effective expression of
the support of Governments for the purposes of UNICEF. The General
Assembly suggested to Governments that the Day be observed on the date
which each considers appropriate.
Most countries celebrate Universal Children's
Day on November 20 – the date
that marks the day on which the
Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959 and
the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1989.
Feast day of St Christeta, Sabina
and Vincent
Tradition has it that when Vincent was a prisoner of the Governor
Dacian, in Spain, he left the imprint of his foot on a stone and
that was enough to convert his guards.
Feast day of St Frumentius,
Apostle of Ethiopia
(Floribund starwort, Aster
floribundus, is
today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)
Frumentius (d. c. 383),
who introduced Christianity
into Ethiopia, was a saint and first bishop
of Axum,
styled the Apostle of Ethiopia. He was a Greek born in Tyre.
Owagit, Hopi The
Hopi are a Native
American nation who primarily live on the 1.5 million acre (6,000
km²) Hopi
Reservation in north-eastern Arizona.
At
this time of year is the Hopi Owagit, a women's healing
ceremony, its name representing melons on the vine. Womanhood is
rightly venerated as the receptacle/womb for the seeds of life.
On which day of the week were you born? Find out here
1466 (assumed year; some sources
give October
28) Desiderius Erasmus of
Rotterdam (Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus; d. July
12, 1536),
Dutchhumanist,
writer, editor, translator, Roman Catholic priest and theologian.
Erasmus's best-known work is The
Praise of Folly, a satirical attack on the traditions of the
Catholic Church and popular superstitions, written in 1509,
published in 1511 and dedicated to his friend, Sir
Thomas More.
During his lifetime, Erasmus was a famous public intellectual, and
he had correspondence with many of the most influential men of his
day (see a
list of his correspondents).
Cook was born in humble
circumstances in Marton, North Yorkshire,
England. After becoming a ship's master in
1759, he went on to
perform some of the greatest exploits in the maritime annals.
1850William
Macleod (d. June 24, 1929), artist on the
Sydney Bulletin
(the one who 'discovered' the great cartoonist David Low);
he had a cartoon in the first edition in 1880. Bulletin
owner JF
Archibald, "who had been impressed by his business methods
when a contributor to the Bulletin, asked him to join the
staff. He became business manager in September 1887, soon acquired
an interest in the paper, and for nearly 40 years was actively
engaged in the management of it. Stained glass windows from his
designs will be found in St Benedict's, Sydney, St John the Baptist
at Queanbeyan, the Church of England at Duntroon and the chapel at
Long Bay penitentiary. Many of his original drawings for the Picturesque
Atlas are at the Mitchell Library, Sydney." Source
1865JA Andrews
(John Arthur Andrews; Jack Andrews; d. 1903),
Australian anarchist writer and pamphleteer, probably the most important of the group which came together in the
Melbourne Anarchist
Club.
Henry Lawson
knew him (c.1892)
when Andrews was 27 and campaigning in Sydney (for which Andrews ended up
in Parramatta Gaol).
Australian
historian Bob
James has researched and written on Andrews and tells us that
during 1889 much of Andrews's writing was published in
Bob Winspear's
The Radical. Andrews couldn't afford a metal type printing press, but managed to
publish The Anarchist (1891) and various tracts on a home-made contraption made from a tobacco tin, using a wooden font,
hand-carved for the purpose. He was associated with Joe Schellenberg and the Smithfield communist anarchists while in Sydney from late-1890, helping to establish the Communist-Anarchist Group of Central Cumberland operations centre there. His writings were highly philosophical (he was probably the most intellectual of the anarchists, indeed of the labour movement at the time), but he was also a hard-working activist. Some of what we know about the
Active Service Brigade was written by him in
Tocsin in 1900. He spent time in prison for his activities,
around 1894 - '95, for sedition and other crimes, such as not having a correct imprint on his magazine. After his early death from tuberculosis he was compared to
Tolstoi,
Kropotkin,
Thoreau and
Verlaine, among others.
William Lane's brother Ernie described him, in Dawn to
Dusk, in these words: "... Clothed in an overcoat to cover his sometimes shirtless body and tattered clothes, Andrews would proceed to the Domain. Tying a large pole with a small black flag attached to an over- head tree he would deliver a two or three hours' exposition of philosophic anarchy to the proverbial ... two men and a dog ... Andrews obviously spoke right over the heads of the crowd ..."
Bertram Stevens said Andrews
"was as gentle as a grub and looked like
Christ".
"The
Australian Star for 21 February 1895 described Andrews at his trial
for sedition as 'a middle-aged man, (with) long hair, pallid face
and restless eyes...' He was, at the time, just on thirty."
Source
1889Nestor
Makhno (d. July 25,
1934), anarcho-communistUkrainian
general who fought the Red and
White Russian armies during the Russian Revolution. He led an
insurrectionary army of peasants who eventually were crushed by
Trotsky's Red Army. In August 1921,
an exhausted Makhno was finally driven by the Bolsheviks
into exile, fleeing to Romania;
then Poland;
and finally to Paris.
He was cremated three days after his death, with five hundred people
attending his funeral at the famous cimetière
du Père-Lachaise in Paris. (Some sources say he was born on October
26.)
"His
reading tours of the United States, which did much to popularize
the poetry reading as new medium for the art, are famous and
notorious, for Thomas was the archetypal Romantic poet of the
popular American imagination: he was flamboyantly theatrical, a
heavy drinker, engaged in roaring disputes in public, and read
his work aloud with tremendous depth of feeling. He became a
legendary figure, both for his work and the boisterousness of
his life. Tragically, he died from alcoholism at the age of 39
after a particularly long drinking bout in New York City in
1953."Source
By Dylan Thomas
... nothing I cared, in the lambwhite days, that time would take me
up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
in the moon that is always rising,
nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
and wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
time held me green and dying
though I sang in my chains like the sea.
1931Nawal El
Saadawi,
Egyptian
feminist writer, activist and physician sometimes
described as 'the Simone de Beauvoir of the Arab world'. Her
novels, short stories and non-fiction chiefly are concerned with the
status of Arab women.
This is the light of the
mind, cold and planetary
The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
The grasses unload their griefs on my feet as if I were God
Prickling my ankles and murmuring of their humility
Fumy, spiritous mists inhabit this place.
Separated from my house by a row of headstones.
I simply cannot see where there is to get to.
The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
Twice on Sunday, the bells startle the sky --
Eight great tongues affirming the Resurrection
At the end, they soberly bong out their names.
The yew tree points up, it has a Gothic shape.
The eyes lift after it and find the moon.
The moon is my mother. She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness –
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.
I have fallen a long way. Clouds are flowering
Blue and mystical over the face of the stars
Inside the church, the saints will all be blue,
Floating on their delicate feet over the cold pews,
Their hands and faces stiff with holiness.
The moon sees nothing of this. She is bald and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness – blackness and
silence.
1939John
Cleese, British actor, comedian (A Fish
Called Wanda; Life of Brian;
and two Harry
Potter movies). His family's
surname was previously 'Cheese', but his father, an insurance
salesman, changed his surname to 'Cleese'. Cleese and then-wife
Connie
Booth collaborated in the legendary television series Fawlty
Towers, which, despite running for only 12 episodes, remains
highly popular today. (Basil Fawlty, the lead character, was based
on real-life rude hotelier,
Donald
Sinclair [1909 -
'81].)
"Returning to England, he began
appearing in a BBC radio series, 'I'm Sorry I'll Read That
Again', based on Cambridge Circus. It ran for several years
and also starred future 'Goodies' Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie
and Graeme Garden. He also appeared, briefly, with Brooke-Taylor,
Chapman & Marty Feldman in 'At
Last the 1948 Show' (1967), for television, and a series of
collaborations with some of the finest comedy-writing talent in
England at the time, some of whom - Eric
Idle, Gilliam, Terry
Jones, Michael
Palin, and Chapman - eventually joined him in Monty Python.
These programs included 'The
Frost Report' (1966) and Marty
Feldman's program 'Marty' (1966). Eventually, however, the
writers were themselves collected to be the talent for their own
program, 'Monty
Python's Flying Circus' (1969), which was originally to be a
vehicle for Cleese but soon showed itself to be an ensemble
program. Monty Python displayed a strange and completely absorbing
blend of low farce and high-concept absurdist humor, and remains
influential to this day." Source
"JOHN CLEESE is not just the
most spiritually advanced, intellectually gifted and
professionally distinguished of the Monty Python group. He is also
the one who got landed with writing these f***ing biographies.
Twenty five minutes to midnight, and he's still sitting there,
poor sod, staring into space, trying to think what he can write
about himself, dog tired and he hasn't even had time for dinner.
So give me a break.
"I've got a script
conference at nine in the morning. I've got to write an intro to
a book by five in the afternoon, a press conference at five-thirty
and dinner with four of the dullest people in Europe after that,
and then up at six-thirty the next morning for seven days'
filming on the trot. So let me off just this once, will you? I
really would appreciate it. I'll make myself a cup of Horlicks
and go straight to bed. Promise. I'm not the sort to give you an
excuse like this and then nip out after a bit of tail. Honest. OK?
Thanks. I really appreciate it.
"Mr. Cleese is happily unmarried
and is the President of the Holland Park Schadenfreude Society."Source
John
Cleese in Fawlty Towers: From The Waldorf Salad episode at
YouTube
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1180
"A term equivalent to our
'flying saucer' was actually used by the Japanese approximately 700 years
before it came into use in the West. Ancient documents describe an unusual
shining object seen the night of October 27, 1180, as a flying "earthenware
vessel." After a while the object, which had been heading northeast from a
mountain in Kii province, changed its direction and vanished below the horizon,
leaving a luminous trail. (Jacques Vallee, Passport to Magonia pp.4-5)"Source
We know from the medieval chronicle by Roger of Wendover(d. 1236), that on
Friday (according to the 10,000-year calendar), October 27, 1206 the English peasant Thurkill was digging ditches to
drain his Essex farm (possibly
at the village of Twinstead,
Sudbury) when a stranger, who identified himself as St James (patron saint of
pilgrims), came
up to him and said he would take the labourer on a journey. Thurkill lay down,
going into a coma. In his vision,
Thurkill passed through a "large purgatorial fire" and was immersed in a
lake "incomparably salty and cold".
His family awakened him on the Sunday by pouring water down
his throat. He was indignant because he had been about to enter Heaven with the psychopomp saint (many sets of religious beliefs
have a particular spirit, god, demon
or angel whose
responsibility is to escort newly-deceased souls to the afterlife,
such as Heaven
or Hell. These
creatures are called psychopomps.
– Wikipedia).
On
Monday night, James returned, angry that the farmer had not told the full story
to his family. On the following feast days, All Saints' and All Souls' Day,
November 1 and 2, Thurkill described his vision to the assembled community in
church. To this day, Thurkill's field floods at the end of October. Or, so it
is said.
1553Michael
Servetus (b. 1511), theologian, was burned at the stake at
Geneva on charges on heresy, at the Protestant
reformer John Calvin's
instigation.
1659New World: William Robinson and Marmaduke
Steven, two Quakers who came from England in 1656 to escape religious
persecution, were executed in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for their religious
beliefs, apparently by fellow refugees who had done the same.
"The two had violated a law
passed by the Massachusetts General Court the year before, banning Quakers from
the colony "under the pain of death." The Religious Society of Friends, whose
members are commonly known as Quakers, was a Christian movement founded by
George Fox in England during the early 1650s. Quakers opposed central church
authority, preferring to seek spiritual insight & consensus through egalitarian
Quaker meetings. They also advocated sexual equality, and were some of the most
outspoken opponents of slavery in early America. Hanged from an elm tree on
Boston Common, the first Quakers executed in America."
1846Beneath this stone are
deposited the remains of Richard Turner, author of the word Teetotal as applied to abstinence from all
intoxicating liquor, who departed this life on the 27th day of October, 1846
aged 56 years. Thus reads the tombstone of Dick Turner, a
Preston,
Lancashire, UK, artisan.
1858The death ofIda
Pfeiffer (b. 1797), Viennese-born great world traveller.
"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
1913Wales: The
UK's most deadly
tornado hit, killing six residents of
Edwardsville, a Glamorgan mining town. The UK Tornado and Storm Research
Organisation says the worst day for British twisters was November 23,
1981 –
when some 105 were reported. Britain has the planet's highest concentration of tornadoes in terms of
land area, though the USA has the largest number altogether.
1975Bruce
Springsteensimultaneously made the
covers of both Time and Newsweek, a move which reportedly embarrassed
the two news weeklies and contributed to growing charges of hype associated with
the singer's breakthrough.
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