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fnordreetings from Australia. 

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5


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It has been said that love robs those who have it of their wit, and gives it to those who have none.
Dennis Diderot, French encyclopaedist, born on October 5, 1713; Paradoxe sur le comédien

From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
Dennis Diderot; 'Essai sur le Mérite de la Vertu'

We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
Dennis Diderot; Le Neveu de Rameau (1762)

Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
Denis Diderot

A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it.
Dennis Diderot (attrib.)

From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.
Chief Joseph, Nez Percé leader who surrendered on October 5, 1877

You're only as good as the people you hire.
Ray Kroc, McDonald's restaurants founder, born on October 5, 1902

Luck is a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get.
Ray Kroc

Some savage faculty for observation told him that most respectable and estimable people usually had a lot of books in their houses.
Flann O'Brien, Irish novelist born on October 5, 1911; The Best of Myles (1968), published posthumously

Chief Joseph

Chief Joseph

Waiting for the German verb is surely the ultimate thrill.
Flann O'Brien; The Hair of the Dogma (1977), published posthumously

Even a purely moral act that has no hope of any immediate and visible political effect can gradually and indirectly, over time, gain in political significance.
Václav Havel, Czech playwright, human rights campaigner and president, born on October 5, 1936; from 'Letter to Czechoslovakian leader Alexander Dubček' (August 1969)

I really do inhabit a system in which words are capable of shaking the entire structure of government, where words can prove mightier than ten military divisions.
Václav Havel; from a speech accepting a peace prize (October 1989)

If you want to see your plays performed the way you wrote them, become President.
Václav Havel; from 'Address to the Institute of Contemporary Arts', London quoted in The Independent, London, March 24, 1990

Despite all the political misery I am confronted with every day, it still is my profound conviction that the very essence of politics is not dirty; dirt is brought in only by wicked people. I admit that this is an area of human activity where the temptation to advance through unfair actions may be stronger than elsewhere, and which thus makes higher demands on human integrity. But it is not true at all that a politician cannot do without lying or intriguing. That is sheer nonsense, often spread by those who want to discourage people from taking an interest in public affairs.
Of course, in politics, just as anywhere else in life, it is impossible and it would not be sensible always to say everything bluntly. Yet that does not mean one has to lie. What is needed here are tact, instinct and good taste.
Václav Havel; from International Herald Tribune, October 29, 1991

'E's not pinin'! 'E's passed on! This parrot is no more! He has ceased to be! 'E's expired and gone to meet 'is maker! 'E's a stiff! Bereft of life, 'e rests in peace! If you hadn't nailed 'im to the perch 'e'd be pushing up the daisies! 'Is metabolic processes are now 'istory! 'E's off the twig! 'E's kicked the bucket, 'e's shuffled off 'is mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisible!! THIS IS AN EX-PARROT!!
John Cleese (The Dead Parrot sketch); Monty Python's Flying Circus commenced on October 5, 1969

There's nothing good about drug use. We know it. It destroys individuals. It destroys families. Drug use destroys societies. Drug use, some might say, is destroying this country. And we have laws against selling drugs, pushing drugs, using drugs, importing drugs. And the laws are good because we know what happens to people in societies and neighborhoods which become consumed by them. And so if people are violating the law by doing drugs, they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up.
Rush Limbaugh, American broadcaster who in 2004 admitted he was a drug addict; October 5, 1995

 

 

October 5 is the 278th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (279th in leap years), with 87 days remaining.
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Thesmophoria, ancient Greece (Oct 5 - 7)

This was a women's festival of Demeter ('barley mother') the Greek goddess of agriculture, health, birth and marriage. She was associated with the Roman goddess Ceres; she was also the daughter of Cronos and Rhea, and therefore the sister of Zeus. Her priestesses were addressed with the title Melissa. Demeter is called Thesmophoros in respect of her establishing laws or thesmoi, by which men must work the land and provide nourishment.
 
In Athens, the festival took place on the 11th - 13th days of the month Pyanopsion which was the time of autumn planting. Today was the first day, the Stenia. The Steniae are said by Photius to have celebrated the return (anodos) of Demeter from the lower world, and the women railed at each other by night. Some of the features of this three-day festival are identical with those of harvest festivals long observed in the north of Europe. 

The cult was practised universally in the Greek world, from the Black Sea to Lesbos, but the secrets of the rites were so well kept that even today we know very little of what the women did. It is believed that the participants dressed in fawn skins and, carrying a thyrsus, a rod topped with ivy, wandered the mountains at night, participating in such ritualistic activities as nursing baby wild animals and consuming milk, wine and honey. The women would imitate the Bacchae (Maenads), performing frenzied, ecstatic dances, sometimes around an image of Dionysus. On the first day, women gathered in the temple area. On the second day there was fasting, and they would return home for the night. 

The rites included married women, this being their only opportunity all year to get away from their husbands and families. Grain was burnt as an offering to Demeter. Piglets, sheep and goats were sacrificed. Women had to refrain from sexual intercourse during the Thesmophoria, and they probably ate plants that suppressed the libido.  

After the Thesmophoria ended, the priests would gather up the large numbers of female figurines that had been used in the rituals, and bury them. Unlike the Mysteries of Dionysus, the Thesmophoria seems to have been revered by the men of Athens, but is mocked in Aristophanes's Thesmophoriazusae.

Cf Jejunium Cereris, Fast of Ceres, Roman Empire, October 4.

"According to Buffie Johnson (Johnson, Buffie, Lady of the Beasts, Harper SanFrancisco 1988), the pig was worshipped everywhere that women were in charge of agriculture. It is an animal associated with great fecundity. In northern India, the Rajput clan worships the Corn Mother (Gauri) in the form of the wild pig. It is also associated with death, perhaps because of the image of the sow eating her piglets. During the Thesmophoria, the pig represented both abundance and life, the seed that is buried in the earth to sprout again, like the corn puppet representing Kore which was thrown into the earth during the winter rituals to be brought back up again in spring when it was sprouting."
Source: School of the Seasons

Festivals in ancient Greece

 

Feast day of the Mania, ancient Rome (second annual day)

mundus patet: Opening of Mundus Cereris, ancient Rome

Mundus cereris was the womb or labyrinthine passage to the underworld, the domain of Ceres, the great Mother of vegetation. The structure was vaulted in the shape of an inverted sky, divided into two parts, and had a cover. We do not know for certain where the Mundus Cereris was, or is, but in 1914 Giacomo Boni discovered on the Palatine Hill in Rome a subterranean structure which he identified with the Mundus.

The cover was removed on August 24, October 5 and November 8, and these days were religiosi, when the way was supposed to be open to the lower world. First-fruits of the season would be offered to the Manes and placed in the pit.

Because the cover to the Mundus, the Lapis Manalis (Stone of the Manes), is considered an Ostium Orci (Gate of Hades), the Manes (ancestral spirits) are freed to roam for the day, so marriage was not permitted today, and nor were battles nor business considered advisable.

One of the numerous spheres over which the goddess Ceres had influence was liminality, that is, boundaries and transitions between different stages of social life, a function that she shared with Janus. We note that this commemoration in its November occurrence almost precisely coincides with the Celtic Samhain (October 31), at which time the veil between the living world and that of the dead is said to be its thinnest, and its Christian corollaries, All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, November 1 and 2 respectively.

 Departed ancestors were remembered at this time. 

Roman festivals and notable days in the Book of Days    Deities of many cultures in the Book of Days

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International World Teachers' DayInternational World Teachers' Day

"On 5 October, teachers' organisations worldwide mobilise to ensure that the needs of future generations are taken into consideration in this increasingly complex, multicultural and technological world.

"UNESCO inaugurated 5 October as World Teachers' Day in 1994 to commemorate the joint signing of the UNESCO/ILO Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers (PDF 116 kb) on 5 October 1966. World Teachers' Day also highlights the Recommendation concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel (PDF 6.6 mb) adopted in 1997."

Source

October 5 is most common birthday in USA; May 22 least common

"A recent in depth database query conducted by Anybirthday.com suggests that October 5th is the United States most popular birth date. It seems that on average more people are born on this day than any other.

"According to the inquiry, an average of 12,576 people are born each year on the 5th of October. It also suggests that some 968,000 Americans celebrate this day annually.

"What makes this early October birth date so fashionable? October 5th however held a not-so-suprising significance, as conception would have fallen right on New Years Eve.

"Which birth date is the least common? May 22nd with an average of 10,259 persons born each year."   Source

 

Audlem Wakes, Cheshire, England
Traditionally, the first person to get drunk at the event was proclaimed Mayor of Audlem for the coming year. 

Source: The Daily Bleed

 

Dionysiad, Rumanian wine festival (see also Dionysus); Ariadne and the Maenads perhaps also commemorated, according to one source.

Deities of many cultures in the Book of Days

Nubaigai, The Festival of the Old Woman, Lithuania
"The Festival of the Old Woman (Nubaigai) is celebrated annually on this date by farm workers in Lithuania. The last sheaf of grain is dressed up as a woman and a festival of feasting, merriment, and games is held to honor the goddess of the corn."   Source

Feast day of St Anna Schaeffer

Feast day of St Attilanus

Feast day of St Bartholomew Longo

Feast day of St Flora of Beaulieu

Feast day of St Francis Xavier Seelos

Feast day of St Galla of Rome, widow
"Daughter of Roman patrician Symmachus the Younger who served as consul in 485; sister-in-law of Boethius. Lay woman, marrying soon after her father's murder, but widowed after a year of marriage; legend says she grew a beard to avoid further offers of marriage."   Source

Feast day of St John Hewitt

Feast day of St Philip of Moscow

Feast day of St Placidus, abbot, and companions
(Starlike camomile [False aster; White doll's daisy], Boltonia asteroides is today's plant, dedicated to these saints.)

Feast day of St Raymond of Capua

Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days

Day of the Holy Spirit (Byzantine) 

Ram Mating Ceremony, Anatolia, Turkey (Oct 1 - 20)

First week in October, Salters' tradition, London, UK
Beadles and Servants of the guild of salters traditionally attended a service at St Magnus Church, London-bridge. Sir John Salter had been a good benefactor to their company, and he ordered in his will that the beadles and servants should go three times each in the first week of October and say to each other, "How do you do brother salter? I hope you are well!"

World Space Week (Oct 4 - 10)

Oktoberfest (Sep 20 - Oct 5)  

Eastern Orthodox name day for St Charitini; see also October 5 (Eastern Orthodox liturgics)

Republic Day, Portugal
Celebrates the overthrow of the Monarchy in 1910.

 

 

 

On which day of the week were you born? Find out here

1703 Jonathan Edwards, evangelical Christian leader

1713 Denis Diderot, French encyclopaedist. His Pensees philosophiques (1746), in which he attacked both atheism and the received Christianity, was burned by order of the Parliament of Paris.

1715 Victor de Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau (d. 1789), French economist

1717 Marie-Anne de Mailly-Nesle duchess de Châteauroux (d. 1744), French mistress of King Louis XV of France

1728 Chevalier d'Éon, French spy in the service of Louis XV who conducted missions for his country disguised as a woman. A brilliant fencer, he gave exhibitions in London and was fatally wounded in 1810. An autopsy revealed his true sex.

1878 Louise Dresser (d. 1965), actress

1830 Chester A Arthur (d. 1886), 21st President of the United States

1882 Robert Goddard, rocket scientist

1902 Larry Fine (d. 1975), American actor (Three Stooges)

1902 Ray Kroc (d. 1984), entrepreneur (founded McDonald's)

Other late starters and late achievers in the Scriptorium

1903 M King Hubbert (d. 1989), geophysicist

1907 Mrs Miller (d. 1997), singer

1908 Joshua Logan (d. 1988), film director, writer

1911 Flann O'Brien (Brian O'Nolan; d. 1966), Irish humourist and novelist (An Béal Bocht; At Swim-Two-Birds; The Third Policeman)

1917 Allen Ludden (d. 1981), television game show host

1919 Donald Pleasence (d. 1995), British character actor (Halloween)

1923 Philip Berrigan, American peace activist, Christian anarchist and Roman Catholic priest. Along with his brother Daniel Berrigan, he was for a time on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list for actions against war.

1923 Glynis Johns, actress

1924 Bill Dana, actor, comedian

1930 Pavel Popovich, cosmonaut

1933 Diane Cilento, Papua New Guinea-born, Brisbane, Australia-raised actress

1935 Diahann Carroll, actress

 

1936 Václav Havel, Czech playwright, human rights campaigner and president, one of the leading intellectual figures and moral forces in Eastern Europe, especially Czechoslovakia. He satirised the communist bureaucracy and supported the Prague Spring reform movement in 1968. He was co-founder of the human rights organization Charter 77 and the Committee for the Defence of the Unjustly Prosecuted.

In November 1989, Vaclav Havel was one of the leading initiators of the founding of the Civic Forum, an association uniting opposition civic movements and democratic initiatives. From the very first days of its existence, he was the head of the Civic Forum, becoming a key figure of the 'Velvet Revolution', when, beginning on November 17, 1989, hundreds of thousands of demonstrators for freedom took to the streets of Prague. This became a popular uprising that seized the reins of power from the incumbent Communist Party.

Havel's works were banned by the government, but the manuscripts circulated privately and were printed in Western Europe. He has been awarded numerous international prizes and honorary doctorates.

Rock music, especially that of Frank Zappa and Lou Reed, and the Czech band Plastic People of the Universe, inspired Havel and other dissidents during their struggle against Soviet rule:

"From 1964 until August 21, 1968, Bohemia rediscovered bohemia, producing arguably the most dynamic artistic flowering communism ever tolerated, highlighted by Milos Forman and the Czech New Wave of cinema, novelist Bohumil Hrabal's Slavic take on magical realism, and the madcap theatrical rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. Havel spent this period at the influential and radical Theatre of the Balustrade, where he gobbled speed and pushed the free expression envelope with absurdist topical plays such as The Memorandum and The Increased Difficulty of Concentration.

"In 1968 a rare copy of the Velvet Underground's first record somehow found its way to Prague. It became a sensation in music circles and beyond, eventually inspiring the Czech name for their bloodless 1989 overthrow of Communist rule, 'the Velvet Revolution.' The Plastic People, then a newly formed troupe that borrowed heavily from Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, quickly added a half-dozen songs from The Velvet Underground & Nico to their repertoire. The group was banned not long after the Prague Spring concluded but continued to play at weddings and secret shows.

"Then, in 1976, four members were arrested on charges of 'disturbing the peace.' The Czech dissident movement, newly roused by Havel's open letter, made the trial an international cause. Havel, who intuitively grasped the symbolism of the case, was in the courtroom every day to witness and document the judicial farce. Just as George Orwell saw picking up a gun to shoot fascists in the Spanish Civil War as 'the only conceivable thing to do,' Havel understood this assault on freedom as one outrage too far. It was a turning point in his life. 'Everyone understood,' he wrote later, 'that an attack on the Czech musical underground was an attack on a most elementary and important thing, something that in fact bound everyone together: it was an attack on the very notion of living within the truth, on the real aims of life.'"   Source

"The Plastics held a Second Music Festival of the Second Culture, also known as 'Magor's Wedding', in the small town of Bojanovice on February 21, 1976. In response to this festival, on March 17, 1976, the Secret Police arrested 27 musicians and their friends including all the Plastic People. In addition, over 100 fans were interrogated. The band's homemade equipment was seized, their homes were searched and tapes, films and notebooks were confiscated. Paul Wilson was expelled from the country soon after and returned to Canada. 

"Six months later, the trial of the Plastic People and the other arrested artists began. The majority of the Plastic People were released due to international protests. However, four musicians including Vratislav Brabenec and Ivan Jirous from the Plastics, as well as Pavel Zajicek from the Plastics' sister band DG 307, and singer Svatopluk Karasek, were held for disturbing the peace. 

"On that day, September 21, 1976, as the four defendants sat handcuffed in the dock, rock and roll went on trial. It was the hippies versus the Communist state ...

"Among the supporters was avant-garde playwright Vaclav Havel who had met Jirous a week earlier and had been impressed with the man and his philosophy. Havel left the trial feeling disgusted with the world and resolved to make a difference."   Source

During Havel's 1998 visit to the US, Lou Reed played at the state dinner in the White House at his request:

"Reed recalls the interference he faced from White House Staff. 'What I remember is doing a soundcheck and somebody said you have to play softly. [I said,] "we can't play softly – this is my idea of softly."'"   Source

Reed visits Havel when he is in Prague.

"Last September [September, 2002 – PW] he delivered a rousing anti-communist speech over Radio Martí, a much-mocked station funded by Washington and beamed to Cuba. 'When the internal crisis of the totalitarian system grows so deep that it becomes clear to everyone,' he declared, 'and when more and more people learn to speak their own language and reject the hollow, mendacious language of the powers that be, it means that freedom is remarkably close, if not directly within reach.' He also nominated Oswald Paya Sardinas – the Cuban spokesman for the Varela Project, an opposition group modeled directly on Havel's 1970s movement Charter 77 – for the Nobel Peace Prize. The speech was virtually ignored by the American press."   Source

Plastic People of the Universe, film    Rich literary world of the Czech undersground    Official website

Velvet Revolution    Havel, Lou Reed: A friendship goes public for art    More    More   

 

1941 Eduardo Duhalde, Argentinan president

1943 Steve Miller, musician

1948 Tawl Ross, musician (P Funk)

1951 Karen Allen, actress

1952 Clive Barker, writer  

Pete Townsend, Bob Geldof, Paul McCartney

1954 Bob Geldof (Robert Frederick Xenon Geldof), Irish (b. in Dún Laoghaire, County Dublin) singer, songwriter, actor and instigator of Live Aid, famine relief concert, and also Live8. Geldof is shown at Live Aid being held aloft by rock musicians Pete Townshend and Paul McCartney.

Geldof came to fame in the mid-1970s as leader of the Boomtown Rats, a rock group closely linked with the punk movement. In 1978, they had their first Number 1 single with 'Rat Trap', which was the first new wave chart-topper in the UK. A follow-up, 'I Don't Like Mondays', was equally successful and also controversial, as Geldof wrote it in the aftermath of Brenda Ann Spencer's attempted massacre at her school in San Diego, California at the beginning of 1979.

Geldof has received many awards for this work, including an honorary knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II. As he is not a British or Commonwealth citizen, Geldof is precluded from using the title 'Sir'. Regardless, the nickname 'Sir Bob' has stuck, and even media reports will frequently refer to him as 'Sir Bob Geldof'. On July 7, 2005, Geldof was nominated for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize because of his dedication to fighting poverty and AIDS in Africa. Bob Geldof is also an active fathers' rights spokesperson in the United Kingdom.

www.bobgeldof.com/    Cool links    Wilson's Almanac Book of Days hip list

 

1958 Bernie Mac, actor, comedian

1960 Daniel Baldwin, actor (Homicide: Life on the Street)

1963 Caron Keating (d. 2004), former Blue Peter presenter

1967 Guy Pearce, actor

1975 Kate Winslet, actress

 

Phew!! Have a rest before the big This day in history section