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The first Sunday in
September is Fathers' Day in Australia. :)
Circensian games, ancient Rome (Apr 12 - 19; Sep 4 - 19)
Jupiter
Stator, ancient Rome, to commemorate Jupiter's
helping Romulus
to stop the Sabine
invasion under Titus
Tatius
About the Roman
calendar
Roman
festivals
Roman calendar
First Sunday in September
Regata
Storica, Venice
(Venezia), Italy
Almaniac Sylvia de Vanna, a native of
Venice, informed me of this:
Today is the traditional historic regatta
in Venice, where the ancient boats with oarsmen in historical
renaissance costumes are on display on the Grand Canal – including people dressed as
the Doge
and wife – followed by the gondolini race (a gondolino
is a smaller version of a gondola and possibly faster).
It is one of the finest pageants in a city that does
fine pageants, and a showcase of the rowing skills of the city's
men and women.
Feast day of St Bertin,
abbot
Feast day of St Charbel
Feast day of St Genebald of
Laon
Feast day of St Gentilis
Feast day of St Herculanus
Feast day of St Jordan of
Pulsano
Feast day of St Joseph Canh
Feast day of
St Lawrence
Giustiniani (Laurence of Justinian), first Patriarch of
Venice
(Mushroom, Agaricus campestris,
is
today's plant, dedicated to this saint.)
Born at Venice,
Italy, July 1,
1381, he died in
Venice on January
8, 1456. "When
he was 19, Laurence had a vision of the Eternal Wisdom in the guise
of a maiden encircled with light. She invited him to seek her with
happiness, rather than satiate his baser lusts … It is interesting
to note that he rarely gave monetary aid except in small amounts
because he thought it might be ill-spent. In fact, when a relative
asked him for a dowry for his daughter, he replied: 'A little is not
enough for you; and if I gave you much, I would be robbing the
poor.'" Source
Feast day of St Obdulia
Feast day of Blessed Teresa of
Calcutta
The celebrated
Albanian
Catholic
nun, Mother
Teresa (1910
- '97) was beatified on
October 19, 2003, by Pope John
Paul II. Born as Agnes Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Üsküb,
a town in the Ottoman
province of Kosovo
(now Skopje
in the Republic
of Macedonia), she was the founder of the Missionaries of Charity and her
work among the poor of Kolkata
(formerly Calcutta)
was widely reported.
Mother Teresa
was perhaps no 'Mother Teresa'
From Wikipedia:
Following Teresa's death in 1997, the Holy
See began the process of beatification, the first step towards
possible canonization, or sainthood.
This process requires the documentation of a miracle.
In 2002,
the Vatican recognized as a miracle the healing of a tumor in
the abdomen of an Indian woman, Monica Besra, following the
application of a locket containing Teresa's picture. Monica Besra
said that a beam of light emanated from the picture, curing the
cancerous tumor.
Besra's husband initially said that the tumor was
cured by later hospital treatment. According to Monica
Besra in TIME Asia, records of her treatment were removed
by a member of the order from the hospital and are now with a nun.
The doctors who treated Monica Besra denied the claims of a miracle
healing and said that they had come under pressure from the
Missionaries of Charity to acknowledge that the healing process was
the result of a miracle.
Besra's husband later withdrew his objections and
attributed the healing to a miracle. A Telegraph story quoted him
as saying: "It was her miracle healing that cured my wife. Our
situation was terrible and we didn't know what to do. Now my
children are being educated with the help of the nuns and I have
been able to buy a small piece of land. Everything has changed for
the better."
Mother
Teresa controversy
and critics
Click for Eastern Orthodox liturgical days Shop saints
Ganesh
Chaturthi (Hinduism; date
varies annually, approx.
Aug 20
to Sep 15)
The birth date of Sarvepalli
Radhakrishnan is celebrated as Teachers'
Day in India
On which day of the week were you born? Find out here
1187 Louis VIII of France (d. 1226)
1568 Tommaso Campanella (d. 1639), Dominican
theologian, philosopher, poet
1600 Loreto Vittori, composer
1638 Louis XIV of France (d. 1715)
 1651 William
Dampier (d. 1715) was christened in St Michael's Church, East Coker, in South Somerset, England
(his date of birth is unknown).
He was an explorer, sea captain, and
scientific observer, and known as a buccaneer –
although he used the word himself, some dispute this.
Dampier Archipelago
off Western Australia is named after him.
He was a crewmember of the pirate ship, the Cygnet,
which was beached on the northwest coast of Australia (somewhere
near
King Sound in Western Australia).
A pirate of 'exquisite mind': Dampier
influences
Dampier is little known outside Britain and
Australia (and, sadly, almost forgotten in those countries), but he
had an unusual degree of influence on figures better known than he:
His observations and analysis of natural history
helped Darwin's and
Alexander von Humboldt's
development of their theories. He made innovations in navigational
technology that were studied by Captain James
Cook and Admiral Horatio
Nelson. His reports on breadfruit
led to Captain William
Bligh's ill-fated voyage
on The Bounty.
"Poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge called Dampier a genius and
'a man of exquisite mind' and advised contemporary travel writers 'to read and imitate him'.
"Diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys dined with Dampier. Evelyn recorded their meeting, writing of Dampier's
'very strange adventures' which were 'very extraordinary and his observations very profitable.' He described Dampier as
'a famous buccaneer' and 'a more modest man than one would imagine.' Evelyn considered Dampier such a
'great traveler' and 'illustrious person' that he recommended a medal be struck in his
honor.
 "Jonathan Swift admired Dampier's clear, lucid style. Captain Lemuel Gulliver refers to his
'cousin Dampier' in the opening passages of Gulliver's Travels and there are clear parallels between Dampier's voyages and Gulliver's …
"Charles Darwin took Dampier's books, which he called 'a mine of information,' aboard the
'Beagle' and was influenced by them, e.g. by Dampier's first use of the word
'sub-species' and by his description of the Galapagos, and drew on Dampier in framing his theories of evolution. Darwin felt so familiar with Dampier despite the more than 100 years between them that he referred affectionately to
'old Dampier' in his diary.
"Captain James Cook and his naturalist Joseph Banks studied and admired Dampier's books prior to their voyages and cited them in their own subsequent works, commending Dampier's accuracy …
"Admiral James Burney, a distinguished former shipmate of Captain James Cook and brother of novelist Fanny, wrote in 1802:
'It is not easy to name another voyager or traveler who has given
more useful information to the world; to whom the merchant and
mariner are so much indebted, or who has communicated his
information in a more unembarrassed and intelligible manner ...
unassuming, equally free from affectation and from the most distant
appearance of invention.'
"Alexander von Humboldt, the very famous German explorer and naturalist, was another great admirer. He believed that later illustrious European scholars and travelers
'added little' to Dampier's 'observations' and considered him 'the finest travel writer'.
"Benjamin Franklin praised the accuracy of Dampier's meteorological
observations and cited his work." Source
He was the first person to make the connection
between winds and currents, and the first to make integrated wind
maps of the world. His maritime charts were used by the greatest
navigator of all time, Captain James Cook (October 27, 1728 - February 14, 1779), and
many others, and were of such quality that some were used by the
British Navy into the 20th century.
Prolific wordsmith
Dampier was more than an influential writer, he
enriched the English language to an extraordinary degree and is
cited more than a thousand times in the Oxford English Dictionary.
According to
Diana
Preston and Michael Preston, A
Pirate of Exquisite Mind: Explorer, Naturalist, and Buccaneer: The
Life of William Dampier, among the many words and expressions
William Dampier introduced into the English language: avocado;
barbecue; breadfruit; caress (verb); cashew; chopsticks; excursion
(trip); kumquat; Nor'wester (wind); posse; rambling;
sea-breeze; sea-lion; serrated; settlement; snapper; soy sauce;
stilts (house supports); subsistence (farming); sub-species
(pre-Charles Darwin); swampy; thunder-cloud; to make snug (as a
phrase) tortilla (source).
Dampier and Robinson
Crusoe
Dampier helped save the life of someone very
important in English literature. On February 1, 1709 real-life
castaway, Alexander Selkirk
(or Selcraig) (1676 - 1721), the model for Daniel Defoe's
Robinson
Crusoe, was rescued by the ship Duke, after four years on a deserted
island four hundred
miles west of Valparaiso, Chile, by Captain Woodes Rogers and
Dampier, who recognised him and vouched for his identity. Defoe was
inspired by Dampier's account ...
Read on at the William
Dampier page in the Scriptorium
1735 Johann Christian Bach (d. 1782), composer,
son of Johann Sebastian Bach
1750 Robert Fergusson (d. 1774), Scottish
poet
1791 Giacomo Meyerbeer (d. 1864), opera
composer
1807 Richard Chenevix Trench (d. 1886),
clergyman, philologist
1827 Goffredo Mameli, Italian
poet and writer
1847 Jesse James (shot
dead by new fellow gang member, Robert Ford, on April 3, 1882), American
outlaw
The
James-Younger Gang
Jesse
James family home
1857 Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (d. 1935),
scientist, inventor
1858
Victor
Daley (b. County Meath, Ireland; d. December 29,
1905), Australian
poet, best known for 'Eureka',
on the Eureka
Stockade.
He published in magazines as Punch and The Bulletin
(sometimes under the signature of 'Creeve Roe', a name adapted
from the Gaelic meaning 'Red Branch'). He was by nature a puritan,
shrinking from "evil language, gross stories and violence of
any kind", but he was also a hard-drinking bohemian, and the
circle of artists and writers (including Henry
Lawson) who formed around him were known as the Dawn
and Dusk Club. Daley died of consumption at Waitara, Sydney. He earlier told Albert Dorrington that "he was getting into training for a big fight about Christmas time". In
1900, according to one source, he had been Australia's best-selling poet.
The Dawn and Dusk Club
Foundation members of the 'the Duskers',
formed around September, 1898, were Daly, Fred
J Broomfield, James
Philp, Herbert Low (journalist), William Bede Melville, Bertram
Stevens and Randolph
Bedford. It was formed at Broomfield's home on the corner of Ice
Road and Great Barcom Street, Darlinghurst, near St Vincent's
Hospital, Sydney. Edwin
Brady says the Dawn to Dusk Club's places of rendezvous were
Giovanni's wine cellar, Paris House, the Coolalta, Pfahlert's Hotel,
Joe Power's, and the Hole-in-the-Wall. (He wrote: "The place
was largely determined by purse; French menu and wine when the going
was good, biscuits and beer when the ghost limped rather than
walked.")
Lawson created the motto: "Roost high
and crow low". Lawson's sometime friend, poet John
Le Gay Brereton had nothing to do with it, thinking they were
just a bunch of drunks. Truth magazine publisher John
Norton called them "a band of boozy, bar-bumming
bards". Daley was elected Symposiarch of the Duskers and the
seven "heptarchs" were Lawson, Stevens, sculptor Nelson
Illingworth, Frank P Mahony, George Augustine
Taylor, Con Lindsay
(journalist), and Philp, later commercial editor of the Brisbane Courier.
Philp drafted the rules. This
source says that Norman
Lindsay was a member.
"It was
only after his death that his work was collected, starting in 1908
with Poems, and then Wine and Roses in 1911, and Creeve
Roe in 1947. His work is little known, but he represents a
lyric alternative in the late 1800s to the predominant bush
ballads of the time." Source
"Many tales are told about Daley's high spirits; the parading of the
Daily Telegraph around the town in a hearse, the dressing up as a bishop, and the gaining of money
from Traill by falsely pretending Grey had died, all make interesting reading,
revealing a humour and a humanity thoroughly enjoyable. It is understandable,
therefore, that Brady felt a deep loss at Daley's death. He and Quinn stood over the
grave, on the headstone of which was written:
For aye the Bird of Fantasy
Sang magic songs to him;
And deep and deeper still rode he
Into the forest dim.
"Recalling his friend's personality, Brady fondly envisioned him –
'his face, his figure, his gestures, his mannerisms, his inscrutable stoicism and unruffled
cheerfulness' – and considered himself the richer for having known him."
Source:
Critical
biography
of Edwin Brady,
by John B Webb, MA (PDF)
Lawson
& Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson
More
poems More
1867 Amy
Beach, composer and pianist
1879
Frank Jewett, inventor, president of Bell
Labs
1888 Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
(d. 1975),
philosopher, educationist, second president of India
1892 Irene Lewisohn, philanthropist, social
worker at Henry Street Settlement
1902 Darryl F Zanuck (d. 1979), Hollywood movie producer and
executive
1905 Arthur Koestl | reetings from Australia.
How it works
Goddess month of Hesperis ends (commenced August 9)
