First opera to be performed in Bellingen will be Pepito, August 6

Pepito - Australian Premiere of Offenbach's Chamber Opera and a Classical Recital by the Bellingen Youth Orchestra
Fri. 6th August - 7:30pm at Bellingen Memorial Hall
All profits to the Bellingen Youth Orchestra
Tickets $25 from Nexus Community Gallery - 6655 9222 OR
Emporium Bellingen OR at the door.
Presented by Bellingen Community Arts Council



Categories: bellingen, music

There's nothing like Australia

From http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOCJDl34PVM. Whether you're Australian or not, here's your chance to contribute to Tourism Australia's new international TV commercial about Oz. The parameters have carefully limited by marketing and PR professionals to show only favourite holiday happy-snaps, not poverty, racism, environmental despoliation, corporate greed & crime, and a host of other ills. More BS brought to you by the Rudd Labor Government of 'the Great Brown Land'. I think they should be bombed with photos of the real Australia, and you are welcome to pass on my opinion via FB and anywhere else.




Categories: australia, pr, advertising, marketing, youtube, video, propaganda, disinfo, disinformation, meme, memetics

Nothern Ireland's bred a disproportionate number of fine poets

From http://bit.ly/9bd2JK -- writes Richard King in 'The ironical loving crush': "IMAGINE for a moment that poetry is heat. What would a map of contemporary poetry look like through a thermographic camera?/In my view, one thing is beyond all doubt: the brightest reds (or is it yellows?) would be reserved for Northern Ireland. Indeed, so vivid would it be that Britain and Australia would look pale by comparison, the US and Canada positively ashen ..."

Categories: poetry, english-poetry, english-literature, ireland

Will 'Top Kill' stop the oil spill?

Devastation will occur for decades. Thanls, Nora, for the link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDGAoU1H2gM



Categories: oil, enery, environment, water, ocean, corporations, disinfo, disinformation

Rainbow over Hyde St, Bellingen

Rainbow over Hyde St, Bellingen
Originally uploaded by Pip_Wilson.

From http://www.flickr.com/photos/pipwilson/4650084937/ ... a splendid rainbow this week. As always happens, my camera batteries were flat when the good thing happened, so I had to rush into the supermarket to buy some new ones. But I hope I got it OK.

Goddess Liberty unveiled before Tiananmen Massacre

From http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/may30.html: May 30, 1989, Tiananmen Square protests of 1989: The 33-foot high 'Goddess of Democracy' statue was unveiled in Tiananmen Square by student demonstrators. The demonstrations culminated in the notorious June 4 Massacre ...



Categories: authoritarianism, liberty, china, tienanmen

Feast day of Frigg, Norse goddess

From http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/may30.html: In Norse mythology, Frigg, Frige, Fricka, Frigga (shown here spinning clouds), one of the foremost goddesses of Norse mythology, was the mother goddess and the wife of Odin or Odr. Considered queen of the Aesir, and goddess of the sky, the goddess of motherhood, fertility, love, household management, and domestic arts. Indeed strong parallels exist between Frigg and Freya of whom she may be a different aspect.

She has the power of prophecy although she does not tell what she knows, and is the only one other than Odin who is permitted to sit on his high seat Hlidskjalf and look out over the universe. She also participates in the Wild Hunt (Asgardreid) along with her husband. Frigg's children are Baldr, Hod and Wecta; her stepchildren are Hermod, Heimdall, Tyr, Vidar, Vali, and Skjoldr. Thor is either her brother or a stepson.



Categories: viking, norway, deity, mythology

Possible death of Joan of Arc

This is the traditional date in 1431 of her death at the stake, but there is evidence to show Joan of Arc was alive, married with children as late as 1436 at Mentz and 1439 at Orleans. The marriage contract between Robert d'Armoise, Knight, and Jeanne d'Arc, la Pulcelle d'Orleans, has been discovered.

After she was captured, she was willing to recant in the face of the terrible punishment awaiting her, and her enemies were prepared to give her life imprisonment on bread and water. However, some of them put men's armour in her cell, and she was naturally tempted to put it on and gain the courage that it imparted to her. Her enemies caught her and said she was an unrepentant heretic, and no pardon could be granted to her, so she was burnt in the marketplace at Rouen.



Her real name was Darc, not d'Arc, so she has no association with a village named Arc. Born at Domremi, a small village on the river Meuse, 1410 (some sources say January 6, 1412, which is where we have her in the Book of Days), she was the youngest child of peasants Jacques and Isabell Darc. Domremi lay in the territory of the Duke of Bar, a staunch supporter of the dauphin Charles VII, near the border with territory of Duke of Lorraine, who was an adherent of the Duke of Burgundy and the English party. The archangel Michael came to her in a vision and told her that she was destined to be the saviour of the French, as well as introducing her to her two saintly guides, Catherine and Margaret.

Two French historians, Pierre de Sermoise and Emile Grillot de Givry have both suggested that there is evidence to say that she was not executed. Another "witch" was substituted, wearing a hood ...

Categories: france, saint, history, biography, capital-punishment

Greenwash tackled by environmental experts

From http://bit.ly/akgD0Y: Greenwash tackled by environmental experts: "As an increasing number of high profile companies are being caught out for making green claims they cannot back up, a round table event looked at how to expose 'greenwash.'

"The event yesterday (May 28) discussed firms like sandwich chain Pret, who were recently caught out over the sustainability of its 'fresh' tuna which was frozen and flown in from South America."

Categories: greenwash, environment, corporations, disinfo, disinformation

Did a Pacific volcano change Western history?

From http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/may29.html: May 29, 1453 The 'fall' of Constantinople was preceded by heavenly wonders. On a Tuesday, Constantinople (now Istanbul) fell to the Turks, or, as it is said in the Muslim world, Constantinople was liberated, after a siege, ending the Byzantine Empire.

It was a major turning point in world history as Constantinople, founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great, was a seat of learning and the tangible presence of Western civilization in the East. It has been said that the flight of many scholarly refugees from Constantinople to Italy was the single most important mainspring of the European Renaissance. Yet the antagonists of the siege of Constantinople had the minds of the Middle Ages era, and the effect of 'ominous' heavenly wonders probably affected the outcome ...



Categories: history

Gilbert of Gilbert & Sullivan drowned

From http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/may29.html: On May 29, 1911, British librettist (of Gilbert and Sullivan fame), dramatist and cartoonist, William Schwenck Gilbert (b. 1836), suffered a heart attack and drowned in a lake on his property at Grim's Dyke while trying to rescue one of two women to whom he was giving swimming lessons.

With Arthur Sullivan (1842 - 1900), Gilbert had formed one half of the successful Gilbert and Sullivan comical opera team.



Categories: uk, history, music, biography

Oak-Apple Day, England

Oak-apple Day (Royal Oak Day; Shick-shack Day; Nettle Day), England

Not only is May 29 the birthday (1630) of King Charles II of England (1630 - '85), it is the day when he entered London at the Restoration of the monarchy in England in 1660), putting an end to Puritan rule.

Today was commanded by an Act of Parliament in 1664 to be observed as a day of thanksgiving, and a special service (expunged in 1859) was put in the Book of Common Prayer. English people wore sprigs of oak with gilded oak-apples (oak galls caused by larvae of the wasps Amphibolips confluenta, Biorhiza pallida and others) on that day.



It remembers Charles II's concealment with Major Careless (or Major or Colonel Carlos, sources vary) in the ‘Royal Oak’ (thus escaping the Roundhead army) at Boscobel, near Shifnal, Salop, after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester on September 3, 1651. As Commonwealth troops approached Boscobel House, searching for Royalists, the King and Careless spent a day hidden in the Royal Oak in the grounds, and the next day hid in a priest hole at the house. After this, Giffard and the Pendrills were able to smuggle the King and Carlos to France ...

Categories: uk, history, calendar-customs

John’s Background Switcher new V. 4.2.1

John’s Background Switcher by John Conners: "John's Background Switcher 4.2.1 has just been released with a couple of important bug fixes discovered after the 4.2 release." JBS, along with Shareaholic http://www.shareaholic.com/, Avast free antivirus software http://www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download and Lunabar http://lunabar.software.informer.com/, is one of the most useful freeware devices on my computer.

Categories: internet-resource, freeware, software

The foundation of Amnesty International

From http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/may28.html: On May 28, 1961 Amnesty International was founded, by English lawyer Peter Benenson, Irish Nobel Laureate Seán MacBride (chairman from 1961 to 1975) and others, with an article, 'The Forgotten Prisoners', in the London Observer and the Paris Le Monde.



Amnesty International is a worldwide campaigning movement that works to promote all the human rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international standards ...

Latest news from Amnesty International

Categories: amnesty-international, human-rights

The Dionne Quints freakshow

From http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/may28.html: May 28, 1934, Corbeil, Ontario, Canada, between 3 and 6 am: During the dark days of the Great Depression, the Dionne quintuplets were born two months prematurely to a poverty-stricken young French-Catholic farming couple, Oliva and Elzire Dionne. They were to become part of a family of 13.

The girls, Annette, Cecile, Emilie, Marie and Yvonne, became the first quintuplets to survive infancy. Each weighing no more than 0.9 kilos (2 pounds), they were put next to a stove in their family's simple farmhouse to keep warm, and mothers from surrounding villages brought breast milk for them.

The unusual occurrence, combined with the Dionne family's poor background, made them the sensation of depression-era Canada and even inspired three Hollywood movies. Dr Allan Roy Dafoe, the doctor who delivered the babies, also became an international celebrity.

In 1935, the Ontario government took the quints from their parents, making them wards of the state, and placed them in a hospital-cum-tourist attraction called Quintland where they were exploited for commercial gain by many individuals, local businesses and national and multinational corporations. The sisters were the nation's biggest tourist attraction -- more popular than Niagara Falls. By the time of the girls' tenth birthday, about three million gawking tourists had visited the 'theme hospital. The Ontario government and local businesses alone made an estimated half billion dollars off the quints.



In 1998, the survivors tried to find out what happened to around $1 million that disappeared from a trust fund set up for them when they were taken from their parents. On a brighter note, the sisters finally won four million dollars as compensation from the Ontario government, though far less than what the government had received in taxes from Dionne-oriented exploitation ...

Categories: science, children, science

Purification of Pythia, ancient Greece

From http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/may28.html: From about 1400 BCE, the shrine at Delphi, Greece, was sacred, probably to Gaia, the mother earth goddess, or to a snake goddess. So important was it as a sacred site, it came to be described as Omphalos, the 'navel', or centre of the world. Later, it became sanctified to Apollo (son of Zeus, and god of the sun, light, youth, beauty, and prophecy), perhaps signifying a shift from matriarchal to patriarchal society, though this is uncertain and still a matter of academic enquiry and debate.

Delphi gained its name from the dolphin, and Apollo was said to have visited the place as one of those sea mammals that barely survive today’s polluted Ionian sea. Snakes were part of Delphic lore until c. 800 BCE when Apollo was said to have slain the serpent that guarded the sanctuary, establishing the oracle anew. (Thus, Apollo became one of the many dragon-slayers of mythology: St George, St Martha and Hercules among them.)



The serpent's name was Python, and had been made from mud and slime by Gaia. At first the oracle priestess (sometimes two in shifts) could only be consulted on one day a year. She might have become entranced, by a drug perhaps; she answered questions in hexameter verse.

The priestess, Pythia (Sybil), seated on a tripod above a crack in the earth, went into a trance while chewing laurel leaves. The temple priests formulated the oracle from the glossolalia ('speaking in tongues', as it is sometimes known in the Christian tradition) which the priestess spoke in her ecstasy. Every four years (the third of each Olympiad), the Pythian Games were held in honour of the priestess, the winners receiving a laurel wreath from the city of Tempe; Apollo himself had instituted these games so the world would never forget his great feat in slaying Python.

The leaders of ancient Greece relied on the Delphic oracle for her prognostications and clairvoyance. King Croesus once simultaneously asked seven oracles "What is the King of Lydia doing now?" Only the Delphic oracle answered correctly that he was cooking a tortoise and a lamb in a pot of bronze.

Jelle Zeilinga De Boer, a geologist at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, USA, reported in Geology, August, 2001, that ethylene, rising up through fissures in the rock beneath the shrine, was probably the sweet-smelling vapour that put the priestess in her trance ...

Categories: ancient-greece, mythology, deity, legend, greek-mythology

YouTube - Akmal Saleh - It's time to tell mum

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljh-uCH9fvw YouTube - Akmal Saleh - It's time to tell mum Australia's conservative 'Labor' gov't, with Senator Conroy leading the charge, wants to censor the Net in Australia and he's making headway. See http://tinyurl.com/3yb4vhl. It will make Oz have the most draconian Net censorship outside Iran and China. Please fight these cretins! Watch this TouTube for a laff. I dips me lid to Nora in Ireland for this one.

Categories: internet, censorship, authoritarianism

'War on terror' costs US taxpayer nearly 1 trillion

From http://costofwar.com/

Categories: war-on-terror, afghanistan, iraq, usa, military, army

Petraeus orders US spies to prepare for anti-nuclear strike on Iran

May 26, 2010 'The Times' -- "Teams of American special forces have been authorised to conduct spying missions intended to pave the way for a military strike on Iran in case President Obama orders one, US government sources have confirmed ..."
Yellow Pages http://yellow_pages.blogspot.com/2010/05/petraeus-orders-us-spies-to-prepare-for.html

Categories: iran, war-on-terror, usa, military

Gulf oil spill: Documents show BP chose cheaper, faster and riskier methods to complete ill-fated Deepwater Horizon well

Gulf oil spill: Documents show BP chose cheaper, faster and riskier methods to complete ill-fated Deepwater Horizon well - South Florida Sun-Sentinel.com: "Oil company BP used a cheaper, quicker but potentially less dependable method to complete the drilling of the Deepwater Horizon well, according to several experts and documents obtained by the Orlando Sentinel."

Blair goes from "greenwash" to landing green job

http://bit.ly/cLSKho Blair goes from "greenwash" to landing green job: "The decision by Silicon Valley-based Khosla Ventures to hire Tony Blair as strategy adviser on green energy will surprise some environmental campaigners. You only need to go as far back as 2003 to find the former prime minster being slammed from all sides for attempting to 'greenwash' the then government's environmental record ..."

Categories: blair, greenwash, corporations

Why You Should Care About Google TV | Lifehacker Australia

Why You Should Care About Google TV | Lifehacker Australia

Debating Synthia, a genetically engineered life form

http://bit.ly/cCahhk [The first synthetic life form has made relatively little news due to very pressing news items such as in Korea, Iraq and the Gulf of Mexico. but this one's a biggie:] Debating Synthia, a genetically engineered life form "Human folly has shown that naturally occurring invasive species introduced into the wrong environment can spread quickly. From killer bees in California and cane toads in Australia to zebra mussels in the Great Lakes and rabbits in Canmore, alien species can cause native populations to collapse, or at least eat all the plants in your garden.

"Imagine what a genetically engineered synthetic life form might do. Unleashed in the Gulf of Mexico to gobble up an oil spill, could lab-grown microbes take over the oceans, killing all forms of life? We hate to be the authors of a bad B-movie, but geneticist Craig Venter's newly created synthetic life, nicknamed Synthia, seems a bit like The Attack of the Franken Cell.

"We're not dismissing the potential good that can come from the scientific marvel that Venter has cooked up at his lab in Maryland. But as Ottawa genetic watchdog Pat Mooney notes, the arrival of Venter's synthetic microbes "should be a wake-up call that a technological step-change of historic and alarming proportions has now occurred."

Categories: genetic-engineering

Deepwater drilling is inappropriate, period | Analysis & Opinion |

http://bit.ly/c8gIwU Deepwater drilling is inappropriate, period | Analysis & Opinion "Jean-Michel Cousteau is an environmentalist, documentary producer, president of Ocean Futures Society and the son of ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau."

Categories: water, environment, oil, energy

Israel Australia passports forgeries - Google News

http://bit.ly/cLKpLZ israel australia passports - Google News

Israel and the spies who scammed Oz

Categories: australia, israel, espionage

No moves to probe Google 'spying'

http://bit.ly/9nJ0Rt No moves to probe Google 'spying': Australia: "COMMUNICATIONS Minister Stephen Conroy has not referred Google for police investigation, despite claiming the internet search engine company deliberately spied on Australians."

Categories: google, espionage, australia, disinformation, disinfo

Sir Henry Parkes - boozer and wowser at the same time

From http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/may27.html: May 27, 1815 Birth of Sir Henry Parkes (d. April 27, 1896), Australian politician (Free Trade Party, or Anti-Socialist Party), sometimes called the 'Father of Federation' and at least considered the most prominent among the Australian 'Founding Fathers'. Known for advocating abstinence while being a heavy drinker himself, Parkes was described during his lifetime by The Times of London as "the most commanding figure in Australian politics".

He was first elected to the New South Wales Parliament in 1854 and was a strong supporter of free trade, immigration programs and education reforms. He introduced laws that gave the government the power to employ teachers and create public schools, abolished government funding to religious schools and improved prisons. He was Premier of New South Wales five times between 1872 and 1891 and was knighted in 1877.

On October 24, 1889, at the Tenterfield School of Arts, Parkes delivered the Tenterfield Oration. The oration was seen as a clarion call to federalists and he called for a convention "to devise the constitution which would be necessary for bringing into existence a federal government with a federal parliament for the conduct of national undertaking".

His image appears on the Australian $5 note. The suburb of Parkes in Canberra is named after him as well as the town of Parkes in central New South Wales.

On April 4, 1888, The Republican, edited by Henry Lawson, printed Lawson's castigation of Parkes's recent speech at Liverpool, outside Sydney, in which Parkes had referred to the opposition as "native dogs and opossums", "inferior animals", "precursors of anarchy", "crimps, thieves and blacklegs", "withered tarantulas", "miserable poodle-headed creatures", "blacklegs, fools and anarchists"(!)





In 1895 on his 80th birthday, Parkes attributed his longevity to abstinence, advising other Australians to avoid alcohol as well. "This is the same gentleman who takes wine for his stomach's sake every day of his life", laughed The Bulletin.

Lawson & Co: associations with Henry and Louisa Lawson

Categories: australia, politics, henry-lawson

Julia Ward Howe, social activist and poet

1819 Julia Ward Howe (d. October 17, 1910), prominent United States abolitionist, social activist, pacifist and poet.

Howe was the author of 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' which was first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1862 and quickly became one of the most popular songs for the Union during the American Civil War.

Despite the bloodthirstiness of 'Battle Hymn of the Republic', after the war Howe focused her activities on the causes of pacifism and women's suffrage. In 1870 she was the first to proclaim Mothers' Day [qv], which was originally an occasion specifically for strenuous and organized opposition to war.

Early progressives in the Book of Days



Categories: usa, pacifism, war, peace, progressive, radical, radical-history, biography

Indigenous Australians given the vote

From http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/may27.html: 1967 Decades overdue, an Australian referendum allowed the Federal Parliament to legislate for Indigenous Australians, and Aboriginal Australians were given the vote. In the referendum 90 per cent of Australians voted to remove clauses in the Australian Constitution which discriminated against indigenous Australians.

The referendum also gave the Australian Federal Government the power to make laws on behalf of indigenous Australians. Technically it was a vote on the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginals) 1967, which after being approved in the referendum became law on August 10 of the same year.



Categories: australia, indigenous

Malcom Fraser quits Liberal Party

http://bit.ly/9SzpsD Malcom Fraser Quits Liberal Party: "'Leftie' Fraser leaves party that left him". It's just staggering, from the point of view of most Australians, that Malcolm Fraser, the politician who was most hated by the Left (when he engineered the sacking of Labor Prime Minister Whitlam), five days after his 80th birthday has left the party that he now sees as too right-wing.

"The prime minster who was attacked by Labor as being a granite-faced arch-conservative in the 1980s was in January derided by the Liberals' Sophie Mirabella as a 'frothing-at-the-mouth leftie' ... Malcolm Fraser, by identifying with Bush senior and repudiating Bush junior, was illustrating that the rightward move of conservative politics is much bigger than an Australian event. It's a big shift in the political world, a world of which Fraser is no longer part ..."

Categories: australia, progressive, conservative, politics, bush

Death in Your Kitchen: Microwave Ovens

From Skeptoid.com: Death in Your Kitchen: Microwave Ovens: An examination of the various claims that microwaved food and water are poisonous.

Categories: skeptic, water, superstition

Festival of the goddess Diana, Roman Empire (May 26 - 31, 17 BCE)

The last days before the kalends of June in the year 17 BCE were a marvellous festival to the goddess Diana leading up to the centennial games, the Ludi Saeculares. These games take their name from saeculum, a word which originally meant a period stretching roughly a century but by a proclamation of Roman emperor Augustus became a period of 110 years. [These games are at May 31 in the Book of Days.] Horace's hymn the Carmen Saeculare was commissioned by Augustus for the occasion ...



Categories: deity, festival, ancient-rome, roman-empire

The mysterious case of Kaspar Hauser

From http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/may26.html On May 26, 1828 Kaspar Hauser showed up in Nuremburg. This is a story that intrigues me as much for the way it captivated the German people of its day and succeeding generations, as for its intrinsic oddness.

On this day, at about 4 o'clock in the afternoon, a youth of about 16 or 17 years of age showed up in a pathetic condition in the marketplace in Nuremburg, Germany.

The boy was dressed in peasant clothes, and had with him a letter addressed to the cavalry captain of the city. He was led to the captain and interrogated, and it was found he could scarcely speak. To every question he replied “Von Regensburg” (from Regensburg) or “Ich woais nit” (I don't know). Except for dry bread and water, he showed a violent dislike to all forms of food and drink. He seemed ignorant of commonplace objects. He carried a handkerchief marked ‘KH’ and a few written Catholic prayers.



In the letter that he carried, it was stated that the writer was a poor day-labourer who had ten children of his own. The man had found the boy deposited on his doorstep by his mother, and had secretly brought the boy up as his own, keeping him confined to the house, somewhere in Bavaria. The boy, said the letter, had expressed an interest in becoming a horse soldier. Accompanying this letter was also a note purportedly from the boy's mother, saying that she, a poor girl, had had the baby, named Kaspar Hauser, on April 30 (Walpurgisnacht, the witching time), 1812, and that his father, an officer in Nuremburg's sixth regiment, was dead.

A burgomaster named Binder took a kindly interest in Kaspar. In the course of many conversations with him, it was discovered that the boy had been kept underground all his life, in a space so small he could not stretch to full length. He had been fed only on bread and water by a man who never showed himself ...

Categories: mystery, germany

National Sorry Day, Australia

In 1998, as the result of an inquiry into the forced removal of Aboriginal children (see Stolen Generation) from their families, a National Sorry Day was instituted, to acknowledge the wrong that had been done to indigenous families, so that the healing process could begin. Many politicians, from both sides of the house, participated, with the notable exception of the then Prime Minister of Australia, ultra-conservative John Howard.

The day was held annually until 2004. It was renamed National Day of Healing in 2005. However, in September 2005 the name reverted when the National Sorry Day Committee decided to restore the name Sorry Day.



Categories: australia, indigenous, calendar-customs

Dinosaurs Among Us

"Today we point our skeptical eye at the jungles of the Dark Continent, and other remote hideaways throughout the world, where tales tell that living relics from the past still walk among us: the dinosaurs. From Mokele Mbembe, the alleged sauropod of the Congo; to the Ropen, said to be a pterosaur ruling the skies of Papua New Guinea; to the idea that plesiosaurs are the lake monsters of Loch Ness, Ogopogo, and others; the reports come from all over. You'd think these stories would be on the decline. As humans spread out into the farthest reaches of our planet and explore more, you'd expect the stories to fade as nothing is found. However, they're actually on the rise, due to promotional efforts by the relatively new Young Earth Creationism movement intent on proving that dinosaurs lived so recently that they coexisted with humans, and may even survive today ..."
Read and listen at Dinosaurs Among Us, @ skeptoid.com

Picture via RationalWiki

Categories: skepticism, creationism

Walt Whitman | American Experience | PBS Video

Walt Whitman | American Experience | PBS Video
Cool if you love Walt Whitman and his extraordinary poetry as much as I do.

Categories: whitman, poetry, american-poetry

First 'shots' in China's bloody Cultural Revolution

From http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/may25.html: May 25, 1966 China's Cultural Revolution: One of the very first incidents in Mao Zedong's period of terror that left millions dead at the hands of their own countrymen and women. Today, Nie Yuanzi and six others placed a poster attacking Beijing University authorities as reactionary, and soon Maoist bloodletting began nationwide among men, women and children.


"At Beijing University, Nie Yuanzi and six others put up a 'big character poster', (da zi bao) attacking the authorities of Beijing University for being 'members of a black gang,' putting out a call to 'firmly, thoroughly, cleanly and totally eliminate any ox ghosts and snake demons.' On the evening of June 1, 1966, the Central People's Radio Station broadcast the text of this poster. The poster sent a shock wave throughout the country. Students took Beijing University as their example and started attacking the authorities of their schools with the same set of words ...

Categories: china, crime, human-rights, civil-rights, communism

Flitting Day, May 25, Scotland

From http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/may25.html The day in the past on which Scottish people mostly changed their residences. Leases were generally for twelve months, and the Scottish people were inclined to move quite often, typically every May 25. "Whether the restless disposition has arisen from the short leases, or the short leases have been a result of the restless disposition, is immaterial." – Folklorist Robert Chambers.

The landlord would come on Candlemas (February 2) and ask the tenants if they wanted to stay after Flitting Day - whether the family will flit, or sit, in Scottish parlance. If not, he would start advertising. The tenant would have to move out by midday on May 25.

Categories: calendar-customs, scotland, folklore

Death of Captain Thunderbolt - maybe

From http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/book/may25.html May 25, 1870: Captain Thunderbolt (Frederick Ward), the notorious Australian bushranger, was allegedly shot dead by Constable AB Walker. Thunderbolt had been the scourge of inns and mail coaches around Bourke and Uralla, New South Wales, and had done at least 80 robberies netting him £20,000. Many of these ill-gotten gains, however, were in the form of cheques and half notes, pretty useless to a highwayman out in the Armidale tablelands wilderness.

A number of years ago I sometimes used to stay on Cockatoo Island, in Sydney Harbour. The house I stayed in had once been the mansion of the governor of the notorious Cockatoo Island Prison that existed during the convict days of Australia – like a mini-Alcatraz or Robbin Island. In the old sandstone prison yard I have seen the iron rings on the walls, with which prisoners were restrained as they were scourged with the cat o’ nine tails, a leather whip sometimes made more fearsome by the addition of small pieces of sharp lead at the end of nine knotted thongs. Cockatoo has only recently been opened to public tours so visitors can get a feel for what a terrible living tomb it was.

On September 11, 1863, Fred Ward and Frederick Britten were the only prisoners ever to escape from the hell of that place, which they did by covering their heads with boxes and swimming a kilometre or so to land. Some say that Thunderbolt was shot dead on May 25, 1870, but a respectable theory has it that Thunderbolt lived a long life and died in a Sydney boarding house in the 1920s ...

Read on at May 25 in The Wilson's Almanac Book of Days.



Highwaymen, outlaws, bushrangers, pirates, gangsters, etc in the Book of Days

Categories: australia, bushranger, history, biography, law, legal, crime

I Started Out With Nothing and I've Still Got Most Of It Left

Seasick Steve and his 3-string guitar: http://bit.ly/lO912 and http://bit.ly/c7CZam -- Glastonbury Fest http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glastonbury_Festival -- I dips me lid to Baz le Tuff for the cool linx.

Categories: music

Bob Dylan turns 69

Birthday boy Bob Dylan is known more for his genius with words and tunes, and for deadpan (once, asked by a journalist how many children he had, he said "Some") than as a comedian.

However, he also has a fondness for silly wisecracks and is known among fans as a real joker at gigs. Sometimes he’s corny, but his cornball jokes are loved by the audience. Here are a few of his quips, and if you have any more, I'm collecting them.

At one gig, Dylan apologized, saying that "I almost didn't make it tonight ... had a flat tire. There was a fork in the road."

At Western Connecticut State University in 1997, when he introduced Bucky Baxter he said, "When I first met Bucky, he didn't have a penny to his name. I told him to get another name."

"My ex-wife left me again. She's a tennis player. Love means nothing to her."

"This is a love song. We love to play it."

"David Kemper on the drums. David's turning 21 tonight. David never lies unless he's in bed."

"David [Kemper] and I drove here tonight in a car singing songs on the way. We were singing cartoons."

"David swallowed a roll of film today. We’ll see what develops."

More of May 24 in The Wilson's Almanac Book of Days.



At top: Dylan cover of Oz magazine (more such covers), by Martin Sharp

Categories: dylan, music