*Ø* Blogmanac | Australia's former G-G slams 'Honest John' gov't over refugees
The following report from Australia's (publicly funded) national broadcaster, ABC, shows that it is just not wild-eyed radicals who condemn the Australian government for its racist policies over refugees. Now the highly respectable Sir William Deane has entered the fray. The reference to "children overboard" is to do with a very serious scandal in which the Howard Government blatantly lied to the Australian people that asylum-seeking adults were threatening to toss their kids off their leaky refugee boats, a tactic that inflamed racism and helped them win an election.

One of the aims of Wilson's Almanac is to draw attention to such lies and policies and to reveal the concentration camps that Australia places refugees in. It's good to see the likes of Bill Deane calling Howard a liar, just as the former UN weapons inspector, Australian Richard Butler did over the invasion of Iraq. The greatest satisfaction comes, because Howard's nickname used to be "Honest John", but he has turned out to be probably the most deceptive and racist 'leader' this country has ever had.

Australia: "The office of Governor-General has caused the Prime Minister some big headaches in the last few weeks. As if its last occupant, Peter Hollingworth, had not caused John Howard enough grief, now the man who filled the post before him is back in the spotlight. Sir William Deane has accused the Howard Government of inflaming prejudice and intolerance, and of acting untruthfully in the infamous children overboard affair."
Read on

*Ø* Blogmanac | May 31 | 1921 Tulsa's night of shame
US: On this day, more than 300 were killed in a race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

This sad (and little known) day marks the worst racial violence in American history. Angered by false rumors, whites were shooting throughout the night of the 31st, looting and burning in the early hours of June 1st. Earlier on this day, the Tulsa Tribune newspaper ran a front page article entitled Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator, and a back page editorial entitled To Lynch Negro Tonight.

The accusation proved false. However, by the time this was determined, the black community of Greenwood was destroyed by a white mob, who murdered many and razed the entire 35 block area.

Photos
Source: The Daily Bleed

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1819 Walt Whitman, American poet (Leaves of Grass)

I loafe and invite my soul.
Walt Whitman, Song of Myself

Now I see the secret of making the best persons: it is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth.
Walt Whitman

I am as bad as the worst, but thank God I am as good as the best.
Walt Whitman

Leaves of Grass online

Walt Whitman Shall Not Sleep, poem by Pip

Blog kálido
I just stumbled upon a great collection of caricatures by the remarkable Sebastian Krüger.

*Ø* Blogmanac | May 30 | 542 AD According to tradition, the death of King Arthur
According to legend, King Arthur was the son of King Uther Pendragon and Igerna, wife of Corlois, Duke of Cornwall who Uther had cuckolded. They later married when Corlois died in battle. It is unlikely Arthur really existed, and he is not found in chronicles before Norman times, five centuries after his supposed death.

On the death of Uther, Arthur became king. He went to war against the Anglo-Saxons, whom he defeated with great slaughter in a place called Mount Badon. He then went on to defeat the Scots and Picts, then conquered Ireland, Iceland, Gothland and the Orcades, followed by Denmark, Norway and Gaul. He supposedly defeated the Gallic governor Flollo at Paris, after nine years of trying to subdue the Gauls.

He returned to his native land, gathered all the princes together and was crowned again, after which representatives from Rome bore a letter from Lucius Tiberius, the procurator of Rome, demanding that he relinquish all the lands that he had taken from Rome, and also that he pay the tribute that Britain had formerly paid to the Imperial power.

King Arthur entrusted his kingdom to his nephew Modred and his queen Guanhumara (Guinevere), and crossed the Channel to France, disembarking at Mont St Michael, where he slew a Spanish giant, who had carried away Helena, the niece of Hoel of Brittany. Arthur engaged Tiberius in France, and defeated him. He was marching with his troops to Rome, passing the Alps, when he got disastrous news from Britain – Modred had conspired with and married the queen, taking the crown. Arthur left half his forces in France under command of Hoel of Brittany, and landed the other half at Rutupiae, or Richborough, Guanhumara fleeing to a nunnery in penitence, where she spent the remainder of her days.

Modred was killed by Arthur's men. After three battles with him, Arthur finally killed him in battle, but was mortally wounded himself. They carried Arthur to the Isle of Avalon (Glastonbury) but were unable to heal him. This tale of the legendary King Arthur comes from Geoffrey of Monmouth and was written in 1147.

Pip Wilson's articles are available for your publication, on application. Further details


More
More d’Arthur
And more links
Glastonbury Festival - the Official Website Friday 27th to Sunday 29th June
Glastonbury Town Website

*Ø* Blogmanac | May 30 | Did the Communists starve Pasternak?
Boris Pasternak, Russian winner of the 1958 Nobel Prize for Literature, in the years leading up to his death on May 30, 1968, suffered appalling persecution by his own government. He had won the Nobel Prize, but, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn after him, was told that if he left the USSR to attend the awards ceremony he would not be permitted to return. He was even expelled from the union of Soviet writers.

Evidence that the Communist regime of the Soviet Union might have wilfully starved Boris Pasternak to death emerged in a book, Moscow: Under the Skin, written by an Italian journalist, Viro Roberti.

Roberti interviewed the great author of Dr Zhivago several times during the ordeal. On March 15, 1960, Roberti met Pasternak, who was emaciated and sickly looking. The novelist told the interviewer, ”I have been expelled from the Union of Soviet Writers so that I shall starve. No one publishes my poetry or my translations anymore, which was my daily bread. The first payments from my editor have been confiscated by order of the authorities …”

Pasternak died ten weeks later, on May 30, 1960. The monopoly State, it seems, had exercised the full logic of its power, disallowing a genius, who had been but mildly critical of communism in Dr Zhivago, the right even to eat.

(More: Schwarz, Frederick, The Three Faces of Revolution, Capitol Hill Press, Washington, 1972, 43-47)

Pip Wilson's articles are available for your publication, on application. Further details

*Ø* Blogmanac | How does Dyson make water go uphill?

James Dyson has invented a novel garden fountain in which water appears to flow uphill.

"A set of four glass ramps positioned in a square clearly show water travelling up each of them before it pours off the top, only to start again at the bottom of the next ramp."

Read on

Make water run uphill in your garden ... and all you'll need then is a sundial on your ceiling.

*Ø* Blogmanac | Bowling for Columbine soon on DVD
Michael Moore's Oscar-winning documentary will be out on DVD in August. You can pre-order through Amazon (see the button in our left-hand column) and forget about it till it arrives at your address as soon as it's released. (US and Canada only. This DVD will probably not be viewable in other countries due to format.) The Almanac will earn a small commission on sales.

Michael Moore's superb documentary (following in the footsteps of Roger & Me and The Big One) tackles a meaty subject: gun control. Moore skilfully lays out arguments surrounding the issue and short-circuits them all, leaving one impossible question: why do Americans kill each other more often than people in any other democratic nation?
Bret Fetzer

Click the Amazon button at lower left.

*Ø* Blogmanac | China Jails Four Internet Activists
BEIJING (Reuters) - A Chinese court has jailed four Internet activists for up to 10 years on subversion charges after 20 months in legal limbo, a human rights group said on Thursday. The Beijing Intermediate People's Court sentenced geologist Jin Haike, 27, and Xu Wei, 28, a journalist for Beijing's Consumer Daily, to 10 years in prison each on Wednesday, the New York-based advocacy group Human Rights in China said.

Yang Zili, a 31-year-old computer engineer, and Zhang Honghai, a 29-year-old freelance writer, got eight years each. The court declined to comment. China has jailed a number of Internet writers in recent years as part of a crackdown on dissent on the Web. The government has created a special Internet police force, filtered foreign sites and shut down others posting politically incorrect fare.

Story

*Ø* Blogmanac | Wine tasting takes brains
An Italian study of 14 men using MRI scans found that the seven of them who were wine experts used both hemispheres of the brain when they tasted wine. The rest used only the right one. According to the scientists the sommeliers' intellectual capabilities allowed them to appreciate the wine more than ordinary people do.
Source
I see. They do MRI scans for this?

*Ø* Blogmanac | May 29 | 1453 Did a Pacific volcano change Western history?

500 years ago today: 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. It was a major turning point in world history as Constantinople, founded by the Roman Emperor Constantine, 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.



During the preceding weeks, the city had suffered many heavy rains and hailstorms. Being medieval men, the leaders believed that the Christian city would not fall to Sultan Mehmed’s siege unless there was a sign in the moon. Unfortunately for them, the moon went into a long and dark eclipse on May 22nd, displaying a thin crescent – the image of the Turkish standard flying over Mehmed's camp.

On the 26th, an unseasonal, thick fog fell on Constantinople. By nightfall, the fog lifted and the Christians were appalled by what they saw: the buildings of the city glowed in ominous shades of red. Even the enormous copper dome of the imposing cathedral, the Hagia Sophia (which has been a mosque ever since) appeared to be engulfed in flames, but it never burned. Phrantzes, a friend of the emperor, wrote that the light remained over the city for an entire night.

Nicolo Barbaro, A Venetian surgeon living in Constantinople at the time, later wrote:

At the first hour of the night, there appeared a wonderful sign in the sky, which was to tell Constantine the worthy, emperor of Constantinople, that his proud empire was to come to an end.... The moon rose, being at this time at the full...but it rose as if it were no more than a three-day moon, with only a little of it showing.... The moon stayed in this form for about four hours.

Following this there were more wild storms that certainly must have encouraged the Muslims to liberate a city that they believed belonged to them, and discouraged the Christians who believed the same with equal fervour.

The Greek chronicler, Kritovoulos of Imbros, wrote:

Such was the unheard-of and unprecedented violence of that storm and hail [that it] certainly foreshadowed the imminent loss of all, and .. .like a torrent of fiercest waters, it would carry away and annihilate everything.

Some scientists now believe that the strange heavenly phenomena came about due to the eruption of a volcano at Kuwae, Vanuata, in the Pacific earlier in the year. The volcanic dust that belched into the atmosphere contributed to the stormy weather, the unusually dark eclipse, the luminescent phenomena and the red skies.

Geologists reckon that Kuwae spewed out more than 32 cubic kilometres of molten rock with a violence two million times that of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. By contrast, the famous Krakatoa expelled less than one-third of that in 1883; Mount Pinatubo belched out only five cubic kilometres in 1991 and caused brilliant sunsets around the globe for months.

Pip Wilson's articles are available for your publication, on application. Further details

*Ø* Blogmanac | What did you do during the African Holocaust?
Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times:
"In Congo, in which I've had a special interest ever since Tutsi rebels chased me through the jungle there for several days in 1997, 3.3 million people have died because of warfare there in the last five years, according to a study by the International Rescue Committee. That's half a Holocaust in a single country.

Our children and grandchildren may fairly ask, "So, what did you do during the African holocaust?"

Some African nations, like Uganda, Mauritius, Ghana and Mozambique, are booming; they show that African countries can thrive. But the failures outnumber the successes: child mortality rose in the 1990's in Kenya, Malawi and Zambia; primary school enrollments dropped in Cameroon, Lesotho, Mozambique and Tanzania; the number of malnourished children is growing across the continent.

"We are losing the battle against hunger," warns James Morris, the head of the World Food Program.

So it's time to rethink this continent. Africa itself has largely failed, and Western policies toward it have mostly failed as well."

Full article

See Wilson's Almanac on the Congo

*Ø* Blogmanac | May 29 | Well-dressing, Tissington, England on Ascension Day
On Ascension Day* in Tissington, England, wells are traditionally dressed with flowers, and sometimes Bible verses are made out in letters of flowers. Well-dressing, practised in many other places throught Britain, is the art of decorating springs and wells with scenes, usually made from local plant life. The dressings are set in clay-filled wooden trays, mounted on a wooden frame and take up to seven days to complete.

Some believe the custom arose during a drought in Derbyshire in 1615, but it is known that the custom of well-dressing began in Celtic times. The wells of Tissington flowed throughout this time, and people from ten miles around drove their cattle there to drink, so at Ascension Day a thanksgiving custom came about.

We know that these kinds of traditions go back to antiquity, and the Romans also practised well-dressing. Seneca wrote "Where a spring rises or a river flows, there should we build altars and offer sacrifices". English kings Edgar and Canute both issued edicts prohibiting the pagan custom of worshipping of wells.

Wells are symbolic of purity, and May was always considered the best time to visit curative springs. Silence was to be kept going there and coming back, and the vessel used to take the water was not allowed to touch the ground. After the Reformation these customs were forbidden.

In another custom associated with today, farmers hung in their roof an egg laid on Ascension Day, in order to protect against lightning and fire.

Ascension is the end of the Easter season. During the 40-day period beginning with Easter Sunday, Christians celebrate the time when Jesus reappeared to some of His followers. This period ends on Ascension Day, or Ascension Thursday.

Pip Wilson's articles are available for your publication, on application. Further details

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Thursday was named after the Viking god, Thor, and to the Vikings today was also the Festival of Mjollnir, Thor’s hammer, on a Thursday, at around the time that Christians celebrate Ascension Day. Mjollnir was made by Brok and Eitri and had enormous destructive abilities; it was associated with lightning. When thrown, it would return like a boomerang after hitting its target, and only Thor and Magni, his son, could manage to lift it. Today was marked by ritual contests such as trial by combat.

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Because the skies were opened to receive Christ on Ascension Day, any rain which falls then comes straight from Heaven: so it has special curative properties, being particularly good for bathing sore eyes. Water from holy wells is also uniquely efficacious if collected early on ‘Holy Thursday’ morning: and Ascensiontide or Whitsun are the favourite seasons for ‘well-dressing’.
John Aubrey, Remains of Gentilism, 1688

History of Well Dressing
The Art of Well Dressing
Well-dressing Links
Good picture of a well-dressing
Mjollnir

*Ø* Blogmanac Amnesty slams Australia
At last, some good news for asylum seekers downunder
"Australia has been lashed by global human rights watchdog Amnesty International over tough counter-terrorism laws and the continued detention of asylum seekers.

"In its annual human rights report, released in London, Amnesty criticised the government over plans to give ASIO new interrogation powers which would see people detained for a week without charge ...

"In a pessimistic report, Amnesty said international paranoia about terrorism in the wake of September 11 had seen 50 years of hard-won human rights freedoms rolled back over the last year in 151 countries."

Read the story

*Ø* Blogmanac | Amnesty launches Annual Report
People around the world are more insecure today than at any time since the end of the Cold War, Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International said today at the launch of the organization's annual report.

"The war on Iraq dominated the international agenda for the past year, but away from the eyes of the world a myriad of 'forgotten' conflicts have taken a heavy toll on human rights and human lives, in places as diverse as Côte d'Ivoire, Colombia, Burundi, Chechnya and Nepal."

"Iraq and Israel and the Occupied Territories are in the news, Ituri in the Democratic Republic of Congo is not, despite the imminent threat of genocide," said Irene Khan. "Drawing attention to 'hidden' crises, protecting the rights of the 'forgotten victims' is the biggest challenge we face today."

At a time of heightened insecurity governments chose to ignore and undermine the collective system of security which the rule of international law represents. While claiming to bring justice to victims in Iraq, the United States has actively sought to undermine the International Criminal Court, the mechanism for universal justice.

The "war on terror", far from making the world a safer place, has made it more dangerous by curtailing human rights, undermining the rule of international law and shielding governments from scrutiny. It has deepened divisions among people of different faiths and origins, sowing the seeds for more conflict. The overwhelming impact of all this is genuine fear -- among the affluent as well as the poor.

Campaigns that ran throughout 2002 resulted in a number of successes. The organization succeeded in the release of individuals like former Russian prisoner of conscience Grigory Pasko, in obtaining justice for Sierra Leoneans with the establishment of a Special Court for that country and for global accountability with the entry into force of the International Criminal Court.

Full Report here

*Ø* Blogmanac | Aussie G-G's passive voice

(or how to apologise without saying you're sorry)
You know how a small child will say "the cup spilled the milk"? That's what comes to mind with the resignation speech by Australia's Governor-General, Dr Peter Hollingworth today.

"I truly regret the way the matter was handled and I apologise to those involved who have suffered as a consequence," he said. This is kid-speak for "I truly regret the way that I handled the matter ..." and reflects more credit on the $750-per-day PR consultants Hollingworth has engaged for weeks at taxpayers' expense than it does on the former Archbishop of Brisbane. While it took some courage to hang onto office for so long after being exposed for protecting paedophile clerics, and to apologise publicly to those who have suffered, it seems to this writer that something was lacking: the use of the active, rather than the passive voice.

His Excellency retires on $180,000 per annum, for life, courtesy of the Australian people. Like the Archbishop, we look after our own.

News story

*Ø* Blogmanac | Death Sentence influenced by Old Testament
Denver (Reuters) - A judge overturned a convicted murderer's death sentence because jurors consulted Biblical passages such as an "eye for an eye" during death-penalty deliberations.

Robert Harlan was convicted and sentenced to death in 1995 for the murder of Rhonda Maloney, a waitress who was driving home from work when Harlan forced her car off the road.

In a five-day hearing last month, Harlan's attorneys argued that several jurors consulted biblical scripture during jury deliberations, particularly two Old Testament passages from Leviticus that read, "fracture for fracture, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, as he has caused disfigurement of a man, so shall it be done to him." And, "whoever kills an animal shall restore it, but whoever kills a man shall be put to death."

While noting that Harlan's crimes "were among the most grievous, heinous and reprehensible" he had seen in 18 years on the bench, Adams County District Judge John J. Vigil said Friday that court officials failed to properly sequester the jury.

*Ø* Blogmanac | May 28 | Purification of Pythia, ancient Greece
From about 1400 BCE, the shrine at Delphi, Greece, was sacred, probably to Gaia, the mother earth goddess, or to a snake goddess. Later, it became sanctified to Apollo (son of Zeus, god of the sun, light, youth, beauty, and prophesy), 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 guarded the sanctuary, establishing the oracle anew. (Thus, Apollo became a dragon-slayer, like St George, St Martha and Hercules.)

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, 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 insituted 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 progostications 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.

Scientists have found 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. We know of this vapour from the first-century CE writer, Plutarch (c. 45-125 CE), who, as a temple priest, was familiar with the shrine and reported that the priestess was under the influence of such a vapour. In his day, however, the vapours were weaker than in previous centuries, which may be attributed to changes in the bedrock beneath this fabled place.

Pip Wilson's articles are available for your publication, on application. Further details

Click the thumb for larger image of Apollo slaying Python

Skeptical view of glossolalia
God versus goddess at Delphi
Geology of the Delphic Oracle
Delphic Oracle's Lips May Have Been Loosened by Gas Vapors
Women and the Pythian Games

*Ø* Blogmanac | Try googling google
Try this: type "search engine" into google, and google comes up third behind My Excite and Alta Vista. I found this item here.

*Ø* Blogmanac | US plans death camp
Until now, the worst thing I could say about Guantanamo was that Americans are holding prisoners, including Australians, without charge, first in wire cages exposed to the elements and now in 6' by 8' concrete cells with electric lights on 24/7, two 20-minute exercise breaks per week, no access to lawyers, Red Cross or family, and forbidden to speak to lawyers. Excuse me, I forgot they had Bush over there, who turned Texas into the killingest state outside China and Nigeria. (I heard on ABC radio today an interview with a former death row pastor from Texas who said that at first he was pro-death penalty, but after seeing more than 90 people killed, he now believes it is state-sanctioned homicide. Indeed, the cause of death is officially given as homicide, he said. He also said that he knows for a fact, by the confessions of dying men, some of whom gave him evidence about themselves and other prisoners that he could not divulge, that between 12 and 15 of those mostly black and Hispanic men were innocent.)

Now, the Brisbane (Australia) Courier-Mail reveals plans by the US to build execution chambers ("death houses", as they are called in Texas) at the Guantanamo Bay concentration camp. "The plans were revealed by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, who is in charge of 680 suspects from 43 countries, including two Australians," says the report.

Another paper, The Mail on Sunday, " reported the move is seen as logical by the US, which has been attacked worldwide for breaching the Geneva Convention on prisoners of war."

Read the story

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Unrelated to Guantanamo, but interesting nonetheless, especially to students of memetics, is Microdoc News: Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story:
"Microdoc News has been studying the way a story enters the blogosphere, develops, and draws to a conclusion. We have traced such stories as 'Where is Raed?', 'Microsoft iLoo', 'war blogging', and 'Second SuperPower', which actually divided into two additional stories 'Googlewash' and 'Googlewashed'. Overall we have traced 45 stories that have developed in the blogosphere over the last three months. Each blogosphere story has a definite beginning, develops along quite predictable lines and comes to a predictable end."

*Ø* Blogmanac | Oh no so slow!

We are having problems with the template of this blog. Its slow download and the fact that sometimes the right-hand column doesn't show, are things that we could fix, but www.blogger.com won't allow changes right now. Ours is not the only blog experiencing the problem, as we have learned from a blogmasters' e-list.

As far as we can ascertain, these problems will be fixed when blogger completes the major changes they are doing now. Thank you for your patience; the Blogmanac will be improved as soon as blogger is ready. Meanwhile, if the pase doesn't have three columns, quite often a few refreshes of this page can fix glitches.

And by the way, the growing Blogmanac team loves to read your comments!

Check here for the latest status reports from blogger

*Ø* Blogmanac | Be warned: worse than SARS
The World Health Organisation today issued a new warning against non-essential travel to the entire Western Hemisphere following renewed concerns about the spread of Severe Loss of Perspective Syndrome (SLOPS).

Officials are warning travellers not to visit the UK, the US, almost all of Western Europe, Canada and Australia, following further outbreaks of the disease, which has led to mass panic among the media, thousands of ecstatic children being kept out of school by their credulous and moronic parents, and increased profits for DIY stores as the idiot public rush to bulk-buy face masks and boiler suits.

A WHO spokesman said, "You'd be much better off going to somewhere like Taiwan or China, because all you've got to worry about there is SARS, and let's face it, you're about as likely to die from that as you are to get kicked to death by a gang of paper cut-out nuns."

The SARS virus has now claimed a staggering 500 lives in only six months, which makes it considerably more deadly than, say, malaria, which only kills around 3,000 people every single day. Malaria, however, mainly affects only darkies what speak foreign, whereas SARS has made at least one English person feel a bit iffy for a couple of days, and is therefore considered far more serious.

The spread of SLOPS has now reached pandemic proportions, with many high-level politicians seemingly affected by the disease. The rapid spread of SLOPS has been linked to the end of the war in Iraq and the need for Western leaders to give the public something else to worry about. Otherwise, they might start asking uncomfortable questions about domestic issues and the war, and that simply would not do.

[Thanks George Newnham from Cairns, Australia, for this one.]

*Ø* Blogmanac | May 27 | Wild Bill Hickock and the dead man's hand

James "Wild Bill" Hickock, or 'Hickok', American frontiersman and marshall, was born on May 27, 1837. On August 2, 1876, while playing poker in a saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota, Jack McCall shot the marshall dead; McCall was later tried and hanged on March 1, 1877.


The hand that Hickock held at the time he was shot was a pair of eights and a pair of aces. This hand later became known famously as the "dead man's hand." What the fifth card Wild Bill was holding is a matter of conjecture – in the 1936 movie The Plainsman with Gary Cooper as Hickock, it was the King of Spades.

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The beauty of the living world I was trying to save has always been uppermost in my mind – that, and anger at the senseless, brutish things that were being done …
Rachel Carson, American author of Silent Spring, born on May 27, 1907

The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.
Rachel Carson

*Ø* Blogmanac | Ireland - Housewife takes shine to old grenade
A woman unearthed a War of Independence hand grenade in her back garden - and then proceeded to scrub and polish up the munition so it could be used as a decoration. Colombian-born Margot Adair even used a knife to chip away at the rusted casing of the live hand grenade. The Emergency Ordinance Disposal team found that the 80-year-old munition was still potentially lethal.
Story

*Ø* Blogmanac | Amnesty - the Death Penalty
By April 2003, 76 countries and territories had abolished the death penalty for all crimes. A further 15 countries had abolished it for all but exceptional crimes such as wartime crimes. Twenty-one countries were abolitionist in practice: ie had not carried out any executions for the past 10 years and are believed to have a policy or established practice of not carrying out executions. At present there are 112 countries which are abolitionist in law or practice and 83 countries which retain and use the death penalty.

The vast majority of executions worldwide are carried out in a tiny handful of countries. In 2002, 81 percent of all known executions took place in China, Iran and the USA.

Latest Death Penalty news
Act now if you would like to join in campaigns

Don't you just love that Tony Blair? He could bore an arsehole into a wooden horse. And the whine!!!

Tonight I've been going through my mail and found an old envelope where I'd scribbled down something I heard him say on the radio months ago:

I don't predict the future. I never have, and I never will.

Think about it. This one definitely goes into Almost Prophetic Quotes soon. :)

I also found an address I tore off an envelope and now I can stop putting out calls for M Sabo to contact me. The fact that I've been advertising for M Szabo probably didn't help. Me dum.

*Ø* Blogmanac | May 26 | Wheely good sound system



Need to make a big sound at a protest rally? This mad Aussie shows you how to make a stereo wheely garbage bin. Take your noise on wheels! Brought to you by the advanced nation that borught you the lagerphone, the kangaroo-scrotum coin purse, and stupid big roadside things.
Get the details here

*Ø* Blogmanac | 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 (or Nurenberg as it is sometimes spelt, among a few spellings), Germany. The lad 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.
Many rumours started to circulate as to the identity of the poor boy. Many said he was the son of a priest, or of a young lady of high rank. Some thought he might be a prince.

On July 18, 1828, the boy was handed over to Professor Daumer, who taught him and also became his biographer. On October 17, 1829, he was found bleeding from a slight wound on his forehead, which he said had been inflicted by a man with a “black head”. This incident created a great sensation; he was protected in the home of a magistrate by two soldiers. England’s Lord Stanhope came to see the now-famous boy, and sent him away to be educated.

In 1833 Kaspar, who was working without distinction in a court office, was approached by a stranger who said that Lord Stanhope wanted to meet him on December 14 at 3pm in the palace garden. Kaspar Hauser went to his rendezvous, but it was to be his last journey. There in the garden he was stabbed by the stranger. Kaspar Hauser died three days later, on December 17.

Conjecture has always surrounded this strange case. Some said he was the scion of a noble English house. Probably the secret of Kaspar Hauser will never be uncovered.

Pip Wilson's articles are available for your publication, on application. Further details

See feral children, and Wikipedia has a good article on Kaspar

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Here's an interesting piece from Ethiopia: Ethiopians pack concert to raise money for drought relief

Last but not least today: the Christ Crawler webbot

*Ø* Blogmanac | The real Dracula
Romania's mediaeval town of Sighisoara has been hosting an international Dracula conference this month.

Folklorists, historians and scientists delviong into the Dracula legend met with amateur vampirologists from all over the world during the third World Dracula Congress.

The original Dracula had a role to play in the longstanding enmity between the Christian and Muslim religions, and it was his cruelty to Muslims that earned him his reputation as a vampire, though this did not really take off until the 19th century and Bram Stokers fanciful novel that he based on various books he had read (as he never set foot in Transylvania).

Dracula, or Vlad Tepes, was probably born in Sighisoara around 1431 to Vlad Dracul or Dragon. His father named the young Vlad 'Dracula', meaning 'son of Dracul'. However, in Romanian the word also means the devil.

It was a time in which the area was at war with forces from the Muslim Ottoman Empire, whose epicentre was in what we call Turkey today. Because Vlad liked to dine while watching impaled Turkish prisoners writhe on wooden stakes, Count Dracula became associated with the wooden stake that supposedly was the only thing that could kill him.

Read about the conference here



By the way, today is the birthday of horror movie great, Peter Cushing (1913), and tomorrow, May 27, Christopher Lee (1922) who played Dracula, and spooky Vincent Price (1911) share birthdays. Mwahahahah!!

*Ø* Blogmanac | May 26 | Wilson takes a lay day -- no, not a lay lady lay :(
Unfortunately pressures of study and job hunting require me to take one or even maybe two days off from the Almanac ezines. However, I have some nice stories I want to share so I'll make quick appearances here in the Blogmanac, and of course they will be sent to subscribers of the Blogmanac daily email (subs box in right-hand column). My apologies to subscribers of Wilson's Almanac and the AAA edition. I hope you'll drop by here for the good read I hope to bring you. On May 26, 1828, a mystery boy showed up in Nuremburg and I'd like to tell the story of Kaspar Hauser. Then on Tuesday, some interesting items about the ghostly drum of Sir Francis Drake, and a strange story about Wild Bill Hickock. See you then.

As always,

Abundance and gratitude, and adidas, amigos.

PS My ISP has been as flakey as a pavlova lately. If I haven't responded to your email, chances are it went south ... err ... north. Please try again or leave a comment here. Also, I hope MA Szabo will contact me regarding a recent correspondence. I have no address to contact you. Ta.

*Ø* Blogmanac | May 25 | St Urban’s (confusing) Day celebrations, Germany
Feast day of St Urban, pope and martyr (Common avens, Geum urbanum, is today's plant, dedicated to this saint)

Today is the Feast day of St Urban (Pope Urban II). Born in Rome, Italy, Urban died there on May 23, 230 and was buried two days later, and the church made that his day of commemoration rather than the usual day of death or martyrdom. Son of Pontianus, he was elected pope c. 222.

Due to a common confusion with the bishop, St Urban of Langres, who is the patron saint of winegrowers, in Europe (especially around Burgundy) today is a weather prognostication.



If the sun shines clearly on St Urban’s Day,
Good vines will grow
according to an old saying;
But if there’s rain, it will damage the vines,
Therefore Urban must soon bathe in water.

A statue of the saint (which St Urban is as unclear to your almanackist as it has been to the practitioners for centuries) decked in grapes was carried through the streets in South Tyrol on St Urban’s day. In Franconia depending whether he has sent good weather or bad, the statue was either sprinkled with wine or splashed with water and dirt.

In many parts of Germany, it was a custom to drag the images of St Paul and St Urban to the river, if there was bad weather on their festival (St Paul’s feast day is January 25).

Saint Urban is portrayed in art after his beheading, with the papal tiara near him. Otherwise, he may be depicted during his beheading as idols fall from a column; he might also be shown being whipped at the stake or else seated in a landscape as a young man (Saint Valerian) kneels before him and a priest holds a book. Sometimes he is a pope with a bunch of grapes (confused with the other guy who is usually portrayed as a bishop with a bunch of grapes or a vine in the image). Sometimes Bishop Urban may be shown with a book with a wine vessel on it or grapes on a missal as he holds the papal triple cross (owing to confusion with the first guy. The second guy is the patron of Burgundian vine-growers, gardeners, and coopers. He is invoked against blight, frost, storm, and faintness. If you’re not confused, read again.

Visit St Urban’s Tower

Pip Wilson's articles are available for your publication, on application. Further details

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1184 On St Urban’s Day, a great fire utterly destroyed the abbey church at Glastonbury and the Old Church of St. Mary's, which had stood adjacent to it. Glastonbury, according to tradition, was visited by Joseph of Arimathea and possibly also by Joseph’s nephew, Jesus Christ. It is also closely associated with King Arthur and is supposedly the same place as Arthur’s “mystic Isle of Avalon”.

What groans, what tears, what beatings of the breast were yielded by spectators, can be imagined only by those who have suffered similar affliction. The confusion of relics, treasures in silver and gold, silks, books and other ecclesiastical ornaments might justly provoke grief. More vehement was the woe of the monks mindful of their earlier happiness, seeing that in all adversity bygone joy is the saddest part of misfortune.
Adam of Domerham, writing a century after the fire that destroyed Glastonbury Abbey; Hearne, T, Adam de Domerham: Historia de rebus glastoniensibus, Oxford, 1727, p 344

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Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, American transcendentalist author, born on May 25, 1803, Self-Reliance

*Ø* Blogmanac | Stereotypes of erotica challenged
An Australian academic's brief talk on ABC Radio disputes some of the common misconceptions about pornography as often asserted by the religious right and the feminist left, and just as often left unchallenged by the media and politicians.
Read it here

*Ø* Blogmanac | Aussie bid to out-glutton America
Australia is now only slightly behind the United States as the world's fattest nation and 60 per cent of Australians are either overweight or obese, a medical study has found.

Story

*Ø* Blogmanac | US gov't adds insult to Iraq museums injury

It has been likened to the burning of the Library of Alexandria in ancient times, a cultural loss almost without parallel. And now Shrub wants to throw some loose change at the benighted people of Iraq and instruct his PR men to give his largesse maximum spin.

The USA government has proudly announced that it will disburse $2 million to help patch up the looted museums of Iraq. The administration of the richest country in the universe will now congratulate itself on its generosity and a significant number of its peons will doubtless continue in their chronic myth that Americans are the biggest aid givers of all nations (in fact, per capita, they come about 18th). What is $2 million worth? Oh, about eight middle class houses. Maybe half a house of a corporate executive. Two million bucks won't even get you a cluster of cluster bombs. Not to put too fine a point on it, $2 million is chicken feed and an insult not only to the Iraqi people but to the citizens of the world. We have sustained an enormous, preventable loss.

While American officials early on reported that only around 25 cultural objects had been looted, it's more like 1,000. Let us not forget that -- by some foul quirk of Bush/Rumsfeld policy, one which we shall probably only know the reason for decades from now when White House and Pentagon documents are declassified -- this tragedy was sanctioned. A quarter of a million Coalition of the Killing soldiers in and around Iraq were ordered to stand by while hospitals and museums of antiquities and all sorts of institutions (all, except, for the guarded Ministry of Oil, independent journalists reported) were trashed and burned by mini-busloads of unknown men. (This aspect of the story has been largely neglected by the media, which has emphasised rampaging individuals rather than the armed and mobile units that were mentioned in dispatches.)

Once again, the Bush administration's spin was preposterous: these men were allegedly paid agents of Saddam Hussein. Once again, the media lapped it up. Well, they're lap dogs, after all. One can only wonder how many Americans will believe that gangs of thugs would run around burning hospitals, museums and virtually the entire bureaucratic infrastructure of Iraq (for that is what happened, apart from the oil wells and administration) because Saddam had paid or had promised to pay them. Hussein was missing, presumed dead. Baghdad was occupied by the might of the American and British armies. The town was crawling with soldiers. If Hussein had pre-paid the goons, why should they do the job now he was without authority, maybe even dead? Wouldn't they take the money and run? If the dictator had promised to pay them after doing the job, why should they do such a dangerous thing literally under the gaze of heavily armed marines and other troops? Who would pay them?

Pull the other leg, Shrub, that one's got bells on it.

A lousy $2 million: read it and weep
US cultural advisers resign over Iraq looting

While we're on the subjct of Iraq, this story at Indymedia covers rather well the complicity of the media. And What, exactly, are we Never Forgetting? has some very useful links, especially with regard to the Coalition's refusal to count the bodies of those they laughtered in Iraq. It's a page at bumperactive.com where you can make bumper stickers ... pretty cool.

*Ø* Blogmanac | Now, get the Blogmanac by email

Just above the seaside mog shot (no, not Mug Shop, though you can go there too) of your almanackist (in the right-hand column), there's a new subscription box. There, you can take out a free sub to all the good stuff that is blogged here each day by me and the growing team. It's a daily ezine and I think you will like it. Get all the news and positive ideas "on the run" for those times you can't check into the Blogmanac.

The Blogmanac ezine is not the same as Wilson's Almanac free daily ezine (you can subscribe to that just above the Blogmanac sub box by clicking the pic). What you will get in the blog zine is what is posted here each day. Take out a free sub and see if you like it!

*Ø* Blogmanac | Bechtel, NASA, 'Shell Police', Bush, apartheid ...
What do they all have in common? Now thereby hangs a tale ... Read the story at t r u t h o u t

*Ø* Blogmanac | Cyber help for Jamaican poor
I have a mate who bought a shipping container which he modified and uses on his rural property for storage and as a cabin when he visits. Containers are cheap (about $500 here, or $US250) and make great, vermin-proof shelters. I also like to think that every container being used by human beings is one less being used in the appalling global shipping industry which has many people fooled that our local areas can't provide our needs. Here's another use to which a container has been put.

"The Container", brainchild of Paul Mobbs, is a Jamaican project to develop a community computing centre in a regular shipping container. Container Project aims to 'repatriate technology' by giving people access to information technologies, and the skills to manipulate them, to serve their own purposes – for example, developing their own digital media. Read about the Container Project

*Ø* Blogmanac | Algerians need help after quake
The number of people dead in the Algerian earthquake disaster now exceeds 1,700. Algeria's poverty will not help matters, and aid from the rich world is urgently needed. Visit the Reuters AlertNet site for news and how to help.

*Ø* Blogmanac | Repub senator breaks ranks with White House over Iraq
The most senior Republican authority on foreign relations in US Congress has warned Shrub that the USA is on the brink of catastrophe in Iraq. Not that he is capable of listening to anyone except a tiny coterie of far-right, Christian-Zionist apocalypticists who captured the Administration long ago. Bush is in thrall to these ideologues and has not the intellect to hear the worldwide voices of anger, nor see the writing on the wall. Iraq is in a mess, and America is more exposed to terrorism than ever it was, thanks to this idiot and his keepers.

"I am concerned that the administration's initial stabilization and reconstruction efforts have been inadequate," said Senator Richard G Lugar, an Indiana Republican who heads the committee. "The planning for peace was much less developed than the planning for war."
Click for NY Times story

*Ø* Blogmanac| Aussie G-G reinserts foot
Australia's Governor-General, Peter Hollingworth, needs a refresher course in The First Law of Holes: When you're in one, stop digging.

In a letter written only last week, long after he became embroiled in a scandalthon, Box of Rocks Hollingworth referred to a 14-year-old student as the person "who started a relationship" with an authority figure at the school.

Read about the G-G's gaffe

*Ø* Blogmanac | May 24 | Bob Dylan's 62nd birthday
For Dylan's birthday I present here a poem in tribute. It ain't no Idiot Wind or Brownsville Girl, but I'm no genius and it's the best I could do (and at least I've never rhymed 'Angelina' with 'subpoena'):



Plagiarism is the sincerest form of theft
Copyright* Pip Wilson 2003
(Tune: Visions of Johanna by Bob Dylan)

Nursie's trying to be in Saturday while the dentist he's slipping with his mouth tool
I watch the ventilator and declare I'll never go back to my old school.
But I sit here seeming all the while dissolving old and inventing new rules.
Out the window the storm can be seen
on the treetops amber movies are screened
the black of the clouds favours green
if it hails we will hear children scream
or maybe write a song about this time
and a thought that has vanished
from a disappeared mind.

If I can dare to strip you down of a little concrete that doesn't make you feel well
you can dare to see me daring to be bare in front of everybody's detail
and I don't have to be ashamed to strip myself into Bobby's mind or to strip his mind into myself.
Because even when the dentist whines a lament
and the storm's at the monastery's gate
he still whispers songs like a dove to a saint
even though neither of us I'm sure knows what to repent
but that could be the reason, that we're both torn from past days
and a thought that has vanished,
takes a lot to repay.

You can try to build on nothing to catch up with the kings of the movies,
they have tried, they have succeeded, they have left us drowning in their beauty.
But I swear on their anthologies they had a lot of breakfast duties in between their cuties.
If you wonder why I steal from his verse
it's not stealing, it's a kind of a curse
if I'm just a borrowed tonsil to a nurse
surely to be a borrowed teacher is no worse
I guess I've been taking lessons since we met
and 'cause thoughts often vanish
he will be around a while yet.

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Hentoff: What made you decide to go the rock n' roll route?

Dylan: Carelessness. I lost my one true love. I start drinking. The first thing I know, I'm in a card game. Then I'm in a crap game. I wake up in a pool hall. Then this big Mexican lady drags me off the table, takes me to Philadelphia. She leaves me alone in her house, and it burns down. I wind up in Phoenix. I get a job as a Chinaman. I start working in a dime store, and move in with a 13-year old girl. Then this big Mexican lady from Philadelphia comes in and burns down the house. I go to Dallas. I get a job as a "before" in a Charles Atlas "before and after" ad. I move in with a delivery boy who can cook fantastic chili and hot dogs. Then this 13-year old girl from Phoenix comes and burns the house down. The delivery boy, he ain't so mild. He gives her the knife, and the next thing you know I'm in Omaha. It's so cold there, by this time I am robbin' my own bicycles and frying my own fish. I stumble into some luck and get a job as a carburettor out at the hot-rod races every Thursday night. I move in with a High School teacher who does a little plumbing on the side, who ain't much to look at, but who's built a special kind of refrigerator that can turn newspaper into lettuce. Everything's going good until that delivery boy shows up and tries to knife me. Needless to say, he burned the house down, and I hit the road. The first guy who picked me up asked me if I wanted to be a star. After what I'd been through, how could I refuse?

Hentoff: And that’s how you became a rock n' roll singer?

Dylan: No, that's how I got tuberculosis.

[Some interview somewhere some time ago.]

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Tangled up in Jews
Wikipedia: Bob Dylan
Lots of Dylan links
Scorsese to film Bob Dylan biography
You know you're a Dylan fan if ... Part One Part Two
Dylan midi
Big Dylan links page

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*Ø* Wilson’s Almanac | May 24 | Corny Bob Dylan
Birthday boy Bob Dylan (May 24, 1941) 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.”

“I was born on the hill over there. Glad to see it's still there. My first girlfriend came from here. She was so conceited I used to call her Mimi.”

February 13, 1999, in Normal, Illinois (Illinois State University campus): “They said I'd never make it to Normal."

At a concert in Tucson, Arizona, he introduced the backup singers as “My ex-wife, my next wife, my girlfriend, and my fiancée”.

At a concert’s end he said he had to “get a hammer and hit the sack”.

Late show, Park West, 2002 (?): Bob introduced Kemper by saying: “David Kemper on drums. David grew up on a farm and on Saturday nights he used to take the cows to the moooooovies.”

“Nice to be here. One of my early girlfriends was from Milwaukee. She was an artist. She gave me the brush-off.”

(Referring to David Kemper on drums): “One of David's first jobs was here in Chicago. He had a job as a waiter but he never took any tips. He was a dumb waiter.”

“Charlie went to see his cousin today at the Hamilton County Jail. He brought him a cell phone ... He almost made it to the show.”

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

“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.”

“David was going to be a doctor but he didn't have any patients.”

“Tony was here once before. He got a bicycle for his wife. Tony said it was a pretty good trade.”

“Larry hurt his foot today, we had to call a toe truck.”

Veteran guitarist Sexton, he proclaimed, is “the meanest man in the band. When we played the Middle East, Charlie killed the Dead Sea.”

Minneapolis : “David Kemper on drums, ladies and gentlemen … David and I were in the Pickled Parrot this afternoon and David asked the waitress if they served crabs ... She said "Buddy, we'll serve just about anybody.”

“You might be wondering what's written on [David Kemper’s] shoes; those are foot notes.”

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*Ø* Wilson’s Almanac | May 24 | Feast day of Hermes Trismegistus, ancient Greece
Hermes is the patron of alchemy and also god of boundaries, guardian of graves and patron of shepherds, patron of thieves and bringer of good fortune. He carried the kerykeion (caduceus), a magical herald’s staff with two snakes twined around it. He is the Greek equivalent of Roman mythology’s Mercury. Apollo gave him the caduceus.

Hermes, the Caduceus and DNA
Hermes carried the caduceus when he flew through the air on his messages and adventures. The medical profession took this emblem, which is a staff with two snakes twining around it, as their symbol, recognised internationally.

When the scientists Watson and Crick discovered DNA 50 years ago, it was observed that like the snakes around the staff, the form of the DNA model is a double helix. Could it just be coincidence, or perhaps some snippet of genetic knowledge, hidden deep within the collective unconscious, emerged in the tales of the ancients and in the logo choice of the medical profession.

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The Sixties were like a flying saucer. Everybody talks about it, but nobody saw it.
Bob Dylan

Dylan quotes
More Dylan quotes
And then some Dylan quotes

Safety at Work

Sacramento Mobilization
CALL TO ACTION! HUNGRY FOR JUSTICE?
"Want to resist the WTO, US Empire and Corporate Globalization? Fed up with genetically engineered trees, food, fish, future? Believe that access to healthy food and clean water is a fundamental human right? Everything is possible!"
MOBILIZE IN SACRAMENTO! CONVERGE JUNE 20-25 2003!

biodev :: Global Declaration from Biodevastation 7
US and International Citizens Oppose the U.S./WTO Intervention Against European Controls on Genetically Modified Foods
Issued and ratified at the 7th international grassroots gathering on Biodevastation, St. Louis, Missouri, USA, May 16-18, 2003 (www.biodev.org)

t r u t h o u t - LA Times | Declassify the 9/11 Report
"The appearance of a government cover-up concerning what happened Sept. 11, 2001, would not increase public confidence in officials' ability to fix what went wrong. Even so, the Bush administration continues to block the release of last year's House-Senate 9/11 panel report. It raises the question: What's to hide?"

War Profiteers Card Deck
"The War Profiteers Card Deck exposes some of the real war criminals in the US’s endless War of Terror ... Exposing their place in the house of cards illuminates the links among corporations, institutions, and government officials that profit from endless war."
[Thanx, Mary MacKay]

Aceh-Sumatra: Shades of East Timor
Indonesia's occupation of the territory of the Aceh-Sumatran people continues, this week becoming even more violent and repressive than usual.

More on Indonesia's oppression of Ache-Sumatra at Melbourne Indymedia and read here about Exxon-Mobil's role

*Ø* Wilson’s Almanac | May 23 | Declaration of Báb, Bahá’í holy day
Commemorates Báb’s prophecy of the coming of a spiritual leader (Bahá'u'lláh) who would usher in a new era in religious history.


*Ø* Wilson’s Almanac | May 23, 1707 | Carolus Linnaeus (born Carl Linné), Swedish botanist
Born at Rashalt, a hamlet in south of Sweden, his father was a clergyman. Linnaeus's life was surrounded by a large garden and the natural environment and he would say of himself, that he went from the cradle into a garden. His father and uncle were horticulturists and inspired the child. Though was destined for the church, he hated the thought of such a life, and was inclined to botany.

Those of us who seem not to excel academically can take heart from the story of Carl Linné. At the University of Lund, where he studied medicine, he was "less known for his knowledge of natural history than for his ignorance of everything else", but Professor of Medicine, Dr Stoboeus, took him under his wing. Soon he left Lund for University of Uppsala, where he met with poverty, but he determined to be a botanist no matter what.

He soon began his famous system of classification, still used today. On May 12, 1732, he began his famed journey to Lapland alone, on horseback and foot, travelling 4,000 miles in five months. Linnaeus brought back nearly 100 previously unknown or undescribed plants. In 1735 he went to Holland where he gained a medical degree; there he became famous when he published his own botanical books. In 1740 he became Professor of Medicine at Uppsala, then transferred to the chair of Botany.

The great botanist spent the remainder of his life there at Uppsala and the Swedish king raised him to nobility. He laboured incessantly, continuing to revise his Systema Naturae, which grew from a slim pamphlet to a multi-volume work, as his concepts were modified and as more and more plant and animal specimens were sent to him from all over the world. He died on January 10, 1778, aged 70, leaving a legacy of changes to the nomenclature of living things that were profound and remain with us.

*Ø* Wilson’s Almanac | May 23, 1805 | A Napoleonic irony
That aggressive little Corsican, Napoleon Bonaparte, having already named himself Emperor Napoleon I, placed the gold and iron crown of Lombardy upon his own head, thus proclaiming himself King of Italy. The iron in the crown was beaten from one of the crucifixion nails from the legendary True Cross, discovered in occupied Palestine by the Roman Empress Helena and presented by her to her son, Emperor Constantine the Great. Or, so it is said. There was never a speck of rust on the iron, said by the clergy to be a "permanent miracle". How ironic, then, that the island to which Napoleon was later sent in exile was one named after that Empress – the South Atlantic island of St Helena.

Pip Wilson's articles are available for your publication, on application. Further details

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Let it not be said, whenever there is energy or creative genius, "She has a masculine mind".
Margaret Fuller, American feminist, born on May 23, 1810

Let it not be said, whenever there is art, gentleness and sensitivity, "He is in touch with his ferminine side".
Pip Wilson, humanist, born on March 1, 1953

Thank you so much for the warm welcome, Pip. It's great to be back in the loop.

Your blog looks great! I'm going to go work on mine, now. A-blogging we will go! I shall return.

Peace & Love,

J-9

American student's pro-peace grad speech met with jeers
I've still not met anyone who has said they approve of the phony "war on terrorism" being waged by the Axis of Diesel, Bush, Blair and Howard. But obviously they couldn't wage it without a certain level of support. I found this report of a young man's speech very chilling, as it is very reasoned and says nothing extraordinary, but was met with jeers and heckling by Chris Hedges's American classmates. The principal of Hedges's alma mater, Rockford College (Illinois) even had to interrupt the speech to remind the students about the right of free speech. One can only wonder what was in their heads and who put it there. Seems to me that many Americans believe that the USA has some kind of patent on liberties such as free speech, but maybe their traditions are eroding. Or perhaps Rockford is a backward part of that country. Either way, it's pretty scary to read this report.

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Blair's Grand Mistake
Belgium is becoming an interesting country. In the course of a week, it has managed to upset both liberal opinion in Europe - by granting the far-right Vlaams Blok 18 parliamentary seats - and illiberal opinion in the United States. On Wednesday, a human rights lawyer filed a case with the federal prosecutors whose purpose is to arraign Thomas Franks, the commander of the American troops in Iraq, for crimes against humanity.

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What permaculturists are doing is the most important activity that any group is doing on the planet.
We don't know what details of a truly sustainable future are going to be like, but we need options, we need people experimenting in all kinds of ways and permaculturists are one of the critical gangs that are doing that.
David Suzuki, geneticist, broadcaster and international environmental advocate

The Great ‘OM’ Event of May 23, 2003
[This item sent to Wilson’s Almanac by Tonya Maxwell, with thanks]
“Like a gentle healing wave of higher resonating frequencies pulsing around the earth, join us in The Great ‘OM’ Event.

“Due to the difference in time zones around the world, this event will be created as a great wave of resonance rippling around the globe beginning on May 23, 2003 starting at 5:00 p.m. and continuing until midnight your time zone in your part of the world. Participants can begin and end chanting at any time between the designated hours during this event to add to the resonance.”

All authority of any kind, especially in the field of thought and understanding, is the most destructive, evil thing. Leaders destroy the followers and followers destroy the leaders. You have to be your own teacher and your own disciple. You have to question everything that man has accepted as valuable, as necessary.
Jiddu Krishnamurti, Indian spiritual teacher, born on May 22, 1895 Freedom from the Known

Oh yeah? Says who?


Krishnamurti didn't walk on water
Not far from my previous home in Sydney, at Balmoral (a harbour beach suburb), in 1924 the local Theosophical Society commenced construction of a grand marble edifice, the 'Star Amphitheatre'. Its purpose was to provide a vantage point to witness a grand event: J Krishnamurti, who many Theosophists believed to be the second incarnation of Christ, was expected to walk on the water through Sydney Harbour Heads.

When the Indian mystic and teacher did arrive, in 1926, it has been said, he did indeed walk on the water, but it was on the deck of a ship when he did so. Krishnamurti had long since given up the messianic claims that had been made for him, since his boyhood, by Theosophical Society leaders CW Leadbeater and Annie Besant.

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While there is a lower class, I am in it; while there is a criminal element, I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free!
American leftist activist, Eugene V Debs, who was imprisoned on this day in 1895

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Bear Waking Day, Norway
Said to be the day that bears wake from hibernation and leave the den.

Feast Day of St Rita
Patron saint of the unhappily married.

Feast day of Ragnar Lodbrok
He was a Viking leader captured by the Northumbrians (England), tortured, and put in a pit full of venomous snakes.


1957 A ten-megaton hydrogen bomb accidentally fell from a bomber in an uninhabited area near Albuquerque (USA) owned by the University of New Mexico. Non-nuclear explosives detonated, blasting a crater approximately 4 metres (approx. 12 feet) deep and 8 metres (approx. 25 feet) across.

Its huge nuclear charge miraculously did not detonate, narrowly averting horror for New Mexico. The bomb was hundreds of times more powerful than the one that had levelled Hiroshima. No one was injured, but radiation was detected in the crater. Source

1989 Danie du Toit, a South African businessman, gave a club speech warning that one never knows when death might strike, so one must live for the moment. Several minutes later he choked to death on a peppermint.

LONDON (Reuters) - Baby Broadcast Baffles Pilots
Instead of landing instructions, aircraft approaching Britain's Luton airport heard the squealing of tiny infant Freya Spratley broadcast over their radios.

Authorities worked 12 hours to track the frequency and determined that a baby monitor at mother Lisa Spratley's house, located near the airport, was broadcasting her baby's cries to the cockpits of approaching planes, the BBC reported on Monday.

"Imagine" and Human Rights
A new music video of John Lennon's "Imagine" will be launched in Ireland by Amnesty International on May 24 as part of a worldwide human rights education campaign.

Yoko Ono has agreed to give Amnesty the rights of the song until the end of 2004 at the suggestion of Irish actor Gabriel Byrne, and the new video has been produced by Academy Award winner Hans Zimmer.

The Imagine public education campaign was inspired by Gabriel Byrne after he heard children at a New York school singing it at his niece's graduation ceremony. Yoko Ono agreed to give Amnesty the rights to the song because the human rights organisation's work "embodies the spirit of 'Imagine'".

** Ø Wilson’s Almanac | May 21, 1898 Armand Hammer, communist capitalist doctor crook

“Regrets and recriminations only hurt your soul.”
The Hammer philosophy

New York-born Dr Armand Hammer led a most extraordinary life as an American businessman and a confidant of US presidents and Communist dictators. As a youth, he met Lenin and was the first capitalist to gain a business concession in the USSR; during the 1920s he was a courier for the Soviet government to the American Communist Party.

The new Marxist-Leninist regime in the USSR gave Hammer the rights to sell old Czarist paintings in the West, and he amassed a fortune as a young man. Many American and other art galleries and institutions as well as private collectors still own Russian masterpieces that the Communist regime and Armand Hammer shipped out of their rightful homeland.

His autobiography painted him as a philanthropist and worker for peace, though other biographies portrayed him as a liar, a Communist propagandist (and possibly an espionage agent through several US administrations), a bully and a briber. He always seemed to skirt prosecution, perhaps because his fortune and fame protected him, though he did come under investigation for a bribery scandal in Venezuela where he had oil concessions. A man of immense energy, he created the multinational giant Occidental Petroleum after he was 65 years old, and worked till 91 years of age.

In his autobiography he boasted that when he bought the corporation that owned Arm and Hammer Baking Soda Company, he was fulfilling a childhood dream of owning his namesake. He wrote that his father Julius Hammer had named him after a character, Armand Duval, in La Dame aux Camellias by Alexandre Dumas, fils. In fact, according to a biographer, his former press agent of many years, Armand Hammer was named after the arm-and-hammer insignia of the Socialist Labor Party that became, under Julius's leadership, the Communist Party of the USA.



THE HISTORY OF THE ARM AND HAMMER® TRADEMARK
The ARM & HAMMER symbol was first used in the early 1860’s by James A. Church, the son of Dr. Austin Church, one of the founders of our business. James A. Church operated a spice and mustard business known as the Vulcan Spice Mills. In Roman mythology, Vulcan, the god of fire, was especially skilled in fashioning ornaments and arms for the gods and heroes. The ARM & HAMMER symbol, therefore, represented the arm of Vulcan with hammer in hand about to descend on an anvil.
(Church & Dwight, Company Information, History of the Logo)

FBI - Freedom of Information Act - Armand Hammer
Occidental and the Al Gore family
More
Some links here on Occidental's bad human rights record and poor-world tricks

Search Term Demo
"Be careful what you put in that Google search. The [US] government may now spy on web surfing of innocent Americans, including terms entered into search engines, by merely telling a judge anywhere in the U.S. that the spying could lead to information that is "relevant" to an ongoing criminal investigation. The person spied on does not have to be the target of the investigation."

EFF: DARPA's report to Congress on TIA
Report to US Congress regarding the Terrorism Information Awareness Program

Welcome to a new team member of the Blogmanac

If you have been reading Wilson's Almanac ezine for a while, Jeannine Wilson will need no introduction. She is a regular contributor to the Premium Almanac with her column, Daily Planet News, and she is the editor/publisher of the excellent free ezine, also called Daily Planet News. DPN is definitely without peer as a source of news and background from a progressive perspective and I can't recommend it highly enough.

J-9, as she is known, hails from Indiana, USA, so now our growing team's three members (so far) are writing from Australia, Ireland and America, bringing new and varied perspectives on the Almanac's familiar topics of hope and life. J-9's motto is "Peace & Love", and I'm sure you'll welcome her as she brings these and more to our Blogmanac. I sure do, and I'm so pleased to have her here. Welcome, J-9! Take it away.

Announcing the CAFE DIEM! store

These extra large mugs will go well with your daily ezine each morning, and each purchase will help the Almy. Twenty-five per cent of the purchase price will be received for each mug sold and help pay the Internet bill. I hope you'll take a look at our brand new mug and consider one for yourself and one as a gift.

The logo says Carpe Diem! Latin for Seize the Day! It features Uluru (Ayer's Rock) from the desert in Central Australia, the largest monolith in the world and an important symbol to all Australians, plus Michaelangelo's famous statue of the god Bacchus, symbolising the enjoyment of life. Enjoy your mug, your ezine and your tea or coffee, and carpe diem!

NSW backs first medicinal marijuana trial
"The use of cannabis for medical purposes is to be allowed for the first time in Australia under a scheme announced in New South Wales. Announcing the four-year trial scheme, NSW Premier Bob Carr said governments had an obligation to explore all avenues available to relieve human pain and suffering."

Abolish Corporate Personhood
"Concerned about the rapid escalation of corporate power in the US and around the world, three years ago members of the US section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) began studying and researching how corporations became so powerful. We discovered the hidden history of "corporate personhood" - the legal phenomenon that provides constitutional protections to corporations. Not only is corporate personhood a key component of corporate power, it's one of the greatest threats to democracy that we've ever known."

Thanks to Almaniac Mary MacKay for alerting me to this article.

1609 Thomas Thorpe received a licence to print Shakespeare's sonnets.

Sonnet CXVI
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.


1844 The Wisconsin Phalanx was founded, an American community based on the ideals of French utopian, François Fourier (often referred to as Charles Fourier).

“His system, known as Fourierism (a form of idealistic "Utopian" socialism), is based on the idea that there exists a universal principle of harmony, displayed in four departments, the material universe, organic life, animal life, and human society. This harmony can flourish only when the restraints which conventional social behavior places upon the full gratification of desire have been abolished, allowing man to live a free and complete life. His ideas were similar to those of Sir Thomas More.” Source

“Of the numerous social philosophers of the 19th Century, Charles Fourier stands as one of the most unknown, yet potentially prophetic visionaries of a liberated world. Similar in spirit to the individualist anarchism of Max Stirner, yet devoid of the alienated egotism, Fourier provides a radical philosophy of liberty which posits the evolution of social, global, and cosmic harmony through the liberation of desire.” Source

More on Fourier

The utopian impulse – lots of links

Fourierism in the USA

Utopian socialism

Utopia by Thomas More

Re-imagining Utopia – invent community online

Intentional Communities

Wilson's Almanac Planet Directory’s links on community

Anarchism and Anarcho-Syndicalism by Rudolph Rocker






1944 Joe Cocker, English rock singer
(For a laugh, see Joe Cocker, Elton and Zappa with their parents)



Echelon Watch | Highlights
"The United States Senate has approved a compromise plan that will expand the ability of U.S. government agents to use foreign intelligence surveillance laws. Under the plan, government officials essentially can get search warrants through a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court without having to show that the targeted person actually has ties to a foreign government or power."

Australians want Queen's man to go
"CANBERRA (Reuters) - An overwhelming majority of Australians want the Queen's representative to be sacked or resign, irrespective of his decision last week to stand aside temporarily while rape claims against him are resolved."

A supporting Almaniac who sends some great stuff in, Lynn Perry, sent these. Thanx, LyP:

George Bush's military records
"Mr. Bush, whose permission to fly was revoked by the military (he was suspended, assigned to a disciplinary unit and not allowed to fly military assignments again) liked to portray himself to voters as a “fighter pilot.” But his embellishments didn’t stop there ..."

The Observer | International | Bush ally set to profit from the war on terror
"James Woolsey, former CIA boss and influential adviser to President George Bush, is a director of a US firm aiming to make millions of dollars from the 'war on terror', The Observer can reveal."

"People have forgotten how much fish used to be in the sea"

Prof Callum Roberts, York University

Net losses: Industrialized fishing hits fish stocks
Read it and get agitated, then agitate. The most prestigious science journal, Nature, reports that since the 1950s, 90 per cent of the world's large fish have been wiped out.

If your media haven't made this the top story this week, then maybe they're due for a letter?

More on this huge story that is falling into the cracks of public discourse, here and here

"A Catalogue of Failures: G8 Arms Exports and Human Rights Violations"
As the G8 heads of state prepare for their summit in Evian, Amnesty International reveals that despite assurances to the contrary, their governments are arming and supplying some of the world's worst abusers of human rights.

A new report published today shows how military and security technology from the world's most powerful nations continues to make its way past inadequate controls into the hands of abusive regimes.

At least two thirds of all global arms transfers between 1997 and 2001 came from five members of the G8 -- the US, Russia, France, the UK and Germany.

Keepers of Bush image lift stagecraft to new heights
"... the White House has stocked its communications operation with people from network television who have expertise in lighting, camera angles and the importance of backdrops ... On Tuesday, at a speech promoting his economic plan in Indianapolis, White House aides went so far as to ask people in the crowd behind Mr. Bush to take off their ties ..."

Telegraph.co.uk - America threatens to move Nato after Franks is charged
America's top military officer has warned that Nato may have to move from its Brussels headquarters after an attempt to bring war crimes charges against General Tommy Franks, the commander of coalition forces in Iraq, in the Belgian courts.

General Richard Myers, chief of the US general staff, intervened in the row with Belgium after American officials expressed fears that Belgian war crimes laws would expose Nato officers to the risk of arrest.

Independent.co.uk - Another day, another outrage
Only days ago, Mr Bush declared that "al-Qa'ida is on the run" and that "about half of all the top al-Qa'ida operatives are either jailed or dead". In either case, he said, "they are not a problem any more".

The wave of suicide attacks in an arc that stretches from Morocco and Algeria through Israel ­where seven were killed yesterday ­to Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Pakistan have been mounted by different violent groups for different reasons. Yet they stand as testimony to the inaccuracy of President George Bush's view that America is winning the "war on terror". They also fortify the position of those who say the war in Iraq was not so much part of that war as a diversion from it ­and that it has fuelled anti-Western attacks rather than reduced them.

CNN.com - Town criminalizes compliance with Patriot Act - May. 18, 2003
"ARCATA, California (AP) -- More than 100 cities and one state have passed resolutions condemning the USA Patriot Act, saying it gives the federal government too much snooping power. But in this liberal fold of Northern California's Redwood Curtain, a simple denouncement just doesn't go far enough.

"To cooperate with the act, the City Council says, is criminal."

This is heartening news to non-Americans who have been puzzled by recent developments in the USA. Maybe they haven't completely lost the plot.

2161 Eight of nine planets will be aligned on same side of sun.

syzygy
(KEY) , in astronomy, alignment of three bodies of the solar system along a straight or nearly straight line. A planet is in syzygy with the earth and sun when it is in opposition or conjunction, i.e., when its elongation is 180° or 0°. The moon is in syzygy with the earth and sun when it is new or full. Source

... in the beginning of March, the seventh night, or the fourteenth day, let [i.e. spill] the blood of the right arm; and in the beginning of April, the 11th day, of the left arm; and in the end of May, 3d or 5th day, on whether arm thou wilt; and thus, of all the year, thou shalt orderly be kept from the fever, the falling gout, the sister gout, and loss of thy sight.
(Book of Knowledge b. 1, p 19, quoted in Chamber’s Book of Days, 1881, p 42) (The third day of the end of May was the 19th, as the beginning of a month of 31 days was reckoned to be the first 16 days)

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.
Abraham Lincoln, in a speech on May 19, 1856

The executioner is, I believe, very expert; and my neck is very slender.
Anne Boleyn’s last words, before her execution on May 19, 1536

Many believe that we need to change values and attitudes. I do not think this is the answer. If we change our thinking methods (especially as regards perception) our values, attitudes and behaviour will follow.
Edward de Bono, teacher of creative thinking, born May 19, 1933, article, May 11, 2002 Source

St Dunstan, as the story goes,
Once pull’d the devil by the nose
With red-hot tongs, which made him roar,
That he was heard three miles or more.
(From an engraved portrait) Today is St Dunstan’s Day

St Dunstan’s Day

Born in King Arthur’s isle of Glastonbury (Avalon), England, in about 924, Dunstan was a highly intelligent nobleman whose parents incited him to study hard, and he acquired ‘brain fever’. Though his friends gave him up for dead, in his delirium he climbed into a locked church at night and the next day was found asleep there, apparently miraculously cured.

He went away to the court of King Athelstan (c. 895-939) where he was a favourite with the ladies, who took his advice on embroidery. Once, he was embroidering with Lady Ethelwyne, when his unattended harp began playing by itself. Banished from the court for witchcraft, he returned to Glastonbury and established the Benedictine rule throughout English monasteries.

Despite this tenth-century saint’s prestige as the initiator of Benedictine rule, he was banished when he offended the sixteen-year-old King. Dunstan heard the Devil laughing and told him to contain his joy as it wouldn’t last long. When Edgar became king he made St Dunstan Archbishop of Canterbury, from which position he, rather than the king, virtually ruled England. His innovations in Britain included the standardising of measures and the establishment of regular justice circuits.

St Dunstan and the pegs
St Dunstan, the patron saint of goldsmiths, introduced to England a practice to prevent fights among drinkers. He ordered that ale tankards be fitted with pegs marking equal intervals, so that when more than one drank from the same cup they would drink equal amounts. Hence the expression “I am a peg too low”.

St Dunstan’s tongs
Dunstan, in a celebrated incident, used a red-hot pair of tongs to pinch the nose of the Devil when he tried to tempt him in the form of a girl. For many years the tongs were on display at Mayfield, England.

More: R Chambers Book of Days, 1879 on St Dunstan
Anglo-Saxon and Viking metalworking


Today’s plant
Monk’s hood, Aconitum napellus, was designated today’s plant by medieval monks. It is dedicated to St Dunstan.


Bendideia, ancient Greece
Bendis was the goddess in ancient Thrace (the name applied by the ancient Greeks to the north-eastern shores of the Aegean Sea) who equated with the Greek Artemis and the Roman Diana, in other words the goddess of hunting. Wearing boots and a pointed cap, and carrying a torch, she was worshipped on this day with a festival of bacchanalian character.

Kallynteria, Greece and Rome
This ancient festival on this day involved nurturance and purification rites, dedicated to Pallas Athena. In other cultures, Athena is more or less congruent with the female deities Minerva, Ceres, Demeter, Maat, Oya, Spider Woman, Mawu, Sophia, Sarasvati, the Shekinah.

Feast day of St Yves
St Yves, or Ives, or Yvo, is the patron saint of lawyers, so all the attorneys ought to have their picnic today. Yves was an ecclesiastical judge at Rennes, France, in the thirteenth century. He was known as the “Advocate of the Poor”, and in the Breton tongue he is known as Sant Ervoan ar wirionez, Saint Yves the truth giver.

The Pardon of St Yves
An annual pardon mut (silent pilgrimage) is held today on his feast day. Pilgrims silently carry candles and many finish on their hands and knees. Beggars and paupers in particular take part, for they have always seen themselves as “the clients of St Yves”.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhh

Radical Full Page Ad in The Washington Post
"May 16, 2003, 0500 PDT (FTW) – From The Wilderness today ran a full-page ad in the front section of The Washington Post intended to educate the American people, support heroic leaders and promote a number of independent media outlets which have made important contributions since 9/11. The ad was the direct result of a donation from a subscriber who had recently viewed FTW Publisher Mike Ruppert's video "The Truth and Lies of 9-11". The ad that ran today was actually a second version, the text of which had to be changed after the first version apparently caused some nervousness in Washington."

George W. Bush's Resume, by Kelley Kramer
Buzzflash's sad/funny resume, which has been doing the Internet rounds, includes:
Accomplishments as president:
Attacked and took over two countries.
Spent the surplus and bankrupted the treasury.
Shattered record for biggest annual deficit in history.
Set economic record for most private bankruptcies filed in any 12 month period.
Set all-time record for biggest drop in the history of the stock market.
First president in decades to execute a federal prisoner.
First president in US history to enter office with a criminal record.
First year in office set the all-time record for most days on vacation by any president in US history.
After taking the entire month of August off for vacation, presided over the worst security failure in US history.

A new poll has been created for Blogmanac readers:
This poll is to help Wilson's Almanac Weblog ('the Blogmanac', at http://wilsonsalmanac.blogspot.com/)
be excellent for its readers. You can vote for one or more choices. Thanks a lot for your support.

Question: My feelings on the Blogmanac are:
o I love it and will probably visit a few times a week
o I love it and will probably visit a few times a month
o I like it and will probably visit a few times a year
o I'm happy with the download time
o I'm unhappy with the download time but will still visit as often
o I'm not really interested in it
o I dislike it
o It needs more humour and funny pictures
o It needs more customs and folklore
o It needs more of Pip's original writing like poems and "Trip Tips"
o I would like to see more blogging team members
o I would consider sponsoring it for a dollar a week in exchange for a link

To vote, please visit the poll

Khayyam, who stitched the tents of science,
Has fallen in grief's furnace and been suddenly burned,
The shears of Fate have cut the tent ropes of his life,
And the broker of Hope has sold him for nothing!
Omar Khayyam, born on May 18, 1048, punning on his surname, which means ‘tentmaker’

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on : nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
Omar Khayyam

It's co-existence or no existence.
Bertrand Russell, English philosopher born on May 18, 1872

One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one's work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell


Kallynteria, ancient Greece
Purification ceremonies of the goddess Pallas Athena.

Feast day of Apollo, ancient Greece
“Apollo ("destroy" or "excite"), is a god in Greek and Roman mythology, the son of Zeus and Leto, and the twin of Artemis (goddess of the hunt). In later times he became equated with Helios, god of the sun, and by proxy his sister was equated with Selene, goddess of the moon. Later, he was known primarily as a solar deity. In Etruscan mythology, he was known as Aplu." Source

Who was Apollo?
Sacred to the god of music, poetry, divination and sunlight, today was for Apollo, the Greek deity of the sun. Today celebrates increasing light of the new season.

Apollo was the god of hunting, pestilence and healing, in Greek and possibly cultures in Asia Minor. He was worshipped around 1300 BCE and earlier, to about 400 CE.

His cult centred at Delos, Pylo-Delphi and other sanctuaries. Literary sources include the epic poems Iliad and Odyssey (Homer); Hymn to Apollo (Hesiod) as well as various temple hymns.

He was the epitome of youthful manliness, and a distant rather than an intimate god. His mother is Leto; she wandered the world, suffering until she chanced on the isle of Delos where she found refuge.

Apollo is generally portrayed in art as a god of hunters carrying a bow and arrows, associated with a stag or roe, and also pictured with lions. A gracious player of the lyre, he became the patron god of poets and leader of the Muses.

However, Apollo was a merciless killer when he had to be, killing the many children of Niobe. He slew the Delphic python and the Olympic Cyclopes, but suffered temporary banishment for his crimes.

The Celts revered him under various synonyms. The sixth-century BC Greek historian Hecateus wrote that an unnamed island we today can clearly identify as Britain, was inhabited by the Hyperboreans (northerners) who “venerate Apollo more than any other god” and that Apollo returned to the island every nineteen years, to much celebration. Hecateus did not know it but he was describing the 19-year lunar metonic cycle which was unknown to Greek scholars until a century after the historian wrote.

Apollo was Christianised as St Vincent, qv Wilson's Almanac, January 22.


Delphi and Apollo
From c. 1400 BCE, the Delphic shrine was sacred, initially probably to an earth goddess represented by a python. (Some believe that this and the legend of St Patrick of Ireland, tell of the supplanting of goddess religion by the masculine.) Snakes were part of Delphic lore until c. 800 BCE when Apollo was said to have slain the serpent guarding the sanctuary, establishing the oracle anew. 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.

King Croesus 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.

Ripping yarns: how they 'saved' Private Lynch - War on Iraq
"In 2001, the man behind Black Hawk Down, Jerry Bruckheimer, had visited the Pentagon to pitch an idea. Bruckheimer and fellow producer Bertram van Munster, who masterminded the reality show Cops, suggested Profiles from the Front Line, a primetime television series following US forces in Afghanistan. They were after human stories told through the eyes of the soldiers. Van Munster's aim was to get close and personal.

It was perfect reality TV, made with the co-operation of Donald Rumsfeld and aired just before the Iraqi war. The Pentagon liked what it saw. "What Profiles does is give another, in-depth, look at what forces are doing from the ground," says Whitman. That approach was developed in Iraq."


Science confirms -- politicians lie
"LONDON (Reuters) - It's official -- after intensive research, scientists have concluded that politicians lie.
In a study described in the Observer newspaper, Glen Newey, a political scientist at the University of Strathclyde, concluded that lying is an important part of politics in the modern democracy."

It's official. Wilson's Blogmanac will continue to bring you great moments in stupid science whenever we see them. How much are these researchers paid?


US Senate Approves (unrealistic and moralistic) AIDS Bill
"... a provision, inserted by House conservatives, that requires a third of the money for prevention to go to programs that promote abstinence until marriage.

"'The president will get to pat himself on the back for this bill at the G-8 summit in two weeks in Evian,' said Sharonann Lynch, an official of Health GAP, a nonprofit advocacy group. 'But good P.R. won't win a war on global AIDS'."

Crikey, it worked!

Zimbabwean officials flout courts after seizing Guardian correspondent
The Guardian's Zimbabwe correspondent, Andrew Meldrum, was deported last night even though three separate court orders were made prohibiting his expulsion.
After spending 23 years reporting on the country, Meldrum was manhandled into a car outside the offices of Zimbabwe's immigration service, driven to the airport and put on a plane to London.
Yesterday (16th) Amnesty International condemned his imminent deportation as part of the continuing clampdown on freedom of expression in the country.
"By attempting to forcibly deport him, the Zimbabwean authorities are proving to the world, once again, that press freedom in Zimbabwe is not a reality," Amnesty International said.

It was more like raindance yesterday when "Riverdance" creators Moya Doherty and John McColgan received their honorary doctorates from the National University of Ireland in Maynooth.
The pair are currently busy putting the finishing touches to the opening ceremony of the Special Olympics in Dublin on June 21. John revealed that the forthcoming show would see the largest ever "Riverdance" line-up, involving 100 dancers.

The Special Olympics will be the biggest sporting event worldwide in 2003.
However groups representing the disabled have criticised the Irish Government's decision to ask Special Olympics athletes from SARS-infected countries not to travel to Ireland for the Games.

LONDON (Reuters) - Iraqi civilians and soldiers have accused British and U.S. troops of torturing them for information during the war in Iraq, human rights lobby group Amnesty International says.

Amnesty researcher Said Boumedouha said the group had so far interviewed about 20 people who said they were tortured -- mostly by beatings but at least one by electric shock -- after being detained as prisoners of war. Some civilians were held as suspected Iraqi militia fighters.

Thank you for the lovely welcome from Downunder, Pip, and Hello from Upover to almaniacs everywhere.
I'm looking forward very much to being a part of the blogmanac, albeit one with a funny accent.
(It's spelt "beannacht" and it means "blessing"!!)
I'm chasing my tail this weekend, but hoping to post very soon.
Back a.s.a.p.
Nóra

Lunar eclipse - some nice pix

Salon.com News | Saving Pvt. Lynch: The made-for-TV movie
"May 16, 2003 | Editor's Note: It was one of those daring escapades that define a war in the public's mind: On April 2, a band of U.S Navy SEALs boldly swept into an Iraqi hospital to rescue teenage soldier Pfc. Jessica Lynch from hellish captivity, an act of heroism captured in dramatic fashion by the raiders' video cameras. But according to recent press reports, several coming from Canada and the U.K., it now appears that the Defense Department's account of the storming of the Nasiriya hospital was grossly inaccurate and heavily dramatized by the Pentagon's savvy propaganda experts. As John Kampfner, who hosts a BBC exposé on the raid that airs this Sunday, wrote Thursday in the Guardian, '[Lynch's] rescue will go down as one of the most stunning pieces of news management yet conceived. It provides a remarkable insight into the real influence of Hollywood producers on the Pentagon's media managers, and has produced a template from which America hopes to present its future wars."

Nauru camps "psychiatrist's nightmare": doctor
"Australia: Almost 450 asylum seekers, including more than 100 children, are still being held on the island of Nauru as part of the [Australian] Federal Government's 'Pacific solution'.

According to the Government, most of the detainees are in good physical and mental health.

But Dr Maarten Dormaar, the former head psychiatrist at the two Nauru detention camps, tells a very different story.

Late last year he quit his job, unable to continue working in what he described as 'a psychiatrist's nightmare'."

Ambarvalia, Festival of Dea Dia (dates of commemoration varied)
This ancient Roman festival celebrates the goddess in her aspect as the cosmic mother of humanity. A goddess of growth, Dea Dia is identified with Ceres, goddess of agriculture, grain, and the love a mother bears for her child (known as Demeter in ancient Greece). Her priests were the Fratres Arvales, who honoured her in this feast. During the Ambarvalia, the priests blessed the fields and made offerings to the underworld powers.

This festival, which involved rites performed on the outskirts of the city, resembles a later, Christian, ritual from around this time of year, the ‘beating of the bounds’ of the Rogation days, which we shall be looking at in the Almanac next week.

Professor Wonderful

All of a half-century ago-when I was a little boy on the farm in my native New England - I remember asking all kinds of questions. What is the Earth made of? Why is the sky blue? Why is the sunset red? How does a bird soar? Why does a brook gurgle? How does an earthworm crawl? Why is a dewdrop round? Why does corn pop? Why does a wood fire crackle? And a thousand like questions. To a few I got the answers in reading. To some I got the answers in dialogue with my Mama and my Papa and with my teachers. Some I thought out – not too well, to be sure – but I was learning to think. By this device – ever questioning – ever uncertain – I gathered up a rather massive body of knowledge.
Professor Julius Sumner Miller, American science populariser, born on May 17, 1909

More Millerisms:

The schools destroy the holy spirit of curiosity.

I’m all for having the leaders of nations meet on the open field with a sword.

Why is it so?

Look it up!

Enthusiasm. Without it we are dead.

Oh, yes! I find this place where I get the mostest light – the mostest light. The mostest. That's the superlative of 'most'. I'm reciting something of Euclid. Beautiful – you should read it!

My wife engages in some imaginative adventures, and she put that together from turkey bones. Isn't that fantastic? Look at that. Look at that creature. Out – born out of her mind.

1909 Professor Julius Sumner Miller, American science populariser, best known in Canada for his ‘mad professor’ work on TV’s The Hilarious House of Frightenstein (this page has audio files) and in Australia for his hit show, Why Is It So?. In the 1950s, he was Disney’s ‘Professor Wonderful’ on The Mickey Mouse Club.



The day The Professor called me a goddamn sonofabitch
It was long ago, about 1986. The Professor admonished me. "I must make it clear. Editors must publish my words precisely as I instruct them to. I will not tolerate misspelling. I frequently tell editors exactly how to present my words."

So began my meeting with the late Professor Julius Sumner Miller, that wonderfully cantankerous Merlin who had been a part of Australian TV almost as long as anyone could remember. His off-screen was no different from his famed on-screen eccentricity. Hadn't I suspected that? The strange ways of the wacky Professor Wonderful, as Disney called him, could only be the product of a life whose eccentricities had worn deep channels in the man by their constant coursing through his being.

I was then editor of a magazine named Simply Living, and this was an assignment I loved setting myself. When introduced to our photographer, Graeme Davey, the Professor asked me for the spelling of the surname of the British scientist Sir Humphrey Davy. On discovering my ignorance, Professor Miller started proving the answer— D-A-V-Y — by reading from a book on the shelf.

"But you're quoting from your own book." I baited him.

"What of it?"

"You can't go to a book of your own writing as corroboration of your claim that Davy is spelt D-A-V-Y." I needed to stand my ground to not be swamped by this expansive personality.

"Notice," said the Professor, in the characteristic manner he always exhibited on his Why is It So? TV program, which, as I said, was his only manner. "Notice, if the editor had had any competence, would he not have corrected ..."

"But you might have told the editor not to change a word," I broke in. How would he react to this cheek from me? He paused long, looked at the others, and turned to me with a sheepish smile.

"Wilson, you're a right honourable son-of-a-bitch!"

Read the rest of this editorial

“Finally, a word on how to tackle a question. Read it. Read it quietly. Read it out loud to yourself or to someone who listens intently. Get your IMAGINATION in gear ! Draw a picture in your mind or a real one on paper or on the sand with your finger or with the toe of your boot. Get into dialogue on it. Use your hands - your arms - gesture - flail them - get excited! - show a passion! Find an analog - what is it like? Talk to yourself. Get 'mad' with it. At the table engage your family - do the experiment - come alive! Soon a faint light emerges - the light grows - an understanding comes forth. Soon too the enthousiasmos - that divine possession - so long fettered by inactivity - blossoms forth. Leonardo put it well: "Quiet water becomes stagnant. Iron rusts from disuse. So doth inactivity sap the vigour of the mind."”
JS Miller

Click to see a letter the Prof wrote me

Nimbin Aquarius 2003 Events
Unfortunately, even though it's not far from home, I don't think I can get to Nimbin for the 30th anniversary of the founding of the free town, though I'm going to try. Many thousands of people with devotion to a new world live in the Rainbow Region (north coast of New South Wales, home of the Almanac), of which Nimbin is one of the main epicentres. Happy 30th, Nimbin!

Correspondent | Jayson Blair: Green or black?
"You just can't get away from the ghostly karmas of Jayson Blair on the net these days. Since the day of the 15,000-word muckracking by New York Times, all perceivable forms of publications including the omnipresent blogs are doing rounds with tales behind the 'black eye' of nytimes.

"Peeping through the cracks, pundits had found the reason why the young Blair could flee through the corridors unscathed after 50-plus errors in his four-year tenure : he is black. Here’s a change of tone ..."

Video Proves 9-11 Was No Suprise
"By now you have all heard the strange story of how George Bush claimed to have seen the first plane hit the World Trade Tower on TV before going into a school room to read to some children. This is a strange story because there was no video of the first impact until a day later, when a video shot by a documentary film crew that captured the first impact surfaced."

The White House lied
"'The White House Lied' was the headline on the ABCNews.com Web site on April 25. They weren't harking back to the days of Clinton and Monica Lewinsky."

Today is Wesak
Buddha’s birthday festival, celebrating also his attainment of enlightenment and his ascension.

Wesak's full moon today coincides with a lunar eclipse (see below). What a great time to be making those necessary decisions and commitments!



"When the full moon is in the constellation of Taurus (usually the full moon in May), a world-wide event takes place that is oftentimes referred to as Wesak. . In the East, this date also marks a celebration of Buddha's birth, attainment of Buddhahood, and his departure from the physical body. The new and full moon periods are always times of increased communication with other dimensions. It is as if the veils become thinner between planes, and is why meditation at these times can be very fruitful. When the moon is in Taurus, a special rending of the veils occurs. As legend has it, Buddha, "The Illumination of Light," and Christ, "The Embodiment of Love," meet at this time for the benefit of humanity and Earth." Source

Djwhal Khul, in the Alice Bailey book, Ponder on This, has suggested about Wesak: "No cost is too great to pay in order to be of use to the Spiritual Hierarchy at the time of the full moon of May (this year in April), the Wesak Festival. No price is too high in order to gain the spiritual illumination which can be possible, particularly at this time."




Feast day of St Brendan the Elder (aka, the Navigator, or Voyager)
This most widely diffused of all legendary saints, St Brendan, is found in manuscripts of all Western European languages, and the travels of St Brendan are the subject of a popular medieval romance, 'The Voyage of Saint Brendan'. Some say that Brendan sailed from Ireland and found America in the cth century. In the 1970s, Tim Severin showed that it was possible to sail a coracle (a small boat made of wood and leather) to America, so it is possible, if unlikely, that Irish monks might have preceded Christopher Columbus by several centuries.

Founder and first abbot of monastery at Clonfert, Galway, Brendan went looking for the island that had once contained Adam and Eve's paradise. He got a ship victualled for seven years, and for 12 monks, but two more wanted to come. “Ye may sail with me”, he said, “but one of you will go to perdition ere you return”.

After 40 days they saw land and sailed around it for three days, when they went ashore. A dog came up and made him welcome "in his manner”. The hound took them to a fine hall with a feast spread out, which they ate. There were beds ready for them, so they slept, and the next day they put to sea again and went a long time without seeing land.

After some time they found a beautiful land with green pasture and a flock of the whitest, fattest sheep they’d ever seen, every one as big as an ox. A kind old man came and said “This is the Island of Sheep, and here is never cold weather, but ever Summer; and that causes the sheep to be so big and white.” He told them to sail east, whence they would come to the Paradise of Birds, where they could keep their Easter-tide celebrations.

As they soon came to land, they made a fire to cook dinner, but their island began to move and Brendan’s intrepid travellers fled to the ship. The sainted leader of this fabulous expedition told his crew that the cause was a great fish called Jascon, “which laboured night and day to put its tail in its mouth, but for greatness it could not”.

They came upon the Paradise of Birds, where one bird said that the birds of this land were formerly angels who had fallen from Paradise with Lucifer. On Easter Day the bird said that it had now been one year since Brendan had left his abbey; when seven years were up he would find what he wanted, and in all these seven years he would keep his Easter-tide with the birds. The birds sang all the Christian hymns of Easter.

On Christmas Day, Brendan’s party found an island with 24 monks. Travelling ever onward, St Brendan and crew had the next Easter on the back of Jascon. Later, they came to an island of frightening fire, and one of the crew jumped overboard in fear, fulfilling the saint’s prophecy.

Brendan died in 578. The others found their island paradise, bringing back food and jewels. The legend influenced the West's search for other lands for centuries, and as late as 1721 the Spanish government sent an expedition in search of Brendan's Paradise.

More

And more


While we're on the subject of Ireland, we have a new moderator!
Nóra Uí Dhuibhir from Dublin, who has accents on her spelling as well as her diction, has kindly accepted my invitation to join me as a co-moderator on the Blogmanac.

Members of the Almanac ezine know Nóra from her frequent offerings of humour and info. She has also been doing an excellent column on human rights for the premium Almanac, and has been a supporter of the Almy in many ways. A seasoned activist, Nóra is also a writer, musician, singer and multi-linguist, as well as a great friend of mine, who will bring a great new dimension to this blog.

Welcome, Nóra, and I really look forward to your posts. Beanneacht or whatever it is.

More from Wilson's Almanac free daily ezine
1763 One of Western history’s most celebrated friendships commenced. James Boswell first met Dr Samuel Johnson, whose famous biography he later wrote and published on this day in 1791. They met in the back parlour of Tom Davies' London bookshop.

Aware of Johnson's well-known prejudices, Boswell at this first long-waited meeting admitted: "I do indeed come from Scotland, but I cannot help it".

1791 Boswell's Life of Dr Johnson – perhaps the best-known biography in the English language – was published on the 28th anniversary of the meeting of these two remarkable men.

USA Urged to Put Warning Labels on Teflon Pans
"An environmental group on Thursday asked the Consumer Product Safety Commission to require that cookware coated with Teflon and similar chemicals carry a label describing potential health risks of the non-stick coating.

"The Environmental Working Group said in a study released on Thursday that cookware coated with Teflon-like coatings could reach 700 degrees Fahrenheit in 3-5 minutes, releasing 15 toxic gases and chemicals, including two carcinogens."

Synthetic gecko hairs promise walking up walls
"The prospect of being able to emulate a gecko and walk up a wall and across the ceiling has come a step closer to reality. Scientists in California have begun to work out how to make a material coated with synthetic gecko hairs. If engineers could create a material that matches the nimble lizard's incredible grip, the applications would be endless.

"We could make super-grip shoes for athletes and tyres that hold the road better in all weathers, for example. And in Hollywood, actors playing superheroes like Spiderman or Neo from The Matrix could climb walls and walk on the ceiling without the studios resorting to computer graphics."

palsofpickover: Seeking Submissions for Cliff's New Site: Reality Carnival
"Impress your friends and loved ones by telling them you are an Associate Editor of RealityCarnival. How? Submit ten headlines that get selected for posting to the main page of RealityCarnival, and you can be listed as an Associate Editor."

I wish I had time. Cliff Pickover is something else.

US: Ashcroft Attacks Human Rights Law
"A new legal brief filed by the U.S. Justice Department would roll back twenty years of judicial rulings for victims of human rights abuse, Human Rights Watch warned today."

New Moon falls on Thursday, 1 May 2003 at 10:16 PM
First Quarter falls on Friday, 9 May 2003 at 9:53 PM
Full 'Hare' Moon falls on Friday, 16 May 2003 at 1:36 PM
Last Quarter falls on Friday, 23 May 2003 at 10:32 AM
New Moon falls on Saturday, 31 May 2003 at 2:21 PM

New Moon falls on Sunday, 8 June 2003 at 6:27 AM
First Quarter falls on Saturday, 14 June 2003 at 9:15 PM
Full 'Hare' Moon falls on Sunday, 22 June 2003 at 12:46 AM
Last Quarter falls on Monday, 30 June 2003 at 4:39 AM


Sky-Watchers Await Total Lunar Eclipse on Thursday
"On the night of May 15 the full moon will slip into Earth's shadow and darken to an orange-reddish glow during the first of four total lunar eclipses to occur over the course of the next 17 months."


Tonight's Sky
"On the American evening of May 15, totality begins at 11:14 p.m. EDT, although the action starts well before that. The partial phase, when the moon first dips into Earth's dark umbral shadow, begins at 10:03 p.m. EDT. After 11:40 p.m. EDT, when the moon reaches mid-eclipse and lies deepest in the shadow, the stages play out in reverse. Totality ends at 12:07 a.m. EDT, and the partial phase wraps up at 1:18 a.m. EDT."

This page shows where the eclipse will be visible. Not from Australia, unfortunately.

1163 Heloise, brilliant student and later wife of French theologian and philosopher Peter Abelard, whose tragic love affair with the tutor resulted in his castration, died in Paraclete Abbey.

(Some sources say 1164)

The death of Heloise
The medieval story of Heloise and Abelard, written down by two of the protagonists of the tale, tells us that Heloise was an orphan, 18 years old, living with a canon of Nôtre Dame Cathedral at Paris, Fulbert, who was her uncle and guardian. Abelard was her tutor, at first by mail, and she grew greatly in learning. Abelard, twice her age, was the most famed man of his time, a rising teacher, philosopher and theologian, and pupils came to him by the thousands. He was also very attractive to women, had a good voice and sang beautifully. Heloise wrote "Female hearts were unable to resist (his singing)".

Fulbert took Abelard into his house to advance Heloise's studies. Abelard neglected his other students and wrote love songs to Heloise, who had become his lover, and finally even the unsuspecting Fulbert knew what all Paris knew. Heloise’s guardian demanded that they marry, and Abelard consented, even though marrying Heloise would ruin his prospects of advancement. For this same reason, Heloise refused to marry him. But they were indeed married, and Fulbert took a cruel revenge on Abelard, by hiring a gang of thugs to castrate him. Both Heloise and Abelard devoted themselves to the religious life to atone for “their sins”.

Heloise only found out what had happened to Abelard many years later. She still loved him, even while in the convent, but he directed her to stay a nun, and said he now loved her as a father would love a daughter; she survived him by 21 years.

When Heloise was buried in Abelard's tomb, his hand rose up to greet her after the tomb was opened. Or, so it is said. Their bodies were moved several times, and were interred in the cemetery of Pere la Chaise, Paris, in 1800, where many years later the bodies of Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison also were laid to rest.

1936 Wavy Gravy (“the illegitimate son of Harpo Marx and Mother Teresa” – Paul Krassner), philanthropist; cult hero of the Californian counter culture, circa 1960s; founder of famed hippie commune The Hog Farm; Master of Ceremonies at both Woodstocks (1969 and 1994)

c. 570 CE Mohammed (born Halabi), son of Abdallah, of the family of Hashini, and of Amina, of the family of Zuhra, both of the powerful tribe of Koreish (but of a lesser branch). Various dates are given as his possible date of birth, including April 20. He died on June 8, 632.

His birthday festival (celebrated at certain different times by different strands of Islam) is called Maulid an-Nabi.

Celebrating the Birth of Mohammed in the Balkans

Mawlid an-Nabi (s), Its Proofs, Its Practice, Its History

Mohammed: miracle man
The life of the prophet Mohammed is arguably not as replete with miracles as those of Jesus and his saints, and the Buddha, but many believe that at his birth his mother radiated light seen in distant Syria and that the prophet fed a thousand men with one sheep. Traditionally, too, it has been believed that he made predictions that came true; he read the mind of Jewish enemies about to poison him; the hand of Abu Jahl withered after throwing stones at him, and Mohammed was even saluted by a stone.

Once, after he stopped leaning on a post, it wept and nearly broke in two. Or, so it is said.

Modern Miracles of Islam
Does this tomato carry a message from God?
“According to a reporter from the Express newspaper, UK, they were calling it the Miracle Tomato of Huddersfield. For when a schoolgirl sliced it in half she found written inside what thousands believe to be a message from God. Moslem Shasta Aslam 14, was astounded to see the words, spelled out in Arabic, "There is only one God" and "Mohammed is the messenger" in the veins of the each segment.” Source



Allah's name in the clouds
More miracles of Islam


1856 L(yman) Frank Baum, American racist, socialist, morphine addict, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz

"An interesting Urban Legend that is true is the fact that when the wardrobe dedpartment of MGM began to buy costumes for the movie Wizard of Oz they bought a huge amount of second hand clothes from many rummage sales around the Hollywood area. When the part of the wizard was cast many overcoats were chosen for him to wear, one was picked and on the first day of shooting, the actor noticed the lining of the coat had a label saying, 'Property of L Frank Baum'. [Check out the online coincidences archive; I'm going to add some of mine there if I can. If you have some cool coincidences of your own, or historical ones I can use in the Almanac, feel free to leave them below in Comments.]

"Baum was a socialist and Oz is a barely disguised socialist utopia, as indicated in this quotation from The Emerald City of Oz:

"There were no poor people in the land of Oz, because there was no such thing as money, and all property of every sort belonged to the Ruler. Each person was given freely by his neighbours whatever he required for his use, which is as much as anyone may reasonably desire. Every one worked half the time and played half the time, and the people enjoyed the work as much as they did the play, because it is good to be occupied and to have something to do. There were no cruel overseers set to watch them, and no one to rebuke them or to find fault with them. So each one was proud to do all he could for his friends and neighbors, and was glad when they would accept the things he produced." Source: Wikipedia

David Briscoe is well known to longer-term members of the Almanac. He's been sending in photographs with mottoes almost since Day One, quite unsolicited and gratis, and they've been very welcome, so I've always included them in the Almy ezine, where they are always one of the most popular features. From time to time I will be sharing these in the Blogmanac, and here's the first selection.

David, who lives with his lovely wife, Rosie, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, shares with me a birthday (aptly, St David's Day) and a love of beauty and poetry. He tells me that his favourite poet is Khalil Gibran, and that this quote is perhaps his favourite. My generous friend, who I have never met and who I did not know till he started sending in pix, now has an online gallery definitely worth a wander through -- check out the "Quotables". Thanks, David!

May 14, 1964 Egypt's president Gamal Abdel Nasser and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev pressed a button that effected the diversion of the Nile River necessary to build the next stage of the Aswan Dam.

"I will make the rivers (of Egypt) dry...
and I will make the land waste, and all that is
therein, by the hand of strangers."
(Ezekiel 30:12-13)



“Millions of people worldwide are facing serious threats to their livelihoods and cultures due to the construction of large dams. Intended to boost development, these projects have led instead to further impoverishment, degraded environments and human rights violations. An estimated 40-80 million people have been forcibly evicted from their lands to make way for dams. Evidence shows that these people have often been left economically, culturally and psychologically devastated.

Growing evidence shows that dams often fall short of meeting their projected benefits. In November 2000, the World Commission on Dams released a highly critical report showing that dams have generated less power, irrigated less land and supplied less drinking water than projected. While dams can prevent some floods from occurring, the WCD found that they can also exacerbate damages suffered when floods do occur. Projects studied by the WCD incurred an average cost overrun of 56 percent, and about half faced delays of one year or more. For more information on the economic, social and environmental impacts on dams, please click on the About Dams link.” Source: International Rivers Network


The High Aswan Dam: Environmental Impacts
Long-Term Negative Impacts of Aswan High Dam
1. Erosion of coastline barriers, due to lack of new sediments from floods, will eventually cause loss of brackish water lake fishery that is currently the largest source of fish to Egypt.
2. Subsidence of Delta, due to lack of new sediment supplies from flood, will lead to inundation of northern portion of Delta, much of which now used for rice crops.
3. Deposition of sediments in Lake Nasser will eventually eliminate irrigation water storage volume from the reservoir, preventing the main use for which the High Dam was constructed.
4. The quantities of sediments which will accumulate in Lake Nasser are so large that there are no plausible ways to remove them in the future.

If you know a blog from a ping, and your RSS from a hole in the ground (as we say Downunder), and you want to play blogs with this site, please contact me and let's talk turnkey.

Anyone who goes to see a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined.
Attributed to Samuel Goldwyn, who bought out Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks from United Artists on May 14, 1939

More Samuel Goldwyn (attributed) quotations
That is the kind of ad I like. Facts, facts, facts.
I don't think anybody should write his autobiography until after he's dead.
Pictures are for entertainment, messages should be delivered by Western Union.
Too caustic? To hell with the cost. If it's a good picture, we'll make it.
That's the trouble with directors. Always biting the hand that lays the golden egg.
I had a monumental idea this morning, but I didn't like it.
I'll take fifty percent efficiency to get one hundred percent loyalty.
I read part of it all the way through.
God makes stars. I just produce them.

1692 Reverend Kirk and the Fairy Knowe
On May 14, Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle, Scotland (author of The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies), collapsed and died on a hill near his home, called the Fairy Knowe. After his funeral, Kirk appeared to a relative with a message for his cousin that he had been taken away by fairies, and held captive. He told his cousin, Graham of Duchray, that he would reappear at the christening of his posthumous child, and that Duchray should break the spell by throwing a knife over his head. When Kirk’s ghost appeared as predicted, his cousin was so upset he forgot to throw the knife, and Kirk’s ghost disappeared forever. Or, so it is said.

The legend grew up that Kirk could be freed if a child was born and christened at his manse, and a knife was stuck into the reverend gentleman’s chair at the christening. In the Aberfoyle district, Rev. Kirk is believed by many not to have died, but to have been taken into fairyland, where he lives today.

1796 British physician Edward Jenner carries out the first successful smallpox vaccination
On this day, Edward Jenner conclusively established the principles of vaccination. He wrote to his friend Gardner:

“A boy of the name of Phipps was inoculated in the arm, from a pustule on the hand of a young woman, who was infected by her master's cows. Having never seen the disease but in its casual way before, that is, when communicated from the cow to the hand of the milker, I was astonished at the close resemblance of the pustules, in some of their stages, to the variolous pustules. But now listen to the most delightful part of my story. The boy has since been inoculated for the small-pox, which, as I ventured to predict, produced no ill effect.”

Some physicians for a long time opposed vaccination: A Dr Smyth warned that vaccinated people caught cattle's diseases, or even became cow-like, and that small-pox was a visitation of God, and not to be treated; a Dr Ferdinand Smyth Stuart published a pamphlet showing Jenner as a monster with the horns of a bull.

Americans and 9-11, by an American journalist "Americans think that they already know everything there is to know, and the rest of the world wants to destroy them with their own knowledge. So they hide in their houses, in front of the TV sets, taking pills at scheduled times. Their psychiatrists say that they are doing the right thing, and life is so serious, they’d better not ask any questions."

More toons here

Ashcoft visits school
(Nora from Ireland sent me this one:)

Attorney General Ashcroft is visiting an elementary school. After the typical civics presentation, he announces, "All right, boys and girls, you can all ask me questions now."

A young boy named Bobby raises his hand and says, "I have three questions:
1. How did Bush win the election with fewer votes than Gore?
2. Why are you using the USA Patriot Act to limit Americans' civil liberties?
3. Why hasn't the U.S. caught Osama Bin Laden yet?"

Just then the bell sounds and all the kids run out to the playground.
Fifteen minutes later, the kids come back to class. "I'm sorry we were interrupted by the bell," Ashcroft says. "Now, you can all ask me questions."

A young girl raises her hand and says, "I have five questions:
1. How did Bush win the election with fewer votes than Gore?
2. Why are you using the USA Patriot Act to limit Americans' civil liberties?
3. Why hasn't the U.S. caught Osama Bin Laden yet?
4. Why did the bell go off 20 minutes early?
5. Where's Bobby?"

Harvard Gazette: Lowell House rings in the May
"'Summer is a-coming and the winter is away-o,' sang Lynn the Fool just after dawn ...

"While Lynn and other pagan revelers danced around a Maypole nearby, the Harvard students put a distinctly Ivy League stamp on the centuries-old celebration of springtime and fertility."

Cut Men: Do They not Bleed? Wendy McElroy
"Male bashing -- the stereotyping of men as brutal, stupid or otherwise objectionable -- is commonplace. Our sons, husbands, fathers and men-friends are gleefully slandered because they are male. They are subjected to malicious jokes and attitudes that would be decried if directed at blacks, Hispanics or women. The assault against men must stop. But how?"

Wendy McElroy's piece states the obvious but it must be stated again and again, and hopefully by more women. Her views are congruent with those expressed in my article, Strategic Disempowerment. I wonder if FOSXNews will ever pick that one up?!! :)

TIME.com: The Oily Americans
"For more than a half-century, American foreign policy dealing with oil has typically been manipulative and misguided, often both at the same time."

Curioser and curioser. Looks like TIME Magazine has been infiltrated by Muslim Communists. How long before the editors win a vacation in Guantanamo?

Voila > l'Actualité > Insolite
""It's not a joke," a Microsoft spokesperson assured AFP. But it
certainly sounds like one. According to Voila.fr, the software giant
is launching the I-Loo - a portable toilet with an adjustable plasma
screen, a wireless keyboard and an internet connection. It will, the
site says, consign the piles of newspapers traditionally found in the
corners of bathrooms to the bin.

"'The internet is so much a part of everyday life that offering people
the chance to surf in toilets is a natural step,' a marketing
director told AFP. 'I't's fascinating to think that the smallest room
could be an way in to the enormous virtual world.'

Outdoor summer festivals such as Glastonbury will probably be the
testing grounds for the invention. Whether the queues outside the
notoriously smelly Portaloos will grow any longer remains to be seen."

Thanx, Nora, for sending this!

Scotland on Sunday - Scotland - Woman sues for lost childhood
"A WOMAN who was taken into care as a child over unfounded sex abuse claims is suing a local authority for compensation for her ‘lost childhood’ in a landmark legal case, Scotland on Sunday can reveal.

The woman, from Ayrshire, was one of hundreds of children wrongly removed from their families in a series of sex abuse investigations across Britain in the late 1980s and early 1990s."

Here in Australia, we have a well-known joke: What's the difference between a rottweiler and a Department of Family Services social worker? Answer: With the rottweiler, sometimes you get your children back.

This poor family in Scotland had a Halloween party, apparently, and it sounds like the wimmin with the spiky hair and long dangly earrings from The Department decided to come in and do their bit. They stole the child away from the parents. Scotland sounds more like Australia than I ever knew. Shame about the drizzly weather, and warm beer.

Reuters AlertNet - Bush, Blair nominated for Nobel prize for Iraq war
"OSLO, May 8 (Reuters) - A Norwegian parliamentarian nominated U.S. President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair for the Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday, praising them for winning the war in Iraq."

This story suggested (with thanks) by LyP in a comment below. It reminded me of the how Alfred Nobel came to give his money to the Nobel Prizes. He read his obituary in the paper one day. No, he wasn't dead, but his bro was and the paper got it wrong. But when he read what a bastard the paper thought he was for inventing dynamite and making a fortune out of death and destruction, he had a conscience attack. He came up with the idea of the Nobel Prize, which was never intended for warriors. Bush and Blair, however, would not be the first unqualified people to get one. I can think of three right off the top of my head who won the prize for peace, who were avowedly in favour of using violence for settling disputes. C'est la guerre (et la vie), huh?

Anger over Iraq invasion slowly evolves into action as Western interests targeted in S-E Asia
"As American and British forces ‘mop up’ the pockets of resistance while ‘cruising’ through Baghdad, the protest and anger generated before and during the war are taking on a new dimension that may not be so easy to deal with as Saddam’s regime: the hatred of anything Western in the minds of people; such is the anger generated and felt as Muslims watched the American aggression in helpless anger."

Occasional Subversion | The "Liberal Media" Notices Afghanistan is a Mess
"The leftist press has been saying it for months, but finally a major media outlet, Time Magazine, has written a story about the mess the U.S. left behind in Afghanistan ... They've had this information for a long time (it's not exactly a big secret), so why report it now? "

ifeminists.com > editorial > Feminists Poised to Highjack the Iraqi Reconstruction Effort
"Iraqi males -- young and old, civilian and combatant -- were the primary victims of Saddam's brutal regime. But as feminist groups pressure the Bush administration to fund programs that favor women, don't expect to hear much about that in the weeks and months ahead."

Who shears his sheep before St Gervatius’s [Servatius’s] day
Loves more his wool than his sheep.
English traditional proverb for May 13

May 13, 1917 Fatima – let the apparitions begin

Mary, Queen of Heaven -- or goddess? -- appears to kids

During the dark days of the first World War, an event happened in a Portuguese village that has profoundly affected the Roman Catholic Church ever since. According to Catholic tradition over nearly the last century, the Virgin Mary (“the Mother of God”), appeared six times to three shepherd children ('the Three Seers') in a chickpea field near the town of Fatima, Portugal. These apparitions commenced on this day and continued until October 13th 1917.

Mary told the children that she had been sent by God with a message for every man, woman and child. She promised that prayers to her would result in the advent of peace in the world. She also gave them secrets that are still carefully guarded by the Vatican. Consequently, something akin to a cult of Fatima has existed within the Catholic Church.

Strangely, the Virgin/goddess instructed the children that they should suffer for sin. An issue of the Catholic newspaper, The Wanderer, stated that after the vision, there "began a gradual transformation of the little shepherds into spiritual victims of reparation for sin."

It is said that the children viewed their suffering as contributing to the conversion of sinners. While in great pain, on of the girls, Jacinta, would pray, "O my Jesus you can convert many sinners now, because this sacrifice is very big."

Mary told two of the children that they would soon "go to heaven" but that the third would live long. This indeed happened as the two youngest died in the great global influenza epidemic that swept the world after World War One, and the other lived as a cloistered nun in a Portuguese convent.

The shrine of Our Lady of The Rosary at Fatima is one of the most significant places of pilgrimages of any religion, anywhere in the world. On May 13, 2000, Pope John Paul II made a pilgrimage to the shrine. His purpose in going was to thank the Virgin Mary again for sparing his life when a would-be assassin wounded him May 13, 1981.

Fatima is also the name of an ancient Arabian goddess and she is identified also as the daughter of the Prophet Mohammed. She is known as Zahra, the radiant one, as well as Batul, meaning virgin. She is queen of humanity, is compared to Mary and is called Maryam. A major all-female feast, sofreh hazrat i zahra, is still very popular with Muslim women; these sofreh (dining cloth) feasts, mainly celebrated in Iran, have their origins in the ancient Zoroastrian religion that began in Iran c.55 BCE.

Fatima is thus a popular girl’s name amongst Muslims and Catholics especially. Variants of Mary, such as Maryam and Miriam are also very popular Muslim names.

Allah revealed to Prophet Muhammad that he created the universe for him and because of him. He later told him that Muhammad himself was created because of Ali and at the end proclaimed that both and all was created because of Fatima (Hadith Ghodsi).



Mary as Goddess

More

Fatima goddess card


May 13, 1985 MOVE along, nothing happening here
Philadelphia, USA, police and a radical black cult named MOVE clashed when MOVE’s headquarters were bombed on the orders of Mayor Wilson Goode. Eleven people died and 61 homes were destroyed in the extraordinary event. Said one resident, "MOVE in its wildest day never perpetrated anything on our block like what Wilson Goode did." However, good Mayor Goode thought otherwise, and said that the action he ordered was "perfect, except for the fire”.

Transition to an empire
"WHEN General Jay Garner landed in Iraq and arrived in bombed and looted Baghdad he declared: 'This is a great day.' As if his presence miraculously ended the thousand and one problems afflicting ancient Mesopotamia. What is astonishing is not the obscenity of the statement but the resignation and apathy with which the media covered the installation of the man who should really be called the proconsul of the United States. As if there were no longer international law."

t r u t h o u t - William Rivers Pitt | The Women Like This War
"Chris Matthews has it right, to a point. Americans do love a little swagger. They hate, however, being lied to."

Weblogs without war
"Now that the war in Iraq is winding down— I decided to take a quick look at how some of the ‘warblogs’ were transitioning."

These times: seizing the truth of optimism
A strange near-silence has fallen over the world since the close of the 'hot' part of the Iraq war. No, I don't mean that there aren't as many news stories, or websites or TV shows, nor that there's not as much spam hitting our inboxes or as many frantic duties in our daily lives. What I'm referrring to is a palpable air of people withdrawing. I think that many in the antiwar movement are quiet now, regrouping perhaps, licking wounds, certainly. But it's not just the peaceniks.

Have you noticed? It's a quiet time. People are not sending as many emails, or messages generally on the Net (expect the damnspammers). It's a time in which I can imagine that many people in the West are renting more videos, eating more popcorn and chocolate, spending more time around the house, maybe in the garden. Maybe reading more novels. Going to the gym more to work out, perhaps a bit less to meet people. More solitude. More pensiveness and self-reflectivity. A lot of watching and waiting -- maybe for a terrorist attack. perhaps for long hoped for signs of true leadership and honesty in our elected representatives. I can't help but think that except for the most committed and fanatical supporters of the New World Order, even those who don't see themselves as part of any paradigm shift or movement might be harbouring secret doubts about what has gone down in the past 18 months.

It's a time for thought; war does that. We saw the blood running in the streets, even in the media who wanted the war so much to occur. As one who receives hundreds of emails and visits dozens of websites each day, I think I sense a new mood, a slow mood like cold molasses. yet I think it's time for hope, as a big crack appeared in the facade of the status quo, and there is a gut feeling abroad that the plasterers we got were not the right crew to call in. Do you sense anything like this?

This Almanac is committed to the new, just as those who have done so much damage to human aspirations are committed to the old. My view is that there are those who will not look at the new moon out of a pathological respect for the old. This blog, and the Almy as a whole, are looking at the moon that is now waxing as I write, getting brighter each evening as it has since before we crawled out of the primordial slime. Please, pull me up if I look back at the dark.

There's a lot to be done, and we haven't scratched the surface yet. Joyous optimism -- not ostrich-like, but wise as the serpent -- is fresh in me and a great many people I know, who see these times as pregnant with great possibilities. Nothing -- not even the recent setbacks -- can dissuade me from that. I'm having so much fun blogging these thoughts and sharing them with the small number of people who will read them. Numbers are nice, but few/better is more important. If I may be allowed a cliche: you can count the pips in an apple, but you can't count the apples in a pip. I commend that statement not only to all the Pips in the world, but to you and each of the very welcome guests to this humble Blogmanac.

Carpe diem! It's all we've got, apart from our imaginations.

Bright blessings to all, especially those who feel hurt, let down and confused by the harshness on this planet. The moon is waxing greater, and always will.

Deep Thinking about Weblogs
"What are weblogs? What's the big deal? Why should we pay attention? We attempt to answer these questions in the essay that follows"

Birthstone for May: Emerald, signifying success in love; hope and immortality.


May is witching time
According to a custom of olde England, May is the witching time. In an English superstition that found its way via immigrants to America, if a broody hen is set during May, all her chicks will be sure to die.

Read more May folklore at Wilson's Almanac's May page

May 12 Twilight Time
’Tis said that from the twelfth of May
to the twelfth of July all is day.
From the twelfth day of May
To the twelfth of July
Adieu to starlight
For all is twilight.
Traditional English saying

There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, 'It is just as I feared!
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!'
Edward Lear, English nonsense verse writer, born on May 11, 1812

Were there none who were discontented with what they have, the world would never reach anything better.
Florence Nightingale, English nurse, born on May 12, 1820

The world is put back by the death of every one who has to sacrifice the development of his or her peculiar gifts to conventionality.
Florence Nightingale

Born May 12, 1820 Florence Nightingale, English nurse during the Crimean War. She was named after the city in Italy in which she was born to English parents. Until then, Florence was an uncommon name, and for males only. Her fame and the respect with which she was esteemed by the British popularised her name as one for girls. Florence Nightingale died 1910.

To Make an Amblongus Pie
by Edward Lear
Take 4 pounds (say 4 1/2 pounds) of fresh Amblongusses, and put them in a small pipkin.
Cover them with water and boil them for 8 hours incessantly, after which add 2 pints of new milk, and proceed to boil for 4 hours more.
When you have ascertained that the Amblongusses are quite soft, take them out and place them in a wide pan, taking care to shake them well previously.
Grate some nutmeg over the surface, and cover them carefully with powdered gingerbread, curry-powder, and a sufficient quantity of Cayenne pepper.
Remove the pan into the next room, and place it on the floor. Bring it back again, and let it simmer for three-quarters of an hour. Shake the pan violently till all the Amblongusses have become a pale purple colour.
Then, having prepared a paste, insert the whole carefully, adding at the same time a small pigeon, 2 slices of beef, 4 cauliflowers, and any number of oysters.
Watch patiently till the crust begins to rise, and add a pinch of salt from time to time.
Serve up in a clean dish, and throw the whole out of the window as fast as possible.


Eisheilige (ice saints), southern Germany, May 11-15
The presence of these “ Strong Lords” bring unseasonably cold and/or wet weather. These are the saints Mamertius, Pancratius (Pancras), Servatius, Bonifatius, and Cold Sophie. These Christian names are versions of the Swabian presiding spirits of these days. Today’s ice saint is St Pancras.

Tomorrow: The visions at Fatima

RSS syndicating this blog
Wilson's Blogmanac now has RSS newsfeed and our first syndicator, http://www.syndic8.com/. Thanks, Jeff!
If any reader would like to recommend syndication agencies/aggregators to submit to, please share it with me. I'm new at this. Any tricks of the trade gratefully received by a newbie.

Frustrated, U.S. Arms Team to Leave Iraq (washingtonpost.com)
"BAGHDAD -- The group directing all known U.S. search efforts for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is winding down operations without finding proof that President Saddam Hussein kept clandestine stocks of outlawed arms, according to participants."

Bush et al consistently lied to the American public about many things (see Myths of the War on Terrorism and Iraq), and many have long suspected they lied about the WMDs. The USA invaded a country not only pauperised by 12 years of cruel sanctions, it invaded a country with a rinky-dink little defence force (and let's not forget that they had destroyed a lot of their weaponry in fron tof the UNMOVIC inspectors, mostly meeting with Blix's approval). All the while, the White House/Pentagon Axis of Diesel's PR moguls have created a myth of the "brave Americans". Since when are valour and courage exemplified by bullies shooting sitting ducks?

It's hard to believe that more than two-and-a-half village idiots in backwoods America fell for this horseshit, but there ya go ... the power of the mega-media these days.

The story above comes from the Washington Post, which still has just a little cred. Not the Washington Times, which is owned lock, stock and fascist by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon and his Loony Moonies --- one of the world's longest-standing CIA client states.

US rivals turn on each other as weapons search draws a blank
"One key argument for war was the peril from weapons of mass destruction. Now top officials are worried by repeated failures to find the proof - and US intelligence agencies are engaged in a struggle to avoid the blame."

Blair voted "worst Briton"
LONDON (Reuters) - Prime Minister Tony Blair has been voted the "worst Briton", narrowly beating glamour model Jordan, in a poll for Channel 4 television.

Geniuses don't die. I'm going to live forever.
Salvador Dali, Spanish surrealist master, who died on May 11, 1989, aged 78

I do not take drugs. I am drugs.
Salvador Dali

A yuppie is someone who believes it's courageous to eat in a restaurant that hasn't been reviewed yet.
Mort Sahl, American stand-up comic, born on May 11, 1927

Operation Strangelove: Peace Is Our Profession
"Be part of a national anti-war action on May 14. Screen Dr. Strangelove, and raise money for groups still working hard for peace, justice and relief in Iraq.

May 11, 1812 Assassination and a prophetic dream

British Tory Prime Minister Spencer Perceval, the son of the 2nd Earl of Egmont, became the only British leader to be assassinated when he was shot dead in the House of Commons by a deranged bankrupt Liverpudlian businessman, John Bellingham.
Perceval was just entering the lobby of the House when he was shot by John Bellingham, who was hiding behind a door. The PM staggered forward, grasped his chest and called out, "I am murdered! I am murdered!", falling to the Commons floor.

A stunned silence ensued, as MPs looked in disbelief at the mortally wounded Prime Minister, and John Bellingham calmly walked back to his seat where he resumed his place.

On the day of the inquest into the death of Spencer Perceval, Bellingham sent the following letter to his landlady:

Dear Madam : Yesterday midnight I was escorted to this neighbourhood by a noble troop of Light Horse, and delivered into the care of Mr. Newman (by Mr. Taylor the Magistrate and MP) as a state prisoner of the first class. For eight years I have never found my mind so tranquil as since this melancholy but necessary catastrophe, as the merits or demerits of my peculiar case must be regularly unfolded in a criminal court of justice, to ascertain the guilty party, by a jury of my country.

I have to request the favour of you to send me three or four shirts, some cravats, handkerchiefs, night-caps, stockings, etc, out of my drawers, together with comb, soap, toothbrush, with any other trifle which presents itself which you may think I may have occasion for, and enclose them in my leather trunk, and the key, please to send sealed per bearer; also my great-coat, flannel gown, and black waistcoat, which will much oblige. Dear madam, your obedient servant, John Bellingham. To the above please to add the Prayer Book.

At the trial it was clear to all that the assassin was mad, but despite that fact, Bellingham was executed within the week.

A prophetic dream
The night following the assassination, before news of the event could have reached him, the wealthy mining engineer John Williams of Scorrier House, near Redruth, in Cornwall, dreamed three times of the exact circumstances of the assassination, even down to the dress of both protagonists. He told his wife, and the next day told several friends, who all verified the fact later. About six weeks later, Williams went to London and visited the House of Commons with a friend, where he was able to point out the exact positions of the prime minister and his assassin. When Williams died, in April 1841, the Gentleman's Magazine's obituary said "His integrity was proof against all temptation and above all reproach".
More

The Anti-Bloggies Awards
"Today I had a cheese sandwich for lunch. It was really good."

You'll let me know if the Blogmanac becomes a cheese sandwich blog, yeah?

Let he who is without sin jail the first Stone.
Protest sign outside court as Keith Richards and Mick Jagger appeared on drugs charges, May 10, 1967

Can't act, can't sing, balding, Can dance a little.
A producer’s verdict of Fred Astaire (American entertainer born on May 10, 1899) after a screen test in the early 1930s

I don't know why everyone makes such a fuss about Fred Astaire's dancing. I did all the same steps, only backwards. And in heels!
American entertainer, Ginger Rogers

I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using gases against uncivilised tribes.
Great Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Winston S Churchill, referring to the Kurds. (Churchill replaced Neville Chamberlain as Prime Minister of Britain on May 10, 1940.)

Laura Jean Daniels's dislocation in time
On May 10, 1973, columnist Joyce Hagelthorn reported in Michigan's Dearborn Press the strange experience of Laura Jean Daniels. Miss Daniels had been out walking late on a moonlit night. She looked at the moon, then back at her surroundings, but those surroundings had been transmuted into another place. She smelt the heavy scent of rose and honeysuckle in the air, and found herself before a thatched cottage where two lovers in old-fashioned clothes were embracing. Soon she found herself in her own street. No satisfactory explanation of her experience has been forthcoming.

Temporal Anomalies in Popular Time Travel Movies


We are plotting revolution! We will overthrow this bogus Republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead.
Victoria Claflin Woodhull, American feminist, who ran for President of the USA on May 10, 1872



May 10, 1872 She might not be a household word today, but in 1872, she was one of the most famous women in the United States of America, a woman a century ahead of her time. Maybe two.

American feminist, snake-oil saleswoman, entertainer, reformer, clairvoyant, orator, stock broker, publisher and free-love advocate Victoria Claflin Woodhull (born September 23, 1838) began her US presidential campaign, with black abolitionist Frederick Douglass as running mate – surely the most unusual and doomed campaign ever.

Woodhull and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, had already invaded male territory as Wall Street brokers (the attractive Woodhull beguiled the mogul Commodore Vanderbilt, who backed their operation and gave them stock tips) and publishers of the political journal, Woodhull and Claflin's Weekly. The journal published the first English translation of The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Woodhull and Clafin spoke for free love, abortion, divorce, legalised prostitution and women's voting rights.

When election day arrived, Woodhull was in prison, charged with sending obscene literature through the mail. The offensive material was an article congratulating popular preacher Henry Ward Beecher for his relationship with a married woman, but chiding him for failing to openly advocate the free love he clearly practised.
Read more




CodePink
Tomorrow is Mothers Day. Sign the Mothers' Day Promise for Peace.

Britain's sex offences bill
"The offence of indecent exposure will be reformed to one where a man or woman expose themselves knowing they might cause alarm or distress, and the penalties doubled to six months for a first offence."

Are we to understand that it will be legal in Britain to flash someone if one knows it might cause some response other than alarm or distress? Will it be a legal defence to have intended ridicule, disgust, hilarity or just mild annoyance?

Animation Express: The Oddgods Series
"Oddgods 0
A mysterious technology which creates physical manifestations of mental images engages two kids in a post-apocalyptic city. Part 0 of 3. 2.2 MB, Flash"

Yahoo! News - Byrd Rips Bush's Aircraft Carrier Use
"I am loath to think of an aircraft carrier being used as an advertising backdrop for a presidential political slogan, and yet that is what I saw," Byrd said on the Senate floor.

Psychedelic Republicans
"That's right - the wait is finally over! It's wacky fun time with all-new Psychedelic RepublicansTM trading cards!"

Is the blog too slow?
On a scale from 1 (terrible) to 10 (fantastic), how do you rate the download time of this page? Your comments will help me know how well the Blogmanac is doing its job. I welcome any of your own thoughts about it. Thanks a lot.

Movie Spoilers
Warning! If you don't want to know the endings or surprise plot twists to dozens of movies, go no further! Turn back now! Or spoil a movie for a friend, and recommend they visit this page!

Editorial
Who are you, dam-ned fiend, and what have you done with my David?!

(Is it something I ate, or is it something about the times in which we live? This is my second editorial today that might be a little splenetic -- see the Hollingworth diatribe below. Oh well, I'm on a roll so here come da spleen!)

I was a great admirer of David Horowitz from about the mid-1980s. That was about the time the former Ramparts editor was copping a lot of flak from the Left for having the balls to criticize Marxist-Leninist regimes such as Nicaragua and the USSR. I recall his seminal article, A Speech to My Former Comrades on the Left (Commentary, June ’86 -- not on the WWW as far as I can see); having been saying most of those things all through the Cold War (and all the flak I copped!) I was relieved to see them being said by a prominent New Left activist.

I read with rapt attention a couple of his books, including his memoir, Radical Son. Horowiz was a red diaper baby and his anecdotes about a childhood with Communist parents make fascinating reading. I especially loved the bit where he recounted his parents picketing (like most of the Left, whether Leninist or not) with signs saying "The Rosenbergs Are Innocent": Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were family friends, fellow Communists who the Horowitz family and all their comrades knew were as guilty as hell of passing nuke secrets to their beloved Soviet Union, which Horowitz now correctly identifies as the most murderous regime ever to exist, along with Communist China.



Destructive generation, co-authored with Peter Collier, gives important insights into people and movements that Horowitz knew well while editor of the world's most influential New Left magazine. What he experienced with the yippies and hippies, and the murderous Black Panthers, is gripping reading. (It was what he knew about the Panthers that sowed the seeds of his break with the Left, but it took him some years to put the pieces together in his own mind.)

Unfortunately, since Horowitz's now rather celebrated disconfirmation with his commitments and those of his erstwhile comrades, he has drifted to the US Empire Right with an exponentially increasing momentum. He now seems to want to out-NeoCon the NeoCons. His FrontPage magazine/Center for the Study of Popular Culture, five or six years ago, seemed to me to hold some hope for intelligent discussion of the Culture Wars and politics. I used to recommend them to everyone, not because I agreed with everything Horowitz was spouting -- not by a long chalk -- but because I had confidence that he was doing what I try to do: grok the whole Left/Right thing and, eclectically perhaps, propose new paradigms. Now I'm linking Horowitz as an example of how the mighty are fallen, and how silly things can get. Horowitz is now just slightly to the left of Heinrich Himmler. Somewhere on the Damascus Freeway, the Great Man dropped his torch along with the denims and guarachi sandals. In order to distance himself from the scum of the New Left (and hooray for that), he's adopted the economic rationalism that is destroying the globe and which cares not one whit for human beings, especially if they are tinted and/or poor. Vale Jerry Rubin, John Lennon, Che Guevara and Bobby Seale. Welcome Francis Fukuyama, George W Bush and Milton Friedman.

Horowitz has a column in Jewish World Review, and another at Salon.com. In these, as well as in FrontPage magazine, a lot of his commentary makes sense, as he criticizes the 'acceptability' of the likes of Angela Davis and many unreconstructed Communists. It is hard to fault much of Horowitz's critique of anti-anti-Communism, and he has a good grasp of the role of ideology in culture. I often nod my head when reading him -- and then, whammo!, he comes out with a statement like "The Mideast blood bath is not about land -- it's about religion. The Israelis' great crime? They're Jews." Or he gets incredibly Puritan about modern culture. Or he condemns progressive ideas as neo-Communist. One cannot deny the influence of Marxism on contemporary Left politics, and one cannot decry Horowitz's condemnation of the Left for its interminable silence on its own crimes, but Horowitz seems to be stuck in that old groove of "If you are not with us, you're agin us". He still wears long hair and a beard, but one suspects most accoutrements of even slightly alternative thought or culture are anathema to St David of Tarsus.

How could such a thing happen? It must be a complex matter, but I'm reminded of a psychology study many years ago. The researchers wondered why people who had had a major disconfirmation in their belief system (such as people who predict the end of the world, or a UFO invasion -- things that don't happen to their schedule) seemed not to stop believing, but to believe twice as hard, and to redouble their efforts at proselytising. Perhaps you know the study and can point me to it online.*

After studying many such subjects, the researchers concluded that the people who had suffered the disconfirmation probably tried to convert everyone else so that they didn't look so silly. It's an embarrassment thing. That is, if the whole world believed what they did, they wouldn't look like fools. Such unconscious motivations were imputed by the researchers to cults such as the Jehovah's Witnesses and Millerites (Seventh Day Adventists), both of which had predicted certain dates for the return of Jesus Christ. When Jesus didn't show up on time, the cults actually grew.

Your almanackist was ever a poor judge of character, and an even worse mind reader. However, I think there might well be something in this hypothesis to partly explain the strange transmogrification of the radical son, David Horowitz, into Donald Rumsfeld's doppelganger. Strange, huh?

*(I think it might be Lebra, Takie Sugiyama. "The Logic of Salvation," International Journal of Social Psychiatry 16, 1969: 45-53, but I can't find it online to confirm -- see http://www.mille.org/scholarship/bibliography/bibliosubjects/413.html.)

More:
Flak Magazine: David Horowitz interview, 03-21-01 Notes from the Provocateur
An interview with David Horowitz
By Julia Lipman

Romeo and Juliet
"Txt Version"

--------------------- Act 1 -----------------------


Login:

Romeo : R u awake? Want 2 chat?

Juliet: O Rom. Where4 art thou?

Romeo: Outside yr window.

Juliet: Stalker!

Romeo: Had 2 come. feeling jiggy.

Juliet: B careful. My family h8 u.

Romeo: Tell me about it. What about u?

Juliet: 'm up for marriage f u are..
Is tht a bit fwd?

Romeo: No. Yes. No. Oh, dsnt mat-r,
2moro @ 9?

Juliet: Luv U xxxx

Romeo: CU then xxxx

--------------------- Act 2 -----------------------

Friar: Do u?

Juliet: I do

Romeo: I do

--------------------- Act 3 -----------------------

Juliet: Come bck 2 bed.
It's the nightingale
not the lark.

Romeo: OK

Juliet: !!! I ws wrong !!!. It's the lark.
U gotta go. Or die.

Romeo: Damn. I shouldn't hv wasted
Tybalt & gt banished.

Juliet: When CU again?

Romeo: Soon. Promise.
Dry sorrow drinks our blood. Adieu.

Juliet: Miss u big time.

--------------------- Act 4 -----------------------

Nurse: Yr mum says u have 2 marry Paris!!

Juliet: No way. Yuk yuk yuk.
n-e-way, am mard 2 Rom.

--------------------- Act 5 -----------------------

Friar: Really? O no.
U wl have 2 take potion
that makes u look ded.

Juliet: Gr8.

--------------------- Act 6 -----------------------

Romeo: J-why r u not returning my texts?

Romeo: RUOK? Am abroad
but phone still works.

Romeo: TEXT ME!

Batty: Bad news. J dead. Sorry m8.

--------------------- Act 7 -----------------------

Romeo: J-wish u wr able 2 read this...am now
poisoning & and climbing in yr grave.
LUV U Ju xxxx

--------------------- Act 8 -----------------------

Juliet: R-got yr text! Am alive!
Ws faking it!
Whr RU? Oh...

Friar: Vry bad situation.

Juliet: Nightmare.
LUVU2.
Always.
Dagger.
Ow!!!

Logout

Ta, Nora!

Now, if it be deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit: so let it be done.
John Brown, American abolitionist, born on May 9, 1900; speaking in court before being sentenced to death

Festival of the Lemuria, Festival of Ghosts, ancient Rome (also 11th and 13th May)
Lemures were wandering spirits of the departed. They were said to revisit their homes at this time, and were shown respect by the Roman people, who set aside a week to appease them.

At midnight, each household’s male head would wash his hands in spring water, then throw away one black bean for each resident of the household. He then washed his hands again, and clashed bronze cymbals together to summon the spirits. This ritual was repeated on the 11th and 13th of this month.

Late Night Live - Iraq, Regime Change, and the Debate the Left Had to Have
"Four speakers take part in this program, which is devoted to a debate of the times. The war in Iraq brought on a fierce public debate, in particular about whether or not war was justified to remove a brutal dictator. It is a debate that has split the 'Left' around the world, raised many questions about the peace movement, and signalled a shift of ideological lines."

Editorial

Australia's Governor-General must resign
Australia's Governor-General has said he will not resign, but resign he must, and without delay.

Rev. Dr Peter Hollingworth is facing an unprecedented barrage of pressure for him to resign as Australia's head of state, following this week's two new rounds of stunning revelations. It is clear now to the Australian public that while he was Anglican Archbishop of Brisbane, he helped cover up the crimes of pedophile priests and actually allowed them to continue working in parish duties where they came in regular contact with altar boys and parishioners' children.

Hollingworth faced a similar situation early last year when it was also patently clear that his attitude to the abhorrent crime of child sexual abuse was one of passive acceptance. Indeed, on television he went as far as to suggest that a 14-year-old girl who had been serially raped by a cleric had been in some way responsible for the outrage. As an ABC journalist succinctly put it, Hollingworth forgot the first law of holes: when you're in one, stop digging. After her abuse and control by the priest, the girl pleaded with Archbishop Hollingworth for the priest not to be allowed to preach, but the good reverend doctor had, incredibly, dismissed her pleas. What sort of man could do that? Certainly not one who should be allowed to hold such high office. He scarcely deserves a job as janitor at the G-G's mansion - not until he shows profound remorse, and not until he has made amends more than the limp apologies such as he has proffered.

Even before the pedophile debacle, one respected commentator suggested Peter Hollingworth should never have "given up his day job", as he suffers from terminal foot-in-mouth disease and seems unaware of his actual legal role in Australian government. He appears to have confused his role with that of our democratically elected representatives (they who consistently confuse their role with that of democratically elected leaders).

Australia has a very silly and archaic method of governance under which the Queen of England's representative is, for reasons completely gibberish to your almanackist, de facto head of state. We appear to be stuck with this anomaly for a while as our conservative Prime Minister, John ("Little Johnny") Howard not long ago presented the people with a Machiavellian referendum on whether the nation should become a republic, offering the public a choice of false alternatives that split the majority republican vote and gave the monarchist minority the ascendancy. (Just as badly, Howard appointed - for the PM appoints the G-G - a churchman to the position of Governor-General, thus muddying the waters around the separation of church and state and exemplifying some old biases that abound in our culture. Imagine if Howard had appointed a head honcho of the Church of Scientology, a Tibetan Lama, a Mormon Bishop or a Pope of my ownChurch of the Sub-Genius. Hey, now there's a job I might go for! I love the G-G's shiny medals and salary!)

Now we are stuck with the likes of Peter Hollingworth, whose de facto power is said to be minimal but whose de jure power is actually quite great. We must not forget that on November 11, 1975 it was a drunken Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, who sacked the elected government of Gough Whitlam in Australia's greatest ever constitutional crisis.

In other developments, the current Archbishop of Brisbane, Dr Phillip Aspinall has announced that 157 new cases of sex abuse have come to his attention since he replaced Peter Hollingworth as Brisbane's Archbishop in 2001.

Now even conservative rags are calling for the G-G to step down, vide the Sydney Morning Herald and Melbourne's The Age, whose May 3 editorial sub-headlined boldly, "If the Governor-General does not step down, he should be sacked".

Yesterday, Bishop Hollingworth's hole was dug even deeper as he publicly stated that he had requested the court to lift a suppression order against an accusation of rape that is being made against him in court. The complainant, Rosemarie Anne Jarmyn, has died since starting the action, but it continues. Ironically, I think it likely that Peter Hollingworth will gain more public sympathy from this stunning revelation. I myself, who wishes him to resign, feel such sympathy, as to be falsely accused is a most terrible thing. One must wait till the facts have been revealed before drawing conclusions.

Meanwhile, Johnny Howard is overseas playing lapdog to George Bush and Tony Blair and glorying in having brought down a dictator without suffering as much as a paper cut themselves, glad as hell that he's out of the country and hoping against hope that Hollingworth falls on his own sword before Howard returns home with some of Blair's birthday cake and probably a very embarrassing ten-gallon hat on his bald pate.

One of the most disturbing things to emanate from the Hollingworth controversy now filling the airwaves is the frequent reference by the Governor-General's many supporters to the G-G's acknowledged "error of judgement". Politicians, pundits and priests intone with weighty words about the poor chap's grave mistake. poor fellow. What a hard time he must be having, tsk tsk.

To my mind, acts of pedophilia may indeed be ameliorated by the behaviour and the age of a child, and to deny this is to behave like a puritan ostrich. Furthermore, the age of consent is an arbitrary and culturally specific cut-off point. Having said that, in cases such as those involved in the Hollingworth scandal, and I used the word deliberately, the term "error of judgement" is a sly euphemism for the aiding and abetting of a crime involving the abuse of the power of a strong individual over a weak one. It should be punishable as such, like assault and battery or theft, and those who would protect the perpetrator should be liable to prosecution. Those who protect the protector should at least be mightily ashamed of themselves.

Sexual abuse of minors, to this writer's mind, is up there with the most heinous of crimes. I do not recall those with knowledge of muders and burglaries being reprimanded by judges for their "errors of judgement". It seems to me that they often find themselevs in the same prisons as the murderers and burglars they are protecting, as accomplices after the fact. Hollingworth, we must never forget, not only did not report the pederast priests to the police, he refused (despite the pleas of the injured parties) to remove them from their sinecures and allowed them to continue working amongst boys and girls. Boys and girls who are taught, by well-meaning but misguided parents and a compliant culture, to view these mortal men as demigods.

In many ways, I like Hollingworth, but it's time for him to walk. In this I concur with the great majority of the Australian population. Moreover, I would take it one step further. Despite the Governor-General's avuncular nature, his great wealth and potentate lifestyle, his palatial residence, good looks and vice-regal bearing, why should he not be charged? If there is a law under which he, like the wives and brothers of video-stealing junkies, can be charged as an aider and abetter or accomplice to a crime far worse than pinching an appliance, then let him be face a court as non-elite people do.

Will this happen? In this country, maybe when Hell freezes over.

Happy Furry Day!
This ancient celebration is held at Helston, Cornwall, UK, on May 8. Furry Day, which is derived from the Latin feriae (festivals, holidays), in the 18th century was incorrectly amended to Flora and in the 19th century the [Furry] dance was called the Floral Dance. It is derived from a pre-Christian festivity and is seen in some other towns, such as Padstow’s well-known April 30 celebrations. In its present form prominent townsfolk dance through the town.

Feast of the Apparition of St Michael
It is not clear which of St Michael’s several appearances is celebrated. He is prince of the angels as opposed to Lucifer and the principal guardian of souls against the powers of evil. In heraldry, his ensign is a banner hanging on a cross, armed as Victory, with a dart in one hand and a cross on his forehead, with the saint also weighing souls in scales.

Happy birthday (1930) Gary Snyder
American poet; main character (‘Japhy Ryder’) in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums

t r u t h o u t - Real American Agenda Now Becoming Clear
"In the early days of the war on Iraq, American planes started bombing [Khalq's] bases. But the Khalq PR machines swung into action in Washington to get the guerrillas spared.
In a secret ceasefire deal, signed April 15 but not released until Wednesday, the Bush boys agreed to let the Khalq be. The group even gets to keep all its weapons.
So the Khalq moves from Saddam's patronage to Bush's."

John Howard's Crawford Visit: President Bush's Statement Praising Australian Prime Minister John Howard for His Steadfast, Iron-Willed Subservience - WHITEHOUSE.ORG
Statement by the President

Dear friend

Pip's Picks was my first blog, an experiment in the technology. I've learned a lot, including the fact that Pip's Picks is superfluous to the much better and bigger blog I've now created here.

From today, to make it easier for you as a visitor, and for me as well, I've decided to enter WWW picks here, at Wilson's Blogmanac. The Blogmanac, if Blogger's archiving system works as they say, should be a vibrant, constantly refreshing home for the sorts of things members and visitors find in the emal magazines and the 1,350-plus pages of Wilson's Almanac Scriptorium. I'm very excited about the prospect.

Bringing Pip's Picks to this site will make the Blogmanac a much more useful online resource, and I intend also to provide a lot more daily Almanac material here. Subscribers to the free daily ezine will, I believe, find it a useful adjunct to the ezine, so I'm going to place a link to this page each day in the ezine.

I hope you'll bookmark this weblog and check in each day for the realization of the Almanac's mission:

"To give readers many reasons and many ways to carpe diem! ... seize the day!"

I'll try to make it a very uplifting experience, unique on the Internet, if I can. With your help, suggestions and comments, I think we can do some good stuff here. By the way, if you post comments, they are for the public. If you want to comment to me, please email me. Thanks, and have fun.

Abundance and gratitude,

Pip Wilson
Almanackist

PS There are still hundreds of great links archived at Pip's Picks so I'll leave that page linked in the navigation bar (left) for a while. News and current affairs will henceforth be here and at the new Wilson's Almanac Yellow Pages.

From an email today, sent by FAIR - Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting
Media analysis, critiques and activism

ACTION ALERT:
TV Not Concerned by Cluster Bombs, DU:
"That's just the way life is in Iraq"

May 6, 2003

"Media have been quick to declare the U.S. war against Iraq a success, but
in-depth investigative reporting about the war's likely health and
environmental consequences has been scarce. Two important issues getting
shortchanged in the press are the U.S.'s controversial use of cluster
bombs and depleted uranium weapons.

"According to a May 5 search of the Nexis database, there have been no
in-depth reports about cluster bombs on ABC, CBS or NBC's nightly news
programs since the start of the war. There have been, however, a few
passing mentions of cluster bombs-- enough so that viewers may be aware of
their existence. Not so with depleted uranium. Since the beginning of
the year, the words "depleted uranium" have not been uttered once on ABC
World News Tonight, CBS Evening News or NBC Nightly News, according to
Nexis ...

"Human Rights Watch -- which warned for months of the danger and possible
illegality of using cluster bombs near populated areas-- has likewise
argued (4/25/03) that "U.S. claims that cluster munitions have not caused
significant damage to civilians in Iraq are highly misleading." The group
has criticized the U.S. and Britain for failing to "come clean" about how
many cluster bombs were dropped and where, so that civilians can be
protected (4/29/03).

"The repercussions of the U.S. and British use of cluster bombs and
depleted uranium weapons will be felt in Iraq for a long time to come. It
is essential that U.S. media push for a full accounting on these issues
from the Pentagon.

ACTION:
Please ask ABC World News Tonight, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly news
to seriously investigate the U.S.'s use of cluster bombs and depleted
uranium in Iraq.

ABC's World News Tonight
Phone: 212-456-4040
mailto:PeterJennings@abcnews.com

CBS Evening News
Phone: 212-975-3691
mailto:evening@cbsnews.com

NBC Nightly News
Phone: 212-664-4971
mailto:nightly@nbc.com

As always, please remember that your comments are taken more seriously if
you maintain a polite tone. Please cc fair@fair.org with your
correspondence.

For more information, see:
The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, " Iraqi cancers, birth defects blamed on
U.S. depleted uranium":
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/95178_du12.shtml

Human Rights Watch's resources about cluster bombs:
http://www.hrw.org/arms/clusterbombs.php"

See also
Iraq Body Count | Comment & Analysis
HOW MANY CIVILIANS WERE KILLED BY CLUSTER BOMBS?
"The Pentagon says 1: Iraq Body Count says at least 200.

May 7, 1968 Parisian students and workers continued their revolt in a nearly successful revolution. The students declared that they were ready for a dialogue on three conditions: withdrawal of the police forces from the Latin Quarter; release and immediate amnesty for the imprisoned students; reopening the Sorbonne and Nanterre. Four hundred and thirty-four demonstrators were arrested on May 7. The police also restored the anarchist Danny Cohn-Bendit's residence permit (but only for a short period). Source

Misasa Hanayu Matsuri, or Flower Spa festival, at Misasa (Spa), Tottori Prefecture, Japan
Misasa is the 'second-best' of Japan’s celebrated healing hot springs. This is a festival to Yakushi, god of medicine. Some of the events are: a flower market; tug of war; float procession; geisha parade; lantern parade, and a fireworks display.

Greece: Set sail ... May 6 is St George's Day in the Eastern Orthodox Christian tradition
Greek sailors’ proverb ”On the day of the Cross, cross your sails and tie your ropes, rest in harbour. On St George’s Day rise and set sail again.”

Nothing easier. One step beyond the pole, you see, and the north wind becomes a south one.
Robert Peary, born on May 6, 1856, explaining how he knew when he had reached the North Pole

Any institution which does not suppose the people good, and the magistrate corruptible, is evil.
Maximilien Robespierre, born on May 6, 1758, Déclaration des Droits de l'homme

The great question, which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is "What does a woman want?"
Sigmund Freud, born on May 6, 1856

I leave this world without a regret.
Last words of Henry David Thoreau, American author and naturalist, who died on this day in 1862. (One source says his last words were “Moose. Indian.”)

May 6, 1782 James Price, a Guildford, England chemist, began an experiment (concluded May 25) to turn mercury (another source says sulphur, and another, half a grain of ‘a certain powder of deep red colour’ with some heated mercury. Yet another refers to a white powder with mercury, borax and nitre, as well as silver.) into gold. He presented some of his supposed gold to King George III, and was awarded the degree of MD by Oxford University. Months later, when asked by Sir Joseph Banks (the botanist famed for his work in Australia with Capt. James Cook) and others of the Royal Society to repeat his experiment publicly, he called a group of members together and drank prussic acid in front of them, falling dead.

One source tells the event without mentioning that Price was found out, as though he had in fact discovered the alchemists’ ‘philosophers’ stone’ – the ability to make gold from base materials.

On September 24, 1541, one of history’s greatest alchemists, Paracelsus (born on November 26, 1493), made his will, but there was no mention of gold or silver, the alchemists’ holy grail. His only legacy was a 125 grams (approx. 4 oz Troy/Apoth.) silver chalice. Paracelsus died in 1541, possibly from a fall (he was a heavy drinker).

Rest of story with more links

M Szabo, please contact Pip.

Exit Napoleon
Napoleon Bonaparte died on May 5, 1821, in exile on the remote island of St Helena. Not long before his death he told his secretary, “There is no more oil in the lamp”, but his last words are said to be either “Mon Dieu - la nation Française - Tête d’armée or “Josephine”. Aged 51, he became ill and went into a coma on this day, dying a few hours later.

Napoleon’s willows
It is said that all the weeping willow trees in Australia are descended from cuttings taken from trees that surround Napoleon’s grave on St Helena, brought by British people when their ships stopped at the island en route.
The willow is by tradition a sad tree. People who have lost their love place mourning garlands on willow branches and exiles hung their harps on them. "She is in her willows" implies the mourning of a female for her lost mate.

May 5, 1945: A US B-29 bomber was shot down over Japan and eight American airmen prisoners were made available for medical experiments at Kyushu Imperial University. The eight were dissected while they were still alive.
This is the only occasion on which Americans became part of the cruel practices associated with Lt Gen. Shiro Ishii’s Unit 731, and the only time at which such experiments were done in Japan. Unit 731 was most active in China in a little known chapter of human bestiality in which perhaps hundreds of thousands of men, women and children were deliberately killed.
The personnel behind the unit went relatively unpunished as General Douglas MacArthur and the US Joint Chiefs of Staff secured their immunity from retribution in exchange for vast amounts of documentation of research conducted (upon Chinese civilians) into biological warfare. More

"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice.
From Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, who wrote it for Alice Liddell who was born on May 4, 1852

Well, Jim, I haven't read any of your books but I'll have to someday because they must be good considering how well they sell.
Nora Joyce, to her novelist husband, on May 4, 1940

The first Sunday in May
On the first Sunday after May Day, in Penzance, Cornwall, UK, people (usually two or three families together) used to visit Rose-hill, Poltier and other adjacent towns, for recreation. They would carry ingredients to make the ‘country cake’ or ‘heavy cake’ made from flour, cream, sugar, and currants. They also visited farmhouses where they ate junket and yoghurt cut in diamonds, and drank tea and punch.

First Sunday in May: Humane Sunday, USA
The first Sunday in May is dedicated to the prevention of child abuse and cruelty to animals. It is sponsored by the American Humane Society.

First Sunday morning of May (Old Style calendar) at Craigie Well, Blackisle of Ross
Many years ago people used to come in large numbers, every first Sunday morning in May, to a sacred spring called Craigie Well. A large briar bush nearby would be covered with threads and bunting, as offerings to the well (similar to oriental prayer flags). The waters, if drunk before sunrise, had healing powers - or so it is said. The whole day had the atmosphere of a fair.

Born on May 2, 1602 Athanasius Kircher, a probable one-time owner of the Voynich Manuscript, the mysterious and so far untranslatable 240-page medieval manuscript owned in more recent years by Wilfrid Voynich (Wilfryd Micha Habdank-Woynicz). Read more

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Normanhurst Boy's High School seniors cross country run, c. 1970 (pix)
I just scanned a funny photo I've had for 33 years. I went to a disciplinarian high school of about 1,200 boys, Normanhurst Boys' High School, in suburban Sydney. This was from 1965-70, a period of considerable youth rebellion there as in most Western places. Among many things they tried to make us do, and quite widely resented and ignored, were sport, physical education and occasional cross country runs. This photo exemplifies our attitudes in those days.

In 1970, all the boys stopped short of the teachers who were judging the senior school cross country race (having walked most of the way), sat down and waved at the fuming authorities, many of whom were ex-WWII servicemen and not amused. However, no amount of their screaming through megaphones could stop youth. It was a school that formerly enjoyed a solid academic and sporting record, and this sort of thing really was "not done". But we all had a laugh and I thought I'd share with you some schoolboy 'organized spontaneity'. I'm not in the picture; I'm happy to say that the prank had been my suggestion, and I stood with the photographer next to the judges' tables.

There are two photos, the small version (46kb) and a big blow-up (268kb) where I can still recognise many of the Normanhurst Boys' High School Graduating Class of 1970.

May 1, 1830: Birth of Mother Jones (‘the Miners’ Angel’; ‘the greatest woman agitator of our times’), born Cork, Ireland. Irish-American anti-war activist and labor radical. She was one of the early leaders of the anarcho-syndicalist (kinda sorta) International Workers of the World, or Wobblies. Another late starter, at 37 years of age she became active in the union movement following the death of her husband. Read more