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Today in History
1st May, 2019"May is blooming and fertile, spring in its full flower. Unlike the storms of March and the “uncertain glory” of April, Shakespeare’s May, with its “darling buds,” is always sweet, and ever the month for love. Traditionally—before the international labor movement claimed May 1st in honor of the Haymarket riot—May Days were holidays of love too, white-gowned fertility celebrations. It’s on a May Day that Thomas Hardy, always attuned to ancient rites, introduces Tess Durbeyfield, whose “bouncing handsome womanliness” among the country girls “under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm” still reveals flashes of the child she recently was.
May has long been the month for mothers as well as maidens, even before Anna Jarvis chose the second Sunday in May in 1908 for Mother’s Day to honor the death of her own mother. The mother of them all, the Virgin Mary, was celebrated for centuries as the Queen of May, and in “The May Magnificat” Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us that “May is Mary’s month,” and asks why. “All things rising,” he answers, “all things sizing / Mary sees, sympathizing / with that world of good, / Nature’s motherhood.”
May’s meanings can get to be too much, though. When the mother in The Furies, Janet Hobhouse’s fictional memoir of a life caught up in isolated family dependence, chooses Memorial Day to end her own life, her daughter mournfully riffs on May in an overdetermined frenzy of meaning: “month of mothers, month of Mary, month of heroes, the beginning of heat and abandonment, of the rich leaving the poor to the cities, May as in Maybe Maybe not, as in yes, finally you may, as in Mayday, the call for help and the sound of the bailout, and also, now that I think of it, as in her middle name, Maida.”
The “may” in “May” had another meaning for Elizabeth Barrett, who wrote to Robert Browning from her invalid’s bed during the “implacable weather” of March that “April is coming. There will be both a May & a June if we live to see such things, & perhaps, after all, we may.” She wasn’t only speaking of better weather coming: since they began to write each other in January they had spoken of meeting in person for the first time—he especially—but she, without refusing, had put him off, excusing herself as “a recluse, with nerves that have been all broken on the rack, & now hang loosely.” When May arrived, she wrote him, “Shall I have courage to see you soon, I wonder! . . . But oh, this make-believe May—it can’t be May after all!” And then on May 20 she met him, beginning a secret courtship, against her father’s wishes, that ended in their elopement in September of the following year."
Source:
A Reader's Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year
On May 2, 2019, Italy and the world honor the day, 500 years ago, when Leonardo da Vinci died. In fact, a host of celebrations are planned here and will last much of the year. In March the celebration committee created by the Ministry for Culture and Tourism elected Prof. Paolo Galluzzi, who is director of the Galileo Museum of Florence, its president. Other committee members include Prof. Vincent Deleuvin, curator of Italian 16th C. painting at the Louvre; Prof. Luke Syson, curator of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Metropolitan of New York, and Pinin Brambilla Barcilon, restorer of "The Last Supper."
When Leonardo's patron Giuliano de'Medici died, Leonardo quit Italy for France in 1516, when he was 64, to live in a fine manor house at Clos-Luce near Amboise. He was unwell and his hand too crippled to paint, but he and his admiring new patron, Francis I, the youthful king of France, became close friends who discussed everything from philosophy to art, architecture and engineering.
Writing in 1550, Giorgio Vasari, in his Lives of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, recorded that Leonardo actually died in the king's arms, with the king "supporting his head to give him such assistance and do him such favour as he could, in the hope of alleviating his sufferings." Vasari's account inspired artists like Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres to paint, that death scene with the king in 1818.
This touching scene of the king cradling the artist's head is unproven but is possible albeit, "With Leonardo, nothing is so simple," writes Walter Isaacson in his carefully researched Leonardo Da Vinci, The Biography (Simon and Schuster, 2017). Leonardo was buried in the cloister of the Church of Saint Florentin at Amboise, "but the current location of his remains is another mystery," writes Isaacson. The church was demolished in the early 19th C., and, although excavation decades later revealed bones, they are cautiously described as Leonardo's "presumed remains."
One of the main events of the 500th anniversary of his death begins this October at the Uffizi Galleries of Florence, with the exhibition "The Leicester Codex of Leonardo da Vinci: Water as Microscope of Nature." The 72-page Codex, which discusses the movement of water, fossils, and moonlight (among other topics) is being loaned by Bill Gates, who purchased it in 1990 for over $30 million. Already on view in Turin at the Biblioteca Reale is the famous self-portrait of Leonardo after two years of restoration. Works on view with the self-portrait will be Italian Renaissance drawings called "Intorno a Leonardo, Disegni italiani del Rinascimento," from July 8 through Sept 15. "For 2019 we are planning to open a permanent display of the 13 Leonardo drawings which we own, in addition to the Codex of the Flight of Birds," says director Enrica Pagella.
In Milan after Feb. 7 a pavilion at the Borsa Internazionale del Turismo (Bit) travel fair will, in the words of the Bit organizers, "illustrate Leonardo's works through contributions from the major cultural venues associated with him: the Sforzesco Castle, the Museum of the Vinciano Cenacolo, the Ambrosiana Library and Art Gallery, the da Vinci National museum of Science and Technology and the Stelline Foundation." Reproductions of some of the machines invented by Leonardo will be on view. As an aside, tourism in Milan has increased notably, thanks partly to a 20% increase in youngsters under 18.
Source: www.italy.org
Leonardo da Vinci
The Best Poems for June. Here are some of the finest Junetime poems, including a few ‘wild cards’ which we’d especially recommend.Edmund Spenser, ‘The Shepheardes Calendar: June’. Inspired by the Roman poet Virgil’s Eclogues, Spenser (c. 1552-99) wrote this long pastoral work about a year in the life of the English countryside. In June, we find the ‘Colin Clout’ shepherd figure of the poem talking to Hobbinoll, his friend: ‘Colin, to heare thy rymes and roundelayes, / Which thou were wont on wastfull hylls to singe, / I more delight, then larke in Sommer dayes’. A window onto a different age.
John Clare, ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar: June’. After Spenser’s Elizabethan calendar, the most famous ‘shepherd’s calendar’ in English verse is by one of England’s greatest nature poets, John Clare (1793-1864): ‘Now summer is in flower and natures hum / Is never silent round her sultry bloom / Insects as small as dust are never done / Wi’ glittering dance and reeling in the sun / And green wood fly and blossom haunting bee / Are never weary of their melody…’
Emma Lazarus, ‘A June Night’. Lazarus (1849-87) is best-known for her sonnet ‘The New Colossus’, celebrating the arrival of the Statue of Liberty in the United States; but this lesser-known poem shows she wasn’t exactly a one-poem wonder. It sees her paying tribute to the ‘dewy air’ of a June night: ‘Ten o’clock: the broken moon / Hangs not yet a half hour high, / Yellow as a shield of brass, / In the dewy air of June …’
W. H. Davies, ‘All in June’. The Welsh poet W. H. Davies (1871-1940) is best-known for his short poem ‘Leisure’, but this poem, describing the natural world in June, is also captivating: ‘Today the fields are rich in grass, / And buttercups in thousands grow; / I’ll show the world where I have been – / With gold-dust seen on either shoe.’
Edward Thomas, ‘Adlestrop’. The origins of this poem lie in an event that took place on 24 June 1914, while the English poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917) was on the Oxford to Worcester express train. The train made an unscheduled stop at Adlestrop (formerly Titlestrop) in Gloucestershire, a tiny village in the Cotswolds with a population of just over 100. Thomas took the opportunity to fill his notebook with his observations of the place before the train started up again. The poem, then, had its origins in an unexpected event, a chance occurrence, that occurred one June day in 1914. Thomas would later write up his observations into this fine, understated poem, which has since become a national favourite.
Sara Teasdale, ‘June Night’. ‘Oh Earth, you are too dear to-night, / How can I sleep while all around / Floats rainy fragrance and the far / Deep voice of the ocean that talks to the ground?’ So asks the American poet Sara Teasdale in this short poem.
Richard Aldington, ‘June Rain’. Aldington was one of the leading imagist poets in the second decade of the twentieth century, and this poem about rain falling in London in the month of June dates from his imagist period.
Louis MacNeice, ‘June Thunder’. This poem, from MacNeice’s 1938 collection The Earth Compels, sees the poet contrasting Junes from his idyllic past with the June of the present, which is full of ominous thunder.
Source: Interesting Literature
On Bloomsday, James Joyce's fans all over the world are celebrating. It commemorates the day on which the events of his novel Ulysses take place. Joyce chose June 16th, 1904, for the setting because it was the day of his first date with Nora Barnacle, his future wife. They'd met each other randomly on Nassau Street in Dublin on June 10th, chatted a bit, and agreed to meet up later. But she stood him up on their first would-be date of June 14th. On the 15th, the 22-year-old James Joyce sent a note to her that read:"I looked for a long time at a head of reddish-brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected. I would like to make an appointment but it might not suit you. I hope you will be kind enough to make one with me — if you have not forgotten me!"
They successfully met up the following day, June 16th. They went for an evening stroll around the south bank of the Liffey River in Dublin. And Joyce later chose this day for the setting of Ulysses.
His publisher Sylvia Beach organized a celebratory Parisian luncheon on June 16th, 1929 — years before the book was legal in the English-speaking world.
The first modern celebration of Bloomsday was in 1954, the 50th anniversary of the fictional events in Joyce's book, and about three decades after Joyce published his novel in 1922. Irish writers Flann O'Brien and Patrick Kavanagh got together with critic John Ryan and a dentist cousin of James Joyce, named Tom Joyce, to make a daylong pilgrimage around Dublin. They were to have stops at the Martello Tower (the opening scene of the novel), Davy Byrne's Pub (where Bloom eats a gorgonzola cheese sandwich) and 7 Eccles Street (where Bloom and his wife, Molly, lived). They role-played, acted out the dialogue, and rode in horse-drawn carriages like those described in the scene of Paddy Dignam's funeral. They were supposed to end up in the red-light section of Dublin, where the 15th chapter of Ulysses "Nighttown" is set, but the literary pilgrims got a bit drunk and distracted at a pub about halfway through the route and lost their ambition to finish it.
Source: The Writer's Almanac
James Joyce
On this day in 1631, Mumtaz Mahal died; her husband, Mughal emperor Shah Jahan, was so grieved by her death that he spent the next 22 years building her mausoleum, the Taj Mahal, in Agra. The two had married in 1612, and she was his favorite of his three wives; her name means "Chosen One of the Palace." She died giving birth to their 14th child.More than 20,000 workers from India, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, and Europe were employed in building the mausoleum and its surrounding complex. The outlying buildings, including the mosque, are made of red sandstone; the tomb, built of white marble inlaid with semi-precious stones, is the most recognizable feature, and it's suffered greatly in recent years from the pollution of nearby foundries and automobile traffic.
The Complete Taj Mahal
Today is Juneteenth, also known as “Freedom Day” or “Emancipation Day.” It’s a holiday commemorating the end of slavery in the United States. It was on this date in 1865 that Union soldiers arrived in Galveston, Texas, to spread the word that slavery had been abolished. Of course, the Emancipation Proclamation had gone into effect some two and a half years earlier, in January 1863; most Confederate states ignored it until they were forced to free their slaves by advancing Union troops.
From the balcony of Galveston’s Ashton Villa, General Gordon read the contents of General Order Number Three: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”
Source: www.juneteenth.com/history
Juneteenth: A Celebration of Freedom
Today is the summer solstice and the first day of summer in the Northern Hemisphere. For those of us in the north, today will be the longest day of the year and tonight will be the shortest night. The entire Earth is about 3 million miles farther from the sun at this time of the year. The difference in the temperature is due to the fact that our planet is tilted on its axis, and at this time of year, the Northern Hemisphere is tilted toward the sun, receiving more direct radiation for longer periods of time each day. It is that slight tilt, only 23 1/2 degrees, that makes the difference between winter and summer. The rise in temperature allows most of the plants we eat to germinate. Wheat and many other plants require an average temperature of at least 40° F to grow. Corn needs a temperature of 50° F, and rice needs a temperature of 68° F.
Source: The Writer's Almanac
The Magic of the Summer Solstice
Hello everybody! I'm back into Today in History8th October will be ... Ada Lovelace Day
Ada Lovelace Day was created to celebrate one of the first computer programmers. As the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, Augusta Ada Byron, was brought up by her mother, Annabella after he passed.
Her mother feared that she would inherit her father’s poetic temperament, and gave Ada a strict upbringing of logic, science, and mathematics. Ada became fascinated with mechanisms and designed steam flying machines, poring over the scientific magazines of the time and embracing the British Industrial revolution.
In 1833, Ada Lovelace was introduced to Charles Babbage whom she helped to develop a device called The Analytical Engine; an early predecessor of the modern computer. Lovelace and Babbage worked together closely for many years in order to refine the Engine.
Ada found relative fame in 1842 when she expanded on an article by an Italian mathematician, in which she elaborated on the use of machines through the manipulation of symbols.
Although Babbage had sketched out programs before, Lovelace’s were the most elaborate and complete, and the first to be published; so she is often referred to as “the first computer programmer”.
Ada Lovelace died of cancer at the age of 36 a few short years after the publication of “Sketch of the Analytical Engine, with Notes from the Translator”. The Analytical Engine remained a vision for many but until Ada’s notes inspired Alan Turing to work on the first modern computers in the 1940s.
Her passion and vision for technology have made her a powerful symbol for women in the modern world of technology.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...
Mod
Didn't know her at all!
LauraT wrote: "Welcome back Antonio! O've missed you!!!Didn't know her at all!"
Thank you LauraT!
October 9, 1934It's the birthday of Australian writer Jill Ker Conway, born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia (1934).
Her father was a sheep rancher, her mother a nurse, and Conway and her brothers were brought up in almost total isolation on Coorain, their 32,000-acre tract of land. By age seven, Conway already had become one of her father's main station hands. With her two brothers away at boarding school, she checked fences, prodded sheep from one paddock to another. Jill was educated at the all-female Abbotsleigh School and the University of Sydney, where she took an honors degree in history. She then spent ten years as the president of Smith College, the first woman to hold that position. She is the author of The Road from Coorain (1989), A Woman's Education (2001) and other books.
She said: "You never know what you'll want to write until it starts writing itself in your head."
As a matter of fact only when I write I know what I think ...
The Road from Coorain: A Woman's Exquisitely Clear-Sighted Memoir of Growing Up Australian
Oct. 10, 1930It's the birthday of playwright Harold Pinter, born in London (1930). He described the neighborhood of his childhood: "It was a working-class area — some big, run-down Victorian houses and a soap factory with a terrible smell and a lot of railway yards." His father was a tailor who worked long days. Pinter said: "At least when he got home, my mother always cooked him a very good dinner. Lots of potatoes, I remember; he used to knock them down like a dose of salts. He needed it, after a 12-hour day. So we were not well-off in any way — he was a working man and that was it."
During World War II, Harold was evacuated from London to stay with 24 other boys in a castle in Cornwall. But he missed his family, and it was expensive for them to house him in Cornwall, so he moved back to London while the war was still raging. He was about 13 years old when he woke in the middle of the night to find that his house had been hit by a bomb. His family all escaped, and Pinter took two items with him: a cricket bat and a love poem he was writing to a girl down the street.
Pinter published his first poem when he was 20, and for the next few years he tried it all: wrote a novel, acted in a touring Shakespeare company, and started writing plays. His first inspiration for drama came unexpectedly. He said: "I was at a party in a house and I was taken for some reason or other to be introduced to a man who lived on the top floor, or an upper floor, and went into his room. He was a slender, middle-aged man in bare feet who was walking about the room. Very sociable and pleasant, and he was making bacon and eggs for an enormous man who was sitting at the table, who was totally silent. And he made his bacon and eggs, and cut bread, and poured tea and gave it to this fellow who was reading a comic. And in the meantime he was talking to us — very, very quickly and lightly. We only had about five minutes but something like that remained. I told a friend I'd like to write a play, there's some play here. And then it all happened."
What happened was that Pinter got a call from his friend Henry Woolf. Woolf said he had one week to find a play to direct at the University of Bristol, and he was hoping Pinter might write one. Pinter laughed at him and said he couldn't possibly write a play in less than six months, and then immediately wrote his first play, The Room (1957), in just four days. It's the story of a couple, Rose and Bert, living in a room in a rundown boardinghouse. Their room seems like a warm retreat from the world outside, but from the beginning things are not right. During the first section of the play, Rose talks to Bert nonstop without receiving a single reply — she answers her own questions while he eats the breakfast she serves him. Then the landlord comes in, and he and Rose talk for a while, while Bert continues to say nothing. Finally, Bert leaves to go to work, and several strangers end up in their room, including a blind black man. When Bert returns, he finds the blind man so threatening that he explodes in violence — after a long monologue, he beats the man, possibly killing him. The play ends with Rose crying out that she can't see.
The Room was performed to a small audience at the University of Bristol. Pinter was terrified during the entire performance. He said: "Since I'd never written a play before, I'd of course never seen one of mine performed, never had an audience sitting there. The only people who'd ever seen what I'd written had been a few friends and my wife. So to sit in the audience — well, I wanted to piss very badly throughout the whole thing, and at the end I dashed out behind the bicycle shed."
Despite how uncomfortable the performance made him, he immediately started work on his second play, The Birthday Party (1958). It's the story of a man named Stanley who is staying with a middle-aged couple, Meg and Petey, in an English seaside town. Two strangers appear, sinister men who try to take Stanley away and make mysterious references to his betrayal of some sort of organization. The play centers on a birthday party Meg throws for Stanley, despite Stanley's repeated claims that it isn't even his birthday. In the end, Stanley is hauled off by the two strangers. When The Birthday Party opened in London, it was a total failure. Critics panned it, no one went to see it, and it closed after eight performances. Today it is considered a classic.
Pinter's plays always have an undercurrent of menace, and on top of that, information about characters never really lines up — characters all contradict each other and blur facts, and it's hard to tell who is lying, or for what reason.
After he wrote The Birthday Party, Pinter got a letter in the mail that read: "Dear Sir: I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your play, The Birthday Party. These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are the two men? 2. Where did Stanley come from? 3. Were they all supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions, I cannot fully understand your play." Pinter wrote back: "Dear Madam: I would be obliged if you would kindly explain to me the meaning of your letter. These are the points which I do not understand: 1. Who are you? 2. Where do you come from? 3. Are you supposed to be normal? You will appreciate that without the answers to my questions, I cannot fully understand your letter."
Harold Pinter's writing style is so distinctive — the sinister mood, the long pauses, the characters who all have different versions of the same event — that he actually has an adjective named after him, "Pinteresque." The Guardian defined it as "a cryptically mysterious situation imbued with hidden menace"; The New York Times as "a byword for strong and unspecified menace"; The Financial Times as"full of dark hints and pregnant suggestions, with the audience left uncertain as to what to conclude." Margaret Atwood described it: "A comet, but a comet shaped like hedgehog or a blur, not a cosy presence: not comforting, not cuddly, nor flannel. Prickly, bothersome, mordant and dour. Always unexpected, coming on you sideways with an alarming glare." You can find even find "Pinteresque" in the dictionary. The Oxford English Dictionary describes it: "Typically characterized by implications of threat and strong feeling produced through colloquial language, apparent triviality, and long pauses." Pinter, for his own part, said: "I can't define what it is myself. You use the term 'menace' and so on. I have no explanation of any of that really. What I write is what I write."
Pinter wrote 29 plays, including The Caretaker (1960), The Homecoming Betrayal (1978), A Kind of Alaska (1982), and Celebration (2000). He died in 2008, at the age of 78.
He said: "How can you write a happy play? Drama is about conflict and general degrees of perturbation, disarray. I've never been able to write a happy play, but I've been able to enjoy a happy life."
Source: The Writer’s Almanac - www.haroldpinter.org
Harold Pinter: A Celebration
Mod
It's the birthday of Australian writer Jill Ker Conway, born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia (1934).
Her father was a sheep rancher, her mother a nurse, and Conway and he..."
And yesterday - the 9 - died Ernesto Guevara, better known as Che...
Almost a mythological figure in a century where heroes were scarce, he was centre of many books, fiction as well as nonfiction. I like to remember Senza perdere la tenerezza. Vita e morte di Ernesto Che Guevara by Paco Ignacio Taibo II
LauraT wrote: "Antonio wrote: "October 9, 1934It's the birthday of Australian writer Jill Ker Conway, born in Hillston, New South Wales, Australia (1934).
Her father was a sheep rancher, her mother a nurse, a..."
Il Che è un personaggio che appartiene al mito ...
October, 2019 is Mental Health Month Some of the greatest battles will be fought within the silent chambers of your own soul. The worst battles we can fight are those within ourselves, against voices that persist and habits that were once healthy and now don’t serve to help us at all. Mental Health problems are a silent enemy, one that those around us can neither see nor hear, but that those who suffer from it can scarcely avoid. Where do you hide from your own mind? Mental Health Month seeks to raise awareness of these conditions and what you can do to help those who suffer from them …
The story of mental health care is a long one, reaching far back into history where men and women battled with what were believed to be literal invisible demons that lived in their heads. Prayer and exorcisms, witch doctors and shamans alike were called on to aid those who struggled with these conditions. Later it was determined that rather than some supernatural element, it was clear that those suffering from these disorders were, in fact, dealing with medical conditions that could be treated, though no one quite knew how in those days …
Mental Health Month is best celebrated by educating yourself on the conditions that those with mental disorders live with. A little understanding can go a long way towards helping these individuals live an open and meaningful life, and feel welcome and loved among their friends and families. You can also volunteer at local clinics, and aid the entire community by providing much-needed assistance to these organizations. If nothing else, a simple donation to one of the organizations who work to champion the research and treatment of these conditions can go a long way. Don’t let Mental Health Month go by without broadening your understanding of the challenges of mental illness …
Source: www.daysoftheyear.com
The Internet and related technologies have reconfigured every aspect of life, including mental health. Although the negative and positive effects of digital technology on mental health have been debated, all too often this has been done with much passion and few or no supporting data. In Mental Health in the Digital Age, Elias Aboujaoude and Vladan Starcevic have edited a book that brings together distinguished experts from around the world to review the evidence relating to this area. The first part of the book addresses threats resulting from the growing reliance on, and misuse of, digital technology; it also looks at how some problematic behaviors and forms of psychopathology have been shaped by this technology. This section reviews problematic Internet and video game use, effects of violent video games on the levels of aggression and of online searches for health-related information on the levels of health anxiety, use of digital technology to harm other people, and promotion of suicide on the Internet. The second part of Mental Health in the Digital Age examines the ways in which digital technology has boosted efforts to help people with mental health problems. These include the use of computers, the Internet, and mobile phones to educate and provide information necessary for psychiatric treatment and to produce programs for psychological therapy, as well as use of electronic mental health records to improve care. Mental Health in the Digital Age is a unique and timely book because it examines comprehensively an intersection between digital technology and mental health and provides a state-of-the-art, evidence-based, and well-balanced look at the field. The book is a valuable resource and guide to an area often shrouded in controversy, as it is a work of critical thinking that separates the hype from the facts and offers data-driven conclusions. It is of interest particularly to mental health professionals, but also to general.
Mental Health in the Digital Age: Grave Dangers, Great Promise
October, 2019 is Emotional Intelligence Awareness Month.The annual campaign to educate people about emotional intelligence began in 2006. Each year the Emotional Intelligence Institute organizes the campaign and offers a number of educational materials for free on the non-profit’s website at www.e-ii.org. With emotions now being understood as the main architect of the human mind, it is imperative for adults and youth alike to better understand how to manage emotions and develop healthier minds.
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"Emotional Intelligence will answer the question: what is emotional intelligence (also referred to as EI.) As the book works to define emotional intelligence through the four main branches, it dives deeper into explaining each branch in hopes of bringing about a higher self-awareness in the reader. Most people walk around with low emotional intelligence out of ignorance. They do not know because they have never been taught. Some crowds believe that the emotionally intelligent are as smart as those with high IQ's. People in positions of leadership show a higher aptitude of EI for being able to help others, to calm the crowd and to work well under pressure without cracking.
Each of the four branches of the emotional intelligence theory is explained in full detail. The first branch is emotional perception. The second branch is emotional reasoning. The third branch is emotional understanding and the fourth branch is emotional management. Each branch has an explanation on how to do it, how to perceive, how to reason, how to understand, and how to manage the emotions. In leaning this, we can then learn how to improve emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence training helps to make leaders out of people and helps people to learn more about themselves and they will learn how to handle their emotions. A person with a high level of emotional intelligence has learned how to control their reaction to their emotions and they can also help others with their responses to emotions. The emotional intelligence definition shows that we are whole people who have emotions and will go through "emotional" times but that we can control our reaction and responses to these emotions instead of allowing the emotions to show as raw and out of control. A person can learn how to react to negative emotions and learn how to release them so they will not harm their health."
Emotional Intelligence
Saturday 13 October 1660, a memorable day for Samuel Pepys.To my Lord’s in the morning, where I met with Captain Cuttance, but my Lord not being up I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major-general Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there was great shouts of joy. It is said, that he said that he was sure to come shortly at the right hand of Christ to judge them that now had judged him; and that his wife do expect his coming again.
Thus it was my chance to see the King beheaded at White Hall, and to see the first blood shed in revenge for the blood of the King at Charing Cross. From thence to my Lord’s, and took Captain Cuttance and Mr. Sheply to the Sun Tavern, and did give them some oysters. After that I went by water home, where I was angry with my wife for her things lying about, and in my passion kicked the little fine basket, which I bought her in Holland, and broke it, which troubled me after I had done it. Within all the afternoon setting up shelves in my study. At night to bed.
N.B. Major-General Thomas Harrison (1616 – 13 October 1660) sided with Parliament in the English Civil War. During the Interregnum he was a leader of the Fifth Monarchists. In 1649 he signed the death warrant of Charles I and in 1660, shortly after the Restoration, he was found guilty of regicide and hanged, drawn and quartered.
Source: www.pepysdiary.com
Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
October 14, 1894 it's the birthday of poet E.E. Cummings (Edward Estlin Cummings), born in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894). He spent most of his life unhappy and irritable in New York, struggling to pay the bills, ostracized by other writers for his unpopular political views, yet he wrote many poems in a naïve style about the beauty of nature and love.
He had published several books of poetry, including Tulips and Chimneys (1923), but was still relatively unknown. He came to wider public attention by giving a series of lectures at Harvard University. Most lecturers spoke from behind a lectern, but he sat on the stage, read his poetry aloud, and talked about what it meant to him. The faculty members were embarrassed by his earnestness, but the undergraduates adored him and came to his lectures in droves. By the end of the 1950s, he had become the most popular poet in America. He loved performing, and loved the applause, and the last few years of his life were the happiest. He died on September 3, 1962.
In the first edition of his Collected Poems, he wrote in the preface, "The poems to come are for you and for me and are not for most people — it's no use trying to pretend that most people and ourselves are alike. [...] You and I are human beings; most people are snobs."
‘l(a’. A slender thing, is one of his poems comprising a single sentence (if it can be called a sentence), with the phrase ‘a leaf falls’ placed parenthetically within the word ‘loneliness’. Probably inspired by the Japanese haiku form, this beautiful E. E. Cummings poem suggests a link between the eternal concept of loneliness and the fleeting motion of a falling leaf. And is it significant that the word ‘one’ appears on a line, appropriately, by itself?
l(a... (a leaf falls on loneliness)
l(a
le
af
fa
ll
s)
one
l
iness
Source: allpoetry.com - poetryfoundation.org
e. e. cummings: Selected Works, Norton Critical Edition
October 15, year 70 (before Christ) is the birthday of the poet Virgil, born Publius Vergilius Maro near Mantua, Italy (70 BC). His father was a peasant farmworker who raised his own social status by marrying his boss's daughter. Virgil was sent to Milan, Rome, and Naples for his education in philosophy and rhetoric. He planned to become a lawyer, but he was too shy to speak in public. He also found that he missed the rural Italian countryside, so he returned to the family farm and wrote poetry.
He lived at a time of political instability and civil wars, and he was horrified in 41 BC when his land was confiscated by the government and given to retiring Roman soldiers. He wrote his first collection of poems, known as the “Ecologues” (published between 42 and 37 BC), about the local farmers and shepherds and the rural landscape. His work became extremely popular because it reminded everyone of a simple time before a series of civil wars.
One of the effects of all the civil wars was that many of the Roman farmers had been forced into the military and their farms had fallen into neglect. By the time the wars were over, few people still lived in rural Italy, and many had forgotten the art of farming. Because of his popularity as a poet, the government asked Virgil to write a poem that would persuade Romans who had left the countryside to return home and work the land again. The result was four volumes of poems known as “The Georgics”, which offer instruction in grain production, the cultivation of trees, animal husbandry, and beekeeping. The poems were intended to instruct farmers; they were also entertaining and full of beautiful descriptions of nature.
Virgil's work so impressed the emperor Augustus that Virgil was given two villas to live in and a generous stipend to live on for the rest of his days. With the civil wars over, Rome had entered one of its first periods of stability and peace, and Virgil set out to write an epic poem about the country that could give all Romans national pride. He called his poem “The Aeneid”. It tells the story of Aeneas, one of the soldiers in the Trojan War, traveling home from Troy to found a new city that would become Rome.
Virgil wrote “The Aeneid” first in prose and then painstakingly transformed it into metered poetry. He found the work extremely difficult. At one point, Augustus inquired about the progress of the poem, and Virgil responded that he must have been mad to attempt the task. After working on it for 11 years, Virgil took a trip to Greece so that he could add specific details to one of the sections of the poem. On the voyage, he caught a fever. He returned to Italy, but it was too late. He died before making the final revisions to his poem.
His final request before his death was that his poem should be burned, since it was imperfect, but the emperor Augustus ordered that the poem be preserved and published — to great acclaim. The work became the basis of standard curriculum in Roman schools, which ensured the preservation of more of his poems than any other classical poet. “The Aeneid” is now considered the greatest work of literature produced by the Roman civilization.
Source: The Writer's Almanac
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In the following verses (Aen. VII 733-743) Virgil describes the land of Sarrestes people, in the Valley of the Town of Sarno, with its river, few miles from Pompei. It’s the place where my family comes from and where I’ve lived most of my life. The Sarno Valley, despite appearing today like a mere extension of the greater Neapolitan metropolis, locked between the Vesuvius and the Lattari Mountains, crossed by the most polluted river in Europe, has always played a major in shaping Campania's history and culture. Its fertile lands yield among the most iconic produce in Italian cuisine: the Gragnano's pasta and the San Marzano tomato; its coasts (from Portici to Castellammare) were instrumental in stimulating the Industrial Revolution under the Two Sicilies' Kingdom; its holidays and traditions are among the most beloved in the whole region. But it is also the area that was struck the worst by de-industrialization and economic decline during this last century.
Nec tu carminibus nostris indictus abibis,
Oebale, quem generasse Telon Sebethide nympha
fertur, Teleboum Capreas cum regna teneret, 735
iam senior; patriis sed non et filius arvis
contentus late iam tum dicione premebat
Sarrastis populos et quae rigat aequora Sarnus,
quique Rufras Batulumque tenent atque arva Celemnae,
et quos maliferae despectant moenia Abellae, 740
Teutonico ritu soliti torquere cateias;
tegmina quis capitum raptus de subere cortex
aerataeque micant peltae, micat aereus ensis.
(Aen. VII 733-743)
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Nor shall you, Oebalus, go un-sung in our verses, you whom they say the nymph Sebethis bore to Telon, who is old now, when he held the throne of Teleboan Capreae: but not content with his father’s fields, even then the son exercised his power over the Sarrastrian peoples, and the plains that Sarnus waters, and those who hold Rufrae and Batulum and Celemna’s fields, who are used to throwing their spears in the Teuton fashion: and those apple-growers that the ramparts of Abella look down on, whose head-cover is bark stripped from a cork-tree: and their bronze shields gleam, their swords gleam with bronze.
The Aeneid
October 16 is Dictionary DayOctober 16, 1758 Noah Webster was born. He was an American lexicographer. He developed the American Dictionary of the English Language that was first published in 1828.
There is power in language, in the command of a broad vocabulary consisting of many words. Poets use words to describe a great and beautiful world, to enchant us and enlighten us. Scientists fiddle out the minutest of miracles in the functioning of the world, and pass them on by using precise and clear language that transmits information from one to another. So it is only fitting that such a thing as Dictionary Day would exist to encourage us to challenge our vocabulary, to broaden it and perhaps take an opportunity to expand our language to the full scope of the tongue’s diversity.
Dictionary Day is held in honor of Noah Webster, the man who is considered to have fathered the American Dictionary. 1758 was an auspicious year for the English language, and the first English Lexicographer, or one whose craft is writing, editing, and compiling English Dictionaries. The good man was born in Hartford Connecticut to a family of some means, and his parents had the distinction of being both priest, farmer, Captain of the local militia, and the one who founded the local book society, something like a local library.
Webster’s mother was the first to ingrain in him a love of learning, a love that was somewhat disappointed when he attended the local school and found the education there wanting at best. So it was that he dedicated himself to improving the education of generations to come, in no small part by working to codify and improve the method by which information is transferred from generation to generation, language.
Dictionary Day encourages us to improve ourselves and the way we speak with others by enhancing our language in the study of the Dictionary. The dictionary is dead. Long live the dictionary! Long gone are the days when people proudly displayed their dictionaries and encyclopedias. What will become of them in a time when no one buys them anymore?
Dictionaries in the digital age. We wonder what will dictionaries become in a time when no one buys them anymore. The language is booming, but lexicography is a shrinking industry. All words are online. In 1996, Merriam Webster launched its first website, providing free access to its dictionary and thesaurus.
Today, Merriam Webster’s Twitter account has a whopping audience of over half a million, and has gathered a cult. Maybe using digital platforms in a way that closely resembles the old prescriptivist dictionaries is the way to forge on and stay relevant. Maybe lexicographers can join fact-checkers and other journalists in the fight against misinformation and “alternative facts,” calling out lies for what they really are. Maybe the dictionary is in a unique position to steer us in the right direction. And, in the process of saving itself, maybe it can save us too.
Sources: daysoftheyear.com - unbabel.com/blog/dictionary-digital-age - merriam-webster.com
Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary & Thesaurus
October 17It's the birthday of Shinichi Suzuki born in Nagoya, Japan (1898).
He's the man who developed the Suzuki Violin Method, a way of teaching very young children to play classical music by listening and imitating, the way they learn to speak. His father had a violin factory, and he and his brothers and sisters thought that violins were like boxes, that they were just toys; they never heard anybody play them.
When Suzuki was 17, he heard a recording of Mischa Elman and was flabbergasted. He took a violin home and started to teach himself to play it by listening to other recordings and trying to imitate them. He began to feel that it ought to be possible to teach anyone to play that way, and the little children he taught became proficient enough to make some listeners suspect he had gathered a bunch of prodigies together like a circus act. He felt strongly that he was not just tutoring musicians, but nurturing souls, and he encouraged his students to listen to other people as carefully as they listened to the notes on their violins.
Source: suzukiassociation.org
Memories of Dr Shinichi Suzuki: Son of His Environment
It was on October 18 in 1954 that the first transistor radio appeared on the market.Transistors were a big breakthrough in electronics — a new way to amplify signals. They replaced vacuum tubes, which were fragile, slow to warm up, and unreliable. During World War II, there was a big funding push to try to update vacuum tubes, since they were used in radio-controlled bombs but didn't work very well. A team of scientists at Bell Laboratories invented the first transistor technology in 1947. But the announcement didn't make much of an impact because transistors had limited use for everyday consumers — they were used mainly in military technology, telephone switching equipment, and hearing aids.
Several companies bought licenses from Bell, including Texas Instruments, who was bent on being the first to market with a transistor radio. Radios were mostly big, bulky devices that stayed in one place — usually in the living room — while the whole family gathered around to listen to programming. There were some portable radios made with vacuum tubes, but they were about the size of lunch boxes, they used heavy non rechargeable batteries, they took a long time to start working while the tubes warmed up, and they were fragile. Texas Instruments was determined to create a radio that was small and portable, and to get it out for the Christmas shopping season. They produced the transistors, and they partnered with the Regency Division of Industrial Development Engineering Associates, who manufactured the actual radios. Their new radio, the Regency TR-1, turned on immediately, weighed half a pound, and could fit in your pocket. It cost $49.95, and more than 100,000 were sold.
Texas Instruments went on to pursue other projects, but a Japanese company called Tokyo Tsushin Kogyo decided to make transistor radios their main enterprise. They were concerned that their name was too difficult for an American audience to pronounce, so they decided to rebrand themselves with something simpler. They looked up the Latin word for sound, which was sonus. And they liked the term sonny boys — English slang that was used in Japan for exceptionally bright, promising boys. And so the company Sony was born. Soon transistor radios were cheap and prevalent.
With transistor radios, teenagers were able to listen to music out of their parents' earshot. This made possible the explosion of a new genre of American music: rock and roll.
Source: audible free -
Crystal Fire: The Invention of the Transistor and the Birth of the Information Age
October 19, 1605 - 1682 The birth and death day of the writer and doctor Sir Thomas Browne, author of “Religio Medici”.Sir Thomas Browne was a British polymath and writer. He was well-versed on a range of subjects including religion, natural sciences and medicine among others. Throughout his career that lasted over several decades, Browne expressed his thoughts and wrote on a range of subjects.
Browne’s works often drew inspiration from the stories in the Bible as well as those in the Classics and are particularly well-known for an understated humour that can be palpable to the reader. Considering the variety of subjects that he dealt with throughout his career, he is rightly considered as one of the most important writers in the English language and as such it is also not a surprise that his works have often been quoted by people from all walks of life.
Some of his noted works include ‘The Garden of Cyrus’, ‘Christian Morals’, ‘A Letter To a Friend’, ‘Religio Medici’ and ‘Hydriotaphia’ among others. It is unknown whether Browne was a gifted orator but there is no doubt that he was one of the most learned men in England.
Source: thefamouspeople.com
Thomas Browne: Selected Writings
20th October will be "Information Overload Day"The world buzzes around us full of noise, from the ding of our phones announcing a new text-message to the “You’ve got mail” announcement letting us know we’ve got yet another piece of doubtless important information. The phone rings, the TV chirps out commercials and admonishments, and the radio drones on endlessly about upcoming elections and what’s going on in the world..
Information Overload Day reminds us that there’s such a thing as too much information, and sometimes this constant inundation can leave actually have a negative impact on our happiness and productivity.
Information Overload Day was established by a group of companies looking to bring awareness to what happens when you overload your employees and customers with far too much information. Research has been showing that productivity is actually being hurt by the sheer amount of information flowing through our lives,
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The information age is drowning us with an unprecedented deluge of data. At the same time, we’re expected to make more—and faster—decisions about our lives than ever before. No wonder, then, that the average American reports frequently losing car keys or reading glasses, missing appointments, and feeling worn out by the effort required just to keep up.
But somehow some people become quite accomplished at managing information flow. In The Organized Mind, Daniel J. Levitin, PhD, uses the latest brain science to demonstrate how those people excel—and how readers can use their methods to regain a sense of mastery over the way they organize their homes, workplaces, and time.
With lively, entertaining chapters on everything from the kitchen junk drawer to health care to executive office workflow, Levitin reveals how new research into the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory can be applied to the challenges of our daily lives. This Is Your Brain on Music showed how to better play and appreciate music through an understanding of how the brain works. The Organized Mind shows how to navigate the churning flood of information in the twenty-first century with the same neuroscientific perspective.
The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
October 21 It’s the birthday of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) the premier poet-critic of modern English tradition, distinguished for the scope and influence of his thinking about literature as much as for his innovative verse. Active in the wake of the French Revolution as a dissenting pamphleteer and lay preacher, he inspired a brilliant generation of writers and attracted the patronage of progressive men of the rising middle class. As William Wordsworth’s collaborator and constant companion in the formative period of their careers as poets, Coleridge participated in the sea change in English verse associated with Lyrical Ballads (1798).
His poems of this period, speculative, meditative, and strangely oracular, put off early readers to become recognized classics of the romantic idiom.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (text of 1834) - Argument
How a Ship having passed the Line was driven by storms to the cold Country towards the South Pole; and how from thence she made her course to the tropical Latitude of the Great Pacific Ocean; and of the strange things that befell; and in what manner the Ancyent Marinere came back to his own Country.
PART I
It is an ancient Mariner,
And he stoppeth one of three.
'By thy long grey beard and glittering eye,
Now wherefore stopp'st thou me?
The Bridegroom's doors are opened wide,
And I am next of kin;
The guests are met, the feast is set:
May'st hear the merry din.'
He holds him with his skinny hand,
'There was a ship,' quoth he.
'Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!'
Eftsoons his hand dropt he.
He holds him with his glittering eye—
The Wedding-Guest stood still,
And listens like a three years' child:
The Mariner hath his will.
The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone:
He cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
'The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared,
Merrily did we drop
Below the kirk, below the hill,
Below the lighthouse top.
The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.
Higher and higher every day,
Till over the mast at noon—'
The Wedding-Guest here beat his breast,
For he heard the loud bassoon.
The bride hath paced into the hall,
Red as a rose is she;
Nodding their heads before her goes
The merry minstrelsy.
The Wedding-Guest he beat his breast,
Yet he cannot choose but hear;
And thus spake on that ancient man,
The bright-eyed Mariner.
And now the STORM-BLAST came, and he
Was tyrannous and strong:
He struck with his o'ertaking wings,
And chased us south along.
With sloping masts and dipping prow,
As who pursued with yell and blow
Still treads the shadow of his foe,
And forward bends his head,
The ship drove fast, loud roared the blast,
And southward aye we fled.
And now there came both mist and snow,
And it grew wondrous cold:
And ice, mast-high, came floating by,
As green as emerald.
And through the drifts the snowy clifts
Did send a dismal sheen:
Nor shapes of men nor beasts we ken—
The ice was all between.
The ice was here, the ice was there,
The ice was all around:
It cracked and growled, and roared and howled,
Like noises in a swound!
At length did cross an Albatross,
Thorough the fog it came;
As if it had been a Christian soul,
We hailed it in God's name.
It ate the food it ne'er had eat,
And round and round it flew.
The ice did split with a thunder-fit;
The helmsman steered us through!
And a good south wind sprung up behind;
The Albatross did follow,
And every day, for food or play,
Came to the mariner's hollo!
In mist or cloud, on mast or shroud,
It perched for vespers nine;
Whiles all the night, through fog-smoke white,
Glimmered the white Moon-shine.'
'God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—
Why look'st thou so?'—With my cross-bow
I shot the ALBATROSS ….
Source: poetryfoundation.org
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
October 22, we’re stepping back to the Autumn of 1899. To the day when a small academic printing-press in Vienna produced two advance copies of a book that was to start a cultural revolution. A book that initially did not find a wide audience. The first print-run was 600 copies and it was almost a decade before a second was required. But a book, nonetheless, whose influence on modern humanity has few parallels …
What are the most common dreams and why do we have them? What does a dream about death mean? What do dreams of swimming, failing, or flying symbolize?
First published by Sigmund Freud in 1899, The Interpretation of Dreams considers why we dream and what it means in the larger picture of our psychological lives. Delving into theories of manifest and latent dream content, the special language of dreams, dreams as wish fulfillments, the significance of childhood experiences, and much more, Freud, widely considered the father of psychoanalysis," thoroughly and thoughtfully examines dream psychology.
Encompassing dozens of case histories and detailed analyses of actual dreams, this landmark text presents Freud's legendary work as a tool for comprehending our sleeping experiences. Renowned for translating Freud's German writings into English, James Strachey,with the assistance of Anna Freud,first published this edition in 1953. Incorporating all textual alterations made by Freud over a period of thirty years, it remains the most complete translation of the work in print.
The Interpretation of Dreams
LauraT wrote: "It has been a revolution indeed!"Revolution indeed, but dreams continue to be ... dreams ...
Mod
Revolution indeed, but dreams continue to be ... dreams ..."
Definitly!
LauraT wrote: "Antonio wrote: "LauraT wrote: "It has been a revolution indeed!"Revolution indeed, but dreams continue to be ... dreams ..."
Definitly!"
Do you dream LauraT? How would you define your dreams? Do you dream in colour or in B&W? Do you remember what you dream? Are you tired, bored or happy with them?
Did the world began on October 23, in the year 4004 BC?Did you know that according to John Lightfoot, Bishop and Vice Chancellor of Cambridge University in 1655, this was the day on which the world began, at nine o’ clock in the morning? His calculation was accepted for many decades.
But he was not alone on wondering when the universe began. Bishop James Ussher, a seventeenth-century Anglican cleric and biblical scholar also had the answer. God created the world, he said in a 1658 chronology titled “The Annals of the World”, on October 23, 4004 BCE.
Ussher was not, in fact, the first to pick that particular date as the beginning of the universe. Sir John Lightfoot, an official at Cambridge University, beat him to the punch by fourteen years. Like Ussher, Lightfoot based his calculations on information in the Bible.
He differed from Ussher on the time of day that creation took place, however. Ussher said the world began on “the evening preceding that first day.” Lightfoot put creation at nine o’clock in the morning.
Ussher worked not only from the Bible but also from histories of the ancient Near East. Because he was widely respected as a scholar, his calculations gained more acceptance than Lightfoot’s, and the determination was chiefly credited to him.
By 1701, Ussher’s date was incorporated into printed versions of the Bible. It remained an accepted date until the first half of the nineteenth century, when the scientific evidence for a much older planet began to emerge.
James Ussher (1581 – 1656) was the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland between 1625 and 1656. He was a prolific scholar and church leader, who today is most famous for his identification of the genuine letters of the church father, Ignatius, and for his chronology that sought to establish the time and date of the creation.
Researches are still on ...
Source: en.wikipedia.org
Annals of the World
Mod
Revolution indeed, but dreams continue to be ... dreams ..."
Definitly!"
Do you dream LauraT? How would you define ..."
I'd say in colour. I quite like myself, and therefore also my hidden side is quite happy with itself! I can remember some of them, some I don't ...
Of course if there's something bothering me, this reflects in what I dream. But that is ... clear!
LauraT wrote: "Antonio wrote: "LauraT wrote: "Antonio wrote: "LauraT wrote: "It has been a revolution indeed!"Revolution indeed, but dreams continue to be ... dreams ..."
Definitly!"
Do you dream LauraT? How w..."
I'm pleased you quite like yourself ... congratulations!
Mod
LauraT wrote: "Hard work of years!!!! But, as we say in Italian, "ha dato i suoi frutti"! (more or less, you could say, hard work, but ... it worked!!!)"There's clearly a hidden context behind these words ... "frutti" from forbiddeen tree are always special ...
"Crash": An Account of the Stock Market Crash of 1929 by Elliott V. Bell October 24, 1929 October 24, 1929, was not the first day of the big break in stocks, nor was it the last. Nevertheless, it was the most terrifying and unreal day I have ever seen on the Street, and it constitutes an important financial landmark, for that day marked the great decline in the prestige and power of Wall Street over national affairs. The day was overcast and cool. A light north-west wind blew down the canyons of Wall Street, and the temperature, in the low fifties, made bankers and brokers on their way to work button their top coats around them. The crowds of market traders in the brokers' board rooms were nervous but hopeful as the ten o'clock hour for the start of trading approached. The general feeling was that the worst was over and a good many speculators who had prudently sold out earlier in the decline were congratulating themselves at having bought back their stocks a good deal cheaper. Seldom had the small trader had better or more uniform advice to go by. The market opened steady with prices little changed from the previous day, though some rather large blocks, of 20,000 to 25,000 shares, came out at the start. It sagged easily for the first half-hour, and then around eleven o'clock the deluge broke …
Source: Check the source - http://bit.ly/2JgKYn7
The Stock Market Crash of 1929
The very first edition of PRIVATE EYE was published on 25 October 1961.Private Eye is a British fortnightly satirical and current affairs news magazine, founded in 1961. It is published in London and has been edited by Ian Hislop since 1986.
The publication is widely recognised for its prominent criticism and lampooning of public figures. It is also known for its in-depth investigative journalism into under-reported scandals and cover-ups.
Private Eye is Britain's best-selling current affairs magazine, and such is its long-term popularity and impact that many of its recurring in-jokes have entered popular culture.
The magazine bucks the trend of declining circulation for print media, having recorded its highest ever circulation in the second half of 2016. It is privately owned and highly profitable.
A deeply conservative institution, it has resisted moves to online content or glossy format: it has always been printed on cheap paper and resembles, in format and content, a comic as much as a serious magazine.
Both satire and investigative journalism have led to numerous libel suits: Ian Hislop is reportedly the most-sued man in English legal history.
It is well known for the use of pseudonyms by its contributors, many of whom have been prominent in public life - this even extends to a fictional proprietor, Lord Gnome.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org
The very first edition of “Private Eye”, was published on 25 October 1961. I was in England at the time, I had come to England few days before as a student.
I lived with a family of Italian origins for a couple of weeks in Morden, a district and town located few miles southwest of central London.
I bought the first number of “Private Eye” at the Morden Tube Station newstand. I remember I had only few shillings left in my pocket and was struggling to find a work.
I was lucky enough to find one in a place where I would have never thought of living, working and studying for longer than two years.
A friend of mine, whom I had met by chance in the London Underground on the Northern Line, drove me to the place with his old MG Spyder car.
He didn’t know the itinerary, we used as a reference the Tube Stations to cross Greater London. South-north, from Morden to a place called Radlett, just outside a town founded by the Romans, called Verulamium.
It was a Hospital located at Harper Lane, Shenley. The facility has been known as “Harperbury Hospital” for 61 years and has been a fixture of the area's mental health scene since 1928.
It had two sister institutions, Shenley Hospital and Napsbury Hospital, within a few miles of its location was. The places are now “derelict places”, but the Roman town is still there: the City of St. Albans.
I remember I had, among the things I carried with me, also a copy of this notorious magazine. It was my “private eye” on a reality I had never thought it could exist.
Those were the days when in London the play “Beyond the Fringe” was on at the “Fortune Theatre”, earning such rave reviews that the prime minister himself has been tempted to come along and watch Peter Cook’s impression of him.
My friend Alfred took me to see the show. With my poor knowledge of the language, I could understand almost nothing, either of the language and of the satire. I also had with me a copy a forbidden book after a year of obscenity trial: “Lady Chatterley’s Lover”.
Those were “my private eyes” on my first English days which would have kept me company for the rest of my life.
Private Eye The First 50 Years
Event Date: October 26, 1881Event Location: Tombstone, Arizona, USA
Possibly the most famous shootout in the history of America's Wild West took place on this day – the Gunfight at the OK Corral in Tombstone, Arizona.
On the one side stood the so-called forces of law and order: Wyatt Earp, his brothers Virgil and Morgan, and Doc Holliday. By reputation these were power-hungry and ruthless men.
Opposing them were the outlaws Billy and Ike Clanton, Tom and Frank McLaury, and Billy Claiborne.
The Clantons and their ranch hands and associates were known as the "Cowboys", a gang numbering up to 300 members. They were rustlers and outlaws and the Clantons repeatedly threatened the Earps because they interfered with the Cowboys' illegal activities.
The Earp brothers held various law enforcement offices in and around Tombstone but were accused by their detractors of being just as guilty of rustling and stage robbery as the Clantons.
(John Henry) "Doc" Holliday, a dentist by trade, was a close friend of Wyatt Earp. A gambler and a gunfighter, Holliday had escaped a charge of murder in Dallas, Texas.
Wyatt (Berry Stapp) Earp was also a professional gambler, the owner of several saloons and a brothel-keeper. Once jailed for stealing a horse, he was one of five brothers, including Virgil who was a deputy US marshal and Tombstone's town marshal (police chief).
Virgil had spent three years fighting in the American Civil War and as a lawman in various towns, so he knew how to fight. By contrast, Wyatt had been involved in only one shootout and Morgan had never been in any gun battles.
So it was fitting that on the day of the OK Corral showdown, Wyatt and Morgan were simply temporary assistants to Virgil.
On the morning of October 25, Ike Clanton and Tom McLaury came into Tombstone for supplies. Over the next 24 hours, the two men had several violent run-ins with the Earps and Doc Holliday. The next day Ike’s brother Billy rode into town to join them, along with Frank McLaury and Billy Claiborne.
Around 3pm, the Earps and Holliday spotted the five members of the Clanton-McLaury gang near the OK Corral and closed in for a confrontation.
The famous gunfight that ensued lasted for just 30 seconds or so, when around 30 shots were fired. Most reports say that it began when Virgil Earp pulled out his revolver and shot Billy Clanton point-blank in the chest, while Doc Holliday fired a shotgun blast at Tom McLaury.
When the dust cleared, Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers were dead, and Virgil and Morgan Earp and Doc Holliday were wounded. Ike Clanton and Claiborne had run away.
According to the Earps, the fight was in self-defence because the Cowboys, armed in violation of local ordinance, aggressively threatened the lawmen and defied a lawful order to hand over their weapons. The Cowboys maintained that they raised their hands, offering no resistance, and were shot in cold blood by the Earps.
Sorting out who was telling the truth was difficult and remains so to this day.
One thing is certain: Wyatt Earp emerged from the battle with legendary status, enhanced over the years by flattering newspaper reports, books and – later – movies.
These included John Ford's highly fictionalised version of events in the 1946 film, My Darling Clementine, starring Henry Fonda as Wyatt Earp.
Then in 1957 director John Sturges took dramatic licence with the confrontation in Gunfight at The OK Corral, having his stars Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas shoot it out for nearly six minutes. The action included spectacular footage of Lancaster firing his rifle as he leapt through the air.
Contemporary newspaper reports state that during the (actual) 30-second shootout, some members of the two opposing parties were initially only about six feet (1.8m) apart.
More recent movie depictions of the shootout include Tombstone in 1993 starring Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp and Val Kilmer as Doc Holliday.
The following year Kevin Kostner took the title role in the film, Wyatt Earp.
What Virgil would have thought about his brother receiving all this kudos can only be imagined.
Source: onthisday.com
Legends of the West: The Gunfight at the O.K. Corral
27th October will be ... Black Cat DayNothing is quite as elegant as a black cat—like a miniature Amazonian jaguar, they doze atop the highest point in the area, waking for several hours daily to prowl around hunting for a tasty morsel. But black cats and kittens are often overlooked when animal shelters are looking for new homes, and can be at the shelter much longer than they should be. So why is this?
The History of Black Cat Day
Interestingly, cats in ancient Egypt were revered highly, partly due to their ability to combat vermin such as mice, rats. Cats of royalty were known to be dressed in golden jewelry and were allowed to eat right off their owners’ plates. The goddess of warfare was a woman with the head of a cat named Bastet.
These days, however, black cats are often are seen as unlucky or mischievous, but not everyone knows why that is. In Celtic mythology, it was believed that fairies could take the form of black cats, and therefore their arrival to a home or village was seen as sign of good luck. Unfortunately, the Pilgrims that came after them were devoutly religious and fearful of anything remotely related to the pagan beliefs of their ancestors, and it was because of that fear that black cats went from being seen as the vessels of fairies to the vessels of witches and demons. At that time it became common practice to severely punish those who kept black cats as pets, and even kill the animals themselves.
Although these days nobody really believes black cats are witches or demons in disguise anymore, they are still often seen as signs of bad luck by many people in the West.
How to Celebrate Black Cat Day
How you decide to celebrate this will depend on how you answer the following questions: firstly, do you have a cat? Secondly, if you don’t have a cat, would you like to and are you ready to have one? And thirdly, if you answered no to the previous two questions, what can you do to celebrate this special animal?
If you have a cat, especially a black one, today is the day to make it feel extra special. We are all so busy with their lives nowadays that we often forget to show give our pets back a some of the love they give us on a daily basis. So buy your cat a new toy or a tasty treat and spend the afternoon playing tug-of-war or rubbing its belly—nobody knows how to enjoy the little things in life like animals do.
If you’ve been thinking about getting a cat of your own and have the time to take proper care of it, maybe today should be the day you welcome a furry feline into your life? Animals shelters are always bursting at the seams with both kittens and older cats who need a human of their own and a warm cozy bed and black cats are less likely to get adopted than other cats, so what are you waiting for? If you are willing to spend a bit of money, you can also buy a black kitten—breeds such as the Bombay are solid black and known to be playful and affectionate.
And even if you can’t have a cat due to allergies or other reasons, that doesn’t mean you can’t celebrate this day! Making a small donation to your local animal shelter can help countless felines and get you in good with the cats of this world…you know, just in case they really do have magic powers.
Source: daysoftheyear.com
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The Black Cat
by Edgar Allan Poe
(published 1845)
FOR the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I neither expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not -- and very surely do I not dream. But to-morrow I die, and to-day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere household events. In their consequences, these events have terrified -- have tortured -- have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but Horror -- to many they will seem less terrible than barroques. Hereafter, perhaps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the common-place -- some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects ...
The Black Cat
On this day, October 28, 1831 Michael Faraday, known to science as the Father of Electricity, demonstrated his dynamo invention. It was to have huge, far-reaching consequences.
He seemed to be just an ordinary boy and nothing about him suggested to his neighbours and friends that Michael Faraday was to become one of the most remarkable scientists in history. His inventions ultimately changed the world and led to many technologies used today.
His father, James, was a sickly blacksmith who struggled financially and lived in a poorer part of London. Michael was born in 1791, the third child of the family.
Neither James nor his wife, Margaret, could offer their son anything more than a basic education at the local church school – and that wasn’t to last long. Apparently Michael left at the age of 13 and took a job as a messenger boy for a local bookseller.
He must have got on well with his employer because he was soon promoted into the role of apprentice bookbinder. But he didn’t just bind books – he read them, too. Especially scientific ones.
A customer named William Dance who discussed one of the books with Faraday was so taken with the young man’s enthusiasm that he gave him tickets for a London series of lectures at the Royal Institution of Great Britain by Sir Humphry Davy, the UK’s top scientist of the time.
Avidly, he went along to the lectures, making extensive notes on Davy’s observations, but adding many thoughts of his own. He then bound the papers into a 300-page handwritten book, which he presented to his hero.
The eminent scientist was so impressed that he soon employed Faraday as a laboratory assistant and gave him a room in the Royal Institution’s attic in which he was to live.
He was to develop into a prolific chemist and physicist whose extensive inventions included the electric motor, transformer, generator, Faraday cage and many other discoveries.
Today, all energy sources still rely on a generator to produce the electrical current that powers everything people use and the electric power used across the globe relies upon Faraday’s research and inventions two centuries ago.
A basement kitchen at the Royal Institution was converted into a workshop and laboratory where Faraday worked tirelessly.
He never registered any patents or tried to make money from his work. He was driven simply by a need to “find out” and was quoted as saying: “I can at any moment convert my time into money, but I do not require more of the latter than is sufficient for necessary purposes.”
During his life, he was asked if he would wish to be interred in Westminster Abbey along with Britain’s kings and queens and scientists of the stature of Isaac Newton. But he refused and after he died aged 75 in 1867 he was buried in a modest grave at London’s Highgate Cemetery.
It is noteworthy that Albert Einstein displayed pictures of three scientists in his office: Isaac Newton, James Clerk Maxwell and Michael Faraday.
Source: onthisday.com
The Electric Life of Michael Faraday
29th October is Internet DayThe Internet is everywhere these days, being accessed on phones and tablets, tied into our cameras and our TV’s. Wi-Fi is accessible from everywhere, from city buses to your neighborhood McDonald’s, and the world grows smaller every day as a result. Internet Day is a celebration of this culmination of computing and communication technology, and they way it has brought all our lives together.
The first letters ever transmitted across the prodigal internet, which consisted of two computers, were “L” and “O”. This was as far as they got before the ‘Net crashed, and they had to reboot to get things in running order. We’ve been resetting our routers ever since, just to keep our beloved lifeline running ever since.
Internet Day celebrates the origin of the very first internet transmission ever sent, and from it the utterly world-changing series of events that followed. People are able to video conference from around the world, and the information is stored and transmitted at unbelievable rates between computers and friends and family. Enhanced Reality is becoming a reality, with Digital Overlays available for real world things, seamlessly combining the world of the internet with the one we walk around in every day.
Hard to believe that the first internet transmission was sent just months after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. The internet is already slightly extra-terrestrial, with video and communication available to the astronauts and space stations circling in low-earth orbit.
Why don’t you start your celebration of Internet Day by visiting the original website, which just so happens to still be online! www.info.cerne.ch Take a moment to gander at its high-quality graphics, it’s utterly sleek and streamlined design, and the sheer high-tech embodied by the first website ever. Absolutely stunning? No?
Realize that at its time, this was the internet, this was how things were designed and put together. So low was the rate at which data could be transferred that images were to be a dream of a distant future, one that would come along swiftly, and with advances and innovations that couldn’t be imagined at that point.
Then go and do your favorite things, visit with your friends, read up on your favorite forums, and generally take some time to appreciate how far the internet has come in the days that followed. Internet Day is a reminder to all of us that this amazing invention started out with two letters “L” and “O”, before we ever were able to login to trillions of website’s put up by billions of users.
Source: daysoftheyear.com
How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone
Mod
30 Oct, 1938 - U.S.A. "The War of the Worlds"Orson Welles broadcasts “The War of the Worlds”. The ‘panic’ which the radio broadcast supposedly caused was exaggerated, to say the least. The story goes that many Americans mistook the fictional broadcast for a real news bulletin about a Martian invasion, but this appears to have been largely propaganda spun by the press, which wished to portray the relatively new radio as an untrustworthy disseminator of news.
The story that mass panic broke out because of an Orson Welles radio show became part of modern folklore. The idea that hysteria swept America on October 30, 1938, when a 62-minute radio dramatisation of The War of the Worlds, remained unchallenged for nearly eight decades. Even those who had never heard Welles reading the HG Wells story about invading Martians wielding deadly heat-rays later claimed to have been terrified. Welles, who was born on May 6, 1915, used simulated on-the-scene radio reports about aliens advancing on New York City to pep up the story by Wells, who died on August 13 1946. But what is the truth about that historic Halloween eve CBS Radio show from the Mercury Theatre in New York? …(cont. at link: http://bit.ly/2Px4HTl)
With H.G. Wells’ other novels, The War of the Worlds was one of the first and greatest works of science fiction ever to be written. Even long before man had learned to fly, H.G. Wells wrote this story of the Martian attack on England. These unearthly creatures arrive in huge cylinders, from which they escape as soon as the metal is cool. The first falls near Woking and is regarded as a curiosity rather than a danger until the Martians climb out of it and kill many of the gaping crowd with a Heat-Ray. These unearthly creatures have heads four feet in diameter and colossal round bodies, and by manipulating two terrifying machines – the Handling Machine and the Fighting Machine – they are as versatile as humans and at the same time insuperable. They cause boundless destruction. The inhabitants of the Earth are powerless against them, and it looks as if the end of the World has come. But there is one factor which the Martians, in spite of their superior intelligence, have not reckoned on. It is this which brings about a miraculous conclusion to this famous work of the imagination.
The War of the Worlds
October 31Today is Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, a day in which the dead are traditionally believed to walk among the living. Communities all across the country throw Halloween parties and parades, but Salem, Massachusetts, goes all out.
It started with “Haunted Happenings” in the 1980s, a celebration that took place over a single weekend. But more and more happenings were added to the events calendar every year, until they filled the entire month of October, and now a quarter of a million tourists flock to Salem to celebrate the month long Festival of the Dead.
There’s a psychic fair and witchcraft expo every day. Psychic mediums deliver messages from departed loved ones — or an expert can teach you how to communicate with the dead on your own. Witch doctors and hoodoo practitioners explain the art of graveyard conjuring. There are séances and cemetery tours. You can solemnly honor your lost loved ones at the Dumb Supper, a feast with the dead. And the whole thing culminates with The Official Salem Witches’ Halloween Ball at the historic Hawthorne Hotel.
Salem has had a complicated relationship with witches ever since the infamous witch trials of 1692. Over the course of a year, nearly 200 residents of Essex County were falsely accused of witchcraft; 19 people were hanged and one man was tortured to death. For generations after the trials, the residents of Salem Town and Salem Village just wanted to put the tragedy behind them — so much so that Salem Village changed its name to Danvers. But some modern-day pagans and Wicca practitioners have turned Salem into a pilgrimage site, so the city ironically, and somewhat uneasily, has made witchcraft part of its marketing strategy.
Author J.W. Ocker wrote about this phenomenon in “A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts” (2016). He says: “The Witches, capital W, religious Witches, they balk a little bit at the Halloween witch, because it’s ugly and it’s a stereotype, and it has all these historical associations with it. Then there are people like the historians who balk at the religious witches, who kind of co-opt the cause of the accused witches by saying that they were almost martyrs for the cause. Then there’s the city trying to make everyone happy.”
Source: The Writer’s Almanac
A Season with the Witch: The Magic and Mayhem of Halloween in Salem, Massachusetts
Mod
In Perugia we also have a Market Fair from the 1st to the 5th of NOvember.
Give it a look:
http://turismo.comune.perugia.it/arti...
November 1stRobert Burns, ‘To a Mouse’. Probably the most famous poem about a mouse ever written. But did you know this is a poem whose origins lie in an event that occurred one November? The full title of this poem is ‘To a Mouse, On Turning Her up in Her Nest with the Plough, November 1785’.
That full title explains what the poem is about – and it was probably based on a real event, when Burns accidentally destroyed a mouse’s nest while ploughing a field.
The poem shows that generally preparing is not always the best alternative. Now and then, it is smarter to embrace the here and now, just like the mouse does.
To A Mouse
Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,
Has broken nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
What makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!
I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
‘S a sma’ request;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss’t!
Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell –
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.
That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain;
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me;
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects dreaer!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
To a Mouse
All About Books
Books mentioned in this topic
The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli (other topics)Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (other topics)
War Made New: Technology, Warfare, and the Course of History: 1500 to Today (other topics)
Women's Rights and the French Revolution: A Biography of Olympe de Gouges (other topics)
Damascus (other topics)
More...
Authors mentioned in this topic
Francesco Guccini (other topics)Paco Ignacio Taibo II (other topics)
William Shakespeare (other topics)
William Shakespeare (other topics)
Denis Diderot (other topics)
British physician, natural theologian and lexicographer Peter Mark Roget published his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and to Assist in Literary Composition, the manuscript for which he had originally written in 1805, nearly 50 years before publication. The 15,000 words it contained were arranged conceptually rather than alphabetically, incorporating 1002 concepts, in six classes derived from Aristotelian, Leibnizian principles of classification:
Abstraction Relations
Space
Matter
Intellect
Volition
Affections
The Thesaurus contained synonyms, in contrast to a dictionary, which contains definitions and pronunciations. "Roget's Thesaurus is composed of six primary classes. Each class is composed of multiple divisions and then sections. This may be conceptualized as a tree containing over a thousand branches for individual "meaning clusters" or semantically linked words. These words are not exactly synonyms, but can be viewed as colours or connotations of a meaning or as a spectrum of a concept. One of the most general words is chosen to typify the spectrum as its headword, which labels the whole group.
"Roget's schema of classes and their subdivisions is based on the philosophical work of Leibniz (see Leibniz — Symbolic thought), itself following a long tradition of epistemological work starting with Aristotle. Some of Aristotle's Categories are included in Roget's first class "abstract relations". The Wikipedia "category schemes" are also based on the same principles" (Wikipedia article on Roget's Thesaurus, accessed 11-28-2008).
"In information technology, a thesaurus represents a database or list of semantically orthogonal topical search keys. In the field of Artificial Intelligence, a thesaurus may sometimes be referred to as an ontology. "Thesaurus databases, created by international standards, are generally arranged hierarchically by themes and topics. Such a thesaurus places each term in context, allowing a user to distinguish between "bureau" the office and "bureau" the furniture. A thesaurus of this type is often used as the basis of an index for online material. The Art and Architecture Thesaurus, for example, is used to index the national databases of museums". The printing of the first edition was 1000 copies. The original manuscript for Roget's Thesaurus is preserved in the Karpeles Manuscript Library Museum.
Source: www.roget.org