Today's the Day

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

July 5th

On this Date: Isaac Newton's Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica is first published by the Royal Society (1687 - the publication costs met by Edmund Halley, as the Society had already spent its annual budget for book publication on Frances Willoughby's De Historia Piscium - the Story of Fish); the Olive Branch Petition is created (1775 - an attempt, pricipally by colonial loyalists, to reach compromise and avoid conflict between the British and the American colonists - that worked, then); Thomas Cook organizes his first passenger Excursion trip - from Leicester to Loughborough (1841 - any puzzlement as to what was so dreadful about Leicester that it made its citizens wish to travel to Loughborough is solved when one realizes that this was a Temperance group trip; it's still very difficult to get a decent pint in Loughborough); Frederic Douglass delivers his "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" speech to the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society (1852); Britain introduces the world's first road speed limit, requiring "self-propelled vehicles" to have a crew of 3, one of whom was to be a man [sic] with a red flag walking at least 60 yards ahead of the vehicle to forewarn pedestrians and other road users, and whom the driver had to obey if ordered to stop - and establishing a speed limit of 4mph on open roads, and 2mph in towns, with a fixed penalty of ten shillings [about £60 in today's values] for contravention (1865); Philadelphia's Liberty Bell makes its final trip from its native city to feature in the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (1915); San Francisco police violently attack Longshoremen, who have been on strike for two months, with tear gas, batons, and firearms - 9 workers are killed, more than 1000 injured, and more than 500 arrested (1934 - a year later to the day, President FD Roosevelt signs the National Labor Relations Act, guaranteeing private sector employees the right to form and join Trades Unions); the first tins of Spam go on sale in the US (1937); the first Bikini is modelled by 19-year-old Micheline Bernardini [who had never eaten a morsel of Spam in her life] at the Piscine Molitor open-air swimming pool in Paris (1946 - Mlle Bernardini's "day" job is as a nude dancer, as designer Louis Reard cannot persuade any professional model to appear in such attire); Aneurin Bevan launches the National Health Service (1948); the Knesset passes the Law of Return, granting all Jews the right to emigrate to Israel (1950); Richard Baker reads the UK's first televised daily News bulletin (1954 - probably not mentioning that, in a small recording studio in Tennessee, an unknown young singer called Elvis Presley had on that very day recorded his first song, That's All Right, Mama); Algeria becomes Independent of France (1962); the 26th Amendment to the US Constitution lowers the voting age from 21 to 18 (1971); Zulfikar Ali Bhutto is deposed as Prime Minister of Pakistan in a military coup (1977); Björk's Debut album is released (1993); Dolly the Sheep is born (1996); the Staffordshire Hoard, a collection of over 3,500 items of Anglo-Saxon gold and silver metalwork, is discovered in the village of Hammerwich (2009 - the largest collection of Anglo-Saxon treasure discovered so far); the Inauguration Ceremony of the Shard in London [the tallest building in Europe so far] is performed by the Prime Minister of Qatar (2012); NASA Space Probe Juno begins its polar orbits of Jupiter (2016)

Birthdays Today include: al-Ghazali (1057); Sarah Siddons (1755); William Crotch (1775); George Barrow (1803); PT Barnum (1810); AE Douglass (1867); Joseph Holbrooke (1878); Wanda Landowski (1879); Jan Kubelik (1880); Louise Freeland Jenkins (1888); Jean Cocteau (1889); Giuseppe Caselli (1893); Gordon Jacob (1895); Paul Ben-Haim (1897); Ernst Mayr (1904); George Costakis (1913); Annie Fischer (1914); Livia Rev (1916); George Rochberg (1918); Janos Starker (1924); Paul-Gilbert Langevin (1933); Matthias Bamert (1942); Veronica Guerin (1958);

Final Days for: Stamford Raffles (1826); Wilhelm Backhaus & Walter Gropius (both 1969); Regine Crespin & George Melly (both 2007); Cy Twombly (2011); Pierre Henry (2017)


And the Radio 3 Schedules for the morning of Thursday, 5th July, 1979 were:

Overture: Walton/Howarth "Spitfire" P&F; Dvorak Romance for Vln & Orch; Chopin Rondo in c; Mozart's Musical Joke; Offenbach Orpheus in the Underworld Ovt; Delius 'cello Concerto; Haydn "Philosopher" Symph.
This Week's Composer: Mendelssohn (Songs Without Words Opp 30 & 53; various lieder).
Allegri S4tet: Haydn Op33#3; Bartok Fourth 4tet; Beethoven Op 127
Hilding Rosenberg: Symph #4

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

July 6th

National Fried Chicken Day in the United States. I don't really know what else to say - neither does WIKI, who provides the useful information "In observance of the day, fried chicken is prepared in a variety of ways, and eaten". So now we know.

Also on This Date: Henry II dies at his castle in France, and is succeeded by his son Richard I (1189); Clement VI issues a Papal Bull condemning Christians who have attacked Jews believing them to have caused the Black Death, and urging clerics to protect Jews from Christians who had been "seduced by that liar the Devil" into such acts of violence (1348 - "It cannot be true that the Jews, by such a heinous crime, are the cause or occasion of the plague, because through many parts of the world the same plague, by the hidden judgment of God, has afflicted and afflicts the Jews themselves and many other races who have never lived alongside them"); John Hus is publicly humiliated and then burnt at the stake as a heretic (1415); the Coronation of Richard III in Westminster Abbey (1483); Thomas More is beheaded for High Treason (1535); Philip II of Spain, husband of Mary I of England, sets sail from Dover to battle the French (1557 - Mary never sees him again, and his failure in battle loses her Calais, the last of the English territories in France ); the Duke of Monmouth's attempt to seize the English crown from Catholic King James II comes to an end with the routing of his troops at the Battle of Sedgemoor (1685); abaondoned by his crew, pirate Captain Wiliam Kidd is arrested in Boston following his betrayal by a former associate attempting to avoid his own arrest (1699); the US Confederation Congress authorize the issue of a new currency - the US Dollar (1785); Louis Pateur's Rabies vaccine is successfully tested on the first human with the disease - 9-year-old Joseph Meister, who had been mauled by a rabid dog (1885 - Joseph receives 11 more injections over the next 13 days, and lives for another 55 years - it would have been longer, had he not shot himself in the mistaken belief that, in sending his family away from their home when the Nazis invaded France, he had sent them directly into the hands of the invaders); Arabian troops led by Bedouin Sheik Auda Abu-Tayeh, joined by TE Lawrence, seize the Red Sea Port of Aqaba from the Ottoman empire (1917); dissident Left-wing activists, disillusioned with the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and seeking to restart the war with Germany, assassinate German Envoy, Count Mirbach-Harff (1918); British Airship R34 completes the first successful transatlantic journey by such a craft (1919 - on the same day, the Research Institute of Sexual Science opens in Berlin); early in the morning, the Frank family walk (Jews are forbidden by the occupying Germans from using Public Transport) from their house in Amsterdam to a secret annex above the offices of Otto Frank's works (1942 - Anne leaves a book, the family cat, and her collection of marbles with a friend "for a short time", as she "doesn't want them to fall into the wrong hands"); Second Lieutenant Jackie Robinson is Court-Martialled for refusing to move down to the back of a bus (1944 - no prizes for guessing Mr Robinson's skin colour; the incident demonstrates the two attitudes to race in the US Army of the time - Robinson's CO had refused to endorse the Court Martial, so Robinson was transferred to a more "obliging" Company - Robinson was then acquited of all charges by an all-white panel of 9 officers); the last London Trams make their last journey - to their resting place at New Cross Station (1952); Althea Gibson becomes the first black player to win a Wimbledon singles championship (1957 - she is also the first winner to receive the Trophy from Elizabeth II. On the very same day, St Peter's Church in Woolton, Liverpool, holds its annual Garden Fete - amongst the performers is a skiffle group led by John Lennon, playing an out-of-tune guitar, called The Quarrymen: in the audience is Paul McCartney, who tunes the offending instrument up); the US performs an underground nuclear explosion codenamed Sedan (1962 - a newspaper misunderstanding leads to reports that the explosion having taken place in Sudan, which in turn leads the Chinese newsagancies reporting the increase of cancer rates amongst the Sudanese people as a result); the Beatles' first film A Hard Day's Night, directed by Richard Lester, is released (1964); Nigerian forces invade Biafra, beginning the two-and-a-half year Nigerian Civil War (1967); Shostakovich finishes his last completed composition, the Viola Sonata Op 147 (1975); an explosion at the Piper Alpha Oil Platform results in the deaths of 167 workers (1988); the Electronic Frontier Foundation is established in San Francisco to protect digital rights from abusive patenting laws and governmental interference (1990); Serbian troops under the command of Ratko Mladic begin to attack the town of Srebrenica (1995); the Yevpatoria Planetary Radar transmits Cosmic Call 2 to five "nearby" stars (2003 - the message will arrive at the nearest "address" in 2036, and at the furthest in 2045); the International Olympics Committee announce that London will host the 2012 Games (2005); seven years after Gordon Brown had announced a report into Britain's involvement in the Iraq War, John Chilcott publishes his committee's findings (2016 - shock findings include the fact that the Pope is a Catholic, and bears defecate in forests)

Birthdays Today include: Stamford Raffles (1781, on the ship Ann, anchored off Port Morant in Jamaica - he died the day before his 45th birthday); William Hookjer (1785); Sophie Adlersparre (1823); Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865); Marc Chagall (1887); Hanns Eisler (1898); Frido Kahlo (1907); Bill Hayley (1925); Dorothy E Smith (1926); Janet Leigh (1927); the Dalai Lama (1935); Dave Allen (1936); Vladimir Ashkenasy (1937); Jet Harris (1939); David Crystal (1941); Sylvestor Stallone (1946); John Byrne (1950); Geoffrey Rush (1951); Hilary mantel (1952); Jennifer Saunders (1958); Eva Green (1980); ... and today is the centenary of the birth of Swiss tenor Ernst Haefliger.

Final Days for: Regiomontanus (1476); Ludovico Ariosto (1533); Granville Sharp (1813); Guy de maupassant (1893); Kenneth Grahame (1932); Horace Pippin (1946); George Grosz (1959); Aneurin Bevan (1960); William Faulkner (1962); Louis Armstrong (1971); Otto Klemperer (1973); Roy Rogers (1998); Joaquín Rodrigo (1999); Buddy Ebsen (2003); Ed McBain & Claude Simon (both 2005);


And the Radio 3 Schedules for the morning of Thursday, 6th July, 1989 were:

Morning Concert: Mozart Symph#32; Mendelsohnn Song Without Words Op67 #4; Vivaldi Bassoon Concerto RV 473; RVW Concerto Academica; Brahms Ballade in D, Op10 #2; Gershwin Lullaby; Weber Clarinet Concerto #2.
Composers of the Week: the Strauss family (misc works by the three sons)
The Concert Saxophone: Richard Ingham & pianist Alan Cuckston play Creston's Sonata, Damase's Konzertstuck, & Denisov's 2 Pieces.
Mozart in Prague: Don Giovanni Ovt; and the Pno Conc in c minor K491.
Guitar Recital by Guillermo Fierens (Frescobaldi/Segovia Aria con Variazione; Sor Sonata in C; Paganini/Fierens 9th Caprice.
Bournemouth SO conducted by Tomasz Bugaj (Lutoslawski Livre pour Orchestre; Shostakovich 'cello Conc #1 [with Antonio Meneses]; Beethoven #7).

[teamsaint]

The idea of National Fried Chicken Day sounds like it has legs.

[cloughie]

The idea of National Fried Chicken Day sounds like it has legs.

Is that the breast you can come up with?

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

You can always bring it up at the next Committee Meeting.

[teamsaint]

You can always bring it up at the next Committee Meeting.

[LeMartinPecheur]

You can always bring it up at the next Committee Meeting.

A poultry response IMHO

[cloughie]

A poultry response IMHO

Could lead to a cock-up!

[Padraig]

Could lead to a cock-up!

Or a hen-do. Same thing really.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

July 7th

The Feast Day of St Æthelburg, who died on this date in 664. The [possibly illegitimate] daughter of East Anglian King Anna (sic - one of the many rulers from the wonderfully Wagnerian-sounding Wuffingas family - and you wouldn't want any of them to catch you sniggering at "King Anna"!), she was sent for her education to the Nunnery of Faremoutiers in Brie, France - and became Abbess there later in life, when she commissioned a Church dedicated to the Twelve Apostles, which remained unfinished at her death.

And it's World Chocolate Day - commemorating the traditional-held date in 1550 when chocolate was introduced into Europe; just what's needed after all that fried Chicken yesterday.

Also on This Date: Edward I dies of dyssentry whilst campaigning against Robert de Bruce (1307 - he is succeeded by his son, Edward II); Joan of Arc is acquitted of heresy at her retrial (1456 - 25 years after she was burnt at the stake); the Treaty of Nemours outlaws all religions except Catholicism in France (1585); Handel's Utrecht Te Deum & Jubilate is premiered in St Paul's Cathedral, London (1713); Haydn receives an honorary doctorate from the University of Oxford, and, in the evening, gives a concert at the Sheldonian Theatre, which includes three of his Symphonies, including the first [possibly - certainly "the first English"] performance of the "Oxford" Symphony, in G #92 (1791); The Wasp the first Comic Book, complete with speech bubbles, is first published in Hudson, NY (1802 - nothing to do with superhepoes, it's a satirical attack on the Republican Party); the first Treaty of Tilsit is signed on a raft in the middle of the Nemen River by Napoleon and Tsar Alexander I (1807 - a French commemorative medalion is issued showing the two emperors in a clinch); the first edition of Walter Scott's first novel Waverley [or " 'tis Sixty Years Since"] goes on sale in three volumes in Edinburgh (1914 - the author remains anonymous) false newspaper reports that abolitionists were encouraging marriage between white women and black men leads to four days of riots in New York targetting abolitionists and their businesses (1834); four conspiritors implicated in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln are hanged (1865); the first of the 25 annual Ziegfield Follies revues is held on the roof of the New York Theater (1907 - 16-year-old future actress Helen Broderick is amongst this very first cast); the first International treaty addressing wildlife preservation, the North Pacific Seal Fur Convention, banning open-water seal hunting, is signed between Britain, the US, Japan, & Russia (1911); Sri Lankan military officer, Captain Duenuge Henry Pendris is executed on trumped-up charges that he had incited anti-Muslim riots (1915 - the injustice gives great impetus to the Sri Lankan Independence movement); the best idea so far, sliced bread, goes on sale for the first time in the city of Chillicothe, Missouri (1928); the Palestine Royal Commission, headed by Lord Peel, publishes a report that recommends a solution to "unrest" between Arabs and Jews in British-controlled Palestine: partition (1937 - it certainly creates consent between the conflicting groups: they all thing it's a bad idea); WHBQ radio station in Memphis broadcasts Elvis Presley's first record, recorded just the day before (1954 - the first time he is heard on a broadcast); Douglas Moore's opera The Ballad of Baby Doe is premiered by the Central City Opera company in Colorado, conducted by Emerson Buckley (1956); Tippett's opera The Ice Break is premiered at Covent Garden, conducted by the work's dedicatee, Colin Davis (1977); Sharia Law is instituted in Iran (1980); Sandra Day O'Connor becomes the first woman to be appointed to the US Supreme Court (1981); a week after her 10th birthday, US schoolgirl Samantha Smith flies to Moscow with her parents at the invitation of USSR premier Yuri Andropov, following their recent exchange of letters concerning world peace (1983 - Smith becomes a celebrity in both the Soviet Union and the US, where her career as an actress is cut short at the age of 13, when the passenger flight in which she and her father were travelling crash-landed, killing everyone on board - she would have been 47 just over a week ago); the first of the Three Tenors concerts takes place at the Baths of Caracalla arena in Rome on the eve of the FIFA World Cup final (1990); the New York Court of Appeals rules that women have the same right as men to be topless in public (1992); four Isalmist suicide bombers from West Yorkshire detonate four bombs across London, killing 52 people and injuring more than 700 others (2005); the last Harry Potter film, HP and the Deadly Hallows (Pt 2) is premiered in London (2011); Andy Murray becomes the first British tennis player in 76 years to win the Wimbledon men's singles title (2013); Micah Xavier Johnson, a former US soldier goes on a shooting spree in Dallas, in reprisal for police shootings of African-American citizens: he kills five people, and injures eleven others [all mainly white police officers] before he is himself killed by a bomb desposal robot, to which a bomb has been attached (2016).

Birthdays Today include: Gustav Mahler (1860); Lion Feuchtwanger (1884); George Cukor (1899); Vittorio De Sica (1901); Robert A Heinlein (1907); Gian Carlo Menotti (1911); Ringo Starr (1940); Bill Oddie (1941); Tony Jacklin (1944); Jeremy Kyle (1965 - gets to spend it at home this year); Bérénice Bejo and Vasily Petrenko (both 1976); ... and Vinko Globokar is 85 today, Shelley Duval will be 70, and it is the centenary of the birth of Jon Pertwee.

Final Days for: Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1816); Henri Nestlé (1890); Johanna Spyri (1901); Arthur Conan Doyle (1930); Fats Navarro (1950); Veronica Lake & Max Horkheimer (both 1973); Germaine Thyssens-Valentin (1987); Cameron Mitchell (1994); Ivor Keys (1995); Syd Barrett (2006).


And the Radio 3 Schedules for the morning of Tuesday, 7th July, 1969 were:

Overture: Scarlatti Sinfonia in Bb; Vivaldi Triple Concerto for 2 Vlns & cllo in d
Morning Concert: "gramophone records"
This Week's Composer: Debussy (Apparition (1884); Fetes galantes bk 1 ; En sourdine; Fantoches flair de June; Proses lyriques).
Concerto: Paul Badura-Skoda (pno)/BBCNSO/Boris Brott (no work[s] specified)
Music Making: Chamber Music performed by the Tunnell S3o with James Galway; solo piano music played by Bernard Roberts; and Ifor James and Wilfrid Parry played an Altohorn Sonata (?Hindemith's?).

[Richard Tarleton]

the first edition of Walter Scott's first novel Waverley [or " 'tis Sixty Years Since"] goes on sale in three volumes in Edinburgh

I read this only recently, in a fit of reading stuff about the Jacobites....still a good read, even if Scott takes his time getting to the point, every so often you have to grit your teeth as you wade through about 20 pages of description or backstory....

The Jacobite Highland chief in the story, Fergus MacIvor, was modelled on Scott's friend Alastair Ranaldson MacDonell, 15th Chief of Glengarry, whose portrait by Raeburn hangs in the National Gallery of Scotland. A snappy dresser (note he has 2 sghean dhus in his right stocking) he invented the Glengarry bonnet, widely adopted by Scottish regiments. Fergus MacIvor ends up in several pieces on a scaffold in Carlisle; Glengarry 15 died trying to jump ashore from a wrecked steamer in a storm near Fort William.



Glengarry 15's younger brother James commanded the Coldstream Guards detatchment that defended Hougoumont Farm at Waterloo. My own 4xgreat grandfather David MacDonell was (with a lot of other sons or grandsons of old Jacobites) in the Portuguese army that fought under Wellington in the Peninsula War.

NB (remembering Ferney's reference to tartan the other day, and vinteuil's recent aspersions on the subject) this portrait, in Glengarry tartan, was painted in 1813, and there is a portrait of Alastair Ruadh MacDonell, 13th Chief, in the same tartan, painted in the 1750s, thus considerably predating the Victorian craze . (My kilt is in this tartan).

[johncorrigan]

[B] John Byrne (1950).

Ah! Not THE John Byrne...I did think John was a wee bit older than that. Scottish National Treasure, in my opinion, and not just because he's from Paisley!

[Richard Tarleton]

Ah! Not THE John Byrne...I did think John was a wee bit older than that. Scottish National Treasure, in my opinion, and not just because he's from Paisley!

You mean the Tutti Frutti, Your Cheatin' Heart, John Byrne?

[johncorrigan]

You mean the Tutti Frutti, Your Cheatin' Heart, John Byrne?

The Slab Boys Trilogy John Byrne as well, Richard.

https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/john-byrne

[LezLee]

The new BBC Scotland channel opened with 'Tutti Frutti'. Still wonderful! I'd forgotten how well filmed it was - really high production values.