February 21st is
Sticky Bun Day
International Mother
Language Day *
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MORE! Claudia C. Jones, Nina Simone and Barbara Jordan, click
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WORLD FESTIVALS AND NATIONAL HOLIDAYS
Bangladesh – Shahid Dibosh
(Martyred language students day)
Bhutan –
Anniversary of His Majesty
Norway –
Birthday of King Harald V
Vanuatu – Dr. W.H. Lini Day
(Father of Independence)
Zimbabwe – Robert Mugabe Day
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On This Day in HISTORY
362 – Church leader and theologian Athanasius returns to Alexandria, after Julian succeeds his father Constantius as Roman Emperor, and issues an edict permitting exiled bishops of the Galileans to return to their home cities
1245 – Thomas, the first known Bishop of Finland, is granted resignation after confessing to torture and forgery
1437 – James I of Scotland is assassinated
1440 – The Prussian Confederation is formed; 19 Prussian cities band together to oppose the Teutonic Knights, who imposed high taxes on them to pay off reparations after their defeat by the Kingdom of Poland, and to re-arm for more war
1556 – Sethus Calvisius born, German late Renaissance composer, chronologer and astronomer; director of the Thomanerchor (boys choir) at the Leipzig Thomaskirche; in astronomy, his Opus Chronologicum expounded a system based on records of nearly 300 eclipses, and Elenchus Calendarii Gregoriani proposed calendar reform
1621 – Rebecca Nurse born, first victim of the Salem witch trials in America
1791 – Carl Czerny is born, Austrian composer; his piano study books are still widely used
1804 – First self-propelled locomotive on rails demonstrated in Wales
1836 – Leo Delibes born, French opera and ballet composer
1842 – John J. Greenough patents a sewing machine
1846 – Sarah G Bagley, first recorded woman telegrapher, becomes superintendent of the Lowell MA telegraph office; organizer and president of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association
1848 – Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish The Communist Manifesto
1855 – Alice Freeman Palmer born, advocate of higher education for women, President of Wellesley College (1881-1887), the first woman president of a nationally known college; first Dean of Women at the University of Chicago (1892-1895)
1858 – The first electric burglar alarm is installed in Boston MA
1866 – Lucy B. Hobbs is the first woman to graduate from dental school, the Ohio College of Dental Surgery in Cincinnati
1874 – The Oakland Daily Tribune begins publication
1876 – Constantin Brancusi born, Romanian abstract sculptor
Wisdom of the Earth, by Constantin Brancusi
1878 – First U.S. telephone directory is distributed to residents in New Haven CT, a single page of fifty names
1885 – The Washington Monument is dedicated
1895 – The majority in the North Carolina legislature, black Republicans and white Populists, vote to adjourn for the day to mark the death of Frederick Douglass
1888 –Clemence Dane born as Winifred Ashton, English novelist and playwright; her first novel, Regiment of Women, was a semi-veiled treatment of lesbian relationships; noted for A Bill of Divorcement, Third Person Singular and Enter Sir John, coauthored with Helen Simpson
1893 – Andrés Segovia born, virtuoso Spanish guitarist
1895 – Carl Peter Henrik Dam born, Danish biochemist; discovers vitamin K (1939)
1903 – Anaïs Nin is born in France, Cuban-American author of 69 volumes of journals, and novels including Delta of Venus and Little Birds
1904 – The National Ski Association is formed in Ishpeming, MI
1907 –W.H. Auden born in England, American poet, playwright and composer
1914 – Jean Frances Tatlock born, American physician and psychiatrist; a member of the Communist Party who wrote for their publication, Western Worker; when she began a relationship with physicist Robert Oppenheimer in 1936, her Communist associations brought her under surveillance by the FBI and her phone was tapped; stress and clinical depression led to her suicide in January, 1944
1915 – Claudia Cumberbatch Jones born in Trinidad, came to the U.S as a child, American communist, author, and black nationalist; wrote a column called “Half the World,” for the Daily Worker; when deported from the U.S. in 1955, she moved to the UK, and founded Britain’s first major black newspaper, The West Indian Gazette, in 1958; noted for “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!”
1916 – The WWI Battle of Verdun begins in France, which will finally end on December 18, 1916
1924 – Thelma Estrin born, American computer scientist and engineer, pioneer in expert systems and biomedical engineering, applying computer technology to medical research and healthcare; IEEE Centennial Medal (1984)
1924 –Dorothy Blum born, American cryptanalyst and computer scientist who worked for the National Security Agency (NSA) and its predecessors from 1944 to 1980, becoming the first woman in the NSA’s management hierarchy in 1972, as chief of NSA Computer Operations
1925 – The first issue of The New Yorker is published
1931 – Alka Seltzer is introduced
1932 – William N. Goodwin patents the camera exposure meter
1933 – Nina Simone born, American singer-songwriter and pianist; her song, “Mississippi Goddam,” in response to Medgar Evers’ murder and the Birmingham Alabama church bombing that killed 4 pre-teen black girls and blinded a 5th, was boycotted in parts of the South
1936 – Barbara Jordan born, politician and civil rights leader; first African-American woman in Texas elected to the U.S. Congress (1973-1979), sponsored expanding coverage of the Voting Rights Act and voted to impeach Nixon; taught seventeen years at University of Texas; awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom (1994)
1947 – Edwin Land demonstrates the Polaroid Land Camera to the Optical Society of America in New York City, the first camera to take, develop and print a black-and-white picture on photo paper all in about 60 seconds. It goes on sale in 1948 for $89.75
1947 – Olympia Snowe born, Republican U.S. Senator from Maine (1995-2013); health care access and abortion rights advocate; cited extreme partisanship causing Congressional dysfunction when she retired; now co-chair of Bipartisan Policy Center Commission on Political Reform
1950 – The first International Pancake Race was held in Liberal KS
1958 – The first Gibson Flying V guitar is shipped from a factory in Kalamazoo MI
1965 – Malcolm X is assassinated in New York City at age 39 by assassins identified as Black Muslims
1968 – McGraw-Hill outbids eight other publishers for the U.S. rights to Hunter Davies’ authorized biography of the Beatles, paying $150,000
1975 – Former U.S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell and H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman are sentenced to 2 ½ to 8 years in prison for the Watergate cover-up
1988 – In Baton Rouge LA, TV evangelist Jimmy Swaggart confesses to his congregation his guilt of an unspecified sin, and that he is leaving the pulpit temporarily – reports link him to a prostitute
1989 – U.S. President George H.W. Bush calls Ayatollah Khomeini’s death warrant against “Satanic Verses” author Salman Rushdie “deeply offensive to the norms of civilized behavior”
1995 – Chicago stockbroker Steve Fossett becomes the first person to fly solo across the Pacific Ocean in a balloon, landing in Leader, Saskatchewan, in Canada
1999 – International Mother Language Day * announced by UNESCO, commemorating the 1952 Bangladesh “language martyr” students, and celebrating cultural diversity
2001 – U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft asks William H. Webster, former head of the FBI and CIA, to undertake a “comprehensive independent review of FBI procedures” after allegations that an FBI agent has been spying for the Russians
2005 – Great Britain’s Royal Navy announces that it will allow same-sex couples to live in family quarters if they are in registered partnership
2013 – Michael Edwards, British poet and professor of comparative literature, becomes the first English person elected to the Académie française
Michael Edwards (glasses, center of photo) at the Académie française
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Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 
Auden is probably my favorite poet (although sometimes I think someone else is). But what a weird combination! The same man wrote Petition:
Sir, no man’s enemy, forgiving all
But will his negative inversion, be prodigal:
Send to us power and light, a sovereign touch
Curing the intolerable neural itch,
The exhaustion of weaning, the liar’s quinsy,
And the distortions of ingrown virginity.
Prohibit sharply the rehearsed response
And gradually correct the coward’s stance;
Cover in time with beams those in retreat
That, spooted, they turn though the reverse were great;
Publish each healer that in city lives
Or country houses at the end of drives;
Harrow the house of the dead; look shining at
New styles of architecture, a change of heart.
– – – – – – – – –
and this: (from Ode to the New Year, 1939″):
To fascists, policemen & women,
long nights on the glaciers of fear,
and a lake of brimstone to swim in
and a BLOODY NASTY NEW YEAR.
– – – – – – – – –
It always kind of startled me, I must say.
Hi Malisha –
I think he took very seriously Ralph Waldo Emerson’s thought from “Self-Reliance”
“A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”
Of course, mentally ill and thoroughly evil people aren’t usually consistent either.
Olympia Snowe believes there can be bipartisanship now, but does she really believe that or is it the only way she can live with herself, after seeing what her party has done? There cannot be any “bipartisanship” when:
— One party (hers) insists that the other is unAmerican and is trying to destroy American patriotism;
— One party (hers) has promoted incarceration without due process (and even without trial) and torture;
— One party (hers) has perverted the political process so that it deprives the majority of the American people of a say in their government; and
— One party (hers) is racist and misogynist. PERIOD. No semicolon there, just PERIOD.
How does anybody compromise with that?
That’s why she announced in 2012 that she was quitting – the group she is with now is trying to find a way to encourage the return of bipartisanship.
When Snowe announced she would not seek reelection, she said: “Unfortunately, I do not realistically expect the partisanship of recent years in the Senate to change over the short term, so at this stage of my tenure in public service, I have concluded that I am not prepared to commit myself to an additional six years in the Senate, which is what a fourth term would entail.”
Snowe’s retirement was a setback for the GOP. As a moderate Republican, she was seen as the party’s best hope to hold the seat in Maine, a strongly blue state. She was replaced by former Governor of Maine Angus King, an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.