![]() ![]() Our Daily Bleed... |
By the fireside, but in the cooler shade
— Thomas Carew, The Spring |
US: NATIONAL HUGGING DAY
FEAST OF JOLLY ROGER
1324 --Japan: Zen Buddhists Tendai & Shingon hold a religious debate.
1647 -- US: Margaret Brent becomes first US woman to ask for the vote (in Maryland assembly).
1661 -- England: Quaker Peace Testimony presented to Charles II.
1769 -- England: The anti-governmental Junius letters first appear, attacking the corrupt nature of the monarchy of King George III, using the only means available (anonymity) in a country struggling with the idea of freedom of speech. In Byron's The Vision of Judgment, Lucifer calls the shadowy figure of Junius to testify against King George's entrance into Heaven.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Junius
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vision_of_Judgment
1775 -- Russia: Russian peasant rvolt leader Emelyan Pugachev dies, Moscow.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emelyan_Pugachov
1789 -- The first American novel, William Hill Brown's epistolary romance The Power of Sympathy, or the Triumph of Nature, is published anonymously in Boston (once attributed to Mrs. Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton).
1793 -- France: Louis Capet, aka Louis XVI. Profession: King of the French. Loses his head. Guillotined on the site of the present Place de la Concorde (or as a punster has it, a French chopping center).
1801 -- US: "Federal Bonfire Number Two": a mysterious fire sweeps the offices of the Department of Treasury, destroying books & papers, after Republicans demanded proof that the expenditures of Timothy Pickering, the recently replaced Federalist Secretary of War, could be properly accounted for. (see November 8).
1818 --John Keats writes his poem "On a Lock of Milton's Hair."
1863 -- Ireland: Short Leash? City of Dublin leases part of Cattle Market for 100,000 years.
1867 -- US: An foolish & overzealous Patrol Special Officer, Armand Barbier, arrests His Majesty Norton I, Emperor of the United States & Protector of Mexico, for involuntary treatment of a mental disorder & thereby creates a major civic uproar.Frisco Police Chief Patrick Crowley apologizes to His Majesty & orders him released. Several scathing newspaper editorials follow the arrest.
All police officers begin to salute His Majesty when he passed them on the street.http://www.zpub.com/sf/history/nort.html
http://www.sfmuseum.org/hist3/crowley.html
1879 --Henrik Ibsen play "A Doll's House" premiers.
1883 -- France: Victor Pengam lives (1883-1920), Brest. The government's "Notebook B" (files on radicals & antimilitarists) notes:
1884 -- US: Roger Baldwin lives, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Friend & defender of social activists whose civil liberties were trampled on — a still common phenomena in the 21st century under the administration of Bush League & Co.
1884 --Guy de Maupassant story "Coco" is published.
1887 -- England: Sir Joseph Whitworth, the man who standardized screws, is screwed for the last time, as they used nails on his coffin.
1888 -- Blues great Leadbelly (Huddie Leadbetter) lives. American blues singer, who twice sang himself out of jails, & who helped to inspire the folk & blues revivals of the Fifties & Sixties."The number one man on the number one gang on the number one farm in the state."
— Pete Seeger http://www.leadbelly.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leadbelly
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ledbelly.htm
1892 -- John Couch Adams English co-discoverer of Neptune, dies.
1895 -- Japan: Ito Noe lives, Fukuoka. Anarchist, social critic, author, translator & feminist. Married the Dadaist author & poet Tsuji Jun (an individualist anarchist, he translated Stirner's The Ego & His Own). Noe was brutally murdered in 1923 by military police, along with Osugi Sakae, & his six-year-old nephew, in what became known throughout Japan as the "Amakasu Incident".
1898 --US: Emma Goldman lectures on anarchism in English & Yiddish in Providence without (!) interference from the mayor or police; Emma is assisted by John H. Cook, former president of the Central Labor Union. To help cover traveling expenses, she earns a percentage on sales she makes for Brady's stationery business while on tour.
1898 --French author Émile Zola is sued for libel over his defense of Dreyfuss.
1900 -- Scotland: Emma Goldman travels to Glasgow, Dundee, & Edinburgh to lecture. Today in Dundee she speaks on "Authority versus Liberty" & "The Aim of Humanity." In Edinburgh, she meets the anarchist Thomas Bell.
1903 -- Try This At Home?: Harry Houdini escapes police station Halvemaansteeg in Amsterdam.
1904 -- Richard P. Blackmur, reclusive poet/critic, lives, probably in Massachusetts. Commenting on the problems of "the serious writer," he characterizes those who work for Henry Luce (of Time & Life magazines) as choosing "a kind of fur-lined purgatory."
1907 --John M. Synge writes the preface to The Playboy of the Western World.
1908 -- US: Ordinance makes public smoking illegal for women in New York City.
1908 --August Strindberg play "The Ghost Sonata" premiers, Stockholm.
http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist_Archives/goldman/socsig/strindberg.html
1911 -- US: Senator Robert M. LaFollette of Wisconsin establishes the National Progressive Republican League. Yup.
1919 -- US: New York City Police Inspector Thomas J. Tunney testifies before a Senate subcommittee, chaired by Senator Overman, investigating links between German agents & the US Brewers' Association & allied liquor interests.![]()
1920 -- US: Palmer "Red" Raids target labor activists & radicals for US government repression. The Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Attorney General orders the roundup of all suspected for prosecution & deportation where possible. Thousands of people are arrested in a nationwide sweep, most arrests are illegal, without warrants or justification.
1920 -- Author Ernest Hemingway returns to America after his World War I experiences.
1921 -- Lithuania: Feminist anthropologist Marija Gimbutas lives, Vilnius.MARIJA GIMBUTAS
Renowned pioneer feminist anthropologist,
theorist of the pacific, nurturing prehistoric goddess.
1922 -- Actor Paul Scofield lives. He played Sir Thomas More in the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons & King Lear in the 1972 film. He appeared in Zefirelli's production of Hamlet as the Ghost.
1924 -- Russia: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik party, dies of a stroke at 54. Lovingly known as "Major" in George Orwell's Animal Farm.The statue pictured here, salvaged from the former Czechoslovakia, now resides in Seattle's Fremont District, a few blocks from BleedMeisterDave's domicile.
"Lenin is not comparable to any revolutionary figure in history. Revolutionaries have had ideals. Lenin has none."
— Peter Kropotkin (Lenin was reportedly seen alive & photographed in Vilnius, Lithuania, the summer of 1996):
![]()
http://web.archive.org/...hem/anders/resor/lenin/
http://www.whatrain.com/seattle/publicArt/RoF.htm
1924 -- Benny Hill, comedian, lives (1924-1992; many sources also say he was born in 1925). Selected a SubGenius Saint for Sept. 2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benny_Hill
1929 -- Harry Crosby asks Hart Crane if The Black Sun Press can publish his as yet unfinished poem "The Bridge."
1929 --Russia: Snowball In Hell? Stalin's "wannabe", Leon Trotsky, is officially banished from the Soviet Union. Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Leon Trotsky (aka, the "Red Butcher" of Kronstadt; "Snowball" in Orwell's Animal Farm) is sent skeedaddling from the country by Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader Uncle Joe Stalin.
1931 -- US: It's Depressing?: Ted Lewis & his band records "Headin' For Better Times."
1932 -- Lytton Strachey, biographer/literary critic with the wonderful, gently mocking, ironic, enormously articulate style, dies in Ham Spray House, Berkshire.Though bitterly attacked throughout his life, he retains his position as a preeminent humorist & wit. Lovers with John Maynard Keynes & Duncan Grant. A conscientious objector (CO) during World War I.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lytton_Strachey
1938 -- USSR: Marxist archivist, historian, activist David Riazanov executed, Saratov Prison. Founder of the Marx-Engels Institute & a prominent victim of Stalin's Great Terror.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Riazanov
http://www.marxists.org/archive/riazanov/bio/bio01.htm
1939 -- Spain: Rafael Torres Escartín, a former member of Los Solidarios, who lost his sanity while in prison & sent to an asylum in 1931, is taken out & shot in Barcelona.
1941 --England: London's communist Daily Worker is suppressed.
1942 -- Count Basie & His Orchestra record "One O'Clock Jump" in New York City for Okeh Records.
1942 --Ivan Dzerzhinsky one-act opera "Blood of the People" premiers, Leningrad.
1946 -- US: Steel Strike.
1946 --"The Fat Man" (created by the leftwing author & poet laureate of the dispossessed, Dashiell Hammett) premiers on ABC radio.
1946 -- France: Isidore Isou & Gabriel Pomerand, forming the lettrist movement in Paris earlier this month, create their first lettrist scandal at the Théatre du Vieux-Colombier.
1950 -- Novelist/activist George Orwell (Eric Blair) age 46, Buys the [animal] farm, dies, London, England."When I see an actual flesh & blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the police[man], I do not have to say which side I am on."
— George Orwellhttp://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/
http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/
http://www.k-1.com/Orwell/anderson2.htm
1950 -- US: Alger Hiss found guilty of perjury & gets five years in prison. A former State Department official, indicted for perjury, after denying he passed secret documents to Whittaker Chambers for a communist spy ring.
1953 -- US: 13 communists convicted of plotting the overthrow of the American government.
1954 -- US launches first nuclear-powered submarine.
1956 --William Shawn succeeds Harold Ross as editor of the The New Yorker.
1959 -- Former "Little Rascal" Carl "Alfalfa" Switzer shot & killed while threatening a debtor with a jack knife; the death is later ruled a justifiable homicide, Sun Valley, California.
http://www.rivalquest.com/ourgang/
1959 --T.S. Eliot play "The Cocktail Party" (Alec Guinness) opens, Broadway (409 performances).
1960 -- South Africa: Rock fall traps 437 workers at Coalbrook; 417 die of methane poisoning. (or the 22nd?)
1961 -- High Seas: Spanish, Portuguese & South American activists hijack Portuguese liner "Santa Maria" to protest the Franco & Salazar dictatorships.
1964 -- Spain: In San Sebastian, psychiatrist / novelist, Luis Martin-Santos, dies, after completing only the first volume of a projected trilogy. The first part, Tiempo de silencio ("Time of Silence"), is a novel about a medical student, Pedro, who is thrust among the inhabitants of the Madrid slums & confronted with their often violent adaptation to severe conditions.
1966 -- Trips Festival. Jan 21-23, Stewart Brand's Trips Fest held at the Longshoreman's Hall, Frisco, California: holds the first light show; 10,000 people show. The Festival at 400 North Point St. featured the Grateful Dead, Big Brother & the Holding Company, The Loading Zone, Chinese New Years' Lion Dancers & Drum & Bugle Corps, Stroboscopic Trampoline, & Ken Kesey & His Merry Pranksters.
Called the first hippie conclave."Pray for the (grateful) dead & fight like hell for the living!"
— (with apologies to) Mother Jones
http://wild-bohemian.com/kesey.htm
1967 --China: Workers & peasants clash with Red Guards in Kiangsi.
1968 -- Four thermonuclear bombs lost when a US B-52 crashes, North Star Bay, Greenland.
1969 -- US: The Navajo Community College, the first tribally established & operated community college in the US, opens at Many Farms, Arizona.
1969 -- Switzerland : Coolant malfunction from an experimental underground reactor at Lucens Vad, results in the release of a large amount of radiation into a cavern, which was then sealed.
1970 --US: A Chicago coroner's jury rules the police murder of Black Panther Fred Hampton was "justifiable" (nuthin' threatens a gang of cops like a black man asleep in his bed).
1973 -- US:Anarchist / composer John Cage piano work "Cheap Imitation" premiers, NYC.
1974 -- US: Oneida Nation wins US Supreme Court decision to sue state of New York for rent on five million acres.
1974 -- US: Four-day postal strike begins at Jersey City, N.J.
1974 -- US: At the insistence of his son Chip, then governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter invites Bob Dylan to a post-concert party at his mansion. Says Carter of the musician, "(Dylan) never initiates conversation, but he'll answer a question if you ask him. Cool.
1976 -- US: Continental Walk for Disarmament & Social Justice starts in Ukiah, California, headed for Washington, D.C.
1977 -- US: Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Jimmy Carter issues unconditional pardon to most Vietnam draft resisters on his first full day in office. Affects between 100,000 to 500,000 people.
1981 -- US: A Bit of No-Java-Jive History? Nation's first museum honoring the dishonorable Dick M Nixon opens in San Clemente, California — well, actually it's more a roadside coffee shop housing some Nixon memorabilia:"We call it a bit of history," explains manager Pete Mitchell, "because, of all the history in the United States, this is just a little bit."
Percolating along, just like the Daily Bleed.
1981 -- This Will Never Fly?: Alfredo Bizarri patents the flying saucer (UK Pat No. 1,582,980). Oddly, Alfredo was a Little Green Guy living in Texass.
1982 -- Blues guitar giant B.B. King donates his entire record collection (including about 7,000 rare blues records he played when he was a disc jockey) to the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture.
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1983 --The Bollingen Prize for poetry is awarded to Anthony E. Hecht.
1984 -- Netherlands: Women's resistance camp set up, Volkel airbase.
1985 --Author Don DeLillo's post-modern novel White Noise wins American Book Award.
1986 -- God dies.
1994 -- Crazy As A Fox?: Lorena Bobbitt found temporarily insane for chopping off her spouse's penis.
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1995 -- Colombia: 93 prisoners are freed when anti-government rebels storm Mocoa prison.
Source: [Calendar Riots]
1996 -- Cannibal & the Headhunters lead singer Francisco Garcia dies at the age of 49.
1997 --
US: 60 protesters with bathrobes, shower caps, & toothbrushes traipse through upscale stores (Nordstrom's & NikeTown) in downtown Seattle, looking for a place to take a shower, in an Eat the State!-inspired protest, drawing attention to City Council plans to kill a proposed downtown public hygiene center for the homeless.
1999 -- Romania: Striking miners, backed by residents, use stones & clubs to force their way through riot police in a ravine, & swept closer to Bucharest. State television said at least 80 people were hit by flying rocks, or were suffering from tear gas. Most were police officers.
1999 -- Greece: Continuing demonstrations against "2525/97 Act" in many cities with clashes in many. Over 40 people arrested, including anarchists.
http://www.ainfos.ca/99/jan/ainfos00190.html
All Animals Are Equal
But Some Animals Are More Equal Than Others
— George Orwell, Animal Farm (the book was rejected by such eminent publishing figures as Victor Gollancz, Jonathan Cape & T. S. Eliot at Faber & Faber)
The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle.
Find out just what people will submit to, & you have found the exact amount of injustice & wrong which will be imposed upon them; & these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both.
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.— Frederick Douglass

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