1851 -- US: Fire at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., destroys about two-thirds of its 55,000 volumes, including two-thirds of Thomas Jefferson's personal library, sold to the institution in 1815.

Established in 1800 when Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President John Adams approved legislation that appropriated $5,000 to purchase "such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress." It is not clear why any of the volumes other than "Dumb & Dumber" are in there.

Today, the collection, housed in three enormous buildings in Washington, contains more than 17,000,000 books, as well as nearly 95,000,000 maps, manuscripts, photographs, films, audio & video recordings, prints & drawings, & other special collections.

Now if someone would only turn on the lights.

Embarking for his celebrated American lecture tour, Oscar Wilde boards the Arizona, whose captain later swears:

"I wish I had had that man lashed to the bowsprit on the windward side."

“If, with the literate, I am
Impelled to make an epigram,
I never seek to take the credit;
We all assume that Oscar said it.”

— Dorothy Parker

http://www.bibliomania.com/0/2/57/frameset.html
http://struggle.ws/ws98/ws53_wilde.html
http://recollectionbooks.com/anow/ppl/wri/wilde/

1881 -- Juan Ramón Jiménez lives. (or 1888?) Spanish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1956. Made his birthplace Moguer famous by his story of the young poet & his donkey, Platero & I (1914), one of the classics of modern Spanish literature.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jimenez.htm



1889 -- Bicycle with a back-pedal brake is patented. Considerable evidence suggesting the research was stolen is dismissed by back-pedaling politicians with a smug "Them be the brakes."




1894 -- Spain: Andreu Capdevila Puig lives (1894 -1987), Barcelona. Dye worker, militant in the CNT, the Spanish Revolution & in France, where he wrote for most of the exile papers (Terra Lliure, Le Combat syndicaliste, Umbral, etc.). Companion of Antonia Sanchez Garrido.
http://militants-anarchistes.info/spip.php?article631
http://www.veuobrera.org/01biogra/1biogr-c.htm

Daily Bleed Saint 2002-2004

Surrealist magician of the little wooden box.

Washington editor of "The Nation" magazine & founder of the legendary "I. F. Stone's Weekly," Stone specialized in publishing information ignored by the corporate media (which he often found in "The Congressional Record" & other public documents overlooked & too hard to find by the big-circulation dailies).

Self-described "Jeffersonian Marxist," Stone combined progressive politics, investigative zeal & a compulsion to tell the truth with a commitment to human rights & the exposure of injustice. Not unlike George Seldes before him & Noam Chomsky's work today, doing the job fat-budgeted corporate-pandering media refuses to do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I._F._Stone
http://www.fair.org/index.php
http://www.salon.com/letters/1998/01/12letters.html

1913 -- Artist Ad Reinhardt lives, in the abstract monochrome continuum, especially black. For a complicated painting intricate in it's diversity, this overwhelming image is a must-see:
http://sweeney.ucr.edu/egallery/reinhardt64.htm
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/reinhardt_ad.html

1913 -- US: 72 miners' children killed in a false fire panic caused by "copper boss thug men" (company stooges) at Union Hall Christmas party, Calumet, Michigan.

"The Italian Hall Disaster." Striking copper miners & their children are having a Christmas celebration; strike-breakers outside bar the doors then raise a false fire alarm. In the ensuing stampede, 73 (roughly half are children) are crushed or suffocated.

Bitter strikes at the time resulted as the miners, under the leadership of the Western Federation of Miners, demanded decent pay & safer working conditions.

Woody Guthrie's description (the song, The 1913 Massacre) of the events is dead-on accurate, according to the residents of Calumet; Italian Hall, where the disaster occurred, was still standing in the early 1980s, but has since been torn down.

http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/BalladIndex.html

1914 -- Wilderness advocate John Muir dies, Los Angeles, California.

Serafín Aliaga lives (1915-1990). Spanish anarquista, head of AJA (Alianza Juvenil Antifascista), delegate to the founding congress of Federación Ibérica de ruventudes Libertarias (FIJL), eventually joined the Communist Party during exile in Mexico. http://militants-anarchistes.info/spip.php?article97 http://www.alasbarricadas.org/noticias/?q=node/6195 http://www.estelnegre.org/documents/serafinaliaga/serafinaliaga.html

Coming from exile England, from Cardiff, Wales, the anarchist Errico Malatesta slips clandestinely back into Tarente (southern Italy) & takes the train for Gènes, where an immense crowd greets his return. Malatesta was a wealthy man who put his entire fortune at the disposal of the cause. He won the militant support of broad sections of his countrymen whose demonstrations & strikes on his behalf saved him from death & imprisonment many times. His writing & speeches on anarchist organization influenced the shape of the anarchist movement. Kropotkin left us a picture of Malatesta's life in exile: "Without even so much as a room that he could call his own, he would sell sherbet in the streets of London to get his living, & in the evening write brilliant articles for the Italian papers. Imprisoned in France, released, expelled, re-condemned in Italy, confined to an island, escaped, & again in Italy in disguise; always in the hottest of the struggle...."

Through the systematic destruction of its finest radical leadership by big business & royalists, Italy eventually succumbed to fascism. Malatesta remained in Italy, under house arrest, until he died. Authorities ordered his body thrown into a common grave.

1919 -- US: Four men attempt to rob the payroll of the L.Q. White Shoe Company in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. One, later known as the “shotgun bandit,” fires at the moving payroll truck. They are unsuccessful & no one is hurt. The would-be bandits escaped. Part of a series of robberies in the area, which includes the Braintree robbery for which the anarchists Sacco & Vanzetti are tried & executed.

We're the black cats and the terror of many to all oppressors we bring defeat!
They held true? to their beliefs until the bitter end
Their pointless fucking execution was some kind of sick revenge!
Fuck You!

— Against All Authority
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yX6xXSbO4UE
Sacco & Vanzetti Timeline
http://infoshop.org/page/Sacco-Vanzetti

1923 -- France: Germaine Berton, the young individualist is acquitted for her attempt to kill Leon Daudet (father of the anarchist Philippe Daudet), the extreme rightwing propagandist for l'Action Française.
[Details / context]


1924 -- Costa Rica withdraws from League of Nations to protest US Monroe Doctrine.


1924 -- US: Someone knocks over a candle on a Xmas tree during a parent/student party in the one-room Babb's Switch School; the fire & stampede to the only door destroys the school & kills 36, Babb's Switch, Oklahoma.


1925 -- England: The London Evening News publishes a story entitled "Winnie-the-Pooh," which eventually becomes the first chapter of the book Winnie-the-Pooh. Illustrations for this story are created by J.H. Dowd.


1930 -- Italy: Petroni Carlotta Zelmira Binazzi dies. Published "Il Libertario", an anarchist weekly magazine, with her partner Pasquale Binazzi.

"Il Libertario" is a vital part of the Italian trade union movement & agitation at the beginning of the century, in the debates over WWI & the upheavals of 1919-1921, surviving repressive efforts by authorities until destroyed by the fascists in 1922.
[Details / context]

1933 -- In his diary Harold Nicolson describes his marriage to novelist/poet Vita Sackville-West: "Had I been a passionate man . . . we should now have separated, I living in Montevideo as H. M. Minister & she breeding Samoyeds in the Gobi desert."


1933 -- Henry Ford denies being an antisemite & states that he never gave financial aid to Hitler or the Nazis. He lies big time, yupadoodle.
http://www.recollectionbooks.com/bleed/0730.htm#HenryFord
http://www.humanitas-international.org/showcase/chronography/timebase/1933tbse.htm


1935 -- Iran: Susha Guppy, writer, composer, singer, filmmaker, lives, Tehran.


1936 -- US: Merry Xmas!! Gilbert Mers's Working the Waterfront describes as follows a 1936 Christmas Eve assault on strikers & supporters in Galveston, Texass, during a strike of longshoremen, sailors, & other maritime workers.

Lieutenant Murray & the waterfront detail put an abrupt end to yuletide that night. The officers started at the foot of 75th Street & worked inland, from bar to bar, smashing heads, furniture, whatever came within range of flailing nightsticks.

From an issue of the old Houston Press, no longer in publication: "Police beat 150 in raid on docks," a headline said. A subhead: "Acting Chief Honea goes to scene, restores order—after police use clubs, guns, fists." Ambulances rushed to the scene. "Twice police jerked men from ambulances & resumed beating them," continued the reporter.

There is more. A few days later in a follow-up story ambulance drivers & attendants complained to a city council meeting that their attempts to administer first aid to victims sorely needing it were interfered with by police, to the point that they were prevented from rendering such aid at the scene, forcing them to transport victims to hospital emergency rooms in worse shape than they need have been.

http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/TT/octbg.html http://www.iww.org/culture/biography/GilbertMers1.shtml

1936 -- US: Ho, ho ho!! On Christmas Eve 50 policemen beat the snot out of 150 strikers on the Houston docks in Texass.
http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/TT/octbg.html


1942 -- Germany: Buzz-Off? First powered flight of V-1 buzz bomb, Peenemonde. Shooting one down, a British pilot gleefully reports: "I caught a buzz." While the Vatican helped Nazi's flee to South America following the war, Nazi research scientists are openly & warmly welcomed in the US. Other Nazi war criminals are secretly hired by the CIA, others aided in their efforts to flee justice.
http://www.barnonedrinks.com/drinks/b/buzz-bomb-1021.html
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/20671_nazis28.shtml?searchpagefrom=1&searchdiff=1336


1946 -- Nederlands: Karl Max Kreuger lives (1946-1999), Amsterdam. Activist, anarchist, a founding member of the Vrije Bond (Free Union) after it split with the OVB (independent union), over it’s failure to involve itself in the broader social issues beyond the workplace.



1947 -- US: 63 Heart Mountain draft resistors, sentenced to jail on June 26th, are granted a pardon.
[Sources]


1948 -- US: First US house completely solar heated is occupied, Dover, Massachusetts.



1954 -- Johnny Ace, ballad singer, dies at 25 while playing Russian Roulette.

Lottery: A state tax upon those who are bad at mathematics.

1955 -- A Purple Xmas?: Aldous Huxley takes his first acid (LSD) trip. Ho, ho, ho!


1957 -- Norma Talmadge dies in her sleep in Las Vegas, aged 64 (or 60). Made at least 67 movies before retiring in 1930. Arthritis had confined her to a wheelchair for several years.


1960 -- King Me?: The Philadelphia Orphan's Court raises singer Chubby Checker's weekly allowance from $150 to $200. The 19-year old has already put three songs, "The Class," "The Twist" & "The Hucklebuck," in the pop Top 40.


1965 -- Cuba: Prison uprising. The queers were the ones who started the riot that gray Sunday dawn of December 24, 1965. Let it be said that they showed more guts than many of us "men"...

"I aam with my peerioood..." "Me too..." "& me..." The "peerioood" epidemic spread through the camp like a prairie fire.

http://www.bigmagic.com/pages/blackj/column7.html

1965 --

Watts riots The Decline & Fall of the Spectacular Commodity Society, English language brochure by Guy Debord analysing the Watts riots in Los Angeles; reprinted in Internationale Situationniste #10, Paris. http://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/chronology/chronology.html | [Situationist Resources]

1966 -- Vietnam: US cargo plane crashes near Da Nang, South Vietnam, killing 103 civilians on the ground.


1968 -- Korea: Crew of Pueblo released by North Korea after 11 months of captivity.


1968 -- Outer Space: Bad Moon Rising? Apollo 8 astronauts take photo of earth rising behind the moon.


1969 -- US: Manson 'Family' indictments. Family values indeed. Meanwhile a Rolling Stones free concert at end of its tour, is marred by the Altamont, California racetrack festival fiasco (300,000 attend; Meredith Hunter killed when Hell's Angels get ugly).


1971 -- Peruvian Airlines turboprop crashes near headwaters of the Amazon, killing all but one of 92 people on board. The sole survivor, a 17-year old West German girl, Juliana Margaret Koepecke, found after wandering dazed & injured through the jungle for nearly 10 days.



1973 -- Tom Johnson of the Doobie Brothers arrested in Visalia, California on charges of marijuana possession. He has to go to court January 10, right about the time the group's new album is released. The title? "What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits."
http://hempfest.org/


1975 -- France: Nicholas Lazarevitch (1895-1975) dies, Paris.

Nicholas Lazarevitch, son of Russian revolutionary émigrés, became an anarcho-syndicalist shortly before WWI. He went to Russia in February 1919, & was close to the Bolsheviks before they arrested him. Married to Ida Mett, he later helped gather the documentation forming the basis of her "expose," The Kronstadt Commune (1938).

May 1968 saw Lazarevitch taking part in the open assemblies at the Sorbonne.

1977 -- Italy: Anti-Christmas demonstration in San Remo.



1980 -- US: Americans remember Iran hostages by shining lights for 417 seconds. The horror inspires a book by Stephen King called The Shining. Khomeini sees the light, quakes in the wake of such powerful symbolism.


1985 -- England: Ante Up? Anti-police riots in Sheffield, Monmouth & Southampton.
[Source: Calendar Riots]


1988 -- Japanese novelist (Nobi) & translator of Stendhal, Shohei Ooka, dies in Tokyo.
http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/01ref.htm#23/1783


1990 -- Iraq: Gulf Peace Team sets up camp, Judayyidat Ar'ar. & doing just a dandy job, thanks.


1991 -- Yugoslavia: Parents of reservists from Grocka protest at Army headquarters, Belgrade.




1991 -- New Slim Fast Program?: Walter Hudson 1,025lb man, dies at 46. Attendees say "it was a crate funeral."

http://www.virtualpetcemetery.org/pet/index.html

1992 -- US: A JailBird in Hand is Worth Two in the...? Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Bush pardons six people in the Iran-Contra case, among them former Secretary of Defense Casper Weinberger & Robert McFarlane, former national security adviser. Power has its prerogatives, & Law & Order prevails once again while many deserving political prisoners remain rotting behind bars. Known, in America, as "The Trickle Out Theory."

The Iran-Contra affair first became public in late 1986, when members of the Law & Order Reagan administration, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), & the armed forces were revealed as illegally selling arms to Iran to help secure release of American hostages held by pro-Iranian groups, & to raise funds for the illicit support of the rightwing Contras to overthrow Nicaragua's government. Revelations about the Iran-Contra connection caused a stink in Congress, which in 1983 passed the Boland amendments prohibiting the Defense Department, CIA, or any other government agency from providing military aid to the Contras. 13 top White House, State Department, & intelligence officials were found guilty of charges ranging from perjury to conspiracy to defraud the US. While Beloved & Respected Comrade Leader President Reagan is heavily implicated, neither he nor Vice President George Bush is directly indicted in the subsequent criminal trials. Ollie North smiles smugly. See Kornbluh, Peter & Byrne, Malcolm (eds.), The Iran Contra Scandal: The Declassified History, (NY: New Press, 1993)

1994 --

R obbery Rave in Turin, an all night fund raising party in support of arrested comrades (part of a series of events leading up to & during what has come to be known as the ‘Marini trial’ in which 68 people are implicated, accused of armed actions). anteriores/diciembre-02/diciembre-02.htm [Source]: http://www.freewebs.com/frameup/chronology.html

1998 -- Saturn enters the #1 house — or the driveway, as US automakers would have it.

1998 --

Peru: Didna See It Coming?: 21 workers at the Psychic Hotline in Peru are locked out of their jobs for refusing a 50% downsizing in pay. Walter Mercado who runs an international franchise of Psychic Hotlines hires scab psychics. The locked out psychics claim they have training in psychology & human behavior while new psychics are hired with no training whatsoever! Their only requirement is "a nice voice." Psychics of the World, Unite! Nationalize the Psychic Hotlines under workers control! — Earl Gilman, "El Nuevo Topo" magazine http://www.michaelmoore.com/   "Lukacs discovered that in ordinary life the exploitation of labor by capital is hidden from the consciousness of the worker by the fact that the terms on which goods are exchanged in the market appear to be determined by factors independent of the workers' own labor." — Stanley Aronowitz, False Promises

2001 --

'Gentleman Bandit' Dies in Prison at 62 Updated: Wed, Dec 26 11:00 AM EST ROME (Reuters) - Italy's "gentleman bandit," an affable anarchist who courteously robbed banks in the 1960s & 1970s, has died in prison of a heart attack at the age of 62, officials said Wednesday. Horst Fantazzini conducted nonviolent stickups across northern Italy, often using a toy gun according to some stories, & won his nickname after sending roses [red & black!?] to a bank teller who had fainted during a robbery. [Details / context]

2007 --

Happy Holidays & a Happy New Millenium! More or Less.

— from the distaff at Reco(o)llection Used Books, the Daily Bleed & the NWA (National Waffler Association)
(Having accepted this greeting, you are bound by these terms: This greeting is subject to clarification, withdrawal & heavy fines. It is freely transferable with no alter(c)ation to the original greeting. It implies no promise by the wisher to actually implement any of the wishes for her/himself, wishee or others, & is void or illegal where prohibited by Law, & is revocable at the soul discretion of the wisher.

This wish is warranted to perform as expected within the usual application of Good Tidings, more or less, for a period of one year, more or less, or until the issuance of a subsequent Holiday Greeting (fat chance),
whichever comes first, more or less,
& warranty is limited to replacement
of this wish or issuance
of a New Wish at the
sole discretion of
the wishee-washee wisher.)

4002 --

"You cannot buy the Revolution. You cannot make the Revolution. You can only be the Revolution. It is in your spirit or it is nowhere." — Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

---

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