Holy Days of Obfuscation
A select semi-secular calendar, compiled by Gregory J. Rosmaita
Neglected and forgotten events and birthdays.
Food for thought, not just worms.
- 1926:
- William
Loughborough, inventor, activist, actor, director, musician,
all-around visionary, and one of the few people who actually lives up
to his mononymic -- "Love" -- born.
- 1809:
- Louis Braille, musician and inventor of the tactile reading system for
the blind that bears his name, born in Coupvray, France
- 1706:
- Benjamin Franklin born whilst the British and their
colonies were still ticking it old style
- 1924:
- Max
Roach born
- 1896
- John Dos Passos -- chronicler, poet, novelist, essayist, playwright, graphical artist and author of the imcomparable U.S.A. trilogy -- born in Chicago. If you've never read anything by Dos Passos, check out the Project Gutenberg's Dos Passos titles -- everything the man wrote is worthy of a reading; you may violently disagree with him from work to work, but he has one of the most distinctive authorial voices in american literature.
- 1706:
- Benjamin Franklin's
after-the-factual birthday
- 1911:
- Little Jazz, a.k.a. Roy Eldridge born
- 1970:
-
Phil Schaap, jazzologist extraordinaire,
broadcasts his first show on WKCR, New York
- 1828
- The first edition of The Cherokee Phoenix published.
- 1685:
- George Friedrich Händel, born in Halle, Germany
February 28
- 1749
- the first edition of Henry Fielding's
incomparable The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling is published.
March
- 1924:
- Although its origins -- or, at least, its melody -- date back to
1893, Happy Birthday To You was first published on this date
as Happy Birthday to You, with
its nearly-universally familiar lyrics, in 1924 by Clayton F. Summy. The
copyright on the song is currently owned by Time-Warner (which bought the
rights in 1988) and which will not expire (at least in the U.S.) until 2030, which means that
"unauthorized public performances for pay" of Happy Birthday
to You, such as those performed by a band at a party, are technically
illegal, unless royalties are paid to the copyright holder, so the next
time you sing Happy Birthday to You, keep an eye over your shoulder
for Time-Warner's lawyers...
- 1733
- Joseph Priestley, a man who wasted not a minute of his life, born in Birstal, West Yorkshire
- Happy St.
Harry's Day!
- Yeah, St. Harry's...
Harold was Patrick's younger brother -- sort of a medieval Indiana Jones
(substitute tonsure for fedora) in that he was deathly afraid of snakes.
Having heard tell of the plague of snakes which infested Ireland, he told
Patrick he'd catch up with him, set out in a seperate barque, took a wrong
turn, and consequently fell off the face of the earth. He's the patron
saint of liars, people with two left feet, and still holds the world's
freefall record... He's also the soggiest saint in Christendom.
- 2008:
- David Paterson becomes the first blind governor of any of the
United States upon his ascension to the governorship of New York upon
the resignation of Elliott Spitzer.
- 1837:
- Grover Cleveland -- "the man so nice, they elected him
twice", but to non-consecutive terms -- born in Caldwell, New
Jersey. Actually, if presidents were elected by direct popular vote,
ol' Grover would have been the first three term
president in the history of the United States.
- 1881:
- Barnum & Bailey's Greatest Show on
Earth opens for the first time at Madison Square
Garden, New York City.
- 1930:
- Pluto (the
planet, not the dog) discovered by Clyde Tombaugh
March 20
- 1727:
- Sir Isaac Newton, dies in London at the age of 84.
- 1911:
- Animator, caricaturist and director T. Hee born and named
"Thornton Hee".
March 29
- 1909:
- Pianist, composer, and singer Aubrey Wilson Mullican, better known as Moon Mullican, born
in Polk
County, Texas.
- 1918:
- 1943:
- Eric
Idle, author, songwriter, actor, vocalist and comedian, born in South Shields, County Durham, England.
- 1945
- Walt "Clyde" Frazier one of the greatest basketballers
ever, born in Atlanta, Georgia.
- 1897:
- Lucille Bogan, the raunchiest of the first wave of recorded blues
singers, and creator of the immortal Shave 'Em Dry (best heard in
its unexpurgated, originally unreleased alternate version), the Sloppy Drunk Blues and the Coffee Grindin' Blues born.
- 1915:
- Muddy Waters, neé
McKinley Morganfield, born in the
Delta
- 1820:
- the incomparable Nadar, born Félix
Tournachon.
- 1792:
- George Washington casts the first Presidential veto in the
history of the United States.
- 1887:
- Anne Sullivan teaches Helen Keller the word "water"
- 1966:
- Timothy Leary, in a speech at New York
City's Town Hall,
compares LSD to a microscope, stating that:
the drug is to
psychology what the microscope is to biology.
- 1827:
- John Walker
sells the first friction
match, which he had invented the year before, thereby starting a strange
chain of events which, through a linguistic freak, became associated with a
"radical" American political movement, the Locofocos, their name being
a corruption of loco focos, in 1835, when the Equal
Rights Party merged with the Working Man's
Party. The party was so named because its members carried friction matches
on their persons to relight the gaslights when more conservative members of the
public and/or their hirelings extinguished the gas so as to prevent their
members from gathering and speaking in public and/or private places.
- 1915:
- Billie Holiday, born Eleanora Fagan,
in Philadelphia.
- 1933:
- Declaring,
Americans deserve a drink
, FDR
signs an executive order allowing the legal sale of beer in the United States, eight
months before the ratification of the
Twentieth Amendment, repealing Prohabition
- 1866:
- Anne Sullivan,
Helen Keller's teacher,
born in Feeding Hills,
Massachusetts
- 1755
- Doctor Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language published.
- 1862:
- President Abraham Lincoln
issues the Compensated Emancipation Act, freeing 3,100 enslaved residents of
Washington, DC,
nine months before the promulgation of the far more famous Emancipation Proclamation. The date was celebrated by Washington's
African-American population from 1866 through 1901. In 2005, the
municipality of the District of Columbia re-established Emancipation
Day, as a public municipal holiday.
April 19
- 1943
- Bicycle
Day: using himself as a guinea pig, Albert Hoffman
(who lived to the hearty age of 102), ingested 250 micrograms of LSD, and
then road his bicycle home through the streets of Basel, Switzerland, on
the first intentional acid trip.
- 1707:
- Henry Fielding, the father of the modern English narrative novel, and
still one of the greatest authors ever to write in the English language,
born in Sharpham, in
Somerset, England
- 1915:
- Charles Mingus born in Nogales,
Arizona.
- 1899:
- Edward Kennedy Ellington, better known as "the Duke", born in
the segregated
southern American town of Washington, DC
- 1896:
- The great guitarist, bluesman, preacher, and performer, the
Rev. Gary Davis born,
in Laurens, South Carolina.
May
- 1910:
- Mary Lou Williams, one of America's -- let alone jazz's -- greatest
pianists, composers, and arrangers, born Mary Elfrieda Scruggs in Atlanta, Georgia
May 21
- 1904:
- Thomas "Fats" Waller begins his all-too-brief life
May 22
- 1914:
- Sun Ra
arrives on Planet Earth (Birmingham, Alabama, to be specific) from Saturn and (temporarily) adopts the nomme de terre Herman "Sonny" Blount
May 25
- Happy Venerable Bede's Day! (Anglican observance)
- aside from writing the Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum, "better" known as
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, Bede (ca. 672 to 735), also known as
"the Venerable Bede" and "The
English Doctor of the Church", is credited with the invention of the
footnote. He also re-edited the Vulgate Bible, through both comparative research and the collation
of several dispirate sources, in order to create a single volume bible; a practice which
was highly unusual at the time. Whereas before Bede, the bible had been circulated as separate books, Bede's version of the Vulgate served as the official
version of the bible for the whole of Western Christendom until
the Reformation, and remained the
Catholic church's
cannonical bible
until 1966.
May 26
- 1926:
- Miles Davis born.
May 27
- Happy Venerable Bede's Day! (Catholic observance)
- Whilst the Anglican church celebrates the feast of
Saint Bede, a.k.a.
"The Venerable Bede", two days
earlier, the Catholic church celebrates Venerable Bede's Day
today, May 27th, basing its calculations on historical accounts
that record the date of Bede's death as the
eve of the
Feast of the Ascension, 735, a
moveable feast
which falls 39 days after Easter Sunday.
May 28
- 1898:
- Andy Kirk, one
of swing's biggest clouds of joy, born.
June 1
- 1495:
- The first written record of "Scotch whiskey"
appears in the Exchequer Rolls of Scotland. Friar John Cor is
listed as distiller.
- 1869:
- The voting machine patented by Thomas Alva Edison
- 1968:
- Helen Keller dies at the age of 87.
June 9
- 1934:
- Donald Duck makes his debut in the cartoon The Wise Little Hen, loudly protesting:
I have a belly-ache
June 12
- 1664:
- The colonies of
Nieuw-Amsterdam and Nieuw-Nederland surrender to the British,
effectively ending Dutch settlement in North America, save for a brief return to Dutch
rule for approximately a year, during the Third Anglo-Dutch war (1672-1674). The settlements on the eastern side
of the Hudson River
were rechristened New York, whilst the western settlements (which not only flanked the
Hudson, but which included settlements on the Delaware River,
populated mostly by Finns and Swedes, was renamed New Jersey.
June 15
- 1775
- the colony of Delaware votes to separate all ties with the British
Parliament and King. It is no coincidence
that the vote was conducted on the anniversary of John
Lackland's signing of the Magna
Carta in 1215.
June 19
- Juneteenth
- Juneteenth commemorates the date in 1865,
upon which Union troops, under the command of Gordon
Granger, landed on Galveston Island, Texas, to take
possession of the state from the Confederates. In
one of his first formal acts, Granger
announced that the Emancipation Proclamation promised not only the freedom
of all of those held in slavery in Texas, but to assert
an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of
property between former masters and slaves
. Since 1980,
Juneteenth has been celebrated as a state
holiday in Texas.
- 1883
- Rube Goldberg, inventor of the Rube Goldberg
Machine and winner of the 1948 Pulitzer Prize for political cartooning,
born Reuben Garret Lucius Goldberg, in
California.
- 1900:
- Louis Armstrong's birthday
(observed)
July 11
- 1938:
-
The Count Basie Orchestra opens at
The Famous Door, launching the "old testament" band's
national career, thanks to both the Decca recordings they had made during
the previous two years under the direction of producer and impressario
John Hammond, as well as the national radio broadcasts that
originated from The Famous Door.
July 20
- 1925:
- Frantz Fanon, essayist, psychoanalyst, and revolutionary, born in
Martinique
July 28
- 1902:
- Karl Popper, father of critical rationalism and co-conceptor of falsifiability, born
in Vienna
August
August 2
- 1776
- the Declaration of
Independence (at least, the parchment version of the Declaration
preserved at the National Archives) is actually signed.
August 4
- 1901:
-
Louis Armstrong's after-the-factual birthday
August 5
- 1735:
- New York Weekly publisher John Peter Zenger
acquited of sedition and libel charges filed by colonial New York's governor
William Cosby, in
the case of The Crown v. Zenger. Zenger's
attorney, the Philadelphian Alexander
Hamilton -- who represented Zenger pro bono --
successfully defended Zenger by arguing that Zenger's articles were not
libelous because they were based on fact. This landmark decision is almost universally credited as the foundation of
the United States' principle of the "freedom of the press" and for
outlining the responsibilities of both media and government in a
functioning democracy.
August 7
- 1936
- Rahsaan Roland Kirk, multi-instrumentalist (in the fullest
sense of the word) and one of the greatest reedmen ever, born in
Columbus, Ohio.
- 1899
- Alfred Hitchcock born
August 19
- 1906:
- Eddie Durham, guitarist, trombonist, composer, arranger,
and inventor born. The first musician to perform on an electrically
amplified guitar, Durham was also largely responsible for the "riff-based" sound that the Basie band brought to New York in
1936. Although no one seems to remember his name, his legacy lives on
whenever a guitar is plugged into an amp,
or whenever Glenn Miller's smash hit,
In the Mood, which Durham
arranged, is played.
- 1904:
- William "Bill" Basie, also known as "the
Count", born in Red Bank, New Jersey
- 1890:
- Man Ray, born in Philadelphia to Russian immigrant
parents, who name him Emmanuel Radnitsky.
- 1909:
- Lester Young, the "President of the Tenor Saxophone",
born in Woodville, Mississippi.
- 1898
- Preston Sturges, one of the greatest screenwriters, directors, and
producers of any era, genre and nationality, born in Chicago as Edmund Preston Biden.
- 1920:
- Charlie "Bird" Parker enters this vale of tears. (Kansas City, Kansas,
to be exact...)
September 8
- 1886:
- Poet, author, sportsman, decorated war hero, and anti-war crusader, Seigfried Sassoon
born,
- 1908:
- Composer, pianist, engineer, and electronic music pioneer Raymond Scott, né Harry Warnow, born in Brooklyn
- 1926:
- John Coltrane, visionary and
saint of the African Orthodox Church, born in
Hamlet, North Carolina
- 1923:
- Theodore "Fats" Navarro, trumpeter extrodinaire, began his
all-too-short life in Key West, Florida, from which he escaped as soon as he could; "
I
don't like Key West at all,
" he later stated, "I'll never go
back.
"
- 1924:
- Earl "Bud" Powell, pianist and composer extrodinaire, born
- 1932:
- Albert Collins, A.K.A.
"The Iceman" and "The Master of the Telecaster", born in
Leona, Texas
- 1917:
- Thelonius Sphere Monk born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina
- 1941:
- WKCR, the radio voice of
Columbia University becomes the first station in the world to broadcast
on the FM band
- 1906:
- Crockett Johnson, author of (amongst other classics of
English literature)
Harold and the Purple Crayon and creator of Barnaby and Mr. O'Malley,
born -- and named David Johnson Leisk -- on East
58th Street, in New York City.
- 1912:
- Don Byas, one of the greatest artists to ever pick up a tenor sax,
and a key (if largely unsung) figure in the birth of bop, born in
Muskogee, Oklahoma
October 31
- 1587:
- Leiden University's Library opens
- 1855:
- Eugene V. Debs, born in Terre Haute,
Indiana, five-time presidential candidate (in 1900, 1904, 1908, 1912
and 1920. Debs' 1912 campaign was his and the American Socialist Party's
most successful; Debs received 6 precent of the popular vote for president.
In 1920, Debs ran for president whilst imprisoned in the Atlanta
Penitentiary, on the charge of sedition for a speech
denouncing American participation in World War I; that he was still
imprisoned 2 years after the war ended, was due in no small part to the
Supreme Court's ruling against him, in which Oliver
Wendell Holmes Jr., famously wrote that
free speech does not include:
the right to shout 'fire' in a crowded
theater.
Debs was finally released from prison on December 25, 1921,
when President Warren G. Harding commuted Debs'
sentence to time served, thereby releasing Debs from his imprisonment.
As a fellow socialist once stated of Debs, That old man with the
burning eyes actually believes that there can be such a thing as the
brotherhood of man. And that's not the funniest part of it. As long as
he's around I believe it myself.
- 1690:
- William Hogarth, born
- 1744:
-
Abagail Adams, patriot, born in Weymouth, Massachusetts
- 1915:
-
Billy Strayhorn born in Dayton, Ohio
- 1933:
- The Twenty-First Amendment to the
U.S.
Constitution, which repeals the Eighteenth Amendment, which prohibited the "manufacture, sale, or
transportation of intoxicating liquors", ratified, thereby ending
Prohibition.
- 1904:
- Clarence "Ducky" Nash, voice artist extrodinaire -- best known
for his thirty years of voicing
Donald Duck -- born in Watonga, Oklahoma, whose main street today bears his name.
- 1815:
- the
enchantress of numbers
and the namseake
of the U.S. Department of Defense's high-level object-oriented
programming language, Ada Lovelace, born in
London to Anne Isabella Milbanke and Lord Byron.
- 1979:
- The Lancaster House Agreement is signed, effectively ending the era of
white minority rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), under Ian Smith, who had seperated the British colony of Southern Rhodesia
from the British
Empire in 1965 in order to preserve white
rule.
- 1907:
- Cabell Calloway III, better known as Cab Calloway, born in
Rochester, New
York
An accesskey has been defined for each month in the year. In an attempt
at mnemonics, i have assigned numeric accesskeys to the first nine
months of the calendar (1 equals January through 9 equals September),
then used the first letter of the remaining months as the accesskeys for
October through December.
- 1 = January
- 2 = February
- 3 = March
- 4 = April
- 5 = May
- 6 = June
- 7 = July
- 8 = August
- 9 = September
- O = October
- N = November
- D = December
- L = List of accesskeys (this list)
- T = Terminal Index
created April 2, 1999
last updated November 3, 2008