April 30th

On this day... Walpurgis Night celebrated throughout Europe. Behind that galumphing title (makes me think of walrus purging) lies a fascinating muddle of Christian and pagan festivities. Catholics mark it as the feast of St. Walburga, a German nun who lived in the 700s; others associate it with the Wiccan feast of Beltane and other fertility celebrations. According to Wikipedia, it's main mascot is the witch. It's sort of like a friendly, springtime Halloween. I personally would recommend splitting up Halloween celebrations: The night of April 30th will be for the warm, fuzzy aspects of the holiday (little kids in puppy costumes, candy), while October 31st is reserved for horror movie marathons, high school keggers, and all other forces of darkness. How much cuter would it be to see children in fanciful outfits gorging themselves against a background of butterflies and spring vegetation? Not to mention how much warmer for those who have to accompany said cute children from house to house? The lengthened days would provide more safety for the trick-or-treaters; adults wouldn't have to worry about scheduling their plans and those of their kids into the same night, because the grown-up parties would be in the fall. It's genius, I tell you. (Why does no one listen?)
The internet is a fickle temptress - I get online looking for good blog links, but end up spending an hour on crap ghost photos. It's so frustrating - Everyone who's ever had dust on their camera lens sends it in to these websites, assuming that they've got orbs. Silly, silly.

April 5th

On this day... birth of German violinist Louis Spohr, 1784. I chose this entry not for any outstandingly interesting tidbit about the man himself (though he made Faust into an opera and painted a mean self-portrait - see picture), but about the unbelievable volume of members of his profession throughout history. I don't believe a there's been a day of Catcomeback research (a grueling process, requiring several hours hard meditation on a mountaintop followed by a ninja battle) that I didn't encounter at least one famous violinist being born, or dying, or occasionally doing something really noteworthy in between. But then, there are plenty of repeated professions. Take actors and actresses - a dime a dozen, or more like a penny. It may be I focus on violinists because they're my favorite sort of musicians. First, because they play my favorite instrument. There's something about the way a violin sounds almost like a woman's voice that's just spine-tingling. Second, because they were the rock stars of Classical music. Yes, Beethoven was deaf and it was awesome, but women rarely went into hysterical fits during his performances, as they were said to do for Paganini. They had a love of the dramatic (Paganini liked to encourage stories that he was the devil by travelling everywhere in a black coach pulled by black horses). You just don't see that kind of thing nowadays - The Devil Went Down to Georgia doesn't even begin to make up for our dire lack of awesome fiddlers. In fact, the story from that song was cribbed from 18th century violinist Guiseppe Tartini. Tartini claimed that one night he dreamt the devil came into his bedroom in an attempt to bargain for his soul. G.T. challenged him to a violin duel, but the sonata the devil played was so incredible that, upon hearing it, G.T. called the whole thing off. After he woke up, he attempted to reproduce the bizarre sound - he came up with The Devil's Trill, which sounds less demonic than you would think, given the circumstances. I guess standards were different in the 1700s. You can listen to a little of it here. If you're unimpressed, I guess you'll just have to make your own deal for musical fame...

April 3rd

On this day... death of Jesse James, 1882. Shot in the back of the head by friend turned bounty hunter Bob Ford while dusting a picture in his St. Joseph, Missouri home. Ain't it a kick, huh? The dusting is what gets me: people who lead the most extraordinary lives tend to die in the most boring ways, or at least while engaged in boring activities. (See my first entry on Ernest the Explorer). They're making a new movie about him; though I worry his death isn't flashy enough for the usual Brad Pitt film. I figure they'll find a way to work around it. Like maybe there's a keg of dynamite in the root cellar whose fuse is piped up through the wall behind the picture, and instead of dusting it he's really lighting that fuse, so that after he dies and the villanous Ford stands manfully over his beautiful, body hair-less corpse and tosses off a one liner, his clever phrase will be forever cut short by a digitally enhanced fireball. Totally sweet.
I actually have a friend who claims to be related to him - Jesse James, not Brad Pitt - on one side of her family. On the other side she's descended from an Irish Catholic priest and a nun. The first time I heard that, it took me a humiliatingly long time to realize why it was noteworthy. A shameful lapse on my part, since I've often entertained the idea of entering a convent - more out of a desire to see if I could do it than from any religious fervor. I'm spiritual, but it's definitely of a more of a neo-pagan Episcopal bent. I have a little (really little - perhaps miniscule is a better term) side business selling Tarot and palm readings for a couple of bucks each. I'm going nuts to try crystallomancy, but it's simply unbelievably difficult to find a suitable crystal ball. There are plenty for sale online, yes, but I've heard that a buyer really needs to be physically present with a variety of crystals before you find one that fits you best. An antique ebay find is tempting, but you never know where it's been, or who's had their aura all over it. Objects that a person identifies with strongly almost always carry traces of them around forever. And if that person was unpleasant... it's sort of like the objects have a psychic STD. (Or is it STI now? I forget). One can also make a scrying mirror - though I'm inclined to be a bit afraid of them. I always heard that mirrors will steal a corpse's soul if said corpse is carried past one. They can be eerie things. But the mirrormaking instructions I've seen deal with the mirror being painted with an opaqe layer of black spray enamel, so maybe that's alright. Hmm. I may have to get my mom to ferry me to a hardware store soon. I'm lucky to have a mother who supports this sort of thing. She'll back me in just about any activity that might make me a billionare one day. I could be like Miss Cleo - except not. Really, hopefully, desperately not.

March 28th

On this day... Ah, friends. It seems like forever ago that I made that last post - so young and full of hope, like a tick among a herd of hemophilic cattle. Well, no more! Europe was, in a word, nightmarish. But somewhere between the food poisoning and the 15-hour Heathrow (herafter called Hellthroe) layover, or maybe between the lost luggage and the being caught in the middle of a rape investigation, things stopped being upsetting and started being funny. Luckily, today's event fits my mood: On this day in the year 37, Caligula became emperor of Rome. He was a sick puppy, even by Imperial Roman standards; however, like my plans for Europe, he started out good. Despite having a traumatic childhood (most of his family was murdered), Cal seemed like a pretty well adjusted young man. In the early years of his reign, he lowered taxes, recalled exiles, and banished sex offenders from the empire. Then, in the middle of his years as leader, he was stricken with a debilitating illness. He survived, but his personality had undergone a complete and irreversible change. He was given to violent fits of cruelty, and at times he seemed to lose all grip on reality: he once made a group of legionaries take a day out of their military campaign to gather seashells, which he said were emblems of his victory over Neptune.
While it's been a long time since I howled with laughter over my last gladiatorial game, I do have just the teensiest bit of sympathy. There are things in childhood that can lie dormant in you for years, just waiting for the right psychological circumstances to rise to the surface like a bubble of swamp gas. Case in point: when I was small, I had a passion for those Halloween sound effects tapes - doors creaking, wolves howling, men with deep voices giving guided tours of graveyards, that kind of thing. I haven't thought about it in ages and ages. Then, in the midst of post European stress disorder, I woke up the other morning with an uncontrollable desire to listen to those tapes again, immediately, or my head would explode. Unfortunately, I had lost track of my old ones. I asked my friends, but they, apparently, don't carry sound effects on their persons. In desperation, I turned to the internet, where I found my fix in all of its synthesizer-ed glory. But what summoned this phantasm from the depths of my subconscious? My vote is with the agony brought up by travel - the need to externalize my fears and return to childhood.
At least I'm not making Romans gather seashells.

March 13th

On this day.... in 1958, birth of Albert II, Prince of Monaco. In preparation for my trip to England (and a final, Thermopylae-esque effort to deny the rising tide of last-day-before-spring-break homework), I spent a productive hour scouring the internet for eligible British nobles. Hopeless. Aside from the fact that I had trouble finding a birthyear later than 1945, most of them bore an unsettling resemblance to a certain public television star of my childhood. While Albert II's nephew Andrea is possibly the most beautiful creature it has ever been my good fortune to ogle, his hobbies - wearing Lacoste riding habits, smoking long cigarettes on yachts, and being lounged upon by beautiful women - don't exactly point to ideal husband material. Why aren't there more unmarried, titled, brilliant, handsome, faithful, wildly affluent people around? I think the times call for a return of the renaissance man. I guess the development of so much excellence takes time. We should all learn from the Count St. Germain, who simply decided to live forever. I mean, it's so simple. Get on the bandwagon.

March 1st

On this day... official start of the Salem Witch Trials. Mass hysteria has pulled some pretty remarkable tricks in its day. According to people who ought to know, group delusions are more common in societies which foster repression. Puritain villages definitely fit this bill, as does Victorian England in the days of Spring-Heeled Jack. Jack was a supernatural figure in a helmet, skintight costume and tall black boots who was fond of breathing blue fire at unsuspecting pedestrians and molesting women - only to escape by superhuman leaps onto rooftops or over high walls. While he sounds remarkably like a DC comics character, Jack was taken quite seriously. At least one victim of a Jack attack was beaten unconscious, and several witnesses claimed to have seen him drown a young woman in a sewer. In 1838, Jack was declared "A Public Menace." The No less authoritative a man than the Duke of Wellington came out of retirement to hunt him down.
Not that there aren't such figures of legend today. But somehow, I don't find Bigfoot as interesting.

February 22nd

On this day in 1295 BCE, Ramses II was crowned in Egypt. Today is also the aniversary of Tennessee's abolishment of slavery, two papal coronations, and the birth of artistic genius Edward Gorey. All in all, a day to celebrate. This is made all the more cheerful by the fact that I just found out (with the help of the good folks at the University of Newcastle) that I am not, in fact, tone deaf. A bad singer, yes - I still haven't mastered the Darth Vader theme - but there's nothing biologically wrong with me. That's the internet for you - despite some rough spots, it still manages to spread cheer.
'Til next time...

February 13th

On this day... 2004 seems to have had more than its share of extremely large eclectica: on this day, not quite a week after the aforementioned whale explosion, Harvard scientists discovered a ten billion trillion trillion carat diamond floating through space. And no, I didn't accidentally repeat the word "trillion" in that last sentence. The diamond is located in the heart of a dead star in the constellation Centaurus. It's a testament to the lack of common sense in the scientific community that they couldn't have waited one more day to announce their find, or just sold the advertizing rights to Zales. Lots more money for research, guys!

February 8th

On this day.... execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, 1587.

History is rife with messy execution stories. (Henry VIII's wives alone take up an hour of spooky fireside conversation, or, in the modern day, that pesky hour of programming after dinner but before American Idol). The deposed, middle-aged queen of Scotland's story is a prime example of the genre. It took three and a half axe swings to remove the poor woman's head - she was conscious for at least the first two.

When I was very small, I saw a show on the History Channel about the French Revolution. The story goes that, after Marie Antoinette was executed, her head was held up for the crowd to laugh at. She blushed. This image has stayed with me doggedly through the years - which may explain why I now associate Kirsten Dunst with decapitation.

I hear in the Tower of London there's a very snazzy waxwork of Queen Mary's head, and a full body model at Madame Tussaud's. Cool? Undobtedly. Worth it? I'm not sure. I'm going to England in the spring, and I'm trying to map out where to go... I don't want to be stuck in tourist traps the whole time. I worry that European tourist traps, like most things in Europe, will be better dressed than the American kind, and may catch me unawares. Sneaky buggers. Not to mention the prodigious amount of gift-buying involved. I have a friend who's requested something, anything, Victorian, as long as it's something weird no one uses anymore. Well, that's a much broader topic than I imagined. From post-mortem photography to pleasure gardens to tear vials... my head's spinning (sorry, Queen Mary. Bad pun).

That last invention's my favorite, by the by - the idea being that you present loved ones with your tears at funerals, christenings, weddings, etc. to show them how emotional it made you. Just imagine the family drama that sprung out of that:

Girl: "Mama, Uncle Bertram's being stingy. Aunt Alice cried at least twice as much about my birthday!"

Uncle Bertram: "I have small tear ducts."

Aunt Alice: "Liar. You cried a vial and a half when that crumpet from your office broke her ankle. Why did I even marry you?"

Uncle Bertram: "We live in a chronically repressed society that allows upper class women only the smallest modicum of involvement in the choice of their marriage partners, creating a two-faced society in which great personal pain is endured on physical and psychological levels in order to maintain a veneer of outward respectability, though it rots our souls slowly from within after the fashion of a cankerous tooth."

Aunt Alice: "...."

Uncle Bertram: "And I keep you in laudanum."

Aunt Alice: *weeps*

Cheers!

Boom!

On this day in 2004, a whale exploded.

No, really.

Beware: that link leads to a somewhat graphic picture. It's hard for a whale to explode in a decorous fashion. I feel particularly sorry for the guy who owned that moped.

Animal combustion is, apparently, not as uncommon as you'd think. It's a large enough anomaly to attract a cult following, at any rate. Most documented ani-plosions occur naturally - here and there, though, you stumble upon truly upsetting manmade detonations. Wikipedia claims the project was called off for being too costly and slow to develop. An educated mind, however, can quickly guess the real reason: angry vampires.



Today's event was actually a tie between the above and another ghastly animal-related occurence: Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven was published today in 1845. Here's a nice little site commemorating his life and works. (Poe's, I mean. After inspiring the poem, that raven took the proceeds and retired to the tropics, where he never did another day's work in his whole darn life). Until next time...

January 9th

On this day in 1768, the first modern circus (featuring a central ring where acrobats, clowns, and dancing dogs performed) was born in London. God bless Mr. Philip Astley: without him, countless generations of dissatisfied people would have nowhere to run away to.
I have a childhood desire to be a tightrope walker (aka funambulist) which has recently resurfaced with a passion. What better way to fill a gap year between high school and college? Not one of those animal abusing, overly-expensive-snowcone-dispensing corporate circus, either. I would want to do something more beautiful and experimental, like Cirque du Soleil (though they've gotten almost as ginormous as Ringling, etc. in recent years... at least they're animal friendly). I also have a friend whose siblings travelled with these guys for a while. It's a bit less sparkly than I'd like, but it seems to be the least discriminating option. Cirque du Soleil talent scouts only hang out at the Olympics.
I got a 70s book on circus skills from my local library: the key to funambulism (and most other deathdefying acts, it turns out) is gradually increasing the amount of deathdefyingness involved. So you begin by constructing a tightrope that's about a foot off the ground (around two tree trunks is ideal) and slowly move it up to two feet, then three...

Unfortunately for my budding career, I live on a hill.

Well, if everything else fails, I still have my psychic powers. I worked on my Celtic Cross spread all through Christmas. It's been hit-and-miss, but predominantly hit. Like my sister said, "The more you do it, the more true it becomes."

On this day….

Death of arctic explorer Ernest Shakleton, 1922.

I always confuse my arctic explorers. They all have such long lists of accomplishments, sledding here and climbing there and winning such-and-such medals. Take Ernest: the first human to cross the Trans-Antarctic mountain range, this man also scaled an active volcano, helped discover the Magnetic South Pole, and became a knight. He then died of a heart attack in his bunk. I guess we can’t all go out with a bang. He had a good run, but I still would’ve hoped for a more dramatic ending. Like that fellow who said, “I’m just going outside. I may be some time,” and went out coatless into an ice storm to die so the other members of their stranded party could survive on his flesh. Talk about a stiff upper lip (the fact that it was frozen stiff is inconsequential).I never knew how fascinating last words really were. You can find lists of them here

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Famous_last_words

and here

http://www.corsinet.com/braincandy/dying.html

Hours of entertainment. My favorite thus far is "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do," spoken by my true love, Oscar Wilde.

Alas! It burns!

Hello, lovelies.