Words 5.30

 Words Twice a Week          5.30

If you are more into listening than reading, Words Twice a Week is available, along with other good stuff, as a podcast from St Paul’s Episcopal Church.  Click here.

This is really preliminary, but we are heading off to camp – no internet access!  There are a number of these events I would like to have had time to investigate further!

Some days from the church calendar -

May 31   The Visitation (of the Blessed Virgin Mary).  In March, Mary, newly pregnant with Jesus comes to visit Elizabeth (6 months pregnant with John).  Elizabeth exclaims “Blessed are you among women”; Mary replies “My soul magnifies the Lord…”  So why are we observing the visitation now?  Well, Mary stayed for three months, and many people think she probably stayed till John was born – June 24.  In some churches and at some times it is/was celebrated on July 2, after the week after John was born.  Here’s a line from Wikipedia - “In the Gospel of Luke, the author's accounts of the Annunciation and Visitation are constructed using eight points of literary parallelism to compare Mary to the Ark of the Covenant.”  I never heard about that – I’ll have to look into it.

June 1   Justin Martyr (His name was Justin and he was a martyr)  He was an early (2nd century) apologist and philosopher.  He went through as variety of philosophies before becoming christian after being witnessed to by an old man, possibly a Syrian Christian.   He was tried and beheaded around 167.  Here’s an interesting note, again from wikipedia - The church of St. John the Baptist in Sacrofano, a few miles north of Rome, claims to have his relics.  The Church of the Jesuits in Valletta, Malta, founded by papal decree in 1592 also boasts relics of this second century Saint.  A case is also made that the relics of St. Justin are buried in Annapolis, Maryland. During a period of unrest in Italy, a noble family in possession of his remains sent them in 1873 to a priest in Baltimore for safekeeping. They were displayed in St. Mary's Church for a period of time before they were again locked away for safekeeping. The remains were rediscovered and given a proper burial at St. Mary's, with Vatican approval, in 1989.

June 2  The Martyrs of Lyons, in particular, St Blandina  She along with the others were martyred in 177.

June 3  The Martyrs of Uganda  23 Anglican and 22 Catholic converts who were killed during a three-way (Anglican, Catholic, Islam) struggle for religious influence at the court of Buganda during the “scramble for Africa” (1881-1914) as European colonization increased from 10% to 90%.   Doctrine of Discovery issues.

June 4  Pope John XXIII  He was one of 13 children born to sharecroppers in Lombardy, who became a priest and later a cardinal.  Elected on the 11th ballot in October 1958, many thought they had elected a tired and ineffective leader.  Instead, in 1962 he called the Second Vatican Council, (“Vatican 2”) which had a dramatic effect on the Roman Church, such as saying Mass in the language of the people, and with the priest facing the people.  Much of the renewal also spilled over into Protestant Churches.

And some days from the world/earth calendar -

May 31

+ This is really disturbing – on this day in 1779, George Washington gave these orders to Gen John Sullivan: The six nations of Indians are to be attacked, with the immediate object being “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements, and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible.  It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more...that the (Indian) country may not be merely overrun, but destroyed.”  Again, Doctrine of Discovery issues.

+ Franz Joseph Haydn died on this day in 1809.

+ Elizabeth Blackwell died in 1910.  A friend of Florence Nightingale, she was the first female physical in the United States.  With her sister, who became a surgeon, she founded The New York Infirmary – a hospital administered by women to train women physicians.

+ Rose Will Monroe (most iconic image of Rosie the Riveter) died in 1997.  She was a riveter at the Willow Run Aircraft Factory in Ypsilanti, Michigan.  The whole Rosie the Riveter saga is interesting – while the men were off at war, the government encouraged women to take over necessary jobs, but when the war was coming to a close, the government began to encourage women “back to the home.”  Women who had held well paying jobs during the war then were somewhat forced to re-enter the work force in lower paying roles.

June 1

+ Helen Keller died in 1968.

+ The Heimlich Maneuver was published in 1974.  I actually used it on someone once.  I don’t know if it made the difference or not, but he started breathing again.

+ James Clark Ross discovered the Magnetic North Pole in 1831.  He also explored around Antarctica, and yes, the Ross Sea and Ross Ice Shelf are named after him.  Tow mountains were named after his boats!  There is also a crater on the moon, a small gull in northernmost North America and Siberia, and a seal in Antarctica named for him.  He commanded the HMS Enterprise on one of the expeditions searching for Franklin’s lost expedition.

June 2

+ Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953

+ Edward Elgar was born in 1857.  He wrote a variety of music – we know him best for a set of 14 Variations on a Theme (The Enigma Variations – apparently he wrote each variation to reflect one of his friends or colleagues), and of course, Pomp and Circumstance, to which probably most of us marched in to graduate!

June 3

+ Johann Strauss the Younger – the Waltz King – died in 1899.  He wrote more than 400 waltzes, including The Blue Danube, the Emperor Waltz, Tales from the Vienna Woods.

June 4

+ The Tiananmen Square Massacre happened on this day in 1989.

+ the first Pulitzer Prize was handed out in 1917.  To whom?

+ in 1783, the Montgolfier brothers, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Etienne, flew in a hot-air balloon.  The flight lasted about 10 minutes and covered just over a mile.  Joseph-Michel also invented the hydralic ram pump.  There was one at our camp years ago.  I can just vaguely remember the sound it made.

June 5

+ Stephen Crane died in 1900.  He wrote The Red Badge of Courage.

+ the first Orient Express train left Paris for Istanbul in 1883.  I am not aware of anyone being murdered on that run.  Well, it went to Vienna.  It wasn’t until 1889 that the route went all the way to Istanbul.  And in fact there were a variety of other routes that it took over the years.

+ 1956 - Elvis sang Hound Dog on the Milton Berle TV Show.  He had finished a tour in the midwest, during which after a show in La Crosse, Wisconsin, an urgent message on the letterhead of the local Catholic diocese's newspaper was sent to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. It warned that "Presley is a definite danger to the security of the United States. ... [His] actions and motions were such as to rouse the sexual passions of teenaged youth. ... After the show, more than 1,000 teenagers tried to gang into Presley's room at the auditorium. ... Indications of the harm Presley did just in La Crosse were the two high school girls ... whose abdomen and thigh had Presley's autograph."

It was Elvis’ second appearance on national tv.  Berle had encouraged him to leave his guitar backstage, and Elvis had stopped an uptempo version of the song with a wave of his arm and shifted into “a slow, grinding version accentuated with energetic, exaggerated body movements.”  It created a storm of controversy.

  Here’s a portion of his acceptance speech for the Jaycees 1970 Ten Outstanding Young Men of the Nation Award -

I'd like to thank the Jaycees for electing me as one of their outstanding young men. When I was a child, ladies and gentlemen, I was a dreamer. I read comic books, and I was the hero of the comic book. I saw movies, and I was the hero in the movie. So every dream I ever dreamed, has come true a hundred times... I'd like to say that I learned very early in life that "Without a song, the day would never end; without a song, a man ain't got a friend; without a song, the road would never bend — without a song." So I keep singing a song. Goodnight. Thank you.

Well, ok.  Bob Dylan’s was better!

June 6

+ The Trail of Tears

+ D Day

+ The YMCA was founded in 1844 in London.

+ Frozen food (Bird’s Eye) was sold in retail stores for the first time in 1930.  It was in Springfield, MA.

+ the video game Tetris was published for the first time in 1984.  Never played it – you?

+ the Basketball Association of America (BAA) was founded in 1946.  It changed it’s name to the National Basketball Association  (NBA) in 1949.

+ Robert Falcon Scott was born in 1868; Alexander Pushkin in 1799

Anyway, that’s what I got for now…..We’re off to camp!

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