Wolf Howling: ben johnson

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Today In History - 11 June: Troy Is Sacked, Stalin Purges, Buddhists Burn, & Justice For McVeigh

Art: Procession Of The Trojan Horse Into Troy, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo
1184 BC – Troy is sacked and burned after the Greeks use the ruse of the Trojan Horse to gain entry into the city. This brought an end to the Trojan War which had begun over a decade earlier when Paris of Troy stole Helen from her husband Menelaus, the king of Sparta. Some 300 years later, these events would be famously memorialized by Homer in the Iliad. Other related works include Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's The Aeneid, and Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida.

1429 – St. Joan of Arc leads the French in their first sustained - and successful - offensive in a generation, engaging the Enlish at the Battle of Jargeau during the Hundred Years' War.

1509 – Henry VIII of England marries his first wife, the beautiful and cultured Catherine of Aragon, widow of Henry's brother, Arthur. Their marriage lasted 24 years and produced six children, though only one that survived, Mary I. Henry, fixated on producing a male heir, would petition the Pope for an annulment, ultimately leading to England's break with the Catholic Church.
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1776 – The Continental Congress appoints Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston to the Committee of Five to draft a declaration of independence.

1837 – The penultimate donneybrook, the Broad Street Riot occurres in Boston when a company of Yankee firefighters met with an Irish funeral procession on Broad Street. Fighting broke out, and eventually 1000 people were included in the melee, though no one was killed.

1937 – As part of the Great Purge that reached its height in 1937 and 1938, Joseph Stalin brutally repressed and terrorized the people and leadership of the Soviet Union in order to insure unquestioning loyalty. On this date in 1937, Stalin had eight of his top army leaders executed. According to official Soviet archives, in 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,367 victims, of whom 681,692 were shot - an average of 1,000 executions a day. According to historians, the best estimate of deaths brought about by Soviet Repression during these two years is the range 950,000 to 1.2 million.

1938 – During the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Battle of Wuhan starts and the Chinese Nationalist government creates the 1938 Yellow River flood to halt Japanese forces. 500,000 to 900,000 civilians are killed.

1963 – Alabama Governor George Wallace stood at the door of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama in an attempt to block two black students,Vivian Malone and James Hood, from attending that school. Later in the day, accompanied by federalized National Guard troops, they were able to register.

1963 – In what became memorialized in a horrific photo, Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc burns himself to death with gasoline in a busy Saigon intersection to protest the lack of religious freedom in South Vietnam.

1970 – After being appointed on May 15, Anna Mae Hays and Elizabeth P. Hoisington officially receive their ranks as U.S. Army Generals, becoming the first females to do so.

2001 – Justice is finally done when Timothy McVeigh is executed for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 and injured more than 800.

Births

1572 – Ben Jonson, English dramatist whose Ode To The Belly is a hilarious poem on the joys of obesity. Find it here.

1776 – John Constable, English painter (d. 1837)

1864 – Richard Strauss, German composer and conductor (d. 1949)

1879 – Max Schreck, German actor of Nosferatu fame.

1910 – Jacques-Yves Cousteau, French explorer and inventor (d. 1997)

1933 – Gene Wilder, American actor

1959 – Hugh Laurie, English actor and comedian

Deaths

1488 – King James III of Scotland

1727 – King George I of Great Britain (b. 1660)

1796 – Samuel Whitbread, English brewer and politician (b. 1720)

1879 – Prince Willem of the Netherlands, disgraced heir apparent to the Dutch throne. Sex, drinking, gambling, incest - this story has it all.

1979 – John Wayne, American actor (b. 1907)

2001 – Timothy McVeigh, American terrorist (by execution (b. 1968)

Holidays and observances

Kamehameha Day, official state holiday of Hawaii, in honor of its first monarch, celebrated with floral parades, hula competition, and festivals

And in ancient Rome, today was the celebration of Matralia in honor of Mater Matuta, a goddess associated with the sea harbors and ports, where there were other temples to her. Her festival of Matralia, celebrated on June 11 in her temple at the Forum Boarium, was only for single women or women in their first marriage, so sort of a girls day out in the ancient world.

Don't miss Rougeclassicism for their ancient world dates in history.

And for the most interesting in links of current event import, see Larwyn's Linx at Doug Ross's Journal.

Harbingers of the Apocalypse

Look if you dare upon the new four horsewomen of the apocalypse who have been loosed upon the land. They are no mere mortals. Gluttony wears a black bikini and has the power to make us overeat at every turn. Sloth wears the green bikini, and causes us to remain motionless on couches while the mere thought of exercise is pondered only fleetingly and with abhorence. In the red bikini is Heavy Foods, whose wonderous cakes, delectible chocolates and candies overloaded with calories call ever bewitchingly to our ears. And last comes "Does My Ass Look Fat In This." She is the great deceiver who makes us lie to others and ourselves. Her siren song allows us to keep thinking that we can wait til the morrow to begin our diets and her discordant notes cause us to believe the claims of snake oil salesman who offer, for a heavy price, the latest placebo that they tell us will allow us to lose weight even as we settle in to eat the entire breakfast bar at Shoneys. Together they form the four horsewomen of the apolcalypse and their coming together is a harbinger of the end of days due to . . . . global warming? Er, yes, at least according to scientists in Britain who now count obesity as one of the primary causes of global warming.

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This from the Telegraph:

As if they didn’t already have enough problems on their hands fat people are now being blamed for global warming.

Mr Edwards and his colleague Ian Roberts argue that because thinner people eat less and are more likely to walk than rely on cars, a slimmer population would lower demand for fuel and food.

Because 20 percent of greenhouse gas stems from agriculture any reduction in food consumption would help cut emissions.

Edwards and Roberts found that obese people need 1,680 daily calories to sustain normal energy and another 1,280 calories to maintain daily activities, 18 percent more than someone with a healthy body mass index.

At least 400 million adults worldwide are obese. The World Health Organization (WHO) projects by 2015, 2.3 billion adults will be overweight and more than 700 million will be obese.

In their model, the researchers estimate 40 percent of the global population is obese, with a body mass index of 30 or over.

The normal range is usually considered to be 18 to 25, with more than 25 considered overweight and above 30 obese.

"Promotion of a normal distribution of BMI would reduce the global demand for, and thus the price of, food," Edwards and Roberts wrote in the latest edition of The Lancet. . . .

Read the entire article. I wonder how the Goracle is going to take this as he looks as if he has been filling out a lot lately. And let's not even get to Michael Moore and Rob Reiner. If this theory has any validity, than those two alone are likely responsible for the melting of the polar ice sheet.

At any rate, this turn of events marks a major departure from Britain's historically appreciative view of increasing waistlines. One imagines that the works of the great Ben Johnson's will soon fall out of favor. In anticipation of that tragedy, let's look at least one last time at Johnson's famous ode to obesity, composed near four centuries ago:

Hymn to the belly

Oom! room! make room for the bouncing Belly,
First father of sauce and deviser of jelly;
Prime master of arts and the giver of wit,
That found out the excellent engine, the spit,

The plough and the flail, the mill and the hopper,
The hutch and the boulter, the furnace and copper,
The oven, the bavin, the mawkin, the peel,
The hearth and the range, the dog and the wheel.

He, he first invented the hogshead and tun,
The gimlet and vice too, and taught 'em to run;
And since, with the funnel and hippocras bag,
He's made of himself that now he cries swag;

Which shows, though the pleasure be but of four inches,
Yet he is a weasel, the gullet that pinches
Of any delight, and not spares from his back
Whatever to make of the belly a sack.

Hail, hail, plump paunch! O the founder of taste,
For fresh meats or powdered, or pickle or paste!
Devourer of broiled, baked, roasted or sod!
And emptier of cups, be they even or odd!

All which have now made thee so wide i' the waist,
As scarce with no pudding thou art to be laced;
But eating and drinking until thou dost nod,
Thou break'st all thy girdles . . .
. . . . . and break'st forth a god.