History of the Day: 9/20, 21

This has been an eventful weekend in history! Saturday was the 21st.

On this day in 1633, Galileo Galilei was tried before the Inquisition for teaching that the Earth orbits the Sun. This always reminds me of the Simpson's episode where Lisa discovers the skeleton of an angel. During the court case, the judge imposes a restraining order to keep Science and Religion 500 yards apart at all times. It also reminds me of the Indigo Girls song Galileo.

Happy Birthday to gasoline-powered cars which first debuted in Springfield, Ma in 1891. Isn't that where the Simpsons is set? Maybe, now that gas is $85 a gallon, we'll have a funeral for gasoline-powered cars in a couple of years.

For the ladies, today is the day that Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the 1973 battle-of-the-sexes tennis match, forever proving that men are from Mars and women are from Wimbledon. And that they can do anything better than men. Perhaps this victory had something to do with Sandra Day O'Connor being appointed the first female justice of the Supreme Court 8 years and one day later.

Today is the birthday of Upton Sinclair, muckracker and author of The Jungle (along with several gajillion other essays and books). He tried to inform his readers about the plight of workers in meat processing plants, but they were only interested in the fact that their sausages were shipped from Germany, bleached and repackaged and sold as fresh. Or, as Sinclair put it,

I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach.

Others have tried to carry on his work, some with animation. If you don't have a weak stomach, check out The Meatrix.

Happy birthday to twins Gunnar and Matthew Nelson, sons of Ricky Nelson and members of glam band Nelson. Cute. If you don't have a weak stomach, check out After the Rain.

Finally, the unfortunately named Chidiock Tichborne was executed for conspiracy to kill Queen Elizabeth in 1586. He and his fellow conspirators were disembowelled while still alive on specially erected gallows in as a warning to other would-be conspirators. However, when the Queen received reports that these gruesome executions were arousing sympathy for the conspirators, she gave orders that the remaining seven conspirators were to be allowed to hang until 'quite dead' before being disembowelled. Ain't she sweet?

Tch, tch, Tichborne was also known as a poet. In an effort to console his soon-to-be grieving widow, he composed the following poem:

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain;
The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

My tale was heard and yet it was not told,
My fruit is fallen, and yet my leaves are green,
My youth is spent and yet I am not old,
I saw the world and yet I was not seen;
My thread is cut and yet it is not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I looked for life and saw it was a shade,
I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I was but made;
My glass is full, and now my glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

Sunday was September the 21st.

Happy Benedict Arnold Day! On this day, General Arnold gave the British the plans to West Point. Sadly, he had just meant to share his egg recipe, but got confused in the exchange.

In 1827, the angel Moroni visited Joseph Smith and gave him the golden plates which Smith would later become the Book of Mormon. It's a good thing that happened then instead of 180 years later, or else Smith might have seen one of those "We Buy Gold" commercials and we would have been robbed of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

In other literary history, J.R.R. Tolkein's Hobbit was published in 1937. If you want to watch something really, really scary, here's Leonard Nimoy singing Bilbo Baggins. It answers the question, "What do you get when you cross Star Trek, The Hobbit and Stepford Wives?"

Happy 134th birthday to Gustav Holst, composer of The Planets. And to Chuck Jones, creator of Looney Toons, animator of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Phantom Tollboth, and both creator AND animator of The Dot and the Line: a Romance in Lower Mathematics. And another happy birthday to Leonard Cohen, who is 74 today. He is one of the most covered singer/songwriters of all time. I couldn't find him singing, but I did find the best cover of his Hallelujah (which you might remember from the first Shrek movie). This one is by Jeff Buckley.

Virgil, the greatest of the Roman poets, died on this day in 19 BC. Here is a particularly poignant excerpt from one of his many poems:

Facilis descensus Averni:
noctes atque dies patet atri ianua Ditis;
sed revocare gradium superasque evadere ad auras.
hoc opus, hic labor est.

It is easy to go down into Hell;
Night and day, the gates of dark Death stand wide;
But to climb back again, to retrace one's steps to the upper air -
There's the rub, the task.

Finally, today is the day Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce died in 1904 and, coincidentally, International Peace Day. Also known as Hinmuuttu-yalatlat (Thunder Rolling Down the Mountain), Joseph tried to keep the peace with the U.S. government after yet another treaty was broken. Some of the young men killed four white men in an attempt to start a war. Joseph, knowing what was coming, began to retreat to the safety of Canada. But the U.S. military pursued him all the way there. Joseph brilliantly outmaneuvered the U.S. troops until, 40 miles from his goal, he had to surrender. He said:

Tell General Howard I know his heart. What he told me before, I have it in my heart. I am tired of fighting. Our chiefs are killed; Looking Glass is dead, Too-hul-hul-sote is dead. The old men are all dead. It is the young men who say yes or no. He who led on the young men is dead. It is cold, and we have no blankets; the little children are freezing to death. My people, some of them, have run away to the hills, and have no blankets, no food. No one knows where they are—perhaps freezing to death. I want to have time to look for my children, and see how many of them I can find. Maybe I shall find them among the dead. Hear me, my chiefs! I am tired; my heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.

And he didn't. For thirty years more, he plead for his people and spoke against the injustice of U.S. policy towards them. Finally, in 1904, he died, the doctor said, "...of a broken heart." Fred Small wrote a song about him called The Heart of the Appaloosa.

It does not require many words to speak the truth.
- Chief Joseph