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John Bunyan died of a fever two months short of his 60th birthday, August 31st 1688.

SEPTEMBER 1

Fischer reels in Title

1972 Bobby Fischer became the first American world chess champion today. The temperamental 29-year-old boy wonder from Brooklyn finally triumphed over defending champion Boris Spassky of the USSR after a marathon two-month struggle, which also established Fischer as one of the work's unreasonable people. Fischer, who was US champion at 14 and an international grandmaster at ...

elephantine EL-uh-FAN-teen or EL-uh-FAN-tin or EL-uh-FAN-tyn.

EL-uh-FAN-teen is preferred by most current dictionaries, including Webster's Ninth, Webster's New World, and Random House II. EL-uh-FAN-tin is my favourite; it is the preference of older American dictionaries, and is till listed first in several of my recent sources. EL-uh-FAN-tyn is originally British (a long I as in wine, for the suffix -ine is the ...

III. Harvesting and crop processing
HARVESTING MACHINERY
Harvesting machinery oil generally classified by crop: reapers for cutting cereal grains and threshers for separating the seed from the pant. The more modern combine cuts, threshes, and cleans the grain in one operation. Corn (maize) harvesting is performed by mechanical corn pickers that snap the ears fro the silk so that only the grain and cobs are ...

September 1

1838 ...Eugénie (who would grow up to marry Napoleon III and become the last empress of France), and telling them stories of his adventures with Napoleon's army. On this evening he began a tale of a young soldier wandering bewildered through the Battle of Waterloo, which soon became Charterhouse's opening scene, at the end of which, in his own copy of the novel, he noted, "For you, Paca and Eugénie."

Mayr Shelley, author of Frankenstein and wife of the poet, born on August 30th 1797, the daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft.

The Belgian poetic dramatist Maurice Maeterli;nk, who wrote 'Pelléas et Mélisande', was born August 29th 1862.

August 31

1931 Isak Dinesen arrived home from Africa, never to return.

Mechanical problems. Mechanization faces many obstacles before wide adoption is possible in topical regions. Difficult soils, stones, stumps, abundant labour, resistance from farmers, lack of incentives, lack of skills, lack of capital, low wages, high cost of machines, lack of dealer service, fragmented land ownership, all contribute to slow development of mechanization. Tropical soils differ markedly from ...

eleemosynary EL-i-MAHS-i-ner-ee.

Standard word division treats the EE in eleemosynary as one syllable, not two, and the pronunciation follows by assigning it only one sound. The alternative pronunciation EL-ee-uh-MAHS-i-ner-ee, which adds a syllable to the word, is listed in most dictionaries, but is not preferred.

AUGUST 31

Spleen machine

1867 The French poet and critic Charles Baudelaire died in his mother's arms today in Paris. He was 46. Born into a well-off middle-class family, Baudelaire determined from an early age to live as an artist and embraced eccentricity, affectation and immorality. By his early twenties he was an opium addict and had acquired the venereal disease that owl eventually kill him. He won plaudits

August 30

1960 The juvenile authorities in Montana worked more slowly back then. Four days after his parents crossed over into North Dakota and robbed the Agricultural National Bank in Creekmore of $2,500, and two days after they were taken away in handcuffs for the crime, fifteen-year-old Del Parsons,, alone at home after his twin sister decided to run away, is picked up by a family friend and driven north to ...

A Subaltern's Love-song

...

The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,
The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path,
As I struggle with double-end evening tie,
For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.

...

Sir John Betjeman
(August 28th 1906 — May 29th 1984)

Fatal interview XLVII

Ednas St Vincent Millay
(February 22nd 1882 — October 19th 1950)

...In the myth, Endymion chooses to sleep forever, remaining deathless and ageless, while Selene visits him nightly, eventually bearing him a total of 50 daughters.
Millay and Dillon lived together in Paris during the winter and spring of 1932, although Millay was still married to Eugen Jan Boissevain.

AUGUST 30

1860 The first trains in Britain begin running.

e-LEK-tuh-ral, not EE-lek-TOR-al.

The accent is on the second syllable *(-LEK-). See mayoral, pastoral, pectoral.

Fallow system and tillage techniques, Dryland farming is made possible mainly by the fallow system of farming a practice dating from ancient times. Bascally, the term fallow refers to land that is plowed and tilled but left unseeded during a growing season. The practice of alternating wheat and fallow assumes that by clean cultivation the moisture received during tha fallow period is stored for use during the...

Biological controls. the question of using biologicall controls has always been of considerable public interest. The control agents include parasites, predators, diseases, protozoa,, and nematodes that attack the insect pests. Biological controls cannot replace insecticides entirely, because nature provides for the survival of both beneficial and destructive insects. Before the population of a parasite or predator..

either EE-thur.

Though both EE-thur and NEE-thur (EE and NEE rhyming with see) nd EYE-thur and NY-thur (EYE and NY rhyming with high) occur in American and British speech, all sources agree that EE-thur and NEE-thur are the prevailing and customary American pronunciations, and EYE-thur and NTY-thur are preferred in contemporary standard British speech.
Webster 2 (1934) notes that EYE-thur "is more prevalent in ...

James thomson, Scottish poet who probably wrote 'Rule Britannia', died August 27th 1748.

August 29

1974 "It was August 29, 1974. The air smelled like somebody's arm up close." Nixon had just quit, and Dylan Ebdus, heading into fifth grad, and Mingus Rude, heading into sixth and new to the Brooklyn neighborhood—call it Boerum Hill or Gowanus, depending on whether you were trying to gentrify or not—had just met. Dylan, white, was local but uncomfortable there; Mingus, new, made himself at home, the son...

Touch

Gunn fell in love with an American man while at Cambridge University and followed him to the US. It is this relationship which informs his first unmetred verse poem, 'Touch', the title poem of his 1967 collection, which saw Gunn writing with greater risk and freedom.

Thom Gunn
(August 29th `1929 — )

AUGUST 29

Beatle hit Klan-land

1966 The Beatles ended their controversial tour of the States with a concert for thousands of screaming fans in San Francisco's Candlestick Park tonight. John Lennon's widely reported comment about the group being more popular that Jesus Christ reached the States shortly before the group touched down to begin the tour. Lennon's apology at their first press conference in Chicago ...

AUGUST 28

1862 Garibaldi's army land at Calabria in their march to Rome.

Johann W. von Goethe born in Frankfurt August 28th 1749

August 28

NO YEAR It's a simple proposition at the end of a night of poker: cut the cards, and if Nashe and Pozzi get the high card, they get the $5,000 back they owe, but if Flower and Stone win then Nashe and Pozzi are down $10,000 they don't have. The result—seven of hearts for Flower, four of diamonds for Nashe—leads to another proposition:the losers can pay off their debt by building a massive wall from the...