Judi > Recent Status Updates

APRIL 17

1961 A small force of about 1300 Cuban exiles has been thwarted in its aim of toppling the Communist regime of Fidel Castro. The invasion force ran into the Cuban army soon after landing in the Bahia de Cochins (Bay of Pigs) and it members were either captured or shot.

Sculpture. The earliest known sculpture of large size in the Sudan is that produced in terra-cotta by the Non culture, which flourished extensively in northern Nigeria from the 5th century BC into the early centuries AD figure 13). these people were the first-known manufacturers of iron in Western Africa, furnaces at Taruga having been dated between the 5th and early 3rd centuries BC; they continued, however, ...

apricot AY-pri-kaht or AP-ri-kaht.

Dictionaries preferred the long A (AY-pri-kaht) until about 1970, when they began a gradual shift over to the short A (LAP-ri-kaht), which is not generally preferred. In fact, Random House II (1987) has taken the liberty of altering the way the word has always been divided, changing it from the traditional a-pri-cot, to ap-ri-cot, probably to reflect the current pronunciation ...

From The Night

Henry Vaughan
(April 17th 1622 — Aril 23rd 1695)

Henry Vaughan termed himself a 'Silurist', a native of Brecon, the land of the ancient tribe of Silures.. His twin brother was an alchemist show interest in Hermeticism and magic Henry shared, although he himself was a country doctor.

Peace

Henry Vaughan
(c. April 17th 1622 — April 234d 1695)

...In 1647 Henry wrote a Latin poem asserting that he had not fought in the war; that "there was a voice in a brother's blood, which could cry to Heaven against the shedder of it."
Thomas Vaughan's wife, Rebecca, died on this da in 1658.

April 1

1956 On the morning of April Fool's Day Edward Abbey began his first workday as a national park ranger by stepping out of his government trailer and watching the sun rise over the canyon lands of Arches National Monument in Noah, Utah. Outfitted with trailer, truck, ranger shirt, tin badge and five hundred gallons of water, Abbey was left more or less alone for six months, which he recorded journals ...

March 31

1934 "I should like to meet the pilgrim halfway," Marianne Moore wrote to her friend Ann Borden a librarian at Vassar who had a young poetical "protégée" who wanted to meet the famous poet. And so Miss Moore came in from Brooklyn and met Elizabeth Bishop, the Vassar senior, at the New York Public Library, where Bishop overcame her nerves enough to invite Moore to the circus. Moore replied that she ...

March 30

1935 Clifton Fadiman, in the New Yorker, on William Faulkner's Pylon: "I've read it twice, once slowly and again in a burst of desperate speed, on the assumption that the first time I might not have seen the forest for the trees. It has lived me a dozen ways. Reaction analysis: one part repulsion, one part terror, one part admiration, three parts puzzlement, four parts boredom.

Style. Attempts have been made to define a "primary" style of sculpture in Africa—a style which, although in contemporary use, is thought to have survived from the earliest period of African woo sculpture. Usually this "primary" style is equated with pole sculpture (Figure 11), in which a minimum amount of wood is removed from a piece of tree trunk to convey an impression of a human figure, with facial features...

applicable AP-li-kuh-buul, not uhh-PLIK-uh-buul.

The accent should be on AP-, the first syllable. The pronunciation uh-PLIK-uh-buul, with the stress on the second syllable, ha existed for at least forty years, but no authority prefers it. See despicable, explicable, exquisite, hospitable, lamentable, summarily.

APRIL 16

1689 Death of Aphra Behn, British novelist and dramatist and early feminist.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

William Wordsworth
(April 7th 1770 — April 23rd 1850)

William's sister Dorothy described these daffodils by Ullswater in her Grasmere Journal for April 15th 1802: "We set off after dinner from Eusemere ... The wind was furious and we thought we must have returned ... The wind seized our breath, the Lake was rough ,..

March 29

1948...as a direct cause of juvenile delinquency. Wertham first made his name by setting up a free psychiatric clinic in Harlem, supported by his friends Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but, as David Hand describes in the Ten-Cent Plague, through his Senate testimony, his book Seduction of the Innocents and his influence on a new Comics Code he became best known last the source of the comiscs industry.

Tristan Tzara, French poet and founder of the Dadaist Movement, born in Moinesti, Romania, April 16th, 1896.

APRIL 15

The unsinkable does the unthinkable

1912 The British luxury liner the Titanic has sunk after hitting an iceberg during her maiden voyage to New York. Over 1500 people are feared drowned int he icy waters of the North Atlantic. The vessel collided with the "skyscraper" sized iceberg shortly before midnight on April 14, causing a 300-foot (91m) gash in the vessel's right side. Five of the ships watertight..

Tools. African wood sculptures are carved with similar tools throughout the continent. An ax may be used to fell the tree; but an adz, with its cutting edge at right angles to the shaft, is used for the substantive work of carving. The skill achieved with this tool is astonishing to the Western observer. Thin shavings can be removed with speed and accuracy, creating a surface (especially when the form is convex)..

apparatus Properly, ap-uh-RAY-tus, not ap-uh-RAT-us. See data.

Dover Beach

...

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
...

Matthew Arnold
(December 24th 1822 — April 15th 1888)

March 28

1888 "At Walt's this evening," Horace Traubel began. They had known each other for a decade, but on this day Traubel began to record his visits with Walt Whitman. The poet was sixty-eight, slowed by a stroke but still dynamic. His young Boswell was twenty-nine, a printer and poet in the spirit of his hero, whose last four years he chronicled,unprettified as Whitman requested, in the nine volumes of Walt...

William Oldys, poet and bibliographer, died April 15th 1761

APRIL 14

1814 The US repeals it trade embargo with Britain.

aphrodisiac af-roh-DIZ-ee-akk (DIZ-ee likę dizzy)

The variant pronunciation af-roh-DEE-zee-ak is now often heard, and its popularity has persuaded the editors of Random House II (1987) and Webster's Ninth 91985) to give it precedence. All of my other sources, however, give only af-roh-DIZ-ee-ak.

TYPES OF AFRICAN VISUAL ART
Decorative arts. The study of Africa art might well begins with the human body itself, for the body has served as a support for painting *especially the bodies of dancers in ceremonies accompanying passage rites marking birth, initiation into adult status, marriage, and death) and for sculpture in the forms of hairdressings and scarifications, both of which are often elaborated into ...

March 27

1964 Wilfred Sheed, in Commonweal, on Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique and Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex: "Thus it comes about that the louder Simone de Beauvoir and Mrs. Friedan shout the funnier they seem...It is quite possible that serious injustice has been done to women: yet there remains a strange aura of frivolity about the whole question."

Night Thoughts

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
(August 28th 1749 — March 22n 18932)

translated by Christopher Middleton

'Night Thioughts' ('Die Nacht') was first published in a songbook published by Bernard Breitkopf in 1796, which contained a number of Goethes early lyrics set to music. Goethe's name appeared nowhere in the book, despite this being the first time his work had been published in any form.