August 26 in history

On August 26:

1071  Battle of Manzikert: The Seljuk Turks defeat the Byzantine Army at Manzikert.

 

1278 Ladislaus IV of Hungary and Rudolph I of Germany defeated Premysl Ottokar II of Bohemia in the Battle of Marchfield near Dürnkrut in (then) Moravia.

1346  Hundred Years’ War: the military supremacy of the English longbow over the French combination of crossbow and armoured knights was established at the Battle of Crécy.

1498  Michelangelo was commissioned to carve the Pietà.

1676 Robert Walpole, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, was born (d. 1745).

1768 The HM Bark Endeavour expedition under Captain James Cook set sail from England.

1778 The first recorded ascent of Triglav, the highest mountain in Slovenia.

1789  Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen approved by National Assembly at Palace of Versailles.

1819 Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, Prince Consort of the United Kingdom, was born (d. 1861).

1858First news dispatch by telegraph.

1862 American Civil War: the Second Battle of Bull Run began.

1865 Arthur James Arnot, Scottish inventor, was born (d. 1946).

1875 John Buchan, 1st Baron Tweedsmuir, Scottish novelist, Governor General of Canada, was born (d. 1940).

1883 The 1883 eruption of Krakatoa began its final, paroxysmal, stage.

 

1894 The second Maori King, Tukaroto Matutaera Potatau Te Wherowhero Tawhiao, died.

1898 Peggy Guggenheim, American art collector, was born (d. 1979).

 

1904 Christopher Isherwood, English-born writer, was born (d. 1986).

1906 Albert Sabin, American polio researcher, was born (d. 1993).

1910 Mother Teresa, Nobel Peace Prize winning Christian missionary, was born (d. 1997).

 

1914  World War I: the German colony of Togoland was invaded by French and British forces.

1920  The 19th amendment to United States Constitution took effect, giving women the right to vote.

1940 Chad was the first French colony to join the Allies under the administration of Félix Éboué, France’s first black colonial governor.

 

1942  Holocaust in Chortkiv, western Ukraine: At 2.30 am the German Schutzpolizei started driving Jews out of their houses, divided them into groups of 120, packed them in freight cars and deported 2000 to Belzec death camp; 500 of the sick and children weremurdered on the spot.

1944 World War II: Charles de Gaulle entered Paris.

1957 The USSR announced the successful test of an ICBM – a “super long distance intercontinental multistage ballistic rocket … a few days ago,” according to the Soviet news agency, ITAR-TASS.

1970  The then new feminist movement, led by Betty Friedan, led a nation-wide Women’s Strike for Equality.

1977  The Charter of the French Language was adopted by the National Assembly of Quebec

1978   Pope John Paul I was elected to the Papacy.

 

1978 – Sigmund Jähn became first German cosmonaut on board of the Soyuz 31 spacecraft.

1980  Macaulay Culkin, American actor, was born.

1982 David Long, New Zealand musician, was born.

1992 Václav Klaus and Vladimír Mečiar signed agreement of split of Czechoslovakia in Brno.

1997  Beni-Ali massacre in Algeria; 60-100 people killed.

Sourced from NZ History Online & WIkipedia

A start to closing NZ-Aust wage gap

New Zealanders’ after-tax average earnings have increased faster than those in Australia in the last couple of years.

Finance Minister Bill English said that was because Australia has had higher inflation and smaller tax cuts than we’ve had on this side of the Tasman.

“As a result, the wage gap between the two countries has actually narrowed slightly.

“We are not getting too excited about that, because we are such a long way behind Australia to begin with. But it’s a good start.”

It’s also a welcome reversal from the widening gap which happened under Labour.

Since September 2008, real after-tax wages in New Zealand have increased by 8.7 per cent. Using a comparable series, Australia’s real after-tax wages have increased by 4.8 per cent in the same period.

“By comparison, New Zealand wage growth significantly lagged Australia’s in the nine years to September 2008. Over that entire period, New Zealand’s real after tax wage growth was a paltry 3 per cent, compared with 19 per cent growth in Australia.

“Put another way, when Labour was in office, real after tax wages in Australia increased over six times faster than wages in New Zealand. No wonder the wage gap blew out under Labour’s watch.”

 The outcome of the Australian election will influence the gap – if Labor wins taxes are likely to increase more or decrease more slowly.

However, for the good of both countries we need the gap to continue to close because of progress in New Zealand not regression in Australia.

That means more policies which promote economic growth and continued reversal of the tax and spend policies which put us into recession long before the rest of the world.

Word of the day

Gadzookery – the use of archaic words or expressions.

Just wondering . . .

Shouldn’t the UK be the UQ at the moment?

12/15

12/15 in this week’s Dominion Post politics quiz.

Save whose farms from what?

A group of Aucklanders wants to Save The Farms .

Not from pests and diseases, high rates bills, compliance costs and a myriad of other real threats. They want to save us from the perceived threat of foreign ownership.

Rather than saving our farms, StF is threatening them.

It is an incorporated society whose purpose is to:

• Maintain ownership by New Zealand citizens of all agricultural and sensitive land and land of cultural importance.
• To gain an immediate Moratorium on the sale of this land to foreign investors.
• To promote and stimulate informed public debate around these objectives in a non political and partisan manner.
• To promote a revision of the Overseas Investment Act 2005.

To this end they want the government:

•  to put a moratorium on the sale of the Crafar farms and other sensitive agricultural land.
•  to give urgency to the proposed review of the Overseas Investment Act 2005 incorporating a robust programme for public submission as announced by the Prime Minister.
• The moratorium on the sale of sensitive agricultural land remains until the review of the Act has been completed.

This is a direct attack on property rights and farm values.

What do they mean by “our” farms anyway?  The only farms which might be considered “ours”  are those owned by Landcorp.

The rest aren’t “ours”. They are the property of the many individuals, trusts, companies and other bodies who have purchased the land.

Excluding foreign buyers would have an immediate and negative impact on the price of farmland. Other would-be purchasers might enjoy that but would-be sellers and the hundreds of other land owners whose farms’ values would plummet, and their creditors, would not.

What makes farms special or different from commercial or residential property, businesses and companies that all foreigners should be prevented from buying it?

Around 80% of our forestry is foreign-owned as are many other companies operating here including several vineyards and wineries and hotel chains. A Chinese company has a big stake in PGG Wrightson which gives them access to PGW’s intellectual property in seed development.

Most of our banks are foreign owned and their policies and operations impact on the day to day life of New Zealanders directly in a way that farms do not.

The Overseas Investment Act  already requires vetting of would-be purchasers of more than 5 hectares of non-urban land.

Regardless of who the owners are they can’t take the land with them and are subject to the same laws and regulations governing what they can do with it as everyone else.

Bernard Hickey says SOF’s is a myopic, xenophobic campiagn which needs debating.

I agree with his adjectives and think a discussion on the facts would be helpful. It could start with a KPMG report which found:

There is no evidence that New Zealand is experiencing an unusually high level of foreign investment in agricultural assets.

No justification for significant changes to the overseas investment rules . . .

KPMG’s Head of Agribusiness, Ian Proudfoot says: 

“As a small, developed economy New Zealand has always required inbound investment to support the standards of living we are now accustomed to, and this holds true even in the current environment. The agricultural sector in particular lacks sufficient equity to take advantage of the opportunities available to it and foreign investment offers the potential for us to maximise the value of our land. Events of the last year have demonstrated we are not always able or prepared to finance these opportunities from our own resources.

 “The high price of quality agricultural land in New Zealand and our remoteness to the rest of world means that even with the natural benefits of water and the link product has to New Zealand’s sustainable brand we are unlikely to be top of the list of preferred destinations for most international land investors currently looking for opportunities,” says Mr Proudfoot.

In other words there is no need for SoF’s campaign because in spite of perceptions to the contrary, New Zealand farmland isn’t particularly attractive to foreign investors.

Given that and our need for capital, those who want to come here should not be discouraged without good reason and not being citizens is not by itself a good reason.

 It is better for farming and New Zealand to allow, or not, sales of farm land to foreigners on a case by case basis than to cut off the investment and ideas which can mean foreign owners give far more to New Zealand than they take.

The threat of foreign ownership is a perception, the threat to farms and their owners from a blanket ban on foreign ownership is real.

August 25 in history

On August 26:

1248 The Dutch city of Ommen received city rights and fortification rights from Otto III, the Archbishop of Utrecht.

1530 Tsar Ivan IV of Russia - Ivan the Terrible – was born (d. 1584)

1537 The Honourable Artillery Company, the oldest surviving regiment in the British Army and the second most senior, was formed.

1580  Battle of Alcântara. Spain defeated Portugal.

1609  Galileo Galilei demonstrated his first telescope to Venetian lawmakers.

 

1724 George Stubbs, British painter, was born (d. 1806).

 

1758 Seven Years’ War: Frederick II of Prussia defeated the Russian army at the Battle of Zorndorf.

1768 James Cook began his first voyage.

 

1825 Uruguay declared its independence from Brazil.

1830 The Belgian Revolution began.

1835  The New York Sun perpetrated the Great Moon Hoax.

 

1894  Shibasaburo Kitasato discoversedthe infectious agent of the bubonic plague and published his findings in The Lancet.

1898  700 Greeks and 15 Englishmen are killed by the Turks in Heraklion, Greece.

1900 Hans Adolf Krebs, German physician and biochemist; Nobel Prize laureate, was born (d. 1981).

1910  Yellow Cab was founded.

 

1912 The Kuomintang, the Chinese nationalist party, was founded.

1916 The United States National Park Service is created.

1918 Leonard Bernstein, American conductor and composer, was born (d. 1990).

 

1920 Polish-Soviet War: Battle of Warsaw,  ended.

1921  The first skirmishes of the Battle of Blair Mountain.

1930 Sean Connery, Scottish actor, was born.

1930 Bruce Allpress, New Zealand actor, was born.

1933 The Diexi earthquake struck Mao County, Sichuan, China and killed 9,000 people.

1938 Frederick Forsyth, English author, was born.

1942 World War II: Battle of Milne Bay, Papua New Guinea.

1944 Paris was liberated by the Allies.

 

1945  Supporters of the Communist Party of China killed Baptist missionary John Birch, regarded by some of the American right as the first victim of the Cold War.

1946 Charles Ghigna (Father Goose), American poet and children’s author, was born.

1948 Three people died and 80 injured when a tornado hit Frankton on the outskirts of Hamilton.

1948 – The House Un-American Activities Committee held its first-ever televised congressional hearing: “Confrontation Day” between Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss.

1949 Martin Amis, English novelist, was born.

1949  Gene Simmons, Israeli-born musician (Kiss), was born.

1950  President Harry Truman ordered the US Army to seize control of the nation’s railroads to avert a strike.

1954 Elvis Costello, English musician, was born.

1961 Billy Ray Cyrus, American singer and actor, was born.

1970 Claudia Schiffer, German model, was born.

 

198  Tadeusz Mazowiecki iwa chosen as the first non-communist Prime Minister in Central and Eastern Europe.

1989  Voyager 2 spacecraft made its closest approach to Neptune, the outermost planet in the Solar System.

1989  Mayumi Moriyama became Japan’s first female cabinet secretary.

1991  Belarus declared its independence from the Soviet Union.

1991 – The Battle of Vukovar began.

1997  Egon Krenz, the former East German leader, was convicted of a shoot-to-kill policy at the Berlin Wall.

2003  The Tli Cho land claims agreement was signed between the Dogrib First Nations and the Canadian federal government in Rae-Edzo (now called Behchoko).

 

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Word of the day

Obambulate – to wander about.

Tuesday’s answers

Monday’s questions were:

1. What are cucurbits?

2.What is raddle?

3. What does a rachiometer measure?

4. What denotes a raglan sleeve?

5. Who said:”A majority is always better than the best repartee.”?

Bearhunter wins the electronic boquet with four right and a bonus for the Scottish accent.

David got two.

Dragonfly got one – I hadn’t known about that use for raddle.

PDM got one right, a half for the knitting and a bonus for wit.

Adam got three right and while his answer for 2 doesn’t match mine I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt on that too.

Tuesday’s answers follow the break:

Can’t legislate for a culture change

Simon Power’s announcement of  proposed changes to liquor laws has attracted a mixed and predictable response.

Some say they haven’t gone far enough while others resent the curbs on freedom.

Kiwiblog has a good summary of the proposals and reaction to them.

It will be an offence for anyone other than a parent or guardian to provide alcohol to an under-18-year-old without a parent’s or guardian’s consent.

 This should help address some of the problems of youth drinking but John Key got to the nub of the problem when he said:

“The law will certainly help give parents some form of protection in terms of what they do [but] it also demands of them that they apply responsibility as a responsible host.”

. . .  Key said it was ultimately up to parents to demonstrate that they did not want a binge-drinking culture.

“In the end we cannot legislate away New Zealand’s drinking culture,” he said.

Legislation won’t change the culture, only people can do that and it’s not only young people who have an immature attitude to alcohol.

Youth drinking is a problem but alcohol abuse doesn’t always stop when people grow up.

I quoted Theodore Dalrymple on this a few days ago. It bears repeating:

. . .  even if the right legislation were enough by itself to reduce public drunkenness to a level at which it was no longer a social problem it would be a very sad day when we looked only to the Government to make us behave decently, either by means of taxing or prohibiting our loss of self-control.

In the second half of the 19th century drunkenness declined dramatically, not because the government repressed it but because there was a public revulsion against it.

Habitual drunkenness came popularly to be seen as despicable: a man who drank to excess all the time was a bad worker, bad father, bad husband and bad citizen. In our own times we have experienced precisely the  opposite: namely a revulsion against sobriety. In my work as a doctor I used to speak to young people who as often as possible drank to the point of not remembering what they had done or what had  happened to them the night before.

I asked them why they did it, to which they replied that they had to express  themselves, that it would be bad for their health not to. It never occurred to them that the need not to make a public nuisance of themselves trumped any need they might personally have to express themselves, even if we allowed that dead-drunkenness is a form of self-expression.

A nation without sufficient self-respect to control itself  will in the end lose its freedom. Self-control will be replaced by government control. We are already far enough down that road.

Legislation won’t change the culture that finds drunkenness normal, acceptable and even amusing.

Until and unless drunkenness and the problems which result from it are regarded as abnormal,  unacceptable and abhorrent we’ll have more government control.

 That  is a poor substitute for self-control and will largely be addressing symptoms rather than causes.

Computer stolen, trust lost

One of our staff left her home in the middle of the afternoon to feed calves.

When she returned a couple of hours later her computer was gone.

The house is up a long drive, well off the road which makes it very unlikely a casual passer-by might have wandered into the property on the off-chance no-one was home.

It’s much more likely it was someone who lives nearby who knows the habits of the occupants.

Insurance will pay for the replacement computer, it won’t replace the photos, email addresses and other information on it. Nor will it replace the trust in neighbours which has been lost.

Rivertstone Kitchen officially the best

The judges of the Cuisine Restaurant of the Year awards have given official confirmation to what North Otago people, and anyone from further afield who’ve been lucky enough to dine there already knew - Riverstone Kitchen is the best.

It was the competition’s supreme winner and also topped the casual dining section.

This is well deserved recognition for Bevan and Monique Smith who produce deliciously simple meals using locally produced ingredients, including fruit and vegetables from their own garden, where at all possible.

Riverstone Kitchen is on Bevan’s family’s farm about 12 kilometres north of Oamaru on State Highway 1. His mother Dot has an amazing gift shop beside it which adds to the fun for day-time diners.

We’ve eaten at Riverstone several times. Every meal from a casual lunch with small children to a wedding breakfast has been superb and the friendly, efficient service matches the food.

Bevan, Monique and their staff provide a wonderful experience for diners. They have also shown locals and people from further afield that it is possible to operate a top quality, successful business in the country.

A TV3 news story on the restaurant is here and a Campbell live interview with Bevan and Monique is here.

The ODT story on the win is here.

August 24 in history

On August 24:

79   Mount Vesuvius erupted. The cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Stabiae were buried in volcanic ash.

 

1198 King Alexander II of Scotland, was born (d. 1249).

1200  King John of England married Isabella of Angouleme in Bordeaux Cathedral.

 

1215  Pope Innocent III declared Magna Carta invalid.

1349 Six thousand Jews were killed in Mainz  after being blamed for the bubonic plague.

1391  Jews  massacred in Palma de Mallorca.

1456  The printing of the Gutenberg Bible was completed.

1511 Afonso de Albuquerque of Portugal conquered Malacca, the capital of the Sultanate of Malacca.

 

1561 Willem of Orange married duchess Anna of Saxony.

1591 Robert Herrick, English poet, was born  (d. 1674).

 

1662 Act of Uniformity required England to accept the Book of Common Prayer.

 

1759 William Wilberforce, English abolitionist, was born (d. 1833).

1814  British troops invade Washington, D.C. and burned down the White House and several other buildings.

1815 The modern Constitution of the Netherlands was signed.

1821 The Treaty of Córdoba is signed Mexico, concluding the Mexican War of Independence.

 

1857  The Panic of 1857 began.

 

1870  The Wolseley Expedition reaches Manitoba to end the Red River Rebellion.

1875 Captain Matthew Webb became the first person to swim English Channel.

 

1878  The Governor, the Marquess of Normanby, formally opened Wellington’s steam tram service, which was reportedly the first to operate in the Southern Hemisphere.

1891  Thomas Edison patented the motion picture camera.

1898 – Count Muravyov, Foreign Minister of Russia presented a rescript that convoked the First Hague Peace Conference.

1899  Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine writer, was born (d. 1986).

1924 Jimmy Gardner , British actor, was born (d. 2010).

1927 David Ireland, Australian author, was born.

1929 Yasser Arafat, Palestinian leader, was born (d. 2004).

1929  Betty Dodson, American feminist and sex educator, was born.

1931 – Resignation of the United Kingdom’s Second Labour Government. Formation of the UK National Government.

  

1932 Amelia Earhart was the first woman to fly across the United States non-stop (from Los Angeles to Newark, New Jersey).

 

1936 A. S. Byatt, English novelist, was born.

1936  The Australian Antarctic Territory was created.

1937  In the Spanish Civil War, the Basque Army surrendered to the Italian Corpo Truppe Volontarie following the Santoña Agreement.

1938  – David Freiberg, American bassist (Quicksilver Messenger Service and Jefferson Starship), was born.

1942 : The Battle of the Eastern Solomons. Japanese aircraft carrier Ryūjō was sunk and US carrier Enterprise heavily damaged.

1945  Ken Hensley, English musician (Uriah Heep), was born.

1949  The treaty creating NATO went into effect.

1950  Edith Sampson became the first black U.S. delegate to the UN.

  

1954  The Communist Control Act went into effect. The American Communist Party was outlawed.

1954 Getúlio Dornelles Vargas, president of Brazil, committed suicide and was succeeded by João Café Filho.

1960  A temperature of −88°C (−127°F) was measured in Vostok, Antarctica — a world-record low.

1963  The 200-metre freestyle was swum in less than 2 minutes for the first time by Don Schollander (1:58).

1967  Aa group of hippies led by Abbie Hoffman temporarily disrupted trading at the NYSE by throwing dollar bills from the viewing gallery, causing a cease in trading as the brokers scramble to grab them up.

1968  France exploded its first hydrogen bomb, thus becoming the world’s fifth nuclear power.

1991 Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as head of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

1991  Ukraine declared itself independent from the Soviet Union.

1992 – Hurricane Andrew hit South Florida as a Category 5 Hurricane.

 

1995 Computer software developer Microsoft released their Windows 95 operating system.

1998 – First RFID human implantation tested in the United Kingdom.

2000  Argon fluorohydride, the first Argon compound ever known, was discovered at the University of Helsinki by Finnish scientists.

2001 – Air Transat Flight 236 runs out of fuel over the Atlantic Ocean and made an emergency landing in the Azores.

2004  89 passengers died when two airliners exploded after flying out of Domodedovo International Airport. The explosions were caused by suicide bombers.

2006 – The International Astronomical Union (IAU) redefines the term “planet” so that Pluto is considered a Dwarf Planet.

 

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Word of the day

Jellygraph – Wikipedia says it’s also know as a hectograph or gelatin duplicator -  a printing process which involves transfer of an original, prepared with special inks, to a pan of gelatin or a gelatin pad pulled tight on a metal frame.

Monday’s quiz

1. What are cucurbits?

2.What is raddle?

3. What does a rachiometer measure?

4. What is a raglan sleeve?

5. Who said:”A majority is always better than the best repartee.”?

Shocking stories

A few weeks ago Jamie Mackay was running a competition on The Farming Show for the most shocking electric fence story.

The winner’s tale involved a barbed wire fence with an electric outrigger and even though I’m not a bloke it made me wince.

My electric fence story isn’t much of a shocker in comparison to that.

We were mustering goats – the where and why is a long story.

In the shorter version we weren’t having much success because the electric fences weren’t stock proof.

After too much of this I wondered aloud if the fence was working properly.

The farm manager said, “Why don’t you touch it and see?”

I approached the fence cautiously, jabbed a wire with one finger and pulled it back without feeling anything. I tried it again with the same result. I got braver, put my palm on the wire, then closed my fist round it, still nothing.

“Try it again with one hand on the ground,” the manager said.

Muggins did – and got painful proof the electric fence was working properly.

The manager had noticed what I’d forgotten - I was wearing tramping boots with thick, rubber soles. They’d insulated me when I first touched the fence but as soon as my hand touched the ground the fence was earthed and I was well and truly zapped.

Local body election race gets dirty

One of the good things about local body elections in smaller districts is that they are usually devoid of personal attacks.

Not so this time.

Someone’s been throwing dirt at Waitaki mayoral aspirant, and sitting deputy mayor, Gary Kircher.

The culprit/s are making the accusations anonmymously which makes it worse.

Four people are seeking the mayoralty but I think it will be a two-horse race between Gary and the sitting mayor, Alec Familton.

I’ve been spectacularly unsuccessful at picking local body results in recent years so am not going to predict the outcome.

The ODT lists all nominees from Waitaki to Invercargill here. 

None of the contests is likely to be as entertaining as the one in Albany where Cameron Slater, AKA Whaleoil, is running.

August 23 in history

On August 23:

79  Mount Vesuvius began stirring, on the feast day of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire.

1305  William Wallace, Scottish patriot, was executed for high treason.

1328  Battle of Cassel: French troops stopped an uprising of Flemish farmers.

1514  Battle of Chaldiran ended with a decisive victory for the Sultan Selim I, Ottoman Empire, over the Shah Ismail I, Safavids founder.

 

1555  Calvinists were granted rights in the Netherlands.

1572   St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre - Mob violence against Huguenots in Paris.

 

1595  Michael the Brave confronted the Ottoman army in the Battle of Calugareni.

1708  Meidingnu Pamheiba was crowned King of Manipur.

1775 King George III declared that the American colonies existed in a state of open and avowed rebellion.

1793 French Revolution: a levée en masse was decreed by the National Convention.

1799  Napoleon left Egypt for France en route to seize power.

1813  Battle of Grossbeeren, the Prussians under Von Bülow repulsed the French army.

1839  The United Kingdom captured Hong Kong as a base as it prepared for war with Qing China.

1858  The Round Oak rail accident in Brierley Hill, England.

1866  Austro-Prussian War ended with the Treaty of Prague.

1873  Albert Bridge in Chelsea, London opened.

1875 William Eccles, English radio pioneer, was born (d. 1966).

1896 First Cry of the Philippine Revolution was made in Pugad Lawin (Quezon City), in the province of Manila.

1900 Malvina Reynolds, American folk singer/songwriter, was born (d. 1978).

 

1904 The automobile tyre chain was patented.

1912 Gene Kelly, American dancer and actor, was born (d. 1996).

1914 World War I: Japan declared war on Germany and bombed Qingdao, China.

1914 – World War I: the Battle of Mons; the British Army began withdrawal.

 

1921  British airship R-38 experienced structural failure over Hull in England and crashed in the Humber estuary.  Only 4 of her 49 British and American training crew survived.

 

1923  Capt. Lowell Smith and Lt. John P. Richter performed the first mid-air refueling on De Havilland DH-4B, setting an endurance flight record of 37 hours.

1929  Hebron Massacre during the 1929 Palestine riots: Arab attack on the Jewish community in Hebron in the British Mandate of Palestine, continuing until the next day, resulted in the death of 65-68 Jews and the remaining Jews being forced to leave the city.

 

1934 Barbara Eden, American actress and singer, was born.

1938 English cricketer Sir Len Hutton set a world record for the highest individual Test innings of 364, during a Test match against Australia.

 

1939 New Zealand writer Robin Hyde died in London.

1939  World War II: Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression treaty, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. In a secret addition to the pact, the Baltic states, Finland, Romania, and Poland were divided between the two nations.

1942  Beginning of the Battle of Stalingrad.

1942  The last cavalry charge in history took place at Izbushensky.

1943 Nelson DeMille, American novelist, was born.

1943   Kharkov was liberated.

1944   Marseille was liberated.

1944   King Michael of Romania dismissed the pro-Nazi government of General Antonescu, who was arrested. Romania switched sides from the Axis to the Allies.

1944  Freckleton Air Disaster – A United States Army Air Forces B-24 Liberator bomber crashed into a school in Freckleton, England killing 61 people.

1946 Keith Moon, English musician (The Who), was born (d. 1978).

1946  Ordinance No. 46 of the British Military Government constitutes the German Land (state) of Schleswig-Holstein.

1947 Assisted immigration to New Zealand for British people resumed after WWII.

1947 – Willy Russell, British playwright, was born.

1948  World Council of Churches was formed.

1949 Rick Springfield, Australian singer and actor, was born.

1951 Queen Noor of Jordan, was born.

1954 First flight of the C-130 Hercules transport aircraft.

 

1958  Chinese Civil War: The Second Taiwan Strait crisis began with the People’s Liberation Army’s bombardment of Quemoy.

1966  Lunar Orbiter 1 took the first photograph of Earth from orbit around the Moon.

1975 Successful Communist coup in Laos.

1977  The Gossamer Condor won the Kremer prize for human powered flight.

1979  Soviet dancer Alexander Godunov defected to the United States.

1982 Bachir Gemayel was elected Lebanese President amidst the raging civil war.

1985  Hans Tiedge, top counter-spy of West Germany, defected to East Germany.

1989  Hungary: the last communist government opened the Iron curtain and caused the exodus of thousands of Eastern Germans to West Germany via Hungary.

1989  Singing Revolution: two million people from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania stoodon the Vilnius-Tallinn road, holding hands (Baltic Way).

 

1989 – 1,645 Australian domestic airline pilots resign after the airlines threaten to fire them and sue them over a dispute.

1990  Saddam Hussein appeared on Iraqi state television with a number of Western “guests” ( hostages) to try to prevent the Gulf War.

1990  Armenia declared its independence from the Soviet Union.

1990  West and East Germany announced that they would unite on October 3.

1994  Eugene Bullard, The only black pilot in World War I, was posthumously commissioned as Second Lieutenant in the United States Air Force.

1996 Osama bin Laden issued message entitled ‘A declaration of war against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy places.’

2000  Gulf Air Flight 072 crashed into the Persian Gulf near Manama, Bahrain, killing 143.

2006 – Natascha Kampusch, who was abducted at the age of 10, managed to escape from her captor Wolfgang Priklopil, after 8 years of captivity.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Wise-cracking vs wit

Dorothy Parker, mistress of the witty and often acerbic comment, was born 107 years ago today.

It was she who said: There’s a hell of a distance between wise-cracking and wit. Wit has truth in it; wise -cracking is simply calisthenics with words.

There are more quotes here.

 

 

Word of the day

Jaunce – to prounce or cause a horse to prounce.