September 22 in history

On September 21:

66  Emperor Nero created the Legion I Italica.

1236 The Lithuanians and Semigallians defeated the Livonian Brothers of the Sword in the Battle of Saule.

1499 Treaty of Basel: Switzerland became an independent state.

1515 Anne of Cleves, wife of Henry VIII, was born (d. 1557).

1586  Battle of Zutphen: Spanish victory over English and Dutch.

1598 Ben Jonson was indicted for manslaughter.

1692 Last people hanged for witchcraft in the United States.

 

1761  George III and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz were crowned King and Queen of the Great Britain.

  

1784  Russia established a colony at Kodiak, Alaska.

1789 Battle of Rymnik established Alexander Suvorov as a pre-eminent Russian military commander after his allied army defeat superior Ottoman Empire forces.

1862  Slavery in the United States: a preliminary version of the Emancipation Proclamation was released.

1866 Battle of Curupaity in the War of the Triple Alliance.

1869 Richard Wagner’s opera Das Rheingold premiered in Munich.

 

1880 Dame Christabel Pankhurst, English suffragist, was born (d. 1958).

 

1885 Ben Chifley, Prime Minister of Australia, was born (d. 1951).

1885  Lord Randolph Churchill made a speech in Ulster in opposition to Home Rule e.g. “Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right”.

1888 The first issue of National Geographic Magazine was published.

1893  The first American-made car, built by the Duryea Brothers, was displayed.

1896  Queen Victoria surpassed her grandfather King George III as the longest reigning monarch in British history.

1906 At a meeting held in Wellington, Marianne Tasker attempted to establish a domestic workers’ union. Central to their demands was the call for a 68-hour working week.

1908 The independence of Bulgaria was proclaimed.

 

1910  The Duke of York’s Picture House opened in Brighton, now the oldest continually operating cinema in Britain.

 

1915 Arthur Lowe, British actor, was born (d. 1982).

1919 The steel strike of 1919, led by the Amalgamated Association of Iron and Steel Workers, began in Pennsylvania.

1924 Rosamunde Pilcher, English novelist, was born.

1927 Jack Dempsey lost the “Long Count” boxing match to Gene Tunney.

1934  An explosion at Gresford Colliery in Wales, lead to the deaths of 266 miners and rescuers.

 

1937  Spanish Civil War: Peña Blanca was taken; the end of the Battle of El Mazuco.

1939  Joint victory parade of Wehrmacht and Red Army in Brest-Litovsk at the end of the Invasion of Poland.

1941  World War II: On Jewish New Year Day, the German SS murdered 6,000 Jews in Vinnytsya, Ukraine.

1951  The first live sporting event seen coast-to-coast in the United States, a college football game between Duke and the University of Pittsburgh, was televised on NBC.

1955 The British television channel ITV went live for the first time.

1958 Andrea Bocelli, Italian tenor, was born.

1960 The Sudanese Republic was renamed Mali after the withdrawal of Senegal from the Mali Federation.

1965 The Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 (also known as the Second Kashmir War) ended after the UN called for a cease-fire.

1970  Tunku Abdul Rahman resigned as Prime Minister of Malaysia.

1971 Princess Märtha Louise of Norway, was born.

1975 Sara Jane Moore tried to assassinate U.S. President Gerald Ford, but was foiled by Oliver Sipple.

1979 The Vela Incident (also known as the South Atlantic Flash) was observed near Bouvet Island, thought to be a nuclear weapons test.

 

1980  Iraq invaded Iran.

 

1985 The Plaza Accord was signed in New York City.

 

1991 The Dead Sea Scrolls were made available to the public for the first time by the Huntington Library.

 

1993 A barge struck a railroad bridge near Mobile, Alabama, causing the deadliest train wreck in Amtrak history. 47 passengers were killed.

1993  A Transair Georgian Airlines Tu-154 was shot down by a missile in Sukhumi, Georgia.

1995 An E-3B AWACS crashed outside Elmendorf Air Force Base, Alaska after multiple bird strikes to two of the four engines soon after takeoff; all 24 on board were killed.

1995 Nagerkovil school bombing, carried out by Sri Lankan Air Force in which at least 34 died, most of them ethnic Tamil school children.

2003  David Hempleman-Adams became the first person to cross the Atlantic Ocean in an open-air, wicker-basket hot air balloon.

2006  The F-14 Tomcat was retired from the United States Navy.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Word of the day

Mizzle – to rain in fine, mist-like drops.

Critical Mass on words

Words and phrases occupied my discussion with Jim Mora on Critical Mass today.

Douglas Coupland has written a Dictionary of the Near Future  which names some of the sensations we may not yet be aware we’re feeling.

Among them are:

AIRPORT-INDUCED IDENTITY DYSPHORIA Describes the extent to which modern travel strips the traveller of just enough sense of identity so as to create a need to purchase stickers and gift knick-knacks that bolster their sense of slightly eroded personhood: flags of the world, family crests, school and university merchandise.

DENARRATION The process whereby one’s life stops feeling like a story.

and

KARAOKEAL AMNESIA Most people don’t know the complete lyrics to almost any song, particularly the ones they hold most dear.

which may be related to:

LYRICAL PUTTY The lyrics one creates in one’s head in the absence of knowing a song’s real lyrics.

 From words of the near future to those which are no longer widely used: At the Phrontistery you’ll find the International House of Logorrhea - a free online dictionary of unusual words to enhance your vocabulary. It’s the work of Forthright who has, since 1996, been compiling word lists in order to spread the joy of the English language.

Forthright’s has criteria for favourite words:

1. it has to be pretty rare (less than five occurrences per 1 million words of text);
2. it should be very euphonious (it has to sound good);
3. it should be of use in a modern context, if not necessarily usable on a daily basis;
4. it should not have a simple one-word synonym;
5. it should not be so long and complex to be useless in conversation.

Among those is:

Aegrotat ee’gro-tat, n (Latin aegrotat, he or she is sick, 3rd person singular of aegrotare, from aeger, sick)

A medical certificate of illness excusing student’s sickness. Rarely used today except in Britain, and then only in the context of degrees and courses considered as passed by a student too ill to finish the appropriate material. Aegrotat is the only surviving remnant of the Latin verb aegrotare.

Farrago fe-rah’go, n (Latin farrago, mixed fodder, from far, grain)

       A confused mass of objects or people; any disordered mixture. This is an excellent term to describe the chaos evident in a crowd, jumble sale, or any drawer in my home. It’s not just a mess, but adds the extra context of confusion and clutter.

That is a perfect description for my desk.

Galimatias gal-i-may’shi-us, n (French, gibberish)

 Nonsense; a confused mixture of unrelated things. This very cordial-sounding word is extraordinarily useful in contexts where one wishes to inform someone that their ideas are bafflingly ridiculous and incoherent without seeming overly impolite. It combines the senses of ‘incoherent’ and ‘ridiculous’ into a unique and useful term.

Then Esquire has come up with a euphemism generator.

It instructs you to take an action verb and add an animal, plant or job title.

The example it gives is soaking the seamstress. I have no idea what that means but it did remind me of a favourite phrase of a former flatmate – fondling armadillos – which was used to describe time wasting, presumably because the armadillo’s hard shell would prevent it from feeling the fondling.

Heartbreak in the paddocks

Lambing is one of the most rewarding times in the sheep farmers’ calendar but it can also be one of the most heartbreaking.

Losing thousands of lambs has a high financial cost. It also has an emotional one.

Trying to help lambs and ewes in bad weather is hard physical work and it’s heartbreaking when in spite of your best efforts stock die.

On Nine to Noon this morning Lyn Freeman spoke about the trials  to Southland farmers David Rose, Federated Farmers Adverse Events spokesperson and Don Nicolson, Feds president.

One of the questions she asked was whether it would be better to lamb at another time. David gave a similar answer to one I wrote on yesterday’s post about the snow – you can get bad weather at any time and lambing has to be timed to meet the feed cycle.

Every time there’s a bad storm during lambing people who don’t understand farming ask why farmers don’t do more to protect their stock.

The simple answer is they do all they can but in really bad weather that’s not enough.

It’s not like overseas where they have smaller flocks and lamb inside. Here where we have much larger flocks and  it’s humanly impossible to give the nurturing required to beat nature’s worst.

Tuesday’s answers

Monday’s questions were:

1. What is  Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane commonly known as and what is it used for?

2. What are the first six letters in the Nato (phonetic ) alphabet used for radio, telephone and military communications.

3. Who said “Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.”?

4. Who is the patron saint of florists?

5.What is the birthstone for September?

Points awarded for answers:

Mr Gronk got three right.

David got 1 5/6.

Bearhunter got three, a bonus for lateral thinking and a happy birthday.

Chris wins the electronic bouquet for a perfect score and a happy birthday.

Andrei got three right and a sigh for true but cynical for his last answer.

Tuesday’s answers follow the break:

My Soul’s Companion

This Tuesday’s Poem is My Soul’s Companion by Doug Poole.

It’s a prose poem and is accompanied by a painting by the poet’s partner, Penny Howard.

Among the other contributions from Tuesday poets linked in the sidebar are Afterword by Clare Beynon and Harvey’ McQueen’s Unexpected Tui.

What’s the point of DHB elections?

When we elected health boards using First Past the Post we had wards which gave us a reasonable chance of knowing at least one of the candidates for whom we could vote.

When STV was introduced we lost the wards and now have to vote for up to four members for the Otago Constituency of the Southern District Health Board.

There are 11 people standing for those four positions. That is an improvement on the 20 plus who stood in previous elections but I’d be very surprised if anyone knew enough to intelligently rank all 11 and most will be struggling to find four they know enough about to support, or not, with confidence.

I don’t know any of the candidates very well but have met four of them and know of one more. I will probably vote for one and may support a second but definitely won’t be voting for the others I know or any of those I don’t know.

This shows up shortcomings with the STV system – it may be good in a small area where people know the candidates or can find out about them easily, but it’s not good for a whole province. Dunedin city voters have the numerical advantage, it’s too expensive for candidates to promote themselves everywhere and most voters will know little if anything about most of those seeking their votes.

But whatever the voting system I wonder what’s the point in elections for DHBs? The chair and half the board members are government appointees and elected or appointed, all board members are answerable to the government.

Allowing elections was an attempt by Labour to convince us we had local control over health boards. We don’t.

They are there to run hospitals and health services for the government and they’re answerable to the Minister of Health.

I don’t have a problem with that but wonder why we have to go through the charade of elections which are really just an expensive exercise designed to make us feel we have some control when in practice we don’t.

September 21 in history

On September 21:

1217 Livonian Crusade: The Estonian tribal leader Lembitu and Livonian leader Kaupo were killed in Battle of St. Matthew’s Day.

1411 Richard Plantagenet, 3rd Duke of York, claimant to the English throne, was born (d. 1460).

1745 Battle of Prestonpans: A Hanoverian army under the command of Sir John Cope was defeated, in ten minutes, by the Jacobite forces of Prince Charles Edward Stuart.

1756 John MacAdam, Scottish engineer and road-builder, was born (d. 1836).

1792 The National Convention declared France a republic and abolished the monarchy.

1827  Joseph Smith, Jr. was reportedly visited by the angel Moroni, who gave him a record of gold plates, one-third of which Smith has translated into The Book of Mormon.

1834 Betty Guard and her children were rescued from Ngati Ruanui (who had held them captive in Taranaki since April) by troops from HMS Alligator and Isabella.

1860   In the Second Opium War, an Anglo-French force defeated Chinese troops at the Battle of Baliqiao.

1866 – H. G. Wells, English writer, was born (d. 1946).

1874 Gustav Holst, English composer, was born (d. 1934).

 

1897  The “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” editorial was published in the New York Sun.

 

1898  Empress Dowager Cixi seized power and ended the Hundred Days’ Reform in China.

1902 Sir Allen Lane, British founder of Penguin Books, was born (d. 1970).

1921  A storage silo in Oppau, Germany, exploded, killing 500-600 people.

1934  A large typhoon hit western Honshū killing 3,036 people.

1937 J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit was published.

1938  The Great Hurricane of 1938 made landfall on Long Island, killing an estimated at 500-700 people.

1939  Romanian Prime Minister Armand Calinescu was assassinated by ultranationalist members of the Iron Guard.

1942  On the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, Nazis sent more than 1,000 Jews of Pidhaytsi to Belzec extermination camp.

1942  In Poland, at the end of Yom Kippur, Germans ordered Jews to permanently evacuate Konstantynów and move to the Ghetto in Biała Podlaska, established to assemble Jews from seven nearby towns.

1942 In Dunaivtsi, Ukraine, Nazis murdered 2,588 Jews.

1942  The B-29 Superfortress made its maiden flight.

1947 Stephen King, American author, was born.

1947 Don Felder, American guitarist (Eagles), was born.

1950 Bill Murray, American comedian and actor, was born.

1957 Kevin Rudd, 26th Prime Minister of Australia, was born.

1961  Maiden flight of the CH-47 Chinook transportation helicopter.

1964  Malta became independent from the United Kingdom.

1964  The XB-70 Valkyrie, the world’s first Mach 3 bomber, made its maiden flight from Palmdale, California.

1965 David Wenham, Australian actor, was born.

1972  Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos signed Proclamation No. 1081 placing the entire country under martial law.

1976  Orlando Letelier, a member of the Chilean socialist government which was overthrown in 1973 by Augusto Pinochet,  was assassinated in Washington, D.C.

1978 Doug Howlett, New Zealand rugby union footballer, was born.

1981 Belize was granted full independence from the United Kingdom.

1981  Sandra Day O’Connor was unanimously approved by the U.S. Senate as the first female Supreme Court justice.

1989  Hurricane Hugo made landfall in South Carolina.

1991  Armenia was granted independence from Soviet Union.

1993 Russian President Boris Yeltsin suspended parliament and scrapped the then-functioning constitution, thus triggering the Russian constitutional crisis of 1993.

1999  Chi-Chi earthquake in central Taiwan, left about 2,400 people dead.

 

2001 – AZF chemical plant exploded in Toulouse killing 31 people

2004  The Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) People’s War and the Maoist Communist Centre of India merged to form the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

2008  Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, the two last remaining independent investment banks on Wall Street, become bank holding companies as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Word of the day

Factious – turbulent; given to faction; seditious; relating to, produced by or characterised by internal dissension.

Monday’s quiz

1. What is  Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane commonly known as and what is it used for?

2. What are the first six letters in the Nato (phonetic ) alphabet used for radio, telephone and military communications.

3. Who said “Clever and attractive women do not want to vote; they are willing to let men govern as long as they govern men.”?

4. Who is the patron saint of florists?

5.What is the birthstone for September?

Snow’s no good for lambs

Spring had been merciful to lambs until now.

But Southland and Otago farmers are expecting big losses in the wake of the weekend’s snowfalls.

Federated Farms board member David Rose said:

“Winter in winter is OK but winter in spring is a bit of a disaster.”

They were in the middle of lambing and had quite a few losses because of the weather, Mr Rose said.

“You feel a bit helpless, really … it’s hard to do anything.”

There were only so many sheep they could put inside, which was difficult at the rate they had been lambing, Mr Rose said. “You do what you can … It’s inevitable you’re going to have losses.”

Feds Otago president Mike Lord said those worst affected could lose 200-300 lambs.

Newborn lambs had virtually no chance against the elements on Saturday because of the wind chill, he said.

Luckily, many late-lambing farmers were due to start today and the losses would have been much worse had the blast hit in a few days’ time, he said.

News reports like this often lead to questions of why farmers lamb at this time of year. It’s all to do with feed supply – having enough grass at the right time to flush ewes before tupping in autumn and to feed them and their lambs in spring and early summer.

Besides, storms strike at any time of the year.

Snow isn’t good for the potential fruit harvest either.

Alexandra’s Blossom Festival is scheduled for next weekend and orchardists have been fighting frosts.

A newsletter to shareholders from Fonterra chair Henry van der Hayden said up to eight inches of snow at Edendale prevented tankers getting out to farms. Several farmers had to dump milk into effluent ponds.

There shouldn’t be any environmental damage as a result of that providing it’s sprayed on to paddocks in the right way at the right time and the co-operative will pay out on estimates of milk lost.

Parliament TV hacked

In The House has been hacked.

The NBR Reports:

The House of Representatives’ official on-demand video website, Parliament TV on Demand (inthehouse.co.nz), has been defaced by Turkish hacker Iskorpitx.

The cyber-vandal has a long history of compromising a website’s server, then replacing its contents with his own “graffiti” – sometime political, but usually just showing off his own talents.

In Parliament TV’s case, the site has been madeover with an animated flag, and the cheery, Borat-ish message: “best regards to all world”.

If hackers can get into this site, how secure is the rest of parliament’s IT system?

It wouldn’t be possible for someone to get into a party leader’s emails would it?

Two cities two codes?

Two weeks ago a 7.1 magnitude earthquake struck Canterbury and no-one was killed.

One of the reasons given for that was building codes which made homes, hotels and other buildings safer.

Two days ago the roof of Stadium Southland collapsed under the weight of the snow and again no-one was killed.

Is this a tale of two building codes?

If not, how can regulations which make buildings strong enough to withstand an earthquake in Canterbury not make a roof strong enough to withstand a snowfall in Southland?

September 20 in history

On September 20:

451  The Battle of Chalons: Flavius Aetius‘s victory over Attila the Hun in a day of combat, is considered to be the largest battle in the ancient world.

524 Kan B’alam I, ruler of Maya state of Palenque, was born (d. 583).

1187  Saladin began the Siege of Jerusalem.

 

1378  Cardinal Robert of Geneva, known as the Butcher of Cesena, was elected as Avignon Pope Clement VII, beginning the Papal schism.

1519 Ferdinand Magellan set sail from Sanlúcar de Barrameda with about 270 men on his expedition to circumnavigate the globe.

1633  Galileo Galilei was tried before the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith for teaching that the Earth orbits the Sun.

 

 

1697 The Treaty of Rijswijk was signed by France, England, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire and the Dutch Republic ending the Nine Years’ War (1688–97).

 

1737  The finish of the Walking Purchase which forced the cession of 1.2 million acres (4,860 km²) of Lenape-Delaware tribal land to the Pennsylvania Colony.

 

1835  Farroupilha’s Revolution began in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil.

1842  James Dewar, Scottish chemist, was born (d. 1923).

1848  The American Association for the Advancement of Science was created.

1854 Battle of Alma: British and French troops defeated Russians in the Crimea.

1857 The Indian Rebellion of 1857 ended with the recapture of Delhi by troops loyal to the East India Company.

1860  The Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) visited the United States.

 

1863  American Civil War: The Battle of Chickamauga ended.

 

1870  Bersaglieri corps entered Rome through the Porta Pia and completed the unification of Italy.

1871  Bishop John Coleridge Patteson, the first bishop of Melanesia, was martyred on the island of Nukapu.

1881  Chester A. Arthur was inaugurated as the 21st President of the United States following the assassination of James Garfield.

1891  The first gasoline-powered car debuted in Springfield, Massachusetts.

1906  Cunard Line’s RMS Mauretania was launched at the Swan Hunter & Wigham Richardson shipyard in Newcastle upon Tyne.

1914 Kenneth More, English actor, was born (d. 1982).

1920  Foundation of the Spanish Legion.

1930 Syro-Malankara Catholic Church was formed by Archbishop Mar Ivanios.

1934 Sophia Loren, Italian actress, was born.

 

1942 Holocaust in Letychiv, Ukraine. In the course of two days German SS murdered at least 3,000 Jews.

1946  The first Cannes Film Festival was held.

1954  The Mazengarb inquiry into ‘juvenile delinquency’  was released. It blamed the perceived promiscuity of the nation’s youth on the absence from home of working mothers, the easy availability of contraceptives, and on young women who enticed men into having sex.

1957   Alannah Currie, New Zealander musician (Thompson Twins), was born.

 

1957  Michael Hurst, New Zealand actor, was born.

 

1962 James Meredith, an African-American, was temporarily barred from entering the University of Mississippi.

1967  The RMS Queen Elizabeth 2 was launched at John Brown & Company, Clydebank, Scotland.

1970  Syrian tanks entered Jordan in response to continued fighting between Jordan and the fedayeen.

1971 – Todd Blackadder, New Zealand rugby player, was born.

1973  Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in The Battle of the Sexes tennis match at the Houston Astrodome.

1979  Lee Iacocca was elected president of the Chrysler Corporation.

1979  A coup d’état in the Central African Empire overthrew Emperor Bokasa I.

1984  A suicide bomber in a car attacked the U.S. embassy in Beirut killing 22 people.

1990 South Ossetia declared its independence from Georgia.

2000  The British MI6 Secret Intelligence Service building was attacked by a Russian-built Mark 22 anti-tank missile.

 

2001 In an address to a joint session of Congress and the American people, U.S. President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror”.

2002  The Kolka-Karmadon rock/ice slide started.

2003 Maldives civil unrest: the death of prisoner Hassan Evan Naseem sparked a day of rioting in Malé.

 

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Word of the day

Laxism - the belief that an unlikely opinion may be safely followed; belief that allows adherents to follow the opinion that favours liberty and against the law even though the opinion is improbable.

Country can’t afford what teachers deserve

I spent a year at Teachers’ College during which the most important lesson I learned was that I would be a bad teacher.

I also learned to appreciate and value good teachers.

I agree they deserve to be paid more but the country can’t afford what they’re seeking and contrary to what teachers’ unions would have us believe not all teachers are good.

Quite why they think teachers are different from every other group where you have a spread of ability is beyond me. If they seriously believe their own propaganda and don’t realise that some teachers are spectacularly good, a few are spectacularly bad and the rest are somewhere between they must be on another planet.

That might also explain their insistence on seeking salary increases well beyond the country’s ability to pay.

They say they’re underpaid when compared with other OECD countries but so are the rest of us and as Kiwiblog points out a more useful comparison would be between pay rates and GDP:

In Australia 3.5% of GDP is spent on non-tertiary education, and in New Zealand it is 4.0%. So we are already paying more as a percentage of GDP, than Australia. Hence the solution is to increase GDP, not to increase the share spent on education.

Only three OECD countries spend a higher percentage of GDP on non-tertiary education than New Zealand.

He followed that up with these figures:

The OECD doesn’t seem to have up to date average wage data for NZ, but there is good data on GDP per capita. So let’s compare teacher salaries to GDP per capita. Taking a primary teacher with 15 years experience, the data is:

• Australia $46,096 salary vs $38,911 GDP per capita = 118% ratio
• UK/England $44,630 vs $34,619 = 129%
• France $31,927 vs $33,679 = 95%
• Luxembourg $67,723 vs $78,395 = 86%
• US $44,172 vs $46,381 = 95%
• NZ $38,412 vs $26,708 = 144%
• OECD $39,426 vs $35,138 = 112%

So in fact New Zealand is paying primary teachers with 15 years experience far more, compared to our national wealth, than the OECD average, and than Australia, the US, UK, US, France etc.

Even if ones takes secondary teachers with 15 years experience, NZ at 144% pays far more relative to national wealth than even Luxembourg.

Picking up on this Kerre Woodham reckons teachers are unpatriotic and the Herald On Sunday says teachers aren’t doing too badly.

That doesn’t mean they couldn’t be doing better. They could, and given the importance of the job they do, they should. But not until economic growth improves enough to make their claims affordable.

Even then, they’d have a much stronger case if they accept that different teachers have differing abilities. The good ones deserve more money, others need more help to improve, or they should accept, as I did,  they’re not good enough and find another job.

Weather woes

A few days ago daffodils and blossom were filling me with the joys of spring. This weekend we’re back to winter.

We went over to Wanaka on Friday afternoon. The sky got darker as we drove inland, we hit sleet west of Kurow and snow by the time we got to Omarama.

It was clear on the west side of the Lindis Pass but we woke yesterday morning to snow well down the hills round the lake.

An email from friends in Riverton yesterday attached photos of snow, not unlike those Robert Guyton has on his blog.

Yet just two weeks from now the clocks will go forward for daylight saving.

 September is always too early for the change in time for me, this weekend shows it’s too early for the weather too.

Women’s suffrage no easy victory

It’s 117 years ago today that Lord Glasgow, the Governor-General signed the Electoral Act 1993  1893  which gave New Zealand women the vote.

Women had been enfranchised in other territories before then but New Zealand was the first self-governing nation to grant the vote to all adult women.

But women’s suffrage was no easy victory, it took years of campaigning before enough MPs were persuaded to change the law.

The time-line of women’s suffrage around the world shows just how recently women in many other countries have been permitted to vote.

If WikiAnswers is to be believed there are still a few countries, and the Vatican City, which give women only partial or no suffrage.

I wonder what they’d think if they knew fewer than half the people registered bothered to vote in the last local body elections and that’s not expected to improve this time?

If we’re free to vote we’re free to not vote. But we might value that freedom more and take voting more seriously if we considered it not just a right but a privilege.

September 19 in history

On September 19:

335  Dalmatius was raised to the rank of Caesar by his uncle Constantine I.

1356  In the Battle of Poitiers, the English defeated the French.

1676 Jamestown was burned to the ground by the forces of Nathaniel Bacon during Bacon’s Rebellion.

1692 Giles Corey was pressed to death after refusing to plead in the Salem witch trials.

 

1777  First Battle of Saratoga/Battle of Freeman’s Farm/Battle of Bemis Heights.

1796 George Washington’s farewell address was printed across America as an open letter to the public.

1862 American Civil War: Battle of Iuka – Union troops under General William Rosecrans defeated a Confederate force commanded by General Sterling Price. 

1863  American Civil War: Battle of Chickamauga.

1870 Franco-Prussian War: the Siege of Paris began.

1881 President James A. Garfield died of wounds suffered in a July 2 shooting.

1882 Christopher Stone, first disc jockey in the United Kingdom, was born (d. 1965).

1893 The Governor, Lord Glasgow, signed a new Electoral Act into law. As a result of this landmark legislation, New Zealand became the first self-governing country in the world to grant all women the right to vote in parliamentary elections.

1911 Sir William Golding, English writer, Nobel Prize laureate, was born (d. 1993).

1927 Nick Massi, American singer and guitarist (The Four Seasons), was born (d. 2000).

 1933 – David McCallum, Scottish actor, was born.

 

1934 Brian Epstein, English musical group manager (The Beatles) (d. 1967).

1940 Bill Medley, American singer and songwriter (The Righteous Brothers), was born.

1940 Witold Pilecki was voluntarily captured and sent to Auschwitz in order to smuggle out information and start a resistance.

1940 – Paul Williams, American composer, was born.

 

1941 Mama Cass Elliot, American musician, was born (d. 1974).

 

1944  Armistice between Finland and Soviet Union was signed ending the Continuation War.

1945  Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce) was sentenced to death in London.

1946 The Council of Europe was founded following a speech by Winston Churchill at the University of Zurich.

1949 Twiggy, English model, was born.

 

1952  The United States barred Charlie Chaplin from re-entering the country after a trip to England.

1957  First American underground nuclear bomb test.

1959  Nikita Khrushchev was barred from visiting Disneyland.

1961  Betty and Barney Hill claimed  they saw a mysterious craft in the sky and that it tried to abduct them.

1970  The first Glastonbury Festival was held at Michael Eavis’s farm.

1970  Kostas Georgakis, a Greek student of Geology, set himself ablaze in Matteotti Square in Genoa, as a protest against the dictatorial regime of Georgios Papadopoulos.

 

1971 Montagnard troops of South Vietnam revolted against the rule of Nguyen Khanh, killing 70 ethnic Vietnamese soldiers.

1972 Matt Cockbain, Australian rugby player, was born.

1972 A parcel bomb sent to Israeli Embassy in London killed one diplomat.

1973 Investiture of King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden.

 

1976 Turkish Airlines Boeing 727 hit the Taurus Mountains killing all 155 passengers and crew.

1982 Scott Fahlman posted the first documented emoticons :-) and :-( on the Carnegie Mellon University Bulletin Board System.

19-Sep-82 11:44    Scott E  Fahlman             
From: Scott E Fahlman <Fahlman at Cmu-20c>

I propose that the following character sequence for joke markers:

  

Read it sideways.  Actually, it is probably more economical to mark
things that are NOT jokes, given current trends.  For this, use

  

1983  Saint Kitts and Nevis gained  independence.

1985 An earthquake killed thousands and destroyed about 400 buildings in Mexico City.

 

1985  Tipper Gore and other political wives formed the Parents Music Resource Center as Frank Zappa and other musicians testified at U.S. Congressional hearings on obscenity in rock music.

 

1989  A terrorist bomb exploded on UTA Flight 772 in mid-air above the Tùnùrù Desert, Niger, killing 171.

1991  Ötzi the Iceman was discovered by German tourists.

1995 The Washington Post and The New York Times published the Unabomber’s manifesto.

1997  Guelb El-Kebir massacre in Algeria; 53 killed.

2006  Thai military staged a coup in Bangkok; the  Constitution was revoked and martial law declared.

 

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia

Do You Hear The People Sing

The man sitting next to me at Oamaru Operatic Society’s production of Les Miserables on Thursday said he cried.

This was the third time I’d seen the show and while I wasn’t moved to tears, I was very impressed by the performance.

Professional singer Tim Beveridge starred as Valjean.  The rest of the cast were local amateurs but there was nothing amateur about their acting and singing.

It took the society nearly three years of planning to bring the show to the Opera House stage. The performance we saw was worth it.

The acoustics of the refurbished Opera House made the most of the voices and orchestra; the set was stunning and costumes superb.