366 days of gratitude

It was cold enough for droplets of ice inside a couple of our windows this morning in spite of double glazing.

Days that start with temperatures that low never get much warmer but it was blue-sky cold with the sun shining enough to make a brisk walk enjoyable and prove the worth of windows designed to make the most of nature’s heater and I’m very grateful for that.

Word of the day

Subdermatoglyphic – pertaining to the layer of skin beneath the fingertips.

Impossible Position

Impossible yoga position but she likes to have goals that no one else can imagine, so they’ll shut up about how they understand exactly what she’s going through. – Impossible Position  ©2015 Brian Andreas – posted with permission.

You can sign up for a daily email delivering a dose of whimsy like this at Story People.

Sunday soapbox

Sunday’s soapbox is yours to use as you will – within the bounds of decency and absence of defamation. You’re welcome to look back or forward, discuss issues of the moment, to pontificate, ponder or point us to something of interest, to educate, elucidate or entertain, amuse, bemuse or simply muse, but not abuse.

The greater danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it  – Michelangelo. 

August 7 in history

322 BC  Battle of Crannon between Athens and Macedon.

936  Coronation of King Otto I of Germany.

1420  Construction of the dome of Santa Maria del Fiore began in Florence.

1427   The Visconti of Milan’s fleet was destroyed by the Venetians on the Po River.

1461   The Ming Dynasty military general Cao Qin staged a coup against the Tianshun Emperor.

1606   The first documented performance of Macbeth, at the Great Hall at Hampton Court.

1679  The brigantine Le Griffon, commissioned by René Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, was towed to the south-eastern end of the Niagara River, to become the first ship to sail the upper Great Lakes.

1714  The Battle of Gangut: the first important victory of the Russian Navy.

1782  George Washington ordered the creation of the Badge of Military Merit to honour soldiers wounded in battle. (later renamed  Purple Heart).

1794  U.S. President George Washington invoked the Militia Law of 1792 to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania.

1819  Simón Bolívar triumphed over Spain in the Battle of Boyacá.

1876 Mata Hari, Dutch spy, was born (d. 1917).

1879 The opening of the Poor Man’s Palace in Manchester.

1890  Anna Månsdotter became the last woman in Sweden to be executed, for the 1889 Yngsjö murder.

1908 The first train to travel the length of the North Island main trunk line,the ‘Parliament Special’ left Wellington.

1926 Stan Freberg, American voice comedian, was born.

1927  The Peace Bridge opened between Fort Erie, Ontario and Buffalo, New York.

1930  The last lynching in the Northern United States, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, were killed.

1933 The Simele massacre: The Iraqi Government slaughtersed over 3,000 Assyrians in the village of Sumail.

1936 Joy Cowley, New Zealand author, was born.

1942  B.J. Thomas, American singer, was born.

1942  The Battle of Guadalcanal began – United States Marines initiated the first American offensive of the war with landings on Guadalcanal and Tulagi.

1944  IBM dedicated the first program-controlled calculator, the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (known best as the Harvard Mark I).

1947 Thor Heyerdahl’s balsa wood raft the Kon-Tiki, smashed into the reef at Raroia  in the Tuamotu Islands after a 101-day, 7,000 kilometres (4,300 mi) journey across the Pacific Ocean in an attempt to prove that pre-historic peoples could have travelled from South America.

1948  Greg Chappell, Australian cricketer and coach, was born.

1955 Tokyo Telecommunications Engineering, the precursor to Sony, sold its first transistor radios in Japan.

1958 Bruce Dickinson, English singer (Iron Maiden), was born.

1959 – Explorer 6 launched from the Atlantic Missile Range in Cape Canaveral.

1960 Jacquie O’Sullivan, British singer (Bananarama), was born.

1960  Côte d’Ivoire became independent.

1964 John Birmingham, Australian author, was born.

1964  U.S. Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution giving US President Lyndon B. Johnson broad war powers to deal with North Vietnamese attacks on American forces.

1965 The first party between Ken Kesey‘s Merry Pranksters and motorcycle gang the Hells Angels introducing psychedelics to the gang world and forever linking the hippie movement to the Hell’s Angels.

1966 Race riots in Lansing, Michigan.

1974  Philippe Petit performed a high wire act between the twin towers of the World Trade Centere 1,368 feet (417 m) in the air.

1978  U.S. President Jimmy Carter declared a federal emergency at Love Canal.

1979  Several tornadoes struck the city of Woodstock, Ontario, Canada and the surrounding communities.

1981 The Washington Star ceased all operations after 128 years of publication.

1985 Takao Doi, Mamoru Mohri and Chiaki Mukai were chosen to be Japan’s first astronauts.

1988 Rioting in New York City’s Tompkins Square Park.

1998  The United States embassy bombings in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi killed approximately 212 people.

1997 – Beatrice Faumuina won athletics world championship gold.

1999  Second Chechen War began.

2008  Georgia launched a military offensive against South Ossetia to counter the alleged Russian invasion, starting the South Ossetia War.

2012 – 3 gunmen killed 19 people in a church near Okene, Nigeria.

2013 – A bombing in a market in Karachi, Pakistan, killed eleven people.

Sourced from NZ History Online & Wikipedia