5 June: St Boniface

Today is the feast day of St Boniface, so here are 10 things you might not know about him.

1. Little is known about his early life other than that, at an early age, he attended a monastery in what was probably Exeter, against his father’s wishes.

2. His original name was Winfrid or Winfred.

3. He was given the name Boniface by Pope Gregory II after the fourth-century martyr Boniface of Tarsus.

4. Pope Gregory III made him Archbishop of Germany.

5. According to the Orthodox church, he’s a patron saint of England and Germany. He’s also the patron of the county of Devon and Winnipeg, Canada. The latter is because a missionary called Father Norbert Provencher built a log church on the banks of a river in what would eventually become Winnipeg and named it for him. The log church was in due course consecrated as Saint Boniface Cathedral.

6. He was a missionary in Frisia, which is today the Netherlands and Germany. Once he began his work there, he never returned to England, but kept in contact with people there by letter.

7. One of the things he’s known for is cutting down an ancient Oak tree that was sacred to Germanic pagans. "Jupiter's oak" was located near the present-day town of Fritzlar in Germany. At least, he started to cut it down, but a strong wind occurred and finished the job. When the probably outraged local pagans saw that their gods did not strike Boniface down, they converted to Christianity.

8. His missionary work wasn’t always as successful as that and it was his lifelong ambition to fully convert the Frisians. On his final mission there, he was killed by armed robbers after telling his bodyguards not to fight them. He allegedly said, "Cease fighting. Lay down your arms, for we are told in Scripture not to render evil for evil but to overcome evil by good." So the robbers slaughtered them, but all for nothing. When they opened the chests the party had been carrying they were disappointed to find they were full of books and manuscripts and not the treasure they’d hoped to find.

9. Some traditions believe it was Saint Boniface who invented the Christmas Tree.

10. St Boniface Down, the highest point in the Isle of Wight, is named after him.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

4 June: 155

Today is the 155^th day of the year. 19 fun facts about 155.

1. 155 in Roman numerals is CLV.

2. 155 in binary is 10011011.

3. London bus 155 runs from Elephant & Castle / London Road to St George's Hospital, Tooting.

4. The Alfa Romeo 155 is a compact executive car produced by Italian automobile manufacturer Alfa Romeo between 1992 and 1998.

5. 155 is the airline code for DHL Aviation.

6. The A155 is a road in England which runs between the A153 at Tumby and the A16 at West Keal.

7. British Rail Class 155 is a diesel multiple unit passenger train. They were built by Leyland Bus at Workington between 1986 and 1987, as part of British Rail's replacement of its ageing first-generation diesel fleet.

8. 155 Scylla is a main belt asteroid discovered by Johann Palisa at the Austrian Naval Observatory in 1875, and named after the monster Scylla in Greek mythology. Two weeks after its discovery this asteroid became lost and was not found again for 95 years.

9. The year 155 was a common year starting on Tuesday, known at the time as the Year of the Consulship of Severus and Rufinus.

10. In numerology, 155 resonates with companionship and teamwork. There is an urge to explore, to be self-reliant, discover new things and express a sense of freedom, but always as a team.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

3 June: Ode to Billie Joe

"It was the third of June, another sleepy, dusty Delta day”: the opening lyrics to the Bobby Gentry hit, Ode to Billie Joe. 10 things you might not know about the song.

1. The B side was Mississippi Delta, which in the beginning was going to be the A side, until Capitol Records producer Kelly Gordon asked Gentry for a B side. She sent in a demo of Ode to Billie Joe and it was decided that was the hit.

2. The original song was much longer than the single version. It had 11 verses and was over 7 minutes long, which it was decided was too much, so it was edited down to five verses.

3. The verses which were cut included a mention of the anonymous narrator’s name: "People don’t see Sally Jane in town anymore … There’s a lot of speculatin’, she’s not actin’ like she did before … Some say she knows more than she’s willin’ to tell … But she stays quiet and a few think it’s just as well…”.

4. In the film based on the song, however, she’s called Bobbie Lee Hartley. The movie, released in 1976, was an attempt to explain why Billie Joe killed himself and the relationship between him and the narrator. In the film, they are dating, against her family’s wishes. Billie Joe gets drunk one night and has sex with a man, and it’s the shame of that (the film is set in 1953) and the fact he realises he liked it, and then can’t perform when Bobbie Lee agrees to go all the way with him, that leads him to jump off the bridge.

5. The lyrics include a verse describing how the young preacher says he saw Billie Joe and a girl who looked a lot like the narrator throwing something off the Bridge. There has been plenty of speculation as to what that was. Theories included a baby, a wedding ring, or Flowers, and that whatever it was it was connected to the later suicide. Bobby Gentry claimed she didn’t know herself what the object was, and also said it really didn’t matter. In the movie, the object was Bobbie Lee’s rag doll, symbolising the loss of her innocence.

6. Gentry’s take on the song was that it was "a study in unconscious cruelty", showing people so wrapped up in the minutiae of their lives (five more acres in the lower forty to plough; pass the black eyed peas; relating how Billie Joe put a Frog down someone’s back at a picture show and how he never had a lick of sense) that they have no empathy for others. The mother complains that the narrator isn’t eating which upsets her because she was cooking all morning, but doesn’t ask if anything is wrong. It’s clear the only person even remotely bothered that a young man killed himself is the narrator.

7. The song ends with a post script from a year later with an update about the family. The brother is married and lives in Tupelo, Mississippi; the father caught a virus and died, leaving the mother distraught and grieving. The narrator goes to the bridge, picks some flowers and throws them off.

8. The Tallahatchie Bridge is real. It crosses the Tallahatchie River in a tiny community called Money, Mississippi, ten miles north of Greenwood, Mississippi. There is a famous photo of Bobby Gentry walking across it. After the song was released, any number of would be suicides flocked to the bridge, causing a nuisance to the locals. The local authorities there had to pass a by-law forbidding anyone from jumping off on pain of $100 fine. The bridge is actually only 20 feet high and so anyone who did jump off would probably survive to get prosecuted. In 1972, vandals set fire to it, causing it to collapse. It has since been rebuilt.

9. Bob Dylan recorded a parody of the song called Clothes Line Saga, which imitated the conversational style with an emphasis on household chores. The shocking event buried in all the mundane details is a revelation that "The Vice-President's gone mad!."

10. Ode to Billie Joe won three Grammy awards and was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2023.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

2 June: Thomas Hardy

Today was the birthday of the writer Thomas Hardy, who was born in 1840. 10 things you might not know about him:

1. Hardy was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset and was the oldest of four siblings. His father, also named Thomas Hardy, was a stonemason and amateur musician, and his mother, Jemima, was in domestic service.

2. He was taught at home by his mother until he was eight. When he left school he became an apprentice to a local architect named James Hicks. In his twenties he moved to London and worked for the architect Arthur Blomfield (famous for, among other things, the chapel at Tyntesfield).

3. One of the more bizarre tasks Blomfield gave him to do was re-locating a cemetery to make way for an expansion by the Midland Grand Railway. This involved exhuming and reburying hundreds of bodies. He took the original tombstones and arranged them around an Ash tree in a circular pattern. The tree is now known as The Hardy Tree and it’s a tourist attraction.

4. His career in architecture meant Hardy could design his own house and get his brother to build it. He named it Max Gate after a local toll-gate named for its keeper, Henry Mack (“Mack’s Gate”). He lived there from 1885 until he died in 1928, and added to it over the years. The house now belongs to the National Trust.

5. Hardy married Emma Gifford in 1874. She supported him in his career as a writer and they shared support for the cause of women’s rights. Emma participated in marches and demonstrations and wrote articles on the subject. Hardy thought giving women the vote would cause a major shake up in society and while he believed this would be a good thing, Emma and her suffragette associates didn’t think his views would help the cause at all, so it was agreed he would keep quiet about it.

6. His marriage to Emma became somewhat strained at the end. By 1899, she was living a completely separate life in the attic and had become very religious. She’s said to have hated his novel Jude the Obscure, which she didn’t read until after it was published. That may have been due to her religious beliefs – the church at the time hated it, too. It could also have been because the story was based too closely on their own marriage. She was writing, too, a manuscript called What I Think of My Husband, and numerous diaries, all of which Hardy burned after she died in 1912. All that said, he was grief stricken when she died and wrote arguably his best and most moving Poetry at that time. In 1914, Hardy married his secretary Florence Dugdale, who was 39 years his junior. When he died, she destroyed his personal papers much as he had done for Emma.

7. He was said to be extremely shy and protective of his privacy. One feature of Max Gate was that it was obscured by trees, and that he would slip out of the house and hide if a visitor turned up that he wasn’t expecting. His favourite Dog was named Wessex, an ill tempered mutt who would bite visitors!

8. He’s often credited with creating the term “cliffhanger” for the plot device where the episode ends at a dramatic moment and the reader or watcher has to buy or watch the next instalment to find out what happens. While Charles Dickens is sometimes given the credit for that, many scholars date it to Hardy’s 1873 novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, which, like many novels of the time, was first published as a serial in a magazine. In it, a character named Henry Knight is literally left hanging from a cliff.

9. From 1910 to 1927, Hardy was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature 25 times, but never won. He was, however, given an Order of Merit by King Edward VII in 1910, an order which is limited to 24 living members at a time.

10. When he died, he expressed the wish to be buried beside his first wife, which presumably didn’t go down too well with Florence. Nor did it with the literary community who thought he should be interred at Westminster Abbey’s famous poets’ corner. In the end a compromised was reached. Most of him was buried in Poet’s Corner near to Charles Dickens, while his heart was buried in Stinsford in Dorset near his first wife.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

1 June: 152

Today is day 152 of the year. Here are 10 fun facts about that number.

1. 152 is the eighth studio album by American rock band Taking Back Sunday, released on October 27, 2023.

2. The Roman numeral for 152 is CLII. In Binary it’s 10011000.

3. The year 152 was a leap year starting on Friday, known in Rome at the time as the Year of the Consulship of Glabrio and Homullus.

4. London bus 152 runs from South Lodge Avenue / Yorkshire Road to Walton Avenue.

5. Customer 152 is a 2004 film directed by Jonathan Holbrook. It’s about a man who buys a car with a mysterious black credit card and is then stalked by mysterious beings in business suits.

6. In the final episode of Ted Lasso, when Rebecca is ready to talk to Ted, he’s sitting in seat 152.

7. 152 Atala is a large main belt asteroid discovered by brothers Paul Henry and Prosper Henry on 2 November 1875. The asteroid is named for the eponymous heroine of the 1801 novella Atala by Francois Rene de Chateaubriand.

8. The A152 is a small non-primary A-road in Lincolnshire, from Donington to Surfleet linking the A52 and the A16, two major primary routes.

9. The Cessna 152 is an American two-seat, fixed-tricycle-gear, general aviation plane, used primarily for flight training and personal use.

10. In numerology, those influenced by the number 152 are materialistic, but also have a sense of balance between material pursuits and immaterial aspects of life. They are people who get things done. They do well in business and are good with people.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

31 May: Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman, the American poet dubbed the “Bard of Democracy” was born on this date in 1819. 10 facts about him:

1. He was born in West Hills, New York to Quaker farmers Walter Whitman and Louisa Van Velsor. He was the second of nine children and given the name Walter Whitman Junior. From the start, he was called Walt in order to distinguish him from his father.

2. The Whitmans weren’t well off, so Walt left school at the age of 11 to help support the family. He started as an assistant to a law firm but moved on to learn the printing trade. He continued his own education in his spare time and at 17 became a teacher.

3. His most famous work is Leaves of Grass, which he self-published in 1855 as a collection of 12 poems. He would continue tinkering with it for the rest of his life, adding more poems and changing the order and the typesetting, so there were many editions. The final one, towards the end of his life, contained more than 400 poems. The title was not inspired by botany so much as writing and publishing. He intended “Leaves” to mean the pages of a book and “Grass” as something close to worthless. Essentially, “Pages of Rubbish”.

4. His other works include a novel, Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate, published in 1842. It was what was known as a temperance novel, one in which the whole point of the story was to highlight the evils of drink. This was a cause he supported in his youth, but in later life did enjoy fine wines and champagnes. He also claimed to be somewhat embarrassed by the novel, calling it "damned rot" which he had written purely for the money, while he was drunk!

5. He never married and had no obvious children. That, and some of his Poetry, plus the fact he had some intense friendships with other men, led to the belief he was probably gay, although he did have at least one romantic relationship with a woman, and claimed that he had fathered six illegitimate children, although this has never been proved. Later in his life, Oscar Wilde paid him a visit and afterwards commented "I have the kiss of Walt Whitman still on my lips," although what Oscar actually meant by that is not entirely clear.

6. He was a bit of a fitness freak and even wrote articles about health and wellbeing for the New York Atlas in the 1850s under the pen name “Mose Velsor”. He advised brisk walks, frequent bathing, and growing a Beard as a barrier to germs. He was also a nudist and once said, “Nature was naked, and I was also.”

7. Bram Stoker of Dracula fame was a big fan. Stoker wrote Whitman a fan letter which was somewhat fawning and self-deprecating, which he hid in a drawer for ages before drumming up the courage to post it. The two writers ended up as regular pen pals, and Stoker has said that Dracula was at least partially based on Whitman.

8. He also wrote a mystery novel called The Life and Adventures of Jack Engle, which was serialised in a newspaper and then hidden away in the archives until 2017 when it was re-discovered by Whitman historian Zach Turpin, who got it published as a book. This is despite Whitman being totally against people “dredging up” his old works and publishing them, even going so far as to threaten to shoot anyone who did so. However, by this time he’d been dead for 125 years, so presumably Turpin didn’t feel threatened by him simply spinning in his grave.

9. A crater on Mercury is named for him.

10. Before he died at the age of 72, he designed his own tomb, a granite mausoleum shaped like a house. His admirers chipped in to make his monument a reality and it stands at his grave to this day.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/

30 May: Buckets

Today is My Bucket's Got A Hole In It Day. To celebrate, 10 facts about buckets.

1. Why is today My Bucket's Got A Hole In It Day, anyway? Apparently, it’s a commemoration of the comedy song There's a Hole in My Bucket in which a character called Henry complains to another character called Liza that his bucket has a hole in it. Liza tells him to fix it. Henry, it has to be said, isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. Or perhaps he’s just trying to get out of doing any work. “With what do I fix it?” he asks. “A straw,” says Liza. The straw is too long. So cut it. With what? A knife. But the knife is dull. So sharpen it. With what? With a stone. But the stone is too dry. So wet it. With what? Duh. Water, of course (although in a NSFW version perhaps Liza could suggest he pees on it). Ah, but in what do I fetch the water, Liza? In a bucket. But…

2. What’s the difference between a bucket and a pail? In everyday parlance, the words are used interchangeably, but technically, a bucket is a container with a wide opening at the top and a handle, used for carrying things, while a pail is for shipping things and has a lid.

3. Buckets have been used for thousands of years. Sculptures dating from around 3200 BC show Pharaoh Narmer with a servant carrying a bucket.

4. Early buckets were made from animal skins. They can be made of wood, metal or plastic.

5. Sometimes, buckets have sacred uses. Sculptures from Assyria-Babylonia and the Olmecs from Mexico show deities and priests holding buckets of water to be sprinkled using a pine cone. More recently, when a Catholic person died, people would bring holy water from the church in a special bucket to sprinkle on the corpse.

6. This custom is one of the suggested theories to explain the term “kick the bucket” meaning to die (or d*e or be unalived on social media where any word pertaining to death apparently has to be censored). Other theories suggest it started with hanging, where the condemned criminal or suicidal person stood on a bucket with the noose round their neck, and it would then be kicked away. Or it might come from an old word for a beam on which Pigs were slaughtered. Or from the idea of a Goat which kicks over the bucket after it’s been milked, signifying a bad ending.

7. No prizes for guessing that this is where the term “bucket list” comes from, meaning a wish list of things a person wants to achieve before the end of their life, or before they kick the bucket. In 2007 the term was used as the title of a film directed and produced by Rob Reiner and starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two terminally ill men who take a road trip in order to complete their bucket lists.

8. There was once, allegedly, a war fought over a bucket. The War of the (Oaken) Bucket was fought in 1325 between two rival city-states in Italy, Bologna and Modena. The story goes that it started when the Modenese stole a bucket from a Bolognese well. Sadly, it’s just a myth. If anything, the bucket wasn’t taken until the end of the battle, when it was taken as a trophy by the victorious Modenese.

9. There’s an obsolete measurement called a bucket, which is 4 imperial gallons (18 L; 4.8 US gal).

10. Occasionally, writers have named their characters after buckets. Charles Dickens created Inspector Bucket, a central character in Bleak House. Roald Dahl named the protagonist of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Charlie Bucket, and of course, there’s Hyacinth Bucket, the main character in Keeping Up Appearances, who insists it’s pronounced “bouquet”. Finally, "Buckethead" is the stage name of American rock guitar player Brian Patrick Carroll.

I also write novels and short stories. If you like superheroes, psychic detectives and general weirdness you might enjoy them. 

Check out my works of fiction at https://juliehowlinauthor.wordpress.com/my-books/