Thursday, 16 June 2022

17 June

 10 weird and wonderful things which happened on 17 June:

  1. Mumtaz Mahal, wife of Shah Jahan, Mughal, Emperor of India, died on this date in 1629. On her deathbed, Mumtaz expressed a dying wish for a monument which would express the beauty of their love for each other. Jahan obliged, setting 20,000 workers to build a monument more than 20 storeys high, which was completed 22 years later. The Taj Mahal.
  2. In 1952 John Whiteside Parsons, pioneering rocket engineer and devil worshipper, tried to follow one of famous occultist Aleister Crowley’s spells to conjure up a homunculus. He must have used too much rocket fuel as the concoction blew up in his face. On the plus side, for him, at least, he would have got to meet Satan himself rather than just one of his minions.
  3. In 1999, Canadian researchers carried out an anatomical examination of Albert Einstein’s brain, and found it was wider than average.
  4. The largest ship in the world at the time, the 692-foot The Great Eastern, built by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was launched on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic on this date in 1860.
  5. In 1961, Russian Ballet dancer Rudolph Nureyev defected to the west in Frankfurt.
  6. In 1826, Australian land owner Frederick Fisher, was murdered by George Worrell, one of his employees, and his body thrown into a creek in New South Wales. The police arrested Worrell, who insisted Fisher was alive and living elsewhere under an assumed name. Legend has it that a ghost, looking like the murder victim, appeared on the bridge over the creek near where Worrell had dumped the body, and pointed directly at the spot when the police were crossing the bridge. On the eve of his execution, Worrell confessed. The creek has been known ever since as Fisher’s Ghost Creek, and an annual festival called the Fisher’s Ghost Festival is commemorated.
  7. In 1823, Charles Macintosh patented the waterproof cloth he was to use in making raincoats.
  8. In 1885 The French ship Isere arrived in New York carrying 350 pieces of a sculpture by Frederic Auguste Bartholdi, ready to be assembled. The Statue of Liberty.
  9. In 1996, Hungarian inventor Ferenc Kovacs launched the musical Condom.
  10. In 2000, Rajaei Sharma became the youngest person to sit a GCSE at the age of six. The exam was in Information Technology.


The Power of Love


Willow believes in crystal healing, cosmic  ordering  and the significance of chance  encounters. She believes there's a spiritual  explanation for everything. Except she struggles to find a reason why she can turn herself into  mist and create a wave of energy which can slam a would-be mugger into a wall. Or why the love of  her life left her for a mysterious woman in sunglasses, who then disappeared without trace. 
 

A chance encounter with Firebolt, leader of the Freedom League superhero team, in a Glastonbury coffee shop, does turn out to be significant. He offers her a new start and the chance to use her powers for good.

Servant is a Christian who has joined the Freedom League in order to use his teleporting power to serve God. He and Willow clash from the start, yet they are drawn inexorably to one another.

When Willow leaves the team abruptly for reasons unknown, Servant knows he must put her out of his mind and find a nice Christian girl to settle down with. He is about to propose to devout and straight-laced Ruth, when Willow returns and turns his entire world upside down.


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