Christmas Every Day

2001

The death of Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams (1952-2001) was a British writer, educated at Cambridge, and known for his humour and wry observations on the human condition. His best-known work was The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which appeared first as a radio series, then a television series, and then a worthless piece of cinematic junk. (However rotten the movie treatment of the Guide was, it was infinitely better than the unspeakably dreadful TV series made of his Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. The fact that this series has been granted a second instalment is one of the more profound arguments against the existence of God.) Adams also wrote for, and appeared in, Monty Python skits, as well as authoring a number of Dr Who episodes. He died of heart failure in the United States.

Here are some of his lines:

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space.

There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened. 

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty- five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

 He hoped and prayed that there wasn’t an afterlife. Then he realized there was a contradiction involved here and merely hoped that there wasn’t an afterlife.

Douglas Adams was an outspoken atheist.

1799

The fall of Seringapatam

In the 18th century, India was divided into a multitude of princely states, many of whom were allied with the British East India Company, and others who were more jealous of their independence. One of the most important of the latter was the Kingdom of Mysore, ruled by Tipu Sultan, an energetic and innovative ruler who persecuted non-Muslims, despised the British and who had led several wars against them. He attempted to recruit the Turkish Empire and Napoleon’s French armies into an alliance against the East India Company. In the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War Tipu fell defending his fortress at Seringapatam. Chambers describes the situation thusly:

On the 4^th of May 1799, Seringapatam was taken, and the empire of Hyder Ally extinguished by the death of his son, the Sultan Tippoo Sahib. The storming of this great fortress by the British troops took place in broad day, and was on that account unexpected by the enemy. The commander, General Sir David Baird, led one of the storming parties in person, with characteristic gallantry, and was the first man after the forlorn hope to reach the top of the breach. So far, well; but when there, he discovered to his surprise a second ditch within, full of water. For a moment he thought it would be impossible to get over this difficulty. He had fortunately, however, observed some workmen’ s scaffolding in coming along, and taking this up hastily, was able by its means to cross the ditch; after which all that remained was simply a little hard fighting. Tippoo came forward with apparent gallantry to resist the assailants, and was afterwards taken from under a heap of slain. It is supposed he made this attempt in desperation, having just ordered the murder of twelve British soldiers, which he might well suppose would give him little chance of quarter, if his enemy were aware of the fact.

It was remarkable that, fifteen years before, Baird had undergone a long and cruel captivity in this very fort, under Tippoo’ s father, Hyder Ally. The hardships he underwent on that occasion were extreme; yet, amidst all his sufferings, he never for a moment lost heart, or ceased to hope for a release. He was truly a noble soldier. As with Wellington, his governing principle was a sense of duty. In every matter, he seemed to be solely anxious to discover what was right to be done, that he might do it. He was a Scotchman, a younger son of Mr. Baird, of Newbyth, in East Lothian (born in 1757, died in 1829). His person was tall and handsome, and his look commanding. In all the relations of his life he was a most worthy man, his kindness of heart winning him the love of all who came in contact with him.

An anecdote of Sir David Baird’s boyhood forms the key to his character. When a student at Mr. Locie’ s Military Academy at Chelsea, where all the routine of garrison duty was kept up, he was one night acting as sentinel. A companion, older than himself, came and desired leave to pass out, that he might fulfil an engagement in London. Baird steadily refused— ‘No,’ said he, ‘that I cannot do; but, if you please, you may knock me down, and walk out over my body.’

The taking of Seringapatam gave occasion for a remarkable exercise of juvenile talent in a youth of nineteen, who was studying art in the Royal Academy. He was then simply Robert Ker Porter, but afterwards, as Sir Robert, became respectfully known for his Travels in Persia; while his two sisters Jane and Anna Maria, attained a reputation as prolific writers of prose fiction. There had been such a thing before as a panorama, or picture giving details of a scene too extensive to be comprehended from one point of view; but it was not a work entitled to much admiration. With marvelous enthusiasm this boy artist began to cover a canvas of two hundred feet long with the scenes attending the capture of the great Indian fort; and, strange to say, he had finished it in six weeks. Sir Benjamin West, President of the Royal Academy, got an early view of the picture, and pronounced it a miracle of precocious talent.

When it was arranged for exhibition, vast multitudes both of the learned and the unlearned flocked to see it. ‘I can never forget,’ says Dr. Dibdin,’ its first impression upon my own mind. It was as a thing dropped from the clouds,—all fire, energy, intelligence, and animation. You looked a second time, the figures moved, and were commingled in hot and bloody fight. You saw the flash of the cannon, the glitter of the bayonet, and the gleam of the falchion. You longed to be leaping from crag to crag with Sir David Baird, who is hallooing his men on to victory! Then again you seemed to be listening to the groans of the wounded and the dying—and more than one female was carried out swooning. The oriental dress, the jewelled turban, the curved and ponderous scimitar—these were among the prime favourites of Sir Robert’s pencil, and he treated them with literal truth. The colouring was sound throughout; the accessories strikingly characteristic The public poured in thousands for even a transient gaze.’

May 2

The sinking of the “Admiral Belgrano”

In April 1982, the Argentinian military junta was not doing well, plagued by civil unrest, human rights atrocities, and economic distress. In order to distract the public’s mind from their dictatorial government’s failures, the ruling generals decided to invade the Falkland Islands, a British colony populated almost exclusively by sheep farmers. The islands had been briefly occupied by Argentina in the early nineteenth century and it was a long-standing myth that these Islas Malvinas had been cruelly ripped from their rightful owners by nasty British imperialists. The generals reckoned that the military might of the British lion had grown toothless and that a female leader (Margaret Thatcher) would lack the martial spirit required for a fight; accordingly, Argentinian commandos were landed on the Falklands and other British possessions in the southern Atlantic. Big mistake. Thatcher ordered a military task force to retake the islands, an enormously difficult undertaking carried out over thousands of miles.

Among the ships dispatched south was the nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror carrying ship-killing torpedoes. When it reached the combat area it was particularly on the lookout for the Argentinian aircraft carrier Veinticino de Mayo but what it spotted first was the Admiral Belgrano, an American-built cruiser that had survived the attack on Pearl Harbor and was later sold to Argentina. Conqueror launched three torpedoes at the cruiser, two of which exploded, tearing holes in the ship and causing it to rapidly sink with the loss of 323 crewmen. Even more significant than the destruction of the Belgrano was that its sinking persuaded the Argentinian navy to withdraw to port, leaving the job of attacking the British fleet to land-based aircraft.

The sinking of the Belgrano was immediately controversial, partly because of a tasteless headline in a London tabloid (see below) but also because the ship was outside the maritime exclusion zone and not heading toward the Falklands. Neither of the latter factors mattered militarily and the Argentine navy has always regarded the attack on the cruiser to have been a legitimate act of war.

By the famed Dr. Albertus Boli (no relation):

The Worker! How we love to sing his praises!
The Worker! How we hate to give him raises!
We praise him as the fount of every virtue,
And also ’cause his union pals can hurt you.

The Worker! He’s the hero of our story!
The Worker! His the fame and his the glory!
We gladly pay him tribute every Mayday,
As long as we don’t have to every payday.

It’s really best, although it may seem funny,
That he should work, and we should get the money:
For ’tis a truth that cannot be ignored
That Virtue ought to be its own reward.

1933

The death of a Greek poet

It was widely believed in the ancient world that great men were born and died on the same day of the year. Such was the case with Constantine Cavafy, born April 29, 1863 and died on his 70th birthday in 1933. Though he was scarcely heard of in his lifetime, his talent is now recognized to the extent that he is considered the greatest Greek poet of the 20th century. Strangely though, Cavafy had scarcely any experience of living in Greece.

Cavafy was born in Alexandria, Egypt, son of a prosperous Greek merchant, and he spent most of his life there, with short stints in Liverpool and Constantinople. He was employed for most of his life as a bureaucrat in the department of irrigation writing poetry only for the amusement of himself and his friends. Recognition from Greek literary circles came late in his life, and only after his death was he more widely known in translation. Some of his poetry was homoerotic; some was historical in inspiration. My favourite is “Ithaka”, the home island long sought by Ulysses:

When you set out for Ithaka
ask that your way be long,
full of adventure, full of instruction.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon – do not fear them:
such as these you will never find
as long as your thought is lofty, as long as a rare
emotion touch your spirit and your body.
The Laistrygonians and the Cyclops,
angry Poseidon – you will not meet them
unless you carry them in your soul,
unless your soul raise them up before you.

Ask that your way be long.
At many a Summer dawn to enter
with what gratitude, what joy –
ports seen for the first time;
to stop at Phoenician trading centres,
and to buy good merchandise,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensuous perfumes of every kind,
sensuous perfumes as lavishly as you can;
to visit many Egyptian cities,
to gather stores of knowledge from the learned.

Have Ithaka always in your mind.
Your arrival there is what you are destined for.
But don’t in the least hurry the journey.
Better it last for years,
so that when you reach the island you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to give you wealth.
Ithaka gave you a splendid journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She hasn’t anything else to give you.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka hasn’t deceived you.
So wise you have become, of such experience,
that already you’ll have understood what these Ithakas mean. 

Here is a reading of it by Sean Connery: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1n3n2Ox4Yfk

1865

The death of John Wilkes Booth

Having shot Abraham Lincoln on the night of April 14, 1865, John Wilkes Booth fled into hiding. While his fellow conspirators were being rounded up, Booth and accomplice David Herold headed south into territory where he might expect Confederate sympathizers to aid him. He paused at the house of Dr. Samuel Mudd to have his broken leg, suffered when he jumped to the stage at Ford’s Theatre, bound and set. (Mudd would later suffer imprisonment for this assistance.) The reward of $100,00 for his capture caused Booth and Herold to be extremely cautious because by now their identity was known and widely broadcast. Nonetheless, Booth was helped along his way by die-hard Confederates who provided shelter and horses.

On April 24, the fugitives reached the Virginia tobacco farm of Richard H. Garrett where the news of Lincoln’s death had not yet been learned; their plan was to make their way to Mexico but federal cavalry were hot on their trail. On the night of April 26, pursuers surrounded the barn where Booth and Herold slept and demanded their surrender. Herold quickly gave up but Booth announced his intention to fight on. The troops set the barn alight and fired into it, hitting Booth in the neck. He was dragged out of the barn and died on the porch of the farm house; his last words were “useless, useless!”