David Prashker's Book Of Days: April 20

1653, 1889, 1893, 1902, 1990

Oliver Cromwell dissolved the English Parliament, in order to rule by decree, today in 1653. As Napoleon would. As Putin has effectively done in Moscow. As some Americans are already suggesting Trump will create a war or emergency of some kind, to allow him to postpone the election at the end of his second term, in order to do more or less the same. We shall see.

With Cromwell we don't need to wait and see, because it is already history - and no, sadly I don't mean that in the sense of "finished" and "over", and GER. It is already history in that it is established in the human consciousness, ever to be repeated, though in its embarrassment it has to keep on coming up with a new name that makes it sound acceptable. “Woke and Cancel” Cromwell can be found on Aug 27 and Oct 1, but especially on Sept 1 (for Cromwell and the Jews see Sept 30 and Dec 8; he also appears on Dec 6).

1893: Birthday of the painter Joan Miró i Ferrà

Pierre and Marie Curie isolated radium, today in 1902 (see March 1)*

Marie once said that:

"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."

Does that valiant piece of idealism apply to any, some, all, or none of the above and below?

But especially the below...

...because, today in 1990, between 11:19 a.m. and 12:08 p.m, two young men of fine character and decent parentage, of Christian upbringing and sound education, upheld their constitutional right to bear arms, by taking rifles into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, shooting dead twelve students and a teacher, leaving a further twenty wounded, and then turning their rifles on themselves.

For the information, the Rocky Mountain columbine is the state flower of Colorado, and it was chosen as such by schoolchildren, in 1891. In 1925, the General Assembly enacted a law to protect this rare and delicate creature (the flower, not the children), making it illegal to uproot it on public lands, and restricting the gathering of its blossoms and buds to twenty-five in any one day. Columbines may not be picked at all on private land without the consent of the landowner. At the time that the law was passed, it was a misdemeanour "punished by a fine of not less than five nor more than fifty dollars". God bless the Constitution! God bless America!

How the Columbine got its name is also worth mentioning (and see October 26). The Latin name is Aquilegia, which means "eagle", and is a reference to the claw-like spurs at the base of the flower. But the eagle is a killer, while the dove represents the sort of peace in which schoolchildren hope to spend their study-time; the Latin for "dove" is "columbus"; and indeed, as the illustration clearly shows, those petals look remarkably like five doves clustered together. Thirteen bodies at a funeral, on the other hand, looks rather more like the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.

Speaking as someone who has spent the whole of his life searching, and trying countless possibilities, and then resuming the quest, but still at seventy I haven't found it, but hopefully, eventually, something, anything, that will make the act of daily living fully worth the while, I have enormous respect and admiration for those who know early on exactly what it is, and then dedicate their every hour to trying to achieve it (this paragraph is in a metallic grey reflects my attempt to capture polonium artistically, though it may be that the silvery grey in the piece that follows is actually closer).

Marie Curie, born Maria Sklodowska, in Russian-ruled Warsaw, on November 7, 1867, had the advantage of being the daughter of a secondary-school teacher for whom science was his specality. Aged twenty-four she enrolled at the Sorbonne, moving between Maths and Physics, marrying her professor in the latter subject, Pierre Curie, and succeeding him as Head of the Physics Laboratory when he was promoted to the senior professorship in 1903, and she at the same time completed her Doctorate. Oh, and I nearly forgot, one other piece of minor information relevant to that year, but it's already noted higher up on this page: the isolation of radium and polonium as a result of their development of the work of Henri Becquerel (see March 1) - it led to them becoming the first married couple to win a Nobel Prize.

Pierre might well have won a second Nobel Prize, but you have to be alive to do that, and tragically he died in 1906 - no, not from cancer caused by radiation; he was run over by a horse-drawn carriage when he slipped and fell, trying to cross a busy street in pouring rain; the wheel crushed his skull and killed him outright. She was given his Professorship, and eight years later the Directorship of the newly-founded Curie Laboratory in the Radium Institute of the University of Paris. In between those two dates, in 1911, she received that second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, though still related to the work she and Pierre had done together. As far as I can understand the matter (I wernt to schools that didn't offer science so this is another of the subjects on my list of "countless possibilities" still waiting to be undertaken) she developed methods for separating the radium out of the residues of radioactive things, and doing so in sufficient quantities that it became possible to identify the variant characters, and then use the device that Pierre and his brother Jacques had invented, the "piezoelectric quartz electrometer" (click here), to study its properties, and especially to seek out anything that might prove beneficial to medicine.

Very ironic that last statement. She died on July 4, 1934, and in her case it was precisely the radiation that did it, aplastic anemia, some from the lab work, mostly from the x-rays she was exposed to during the First World War.