March 23

1743, 1918




What an absolutely splendid headline:

"Messiah premieres in London"

              !

Handel's "Messiah" I presume, or maybe it was the real thing, himself (I think that should be capitalised: Himself) making his first appearance in a pulpit since the last time he was in shul, or Temple anyway - was it not his lambasting of the unethical capitalists who were running their flea-market in its very courtyard, rather than anything theological, that caused the last straw to break the camel's back and him to have the authorities come down on his forehead with a hedge fund and a Ponzi scheme of their own?


Or is that take on history too non-conformist for you, too much of a challenge to your traditional position; too Dadaist even. But appropriate: the Dada manifesto was published today in 1918... written on July 14, 1916 by Hugo Ball, and read the same day at the Waag Hall in Zurich, for the first public Dada party.

Read it here.



Amber pages


Can you get more traditional than the work of William Morris, born today in 1834?


And then, today in 1940: the All-India-Muslim league adopted a Muslim homeland resolution; and sixteen years later, in 1956, presumably choosing this date for that reason, Pakistan declared itself a republic.



(Shall I do this as an essay on the stupidity of the 2-state solution?Pakistan was anyway three from the outset, the West Bank around Lahore, the Gaza Strip on the Bay of Bengal, and the regional superpower keeping the two apart, while being itself the third part of the equation, India. A recipe for war.)




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