Every Day Is Special

August 5 – Zenger Found “Not Guilty”

Posted on August 5, 2014

If a powerful leader such as a mayor, governor, or president was doing something very wrong, and a newspaper reporter found out about the wrongdoing...should he publish his findings?

I hope you answered, “Of course!”

But...this leader is powerful. And he or she is part of the government. Wouldn't the government official be able to make a lot of trouble for the reporter?

Once again, I hope you are answering that the freedom of the press (and we include podcasts and TV reporting and radio broadcasts and blogs as part of the “press”) is very important to a free society. The people MUST be informed of the wrongdoing of their elected officials, and the informers themselves must be protected.

The question of the day is, how did “freedom of the press” get started?

Today is the historic anniversary of an important step toward that freedom.

German-born John Peter Zenger was a publisher and printer working in New York City. He actually started a publication in order to express his criticisms of the colonial governor William Cosby.

Cosby didn't like being criticized in print. He issued an official proclamation that said that Zenger's New York Weekly Journal was filled with “divers scandalous, virulent, false and seditious reflections.”

And then Cosby sent police officers out to arrest Zenger on charges of “seditious libel.” After more than eight months in prison, after two trials and several lawyers, the public was behind Zenger and hanging on every word of the trial. The main defense lawyer, Andrew Hamilton, pleaded the case directly to the jury (because the judge owed his position to Cosby and had been showing bias at every turn.

And how did the lawyer defend Zenger? He obviously HAD published the things that Governor Cosby said he had – the printed papers were right there, for all to see! Hamilton's argument was that, if he could prove that the things Zenger had said were TRUE, it wasn't libel.

That's not how things were seen back then. There was an argument that “a libel is no less a libel for being true.” In British law, back then, truthful criticisms of others were the worst sort of libel, because if the criticisms were true, the criticized couldn't easily refute them.

Hamilton argued that people ought to be able to criticize their government. Zenger, writing as Cato in his Journal, said, “The exposing therefore of public wickedness, as it is a duty which every man owes to the truth and his country, can never be a libel in the nature of things...”

On this date in 1735, the jury found Zenger innocent of libel. The truth won out!

Did you know...?

Libel is now generally defined as false statements appearing in print (or via audio visual media) that harm the reputation of a business, individual, product, government, or even group.

Slander is the same thing but spoken rather than published or broadcast.

Defamation is the general term that includes libel and slander.

Also on this date:

Anniversary of the banning of “Monster Mash”

Assistance Dog Day

Foundation Day in Santo Domingo

Anniversary of a quasar breakthrough

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September holidays
September birthdays
Historical anniversaries in September

August 4 – Happy Birthday, Kieron Williamson

Posted on August 4, 2014

Kieron Williamson is considered a child prodigy.

In 2009, Williamson held his second exhibition. All 16 watercolor paintings sold within the first 14 minutes - for a total of more than 18,000 pounds!

(I guess you can tell that he's British.)

And at his next exhibition, his paintings sold out within 30 minutes – for a total of 150,000 pounds!

Wait – there's more! In 2011, Williamson sold 33 paintings in 10 minutes for a total of 100,000 pounds, and in 2013 he sold 23 paintings for 242,000 pounds, and the very next week he sold 12 paintings for 210,000 pounds.

Williamson is turning 12 today.

Williamson made a splash when he was just six years old, quickly becoming known in the U.K. for his advanced use of perspective and shading. Since then, as you can tell, he has been pretty prolific – he makes new art all the time.

Here is his official website.

Here are some paintings Williamson made when he was just six years old!

And here are some more recent works:

I read that Williamson will no longer be attending school, so he can concentrate on painting. I guess that means that he will be homeschooling!

Here are a few instructional videos about watercolor painting.

Here is a time-lapse of an accomplished watercolorist painting some flowers. Notice that sometimes paints are added to wet spaces (wet-into-wet) and other times they are added to dry spaces (wet-on-dry).

Here is a great beginning lesson on watercolor.

Here are some hints about wet-into-wet.

Also on this date:

Geologist Johann Gottlob Lehmann's birthday

Coast Guard Day in the USA

Constitution Day in Cook Islands

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September holidays
September birthdays
Historical anniversaries in September

August 3 – Anniversary of the "Discovery" of the La Brea Tar Pits

Posted on August 3, 2014

Lovely green grass... a boulder here or there, half submerged in the earth... a patch of weeds over here, a patch of bare dirt over there, a patch of—

Wait!! What is THAT?

It's black. It's sticky–yicky, oozy–squoozy. It's even bubbly!

It's tar!

My sister used to live just a block away from the La Brea Tar Pits, in Los Angeles, California. And not all of the tar is safely fenced off from us modern humans walking around Hancock Park. As we walked along, we often saw sticky patches of fresh tar bubbling up here and there!

It was quite...unnerving!

You know that there is petroleum, or oil, underneath the ground in some places, right? Well, that is the case in some areas of Los Angeles. Some crude oil has been seeping up to the Earth's surface through cracks in the crust; once exposed to the air and sun, some of the lighter components of the oil has been evaporating away. The denser part that is left behind is called natural asphalt, or tar.

The pools of tar have been growing (and sometimes shrinking) over tens of thousands of years. And over the years, the pools have been accumulating a dusting of dust and dirt and a partially covering of leaves and other natural debris. And over those thousands of years, many animals have stumbled into the pits, where they found themselves stuck. Naturally, some predators that saw the stuck animals decided to get an easy dinner—but then they also got stuck!

On this date in 1769, a Spanish friar named Juan Crespi noticed and wrote about the pools of tar—and he is the first person we know saw them. (Obviously, many native Americans must have seen the tar pools at one point or another—but we don't have records that tell us who or when. That is why Crespi gets the label “discoverer,” when really he was probably the first European person—not the first person—to discover the tar pools!)

Did you know...?

La Brea means “the tar” in Spanish. So the name The La Brea Tar Pits translates to “The The Tar Tar Pits.”

The tar not only killed a lot of animals, it preserved their bones as fossils. At the La Brea Tar Pits there is a museum in which many of the more than 1,000,000 fossils found in the pits are displayed. The species found include more than 150 species (kinds) of plants and more than 460 species of animals.

Only one human skeleton has ever been found in the La Brea Tar Pits—a woman who lived and died around ten thousand years ago. There is evidence that suggests that she was deliberately submerged in the tar pit only after she died. In other words, the tar didn't kill her; instead, she was buried in one of the pools.

Jose Longinos Martinez wrote in 1792: “Near the Pueblo de Los Angeles there are more than twenty springs of liquid petroleum, pitch, etc. Farther to the west of said town . . . there is a great lake of pitch, with many pools in which bubbles or blisters are constantly forming and exploding. They are shaped like conical bells and, when they burst at their apex, they make a little report.”
(In this case, report means an explosive sound.)

There have been more than 60 tar pits excavated by scientists, although only about 12 were found to hold a lot of fossils.

There have been no dinosaur bones discovered in the tar pits. The dinosaurs died out millions and millions of years before the pools of tar formed.

The bones found in the tar pits include mammoths, dire wolves, short-faced bears, saber-toothed cats, and giant sloths.

Also on this date:

National Doll Day

National Eisteddfod of Wales

Watermelon Day

Anniversary of the discovery of a Neanderthal

Anniversary of the first watercraft to reach the North Pole

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September holidays
September birthdays
Historical anniversaries in September

August 2 – Take a Penny, Leave a Penny Day

Posted on August 2, 2014

There are so many little ways that people help other people out, or make their lives a little easier...

Someone was smart when they came up with those little Take a Penny, Leave a Penny trays that you see next to cash registers in grocery stores and elsewhere.

Without those trays, all of us would be doing what so many people used to do, dump pennies into their pockets and purses and later, trying to lighten the load in pockets and purses, dumping the pennies into jars at home. Since pennies are almost useless in most transactions (for example, no coin-op machine seems to take them, anymore), pennies used to build up and build up in our homes. Finally, in desperation, many of us would take our jars of pennies to one of those big machines that sorts and counts change and pays us in more sensible forms of cash. Or we would buy penny wraps and count the coins ourselves, and take them to the bank to cash them in.

But with the Take a Penny, Leave a Penny trays, whenever you get from one to four pennies, you can just dump them into the tray. And whenever you need a penny or two so you don't have to break a twenty, you can take what you need. No more pennies in a jar, right?

So brilliant!

I bet whoever thought of creating those trays made a handy bit of dough. Sure, some people just take any old bowl and make a hand-made sign, but plenty of folks bought specially inscribed plastic trays for the purpose. And then of course there were all those manufacturers who bought trays and slapped ads on them and passed them out to the stores they deal with...

To celebrate today...

Scrounge around for pennies at your house and fill all the Take/Leave Penny trays you can.

Or try to come up with a another cool idea to save everybody time and money and aggravation.

Or use Google to find out why some people want to eliminate the penny. Are there any good arguments against getting rid of the penny?

Also on this date:

Satchmo Days

Anniversary of the final end of the final fighting of the Civil War

Statue-of-Liberty sculptor Frederick Bartholdi's birthday

Ilinden and Day of the Republic in Macedonia

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September holidays
September birthdays
Historical anniversaries in September

August 1 – National Days in Benin and Switzerland

Posted on August 1, 2014

Could there be two nations less alike, and two national days as varied?

Switzerland is a European nation with three official languages and a reputation for great cheese, chocolate, watches and clocks, and (especially) banks. It has the highest nominal wealth per adult in the world.

Switzerland is marked in bright pink.

Benin is an African nation with only one official language but several indigenous languages; the economy depends largely on subsistence farming and a few agricultural exports such as cotton and nuts.

The Swiss National Day harkens back to an oath of confederation sworn by representatives of three Alpine cantons against the Holy Roman Empire – way back in 1291! It is a federal representative democracy and has one of the most stable governments and economies in the world—partly, no doubt, because the nation has a long history of armed neutrality and therefore it doesn't waste people and resources on war.

Benin's Independence Day celebrates its much, much more recent (1960) independence from colonial power France.

Since its independence, the nation has attempted to set up democratic governments many times but has experienced many military coups and governments.

Most of Switzerland is high mountain country with lots of glaciers and snow. Tourism—especially winter tourism—is important.

Most of Benin is flat and tropical. Much of the land that is not farmed is covered with mangroves or is savannah covered with thorny scrubs and the occasional huge baobab tree.

To celebrate today, some Swiss people will enjoy the Rhine Falls illuminated, and others will enjoy a historical reenactment or a fireworks show. Basically, the celebrations tend to be more regional and local than national.