Additional events and anniversaries in early winter 2023

This is an addition to the much longer December 1st calendar post at:  durhamspark.blogspot.com/2023/12/some-events-and-anniversaries-in-late.html  There is much more I wanted to add here, though this took too long; maybe I will add more later or in another post.

If social media is intentionally addictive and manipulative, what about blogging services?

I inadvertently dug up the black trapdoor spider during some of the coldest weather so far this winter last week, but I tried to put it back in a sheltered location.  It was warmer over the weekend and in late afternoon on the 3rd (?) a large toad was out, maybe a female American toad.  

At one time there was a mistletoe growing on a silver maple on my street, later joined by others in post and Spanish or Southern red oaks, but then there were all lost over a few years to cutting and a hurricane or other storm.  I didn't know of any others in my immediate neighborhood, but several weeks ago I noticed a new mistletoe in the top of another maple, hidden behind a tall, thin Christmas tree-shaped conifer.  Mistletoe is relatively common along streets in urban areas in the Triangle and sometimes around parking lots and bodies of water.  Near a power substation on the north side of downtown Durham there is or was a deciduous tree, probably a small oak, with so much mistletoe that it looked evergreen.  I recently found a mistletoe growing in the top of a fruitless persimmon, an unusual host, near East Franklin Street in Chapel Hill.   Our mistletoe seems to prefer certain maples and oaks.  If mistletoe increases in Durham maybe we will gget more great purple hairstreak butterflies, mistletoe being their larval food.

A reminder that the Redwood City Seed Company in Redwood City, California is going out of business at the end if the year:  ecoseeds.com/

Some meteor showers in December and January:

The Southern Taurids September 28 – December 2, peaking November 4 – 5 and the Northern Taurids October 13 – December 2, peaking November 11 – 12; the Leonids November 3 – December 2, peaking November 17 – 18, maybe with a storm in 2099; the Geminids November 19 – December 24, peaking December 13 – 14; the Ursids December 13 – 24, peaking December 21 – 22; and the Quadrantids December 26 – January 16, peaking January 3 – 4:  amsmeteors.org/meteor-showers/meteor-shower-calendar/ 

New to me – slow and probably very spotty Wirtanen meteors around 11:20 UT December 12th from radiants in southern Sculptor, near alpha Phoenicis and between alpha Pegasi and beta Piscium; 2023 might be a good year for this shower.  These meteors are thought to come from Comet 46P/Wirtanen, a small sort-period comet discovered January 17, 1948 at Lick Observatory in northern California:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/46P/Wirtanen

Asteroid Vesta is visible with binoculars crossing the very top of Orion (an upraised "hand?") and into Taurus this month.  Very dark asteroid 319 Leona will pass in front of or occult the star Betelgeuse, at the top of Orion, December 11-12, seen from the southern tip of Florida, such as Miami:  occultations.org/publications/rasc/2023/nam23MBspecialoccs.htm  

Spica in Virgo, the rapidly waning Moon, and  brilliant Venus are visible in the east before dawn and today I think I saw very bright Arcturus in Bootes coming up over the trees again, after the spring and  summer.

Oakland, California UFO or mysterious airship November 22, 1896. ...

The Eclipse of Phlegon, November 24th in the year 29 CE, might have been recorded in the Bible regarding the crucifixion of Jesus.

A total solar eclipse November 24, 569 CE south of Mecca is thought to be the eclipse referred to in the Quran as occurring before Muhammad was born.

Author CA Burland is supposed to have argued, at the 1956 International Congress of Americanists, held in Paris, that Stele I of El Castillo, a compound in an ancient Maya city near Santa Lucia Cotzumahualpa, recorded a transit of Venus across the Sun November 25 416 CE:  brief reference on page 64 of We Are Not the First:  Riddles of Ancient Science, by Andrew Tomas, 1971-1973

Professor of religion and theology and prominent 9/11 truth author David Ray Griffin was born August 8, 1939 in Wilbur, Washington and passed away recently, November 26, 2022:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Ray_Griffin

Spiral petroglyphs at the Loughcrew Cairn L megalithic monument, near Oldcastle, in County Meath, Ireland, are thought to represent the oldest record of a solar eclipse, noting an eclipse on November 30, 3340 BCE:  the October 2023 issue of Astronomy magazine.

There haven't been any arrests over the Moore County, NC power substation attacks a year ago.  I think it was also about year ago that the power went out on a very cold morning in Durham, but in that case it was due to unexpectedly high demand.

Israel's 10,000th air attack on Gaza was December 3rd:  nypost.com/2023/12/03/news/israel-launches-10000th-airstrike-in-gaza-700-people-reported-killed-in-past-24-hours/

legitgov.org/index.php/2023/12/06/the-state-of-texas-media-outlets-sue-u-s-state-dept-for-conspiring-with-newsguard-to-censor-american-media-companies/

justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/george-orwell-call-your-office-state-outsourced-censorship-conservative

An annular solar eclipse December 7, 150 CE had the longest duration of any between 2000 BCE and 3000 CE, at 12 minutes and 23 seconds.

Peruvian president José Pedro Castillo Terrones (born October 19, 1969) was overthrown December 7, 2022.  Pro-Castillo demonstrators were killed in the Ayacucho Massacre December 15, 2022 and the Juliaca Massacre January 9th of this year, etc.  There were demonstrations across Peru on December 7, 2023.

There is uncertainty about how the Aztec and Gregorian calendars should line up; the month of of Panquetzaliztli (Raising of the Banners) might have been November 30th-December 9th:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C4%81nquetzaliztli , December 6 - December 25, or November 9 - 28:  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_calendar ; In The Aztecs (1992) Richard F Townsend gives the dates November 21 to December 10th.  The following month is Atemoztli (Descent of Water).

Japan's IKAROS (Interplanetary Kite-craft Accelerated by Radiation Of the Sun), the first successful spacecraft to be propelled by a solar sail, flew by Venus December 8, 2010, 52,100 miles out. 

December 9, 1965 Kecksburg Incident/UFO crash – one investigator in Pennsylvania:  www.stangordon.info/wp/kecksburg/

In Operation Linebacker II the Democratic Republic of Vietnam was heavily bombed (with about the same explosive force as the two nuclear bombs used on Japan) from December 18 - 29, 1972, hitting a hospital, residential areas, dikes, electrical facilities, etc. and killing over one to two thousand civilians just weeks before the Paris Peace Accords were signed to end the Vietnam War ( revcom.us/a/574/american-crime-case-number-34-1972-christmas-bombings-of-north-vietnam-en.html ). 

The last Japanese soldier from WWII (actually Taiwanese) was arrested in Indonesia December 18, 1974, but a Wikipedia article claims others joined communist guerillas in southern Thailand (perhaps this refers to Malaysian guerillas).  This might not be true, though in other cases I think surrendered Japanese soldiers did join local national liberation struggles following WW2. 

The Moon Treaty was signed December 18, 1979, but not by any of the powers capable of human spaceflight.  The Outer Space Treaty was created January 27, 1967 and came into effect October 10th that year.

International Migrants Day is December 18th:  www.un.org/en/observances/migrants-day

There are UN days celebrating several languages, and Arabic Language Day is December 18th:  www.un.org/ar/observances/arabiclanguageday/ , in Arabic.  French Language Day is March 20th:  www.un.org/fr/observances/french-language-day/ , in French.  Chinese Language Day April 20th:  www.un.org/zh/observances/chinese-language-day , in Chinese.

According to The Long Surrender, by Burke Davis, Walter Williams of Houston was the last veteran of the Civil War, dying December 19, 1959 at age 117.  He had served under Confederate General John Hood.  The last Federal veteran was Albert Woolson of Duluth, who died about three years earlier.  According to Wikipedia, the last known widow of a veteran of the Civil War died August 17, 2008, but someone receiving a Civil War pension was still alive more recently.  The last people enslaved prior to Emancipation also probably lived well into the 20th century.  Forced prison labor remains legal (forced labor or not, prisons produce most of the cleaning chemicals used by state entities in North Carolina, such as the state parks; visitors can easily look into cleaning closet in the parks), and people are illegally enslaved in the US today.  

South Carolina was the first state to secede, December 20, 1860, and the Civil War started a few months later.

George HW Bush attacked Panama December 20, 1989, resulting in hundreds to thousands of civilian deaths, including American civilians and a Spanish journalist.  Poor neighborhoods were burned and demolished, thousands were deprived of work, and churches, embassies, unions, and other institutions were violated by searches and seizures ( revcom.us/a/540/american-crime-case-43-the-US-invasion-of-panama-1989-1990-en.html ).  The war also allowed the USA to test what were new weapons at the time, including the Humvee, AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, and the F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter.

Portugal restored Macau to Chinese sovereignty December 20, 1999.

The UN's International Human Solidarity Day is December 20th:  www.un.org/en/observances/human-solidarity-day

The Northern Hemisphere's winter solstice will be Thursday, December 21st in 2023, with the longest night of the year.  The Earth is actually closest to the Sun in the Northern Hemisphere's winter.

Georgian Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet statesman J.V. Stalin (Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili) was born December 21, 1879 or 1878 in Gori, now in the Republic of Georgia, but at the time part of the Tsarist Russian Empire.  Many of his writings are available online at www.marx2mao.com/Stalin/Index.html , www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/decades-index.htm , redstarpublishers.org/  , in Spanish at:  pcmml.org/biblioteca/ , etc.   

Thomas Sankara, called Africa's Che Guevara, was president of Burkina Faso from 1983 until he was assassinated October 15, 1987.  Sankara was born December 21, 1949, in the northern town of Yako, in what was then the French colony of Upper Volta.  Some of his writings are posted at:  www.marxists.org/archive/sankara/index.htm

Alex Saab was born December 21, 1971 in Barranquilla, Colombia.

The Apollo 8 mission was December 21 - 28, 1968, and was the first Saturn V launch with a crew and the first crewed mission to leave Earth orbit and orbit the Moon.  The three crew members, Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders, were the first to visit another celestial body and see the Earth 'rise.'  An influential photo taken on the 24th by Anders might have aided the development of environmental protection movements.

The Cambodian-Vietnamese War, in which Vietnam overthrew the Khmer Rouge government of Democratic Kampuchea, began December 21, 1978.

Soviet statesman Lavrenti Beria was shot December 23, 1953 as Nikita Khrushchev rose to power.  Some of Beria's works are available at www.marxists.org/archive/beria/index.htm and redstarpublishers.org/  For some political and historical analysis of his actions see:  ml-review.ca/aml/index/subject.html

The First Battle of Fort Fisher was December 23-27, 1864.

Christmas is December 25th, a Sunday in 2023.  

The Capricorn astrological period, is conventionally set as the period from December 22nd to January 19th.  Two thousand years ago the Sun actually was 'in' the ancient constellation Capricornus, in late December, but now it is in Sagittarius around the solstice.  Capricornus was imagined between the cosmic water and earth, thus the constellation was a half fish "Sea Goat."  For some reason some label Stalin a Capricorn.

Soldiers organized informal Christmas truces during WWI (especially on the Western Front, but also in the East), especially early in the war (1914) and less so in later years.  In many cases these fraternizing truces were repressed and there might have been cover ups.  

WWI was supposed to be over by Christmas; a war over Serbia became a world war, and today the US elite portrays the potential for war over Ukraine or Taiwan as nothing to worry about.  Are they taking the world towards a global conflagration or are they bluffing?  Soon women might be required to register for the draft, so they can die for US imperialism as well, assuming it takes a while for WWIII to go nuclear on a large scale or maybe by then autonomous swarms of drone will be WMDs.     

Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu were executed December 25, 1989

Romanian President and General Secretary of the Romanian Communist Party Nicolae Ceaușescu, his wife Elena, Romania's Deputy Prime Minister, and others were captured December 22, 1989.  Whatever their revisionism or alleged crimes, the Ceaușescus were barely given a trial before being executed by firing squad on the 25th (which is apparently also Romania's date for Christmas).  The Romanian Communist Party vanished, but former members continued to run Romania, as happened elsewhere in Eastern Europe and the former USSR.  Apparently the Ceaușescus were the last people killed before Romania abolished the death penalty.

Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics December 25, 1991, one of the last events after years of active destruction and dismantling, not passive, natural, and inevitable "collapse" of the Soviet socialist project.

The James Webb Space Telescope was launched from the EU's equatorial spaceport in French Guiana in northeastern South America December 25, 2021, and placed at the distant Earth-Sun Lagrange Point L2.  It is often said that unlike the HST, the JWST can't be reached if there is a problem and apparently it isn't designed for refurbishing, but that shows how little progress there has been in human spaceflight since Apollo, beyond living in space stations orbiting close to the Earth.  Many decades ago there was talking of sending humans to Mars by now, but today the USA is having trouble even getting back to the Moon.  A private mission to the Moon might be launched January 2024.  There has been talk of privately owned spacecraft going to refurbish the HST, in the absence of the Space Shuttle.   

 Sen Katayama, co-founder of the Japanese Communist Party and an official in the Comintern, was born December 26, 1859.  He was also one of the first members of the CPUSA and was also active in Canada and Mexico; he was honored with burial in Moscow's Kremlin Wall Necropolis.  Some of his writings are available at www.marxists.org/archive/katayama/index.htm and there is a book about his legacy at redstarpublishers.org

December 26, 1862, following the Dakota War, 38 Dakota or Dakota Sioux were hung, the largest mass execution in US history.  303 Dakotas were convicted of murder or rape, some in trials lasting less than 5 minutes, and without defense attorneys, but Lincoln commuted the sentences of 264 prisoners and one more received a reprieve.  They were buried in a mass grave, possibly after skin was taken from some of the bodies.  Graverobbers later stole bodies for anatomy specimens.  Except for a group that helped the American settlers, the rest of the Dakota lost their reservation and were exiled from Minnesota over the next few months, and many died during the journey.  Any Dakota found in Minnesota could be killed, with the offer of a $25 dollar bounty.  The unrelated Ho-chunk tribe was also expelled.  Nonetheless some Dakota remained or returned 20 years later.

Chinese revolutionary and statesman Mao Zedong (or Mao Tsetung) was born December 26, 1893 in Hunan Province, People's Republic of China.  Many of his writings are available online at www.marx2mao.com/Mao/Index.html , www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/date-index.htm , foreignlanguages.press , redstarpublishers.org/ , etc.

Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet politician Anatoly Vasilyevich Lunacharsky was born November 23 or 24 in what is now Poltava, Ukraine.  He was appointed as the USSR's ambassador to Spain but passed away December 26, 1933 in France.  In 1932 he represented the USSR at the League of Nations.   

American entomologist E.O. Wilson, known for his work on ants, sociobiology, island biogeography, biodiversity, and the online Encyclopedia of Life, though he was also condemned by the PLP, died December 26, 2021.  He was born June 10, 1929 in Birmingham, Alabama.  

The great Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami / Boxing Day Tsunami/ Sumatra/Andaman Earthquake was December 26, 2004 off northern Sumatra, Indonesia, close to Aceh.

December's Full Moon is Tuesday, December 26th, the "Cold Moon," though in recent years there have often been long periods of warm or mild weather December here and our coldest and snowiest month is January, with the "Wolf Moon."  [Others call January's full Moon the "Cold Moon," with the "Long Nights Moon" in December, the "Mourning Moon" in November, and the "Blood Moon" in October.]  The Moon is a delicate waning crescent in the east before dawn now, amid the constellations of spring evenings, and the dark new Moon will be Tuesday, December 12th.

Colonial Boston Harbor, in Massachusetts, UFOs and voices were reported in March 1639 and again January 18, 1644 and over the following two weeks [from Jim Brandon's Weird America: A Guide to Places of Mystery in the United States, 1978; mentioned by Governor John Winthrop's Journal, etc.] .

A UFO was reportedly seen in Denison, Texas January 25, 1878 [John Martin, a farmer from the Dallas area was hunting and described seeing a "large orange 'object;'" a report from another newspaper was reprinted in the Denison Daily News on the 25th and happened earlier, maybe on the 24th; this supposed to be the first time a UFO was likened to a "saucer;" the term "flying saucer" was coined by the media in 1947, though in that case "saucer" referred to the motion not shape:  Phenomenon:  Forty Years of Flying Saucers, edited by John Spencer and Hilary Evans, 1988 – Amazon makes such 'older' books difficult to find without the exact title, "forty" not 40, etc.]; Denison, next to the northern border with Oklahoma, is the birthplace of Dwight D Eisenhower (October 14, 1890) and Jim Hightower (January 11, 1943).

The shortest solar eclipse between 2000 BCE and 3000 CE was February 3, 919 CE, at 2.5 seconds.

Russia's Znamya-2 space mirror experiment, originally a solar sail experiment, launched October 27, 1992 on Progress M-15, and was successfully deployed near the Mir space station February 4, 1993.  The 20-meter mirror created a 5 kilometer wide spot lit as if by the light of a full Moon, racing at 8 kilometers a second from the south of France to western Russia.  I wonder if anyone was upset by this gigantic light trespass, or was everything prearranged?  I remember that a Russian orbital mirror was covered in Durham's Herald-Sun newspaper at the time.  The satellite was deorbited and burned up over Canada after a few hours.  

February 5, 1999 Znamya-2.5, 25 meters wide and designed to illuminate an area 7 kilometers wide with light equal to five to 10 full Moons was deployed but then damaged before much could be done.  A Znamya-3 60 to 70 meters wide had been planned, but wasn't built.  In a limited way maybe Znamya was going too far and could have erased the night, though these were just experiments.

The NC Botanical Garden's Darwin Day Lecture 2024 will be Monday, February 12th 7-8pm – "Using science-fiction depictions to learn real-world evolution concepts" with Mohamed Noor, a professor of biology, interim vice provost at Duke, and a consultant for Star Trek series:   reg.learningstream.com/reg/event_page.aspx?ek=0005-0014-e26d3b3d83b74d57b1592ecafa675cba

The NCBG will be closed December 23rd to January 1st, except for the natural area trails, Coker Arboretum on the main UNC Campus, etc.

There will be events for Saving Our Savannas: Stories of the Longleaf Pine over six months, starting in January. 

The African-American Legacy in Gardening and Horticulture Symposium March 30th:

Hayti Heritage Center
804 Old Fayetteville Street, Durham NC 27701
March 30, 2024, 10 a.m.
Free and Open to the Public

There is supposed to be some maybe underacknowledged ancient Mexican influence on the Western tradition in gardening, not limited to the foodplants, ornamental flowers, and herbs discovered and grown, if not domesticated, in Mexico and neighboring countries.  The Aztecs had ornamental gardens and city beautification, and zoos.  Some individual pre-Columbian cypress trees and parks still exist in Mexico City.  

People might not be aware that there is such a thing as garden history and national or regional traditions in ornamental gardening.  Trends in gardening can be seen just driving around Durham over the decades.  I've been seeing what might be called "cottagecore" (sic?) and foodscaping in recent years, and it seems very different from how people landscaped a few decades ago; it might even have been declared a violation of local laws not long ago.

The first of 36 solar eclipses recorded in China and noted in Confucius' Chunqiu, or The Spring and Autumn Annals, is thought to have been February 22, 720 BCE.  

The partial solar eclipse closest to total, the diameter of the Moon appeared to be 0.99985 of the Sun's, was March 30, 1578 BCE.  Plutarch made the first known description of the solar corona during a solar eclipse March 20, 71 CE.