On this day in1889, Archduke Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian crown, is found dead with his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera in the Mayerling. Rudolf was was the only son and third child of Emperor Franz Joseph I and Empress Elisabeth of Austria. He was heir apparent to the imperial throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire from birth. In 1889, he died in a suicide pact with his mistress Baroness Mary Vetsera at the Mayerling hunting lodge. The ensuing scandal made international headlines.
Rudolf was raised together with his older sister Gisela and the two were very close. At the age of six, Rudolf was separated from his sister as he began his education to become a future Emperor of Austria. This did not change their relationship and Gisela remained close to him until she left Vienna upon her marriage to Prince Leopold of Bavaria. Rudolf’s initial education under Leopold Gondrecourt was physically and emotionally abusive, and likely a contributing factor in his later suicide.
In Vienna, on 10 May 1881, Rudolf married Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, a daughter of King Leopold II of Belgium, at the Augustinian Church in Vienna. Although their marriage was initially a happy one, by the time their only child, the Archduchess Elisabeth (“Erzsi”), was born on 2 September 1883, the couple had drifted apart.
In 1886, Rudolf became seriously ill and the couple was directed to the island of Lacroma (off present day Croatia) for his treatment. In transit, Stéphanie also became seriously ill and described “suffering terrible pain”. Stéphanie’s symptoms and outcome indicate Rudolf had most likely infected her with gonorrhoea. Rudolf himself did not improve with treatment and grew increasingly ill. It is likely he had contracted syphilis in addition to gonorrhoea. In order to cope with the effects of the disease, Rudolf began taking large doses of morphine.
In 1886, Rudolf bought Mayerling, a hunting lodge. In late 1888, the 30-year-old Crown Prince met the 17-year-old Baroness Marie von Vetsera, and began an affair with her. On 30 January 1889, he and the young baroness were discovered dead in the lodge as a result of an apparent joint suicide. As suicide would prevent him from being given a church burial, Rudolf was officially declared to have been in a state of “mental unbalance”, and he was buried in the Imperial Crypt of the Capuchin Church in Vienna. Vetsera’s body was smuggled out of Mayerling in the middle of the night and secretly buried in the village cemetery at Heiligenkreuz.
On this day in 1891, Lydia Liliʻu Loloku Walania Kamakaʻeha (Liliʻuokalani), ascended to the throne of the Hawaiian Kingdom, nine days after her brother’s death. During her reign, she attempted to draft a new constitution which would restore the power of the monarchy and the voting rights of the economically disenfranchised. was the only queen regnant and the last sovereign monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom, ruling until the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom on January 17, 1893, in a coup that was led by the Committee of Safety, composed of seven foreign residents (five Americans, one Scotsman, and one German) and six Hawaiian Kingdom subjects of American descent in Honolulu. The overthrow was bolstered by the landing of US Marines to protect American interests, which rendered the monarchy unable to protect itself.
After an unsuccessful uprising to restore the monarchy, the oligarchical government placed the former queen under house arrest at the ʻIolani Palace. On January 24, 1895, under threat of execution of her imprisoned supporters, Liliʻuokalani was forced to abdicate the Hawaiian throne, officially resigning as head of the deposed monarchy. Attempts were made to restore the monarchy and oppose annexation, but with the outbreak of the Spanish–American War, the United States annexed Hawaiʻi. Living out the remainder of her later life as a private citizen, Liliʻuokalani died at her residence, Washington Place, in Honolulu in 1917.
Today is the birthday, in 1873, of Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, known as Colette. She was a French author and woman of letters. She was also a mime, actress, and journalist. Colette is best known in the English-speaking world for her 1944 novella Gigi, which was the basis for the 1958 film and the 1973 stage production of the same name. Her short story collection The Tendrils of the Vine is also famous in France.
Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was born on 28 January 1873 in the village of Saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye in the department of Yonne, Burgundy. Her father, Captain Jules-Joseph Colette (1829–1905), was a war hero. Her mother, Adèle Eugénie Sidonie, was nicknamed Sido. Colette’s great-grandfather, Robert Landois, was a wealthy Martinican mulatto, who settled in Charleville in 1787.
In 1893, Colette married Henry Gauthier-Villars, an author and publisher 14 years her senior, who used the pen name “Willy”. Her first four novels – the four Claudine stories: Claudine à l’école (1900), Claudine à Paris (1901), Claudine en ménage (1902), and Claudine s’en va (1903) – appeared under his name. Fourteen years older than his wife and one of the most notorious libertines in Paris, he introduced his wife into avant-garde intellectual and artistic circles and encouraged her lesbian dalliances. And it was he who chose the titillating subject matter of the Claudine novels: “the secondary myth of Sappho.
Colette and Willy separated in 1906, although their divorce was not final until 1910. Colette had no access to the sizable earnings of the Claudine books – the copyright belonged to Willy – and until 1912 she conducted a stage career in music halls across France, sometimes playing Claudine in sketches from her own novels, earning barely enough to survive and often hungry and ill. To make ends meet, she turned more seriously to journalism in the 1910s.
During these years she embarked on a series of relationships with other women, notably with Natalie Clifford Barney and with Mathilde de Morny, the Marquise de Belbeuf (“Max”), with whom she sometimes shared the stage. On 3 January 1907, an onstage kiss between Max and Colette in a pantomime entitled “Rêve d’Égypte” caused a near-riot, and as a result, they were no longer able to live together openly, although their relationship continued for another five years.
Colette was 67 years old when France was occupied by the Germans. She remained in Paris, in her apartment in the Palais-Royal. Her husband Maurice Goudeket, who was Jewish, was arrested by the Gestapo in December 1941, and although he was released after seven weeks through the intervention of the French wife of the German ambassador.
In 1944, Colette published what became her most famous work, Gigi, which tells the story of the 16-year-old Gilberte (“Gigi”) Alvar. Born into a family of demimondaines, Gigi is trained as a courtesan to captivate a wealthy lover but defies the tradition by marrying him instead. In 1949 it was made into a French film starring Danièle Delorme and Gaby Morlay, then in 1951 adapted for the stage with the then-unknown Audrey Hepburn (picked by Colette personally) in the title role. The 1958 Hollywood musical movie, starring Leslie Caron and Louis Jourdan, with a screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner and a score by Lerner and Frederick Loewe, won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
Upon her death, on 3 August 1954, she was refused a religious funeral by the Catholic Church on account of her divorces, but given a state funeral, the first French woman of letters to be granted the honor, and interred in Père-Lachaise cemetery.
Colette, possibly around 1910
BADA BING
I tried making skimmed milk, but it was too hard to throw the cow across the lake.
A person learning English as a second language just asked me the difference between “burned” and “burnt”, and I just stared blankly back with a 404 error screen running through my brain.
You might be in a CULT if you buy a red hat made in China to support a felon who married an immigrant and has convinced you that all your problems are caused by immigrants and felons. Or maybe you’re just stupid.
(phone ringing) Boss: Why the hell aren’t you picking that up?! Me: I always answer on the third ring, makes me seem cooler. Boss: PICK IT UP! Me: Fine… 911 what’s your emergency?
BREAKING: The cold weather is set to last until it gets warmer.
I celebrate every touchdown my team makes by drinking nearly a liter of beer. That’s a two pint conversion.
What were electric eels called before electricity was discovered?
Me to dog: I’m out of treats. Dog: I’ll hold your beer ’till you get back.
Minute and minute shouldn’t be spelled the same. I’m not content with this content. I object to that object. I need to read what I read again. Excuse me but there’s no excuse for this. Someone should wind this comment up and throw it in the wind.
I saw someone with a tattoo that read, Comparison is the Thief of Joy. I’m going to get the same tattoo…but mine will be bigger!
How big is Greenland? It’s so big that it covers up 99% of the Epstein files.
I had a leak in the roof over my dining room so I called a roofer to take a look at it. “When did you first notice the leak?” he asked. I told him, “Last night, when it took me two hours to finish my soup!”
My brother thinks he’s a turtle. I’m taking him to the best terrapist in town.
Whoever said 10°F is better than 100°F better be sitting outside enjoying it today.
They say the machines of the future will be as smart as people. Okay, but which people? Because that’s gonna make a big difference. (Bilbo)
Smart people underestimate themselves and ignorant people think they’re brilliant.
When in grizzly territory, always hike in groups and carry sedative dart guns. Remember, there’s safety in numb bears.
Today is the birthday, in 1968, of Canadian musician singer songwriter, Sarah McLachlan, who had the 1997 US No.2 album Surfacing. McLachlan has won three Grammy Awards and has sold over 40 million albums worldwide. After becoming frustrated with concert promoters and radio stations that refused to feature two female musicians in a row, she founded the Lilith Fair tour in 1997. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSz16ngdsG0
On this day in 1945, the Soviet 322nd Rifle Division liberated the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. The camp was was a complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II. It consisted of Auschwitz I, the main camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp with gas chambers, Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben, and dozens of subcamps.
Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million were murdered. The number of victims includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Romani, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 others. Those not gassed were murdered via starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments.
When the Soviet soldiers arrived, They found 7,000 prisoners alive in the three main camps, 500 in the other subcamps, and over 600 corpses. Georgii Elisavetskii, a Soviet soldier who entered one of the barracks, said in 1980 that he could hear other soldiers telling the inmates: “You are free, comrades!” But they did not respond, so he tried in Russian, Polish, German, Ukrainian. Then he used some Yiddish: “They think that I am provoking them. They begin to hide. And only when I said to them: ‘Do not be afraid, I am a colonel of Soviet Army and a Jew. We have come to liberate you’ … Finally, as if the barrier collapsed … they rushed toward us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs.”
Female prisoners at Birkenau
By mail…
Only in Britain – Complaints to Councils Extracts from letters written by council tenants:
1. It’s the dog’s mess that I find hard to swallow.
2. I want some repairs done to my cooker as it has backfired and burnt my knob off.
3. I wish to complain that my father twisted his ankle very badly when he put his foot in the hole in his back passage.
4. Their 18 year old son is continually banging his balls against my fence.
5. I wish to report that tiles are missing from the outside toilet roof. I think it was bad wind the other day that blew them off.
6. My lavatory seat is cracked, where do I stand?
7. I am writing on behalf of my sink, which is coming away from the wall.
8. Will you please send someone to mend the garden path. My wife tripped and fell on it yesterday and now she is pregnant.
9. I request permission to remove my drawers in the kitchen.
10. 50% of the walls are damp, 50% have crumbling plaster, and 50% are just plain filthy.
11. The next door neighbor has got this huge tool that vibrates the whole house and I just can’t take it anymore.
12. The toilet is blocked and we cannot bath the children until it is cleared.
13. Will you please send a man to look at my water, it is a funny color and not fit to drink.
14. Our lavatory seat is broken in half and now is in three pieces.
15. I want to complain about the farmer across the road. Every morning at 6am his cock wakes me up and it’s now getting too much for me.
16. The man next door has a large erection in the back garden, which is unsightly and dangerous.
17. Our kitchen floor is damp. We have two children and would like a third, so please send someone round to do something about it.
18. I am a single woman living in a downstairs flat and would you please do something about the noise made by the man on top of me every night.
19. Please send a man with the right tool to finish the job and satisfy my wife..
20. I have had the clerk of works down on the floor six times but I still have no satisfaction.
He wants it all!!!
Today is the birthday, in 1951, of Brian Downey, Irish drummer and founding member of Thin Lizzy, who had the 1973 UK No.6 single ‘Whisky In The Jar’ and hits with ‘Jailbreak’ and ‘The Boys Are Back in Town’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quyB8PMTD3o
Today is the birthday, in 1892, of Elizabeth Bessie) Coleman. She was the first African-American woman and first Native American to hold a pilot license, and is the earliest known Black person to earn an international pilot’s license. She earned her license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale on June 15, 1921.
Born to a family of sharecroppers in Texas, Coleman worked in the cotton fields at a young age while also studying in a small segregated school. She attended one term of college at Langston University. Coleman developed an early interest in flying, but African Americans, Native Americans, and women had no flight training opportunities in the United States, so she saved and obtained sponsorships in Chicago to go to France for flight school.
When Coleman was two years old, her family moved to Waxahachie, Texas, where they lived as sharecroppers. Coleman began attending school in Waxahachie at the age of six. She walked four miles each day to her segregated, one-room school, where she loved to read and established herself as an outstanding math student. She completed her elementary education in that school. Every season, Coleman’s routine of school, chores, and church was interrupted for her to participate in bringing in the cotton harvest.
When she turned eighteen, she took her savings and enrolled in the Oklahoma Colored Agricultural and Normal University in Langston, Oklahoma (now called Langston University). She completed one term before her money ran out and she returned home. In 1915, at the age of 23, Coleman moved to Chicago, Illinois, where she lived with her brothers. In Chicago, she worked as a manicurist at the White Sox Barber Shop, where she heard stories of flying during wartime from pilots returning home from World War I. American flight schools of the time admitted neither women nor black people, so Robert S. Abbott, founder and publisher of the Chicago Defender newspaper, encouraged her to study abroad. Abbot publicized Coleman’s quest in his newspaper and she received financial sponsorship from banker Jesse Binga and the Defender.
Bessie Coleman took a French-language class at the Berlitz Language Schools in Chicago and then traveled to Paris, France, on November 20, 1920, so that she could earn her pilot license. She learned to fly in a Nieuport 564 biplane with “a steering system that consisted of a vertical stick the thickness of a baseball bat in front of the pilot and a rudder bar under the pilot’s feet.” On June 15, 1921, Coleman became the first black woman and first Native American to earn an aviation pilot’s license and the first black person and first self-identified Native American to earn an international aviation license from the Fédération Aéronautique Internationale.
“Queen Bess”, as she was known, was a highly popular draw for the next five years. Invited to important events and often interviewed by newspapers, she was admired by both blacks and whites. She primarily flew Curtiss JN-4 Jenny biplanes and other aircraft that had been army surplus aircraft left over from the war. She made her first appearance in an American airshow on September 3, 1922, at an event honoring veterans of the all-black 369th Infantry Regiment of World War I. Held at Curtiss Field on Long Island.
Committed to promoting aviation and combating racism, Coleman spoke to audiences across the country about the pursuit of aviation and goals for African Americans. She absolutely refused to participate in aviation events that prohibited the attendance of African Americans.
On April 30, 1926, Coleman was in Jacksonville, Florida. She had recently purchased a Curtiss JN-4 (Jenny) in Dallas. Her mechanic and publicity agent, 24-year-old William D. Wills, flew the plane from Dallas in preparation for an airshow and had to make three forced landings along the way because the plane had been so poorly maintained. Coleman’s friends and family did not consider the aircraft safe and implored her not to fly it, but she refused. On take-off, Wills was flying the plane with Coleman in the other seat. She was planning a parachute jump for the next day and was unharnessed as she needed to look over the side to examine the terrain.
About ten minutes into the flight, the plane unexpectedly went into a dive and then a spin at 3,000 feet above the ground. Coleman was thrown from the plane at 2,000 ft (610 m), and was killed instantly when she hit the ground. Wills was unable to regain control of the plane, and it plummeted to the ground. He died upon impact. The plane exploded, bursting into flames. Although the wreckage of the plane was badly burned, it was later discovered that a wrench used to service the engine had jammed the controls. Coleman was 34 years old.
Coleman in 1923
Today is the birthday, in 1964, of Susannah Melvoin, American vocalist, and songwriter. She has worked with Prince, Roger Waters, Eric Clapton and Mike Oldfield. As a songwriter, has co-written songs performed by Madonna and Eric Clapton. Prince wrote The Family’s 1985 song ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ about Susannah Melvoin. She is the twin sister of musician Wendy Melvoin who was in Prince’s band Revolution as well as Wendy & Lisa. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-EF60neguk
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