Saint Simeon Stylites

The son of a shepherd, Simeon Stylites was born in the Amanus mountains village of Sis, now the Turkish town of Kozan, in Adana Province around 386 AD.

Simeon developed a zeal for Christianity when at the age of 13 he heard a reading of the Beatitudes as he was watching his father's sheep. The verse "Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh" particularly intrigued him. Simeon asked an old man the meaning of these words, and it was explained to him that eternal happiness is obtained by suffering, and that it is in solitude that is most surely gained.

Young Simeon at once joined some hermits of the district, with whom he lived for two years. Then he lived for some 10 years at the monastery of Teleda where he practiced an austerity so extreme that his brethren made the decision that he was unsuited to any form of community life. Simeon was asked to leave the monastery.

From then on Simeon lived in a solitary manner. He carved himself a virtuous reputation by such saintly acts as going without any food or drink for the entire Lent period, chaining himself to a rock and standing for days at a time in furious prayer.

By the 420s, pillar dwelling had become quite a fad amongst holy men. Simeon made the decision to spend the last part of his life on top of a pillar in Syria. His decision to build himself a nine-foot high column was prompted by the constant interruptions from curious crowds congregating outside the cave where he was residing, who had heard reports of his already extreme self-denying lifestyle. 

Wikipedia

Simeon climbed his pillar in 422 AD and as time went by, he graduated to higher and higher columns until this his final one which was 60ft high. On it was a platform 6-foot wide dressed in the skins of animals, where Simeon ate food sent up to him in a basket by people below. 

Simeon prayed on his pillar almost without ceasing and bobbled about a great deal, kneeling and jumping about with dervish like frenzy, sometimes shouting sermons to the crowds below. 

On one occasion for a period of a year Simeon stood on one leg and tied a rope around his waist so tightly that his lower body became putrefied and infested with ulcers and maggots. He proceeded to eat the maggots saying, "Eat what God has given to you."

A 1901 illustration by W. E. F. Britten for Alfred Tennyson's St. Simeon Stylites.   

In Simeon's lifetime, hermits were viewed as luminaries who people flocked to see and he preached to increasingly large congregation. Thousands of Arabs, Persians, Armenians and locals were converted by his sermons.

In his later years, Simon Stylites was the foremost famous personality in his part of the world. The Emperor Theodocus and Leo 1, the Bishop of Rome, would often consult him and request his prayers and Marcian, another Emperor visited him frequently although in disguise.

After 30 years on his final pillar, Simeon Stylites died on September 2, 459. He passed away with his body stooped over in prayer.

"St Simeon Stylites" is a poem written by Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson, in 1833 and published in his 1842 collection of poetry. The poem describes the actions of Simeon Stylites, who counts his various physical acts and hopes that he has earned his place in heaven. It captures Tennyson's feelings following the death of a close friend, Arthur Hallam, and contains feelings of self-loathing and regret.

According to The Guinness Book of Records, Saint Simeon Stylites is responsible for their oldest unbroken record having been responsible for the longest time someone has remained on top of a pole for over 1550 years.

There are still remains of the immense pillar, where Simeon Styltes stood for so long, at The Church of Saint Simeon Stylites located approximately 30 kilometers (19 mi) northwestern part of Aleppo, Syria.

The remains of the pillar of Saint Simeon Stylites. Wikipedia

Stuttering

Stutterers are people who have a speech disorder in which the flow of speech is disrupted by involuntary repetitions and prolongations of sounds, syllables, words or phrases, and involuntary silent pauses or blocks during which the stutterer is unable to produce sounds.

Stuttering and stammering are not quite the same: a stutter is an involuntary repetition of one letter, while a stammer is any speech-slowing defect.

The ancient Greek Demosthenes stuttered and was inarticulate as a youth, yet, through dedicated practice, using methods such as placing pebbles in his mouth, became a great orator of Ancient Greece.

Greek orator Demosthenes practicing oratory at the beach with pebbles in his mouth

British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was one of the 30% of stutterers who have an associated speech disorder—a lisp in his case—yet led his nation through World War II.

King George VI was so embarrassed by his stutter that he hired speech-language pathologist Lionel Logue and greatly improved his public speaking.

Country singer Mel Tillis stutters when talking but not when singing.

German actor Dieter Thomas Heck started stuttering after being trapped under a staircase after a bombing raid in World War II.

American actor James Earl Jones had a severe stutter as a child and refused to speak in school.

English comedian Rowan Atkinson incorporates his stuttering into his work by using over-articulation to overcome problematic consonants.

Golfer Tiger Woods stuttered as a child and used to talk to his dog until he fell asleep in an effort to get rid of it.

Bruce Willis had severe stuttering problems as a child. He discovered the stutter disappeared while performing in a school play through the memorization of lines. While studying acting in college it was the combination of acting and speech therapy which helped him overcome his condition.

Student

Bologna University in the Kingdom of Italy, then part of the Holy Roman Empire, was the first Western European institution generally considered a university. Founded in 1088, it was the first place of study to use the term universitas for a place of learning involving students and masters.

A university class, Bologna (1350s).

In the early part of the 13th century Oxford and Cambridge students found their own lodgings and made their own arrangements with individual masters in these two university towns. The first residential colleges was established later in the century: Merton set the pattern in Oxford in 1264, followed by Peterhouse in Cambridge twenty years later.

Italian Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646-1684) was the first woman in history to receive a PhD. Fluent in French, ish, and Hebrew, she also studied astronomy, mathematics, music, philosophy,  and theology. As the fame of her intellectual accomplishment spread, and Piscopia was invited to join several scholarly societies. Upon the recommendation of Carlo Rinaldini, at that point the Chairman of Philosophy at the University of Padua, she was conferred a doctor of philosophy of degree in Philosophy on June 25, 1678, in Padua Cathedral. Piscopia was presented with the traditional laurel wreath, ermine cape, gold ring, and book of philosophy in the presence of the University authorities, the professors of all the faculties, the students, and most of the Venetian Senators, together with many invited guests.

Ritratto di Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia, Ignoto 

In 1812, two Cambridge University colleges ordered that students appearing in pantaloons or trousers should be considered as absent.

The Edinburgh Seven were the first women to matriculate at a British university on November 2, 1869. They were led by Sophia Jex-Blake, who had been denied admission to the University of Edinburgh Medical School because of her gender. The other six women were Margaret Todd, Edith Pechey, Helen Evans, Isabel Thorne, Louisa Stevenson, and Mary Anderson.

The Edinburgh Seven faced a great deal of discrimination from the university and the male students. They were charged higher fees than the male students, and they were not allowed to use the same facilities. They were also subjected to harassment and intimidation.

On the day of their anatomy exam on November 18, 1870, several hundred male students pelted them with mud and other objects and shoved a sheep into the exam hall. The women were forced to leave the exam, but they refused to give up. They continued their studies and eventually graduated from the university.

The Edinburgh Seven's fight for women's rights was a major victory. They paved the way for other women to study at universities, and they helped to change the way society views women's education.

Born in England, Kate Millington Edger (1857-1935) studied in Auckland, New Zealand. In 1877 she became the first woman university graduate in New Zealand, and the first woman in the British Empire to earn a BA.

The first three women in Britain to graduate from university received their Bachelor of Arts degrees at London University in 1880.

Oberlin College is a private liberal arts college in Oberlin, Ohio. Two years after it was founded, Oberlin became in 1835 the first college in the United States to admit African-Americans. It was the first to admit women in 1837.

Helen Magill White (November 28, 1853 – October 28, 1944) was the first American woman to earn a PhD. Raised by a Quaker father who believed she should have the same education as her brothers, Helen attended Boston University, where in 1877, she earned a doctorate in Greek. Her thesis "The Greek Drama" was discovered at Cornell in 2018.

International Students' Day is an international observance of the student community, held annually on November 17. It remembers the anniversary of the 1939 Nazi storming of the University of Prague after student demonstrations against the German occupation of Czechoslovakia. Germans closed all Czech universities and colleges, sent over 1200 students to Nazi concentration camps, and had nine students and professors executed on November 17.

Pixiebay

On November 16, 1949, students in Ghent (Belgium) stormed the medieval castle, lowered the portcullis and threw fruit from the walls at the police to protest a new tax on beer. The event is still commemorated yearly by the city as the greatest student prank in its history.

Ingeborg Rapoport, the oldest person to ever receive a regular Doctorate degree. She submitted her thesis on diphtheria in Nazi Germany in 1937 but was refused oral examination because she was Jewish. Rapoport successfully defended her dissertation and received her doctorate from the University of Hamburg at the age of 102.

Students at Christ's Hospital Boarding School in England have been wearing the same uniform since 1556.

The composer Constant Lambert as a pupil, wearing the traditional uniform

There's a perpetual student named Michael W. Nicholson who has earned 29 degrees.

Iran has the highest female to male ratio in universities among all sovereign nations. More than 70% of students in engineering and pure sciences are women.

Every November in South Korea, there's a day where everyone makes silence to help students concentrate for their most important exam of their lives. Planes are grounded, constructions are paused, banks close and even military training ceases. This day is called Suneung.

College students have a reputation for engaging in binge drinking. In a survey in the US it was discovered that in the course of a few weeks nearly 65 percent of college students had experienced a hangover from excessive drinking, and over 55.percent reported having been nauseated or vomiting due to alcohol over indulgence.

Every high school student in Sweden aged 16-20 is entitled to "study grant" of $139 monthly. The only requirement is to attend the school.

In Sweden, some students let out a primal scream at 10 PM every night. The 'Flogsta Scream' is when students at some universities stop what they're doing at exactly 10 PM and collectively scream from their windows to help blow off steam and ease the stresses of college life.

Source BBC

Charles Studd

Charles T Studd, often known as C. T. Studd (December 2, 1860 July 16, 1931) was an outstanding cricketer who represented England in international matches against Australia. 

Studd played for England in the 1882 match won by Australia, which was the origins of The Ashes. He was also in the English team that returned from Australia in triumph in 1883 with the Urn. Studd was twice declared to be "the best all-round cricket player" in England. 

Charles T Studd

His wealthy father Edward Studd was converted to Christianity during an 1876 Moody and Sankey campaign in England. A visiting preacher to the Studd home at Tidworth converted Charles and his two brothers to the faith while they were students at Eton. 

At first Charles didn't take his faith seriously but years later, attending another D. L. Moody revival meeting, he was brought to a position of full surrender to Jesus Christ.

Studd was one of the "Cambridge Seven," six students from Cambridge University and one from the Royal Military Academy, who offered themselves to Hudson Taylor for missionary service at the China Inland Mission, leaving for there in February 1885.

The Cambridge Seven

Studd's favourite doggerel was:
"Some want to work within the sound
Of church or Chapel Bell
I want to run a rescue shop
Within a yard of hell."

Studd was sent home from China because of ill health in 1894. Between 1900–1906 Studd served as pastor of a church at Ootacamund in Southern India.

In 1910 Studd sailed for Africa, contrary to medical advice. Studd's only companion in Africa was a 21-year-old medical student and together they founded churches in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Studd founded in 1913 the Heart of Africa Mission, which later became the Worldwide Evangelisation Crusade, (now called WEC International) a mission that currently has over 1,800 workers evangelizing throughout the world.

CT Studd served in Africa until his death 21 years later.

Source Reformationsa

Strike

A strike, also called labor strike or strike action, is when a large number of workers stop working in protest. A strike usually takes place in response to employee grievances. 

Amazon labor strike. Pixibay

The first ever labor strike in history took place on November 14, 1152BC. It was held by workers in the royal necropolis during the reign of Pharaoh Ramses III in ancient Egypt. The artisans of the Royal Necropolis at Deir el-Medina walked off their jobs because they had not been paid and the stoppage proved successful as the Egyptian authorities raised the wages.

The English word "strike" originated in 1768, when sailors, in support of demonstrations in London, "struck" or removed the topgallant sails of merchant ships at port, thus crippling the ships.

Strikes became common during the Industrial Revolution, when the importance of mass labor in factories and mines gave the workers some power. 

In 1842 the demands for fairer wages and conditions across many different industries finally exploded into the first modern general strike. The nationwide stoppage started among the miners in Staffordshire, England, and soon spread through Britain affecting factories, mills in Yorkshire and Lancashire, and coal mines from Dundee to South Wales and Cornwall. 

Agitated workers face the factory owner in The Strike, painted by Robert Koehler in 1886

In 1844, policemen in New York City staged a strike against their proposed blue uniforms. The reason for their opposition was that they considered uniforms to be symbols of servitude, as maids and butlers wore them in the old country.

The Newsboys' Strike of 1899 lasted two weeks and forced US newspapers to pay their newsboys more. Until then, newsboys bought papers from the publishers and had to resell them to make money.

In 1909, the first hunger strike in a British prison was begun by Inverness-born suffragette Miss Marion Wallace Dunlop, after she was imprisoned for willful damage. She kept it up for 91 hours, until she was released from Holloway Prison on grounds of ill-health.

A seventeen-month-long strike action, which at its peak involved 15,000 coal miners represented by the United Mine Workers across 65 mines, began on March 9, 1910 in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania, U.S.

The strike was sparked by a wage dispute between the miners and the mine owners, who were seeking to cut wages in response to a drop in coal prices. The miners, who were already working long hours in dangerous conditions, refused to accept the proposed wage cuts and instead went on strike.

The Westmoreland strike was a difficult and often violent affair, with clashes between strikers and mine owners, as well as between striking miners and those who continued to work during the strike. The strike also had a significant impact on the local economy, as many businesses that relied on the mining industry struggled to stay afloat.

In the end, the Westmoreland strike was only partially successful, with some miners returning to work under the new, lower wages, while others held out and eventually received higher wages and improved working conditions. The strike remains an important event in the history of the UMW and the labor movement in the United States, 

In 1917, 1,300 miners went on strike in Bisbee, Arizona over unsafe working conditions, low pay, and long hours. The mining company, Phelps Dodge, hired 2,000 men who on July 12, 1917 loaded the strikers at gunpoint into cattle cars for a 16 hour trip through the desert without food or water and left them in New Mexico.

The Winnipeg General Strike begun on Thursday May 15, 1919. By 11:00 am, almost the whole working population of Winnipeg, Canada, had walked off the job. During the strike, members of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police charged into the crowd of strikers on horseback, beating them with clubs and firing weapons. It was one of the most famous and influential strikes in Canadian history.

Crowd gathered outside old City Hall during the Winnipeg general strike, 

The 1926 general strike in the United Kingdom was a nationwide stoppage that lasted 9 days, from May 3 - May 12.  It was called by the General Council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in an unsuccessful attempt to force the British government to act to prevent wage reduction and worsening conditions for 1.2 million locked-out coal miners.

Winston Churchill was Chancellor of the Exchequer during the General Strike. He proposed to force the striking miners back to work by cutting off poor relief to their wives and children.

Tyldesley miners outside the Miners’ Hall during the strike

Apprentice barbers in Copenhagen, Denmark, staged the longest strike in history from 1938 to 1961.

The largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country – and the first general wildcat strike in history – occurred in May 1968 in France. The prolonged stoppage involved eleven million workers for two weeks in a row, and its impact was such that it almost caused the collapse of the de Gaulle government. 

The picture below shows strikers in Southern France with a sign reading "Factory Occupied by the Workers." Behind them is a list of demands.

By BeenAroundAWhile at en.wikipedia,

The phrase "industrial action" used in British journalism for a strike was established in 1971. It is a curious choice of words, "inaction" would be more suitable.

On December 28, 1973, during the last of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Skylab missions, the crew turned off all communications with NASA after being over-worked and spent the day relaxing and looking at the Earth. It is the only strike to occur in space.

On October 24, 1975 an estimated 90 percent of women of Iceland took part in a "women’s day off" to protest wage discrepancy and unfair employment practices. Participants, led by women’s organizations, did not go to their paid jobs and did not do any housework or child-rearing for the whole day. Fathers had little choice but to bring their children to work or stay home themselves, leading them to call it "the long Friday."

The secret police in Communist Romania subjected the leaders of a 1977 coal miners' strike to 5-minute chest X-rays to ensure that they developed cancer.

In the early spring of 1981, several members of the quickly growing Polish Solidarity movement were brutally beaten up by the country's security services. On March 25, Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa met Deputy Prime Minister Mieczysław Rakowski of the Polish United Workers' Party, but their talks were fruitless. Two days later, a four-hour national warning strike took place. It was the biggest strike in the history of the Eastern Bloc, during which at least 12 million Poles walked off their jobs. On March 30, 1981, a day before the proposed national strike, the government of Poland reached agreement with Solidarity.

At 7 a.m. on August 3, 1981, the the US Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization declared a strike, seeking better working conditions, better pay, and a 32-hour workweek. Two days later President Ronald Reagan fired the 11,345 striking members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization en masse for failing to carry out their oath to never strike as employees of the US federal government.

Until 1991 there was a 3 acre aquarium in Montreal. The aquarium closed down after all of the dolphin trainers went on strike, leaving the dolphins unfed for 38 days and causing most of them to die.

Major League Baseball players went on strike on August 12, 1994. The labor stoppage resulted in the premature termination of the season, and the cancellation of the World Series for the first time since 1904.

In 1998, Mickey Mouse went on strike at Disneyland Paris over a pay dispute.

Barbra Streisand

EARLY LIFE

She was born Barbara Joan Streisand to Jewish parents on April 24, 1942 in Brooklyn, New York. 

Barbara changed her name to Barbra when she was 18-years-old as she wanted to be unique, but didn't want to change her name completely.

1966 promotional photo of Barbra Streisand

Her mother Diana (born Ida Rosen) had been a soprano singer as a teenager and considered a career in music, but later became a school secretary.

Her father was a high school teacher, who died of a cerebral hemorrhage when Barbra was just fifteen months old.

Diana Streisand worked as a low-paid bookkeeper while bringing up Barbara and her older brother. They struggled financially until Barbra's mom remarried in 1949.

Barbra attended Bais Yakov School in Brooklyn, New York as a child.

While a student at Brooklyn's Erasmus Hall High School, Barbra had an unrequited crush on a schoolmate who also would achieve international renown - chess genius Bobby Fischer.

At Erasmus Hall High School. she sang in the school choir alongside Neil Diamond. The pair teamed up again in 1978 for the smash hit "You Don't Bring Me Flowers".

CAREER

Barbra Streisand made her Broadway debut aged 19 on March 22, 1962 in the musical I Can Get It For You Wholesale. Streisand played the role of Miss Marmelstein in the production, which ran for 300 performances at the Sam S. Shubert Theatre in New York City. Her performance in the musical was widely praised, and she won the Tony Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role in a Musical for her work.

Barbra Streisand, c. 1962.

In 1970 Barbra Streisand became the first person ever to receive a Grammy, an Emmy, an Academy Award, and a Tony. She won her first Grammy in 1963, her first Emmy in 1965, her first Oscar in 1968, and her one Tony, an honorary "Star of the Decade" Tony Award, in 1970.

Streisand is still the only artist ever to receive an Oscar, Tony, Emmy and Grammy plus record a number one single and album.

With the release of Yentl in 1983, Streisand became the first woman to write, produce, direct, and star in a major studio movie.

On New Year's Eve 1993, Barbra Streisand embarked on her first ever full tour. The tour consisted of 26 shows and ended in Anaheim, California in July 1994. Although she had sung concerts this was her first tour after a 28 year bout of stage fright.

Barbra: The Concert was broadcast on HBO August 21, 1994 and received a television audience of 11.2 million viewers, becoming the highest-rated musical event in HBO’s history.

When in 1999 the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) announced the biggest-selling artists of the century in the United States, it was revealed that Barbra Streisand was the best-selling female solo act of the 20th century.

When Barbra Streisand's 2014 long player Partners topped the Billboard 200, she created US chart history by becoming the first artist to score number one albums in every decade from the 1960s to the 2010s. 

PERSONAL LIFE 

Streisand has been married twice. Her first husband was actor Elliott Gould, to whom she was married from 1963 until 1971. They had one child, Jason Gould, who appeared as her on-screen son in The Prince of Tides.

Streisand with husband Elliott Gould and son Jason (1967)

Her second husband is actor James Brolin, whom she married on July 1, 1998

Both of Streisand's husbands, Elliott Gould and James Brolin, starred in Capricorn One (1977).

A photograph of Barbra Streisand's Malibu, California home was taken in 2003 by aerial photographer Kenneth Adelman for the California Coastal Records Project. 

Streisand's attempts to suppress the photograph led to the unintended consequence of publicizing it much more widely; before the singing star filed her lawsuit, the image had been downloaded only six times, whereas in the month after the lawsuit afterwards more than 420,000 people visited the site. The term "Streisand effect" evolved from the controversy and has been used to describe subsequent cases of the phenomenon.

The image of Streisand's Malibu house By Copyright (C) 2002 Kenneth & Gabrielle Adelman

Barbra Streisand had her dead dog Sammie cloned twice and both pets now have different personalities than the original.

Leaked documents from a U.S. tour revealed that Streisand demanded 120 luxury towels and a sprinkling of rose petals in the toilet bowl at every show.

She founded the Streisand Foundation in 1986 to support social and political causes.

Street

A street is a piece of land, which is paved enabling people to travel on it.  We often use the words "street" and "road" for the same thing, but really a road's main function is transportation, while streets are generally located in urban areas with the intention of facilitating public interaction and are usually lined with houses or other buildings.

Pixiebay

HISTORY

The word street has its origins in the Latin strata (meaning "paved road" - abbreviation from via strata).

On August 23, 1617 the first one way streets were established in London. The city's narrow streets had become so congested that an Act was passed to regulate "disorder and rude behaviour of Carmen, Draymen and others using carts" by making 17 alleys around Thames Street one-way.

A link-boy was a boy who carried a flaming torch to light the way for pedestrians walking streets at night. Linkboys were common in London in the days before street lighting. The linkboy's fee was commonly one farthing, and the torch was often made from burning pitch and tow.

The first gas street lamps were erected in London's Pall Mall in 1807. They were lit each night and extinguished in the morning by lamplighters. At first many passers-by feared they would be burnt if they touched the lamp posts.

A Peep at the Gas Lights in Pall Mall Rowlandson 1809.

Since 1858, all new streets containing terraced houses in the United Kingdom have been at least 36 feet (11 m) wide.

The first street in the world to be lit by electric light bulbs was Mosley Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, England, in 1879.

The first electric street lights ever installed by a municipality were turned on in Wabash, Indiana in 1880.

One of the world's first permanent one-way streets was enforced in St James's Street, Nottingham, England in 1924. As there was at the time no legal traffic signs, a banner was hung across the street saying "One-way traffic- no road this way".

The first automatic street light was installed in New Milford, Connecticut in 1949.

FUN STREET FACTS

For many years the steepest street in the world was reckoned to be Baldwin Street in Dunedin, New Zealand with a 38% incline (a gradient of 1:2.86).

House at Baldwin Street, Dunedin.  Andy king50 Wikipedia

In 2019, The Guinness Book of Records named Ffordd Pen Llech, which snakes through the North Wales town of Harlech as the world's steepest street. Ffordd Pen Llech has a gradient of 1:2.67 (37.45% stretch over fall). That means those travelling on the street go 1 m up (or down) for every 2.67 m travelled horizontally.

London's Oxford Street is Europe's longest high street at 1.5 miles.

For many years, the Guinness Book of World Records erroneously named Toronto's Yonge Street as the longest street in the world, stretching 1,896 kilometres (1,178 mi) north from Lake Ontario. In fact, Yonge Street is only 86 kilometres long. The longest street record seems now to be up for grabs.

The most common street name in the U.S. is "Second Street." 'First' is in fact the third most common. Third is the second with Fifth being the sixth most common.

At just 2.05m (6ft 9in) long, the record for the shortest street is held by Ebenezer Place in Wick, Scotland. It has just one address, the front door of No 1 Bistro, part of Mackays Hotel.

Ebenezer Place,  Wick, Scotland. Noudbijvoet. Wikipedia

Oscar Wilde, Robert Falcon Scott, David Bowie, and Bob Marley all lived at one time or another in Oakley Street, which runs roughly north to south from Chelsea's King's Road to the crossroads with Cheyne Walk and the River Thames.

Streets are almost always wet in movies. This is because wet pavement is photogenic and the water diffuses reflections and helps eliminate shadows caused by filming equipment and light sources.

South Africa is the only country in the world to have two Nobel Peace Prize winners, who had homes on the same street.

Vilakazi Street in Soweto was where both Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu resided.

Source Zululandobserver

Meryl Streep

Meryl Streep was born in Summit, New Jersey on June 22, 1949.

Her mother, Mary Wolf (née Wilkinson; 1915–2001), was a commercial artist and an art editor, and her father, Harry William Streep, Jr. (1910–2003), was a pharmaceutical executive.

Meryl Streep 2016. Dick Thomas Johnson from Tokyo, Japan -

Meryl Streep had operatic lessons at the age of 12 from vocal coach Estelle Liebling, who performed in more than 1600 concerts with John Philip Sousa and his band. Later she played the title role in Florence Foster Jenkins, about an opera singer who was known for her painful lack of singing skill.

Streep originally applied to Law School but slept in on the morning of her interview and took it as a sign she was destined for other things.

In 1974 future screen queens Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver acted together as drama students in Aristophanes' Greek comedy, The Frogs, which was performed in Yale universities swimming pool.

She received her Master's degree in Fine Arts from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut in 1975.

She made her stage debut in 1975 with The Public Theater production of Trelawny of the Wells.

Meryl Streep made her film début in The Deadliest Season, a 1977 movie about sports violence.

Meryl Streep took on the role of Linda in the 1978 war drama The Deer Hunter despite not liking the character, in part to be close to her boyfriend John Cazale, who was terminally ill with lung cancer at the time. Streep and Cazale had been dating since 1976 and when he was diagnosed with cancer, Streep wanted to support him as much as possible. She was also aware that his time was limited, and she wanted to make the most of their time together. Cazale died in March 1978, just a few months before The Deer Hunter was released. 

Her supporting role in The Deer Hunter proved to be a breakthrough for Streep and she received her first Academy Award nomination for it. She also won an Emmy Award that year for her role in the mini-series Holocaust.

Streep won the Academy Award the following year for playing a troubled wife in the top-grossing divorce drama Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). However, after the ceremony Streep absent-mindedly left the statue on top of the room in the ladies at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles, where the awards were being held.

Streep in 1979. By Jack Mitchell, 

Streep established herself as a leading Hollywood actress in the 1980s. She played dual roles in the 1981 period drama The French Lieutenant's Woman, and starred the following year as a Polish holocaust survivor in Sophie's Choice, winning the Best Actress Oscar for the latter.

Her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher in the 2011 biopic The Iron Lady earned Streep another Academy Award for Best Actress.

Meryl Streep has received 21 Academy Award nominations, more than any other actor or actress in history.

The real-life characters Streep has played include: Julia Child, Ethel Rosenberg, Karen Silkwood, Karen Blixen, Roberta Guaspari, Lindy Chamberlain, Susan Orlean, Margaret Thatcher, Florence Foster Jenkins and Kay Graham.

Streep learned to play the violin, by practicing six hours a day for eight weeks, for her role in Music of the Heart.

Streep married sculptor Don Gummer in the garden of her parent's home on September 30, 1978.

They have four children, son Henry Wolf Gummer (born November 13, 1979) and daughters Mary Willa Gummer (born August 3, 1983), Grace Jane Gummer (born May 9, 1986), and Louisa Jacobson Gummer (born June 12, 1991).

Strawberry

STRAWBERRIES IN HISTORY

The 600 strawberry varieties found today stem from five or six original wild species.

The wild, small, fragrant forest strawberry of Europe was available to the Romans. 

Pixiebay

Ancient Romans used strawberries as medicine, believing they could cure fever, bad breath, gout, sore throats, depression, fainting and diseases of the blood.

The monks of Western Europe used the round-fruited, wild strawberry in their "illuminated" manuscripts.

The English and French used the beautiful heart-shaped berries to landscape their gardens. In fourteenth-century France, Charles V (The Wise) ordered twelve hundred strawberry plants to be grown in the Royal Gardens of the Louvre.

The alchemists considered the fruit to be an elixir for a long life. However, the strawberry did not enable Charles V to live an extended life. He died in 1380 aged 43.

In Bavaria, farmers harvested strawberries and tied small baskets of the fruit to the horns of their cows as an offering to the elves, who they believed helped the cows to make more milk.

The combination of strawberries and cream was first created by Thomas Wolsey in the court of King Henry VIII. 

Pixiebay

No one knows how strawberries got their name.

Native American Indians called strawberries "heart-seed berries" and pounded them into their traditional corn-meal bread.

Europeans came across wild strawberries in Virginia when their ships landed there in 1588, grown by local American Indians. Having discovered the great taste of the Native Americans bread, colonists decided to create their own version, which became Strawberry Shortcake.

When Virginia sent a better flavored, strawberry to England in 1642, and a large white strawberry from Chile was introduced in 1806, the big fruit we know today, emerged.

Michael Keens, a market gardener of Isleworth near London, exhibited the first cultivated strawberry that combined size, flavor, and color at the Royal Horticultural Society on July 3, 1806. Prior to this, wild strawberries and cultivated selections from wild strawberry species were the common source of the fruit.

Israeli farmer Ariel Chahi contacted Guinness World Records when he found an unusually large strawberry during harvest with an approximate height of 18 cm (7.09 in) and circumference of 34 cm (13.4 in). It was weighed on February 12, 2021 at a huge 289 g (10.19 oz) breaking the weight record for the heaviest ever strawberry. This strawberry is of the Ilan variety and was grown by Ariel’s family business "Strawberries in the Field" located in Kadima-Zoran, Israel.

FUN STRAWBERRY FACTS

Strawberries have more vitamin C than oranges. It takes seven or eight individual strawberries to equal the amount of vitamin C in one medium sized orange.

In order to grow, strawberries need as much as six hours of direct sunlight every day.

Every strawberry plant is hand-picked approximately every three days. This is the time it takes for strawberries to complete their cycle of turning from green to white to red.

Picking home-grown garden strawberries By Loadmaster (David R. Tribble)

Strawberry fragrance is almost as strong as a rose because the strawberry belongs to the genus Fragraria in the rose family. The name of the scientific classification was derived from the Old Latin word for fragrant. The modern Italian word for strawberry is still "Fragola."

Strawberries are the only fruit with seeds on the outside of their skin. There are about 200 dry, yellow seeds on each berry, each of which is actually considered a separate fruit.

Botanists don't classify strawberries as a true berry. That's because true berries, like blueberries and cranberries have seeds inside and not outside.

The largest strawberry-producing state in the US is California, which harvests 83% of the strawberries grown in the country on approximately 24,500 acres.

Strawberry field in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. By Dietmar Rabich

California produces one billion pounds of strawberries each year. If all the strawberries produced in California in one year were laid berry to berry, they'd wrap around the world 15 times.

Sources Food For Thought by Ed Pearce, Wellpict

Straw (drinking)

Marvin Stone of Washington, D.C., patented the paraffin-covered paper drinking straw on January 3, 1888. He made his first prototypes by winding a strip of paper around a pencil and gluing it at the ends.

Pixiebay

Stone's drinking straw was designed to have a diameter slightly smaller than the typical lemon pip, as he was tired of getting lemon seeds in his mouth when drinking lemonade.

Prior to Stone's paper straw, people used natural rye grass straws, which were undesirable because they imparted a grassy flavor in beverages.

Stone owned a factory that made paper cigarette holders and by 1890, his factory was producing more drinking straws than cigarette holders.

In 1906 a machine was invented by Stone's "Stone Straw Corporation" to automatically wind the straws.

If you place two straws in your mouth, one inside of a drink and the other on the outside, you won't be able to drink through either of them.

There's a maximum height that water can be sucked up a straw: 10 meters (34 feet). At this height, a perfect vacuum is created at the top of the straw, and water will begin boiling spontaneously.

Pixiebay

In Japan, McDonald's straws are designed so that when used with a shake, the speed will be the same as an infant drinking breast milk.

The average American uses 35,000 plastic straws in their lifetime.

Every single day, Americans toss 500 million plastic straws in the trash. That's the equivalent of 125 school buses full of plastic drinking straws.

Source Treehugger 

Igor Stravinsky

EARLY LIFE

Igor Fyodorovich Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum, near St. Petersburg, Russia, the son of Fyodor Stravinsky a singer with a fine bass voice at the Russian Imperial Opera.

Photoportrait of Igor Stravinsky, Russian composer.

Igor was the third of four children, all boys. As a child he spent the winter months in St Petersburg and the summers in the country where several of his relatives on his mother’s side had large estates.

Igor often went to the operas that his father sang in. He also went to ballets and even heard Tchaikovsky conduct in 1893, at the end of his life.

Although he was taught piano and composition as a boy, Igor's family determined that he would have a career in law, and he graduated from St. Petersburg University in 1905.

However, Stravinsky was far more interested in music; between 1903-06 he studied composition privately under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsokov and became a member of that composer's circle.

CAREER

Through the influence of Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky's early works including "Symphony in E Flat", "Fireworks", and "Scherzo Fantastique" received performances.

Igor Stravinsky, 1903

In 1908 Rimsky-Korsakov died and Stravinsky met Sergei Diaghilev, the Russian ballet impresario. Diaghilev invited Stravinsky to orchestrate various pieces of ballet music for the 1909 season of his Ballets Russes in Paris. 

The following year, the Ballets Russes danced Stravinsky's first major work, The Firebird, and for the next 20 years he was closely associated with Diaghilev's company.

Stravinsky became an overnight sensation following the success of The Firebird's premiere in Paris on June 25, 1910 and the work made him world famous.

In his early years with the Ballets Russes, Stravinsky and his family lived in Russia during the summer months and spent each winter in Switzerland. During this period, Stravinsky composed two further works for the Ballets Russes: Petrushka (1911), and The Rite of Spring (1913).

The premiere of Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps ("The Rite of Spring") at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris on May 29, 1913 caused a tremendous commotion. The avant-garde nature of the music and choreography resulted in such booing from the audience that the Diaghilev dancers could not even hear the orchestra. The New York Times reported the sensational Rite premiere, nine days after the premiere (see below). 

With the advent of World War I Stravinsky moved permanently to Switzerland. During this time he produced the original stage work Renard (1916), "a burlesque in song and dance."

When the Russian Revolution broke out in February 1917 Stravinsky originally thought it would be a good thing, but when the Bolshevik Revolution followed it became obvious that he would never be able to go back to Russia. Arising from this, he wrote in 1918 L’histoire du soldat ("The Soldier’s Tale"). a theatrical work "to be read, played, and danced" by three actors and one or several dancers.

When the war ended Stravinsky decided to move to France, where he developed subsidiary careers as a concert pianist and conductor. 

The French years marked a major change in Stravinsky's style--from basically Russian influences to the music of the Classical period, as well as exploring themes from the ancient Classical world, such as Greek mythology. Important works in this "neo-classical" period include "the Octet" (1923), the "Concerto for Piano and Winds" (1924), the "Serenade in A" (1925) and the opera-oratorio Oedipus Rex (1927). 

Stravinsky in 1921

Throughout the rise of his career Stravinsky was estranged from Christianity. However, in his early forties he befriended a Russian Orthodox priest, Father Nicholas in France and reconnected with his Russian Orthodox faith. This deep religious experience affected his music and he produced a number of religious pieces, the best of which is the "Symphony of Psalms" (1930), written for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s 50th birthday celebrations.

Stravinsky was invited to lecture at Harvard University in 1939, and when World War II started he made his home in Hollywood, California. The war years produced the "Symphony in C Major", the summation of neoclassical principles in symphonic form, and "Symphony in Three Movements", which combines features of the concerto with the symphony.

From 1948 to 1951 Stravinsky worked on his neoclassical opera, The Rake's Progress, conducting its first performance in Venice, Italy.

Stravinsky engaged the young American musician Robert Craft to help him in Hollywood. Craft was surprised to find that Stravinsky never visited his fellow composer Arnold Schoenberg, who only lived a few streets away. After Schoenberg died in 1951 Craft encouraged Stravinsky to listen to Schoenberg’s serial music. 

Soon Stravinsky started to use serialism in his own compositions. His Canticum Sacrum for voices and orchestra (1955) and ballet Agon contain 12-tone elements and were followed by the fully serial works Threni (1958), Movements (1959) and Requiem Canticles (1966).

PERSONAL LIFE

From approximately 1890 until 1914 Stravinsky frequently visited Ustilug, a town in the modern Volyn Oblast, Ukraine. He spent most of his summers there, where he also met his cousin, Katherine Gavrylivna Nosenko (called "Katya"), whom he married on January 23, 1906.

In 1907, Stravinsky designed and built his own house in Ustilug, which he called "my heavenly place". In this house, Stravinsky worked on seventeen of his early compositions, among them The Firebird, Petrushka, and The Rite of Spring. 

Igor Stravinsky's house-museum in Ustilug,By Viacheslav Galievskyi 

Katya and Stravinsky's fourth and last child, Marie Milène was born in Lausanne in January 1914. After her delivery, Katya was discovered to have tuberculosis and was confined to the sanatorium at Leysin, high in the Alps. 

In February 1921 Stravinsky met the sophisticated intellectual and urbane Vera de Bosset in Paris, while she was married to the stage designer Serge Sudeikin. The worldly Vera was a stark contrast to the increasingly pious Katya and they began an affair that led to Vera leaving her husband. Vera and Stravinsky saw one another as much as possible for the next 18 years.

In March 1939 Katerina died from tuberculosis. Vera joined Stravinsky in America in January 1940; they were married in Bedford, Massachusetts on March 9th.  

In 1962 Stravinsky returned to Russia for a visit – his first trip to his homeland for nearly half a century. During his stay in the USSR, he met several leading Soviet composers, including Dmitri Shostakovich and Aram Khachaturian.

LAST YEARS AND DEATH

Ill health slowed Stravinsky in his final years, and he died in New York City at the age of 88 on April 6, 1971.The cause on his death certificate is heart failure.

As per his wishes, he was buried in Venice on the island of San Michele near the tomb of Sergei Diaghilev.

Sources Compton's Encyclopedia, Europress Encyclopedia