Today, The Grandma has been watching Forever, one of her favourite TV series. She has enjoyed the whole season and the unforgettable interpretation of JohnNoble as AubreyGriffin in the last episode of the series, the Australian actor who was born on a day like today in 1948.
John Noble (born 20 August 1948) is an Australian actor.
He is known for his roles as Denethor in the Lord of the Rings film trilogy, Dr. Walter Bishop on the science fiction series Fringe, Henry Parrish on the action-horror series Sleepy Hollow, Morland Holmes on the police procedural series Elementary, and AubreyGriffin on the fantasy crime drama series Forever.
Noble has also done voice work as Leland Monroe in the video game L.A. Noire,Unicron in the animated series Transformers: Prime, and Scarecrow in the DC Comics video game Batman: Arkham Knight.
Noble starred as scientist Walter Bishop in the television series Fringe.
He made occasional appearances on the television series All Saints. He is internationally known for his performance as Denethor in The Lord of the Rings trilogy. He played Russian Consul Anatoly Markov in the sixth season of the US television series 24.
In 2011, he appeared as Real Estate tycoon Leland Monroe in Rockstar's video game L.A. Noire. He is also the voice of Unicron for the television show Transformers: Prime and its conclusion TV film.
Noble played Morland Holmes, father of Sherlock Holmes, in Elementary. He was a series regular for season 4 with guest appearances in seasons 6 and 7.
John Noble later worked in Legends of Tomorrow where he voiced the time demon Mallus. In its episode Guest Starring John Noble, he portrayed himself when Atom visited him on set of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the Kingand had him record a fake rewrite which would be used to fool Nora Darhk.
Noble played Aubrey Griffin in The Last Death pf Henry Morgan, the last episode of Forever.
Noble divides his time between residences in New York City and Sydney, Australia, with wife Penny Noble. They have two children: Daniel Noble and actress Samantha Noble.
In 2011, John Noble's hobbies were reported to be music, painting, andnarration. He studies theoretical physics and requested that the writers of Fringe always keep things grounded in what could be scientifically feasible.
In 2012, Noble was diagnosed with osteoporosis. His charity, Noble Bones,helps to raise awareness of the disease.
Today, The Grandma has received news from Mayte, one of her closest friends.
Mayte has been spending some days in the Costa Brava, Catalonia and has shared her memories and photos with The Grandma.
Castell d'Aro,Platja d'Aro iS'Agaróis amunicipality inthe middle of the CostaBravain Catalonia.
It is formed from two parts: Castell d'Aro is an ancient village built around a medieval castle and a fortified church, 3 km inland on the road from Platja d'Aro to Santa Cristina d'Aro; and Platja d'Aro is a coastal town on the road from Palamós to Sant Feliu de Guíxols which stretches along a large 2 km beach.
Originally a small fishing village, Platja d'Aro is now a major coastal resort, popular predominantly with Catalans and villa-owning Northern Europeans.
Along the coast, connecting the main beach with numerous small beaches, is the Camí de Ronda.
Castell d'Aro is located in the heart of the Costa Brava, 80 km north of Barcelona. It borders with Calonge to the north, Santa Cristina d'Aro to the west, Sant Feliu to the south and the Coast to the East.
Castell-Platja d'Aro occupies the eastern end of the Vall d'Aro, a narrow plain drained by the river Ridaura and located between the Mountain ranges of Cadiretes and southern end of the Gavarres.
Platja d'Aro was originally a small fishing village on the highway between Palamós and Sant Feliu de Guíxols with a 2 km long beach. It is now a major tourist resort with hotels and other commercial premises.
The first evidence of human habitation are a number of tombs dating from the neolithic era 2500 BC in the Pinell area. Around 2000 BC, towards the end of the neolithic period, groups of humans settled in the mountains of Treumal and Vallvanera. There are a number of monuments from this period, including the menhir of Vallbanera and the dolmen Cova dels Moros.
Roman ruins were discovered at the Vila de Pla de Palol dating from the 1st-4th Centuries AD. These occupy an area of 10,000 m2, and retain the majority of the patios and open spaces. The villa was part of a large agricultural estate including vineyards. It also exported clay for the manufacture of ceramics that were later exported by sea from the natural harbor of Cove Rovira.
From the 9th century the countryside started to recover from Sarracen raids and the repopulation of the Vall d'Aro began. The first arrivals were farmers.
In 781, Charlemagne offered the Bishop of Girona the territory of the Vall d'Aro. The first documented reference of Platja d'Aro, in its original name of Fanals d'Amunt, appears in 968.
King Lothair I confirmed his possessions to Sunyer, the Abbot of the monastery of Sant Feliu de Guíxols, including Fanals d'Amunt and its church. The origin of Castell d'Aro is the Castle of Benedormiens. The Castle was first documented in 1041, when the religious authorities, the local Knights and Nobles granted the monastery of Sant Feliu de Guíxols the safekeeping of the castle with the obligation to protect all the Vall d'Aro, of which Fanals was an important part.
In 1585 a new church was built in Fanals de Baix, the present Fanals d'Aro. A new settlement grew around this building deserting the older Fanals d'Amunt.
In 1774 an extension was completed to the Church of Fanals d'Aro.
During the following centuries only one municipality existed, in 1858 the area was divided with Romanyà, Bell-lloc, Santa Cristina d'Aro and Solius becoming separate from Castell d'Aro and Fanals d'Aro. This is regarded as the official creation of the two cities, Santa Cristina d'Aro and Castell d'Aro.
In 1843, the district was characterized by high rents, a centralized municipal model with limited suffrage. The elections of 1869 reflected the federal and republican character of Empordà and Fanals. As a result, constitutional guarantees were suspended and disarmament of the popular military service ordered by Central Government. The federalists took up arms supported by the inhabitants of Fanals, they participated in the Foc de Bisbal, where they faced a number of government forces.
The architect Rafael Masó Valentí was instructed by the Ensesa family to design a new residential estate at S'Agaró. It was designed as a self-contained garden city. At the same time swimming pools at Sant Pol were built as well as the luxurious Monumental Hotel and the Hotel Gavina.
In 1962, as part of new tourist development the municipality changed its name from Fanals d'Aro to Platja d'Aro. The council moved their offices at the same time from Castell d'Aro to Platja d'Aro. The town sought to promote itself internationally; in 1964 an offer was made for a week holiday to 50 couples celebrating their silver wedding anniversary. Another campaign focused on honeymooners with the slogan love is found in Platja d'Aro.
In 1970, the City Council, owner of the Castle of Benedormiens de Castell d'Aro, ordered its first restoration. The oldest part was conserved dating from the 12th century.
In 1978, a Carnival Fiesta and in 1979 the first democratic Council was elected. In 1983 the rooms of the Castle of Benedormiens were altered for exhibition space. In 1995 the old nucleus of Castell was declared as an official area of interest and conservation area by the Generalitat de Catalunya, together with S'Agaró.
Today, The Grandma has been reading about PierreJules César Janssen, the French Astronomer who discovered helium on a day like today in 1868.
Pierre Jules César Janssen (22 February 1824-23 December 1907), usually known as Jules Janssen, was a French astronomer who, along with English scientist Joseph Norman Lockyer, is credited with discovering the gaseous nature of the solar chromosphere, and with some justification the element helium.
Janssen was born in Paris into a cultivated family. His father, Antoine César Janssen was a well known clarinettist from Dutch/Belgian descent, his father emigrated from Walloon Brabant to Paris. His mother Pauline Marie Le Moyne was a daughter of the architect Paul Guillaume Le Moyne.
Pierre Janssen studied mathematics and physics at the faculty of sciences. He taught at the Lycée Charlemagne in 1853, and in the school of architecture 1865-1871, but his energies were mainly devoted to various scientific missions entrusted to him.
Thus in 1857 he went to Peru in order to determine the magnetic equator; in 1861-1862 and 1864, he studied telluric absorption in the solar spectrum in Italy and Switzerland; in 1867 he carried out optical and magnetic experiments at the Azores; he successfully observed both transits of Venus, that of 1874 in Japan, that of 1882 at Oran in Algeria; and he took part in a long series of solar eclipse-expeditions, e.g. to Trani (1867), Guntur (1868), Algiers (1870), Siam (1875), the Caroline Islands (1883), and to Alcosebre in Spain (1905). To see the eclipse of 1870, he escaped from the Siege of Paris in a balloon. Unfortunately the eclipsewas obscured from him by cloud.
In the year 1874, Janssen invented the Revolver of Janssen or Photographic Revolver, instrument that originated the chronophotography. Later this invention was of great use for researchers like Etienne Jules Marey to carry out exhibitions and inventions.
In 1868, Janssen discovered how to observe solar prominences without an eclipse.
While observing the solar eclipse of 18 August 1868, at Guntur, Madras State (now in Andhra Pradesh), British India, he noticed bright lines in the spectrum of the chromosphere, showing that the chromosphere is gaseous. Present in the spectrum of the Sun, though not immediately noticed or commented upon, was a bright yellow line later measured to have a wavelength of 587.49 nm. This was the first observation of this particular spectral line, and one possible source for it was an element not yet discovered on the earth. From the brightness of the spectral lines, Janssen realized that the chromospheric spectrum could be observed even without an eclipse, and he proceeded to do so.
On 20 October, Joseph Norman Lockyer in England set up a new, relatively powerful spectroscope. He also observed the emission spectrum of the chromosphere, including the same yellow line. Within a few years, he worked with a chemist and they concluded that it could be caused by an unknown element, after unsuccessfully testing to see if it were some new type of hydrogen. This was the first time a chemical element was discovered on an extraterrestrial body before being found on the earth. Lockyer and the English chemist Edward Frankland named the element after the Greek word for the Sun, ἥλιος (helios).
Janssen died at Meudon on 23 December 1907 and was buried at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, with the name J. Janssen inscribed on his tomb. During his life he was made a Knight of the Legion of Honor and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London.
Craters on both Mars and the Moon are named in his honour. The public square in front of Meudon Observatory is named Place Jules Janssen after him. Two major prizes carry his name: the Prix Jules Janssen of the French Astronomical Society, and the Janssen Medal of the French Academy of Sciences.
Janssen named minor planet 225 Henrietta discovered by Johann Palisa, after his wife, Henrietta.
Today, The Grandma has been watching some cartoons. She loves them. She has chosen Fiddlesticks, a cartoon directed and animated by Ub Iwerks with Flip the Frog as the main character, that was released on a day like today in 1930.
Fiddlesticks is a 1930 Celebrity Pictures theatrical cartoon short directed and animated by Ub Iwerks, in his first cartoon since he departed from Walt Disney's studio. The short features Iwerks' character Flipthe Frog.
It is the first complete sound cartoon to be photographed in color. The film went into the public domain after the copyright owner failed to renew the copyright after the film's 28 year term.
Flip the Frog is an animated cartoon character created by American animator Ub Iwerks. He starred in a series of cartoons produced by Celebrity Pictures and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1930 to 1933. The series had many recurring characters besides Flip; including Flip's dog, the mule Orace, and adizzy neighborhood spinster.
Ubbe Ert Iwwerks (March 24, 1901-July 7, 1971), known as Ub Iwerks, was an American animator, cartoonist, character designer, inventor, and special effects technician.
The film was simultaneously released with King of Jazz, a musical revue, and was released with a cartoon depicting how Paul Whiteman, the music director of the film, became the King of Jazz.
Flip is seen dancing on lilypads until he reaches land and dries himself off. He walks to a party, where he performs a dance for the audience, accidentally climbing to a spider web. He also performs a duet, playing piano alongside a mouse (who bears a striking resemblance to Mickey Mouse, which Iwerks co-created with Walt Disney during his days at Disney's company) playing the violin. They perform two songs. In the first song, the mouse starts crying, and so do Flip and the piano. The second song makes Flip start hugging the piano, which then kicks Flip. The cartoon ends with Flip beating on the piano; he kicks all the piano keys into the air, and they drop onto him.
Fiddlesticks was the first in the Flip the Frog series. The sound system was Powers Cinephone, the same system used for Disney's Steamboat Willie (1928).
The unnamed mouse in the cartoon bears a striking resemblance to Mortimer Mouse, the original concept behind Mickey Mouse, both of whom were first animated by Ub Iwerks.
Today, The Grandma has been listening to somemusic. She has chosen MikeSeeger's songs, the American folk musician and folklorist who was born on a day like today in 1933.
Mike Seeger (August 15, 1933-August 7, 2009) wasan American folk musician and folklorist.
He was a distinctive singer and an accomplished musician who played autoharp, banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, guitar, mouth harp, mandolin, dobro, jaw harp, and pan pipes.
Seeger, a half-brother of Pete Seeger, producedmore than 30 documentary recordings, and performed in more than 40 other recordings.
He desired to make known the caretakers of culturethat inspired and taught him.
Seeger was born in New York and grew up in Maryland and Washington D.C. His father, Charles Louis Seeger Jr., was a composer and pioneering ethnomusicologist, investigating both American folk and non-Western music. His mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was a composer. His eldest half-brother, Charles Seeger III, was a radio astronomer, and his next older half-brother, John Seeger, taught for years at the Dalton School in Manhattan. His next older half brother was Pete Seeger. His uncle, Alan Seeger, the poet who wrote I have a rendezvous with Death, was killed during the First World War.
Seeger was a self-taught musician who began playing stringed instruments at the age of 18. He also sang Sacred Harp with British folk singer Ewan MacColl and his son, Calum. Seeger's sister Peggy Seeger, also a well-known folk performer, married MacColl, and his sister Penny wed John Cohen, a member of Mike's musical group, New Lost City Ramblers.
The family moved to Washington D.C. in 1936 after his father's appointment to the music division of the Resettlement Administration. While in Washington D.C., Ruth Seeger worked closely with John and Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress to preserve and teach American folk music. Ruth Seeger's arrangements and interpretations of American Traditional folk songs in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s are well regarded.
At about the age of 20, Mike Seeger began collecting songs by traditional musicians on a tape recorder. Folk musicians such as Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, John Jacob Niles, and others were frequent guests in the Seeger home.
In 1958 he co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers, an old-time string band in New York City, during the Folk Revival. The other founding members included John Cohen and Tom Paley. Paley later left the group in 1962 and was replaced by Tracy Schwarz. The New Lost City Ramblers directly influenced countless musicians in subsequent years.
The Ramblers distinguished themselves by focusing on the traditional playing styles they heard on old 78rpm records of musicians recorded during the 1920s and 1930s. Tracy was also in Mike's other band, Strange Creek Singers. So was Mike's former wife, Alice Gerrard. She was Alice Seeger in that band and sang and played guitar in it. The other people in Strange Creek Singers were bass player and singer Hazel Dickens and banjo player Lamar Grier. Mike sang and played guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, autoharp, and harmonica in the band.
Seeger received six Grammy nominations and was the recipient of four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, including a 2009 National Heritage Fellowship, which is the United States government's highest honour in the folk and traditional arts. His influence on the folk scene was described by Bob Dylan in his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. He was a popular presenter and performer at traditional music gatherings such as Breakin' Up Winter.
Eight days before his 76th birthday, Mike Seeger died at his home in Lexington, Virginia, on August 7, 2009, after stopping cancer treatment.
The Mike Seeger Collection, which includes original sound and video recordings by Mike Seeger, is located in the Southern Folklife Collection of the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Today, The Grandma has been reading about the Haitian Revolution, the insurrection against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, that started on a day like today in 1791.
The Haitian Revolution, in Haitian Creole RevolisyonAyisyen, was a successful insurrection by self-liberated slaves against French colonial rule in Saint-Domingue, now the sovereign state of Haiti.
The revolt began on 22 August 1791, and ended in 1804 with the former colony's independence. It involved black, biracial, French, Spanish, British, and Polish participants -with the ex-slave Toussaint Louverture emerging as Haiti's most charismatic hero.
The revolution was the only slave uprising that led to the founding of a state which was both free from slavery, though not from forced labour, and ruled by non-whites and former captives. It is now widely seen as a defining moment in the history of the Atlantic World.
The revolution's effects on the institution of slavery were felt throughout the Americas. The end of French rule and the abolition of slavery in the former colony was followed by a successful defense of the freedoms the former slaves won and, with the collaboration of already free people of color, their independence from white Europeans.
The revolution represented the largest slave uprising since Spartacus' unsuccessful revolt against the Roman Republic nearly 1,900 years earlier, and challenged long-held European beliefs about alleged black inferiority and about slaves' ability to achieve and maintain their own freedom. The rebels' organizational capacity and tenacity under pressure inspired stories that shocked and frightened slave owners in the hemisphere.
Much of Caribbean economic development in the 18th century was contingent on Europeans' demand for sugar. Plantation owners produced sugar as a commodity crop from cultivation of sugarcane, which required extensive labor. The colony of Saint-Domingue also had extensive coffee, cocoa, and indigo plantations, but these were smaller and less profitable than the sugar plantations. The commodity crops were traded for European goods.
Starting in the 1730s, French engineers constructed complex irrigation systems to increase sugarcane production. By the 1740s Saint-Domingue, together with the British colony of Jamaica, had become the main supplier of the world's sugar. Production of sugar depended on extensive manual labor provided by enslaved Africans. An average of 600 ships engaged every year in shipping products from Saint-Domingue to Bordeaux, and the value of the colony's crops and goods was almost equal in value to all of the products shipped from the Thirteen Colonies to Great Britain.
The livelihood of 1 million of the approximately 25 million people who lived in France in 1789 depended directly upon the agricultural imports from Saint-Domingue, and several million indirectly depended upon trade from the colony to maintain their standard of living.
Saint-Domingue was the most profitable French colony in the world, indeed one of the most profitable of all the European colonies in the 18th century.
Slavery sustained sugar production under harsh conditions, including the unhealthy climate of the Caribbean, where diseases such as malaria (brought from Africa) and yellow fever caused high mortality.
In 1787 alone, the French imported about 20,000 slaves from Africa into Saint-Domingue, while the British imported about 38,000 slaves total to all of their Caribbean colonies. The death rate from yellow fever was such that at least 50% of the slaves from Africa died within a year of arriving, so while the white planters preferred to work their slaves as hard as possible, providing them only the bare minimum of food and shelter, they calculated that it was better to get the most work out of their slaves with the lowest expense possible, since they were probably going to die of yellow fever anyway.
The death rate was so high that polyandry -one woman being married to several men at the same time- developed as a common form of marriage among the slaves. As slaves had no legal rights, rape by planters, their unmarried sons, or overseers was a common occurrence on the plantations.
In 1789, Saint-Domingue produced 60% of the world's coffee and 40% of the sugar imported by France and Britain. The colony was not only the most profitable possession of the French colonial empire, but it was the wealthiest and most prosperous colony in the Caribbean.
The colony's white population numbered 40,000; mulattoes and free blacks, 28,000; and black slaves, an estimated 452,000. This was almost half the total slave population in the Caribbean, estimated at one million that year. Enslaved blacks, regarded as the lowest class of colonial society, outnumbered whites and free people of color by a margin of almost eight to one.
Two-thirds of the slaves were African born, and they tended to be less submissive than those born in the Americas and raised in slave societies.
On the night of 21 August 1791, when the slaves of Saint-Domingue rose in revolt; thousands of slaves attended a secret vodou ceremony as a tropical storm came in -the lighting and the thunder were taken as auspicious omens- and later that night, the slaves began to kill their masters and plunged the colony into civil war.
To prevent military disaster, and secure the colony for republican France as opposed to Britain, Spain, and French royalists, separately or in combination, the French commissioners Sonthonax and Étienne Polverel freed the slaves in Saint-Domingue in their declaration of abolition on 29 August 1793.
In nationalistic terms, the abolition of slavery also served as a moral triumph of France over England, as seen in the latter half of the above quote.
It is Toussaint's supreme merit that while he saw European civilisation as a valuable and necessary thing, and strove to lay its foundations among his people, he never had the illusion that it conferred any moral superiority. He knew French, British, and Spanish imperialists for the insatiable gangsters that they were, that there is no oath too sacred for them to break, no crime, deception, treachery, cruelty, destruction of human life and property which they would not commit against those who could not defend themselves.
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