March 15, 2021
Beware the Ides of March!
You may have heard the phrase “beware the Ides of March” (Julius Caesar, Act 1, Scene 2), but what is an Ides and what’s there to fear? The Ides is actually a day that comes about every month, not just in March – according to the ancient Roman calendar, at least. The Romans tracked time much differently than we do now, and very confusingly so, with months divided into groupings of days counted before certain named days: the Kalends at the beginning of the month, the Ides at the middle, and the Nones between them. The Ides of March is the 15th day.
Julius Caesar was stabbed to death during a meeting of the Senate on the Ides of March in 44BC. According to the Greek biographer Plutarch, a seer had warned that harm would come to Caesar no later than the Ides of March. On his way to the Senate, Caesar is said to have passed the seer and joked: “The Ides of March are come”, implying that the prophecy had not been fulfilled, to which the seer replied “Aye, Caesar; but not gone.”
Shakespeare dramatized the assassination and its aftermath, and as the words were used a warning to Caesar in the play, the phrase has since been used as a warning in other situations and hence became superstitious.
👉 The assassination of Caesar is not the only bad thing to happen on March 15. A French raiding party began a 48-hour spree of rape, pillage and murder in southern England in 1360. A cyclone wrecked six warships – three U.S., three German – in the harbor at Apia, Samoa, leaving more than 200 sailors dead, 1889. Czar Nicholas II of Russia signed his abdication papers, ending a 304-year-old royal dynasty and ushering in Bolshevik rule, 1917. Germany occupied Czechoslovakia, 1939. A Saturday night blizzard struck the northern Great Plains, leaving at least 60 people dead in North Dakota and Minnesota and six more in Manitoba and Saskatchewan, 1941. CBS canceled the “Ed Sullivan Show,” 1971. After accumulating reports of a mysterious respiratory disease afflicting patients and healthcare workers in China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Singapore and Canada, the World Health Organization issued a heightened global health alert. The disease will soon become famous under the acronym SARS (for Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome) 2003.
👉 On this third Monday of Women’s History Month, let’s begin look at women who have flown into outer space.
The first man to fly into space was a Russian, Yuri Gagarin. The first woman to fly into space was a Russian, Valentina Vladimirovna Tereshkova. Sally Ride, the first American woman would not fly into space until 20 years and 2 days had passed since Tereshkova’s historic ride.
Tereshkova was not a scientist, she was not a pilot. She was a textile worker and an amateur parachutist. In the early days of Russian space flights, once the capsule had safely reentered earth’s atmosphere, the hatch on the space craft was blown, and the astronaut leaped into the air, four miles above the earth, parachuting to land.
Her call sign on the flight of Vostok 6 was Chaika (Russian: Чайка, literally “Seagull”). With a single flight, she logged more flight time than the combined times of all American astronauts who had flown before that date. She orbited the earth 48 times and spent 2 days, 22 hours, and 50 minutes in space. The 6 Mercury astronauts who flew missions (Deke Slayton was grounded because of a heart murmur) flew 2 days, 5 hours, and 51 minutes. She remains the only woman to have been on a solo space mission.
An assassination attempt was made upon Leonid Brezhnev on January 22, 1969, when a deserter from the Soviet Army fired shots at a motorcade carrying the Soviet leader to a ceremony honoring cosmonauts of the recent Soyuz 4 and Soyuz 5 missions to the Kremlin. Alexei Leonov, the first man to walk in space, and Valentina Tereshkova were riding in the second car, which was struck by bullets, killing the driver, but they were unharmed.
Tereshkova, who turned 84 on March 6, remained in the space program as a cosmonaut instructor, but never went to space again.
Next week, the stories of some American women who have flown into space.
👉 I’m not sure what I was looking for when I found this clip of Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich playing drums on Sammy Davis, Jr.’s television show. To simply say that Krupa and Rich were “playing drums” does not do them justice. They are probably the greatest drummers of all time (and Sammy was no slouch). Enjoy.
👉 Here are some more “Clever Sayings” (from a list we started last week).
Ever stop to think and forget to start again?
There may be no excuse for laziness, but I’m still looking.
Give me ambiguity or give me something else.
Is it wrong that only one company makes the game Monopoly?
I was going to wear my camouflage shirt today, but I couldn’t find it.
If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.
👉 And some signs and panels of humor:
👉 Give Thanks
“Oh, give thanks to the Lord, for He is good! For His mercy endures forever. Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, Whom He has redeemed from the hand of the enemy, and gathered out of the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south” (Psalm 107:1-3 NKJV).
Giving thanks is all we can give Him, and it is the least we can give Him. The psalmist tells us why we should praise God. He is good. His mercy endures forever. He has redeemed us. A short list that you may wish to personally expand.
In many Bibles, the word “endures” is in italics which means it is not in the original manuscript, but was supplied by the translators to help us better understand the verse. But in this verse, I think we get a deeper meaning if we leave it out: “his mercy forever.” That mercy had no beginning, and will never know an end.
Our sin required mercy. We were guilty, and without hope of satisfying the punishment deserved in any fashion, but the Lord who “is good” displays His mercy, and will do so forever. For the psalmist, it was an annual sacrifice on the day of atonement that rolled his sins ahead for another year. For believers on this side of the Cross, our sins have been removed from us as far as the east is from the west. They have been plunged into the sea of God’s forgetfulness. If the psalmist could declare “Oh give thanks to the Lord,” we have more reason to do so.
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