1st - Mayday Hurray!

3rd - Students met at the Sorbonne in Paris to protest, the police were called, a riot started & the rest is history...

The ensuing 'evenements' during May 1968 included a strike

by 10 million workers & a 'revolutionary situation' in which the

French Government almost collapsed.

Among the many slogans: "Sous les pavé, la plage!"

(Beneath the pavement, the beach.)

[See, also, another French Revolution,

& another Riot! More insurgency can be found here, as well]

- Thomas Hood died 3rd May 1854. One of his famous witty bits here.

4th - Margaret Thatcher first woman elected Prime Minister of U.K. (1979)

5th - Karl Marx B-day (1818) marx2.jpg (1978 bytes) (Great Beard!)

6th - Birthdays of Orson Welles (1915), Orson-Welles.jpg (12353 bytes) ,

rudolphvalentino.jpg (30904 bytes) Rudolph Valentino (1895)

Sigmund Freud (1856) &....Tony Blair (1953)- what do these four have in common? Showbiz maybe?

- Thoreau died, aged 44. "American naturalist, essayist, poet and philosopher... best known for his book Walden , a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience,.... an argument for disobedience to an unjust state." (Wikipedia)

12^th - Dante Gabriel Rossetti born 1828.

15th - Nakba Day, 'Day of the Catastrophe/ Disaster' (an-Nakba). For Palestinians an annual day of commemoration of the massive displacement preceding and following Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948.

During the 1948 Palestine war, an estimated 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled, and hundreds of Palestinian towns and villages were depopulated and destroyed.

Check out what I wrote about Palestine & Israel.

17th - Sandro Botticelli died 1510, painter of Birth of Venus

russell.gif (25755 bytes)

18th - Bertrand Russell born 1872 (d.1970), philosopher & peace campaigner:

"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

Men fear thought as they fear nothing else on earth -- more than ruin -- more even than death.... Thought is subversive and revolutionary, destructive and terrible, thought is merciless to privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habit. Thought looks into the pit of hell and is not afraid. Thought is great and swift and free, the light of the world, and the chief glory of man.

Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons.

The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time.

The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts.

"

24th May - Bob Dylan's B-day (1941)

"He not busy being

born is busy

dying"

Timeless, transcendental Troubadour.

[If your sound's turned on, you'll hear a clip from 'Forever Young]

Loyalist Militiaman at the Moment of Death, Cerro Muriano, September 5, 1936

25th May - Robert Capa, photo-journalist, killed when he stepped on a landmine in Vietnam (1954). He covered 5 different wars. Co-founder of Magnum with Henri Cartier-Bresson among others.