It is a day like all other days, except you are there

January 11th. Wednesday. The middle of the week blahs. An ordinary day.

If you think there’s nothing about which to post, you have another think coming.

Here is a list of events that happened, people who were born, and people who died on January 11th. There are enough links in there to keep you in posts for years and years.

For example, Muhammed led an army of 10,000 to conquer Mecca in 630. Theodora was crowned Empress of the Byzantine Empire in 1055. Vladislav II became King of Bohemia in 1158. The first recorded lottery in England occurred in 1569. Mt. Etna erupted in Sicily, Italy, in 1693. Ching-Thang Khomba was crowned King of Manipur in 1779. William Herschel discovered Titania and Oberon, two moons of Uranus, in 1787. Alabama seceded from the United States in 1861. The Anglo-Zulu War began in 1879. Romania annexed Transylvania in 1919. Insulin was first used to treat diabetes in a human patient in 1922. Amelia Earhart became the first person to fly solo from Hawaii to California in 1935. Japan declared war on the Netherlands and invaded the Netherlands East Indies in 1942 and also captured Kuala Lumpur. Enver Hoxha declared the People’s Republic of Albania with himself as president in 1946. East Pakistan renamed itself Bangladesh in 1972. Alexander Hamilton and Pierre Mendès France were born (not in the same year). Francis Scott Key and Thomas Hardy died (ditto). In 2010, Miep Gies, the woman who discovered Anne Frank’s diary, died.

Lots of raw material from which to choose.

I have decided to declare January 11th as “Do It Yourself” Day in Blogworld.

Have at it.

[Editor’s note. I happened to fixate on Ching-Thang-Khomba, who was crowned King of Manipur in 1779. Clicking on Ching-Thang-Khomba revealed that his full name was Ningthou Ching-Thang Khomba and that he also was known as Rajarshi Bhagya Chandra, Jai Singh Maharaja and that he lived from 1748 until 1799 and that he was the inventor of the Ras Lila dance, which I had never heard of. So I clicked on Ras Lila Dance and learned that rasa lila, The Dance of Divine Love, takes place one night when the gopis of Vrindavan, upon hearing the sound of Krishna’s flute, sneak away from their households and families to the forest to dance with Krishna throughout the night, which Krishna supernaturally stretches to the length of one Night of Brahma, a Hindu unit of time lasting approximately 4.32 billion years. In the Krishna Bhakti traditions, the rasa-lila is considered to be one of the highest and most esoteric of Krishna’s pastimes. In these traditions, romantic love between human beings in the material world is seen as merely a diminished, illusionary reflection of the soul’s original, ecstatic spiritual love for Krishna, God, in the spiritual world.

See what I mean?

And if you click on the gopis of Vrindivan, there’s just no telling what you may end up discovering. -- RWP]