India | A Year of Celebration

1st September 2013
Celebration: Disaster Prevention Day
Mission: Prevent a disaster
Status: Failed to actively prevent a disaster, however none were presented to me
Notes: A 7.9 Mw earthquake struck the Kantō Plain in Japan on this day in 1923.

2nd September 2013
Celebration: Keanu Reeves’ Birthday
Mission: Call everyone “Duuuude” all day
Status: No
Notes: Film star Keanu Reeves was born in Beirut on this day in 1964 to an English mother and a Hawaii father. Most famous for being Neo from The Matrix and Ted “Theodore” Logan from Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventue. He was also Jonathan Harker in Francis Ford Coppola’s “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”, the hero-cop in Speed, and not even pretending to be from Liverpool in Constantine.

3rd September 2013
Celebration: William Wordsworth composed the sonnet “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802”
Mission: Compose your own sonnet about a London bridge
Status: No
Notes: Despite the title of this poem, it was actually composed on 31st July 1802.

4th September 2013
Celebration: Beyoncé’s Birthday
Mission: Shake your tush
Status: No. I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly
Notes: Beyoncé Knowles-Carter was born in Houston, Texas on this day in 1981. She started out as one of Destiny’s Child, but then went solo.

5th September 2013
Celebration: Freddie Mercury’s Birthday
Mission: Rock out to some Queen
Status: Complete
Notes: Farrokh Bulsara was born in Zanzibar on this day in 1946 to Indian parents working in the British Colonial Office. He went to boarding school in India where he learned to play piano and changed his name to Freddie Bulsara. Following the Zanzibar Revolution in 1964 his family relocated to Feltham in England, and Freddie went to study Art & Graphic Design in West London. In 1970 he joined Brian May & Roger Taylor’s band Smile. He renamed the band as Queen and renamed himself as Freddie Mercury.

6th September 2013
Commiseration: Death of Pavarotti
Mission: Sing “Nessun Dorma”
Status: No
Notes: Opera singer Luciano Pavarotti died at his home in Modena on this day in 2007. He was most famous as the singer of Nessun Dorma, the BBC’s theme-song for the football world cup Italia ’90, and as one of The Three Tenors.

7th September 2013
Commiseration: National Threatened Species Day (Australia)
Mission: Visit the emus at Battersea Park Children’s Zoo
Status: No
Notes: The last known thylacine (Thylacinus cynocephalus, or “Dog -headed pouched-one”, also known as a Tasmanian Tiger) died in Hobart Zoo in Tasmania on this day in 1936. Someone said it was called Benjamin, but it turned out he was lying. They were tigery looking marsupials. We didn’t go to Battersea, but we did go to Littleton in Hampshire and saw what can only be described as a “Horse-Cow”.

Unless you want to describe it as a “Cow-Horse”.

8th September 2013
Commiseration: International Literary Day
Mission: Read your children a book
Status: Complete
Notes: Writing this update almost a month later, I can’t actually remember what we read now… but we always have books at bedtime, so I’m calling this one a ‘Complete’.

Celebration: M. Night Shyamalan’s Birthday

Mission: Watch “Sixth Sense”

Status: Failed

Notes: Although his parents had already emigrated to Pennsylvania, Manoj Shyamalan’s mother had returned to Puducherry in India for his birth on this day in 1970. They returned to the USA shortly after, and he grew up to be the Academy Award winning director of The Sixth Sense.

However, I didn’t watch that, or any other, movie on this night.

No, instead I went out to Shoreditch’s Village Underground to see The Polyphonic Spree in their only London gig of the year.

They opened behind a blank banner, and as the band started up, the singer scrawled in backwards from behind the message ‘WE ARE FRIENDS’ before cutting it down & bursting into song…