St. Polycarp, a second century bishop of Smyrna, is subject of new movie just released on DVD

St. Polycarp, one of the three chief Apostolic Fathers, who was a second century bishop of Smyrna, one of the new centres for the Christian world after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 AD, and located in modern-day Turkey on the Aegean Sea, was martyred at the age of 86 in 155 AD on the orders of Statius Quadratus, proconsul of Asia. Martyred, but not forgotten, Polycarp is the subject of the Henline Productions of Loveland, Ohio movie Polycarp: Destroyer of Gods, which was released on DVD May 5, and is based on a novel authored by Pastor Rick Lambert, a co-pastor of Grace Bible Church in Cincinnati.

Born in 69 AD, the real-life Polycarp was an important historical link to that Sub-Apostolic Age, during which it was possible to learn by word of mouth what the Apostles taught from those who had heard them for themselves.

But sorting out fact from fiction when it comes to the life of Polycarp of Smyrna, like so many ancient saints from the Sub-Apostolic Age, is no simple task. Much is simply shrouded in the mists of time and certainties are in short supply. Even the historical fact that Statius Quadratus was the proconsul of Asia at the time who ordered Polycarp’s martyrdom is not beyond dispute, nor is the exact year of Polycarp’s death. Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus wrote it was St. John the Apostle himself who made Polycarp a bishop.

The main sources of credible historical information concerning St. Polycarp are the Epistles of St. Ignatius; Polycarp’s own Epistle to the Philippians; sundry passages in St. Irenaaus; and the Letter of the Smyrnwans recounting the martyrdom of St. Polycarp. The Epistle of St. Polycarp was a reply to one from the Philippians, in which they had asked him to address them some words of exhortation.

Four out of the seven genuine epistles of St. Ignatius were written from Smyrna. In two of these – Magnesians and Ephesians – he speaks of Polycarp. The seventh Epistle was addressed to Polycarp.

Just before his martyrdom in 155 AD, Polycarp was urged by Quadratus, or whoever the proconsul was, to curse Christ, leading to Polycarp’s celebrated reply: “Fourscore and six years have I served Him, and He has done me no harm. How then can I curse my King that saved me?”  Polycarp was then burned and stabbed to death.

Henline Productions, formerly J&J Productions, is the brother and sister Protestant evangelical homeschooled filmmaking team of Joe Henline, 20, and Jerica Henline, 22.

In 2010, they entered the five-minute short video No Time in the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival and finished as semi-finalists in the competition..

Their next film, The Forgotten Martyr: Lady Jane Grey, shot in 2011 was entered into the 2012 San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival and won them the Best Young Filmmaker award, and was runner-up in the Short Film category. Awards from other independent Christian film festivals included, Best Young Filmmaker at the GloryReelz Christian Film Festival, Golden Crown Award (Best Student Production) at the International Christian Visual Media Festival and Best Young Filmmaker at The Attic Film Festival.

In their script for Polycarp, a 12-year-old slave girl, Anna, is rescued and adopted by Christians in 2nd century Smyrna and befriended by the aged Polycarp. You can watch a brief 1:52 YouTube trailer for it here at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IjPlffZVy8

In real life, of course, Polycarp was supposedly born into slavery, purchased as a young boy, and raised by a godly woman in Ephesus.

As Anna is taught by Polycarp and her new family, she struggles to reconcile her beliefs with those of the Christians. When the Roman proconsul demands that all citizens worship Caesar to show their allegiance to Rome, Polycarp and the Christians stand for their faith against the growing threat of persecution, and Anna is forced to choose whom she is willing to live – and die – for.

Polycarp was awarded Best Feature Film, Audience Choice Award and Best Original Music Score at the second Christian Worldview Film Festival in March at Castle Hills First Baptist Church, also in San Antonio.

Tulsa native Garry Nation received the award for Best Lead Actor in a Feature Film for his performance as Polycarp.

“This is a moving story of second-century persecution, reminiscent of the persecution many believers face today,” said Alex and Stephen Kendrick, producers of Courageous and Facing the Giants.

The Kendricks, who are both associate pastors on the staff of Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia, got their start in 2003 with their first movie Flywheel. They conceived the idea for Flywheel in the spring of 2002 after they saw the results from Barna Research Group demonstrating empirically popular culture movies and television shows are more influential in American society than the Christian church.

Flywheel, which tells the story of a dishonest used car salesman who comes to grips with his need for God, relied on untrained actors from the Sherwood Baptist Church congregation to play all the roles, debuting as an independent film on a single Carmike Theatre screen in Albany, Georgia in April 2003 and ran for six weeks initially, often outdrawing Hollywood films on adjoining screens.

Then came Facing the Giants in 2006 and in 2008 Fireproof, made on a $500,000 budget, but generating more than $33.4 million at the box office, making it the highest-grossing independent film of the year. Their most recent film, Courageous, was released in September 2011. It was produced with a budget of $2 million and has grossed more than $34.5 million to date. Facing the Giants, which grossed more than $10 million; Fireproof, which grossed more than $33 million; and Courageous have a combined gross of nearly $80 million at the box office, with a combined budget of less than $4 million.

The Kendicks wrapped up principal photography on their fifth movie, War Room, last July in and around Charlotte, North Carolina. It is their first project independent of Sherwood Pictures, the movie ministry of Sherwood Baptist Church. It being produced  by Kendrick Brothers Productions with Provident Films and AFFIRM Films in distribution partnership. Provident Films, a division of Provident Music Group, develops, produces and markets faith-based films. Nashville-based Provident Music Group is a division of Sony Music Entertainment. AFFIRM Films is a division of Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions (SPWA), a Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) company, which is a subsidiary of Sony Entertainment Inc., which in turn is a subsidiary of Tokyo-based Sony Corporation.

It is also the first Kendrick brothers project shot outside their hometown of Albany, Georgia. It drew more than 1,000 volunteers from 85 churches in the Charlotte area who stepped up and reached across denominational lines to support the production. Pre-production began in 2013 and the movie is in post-production currently and scheduled to be released Aug. 28. The Kendricks remain associate pastors at Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia.

Each Kendrick brothers film explores a subject important to Christians and the Christian life: personal integrity in Flywheel; resilient faith in Facing the Giants; loving marriages in Fireproof and heroic parenting in Courageous. War Room’s focus on prayer strategically highlights a subject of interest to a majority of Americans. According to a National Opinion Research Center survey on frequency of prayer, nearly 90 per cent of Americans claim to pray regularly. Some 60 per cent say they pray at least once a day – for Christians, that number grows to 84 per cent, according to a U.S. News and Beliefnet online poll. Almost 80 per cent of American Christians say they pray most often at home.

A family-friendly drama, War Room is about learning to fight the right kinds of battles. Filled with humor, wit and heart, it follows Tony and Elizabeth Jordan, a middle-class couple, and their daughter, Danielle, as they struggle through personal, marital and spiritual issues. Their lives are forever changed after Elizabeth meets an elderly widow who helps her develop a secret prayer room in her home.

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Strike & Spare: Canadians uniquely have 5-pin bowling but Americans have a 10-pin bowling alley in the White House

Nick DiVirgilio’s NC Crossroad Lanes upstairs at his North Centre Mall on Station Road in Thompson, offering both five-pin and 10-pin bowling, opened in March 1999 and celebrated its 16th anniversary March 19.

My first trip to Nick’s NC Crossroad Lanes – at least to bowl – was for some five-pin bowling a few weeks before that on Feb. 28 when my friend Paul Boge, the Winnipeg writer and filmmaker was in town for the weekend as guest speaker for Pastor Ted Goossen’s annual Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship Family Enrichment weekend, and a Saturday afternoon outing to the bowling alley was on the agenda. My curiosity got the best of me in wondering if Boge is as good a bowler as he is speaker and Christian apologist. He is.

DiVirgilio’s NC Crossroad Lanes has been the only game in town when it comes to bowling since May 2010 when the last strikes were thrown at Thompson Lanes on Churchill Drive, which opened in 1965 and was operated by the Stuart family for 40 of its 45 years in existence.

Before my end of February five-pin outing at NC Crossroad Lanes with my friends from Thompson Christian Centre Fellowship, I think my most recent bowling outing had been back in Kingston, Ontario when I was a grad student at Queen’s University in the mid-1990s.

Five-pin bowling, for my American readers, is a Canadian thing, invented by Tommy Ryan in Toronto in 1909. Original pin count (values) are established as (from left to right) “4-2-1-3-5.” The first five-pin bowling league was formed at Ryan’s Toronto Bowling Club the following year in 1910. While there are  some five-pin bowling alleys in the United States and in Europe, the vast majority of five-pin bowling alleys and leagues are found in Canada.

Ryan ran his own pool hall in Toronto prior to inventing the sport of five-pin bowling. Ryan came up with the idea of five-pin bowling after many of his clients complained that the balls in 10-pin bowling were too heavy. As a result, he produced a version of bowling with a new scoring system, lighter balls, and rubber rings around the pins.

The first five-pin bowling organization was the Canadian Bowling Association (CBA) formed in Toronto in 1927, which followed a year later in 1928 with its first Official 5 Pin Rule Book printed by the CBA. In 1952, the pin count was revised to (from left to right) 2-3-5-3-2 (as it is currently). The highest possible score that can be attained in five-pin bowling is 450. This can be accomplished by achieving a strike in the first nine frames and then achieving three more strikes in the tenth (final) frame. In five-pin bowling, three strikes in a row is a total of 45 points (in the first frame in which the streak began). When multiplied by 10, the final point total would be 450.

The Canadian Five-Pin Bowler’s Association now determines the rules and rule changes in five-pin bowling, while the Bowling Proprietors Association of Canada (BPAC) represents the interest of bowling alley owners.

When a player uses all three of their throws to knock down all of the pins, it is known as a “full set.” Three consecutive strikes is known as a “turkey”; three consecutive strikes in the tenth frame is called a “Strike Out,” while hitting both three pins (in your first two throws) is called a “Howie.”

Each week nearly one million Canadians go bowling and five-pin bowling was voted the fourth-greatest Canadian invention of all time on the CBC Television series Greatest Canadian Inventions.

The United States had 4,061 bowling centers in 2012, down 25 percent from 1998, the earliest year for which the U.S. Census collected consistent data, Bloomberg Business reported last July. By contrast, the United States added 2,000 bowling alleys between the end of the Second World War and 1958, when the American Society of Planning Officials reported in May 1958 that “the bowling alley is fast becoming one of the most important – if not the most important – local center of participant sport and recreation.”

While Canadians may have the claim on five-pin bowling, Americans can point to the unique distinction of having a bowling alley – albeit 10-pin – right in the White House in Washington. In fact, it turned 68 last Saturday, as President Harry S. Truman officially opened it on April 25, 1947.

Fellow Missourians funded the construction of the bowling alley on the ground floor of the West Wing in honour of the president. They had intended to open the alley as part of Truman’s 63rd birthday celebration on May 8, 1947, but construction was completed ahead of schedule. Truman’s favourite pastime was poker and although he had not bowled since he was a teenager, A&E Television Networks’ This Day in History notes, “he gamely hoisted the first ball, knocking down 7 out of 10 pins. One of the pins is now on display at the Smithsonian Institution.”

Truman allowed staff to start a league but presidential bowling was moved to the Old Executive Office Building in 1955 to make way for a mimeograph room. But in 1969, President Richard Nixon, an avid bowler, had a new one-lane alley built, which was paid for by friends, in an underground workspace area below the driveway leading to the North Portico.

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Just remember, you are about to pass briefly through The Twilight Zone: Nothing can happen tomorrow between 2:01 a.m. and 2:59 a.m. because those 59 minutes do not exist on March 8

As government news releases go, this “media bulletin” sent to me, and no doubt many others via e-mail by the the province at 11:32 a.m. yesterday, sort of stretches the old journalistic notion of the word “bulletin” connoting some sense of urgency. “Daylight saving time returns to Manitoba early in the morning of Sunday, March 8, when clocks across the province will be advanced by one hour,” says the lede (journalism-speak for opening sentence or paragraph).

“Under the Official Time Act, daylight saving time begins on the second Sunday in March and continues until the first Sunday in November.

“The official time change to daylight saving time occurs at 2 a.m., Sunday, March 8 at which time clocks should be set ahead to 3 a.m.”

While it has been gradually remaining lighter later in the evening since late December here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re about to get an even bigger early evening light boost Sunday. Tonight the sun sets at 6:19 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST). Tomorrow sunset here is at 7:21 p.m. Central Daylight Saving Time (CDT).  Presto! In the course of a single day, we’ve picked up another hour and two minutes of daylight in the evening. And by the time the spring equinox arrives March 20 here in Thompson, Manitoba at latitude 55.7433° N, we’ll be seeing about the same amount of hours of daylight as night,  with sunrise at 7:35 a.m, and sunset at 7:46 p.m. Come the summer solstice June 21, don’t be surprised if we’re out on the dock at the Paint Lake Marina, a bit south of here, fishing until almost 11 p.m., as sunset won’t be until 10:26 p.m.

For this, we can thank George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST). Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island.

Standard Time, of course, with its standardized times zones, is a Canadian invention, courtesy of Sir Sandford Fleming, conveniently divided into hourly segments, and dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead.

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Fleming’s genius was to create 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time.

But  on the other side of the world in New Zealand, Hudson had a somewhat different interest a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time.  Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

While interest grew in  Hudson’s Daylight Saving Time ideas between 1895 and 1898, they were hardly greeted by a rousing show of unanimous support when he presented his first paper in Wellington on Oct. 15, 1895, according to  the abstract in Volume 28, 1895 of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, which noted, “The author proposed to alter the time of the clock at the equinoxes so as to bring the working-hours of the day within the period of daylight, and by utilizing the early morning, so reduce the excessive use of artificial light which at present prevails.

“Mr. Travers said the clocks could be managed by having different hands. He did not think we were far enough advanced to adopt the plan advocated by the author of the paper.

“Mr. Harding said that the only practical part of Mr. Hudson’s paper had long since been anticipated by Benjamin Franklin, one of whose essays denounced the extravagance of making up for lost daylight by artificial light. Mr. Hudson’s original suggestions were wholly unscientific and impracticable. If he really had found many to support his views, they should unite and agitate for a reform.

“Mr. Maskell said that the mere calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time. It was out of the question to think of altering a system that had been in use for thousands of years, and found by experience to be the best. The paper was not practical.

“Mr. Hawthorne did not see any difficulty in carrying out the views advocated so ably by Mr. Hudson.

“Mr. Hustwick was of opinion that the reform spoken of would have to wait a little longer.

“Mr. Richardson said that it would be a good thing if the plan could be applied to the young people.

“Mr. Hudson, in reply, said that he was sorry to see the paper treated rather with ridicule. He intended it to be practical. It was approved of by those much in the open air. There would be no difficulty in altering the clocks.”

While Hudson may he have been somewhat discouraged by that initial reception, he was far from defeated, so he was back before the Wellington Philosophical Society with his second paper on the subject three years later in October 1898:

“In order to more fully utilize the long days of summer, it is proposed on the 1st October of each year to put the standard time on two hours by making 12 (midnight) into 2 a.m., whilst on the 1st March the time would be put back two hours by making 2 a.m. into 12 (midnight), thus reverting to the present time arrangements for the winter months,” wrote Hudson in 1898.

“The effect of this alteration would be to advance all the day’s operations in summer two hours compared with the present system. In this way the early-morning daylight would be utilised, and a long period of daylight leisure would be made available in the evening for cricket, gardening, cycling, or any other outdoor pursuit desired. It will no doubt be urged that people are at present quite at liberty to make use of the early-morning daylight in summer without any such drastic alteration in the established order of things as is here suggested. To this objection it may be pointed out that, living as we do in a social community, we are unable to separate ourselves from the habits of those around us. We cannot individually alter our times of going to bed or getting up, but must fall in with the habits of the majority – at all events, to a great extent, Again, under the present arrangement, those who desire to utilise the early-morning daylight are compelled to take some of their recreation before their daily work and some afterwards, which in many cases results in their having to forgo pursuits that they would be enabled to follow successfully if their daylight leisure were continuous  … The foregoing remarks are framed to apply to us in the Southern Hemisphere, but with the seasons reversed they’ would, of course, apply with equal force to the Northern; Hemisphere.”

While Vernon’s self interest in Daylight Saving Time stemmed at least in part from his interest in collecting insects during a  longer evening, along with such other genteel pursuits by his countrymen as  cricket, gardening and cycling, it wouldn’t be until 18 years later that his DST proposals would be implemented in a modified form in a very different military context in the midst of the First World War by  Germany and Austria at 11 p.m. on April 30, 1916, when they advanced the hands of the clock one hour until the following October.  The rationale was simple: conserve fuel needed to produce electric power. Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey and Tasmania immediately followed suit, as did Manitoba and Nova Scotia here in Canada. Britain also followed three weeks later on May 21, 1916. In 1917, Australia and Newfoundland began DST.

The United States followed on March 31, 1918 and Daylight Saving Time was observed for seven months in 1918 and 1919, but was largely unpopular and Americans used in variably and inconsistently for decades afterwards. The most recent change in the United States, pursuant to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, adding parts of March and November to DST, came into effect in 2007, and has been adopted by most Canadian jurisdictions to keep in synchronization with American business and government interests. The operative word is “most,” however, as there are a slew of Canadian exceptions to the general norm.

Most of British Columbia is on Pacific Time and observes DST, but there are two main exceptions: Part of the Peace River Regional District, including the communities of Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Hudson’s Hope, Fort St. John, Taylor and Tumbler Ridge, are on Mountain Time and do not observe DST. This means that the region’s clocks are the same as those in Calgary and Edmonton in the winter, and they are the same as those in Vancouver in the summer.

The East Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia, including the communities of Cranbrook, Fernie, Golden and Invermere, are  on Mountain Time and observe DST, meaning the region is always on the same time as Calgary. An exception is Creston, which observes MST year-round. Clocks in Creston match those in Calgary in the winter, and Vancouver in the summer.

While the rest of Nunavut observes DST, Southampton Island, including Coral Harbour, remains on Eastern Standard Time throughout the year. The Kitikmeot Region including Cambridge Bay observes DST but is on Mountain Time.

Most of Ontario uses DST, but Pickle Lake, New Osnaburgh, and Atikokan, located within the Central Time Zone in Northwestern Ontario, all observe Eastern Standard Time all year long.

Most of Quebec also used DST. However, the eastern part of Quebec’s North Shore, east of 63° west longitude, are in the Atlantic Time Zone, but do not observe DST for the most part, meaning in summer their clocks match those of the rest of the province, while in November, their clocks are match Atlantic Standard Time (AST) in the Maritimes. Although places east of 63° west are officially on Atlantic Time, local custom is to use Eastern Time as far east as the Natashquan River. Those communities observe DST, including all of Anticosti Island, which is bisected by the 63rd meridian. Les Îles de la Madeleine observe DST and are on Atlantic Time.

Although Saskatchewan is geographically within the Mountain Time zone, the province is officially part of the Central Time zone. As a result, while most of Saskatchewan does not change clocks spring and fall, it technically observes DST year round. This means that clocks in most of the province match clocks in Winnipeg during the winter and Calgary and Edmonton during the summer. This time zone designation was implemented in 1966, when the Saskatchewan Time Act was passed in order to standardize time province-wide. Lloydminster, which is bisected by the Saskatchewan-Alberta provincial boundary, observes Mountain Time year-round, with DST, which in the summer synchronizes it with the rest of Saskatchewan. Along the Manitoba inter-provincial boundary, the small, remote Saskatchewan municipalities of Denare Beach and Creighton unofficially observe Central Daylight Time during the summer,  keeping the same time as the larger neighbouring Town of Flin Flon here in Manitoba.

Just remember, you are about to pass briefly through The Twilight Zone. Nothing can happen tomorrow between 2:01 a.m. and 2:59 a.m. because those 59 minutes do not exist on March 8: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVSRm80WzZk

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The rise and fall and rising again of Alexander Dubček and the blooming of Czechoslovakia’s ever-so-brief Prague Spring of 1968

It was 47 years ago yesterday that Alexander Dubček replaced Antonin Novotný as first secretary of the Czechoslovak Party Central Committee and the Prague Spring of 1968 began to unexpectedly bloom under the still Communist regime.

Dubček was born in 1921 in Uhrovek, Slovakia. He had joined the Communist Party  in Slovakia in 1939 and during the Second World War in 1944 joined the Slovak Resistance, serving with the Jan Zizka Brigade, which operated in the lower Tatra Mountains.

After the war ended n 1945, Dubček rose through the Communist ranks. From 1951 to 1955, he was a member of the Národního shromáždění republiky Československé, the national assembly, and in 1953 he was sent to the Moscow Political College, where he graduated in 1958 with honours.

When he returned to Czechoslovakia, Dubček was appointed principal secretary of the Slovak Communist Party in Bratislava.Under Dubček’s leadership, Slovakia began to move toward political liberalization. Kultúrny život, the weekly newspaper of the Union of Slovak Writers, published frank discussions of liberalization, federalization and democratization, written by progressive and controversial writers – both Slovak and Czech – and became the first Slovak publication to gain a wide following among Czechs, as well as Slovaks.

In 1958, Dubček also joined the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, which he served as secretary from 1960 to 1962, and the same year became a member of the Czechoslovak Party Presidium. A year later, he succeeded Karol Balicek as first secretary of the Slovak Communist Party. From 1960 to 1968 he was again a member of the Národního shromáždění republiky Československé.

On Jan. 5, 1968, the party’s central committee nominated Dubček to succeed Novotný after the Czechoslovak Party Central Committee passed a vote of no-confidence in its then first secretary.
As first secretary, Dubček, although no democrat, began nourishing the first seeds of what became known as the Prague Spring, that proved to be a brief but exciting season of liberalization that wouldn’t bloom again for 21 years until the Velvet Revolution of November 1989, when  Dubček returned from long political exile to be elected speaker of the  Federální shromáždění, the federal assembly.

In 1968, Dubček had moved toward what became known as “socialism with a human face,” saying he was determined to achieve the “widest possible democratization” of Czechoslovakia and the establishment of “a free, modern, and profoundly humane society.”

He allowed Communist Party members in Czechoslovakia to challenge party policy, as opposed to the traditional acceptance of all government policy. Party members were given the right to act “according to their conscience.” He also announced the end of censorship and the right of Czech citizens to criticize the government. The country’s newspapers produced scathing reports about government incompetence and corruption.

Dubček also announced that farmers would have the right to form independent co-operatives and that trade unions would have increased rights to bargain for their members.

At the same time, Dubček tried to reassure the country’s Soviet masters that Czechoslovakia had no intention of leaving the Warsaw Pact and Czechoslovakia’s 1968 reforms were an internal matter. The Soviet Union was not reassured.

On the pretext they had evidence that West Germany was planning to invade the Sudetenland, comprising the Czechoslovakian border districts of Bohemia, Moravia and parts of Silesia. Moscow said it  would provide Czechoslovakia with the troops needed to protect the country from invasion by the NATO power. Dubček refused the offer but the Soviets insisted.

On the night of Aug. 20-21, 1968, Soviet and other Warsaw Pact forces from Hungary, Poland, East Germany and Bulgaria crossed the frontier into Czechoslovakia. The occupying armies quickly seized control of Prague.

The beginning of the end of the Prague Spring came on that night of Aug. 20-21, 1968. Dubček was arrested, spirited away to Moscow with other reform leaders, and detained for a week before he was returned to Prague and released, and then continued on as first secretary until April 17, 1969, when he was appointed speaker of the new Federální shromáždění, the federal assembly, and soon after went on to serve as Czechoslovakia’s ambassador to Turkey for just over six months from Dec. 15, 1969 to June 24, 1970. Three days later, on June 27, 1970, Dubček was expelled from the Communist Party and banished to Bratislava where he worked in a timber yard, spending the next 19 years in a low-profile but not entirely uncomfortable position, although he had little contact with the outside world for almost two decades and was under surveillance by the Státní bezpečnosti (StB), the Czech secret police.

Dubček  spent the last three years of his life back in the political limelight after the Velvet Revolution of November 1989. He died at the age of 70 on Nov. 7, 1992 at Homolse Hospital in Prague. A little more than two months earlier on Sept. 1, Dubček had been seriously injured in an automobile accident that occurred when a car driven by his  chauffeur left the highway in a rainstorm and plunged down a ravine. Dubček suffered serious spine and chest injuries and underwent surgery.

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Mouthwatering American Thanksgiving recipes correction in the New York Times and other pardonable acts

I’ve read a good number of corrections and clarifications over the years in newspapers as a journalist. I daresay I’ve had to write a few myself. That’s the nature of the beast. But the correction appended Nov. 26 by New York Times editors to a Nov. 18 story headlined “The United States of Thanksgiving,” which overreached it turns out in scouring “the nation for recipes that evoke each of the 50 states (and D.C. and Puerto Rico)” takes the cake for both its length, reflecting the rather larger number of errors, and something unique in my experience as a reader. It was so mouthwatering it made me hungry just reading it.

As a former resident of North Carolina, Massachusetts and New Hampshire, all I can say is yum. Happy Thanksgiving to all north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. You can read the original New York Times story here at: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/18/dining/thanksgiving-recipes-across-the-united-states.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

The correction appended the bottom of the story online reads:

“Correction: November 26, 2014

“An article last Wednesday recommending a Thanksgiving dish from each state, with a recipe, contained numerous errors.

“The recipe from Connecticut, for quince with cipollini onions and bacon, omitted directions for preparing the quince. It should be peeled, cored and cut into 1-inch chunks. An illustration with the West Virginia recipe, for pawpaw pudding, depicted a papaya — not a pawpaw, which is correctly depicted above. The introduction to the recipe from Arizona, for cranberry sauce and chiles, misstated the origin of Hatch chiles. They are grown in New Mexico, not in Arizona.

“The introduction to the Delaware recipe, for du Pont turkey with truffled zucchini stuffing, referred incorrectly to several historical points about the Winterthur estate. It was an ancestral home of the du Pont family, not the sole one; it was established in 1837, not in 1810; the house was completed in 1839, not in 1837. The introduction also misstated the relationship of Pauline Foster du Pont to Eleuthère Irénée du Pont. Pauline was the wife of Mr. du Pont’s grandson, not his daughter-in-law.

“And, finally, the label for the illustration for the nation’s capital misspelled the District of Columbia as Colombia.”

Much like Canadian Thanksgiving, which I wrote about last month (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/10/11/canadian-thanksgiving-eh-february-april-may-june-october-november-a-very-moveable-feast-historically/) our American cousins have an older and equally interesting Thanksgiving history of this very moveable feast in both countries.

In the United States, Thanksgiving is a more complex feast. Originally, the Pilgrim Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony celebrated their first Thanksgiving Day on July 8, 1629. The following year, John Winthrop gave his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he rightly predicted the colony would be metaphorically, as from salt and light in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, known as the “city on a hill, ” watched by the world.

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop said. “The eyes of all people are upon us … we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

Almost four centuries later, their purposes perhaps not quite as lofty, Americans now celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is the single-biggest domestic travel weekend of the year for Americans going home, wherever that might be, to visit family.

Canadian Thanksgiving, or Jour de l’Action de grâce, by contrast is a somewhat more low-key affair.

While we do travel to visit family and many of us will sit down to eat turkey with family and friends, it’s nothing on the scale of the American experience.

Perhaps that’s because we have our Thanksgiving on a Monday at the end of a weekend, not on a Thursday at the beginning of a long weekend (officially the Wednesday and Friday are not holidays in the United States, just the Thursday, but virtually no one – aside from unfortunate retail store clerks – works the Friday, as those of us who have lived there know.) Just try and get a government official on the telephone after mid-afternoon Wednesday, or all day Friday of American Thanksgiving week if you wish to test this hypothesis.

While the fourth Thursday in November is also often the last Thursday as well (as it is this year), even a cursory glance through the years of our Gregorian calendar reveal some years, of course, have five Thursdays. Such was the case in 1939, the last year of the Great Depression, when Thanksgiving was scheduled to fall on Nov. 30, not only on the fifth Thursday of November but the very last day of November as well in fact, and less than a month before Christmas, causing President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democrat, to use the moral authority of his office by proclamation to move Thanksgiving up a week to Nov. 23 at the initiative of Lew Hahn, general manager of the Retail Dry Goods Association, who had warned U.S. Secretary of Commerce Harry Hopkins as early as August that the late calendar date of Thanksgiving that year could have an adverse effect on retail sales, and that an earlier Thanksgiving could perhaps boost the bottom line.

To understand the rationale more fully, harken back to that bygone era where it was quaintly considered bad form for retailers to display Christmas decorations or have Christmas sales before the celebration of Thanksgiving, as opposed to the current day-after Halloween kick-off. Or is it the day after Labor Day now Christmas sales start? One of the two methinks.

Roosevelt, however, had waited until Oct. 31 to announce his thinking on the matter of moving up Thanksgiving by a week 23 days later. The short-notice change in dates affected the holiday plans of millions of Americans; while there was plenty of confusion and many were inconvenienced, others hit pay dirt.

On the downside, many college football teams traditionally ended their seasons with games against their main rivals on Thanksgiving, and had scheduled them in 1939 for Nov. 30. Some athletic conferences had rules permitting games only through the Saturday following Thanksgiving. Changing the date could mean many teams would play their season finale in empty stadiums or not at all. The change also reportedly caused problems for college registrars, schedulers and calendar makers.

The Thanksgiving winners in 1939 lived in Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. Those three states observed two Thanksgiving holidays that year; the just-proposed Thursday, Nov. 23, and then they did it all over again a week later on the originally scheduled holiday on Thursday, Nov. 30.

Now, that’s something to express gratitude for, unless your were a turkey taking a double-hit on your numbers possibly in  Colorado, Mississippi and Texas. All told, 23 states and the District of Columbia, of the 48 states in those pre-statehood days for Alaska and Hawaii (both joined the union 20 years later in 1959), recognized Nov. 23 as Thanksgiving in 1939, while 22 states stuck with the original Nov. 30 date as planned.

Gradually, the fourth Thursday in November as Thanksgiving, with some see-sawing back-and-forth and general waffling, took a more permanent hold throughout the United States. Texas was the last state to change its holiday law, observing the last Thursday in November as  Thanksgiving when there are five Thursdays in the month for the final time on Thursday, Nov. 29, 1956.

The considerable, and for a time in the early 1940s, still ongoing confusion surrounding when Thanksgiving should be celebrated was not surprisingly diffused in the popular culture as ripe material for laughs through cinema, as well as radio. “In the 1940 Warner Bros. Merrie Melodies cartoon Holiday Highlights, directed by Tex Avery,” Wikipedia notes, “the introduction to a segment about Thanksgiving shows the holiday falling on two different dates, one ‘for Democrats’ and one a week later ‘for Republicans.'”

In the 1942 musical Holiday Inn, starring Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire, a classic black-and-white film, which I borrowed in DVD format from the Thompson Public Library a few years ago (and which was on the shelf today I noticed) there is a delightful parody where a November calendar appears on which an animated turkey jumps back and forth between the two weeks, until he gives up and shrugs his shoulders at the audience.

And speaking of turkeys getting the last laugh, no discussion of American Thanksgiving is complete, of course, without addressing the issue of the Presidential turkey pardon. In a piece called “Why presidents pardon turkeys — a history” by Domenico Montanaro, PBS Newshour yesterday offered the comprehensive history of the practice, which you can read at http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/presidents-pardon-turkeys-history/#.VHbAtv1lVLA.facebook

Cheese, a 49-pound big boy born on July 4, with a height of 36 inches and a wingspan of 4½ feet, and a “strut style” described as “grand champion,” was this year’s recipient yesterday of a presidential pardon from U.S. President Barack Obama during the annual ceremony in the Grand Foyer of the White House. It was Obama’s sixth turkey pardoning as commander-in-chief Wednesday at the White House. Cheese’s gobble was characterized as “loud, romantic, with a country ring to it.”

The annual tradition now sees two turkeys spared from the dinner table, but only one is selected to take part in the White House pardon ceremony.

This year’s duo was Mac and Cheese, but only Cheese got to ham it up before the cameras.

“I am here to announce what I’m sure will be the most talked about executive action this month,” President Obama said, his two daughters Sasha and Malia by his side. “Today, I’m taking an action fully within my legal authority, same taken by Democratic and Republican presidents before me, to spare lives of two turkeys — “Mac” and “Cheese” from a terrible and delicious fate.”

He added, “If you’re a turkey, and you’re named after a side dish, your chances of escaping today dinner are pretty low, so these guys beat the odds. … They’ll get to live out the rest of their days respectably at a Virginia estate. Some would call this amnesty, but there’s plenty of turkey to go around.”

Mac, also a male born on the Fourth of July this year, came in two pounds lighter than Cheese, tipping the scales at only 47 pounds. He also had a half-foot smaller wingspan of only four feet. His strut style was described as “feather-shaker.”  Mac’s gobble was characterized as “rhythmic, melodious, with a touch of bluegrass.”

Mac and Cheese will be sent to a park in Leesburg, Virginia, a Washington suburb. The property has been used to grow turkeys in the past. The estate was owned by former Virginia Governor Westmoreland Davis, who raised hundreds of his own turkeys there in the 1930s and 1940s.

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George Vernon Hudson, Daylight Saving Time and the coming Hour of Ambiguity Nov. 2

While it has been gradually getting darker earlier in the evening since late June here in the Northern Hemisphere, the fact many of us can still travel home in waning daylight from work or school in the late afternoon in late  October is in itself a credit to George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST). Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island.

Standard Time, of course, with its standardized times zones, is a Canadian invention, courtesy of Sir Sanford Fleming, conveniently divided into hourly segments, and dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead.
Fleming’s genius was to create 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time.

But  on the other side of the world in New Zealand, Hudson had a somewhat different interest a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time.  Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

While interest grew in  Hudson’s Daylight Saving Time ideas between 1895 and 1898, they were hardly greeted by a rousing show of unanimous support when he presented his first paper in Wellington on Oct. 15, 1895, according to  the abstract in Volume 28, 1895 of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, which noted, “The author proposed to alter the time of the clock at the equinoxes so as to bring the working-hours of the day within the period of daylight, and by utilizing the early morning, so reduce the excessive use of artificial light which at present prevails.

“Mr. Travers said the clocks could be managed by having different hands. He did not think we were far enough advanced to adopt the plan advocated by the author of the paper.

“Mr. Harding said that the only practical part of Mr. Hudson’s paper had long since been anticipated by Benjamin Franklin, one of whose essays denounced the extravagance of making up for lost daylight by artificial light. Mr. Hudson’s original suggestions were wholly unscientific and impracticable. If he really had found many to support his views, they should unite and agitate for a reform.

“Mr. Maskell said that the mere calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time. It was out of the question to think of altering a system that had been in use for thousands of years, and found by experience to be the best. The paper was not practical.

“Mr. Hawthorne did not see any difficulty in carrying out the views advocated so ably by Mr. Hudson.

“Mr. Hustwick was of opinion that the reform spoken of would have to wait a little longer.

“Mr. Richardson said that it would be a good thing if the plan could be applied to the young people.

“Mr. Hudson, in reply, said that he was sorry to see the paper treated rather with ridicule. He intended it to be practical. It was approved of by those much in the open air. There would be no difficulty in altering the clocks.”

While Hudson may he have been somewhat discouraged by that initial reception, he was far from defeated, so he was back before the Wellington Philosophical Society with his second paper on the subject three years later in October 1898:

“In order to more fully utilize the long days of summer, it is proposed on the 1st October of each year to put the standard time on two hours by making 12 (midnight) into 2 a.m., whilst on the 1st March the time would be put back two hours by making 2 a.m. into 12 (midnight), thus reverting to the present time arrangements for the winter months,” wrote Hudson in 1898.

“The effect of this alteration would be to advance all the day’s operations in summer two hours compared with the present system. In this way the early-morning daylight would be utilised, and a long period of daylight leisure would be made available in the evening for cricket, gardening, cycling, or any other outdoor pursuit desired. It will no doubt be urged that people are at present quite at liberty to make use of the early-morning daylight in summer without any such drastic alteration in the established order of things as is here suggested. To this objection it may be pointed out that, living as we do in a social community, we are unable to separate ourselves from the habits of those around us. We cannot individually alter our times of going to bed or getting up, but must fall in with the habits of the majority – at all events, to a great extent, Again, under the present arrangement, those who desire to utilise the early-morning daylight are compelled to take some of their recreation before their daily work and some afterwards, which in many cases results in their having to forgo pursuits that they would be enabled to follow successfully if their daylight leisure were continuous  … The foregoing remarks are framed to apply to us in the Southern Hemisphere, but with the seasons reversed they’ would, of course, apply with equal force to the Northern; Hemisphere.”

While Vernon’s self interest in Daylight Saving Time stemmed at least in part from his interest in collecting insects during a  longer evening, along with such other genteel pursuits by his countrymen as  cricket, gardening and cycling, it wouldn’t be until 18 years later that his DST proposals would be implemented in a modified form in a very different military context in the midst of the First World War by  Germany and Austria at 11 p.m. on April 30, 1916, when they advanced the hands of the clock one hour until the following October.  The rationale was simple: conserve fuel needed to produce electric power. Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey and Tasmania immediately followed suit, as did Manitoba and Nova Scotia here in Canada. Britain also followed three weeks later on May 21, 1916. In 1917, Australia and Newfoundland began DST.  The United States followed on March 31, 1918 and Daylight Saving Time was observed for seven months in 1918 and 1919, but was largely unpopular and Americans used in variably and inconsistently for decades afterwards. The most recent change in the United States, pursuant to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, adding parts of March and November to DST, came into effect in 2007, and has been adopted by most Canadian jurisdictions to keep in synchronization with American business and government interests. The operative word is “most,” however, as there are a slew of Canadian exceptions to the general norm.

Most of British Columbia is on Pacific Time and observes DST, but there are two main exceptions: Part of the Peace River Regional District, including the communities of Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Hudson’s Hope, Fort St. John, Taylor and Tumbler Ridge, are on Mountain Time and do not observe DST. This means that the region’s clocks are the same as those in Calgary and Edmonton in the winter, and they are the same as those in Vancouver in the summer.

The East Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia, including the communities of Cranbrook, Fernie, Golden and Invermere, are  on Mountain Time and observe DST, meaning the region is always on the same time as Calgary. An exception is Creston, which observes MST year-round. Clocks in Creston match those in Calgary in the winter, and Vancouver in the summer.

While the rest of Nunavut observes DST, Southampton Island, including Coral Harbour, remains on Eastern Standard Time throughout the year. The Kitikmeot Region including Cambridge Bay observes DST but is on Mountain Time.

Most of Ontario uses DST, but Pickle Lake, New Osnaburgh, and Atikokan, located within the Central Time Zone in Northwestern Ontario, all observe Eastern Standard Time all year long.

Most of Quebec also used DST. However, the eastern part of Quebec’s North Shore, east of 63° west longitude, are in the Atlantic Time Zone, but do not observe DST for the most part, meaning in summer their clocks match those of the rest of the province, while in November, their clocks are match Atlantic Standard Time (AST) in the Maritimes. Although places east of 63° west are officially on Atlantic Time, local custom is to use Eastern Time as far east as the Natashquan River. Those communities observe DST, including all of Anticosti Island, which is bisected by the 63rd meridian. Les Îles de la Madeleine observe DST and are on Atlantic Time.

Although Saskatchewan is geographically within the Mountain Time zone, the province is officially part of the Central Time zone. As a result, while most of Saskatchewan does not change clocks spring and fall, it technically observes DST year round. This means that clocks in most of the province match clocks in Winnipeg during the winter and Calgary and Edmonton during the summer. This time zone designation was implemented in 1966, when the Saskatchewan Time Act was passed in order to standardize time province-wide. Lloydminster, which is bisected by the Saskatchewan-Alberta provincial boundary, observes Mountain Time year-round, with DST, which in the summer synchronizes it with the rest of Saskatchewan. Along the Manitoba inter-provincial boundary, the small, remote Saskatchewan municipalities of Denare Beach and Creighton unofficially observe Central Daylight Time during the summer,  keeping the same time as the larger neighbouring Town of Flin Flon here in Manitoba.

This year, we shift back to Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time at 2 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 2, which means an extra hour of slumber for many, but also causes me to ponder the potential complications of moving the clock back an hour and repeating the hour from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. What happens when the clock jumps backward at 2 a.m. again to 1 a.m. for the second time that night and then repeats the hour? Would you have official log chronologies showing 1:13 a.m., 1:37 a.m., 1:56 a.m., 1:03 a.m. and 1:12 a.m. with the later two actually coming after the first three because they came after the clock fell back an hour? How would you distinguish which came first if need be, if someone needed to inspect the log months later (add the annotation 1:13 a.m. CDT or 1:03 a.m. CST?)

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Douglas explains that “in a handwritten log the hour of ambiguity to which you refer can be simply resolved by appending the time zone (e.g. CST or CDT) to potentially ambiguous entries … e.g. “01:32 CDT” for the first pass through the hour of ambiguity and “1:32 CST” during the second pass.

“By explicitly writing the time zone as part of the time entry,” Douglas he added, “you also bypass the time acts’ defaults for official time – as you might wish to do if you are making agreements across a time zone boundary where there is the possibility of geographic ambiguity of time zone.

“The above procedure is very clear in Canada, but unfortunately less so in the USA,” said Douglas. “We in Canada can refer to ‘official’ or ‘legal’ time, which can alternate between being a ‘Standard Time’ or being a ‘Daylight Time.’ In the USA, to allow regulation by the federal government, both ‘Standard Time’ and ‘Daylight Time’ must be considered a ‘standard’ to avoid having time changes be a state responsibility under the residual powers clause of their constitution. If you think you may have to deal with the American ambiguity, it may be worthwhile to include an explanatory note in the log, such as ‘CST is defined as UTC-6h, and CDT is defined as UTC-5h.’

“If the times are being logged in a permanent logbook, with entries in chronological order for a fixed reckoning of time (i.e. in the absence of clock adjustments), then a simple way of removing the ambiguity is to include in the appropriate place in the log an entry such as “02:00 CDT – log’s clock changed from CDT to CST – 01:00 CST.

“If the log is a computer log, by using the operating system’s timestamps (for example as the time recorded for a file’s modification) the problem disappears since these timestamps are recorded as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC – the modern version of Greenwich Mean Time) which is never subjected to Standard/Daylight changes. The operating system re-interprets these timestamps into its version of the correct local time in effect for the particular UTC timestamp, and this re-interpretation may unfortunately still be expressed ambiguously, but the underlying UTC timestamp can be used to resolve any ambiguity about time zones and Daylight/Standard time.”

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Canadian Thanksgiving, eh? February, April, May, June, October, November: A very moveable feast historically

On Monday we mark Thanksgiving for exactly what the holiday, a moveable feast date, says it is – a time to give thanks for our abundance, our bounty and great good fortune to live in this land of plenty.

In the United States, Thanksgiving is a more complex feast. Originally, the Pilgrim Puritans of Massachusetts Bay Colony celebrated their first Thanksgiving Day on July 8, 1629. The following year, John Winthrop gave his famous sermon, “A Model of Christian Charity,” where he rightly predicted the colony would be metaphorically, as from salt and light in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, as recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, known as the “city on a hill, ” watched by the world.

“For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill,” Winthrop said. “The eyes of all people are upon us … we must be willing to abridge ourselves of our superfluities, for the supply of others’ necessities. We must uphold a familiar commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience, and liberality. We must delight in each other; make others’ conditions our own; rejoice together, mourn together, labor and suffer together, always having before our eyes our commission and community in the work, as members of the same body.”

Almost four centuries later, their purposes perhaps not quite as lofty, Americans now celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday of November. It is the single-biggest domestic travel weekend of the year for Americans going home, wherever that might be, to visit family.

Canadian Thanksgiving, or Jour de l’Action de grâce, by contrast is a somewhat more low-key affair. While we do travel to visit family and many of us will sit down to eat turkey with family and friends, it’s nothing on the scale of the American experience.

Perhaps that’s because we have our Thanksgiving on a Monday at the end of a weekend, not on a Thursday at the beginning of a long weekend (officially the Wednesday and Friday are not holidays in the United States, just the Thursday, but virtually no one – aside from unfortunate retail store clerks – works the Friday, as those of us who have lived there know.) Just try and get a government official on the telephone after mid-afternoon Wednesday, or all day Friday of American Thanksgiving week if you wish to test this hypothesis.

The history of Thanksgiving in Canada goes back to the English explorer, Sir Martin Frobisher, who had been trying to find a northern passage to the Orient. Frobisher didn’t succeed but he did establish a settlement in Northern America. In the year 1578, he held a formal ceremony, maybe in the eastern Arctic, maybe in what is now Newfoundland and Labrador, to give thanks for surviving the long journey.

We celebrate our Thanksgiving now quite a bit earlier than the Americans, on the second Monday of October, for reasons having to do mainly with geography and meteorology. We’re a lot farther north than they are, for the most part, and hence colder. Our harvest generally comes earlier.

Logical as that may seem, we haven’t always celebrated Thanksgiving in Canada in early October.

The second Canadian Thanksgiving after Frobisher’s in 1578 was held in Nova Scotia in the late 1750s. Residents of Halifax also commemorated the end of the Seven Years’ War  and the Treaty of Paris of 1763, where France formally ceded Canada to the British, with a day of Thanksgiving.

We celebrated Thanksgiving in Upper Canada on June 18, 1816 to mark both the  Treaty of Ghent on Dec. 24, 1814, which ended the War of 1812, and another Treaty of Paris almost 11 months later on Nov. 20, 1815, ending the war between Great Britain and France. Lower Canada had already had their Thanksgiving celebration almost a month before Upper Canada on May 21, 1816.

The cessation of the 1832 cholera epidemic, which claimed 9,000 lives, more than half of them in Lower Canada, was reason enough to have Thanksgiving on Feb. 6, 1833. The restoration of  peace with Russia at the Congress of Paris and a third Treaty of Paris after the three-year Crimean War was enough for the United Province of Canada, made up of  Canada East and Canada West,  to have Thanksgiving on June 4, 1856. The first Thanksgiving Day after Confederation was on April 15, 1872, to give thanks for the recovery of the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) from a serious illness.

In 1879, Parliament declared Nov. 6 a day of Thanksgiving and a national holiday.

Over the years many dates continued to be used for Thanksgiving, the most popular for many years being the third Monday in October. After the end of the First World War, both Armistice Day, as it was then known, and Thanksgiving were celebrated on the Monday of the week in which Nov. 11 fell.

Ten years later, in 1931, the two days became separate holidays and Armistice Day was renamed Remembrance Day.

Finally, on Jan. 31, 1957, Parliament proclaimed, “A Day of General Thanksgiving to Almighty God for the bountiful harvest with which Canada has been blessed … to be observed on the second Monday in October.”

News and religion: Where the twain meets

“Is this the Gate of Hell? Archaeologists say temple doorway belching noxious gas matches ancient accounts of ‘portal to the underworld.’” For a minute, I thought I must be reading a headline on April 4, 2013 (after checking to make sure it wasn’t April 1) from what had to be the second coming of the late Generoso Pope, Jr.’s Weekly World News, a supermarket “news” tabloid published out of Lantana and later Boca Raton, Florida from 1979 to 2007.

The Weekly World News was renowned for its outlandish cover stories often based on supernatural or paranormal themes with a take on the news that approached the satirical. Counterintuitively printed entirely in black-and-white in an age of colour, its distinctive covers have become pop-culture icons in their own right. It continues to exist as a website at: http://weeklyworldnews.com/, billing itself as “The World’s Only Reliable News.”

I admit to having a soft spot for the Weekly World News going back to at least 1991 when I took Cultural Studies 235 “Media and Society” as a summer course in stately Sadleir House, built in 1892 and then the crown jewel of Peter Robinson College on Trent University’s downtown campus in Peterborough, Ont. The idea that I could spend the summer riding my yellow 18-speed mountain bike across the London Street pedestrian bridge, built in 1876, over the Otonabee River – and get academic credit to read and write an academic paper on the Weekly World News was well beyond delicious.

As it turned out though the “Is this the Gate of Hell?” was not from the Weekly World News nor any other of its supermarket tabloid ilk, but rather the mainstream Daily Mail in London (although admittedly the line between supermarket tabloid and mainstream newspaper is being increasing blurred beyond recognition.) Media outlets around the world had in fact picked up the story. CTV News here in Canada opted for the online headline, “’Gate to hell’ dug up in Turkey,” while Silver Spring, Maryland-based Discovery News opted for the slightly more conservative “Pluto’s Gate Uncovered in Turkey.”

According to the Daily Mail story, which ran April 2, 2013“Archaeologists say they have discovered the ‘Gates of Hell’, the mythical portal to the underworld in Greek and Roman legend.

“The site, in the ancient Phrygian city of Hierapolis, now Pamukkale in southwestern Turkey, is said to closely match historical descriptions of what was known as Ploutonion in Greek and Plutonium in Latin. In its heyday, a small temple with traditional Greco-Roman pillars was said to have stood next to wall with steps leading down to a cave doorway filled with foul and noxious gasses … The site remained fully functional until the 4th century A.D. and became an important pilgrimage destination for the last pagan intellectuals. Historians believe the site was sacked by Christians in the 6th century A.D., with several earthquakes adding to the damage.”

In his 1889 poem, The Ballad of East and West, the India-born English poet Rudyard Kipling wrote, “OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat.” Those who claim religion is not news and has no place in the media (outside of the pages of supermarket tabloids or the church press) are living in a world of false dichotomy. Religion, whether they like it or not, is often the news of the day. The fact such news exists independently of their own interests makes it no less newsworthy, as coverage of U.S. President Barrack Obama’s visit last year to Petra, the fabled “lost city” carved out of red-rose sandstone cliffs in the desert of southern Jordan, demonstrated.

Petra? That would be under “e” for eschatology, the branch of systematic theology, which deals with the doctrines of the last things (ta eschata), and where many evangelical Protestant premillennial dispensationalist Bible scholars think the “Remnant” will escape to mid-Tribulation. That’s Petra.