The Gad About Town

“It soared, a bird, it held its flight, a swift pure cry, soar silver orb it leaped serene, speeding, sustained, to come, don’t spin it out too long long breath he breath long life, soaring high, high resplendent, aflame, crowned, high in the effulgence symbolistic, high, of the ethereal bosom, high, of the high vast irradiation everywhere all soaring all around about the all, the endlessnessnessness …”—James Joyce, Ulysses, “Wandering Rocks”

On June 16, 1904, James Joyce and Nora Barnacle had their first date. They later married. To commemorate this, Joyce set this date as the date during which the events in his novel Ulysses take place. The novel covers an ordinary day in the life of Leopold Bloom, an ordinary Dubliner. The closing chapter is written from inside the thoughts of Molly Bloom (Leopold’s wife) as she falls asleep, and the last words of the novel are seen in the image at top.

Joyce and his future wife met on June 10 on Nassau Street in Dublin. He spotted her and struck up a conversation. She thought he was a Swedish sailor, with his blue eyes and yachting cap. He asked her out on a date and they agreed to meet on June 14, but she stood him up. He wrote a dejected note and they decided to meet on June 16. On June 16, they strolled together at Ringsend in Dublin. That was all, but they were a couple from that day on.
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A 2000-foot deep lake now sits atop Mount Pinatubo on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. It is picturesque, a popular hiking destination, but 25 years ago today, it did not exist. On this date in 1991, the summit of the volcano was still in place, but after a year of earthquakes and huge explosions that sometimes sent ash clouds as tall as 15 miles into the atmosphere, the climactic explosion came.

Technically, it was an Ultra-Plinian type eruption. Seismographs nearby, at Clark Air Force Base, were rendered inoperable: they were knocked offline completely by what they were supposed to measure. The explosion was the second-largest volcanic eruption in the Twentieth Century and it was 10 times larger than the eruption of Mount St. Helens a decade earlier. The top 1000-plus feet of the mountain was removed by the blast, and the ash and other materials (such as sulphur dioxide) that were launched 20 miles into the atmosphere for several continuous hours affected global climate for the next two years: a global cooling hurt agriculture around the world.

The photo at top, by Alberto Garcia, was taken from more than 20 miles away from the eruption. The cloud almost overtook the speeding trucks. Garcia now resides in Canada.

Even with a year of warnings, several hundred people lost their lives as a result of the eruption. Many were lost because, by coincidence, a typhoon struck Luzon the same day as the eruption and this brought more ash down more quickly than it would have fallen on its own over some regions, and rooftops collapsed under the weight of the mud falling from the sky.
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