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February 29, 2012
Marcela Paz's 110th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/3x...sNTtsje-Q=s660
Marcela Paz, a Chilean writer. She also used the pen names of Paula de la Sierra, Lukim Retse, P. Neka and Juanita Godoy. She was a recipient of the National Prize for Literature.
In 1947 Paz published the first book with her most famous character, Papelucho. Papelucho became a companion and an inspiration to generations of children and perhaps one of Chile's most well known humanized characters of the twentieth century. Between 1964 and 1967, she directed the Asociación Internacional del Libro Juvenil, the Chilean chapter of the International Board on Books for Young People.
In 1968 she received a Hans Christian Andersen honour diploma. In 1979 she received the gold medal from the Instituto Cultural de Providencia. In 1982, she was awarded with the Premio Nacional de Literatura de Chile.
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Mar 5, 2012
Heitor Vila Lobos' 125th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/iq...zVoNiD2CL=s660
Heitor Villa-Lobos was a Brazilian composer, conductor, cellist, and classical guitarist described as "the single most significant creative figure in 20th-century Brazilian art music". Villa-Lobos has become the best-known South American composer of all time. A prolific composer, he wrote numerous orchestral, chamber, instrumental and vocal works, totaling over 2000 works by his death in 1959. His music was influenced by both Brazilian folk music and by stylistic elements from the European classical tradition, as exemplified by his Bachianas Brasileiras and his Chôros. His Etudes for classical guitar [1929] were dedicated to Andrés Segovia, while his 5 Preludes [1940] were dedicated to his spouse Arminda Neves d’Almeida, a.k.a. "Mindinha." Both are important works in the classical guitar repertory.
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Mar 6, 2012
Ghana Independence Day 2012
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Qa...__y7U3g3X=s660
The Independence Day of Ghana is a national holiday celebrated yearly. This day is an official state holiday for the citizens of Ghana both within and in the diaspora to honour and celebrate the Heroes of Ghana who led the country to attain its independence. The Independence Day is celebrated on March 6 every year. Independence Day is also remembrance of the day that marks the declaration of Ghanaian independence from the British colonial rule. The first Prime Minister of Ghana; Kwame Nkrumah became the Head of Government from 1957 to 1960. On 6 March 1957 Kwame Nkrumah declared to the people of Ghana about their freedom, he added that, "the African People are capable of managing their own affairs and Ghana our beloved country is free forever." Ghana was the first country in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve its independence from European colonial rule.
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Mar 7, 2012
Alessandro Manzoni's 227th Birthday's
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/_T...L9VkkY1_8=s660
Alessandro Francesco Tommaso Antonio Manzoni was an Italian poet, novelist and philosopher. He is famous for the novel The Betrothed, generally ranked among the masterpieces of world literature. The novel is also a symbol of the Italian Risorgimento, both for its patriotic message and because it was a fundamental milestone in the development of the modern, unified Italian language. Manzoni also contributed to the stabilization of the modern Italian language and helped to ensure linguistic unity throughout Italy. He was an influential proponent of Liberal Catholicism in Italy. His work and thinking has often been contrasted with that of his younger contemporary Giacomo Leopardi by critics.
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Mar 13, 2012
Mohammed Abdel Wahab's 110th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Rp...aGkiEWV1d=s660
Mohamed Abdel Wahab was a prominent 20th-century Egyptian singer, actor, and composer. He's best known for his Romantic and Egyptian patriotic songs.
He contributed and composed the national anthems of Tunisia, "Humat al-Hima", The United Arab Emirates, "Īsiy Bilādī", and "Libya" which was from 1951 to 1969 and again since 2011.
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Mar 14, 2012
Akira Yoshizawa's 101st Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Es...t-d8HbJWw=s660
Akira Yoshizawawas a Japanese origamist, considered to be the grandmaster of origami. He is credited with raising origami from a craft to a living art. According to his own estimation made in 1989, he created more than 50,000 models, of which only a few hundred designs were presented as diagrams in his 18 books. Yoshizawa acted as an international cultural ambassador for Japan throughout his career. In 1983, Emperor Hirohito awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun, 5th class, one of the highest honors bestowed in Japan.
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Mar 16, 2012
Cesar Vallejo's 120th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/fG...N4YO3G5Vd=s660
César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. Although he published only three books of poetry during his lifetime, he is considered one of the great poetic innovators of the 20th century in any language. He was always a step ahead of literary currents, and each of his books was distinct from the others, and, in its own sense, revolutionary. Thomas Merton called him "the greatest universal poet since Dante".
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Mar 17, 2012
St. Patrick's Day 2012
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/iB...P2hemRe-4=s660
A holiday celebrated by people all over the world, St. Patrick's Day finds its origins deep in Irish history. As we celebrate Ireland's national day every year, I wanted to find a fresh way to draw this doodle-- and in my research I found "what's old is new." The Book of Kells, considered one of Ireland's greatest treasures, is equally important to both Irish and art history. The pages of this illuminated manuscript has inspired centuries of artists from 800 AD right into the digital age.
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Mar 19, 2012
80th Birthday The Sydney Harbour Bridge
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/kl...mCEMRAjQA=s660
The Sydney Harbour Bridge is an Australian heritage-listed steel through arch bridge across Sydney Harbour that carries rail, vehicular, bicycle, and pedestrian traffic between the Sydney central business district [CBD] and the North Shore. The view of the bridge, the harbour, and the nearby Sydney Opera House is widely regarded as an iconic image of Sydney, and of Australia itself. The bridge is nicknamed "The Coathanger" because of its arch-based design.
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Mar 19, 2012
200th Anniversary of Spain's Constitution
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Cc...fohj_EbSA=s660
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Mar 27, 2012
Mies van der Rohe's 126th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Ob...CADkw5EOQ=s660
I grew up in downtown Chicago in the 1970s and 80s, and several friends lived in apartment buildings designed by Mies. In addition, Myron Goldsmith [one of Mies' students and associates], his wife and kids, were close friends of my family. For me, Mies wasn't precious or intellectual or challenging or even "modern;" his buildings were just places where people raised kids, worked at interesting jobs, and taught. As I grew older, I wondered why he lacked the public awareness and embrace of an architect like Frank Lloyd Wright.
Now, even though I have a more sophisticated knowledge of Mies' designs, I am a fan because of what his designs engage and inspire. Moving through them takes me past industrial materials and spare forms, and yields color, a relationship with nature, and vibrant interaction in the universal spaces.
Mies built S. R. Crown Hall, featured in today's Google Doodle, as a "home for ideas and adventures." Since its completion in 1956, it has been home to IIT's College of Architecture and has inspired students, lectures, dances, art exhibitions, and more. It is a lab for creation, which is fitting because the structure itself was a lab for Mies' breakthrough in the use of glass and steel-he defied expectations and proved his genius by using steel frames to hang a ceiling, rather than using supportive columns. The result was a revolutionary clear-span structure, 120 by 220 by 18 feet high, the premiere enclosed universal space.
Since assuming my role as Director of the Mies van der Rohe Society, I am in awe of what this space provokes. In 2006, we hosted an exhibition of mid-century Marimekko textiles and products. Visitors thought the building and the fabrics were so fresh and so now, they couldn't believe it had all been designed decades earlier. Four years later, we showed the largest-ever exhibition of Andy Warhol's Silver Clouds, a light-filled room for 1,000 helium-filled reflective balloons to interact with people of all ages. And every summer we host a day for hundreds of families to sprawl on the floor and use Legos to build their own creations.
The skyscrapers, wide-open lobbies, exterior plazas, and spare-but-useful living plans that define today's major cities are possible because of Mies and his "less is more" philosophy. Come visit S. R. Crown Hall, take a tour of the campus he designed for Illinois Institute of Technology, and have your own adventure in Mies' space.
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Apr 1, 2012
13th Anniversary of the 4 unit VLT telescope: Antu, Kueyen, Melipal and Yepun
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/R7...uL6BYVocu=s660
The Very Large Telescope [VLT] is a telescope facility operated by the European Southern Observatory on Cerro Paranal in the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. The VLT consists of four individual telescopes, each with a primary mirror 8.2 m across, which are generally used separately but can be used together to achieve very high angular resolution. The four separate optical telescopes are known as Antu, Kueyen, Melipal, and Yepun, which are all words for astronomical objects in the Mapuche language. The telescopes form an array which is complemented by four movable Auxiliary Telescopes [ATs] of 1.8 m aperture.
The VLT operates at visible and infrared wavelengths. Each individual telescope can detect objects roughly four billion times fainter than can be detected with the naked eye, and when all the telescopes are combined, the facility can achieve an angular resolution of about 0.002 arc-second. In single telescope mode of operation angular resolution is about 0.05 arc-second.
The VLT is the most productive ground-based facility for astronomy, with only the Hubble Space Telescope generating more scientific papers among facilities operating at visible wavelengths. Among the pioneering observations carried out using the VLT are the first direct image of an exoplanet, the tracking of individual stars moving around the supermassive black hole at the centre of the Milky Way, and observations of the afterglow of the furthest known gamma-ray burst.
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Apr 9, 2012
Eadweard J. Muybridge's 182nd Birthday
https://www.searchenginewatch.com/wp...gle-doodle.png
http://www.google.com/doodles/eadwea...182nd-birthday
Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion, and early work in motion-picture projection. He adopted the first name Eadweard as the original Anglo-Saxon form of Edward, and the surname Muybridge, believing it to be similarly archaic.
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Apr 9, 2012
Elias Lönnrot's 210th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/eS...hrzt-0EFD=s660
Elias Lönnrot was a Finnish physician, philologist and collector of traditional Finnish oral poetry. He is best known for creating the Finnish national epic, Kalevala, from short ballads and lyric poems gathered from the Finnish oral tradition during several expeditions in Finland, Russian Karelia, the Kola Peninsula and Baltic countries.
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Apr 10, 2012
Lee Jung-seob's 96th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/E9...rdWLrjii2=s660
Lee Jung Seob was a Korean artist, most known for his oil paintings such as "White Ox".
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Apr 13, 2012
Songkran Festival 2012
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/V0...VndzgsX5E=s660
Songkran is a term derived from the Sanskrit word, saṅkrānti, and used to refer to the traditional New Year celebrated in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, parts of northeast India, parts of Vietnam and Xishuangbanna, China. It begins when the sun transits the constellation of Aries, the first astrological sign in the Zodiac, as reckoned by sidereal astrology. It is related to the equivalent Hindu calendar-based New Year festivals in most parts of South Asia which are collectively referred to as Mesha Sankranti.
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Apr 15, 2012
Wilhelm Busch's 180th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/Hi...7o0KIko9Q=s660
Heinrich Christian Wilhelm Busch was a German humorist, poet, illustrator, and painter. He published wildly innovative illustrated tales that remain influential to this day.
Busch drew on the tropes of folk humour as well as a profound knowledge of German literature and art to satirize contemporary life, any kind of piety, Catholicism, Philistinism, religious morality, bigotry, and moral uplift.
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Apr 18, 2012
Antero de Quental's 200th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/HD...qXoi4-X3r=s660Antero Tarquínio de Quentalwas a Portuguese poet, philosopher and writer. De Quental is regarded as one of the greatest poets of his generation and is recognized as one of the most influential Portuguese language artists of all time. His name is often mentioned alongside Luís Vaz de Camões, Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage and Fernando Pessoa.
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April 9, 2012
Elias Lönnrot's 210th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/eS...hrzt-0EFD=s660
Elias Lönnrot was a Finnish physician, philologist and collector of traditional Finnish oral poetry. He is best known for creating the Finnish national epic, Kalevala, from short ballads and lyric poems gathered from the Finnish oral tradition during several expeditions in Finland, Russian Karelia, the Kola Peninsula and Baltic countries.
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Apr 10, 2012
Lee Jung-seob's 96th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/E9...rdWLrjii2=s660
Lee Jung Seob was a Korean artist, most known for his oil paintings such as "White Ox".
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Apr 27, 2012
Theo Angelopoulos' 77th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/FG...l-u-3vIJI=s660
Theodoros "Theo" Angelopoulos was a Greek filmmaker, screenwriter and film producer.
An acclaimed and multi-awarded film director who dominated the Greek art film industry from 1975 on, Angelopoulos was one of the most influential and widely respected filmmakers in the world. He started making films in 1967. In the 1970s he made a series of political films about modern Greece.
Angelopoulos' films, described by Martin Scorsese as that of "a masterful filmmaker", are characterized by the slightest movement, slightest change in distance, long takes, and complex, carefully composed scenes. His cinematic method is often described as "sweeping" and "hypnotic."
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May 9, 2012
Royal Ploughing Ceremony and Farmer's Day
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/QZ...Ayw3UAFm4=s660
The Royal Ploughing Ceremony , also known as The Ploughing Festival, is an ancient royal rite held in many Asian countries to mark the traditional beginning of the rice growing season. The royal ploughing ceremony, called Lehtun Mingala, was also practiced in pre-colonial Burma until 1885 when the monarchy was abolished.
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May 12, 2012
Edward Lear's 200th Birthday
https://www.google.com/logos/2012/lear12-hp.jpg
Edward Lear was an English artist, illustrator, musician, author and poet, now known mostly for his literary nonsense in poetry and prose and especially his limericks, a form he popularised. His principal areas of work as an artist were threefold: as a draughtsman employed to illustrate birds and animals; making coloured drawings during his journeys, which he reworked later, sometimes as plates for his travel books; and as a [minor] illustrator of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's poems. As an author, he is known principally for his popular nonsense collections of poems, songs, short stories, botanical drawings, recipes and alphabets. He also composed and published twelve musical settings of Tennyson's poetry in poem.
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Apr 18, 2012
Jan Kaplický's 75th Birthday
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/40...PFq5-WODJ=s660
Jan Kaplický was a Neofuturistic Czech architect who spent a significant part of his life in the United Kingdom. He was the leading architect behind the innovative design office, Future Systems. He was best known for the neofuturistic Selfridges Building in Birmingham, England, and the Media Centre at Lord's Cricket Ground in London.