Moonlight, Summer Moonlight
by Emily Brontë

'Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,

But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.

And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head.

"Moonlight, Summer Moonlight" by Emily Brontë. Public domain. (buy now)

On this date in 1989, a geomagnetic storm shut down Toronto's stock market. The primary and backup computer systems at the Toronto exchange failed, one right after the other, for the first time since the systems were installed 26 years earlier. Since no one could access the market information that was crucial for trading, the exchange shut down for three hours and all trades were diverted to Montreal.

Scientists blamed the Sun. The geomagnetic storm was caused by an increase in solar flares. These in turn produced in a coronal mass ejection (CME), flinging high levels of solar radiation toward the Earth. The radiation affected microchips and caused computer problems across North America. A similar storm the previous March had taken out the Hydro-Quebec power grid, depriving 6 million people of power for nine hours. And a five-day megastorm in 1859 fried telegraph wires all over the United States and Europe, and the aurora borealis was seen as far south as Mexico, Hawaii, and Italy.

Now that scientists are aware of the effects of CMEs, they monitor solar activity and keep an eye out for such events, which usually take at least a day and a half to reach Earth's magnetosphere. With that lead time, power grids and satellites can be temporarily taken off line to protect them from permanent damage.

It's the birthday of the man Time magazine called "the laureate of American lowlife": Charles Bukowski (books by this author), born Heinrich Karl Bukowski in Andernach, Germany (1920). His father was an American soldier, and his mother was German. They moved back to the States when the boy was two years old, and he grew up in Los Angeles, a scrawny kid who was frequently bullied. He had his first drink at 13: "It was magic," he later wrote. "Why hadn't someone told me?"

He published his first short story when he was 24, but got discouraged by all the rejection slips that followed, and didn't write again until he was 35. He published his first book of poetry, called Flower, Fist, and Bestial Wail, in 1959. He once said that his work was 93 percent autobiographical; it featured his alter ego, Henry Chinaski, a writer who works at a variety of unskilled jobs, drinks heavily, and takes up with loose women.

Bukowski said, "Bad luck for the young poet would be a rich father, an early marriage, an early success or the ability to do anything well."

On this date in 1896, gold was discovered in the Yukon Territory in Canada, sparking the Klondike Gold Rush. George Carmack, Skookum Jim Mason, and Tagish Charlie found the gold in Rabbit Creek, near Dawson. They christened the creek "Bonanza Creek," and word spread among the locals, who staked claims and were soon gathering up the plentiful ore.

The discovery of large amounts of gold didn't hit the Seattle and San Francisco newspapers for almost a year, but when it did, a hundred thousand people set off for the Yukon to make their fortunes. A few thousand did indeed strike it rich, but the rest made the arduous journey for nothing. There are famous photographs of the long lines of prospectors and their pack animals trekking through the snowy mountains, all of them heavy laden because the Mounties required everyone to bring a year's supply of provisions. But starvation was not uncommon, and one man reportedly boiled his own boot so he could drink the broth. His story inspired the famous boot-eating scene in Charlie Chaplin's silent feature The Gold Rush (1925).

It's the birthday of the Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo (books by this author), born in Ojoto in 1932. There was no single moment that he realized he had to be a poet; there was just the moment that he realized he couldn't do anything else: "It's just like somebody who receives a call in the middle of the night to religious service, in order to become a priest in a particular cult, and I didn't have any choice in the matter. I just had to obey."

Okigbo was killed in the war for Biafran independence in September 1967. He published only three volumes of poetry in his short lifetime: Heavensgate (1962), Limits (1964), and Silences (1965).

Today is the birthday of English philosopher and playwright Catharine Trotter Cockburn (1679) (books by this author), born in London. Not much is known of her childhood, except that her father, a sea captain, died of the plague when Catharine was four, and the family struggled to get by. She was a precocious child and taught herself to read and write at an early age. Her first novel, Adventures of a Young Lady (1693), was published anonymously when she was 14. She also learned French and Latin, and was a moderately successful playwright; her first play, Agnes de Castro, was produced when she was just 16, and she wrote and staged four more in the next few years. When she wasn't writing plays, she was reading philosophy, mostly the work of John Locke. She published her first philosophical essay, The Defence of Mr. Lock's [sic] Essay of Human Understanding (1702), at the age of 23, and Locke was so impressed that he sent her money and books. She married clergyman Patrick Cockburn in 1708, and gave up writing until 1726. She went on to publish two more works of moral philosophy; these, along with her letters, were published as her collected works after her death in 1749.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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