…besides the obvious 5th anniversary that is all over the news, today is also a nationalistic day of celebration in Cataluña (like Quebec’s fête de la Saint-Jean on June 24), called La Diada Nacional de Catalunya. It “celebrates” (“commemorates” is a better word) the fall of Barcelona to the troops of Felipe V on this day in 1714, and the subsequent loss of many Catalan institutions. It was officially instituted as a national holiday by Catalan Parliament in 1980.
Unrelated (I think) to this, here is a photo I took of a restaurant in Almería (southern Spain) last year. It’s name is — well, read it for yourself! I am not sure what historic event its name refers to, though surely not the New York events since it seems the restaurant was established in 2000 (?).
Ninety years ago was the second (!) collapse of the Pont de Québec, a humbling lesson of engineering failure which is taught to Canadian engineering students. The bridge was long rumoured to be the material from which the original iron rings were made for engineering grads.
One hundred years ago today, in 1906, Mahatma Gandhi adopted his peaceful protest methodology called satyagraha (“devotion to the truth”).
Devotion to the truth. Now there’s something worth celebrating!