Customs of England

Harvest Festival is a celebration of the food grown on the land.

Thanksgiving ceremonies and celebrations for a successful harvest are both worldwide and very ancient. In Britain, we have given thanks for successful harvests since pagan times. We celebrate this day by singing, praying and decorating our churches with baskets of fruit and food in a festival known as 'Harvest Festival', usually during the month of September.
Harvest Festival reminds Christians of all the good things God gives them. This makes them want to share with others who are not so fortunate. In schools and in Churches, people bring food from home to a Harvest Festival Service. After the service, the food that has been put on display is usually made into parcels and given to people in need.
Harvest festivals are traditionally held on or near the Sunday of the Harvest Moon. This is the full Moon that occurs closest to the autumn equinox (about Sept. 23). In two years out of three, the Harvest Moon comes in September, but in some years it occurs in October.

Unlike the USA and Canada, the UK does not have a national holiday for Harvest Festival.

http://www.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/customs/

Poets

Dwayne Douglas Johnson was born in Hayward, California on May 2nd 1972 to Rocky Johnson and Ata Johnson. While growing up, Dwayne traveled around a lot with his parents and watched his father perform in the ring. During his high school years, Dwayne began playing football and he soon received a full scholarship from the University of Miami where he had tremendous success as a football player. In 1995, Dwayne suffered a back injury which cost him a place in the NFL. He then signed a 3 year deal with the Canadian League but left after a year to pursue a career in wrestling. He made his wrestling debut in the USWA under the name Flex Kavanah where he won the tag team championship with Brett Sawyer. In 1996, Dwayne joined the WWE and became Rocky Maivia where he joined a group known as "The Nation of Domination" and turned heel. Rocky eventually took over leadership of the "Nation" and began taking the persona of The Rock. After the "Nation" split, The Rock joined another elite group of wrestlers known as the "Corporation" and began a memorable feud with Steve Austin. Soon the Rock was kicked out of the "Corporation". He turned face and became known as "The Peoples Champion". In 2000, the Rock took time off from WWE to film his appearance in The Mummy Returns (2001). He returned in 2001 during the WCW/ECW invasion where he joined a team of WWE wrestlers at The Scorpion King (2002), a prequel to The Mummy Returns (2001). He is divorced from his first wife Dany Garcia (Garcia). They have a daughter together named Simone Alexandra, born in 2001.

Flood

Crews worked to restore power Monday to more than 400,000 homes as a powerful low-pressure system churned off the Eastern Seaboard.Hurricane-force winds over the weekend toppled trees, taking power lines with them. Heavy rain caused flooding and airport delays across the region."High winds are over, but the rain and flood threat re
main in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast," CNN meteorologist Jacqui Jeras said. "There are major travel delays -- and more expected on Monday."Some coastal areas have received more than 6 inches of rain since Saturday, according to the National Weather Service. Flood warnings remained in effect from Maryland to Maine.

Health Care

In a session that lasted into the early morning hours, Senate Republicans found violations in two provisions of the health care bill, forcing it back to the House for another vote. Democrats say they expect the House to approve it quickly.

The GOP -- which has vowed to use every parliamentary tool available to undermine the recently enacted health care reform law -- launched its attempt to amend or kill legislation expanding the new law in a Senate session that finally adjourned at 2:45 a.m. Thursday.

The Senate plans to reconvene at 9:45 a.m. to consider other GOP amendments, which also are designed to force Democrats to cast unpopular votes in the run-up to November's midterm elections.

Senate Democrats easily defeated the first of 29 amendments introduced by Republicans, which challenged provisions in the bill such as those involving changes to Medicare funding.

Also defeated were attempts to send the measure to committee for reconsideration -- which would effectively kill it -- and other amendments intended to strip provisions from the bill.

Martian Luther King Jr

Now, in order to answer the question, "Where do we go from here?" which is our theme, we must first honestly recognize where we are now. When the Constitution was written, a strange formula to determine taxes and representation declared that the Negro was 60 percent of a person. Today another curious formula seems to declare he is 50 percent of a person. Of the good things in life, the Negro has approximately one half those of whites. Of the bad things of life, he has twice those of whites. Thus half of all Negroes live in substandard housing. And Negroes have half the income of whites. When we view the negative experiences of life, the Negro has a double share. There are twice as many unemployed. The rate of infant mortality among Negroes is double that of whites and there are twice as many Negroes dying in Vietnam as whites in proportion to their size in the population.


Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday was first observed as a national holiday in 1986. However, his life had become a fixed part of American mythology for years prior to this. Indeed, to many African Americans whose rights he helped expand, to many other minorities whose lives his victories touched, and to many whites who welcomed the changes his leadership brought, King's life seemed mythological even as he lived it. He is celebrated as a hero not only for the concrete legislation he enabled, but for his articulation of dreams and hopes shared by many during an era of upheaval and change.

After lengthy theological training in the North, King returned to his home region, becoming pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. As a promising newcomer free from the morass of inter-church politics, King became the leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott when it broke out in 1955. That year-long non-violent protest, which led to a Supreme Court ruling against bus segregation, brought King to the attention of the country as a whole, and led to the formation of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, or SCLC, an alliance of black Southern churches and ministers. This group elected King their president, and began looking for other civil rights battles to fight.

The episodes immediately following met with less success, but nonetheless provided King with the opportunity to refine his protest strategies. Then, in 1963, King and the SCLC joined a campaign in Birmingham, Alabama, to end segregation there and to force downtown businesses to employ blacks. Peaceful protests were met by fire-hoses and attack-dogs wielded by local police. Images of this violence, broadcast on national news, provoked outrage, and this reaction created a political atmosphere in which strong federal civil rights legislation could gain favor and passage, and the next year President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Meanwhile the SCLC, under King, was repeating the tactics of Birmingham in Selma, Alabama, this time for the sake of African American voter registration. Once again, images of the police brutality directed at the protest enabled the passage of federal legislation, this time the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The community of black activists felt that these two major victories marked the limit of what gains could be made politically, and thus after 1965 King began to focus on blacks' economic problems. His strategies and speeches concentrated increasingly on class as well as race, and addressed the United States as a whole. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, and this recognition encouraged him to broaden his scope: by the time of his death, he was speaking out virulently against the Vietnam War, and was organizing a Poor People's March on Washington.

When King was assassinated in 1968, the nation shook with the impact. Riots broke out in over one hundred American cities. King was almost immediately sanctified by the white-controlled media, which, however, in its coverage of his accomplishments, also neglected the radicalism of his final three years. Instead his contemporaries focused (as we continue to focus today) on the spirit and the accomplishments of the middle of King's career. For many born after his death, he is known best for the "I Have a Dream" speech, which reflects this spirit, and which he delivered in 1963 at the height of his fame. The federal holiday commemorates this King, who articulated the progressive, human hope of the early 1960s.

Martha Coston

Martha Coston perfected then patented her deceased husband’s idea for a pyrotechnic flare. Coston’s husband, a former naval scientist, died leaving behind only a rough sketch in a diary of plans for the flares. Martha Coston developed the idea into an elaborate system of flares called Night Signals that allowed ships to communicate messages nocturnally. The U. S. Navy bought the patent rights to the flares. Coston’s flares served as the basis of a system of communication that helped to save lives and to win battles. Martha Coston credited her late husband with the first patent for the flares, but in 1871 she received a patent for an improvement exclusively her own.

Otis Boykin

Otis Boykin

Otis Boykin (1920–1982) invented the electronic control devices for guided missiles, IBM computers, and the pacemaker.
Otis F. Boykin was born on August 29, 1920 in Dallas, Texas. After graduating high school, he attended Fisk College in Nashville, Tennessee. He graduated in 1941 and took a job as a laboratory assistant with the Majestic Radio and TV Corporation in Chicago, Illinois. He undertook various tasks but excelled at testing automatic aircraft controls, ultimately serving as a supervisor. Three years laster he left Majestic and took a position as a research engineer with the P.J. Nilsen Reseach Laboratories. Soon thereafter, he decided to try to develop a business of his own a founded Boykin-Fruth, Incorporated. At the same time, he decided to continue his education, pursuing graduate studies at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, Illinois. He attended classes in 1946 and 1947 but was forced to drop out because he lacked the funds to pay the next year's tuition.

Despite this setback, Boykin realized that a Masters Degree was not a pre-requisite for inventive competence. He set out to work on project that he had contemplated while in school. Otis BoykinAt the time, the field of electronics was very popular among the science community and Boykin took a special interest in working with resistors. A resistor is an electronic component that slows the flow of an electrical current. This is necessary to prevent too much electricity from passing through a component than is necessary or even safe. Boykin sought and received a patent for a wire precision resistor on June 16, 1959. This resistor allowed for a specific amounts of current to flow through for a specific purpose and would be used in radios and televisions. Two years later, he created another resistor that could be manufactured very inexpensively. It was a breakthrough device as it could withstand extreme changes in temperature and tolerate and withstand various levels of pressure and physical trauma without impairing its effectiveness. The chip was cheaper and more reliable than others on the market. Not surprisingly, it was in great demand as he received orders from consumer electronics manufacturers, the United States military and electronics behemoth IBM.

Martian Luther King Jr

In 1957 he was elected president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization formed to provide new leadership for the now burgeoning civil rights movement. The ideals for this organization he took from Christianity; its operational techniques from Gandhi. In the eleven-year period between 1957 and 1968, King traveled over six million miles and spoke over twenty-five hundred times, appearing wherever there was injustice, protest, and action; and meanwhile he wrote five books as well as numerous articles. In these years, he led a massive protest in Birmingham, Alabama, that caught the attention of the entire world, providing what he called a coalition of conscience. and inspiring his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail", a manifesto of the Negro revolution; he planned the drives in Alabama for the registration of Negroes as voters; he directed the peaceful march on Washington, D.C., of 250,000 people to whom he delivered his address, "l Have a Dream", he conferred with President John F. Kennedy and campaigned for President Lyndon B. Johnson; he was arrested upwards of twenty times and assaulted at least four times; he was awarded five honorary degrees; was named Man of the Year by Time magazine in 1963; and became not only the symbolic leader of American blacks but also a world figure.

At the age of thirty-five, Martin Luther King, Jr., was the youngest man to have received the Nobel Peace Prize. When notified of his selection, he announced that he would turn over the prize money of $54,123 to the furtherance of the civil rights movement.

On the evening of April 4, 1968, while standing on the balcony of his motel room in Memphis, Tennessee, where he was to lead a protest march in sympathy with striking garbage workers of that city, he was assassinated.