Category: 2018

The Wikipedia article of the day for April 14, 2018 is Urse d’Abetot.
Urse d’Abetot (c. 1040 – 1108) was a Sheriff of Worcestershire and royal official under Kings William I, William II and Henry I. Urse’s lord in Normandy was present at the Battle of Hastings, and Urse moved to England shortly after the Norman Conquest, where he was appointed sheriff around 1069. His castle in the town of Worcester encroached on the cathedral cemetery there, angering the Archbishop of York. He helped to put down a rebellion against King William I in 1075, and quarrelled with the Church in his county over the jurisdiction of the sheriffs. He continued in the service of William’s sons after the king’s death, and was appointed constable under William II and marshal under Henry I. He earned a reputation for extortion, and during the reign of William II, he was considered second only to the king’s minister Ranulf Flambard in his greediness. Through his daughter, Urse is an ancestor of the Beauchamp family, who eventually became Earls of Warwick.

Source http://handbookblogger.blogspot.com/2018/04/wikipedia-article-of-day-for-april-14.html

The Wikipedia article of the day for April 12, 2018 is Imogen Holst.
Imogen Holst (12 April 1907 – 9 March 1984) was a British composer, arranger, conductor, teacher and festival administrator. In the 1940s she helped to establish Dartington Hall as a major centre of music education, and for the next 20 years was the joint artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival. The only child of the composer Gustav Holst, she attended the Royal College of Music, but was unable for health reasons to follow her ambitions to be a pianist or a dancer, and became a full-time organiser for the English Folk Dance and Song Society. In the early 1950s she became Benjamin Britten’s musical assistant. In later years she concentrated on the preservation of her father’s musical legacy, and wrote several books on his life and works. The music she wrote is not widely known and has received little critical attention. She received numerous academic honours, and was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1975.

Source http://handbookblogger.blogspot.com/2018/04/wikipedia-article-of-day-for-april-12.html

The Wikipedia article of the day for April 11, 2018 is Washington State Route 520.
State Route 520 (SR 520) is a 13-mile (21 km) state highway and freeway in the Seattle metropolitan area in the U.S. state of Washington. Connecting Seattle to the Eastside region of King County across the Evergreen Point Floating Bridge on Lake Washington, it intersects Interstate 5 (I-5) in Seattle, I-405 in Bellevue, and SR 202 in Redmond. It was designated as a freeway in 1964, but was not fully constructed until the late 1970s. Increased traffic on the corridor, spurred in part by expansion of the Microsoft headquarters in Overlake, led to the addition of high-occupancy vehicle lanes and new interchanges in the 1990s. In April 2016, the original floating bridge was replaced by a wider one as part of a multibillion-dollar expansion program that is scheduled to be completed in the 2020s. The program includes the construction of a new bicycle and pedestrian path, bus stations, and interchanges.

Source http://handbookblogger.blogspot.com/2018/04/wikipedia-article-of-day-for-april-11.html

The Wikipedia article of the day for April 10, 2018 is Æthelstan A.
Æthelstan A is the name given by historians to an unknown scribe who drafted charters (example pictured) for land grants made by King Æthelstan of England between 928 and 935. Providing far more information than other charters of the period, they contain the date and place of the grants and an unusually long list of witnesses, including kings of Wales and occasionally Scotland and Strathclyde. The charters commence shortly after Æthelstan conquered Northumbria in 927, making him the first king to rule the whole of England. They give him titles such as “King of the English” and “King of the Whole of Britain”, reflecting his claim to a higher status than previous West Saxon kings. The charters are written in the elaborate hermeneutic style of Latin, a hallmark of the English Benedictine Reform; the style became dominant in Anglo-Latin literature in the mid-tenth century. The scribe stopped drafting charters after 935, and his successors returned to a simpler style, suggesting that he was working on his own rather than as a member of a royal scriptorium.

Source http://handbookblogger.blogspot.com/2018/04/wikipedia-article-of-day-for-april-10.html

The Wikipedia article of the day for April 9, 2018 is Lesser Antillean macaw.
The Lesser Antillean macaw (Ara guadeloupensis) was a parrot of the Guadeloupe islands. There are no conserved specimens, but this macaw is known from several contemporary accounts, and the bird is the subject of some illustrations. Austin Hobart Clark made a species description based on these accounts in 1905. A phalanx bone from the island of Marie-Galante confirmed the existence of a similar-sized macaw predating the arrival of humans, and was correlated with the Lesser Antillean macaw in 2015. According to contemporary descriptions, the body was red, the wings were red, blue and yellow, and the solid red tail feathers were between 38 and 51 cm (15 and 20 in) long; apart from the tail feathers and its smaller size, this description matches the scarlet macaw. These accounts also said that it ate fruit (including the poisonous manchineel), nested in trees and laid two eggs once or twice a year. Although it was said to be abundant in Guadeloupe, by 1760 it was becoming rare and was soon eradicated, probably by disease and hunting.

Source http://handbookblogger.blogspot.com/2018/04/wikipedia-article-of-day-for-april-9.html