February 13

Events

• Current events

• 518BC - Limbs of boys, eh? Kinky.... - Pindar, a man who is generally regarded as the greatest lyric poet in Greek literature, was born on this date. His work represents the culmination of the Greek choral lyric, composed to be sung to a musical accompaniment by choruses of young people. Only a portion of his works survive. Among them are this fragment: "Of Archestratus’s lovely son, this was my encomium. I saw him in that time, at the altar of Olympia, victorious by the might of his hand, lovely to look at, loveliness blended with the bloom of youth, that once with the help of Venus kept shameless death from Ganymede." For Theoxenus, a boy he loved, he wrote this: "[W]hosoever, once he hath seen the rays flashing from the eyes of Theoxenus, is not tossed on the waves of desire, hath a black heart forged.... But I, to grace the goddess, like wax of the sacred bees when smitten by the sun, am melted when I look at the young limbs of boys."

• 1988 - Those wacky, over-sexed French!!! - Film-goers in West Germany were treated to the world premiere of the film Le Petit Amour (Re-titled Kung-Fu Master for Englih-speaking audiences) on this date. What was the film about? The advertising tag-line says it all: "He was 15. She was 40. Love is where you find it." The film was based on a short story written by Jane Birkin, who plays the woman. The boy was played by 15 year old Mathieu Demy, whose mother (Agnes Varda) directed the film. The film received very wide critical praise for the sensitive and positive portrait of the woman and her feelings for the boy. The film was nominated for the best film award at the Berlin Film Festival, where it debuted.

• 2002 - Expensive, redundant, and ineffective? It must be a government thing! - The Canadian federal government announced on this date its intention to establish a national sex offender registry. For most of the year previously several Provincial and Territorial leaders were pressuring the federal government into creating such a registry. Ontario, for one, had declared its registry a success despite the fact that there was no evidence at all that registry, which costs taxpayers $4,000,000.00 annually to maintain, had helped to prevent or solve a single crime. Less than a year later, the Canadian government announced its plan for their registry. It would be non-public - providing information to police that they already had in their records anyway.