Today -100: March 17, 1913: Of canberras, birthday dinners, pellets of uncertain composition, and butterfly rights

Building began a few days ago on the site chosen for the future capital of the Commonwealth of Australia. The NYT claims that the word canberra, which was just chosen as the city’s name, means “laughing jackass” (that’s a bird) in one of the Aboriginal languages. Actually, no one really knows what canberra means.

Boss Murphy and Tammany Hall will boycott a birthday dinner to honor Gov. Sulzer and are pressuring Democratic politicians to stay away. The fight started over the refusal of Sulzer, an anti-Tammany Democrat, to appoint Murphy’s choice to be commissioner of highways (there are a lot of lucrative contracts in highways).

British women’s suffragists are no longer able to hold public meetings (outdoor meetings, anyway) without being mobbed and shouted down. Yesterday (Sunday), “General” Flora Drummond of the Women’s Social and Political Union attempted to give a speech in Hyde Park, only to meet with raucous interruptions, hurled clods of grass, oranges, and “pellets of uncertain composition.” A fight between the mob and police ensued, as was the custom. A meeting at Hampstead Heath was broken up non-violently, with shouting, singing and booing.

British papers are claiming there was a suffragette plot to kidnap Lloyd George.

Headline of the Day -100: “War over Butterfly Rights.”

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