80px|The Mantra-Rock Dance poster by Harvey W. Cohen

Mantra-Rock Dance was a musical countercultural event held on January 29, 1967, at the Avalon Ballroom in San Francisco. It was organized by followers of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness as an opportunity for its founder, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, to address a wider public, and as a promotional and fundraising effort for their first center on the West Coast of the United States. The Mantra-Rock Dance featured American rock groups the Grateful Dead, Big Brother and the Holding Company (for whom Janis Joplin was the lead singer) and Moby Grape; these bands agreed to appear with Prabhupada and to perform for free. The participation of countercultural leaders considerably boosted the event's popularity; among them were the poet Allen Ginsberg, who led the singing of the Hare Krishna mantra on stage along with Prabhupada, and LSD promoters Timothy Leary and Stanley Augustus Owsley III. The Mantra-Rock Dance concert was later called "the ultimate high" and "the major spiritual event of the San Francisco hippy era". It led to favorable media exposures for Prabhupada and his followers, and brought the Hare Krishna movement to the wider attention of the American public. (more...)

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Read the rest of this article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantra-Rock_Dance

_______________________________ Today's selected anniversaries:

622:

The epoch of the Islamic calendar occurred, marking the year that Muhammad began his Hijra from Mecca to Medina. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_calendar

1782:

Mozart's opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail made its premiere, after which Emperor Joseph II made the apocryphal complaint that it had "too many notes". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_Entf%C3%BChrung_aus_dem_Serail

1931:

Emperor of Ethiopia Haile Selassie signed the nation's first constitution, the first time in history that an absolute ruler voluntarily shared sovereignty with his subjects. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1931_Constitution_of_Ethiopia

1950:

Korean War: A Korean People's Army unit massacred twenty-one U.S. Army prisoners of war. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaplain-Medic_massacre

1965:

South Vietnamese Colonel Pham Ngoc Thao—an undetected communist spy—was hunted down and killed after being sentenced to death in absentia for a February 1965 coup attempt against Nguyen Khanh. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pham_Ngoc_Thao

_____________________________ Wiktionary's word of the day:

saccade (n): A sudden movement of the eyes from one point to another, either voluntary or involuntary http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/saccade

___________________________ Wikiquote quote of the day:

Nothing limits intelligence more than ignorance; nothing fosters ignorance more than one's own opinions; nothing strengthens opinions more than refusing to look at reality. --Sheri S. Tepper http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sheri_S._Tepper