From today's featured articleWilliam Matthews (1770–1854) was the first person born in British America to be ordained a Catholic priest. Originally from the colonial Province of Maryland, he became influential in the establishment of Catholicism in Washington, D.C. through his parochial service and founding of several educational institutions. He was the second pastor of St. Patrick's Church, the President of Georgetown College (later known as Georgetown University), and the head of the Washington Catholic Seminary, which became Gonzaga College High School, in addition to being co-founder and president of the Washington Library Company, the first public library in the District of Columbia. He founded several orphanages, schools, and parishes, and was co-director of the District of Columbia Public Schools. In 1832 he officiated at the wedding of a French diplomat and Mary Anne Lewis, a ward of President Andrew Jackson, in the first Catholic ceremony to be held in the White House. (Full article...)
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Oleg, also known as "the dance of the bumblebees", is a form of love dance in the Indonesian province of Bali. It is performed by a male and female dancer and is intended to be evocative of a garden, in which bees fly around and collect nectar from flowers. The dancers represent a male and female bee, with the obsessively flirtatious male chasing the female from one flower to another. Although the female bee at first appears coquettish, she eventually accepts the male's advances. The two dancers wear different costumes with the female clad in a traditional fabric known as a prada, which is covered in gold paint and has a long sheer scarf to serve as wings, while the male wears a similar fabric but arranged differently on his body so that it trails behind him. Oleg was first choreographed by I Ketut Marya of Tabanan in 1952, at the request of the music presenter John Coast. It was initially controversial among traditionalists, but has now been absorbed into the canon of Balinese dance.
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