Friday, January 14, 2005
Today's Birthdays
Birthday of novelist and short-story writer Mary Robison, born in Washington, D.C. (1949). Why Did I Ever (2001), her most recent book, won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. Robison grew up in Ohio with five brothers and two sisters. She ran away from home twice when she was young,...
Sign in to see full entry.
Thursday, January 13, 2005
Ulysses, Wyatt Earp, and a Sad End
Birthday of short story writer Lorrie Moore, born in Glens Falls, NY (1957). She's the author of the short story collections Like Life (1990) and Birds of America (1998). She published her first book of short stories at age 26. That book was Self Help (1985), and the stories were written in the...
Sign in to see full entry.
Wednesday, January 12, 2005
All About Great Men
The first birthday I want to mention is that of my father. He is 90 today. I won’t mention him by name here because you won’t recognize it. His initials are AJB. He is a great man to me. He was a strict father, but raised three daughters to be independent women who do not feel they are anything less...
Sign in to see full entry.
Tuesday, January 11, 2005
$10 Man, a Thinker, and "Cry, the Beloved Country"
Birthday of Alexander Hamilton (1755, some sources say 1757), one of the founding fathers of the USA. (He’s on the $10 bill.) He was born in the British West Indies, and grew up on the tiny island of Nevis, where his father abandoned the family and his mother died when he was just a boy. He was...
Sign in to see full entry.
Monday, January 10, 2005
Thomas Paine, Frank James, Jeeps, and Bugs
Birthday of the poet Philip Levine, born in Detroit (1928). His collections of poetry include What Work Is (1991), The Simple Truth (1994), and The Mercy (1999). He said, "As a boy of fourteen, I took long walks and talked to the moon and stars, and night after night I would reshape and polish these...
Sign in to see full entry.
The Weekend that Was
Saturday, January 8 Birthday of British physicist Stephen Hawking, born in Oxford, England (1942). In the mid-1960s, Hawking was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig's disease, and given three months to live. When asked yeaers later about living with the disease, he said that...
Sign in to see full entry.
Friday, January 7, 2005
Birth of Movies and Long-D Calls, Good Eats, and Creepy Folks
Anniversary of the first bit of motion picture made. In 1894, Thomas Edison Studios filmed a comedian named Fred Ott sneezing. The Fannie Farmer Cookbook debuted on this day in 1896, written by the woman called "the mother of the level measure," Fannie Merritt Farmer. This day in 1927, the first...
Sign in to see full entry.
Wednesday, December 8, 2004
Walter Mitty, A One-Shot Wonder, A Writer's Quest, End of the Beatles
Birthday of the great humorist James Thurber, born in Columbus, OH (1894). He began submitting humor pieces to New Yorker magazine in 1926, when the magazine was around a year old. He said, "My pieces came back so fast I began to believe the New Yorker must have a rejection machine." He eventually...
Sign in to see full entry.
Tuesday, December 7, 2004
Pearl Harbor Day
In 1941 on this day, the Japanese attacked the American navel base at Pearl Harbor. Early in the morning 183 Japanese fighter planes took off from aircraft carriers in the Pacific Ocean. They used broadcasts from Honolulu radio stations to help them navigate. The planes arrived off the coast of the...
Sign in to see full entry.
Monday, December 6, 2004
Novels, Trees, Songs, and LIFE
It's the birthday of novelist Susanna Moodie, born Susanna Strickland in Suffolk, England (1803). As a young woman, she married an adventurous man, and the two of them sailed off to live in the backwoods of Canada, which at the time was still wild country. She had thought that life in the new colony...
Sign in to see full entry.
