I am including a couple of interesting birthdays from "The Writer's Almanac" because the authors are some of your and my favorites.

Kit

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It's the birthday of the artist and illustrator Norman Rockwell, born in New York City (1894). He loved drawing from an early age, and studied at the National Academy of Design. He wanted to go into the advertising business, but he had a hard time drawing beautiful women. He said, "No matter how much I tried to make them look sexy, they always ended up looking ... like somebody's mother." So he focused on the Boy Scout magazine, Boy's Life, and went on to paint covers for The Saturday Evening Post.

Norman Rockwell said, "The commonplaces of America are to me the richest subjects in art. Boys battling flies on vacant lots; little girls playing jacks on the front steps; old men plodding home at twilight."

It's the birthday of the novelist James A. Michener, born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania (1907). His parents abandoned him when he was a very young boy, and he was adopted by a poor young widow named Mabel Michener. He joined the Navy during World War II. It was in a Quonset hut that he began writing his first book, Tales of the South Pacific, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948. It was turned into the Broadway musical South Pacific, and the proceeds from the musical let him devote his life to writing.

He went on to write a series of big historical novels, most of them about places, including Hawaii (1959), Chesapeake (1978), Texas (1985) and Alaska (1988). He filled his books with historical and geographical details. His books sold more than 75 million copies, but even though he made a great deal of money, he lived an extremely frugal life, and gave most of his money away. Over his lifetime, he donated 117 million dollars to various institutions, including the University of Texas.

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Wooooha!  Take a look at this - Dave Letterman talks to kids in San Francisco, CA!

http://www.cbs.com/latenight/lateshow/dave_tv/comedyclips/index/php/comedyclips.phtml

Poem: "The Past Is Still There" by Deborah Garrison, from The Second Child. © Random House.

The Past Is Still There

I've forgotten so much.
What it felt like back then,
what we said to each other.

But sometimes when I'm standing
at the kitchen counter after dinner
and I look out the window at the dark

thinking of nothing,
something swims up.
Tonight this:

your laughing into my mouth
as you were trying
to kiss me.

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I have been trying something new in my life, very radical - morning. I am not a morning person however I'm giving it a go.  Morning does have some privileges - coffee.  I think I'll get some.
- Kit
***********************
Ok, one joke before coffee.  But just for you.

Lena and Sven were in a motel room when there came a knock on the door.
Lena looked through the peep-hole and exclaimed, "Oh my gosh, it is my
husband Ole, jump out da window!" Sven replied, "I can't jump out da
winda, we are on the 13th floor!" Lena replied, "Fool, this is no time
to be
superstitious!"

A little Poem that gives thought to dealing with conflict. - Kit

The Virtue of Trusting One's Mind - by Marcia Slatkin, from A Woman Milking: Barnyard Poems. © Word Press.

When goats don't want to move,
they don't make sounds.

They fold legs at bald knees,
bend rough necks to earth,
and just sink down.

They never

rant, rail,
protest, declaim,
debate, explain, and then,
head bowed, plod meekly
forward anyway,

as I did
as a child
and still do now

I was there when you were born.  Happy, anticipating, full of life.

Who are you. what would you be?  You see, I had such hopes, dreams.

The years went by ... time.

The young years, the growing years, the tough years, where did you go?

Why didn't you need me?

Now, on the brink, the cusp, what will you do?

Make a decision.

OH if you own a home, this pretty well sums it up!  I think it is part of the applicance mafia.  Maybe we should open an case .....

Appliance Death Pacts
by Linda Baldwin
January 24, 2007

What does a weed wacker have in common with a microwave oven? Time of death. Nothing associated with home ownership dies alone. The washer takes out the dryer. The curling iron demands the blow dryer. The dishwasher pacts with the disposal. But the weed wacker and the microwave? Do do do do? How can they communicate?

While the concept defies reason, it seems to be fact. An eerie truth, granted, but no more strange than the dryer eating socks, and one accepts that as a Life Truth. Once the disease gets into the house itself, though, the price tag climbs. The roof takes out the lawn. Leaking water pipes, too, will not die alone. They took with them the vacuum cleaner. So far, the trend is a couples thing and they check out two by two. Worse yet is when the trend graduates to a trio. I lied about the washer and dryer, come to think of it. They demanded the dishwasher as company. The disposal must have been an afterthought. Oh, I remember — the pipes died with the central AC. Another trio: the pipes and AC conscripted a toilet.

I know what you're thinking: that's what you get for buying an older home. Wrong! It was brand spanking new only, hmmmm, 1989 until (background finger counting)—17 years old! Still, if they can put a man on the moon...

When I think about the wrecks my parents bought in New England — fixer-uppers in their golden years — I don't recall this phenomena. The roofs were slate, so you replaced the occasional escapee. The pipes froze in the winter and had to be thawed. Come to think of it, the iced pipes would take out the car.

About the author:
As a freelance writer in sunny Florida, I'm currently enjoying full-time employment and a steady paycheck, for which I write businessese for a company that knows the existence of spellcheck is not a shortcut to effective writing. Hurrah.

As some of you know, this represents the feelings of many of my co-workers.

- Kit

A Department of Agriculture representative stopped at a farm and talked with the old farmer.
"I'm going to inspect your farm."
The old farmer said, "You better not go in that field."
The Ag representative said in a wise tone, "I have the authority of the U. S. Government with me. See this card? I am allowed to go wherever I wish on agricultural land."
So, the old farmer went about his farm chores.
Later, the farmer heard loud screams and saw the Department of Agriculture rep running for the fence and close behind was the farmer's prize bull. The bull was madder than a full nest of hornets and the bull was gaining at every step.
The old farmer called out, "Show him your card!"

OH, This Just HAS to be Blogged!

Chinese court rules boy’s screaming led to the death of dozens of chickens

BEIJING - Hundreds of chickens have been found dead in eastern China — and a court has ruled that the cause of death was the screaming of a 4-year-old boy who in turn had been scared by a barking dog, state media reported Wednesday.

The bizarre sequence events began when the boy arrived at a village home in the eastern province of Jiangsu in the summer with his father who was delivering bottles of gas, the Nanjing Morning Post reported.

A villager was quoted as saying the little boy bent over the henhouse window, screaming for a long time, after being scared by the dog.

“One neighbor told police that he had heard the boy’s crying that afternoon and another villager confirmed the boy screaming by the henhouse window,” the newspaper said.

A court ruled the boy’s screaming was “the only unexpected abnormal sound” and that 443 chickens trampled each other to death in fear.

The boy’s father was ordered to pay $230 in compensation to the owner of the chickens.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16784154/

On this day in 1848, James W. Marshall was building a sawmill for Captain John Sutter, using water from the South Fork of the American River, when he noticed several flakes of metal in the water and recognized them to be gold. Though he tried to keep it a secret, the word spread quickly, and triggered the California gold rush of 1849.

At the time, California was technically a part of Mexico. Coincidentally, just a little more than a week later, the United States and Mexico signed a treaty that led to the United States' purchase of the land that became California, as well as the other southwestern states. If Mexico had known about the discovery of gold on this day, they might never have sold all that land for just $15 million.

The reason the gold rush caused such a huge migration of people across the United States was that gold was a particularly easy mineral for ordinary people to mine. Gold has chemical properties that make it unlikely to combine with other minerals, so it is usually found relatively pure in nature. And because of its density, it would often get washed out of mountainsides in rivers, and then settle at the bottom of the river wherever the water was calm. So instead of having to build a huge mining operation, with lots of fancy machinery, ordinary people could just sift through the pebbles at the bottom of a stream, and if they were lucky, they'd find gold. The price of gold was about $20 an ounce at the time. If a riverbed contained gold, it was possible to pan out 10 ounces a day, earning more in a week than the average worker could earn in a year.

In the 10 years prior to 1848, only 2,700 people had settled in California. By the end of 1850, almost 200,000 people had moved there, and they did so even though California was 1,000 miles from the nearest state, Texas, and there were no major roads to get there.

By 1860, more than $600 million in gold had been mined out of California, but very few ordinary people actually made it rich. The riverbeds were panned out pretty quickly, and then the only way to get the gold was by using machines. But even though it didn't help many of the miners, the gold rush greatly increased government revenues, and helped build the American West. Some historians have argued that the gold from California even helped the North win the Civil War, since it was those gold revenues that helped fund the war effort.

One of the people who did manage to make a fortune from the gold rush was an immigrant from Bavaria named Levi Strauss. He was a traveling merchant, and he specialized in a sturdy brand of trousers made of sailcloth and held together with copper rivets. His pants were extremely popular, and they became the basis of modern blue jeans. - From The Writer's Almanac.

Little Johnny's at it again..... A new teacher
was trying to make use of her psychology courses. She started her class
by saying, "Everyone who thinks they're stupid, stand up!" After a few
seconds, Little Johnny stood up. The teacher said, "Do you think you're
stupid, Little Johnny?" "No, ma'am, but I hate to see you standing
there all by yourself!"

Little Johnny watched, fascinated, as his mother smoothed cold cream on
her face. "Why do you do that, mommy?" he asked. "To make myself
beautiful," said his mother, who then began removing the cream with a
tissue. "What's the matter?" asked Little Johnny. "Giving up?"

The math teacher saw that little Johnny wasn't paying attention in class. She called on him and said,
"Johnny! What are 2 and 4 and 28 and 44?" Little Johnny quickly replied, "NBC, FOX, ESPN and the Cartoon Network!"

Little Johnny's kindergarten class was on a field trip to their local
police station where they saw pictures tacked to a bulletin board of
the 10 most wanted criminals. One of the youngsters pointed to a
picture and asked if it really was the photo of a wanted person. "Yes,"
said the policeman. "The detectives want very badly to capture him."
Little Johnny asked, "Why didn't you keep him when you took his
picture?"

Little Johnny attended a horse auction with his father. He watched as
his father moved from horse to horse, running his hands up and down the
horse's legs and rump, and chest. After a few minutes, Johnny asked,
"Dad, why are you doing that?" His father replied, "Because when I'm
buying horses, I have to make sure that they are healthy and in good
shape before I buy. Johnny, looking worried, said, "Dad, I think the
UPS guy wants to buy Mom."

A Little Latin Lexicon for Neurologists:

seize the day. . .
carpe diem

seize the night . . carpe noctem

seize the day and night . . . . . . .
status epilepticus

Seizin's greetings to all!

Edgar Allan Poe

It's the birthday of the poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe, (books by this author) born in Boston (1809). He was the son of two actors, but both his parents died of tuberculosis when he was just a boy. He was taken in by a wealthy Scotch merchant named John Allan, who gave Edgar Poe his middle name. His foster father sent him to the prestigious University of Virginia, where he was surrounded by the sons of wealthy slave-owning families. He developed a habit of drinking and gambling with the other students, but his foster father didn't approve. He and John Allan had a series of arguments about his behavior and his career choices, and he was finally disowned and thrown out of the house.

He spent the next several years living in poverty, depending on his aunt for a home, supporting himself by writing anything he could, including a how-to guide for seashell collecting. Eventually, he began to contribute poems and journalism to magazines. At the time, magazines were a new literary medium in the United States, and Poe was one of the first writers to make a living writing for magazines. He called himself a "magazinist."

He first made his name writing some of the most brutal book reviews ever published at the time. He was called the "tomahawk man from the South." He described one poem as "an illimitable gilded swill trough," and he said, "[Most] of those who hold high places in our poetical literature are absolute nincompoops." He particularly disliked the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier.

Poe also began to publish fiction, and he specialized in humorous and satirical stories because that was the style of fiction most in demand. But soon after he married his 14-year-old cousin, Virginia, he learned that she had tuberculosis, just like his parents, and he began to write darker stories. One of his editors complained that his work was growing too grotesque, but Poe replied that the grotesque would sell magazines. And he was right. His work helped launch magazines as the major new venue for literary fiction.

But even though his stories sold magazines, he still didn't make much money. He made about $4 per article and $15 per story, and the magazines were notoriously late with their paychecks. There was no international copyright law at the time, and so his stories were printed without his permission throughout Europe. There were periods when he and his wife lived on bread and molasses, and sold most of their belongings to the pawn shop.

It was under these conditions, suffering from alcoholism, and watching his wife grow slowly worse in health, that he wrote some of the greatest gothic horror stories in English literature, including "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Near the end of his wife's illness, he published the poem that begins (Above taken from the Writer's Almanac, 1/19/06),

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. `'Tis some visitor,' I muttered, `tapping at my chamber door - Only this, and nothing more.' Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore - For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore - Nameless here for evermore. And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain Thrilled me - filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating `'Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door - Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door; - This it is, and nothing more,' Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer, `Sir,' said I, `or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore; But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping, And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door, That I scarce was sure I heard you' - here I opened wide the door; - Darkness there, and nothing more. Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before But the silence was unbroken, and the darkness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, `Lenore!' This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, `Lenore!' Merely this and nothing more. Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning, Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before. `Surely,' said I, `surely that is something at my window lattice; Let me see then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore - Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore; - 'Tis the wind and nothing more!' Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter, In there stepped a stately raven of the saintly days of yore. Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door - Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door - Perched, and sat, and nothing more. Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling, By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore, `Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,' I said, `art sure no craven. Ghastly grim and ancient raven wandering from the nightly shore - Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night's Plutonian shore!' Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.' Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly, Though its answer little meaning - little relevancy bore; For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door - Bird or beast above the sculptured bust above his chamber door, With such name as `Nevermore.' But the raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only, That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour. Nothing further then he uttered - not a feather then he fluttered - Till I scarcely more than muttered `Other friends have flown before - On the morrow will he leave me, as my hopes have flown before.' Then the bird said, `Nevermore.' Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken, `Doubtless,' said I, `what it utters is its only stock and store, Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful disaster Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore - Till the dirges of his hope that melancholy burden bore Of "Never-nevermore."' But the raven still beguiling all my sad soul into smiling, Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird and bust and door; Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore - What this grim, ungainly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore Meant in croaking `Nevermore.' This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom's core; This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining On the cushion's velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o'er, But whose velvet violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o'er, She shall press, ah, nevermore! Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor. `Wretch,' I cried, `thy God hath lent thee - by these angels he has sent thee Respite - respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore! Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!' Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.' `Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! - Whether tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore, Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted - On this home by horror haunted - tell me truly, I implore - Is there - is there balm in Gilead? - tell me - tell me, I implore!' Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.' `Prophet!' said I, `thing of evil! - prophet still, if bird or devil! By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore - Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn, It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore - Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels named Lenore?' Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.' `Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!' I shrieked upstarting - `Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore! Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken! Leave my loneliness unbroken! - quit the bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!' Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.' And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted - nevermore! The Raven [First published in 1845]