celebrate
I love getting the writer's almanac in my inbox. many days I am so busy that I delete it without reading, but when I do take the time, it's worth it. from today's almanac:
It's the birthday of Douglas Adams, born in Cambridge, England (1952). He's the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a series of satiric science-fiction novels that begins when the main character, Arthur Dent, is yanked from Earth just before the planet is demolished to make space for an interstellar highway. The book begins, "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time…lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches."
Mary Shelley published her gothic horror novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, on this day in 1818. She was married to the poet Percy Shelley, and she was five months pregnant when she finished the novel. She and Percy would sometimes visit their friend Lord Byron at his villa in Switzerland, and they would stay up past midnight and tell ghost stories by the firelight. Her story of Frankenstein was descended from one of the stories she told.
It's the birthday of bandleader Lawrence Welk, born in Strasburg, North Dakota (1903). He started out playing with a band called "The Hotsy Totsy Boys" across North Dakota, then Chicago and, finally, California.
It's the birthday of Douglas Adams, born in Cambridge, England (1952). He's the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a series of satiric science-fiction novels that begins when the main character, Arthur Dent, is yanked from Earth just before the planet is demolished to make space for an interstellar highway. The book begins, "Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. This planet has -- or rather had -- a problem, which was this: most of the people on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time…lots of the people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches."
Mary Shelley published her gothic horror novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, on this day in 1818. She was married to the poet Percy Shelley, and she was five months pregnant when she finished the novel. She and Percy would sometimes visit their friend Lord Byron at his villa in Switzerland, and they would stay up past midnight and tell ghost stories by the firelight. Her story of Frankenstein was descended from one of the stories she told.
It's the birthday of bandleader Lawrence Welk, born in Strasburg, North Dakota (1903). He started out playing with a band called "The Hotsy Totsy Boys" across North Dakota, then Chicago and, finally, California.