Birthdays missed

Catching up:

July 8: John D. Rockefeller (shown here) was born on this day in 1839.

"The rich are the scum of the earth in every country." -- G. K. Chesterton.



July 9: Romance novelist Barbara Cartland was born on this day in 1901.

"If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves." -- Don Marquis.



And today: French novelist Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

"I think he (Proust) was mentally defective." -- Evelyn Waugh.

Wilson shoots down Sandburg

Birthday of poet Carl Sandburg, born 1878.

"The cruellest thing that has happened to Lincoln since he was shot by Booth has been to fall into the hands of Carl Sandburg." -- Edmund Wilson, referring to Sandburg's famous biography of Abraham Lincoln.



"The philanthropists and social reformers who know worship his (Lincoln's) name," wrote G. K. Chesterton, "would have regarded him as belonging to the type which they think 'unemployable'; a scalawag, a drifter and dreamer, a man who would come to no good. His casualness, his coarseness, his habit of taking up this and that and not making it pay, his changes of trade and dwelling-place...Though Lincoln was never an habitual drunkard like Grant, he had all about him the same savor of unsuccess."

Today is International Day for Tolerance

"Tolerance is only another name for indifference." – W. Somerset Maugham

"Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions." – G. K. Chesterton.

Today's Perverse Verse:

Even tho I hate you,
I can tolerate you,
At least for today--
But then -- go away!