Philosophers, poets, playwrights and other putzes

October 18, 1785 -- English poet and novelist Thomas Love Peacock was born. He wrote:

"Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent."



October 17, 1938 -- Daredevil Evel Knievel was born in 1938.

"No one ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public." -- H. L. Mencken.



October 16, 1888 -- Playwright Eugene O'Neill was born. He wrote:

"I sometimes think that the United States...is the greatest failure the world has ever seen."




October 15, 1844 -- Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born.

"(He was) an agile but unintelligent and abnormal German, possessed of the mania of grandeur." -- Leo Tolstoy.

He wasn't the first to think of that

H. L. Mencken, one of the patron saints of cynics, was born on this day in 1880. He wrote:

"My guess is that well over fifty percent of the human race goes through life without having a single original thought."

Sit down and be counted

Jim Thorpe, the greatest American athlete ever, was born on this day in 1888.

“I hate all sports as rabidly as a person who loves sports hates common sense.” – H. L. Mencken.



Sports, according to the latest census, is now the third-largest religion in the world. And like all religions, it is based on a set of highly questionable premises, one of them being: Life is a game.

All of us are born with the instinct to play, along with the instincts to feed, talk, and pack crayons in our noses, but we’re taught not to let any particular instinct become an obsession – except play.

From the time you’re old enough to open your eyes, it seems, there’s always somebody shoving a ball in your face, expecting you to throw it or catch it or kick it – or at least look like you would if you could.

As you grow up and learn to walk and then run, the sports paraphernalia begins to pile up around the house, and pretty soon you can’t even sit down and read a comic book or pick your toenails without your old man wanting you to come outside and throw the old cantaloupe around.

In school they expect you to play, starting with recess. Teachers never let you just stand around on the playground enjoying the clouds and the trees and the smell you just made, but demand that you participate in their idiotic games of “Red Rover” or “Capture the Potato.”

As if this weren’t enough, you’ve got to cope with all those extracurricular activities: Little League, YMCA, Cub Scouts or Brownies, camp, soccer teams, swimming clubs, gymnastics, Fourth of July races, and so on, until you just want to crawl into a nice hot bath and drown yourself.

By the time you reach high school chances are you’ve already logged millions of hours in pools and gymnasiums, on gridirons and diamonds – and now the serious part starts. You’ve got to decide what sport to major in.

Let’s say you decide on one, because you like it more than any other – love it , even. What happens now is that the person in charge – your coach – takes something that started out as fun and turns it into something different.

A coach is usually a former athlete, and consequently bitter and bent on revenge. Most coaches pass along the things they’ve learned from their own coaches, things like the importance of teamwork and keeping your shirt tucked in.

The one useful function the coach may serve is to sour a youngster on sports for the rest of his or her life.

What a character!

Sportswriter Heywood Hale Broun was born on this day in 1918. His famous remark is "Sports do not build character. They reveal it."

"I hate all sports as rabidly as a man who loves sports hates common sense." -- H. L. Mencken.

Happy Valentine's Day

"To be in love is to be in a state of perpetual anaesthesia." -- H. L. Mencken.

To live -- and to do good -- is to suffer

Albert Schweitzer was born on this day in 1875.

“High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.” – H. L. Mencken.

“A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.” – George Orwell.

Chapter 13, maybe

The American philosopher William James was born on this day in 1842. He wrote:

"Religion is a monumental chapter in the history of human egotism."

And here is chapter and verse from H. L. Mencken:

"No one knows who created the visible universe, and it is infinitely improbable that anything properly described as evidence on the point will ever be discovered. No one knows what motives or intentions, if any, lie behind what we call natural laws. No one knows why man has his present form. No one knows why sin and suffering were sent into this world--that is, why the fashioning of man was badly botched."

Her stories weren't corny, though

American novelist Willa Cather was born on this day in 1873, in Virginia.

When she was 10 years old, she moved to Nebraska, where she grew up and which she later made the setting of her most famous novels, O Pioneers! and My Antonia.

H. L. Mencken said of her and her books:

"I don't care how well she writes; I don't give a damn what people in Nebraska do."