Welcome to November

Holiday of the Month: Thanksgiving.

"Americans are a race of convicts and ought to be thankful for anything we allow them short of hanging." -- Samuel Johnson.

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.

Poor Sarah Palin

Today: Queen Elizabeth I was born on this day in 1533.

"Being a woman is a terribly difficult trade, since it consists primarily in dealing with men." -- Joseph Conrad.

Yesterday: The first Pilgrims set sail for the new world on Sept. 6, 1620.

"There is no such thing as an American. They are all exiles uprooted, transplanted and doomed to sterility." -- Evelyn Waugh.