A Day in the Life

I've missed blogging these last couple of weeks. But the beginning of a new school year has kept me preoccupied and away from this page. Now it's Friday afternoon, and things are fairly quiet around the Honors House. Unfortunately, my mind is pretty quiet as well. I think parts of it are actually napping at the moment. So, the part of me that's conscious is just going to write down a couple of interesting little notes.

Today is August 29. What does that mean? Well, I'll tell you (in rather random pieces)--

• Republican presidential hopeful is 72 today, and in addition to celebrating his birthday and the end of this year's Democratic National Convention, McCain has just named Sarah Palin as his running mate. She's the governor of Alaska, and I've never heard of her before. I've always wanted to go to Alaska, so I've nothing against her there. Initial profiles I've read of her suggest that she's potentially an interesting woman. (By the way, this is the first time that I've been aware of myself as older than such folk as Barack Obama, who is 47, and Sarah Palin, who is 44.)
• Former-pop-superstar-turned-unfortunate-famous-freak Michael Jackson is 50 today. Somehow that's difficult to imagine, but I don't know why. I never thought much about it until now, but Jackson and I were born in the same year, 1958, he three months earlier than I. In 6th grade the girls in my class and I would argue over who was better, Michael Jackson or Donny Osmond. I argued for Jackson, they for Osmond. Once upon a time, Michael Jackson was clearly the most famous singer/songwriter/performer of the two. He's still most famous, but, as with today's MTV, music has little or nothing to do with it. (By the way, according to a book I'm reading, Osama bin Laden was also born in 1958, in January, a fact that I'm likely to muse on at some point.)
• Today is the birthday of jazz man Charlie "Bird" Parker.
• It's the birthday of British political philosopher John Locke, many of whose ideas (and phrases) Thomas Jefferson adapted (or plagiarized) for the Declaration of Independence.
• It's the birthday of Ingrid Bergman.
• It's the birthday of Oliver Wendell Holmes. According to my Book of Days for the Literary Year, it was on this day in 1825, Holmes's 16th birthday, that he stood before the examiners of Harvard College and breezed through their tests.
• It was on this day three years ago that Hurricane Katrina made its second US landfall, this time in Louisiana and just after six o'clock in the morning; by this time in the afternoon (3:26), levees were breached and lives were lost--actually and metaphorically.