Saturday, March 22, 2008

Why do you make me blue


From last summer. I've been too busy pruning and recovering to do any hiking, though the weather has been quite tolerable. Pruning: what I thought would be a one-week project at most, is turning out to be far more complex and time-consuming. Who knew there was so much wood in a tree? Egad man, we have carted away two 50-gal containers of very chopped-up branches so far, and I am only now beginning to see a dent in the tree itself (and that's to say nothing of the piles of branches remaining in the yard). This is clearly an annual job, which had been ignored for years. And I haven't even started on the pear tree. And the time is very ripe for starting a garden again....

But in 1895, the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumiere showed their first motion picture.

In 1903, Niagara Falls ran dry due to drought.

In 1930, Stephen Sondheim was born. William Shatner followed a year later, and Andrew Lloyd Webber came along in 1948.

In 1962, The Beatles released their first full-length LP in the UK, Please Please Me.

And in 1986, the chief librarian of Wilberforce University in Ohio, one of the oldest predominantly black universities in the United States, was puzzled to find a copy of Scriptores Reis Rustica (Writings about Country Life) printed in Bologna in 1496, while rummaging through some old magazines. The 300-page volume had been rebound using the original wooden covers. No-one could guess how it came to be there.

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