Greetings Readers,
The Wife, after five weeks away, finally returns to The Shire on today’s edition of The Diary of a Nobody. Sparrow spent no small amount fussing over her return, to include folding clothes and doing the lawn, and The Wife generally found favor with his efforts, though virtually the entire contents of the refrigerator had to be tossed because nothing except mayo and cheese had been touched for five weeks.
There was not a Thought for the Day either one or two years ago today, so we found one from American poet and diplomat James Russell Lowell, who discusses how an entire wilderness of warning is not a substitute for going out and doing something.
The initial rewrites of our latest novel Criminals, Courtesans and Constables are coming along rather slowly, frankly…This is not a bulletin, for us at least, because while few things get in the way of writing the first draft, we are always open to an excuse to put off rewriting it. This is not to say we are not thinking about it, however. New ideas and lines will regularly crop up, and we dutifully write them down for later use. (Actually, it’s the second decade of the 21st century, so we usually use the voice-to-text feature to message them to ourselves.)
On This Date:
In 2007: The first iPhones are released to the public, after two-and-a-half years and an estimated $150 million in development costs. The two models are priced at $499 and $599, depending on storage, and required a two-year contract. Through their 2017 fiscal year, Apple has sold over 1.2 billion iPhones.
In 1897: The Chicago Colts – now the Cubs – defeat the Louisville Colonels 36-7 to establish a major league record for runs in a game that still stands. The Colts became the seventh ML team to score in every inning of a nine-inning game and the first to have six players score four runs in a game.
In 1963: Kyu Sakamoto is at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the third and final week with Sukiyaki. Sukiyaki is the Anglicized title, has no relevance to the song at all and is actually a Japanese beef dish. The song spent three months at #1 in Japan and Sakamoto was the first Asian to hit #1 in America. Sakamoto died in 1985 when Japan Airlines flight 123 crashed a few minutes after takeoff in what is still the deadliest single-aircraft crash in history.
As always, many thanks for reading, and have a reasonably good day.
Gaylon
