Tuesday, November 9, 2010

"Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid."
Hedy Lamarr, actress, inventor, glamour girl, born 9 November, 1913, in Vienna, Austria, in the last days of old Europe. apres le deluge, as it were. According to the wikibots, her parents named her Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler. By the time she died @ age 86, 19 Jan. [Gen. Robt. E. Lee's birthday, just for you to know] 2000, ponder on all the changes she witnessed.


So, happy birthday Hedy Lamarr (apparently as smart as she was lovely to look at. if so she'd be like a genius) & to you, long-gone minister and newspaperman Elijah Parish Lovejoy of Alton, Illinois, whose printing press was dumped into the Father of Waters by pro-slavery activists (strict constructionists of the U.S. Constitution they might have styled themselves. a barbarian by any other name...). One of them shot & killed him, 2 days before his 35th birthday. I seem to remember that pioneer missionaries Narcissa Whitman and her new husband (also doomed to violent death, both of them, in a future November) met Mr. Lovejoy on their way west in 1836. And that it was a few weeks after Lovejoy's death, in 1837, that a tall, muscular, wisecracking, introspective, ambitious & brilliant backwoods Illinois legislator (ditto), met smart, pretty, vivacious Mary Todd, just up from Lexington, Kentucky...
Anyway, exactly 101 years after Mr. Lovejoy was killed, a similarly violent bunch of yokels, convinced of their righteousness, launched "Kristallnacht" upon their fellow Germans & Austrians. http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/kristallnacht.html
Lest you be thinking that YOU'RE having a bad day.

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