January 5, 2009

• The Writer’s Almanac

  I subscribe to Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac. It gives me a daily dose of poetry and some trivia about writers and events. Over the past few days, there have been some interesting ones.

  From January 3
  

  **It’s the birthday of the ornithologist James Bond born on this day in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1900). He was the leading expert on birds of the Caribbean, and his book Birds of the West Indies (1936) is still in print today.

  The novelist Ian Fleming was an enthusiastic bird-watcher, and he was living in Jamaica and came across a copy of Birds of the West Indies. Fleming was writing a thriller and decided to use the name James Bond for the protagonist, agent 007. That thriller was Casino Royale (1953), the first of Fleming’s 12 James Bond novels.

  
  From January 4
  

  **It was on this day in 1825 that the writer Alexandre Dumas fought his first duel. He was 23 years old, and he had gotten into a fight with a soldier over a game of billiards. They had a duel with swords. Not only did Alexandre Dumas lose the duel, but his pants fell off in the middle of it.

  But 20 years later, he became famous as the author of The Three Musketeers (1844) and The Count of Monte Cristo (1845).

  **And it’s the birthday of Jack Norworth born in Philadelphia in 1879. Jack Norworth had never been to a baseball game, but one day in 1908, he was riding the subway and he saw a sign that said “Baseball Today — Polo Grounds,” and he started thinking of baseball lyrics. He wrote them down on a piece of scratch paper, and then took them to the composer Albert Von Tilzer, another man who had never seen a baseball game, who went ahead and wrote the music. And the song became very famous: “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

  • 10:03 am
  • 7 Comments