♥~ 1809 –Charles Darwin naturalist: theory of evolution: On the Origin of the Species by Means of Natural Selection, Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex; died Apr 19, 1882.  Charles Darwin theory of evolution is still debated to this day, over one hundred years after his death. How’s that for survival? Darwin Day is celebrated around this birthday by the International Darwin Day Foundation.

♥~ 1950 – Steve Hackett songwriter, musician: guitarist: group: Genesis: Invisible Touch, Turn It on Again, Land of Confusion, Hold on My Heart, Tonight, Tonight, Tonight,In Too Deep, That’s All

♥~1955 –  Arsenio Hall Emmy Award-winning TV talk-show host: Emmy Award-winning TV talk-show host:

♥~1980 – Christina Ricci actress: The White Rose, Monster, Anything Else, The Gathering, Pumpkin, The Laramie Project, All Over the Guy, Grey’s Anatomy

★~ Good to Know:

♥~  Young Abraham Lincoln excelled at “fives,” a precursor of handball. With his exceptionally long arms and legs, he could reach the ball from any angle. He played the game as he awaited the results of the presidential nominating convention in Chicago in May 1860.

♥~ Young Abe Lincoln adored gingerbread men – The cookie his mom used to make before she died was “our biggest treat,” he later recalled, but “it wasn’t often.” Lincoln turned his fondness for them into a well-liked anecdote he frequently told about a boy who loved gingerbread more than anybody else because he got to taste it so seldom.

♥~ In 1857, Mary and Abraham Lincoln made their only trip outside the U.S. together – to Niagara Falls in Canada.

♥~ When asked if her husband had a hobby, Mary Todd Lincoln had a one-word reply: “Cats.” President Lincoln loved cats, and he would spend hours playing with them. When the president found three kittens abandoned at a wartime telegraph hut in 1865, he picked them up and saw to it they found a loving home.

♥~ Back when every grocery store was more or less a farmers market, during his years lawyering in Springfield, Ill., Lincoln would hit the butcher shop or the bakery the first thing in the morning, before work. Neighbors saw him “wending his way to market with a basket on his arm and a boy [one of his sons] at his side.”

♥~ President Lincoln’s musical tastes ran to Friedrich von Flotow’s opera “Martha,” the Scottish love ballad “Annie Laurie,” and the Confederate anthem “Dixie.” Dixie had been a popular song throughout the country before the war. After the South surrendered, Lincoln jokingly claimed the song as federal property.

♥~ Abraham Lincoln was one of two sitting presidents ever to come under fire during a war. It happened at the Battle of Fort Stevens in 1864. The first president to be in that position was James Madison during the War of 1812.

♥~Lincoln was in greater peril than Madison on the battlefield, though. He was about a foot taller.

♥~  On the last day of the president’s life, the Lincoln’s talked about traveling to the Holy Land or to California, where there might be more opportunities for their sons.

♥~ President Lincoln was the first U.S. president to be embalmed. Nineteen days passed between his assassination in Washington, D.C. and his burial in Springfield, Ill. The funeral train stopped in cities along the way, and 1.5 million Americans viewed the casket. Because he was the most photographed man in America and instantly recognizable, Lincoln’s body became a sterling advertisement for the then-fledgling embalming industry. The embalmers, who rode the funeral train, touched up their work so often that the president’s face was still intact when his coffin was opened in 1901.

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Off and running. Busy day. I’ve just accepted that it may never be above 20 degrees again and I can’t huddle in my house forever. After all “there is no bad weather only inappropriate clothes” (Ranulph Fiennes) and I have more than enough winter wear at my disposal. I want to go out, have a Starbucks, and intermingle with the human race. Sort of. Not really. But, go, I must.

Have a wonderful Wednesday!

Odd Loves Company!