Today really ought to be a national holiday.
Oh, wait, it is a holiday.
Leonardo DiCaprio is 41 today.
Calista Flockhart, Mrs. Harrison Ford, is 51. (He’s 73. [(73/2) + 7] = 44. They’re good.)
The late Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born on November 11, 1922.
“Do you realize that all great literature — Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, the Bible, and ”The Charge of the Light Brigade” — are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being?” — Kurt Vonnegut
George Patton was born on November 11, 1885. From his New York Times obituary in 1945:
Gen. George Smith Patton Jr. was one of the most brilliant soldiers in American history. Audacious, unorthodox and inspiring, he led his troops to great victories in North Africa, Sicily and on the Western Front. Nazi generals admitted that of all American field commanders he was the one they most feared. To Americans he was a worthy successor of such hardbitten cavalrymen as Philip Sheridan, J. E. B. Stuart and Nathan Bedford Forrest.
His great soldierly qualities were matched by one of the most colorful personalities of his period. About him countless legends clustered–some true, some untrue, but all testifying to the firm hold he had upon the imaginations of his men. He went into action with two pearl-handled revolvers in holsters on his hips. He was the master of an unprintable brand of eloquence, yet at times he coined phrases that will live in the American Army’s traditions.
“We shall attack and attack until we are exhausted, and then we shall attack again,” he told his troops before the initial landings in North Africa, thereby summarizing the military creed that won victory after victory along the long road that led from Casablanca to the heart of Germany.
Patton died in Germany on December 21, 1945, as a result of injuries from an automobile accident.