Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on this date in 1835, and the world is a better place for it having happened.
Casting about for an appropriate passage of his to share, I came across this one from The Innocents Abroad which seems applicable to bloggers everywhere….
At certain periods it becomes the dearest ambition of a man to keep a faithful record of his performances in a book; and he dashes at this work with an enthusiasm that imposes on him the notion that keeping a journal is the veriest pastime in the world, and the pleasantest. But if he only lives twenty-one days, he will find out that only those rare natures that are made up of pluck, endurance, devotion to duty for duty’s sake, and invincible determination, may hope to venture upon so tremendous an enterprise as the keeping of a journal and not sustain a shameful defeat.
This picture, by the way, is of Mark Twain in Nikola Tesla’s lab in 1894, which I came across on Wikipedia.
If you’re casting about for something to read, take a gander at Mark Twain’s works at Project Gutenberg.
A couple of other blogs mentioned the birthday this morning:
- Movie Morlocks has “Always the Twain” covering Mark Twain and Hollywood.
- World Hum posted “Happy Birthday, Mark Twain and Jonathan Swift”, (it’s Swift’s birthday as well) mentioning they were “creators of the World Hum’s No. 7 and No. 6 greatest fictional travelers respectively…”
Speaking of birthdays, yesterday was the 80th birthday of Vin Scully.
