Willie Nelson's birthday

 Happpy 92nd to Willie Nelson!

"I have this kind of philosophy that I can't do anything about what happened yesterday, or what's going to happen tomorrow. But I feel in full control of what's going on now. I think worry will make you sick. I've never seen it accomplish anything. I've never seen worrying about anything change it. So I decided not to do it. If you can't do anything about it, why in the hell worry about it? Every negative thought you have releases poison into your system, and will kill you or give you cancer, or tumors or whatever else you can think of. So if you are thinking negative about anything, erase that."

Willie Nelson On Eggs, Martial Arts & Living A Life Without Worry.

Photo by Michael O'Brien

Frederick Law Olmsted

April 26 is

"...the birthday of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted, born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1822. Even though he studied such diverse subjects as chemistry, engineering, and agriculture, he wasn't big on formal education, preferring instead to wander through nature. He believed that exposure to forests, meadows, and other green spaces was therapeutic, and was something that even city dwellers needed. This belief was solidified as he traveled the world in his twenties. He and some friends took a six-month walking tour of Britain and Europe, where he saw many parks and formal gardens, and also took an interest in the class system that he observed there. The trip helped form the philosophy that informed his life's work: that people of all walks of life should have access to a common green space. It was a radical idea for the mid-19th century. Olmsted believed that parks would give city dwellers a sense of tranquility. He said, "It is one great purpose of the Park to supply to the hundreds of thousands of tired workers, who have no opportunity to spend their summers in the country, a specimen of God's handiwork that shall be to them, inexpensively, what a month or two in the White Mountains or the Adirondacks is, at great cost, to those in easier circumstances."

In 1853, the city of New York set aside a 700-acre plot of land for the purpose of developing a public green space similar to London's Hyde Park or Paris's Bois de Boulogne. The land was mainly in use as a home for squatters until 1857, when a design contest to expand and improve the park was announced. Olmsted partnered with British designer Calvert Vaux, and together they came up with a proposal they called the "Greensward Plan." Their plan won the contest, and construction began on the park in 1858.

Olmsted and his firm were involved in the design of several other parks and green spaces across the country, including Brooklyn's Prospect Park; the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina; and the campuses of Stanford, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. He designed the Emerald Necklace, a park system for the City of Boston. He also worked on the landscape that surrounds the Capitol Building in Washington, D.C.

Though Olmsted is most famous for landscape architecture, that's only one of his accomplishments. He worked as a journalist and wrote several books on various subjects, including two on slavery and Southern society. He was a managing editor of Putnam's Magazine and was also a partner in the publishing firm of Dix and Edwards. He drained the saltwater and sewage from Boston's Back Bay and created the Fenway. He managed a gold-mining estate in California. He was the administrative head of the U.S. Sanitary Commission, which was the forerunner to the American Red Cross and helped meet the needs of Union soldiers during the Civil War. He was a leader in the conservation movement, helping to preserve the Yosemite Valley and Niagara Falls.

His friend and colleague Daniel Burnham once said of Olmsted: "An artist, he paints with lakes and wooded slopes; with lawns and banks and forest covered hills; with mountain sides and ocean views."

In 1895, Olmsted suffered a mental breakdown. He lived out the final years of his life in the McLean Hospital in Waverly, Massachusetts."

Thanks Writer's Almanac 2014

At Biltmore, North Carolina

Washington Irving

 April 3 "...  is the birthday of American author, statesman, and short-story writer Washington Irving, born in 1783 in New York City. That same week, the British cease-fire was brokered and the American Revolution ended, and William and Sarah Irving named their youngest child in honor of its most famous general, George Washington. Young Washington was somewhat sickly as a child, and was pampered and petted by his older siblings; as a schoolboy, he often snuck out of evening classes to attend the theater. He eventually became a lawyer, although he barely passed the Bar, and when his health continued to be poor, his family sent him on a Grand Tour of Europe in 1804, where he skipped the usual tourist destinations, but nevertheless made many friends and cultivated a lifelong love of travel.

He began publishing commentary and theater reviews at the age of 19, under the name Jonathan Oldstyle. His earliest major writings were satires, and he wrote under assorted humorous pen names, like William Wizard, Launcelot Langstaff, and Geoffrey Crayon. He concocted an elaborate prank in 1809: He posted several "missing person" notices in New York newspapers, searching for information on the whereabouts of historian Dietrich Knickerbocker (another Irving pen name). Once people's curiosity and concern were piqued, he then published a notice by Knickerbocker's fictional landlord, saying that if the missing man didn't show up to pay his rent, the landlord would publish a manuscript Knickerbocker had left behind and keep the proceeds. The manuscript, written by Irving, was called A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, and was a satire on self-important historical and political writing. The public ate it up, and the book was followed by collections of short stories and essays, including The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819), which contained his two most famous stories, "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle." Crayon was his most often-used persona, although he did write under his own name from time to time — chiefly nonfiction, such as biographies of Columbus, Mohammed, Oliver Goldsmith, and George Washington.

Washington Irving wrote a collection of "sketches" called "Old Christmas," which revived many old English Christmas traditions and restored the holiday's prominence in America. Charles Dickens credits Irving for much of the holiday's portrayal in A Christmas Carol, and Santa's flying sleigh traces back to a dream sequence in Irving's A History of New-York, in which Saint Nicholas arrives in a flying wagon.

And Irving is also responsible for that misconception, which is still found in history textbooks, that prior to Columbus's discovery of America, Europeans thought the world was flat. In reality, belief in a flat Earth had gone out of favor in the 1300s and the argument among scientists in 1492 was the size, rather than the shape, of the world. In his biography of Columbus, Irving wrote: "Such were the unlooked for prejudices which Columbus had to encounter at the very outset of his conference, and which certainly relish more of the convent than the university. To his simplest proposition, the spherical form of the earth, were opposed figurative texts of Scripture." The problem is that Galileo, not Columbus, was the man who argued with the church on this point.

Irving was the first American author to gain acclaim and respect in Europe, and during his lifetime his home in Tarrytown, New York, known as "Sunnyside," was the most famous residence in America after George Washington's Mount Vernon. His legacy is much more a part of American life than most of us are aware of: He's the one who first used the phrase "the almighty dollar," and he coined one of New York's most enduring nicknames, "Gotham," which is Anglo-Saxon for "Goat Town," and which comes from a town called Gotham [GOAT-um] in Lincolnshire, England, which was famous for tales of its stupid residents. The residents of New Goat Town are sometimes known as "Knickerbockers," after one of his pseudonyms, and that's also where the New York Knicks basketball team got its name.

Thanks Writer's Almanac 2014

Hans Christian Andersen

April 2 is the birthday of Danish author and poet Hans Christian Andersen, born in 1805 in the town of Odense. He went to work at a young age, supporting himself first as a weaver's apprentice, then a tailor's. At 14, he moved to Copenhagen, hoping to become an actor, and began writing when a theater colleague called him a poet. He published his first story, The Ghost at Palnatoke's Grave, in 1822. He eventually went to college, but he was a mediocre student.

He considered himself a novelist and playwright, and he wrote travelogues, beginning with the conventional framework of description and documentary account but building something unique with his inclusion of musings on larger themes like the role of the author and the nature of fiction. But it's for his three collections of fairy tales that he is best known. Since he never mastered writing in the formal Danish style in school, he wrote in the everyday language of the common Danish people, and he refused to talk down to children or shelter them from the dark and scary. Later translators cut out some of the scarier parts and gave the tales happy endings, and so we often think of them as lighthearted and innocent, but that was not really the case. His fairy tales inspired Charles Dickens, who became his friend, and also Oscar Wilde.

His personal life was a succession of unrequited longings for women, including the singer Jenny Lind, and occasionally men. He never married, but was well aware of how beloved he was by the world's children. Not long before his death, he was conferring with the composer of his funeral march, and told him, "Most of the people who walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with little steps."

In Andersen's honor, his birthday was declared International Children's Book Day, a day to promote children's literature and foster a love of reading in the world's youth.

History begins this way

From Heather Cox Richardson April 1, 2025

 Today Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) made history.

For more than 25 hours he held the floor of the Senate, not reading from the phone book or children’s literature, as some of his predecessors have done, but delivering a coherent, powerful speech about the meaning of America and the ways in which the Trump regime is destroying our democracy.

On the same day that John Hudson of the Washington Post reported that members of Donald Trump’s National Security Council, including national security advisor Michael Waltz, have been skirting presidential records laws and exposing national security by using Gmail accounts to conduct government business, and the same day that mass layoffs at the Department of Health and Human Services gutted the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the National Institutes of Health (NIH), and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Booker launched a full-throated defense of the United States of America.

Booker began his marathon speech at 7:00 on the evening of March 31 with little fanfare. In a video recorded before he began, he said that he had “been hearing from people from all over my state and indeed all over the nation calling upon folks in Congress to do more, to do things that recognize the urgency—the crisis—of the moment. And so we all have a responsibility, I believe to do something different to cause, as John Lewis said, good trouble, and that includes me.”

On the floor of the Senate, Booker again invoked the late Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who had been one of the original Freedom Riders challenging racial segregation in 1961 and whose skull law enforcement officers fractured on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 as Lewis joined the marchers on their way to Montgomery to demand their voting rights be protected.

Booker reminded listeners that Lewis was famous for telling people to “get in good trouble, necessary trouble. Help redeem the soul of America.” Booker said that in the years since Trump took office, he has been asking himself, “[H]ow am I living up to his words?”

“Tonight I rise with the intention of getting in some good trouble. I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our country is in crisis and I believe that not in a partisan sense,” he said, “because so many of the people that have been reaching out to my office in pain, in fear, having their lives upended—so many of them identify themselves as Republicans.”

Standing for the next 25 hours and 5 minutes, without a break to use the restroom and pausing only when colleagues asked questions to enable him to rest his voice, Booker called out the Trump administration’s violations of the Constitution and detailed the ways in which the administration is hurting Americans. Farmers have lost government contracts, putting them in a financial crisis. Cuts to environmental protections that protect clean air and water are affecting Americans’ health. Housing is unaffordable, and the administration is making things worse. Cuts to education and medical research and national security breaches have made Americans less safe. The regime accidentally deported a legal resident because of “administrative error” and now says it cannot get him back.

“These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such,” he said. “This is our moral moment. This is when the most precious ideas of our country are being tested…. Where does the Constitution live, on paper or in our hearts?”

Throughout his speech, Booker emphasized the power of the American people. He told their stories and read their letters. And he urged them to stand up for the country. “In this democracy,” he said, “the power of people is greater than the people in power.”

He emphasized the power of the people by calling out South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond, who until today held the record for the longest Senate speech: a filibuster he launched in 1957 to try to stop the passage of that year’s Civil Rights Act. Thurmond spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes, but unlike Booker, who used his time to make a powerful and coherent case for reclaiming American democracy, Thurmond filled time with tactics like reading from an encyclopedia.

But, Booker noted, Thurmond’s attempt to stop racial equality failed. After he ended his filibuster, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and Black Americans and their allies used it to demand the equal protection of the law, including the right to vote. “I’m not here…because of his speech,” Booker said. “I’m here despite his speech. I’m here because as powerful as he was, the people were more powerful.”

“It is time to heed the words of the man I began this whole thing with: John Lewis. I beg folks to take his example of his early days when he made himself determined to show his love for his country at a time the country didn’t love him, to love this country so much, to be such a patriot that he endured beatings, savagely, on the Edmund Pettus bridge, at lunch counters, on freedom rides. He said he had to do something. He would not normalize a moment like this. He would not just go along with business as usual. He wouldn’t know how to solve it, but there’s one thing that he would do, that I hope we all can do, that I think I did a little bit of tonight.

“He said for us to go out and cause some good trouble, necessary trouble, to redeem the soul of our nation. I want you to redeem the dream…. Let’s be bolder in America with a vision that inspires with hope. It starts with the people of the United States of America—that’s how this country started: ‘We the people.’ Let’s get back to the ideals that others are threatening, let's get back to our founding documents…. Those imperfect geniuses had some very special words at the end of the Declaration of Independence…when our founders said we must mutually pledge, pledge to each other ‘our lives, our fortunes, and our Sacred Honor.’ We need that now from all Americans. This is a moral moment. It’s not left or right, it's right or wrong.

“Let’s get in good trouble.

“My friend, madam president, I yield the floor.”

According to Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell, before he was through, Booker’s speech had been liked on TikTok 400 million times.

The people spoke today in special elections. Republican candidates in Florida won by about 14 points in each of two U.S. House races, but just five months ago, Republicans won those seats by 30 and 37 points. It appears that voters are angry at the Republican Party.

In Wisconsin, the state supreme court race showed a similar dynamic. The candidate endorsed by President Trump and backed by more than $20 million from Elon Musk, lost the race to his opponent, circuit court judge Susan Crawford. Musk had campaigned in the state for Crawford’s opponent, handing out two $1 million checks and saying that the election could determine “the future of America and Western Civilization.”

Crawford won by about 10 points.

“As a little girl growing up in Chippewa Falls,” Crawford said in her victory speech, “I never could have imagined that I’d be taking on the richest man in the world for justice in Wisconsin. And we won.”