Today's Word—Bad News

Turn It Off!

Everybody Tells Me Everything

“I find it very difficult to enthuse
Over the current news.
Just when you think that at least the outlook is
so black that it can grow no blacker, it worsens.
And that is why I do not like the news,
because there has never been an era
when so many things were going so right
for so many of the wrong persons.”
—Ogden Nash (1902-1971), poet, 1941
(Thanks to alert WORDster Tom Hodges)

On This Day . . .
. . . In 1917, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war against Germany, saying, “The world must be made safe for democracy.”
. . . In 1513, Spanish explorer Juan Ponce de Leon landed in Florida.
. . . In 1865, Confederate President Jefferson Davis and most of his Cabinet fled the Confederate capital of Richmond, Va.
. . . In 1932, aviator Charles Lindbergh, through an intermediary, paid $50,000 ransom in a New York cemetery to a man who promised to return his kidnapped son. (The child was found dead the following month. The ransom money was eventually traced to Bruno Hauptmann, who was executed for the crime.)
. . . In 1968, “2001: A Space Odyssey” premiered in Washington, D.C.
. . . In 1982, Argentina seized the disputed Falkland Islands from Britain.
. . . In 2005, Pope John Paul II died at 84 after 26 years leading the Roman Catholic Church.
. . . In 2007, in its first case on climate change, the Supreme Court declared in a 5-4 ruling that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.

Birthdays:
66 . . . singer Leon Russell
63 . . . Baseball Hall of Famer Don Sutton
61 . . . country singer Emmylou Harris
84 . . . German artist Max Ernst (1891-1976)
71. . . conquerer and ruler Charlemagne (742-814)
73. . . Italian writer, soldier and adventurer Giovanni Casanova (1725-1798)
70. . . Frederic Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904), French sculptor of Statue of Liberty