My ongoing physical therapy was kicked into a higher gear due to some sticking of the shoulder and the elevated pain had me up quite early this morning. I made the best of it by watching a couple of episodes of Sherlock Holmes from my DVD set and enjoyed a bowl of Hamborger Veermaster in an Ashton XXX Sovereign. Now on a bowl of same tobacco in the new Stnawell Featherweight.
It's the birthday of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, born in 1756 in Salzburg, which is now in Austria.
Mozart's father, Leopold, was one of Europe's leading music educators, and he took Mozart and his sister on tours throughout Europe. Young Mozart began composing original work at age five. During a trip to Italy, Mozart amazed his hosts when he listened only once to the performance of a Gregorio Allegri composition and then wrote it out from memory.
Mozart moved to Vienna in 1781, and in 1782 he married Constanze Weber. The couple had six children, but only two of them survived into adulthood. Mozart continued to compose music, and he wrote his famous opera The Marriage of Figaro (1786).
No one knows for sure why Mozart died at age 35. Many people speculate that he died of mercury poisoning while being treated for syphilis. Others think he died from eating badly cooked pork. Some insist that Mozart was murdered by his rival, Antonio Salieri. Mozart was buried in a mass grave because the country was battling an outbreak of bubonic plague, not because his family could not afford a proper burial.
Mozart said, "When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer — say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep — it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best, and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not, nor can I force them."
It's the birthday of Lewis Carroll, born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in Cheshire, England in 1832, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through the Looking-Glass (1871).
He was a faculty member in mathematics at Oxford and a serious photographer. When he was 24 years old, a new dean arrived at Carroll's church and brought his three daughters: Lorina Charlotte, Edith, and Alice. Carroll befriended the girls and spent a lot of time with them. In July of 1862, floating in a rowboat on a pond, he came up with a story about a girl's adventures in a magical underground world, and he told it to the three sisters.
Many biographers have made out Carroll to be a shy, awkward recluse, but he was actually charming and sociable. He loved to host dinner parties, and he wrote about 97,000 letters in his lifetime.
Carroll never forgot the day he invented the story of Alice and her adventures. He remembered "the cloudless blue above, the watery mirror below, the boat drifting idly on its way, the tinkle of the drops that fell from the oars ... the three eager faces, hungry for news of fairy-land." Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was published in 1865, and it became one of the most popular children's books in the world.
http://writersalmanac.publicradio.org/
Paul
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