Saturday
Mar. 8, 2003
Saturday
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Poem: "Saturday," by Daniel Hoffman from Beyond Silence: Selected Shorter Poems 1948-2003 (Louisiana State University Press).
Saturday
An experiment results in the transmutation
of a fly and a man. When
the old castle of a vampire baron is restored
the baron returns and goes
on a killing spree. A mad scientist transplants his
insane assistant's brain in
another human. After a baby sea-monster
is captured off the coast of
Ireland and placed in a London circus, its angry
father makes a shambles of
the city. Suffering from exhaustion, a pop singer
comes to a bee farm for rest
only to find her life endangered by the insane
beekeeper. A vampire must
prey upon living humans to sustain its own life.
The life of a young woman
is irrevocably changed when she moves into a
sinister house. A public
opinion analyst, stumbling on a hillbilly
family, becomes involved
in murder. A successful songwriter decides to
pursue the girl of his dreams.
Literary Notes:
It's the birthday of writer John McPhee, born in Princeton, New Jersey (1931). He is the author of many books and a staff writer for many years for The New Yorker magazine. In his book Oranges (1967), about the orange growing business, he wrote, "An orange grown in Florida usually has a thin and tightly fitting skin, and it is also heavy with juice. Californians say that if you want to eat a Florida orange you have to get into a bathtub first. California oranges are light in weight and have thick skins that break easily and come off in hunks. The flesh inside is marvelously sweet, and the segments almost separate themselves. In Florida, it is said that you can run over a California orange with a ten-ton truck and not even wet the pavement."
It's the birthday of chemist Otto Hahn, born in Frankfurt, Germany (1879). In 1944, he won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering the fission of heavy nuclei, which made the atomic bomb possible.
It's the birthday of essayist and children's author Kenneth
Grahame, born in Edinburgh, Scotland (1859), known for his book The
Wind in the Willows (1908), one of the best-known children's classics in
the English language. When he was five years old his mother died of scarlet
fever, and Kenneth, delirious and near death from the disease himself, could
not understand his mother's failure to be near him. That spring he and his siblings
went to live with their grandmother in her big, run-down house on the Thames,
and he played freely in the meadow and on the river bank, withdrawing into an
imaginary world. When he returned at age forty-six to the rural area where he
had lived as a child, and began exploring it with his small son, he found he
remembered every detail and association. He developed the idea that children
need a "secret kingdom" in their minds where they could go when upset
or bored by the rest of the world. Grahame helped steer children's literature
away from stories about how children should behave, and just tried to appeal
to their imaginations. He wrote his famous book almost by accident. He was working
at a bank at the time, and publishing essays on the side. Every night he came
home to his son, whom he'd nicknamed Mouse, and told him bedtime stories before
bed. The stories were about the adventures of a Badger, a Mole, a Toad, and
a Water rat. In May 1907, Grahame's son went with his governess on a holiday,
and Grahame continued telling his son bedtime stories in letters. These letters
became the first draft of The Wind In the Willows. He said, "There
is nothing -- absolutely nothing -- half so much worth doing as simply messing
about in boats… In or out of 'em, it doesn't matter. Nothing seems really
to matter, that's the charm of it. Whether you get away, or whether you don't;
whether you arrive at your destination or whether you reach somewhere else,
or whether you never get anywhere at all, you're always busy, and you never
do anything in particular; and when you've done it there's always something
else to do."
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