The 39.8% Solution.
If you think we’re a ‘house divided’ today...
Abraham Lincoln was elected president the first time around with not even 40% of the popular vote.
Happy 177th Birthday Sherlock Holmes!
Today, January 6th, 2025, was Sherlock Holmes’s birthday!
Well, not really.
Sixty-something years ago, William Baring-Gould wrote a supposed biography of the fictional detective which pronounced January 6th to be his birth date, and Sherlockians everywhere—judging by the “Happy 171st Birthday Sherlock Holmes!” Facebook posts I’m seeing—continue to celebrate it.
I don’t.
Why Juneteenth?
“A bit of a made-up holiday, isn’t it?” asked an acquaintance after Juneteenth was recognized as a national holiday three summers ago. He wasn’t questioning why we would celebrate the ending of slavery in America—he was quibbling with the date itself:
“The first ‘Juneteenth’ came two and a half years after Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation and six months before the 13th Amendment was ratified. If we’re going to celebrate the end of slavery, why not pick one of those dates?”
Write That Book!
There’s a book inside you that’s been waiting to come out, and when New Year’s Day rolls around, you swear you’re going to bear down and finish it—this year! But another twelve months go by without a manuscript to show for it and you tell yourself, “No, really, this year….” And again and again, until so many New Years go by you lose count. Your friends stop asking about it. Your spouse no longer listens to the excuses. Your kids think you’ve gone soft. Even the cat doesn’t want to hear about it.
And yet that book is still inside, waiting to come out.
I know all about that book—I had it in me, too. “This is the year,” I’d say, full of resolve. Then, a year later, “No, really, this is the year….”