Birthdays Today

President Theodore Roosevelt was born today in 1858.  While not a big fan of the Progressive movement he led, Roosevelt was almost entirely admirable as a man -- he was a true force of nature.   I can recommend heartily the two volumes of the Edmund Morris biography, and am looking forward to the third volume, which comes out next month.   Also, I loved Candace Millard's book The River of Doubt, about Roosevelt's ill-fated expedition up an unexplored tributary of the Amazon in the year after his defeat for the Presidency in 1912.   It seems odd now in the era of GPS to recall that, less than a hundred years ago, there were "unexplored" parts of the globe.  It also is remarkable that the world's most famous man (at the time), Teddy Roosevelt, went on an expedition of discovery that could have and probably should have cost him his life.

It is also the birthday, in 1901, of the great Marlene Dietrich.   One of my favorite all-time movies is Destry Rides Again, where Dietrich plays the femme fatale in a corrupt Western town cleaned up by Jimmy Stewart's cerebral sheriff.   Here's a fun scene:

Finally, today is also the birthday of John Cleese, born in 1939.   Hard to imagine Cleese is really 71 years old.   The Cheese Shop Sketch from Monty Python, on the other hand, will never get old:

Pretty sure that's #2 on my list of all-time favorite Monty Python sketches, behind only the Dead Parrot sketch.