Cranky Large Medium reading, 12 May

Go away.

Haven't you gone, yet? Why not? Is there some native cruelty about you, that you stay where and when you are not wanted? Oh, no, you just came for something and you won't go without it. That something would be... of course, a reading! What a surprise. I breathe deeply to recover from my shock. So, after the reading, you will go away? Let me hurry it out, then. Here you are:

All right, Mister Spock, you're so stuck on logic and reason you can't get a date more frequently than every seven years. Still, you have ambition, partly an ambition to improve yourself (simple enough for any human). You are spoiled, like literature and music and artsy surroundings -- as does every hoity-toity snoot. You demand a lot of affection and attention, some of which you are willing to return.

Are you happy, now? Of course not. Just look at it from a rational perspective. You still have your life. That's a lot more than these people have, all of whom, on this date in history, met a logical conclusion: Thomas Palaeologus, Thomas Wentworth, George Vancouver, J. E. B. Stuart, Irena Sendler, Edme Mariotte, Thomas Lowndes, Jacques Philippe Marie Binet, Friedrich William Eduard Gerhard, Anselme Payen, Pope Silvester II, Pope Sergius IV, George Chapman, John Dryden, Amy Lowell, Max Brand, Arthur Quiller-Couch, John Masefield, Nelly Sachs, Lucas Achtschellinck, Lambert-Sigisbert Adam, Charles Barry, Saul Steinberg, Robert Rauschenberg, Bedřich Smetana, Erich von Stroheim, Robert Reed, Lenny Montana, Heinie Manush, Art Pollard, Adam Petty, John Cadbury,

and Pierino "Perry" Como.

Catch a falling cake.
Happy birthday, anyway.