be well, do good work, and keep in touch.

the best part of waking up at ass o'clock to take air force to the airport? remembering garrison keillor and his writer's almanac are on morning edition at 5:30 monday thru friday. (the best part of blogging about it? visiting the site to make a link and finding out i can get it by email every morning. i think it would lack a certain something without his Voice, though.)

in the w.a. keillor talks about significant authors who are (or would be) celebrating birthdays. and he reads excerpts, usually poetry.

here's an excerpt from this morning, but you should read the whole thing yourself:

"...And today is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway, born in Oak Park, Illinois (1899). He went off to fight in World War I when he was just 17. He had bad eyesight, so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. He gave away chocolate and cigarettes to the Italian troops. And just about a month after he got to Italy, he was hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell. He spent weeks in the hospital and then came back home to his parents in Oak Park.

Hemingway liked to give the impression that he was a poor bohemian, but he actually had plenty of money.

He wrote in a letter to his father, "I'm trying in all my stories to get the feeling of the actual life across—not to just depict life—or criticize it—but to actually make it alive."