What will you buy with your check?

So the President will save the economy by giving everyone some pocket change. Perhaps everyone could chip in and buy Britney Spears some panties and a doctor.


And now your Today in History -


On January 19, 1793, French king Louis XVI was condemned to death. He was guillotined in Paris two days later. Please refer to my post on the word "impeachment".


January 19, 1809 -
It's the birthday of the poet and short-story writer Edgar Allan Poe, born in Boston. He was the son of two actors, but since he was Edgar Allan Poe, both his parents died of tuberculosis when he was just a boy. He was taken in by a wealthy Scotch merchant named John Allan, who gave Edgar Poe his middle name. His foster father sent him to the prestigious University of Virginia, where he was surrounded by the sons of wealthy slave-owning families. He developed a habit of drinking and gambling with the other students, but his foster father didn't approve. He and John Allan had a series of arguments about his behavior and his career choices, and he was finally disowned and thrown out of the house. Sometimes, we all make bad choices.


He spent the next several years living in poverty, depending on his aunt for a home, supporting himself by writing anything he could, including a how-to guide for seashell collecting and picking the pockets of the dead at funerals. Eventually, he began to contribute poems, journalism and helpful cleaning tips to magazines. At the time, magazines were a new literary medium in the United States, and Poe was one of the first writers to make a living writing for magazines. He called himself a "magazinist."


He first made his name writing some of the most brutal book reviews ever published at the time. He was called the "tomahawk man from the South." He described one poem as "an illimitable gilded swill trough," and he said, "[Most] of those who hold high places in our poetical literature are absolute nincompoops." He particularly disliked the work of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and John Greenleaf Whittier.


Poe also began to publish fiction, and he specialized in humorous and satirical stories because that was the style of fiction most in demand. Once again, remember this is Edgar Allan Poe - so, soon after he married his 14-year-old cousin, Virginia, he learned that she had tuberculosis, just like his parents, and he began to write darker stories. One of his editors complained that his work was growing too grotesque, but Poe replied that the grotesque would sell magazines. And he was right. His work helped launch magazines as the major new venue for literary fiction.


But even though his stories sold magazines, he still didn't make much money. He made about $4 per article and $15 per story, and the magazines were notoriously late with their paychecks. There was no international copyright law at the time, and so his stories were printed without his permission throughout Europe. There were periods when he and his wife lived on bread, molasses, and dustbunnies and sold most of their belongings to the pawn shop.


It was under these conditions, suffering from alcoholism, and watching his wife grow slowly worse in health, that he wrote some of the greatest gothic horror stories in English literature, including "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Near the end of his wife's illness, he published the poem that begins,


"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door."


It became his most famous poem: "The Raven."






Don Simpson, American film producer, S & M bottom, owner of a collagen enlarged penis and snuff and porno film aficionado, was found dead on the toilet in his home in Los Angeles on this date in 1996. The cause of death was a heart attack. According to the coroner's report, Mr. Simpson had Toradol, Librium, Ativan, Valium, Depakote, Thorazine, Cogentin, Vistaril, Lorazepam and 19 others, including morphine in his system at the time of his death. According to High Concept, a Simpson biography by reporter Charles Fleming, Simpson had a $60,000 per month drug habit at the time of his death. His job as an executive at Paramount Studios came to an end when he allegedly passed out in the middle of a meeting. Simpson told an acquaintance, "They fired me on a f*cking morals charge! They had executives (read Barry Diller) buggering boys in the backseats of their Porsches, and they fired me on a f*cking morals charge!"





He was a charming man at parties.


And so it goes.