It's the birthday of poet Rainer Maria Rilke , born in Prague (1875). As a very young man he met and fell madly in love with Lou Andreas-Salomé, the wife of a German university professor. She became a prime influence on his life and writing, though their affair was eventually called off. He followed her to St. Petersburg, Berlin, and other cities, where she helped him write, more as a mother-figure than a lover. Eventually he left her and travelled widely around the Continent by himself, finally settling in Paris. His great poems come from his 12 Paris years, including The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), and Duino Elegies (1923). Rilke wrote:

"It is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be a reason the more for us to do it. To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one being to love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation."

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) said, "The secret source of humor is not joy but sorrow; there is no humor in Heaven." He also said, "Go to Heaven for the climate, Hell for the company."

It's the birthday of the playwright David Mamet, born in Chicago, Illinois (1947). His father was a labor lawyer who loved to argue for the sake of arguing. Mamet said, "In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, solely based on our ability to speak the language viciously."

I'm very glad that Tommy Douglas was named "The Greatest Canadian". I would have been ashamed to be Canadian if people had chosen Don Cherry!

"The problem is not materialism as such. Rather, it is the underlying assumption that full satisfaction can arise from gratifying the senses alone. Unlike animals whose quest for happiness is restricted to survival and to the immediate gratification of sensory desires, we human beings have the capacity to experience happiness at a deeper level which, when achieved, can overwhelm unhappy experiences." -His Holiness the Dalai Lama

I hope that Tommy Douglas will win when the votes are tallied for "The Greatest Canadian" through CBC TV. I've voted for him several times on the website (http://cbc.ca/greatest ) and by phone.