Today is Vincent Van Gogh's birthday. He painted some really weird shit before cutting off his ear, losing the plot and killing himself at age 43. He would have been 152.



This one is "Starry Night". I did a piece on Don McLean and his "Vincent" a few months ago.

Today is also Anna Sewell's birthday. She was born a bit earlier than Vincent, in 1820.

Anna was a disabled Quaker Englishwoman of gentle birth who, in her later life, wrote one very famous book that attributed human feelings to an animal, in this case a horse. It sold 30 million copies.

Its title was "Black Beauty". She died just a few months after it was published and never saw the improvements it brought about in the treatment of working horses in late 19th Century Britain.

You can read it or rip it here if your education never stretched that far.