“Autumn, the year's last, loveliest smile.” so wrote the poet, William Cullen Bryant, born in Massachusetts on the 3rd of November, 1794, the year of the so-called Whiskey Rebellion. man oh man, we Americans have always gotten our knickers twisted over taxes, never liked paying the club dues. John Trumbull painted his grand and famous [grandly, famously crowded] painting, commemorating the signing of the Dec. of Ind. that year....As to Wm. C. B.'s notion of smiling nature, I reckon I'd counter w/ a white December morning. Here's a link to Wm.'s Thanatopsis:

http://www.poetry-archive.com/b/thanatopsis.html

Me, I'll read it later. That's one long-ass 'pome'

It's the birthday, too, of Anastasia's big sister Olga, the Grand Duchess Olga Nikolaevna Romanov, one of Czar Nicky's lovely, photogenic, doomed daughters, who no more asked to be born into their coddled lives [or did they? guess we'll find out on the other side] than did their stubborn, shy parents and all the infants of the masses. Olga, I find, was born when my grandmother, Eulah Brown of Cameron, MO, was two years old. ...