Happy new year! And a belated birthday wish to my literary hero E. M. Forster, who was born on the 1st January 1879. I hope he won’t mind me calling him Morgan. In any case, I was looking through the stats for musicandmeaning.com (this will become evident in a forthcoming entry), and I found out that The Writer’s Almanac (public radio’s daily humanities blurb hosted by Garrison Keillor), mentioned Forster’s birthday and linked to my Forster site on its Web and e-mail editions for December 27, 2004 to January 2, 2005 (scroll down to January 1, or search in-browser for "Forster"). Very cool. In terms of the Almanac‘s blurb about Forster, I’m not sure where the quote comes from — it would have been nice to see a source. I’ll try looking it up, or maybe I could e-mail and ask the Almanac writers. I also noticed that Howards End is spelled with the dreaded apostrophe… <grin>

I haven’t heard The Writer’s Almanac on the radio in a while — I can’t remember when the last time was. I heard it regularly about ten years ago, when I was in high school. In the evenings I’d work on an article for the high school newspaper; I’d have my portable radio tuned to a public station (I’m guessing it must have been KUSC — I don’t remember KCRW or KPCC airing Writer’s Almanac on weekday evenings).