Happy Birthday - Daniel Day-Lewis. I mentioned him in passing because one of the parts he has played in film - Abraham Lincoln - shared a birthday with Charles Darwin. It's not for lack of commitment that he won an unprecedented 3rd Best Actor Oscar for the part: he is famous for taking method acting to extremes - learning Czech, skinning a deer and contracting pneumonia for his craft. It is said that he even saw the ghost of his own father while playing Hamlet, blew a psychic gasket and hasn't appeared on stage since. We have a neighborly connexion in that the same (ghostly) father was born near Stradbally, Queen's County while my grandfather was born across the border near Birr, King's County. There's hardly anyone left alive who would care enough about their Anglo-Irish roots to affect to deny the existence of Offaly and Laois. I don't know if DDL cares a button one way or the other.
I haven't seen Lincoln yet, and am not in a tearing hurry to do so but still have strange dreams about DDL's buckskin-clad thighs pumping up and down as they leap through the woods in the steps of Chingachgook (or was it Queequeg? or Umslopogaas? I forget)
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