Today is the 46th annual Earth Day. This year’s theme is, “Trees for the Earth.”

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“He that can heroically endure adversity will bear prosperity with equal greatness of soul; for the mind that cannot be dejected by the former is not likely to be transported with the later.”—Henry Fielding, “Amelia”

Henry Fielding was born on this date in 1707. He was also the author of the novels Joseph Andrews; The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling; and Shamela.

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“You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.”—Vladimir Nabokov, “Lolita”

Vladimir Nabokov was born on this date in 1899.
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Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia visited Kingston, Jamaica, fifty years ago today. Over 100,000 people came to the airport to catch a glimpse of him. (Photo above.)

A religious movement had grown in Jamaica since the 1930s holding that the emperor himself was God incarnate, the Messiah, the “King of Kings.” Selassie’s birth name was Tafari and his pre-imperial title had been Ras (“duke”)—Ras Tafari—which the religion took as its name. The followers called themselves Rastafarians.

The Emperor never embraced the idea of his divinity, but he never denied it outright, either. “Who am I to disturb their belief?” he is reported to have said once. Today is a holy day in Jamaica, Grounation Day, the day the messiah himself visited Jamaica. A video from the day, below the fold:
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Dr. Simon Forman was a doctor and astrologer in Shakespeare’s time who would be forgotten except he kept a diary about his day-to-day life in 1610 and 1611-era London. In it, he recounts seeing several of Shakespeare’s plays live in production at the Globe Theater. He describes seeing “Macbeth” on April 20, 1610 (or 1611; opinions differ), in what was one of the first-ever productions of “the Scottish play.”

He only devotes a couple paragraphs to describing the play (excerpted above), and he crams several acts into this (below the fold):
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