Good morning.
Sunrise this Saturday is 7:07 AM and sunset is 7:01 PM. The moon is in a waxing gibbous phase with 99% of its visible disk illuminated. Today’s high will be thirty-five.
Of Friday’s poll, over 80% of respondents thought that Rod Sommerville of Australia was sensible when he had a beer while waiting for medical assistance after receiving a snake bite.
We’re at the Ides of March, famous to us as an expression for a long-ago assassination:
“Beware the Ides of March,” the soothsayer urges Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar (act I, scene ii). Despite the forewarning, Caesar is stabbed in the back by his friend Marcus Brutus. Caesar falls and utters his famous last words, “Et tu, Brute?” (And you, Brutus?)
Shakespeare’s source for the play was Thomas North’s Lives of the Nobel Grecians and Romans, which detailed the murder of Caesar in 44 B.C. Caesar’s friends and associates feared his growing power and his recent self-comparison to Alexander the Great and felt he must die for the good of Rome. North’s work translated a French version of Plutarch, which itself had been translated from Latin. Shakespeare’s version was written about 1599 and performed at the newly built Globe Theater.
Ides, Kalends, Nones – simply terms of the Roman calendar that might have had no special meaning to us but for Shakespeare’s play about a certain act on a certain day.
On this day in 1862, more Wisconsinites do their part for the Union:
1862 – (Civil War) 17th and 18th Wisconsin Infantry Regiments Mustered In
The 17th and 18th Wisconsin Infantry regiments mustered in at Madison and Milwaukee, respectively. Both regiments would move from the lower Mississippi Valley into Tennessee and Georgia, participate in Sherman’s March to the Sea, and converge on Virginia at the end of the war. Before they mustered out, the 17th would lose 269 men and the 18th, 225.