Round numbers

A big day--the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, and Darwin's, two of the most influential minds of the 19th century. Kit Carson was also born in 1809, as was Nikolai Gogol, Edgar Allen Poe, Alfred Tennyson and 562 other notables and excrebles listed in the Wikipedia category:1809 births. How we love round numbers--50, 100, 200, 1000.

This is the centennial of the NAACP, started on the centennial of Lincoln's birth. Also, the Lincoln penny was introduced in 1909 to honor The Great Emancipator. According to the inflation calculator, that 1909 coin was worth 22 times the value of its 2009 descendant. I have a 1909 Lincoln penny collected in my numismatic youth, bearing the mark VDB, the initials of its designer. Wouldn't trade it for a quarter. Also in 1909, Mahler conducted the NY Philharmonic for the first time, Perry reached the North Pole, Orville Wright tested the first military aircraft, and the first ship at sea was rescued due to radio.

Celebrating fifty (tomorrow) is Barbie, whose freakish anatomy cannot be accounted for by Darwin's theories. 1959 saw Castro chuck Fulgencio Batista out of Cuba; Alaska joined the Union as the 49th state, Bozo the Clown and Rawhide premiered on TV, Pope John XXIII proclaimed the Second Vatican Council, and the Presbyterian Church OKed the ordination of women.

Church of the Holy Sepulchre before Al-Hakim.

Those who take the longer view might note the coronation of Henry VIII in 1509, the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem by Caliph Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah, who hacked the church's foundations down to bedrock in 1009 AD, or the birth of Roman Emperor Vespasian in 9 AD. You have to wonder, looking at a 2009 infant, what they might do to get themselves onto the 2209 list. We can hope it's not the hacking down to bedrock thing.