A Titanic day…
The North Atlantic…
This day goes down in history as one of Titanic hubris—in 1912 it marked the sinking of the eponymous “unsinkable” passenger-liner en route to New York (at the age of 96, Millvina Dean of Southampton is today the last living of the famous ship’s 706 survivors). Besides being my brother Jim’s birthday, 15 April was also the birthday of Leonardo daVinci (in 1452), the day that Abraham Lincoln died (in 1865), the birth-date of German poet/moralist Wilhelm Busch (in 1908—remember the cretinous Max und Moritz, Jim?), and the horrific, dark day in 1945 that British and Canadian troops discovered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.
Images: Willy Stöwer’s Untergang der Titanic; da Vinci’s John the Baptist (detail); and Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz.