“Heroes”

"Heroes"

The Best Person Ever poll didn’t quite touch all the bases, mainly because the people involved aren’t quite dead yet. So, people I think are/were graet:

- Ernest Shackleton. The greatest polar explorer who never quite got there, got stuck and had to sit on an ice-flow for a year before rowing to safety across thousands of miles of empty water. Like all great explorers and inventors, he was utterly useless with money, and spent his entire life in bitterly cold places to escape angry creditors and family members.

- Galileo Galilei. Owner of a magnificent beard, and some of the finest astronomical instruments known to man. Was not the first, and certainly won’t be the last to get into trouble with religious types for pointing out that they are completely and utterly wrong in the matters of science, and would you mind just fucking off out of my lab, please?

- Matt Groening. Creator of The Simpsons and Futurama, and therefore in the top ten of greatest living people, ever. Left-handed, too, which makes him doubly excellent. Officially the only American to be spared come the revolution.

The fact that all of these people share my birthday is, of course, purely coincidental.

Also sharing my birthday: The Labour Party (100 years old in 2006). I remember them, they used to stand for something.

You know what I’m going to ask. Regular reader Ricardipus confesses he shares his birthday with Talk Like a Pirate Day, and will thus be getting scurvy by way of a present this year. Who do you share your birthday with – and are they particularly heroic?