Garrison Keillor's daily almanac

this is from Garrison Keillor's daily Writer's Almanac.

It's the birthday of journalist Brendan Gill, born in Hartford, Connecticut (1914), who wrote for The New Yorker for more than 60 years, publishing fiction, essays, and criticism. He said, "Fiction is my chief interest, followed by architectural history, followed by literary and dramatic criticism. If these fields were to be closed to me, I would write copy for a bird-seed catalogue. In any event, I would write." Gill loved his job and he loved New York. He said, "You feel, in New York City, the energy coming up out of the sidewalks, you know that you are in the midst of something tremendous, and if something tremendous hasn't yet happened, it's just about to happen."
He also said, "Not a shred of evidence exists in favor of the idea that life is serious."

It's the birthday of Damon Runyon, (books by this author) born Alfred Damon Runyon, in Manhattan, Kansas (1884). He started out as a newspaper man but made his breakthrough as a fiction writer during the prohibition era, when he began to write about gamblers, bookies, fight managers, theater agents, bootleggers, and gangsters in New York City. He wrote semi-fictional sketches of real people, and he gave them names like Dave the Dude, Harry the Horse, Nathan Detroit, Benny Southstreet, Dream Street Rose, Big Julie from Chicago, and Izzy Cheesecake. He helped popularize the slang of the era, in which a woman was called "a doll," a gun was called "a rod," money was called "scratch," and people didn't die, they "croaked." His short stories were collected in books such as Blue Plate Special (1934) and More than Somewhat (1937), but he's best remembered for the musical Guys and Dolls, based upon several of his stories and characters he created. Damon Runyon said, "Sell your cleverness and buy bewilderment."