As the countdown winds down — only 13630 days, according to the main schedule — we look at one of the interim milestones as well as some of the news items that indicate our species’ desire to divert our attention from diverting our attention from reaching our goals.

1. First, there is the Mars One mission that wants humans willing to take a one-way trip to Mars, becoming the first to travel to, live and die on a nonEarth celestial body.
2. Next, there are the theories that lay out theories about theories why we would want to premeditate murder — of course, the real purpose of every conspiracy theorist is to protect free speech, regardless of the theory and the headlines it does or doesn’t generate.
3. For every conspiracy theory about the government censoring the news, there are verified stories in which mass media mavens actually kept quiet at the government’s behest.  Numerous times during WWII, the U.S. government asked newspaper reporters and publishers to hold off reporting a battle or an invasion and they did.  In other countries, the government simply took the great honour of culling and killing the reporters and their publishers ahead of time because the government never trusted them to begin with.

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Like other Presidents who exerted forceful leadership at critical junctures in American history, [Franklin D.] Roosevelt was the recipient of both passionate adoration and blind hatred.

Roosevelt jokes — and jokes about his wife, Eleanor, who was always on the go — abounded.

Some of them Roosevelt enjoyed; others he regarded as beneath contempt.

His favorite cartoon showed a little girl running to tell her mother standing in front of a fashionable home: “Look, mama, Wilfred wrote a bad word!”  The word on the sidewalk was “Roosevelt.”

And his favorite story was about the commuter from Westchester County, a Republican stronghold, who always walked into his train station, handed the newspaper boy a quarter, picked up the New York Herald Tribune, and then handed it back as he rushed out to catch his train.

Finally the newsboy, unable to contain his curiosity any longer, asked his customer why he only glanced at the front page.

“I’m interested in the obituary notices,” the man told him.

“But they’re way over on page twenty-four, and you never look at them,” said the boy.

“Boy,” said the man,” the son of a bitch I’m interested in will be on page one!”

In that vein…

At a Cabinet meeting one day Roosevelt gleefully told the story about an American marine who, ordered home from Guadalcanal, was disconsolate because he hadn’t killed even one of the enemy.

He stated his case to his superior officer, who said: “Go up on that hill over that and shout: ‘To hell with Emperor Hirohito!’ That will bring the Japs out of hiding.”

The marine did as he was ordered.

Immediately a Japanese soldier came out of the jungle, shouting, “To hell with Roosevelt!”

“And of course,” said the marine, “I could not kill a Republican.”

— more stories collected in Presidential Anecdotes by Paul F. Boller, Jr. (Kingsport, TN, 1981)