23 May 11

Today is the 101st birthday of Margaret Wise Brown, author of Goodnight Moon and other children's books. I don't have any appropriate tie (except maybe Van Gogh's "Starry Night," or "Bedroom at Arles"!) for the theme of "Goodnight comb / And goodnight brush / Goodnight nobody / Goodnight mush / And goodnight to the old lady whispering 'hush.'" So instead I'm honoring the birthday (in 1707) of Carolus (Carl) Linnaeus, the "father" of biological taxonomy, the system of naming and classifying organisms by kingdom-phylum-class-order-genus-species. The bunny in Goodnight Moon is probably an Eastern cottontail, Sylvilagus floridanus.