Happy birthday... Mr President

A birthday, a US presidential election and a big ol' horse race. Taken separately, these things are always fun: birthdays are fun; Sarah Palin has made the presidential election very funny; and how much fun can you have with four legs?

So what happy happenstance has brought these three fun things together? That's right! They share the same day on our rusty old Gregorian calendar.

On November 4 this happy triumvirate will explode in a shower of coloured popcorn, confetti and horse poo, in no particular order.

In honour of this once-in-a-lifetime alignment, I am dedicating the next week to the magnificence and sometimes nonsense of birthdays, elections and horsies, culminating in a, well, in a post on all three on the day itself ("wow," I hear you say, "now that's something to look forward to").

So let's get started.

When President Kennedy turned 45 he had a whole bunch of people over to Madison Square Gardens for a bit of a barbie. Marilyn Monroe was wandering by and thought she'd join in; it'd been ages since she'd had a snag and a tinny. Getting into the spirit of things she threw on an old diamante-studded evening gown she had in the back of the Torana and sang a round of 'Happy Birthday' to the President, very wittily inserting "Mr President" where we usually say the person's name! Imagine.

All well and good, you may say, but then Monroe continued with a snippet from the golden oldie tune 'Thanks for the Memory' (you know, Bob Hope... Frank Sinatra... Rod Stewart), for which she had written new lyrics:

Thanks, Mr. President

For all the things you've done

The battles that you've won

The way you deal with U.S. Steel

And our problems by the ton

We thank you so much.

This, my friends, is lyric-genius. Let us all put down our pencils in lyric-awe. Happy birthday, Mr President, indeed.