Odd little fact of the day: Charles Darwin was a great-uncle of the composer Ralph Vaughn Williams.

(I love Vaughn Williams' music. I think he's displaced even Bach as my favorite composer. His music is the quintessence of what I think of as "Englishness," in the best possible sense of the word. It's both evocative and comforting. Some of his pieces capture the feeling of having hiked up a hill on a cool fall day; others call up a certain bustling pomposity that is enjoyable in its own sense. He also seemed to have a great love for folk-tunes, and I appreciate that in a composer (I love Dvorak for similar reasons) He's also responsible for at least arranging the tunes of a number of the hymns I love.

And he also apparently liked cats, if the picture in the link above is any indication.)