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« The Brawl at Symphony Hall | Main | There's a new economics blogger in town » Friday, May 11, 2007Assassin DayYesterday, May 10, has been through the years quite a day in the annals of assassination. As Answers.com tells us, John Wilkes Booth (b. 1838), James Earl Ray (b. 1929) and Mark David Chapman (b. 1952) were all born on May 10. If you need reminding, Booth ended up killing Abraham Lincoln in Ford's Theatre; Ray shot Martin Luther King, Jr. dead when he stepped out onto a hotel balcony in Memphis; and Chapman ended the life of John Lennon outside of his apartment building on 72nd St. and Central Park West in Manhattan. Could astrology be at work? Could Ray have been inspired by Booth, his birthday-sharing predecessor? Or Chapman inspired by either Booth or Ray or both? We'll never know about Ray, who died in 1998. But perhaps we'll hear something from Chapman, who has been denied parole at New York state's Attica prison several times since 2000. Abbas Reza picks up the item and adds a question: "does anyone know why assassins are almost always known by their full names, meaning their middle name is also always included? Why not just Lee Oswald, for example? I favor the explanation that it saves all the Mark Chapmans, John Booths, and James Rays of the world from being mistaken for a cold-blooded killer. Posted by Evan Hughes at 02:49 PM
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