I feel obliged to inform you, if you didn't already know, that it's Thomas Jefferson's 266th birthday today.

In the latest issue of Common-Place ("The Journal We Don't Pay For"), Alison L. LaCroix relates how she, another professor at the University of Chicago Law School, and some intrepid law students tried to get inside the legal minds of the Founding Fathers by reading the same fiction they read.

Last September, I received a question from someone looking for a Jefferson letter titled, "The Value of Constitutions." Jefferson didn't usually bother to give his letters titles, so this was a bit puzzling. I finally figured out that this letter had been published in a volume edited by Edward Dumbauld, chapter 4 of which was titled, "The Value of Constitutions." It seemed pretty obvious that somewhere along the way, someone had quoted from the letter and attached the chapter title in such a way that people assumed that it was the title of the letter. Whoopsies.

Well, it's the 144th birthday of Paul Leicester Ford.

Thomas Fleming asks the question, "Was George W. Bush such a bad president?" I mean, look at...Thomas Jefferson, for example! He really whiffed on that embargo thing.

I'm eagerly delving into a book that arrived just today: Antonio Molina, Patriarch of the Anthony Mullins Family: An American History, compiled by Marjorie O'Brien Casteel. Who is Antonio Molina, AKA Anthony Mullins (or "little Anthony," as Jefferson called him)?

There have been a flood of news stories about the dramatic increases in usage of public libraries across the country.

Well, I've missed our President's actual inauguration by several days, but I'd like to belatedly commemorate the occasion by offering an intriguing historical tidbit about - yes! - Jefferson's first inauguration.

We get a lot of questions from the public asking us to verify quotations as Jeffersonian or not, but these almost always concern only a single quotation. The other week I got a query from an inquiring person that contained not one, but 10 quotations. The source of the query was a sort of chain-email calling Jefferson a "prophet" - an appellation I suspect he would not in fact like very much - and listing 10 purported Jefferson quotations.

It is claimed, by websites and other sources various and sundry, that Thomas Jefferson, upon hearing of a meteorite crash in Connecticut in 1807 and its subsequent reportage by two professors at Yale, scoffed that it "was easier to believe that two Yankee professors could lie than to admit that stones could fall from heaven."