{"id":17821,"date":"2012-11-18T11:40:08","date_gmt":"2012-11-18T16:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=17821"},"modified":"2013-10-02T20:10:30","modified_gmt":"2013-10-03T01:10:30","slug":"having-infamous-ancestors","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/11\/18\/having-infamous-ancestors\/","title":{"rendered":"Having (in)famous ancestors"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>John Scalzi is having mixed reactions to all the Twitter updates about Lincoln and theatres:<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet tw-align-center\">\n<p>Man, if I see another joke about Lincoln and theaters, I might just have to shoot someone.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; John Scalzi (@scalzi) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/scalzi\/status\/270157228403728386\" data-datetime=\"2012-11-18T13:31:17+00:00\">November 18, 2012<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet tw-align-center\">\n<p>Fun fact: John Wilkes Booth is my great-great-great(etc) uncle. It&#8217;s true. Also: He has the same birthday as me.<\/p>\n<p>&mdash; John Scalzi (@scalzi) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/scalzi\/status\/270158885292232705\" data-datetime=\"2012-11-18T13:37:52+00:00\">November 18, 2012<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><script src=\"\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script><\/p>\n<p>And he wrote about his infamous relative <a href=\"http:\/\/whatever.scalzi.com\/2005\/05\/17\/the-family-assassin\/\" target=\"_blank\">a few years ago<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>Every family should have an interesting skeleton in the family closet. In my family, it\u2019s John Wilkes Booth, assassin of Abraham Lincoln, who, of course, was the President of the United States during the American Civil War. Booth assassinated Lincoln not long after the cessation of hostilities between the Union and the Confederacy, by sneaking into the President\u2019s box at Ford\u2019s Theater (the show: <em>Our American Cousin<\/em>) and shooting him in the back of the head with a pistol. Booth then leaped from the box to the stage, shouting \u201c<em>Sic semper tyrannis<\/em>\u201d (\u201cThus it is with tyrants\u201d) and \u201cThe South is avenged.\u201d He broke his leg but managed to escape nevertheless. However, eleven days later, he was discovered in a barn, burned out, and then shot (by himself or by a soldier, it\u2019s unclear). He died shortly thereafter. Some maintain that Booth\u2019s body was never positively identified, so it\u2019s possible he actually escaped. Either way, he\u2019s dead now.<\/p>\n<p>For the record, I\u2019m not a direct descendant \u2014 my line goes through one of his nine other siblings, making him something along the lines of a great-great-great-great-great-grand-uncle. Whenever I mention my relationship to him, though, people\u2019s eyes get wide, their jaws go momentarily slack, and some people actually back up a step, as if a long dormant assassination gene might suddenly fire up, and they\u2019d be the unlucky recipient. I get a kick out of that. Then I go for the extra point my mentioning that John Wilkes and I have the same birthday: May 10, 131 years apart. By the time I mention I get edgy handling pennies and five dollar bills, people begin to wend their way to the nearest door.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>John Scalzi is having mixed reactions to all the Twitter updates about Lincoln and theatres: Man, if I see another joke about Lincoln and theaters, I might just have to shoot someone. &mdash; John Scalzi (@scalzi) November 18, 2012 Fun fact: John Wilkes Booth is my great-great-great(etc) uncle. It&#8217;s true. Also: He has the same [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,57,13],"tags":[933,173,650,381],"class_list":["post-17821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-humour","category-usa","tag-abrahamlincoln","tag-assassin","tag-civilwar","tag-theatre"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4Dr","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17821","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17821"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17821\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17823,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17821\/revisions\/17823"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17821"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17821"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17821"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}