James Thurber

The naked truth about me is to the naked truth about Salvador Dali as an old ukelele in an attic is to a piano in a tree, and I mean a piano with breasts.  

(James Thurber -- whose hilarious but often surreal short stories and cartoons graced the New Yorker's pages for many years -- was born on this date in 1894.  When he was a child, his brother William shot James in the eye with an arrow when they were playing a game.  Thurber lost his eye, and eventually became almost entirely blind as a result of the injury.  Neurologist V. S. Ramachandran has suggested that Thurber's remarkable imagination may be partly explained by Charles Bonnet syndrome, a neurological condition that causes complex visual hallucinations in otherwise mentally healthy people who have suffered a significant level of visual loss.)