Things We Learned from Twitter This P.M.- It was 145 Years Ago Today....

....That John Wilkes Booth, the theatrical actor who assasinated President Abraham Lincoln at the Ford's Theatre in Washington, DC, was himself shot to death by Boston Corbett (1832-1888?-death date can not be confirmed, read on!).

An interesting detail about the shooting of Booth is that Corbett was actually arrested for the incident for a brief while before he was given $1,600 in reward money.

Corbett was an evangelical Christian who tried to immitate Jesus Christ to far extremes. He even referred to the shooting of Booth as something which 'God delivered upon him to carry out.'

Sometime before joining the Union Army, Corbett castraited himself with a pair of scissors.

In 1865, a short time after Lincoln's assasination, Corbett was asked to join a group of Union soldiers who would try to find Booth. They found him in a Virginia farm. Corbett shot Booth with a Colt revolver at a distance of no more than 12 feet.

After the incident, Corbett went crazy and moved to Kansas. He escaped from the Topeka Asylum on horseback in 1888 reportedly on his way to Mexico. Pardon the cliche---he was never seen or heard from again.

As for the Ford's Theatre, they will produce the famed musical "Little Shop of Horrors" starting on May 22 with Christopher Kale Jones starring as Seymour.

PS_I must profess that I did contemplate not posting this piece because of the incident in Asheville, NC, yesterday in which a disturbed man apparently brought a gun to the Asheville Airport where President Barack Obama was preparing to head back to the White House after a weekend vacation. But, both the history and the novelty of the Booth shooting were too interesting to me. We are certainly glad no one was succesful at hurting President Obama or his family, especially since I live in North Carolina.

SIDEBAR_In something I also learned through Twitter, Joe Rubino of "The Colorado Daily News" in Boulder, Colo., is reporting that suicide rates at Colorado University are at a four-year low. According to the article, there have only been two suicides on the campus of the Boulder university this school year. The story comes just a few weeks after NPR reported that Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, was seeing a major increase in campus suicides."From a suicide prevention standpoint we've been very succesful," Deb Coffin, CU's dean of students, told "The Colorado Daily."