In 1922, on this day the author Kurt Vonnegut was born. As recounted in his famous book Slaughterhouse-Five, Tralfamdorians had explained to him that the act of conception was much more complicated than most human beings believed. Flying-saucer crews had identified no fewer than seven sexes on Earth, each essential to reproduction. Vonnegut couldn't possibly imagine what five of those seven sexes had to do with the making of a baby, since they were sexually active only in the fourth dimension. The Tralfamadorians tried to give Vonnegut clues that would help him imagine sex in the invisible dimension. They told him that there could be no Earthling babies without male homosexuals. There could be babies without female homosexuals. There couldn't be babies without women over sixty-five years old. There could be babies without men over sixty-five. There couldn't be babies without other babies who had lived an hour or less after birth. And so on. It was gibberish to Vonnegut.

Kurt Vonnegut	In 1968, war buddies Bernard V. O'Hare and Kurt Vonnegut went back to Dresden with Guggenheim money. They took a taxi with Gerhard Mueller. All three had served in the war. Mueller told them that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. They asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now.
Pacifist

He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes. He sent O'Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and here is what it said ~ I wish you and your family also as to your friend [Kurt Vonnegut] Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I hope that we'll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will.

In 1948, the very toughest reporters and writers were women who had taken over the jobs of men who'd gone to war.

And the first story Kurt Vonnegut covered he had to dictate over the telephone to one of those beastly girls. It was about a young veteran who had taken a job running an old-fashioned elevator in an office building. The elevator door on the first floor was ornamental iron lace. Iron ivy snaked in and out of the holes. There was an iron twig with two iron lovebirds perched upon it.The making of Slaughterhouse-Five, Part 2This veteran decided to take his car into the basement, and he closed the door and started down, but his wedding ring was caught in all the ornaments. So he was hoisted into the air and the floor of the car went down, dropped out from under him, and the top of the car squashed him.

So it goes. So I phoned this in, and the woman who was going to cut the stencil asked me. "What did his wife say?" "She doesn't know yet," I said. "It just happened". "Call her up and get a statement". "What?" "Tell her you're Captain Finn of the Police Department. Say you have some sad news. Give her the news, and see what she say"

So I did. She said about what you would expect her to say. There was a baby. And so on. When I got back to the office, the woman writer asked me, just for her own information, what the squashed guy had looked like when he was squashed. I told her.

"Did it bother you?" she said. She was eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar. "Heck no, Nancy," I said. "I've seen lots worse than that in the war".