so I'm hoping this whole researching the descendants of my ancestors obsession I've developed starts to wear off soon.  Spent pretty much every hour this past week that I wasn't working/sleeping/at the topless beach/at the gym/being drunk learning of more kinfolk.  I know I promised to limit 'em to the heroes section of the profile page (also putting truncated bios on the family reunion's twitter, but this one here started getting a lil' long.  Plus it incorporates lots of different family members and there is no way I could fit all the pictures and ancestral charts.  Was just gonna be Oliver Wendell Holmes, but then his son got in on the action and that reminded me of this other relative and then  .  .  .  well, you'll see

Oliver Wendell Holmes = the ultimate Boston Brahmin.  Writer dude who hobnobbed with the other aristocrats.  His son was Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.  He was on the Supreme Court for 30 years.  Must've inherited some of dad's writing skills too because he is one of the most cited Judges ever.  Even non-lawyer types are familiar with his phrase "clear and present danger" (mostly because it was made into a Harrison Ford movie).  If the talking heads at FOX news or AM radio were as smart as me, they'd quote him as a reason that government shouldn't be in charge of health care or anything else.  While he doesn't exactly advocate killing Sarah Palin's retarded baby, he does think that sterilizing it so can't make more retard babies is a good idea:

Court-ordered state sterilization is a scary thought, and the Republicans should stop trying to convince everyone that Barack Obama's pregnant mom flew from Hawai'i to California to New York to Europe to Cairo to Kenya so she could secretly give birth to him in Africa and then flew from Kenya to Cairo to Europe to New York to Seattle and back to Hawai'i so she could illegally register him as a 'Merican even though he was totally born an illegal immigrant in Africa.  They should start throwing that quote around.  Let a Democrat tack on the last sentence with the punchline.  I purposely omitted it so Palin Nation can go crazy when the liberal media starts making personal attacks on her and her parents

Sarah Palin is related to me through several of her ancestors, but for the sake of consistency only showed one line of descent here (even though she also shares the same Lothrop/Lathrop ancestors as the Wendell Holmeses and I).  I figured that her and Barry Hussein being 10th cousins is funnier and adds to the notion that you never know to whom you are related.  Who needs 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon when you got the genealogy game?