Happy 65th birthday, Michael Crichton!
47 years ago, my dad played center on his high school basketball in Patchogue, NY. He told me that one of the tallest guys he ever played against was the center for the Roslyn high school team, standing about 6’9". That center would go on to write novels under the pen names John Lange and Jeffery Hudson, so as to disguise his medical career. Lange, incidentally, means "tall one" in German, Danish and Dutch, and Sir Jeffrey Hudson was a dwarf in the court of Queen Consort Henrietta Maria of England.
Eventually, he started using his own name, writing such works as The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery, Jurassic Park, and Sphere, and writing and sometimes directing such films as Westworld, Looker, Runaway, and Twister, and creating the long running television series ER.
We could not let this day go by without a big tip-o-th’geek hat to you, so happy birthday, Michael Crichton! (But Charlie Pellegrino still thought of how to find dinosaur DNA first.)