No, not Stan Lee, his 87th birthday isn’t until December 2009. Today is the birthday of Hall of Famer Stan Musial, #6 for the St. Louis Cardinals with a .331 lifetime batting average, and a man so respected in the game that Brooklyn Dodgers fans never booed him at Ebbets Field.
Happy birthday to the Donora Greyhound!
Today is Dana Snyder’s 34th birthday. Most of us only recognize him when he is playing a narcissistic talking milkshake with a penchant for irrational shenanigans, but the voice over artist is a favorite all across the Adult Swim board, not just as Master Shake in the absurdist hit, Aqua Teen Hunger Force. His voice has been featured on Minoriteam, Squidbillies and even Robot Chicken.
What most of us didn’t know is that his most famous character, Shake, is pistachio flavored. Fancy that. You hear of pistachio ice cream, but you never see a pistachio milkshake. Why is that? Too chunky? But Shake isn’t made from pistachio ice cream: he’s made from pistachio flavored ice cream and that’s different.
Mmmm, pistachio ice cream.
Excuse me.
On this day in 1969, the National Educational Television network premiered a show from the Children’s Television Workshop, with songs, animation, Carol Burnett, and Muppets. Thirty-eight years later, Sesame Street has become the longest running American children’s program, having helped educate generations of children worldwide.
The effect of the show is so powerful and widespread, this song made it up to #16 on the Billboard charts in 1970:
Today we celebrate the birthday of one of comics most creative contributors, the great Neil Gaiman. To think, we all knew him when he was just writing some of the most brilliant comics out there, before he was responsible for half the films coming out from Paramount this year. But the man is nothing if not versatile– he writes short stories, TV shows, movies, novels, and once even wrote a poem about erotic cannibalism in strict iambic pentameter.
While we tip him a bit of the birthday hat, we’d be remiss if we didn’t point out this story from Munden’s Bar…
On this day in 1972, Rebecca Romijn was born in Berkeley, California. After a successful career as a swimsuit and lingerie model, she made the transition to acting, appearing in such movies as Femme Fatale and Rollerball, as well as The Punisher and all three X-Men films as Mystique.
Currently, she’s appearing on Ugly Betty as a– well, never mind, it’s too preposterous. And I’m saying that after watching her do backflips in full-body blue makeup.
Happy birthday to a woman many have referred to as the Jolly Blond Giant. I don’t know why, she seems like a nice normal height to me…
Born today in 1946, we celebrate the geekdom of Dennis Muren of Industrial Light & Magic, the first special effects artist so esteemed that he got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Noting that he was responsible for the effects in the original Star Wars and that seven (count ’em: seven!) Oscar wins later he’s still at the top of his game are facts not to be overlooked. Among Mr. Muren’s impressive credits are Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Terminator 2, Jurassic Park, the flying bicycles in E.T. and more recently, Hulk and War of the Worlds.
Today we celebrate the man whose imagination and career literally paved the great white way of CGI visual effects in Hollywood, helping transform serious suspension of disbelief to viewers’ pure engrossment.
So… what have you done for us lately?
On this day in 1969, the first ever computer-to-computer link was estapblished on ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. It was developed by a U.S. Governmental team called DARPA, which sounds just a little too close for comfort to the plotline on Lost. But it actually stands for Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Nope, that’s still pretty creepy.
But creepy or not, those brainiancs are indirectly responsible for this website, this tidbit and your reading of it, coming into being. Switchboards, zeros and ones, hell who cares how they did it as long as I can illegally download what happens next on Battlestar Galactica. Cheers to you, creepy governmental operations, and please keep ’em coming.
Incidentally, the first message was sent at 10:30 PM by UCLA student programmer Charley Kline and supervised by UCLA Professor Leonard Kleinrock. The message was sent from the UCLA SDS Sigma 7 Host computer to the SRI SDS 940 Host computer. The message itself was simply the word "login". The "l" and the "o" transmitted without problem but then the system crashed. Therefore, the first message on the Internet was "Lo". They were able to do the full login about an hour later.
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.)
Today in 1938, the classically trained turned fantasy actor Derek Jacobi was born. Sir Derek (knighted twice over, no less) is probably best known to older audiences for his critically acclaimed portrayal of Claudius in the series, I, Claudius and Brother Cadfael in the Cadfeal mysteries. Younger audiences may recognize him for his work in The Secret of NIMH, Dead Again, Jason and the Argonauts, Underworld: Evolution, the remake of Doctor Who and the much anticipated The Golden Compass. He also won an Emmy in 2001 for parodying his Shakespearean backround on an episode of Frasier:
While Jacobi trained at the University of Cambridge alongside the great Sir Ian McKellen, he never knew until much later in life that Sir Ian had a crush on him that McKellen now admits was "a passion that was undeclared and unrequited." Alas, poor Ian… although it looks like things pretty much worked out for the both of them.
Today could not go by without our wishing a happy birthday to one of the greatest figures in sci-fi film history, Ms. Carrie Fisher. Fisher, who famously portrayed Princess Leia in the original Star Wars movies, was born in 1956. She adorned a golden bikini while kicking Jabba’s butt, winning the hearts of boys all over and her ear-muff hair-do became her character’s trademark. Certainly wardrobe had a thing to do with it, but it is also the lady who carried the look that really sealed her iconic status. Happy Birthday, Princess!
On the off chance you’ve never seen it, here’s Carrie’s audition. Note the day player she’s acting against:
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