It’s the birthday

… of Bill Gates. The former resident of Albuquerque is 49 today.

… of Julia Roberts. The Oscar-winning (Erin Brockovich) actress is 37. Ms. Roberts was also nominated for Best Actress for Pretty Woman and Best Supporting Actress for Steel Magnolias.

It’s also the birthday of Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine. He was born in 1914 and died in 1995. The following is from The Writer’s Almanac:

In the 1950s, Salk turned his attention to the polio virus. The disease affected children and many of those infected became paralyzed or died. There had been larger and larger outbreaks of polio in the United States since the late 19th century. By 1952, more than 58,000 cases were reported and more than 3,000 children had died of the disease.

It was the height of the baby boom, there were more children in the United States than ever before, and parents were terrified. The outbreaks occurred in the summer, and parents kept their children home from swimming pools out of fear they would be infected.

Salk’s groundbreaking discovery was that a vaccine could be developed from a dead virus. Scientists were skeptical at the time, but Salk believed so strongly that it would work that he first tested the vaccine on himself, his family and the staff of his laboratory to prove it was safe.

When the vaccine was finally released to the public in 1955, polio infection rates were reduced to less than 100 cases a year, and Salk was declared a national hero.

It’s over

Michael Bérubé sums it up pretty well:

And surely some of you must regard victory itself as a prize of dubious worth. Until tonight, your team was legendary, and their legend shaped and defined your self-identification as fans. If you win the World Series, you win the World Series– and you become kin to the 2002 Angels and the 1980 Phillies. You will be elated (and drunk!) for a couple of days, sure. But then the championship will begin to sink in, and while some of you will say, as did a New York Rangers fan in 1994, “now I can die in peace,” others among you will be plunged into existential crisis.

This was written before last night’s game.

One of our 50 is missing

At a restaurant just off Interstate 40 in Tucumcari, N.M., four women from Arkansas, en route to a fat farm in Arizona, appeared flush with excitement, New Mexico magazine reports.

The excitement, it turned out, was due to the fact that they were able to cross over into New Mexico without showing their passports — which all deemed necessary for the trip.

From Porter’s People in the Akron Beacon Journal

Thanks to Dwight Perry for the link.