The Solstice is at 11:08 tonight Mountain Time.
Today is the birthday
… of Joe Paterno. The football coach at Penn State is 81.
… of Phil Donahue. The talk show host is 72.
… of Jane Fonda. The two-time Oscar-winning actress is 70. Miss Fonda has been nominated for the best actress Oscar six times, winning for Klute and Coming Home. She was also nominated for best supporting actress for On Golden Pond.
… of Carla Thomas. Gee Whiz, she’s 65.
… of Michael Tilson Thomas. The director of the San Francisco Symphony is 63.
… of Samuel L. Jackson. Mace Windu is 59. Jackson was nominated for the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction.
… of Chris Evert. The tennis hall-of-famer is 53.
… of Jane Kaczmarek. Malcolm’s mom is 52.
… of Ray Romano. Raymond is 50.
… of Kiefer Sutherland. He’s 41.
… of Julie Delpy. The actress, who was nominated for a writing Oscar for Before Sunset, is 38.
Frank Zappa was born on this date in 1940. He died in 1993.
The singer, songwriter, and composer was born in Baltimore, Maryland (1940). Zappa’s father was a meteorologist in the Army who studied the effects of weather on explosions and poisonous gases. The gas masks and chemical paraphernalia his dad brought home were some of young Zappa’s first toys. When Frank Zappa started playing atonal classical music on his electric guitar, he said that his goal was to make sounds that would cause people to run from the room the moment they heard it. He was also a political activist, and he once proposed that the United States form a fourth branch of government devoted entirely to creativity.
Joseph Stalin was born on this date in 1879. This from his obituary in 1953:
Joseph Stalin became the most important figure in the political direction of one-third of the people of the world. He was one of a group of hard revolutionaries that established the first important Marxist state and, as its dictator, he carried forward its socialization and industrialization with vigor and ruthlessness.
During the second World War, Stalin personally led his country’s vast armed forces to victory. When Germany was defeated, he pushed his country’s frontiers to their greatest extent and fostered the creation of a buffer belt of Marxist-oriented satellite states from Korea across Eurasia to the Baltic Sea. Probably no other man ever exercised so much influence over so wide a region.